Jack looked at a slumped Hector who moaned and wriggled on the floor; the injury to his back was preventing him from getting to his feet as well as the stab wound to his leg. "What are we gonna do with him? Do you think you've crippled him?"
Paul never answered Jack's first question with words, and as for the second, he didn't care whether he had crippled him or not. Instead, Paul Parker walked over with the shotgun; he checked the gun to confirm that there was one cartridge left. He snapped it back shut, and took a sad look at Gary's body. Nobody deserved that kind of treatment. He then scowled back at the groaning Hector.
"We'll leave him here," Paul answered eventually. "The Lurkers can have him."
He then emptied the last cartridge into the back of Hector's legs, and dropped the gun onto the floor with a strident clatter. The pellets scalded the flesh of the forty-six-year-old, and more. It felt like the back of his legs had been slashed with a hundred razor blades as the burning was forcing him to lose consciousness and to also fill his shorts.
Jack and Paul both walked out, dazed and scared, their ears were ringing from the aftermath of the blast and the screaming coming from the canteen. Once they were outside, they were greeted with a deathly silence, apart from the ringing. Wordlessly, they got into their cars, leaving the silver Mazda that Gary had arrived in, and left to get back to the village hall.
They had some explaining to do.
Chapter Twenty
The van reversed back onto the front garden, and Karen pulled up the parking brake once it came to a stop. Both Karen and her new friend, George Jones, looked around the main road to see that all the houses, gardens, and the huge street itself, was still barren.
"Wow," George sniffed. "There's nobody here."
"Not for now."
Karen opened the door and jumped out of the vehicle with the bag of supplies; George followed suit. They both met each other round the back of the van and George glared up at the sun that furiously beamed down.
George sighed, "It won't be like this forever. They'll come eventually, I'm sure of it."
"I know." Karen didn't appreciate George's negative, yet, realistic comment. She pulled up her T-shirt to reveal a Browning pistol that was slotted in the side of her jeans. "But I'll be ready for them."
George gasped and gave off a wry smile; he was in good company. "So let's meet this friend of yours."
"Later. He's ill."
Karen took the bag of supplies and passed them to George. She then took out her keys and looked behind her before she opened the front door; a slight twitch of a curtain could be seen over the road, four doors down.
Maybe they weren't completely alone, she thought. Although the lack of cars in the driveways suggested that most of the residents in that part of the area at least, were absent, she was sure that they must be a handful of people who decided to hide and barricade themselves in.
They both entered the house, with George carrying the carrier bag of medicines, and went into the living room. Both sat on the couch with a groan, as if they had just come back from work, as they would after a normal day, during a normal week...living in a normal world. Those days were gone.
George asked, "Electricity still working?"
Karen nodded her head. "For now."
"Tea?"
Karen nodded again, and sorted through the bag and pulled out a box of pills. She waved them at George and said, "I gonna go up and give him these. You two can meet once he's back on his feet again."
"Is he badly ill?"
"Just a fever, nothing life-threatening."
"Need water for this guy?" George hovered at the entrance of the kitchen waiting for an answer, as he was about to go in and put the kettle on to make tea.
"Nah; should be a bottle on the bedroom side-table. Be back in a mo; make yourself...well, you know."
Karen galloped upstairs and walked into the bedroom to see an ashen-coloured Pickle lying in his bed. He didn't look well at all. The fever, or whatever it was, was at its peak, and Karen quickly pulled out a strip of tablets, took two out and looked over to the bottle of water. She sighed, as he had hardly touched any. Maybe he had been sleeping all this time.
She nudged him slightly, and his eyes widened immediately. "What?"
Karen smiled affectionately. "Got some stuff for you to take."
Pickle attempted to sit up, but it was a struggle. As soon as his head went further than six inches off the pillow, his head felt heavy and it pounded hard like a bad hangover. His head immediately lowered back down and he placed his shaking hand on his roasting head. "What's wrong with me?"
"It's just a fever; I had the same thing a couple of months ago. I was in bed for two days before I could get up."
Karen could see the concern scrawled on his face, gave him a sympathetic smirk, and tried to put his mind at ease. "It has nothing to do with what's happening out there."
"Are yer sure?"
"Yes, I'm a nurse, remember?"
"I know, but what do yer nurses know? All yer do is make beds and wipe old men's arses all day."
"How dare you, you cheeky pig," she half-laughed and half-gasped when Pickle made his tongue-in-cheek remark. "Don't forget, I'm carrying a gun."
Pickle smiled and responded by waggling his right hand under the sheet, as if to say, so am I. She smirked back, forgetting she had gave him the other Browning before she left.
She helped to lift his head up and gave him the two pills to swallow, followed by a gulp of water that nearly choked him.
"What are those pills, anyway?" he quizzed.
"They'll help you grow some balls," she laughed.
"No, seriously." Pickle's eyes grew heavier by the second.
"Cyanide," she replied with a smile. "Now you get better; we have a guest downstairs."
Pickle had drifted off, and never asked who the guest was.
