Death Plague Omnibus [Four Zombie Novels] by Ian Woodhead Page B

reading glasses. It had been such an eventful night. Dennis chuckled to himself. That was one way of putting it. He hadn’t had this much fun since before his wife had died. He looked at his hot chocolate and sighed. After all those years of marriage, her drinks-making was the only thing he missed.
    Dennis leaned back against the back of the chair and allowed his eyes to close, recalling the multiple images that had already caressed and fondled his mind tonight. Each one had helped to awaken the beast within him that Dennis had believed to be permanently dormant.
    His charged emotions received yet another jolt once those two dead men had stumbled out of the view of his binoculars.
    Definitely dead.
    He had died ten years ago. Dennis knew this because it was he who had murdered the man and buried his body in the garden across the road while the house was between tenants. Ronald Spinks held a special place in Dennis’s heart. He had been the last person to feel the cut of his knives before he hung up his special tools for good.
    From that point on, events just escalated, exhilarating him and scaring him both in equal measures. From the safety of his living room, he watched two old men. He was sure that one of them was Albert Pannier. It was difficult to tell because most of his face was missing. They lurched out of the alleyway between number eight and number ten, stopped right in front of a young mother pushing her pram, and pulled the baby right out of its seat. It took them just seconds to extinguish the child’s light. The mother’s screams were cut short as they both dived on her too.
    Just ten minutes later, Rebecca Westwood walked past his window holding her son’s hand. Daniel Westwood was only eight, but he already had a good throwing arm. The little bastard had even tried to put Dennis’s windows out a couple of years ago. Dennis had soon put that little bugger in his place. He had shot him in the leg with his air rifle from the bathroom window. The kid had been very polite to him ever since.
    The two old men had dragged most of the pieces back into the alleyway, but that pram, splattered with bits of baby, still lay on its side in the middle of the road. Both Rebecca and Daniel paid it no heed as they walked past. Dennis was hoping that Rebecca’s maternal instinct would compel her to investigate. It looked, as his wife had always stated, that the girl obviously didn’t have any.
    It was just typical behaviour from Breakspear’s younger generation. They were so involved with their own sad and pointless lives that they just didn’t notice anything beyond their own blinkered vision. The feeling of community pride that had thrived on the Breakspear estate when he and Ethel moved here fifty years ago was long dead.
    Dennis had zoomed in on the kid’s face to see if the fallen pram would draw out any reaction from Daniel. His sullen features remained unchanged, at least until they approached their own garden gate.
    The change was as sudden as it was frightening. The light in Daniel’s eyes just went out, and his face lost all of its animation. Dennis had seen this effect happen before, lots of times. The most recent was when he’d watched his wife die. He was now looking at the face of a dead child.
    His heart began to beat a little faster when Dennis realised just what was going to happen next. He moved a little closer to the window, eager not to miss this. Sure enough, the little boy suddenly lurched to a standstill just before they reached their gate. Rebecca must have thought her darling son was just being awkward, and proceeded to give him what for. How she failed to notice that the kid was now a walking corpse was beyond him.
    The lass didn’t have the brains she was born with and Rebecca, like the rest of her family, weren’t born with that much in the first place. Daniel wrapped his arms around her neck and fastened his teeth round her jugular. Dennis found it unnerving how they always went for the