Snatchers 2: The Dead Don't Sleep by Shaun Whittington

it, and she then made a conscious decision to leave.
    She placed the bag on the passenger seat of the van, and went round the other side to start the engine. The beings from afar seemed a little closer last time she looked and she decided to go down that particular road to inspect how the small village, of name she didn't know, was coping. The van's engine roared as she slipped it into first and moved off without checking her blind spot.
    As the van increased its momentum, with a mixture of the declining hill and Karen adding a little more gas, she could clearly see that this particular tiny village was awash with the creatures. Every street, every main road, and every private area—like the cemetery, a children's play park and a set of tennis courts—was populated with these things. There were a few on the main road, and if they weren't so spread out, she would have had to have hit the gas pedal to get herself through the masses of walking bodies, but it seemed reasonably easy, as she swerved by most of them. Only two bounced off the solid van.
    As she got to the top of the main road, now exiting the small village, she decided to turn right and go the long way round, back to the house where Pickle was. She was now driving along a main road surrounded by woodland, and she noticed that the further she progressed along the long, lonely main road away from the village, the less of them there seemed to be. She estimated that there must have been fifty of those things, and some appeared to be leaving the village.
    But why were they leaving? Was there nothing left to eat?
    She didn't have the answers, but felt a chill knowing that these things were slowly leaving. She was now only half a mile away from the village she had just left, and she thought to herself that the sooner Pickle gets over this illness, the better, because in a matter of days they may have to move once again.
    The van continued to growl along the desolate road and she looked at the gauge seeing that the van was half-empty. She decided on no more ventures and headed towards Heath Hayes to the first house of the village. How long would it be before those things got to Heath Hayes? Pickle was in no fit state to be moved, but Karen had made the assumption that if there was a sighting of just a few of them, she would seriously consider thinking about moving out once again.
    She wasn't sure Pickle would agree. Illness or no illness, Pickle had made it plainly obvious on a few occasions that he was sick of running, and announced that even if their new street was swarmed with the things, they were still safe as long as they never got inside the house, and if they kept quiet and made no unnecessary noises, there was no reason why the creatures wouldn't eventually just shamble past the house and go on to the next village. A theory that he was still unsure of.
    It appeared to Karen, that once a village was devoid of life, they seemed to leave like some of them did eventually in Rugeley when they headed towards Stile Cop on that fateful night.
    Pickle's theory was that if he and Karen continued to run, they would eventually run out of petrol, and he would rather be in a scenario of being surrounded by them in a barricaded house, rather than being on foot and running from swarms of them in the woods or the populated villages and towns of Staffordshire.
    Karen remembered what Pickle had told her about parking up the van. He told her to back the van up onto the front garden of the establishment for a quicker escape, if need be. Before she had chance to do that, and before she had chance to enter the street that was the entrance to Heath Hayes and was now a hundred yards up ahead at the next turn off to the right, she could see a figure in the foreground.
    She panicked a little, as she thought that maybe this was already the start of the possible invasion, but the more she gained on the being, the more it seemed like it was of human kind. The man in front turned as if he had