Snatchers (A Zombie Novel) (5 page)

Chapter Eight

David Pointer reached for the remote and put the TV onto standby, he had seen enough. He then looked to his shaken wife, Davina, who was clearly distraught and confused about the news that was finally being soaked up by her brain.

He asked in a soft voice that was coated in shock, "So what happens now?"

She shrugged her shoulders; she was hoping that
he
would have some answers.

He quickly stood to his feet, the room span once as he got to his feet too quickly. He looked over to his daughter, Isobel, who sat in the corner of the living room, innocently playing, oblivious to the catastrophe that was being broadcasted around the world.

He walked over to his daughter, stroked her blonde hair and kissed the back of her head; he then looked over to his wife. "Go upstairs, both of you get dressed."

"What about you?" Davina wiped her eyes.

"I'm gonna stay down here for a bit, get some food and water. We're going into the attic."

David walked over to his unopened living room blinds, and nervously placed his fingers inbetween them and carefully pulled them apart about two inches. The street was desolate; he shook his head.
There doesn't seem to be anybody about.

David walked briskly around the house, as his wife and daughter began progressing upstairs. He checked the patio door in the back room; he pulled the blind down to the floor and struggled to move the leather couch against the door. As he dragged the couch toward the door, it had made a huge scratch on the wooden floor, an action that would normally anger Davina, but under the circumstances David was sure it was something he wasn't going to be in trouble for.

Satisfied that the back room was secured, he shut the door behind him, went to the reception area and made sure the front door was locked. He knew it wasn't that strong and recognised that this was probably the weak spot of the house. It was locked, and he moved everything that he could think of against the front door, TVs, tables...any kind of furniture that would cause an obstacle.

No wonder the street is empty. Millions of people across the UK, possibly the world, are, or have been, doing exactly what I'm doing now.

He went into the living room and kitchen to make sure windows had been secured, then went into the cupboard under the sink and began to fill bags with food, bottles of water, medication—he was practically emptying the cupboards. He had two rucksacks full of food and water, and took one upstairs where his wife stood in their daughter's bedroom. Isobel was now playing with her play-kitchen.

He dumped one bag onto the floor; the couple never uttered a word to one another, they just looked at each other briefly, and then he went back downstairs for the other bag. Once he returned, he grabbed the metal pole and opened the latch to the attic that was situated in Isobel's room, and pulled down the metal ladders. "I'll do my best to block off the downstairs. From now on, we use the upstairs only for washing, baths...obviously not sleeping, 'cos that would be too dangerous."

Davina queried, "What happens if they get in?" She was hoping for a,
they won't
response, but it never came.

"Then we stay in the attic."

"We can't survive in the attic alone."

"No, but there's a skylight. Which means, I can get out of the skylight and walk across the roofs of the houses and check other skylights, maybe break into the neighbour's house and see what the neighbours have left, food...whatever."

"David," Davina half-laughed and began to lecture her husband. "You can't just break into peoples' houses and rob them."

"Do you honestly think the neighbours are coming back? They're in New York for a week, and even if they do come back after this mess has been finished, do you think they'd be pissed with us for breaking into their house in order to survive?"

"We live in a terraced block of eight houses; what happens if the other neighbours have already done that?"

"Then that's fine. They need to do what they need to do to survive."

"And what happens if things get so desperate, they try and break into
our
house, even though we're in here?"

"Then I need to protect us." David pulled out a knife from his jeans, and he pointed over to the rucksack where Davina could see a hammer popping out of the bag. He said, "I'm off to get the other bag, want anything else?"

"Not that I can think of," she whispered. "Tooth brushes, deodorant—we can leave that sort of stuff for later."

"I should think about filling the bath upstairs."

She looked at David with bemusement.

"Just in case something happens to the water system, whether it's turned off or gets polluted. We can't survive without water."

She looked over to Isobel and went over to her cupboard to pick out her clothes. She had her back to her husband and he could see her head lowering. He walked up behind her and placed his hand on her shoulder. She turned around to reveal her tearstained cheeks; they gently hugged one another. Both of their tears rolled and ran onto each other's shoulders. When they broke away from one another, they began to adjust themselves. It was a brief moment of sadness, but they both felt better for letting themselves go for a minute.

As David left the room, he could hear his daughter asking, "Mummy, are you okay?"

He trudged down the stairs and cried harder than before. Now with his family out of the way, he broke down and cursed himself for doing so. He was supposed to be the strong one, and wasn't doing a very good job of it.

David looked behind him and made sure he was out of earshot from Davina and Isobel, and once satisfied that he was as alone as he could be, a cocktail of emotions burst out of him.

