Searching For Summer: A Zombie Novel

by Midwood, Peter

  Danny nodded. “Did it bite you?” he asked.

  “No. As it happens, I got away and put the damned thing out of its misery. The next thing I did was cut the rest of my hair off so it couldn’t happen again. I used my hunting knife, which I learnt to always have on me.” The woman tapped a tan leather sheath on her belt. “And a pair of office scissors. Blunt scissors, I should add, which would struggle to cut through fog.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” Danny said. “I was just making light of a bad situation and if you’re fishing for a compliment how’s this: I think you are a woman with remarkable resilience and the heart of a lion. You have had to kill people you have known for years, some of whom will have been your best friends and drinking buddies, but you put them down regardless.” The woman nodded slowly, and her eyes welled up again. “Still, you chose to stay when you could have run. You stayed because you felt you were abandoning them and hoped that help would arrive and a cure would be found to turn these ghouls back into your friends.” The girl put a hand over her eyes and bowed her head. “You did what you had to do to stay alive, and I’ll wager that you tried to reason with each and every one of them before you fired.”

  The girl’s shoulders bobbed up and down as her sobs broke through. “I tried my best, officer,” she said. “I really did.”

  “I know you did,” Danny said. “But do you know what impresses me the most? Every morning you woke up to fight the same demons which left you mentally and physically drained the night before. And that, my girl, is courage.”

  She came to him, rested her head on his chest and let the tears flow. Danny put his arms around her and held her tight. The pair remained that way, both giving and receiving comfort until Simon reappeared in the doorway. “Sir, I think we should be going now.”

  Danny and the young woman went out onto the landing with Simon, and the trio looked out across the car park. A horde of about fifty zombies was staggering towards the building, and in the distance, packs of them were coming from all directions, their numbers incalculable.

  “It’s getting worse,” Simon said.

  “He’s right,” the woman said. “I used to shoot from here if I thought they might be a threat, but there were never as many as this.”

  “We need to go, right now,” Danny said.

  “I’m going to stay here,” the woman said. “I’ve started cleaning the place out, making it habitable.”

  Danny remembered the small pile of bodies at the foot of the stairs, dumped over the side by a woman trying to make a home in a hostile world. “If you stay here you’ll die,” Danny said, matter-of-factly. “This place isn’t safe anymore.”

  “I’ve kept them out so far,” she said. “And I can pick them off from up here all day long.”

  “Look at them all, lady,” Simon said. “There are hundreds of them and more will come.”

  “He’s right,” Danny said. “You can’t shoot them all. You’d run out of bullets, and they’d besiege the place. You’d probably starve to death.”

  The young woman shrugged her shoulders and looked down on the malevolent gathering below. “And where would we be going, exactly?”

  “To find my daughter.” She cast a cursory glance at Simon and raised her eyebrows to ask if the big guy was alright. Danny picked up on it and smiled. “I’m fine, ma’am, before you start doubting my sanity. She’s been kidnapped and taken to a bad place, called The Castle, and I have to get her back.”

  The woman’s expression paled. “Just a minute,” she said and went back into the building to retrieve her handbag. She rummaged through a collection of papers and pulled out a yellow flyer. “This is the one.” She unfolded the A3 sheet and read the text aloud. “The Castle: come and join us, be part of God’s new world and live in Christian bliss with the Preacher. All are welcome in Paradise.”

  “Let me see that,” Danny said, taking it from her.

  While he was reading the address printed along the bottom, Simon was almost jumping up and down with impatience. He tugged on Danny’s trouser leg. “We have to go, sir.”

  “I don’t usually pay attention to flyers anymore,” the girl said. “Most of the places have fallen, but this was stuck on the window by the bottom of the stairs, and it’s dated only a few days ago, so I kept it. The guy who posted it probably saw all the cars around the place and thought maybe somebody was still alive to drive them.”

  Danny wondered if the fly-poster and Summer’s kidnapper was the same person.