Karen took a sympathetic look at Pickle, and knew that with the world in the shit, no proper sanitation, lack of clean water, and no decent healthy diet because of lack of food, humans' health was going to diminish as the months and years progressed. With the medication supplies struggling as well, old time diseases such as diphtheria, smallpox, cholera and polio could eventually make a comeback.
She walked to the bathroom to get a flannel that was sitting on the sink. She ran the cold water and placed the purple flannel underneath it; she squeezed it and rung out most of the cold water that had been soaked up and headed back to the bedroom. She stood over Pickle and carefully placed the cold, soaked material on his forehead in a desperate effort to cool his elevating body temperature. She took one last sympathetic look at the dishevelled man; he was the shadow of the man that she first met in the woods, and hoped he'd be on his feet within the next day or so.
She left the bedroom and closed the door quietly behind her. She walked across the landing and headed for the top of the stairs and halted in her tracks; she brought her nose up and sniffed like a rat. She then looked up to the hatch leading to the attic. She sighed, knowing that the family were going to have to get moved and buried before they eventually stunk the house out.
She trudged down the stairs and decided to have a relaxing cup of tea and get to know her new male friend, before lulling him into a false sense of security that everything was rosy in the house, and then announcing that there was a dead family, including two young girls, in the attic, and she needed help removing them. She decided to have the tea first, before delivering her potentially surprising announcement.
She entered the living room, and was greeted with a smiling George Jones who stood holding two steaming hot cups of tea. She beamed back and thought for a second, despite his rugged looks, he was reasonably attractive. She then became sad and overcome with guilt. Her fiancé, Gary, had only been dead over a week. But she wasn't flirting; she just noticed that he was an attractive man, that's all. Was that so wrong?
Karen had only just realised it was Sunday, as it was hard to keep track of the days since the break
out had occurred.
It was only a week ago, but it seemed so long since she left her street in her Cherokee jeep, wondering what the hell was going on. It was only a week ago since she was carjacked and was running for her life. It was only a week ago since she escaped from those things by climbing into Stile Cop's cemetery and then running into the woods.
She then thought about the word Snatchers, and where she first heard it, which led her to think about Oliver Bellshaw. A shiver ran down her spine when she thought about him. What a creep he was.
Chapter Twenty One
The cars moved nonchalantly through the industrial estate and they could both see to their left, where the small town of Handsacre was situated, at least fifty of the things walking away from the village and heading forwards, their way. They weren't too far away and Paul deliberated that it might prove that the journey back, to eventually retrieve Gary's body, might be a tad difficult, if not impossible, if the things were still around.
But as far as the ghouls were concerned, what was going to be their next destination? Their next village or town?
Paul was in front and Jack was twenty yards behind in his vehicle, but Jack had glared at the things to his left for a couple of seconds too long and ended up driving off the road. His body shook in a panic and his car rolled harmlessly into a ditch—something he had done before only a week ago.
Paul pulled up Lee Hayward's Cherokee jeep by the side of the road, and jumped out shaking his head. He was clearly angry at Jack's lack of concentration, but pitied him when he saw the forty-year-old with his head against the steering wheel, crying.
Paul stopped in his tracks, standing between the jeep and Jack's vehicle. He wasn't sure if Jack was crying because of what had just happened to Gary, a guy he seemed to be reasonably close to despite only knowing each other for a week, or whether it was the situation as a whole that was affecting him.
Paul lowered his head with sympathy, smacked his lips together, and strolled towards the car that was clearly in there for good. The car was almost on its side, with the two wheels on the right side off the ground by at least a metre. They needed a tow truck. With the car ditched, it also meant that another load of food had been unnecessarily abandoned. With the things only hundreds of yards away, it appeared that coming back for the food and back for Gary's body was also going to be nothing short of a suicide mission.
Knowing that time wasn't on their side, Paul opened the car door and offered Jack his hand. It was a struggle to pull the man out of the leaning car, but they managed it in the end. Paul affectionately placed his arm around the distraught Jack Slade, and they both slowly walked to the Cherokee jeep.
Without uttering a word to one another, Paul and Jack sat in the front of the jeep. Paul rubbed his hands together and was never really any good with this kind of thing. Comforting another emotional male was something he had very little experience of, and wasn't sure he wanted to start now.
"You okay?" Paul asked. It was all he could think of to say. Of course he wasn't okay! A friend of his had just been raped and killed like a pig in a slaughterhouse, and he was very nearly raped himself, and was now living in a world he was unfamiliar with.
"You know what?" Jack sniffed and wiped his eyes with his forearm. "If you hadn't have got yourself free…what happened to Gary, would have happened to me."
Paul nodded his head in agreement. He already knew this; it was the reason why he so desperately tried to free himself, and why both of his wrists looked like they had been burnt with a hot rod. The pain was terrible, but he was trying to ignore it.
Jack continued, "And all I could do was sit there in shock. It just shocked me the way a human could treat another human..." he paused. "You see these things, these Lurkers, as you call them, I've killed some. I'm not a coward, or at least I didn't think I was. But I just sat there and…"
"Stop beating yourself up about Gary," Paul interjected. "It's not your fault, or mine."
