Searching For Summer: A Zombie Novel

by Midwood, Peter

  He took out his car keys and braced himself for the run of his life, adopting a sprinter’s stance. “Keep your eyes closed, Simon,” he said. “We’re almost there. It’s just a short run to my car, and we’re home and dry. Hold on tight Simon. Are you ready?”

  The boy nodded, and Danny sprinted left out of the alley onto the road. The zombies behind him grunted and groaned, but by the time those in front had been alerted to his presence, he had already passed them. The confused ghouls turned around in circles, before heading back to the burning building that had initially drawn them. Danny ran down the path on the opposite side of the street to the inferno, and when he reached his car, he paused to look at the fire he had started. A pack of zombies on their hands and knees were pulling apart the blackened remains of the injured man. He had made it halfway through the doorway; a gallant effort, Danny thought. Orange flames danced across the wooden shrapnel in his leg, acrid black smoke billowed over the heads of the feasting zombies and curled up the wall in a toxic cloud.

  Further down the street, somebody cried out, echoed by the cry of another, and then another. The sound of gunfire filled the air, and Danny counted discharges from six different weapons as the barflies made their last stand. The undead swamped them, and screams replaced the sound of their weapons. A solitary final shot rang out, and Danny assumed the last survivor had taken his own life.

  In the building next door to Marvin’s, something exploded, blowing out the windows and sending the front door cartwheeling across the street. Danny instinctively ducked behind his vehicle as the missile came hurtling towards him and Simon. The shredded door slammed into the side of his police car, denting the wing and passenger door. A hairline crack appeared at the top of the windscreen. He tapped the boy’s hands clasped around his neck. “Let go now, Simon, we have to be going.”

  Danny afforded a final glance before he started the engine and saw the eyes of the whole street fixed on him. The zombies had followed the path of the door, stimulated by movement, and discovered Danny and his companion. The mass hobbled towards the car from every direction, and the most recent dead broke through the front line, being more mobile on less decayed legs. Simon screamed, and Danny turned the key in the ignition, bringing the engine to life. He floored the accelerator and shot out of the parking space into the crowd of walking corpses.

  The leading zombies scattered on impact, most of them bouncing over the bonnet or rolling down the wings, but as he headed down the road the crowd thickened, and progress became slower until it stopped altogether. The sheer numbers of the mob were the problem; they blocked the road completely, and they were too many just to plough through. Simon put his hands over his eyes to blot out the sight of dozens of rotting faces pressed up against the car windows.

  The zombie of an elderly lady with one eye hanging down on her cheek snapped a wiper off the windscreen and shoved it in its mouth. The severed appliance punctured its cheek, and the creature pulled it out through of the hole in its face. A big zombie male, missing a nose, barged the woman out of the way and pounded on the windscreen with clenched fists. The hairline crack ran all the way down to the bottom of the screen. Others copied it, and Danny feared the glass might break. Were they evolving? Were they learning how to breach defensive barriers?

  Danny slammed the car into reverse and backed out of the assault. The crowd was thinner behind him, and he was able to reverse quite easily, but if they were evolving, how long would it be before the creatures realised by surrounding a vehicle they could render it immobile? Without dwelling on the answer, Danny put the car into first gear, stepped on the accelerator and swerved around the crowd. He upped a gear as he knocked down a few stragglers, limping towards the mob and changed up through the gearbox as he sped down the street.

  He glanced over Simon (who still had his hands over his eyes) and looked out of the passenger side window as he passed the dead barflies. There was only one that was recognisable, a man in a red-checked shirt, the one who had killed himself. He was half on the road, half on the path and his brains were splattered in a fan shape across the shopfront behind him, covering a ‘final reductions’ poster. Danny wondered if the retailer had held an end-of-world sale.

