Snatchers: Volume One (The Zombie Apocalypse Series Box Set--Books 1-3) (53 page)

Chapter Thirty Eight

Pickle had had a hearty lunch, which consisted of two rounds of bread and four slices of ham and cheese. When he first managed to drag himself out of his bed, he was hoping for toast and eggs. He noticed that the fridge light wasn't on; he also couldn't get the gas cooker to ignite and couldn't find any matches anywhere.

Finally, at last, they had lost power.

Whether it was a national thing, he didn't know, but he knew it was coming and was surprised it had taken so long.

After his breakfast—that was washed down with a glass of diluted orange juice—he got dressed and put on his black T-shirt and grey jogging bottoms. With Karen out of the house, he took the liberty of having breakfast in the nude. He had changed his underwear—briefs and socks—upstairs, before going downstairs, and had went through the deceased male's cupboard for the underwear.

He looked at the Timex clock on the wall of the kitchen and wondered if Karen was okay. An hour ago, he still felt jaded and had felt a new lease of energy once he had eaten. Throwing Bonser into the back of the van had depleted any energy he had left and he needed another lie down, although it was brief as his concern for Karen grew. He knew she could handle herself. What could go wrong? She was fit and sported a handgun, whereas, Bonser was injured and in a severe amount of pain.

He wanted to go with her, but he was too exhausted and Karen had also gave him a
don't you trust me?
look when he mentioned it; so Pickle left her to handle it herself once they threw Jason in the back.

Maybe I should have just killed him
. Pickle then smiled and shook his head.

It would have been easier to finish Bonser in the house, but leaving an injured man in the middle of nowhere was a fate that a man like Bonser deserved. Pickle knew of some of the things Bonser had got up to in prison, especially beating and raping the young, fresh remands that would come onto the wing. He deserved nothing more than an agonising death. A bullet to the head was too quick for an animal like Jason Bonser, or any of the Murphy family from Little Haywood, and it was out of character for someone like Pickle to kill someone in cold blood anyway, despite Bonser's despicable criminal background.

He ran his thick fingers through his short, dark hair, and before his paranoid mind wandered and conjured up images of Karen being overpowered by Bonser, the groan of the van could be faintly heard in the distance. He raised a smile, and then suddenly realised that there was a miniscule chance that Karen could have been taken by surprise and that it could be Jason on his way back, ready to shoot him and have the house and van to himself while Karen had been left for dead.

As a precaution, he ran upstairs and almost fell into the wall on the way up, as he was still feeling jaded. He walked briskly into the front bedroom and peered out of the window. The van pulled up, and he knew it was Karen as the vehicle did a sloppy three-point turn and backed the vehicle onto the front garden, just the way they had planned.
She took her time
.

His faint smile had evaporated off his face when he saw a young woman and a boy getting out of the passenger side of the van. Karen left the vehicle from the driver's side, and Pickle's disappointment grew when he saw the twenty-three-year-old reaching for the back doors of the van.

Pickle shook his head and placed his right hand on his cheek.
Don't tell me there's more.

Three males clambered out of the van, and scrunched their sensitive eyes as they were exposed to the daylight. Karen looked up at the frowning face of Pickle. He was still standing by the window and Karen shrugged her shoulders apologetically up at her friend. Pickle felt powerless to do anything. He couldn't turn them away now, not with a young boy in tow. Two of the men from the back looked like they could probably handle themselves in a dire situation, which might be useful for the future, Pickle thought. He wasn't sure of the older gentleman.

The main thing that did worry the forty-three-year-old ex-inmate was that they had now five extra mouths to feed. With his limited experiences of group situations, Pickle was hoping that if a situation occurred the same as Stile Cop, the results would have a different outcome. They had lost three people that night, including KP, and he didn't want to be responsible for anyone but himself, especially a young boy. He had always looked after himself, as most around him didn't need looking after, and that was still the case with Karen by his side. But the sight of the young terrified woman with her equally terrified little man, made Pickle nauseous and hoped that one of the men from the back of the van was the father of the child, so
he
could be responsible for the youngster's safety and not Pickle.

