He opened the window to catch a stray breeze, and could hear a cacophony of sirens and, what sounded like, children shrieking from a few houses away. He smiled to himself and shut the window. He could have thought of worse places to live in.
He put on his jeans standing up, feeling his lower back smarting as it always did when he first got out of bed, and managed the task successfully without falling over.
*
Downstairs, Davina was dressed in her grey housecoat, a Christmas present from David, and wore nothing underneath it. She had on her burgundy slippers, and was making herself a cup of coffee. This had been the first time David had slept in for a while, and she looked at the clock thinking that he certainly was embracing every minute. She had been up since 7am, and had spent most of the morning with the curtains drawn, reading with Isobel, and watching Peppa Pig.
It was now after ten, and she thought that twelve hours was more than enough for her husband. Now bored after spending three hours watching children's TV, she turned on her phone and logged onto her social network.
Her eyes widened. Surely must be some mistake.
She had never been so popular. She had thirteen messages on her personal message inbox. She placed the phone on the side of the sink, and patiently waited for the kettle to boil. She made her coffee, and with her right hand holding the cup and her left holding the phone, she began to scroll through the messages. She started from the bottom, and decided to work her way up from the earliest sent to the latest.
The first message was sent at 7:46am; it was from her sister who lived in Norwich. It read: R u ok up there? Call me ASAP. Love you.
Davina tucked her short brown hair behind her ears and shook her head. "What's wrong, sis?" she muttered to herself. "Has Barry left you again?"
She checked the second message of the thirteen. It was from her work colleague called Amanda, who was working the night before—Davina was due to go in on Tuesday night. It read: Hi hun, can't make it tonight. I feel ill, gonna go to my bed and see how I feel later.
Another five messages she had received were very short and asked her to put on the television. A couple others were random bullshit, apart from the one by her mother that was sent at 8:23am. It was Davina's final message.
It read: Tried to call. Where are you? Your dad and me are hiding in the living room. They're banging on the windows, trying to get in. For God's sake, keep your doors locked. Get David to get you lot up in the attic. Look after that granddaughter of mine. Love you always, Mum.
Davina stroked her upper lip with her forefinger and thumb, as if she had a moustache to play with. It was her thinking pose, but it didn't matter how hard she thought, she couldn't fathom what was going on. She read her mum's message once again. They're banging on the windows, trying to get in. What does she mean?
She took a slurp from her piping cup of coffee and read the messages over and over. She placed her phone onto the side and strolled into the living room. Her daughter was sitting on the floor in the corner of the living room, colouring in her books. Davina switched over the channel to the news.
The British news was proving difficult to get on; she punched in the channel number for the BBC and a message came up on the screen and there were four messages in bullet point format, telling the viewer that the programme was off the air due to the new circumstances that had occurred. It also advised people to stay indoors and to keep their doors and windows locked.
Davina placed her hand on her chest and immediately thought about a nuclear attack, but then she reminded herself of her mother's message. They're banging on the windows, trying to get in. It wasn't making any sense.
She decided to change the channel to CNN, as she couldn't get FOX news because it was a channel that they had to pay for, and it wasn't a channel that was in their package when they bought cable.
As Isobel continued to use her crayons innocently in the corner of the room, Davina's mind slowly managed to digest some of the information that was being fed to her. Here eyes narrowed and her forehead scrunched tightly, creating wrinkles.
Surely this has got to be a joke?
She flicked through other channels that she never knew existed and looking at the images that were being shown on Russia Today and Al Jazeera, she realised this was no joke. She put the channel back on to CNN.
Davina looked up to the ceiling and could hear the gentle thuds coming from above; it sounded like David had finally awoken. Maybe he could make sense of all this. She got to her feet to greet her husband; her legs wobbled a little as she stood. The astonishment and surreal event of what was happening had stunned her so much she couldn't even feel her legs walking to the bottom of the stairs, as it was as if she was floating.
They're banging on the windows, trying to get in.
"Morning," came David's tired greeting.
He trudged down the stairs, where at the bottom, Davina was waiting for him. Her skin was snowy white; the blood from her face had been wanted by other parts of her body. "Morning."
David stood still on the very last step and gazed at his wife; he was certain she had received a distressing phone call. A relative had died? Her mum? But then again, Davina was a sensitive soul. She also looked this way when she found out that Amy Winehouse had passed away. He didn't know what to think, so he asked her what was wrong.
She shook her head, and shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. I think you need to sit down and watch the TV. I'm just gonna double check the doors and windows are locked, and then go upstairs and get dressed."
"Okay." David elongated his response, simply because his head was being suffocated by mystification.
Davina walked past him and checked the front door, as she went through the other rooms downstairs. David smiled at his daughter, who smiled back, and then sat down on the brown leather couch and gaped at the television for a minute to be greeted by shaky mobile phone footage and presenters looking like they had seen a ghost.
Shit!
Chapter Five
It had been an arduous shift in the A and E department, and it had been a typical Saturday night/Sunday morning as the grade D staff nurse was coming to the end of her shift.
