The Givers of Life (Book 1): The Risen Dead
The Risen Dead
Book 1
The Givers Of Life
Neil Davies
Copyright Neil Davies 2017
C&N Publications
Cover art and design by Neil Davies
Contents
The Beginning
One Year On
The Old Camp
The Attack
The Lovers
Aftermath
The Day
Surrounded
Protection
Thor's Rock
Waiting
On The Run
Almost Lost
Unlikely Saviour
Alliance
Heading Home
Home Invasion
Trapped
The End... For Now
CHAPTER ONE
The Beginning
The pain he felt as he lay dying in the gutter, aged 27, the victim of a random, frenzied knife attack, could not compare to the agony he felt four years later when he was reborn.
The stretching of withered muscles, the aching of bones, burned hot pain throughout his body. Dry facial muscles forced his mouth open in a silent scream as thoughts and images, a bastardised, corrupt version of life, streamed through his mind. Synapses sparked to life, pushing signals between lethargic neurons. He was not sure who or what he was, but there was a consciousness stirring within his brain. Not quite alive, but no longer dead.
He heard voices, sibilant, sinuous.
It is coming. Soon. The time for you to rise.
He felt no fear, nor even curiosity, just awareness, a strong sense of anticipation and, most of all, hunger.
#
When the end came for most of humanity, John Roundtree was standing quietly at the bottom of his garden, listening to the early evening birdsong and the soft bubbling of the brook just two hundred yards beyond the wire fence.
As a child he had played there, leaping the great chasm from bank to bank that he could now almost step across, playing the war games with his friends that would one day become his career. The brook had always been there, and the small matter of a three-hundred home housing estate constructed nearby was not enough to disturb its shallow path through the fields.
“You’ve got that mysterious look on your face again,” said Chris Thomas, stepping out of his house next door and handing John a cup of coffee across the knee-high picket fence that separated their gardens. "Childhood memories?"
John nodded and took a sip.
Chris had known John’s parents, watched John grow up, leave to join the army and, after his mother’s death, return home to care for his father.
“I was surprised you stayed on after the old man passed. Thought you’d be back on your travels again.”
John glanced at his neighbour. Somewhere between his own age of 34 and his father’s, Chris Thomas had succeeded in staying friends with both generations, carefully avoiding the frequent loud and vitriolic arguments between the two.
“Got to settle sometime. When I came back I was a mess."
He turned back to the field and Chris could see the moist glint of tears in his eyes. Things had happened over in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he had never spoken of them in any detail. He had been a loud, lively, cheerful youth when he signed up, but he came back a quiet, introspective man.
“I didn’t mean to bring back bad memories, John, I was just worried.”
John managed a smile.
“I know. This is my home. Doesn’t matter what happened elsewhere. This is my home now.”
“Dinner’s ready!”
The shout startled them both and they turned as Chris’s wife stepped out onto the garden path.
“Hi, John,” she said, smiling. “Didn’t know you were there. If you’re hungry, there’s enough here for an extra mouth. Annie's always watching what she eats so there's plenty to go round.”
“I’m okay thanks. Got some things cooking.”
“Fair enough, but you know you’re always welcome. Chris? You coming in soon?”
“In a moment. I’ll just finish this cup of coffee and be right in.”
They raised their cups and drank, looking back out over the fields, listening to the brook and the birds.
Except there were no birds.
Everything but the soft bubble of the water had fallen silent.
"That's odd," said Chris.
Barbara, stepping further down the path, looked up to the sky.
"Probably means there's a storm coming or something."
Chris nodded. "Still, I've never known them to all stop singing like this. What about you John?"
John said nothing. Instincts, naturally sharp and sharpened even further by his Special Forces training, were telling him to run, hide. It confused him. There seemed no obvious threat.
"Told you there was a storm coming," said Barbara. "Just look at that sky."
John looked. Black clouds were rolling in, faster than any he had ever seen, bringing with them an eerie, heavy darkness. They filled the whole sky, from horizon to horizon, boiling and bubbling like thick, viscous oil. The air grew dense, tasting of iron and sulphur.
"I don't know what's going on, but I don't think it's a storm." John looked back towards his house, judging the distance and how long it would take for him to run it. "Chris? Barbara? I really think we should all get back indoors, right away."
The air grew suddenly thicker, heavier, overpowering. John looked to the sky again, struggling for breath. He thought he saw a break in the rolling blackness, two patches of deep red, glowing, but then they were swallowed by darkness once more.
They had looked like eyes.
John's instincts screamed at him. He could no longer ignore them. Grabbing Chris around the shoulders, he pulled him to the ground, at the same time shouting, "Barbara, get back in the house!"
She hesitated, watching, scared as Chris and John struggled. She was unsure what to do, whether to help her husband or go inside. But the sky was mesmerising, the way the clouds rolled and undulated like waves, and she chose to do nothing but stand and gaze upwards.