He ran the cold tap from the kitchen sink and cried hard, with his head resting on the kitchen worktop. He remained there for minutes until his psyche had instructed him to pull himself together. He closed his mouth and his lips in an attempt to keep the emotions in check, but like a bad cough or trying not to laugh in a hilarious situation, he couldn't manage this, and his mouth widened again as his sobbing continued.

He splashed his face repeatedly while still crying and washed out his burning eyes with the icy water. He had never cried that hard for years, not since the day of his mother's funeral in fact. His heartfelt emotion wasn't for himself, it was for his family, and it was for other families across the UK, possibly the world—if it had spread that far. He was certain that the world wasn't indestructible, and that the end of life, at least human life, was a threat that was very realistic, but he wasn’t expecting this! And why now? Why in
his
lifetime did it have to happen now?

Whether it was ten years from now, or two hundred years, David Pointer was aware that the possibility of a global threat was very real. The KT extinction and the Clovis comet were realistic scenarios that scientists claimed had wiped out the dinosaurs and had changed the shape of the Earth, as people knew it now. David had read once about the Clovis comet and that thirteen thousand years ago it exploded over the Great Lakes, ignited the forest, spurred global cooling and killed a lot of species like mastodons.

Since the fifties, nuclear threat had always been around; that threat had diluted somewhat since the fall of the Soviet Union, but it was still there from other sources.

Despite David trying to get his head straight, he was finding it hard to fathom that some kind of virus was spreading through Britain like wild fire. The Spanish flu killed the same amount of people in two years than what the Black Death did in two hundred, which was only a matter of decades ago, but back then, bodies weren't coming back to life and attacking other people.

He sniffed hard and could feel the mucus running down the back of his throat and spat into the sink to clear it.
Stop acting like a pussy.
He splashed his face once more, turned the tap off and jogged back upstairs.

He had a family to protect.

Chapter Nine

Karen Bradley looked around her house carefully; her body shook as she strolled through to the living room but there was no sign of Gary there. For some reason, her instincts were telling her not to call him. She walked with gentle and careful feet from the living room to the kitchen, and content that there was no presence on the ground floor of the house, her thoughts focused about going upstairs.

He had been out the night before and she wondered if he was in at all. It wouldn't be the first time that Gary had got so drunk that he ended up on a friend's settee, or even a prison cell for the night, which happened the once—not a great move for a young lawyer.

She crept upstairs and was half-sobbing once she appeared on the landing. She stood motionless and couldn't stop thinking about her neighbour. She then heard a thump coming from her bedroom, as if someone had fallen out of bed. She blew out her cheeks and was now convinced that her boyfriend had made it home and was now getting up, possibly with a sore head and probably needing some TLC from Karen. But after witnessing the demise of Sharon Henderson and knowing that there was a killer on the street, she'd be lucky if she slept at all for the next few days. As soon as she talked to Gary, she promised herself that she would try the police again.

She stepped carefully toward her bedroom door, and gently pushed it open with the three fingers of her left hand. The door opened soundlessly and she saw Gary in the corner of the bedroom with his back to her. She shook her head, convinced that the naked man was still drunk and had only got up for a pee.

She was unsure. About what, she didn't know.

Something wasn't right.

She called out his name with a whisper and he turned around. He looked awful; his skin was ivory, his eyes looked bruised and sunken, his overall physique looked…dead, and he didn't look that much different to the crazed man out in her street.
What the hell is going on?
As soon as he saw her, he released a groan and quickly shuffled toward her, which forced out a gasp from Karen and a gallop in her heartbeat.

"Gary, what's wrong?" was the only three words she could muster.

He was yards away from her, and his demeanour alerted her senses to run, she didn't know why, but she responded to those senses. She ran away from the naked, lifeless soul and galloped down her stairs.

Wait! What the hell was she doing? This was her boyfriend. This was Gary!

The same Gary who had proposed to her only a month ago, the same Gary who cried when she told him that she
would
marry him, and the same Gary who massaged her feet until she slept every time she came off nightshift.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs and could hear him stumbling about upstairs and in no time, he appeared at the top, and he looked unsure whether to go down or not. She looked up at him. Her confused psyche made her gasp once she looked at his naked body again. It was strangely riddled with blue visible veins, and covered in contusions. That was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with? But now it didn't look like Gary; it didn't
feel
like Gary.

She placed her hand in her pocket and searched for her phone; she switched it on and she glared at what his next move was. He took one step forward and she took a sharp intake of breath; he took another step and progressed down by one step, getting a little closer, then another, but the fourth step didn't materialise. His clumsy and docile foot missed the next one and his body stumbled violently and quickly down the stairs. Karen let out a scream and moved out of the way of his path as his head smacked against the radiator with a hard clunk at the bottom of the stairs.