Her feet ached for her shoes to be kicked off, her head pounded and she would have welcomed eight hours sleep right now. It had been a crazier night than normal. So much so, that a four-man armed police guard had to be issued in the department, which had been the first time she had experienced anything like that—albeit she was only twenty-three and had only been qualified for two years.
At around midnight the usual drunks had wandered in; stomachs were pumped, some were aggressive than normal, and a junior doctor was even bitten by one of the drunks. It took three nurses to restrain the attacker, and that was when they needed to call the police. The junior doctor was treated and taken to another unit.
Around 6am, Staff Nurse Karen Bradley, had taken her break and found that the ward had been overrun with people who had received bite wounds, just like the gang member the night before. It had been a surreal night; three nurses as well as the junior doctor had been attacked, and she was seriously considering a new career.
The Saturday before, the department had dealt with twelve drunks, two stabbings and a young girl who had been killed by a hit and run driver. There had been a lot of local media attention surrounding the town suggesting that knife crime was rising by an alarming rate. A week later, a biting epidemic seemed to be the new thing. What on earth next?
Since the government cuts, Karen had felt like she was trying to do her job with one hand tied behind her back. Beds were short; staff were not being replaced by the ones that were leaving, so the remaining staff had to deal with what crap was thrown at them. It had come to the point that they had to start and turn away patients, and refer them to the nearest hospital in Stoke, as Stafford was heaving.
Five minutes before her shift had finished, she and another nurse were attacked by an individual who ran in from the outside and tried to bite them. L
uckily for the pair of them, nobody was injured as a police officer had restrained the crazed individual. Her boss had asked her to do some overtime, but she refused. She had had enough, and welcomed her two days off that she was due.
She walked out of the department briskly, almost in tears because of the crazy night that she had experienced, and went toward her vehicle which was thankfully parked near the A and E department, and she took the short journey to her Cherokee Jeep.
She fumbled for her keys, fired the ignition, and slipped the Jeep into first without putting on her seatbelt. She shook her head as she saw mindless idiots in a daze strolling around the staff car park; there were three to be exact, and one even ran with a hobble toward the department's entrance.
The hospital was away from the town centre, and almost in the middle of the countryside, which was a pain for patients who had no car, but Karen liked that, as she thought if the hospital were situated right in the heart of the town, they would be inundated with patients with minor problems. Minor problems that could be solved with a small bandage, or a burn, that could have been easily treated with an immediate run of a cold tap.
She pulled out of the hospital car park and headed toward her hometown of Rugeley. She was missing her bed, and more importantly, couldn't wait to snuggle up to her boyfriend who always loved his lie-in on a Sunday, as he always went out with the boys on a Saturday night.
As she exited Stafford, she headed for the country. It was another two miles before she would reach her hometown and blasted up her iPod and began to sing out to a track from a Stereophonics album she had purchased a few weeks ago. In the distance, she saw a figure up ahead who was shuffling slowly in the middle of the road.
Fuck 'em, she thought.
She had already done her bit working in that crazy hospital; she was too tired to play Mother Teresa and give a drunk a ride home. Besides, picking up a strange drunken man wouldn't have been one of her better ideas. Her Gary certainly wouldn't be too impressed with her kind-hearted behaviour, if she did indeed stop for the individual.
As the man stumbled to the other side of the road, she felt comfortable that she could pass him without slowing down, and more importantly not strike the drunken fellow.
At last, she entered the town and bizarrely saw a handful of people shuffling around the streets; two were in the road. She shook her head and wondered if it had been a charity 'drink yourself into oblivion weekend.' Too tired to even care, she pulled up into her quiet street, and parked the Jeep into the drive. She looked at her house and sighed with contentment.
For a twenty-three-year-old, she was lucky to have such a place. With her twenty-six-year-old boyfriend being a newly qualified lawyer, she knew it was a place she couldn't afford on her own nurse's wage.
She stepped out of the Jeep and headed toward the front door. She took a gander to her left in the desolate street. Her instincts also forced her to look to her right.
She saw one of her neighbours dressed in sports attire; it was Sharon Henderson. She was a fitness instructor at the local gym, and would religiously go for her Sunday morning jogs without fail. It seemed that this particular morning, her exercise session wasn't going to take place, as she tried to chat to a person that was stumbling toward her in the street. She asked if that person was okay, but there was no answer from the worn looking individual, just a gentle moan. To Karen, he looked like a drunk—but more than that, he looked like a drunk that had been dragged through a hedge and then beaten up.
Karen saw the woman being pulled to the floor by the being she had never seen before.
"Sharon!" Karen called out, totally confused.
Her body nudged forward to help her neighbour who was situated twenty yards away, but fear had paralysed her legs temporarily and instead of helping the distressed woman, she stood and watched the whole event that was about to unravel before her shocked eyes.
She called out helplessly once more. "Sharon!"
