Last Days With the Dead by Stephen Charlick Read Free Book Online

goodbye?’ Anne panted, as she threw her arms around her sister’s waist.
    ‘Love you,’ Liz said, kissing the top of Anne’s curly blond e hair. ‘Do what Alice tells you, and behave.’
    Anne pushed her face away from Liz and looked up at her, her eyes rolling in exasperation.
    ‘Yes,’ she replied, a little unconvincingly.
    Now that all the goodbyes were finally done, Liz joined Imran and Phil in the cart and waited for William to wind the hand crank that would open the Convent’s inner gate.  
    With the creaking of hinges, the wide doors slowly opened and after the lightest flick of the reins from Phil, Samson plodded through into the holding area. Once the inner doors had closed behind them, it only took a few minutes for William to crank open the outer gates and they were on their way.
    It had been a while since Liz had been out in one of the boxed carts , and the familiar sense of claustrophobia and its gentle rocking motion was bringing back a flood of memories, not all of them good. But she tried not to focus on those painful scenes that threatened to play across her mind, instead, grabbing hold of the fleeting good times. Holding them tight, she wrapped them about her, allowing herself to drift along with them. It had been the simple times that she had spent with Charlie on their trips that pleased her the most now. It was the small, every day acts of love she had felt from the man that had become a replacement father for first her and her sister, and then in turn, Imran and his brother, those were the memories she welcomed now. The morsels of knowledge he had fed her over the years that at the time, had seemed small and insignificant once put together, had given her the tools to protect herself and those she loved, from not only the Dead, but the living as well. Bit by bit, Charlie had made both her and Imran into the people they were today. The woman she had become, was a sole product of one man’s love for a frightened ten-year-old girl holding her infant sister in her arms that he had, quite by chance, stumbled upon as the world had fallen into ruin.
    ‘You okay?’ Imran asked, placing his hand over hers.
    ‘What ,’ she asked, allowing the memories to fade like smoke on the wind, ‘sorry, yes, I’m fine. I was just thinking about Charlie, that’s all.’
    Imran didn’t need to ask whether she meant Charlie the soldier and father , or Charlie the child he had given Alice. He could tell from the barely hidden pain behind her eyes that it was their surrogate father she was thinking about.
    ‘I know,’ said Imran, squeezing her hand, ‘I miss him too.’
    ‘Anyway,’ she said, with a sad smile as she visibly shook the ghosts of her past from her, ‘let’s let some air in here.’
    Using one of the sidewalls to brace herself, Liz reached up to flip open the hatch in the roof. Immediately, the spring morning sunshine broke through the gloom of the shadowy interior, dispelling the last fragments of her mournful memories to the back of her mind. With a sudden jolt, the cart lurched to one side, causing Liz to stumble.
    ‘Sorry,’ said Phil, glancing back at her, ‘there seems to be more pot hole s than road left these days. I think we’re going to have to go on the hunt for some sort of gravel at some point. We need to try to fill the worst of them in, at least as far as the gate anyway.’
    ‘Or source some sort of alternative to wooden cart wheels,’ Liz added, easing herself down onto one of the side benches . ‘Something with a bit of bounce would certainly take the edge off them.’
    ‘Would we be able to use tractor tyres ,’ asked Imran. ‘There are so many farms round here, there’s bound to be a tractor or two in a barn somewhere.’
    ‘I think they might be too deep,’ Phil mused, scratching his beard with the back of his hand . ‘Then there’s the problem of getting air into them. I’ll ask Duncan about it when we get back, he likes a challenge.’
    For the next ten