Searching For Summer: A Zombie Novel Read online

  Searching for Summer

  A Zombie Novel

  Peter Midwood

  This is a work of fiction, and any similarities to places and persons living or dead are purely unintentional and coincidental. The right of Peter Midwood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Copyright © Peter Midwood 2017

  All rights reserved

  KINDLE edition

  This book is an homage to all the zombie films I watched as a youth. I loved them all, not just the famous classics, but the lesser known Italian flicks, however badly they were dubbed and acted. Even now, when I can’t take any more of the drivel that passes for modern TV, I find my eyes being drawn to the far right of the Blue-Ray shelf and plucking out “Zombie Flesh Eaters.”

  So, thanks to George A Romero, Sam Raimi and Lucio Fulci for the scares and embarking me on a quest to find the best zombie films. I know now that watched them thirty-five years ago.

  Thanks to PublishNation for the formatting and Ravenborn of SelfPubBookCovers for the cover design.

  Also, thank you, the reader, for buying this. Leaving a review on Amazon is the best thing you can do to help an indie writer, and I would be very grateful if you would take the time to do so.

  If you enjoy this book, please check out my other works and hopefully we’ll meet again in future projects.

  Also available by this author

  The Bad Triplet

  The Octopus Puppets (a novella)

  Zechariah 14:12

  …their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.

  Contents

  Prologue: S3 Origin

  1: Taken

  2: A Burial and a Promise

  3: Barricade

  4: Another One

  5: Fill and Kill

  6: Last Service

  7: Rise of the Preacher

  8: Gentlemen’s Club (I)

  9: Gentlemen’s Club (II)

  10: Gentlemen’s Club (III)

  11: Snooping

  12: Moving Again

  13: Piper and his Mum

  14: Arrival

  15: Car Shopping

  16: Greg

  17: Harem

  18: Pip

  19: Observations

  20: Doubts

  21: Breach

  22: Storming The Castle

  23: Close Call

  24: Bruce and the Girls

  25: Escape

  26: Free

  27: In the Land Rover

  28: Endgame

  29: New Home

  Prologue: S3 Origin

  When Alexander Lightfoot left Oxford University with a DPhil in biochemistry, he had no idea he would be responsible for the end of the world. He pulled his car over onto the grass verge and clutched his right arm to his chest, wincing at the acute pain spreading through the limb. He slowly rolled up his shirt sleeve, as if the delay would somehow lessen the visual impact of the wound. It didn’t, and he moaned in despair at the puckered-edged lesion on his inner forearm.

  In the two hours since the subject had bitten him, the skin surrounding the bite had turned marble white, and swollen plum-coloured veins carried the infection to the rest of his body. He rolled his thumb over the top of the wound and the flesh peeled away, like the skin of a boiled tomato, blood bubbled out of the crater in his arm and dropped onto his trousers. He pressed the flap of skin back into place and stripped off his tie, using a finger to undo the knot while maintaining pressure on the wound. He tied a tourniquet around his upper forearm, using his teeth to yank the ligature tight and pulled back out onto the road.

  He had to get to a hospital; he would die if he didn’t. The Ministry of Defence had their own doctors at the laboratory, but he didn’t trust them. He had known people to disappear without a trace, and although he hadn’t thought it possible in this day and age, it happened all the time. Anybody thought to be divulging information or even asking the wrong questions was ‘moved on’ as they put it. When the MOD had headhunted him, he had been flattered by their interest, and they assured him they always looked after their own. He realised too late that it only applied to those at the top of the ladder and in the event of an emergency, those on the lower rungs had their fingers stood on by their superiors climbing to safety.

  His brief stint at the lab ran through his mind in sporadic flashbacks as his vision blurred in and out of focus and his driving became erratic. He was set to work on the Super Soldier Serum, abbreviated to 3S, but it was not a program for creating a Captain America-type fighter, it was a virus designed to re-animate corpses. Taking into account all the men lost in warfare the MOD had embarked on creating an army that the enemy couldn’t kill, and they determined the best way to do that was to send in troops that were already dead.

  The MOD gave Alex the bodies of four recently deceased servicemen to experiment on and the untested formula for 3S. The corpses had their foreheads tattooed with their given letter – A, B, C and D and Alex named them Andy, Bobby, Charlie and Dave. The primary results were disappointing, but after a few trial and error tests with the synthetic amino acids to formalin ratio, the virus worked. On the fourth day, Charlie opened his eyes and thrashed his head about, gnashing at the air. As Alex leant over the adjacent gurney to draw a blood sample out of Charlie’s neck, Bobby sank his teeth into his forearm.

  A car horn blasted. Alex flinched and corrected his steering, barely missing the oncoming vehicle. Suddenly, he was wide awake and heading for the local hospital, but it was short-lived. Seconds later, his head lolled towards the windscreen, and the car careered onto the opposite side of the road. In his final moments, he realised the devastating effects of what he had done. He had created a new virus, a submicroscopic parasite with a biological imperative to reproduce and the host body had bitten him transmitting the virus via saliva, thus ensuring its survival.

