He scraped it off against the surface of the road with as much enthusiasm and distaste as if it were dog shit. He slid open the side door of the van, and its two occupants screamed and huddled together. “What have I told you kids?” he said. “No fucking screaming. You, nigger-boy, come here.”
Simon yelped and pressed himself closer to Summer who put her arms around him. “Leave him alone, Mr Piper, he’s just a little kid.”
“And in this modern world, even little boys have their uses. Now come here, Simon.”
The boy shook his head.
Piper pulled out his gun. “One way or another, kid, this is the end of the line for you. Don’t make me come in there and get you. And you, Summer, let go of him.”
Reluctantly Simon peeled himself away from Summer’s embrace and shuffled on his backside towards the door. As soon as he was within reach, Piper grabbed his arm and yanked him out onto the street. “That way,” Piper said to Simon, pointing to somewhere Summer couldn’t see. “And sit here in silence, little lady, if I hear one peep out of you, I’ll come back and slit your throat.”
He drew a finger across the front of his neck for emphasis and closed the door. Summer was alone in the dark again.
“Stop here, kid,” Piper said when they had barely walked five meters.
Piper walked past him and lifted the latch of a tall black gate in a high, barbed-wire-topped wall. He raised his gun and slowly pushed the gate open. “All’s clear, kiddo,” he said. “Come on in.”
Simon followed him down a short, blood-stained concrete path to a steel-plated door and Piper pressed the doorbell, fixed to the wall beside it. Simon couldn’t hear the chime it should have made and wondered if it worked at all. Piper smiled down at him like a favourite uncle and answered his unvoiced question. “Won’t be long, Simon, the bell rings deep inside the building so none of them twitchers hear it and set about eating whoever pressed the buzzer.”
As if on cue, several loud creaks and clanks came from inside the building as multiple security bolts unfastened and the door swung inwards a fraction, stopped by a chain thick enough to moor the Titanic. The chubby, unshaven face of a middle-aged man appeared in the opening and his unfriendly stare swept across Piper and the boy. Simon looked back at the man, but couldn’t meet his gaze, so he let his eyes drift down the man’s dirty white shirt until they stopped at the machete he held. “Piper,” the man said, smiling, showing nicotine-stained teeth. “You’ve brought me another one, how kind.”
“Well, I aim to please,” Piper said.
The man shut the door to release the chain and opened it ninety degrees. A look of disappointment replaced the man’s hard stare. “He’s a nigger,” he said as if he hadn’t initially noticed the boy’s skin colour.
“Now, now, Marvin,” Piper said. “You expressed a preference of age, not skin colour. Besides I don’t think you’ll have any back-chat from this one, he’s as good as gold. Isn’t that right Simon?”
“Yes sir,” Simon said. “I’ll be good, I promise.”
“You’d better be good and careful,” Marvin said. “The last boudoir boy got himself bitten. I had to put him down myself.” He held his machete up and stared at the pitted steel blade. “And you don’t want that, do you, boy?”
“No, sir.”
“Damned straight you don’t, and I don’t want that either. Labour’s hard to find these days, and I, sure as shit, aren’t cleaning the fucking mess up. Now, come on inside.”
He stood aside to let Piper and Simon into the building. “Did you bring any diesel for the generator?” Marvin asked. “It’s getting low, and if we have to use candles in the bar, things can get a little dangerous with drunks knocking them over. Not to mention folk falling over stools and bumping into each other. That’s how fights start.”
“No, I’m sorry, pal, my next run’s a fuel run. This time I’m on a kiddie hunt.”
They walked in silence the rest of the way until they reached the bottom of a staircase and the landlord turned to face Piper. “I suppose you’ll want a free one?”
“Damned straight,” Piper said. “I kind of like that saying, I must try and use it more often.” He looked at Simon. “You be good, kid, and try to be happy, life’s what you make of it.” He winked at the boy and went upstairs.
Marvin nudged Simon in the back, “Keep going, boy.”
