Six Days With the Dead by Stephen Charlick Page A

carry one of the hand guns with you at all times,’ Charlie was telling Barry ‘We don’t want to take any chances with strangers, not with raiders in the area and you’ll have to forget some of those old police standoff procedures of yours. Shoot first, ask questions later.’
    Barry nodded, knowing he would do what he had to, to keep those in the Convent safe. 
    Liz noticed William, their newest member, sitting on an upturned bucket by the stable door watching the men as they checked over the contents of the cart. As she walked over to him, he slowly turned his sad eyes towards her and then back to the cart.
    ‘ This man is broken,’ Liz thought.
    Like many, his whole world had been snatched from him by unseen Dead hands in one night. She didn ’t know which was worse, to have them taken at the beginning when the Dead first changed the world or now, after fighting and surviving for so long. There was always the slim chance that Frankie, his nephew may still be alive, hiding somewhere, though she doubted it. Liz crouched down on one knee so that she was level with William.
    ‘ What was Frankie wearing, William? So if we see him we’ll know it’s him.’
    ‘ Erm…’ he seemed lost in his own dark thoughts and pulling himself back to answer Liz was clearly a struggle for him. Slowly his eyes met hers. ‘Erm… I think he had on his blue Sponge Bob T-shirt and some jeans. But he’ll call out to you if he sees you, surely? He’ll be scared but he won’t want to be alone. If he sees you, he’ll call.’
    The hope on William ’s face was pitiful and Liz suspected it was sadly misplaced. If they did happen to come across Frankie, she doubted he would be in any state to call out to them, other than a sad moan of the Dead. With a sad smile, she touched Williams’s hand.
    ‘ If we see him… I’ll take care of him,’ she said slowly, trying to get what she really meant across to the broken man in front of her. Willing him to see through his grief to what she was really saying. But William pulled her hand to his face, kissing it.
    ‘ Thank you. I know you’ll bring him back to me. Little Frankie, he’s all I have left now.’ Tears began streaming down his face, ‘Thank you.’
    As his misplaced gratitude collapsed back into despair, he let go of Liz ’s hand to cover his own face, as he openly wept. Liz slowly stood up and went back to the cart where Imran was inside checking through the weapons that were hooked onto its ceiling and walls.
    ‘ Everything Ok?’ she asked, as Imran replaced a small axe onto its brackets.
    ‘ Yep, Barry’s put in all the weapons we might need. Let’s hope we won’t need most of them though,’ he replied, buckling a strap on the wall around his spare quiver of arrows.
    Giving the quiver a rattle to make sure it was secure, Imran jumped down through the carts back hatch.  The cart had three other hatches. One each side and one on its roof. If they ever got into real trouble, whoever was in the cart wouldn’t want their options reduced by only having one exit. At the moment each of these were also open, trying to keep the cart relatively cool until they left and had to close them.
    ‘ God, it’s going to be uncomfortable in there today,’ Imran said, removing his Kufie cap to wipe the sweat from forehead with the back of his sleeve ‘Perhaps we’ll get some rain to take down the heat,’ he continued looking up at the murky sky.
    Weather patterns had become a little erratic after the Dead came. Charlie had told Liz that in those first few weeks, many of the European governments, fearing meltdowns while their technicians fought for their lives, had shut down their Nuclear power stations. It may have plunged Europe into medieval blackout, which itself brought its own set of problems, but at least nuclear disaster hadn’t been added to their list of worries. He doubted if this precaution had been adopted globally and assumed in either China, Russia or the US, some