Her neighbour never called back, and now her attacker fell on top of the fitness fanatic and buried its head into her neck. Karen couldn't see what was happening in this bizarre, surreal situation, but the high-pitched scream from her female neighbour suggested that her throat was being ripped out by the thing that was on top of her.
This was confirmed, when it lifted its head and blood ran from its mouth that chewed at something frantically. Its mastication was rushed and it went in for another bite. The screaming had stopped from Sharon as a pool of crimson developed around her neck area, and she lay lifeless on the pavement, apart from the twitch in her left leg. It stood to its feet as if it was bored by its prey and turned toward Karen.
Its face was pale, and the sunken black eyes and its bloodstained mandible, made it look like a Halloween costume—a very realistic Halloween costume. It took one look at her, and began moving toward her, quicker than she had imagined. Her heart pumped furiously as she frantically searched for her front door key and slotted it in, and took a look to her right again. He was gaining on her and was now on her drive, and although she had only looked for a brief second, his face looked ghastly, as if he was already dead. She let out a fearful shriek, gave the key a twist with her wrist and pushed the front door open, slammed it shut, locked it, and called out her boyfriend's name.
As soon as she shouted out Gary's name, she immediately released a furious jet-like release of vomit that landed on the hallway carpet with a heavy splat. The unusual feeling in her stomach was there for a few seconds before the release, which almost took her by surprise. She spat out the remaining chunks that stubbornly refused to budge out from the gaps of her teeth. Her right angle position returned back to vertical as she stood up straight, and could hear the moans coming from behind her as the awful face pressed itself against the frosted glass of the front door, smearing it with blood.
She sat down and picked up her landline phone and called the police. She waited for a full minute but there was no answer, she slammed the phone down to try and recollect her weird thoughts.
Did that really happen?
She wondered that if she managed to get through to the police and told them her story, they would probably just laugh on the other end of the line. She walked into her living room and peered from the blinds out of her window. The corpse of Sharon Henderson was definitely there and remained on the pavement, which proved that Karen wasn't becoming demented. She went back to her front door to see that Sharon's attacker had gone, as if his attention had been seduced to go somewhere else. She went back into the living room, sat down and placed her juddering hands on her clammy forehead and tried to make sense of the episode that had just occurred.
It was proving difficult.
Chapter Six
Jack Slade took Kerry's advice to sit down and watch TV.
He flicked through the channels, but most of them were off. As he came across the FOX channel, he brought the volume up by another three notches and allowed the news to slowly, and grudgingly, sink in.
He blew out his lips to try and somehow blow out some of the tension out of his body. There were reports mainly coming from the USA, although there were three correspondents, one based in London, Dublin and the other based in Calais.
Jack watched as the American male reporter based in London—who was originally there to report on a serial killer who had been caught stalking women for the last ten years—begin his report. He could only tell the viewer mainly hearsay, and wasn't really revealing information that would benefit the public. The Dublin based reporter could only offer the same information; it was clear they had no idea what was happening and the Calais based reporter told the viewers about the closure of the Channel Tunnel, and then went into the history of how it was made, stating indirectly that she also had no idea what was going on, and was trying to stretch out there so-called report.
One recorded video was played every five minutes. It was a video of a London politician being attacked by half a dozen people, and being eaten alive. The VT stopped there, as o
bviously the cameramen had either been attacked him/herself, or had the sense to make a run for it.
Jack watched it for twenty minutes before turning away from the TV; the reporters and newsreaders were constantly repeating themselves, experts were brought on to be interviewed and pretended to have the answers on something they knew nothing about.
Why don't the arrogant bastards just admit that they don't know?
He headed for the mini bar and pulled out a miniature bottle of Jim Beam. He swallowed it in one. This wasn't an attempt to get drunk once more; Jack's nerves were shot to pieces and the surrealism of what was occurring before his eyes had to be dealt with in whatever way he deemed fit. He headed toward the closed blinds, and stood opposite them with his hand on the cord ready to twist them open. His tried his utmost to control his breathing, and was dreading what was going to greet his eyes as he opened the blinds.
Without hesitating any longer and wanting to quench the intense build-up, he twisted the blinds open and pulled the cord to slowly open them fully. As they parted, he took a careful look out of his hotel window, expecting scenes of carnage.
The hotel was situated within Central Station, and as he looked out on Union Street, where opposite there was the usual shops like, Poundland and Burger King, he noticed there wasn't a soul in sight, which wasn't totally unusual as it was Sunday morning. Even on a Sunday morning, however, Jack expected Glasgow to have one or two souls moping about. Maybe a drunk here and there, a police presence, or the odd Eastern European beggar that the city seemed plagued with these days, but there was nothing.
He looked back at his room and wondered if everyone had left the hotel. But where to? Somewhere remote where they could be considered safe? Or back home with their families? He looked back at his phone and read the text messages from Kerry once more. He thought about a chemical attack and maybe the gas had caused people to become crazy, but his brain suddenly reminded him from what he had seen on the TV that the theory had been quashed by the media, as nothing had been picked up.
Snatchers (A Zombie Novel) Page 3