Snatchers (A Zombie Novel) by Shaun Whittington Read Free Book Online Page A

hoping for a, they won't response, but it never came.
    "Then we stay in the attic."
    "We can't survive in the attic alone."
    "No, but there's a skylight. Which means, I can get out of the skylight and walk across the roofs of the houses and check other skylights, maybe break into the neighbour's house and see what the neighbours have left, food...whatever."
    "David," Davina half-laughed and began to lecture her husband. "You can't just break into peoples' houses and rob them."
    "Do you honestly think the neighbours are coming back? They're in New York for a week, and even if they do come back after this mess has been finished, do you think they'd be pissed with us for breaking into their house in order to survive?"
    "We live in a terraced block of eight houses; what happens if the other neighbours have already done that?"
    "Then that's fine. They need to do what they need to do to survive."
    "And what happens if things get so desperate, they try and break into our house, even though we're in here?"
    "Then I need to protect us." David pulled out a knife from his jeans, and he pointed over to the rucksack where Davina could see a hammer popping out of the bag. He said, "I'm off to get the other bag, want anything else?"
    "Not that I can think of," she whispered. "Tooth brushes, deodorant—we can leave that sort of stuff for later."
    "I should think about filling the bath upstairs."
    She looked at David with bemusement.
    "Just in case something happens to the water system, whether it's turned off or gets polluted. We can't survive without water."
    She looked over to Isobel and went over to her cupboard to pick out her clothes. She had her back to her husband and he could see her head lowering. He walked up behind her and placed his hand on her shoulder. She turned around to reveal her tearstained cheeks; they gently hugged one another. Both of their tears rolled and ran onto each other's shoulders. When they broke away from one another, they began to adjust themselves. It was a brief moment of sadness, but they both felt better for letting themselves go for a minute.
    As David left the room, he could hear his daughter asking, "Mummy, are you okay?"
    He trudged down the stairs and cried harder than before. Now with his family out of the way, he broke down and cursed himself for doing so. He was supposed to be the strong one, and wasn't doing a very good job of it.
    David looked behind him and made sure he was out of earshot from Davina and Isobel, and once satisfied that he was as alone as he could be, a cocktail of emotions burst out of him.
    He ran the cold tap from the kitchen sink and cried hard, with his head resting on the kitchen worktop. He remained there for minutes until his psyche had instructed him to pull himself together. He closed his mouth and his lips in an attempt to keep the emotions in check, but like a bad cough or trying not to laugh in a hilarious situation, he couldn't manage this, and his mouth widened again as his sobbing continued.
    He splashed his face repeatedly while still crying and washed out his burning eyes with the icy water. He had never cried that hard for years, not since the day of his mother's funeral in fact. His heartfelt emotion wasn't for himself, it was for his family, and it was for other families across the UK, possibly the world—if it had spread that far. He was certain that the world wasn't indestructible, and that the end of life, at least human life, was a threat that was very realistic, but he wasn’t expecting this! And why now? Why in his lifetime did it have to happen now?
    Whether it was ten years from now, or two hundred years, David Pointer was aware that the possibility of a global threat was very real. The KT extinction and the Clovis comet were realistic scenarios that scientists claimed had wiped out the dinosaurs and had changed the shape of the Earth, as people knew it now. David had read once about the Clovis comet and that thirteen thousand years ago it exploded