He walked forward until he came to a set of double doors with opaque glass panels. Simon wasn’t sure if the glass was supposed to be like that or if it was just filthy. He turned to look at Marvin who nodded his head. Simon pushed the doors open and stepped into the serving area behind a bar with Marvin following him.
“Well, well, well,” said a man in a red tartan shirt and a filthy blue baseball hat. “It looks like we’ve got ourselves a little nigger boy.”
Although Simon couldn’t see over the bar, he assumed the rest of the room’s occupants had come to take a look at him. He counted twelve people peering down at him, all men, with unkempt beards.
“He’s my nigger,” said Marvin. “And anybody who messes with him will be barred.”
The whole room laughed, and Simon didn’t think they had taken the threat seriously. “Get to work then, boy,” Marvin said. “Take that bucket and empty all the ashtrays into it. After that, bring them back here and rinse them out in the sink. Then you can wash some plates up, but for Christ’s sake, make sure you change the water.”
Simon went through the bar flap and returned with an armful of ashtrays collected from the tables. He placed them in the sink and was watching it fill with water when Marvin slapped him hard enough across the back of his head to bring tears to his eyes. “Put some more goddamned ashtrays out first. Otherwise, the customers will have nowhere to put their fags out.”
Simon scampered back out with some clean ashtrays taken from a pile stacked near the sink. “Honestly,” Marvin said. “Nowadays, you just can’t get the staff.”
Upstairs, Piper walked down a long corridor of closed doors hiding sinister secrets. He paused outside a door and listened to a punter whooping and yee-hawing like a rodeo cowboy. He smiled and moved along to a room with an open door, stepped inside and closed the door behind him. What happened in here was his private business, and he didn’t want anybody watching.
Tied to the bed, spread-eagled, was a naked female zombie who looked to have been twentyish when she died. The once-blonde hair was matted with blood and hung lank down to its wizened breasts. Dirty blue ropes bound its hands to the wrought iron headboard, and it thrashed against the restraints, hissing and snarling. Piper was instantly aroused and stripped off his trousers and Y-fronts. He waved his erect penis dangerously close to zombie’s face and did a little dance. The creature gnashed its teeth and stretched as far forward as the ropes would allow. “My, you’re a game bird, aren’t you?” he said, stepping back to a safe distance. “But we have ways of taming you. Do you want to know what they are, my dear? Good, you’re about to find out.”
The zombie continued to wriggle and snarl, and the thin ropes cut into its wrists. There was no blood to act as a lubricant, but Piper was concerned that the twitcher might simply rip its hands off in the struggle to escape. “I think we best make this quick. A man can’t be too careful in this strange world.”
He went over to a sideboard, the only other item of furniture in the room, and browsed the assortment of implements placed on top of it. He picked up a pair of brass knuckle dusters and slipped one onto each hand. He returned to the bedside, and when the creature lurched forward, he threw a straight right into its open mouth. Its head crashed into the headboard, but it was unfazed and came back in a growling frenzy.
Piper had knocked half of its teeth out and hit it again in an attempt to remove the rest. Sometimes, clients had Marvin remove the teeth before their arrival, but for Piper, disarming the monster was as much fun as the rest of the experience. The thing on the bed turned to face him again and growled, showing a few ragged stumps of teeth. “Noth
ing personal, old girl, but it’s best if I make sure.”
He went back to the sideboard and returned with a large set of grips, the kind used to loosen large nuts, and a brown envelope. He clamped the grips onto its bottom jaw and squeezed the handles together. He gave them a twist and a yank, tearing the mandible from the zombie’s face. It came away with stretches of rotting skin that strangely reminded Piper of pizza. He dropped the jawbone and tool on the floor and climbed onto the bed, kneeling between the thing’s splayed legs. “There we are, now it’s safe, although French kissing’s out of the question.” The zombie made a strange clicking noise and still nodded its head in an attempt to bite him, even though the act was now impossible.
