Free Lanherne Chronicles (Prequel): To Escape the Dead by Stephen Charlick

cadavers the four survivors could finally see what awaited them. Of the three figures only one seemed to have been completely spared the ravages of the blaze. It was Daniels. Sally had been right when she had said Daniels had been torn apart, the gaping cavity where his intestines had once been was testament to her words. His two Dead compatriots must have at some point caught the full force of the blaze, their chard and burnt limbs cracking to ooze liquid body fat with each movement. How their brains hadn’t already been completely destroyed inside their shells of burnt flesh, Charlie had no idea but such was the tenacity of whatever force kept their lifeless limbs moving.
    ‘I’ll take out Daniels,’ said Charlie, stepping forward to meet the man whose vision of a new beginning had gone so terrible wrong in the space of one night. ‘Liz, Tom deal with the other two… Michael, watch our backs.’
    ‘On it,’ replied Tom, eagerly spinning the sickle in his right hand.
    Liz spared a second to throw Charlie a worried glance. They had discussed this before. Whereas for her and Charlie dispatching the Dead was a necessary task to ensure their safety, Tom, fed by his need for vengeance, had made it personal. He had twisted the need to survive into a need to destroy and that was dangerous. With death around every corner you needed to deal with the Dead with a cool head, calculating each move to bring about the desired end. It was too easy for Tom to be caught up in the moment, lost to his emotions and that’s when mistakes could happen, deadly mistakes. Emotion simply had no place when you were as drastically outnumbered by such a foe as they all were.
    ‘Take the one on the right,’ said Liz, finally nodding to Tom as she stepped past Michael, her sword raised high behind her, ready to strike.
    With the smell of torched flesh burning in her nose, Liz kicked aside a piece of burnt wood resting at her feet and waited for the unfortunate Dead thing to come to her. Of course Tom had already darted forward, all too keen for the sickles in his hand to be bathed in the blood of the Dead once again. With the cracking and creaking of limbs almost destroyed by raging fire, the Dead man in front of her reached out a hopeful but blackened claw towards her. Taking a small step back, Liz casually noticed that a golden wedding ring had somehow managed to stay lodged on one of his destroyed fingers. Instantly dismissing thoughts of who this man may have been or what life he may have once had, Liz coolly sliced her blade through the air, removing the reaching claw and arm at the elbow. Oblivious to his missing limb the Dead man continued in his stumbling advancement to the living flesh he craved but Liz was ready for him and almost instantly her blade was whispering effortlessly through the air again. With only the slightest resistance, her blade sliced through the ruined flesh, tendon and cartilage of his neck, finally separating his head from his equally burnt shoulders; and as his body fell lifeless to the floor Liz’s eyes followed the head as it came to rest by a stack of scorched chairs. Glancing over at Tom, a strange look of satisfaction on his face as he stood over the crumpled body of the second Dead man, Liz knew she had time to give her now headless Dead man the oblivion of true death he deserved. Stepping over his body Liz looked down at the head that even now sought impotently to bite into her boot. Placing her foot against the head to steady the rocking, she placed the tip of her sword above the shrivelled burnt remains of his ear.
    ‘Sorry…,’ was all she could think of to whisper as she sent the thing before her on his final journey to meet his God.
    With that she stabbed down and after the brief crunching of broken bone, the roaming eyes in the head were at last still.
    ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, turning to watch Charlie trying to move Daniels’ now lifeless body.
    ‘Waste not, want not,’ he simply