  The cannibalistic traits were a genetic mutation instigated by the 3S virus as a guarantee of replication. Alex hadn’t foreseen how aggressive his creation would be and he hadn’t thought to work on an antidote. His high intellect allowed him to remember mathematical combinatorics and probability inside his head, so there was no paper trail or computer records for his successors to follow on the hunt for a cure. If the hosts were to infiltrate the population, the results would be catastrophic.

  Now, he was a carrier himself and soon his body would be taken over by his own creation. He would be compelled to pass on the virus by infecting others. I have to get to a hospital was his last thought before he died, and his government-owned BMW i8 crashed into a tree at just over sixty miles per hour.

  Julie and Graham McCormack were on their way to a silver wedding anniversary celebration when he spotted the hundred-thousand-pound car wrapped around a tree. He stopped by the wreck, and the pair got out to see if they could help the driver, but the ashen pallor and acute head-to-neck angle of the driver gave the McCormacks little hope him. Graham reached inside the vehicle to check for a pulse anyway, and as his hand touched the airbag, the supposedly-dead driver bit him on the hand. The couple left the ungrateful man to his injuries, and instead of going to the party, they turned around and drove to the hospital where Alex was heading when he died. On route, Julie phoned an ambulance for the driver of the crashed BMW, struggling to hear the receptionist over Graham’s cursing.

  An ambulance arrived at the scene of the accident, but the driver was nowhere in sight. The paramedics thought it a miracle that anybody could walk away from a crash of such magnitude, unaware that Alex was de
ad before the moment of impact. While the pair filmed the wreckage of his car, Alex attacked a young woman half a mile away, who was out walking her dog. He bit a chunk out of her neck, but the woman escaped by fighting valiantly. Sadly, she bled to death before she got home. A passing motorist saw the dog by the roadside, barking at a pair of feet, sticking out of the long grass and stopped to investigate. The dog watched its master bite the man’s throat out before the animal itself suffered the same fate.

  Graham was patched up and sent home where he later died, came back and bit a chunk out of his wife’s shoulder. Julie went to her sister’s house, vowing never to return to her psychotic husband while her sister administered first aid. During the night, Julie died. The next morning, she rose as a zombie and bit her five-year-old niece, Abbie, almost severing an ear from her head. After locking Julie inside the house, the family fled in tears. Abbie was taken to the hospital and housed in the critical ward, where she died and bit the orderly wheeling her to the morgue.

  Doctors took photos, stood and stared, but had no idea what to do. Abbie bit a tropical disease specialist when he tried to extract blood from her inner elbow. He died in his office and attacked his secretary when she went in to check on him, after being concerned about the grunting noises she heard. She went downstairs to A&E where she had her bitten hand tended to and went home, she collapsed and died on the way from her car to her house. An hour later, she staggered onto the street and bit six people before being shot by police marksmen. A police doctor pronounced her dead at the scene just before she bit off the two fingers he’d been using to check for a carotid pulse.

  As the hospital filled up with victims of bite attacks, the army took over and put the building on lockdown. Frightened people took casualties to neighbouring towns, taking the virus with them. Many died on route, and passing motorists got bitten as they tried to help seemingly stranded travellers. The would-be helpers drove away bandaged up and baffled, spreading 3S nationwide.

  Conor McGrath tied a handkerchief around his bloody little finger before continuing on his way to Holyhead where he boarded the ferry for Ireland. Sleeping passengers are a common sight in public areas on the crossing, so everybody who saw him thought him be snoozing. In reality, he was dead at a table by a window with his head on his folded arms. Ten miles out to sea, he came back as a zombie and wreaked havoc on board.

  A burly Frenchman called Pierre Beauchamp, visiting the country on a business trip punched a zombie in the mouth as it came at him while he was refuelling his rental car. He became infected by its saliva when he cut his knuckles on its teeth and put the pain and swelling down to bruising from the severity of the blow he had delivered. After boarding the flight home, he nestled under a blanket and died. Thirty minutes later, he came back from the dead and ran amok down the aisle, biting eighteen people before being overpowered.

  When the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport, the control tower heard the pilot struggling with someone in the cockpit via the two-way radio and assumed it was terrorists. As emergency procedures came into operation, the airliner crashed into terminal three, and two-hundred-and-twelve zombies spilt out of the wreckage, attacking anybody they could, including the assembling military response unit.

  An infected woman died on a flight to Benidorm, and twin brothers died over the Atlantic Ocean on their way to New York. Four men out of a party of twelve ignored their minor wounds so they wouldn’t miss the stag party and boarded a plane to Amsterdam.

  The aerial incidents instigated a blanket ban on all flights in and out of the UK, but it was too late. The 3S virus was a pandemic, and the human race was doomed.

  1: Taken

  “You never forget the first time you shoot somebody in the head. The second time is not as memorable, and after the third, it just becomes routine. But that first time, it’ll stay with you forever.”