Piper tore open the envelope and pulled out a packet of condoms and a tube of KY Jelly. He took two of condoms out of the box and rolled them over his erect penis. “Like I said earlier, you can’t be too careful. I don’t know what you might have.” He smiled at the jawless thing on the bed, squeezed the contents of the tube into his hand and smeared the lubricant up and down the length of his penis. “I suspect you might be a bit dry down there. No offence, but I’m not going down on you.” He placed his hands on its shoulders and pushed the zombie down onto the mattress, relishing the feel of cold, lifeless flesh beneath his hands and as he forced himself between her emaciated thighs and penetrated her, he let out a moan of ecstasy.
In the room next door, Gary Strachan was sodomising a young zombie boy and further down the hall, Kenny Marshal was balls-deep inside the reanimated corpse of a young woman who had once painted nails for a living. In the last room on the left, Sidney Albright was performing his version of a lobotomy on a badly burnt zombie, having always fantasised about being a surgeon and directly across the landing, Big Dave was cutting the fingers off an infant zombie girl with a pair of garden secateurs because he was just downright mean.
In the world outside, survivors worried about the future of the planet and the continued existence of humanity. Mothers lucky enough to have their children still alive, cried while they slept and some were still crying when they woke with empty bellies.
In the petrol-dowsed basement of a rugby club, four fathers who had failed to protect their families made a suicide pact and drew straws on who should be the executioner. The loser stood behind the others and fired three successive shots into the backs of their heads and then set fire to a pile of newspapers in front of the door. He then knelt among his dead associates, put the barrel of the gun to his right temple and blew his brains out.
But in Marvin’s Gentlemen’s Club, all was well.
9: Gentlemen’s Club (II)
The tyres of Danny Weston’s police cruiser screeched on the tarmac as he over-steered the bend in the road and crossed the Astley town boundary. He paid little attention to the road and none at all to the small groups of zombies staggering about the street. They growled and reached for his car as he shot past them, but he never noticed. He concentrated on the road ahead. The red dot on the monitor, tracking the bug in Summer’s shoe, had been motionless for some time, and he was starting to fear the worst. Had she been killed and dumped? He prayed not. She was half a mile away so he would soon find out.
As he neared Summer’s location, he had to force himself to take his foot off the accelerator. He let the cruiser slow down to a snail’s pace, keeping a look-out for the Harlequin-stencilled van amongst the shadows. He picked the monitor out of the passenger seat as he turned into High Parade and smiled. The distance counter showed ninety meters. Unfortunately, Danny’s attention was on the monitor screen, and he never noticed the entrance to the service road where Piper’s van was parked. His car trundled passed it along the fronts of the bars and bistros.
When the distance counter got down to twenty meters, the breadcrumb trail disappeared, the red dot stopped flashing, and the screen turned white. A pop-up notice declared the device found, and a black and white chequered flag waved back and forth on the screen. Danny cursed and let the car roll down the street for another twenty meters, then killed the engine. Somewhere on the opposite side of the street was his daughter. He scoured the shopfronts for tell-tale signs of life, but there were none, he would have to check them all personally.
He replaced the half-empty clip of his Glock and put two more clips in his pockets. He went to the boot and took out the Heckler sub-machine gun, swinging the strap across his back. Danny was taking no chances. One way or another, he was getting Summer back.
“Did you hear that?” asked Gavin McKenzie, the guy in the tartan shirt.
“Hear what, Gav?” Marvin said.
“I thought I heard a car engine.”
Simon was on his hands and knees scrubbing the filthy oak floor with a brush that had about a dozen bristles left on it. He stopped what he was doing and cocked his head to one side, hoping to hear the arrival of a vehicle, preferably from the military and laden with troops to rescue him. A kick in the ribs shattered his daydream. “Did I tell you to stop, Simon?” Marvin said. “No I didn’t, and if you’re expecting me to feed you, you need to earn a meal ticket, and the best way to do that is by doing everything I say without stopping. You got that?”
He walked to the boarded-over windows without waiting for Simon to answer. Gav followed him, as did most of the bar flies. He pulled back the corner of a board, covering the window next to the door, and pressed his eye into the gap. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “It’s a cop, and he’s heading right this way.”
