Pickle coughed and winced a little. He was still tender in the torso area, but never complained about it. "Once we get to the other side o' the estate, the Sandy Lane camp isn't far. If we get a vehicle, we'll have to go the Slitting Mill way, the long way round. Personally, I would rather just go on foot."
"Anyone know how to steal a car?" asked Jack.
No one answered verbally, but all looked at one another sheepishly.
"Great!" Vince snapped. "No one. So we're gonna need to walk along the railway track, and get onto the main Brereton road to the camp. Then it's two miles from there."
"We could break into a house and steal the keys to a car," suggested Shaz.
"I think we should go on foot," Pickle spoke up. "Driving will be quicker, obviously, but if we're on the road, we could be targeted by mercenaries."
"But if we go on foot we could be attacked by the Rotters," said Vince. "And anyway, we're gonna be coming back for dad and Karen by truck anyway."
"Yeah, but coming back we'll have a strong vehicle, and we'll also be armed."
"Okay," Vince sighed. It was obvious that he preferred to get to the camp by car, despite already being a victim of a carjacking, resulting in the death of Claire and Paul.
"What would yer rather have, Vince?" Pickle queried. "Being in a car and having men armed with a bat or a gun, chasing yer? Or, being on foot and takin' care of a stumbling member o' the dead, carrying no weapon apart from the teeth in its mouth?"
"Neither," laughed Vince, then held his hands up. "Okay, I see your point. It's gonna take longer, but as long we come back in one piece, that's all that matters."
They had walked through the estate and were all surprised to see the place was barren. The occasional evidence of violence could be seen, including bloodstains on the pavement, a few scattered body parts and burnt out houses, but there was no dead meandering the streets at all. It was very bizarre.
Jack looked around and couldn't see a single sign of life. "I bet this place was jumping a few weeks back."
"It was." Shaz nodded sadly. "Before I met up with Pickle I was going from one abandoned house to the next. They were everywhere; but where are they now?"
All four had reached the main road and began following Vince's lead. He told them that they needed to walk a few hundred yards down, veer right to avoid the Sandy Lane camp, then climb over the railings and down the steep bank to get to the rail track.
Jack smiled when this was announced, and it took him back to his childhood. He and two other friends used to climb over the very same railings and walk along the rail track, then they'd hide in some bushes and throw stones at the signal box, forcing the man inside to come out and chase them. Their actions were very dangerous, but they never possessed a phone or a games console back then; they had to entertain themselves and by doing this they caused misery to others.
Jack couldn't believe the amount of things he got up to when he used to walk the streets of Rugeley as a ten-year-old. He and his friends would run across the backs of peoples' gardens, throw fireworks under cars, and use the red phone box to make hoax calls to the fire and rescue services. Thinking back to those days, he felt a little ashamed. Then his thoughts went to Thomas; he hung back and Shaz hooked her arm in his, seeing that he was becoming upset.
"It's okay," she said. "I think about Spencer every minute of every day. Don't forget, it hasn't even been a month yet."
Vince could see that Pickle was more eager in his strides than he was, and tried to catch him up when he looked over his shoulder to see Shaz and Jack comforting one another.
Vince quickened his steps and caught up with Pickle. He decided to get to know the muscular man. "So what's your story?"
Pickle looked at Vince, a man he hardly knew, and took a while to answer. "Well, I'm the youngest o' three, ma parents are older. I left school and became a trampoline salesman, off and on."
Vince laughed at Pickle's dead-pan humour. "No, I meant your story during the outbreak."
"What do yer mean?"
"We all have a story how we got where we are." Vince was keen to find more about this intriguing man.
Pickle struggled to answer Vince's question at first. Where would he begin? Lost in contemplation, Pickle took a while to answer Vince. Eventually he uttered, "I was in prison when it all kicked off."
"What were you doing in prison?" Vince didn't give Pickle much time to continue his story, and seemed impressed already that a member of the group had done time. "And how did you get out?"