  A zombie with an arm missing below the elbow was pawing at the empty display window, using his remaining hand to scoop brain goo off the glass and eat it. Feasting ghouls were stripping the suicide-committer and his five associates to the bone; their entrails spread all around the road like an explosion in an abattoir. A zombie child plucked something long and stringy out of a body cavity and dangled it over its face. It sucked whatever it was into its mouth as if it was spaghetti. “Keep those eyes closed, Simon,” he said and sped out of the street.

  13: Piper and his Mum

  Piper drove out of town and onto the A136 heading south. Abandoned cars lined either side of the dual carriageway, but his vehicle was the only one moving. As he travelled the area, it always amused him how courteous other road users were. It was as if before, during, or after passenger attacks, the drivers had pulled over to make way for fellow motorists. Perhaps a new rule had been added to the Highway Code: In the event of an in-car zombie altercation whereby the driver is bitten, the said driver (or an appointed competent person) must bring the vehicle to a stop without blocking the carriageway while still being of sound mind.

  He turned on the radio, hoping he might hear a broadcast, but it was the usual hiss of static. At the start of the zombie outbreak, a single announcement was played on all stations advising people to stay indoors and remain calm. Help would be coming. He never owned a telly; he could watch what he wanted on-line, but he assumed a similar message was being displayed on every channel, maybe even on the shopping channel which his mother used to watch when she was too shitfaced to move. No wonder his father left.

  He remembers it well, the day his father left, it was Monday the sixteenth of September 1991, Piper was fourteen and had just started his second-to-last year at school. His form tutor was Mrs Broderick, and as well as having the nicest tits he had ever seen, she had intervened when Steve Garfield and his cronies said his new name was Captain Nemo because the lenses of his glasses were as thick as submarine windows. She taught history, which was the last lesson on that day and she kept Steve and his gang back after school, as punishment for their name-calling. Piper revelled at the sight of the four boys through the classroom windows, hunched over their desks writing while he strolled happily away in the warm September sunshine.

  When he turned into his street, the spring in his step abruptly vanished. A crowd of people stood outside his house, and a police car sped past him and parked opposite the crowd. Piper thought the place must be on fire or something and sprinted home, pushing his way through the laughing onlookers. He gazed in bewilderment at the carnage that was his front garden.

  The small square of lawn, which his dad mowed every week through spring and summer, was covered in his father’s shredded clothes and personal belongings. His prized snooker cue (signed by Steve Davies in the 1980s) had been snapped in half, and the shattered narrow end stuck out of the ground like a sapling tree struck by lightning. The wider end had been used to batter his collection of snooker trophies into shapeless lumps, and the makeshift club lay amongst the pile of scrap metal and broken podia.

  Photos of his father shaking hands with snooker stars were scattered all over the lawn, as were framed photos of his parents on various holidays – elephant trekking in Thailand, camel riding in Tunisia, and posing on a beach in Barbados. His mum appeared at the front bedroom window and hurled an armful of CDs out of it. “Take this fucking shit with you,” she yelled. “Let’s hope she likes boy bands. Although going by her age, her bedroom wall will be full of their posters. That’s right, folks,” she yelled to the crowd, “he’s got Boyzone, Take That, New Kids on the Block, even the fucking Backstreet Boys. The fucking cheating faggot.”

  Piper stepped through the garden gate and saw his father salvaging some light tan shoe
s from his ruined wardrobe. He looked up when he noticed him. “I’m sorry you had to see this, son.”

  “Didn’t you buy them on our honeymoon in Florence, you bastard?” his mother hollered. “I hope they fucking cripple you.”

  She hurled an empty vodka bottle at his father, but it went wide and smashed on the path, just in front of Piper. His mother screamed when she saw her son and clasped her hands to the side of her face. “Oh, my little honey-bunny, I’m sorry. It was meant for your wicked, cheating, kiddie-fucking father. Stay right there, baby, Mummy’s coming.”

  She disappeared from the window, and Piper waited, dumbfounded. He had seen his mother drunk on several occasions, but never like this. He was aware that his father hadn’t been at home much lately and that every time he had a business trip, which meant an overnight stay, his mother would drink herself into oblivion and cry loudly. Sometimes she would come into Piper’s bedroom while he pretended to be asleep and stroke his hair, whispering how much she loved him and how she’d always look after him.