  A high-ranking military officer had used those words as an opener for his briefing when he addressed the North Yorkshire Police Department about the imminent outbreak of a zombie epidemic. “You must shoot the creatures on sight,” he had said. “Their brains have to be destroyed, so it must be a headshot and do not make what will most likely be a fatal mistake of hesitating. If you do not kill it, then it will kill you. The thing coming towards you is not your wife, child or mother, it is a merciless killing machine and must be terminated. If we all do our bit, we will keep the situation under control.”

  That talk had taken place a month ago, and in that time, the world as Danny knew it had ended. He had been Sergeant Weston, a respected pillar of the community. Now, he was a prisoner in his home and given a chance, the community would, literally, eat him alive. He pressed his face against the net curtain of his bedroom window and looked down at the street below. A dozen zombies staggered along the path, seemingly mindless but all the time, searching for prey as a pack. Danny had seen this several times on the force; the creatures tore apart any living thing they found.

  He shuddered at a particularly gruesome memory involving babies in a bathtub and looked over his shoulder at his family. His wife, Lydia, was faffing with her iPhone, probably trying to ring or text her friends. She had been doing this for the last two days without success, and Danny didn’t have the heart to tell her that her friends were likely to be as dead as the phone networks. She looked up when she noticed him watching and smiled, turning off her phone to save battery life. Since the power had cut out two days ago, she had resorted to using battery-powered chargers, designed for camping trips, but their diminishing supply of AAs had taught her to be stringent with it.

  Sitting on the floor behind his wife was their twelve-year-old daughter, Summer. She was working her way through a teenage activity book, while an iPad flooded her head with music from the latest (and probably the last ever) boy band. She liked to secure herself in the old world she had always known, where the dead doesn't eat the living. He watched her drawing sausages around letters in a puzzle while contemplating what her future held. The sound of an approaching vehicle snapped Danny away from his thoughts.

  He turned back towards the window, and Lydia ran to his side, even Summer looked up from her magazine. “Is somebody coming to help us, Dad?” she said, pulling out her earphones.

  “Hush, darling,” he said. “You know the rules.” He dropped his voice until it was barely audible. “Only whispering is allowed. We don’t want those things to know we’re here, do we?”

  “No, Dad,” she whispered back and joined her parents by the window.

  The three of them stood back from the net curtains, out of sight of the zombies on the street. A dark blue Ford Transit van trundled down the road and rolled to a stop outside their house. A decal of a flute-playing Harlequin figure embellished the side of the van. A golden swirl of notes tumbled out of the instrument on a wavy music stave.

  “Who’s that?” his wife asked.

  “I don’t know,” Danny said. “But he’s playing a dangerous game.”

  The zombies in the street heard the vehicle and headed towards it. They were still a good distance away, but they were coming, and now they had seen him, they would not give up. Zombies were a persistent lot once they fixed onto something, they might be clinically dead, but there was nothing wrong with their hearing or eyesight. Little was known about their other senses. Danny didn’t know if they could follow the scent of things and he presumed they had lost their sense of taste. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to eat the things they did.

  A man got out of the van, casually walked into their garden and waved up at the window. He was a short and stout balding man who looked to be in his late forties. Two tufts of black frizzy hair above his ears made him look like a university professor and the thick black-framed glasses he wore added to the stereotypical appearance. “He’s coming here,” Lydia said. “Do something, Danny. He’ll bring the twitchers.”

  Twitchers was the name the press had given zombies in the early days of the outbreak as an attempt to play down the lethal
ity of the creatures. It was a preposterous piece of propaganda, quickly dropped after hundreds of people were killed while trying to take twitcher selfies. The name had stuck, but Danny never used the colloquialism. A cannibalistic walking corpse is a zombie. Know your enemy.

  Before Danny could reply, there was a knock on their front door. Not just a gentle rat-a-tat-tat, but a loud and steady thud, like the knock of a determined bailiff. “Stay here,” Danny said and headed for the stairs.

  He looked out of the landing window and saw the first of the zombies about twenty meters away. Half of its bottom lip was missing, and its left eye hung down on its cheek. It reached out its arms and moaned as it headed for the house. He couldn’t tell if it was a male or a short-haired female, the puffy, yellow face made it impossible to distinguish. It didn’t matter what sex it was, zombie man and woman were deadly equals and in less than a minute, it would be biting chunks out of their doorstep caller.

  He drew his Glock from its holster and descended the stairs. The caller, distorted by the textured glass, tried the door handle and repeatedly banged on the glass top panel. Danny reached the bottom of the stairs, strode through the living room and swung the door open. “Hi,” the visitor said.

  Danny aimed the gun at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The bullet whizzed past his ear and into the forehead of the unsexed twitcher which had tottered into his garden. Its knees buckled and it toppled sideways into a flower bed. “State your business,” Danny said. “Or the next bullet goes in you.”

  “Don’t shoot, officer,” the visitor said. “I’m here on official business, and I think you might have just deafened me.” He cocked his head to one side and patted his ear like he was emptying the auditory canal of water.