Pickle sighed and had a chuckle to himself. He knew that Vince was going to interrupt him every other second with queries, so Pickle tried to leave nothing out. "In short," he began. "I used to be a dealer, and I'm not talking about the kind yer see in a casino. I was doing time when the outbreak was announced. We all panicked and began banging our cell doors. Fortunately, I was in a house block that had two officers in charge that were sympathetic. They released us and finally gave us a lift."
"So how did you meet Karen? Shaz told me she was a nurse at Stafford."
"I met up with Karen at Stile Cop. We stayed there for a few days before we were attacked during the night. We lost the two officers as well as my partner, KP."
Vince screwed his face and said, "KP? Funny name for a woman."
"KP wasn't a woman."
"Oh." Vince looked embarrassed, and was about to crack a joke to lighten the mood, but he feared he would upset Pickle who looked the type of man that could take Vince with one arm tied behind his back.
Pickle continued, "Anyway, when we were attacked at Stile Cop, me and KP ran down a hill to get to the van that was surrounded, while Karen created a distraction by shooting them."
Vince gave Pickle a surprised look. Karen created a distraction by shooting them?
"We used to have Brownings. Karen was alone, in the dark, shooting them. She was surrounded by dozens o' the fuckers. She's got some fucking balls, I can tell yer. Anyway, KP never made it, and me and Karen left Stile Cop in a prison van that the officers stole. Then we stayed at a car park, then a house. Then we met up with Jack and fled to a sports centre. That was short-lived. So we fled into the woods and came across yer dad's cabin. He's an absolute life-saver."
"Jack told me about the sports centre." Vince released a sad sigh and added, "He told me about people being bit, and what happened to his son, with the blood getting into his eye."
Pickle pointed at Vince and announced, "If yer ever see me get bit, leave me. As soon as those teeth get into the flesh, yer finished."
Vince nodded, unsure whether Pickle was giving him some advice or it was some kind of threat.
"So what's the deal with Karen?"
Vince never had the chance to get an answer from his question, when Shaz yelled out, "Look." Shaz pointed up ahead, and reached for her machete.
Two ghouls were up ahead, walking in their direction. The one on the left was a rotund woman, and the creature on the right was a male, with a thin black beard.
Vince pulled out his hammer and said to Shaz, "You deal with the salad dodger. I'll deal with Jack Sparrow."
Pickle and Jack stood back while Shaz and Vince made little work of the ghouls' demise. Once they were finished and left the beasts on the floor, heads pouring out the dark stuff, Vince pointed and announced, "The rail track is just up there."
They walked for a few minutes and could see the remains of a corpse lying in the middle of the road. Shaz had already pulled her grey T-shirt up, anticipating the horrendous smell, and when all four reached the body, they could see only the head and a couple of limbs were left. Intestines were strewn across the road, and whoever or whomever had caused this destruction, had now disappeared and gone elsewhere.
"Damn shame." Jack shook his head. It didn't matter how many times he witnessed these images, it was still horrific. Every time he saw something like this, he couldn't help imagining what it would actually be like to be devoured in such a way, especially by a group of them.
&nb
sp; Was that the way he was going to go? He hoped not.
Vince nodded in agreement with Jack's statement. "It's happened to many thousands, especially in the first week, but it's still awful when you see it."
The head of the victim was lying on its side; the mouth of the decapitated head was wide open, and the eyes were still present. The head also sported long black hair, tied in a ponytail, but most of it was covered in blood, and there was also a cut to its face.
"Fuck 'im," Pickle sniffed. He felt the eyes of the group glaring at him as soon as he released the unsympathetic statement.
"That's a bit harsh, Pickle." Shaz was taken aback by Pickle's unusually cold manner. It wasn't like him at all. Shaz thought that this would be the kind of thing that Karen would say, and Pickle would then tell her off or give her one of his looks.
