Snatchers 2: The Dead Don't Sleep by Shaun Whittington Read Free Book Online Page A

muscular heavy frame to lift, but Pickle's favourite exercise at the prison's gym were pull-ups, so this action was a simple thing to execute, although he was a little out of practice and had no time to do a warm up. Karen thought that her hands were going to snap in half once Pickle's weight could be felt, but it only lasted a mere second before he pulled himself up.
    Once he was up, he cursed aloud that he had no torch with him, as all he could see all around him in the attic was blackness. He ran his fingers through his short, brown, greasy hair and tried his utmost to scan the dusky area with his naked eyes. It was night vision goggles he needed.
    "Wait," Karen instructed, and saw two light switches by the bathroom door. She tried the first one, which lit up the bathroom. She then tried the second, which lit up the attic. She looked up and saw the black square fill full of yellow light and stood at the bottom, waiting for Pickle to tell her that it was clear and then they could continue to relax, eat, drink, and eventually try and get a decent sleep once the evening arrived.
    "Cheers," Pickle shouted down. "Just gonna have a wee look around."
    He looked around and wasn't prepared for what he was about to see next.
    Despite the attic being a normal unkempt attic, with boxes of books along with other useless accessories in the corner of the attic, there was a scene that forced his throat to swell, making it near impossible for him to produce a necessary gulp.
    He continued to glare.
    Two girls, no older than ten, were lying motionless on their backs as if they were just sleeping, but Pickle knew they were dead. They lay next to one another and were separated by two yards from the bodies of their parents. The woman, who looked like she used to be very attractive, lay on her side with a dark circular bloodstain that soaked through her white blouse at the side of her chest. The man's state was even worse. He was huddled and curled up like a hedgehog; his arms were saturated with blood, and Pickle worked out within a second what had happened when he saw the heavily stained knife lying by the man's side.
    In his cell, a few months ago, he watched a nature programme on corn snakes. One particular corn snake had entered a lair belonging to a mouse, and instead of allowing its babies to be lunch for the snake, the mouse turned against its babies and ate them for itself. It was a strange situation and Pickle always remembered it.
    It appeared that the dad had done the same.
    Instead of subjecting his family to a new and more grisly world, he and his wife seemed to have come to a horrific and sad agreement that maybe they were better off away from the new world. There was no sign of blood on the girls, so all he could think of was that they had taken pills or had been smothered. There were no sign of pill bottles, but there was a cushion that could have been used to smother the girls, lying by the side of them. God knows what the surviving girl was thinking when her father, or mother, was smothering her sister, knowing that she was next. Had her parents gone mad?
    The used knife by the father's side was the reason why the wife had a large round blood stain on her white blouse. After killing the girls, the distraught parents probably, at the time, knew that there was no going back now. Pickle assumed that he must have stabbed his own wife through the heart and the distraught father then slashed his own wrists, waiting for the life to drain out of him and eventually be with his family that were waiting for him on the other side.
    Pickle knew these scenes were probably in every other street, but seeing it was still a horrible experience. He then remembered the other bedroom that had the Robert Pattison poster. He thought to himself that it must have belonged to a teenage daughter that had either gone out for the night, or had left temporarily to go to university. Whatever the reason, she wasn't there. He peered over the hatch and glared