"I remember Gary mentioning what could happen, once the surviving human race became desperate. Killing each other for food, gas. It's starting already, isn't it?"
"That wasn't for survival!" Paul exclaimed. "That was for sick pleasure, that's all. They were taking advantage of a lawless world. Those fuckers have probably spent their lives in and out of jail, but now there's no deterrent."
"What's happening? Where is everybody? Are we getting help from overseas?"
"Nobody knows anything anymore," Paul sighed, and started the engine once he saw the first couple of creatures appear in his rear-view mirror. The beings that had distracted Jack, that had caused him to crash, were now gaining ground and heading slowly towards the jeep.
Paul looked in the rear-view mirror once again, and wasn't in so much of a rush to get going, as they were still a hundred yards away. What did worry him, however, was where those things were going, and how long would the village hall be safe for, because these things never seemed to stay in the same area once human life had evaporated.
"What about your family? You given up hope?" Jack was beginning to compose himself.
Paul shrugged half-heartedly. "I woke up to find a living room full of these fuckers, and Jocelyn and my two-year-old daughter were no longer there. I don't know where they are, or whether they're alive."
"You haven't given up hope though?"
Paul shook his head. "I'm convinced they're still out there somewhere. You found Thomas, didn't you?"
Jack smiled warmly, and his tears seemed to be subsiding.
"We can talk about it once we get back to the hall." Paul slipped the jeep into first and pulled away.
"What are we gonna tell Jemma…you know, about Gary?"
Paul shrugged his shoulders; the jeep took a sharp right bend at thirty. Despite Paul showing Jack sympathy, Jack had a feeling that Paul was still a little pissed off that they had to leave a car full of food behind. Feeding over a dozen people was no easy task.
Paul finally answered Jack Slade's query about what to tell Jemma once they arrived back at the village hall. "The truth."
Chapter Twenty Two
It was traumatic for Karen having to deal with the family in the attic, but it had to be done, as they needed a dignified burial, and rotting away up there was no good for them or the new residents that were planning on living there for a while.
Once she gently broke the news to her new guest that a removal of a family needed to take place, George didn't seem too flustered or shocked about what he was asked to do. Karen was surprised by his reaction, but then again, she didn't know his story and how he had managed to reach the outskirts of the village.
Maybe he had gone through hell—like everybody else, and nothing shocked him anymore. The new world had quickly desensitised Karen from the Snatchers—from violence itself, and she assumed that George Jones was made of the same stuff, or had been moulded into the same kind of character she had turned into. It was now the kind of world that it either makes you or breaks you.
George Jones insisted on digging the grave in the back garden, but informed Karen that if he saw just one of those things, he was going back inside as he was unarmed. Karen got the impression that he was hinting for her weapon, but nobody was having that. It was a gift from Pickle, and she decided to withhold information about there being a shotgun and another Browning—which Pickle had—in the main bedroom. She didn't know why she did this. Maybe a precautionary measure as she didn't know the man and only knew his name.
Karen decided after the burial to hide the shotgun that sat under Pickle's bed in the bedroom cupboard for now, as she didn't know George properly, yet. She did trust him and liked him, but she had decided to be over-cautious with this one after getting burnt with Oliver Bellshaw a week ago.
They spoke very little while they dug, and Karen had come to the conclusion that George wasn't the talkative type. George and Karen both agreed that one large grave would suit both of them and the deceased family. They came to the conclusion that one big grave wouldn
't be as time consuming and exhausting than digging four individual graves, and it would also be fitting if all four were buried together. They pretty much died together as a family, and now they were being laid to rest together as a family.
The exhausting part had been achieved, by moving the mum and the dad first. George had struggled, especially with the deceased male, but using both he and Karen's strength, they had managed to carry out the bodies despite the awkwardness of the rigor mortis.
Their final trip to the attic was the removal of the two girls.
They moved them out, one by one; Karen refused to look at their faces, and once she was outside she gently and carefully placed them on top of each parent who were lying next to each other. George had done a good job of making the solitary grave wide enough for the parents to be placed side-by-side, as dumping each body on top of one another seemed a little callous and disrespectful.
Once each girl was placed on one of their parents of the shallow grave that was three feet in depth, George looked at Karen as if he didn't know what to do next, but Karen wordlessly grabbed the shovel they had raided from the family's shed, and began moving the dug-up soil onto the dead family.
Karen could feel her emotions getting carried away and could feel the lump in her throat and the water filling in her eye sockets. She took a quick peep at George, who didn't seem to be moved by the incident, and felt that his behaviour was a little odd, as well as cold. She was intrigued to find out more about him, and told herself that was exactly what she was going to do once she had seen to Pickle and settled down for the night.
It was an arduous task, especially as they were both exhausted from removing the bodies. George, seeing that Karen was physically struggling, took the shovel off of her and decided to finish the job off. George had become more puffy and stopped a few times to wipe his brow and have a rest, which was understandable as he dug the grave himself.
Snatchers: Volume One (The Zombie Apocalypse Series Box Set--Books 1-3) Page 42