He didn't blame Karen. What could she have done? Driven past them and let them wander the rural villages of Staffordshire? He knew Karen's conscience wouldn't allow that to happen, and he was no different.

He remained standing as the bodies entered the reception area below him. The house was suddenly filled with soft voices, just as it might have been ten days ago when the family of the house had been alive.

He heard the door slam shut and Karen's voice telling the guests to make themselves comfortable. Pickle rested his elbows on the windowsill and stared out into the desolate street. He was getting a headache again. Maybe dehydration, he thought. There was still plenty of water in the van, but decided to use the tap.

He made his way downstairs, and promised to exchange pleasantries with his new guests and make them all a drink. He was never the best at being the host in the real world, so this was something else he wasn't looking forward to.

He sighed selfishly, now that there were more people in the house, and ponderously made his way downstairs.

Time to mingle.

Chapter Thirty Nine

With the clamour coming from the bedroom door, the repeat of The Lord's Prayer was becoming increasingly impossible. The noise and her own panic was making her forget the words, and when she did remember some of them, the strident hammering of the bedroom door made it hard for her to hear her own voice.

Jocelyn cried and held onto her daughter tightly. The two-year-old was still screaming, and Jocelyn had stopped covering her mouth. The truth was, she felt like screaming herself, and the only thing that prevented her from doing so was that she didn't want to add further stress to her young daughter's body, if that at all was possible.

Jocelyn thought about the van that had driven past and knew that that was their last hope of survival. She knew that thousands upon thousands of families had already gone through the experience that her and her daughter were about to endure, but it didn't help her tremulous body.

She constantly rubbed and kissed her daughter's head in a pathetic way of soothing her panic-stricken frame. It seemed bizarre to Jocelyn how young children could pick up on consternation. Obviously, Hannah didn't know what was really occurring in the real world, but her senses still informed her that something terrible was about to happen to them both.

She had cried and screamed for so long now, that it had been a while since she heard her daughter speak. Despite being two years old, her range of vocabulary was very good for someone so young. When she at last released a sentence, Jocelyn wished she never did, as that one sentence almost broke her heart.

Out of nowhere, while her tears fell like blood from a wound, Hannah screamed, "I want my daddy!"

Jocelyn's eyes stung with more tears than her eyes could handle, and held her daughter even more tightly. "So do I, baby. So do I. Oh Paul, where are you? We need you."

The crack of wood made Jocelyn jump, and then she heard the cupboard smashing its way downstairs. The cupboard that she moved to the landing to block the attackers had only worked for a matter of minutes. The only thing that was stopping those things from getting to their prey was a cheap wooden door that had no lock and nothing behind it apart from a side-table, which was the only thing Jocelyn could physically move in the room.

She glared at the door that was slowly beginning to break before her very eyes. She stood up, still clutching onto her hysterical daughter, and took a peep outside. She looked down and out of the window and could see dozens below. Even if she somehow escaped from the bedroom window without spraining an ankle, it was apparent that the outcome would still be the same…death.

She closed her eyes and tried singing a lullaby to sooth the young girl that was still asking for her daddy. Jocelyn's mind was blank. She started to sing
Wee Willie Winkie
, but forgot the third line and stopped abruptly. She then tried to sing the
Rainbow Song
, but the clamour grew so strident, it was impossible to hear herself think. Her daughter's screaming suggested to her that no nursery rhyme was going to help them now. She continued to hold her daughter tightly, and began to reminisce about her time with her husband.

Jocelyn Parker—then Hales—met Paul Parker while they were in their early twenties; both had come out of a relationship, and the last thing they needed was another one so soon. Paul was supposed to be a one-night stand when she met him in a club. But after lying in bed together through the early hours of the morning, they both then realised that they were extremely compatible. It seemed stupid to not see one another again just because they had both come out of a relationship within a month.