  His mum, now not able to look after herself, fell through the front door and landed on all fours, much to the amusement of the crowd, who showed their appreciation with a burst of laughter. His father went over to her and helped her back onto her feet by placing a hand under her elbow. “Why don’t you go back inside and calm down, Hattie.”

  His mother turned away, and Piper hoped she was going to listen, but she whirled around and swung a wild roundhouse punch at his dad’s face. It missed by a meter, and a police officer caught her arm. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere, but his intervention had probably prevented her from falling again. “Listen to your husband, ma’am. Let’s all go inside and calm down.”

  “Listen to him, officer?” his mother slurred. “Listen to that fucking man-whore? I wouldn’t listen to him any more than I’d listen to the boy band shit he likes or an interfering cunt like you.”

  The crowd fell silent, Piper’s dad put his face in his hands, red with embarrassment. The policeman’s face turned to stone. “This is your last chance, Hattie, calm down, or you’ll be arrested. I won’t be spoken to like that.”

  “Fuck you,” his mother screamed and slapped the policeman across the face.

  That blow was as much as he was going to take. The officer grabbed hold of her wrist and yanked his handcuffs off his belt. She tried to slap him again with her free hand, but he blocked it with his forearm. “Sir, grab your wife’s other arm for me.”

  “Don’t you fucking touch me, you worthless, whore-fucking shitbag.”

  His father hesitated, but in the pause that followed, the officer whirled her around by twisting her arm behind her back and grabbed her other arm as she held it out for balance. He snapped the cuffs on and then stood back and allowed his prisoner to let off some steam. The two men backed out of the house, and Hattie followed, kicking out at them, spitting and swearing like a trooper with Tourette’s syndrome. Piper had seen and heard enough, he turned away and trudged out of the garden with his shoulders slumped, and the love for his parents spoiled.

  He felt a slender arm snake around his shoulders, and he caught a gentle whiff of lavender. An elderly policewoman pulled him close and guided him into the back of a squad car. She sat in the driver’s seat, looked at him in the rear-view mirror and said in the husky voice of an old movie siren, “How would you like to help me, back at the station, while this fuss over nothing fizzles out?”

  Piper nodded his head and felt a solitary tear roll down his cheek. The officer reached into the back seat, wiped it away with her thumb and ruffled his hair. “If you’re going to be my partner, you’ll have to start with rule number one: no tears. This storm in a teacup isn’t worthy of them anyway. It’ll all be forgotten about tomorrow.”

  The policewoman was a lying bitch. He never helped her at the station, and neither was he treated like her partner. Instead, she left him in a room just big enough to accommodate its only desk and chair and gave him half-a-dozen sheets of lined A4, a ruler, and three blunt colouring pencils – green, pink and brown. He was expected to amuse himself with this pitiful array of stationery for the five hours he spent in there as if he were four, not fourteen. Now and then, the policewoman would poke her head around the door and ask if he needed anything. Piper would think up several cutting answers between her visits but always refrained from being rude until he could hold his tongue no longer and answered, “A pencil sharpener. For Christ’s sake, get me a pencil sharpener, these pencils haven’t had a point since the days when you were young and pretty.”

  That was the last time he saw the woman, the next person to look in on him was male, and he didn’t have a pencil sharpener either.

  The policewoman also lied about it being a storm in a teacup. Later that night, he was taken to a bungalow and handed over to an unknown couple who fed him and gave him a bed for the night. He doesn’t remember much about his emergency foster parents, except they were kind to him and after he had a shower, they gave him brand new Batman pyjamas. Which was okay (as long as nobody from school saw him) because Batman’s cool.