Across the world, billions of others did the same.
"What... the... hell.." gasped Chris, struggling ineffectually against John's solid restraint.
Lightning ripped the darkness from every section of the sky, a simultaneous discharge of electricity unlike anything ever witnessed before. It blinded those, like Barbara, who were looking upwards, burning holes in their retina, vitreous jelly boiling out of their sockets.
The blast of thunder shattered windows, split the ground, ripping open great wounds in the grass of the fields, the tarmac of the roads. John's ears bled, the pressure of the sound wave almost unbearable. The rock deep in the earth vibrated, the low moan of a dissonant harmonic rising as the percussive blast subsided.
More lightning, a matrix of blinding light and jagged bolts, brief blossoms of flame sprouting for miles around, scarring the landscape with craters. Another explosion of thunder punching through walls, tearing the ground, pounding at the two men where they lay.
John covered Chris with his body as best he could. He kept his head down, his eyes closed. It was incoming fire, worse than any he had experienced in warfare, but the rules were the same. There was no point running. You just huddled down and hoped for the best.
As the last rumbles of thunder rolled away, a sudden, furious wind was sucked into the vacuum of silence from all directions. It tugged at John's clothes, his hair. It span dust devils from the ground, stripped leaves from branches and whipped up the fires from the lightning strikes. Risking a glance towards Barbara, he saw her still staring at the sky with sightless eyes,
a strange smile on her face, a face now red-raw with the wind-blown heat. He looked up to the sky and saw twisting tornadoes of pulsating colour, tentacles of lightning writhing across black clouds, and those glowing red patches that looked like eyes. They seemed to stare right at him.
He turned his face back to the ground as a further bombardment of lightning pummelled the earth, struck through the windows of houses, tore holes in roofs, killing people who thought they were safe inside, out of the storm.
The wind intensified, the thunder almost lost in the speeding-train-like noise. John and Chris screamed, battling to stay as flat to the ground as they could, the wind tugging at their bodies, the heat singeing their hair.
Barbara, lifted by the wind that swirled around her, spiralled almost gracefully into the air.
Struggling to maintain consciousness, John watched, helplessly, as the limp form of Chris’s wife slammed into the wall of their house. She hung for a grotesque moment before slipping to the ground, a trail of blood staining the brickwork. He barely heard Chris scream her name, the words torn away by the wind, lost in the howl of the elements, the blasts of lightning, the roar and rumble of thunder. And buried within that confusion of noise, so deep it was little more than a suggestion, other words twisted, rose, fell, on the edge of understanding, of reality, of belief...
Soon they will rise.
John had no time to wonder at their meaning. The air was full of debris, a flying stone clipping the back of his head, blood spatter whisked away in a fine spray.
His vision swam, fluid and unfocused. Screeching metal twisted and tore nearby as the garden fence was ripped apart. As blackness began to engulf his thoughts, he felt Chris trying to move, to crawl towards his wife. John held on tighter. He had seen enough death to recognise its look on a person’s face.
They were both thankfully unconscious by the time a wind-blown spade decapitated the already dead woman sprawled by the house wall.
CHAPTER TWO
One Year On
John Roundtree stared at the rectangular mound of earth at the bottom of his neighbour’s garden. One year ago to the day, he had helped Chris and Annie bury Barbara, wrapped in black bin bags. He had not joined the brief prayers they said as he shovelled the dirt back into the hole, the plastic sounding curiously wet under the falling soil. He had possessed little faith to begin with, and the rest had died in the Middle East.
Silently he apologised for having no flowers to place on her grave, but there were few flowers around anymore. Most had shrivelled along with the surrounding vegetation a year ago. Only the hardy weeds grew with any success in this new, blasted scrubland.
He lifted his head and looked across the dry, brown landscape, pockmarked with craters, that had once been so rich and green. Twisted, deformed roots and branches tangled together where thick, luxurious hedges had stood. Trees, curiously truncated, their top-most branches snapped off or burnt to ash, stretched bare and black against a sky still grey with airborne dust high in the atmosphere.
The wind rose with an unpredictability John and his fellow survivors were gradually getting used to, and he shivered at the icy breeze that curled around his back and tugged gently at hair he had not cut since The Incident, as most chose to call it. The weather was as screwed as everything else in this new world.
And they still had no idea what had happened one year ago.
“Do you think it’ll get any easier?”
John didn’t need to look round to know that it was his neighbour, Chris, who had joined him.
“I honestly don’t know. How are you coping?”
“There are still mornings when I find it hard to think of any reason to carry on.”
The wind was strengthening, its cold biting through John’s green army sweatshirt, making him shiver. He thought back to Rick Harper across the road and old Mrs Pierce at number seventy-three and God knew how many other people who had not been able to face life without their loved ones. Rick hanged himself. Mrs Pierce overdosed on prescription sleeping pills.
When Chris spoke again, his voice cracked with emotion.