  An incremental groan boomed out, like rolling thunder, as the undead spotted the trio outside the safety of the building and the front liners quickened their paces, as fast as rigor mortis-riddled limbs would allow. Danny folded the flyer up and put it in his breast pocket. “Come on, Simon,” he said. “Let’s go find Summer.”

  Simon set off down the fire escape at a run, and Danny followed him. The young woman remained on the landing, unsure of what to do. At the first half landing, Danny stopped and turned to face her. “What’s your name please, ma’am?”

  “It’s a little late for introductions, don’t you—”

  “Tell me your name please, young lady. Time is short.”

  “My parents called me Philippa, but everybody calls me Pip. At least they used to before they all died.”

  “Well, Pip, you’ve got until the time it takes us to reach my car to decide. You can stay here on your own and take your practically non-existent chances against the undead, or you can come with us and see if Paradise is all it’s cracked up to be.”

  He turned his back on Pip and recommenced his descent. Six steps further down, he heard her footsteps behind him and smiled.

  19: Observations

  “For God’s sake, Piper, did you have to kill her?”

  “Yes, I did, Moses. I’m not taking shit from anybody, let alone a mouthy little bitch like her.”

  “Oh dear.” Moses put his head in his hands and walked over to the bay window overlooking the greenhouse and golf course beyond it. “There are almost no girls left in camp,” he said. “You’ll have to go out and get more.”

  Piper joined him at the window. “Look at it out there, Moses,” he said. “Look at those things gathering. Soon the roads will be impassable, and this place isn’t safe anymore. The last thing you need to worry about is not having enough kids to fuck.”

  Moses opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say in his defence, so closed it without speaking. He looked down at the wire fence, straining against the weight of the living dead. The fence was the only barrier against an invasion, and the spectacle gave him cause for concern. A line of zombies pressed up against it, hissing and snarling at the obstacle. Ashen grey fingers pressed through the crisscrossed squares and decaying arms shook the structure, searching for a weak spot. For now, the boundary was safe, but he would have to take precautionary steps.

  Piper seemed to read his thoughts. “You need to get some men down there and get them things off the fence,” he said. “I suggest you make some spears to save bullets and have your men stab them through the fence.”

  “Brilliant,” Moses said. “And do you know what we have in the storage shed?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Javelins,” Moses said, clapping his hands. “I spotted them amongst a load of Olympic paraphernalia. It’s as if God put them there for me.”

  This time, it was Piper’s turn to put his head in his hands. “I think I’ll prep’ for my outing.”

  He left Moses looking out over his doomed empire and went to his basement hideaway to retrieve his weapons and munitions supply. He was leaving, and never coming back. Moses was a fool for thinking he could stay here. The number of zombies trying to get in was increasing by the hour, and it would only be a matter of time before they succeeded. His army was little more than useless, untrained men from civilian backgrounds who struggled to shoot creatures that moved at a snail’s pace. If the fence breached, the so-called guards would probably run to save thei
r pathetic selves, their duties forgotten. Piper was not going to wait for that day to come, and that day would most likely be tomorrow.

  He went down to is basement hideaway and wrinkled his nose at the smell which greeted him at the bottom of the stairs. “Is that you making that god-awful smell, my friend? So, it is. I see you’ve dropped your guts.”

  He laughed and pointed at the pile of intestines on the floor. The zombie hanging in chains turned toward the sound of his voice and snapped its teeth. It thrashed in its shackles, and a few more bits of its insides fell out, adding to the pile of decaying innards seeping towards the edges of the polyethene sheet. When Piper walked behind it, the twitcher growled and tried to turn its head one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.

  Piper circled the creature until he was in front of it. “It would appear that your kind is winning the war against humanity,” he said. “Whoever would have thought it? Our great and noble race reduced to a band of scurrying cowards, living in fear of brainless, cannibalistic ghouls, like you. If I were wearing one, I’d take my hat off to you.” He picked the machete off a blood-stained table and used a pair of steps to climb eye-level with his prisoner. The zombie thrust forward, but Piper was safely out of reach. “It’s nothing personal, old boy, I’m just doing my bit for mankind.”

