Kingsley faced the window again, wishing a sinkhole would open beneath him and swallow him up.
“Mate… I’m sorry,” Eric said, realising that his words had poked at a fresh wound. He stood and started toward the front of the bus. “Forget about it.”
Kingsley stared at the back of Eric’s head, wanting to punch the man despite knowing that he was speaking the truth. As he always fucking did.
Kingsley couldn’t escape his fear of confrontation, though. He couldn’t stop reliving in his mind the moment James had been shot with the crossbow. The way his eyeball had exploded as the bolt speared through it was something he would never forget.
People were the worst. They really were the fucking worst.
The bus slowed to a halt. “We’re here,” Sammy said.
6.
Sammy’s parents lived on a secluded, winding cul-de-sac. As they would have struggled to turn the bus around in the narrow dead-end street, they decided to leave it on the main road, taking the keys with them while they went to see if Sammy’s parents were home.
It was incredibly quiet. It would have been pretty dark out if it weren’t for the street lights; they hadn’t gone out yet, but most of the lights were off inside the bungalows and houses. Presumably, the power stations that supplied the national grid would falter sooner or later with no one to maintain them.
The only home that seemed to have lights on inside was a bungalow on the left side of the street, close to where the winding road terminated. A side window glowed languid orange, silhouetting a dark figure standing in front of it. A snapper. The arhythmic sound of it thumping on the glass was all they could hear other than their own footfalls.
Kingsley had never been to Sammy’s parents’ home. He had no idea what it looked like. But when Sammy paused and stared at the bungalow with the light on for a good few seconds, he knew that was their place.
Eric stood next to her and rubbed her back. “When you’re ready,” he whispered.
Sammy didn’t take her eyes off it. She didn’t say anything either. She just gulped, then after a few moments she drew her knife and started toward the bungalow.
The snapper didn’t hear her approach. It was still beating on the window when she stuck the knife in the back of it’s skull, drove it to the brain stem. Yanking her knife from the body, she squatted with her elbows on her knees for a few moments.
For a second, Kingsley thought the snapper Sammy had just killed might have actually been her undead father, and that was why she had suddenly stopped. He couldn’t see well in the dusk, but the body looked like an old guy.
Then he realised that Sammy was simply hesitating to take a look inside her parents’ home out of fear of what she would find.
Abruptly – perhaps in a moment of sudden courage – Sammy stood, cupped her hands against the window and peered between them at her parents’ kitchen. Kingsley and Eric joined her.
There was nothing out-of-the-ordinary to see in there. Some dirty dishes were piled in the sink and an open box of dog biscuits stood on the kitchen counter. One of the cupboards hung open though, and a roll of gauze, as well as some boxes of prescription drugs, were visible inside.
Then Sammy’s breaths grew shaky. Kingsley glanced at her and back at the kitchen in confusion. What did she see that troubled her?
It was only when he craned his neck to the left and noticed the open utility room door that he saw what was bothering Sammy.
A man on his knees in the doorway, leaning into the narrow, unlit space of the utility room – Sammy’s dad.
She rapped on the window. “Dad! Dad, it’s me!” The man didn’t move.
Eric touched her shoulder and held a finger in front of his mouth, reminding her that making loud noises wasn’t a good idea out here in the dark. “Let’s go in. Will they have locked the doors? Do you have a key?”
Sammy shook her head. “No, I don’t have a key and I’m pretty sure they’ll be locked. Mum used to keep the doors locked all the time in our old house, day and night. She’s like that. Even if they somehow have no idea what’s going on out here, I doubt she’ll have left them unlocked.”
Trying the front door and finding it locked, as Sammy had guessed, they rang the doorbell a few times. No answer. They went to the back door, passing the kitchen window again and seeing that her dad was still in the same place. It was hard to tell if he was alive or dead. Or…
They had no luck with the back door either.
“Oh god,” Sammy said. “He probably can’t hear me. Mum told me that dad’s hearing was going, but I didn’t know it was that bad already.”
“You sure there’s not a spare key lying about somewhere?” Eric asked.
She shook her head again, looking defeated.
“Do your parents have a security system?”
“No.”
Eric nodded to himself. “Then we can get in without an alarm going off and attracting snappers.”
“How are you going to break in?” Kara asked. “Kick down a door?”
“That’s not ideal. The only one I would be able to kick in is the front door, as the back door swings out into the garden. But the front one will be made from hardwood – solid-core material. It’ll take too long and I might injure myself. We could smash a window, but the noise is an issue.”
“So what option does that leave us with?”
Eric pulled the chain mace from his belt, looked at his friends and cocked his head, gesturing for them to follow as he moved back round to the front of the bungalow.
“Mum will have a heart attack,” Sammy murmured.
Eric stood a foot from the door, hefting the mace. “We don’t have a choice.” He started swinging the weapon lightly back