  When he went downstairs the next morning, a policeman was waiting for him and took him home to his mother, who looked rougher than the Cornish coast and had breath that would knock a vulture off a skunk carcass. Of his father, there was no sign and nor would there be again. The policeman whispered something to his mother about not having to go through it alone and how things will work themselves out and left. As soon as he did, Hattie Piper headed for the drinks cabinet. When she saw her son watching, she said, “It’s just the one, son. I need it to settle my nerves. Why don’t you go over to your friend’s house.”

  Piper did just that, he went to his friend’s house and stayed there as long as he could. In the late afternoon, he went to another friend’s house and stayed there until his friend’s dad said he should be going home now. On the way home, he called on another friend, but his mum said he was in the bath and wasn’t it a little late for a boy his age to be out alone? Piper thought she was probably right and returned home to find his mother sparked out on the living room floor, blotto.

  He stepped over her and went into the kitchen to find something to eat. The cupboards were all but bare, and he pulled the blue-spotted crust off the last of the bread and scraped the jar to make a peanut butter sandwich. He washed it down with flat Coke and checked his mother for signs of life by gently cupping her nose in his hand. He could feel her irregular breaths on his palm, as she slept her alcohol-induced sleep, so he left her lying on the floor between the armchair and the sofa and went to bed. As he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, he prayed for his dad’s return and cried himself to sleep.

  In the early hours of the morning, he was woken up by his mother getting into his bed. He had his back to her and daren’t move, instead, he just stared at the red digits of his radio-alarm clock showing one-forty-five. He assumed she had drunkenly gone into the wrong bedroom and would soon realise her error and leave, but when the number five on his clock turned to six, she snaked an arm under his shoulder and put her leg on his hip. She put her lips to his ear and whispered, “I know you’re awake, my love. Turn around and give Mummy a cuddle.”

  He found the manoeuvre awkward under the weight of her leg but turned to face her. “Mum,” he said, “is everything all—”

  She stopped his question by kissing him full on the lips, pushing her tongue into his mouth. Initially, he was horrified and tried to pull away, but as it continued he began to enjoy the sensation, despite the taste of alcohol and responded by probing his mother’s mouth with his tongue. She took his left hand and placed it on her right breast. Piper could feel her nipple stiffening under the thin fabric of her nightie, and his penis jumped to attention. As if she knew, his mother reached down and began rubbing the crotch of his pyjamas.

  He placed his other hand on her left breast and gently squeezed them simultaneously, tweaking her nipples as he did. His mother cooed with pleasure and slipped her ha
nd inside his pyjama bottoms. “My, we are growing up fast, aren’t we?” she said, sliding her hand up and down the length of his penis. Piper couldn’t answer; his breathing became sharp jagged breaths, and a tingling sensation brewed in his testicles, unlike anything he’d ever felt before. A second later, and for the first time in his life, he ejaculated, letting out an involuntary cry of pleasure as he came.

  His mum slapped his hands away from her breasts and got out of his bed. “That wasn’t very fair for Mummy, was it?”

  Piper didn’t know what to say because he didn’t know what she meant. He just stared at her silhouette, backlit by the landing light and waited for her to say something else. After a minute, she came back over to his bed. “Mummy’s sorry,” she said. “Goodnight, my darling.”

  She bent down and planted a gentle kiss on his lips. Piper put his arm around her neck and pushed his tongue inside her mouth. She wrenched away and stormed back to the door. “No, you don’t,” she shouted. “Don’t you ever do that, not unless Mummy wants to.”

  She went out of his bedroom and slammed the door behind her, leaving Piper confused but euphoric from his first orgasm. He cleaned himself up as best he could with some bedside tissues and slept, contented with the thought that there would soon be a repeat of tonight’s antics.

  When Piper went downstairs the next morning, there was no sign of his mum; she would be sleeping off the drink, no doubt. Her absence suited him fine because the meeting would have been awkward. There was no sign of breakfast either, so he took a ten-pound note from his mother’s purse, left on the kitchen worktop, and bought a Cornish pasty on the way to school. He spent most of the change on food at dinner time and bought a sandwich and chocolate on the way home, knowing it would be the last thing he ate that day.