“I don’t think I could have got through losing Barbara if it wasn’t for Annie. By rights it should have been me looking after her, but she takes after her mother. Strong and capable.” He smiled, brushing a meandering tear from his cheek. “Only 24 and already more mature than her father.”
He glanced back towards his house, not liking to leave his daughter alone for too long. Besides, she was doing the washing, and since the loss of electricity to the street some four months ago that was an arduous task.
“I need to get back. Annie…”
“Sure, I understand.”
John waited until Chris had gone before stepping over the tangled fronds of wire that had once been a garden fence and walking to the edge of the dry ditch. He missed the brook and the green fields.
Lifting a hand to wipe wind-blown hair from the corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement among the twisted fingers of wood that had once been the field’s boundary hedge.
He froze, stared. His heart beat faster than it had for some time, his adrenaline rising as his training, rusty but still there, kicked in.
He jumped as a fox broke cover, scampering across the dry, brown earth away from him.
He watched it run, a rare but not unheard of sight. Some wild animals had survived The Incident, although few pets had. He guessed the wild ones were tougher, less pampered. Even at this distance, however, he could tell the animal was scrawny, its fur thin and patchy. Humans weren’t the only ones struggling to survive in this new world, and he felt a strong empathy with the fox, part of him wishing he could join it, running across the fields, away from everyone and everything that triggered memories.
As he was about to turn back towards his house he hesitated, looking once more towards the tangle of dead and dying wood. Was there something else there? Was the fox the only thing he had seen moving?
Standing still, slowing his breathing, he stared, unblinking, daring something to move, something, or someone, to show themselves.
Nothing.
He took a step towards the hedge, stopped, smiled. Shaking his head, he turned back towards the house. He was getting jumpy. Something had moved in the hedge and then a fox had run out of it. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to work out that he’d seen the fox just before it ran.
Still, he glanced back as he walked away. Just in case he was wrong. Just in case there had been more than the fox in that hedge.
#
He thought he had been seen.
When the fox broke cover, he thought he had been seen. But the man watched the fox run and noticed nothing else. He was glad, now, that he had resisted his immediate urge to tear into the fox, to rip it apart and feast on its flesh and its blood. Had he done that, the man might have investigated further, and he did not yet feel strong enough to confront a full-grown living man face-to-face.
As he watched the man walk away, he felt strangely empty, almost sad. He had been like that once. Alive. It seemed so long ago that he could barely remember what it felt like, but he knew with certainty that he had, once, been alive.
He looked down at his hand, pebbles of bone breaking through dry, thin, parchment-like skin at the joints. His fingers lay on grey flesh showing through the tears in his old trousers. Lifeless. Bloodless. A dry tongue licked over cracked lips, black teeth in rotted gums grinning through a hole in his cheek. The decay meant nothing to him. As long as he could function, could carry out the wishes of The Givers Of Life, then his existence was worthwhile. He lived, if that was the correct term, to serve. And to eat.
Crawling to the end of the dry, depleted hedge gave him a better view of the houses. It was important he saw all he could. He had been one of the first to be sent out. A scout. His task, to find and note any human settlements, to estimate their strength and to return so an attack could be planned. He knew he was only one of millions around the world. He didn’t question how he knew thi
s, he just knew. Just as he knew that The Givers Of Life were on their way. He was just a soldier in their army, one of those helping to clear the ground for their triumphant return.
He questioned nothing. He just knew.
Preparing to back away to the cover of the dead wood behind the hedge, he saw the girl.
She stepped out of one of the houses, hanging washing over a line strung between the doorway and the one standing fence post in the garden. She was too far away for him to study closely, but he could see blonde hair falling over her shoulders, and he could see small breasts swelling beneath her t-shirt, and good, strong legs as she stood on tip-toe to fix the pegs to the washing.
The dead had risen with their hungers intact, regardless of whether the physical ability remained. There were women in their ranks, but he found little enticement in the dry husks of their bodies. They were as desiccated and empty as he was, and as disinterested in him as he was in them. But this girl, this warm, living girl of soft flesh and hot blood, would satisfy him.
After nightfall, he would return. The report could wait. First there was something he needed to do for himself. Ripping the girl's throat from her slender neck would prepare him well for the battles ahead.
CHAPTER THREE
The Old Camp
John pedalled the bike hard up the hill, staying near the centre of the narrow country lane. He didn’t have to worry about cars. There had been no petrol or diesel for over six months.
For part of the way, he rode with Steve and Julie, young survivors living on the same housing estate. Their destination was Thurstaston Hill, and when they turned their bikes onto an old, overgrown footpath that gave a more direct route, he waved them goodbye, unable to prevent a momentary wash of nostalgia.
Before he left for the army, he would often walk through the gorse-lined pathways of the hill, holding hands with one girl or another. The view across the River Dee to the Welsh coast might have drawn older couples and families, but there were more than enough secluded spots for the young and in love.