“Cops don’t mean shit nowadays,” Gav said, and everybody in the bar murmured their agreement.
“He’s armed to the teeth,” Marvin said.
“Fuck him,” said a short guy in a high-viz sweatshirt. He pulled an enormous hunting knife out of a sheath and polished the blade with a small rag. “So are we.”
There was a gentle knock on the door and an awkward moment of silence while Marvin pondered what to do. The letter plate lifted up, and Danny said through the open flap, “Let me in, please. I know someone’s in there. I saw the light when you pulled the shutter back just now.”
Marvin cursed himself for his carelessness and moved to the door. “What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything,” Danny said. “I just need some human company. I haven’t spoken to anybody in days.”
Marvin looked at the faces of the people in the room. They had all known the misery of solitude; there was nothing worse. The main reason he had kept the bar open was so he could have company. He slid back the heavy top and bottom bolts and unlocked the door with a key, dangling from a chain on his belt. “Get inside, quick,” he said, after opening the door. “We don’t want any twitchers knowing we’re here.”
Danny stepped amongst them.
Upstairs, Piper had finished his sordid business with the zombie and was standing over it with a raised axe, also taken from the sideboard. “It’s nothing personal, sweetheart,” he said. “But I can’t have you going around telling tales about me now, can I?”
The creature on the bed thrust its ruined head towards him. Its distended black tongue lolled in front of its neck, like a grisly pendulum. Using both hands, Piper brought the axe down on top of the zombie’s head, smashing through the bone and destroying the brain inside. It stopped moving instantly, and foul-smelling grey gunk trickled out of the crevice in its skull onto the pillows. “Well, I’ll be going now,” Piper said, wiping the axe head on the top sheet. “I hate long goodbyes.”
He put the axe back on the sideboard, ready for the next customer and left the room. He thought about taking a shower but remembered the size of the cockroaches in there the last time he used it, so he passed the bathroom and went back downstairs, heading for the bar. He didn’t like roaches; they were such dirty critters.
The second Danny was inside the building, he scoured the room, but there was no sign of Summer. There was a coloured boy scrubbing the floor on his hands and knees who looked like he didn’t belong. The boy looked terrified, but beyond the fear, Danny saw
hope in his eyes. “You looking for something in particular? Only I’m the landlord, and I like to know what’s going on inside my pub,” the man who had let him in said.
“Yes, I am,” Danny said. “I’m looking for my daughter. Her name’s Summer, she’s twelve years old and stands about this high.” He held his hand out, palm pronated, at chest height. “Does that ring any bells with you lot?”
“She’s not here,” the landlord said, “and never has been.”
Danny looked at the landlord’s eyes and glanced at the faces around him, and as much as he hated to accept it, he knew the man was telling the truth. His police training had taught him how to tell when somebody was lying or trying to hide something. Some said the eyes were windows to the soul, but to Danny, they were windows to the truth.
“What makes you think she’d be here, officer?” said a man in a mucky blue hat.
“Call it a hunch,” Danny said and then nodded at the frightened child in the room. “What’s the story with the boy scrubbing the floor?”
“None of your business,” the landlord said. “But seen as you asked, his folks got killed, and I promised them I’d look after him.”
“And what a sterling job you’re doing,” Danny said.
The landlord mumbled something under his breath and went back behind the bar. “Simon,” he snapped, “Come and give me a hand with the rooms upstairs.”
The little boy dropped the scrubbing brush into a metal bucket, looked at Danny pleadingly, and ran behind the bar to join the landlord. Marvin held the door open while he waited for the boy and through the frosted glass, Danny saw him drawing his finger back and forwards across his throat. Two men sitting at the bar, opposite the open door, nodded their heads slightly.
The door swung shut, and Danny approached the bar. The men who had been there to meet him on entry resumed their places. Some stood on either side of him; others sat at small round tables, dotted around the room. Danny turned around so he could see those sitting behind him and took comfort from the weight of the sub-machine gun across his back. He stood with his elbows on the bar top and waited for the inevitable.
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