Snatchers: Volume One (The Zombie Apocalypse Series Box Set--Books 1-3) (39 page)

Chapter Nine

They had both decided to take a look in the attic, as they weren't sure what they were going to find, if they were going to find anything. There was a chance that there could be nothing there, but Karen knew that if Pickle wanted the sleep his body craved, they were never going to rest, not until every square inch of the house was investigated. Even though Pickle had already been upstairs and checked the bedrooms, he and Karen slowly and hesitantly walked to the landing and double-checked the rooms once again.

After checking, they closed all the doors tightly shut. They both looked up to the attic that was situated on the landing. There was a hook on the trap door of the attic. It was unhooked, which suggested to the two squatters that someone or something was up there. Pickle took his shotgun and gave the door a quick, sharp nudge, which allowed the door to open and swing out like a pendulum. It revealed a dark, square hole in the roof.

"Let's see if anything comes out o' there first," he suggested. They waited a few uncomfortable seconds and then he shouted up to the attic. "Hello!"

"Hello!" This time Karen called out. "Is there anyone up there? We mean you no harm. Come out."

They both waited patiently and stared into the black hole waiting for something to happen, but it never came. They both gaped at each other, unsure about the next move, although the next move seemed obvious: One of them was going to have to go up and check it out.

Pickle had a look of defeat and his facial expression made Karen aware that he should be first to go up to see if the area was safe. She had no qualms about going up herself, but she didn't want to impose on Pickle's masculinity.

Karen clasped her hands together, with her palms facing up, in order to give Pickle a bunk-up. He carefully stood his shotgun against the wall near the bathroom, and placed his right boot into Karen's hands, and lifted himself up, grabbed the outside of the hatch and pulled himself up quite easily. He had a muscular heavy frame to lift, but Pickle's favourite exercise at the prison's gym were pull-ups, so this action was a simple thing to execute, although he was a little out of practice and had no time to do a warm up. Karen thought that her hands were going to snap in half once Pickle's weight could be felt, but it only lasted a mere second before he pulled himself up.

Once he was up, he cursed aloud that he had no torch with him, as all he could see all around him in the attic was blackness. He ran his fingers through his short, brown, greasy hair and tried his best to scan the dusky area with his naked eyes. It was night vision goggles he needed.

"Wait," Karen instructed, and saw two light switches by the bathroom door. She tried the first one, which lit up the bathroom. She then tried the second, which lit up the attic. She looked up and saw the black square fill full of yellow light and stood at the bottom, waiting for Pickle to tell her that it was clear and then they could continue to relax, eat, drink, and eventually try and get a decent sleep once the evening arrived.

"Cheers," Pickle shouted down. "Just gonna have a wee look around."

He looked and wasn't prepared for what he was about to see next.

Despite the attic being a normal unkempt attic, with boxes of books along with other useless accessories in the corner, there was a scene that forced his throat to swell, making it near impossible for him to produce a necessary gulp.

He continued to glare.

Two girls, no older than ten, were lying motionless on their backs as if they were just sleeping, but Pickle knew they were dead. They lay next to one another and were separated by two yards from the bodies of their parents. The woman, who looked like she used to be very attractive, lay on her side with a dark circular bloodstain that soaked through her white blouse at the side of her chest. The man's state was even worse. He was huddled and curled up like a hedgehog; his arms were saturated with blood, and Pickle worked out within a second what had happened when he saw the heavily stained knife lying by the man's side.

In his cell, a few months ago, he watched a nature programme on corn snakes. One particular corn snake had entered a lair belonging to a mouse, and instead of allowing its babies to be lunch for the snake, the mouse turned against its babies and ate them for itself. It was a strange situation and Pickle always remembered it.

It appeared that the dad had done the same.

Instead of subjecting his family to a new and more grisly world, he and his wife seemed to have come to a horrific and sad agreement that maybe they were better off away from the new world. There was no sign of blood on the girls, so all he could think of was that they had taken pills or had been smothered. There were no sign of pill bottles, but there was a cushion that could have been used to smother the girls, lying by the side of them. God knows what the surviving girl was thinking when her father, or mother, was smothering her sister, knowing that she was next. Had her parents gone mad?

