Snatchers (Book 9): The Dead Don't Scream by Shaun Whittington Page A

gone. Maybe the coast was clear.
    He leaned over to kiss his wife on the forehead.
    "I'll just go and check," he said quietly. "If it's clear, we'll make a run for it to the Lea Hall building. There should be some guards there."
    "Probably not there anymore," she sighed in defeat.
    Ignoring her negative comment, he crawled over to the end of the tent and reached for the zip once again. He undid the zip and peered out.
    His partner asked, "Anything?"
    He turned around and shook his head.
    "Are you sure?"
    He nodded. "I'm sure."
    "You didn't look out for very long."
    He sighed and was about to take another look, but she screamed out as a rotten hand from outside grabbed at his throat, and the diseased mouth that belonged to the hideous face of a creature tore his right cheek away. He yelled out and took another bite to his ear, and now more came stumbling towards the tent and began to circle it.
    Seven of them, from outside, fell on top of the tent and made light work of tearing through it. By the time the woman had been bitten, her husband had already been eviscerated. She never managed to witness her husband's slow death in full, as hands from behind her grabbed at her face and ripped her skin away, whilst another beast tore into her throat.
     
    *
     
    Gillian Hardcastle glared out of her bedroom window with her teary, blurry eyes and witnessed many dozens of the dead walking through Sandy Lane, through Hill Street and down into the front gardens.
    She ran to the back of her house, and looked outside the other bedroom window. She opened the window and could hear the dead in the back gardens. She couldn't see them, it was pitch black, and the only reason the dead could clearly be seen on Sandy Lane was because of the light that the burning tanker was providing.
    She returned back to her bedroom and cried as more seemed to be appearing, and it didn't take a genius to realise that the burning tanker wasn't helping.
    She dropped to her knees, put her palms together and began to pray.
    She hadn't prayed in a while, and wasn't too sure there was a God to pray to. If her prayers weren't going to be answered, she had a bottle of painkillers in her medicine cabinet that could take her away from this nightmare.
     
    *
     
    Tears rained down Henry Winter's cheeks as he could see the dead along the road, in their mass numbers. The only positive about this whole dire situation was that it was just he and his wife that were in the house. His three offsprings weren't children anymore, and had flown the nest many years ago.
    His two sons were in their late twenties. They had been living in London for the last ten years and had jobs in retail. He and his wife hadn't heard from them for seven weeks. They were in contact for the first week of the crisis, but after that they both couldn't be reached. He and his wife feared the worst. Henry's daughter was twenty-two and had been working as a rep in Tenerife. He had no idea how bad the crisis was in that part of the world, and only hoped, especially with Tenerife being a Spanish island, that it had been untouched by the infection.
    He continued to glare out, and saw their numbers grow so much that Sandy Lane looked something like the start of a marathon with the amount of dead that were there.
    They were fucked. They were completely fucked.
    Nobody could get them out of this mess, and he could see that some of those fiends were heading into front gardens and mooching around and slapping on windows.
    Henry could see that the house next door had been breached and heard the window of the living room smash. He had no idea why they were trying the place. Nobody had lived there for two months. Maybe it was accidental. Maybe it was just the sheer numbers of the dead that slowly forced the glass to break once they were pressed up against it.
    His house was going to be next. He was convinced of it.
    His wife walked in. She had her brown dressing gown on and was shaking with fear. Her rotund figure