  He swung the heavy blade down on top of the zombie’s skull, burying it in as far as the bridge of its nose. The creature stopped struggling instantly and hung limply in the chains. He wrenched the weapon free and wiped the blade on the chest of the slain zombie. “I think I’ll leave you here,” he said. “You can be an homage to all those who came here before you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to dash.”

  Three trips later, he had loaded his van with his entire arsenal, he would need it to survive in the world beyond The Castle gates. Outside his vehicle, he stopped to look at how the defenders of the fence were faring against the build-up of zombies, and he wasn’t surprised to see they weren’t coping very well. They were stabbing the creatures in the body, not the head and as he watched, one of them lost his spear/javelin to one of the twitchers through the fence. It was passed around overhead until they lost interest in it and dropped it on the floor. Piper laughed and got into his van. Surely, better things awaited him on the outside?

  The journey from the office block to The Castle was only ten miles and took them less than an hour, good going for the vehicle-strewn, zombie-infested roads of today. The trip was mostly spent in silence, except when Pip sang along to a Dolly Parton CD that Greg had left in the player. Her singing amused Simon and irritated Danny, but he let her be as she was enjoying herself and seeing somebody happy in today’s world was both a rarity and a joy to see. Now and then, she would shout out directions taken from a crudely drawn map on the back of the flyer.

  When The Castle finally came into view, there could be no mistaking it. The former golf club stood in a hollow and Danny stopped the Land Rover, between two stone pillars, at the start of the private road leading down to it. He was taken aback by the number of zombies surrounding it. “Oh, my God,” Pip said, from beside him.

  “That’s a lot of zombies, sir,” Simon said, from behind him.

  Danny estimated two hundred zombies surrounding the pretend fortress, with more coming towards it. At the front wall, approximately fifty zombies were trying to get through the wrought iron gates or reaching up at the guards on the crenellations, but the majority of the monsters were at the rear fence. He took his binoculars off the back seat and stood on the roof of the vehicle, to get a better look at the situation. It was worse than he had first thought.

  Zombies pressed, three or four deep, against a wire fence that ran as far as Danny could see. Creatures were crossing the surrounding fields, swelling the ranks of the undead and bowing the wire mesh to the point of breaking. About twenty guards were stabbing at the fence with spears, but having little success in alleviating the pressure on it. The defenders of the front gate were doing no better, hurling rocks down into the crowd, presumably, to save bullets. They might as well have been throwing custard pies.

  The coloniser of The Castle had made the grave mistake of thinking the mock battlements and ramparts would be as durable as those of a real fortress when they were nothing more than gaudy decorations. It was an error of biblical proportions.

  Pip joined him on the car roof. “How’s it looking?” Danny passed her the binoculars. “Wow,” she said, “Not good, huh?”

  “It could be better.”

  “Have you got a plan?”

  “No, but that’s not going to stop me from getting my daughter back.”

  “Look,” Simon said, leaning out of the back window. “Someone’s coming out.”

  Danny took his binoculars back and held them to his eyes. The wrought iron gates swung inwards, and as the undead army tried to get in, a dark blue Transit van barged its way out. The gates closed behind it and bludgeons quickly took care of the few zombies that had managed to get inside the grounds. As the van pulled away from the throng, Danny saw the Harlequin figure stencilled on the side. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “Anyone you know?” Pip asked.

  “Oh yes,” Danny said, lowering the binoculars. “That’s the son of a bitch who killed my wife, kidnapped my daughter and left me for dead.”

  “Oh man, I’m sorry,” Pip said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “And I guess you’re not the forgive and forget type?”