He responded to Shaz's comment. "It's not harsh at all."
Shaz, Jack and Vince decided to keep their mouths shut for fear of causing an argument, or worse.
Pickle pointed his finger at the decapitated head. "That's the guy tha' took ma finger off."
Chapter Twenty Eight
The padlock on the garden shed was a struggle to get off, but Tommy had managed to remove the door off its hinges with a hoe that was left abandoned in the corner of the garden. He stepped into the shed to see that it was nothing special. Like any other shed, it had garden equipment like an electric lawnmower, a hedge trimmer, strimmer, spade, rake and a shovel amongst other things. In the left corner of the shed were deck chairs, empty plant pots and a pink junior bicycle.
He pulled out the shovel and left the shed. He exited the back garden of the place via the gate that was available. He was now in a wooded area and looked around for a spacious part where there wouldn't be any tough tree-roots hidden, and began to dig at the soil.
Eventually it was going to be Megan's grave.
It was only right that she had a burial, and he couldn't possibly leave her in her bedroom, rotting away. She deserved better than that.
Tommy was planning on using the house, and hoped that he would ride this virus out until things began to improve. The other three, her family, that had been dead for weeks, were going to be dumped in the garden and covered up with whatever he could lay his hands on. He didn't have the energy to dig four graves, and he didn't want to create one large hole to put all four in. To put Megan in a hole with three ghouls, despite them being her family once upon a time, didn't feel right to him.
The digging process took about an hour, and throughout the digging Tommy berated himself for Megan's death. He had got up three times during the night because of his paranoia of them things getting in from the other room, but he never heard Megan creep in and take his gun. The guilt plagued his mind.
He patted the earth with the back of the shovel once he was finished, and whispered a prayer for the young girl. His eyes looked up as gentle rustles could be heard up ahead. His eyes could see a fox trotting his way down the dirt path, most probably up to no good.
His thoughts went back to Megan.
She was only thirteen, barely a teenager, and it still pestered him how a thirteen-year-old girl had managed to fire the damn handgun in the first place.
How did she know that in order to fire the pistol, the trigger safety and the trigger itself, must be deliberately depressed at the same time? If the trigger safety is not depressed, the trigger will not move rearwards and allow the pistol to fire. She must have been playing with it for a while. There's no accidental firing; if the gun fires it means the person has done something to make that happen.
After the burial, he headed back to the house to start the exhausting task of removing the three bodies from upstairs.
When he entered the kitchen, he grabbed a tea towel off of a radiator and tied it around his face to shield his sense of smell from the rotting corpses. He then went into the cupboard under the stairs and pulled out a pair of pink marigolds, put them on, and went upstairs. He never thought that he needed the marigold gloves when disposing of Megan, but these creatures had been dead for weeks and could be carrying all kinds of infections that scientists haven't even discovered yet.
He decided to go for the heaviest member of the dead first and dragged the man by his legs, his head smacking off every step as Tommy progressed to the bottom, his injuries staining each step with congealed blood. He was then dragged through the living room, through the kitchen, and eventually dragged outside and dumped in the middle of the garden.
Ten minutes had passed, and the mother had also been placed next to her husband. Exhausted, Tommy was relieved that he'd left the lightest to last, and once he had been disposed of, he took the tea towel and marigolds off and threw them on top of the corpses. They stunk, but at least now they would pong outside, and not stink out the house.
He waved at his face as a couple of flies had already turned up. He was amazed how quickly these vile insects detected a dead body and were now ready to lay their eggs in the eyes, ears and mouth of the defunct beasts.
More buzzed around him. Where the fuck did they come from?
He slapped at his face and finally turned around and headed back to the house. There was still one more corpse to remove. The family dog, Buddy.
He went back into the kitchen and checked the same cupboard where he had got the marigolds from. He pulled out a thick Lidl carrier bag and left the house to go round the front that faced the main road with the woods on the other side. He sucked in a breath and realised he should have kept his tea towel and his marigolds on.
