Summer Holiday

Summer Holiday is, in a way, a typical short story for me.

It has a beginning, a middle but, as often happens, I don't quite put in an ending.

That way I can always come back to it at a later date and expand on it in another story.

I like that as, if I've gone to the trouble of getting to know my characters (and, for me they're real people), I don't have to say good bye to them.

Anyway, here goes...

A few years ago Jill, my ex, and I were having a hard time of things. We were arguing over petty issues and, like a child, I would always storm off and sneak away to a local bar where I would have a beer or two and chain smoke forbidden cigarettes.

I had recently given up smoking you see; which was probably why I was so irritable. One of the reasons anyway; there was a teenaged stepson who was at that ‘Difficult Age’ and who didn’t really want a stepdad; definitely not one like me. Even though I thought I’d tried my hardest – thought I’d done my best – it wasn’t good enough and that certainly that didn’t help.

So, I’d go and escape to the bar, drink my beer, smoke some cigarettes and then wash my hands and face and spray deodorant on my clothes to hide the fact.

And I’d do a bit of writing whilst I was there.

Jill obviously knew that I’d been smoking but she didn’t say anything; preferring to save it up for the next argument; the one that was always just around the corner.

And, at that time, there were plenty of corners in our lives.

Eventually we split up, although we did stay sort of friends for a few years afterwards.

Recently I was tidying up some old documents and found the manuscript for this story.

I decided to finish it. There was no plot and no real reason for the story. It was just about a bunch of friends, all who enjoyed riding motorbikes, all just trying to survive a zombie apocalypse in south west Brittany, France.

Although it is a short story in itself, I have a feeling that, one day, there might be a chapter two and maybe even, a chapter three.

As I said at the start...

We’ll see.

All the best

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Summer Holiday

1

I was riding slowly down the road past St. Martin sur Ouest when I saw her.

She was wearing a light blue cotton dress that had once been pretty.

Indeed, she had probably once been pretty too.

She was young; although that was hard to tell these days. Perhaps eighteen or twenty – difficult to say for sure.

She was grazing on the corpse of a dead cow in the middle of the road.

Another two grunts were coming out of the woods and approaching her; they could smell death and flesh from over a mile away.

A little part of me wanted to stop and see what would happen but a bigger part, the sensible part, decided to get back to the farm and warn the others.

After all, when you’ve seen one bunch of grunts fight over a pile of putrid cow’s flesh, you don’t really need to see it again.

Not if you wanted to sleep at night, that is.

2

“So, there were three of them?” Mick asked.

I just nodded.

“Holy fuck.” Sarah said.

“We’ll have to run double shifts tonight,” Mick added. “And be ready to move.”

But we were always ready to move. The bikes were stored in the barn, all topped up with fuel and with our panic bags already in place.

I’d thought that we’d be safe here, though. Last winter was hard for the grunts and, anyway, we were a long way from the nearest town or city and, as we had found out, grunt doesn’t like to travel.

In any case, as the remaining livestock died out, we’d been seeing less and less of them.

Last Autumn we’d found a herd of grunts, holed up in a barn, grazing on a store of grain.

After we’d killed the grunts we salvaged what we could of the grain and burnt the rest.

But that was a one off; the other thing that we’d learned about grunts was that. Where possible, they preferred meat.

Preferably human meat.

I sat back, closed my eyes and lit one of the two cigarettes that I allowed myself a day.

This time of day, eighteen months ago, the wine would have been flowing, music would have been playing and there would have been laughter in the air.

Now the mood was sombre, it was quiet and we rationed our wine, just like everything else.

3

I suppose that we had been lucky. We had survived the initial outbreak and all the chaos that had ensured.

Most people hadn’t.

We had all been, all eight of us, on holiday in France.

Jed had rented a big old farmhouse deep in the Breton countryside, miles from the nearest village. He and Alison had gone out early and the rest of us had met up in Portsmouth on a Friday night to catch the ferry to join them.

Passport control had been stricter than normal and this was perhaps the first sign that something was wrong.

Had the government already known about the infection and was trying to keep it quiet?

I don’t know.

In retrospect, that would have explained the army lorries that we had seen on the M3 on the way down.