  “No.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  Danny smiled at her and jumped off the car roof. “I’m going to bring him in for questioning. Quick, Pip, get back in the car. Now, I have a plan.”

  Piper laughed as he accelerated the van away from the twitchers. Some of them gave chase, and he spotted a few of the ghouls crossing the fields change direction and head towards him. He was never in any danger, though. Once the zombies realised he was out of reach, their primal instincts would turn them back to where prey was easier to catch. He looked in the mirrors as he sped down the lane and saw that nearly all of them had given up. Only three persisted, staggering after him with arms held horizontal before them, like cartoon sleepwalkers. “Sorry guys,” he said. “Piper’s off the menu, and out of here.”

  He shot through the stone pillars at the end of the road and swung a hard left onto the main road. Suddenly, the van juddered and veered towards the hedgerow. “What the fuck?” He yanked the steering wheel to the right, and the van lurched all the way over to the other side of the road. He straightened the wheel to counteract his oversteering, but the van mounted the grass embankment, seemingly with a mind of its own, and bounced back onto the Tarmac. The hubcap from a rear wheel came off and overtook him, before disappearing into the grass verge. He looked in the driver’s door mirror and saw he had just driven over a stinger, stretched out between the stone pillars.

  He was about to pull over when a huge black Land Rover pulled out of a field gate and sped towards him. Its front end bore an earth-moving shunt and Piper didn’t like to think about the damage such a thing could cause. He floored the accelerator and the inside of his van filled with acrid black smoke, as the punctured front tyres shredded and melted. The bare metal wheel rims spun and sent up a fountain of sparks, but failed to find purchase on the road. He pressed the button to open the windows, coughing out the noxious fumes. Before he had a chance to lean out into fresh air, his neck jarred, and he was thrown forward in his seat, as the Land Rover rammed into the back of him. He heard the rear doors buckle inwards and underneath the van, something snapped with a twang.

  The force of the collision sent the van broadsiding down the road, and Piper wrestled with the steering wheel in a hapless attempt to regain control. At the bend in the road ahead, he just managed to navigate the acute turn when the Land Rover slammed into him again, sending the van careening off the road, over a dyke and through a hedge. Directly beyond the hedgerow, a large oak tree loomed, and all too late, Piper reached for his seatbelt. The van collided with t
he tree, crumpling the front end like tissue paper. The airbag activated on impact, but unharnessed, Piper was thrown out of his seat, over and above the protective cushion. His forehead thumped into the windscreen, shattering the point of impact into a spider’s web of cracks.

  He dropped back into his seat and fought against unconsciousness. He knew he had to get his gun; his life depended on it. The airbag was slowly deflating, but it still blocked his access to the glove compartment, where he had the weapon stashed. He tried to lean over, but searing agony tore through his insides and rendered him paralysed. He cried out and collapsed over the middle and passenger seats, powerless to reach his weapon.

  He felt the van rock, as somebody yanked hard at the driver’s side door and on the second tug, it flew open and dropped off its hinges. Strong hands hoisted him off the seats and hurled him to the ground. He rolled over twice before coming to rest on his back, every move like an electric shock passing through his battered body. The bright sunlight, magnified by the thick lenses of his spectacles burned his eyes, and even though he had them tight shut, he feared for permanent damage to his sight. He tried to lift his hands to shield his eyes, but couldn’t raise them off the ground. The powerful rays were blocked out by the shadow of a giant of a man standing over him.

  Piper squinted to try and make out the man’s features, but before he could identify him, the big man reached down and yanked Piper to his feet. He held him off the ground for a second, glaring at him and then with a roar of anger, threw him into the side of his crippled van. Piper hit it with his back and went down quicker than a fat kid on a see-saw. Immediately, his assailant dragged him back onto his feet. “Do you remember me?” he said, grabbing Piper’s neck and banging his head against the van. “I’m the guy whose wife you killed. The same guy you shot three times and left for dead. But above all, I’m the pissed-off father of the little girl you took.”