Snatchers (A Zombie Novel)

by Shaun Whittington

  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 sh
e 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.

  Chapter Ten

  "Who is it?"

  The person behind the hotel room door never answered Jack Slade. He walked toward the door and placed his ear next to the wood. He jumped when the gentle knock appeared behind the door once again. Jack spoke through the door. "Who's there?"

  "Open the door," the voice urged in a whisper.

  Jack blew out his cheeks in relief, and immediately opened the door. He was greeted by a large man, who looked at least thirty pounds overweight. His heavy breathing suggested that he needed to change his job, as his fitness was non-existent. Jack looked at the man's uniform; he seemed to be a security guard.

  "Is there anybody else with you?" Jack asked the guard, who walked into the hotel room without waiting to be invited. Considering the crazy circumstances that were occurring, Jack was unbothered by this rude intrusion, and shut and locked the door once the brawny man was inside.

  Still trying to catch his breath, the security guard shook his head and let out a breathy, "No." He sat on Jack's bed and placed his hands on his clammy head.

  Jack needed answers. "So what's happening? What do you know?"

  The man raised his hand toward Jack, telling the impatient, panic-stricken man to hold on for a minute while he caught his breath.

  "What's happening?" the man half-snickered, his accent was Glaswegian, and was still breathing like an asthmatic in a feather factory. "The end of the world, that's what's happening. And what do I know? You watched the TV?"

  Jack nodded.

  "Then you know as much as I do. As for the hotel—"

  "What about the hotel?"

  "I've had to lock it up. It was crazy this morning."

  "Crazy? How?"

  "People leaving in their droves this morning, some people are refusing to come out of their rooms, but it's not my problem anymore. I even had one guest who hadn't seen the TV and went down to the kitchens pissed off that there was no breakfast. I told him to either go back to his room or leave and explained to him what was happening. It's not everyday you need to inform someone that the apocalypse is happening."

  Jack taunted, "I wouldn't actually go that far."

  "Really? Have you seen the news?"

  "I've seen enough."

  "This is gonna be global, mark my words. You can't escape God's doing."

  Jack Slade never responded to the security guard's comments, and had just remembered that he didn't even know his name. As if the guard was psychic, he suddenly held out his hand and introduced himself as Robbie Owen.

  Jack smiled and told Robbie his name, and then the usual ramblings of do you have a family? began and they discussed their family in a brief one-minute summary.

  Jack informed Robbie that he feared for his six-year-old son, who lived over four hundred miles away in England. As far as distant relatives were concerned, like uncles and cousins, he wasn't caring too much about them, and he didn't expect them to be putting him on top of their agenda either.

  Robbie, on the other hand, was in a horrific quandary. He wanted to get back to his wife and three children in a place in Glasgow called Nitshill, only a few miles from where Jack lived in Pollok. Jack did mention that he lived not so far away, and Robbie's eye lit up once that information was given to him.

  Robbie quizzed, "So you gonna stay cooped up in here, or you gonna try and get home?"

  Jack smiled thinly at his new companion and spoke. "I'm gonna try and get home. Why? You want a ride?"

  Robbie lowered his head and half-laughed. He nodded and Jack could see tears forming in Robbie's eyes. "That would be great. Have you managed to contact your family?"

  Jack responded with a single nod of the head. "You?"

  "Can't get through, I've text her though. If she's watched the TV, then she 's probably taken the advice of going upstairs and barricading herself in the room with the wee 'uns. Anyway, make the most of technology, won't be long before everything goes down, even carrier pigeon will be difficult."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Think about it. We all have phones, right? How long before they cease to stop working? Who's topping up the phones if there is nothing on the end of the other line? Look at the complexity of the Internet. Who's gonna pull the levers? I remember seeing a documentary on the hurricane Katrina catastrophe; those poor people were in a state for two months. Mobile phones were useless, there was no Internet access, the only thing that worked was world band radio, and CBs that people worked by using a car battery. Where was the government? Nowhere to be found for five days."

  Jack grew confused at Robbie's passionate rant, and he seemed a man that could lose his temper quite easily. He appeared to be someone not to get on the wrong side of. "What's your point?"

  Robbie added, "My point is, when the shit hits the fan, you're on your own, my friend. I saw that places in London and other cities are being quarantined by the army, but if you live in a village or a wee town, you're fucked. I wonder how long it'll be before our army gets here?"

  Jack said, "Probably never. We don't have the personnel. I think London will be the government's main priority. Can people still use the Internet though? I couldn't get anything on this shitty phone of mine."

  "So far, but what's the fucking point, apart from e-mailing or Facebooking loved ones? If this thing goes on for more than a few weeks, people are going to be running out of food and water. The Internet is the least of their worries when you have an empty stomach and starving children. Even if electricity is still working, do you think when people are struggling to survive, people will be popping into the local cyber cafe for a wee hour if it was open?"

  Again, Robbie's vexation grew the more he spoke and the more Jack asked questions. Jack felt it was understandable. Like everyone else, he was frightened, perplexed and beleaguered that there was no support of any kind.

  "I'm just saying, that's all," Jack spoke defensively.

  Robbie smacked his lips together and bowed his head. Jack thought that that was the nearest he was going to get from Robbie as far as apologies were concerned, but it was something that didn't bother him, and something he didn't want to dwell on.

  "So do you want that ride or not?"

  Robbie smirked. "You bet. Please tell me you're parked in the hotel car park."

  Jack Slade shook his head, and gave off an apologetic enervated simper. "Afraid not. I'm parked at a NCP on Jamaica Street."

  "That's a few streets away."

  "Take it or leave it." Jack began to adjust himself, as if he was getting ready to leave.

  "Lucky I brought these from the kitchen with me. We might need them." Robbie took out two kitchen utensils: a carving knife an
d a cleaver. He handed the cleaver to Jack, who immediately put it into his belt.

  Jack tried an imprudent smile, but the moment he attempted it, his lower lip shimmered. "Shame."

  "What?"

  "You're a security guard. If we were in America you'd be carrying a gun."

  "And attract attention with the noise from gunshots. What good would that do? We're trying to avoid these things, aren't we?"

  "I don't even know what these things are. I just hope your God is looking down on us." Jack snapped, before opening the door.

  "Just because evil happens in our world, does not mean that God is neither in control, nor sorrowful." Robbie walked over toward the window and pulled back the netting, his eyes widened, then narrowed as if he was trying to focus on something in particular. He continued to glare and waggled his head.

  "What is it?" Jack was intrigued to know what it was that was disturbing the huge Glaswegian.

  "This is the kind of shit that's happening across the country." He gestured with his hand for Jack to go and take a look.

  Jack walked over toward Robbie in no hurry at all, and half-closed his eyes as he usually did when a tense moment was building in the horror movies he used to watch. His eyes opened carefully and he could see three people crouched over a poor individual who was wriggling around trying to get free. Jack reached for the handle and slowly opened the window, still transfixed on the scene that was occurring below him. As the window opened, the screams began to fill the room, they were horrific, and Jack was unaware that a grown man could make such a noise. The pain must have been indescribable. He shut the window tightly and looked at Robbie.

  "Are they...eating him?"

  Robbie nodded; his face was expressionless.

  "But..?"

  Jack couldn't find the words to finish his sentence, but Robbie understood the shock, as he felt the same when it first burst onto the television. The scenes of people being attacked on FOX and CNN were horrendous, although Robbie found it slightly funny in a black way that despite what was going on in the real world, he could still manage to find a comedy channel and watch Fawlty Towers, Cheers or The Big Bang Theory if one felt the urge.