They decided to take things slowly, despite jumping into bed together on the first night, and were married within two years of meeting one another. As they both approached their thirties and had exhausted themselves with lavish holidays and many nights of partying with friends, they decided that they would like to try for a family. Some of Jocelyn's friends had struggled to get pregnant; some had lazy ovaries. One of her friends was going through the IUI treatment, and her closest friend was going through the second stage of IVF.

The Parkers never took anything for granted after seeing what their friends had gone through, so they decided to start a family as they reached their late twenties, in case they needed treatment themselves. Not getting pregnant seemed a lot more common than they thought, but they turned out to be blessed.

Jocelyn's brief reminiscing had come to an abrupt halt once the bedroom door finally gave in, and one-by-one the rotting, walking corpses spilled into the room through the shattered and splintered door, like a horde of pumped up and excited shoppers waiting for a new store to open.

The first one to come in looked purple, and was terribly bloated. It was unrecognisable and was followed in by many more. No matter how hard Jocelyn clung onto Hannah, her hysterical daughter was eventually taken off her by dozens of hands and was torn apart within seconds. Her screaming was horrendous, but short.

A hysterical Jocelyn put up a decent fight, even as she was being bit. But once the room was heaving with at least ten of them, she decided to give up and dropped to the ground and glared into nothingness as they ripped her flesh away.

The last thing that she saw was the remains of her unrecognisable two-year-old daughter, who was in three bloody pieces, being devoured by the relentless and ravenous creatures that had swarmed the room.

Jocelyn's eventual death came once hands grabbed her neck, and tore her throat out.

Chapter Forty

According to the digital watch on Lee Hayward's wrist, it was 15:19pm. Many minutes had passed since they arrived. He asked Pickle if it was okay to use the back bedroom to have a nap, and Pickle reluctantly agreed. They had only just got rid of Jason Bonser, so he was a little paranoid about every character that Karen had brought back, with the exception of Kerry and young Thomas.

Kerry and Thomas went upstairs into the children's bedroom, and was told by Karen that the house was already empty when they arrived—a story concocted so that the youngster and mother wouldn't feel uncomfortable.

Paul and Jack stood in the kitchen, and was drinking water that was fetched from the van. Pickle kindly told the visitors that any water consumed should come from the tap and not the van, as they should take advantage of the running water before it was no more.

Karen sat down in the armchair and looked over to Pickle who was sitting on the end of the couch. Her eyes were apologetic.

"You look better," she said in a whisper, out of earshot from the two males in the kitchen.

He replied, "I
feel
better."

"When did the power go out?"

Pickle's lips were raised towards his nose and gave a lazy shake of his head. He didn't know.

"Look, about—"

"It doesn't matter," he interrupted, and produced a genuine smile. "What else could yer do? Drive by them?"

Karen changed the subject and said, "They're near here. We saw some of them on the other side of the village, trying to get into a house as we drove past. When I picked those people up, they were running from them in the woods. They're fucking everywhere."

"The main road looked clear to me when I looked." Pickle stood up and walked over to the living room and glared out of the window to see if the situation had changed, as it had been only minutes since he scanned the street.

Added Karen, "It is for now, but I don't think it'll be too long before they start heading this way."

He moved away from the window and returned to his original sitting position. He released a defeated sigh. Karen had heard that sigh before. It was soon after KP had left the van and wandered off to shoot himself. Pickle had promised to be more positive in such a dire world, but it was easier said than done. "Well, let's hope they're just passing through and going on to the next populated area. I'm sick o' running."

"Me too," Karen spoke in agreement, but felt like the fight in Pickle had evaporated again. Maybe he was still weak from his virus.

Paul Parker had entered the living room and gave his hosts a thin smile as a way of a silent salutation. He slowly placed his backside on the couch at the opposite end to where Pickle was sitting. He felt that he had walked in on a private conversation and would have felt stupid getting to his feet and walking back out again, so he awkwardly slurped on his water and kept his eyes on the carpet.

"So what's your story?" Paul asked Kerry and Pickle.

Pickle smiled. "Like yours; it's too long to tell. We could be here all night."

