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

Liz stepped purposefully forward to meet the girl.
    With a groan, the girl took another stumbling step forward, reaching a cracked and dirty hand imploringly toward Liz as she did so. Liz paused to watch the Dead girl for a second. It was if the girl’s corpse almost shook with excitement to be suddenly so near one of the living, but as her mouth began to snap open and closed in anticipation of ripping into Liz’s flesh, Liz knew the time to watch was over. With a twitch of her wrist, the blade arched through the air, removing one of the girl’s extended hands with a brittle snap. Before the removed appendage had hit the concrete, Liz was using the power of the swing to follow through. A split second later when the hand came to a rocking standstill on the road, the girl’s head tumbled to the ground to join it, closely followed by her now lifeless body. Stepping over the body, Liz switched the position of the blade in her hand and with a grunt, stabbed down its tip into the still moving face of the Dead girl. As her blade tore through the decaying flesh of the Dead girl’s face to pierce the barely covered bones of her skull, the creature was finally put to rest.
    Without a second thought for the girl, Liz then moved onto the next walking corpse. This time it was a short man dressed in filthy mechanic ’s overalls. Most of the skin and much of the flesh had been ripped from his face at some point. What was left, had taken on a sickly shade of green and was threaded through by a spider web of dark veins. At the edges of the torn flesh, hanging limply from his pitted skull, Liz casually noticed that the larvae of some unknown insect was happily living their lives burrowing and feasting on the man. Again, the excitement on the cadaver’s features was palpable, as a dark coloured drool dripped from his ravaged lips. Taking a few steps towards him with her blade held high behind her, Liz waited for just the right moment to strike, and as the Dead man opened his mouth to let forth his pitiful moan, Liz saw her opportunity and lunged. With lightning speed, her blade fell, slicing cleanly through what little flesh and tendons were left on the man’s jaw, and following through to his vertebrae and spinal cord. With a sound almost like a cough, the Dead man stopped in his tracks. Then, slowly at first, and faster as its momentum increased, the top half of the man’s face slid from position, to fall with a splat on the road. In the seconds before the body fell, its twitching slug like tongue tried to probe the roof of a mouth that was no longer there, and subconsciously, Liz’s own tongue in her mouth mirrored the sickening movements. Glancing down at the top half of the Dead man’s face, Liz noticed his milky eyes still followed her every movement.
    ‘Nighty night ,’ she said, stamping down hard on the Dead man’s skull and sending a spray of decaying brain matter across the road as his skull shattered.
    A few steps behind the now permanently lifeless body were two more Dead men, eagerly shuffling their way towards her. As if in practiced unison, they lunged for her as one. The taller of the pair even managed to brush his Dead fingers along Liz’s shoulder, but her reflexes were too quick for him, and with a powerful flick of her wrist, she severed his arm at the elbow, while kicking out hard at his smaller companion. This gave her just the room she needed to quickly alter the position of the blade in her hand and thrust it upwards under his chin. With a ‘crack’, the tip of her sword slid through the Dead man’s decaying jaw and into the base of his skull. It only took a second for the tall Dead man’s remaining arm to fall uselessly to his side, and in that moment, Liz tugged free her sword from his jaw, allowing him to crumple to the road. Turning to now deal with the smaller Dead man, Liz noticed Imran had already taken care of him. There, protruding from a ruined eye socket was one of Imran’s arrows. Liz