The used knife by the father's side was the reason why the wife had a large round blood stain on her white blouse. After killing the girls, the distraught parents probably, at the time, knew that there was no going back now. Pickle assumed that he must have stabbed his own wife through the heart and the distraught father then slashed his own wrists, waiting for the life to drain out of him and eventually be with his family that were waiting for him on the other side.

Pickle knew these scenes were probably in every other street, but seeing it was still a horrible experience. He then remembered the other bedroom that had the Robert Pattinson poster. He thought to himself that it must have belonged to a teenage daughter that had either gone out for the night, or had left temporarily to go to university. Whatever the reason, she wasn't there. He peered over the hatch and glared at Karen. "We should sleep okay tonight."

"No one up there?"

"A family. But they're dead."

Karen never asked him the details, and just lowered her head with sadness. Pickle had seen enough, and sat at the edge of the hatch, with his legs swinging freely and jumped back onto the landing.

"Let's put the hatch back," he spoke. "We'll leave the poor wee souls in peace, for now."

Pickle winced and began to rub his temples; he tried to shake off whatever was causing him discomfort, but it was to no avail.

"Anything wrong?" Karen placed her hand comfortingly on his shoulder; she tried to make eye-contact, but his eyes were closed and his hands tried to rub away the pain.

"Apart from the end o' the world?" he chuckled falsely. "It's nothing. Just a niggling migraine. Dehydration, maybe."

Karen lowered her head, looked up to the hatch of the attic and stared at her male companion. "Do you think it's global?"

Pickle shook his head. "I only know what
you
know. But if it's not, where's the help?" Pickle sighed. "Right, I'm gonna have that bath. It'll probably be my last before I have to start using that brook."

"It wasn't that bad." Karen smiled.

Pickle guffawed, "Apart from caving in the face of a Snatcher inbetween it."

She shrugged. "Just a normal day these days."

"I suppose yer right."

Chapter Ten

He slipped the Clio into third as he hit another bend, and the wheels screamed their way round the tight curve. As the car reached a dangerous fifty, Jason Bonser decided to fiddle with the radio to see if there was anything to listen to, whether it was information or even a music station.

His thoughts went to his sister. The last time he had called her was a few days ago from inside the prison with his smuggled mobile phone. From what he had heard, it sounded like they were getting in, but he knew that it didn't necessarily mean she was done for. Her house may be infested with the things, but she could be locked in her bedroom or in the attic.

His overall goal was to see his sister.

He had been a despicable character in and out of prison, and his sister was the only person he generally cared for, as it was her that helped raise Jason while their parents spent most of their time getting drunk, before their eventual and predictable premature deaths had occurred while Jason and his sister were still in their teens.

He tried his best to keep his eyes on the road and was, so far, doing it with success. He couldn't get anything on the station and looked up and felt his heart jump into his mouth as one solitary walker appeared from nowhere and was slammed by the Clio, its body splitting in half with ease. Drenched in panic, and with his windscreen being decorated with dark fluid from the walking corpse, he released a gasp. Jason then steered briskly to the left, albeit too late, and the car swung round ninety degrees, hit the side of the fence and toppled a few times, like a rolled dice, until it came to an early stop.

He was out cold for ten minutes.

His eyes opened slowly and the constant banging and slapping on the vehicle aroused his suspicions. Although it took a few seconds for his brain to register what was happening, when he did realise he shot up and quickly felt for the door handle. The car had rolled back onto its wheels after the crash, and Jason was mildly concussed. Now he was trapped in a real nightmare scenario. The motor was finished for sure, and was sat crumpled in what looked like a farmers field.

Outside there was three of them, all at the driver's side, only inches away from Jason, and all were ashen with their bloated, gross faces, snarling at the potential protein meal that sat inside. They growled and slammed the window with their fists. Sometimes when they snarled, dark blood would exit out of their mouths and splat onto the driver's side window. Jason frantically searched for the tyre iron, and once he found it on the floor next to the passenger seat, he wasted no time in exiting the vehicle before more of them turned up and ended up covering both sides of the door.