"Gary?" she sobbed.

She knelt down and touched his pale face, convinced he had knocked himself out. She now began to call for an ambulance
and
the police. Even before the fall, it looked like that he had somehow caught a virus, a virus that her knowledge had no answer for. He looked ill.

As she patiently waited for the call to be answered, she took another look at his naked body and ran her fingers down from the middle of his chest down to his stomach.

Like his face, his body was ashen, and felt like a similar temperature as snow, as he felt freezing. Exasperated by her phone, she hung up and said to herself that she'd try in another minute. Before she had time to check for breathing and for a pulse, her nose twitched the longer she remained by his side.

Her nose picked up an indescribable smell, almost like rotting meat or rancid fish. She knew it was coming from Gary and this only added to her confusion. She put her fingers to his carotid artery and couldn't find a pulse. She now started to panic.

She suddenly got off her knees and ran to the downstairs toilet and for a second time, threw up, this time so violently, some of the vomit forced its way through her nostrils as well. As she spat into the toilet, she got to her feet, rinsed out her mouth and ripped off some toilet paper to blow out the remaining puke that grudgingly refused to leave from her nose. She wearily left the bathroom, and stepped over her boyfriend's body.

Now that her phone had been switched on, her phone began to vibrate furiously. At first she thought it was ringing, but when she pulled it out she noticed that she had seven missed calls and sixteen text messages.

She had a text off her half-sister, Kelly Bradley, who lived in Glasgow with their forty-five-year-old father, James, who she hadn't seen in years. She scrolled through her phone and most messages were telling her to be safe or telling her to put the TV on. She adhered to the latter and whilst standing and watching the TV in the living room, she called the emergency services once again. Her eyes gazed at the information that was being forced into her stubborn mind on the TV, and the more information her brain soaked up, the less important the phone call and her boyfriend seemed to be. After two minutes, she eventually hung up, put the TV onto mute and called her mum.

Thankfully her mum answered.

"Mum," she spoke with angst in her voice. "Are you okay? What's going on?"

She sat down on the sofa, as her frightened mother informed her daughter about what she had heard on the news so far. Karen could see for herself what was happening, as the pictures were being broadcasted like an advertisement for a new Hollywood horror flick.

It was a lot of information to take in, but the main words that came from her mother was:
Virus! They're dead—but they're not! They'll try and bite you! The whole of the UK is infected! How's Gary?

Shit. Gary.

After she hung up, Karen turned around to see Gary slowly and clumsily getting to his feet.

Shit! Is he one of them?

He stumbled toward her rather quickly than she had anticipated. She called out his name constantly, hoping that something inside of him would trigger and he would return to his old self, but he looked dead, he looked like something out of a Hammer Horror episode.

His grip startled her, he was a strong man anyway, but his stumbling gave her a false sense that he was weak or had been weakened by the illness, and as he stepped forward, his naked body forced himself on top of Karen who yelped as they both crashed to the floor.

It was obvious that the nature of his grip—and the fact that his gaping mouth tried to force its way toward her neck—convinced that whatever this is, it wasn't Gary anymore.

She used her hand to push under the chin to stop the mouth from progressing any further. She noticed his chin had a scratch underneath it. His cold, heavy body writhed on top of her. She screamed at the top of her voice to increase her aggression, raised her knees up and twisted her body with one swift turn to her right.

The thing that was once Gary, fell to the side of her. She got to her feet quickly and ran out of the room, grabbed her car keys and left through the front door still wearing her nurse's uniform. She jumped into her Cherokee Jeep and reversed out without looking behind her. As she headed out of her street, she noticed that there were two bodies shuffling around in the street, including the guy she had saw before she entered her house, the same one that killed Sharon Henderson.

Although it was hard to take in, she now knew what they were—or what her mother told her what they were—and what they were capable of. Considering there was a virus sweeping the nation, she expected there to be more than two bodies stumbling about the street—not that she was complaining.

As she headed toward the end of her street, she was tempted to run down one of the male stumblers, but decided that at such an early stage it would be better to try and keep her car in pristine condition for as long as possible. She didn't know what lay ahead of her, and a damaged radiator before she even had left the street, would have been a massive inconvenience for her own survival.

She looked in her interior mirror and saw the two bodies mooching around.

Where was everyone else? Hiding in their houses? Dead?

Shit!
She cursed mentally. She had left her phone in the house.

It was too late now. There was no chance she was going back in that house unarmed, her mother's place was too far away to drive to, and she wanted to use as less fuel as possible, but firstly, she needed to find a place to park up and think.

At the moment it was impossible to think.