He picked the head of the black Labrador by both ears and finally put it into the carrier bag. He tied the bag in a knot and walked round the other side of the house to throw it next to the rest of the bodies. Returning to the front, he bent down and took a hold of the hind legs of the dead animal. He dragged the headless body around to the back garden and put it next to the others, quickly walking away from the hundreds of flies that seemed to have come from nowhere.
With the noise of the buzzing coming from behind him, Tommy headed back to the house and locked the front door once he was inside. After throwing up in the sink, Tommy went upstairs and was overcome by the smell of death before he reached the landing. He needed to do something about that.
He took out all the supplies out of Megan's room, including his own bag. With her blood and brain debris spread over the wall, it was a place he didn't want to stay, and also didn't have the water to clean the place up anyway. He dumped his bag in the room he had slept in the night before, as well as the food and drink Megan had been living on, and finally placed the camping stove and canister into his new room on the bedroom floor.
He went into Megan's room and opened her small window to allow some air in the place, then left and shut the door. He never wanted to go back in there, and the parent's room was in an even worse state with the dead being in there for over three weeks, but he walked in to open their window as well, being careful where he tread. He didn't think the opening of the windows would be a great help to filter out the smell, but he needed to try something.
After he had opened the window, he carefully tiptoed out of the room, making sure the soles of his shoes never made contact with the sticky blood on the carpet. He shut the door behind him and headed for the bedroom that used to belong to Megan's brother. He closed the door once he was in, and had a look around at the teenage boy's room.
It was tidy, had a desk with books and a now unworkable laptop. And the walls had three large posters. The poster at the foot of the bed was of The Beatles' Abbey Road album. The other two posters were of two young attractive girls. Their names were at the bottom of the posters. Michelle Keegan and Sarah Riley. Tommy shook his head. "Never heard of 'em." They were probably dead now, anyway.
Although the two bedrooms were out of bounds and there was staining on the stairs as well as the areas where he'd dragged the bodies on the ground floor, the place was more than liveable, and a lot more attractive than staying in a cabin in the mid
dle of the woods. Despite the unnecessary and tragic death of a young girl, he felt reasonably content.
Perfect.
Or was it?
*
Karen Bradley had finally made it to the top; she had almost forgot how difficult it was, and once she was there she sat down on the grass. She ran her fingers through her greasy locks and promised herself that the first thing she was going to do when she reached Vince's camp was to wash her hair.
She made an O shape with her lips and blew out some air, in an attempt to kill off the sickness that suddenly crept upon her. She had no access to pregnancy tests, but with her nausea and being late, it didn't take a genius to work out what was happening. She didn't know exactly how long she had been pregnant. She couldn't even remember the last time she took her period, which was acceptable considering what she had been going through in the last three or four weeks.
She placed the shotgun down on the grass, and stretched out her arms behind her back, clasping her fingers together. Once she stretched off, a chest stretch that she remembered from her gym induction many months ago, she felt a discomfort in her breasts. She touched them, and for the first time they were sore and tender. Yep. Definitely pregnant.
Karen had been vomiting since the beginning of June, but she had put that down to shock, witnessing people being butchered, and the dead walking. She never thought anything of it, until her and Pickle reached Wolf's cabin and she began getting a metallic sensation in her mouth. The vomiting and tiredness never made her think that she could be pregnant, because now, vomiting and tiredness came with living in this new world for most survivors anyway.
She lowered her head and began to sob. Her shoulders shook up and down, and fluid from her eyes and her nose was escaping. She lifted her head and cried, "I've had enough! I've had enough!" She wrapped her arms tightly around herself in a desperate way to be comforted, and continued to cry for a further two minutes.
She needed reassurance. She needed words to keep up her confidence and keep her strong.
Snatchers: Volume Two (The Zombie Apocalypse Series Box Set--Books 4-6) Page 13