I do remember a man in the queue in front of me at the ferry terminal.

He was shivering and shaking even though it was unseasonably warm for June.

They’d escorted him from the queue; a burly policeman on either side.

At the time I wondered if he’d been smuggling – perhaps his behaviour had been due to fear?

We must have been amongst the last to leave before they closed the ports. At the time we didn’t know how lucky we’d been.

But then, we didn’t really know anything at all; until, that is, it was way too late.

4

For the first week of the holiday we enjoyed ourselves as only a bunch of biker friends can. We woke late and took it in turns to ride to the village to buy our daily supplies. Wine, beer, milk, bread and cheese were all we ever seemed to need.

Oh, and those gorgeous Charantais melons that were in season and sweet and cheap. We bought a lot of those.

The days were passed just lazing in the sun; reading, listening to music and drinking chilled red wine.

There was laughter as well; lots of laughter.

The first that we noticed of anything strange was the influx of cars parked in the village – all with number plates from Paris or Rennes.

Then, a few days later, the village shop didn’t open.

We assumed, wrongly as it now seems, that it was one of the dozens of bank holidays that the French seem to enjoy.

But the next day the village shop still wasn’t open and the village seemed strangely silent and empty.

The following day it was my turn to get the bread.

I rode into St. Martin and, in a way, wasn’t too surprised to find that neither the shop nor the bar were open.

Then I saw them.

There were three of them; two women and a man.

The two women seemed to be wearing pyjamas – blood smeared pyjamas. The man was slowly crawling along the pavement, his intestines trailing behind him. The women were eating his intestines even as he tried to escape.

I stopped the bike and looked around for the camera crew. But this wasn’t a film set; this was for real.

As I looked around I noticed another couple of women who looked like they were also eating; eating something that may or may not have been a screaming baby.

In a daze I started up the bike, turned around and headed back to the farmhouse. One of the two women eating the squirming baby looked up at me; I recognised her blood smeared face. Until a few days ago she had run the village shop. She used to joke with us that we were buying far too much wine.

“You’re naughty boys,” she used to say. “Naughty girls too. Oh, what it was like to be young. I was young once myself, you know, if you can believe it; a long, long time ago. Enjoy your wine and the summer.”

It sounded better in French.

When I got back to the farm I remember sitting on the bike, unable to get off. Unable to do anything.

“Oi, boy” Mick had shouted to me. “You get the cigarettes?”

I just sat on the bike, shaking, mute and struggling to find words to explain what I had seen.

Sarah must have realised that there was a problem as she came over, switched off the engine and helped me dismount.

Later, and I don’t know how much later, after I had explained what I’d seen a dozen times, Martin and Colin went off to check.

When they returned they were white in the face and uncharacteristically silent.

5

For the next week we crowded around the radio, listening for news. There wasn’t a television in the farmhouse and certainly no internet to be had. In a way that had been part of the attraction in the first place.

We learned that there had been an outbreak of a type of flu. Then that there had been an accident at an army base. Then that a plane, carrying military supplies had crashed.

In the end, it was just rumours and half truths and there fewer and fewer radio broadcasts anyway.

We’ve made a sort of life for ourselves, if you can call it that. We’ve learned how to scavenge and how to stay clear of the grunts. That’s what they call them; mainly due to the noise they make when they are chewing fresh flesh.

They seem to like their flesh fresh and preferably still alive.

We don’t get many visitors; we are wary of them and they seem scared of us.

A week after the outbreak (that’s what we call it now) a British family - Mum, Dad and two young girls in a Volvo - stopped by. They had been on holiday here and were trying to get back home. We found the Volvo two days later; empty and deserted. Just some smears of blood and, what could have been young girls’ bones – scraped clean.

As I say, we’ve made a sort of life for ourselves. We survived the first winter and seem reasonably well set up for the next.

Unless, of course, grunt takes an interest in us and comes to visit in force.

Perhaps during the night.

I really don’t know what will happen then.

We’ve heard about the enclave at the walled city of St. Malo on the north coast.

We keep talking about making for there but that’s all it is so far, just talk.

And, if talk turns into action, well, I’ll let you know how that works out.

To be continued...

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