Fear the Dead 5: Rise Up by Jack Lewis

Author:Jack Lewis [Lewis, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

11

Not all hills had their own special signs, but this one did. Carved onto a weathered block of oak at its foot was, ‘Beggar’s Peak.’ Despite already feeling tired, we crested it, our boots scuffing against frost-crusted dirt all the way up. The wind howled through the dead trees dotted here and there, but even that couldn’t drown out the sound from the view below. A frog chorus of groans. The sound of a thousand bodies shifting, moving, moaning.

“Oh my Christ,” said Billy. “Look at them all.”

Mel instinctively lowered herself down to the ground and kept still. She stared, mouth agape. I thought I could match the expression I saw weaving across her face in a web of fear. No sane person could look out from this hill and feel nothing at all. That was exactly why Shawn stood there impassively, scuffing the heel of his boot against the mud.

Way below us, a sea of rotting bodies stretched across the valley, marching as though taking a dead king to his tomb. They were parading east in a relentless tide. I lifted my binoculars to my eyes, scanned all the way across the procession. The infected spearheading the army barely seemed aware of themselves, each other, or their surroundings. They shuffled without purpose, arms twitching, heads lolling back and forth.

This was behaviour I expected from them. I was alright with it. These ones didn’t bother me one bit. It was the rest of the marching band’s tune that I didn’t like.

Stalkers weaved between the legs of slow ones, in and out like dogs herding sheep. Their movements had intelligence and deliberation behind them. Here and there, sirens crawled across the ground, whispering and yelling and screaming. The words stumbled out of their mouths as though they couldn’t help it. Even up here, I could pick out snatches of their laments.

“Open the door! Open the door, for fuck’s sake!”

“Daddy! Please! Help…”

“Check the bedrooms for survivors.”

These were emaciated things with hollow eyes. Mouths that never stopped whispering, crying, pleading. After the village, I never wanted to see another siren again. I wished I’d never learned they existed.

But the worst were the shepherds.

Not one, but at least eight by my count. They stood taller than the rest. They weren’t part of the mindless flood of corpses. They patrolled the east and west flanks, controlling it. The shepherds walked not just because their brains gave them little other option; their steps had a strange, off-putting determination.

I couldn’t take looking at them anymore. Feeling ill, I lowered my binoculars and turned away from the horror for a second or two. That did nothing for their sounds and their smells, but at least I’d spared one of my senses. Even a single infected was wrong enough, something ‘other’ that tweaked our deepest fear responses. Having so many there at once was too much for our human brains to handle. We weren’t meant to look upon such things. In fact, it reminded me of pulling playground duty when I subbed at a primary school not long after I got my teaching qualification.

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