Death Plague Omnibus [Four Zombie Novels] by Ian Woodhead

single night at eight o’clock on the dot.
    Watching them play out their sweet, sugar spun life had been irritating Dennis for years. Their happy-go-lucky outlook on life made Dennis physically retch. There had been countless times when he had hoped that at least one of the scrotes in Breakspear would decide to knock the crap out of them, or even better, rape and murder the pair of them. Yet somehow they just carried on following their rainbow-coloured lives, never getting beaten up, not returning home to discover someone had broken into their house and crapped on their bed, and never suffering verbal abuse from any of the kids.
    Anyone else stupid enough to try a trick like that wouldn’t have lasted a single night. Wandering around the edge of the estate after the sun had gone down was the same as asking for pain. They would either have testicles the size of footballs or be mentally disturbed.
    Their unbroken luck had drastically changed that night when the husband noticed a young, blond-haired youth stumble over a low wall opposite their house and hit the ground hard. Of course, the pair of the idiots had rushed over the road to investigate, to see if they could be of any assistance. Dennis had watched the whole drama unfold through his new binoculars. It almost felt as though he was standing right next to Donald Harding.
    Just by looking at the face of that young man still lying on the ground, Dennis knew that the guy had passed on. He’d seen enough corpses in his previous career to know what a dead person looked like. He had trouble containing his excitement when the cadaver opened his eyes. The youth snapped out his arm and grabbed Donald’s ankle. Those two good Samaritans were now in serious trouble. The corpse pulled Donald down, grabbed his hair, and bit a large chunk of meat out of the side of his neck.
    Donald smacked into the pavement with his life fluid streaming out of the side of his neck. The blood flowed into the gutter and disappeared down the closest drain. The man’s poor wife had shrieked like a banshee. It must have finally dawned on the silly bitch that their neighbourhood was not made from fluffy white clouds and cute cartoon bunnies. Dennis had seen that the only response to her cries for help was the twitching of curtains. He suspected that half the houses on the road would have locked their doors when she had started up her scream motor.
    Her husband’s body had started to jerk and twitch a few minutes later. The woman hadn’t noticed, she was too busy trying to stay away from the other man. Dennis grinned in disbelief when Donald’s hands began to spasmodically open and close. For Dennis, a man so intimate with death, this was the most exciting event of his life. What was happening here? The dead stayed dead, they did not come back to life. Donald should not have been able to do that—he had bled out like a stuck pig—that man was deader than dead. Despite the impossibility of the situation, that dead man had gotten back on his feet. He wasn’t that steady on them, but he was still moving about.
    The whole situation got more interesting as each moment passed. The woman had yet to notice that her darling husband had just come back to life. The hysterical woman’s eyes hadn’t left the other man. Dennis thought that all his birthdays had come at once when both men lunged for the woman from opposite sides. She didn’t stand a chance. The men wrestled the screaming woman to the ground, then pulled off her arms like an old rag doll and proceeded to tear out lumps of flesh from her legs and chest. It took her a while to stop screaming.
    The walking dead men left the woman’s body slumped against a lamppost on the other side of the street. It had been there for some time, and not one person had passed it save for a mongrel dog who rushed past, stopped, then pissed on the body before running off. Her left arm lay in the middle of the road across a faded white line where the men had dropped