Lockey vs. the Apocalypse by Meadows, Carl (love novels in english .TXT) 📗

a spiral with no visibility. I couldn’t see what was happening on the top floor but as I reached the top of the stairs, my breath caught.

Skye was down, blood everywhere as her throat was a ragged mess. Faith was the one screaming, her lover on the verge of death, no possibility of saving her. Hope was atop her, bloody chunks of meat grinding in her teeth while Faith screamed in blind grief and panic, frozen and unable to move. I guess the two women went to check on Hope and Jericho for some reason, maybe concerned about them because of noise as they were in the same bedroom.

When Nate and I examined the scene later, we pretty much worked out what had happened. Hope had, ironically, lost all hope. There was a bottle of pills virtually empty beside her bed and without doubt, that broken look that concerned me had evolved into full suicidal thoughts. She couldn’t face the world and her unhappiness any longer, no chance of a normal future ahead of her, and she just ended it. She clearly died in the night and then murdered her sleeping husband.

Faith and Skye were in the next room and must have heard the couple bumping about in the morning, gone to check on them as a pair, got no response from knocking on the door and decided to open it to see if everyone was okay.

That must have been when Hope lunged through the open portal, fixed her teeth to Skye’s throat and ripped out her jugular.

Even as Ariel and I watched in horror, Jericho—his belly chewed wide open to reveal a spill of intestinal loops—lunged after his undead spouse, clattering into Faith and bearing her down, his teeth savaging her face.

Fuck.

This was four undead now in the house and the door to mine and Freya’s room—with my little dude Particles in—was the one directly opposite. If she opened the door, there were four zeds in immediate lunging distance.

“Freya!” I roared above the din. “It’s Erin! Don’t answer, don’t make a sound, keep the door closed until I tell you it’s clear!”

The door stayed closed and the smart woman kept her mouth shut. Particles, as ever because he’s super smart when it comes to zombies, kept his little doggy trap firmly shut.

However, my bellowing from the top of the stairs drew every glassy eye my way.

“Ah, shit,” I muttered.

Guess where my loaded shotgun was?

Still beneath my bed. In a closed room. With four zombies now between me and it.

There was no way past them, so I had to draw them downstairs where there was space, then I could get up the stairs, get the shotgun and clean this unholy mess up.

It twitches my arse how fast some of these things reanimate. Hope and Jericho were the first to react to my voice, but it was no more than ten seconds before Skye twitched to life and judging by the god awful ruin of Faith’s neck and face, she wasn’t going to be far behind. All I wanted at the moment, though, was the fuckers to get away from my friend and my dog.

A door opened further up the hallway and Zion stepped out at exactly the wrong moment.

“What the hell is…?”

His sentence ended as Hope’s teeth drove deep into his arm. The timing was exquisitely bad, as Zion stepped into the hall just as Hope reached his door. He had no time at all to react and he unleashed a scream of pain—higher pitched than most girls surprisingly—before Hope ripped the chunk out of him. He fell backwards into his room, somehow kicking the door shut behind him.

Well, at least that was one less undead to deal with. Locking himself in his room as he died from his bite meant there was only four to deal with immediately, but fucking hell; we’d gone from ten spiritual lodgers to five in a minute. Freya was locked up safe, Ariel was behind me, Grace and Theo were in their bungalow away from the madness, which meant there was just….

Pax… Barclay… opened his door, just as a reanimated Jericho was passing by. I didn’t see what happened, because Pax didn’t get a chance to appear. All I saw was Jericho turn, his lips peel back, then he lunged through the open doorway. Gurgled screams followed and I nearly shit myself as Ariel hit a frequency of scream that could powder stone.

“Buffalo!” she screamed at a decibel level never achieved by the human voice until this moment.

Well, her buffalo just got served at an undead cook-out, and she lost her shit. I don’t mean just screaming with horror and grief. I mean a total psychotic break. She just screamed and screamed, her arms flailing like some demented puppeteer had got hold of her strings and was having a seizure. All the while she just screamed at that bone-jarring frequency, the sound like a rusty blade sawing down my spine.

I turned, wanting to get down the stairs, but she wouldn’t move.

“Ariel!” I roared. “For fuck’s sake, move!”

I was trapped between what was going to be a small battalion of five undead—once her buffalo was up and about again—and a screaming marionette. I wanted to make her come with me, but she was broken, I knew she was. She was just screaming in tongues, her eyes somewhere else, her throat tearing with grief. It broke my fucking heart, but I had to leave her. I pushed past her, tried to make her follow me down the stairs, but she pulled away, screaming “Buffalo!” in the midst of all her madness. She wouldn’t move and the undead yogis were almost upon us. The lips had started to peel back, the clawed grasp reaching out.

“Fucking hell, Ariel,” I almost sobbed. And left her.

The guilt of that will probably catch up to me at some point. I keep telling myself she was gone, she couldn’t be helped and logically, her grief was so spectacular, she’d have probably taken