He shuffled over to the passenger seat, the gear stick caressing his buttocks while doing this, and tried to open the passenger door. The creatures suddenly realised that their meal was trying to escape, and stumbled around the car to get to the other side. Noticing this, a panic-stricken Jason pulled the door handle and then kicked it open. The door swung open, and the inmate jumped out with the tyre iron in his right hand, and began to run. They pathetically tried to follow him as he ran. He checked himself and couldn't believe he had managed to escape the crash unscathed, considering he wasn't wearing a safety belt either.

He estimated that he had travelled eight miles as he had made it to Milford, before crashing into the fence. Now he was on foot, and all that surrounded him was main roads and woodland. He was two miles from Heath Hayes, and his original destination was to get to his sister's in Norton Canes, if she was still alive. Thankfully, the street he was in and was heading out of, seemed barren. It wasn't a surprise as the population of Milford was pretty low in normal circumstances anyway.

He started his journey on foot at a pedestrian pace and decided that once he got to the last house of the street, he was going to break in, replenish his energy levels by taking food, and his body thoroughly needed hydrating as well.

He had seen the twitches of curtains as he walked past most of the houses in the street, but with the end house it looked, and he had a feeling, that it had been left abandoned as there was no car on the drive. The last thing he wanted to do was break into an already populated house and be stabbed by the scared residents, or worse.

His pace quickened as he got to the last house of the quiet, empty street and stood still, admiring its structure. He looked up at the windows and could see they all had their blinds and curtains drawn. He looked to his right, to the end of the street, then to his left where the beginning of Cannock Chase was, and crossed the road and headed for the front door. He decided to do the polite thing at first and knock on the door just to be absolutely certain. The last thing he needed was to break into a house and get attacked for his troubles.

He waited patiently, and knocked a little louder and a little longer the second time. Again, there was no answer, so he began to tap the glass of the front door with the tyre iron to shatter one of the small panes of glass. Once this was achieved, he put his left arm in and reached for the handle and opened the door with ease.

He was greeted with an empty ground floor, but could hear the faint sound of a woman crying. Disappointed that the house wasn't vacant, he shut the door gently and put the snib on to lock it. He then crept upstairs and continuously whispered the words,
hello
. As he got to the top of the stairs, a bedroom door opened. Inbetween the crack of the door was a half nose and one bright, round blue eye. The door suddenly got wider and both persons exhaled in relief.

"Who are you?" she gasped.

"I'm sorry, I thought the house was empty," Jason tried to explain. "I didn't realise someone was in. Didn't you hear me knocking?"

She nodded her head, and seemed to take an age to answer his question. "I thought it might be them, trying to get in."

Jason took a step closer, but the woman held her hand up in an attempt to stop him from progressing any further. She put her right forefinger to her lips, urging him to keep quiet and ushered him downstairs into the dark ground floor, where every window had been covered up. They both walked downstairs, with Jason leading the way. He sat on her couch and she checked if he had locked the door properly and asked if he needed a drink. He nodded and asked for a coffee, and water. She returned from the kitchen with a pint of water, which Jason had drank in a matter of seconds, and asked for another.

Two silent minutes had passed, and the woman eventually arrived with two hot cups of coffee.

He peeped at the woman and although she was in desperate need of a makeover and a shower, he came to the conclusion that with a little effort, she would look reasonably attractive. "So what's your name?" Jason asked.

She sat herself down. "Jenny." She also gazed at the man, and came to the conclusion that he looked like a brute, a man that probably had steroid sandwiches.

"So where is everybody?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "My husband went to work last week; he works on a construction site, but he never came back. I've been in here ever since it happened. Starting to run out of food now, though. There's a local shop down the road, but I'm guessing that it's already been burgled and stripped."

Jason took a sip from the coffee. "Wow, that's good coffee."

"Thanks. Not much of that left, either."

"You have a phone?"

"Not one that works," she said sadly.

There was a silence that greeted the two strangers and Jason bit his bottom lip. "I'm sorry about your husband."

She sat up and looked affronted with what Jason had said to her. She shook her head. "He's not dead."

Jason raised his eyebrows as if to say, really?

Her face looked sad and she lowered her head.
Maybe he isn't coming back. Maybe he is dead.