"At least we're alive, though."

"For now," Pickle responded, his tone drenched in negativity.

Paul asked, "Do you have family?"

Pickle sighed and glared at Paul. "Look 'ere, ma friend, don't take this personally—"

"I get it," Paul interjected. "You don't want to get to know someone in case they get killed, right?"

"We've lost some people in the last week."

"Haven't we all?" Paul exclaimed.

Pickle grinned at Parker, and was pleased that amongst the group, there was another man who had balls. He wasn't entirely sure about the man they called, Jack Slade, and Lee Hayward looked like he was ready to have a heart attack. In some ways, Hayward reminded Pickle of Laz.

Karen watched in silence, as Jack walked out of the kitchen and headed upstairs to see his son.

*

There was a gentle knock on the door of the smallest bedroom in the house. Without waiting for an instruction, Jack slowly opened the door and went in to see his son and Kerry sitting on the bed. His son was drawing a picture on a scrap of paper with a dark green crayon that he had found on a dressing table. The table looked like it belonged to a girl.

Jack sat next to Kerry on the bed, and was staring at Thomas in a state of self-hypnosis. Jack silently sat up and placed his hand comfortingly on Kerry's left thigh. She never responded and continued to glare. Jack could see her eyes were glassy and water from her eyes was ready to fall onto her lap. He didn't feel it was necessary to speak to Kerry, so he remained quiet. He knew what she was thinking and what kind of questions were probably swirling in her mind, like brown, fallen leaves on a windy October day: What's going to happen to us? To Thomas? When will this madness end? Will it ever end? Will we get through it?

Jack looked around, what appeared to be, a girl's bedroom, and looked over Kerry's shoulder to assess his son's artwork. Thomas then sat up straight and wordlessly handed the scrap of paper to his mum. Before looking at the picture, she smiled at her son and kissed his head. He felt clammy.
God, I hope he's not coming down with a fever. Our diets have hardly been tiptop since the outbreak.

Kerry thought about her own diet. It had recently consisted of no fruit, mainly bread, and hardly any water, which was probably one of the reasons why she was getting pounding headaches. She was used to exercise and consuming two litres of water per day, but she was lucky if she had had two litres in the last
seven
days. Briefly, Kerry thought about the rest of the group from the village hall. She knew some were dead, but she hoped the remaining ones were okay. Then she thought of her mother. She was convinced that the stress of the outbreak had killed her, and was kind of glad that she wasn't around anymore to be going through what they were going through now.

She then gaped at the picture at what her son had drawn. It took a while for Kerry to work out what the picture was, although Jack had actually worked it out before her. But when she did, it made her heart fill full of sadness. It was a picture of four people in the sky, and underneath them Thomas had drawn six figures with stretched-out arms.

Kerry assumed that the six people were the ghouls that were plaguing them, and the four people in the sky was herself, her mum, Jack and Thomas, in heaven. She passed the picture to Jack.

Although the young boy had witnessed someone being killed in his street when the outbreak was in its infancy, since then, he had been shielded from it by his mother, but no matter how much she tried to hide the horror from Thomas, it seemed frivolous, as the boy wasn't stupid. He knew what was going on. He might not have known how it had happened and the amount of people that had been slaughtered, but he knew the world, as
he
knew it, had changed for the worse.

At last, Thomas spoke. "I miss grandma."

"So do I," his mum spoke softly, while the tears rained down.

"I'm tired."

Kerry stroked his hair lovingly and asked, "Do you want a lie down?"

Thomas nodded, and nervously looked up at his mum. "Can I be on my own?"

"Sure you can," Jack said, before Kerry had time to protest. He knew what she was like. She would insist on sleeping next to him, but if Thomas wanted to be alone—despite only being six—then his mother should adhere to his wish.

It was a strange request from a little boy who had been introduced to such a nightmarish new world, but both parents reluctantly agreed to leave him.

"Come on," Jack said to Kerry, before she attempted to change her son's mind. "Let's go downstairs and get a drink of water."