Zombie Blaster

Mikey Johnson laughed aloud as he finished off his thirteenth zombie.

He loved the game; it was every bit as good as his best friend, Joe, had told him.  It was worth the silent lie he’d used to get Mom to buy it.  Harry, his half-brother,  had started screaming just as Mikey had spotted it on the shelf, and that had distracted Mom enough so she hadn’t noticed he’d positioned his thumb carefully over the rating when he’d held it up to show her.  Sometimes even his so-called stepfather’s smelly, dribbly baby came in useful.

“Mikey!” Mom yelled up the stairs and he knew she wanted him to fetch something.  Harry was grizzling and his stupid little half-sister, Lucy, was whining so there was a chance he could pretend he hadn’t heard and just wait for Mom to forget she’d called him.

There was also a chance she’d come upstairs and see what he was playing and he couldn’t allow that.  He wanted to get to the end of the mission before Joe.  He was sick of him bragging about how many zombies he’d blasted and how many levels he’d won.  Best mate or not, he could be a pain when he had anything new.

“Just pop to the kitchen and get me a better knife!” Mom called when she heard Mikey clattering down the stairs.  He stopped in the doorway and watched her trying to saw through the pumpkin skin with a blunt piece of cutlery that wouldn’t have cut a hole in cotton-candy.  The eyeholes were jagged and there was pulp everywhere.  Lucy had her fingers in her mouth, sucking them, drool running into her sleeve.  Sometimes she was worse than the baby.

“Mom!” he tried, but she gave him a sharp look and, harassed as she was, he knew she wouldn’t let him off.

“Kitchen!” she insisted, as Shelly came in, her hand deep in a family size bag of potato chips.

“Little baby too scared to go in the kitchen?” his big sister sneered.  “Too scared of ghosts and zombies?”

“Couldn’t you wait until dinner?” Mom snapped, glaring at his skinny older sister.  She was always stuffing something in her mouth but she never put on weight.  Mikey, on the other hand, ballooned whenever he looked at food.  Everybody thought THEY were the ones with different fathers.

He made his escape while Mom was distracting Shelly.  He hated the new house just BECAUSE the kitchen was in the basement; it was alright at meal times, when everybody was there, but when he was alone he found it creepy.  The last thing he needed was Shelly making fun of him.

He crept down the stairs as if he wanted to sneak in and out before anything nasty knew he was there.  At the bottom, he switched the light on and headed straight for the table.  With a shiver dripping down his back, he reached for the smallest knife in the block.  There was a sound as his fingers closed on the handle; a buzzing sound.

Then the light cut out and the kitchen turned black.  Panicking in case he forgot the way out, he whirled round with the knife still in the block and pulled everything off the table.  The knives scattered near his feet but, worse, his new stepfather’s favourite fruit bowl fell to the floor and shattered.

Mikey wanted to shout for help but his voice wouldn’t come and, in any case, he didn’t want Shelly to know he’d chickened again.  Instead, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the pale, dim light coming in from the street, through the slit that was supposed to be a window.

He was glad he hadn’t bothered to take off his trainers when he’d sneaked up to his room to install the game; at least he wouldn’t cut his feet.  And, if he came clean with Mom about the bowl, she’d fix it so he wouldn’t get grounded for more than a couple of years.

Suddenly, he felt a draught on the back of his neck.  It felt warm but it chilled his bones.  There was a kind of whistling moan, like the sound effect on Zombie Blaster just before a new zombie appeared.  He looked round, scared but he couldn’t see anything.

Wrong.  There was a glow near the stove; a bluish-yellow glow like the chief zombie on Level Five.  He hadn’t got past Level One but he’d watched Joe trying to defeat it; trying but not succeeding; it was undefeatable.

There was a flicker to his left, and the curtain moved.  The moaning started again; longer this time.  There must be a whole army of zombies ready to appear.

Then there was a yelp; no, a bloodcurdling scream, and the scream went on and on, like the yelping screaming battle howl of the zombie horde.  Mikey’s heart moved up into his throat, joining the lump that’d been waiting to choke him ever since the light had cut out.  He heard Mom running to the top of the stairs and he hoped he survived long enough for her to rescue him.

Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, and everything seemed to be closing in on him but, in the middle of it all, he had his first unselfish thought of the year: if the zombies killed Mom, who would look after Lucy and Harry?

“Stay away!” he yelled bravely, and his voice sounded unexpectedly strong, as if it belonged to somebody else.  “Get out and get the cops!  Take the babies with you!”  He was more afraid than he’d ever been but he wanted to save his family.  “Tell Shelly to get out!” he added.  Even SHE didn’t deserve to be eaten by zombies.

“Tell Shelly what?” a sobbing voice asked and he realised the howling had stopped.  The light came on and he saw his sister leaning against the sink, holding her foot and trying to stop her big toe bleeding.  “You had to spoil it!” she complained but he could tell she wasn’t really angry.  There was a piece of blue glass sticking out of her toe, from Mom’s third husband’s precious fruit bowl.  She must have brushed against the shard when she’d come to rescue him.

“What have you two been up to?” Mom’s voice came, astonished and angry, but she softened when she saw the blood.  She had Lucy behind her and Harry in her arms.  “I can’t send you down for a knife without you wrecking the joint!”

She ushered Lucy back to the relative safety of the concrete staircase then picked her way carefully through the debris to her other daughter.  She passed the baby to her and began to examine the cut.  “You’re lucky I washed that bowl this morning, so I don’t have to take you for a tetanus shot”, she muttered, stepping cautiously towards the table.

Mikey realised what she wanted and passed her the first aid kit without being asked; it was a tiny fragment of the debt he owed his sister for scaring away the zombies.  They’d probably taken one look at her and thought she was the leader of a skeleton army.

“I sent you down to HELP Mikey”, Mom reminded Shelly, as she bandaged the injured toe, “NOT to join in his silly ghost games.”  Shelly smiled sheepishly at her brother while the realisation hit him that his sister had been behind all the zombie effects.

SHE’D been the one who’d made the moaning sounds; SHE’D blown on his neck to make him shiver; SHE’D made the ghostly glow near the stove; SHE’D shook the curtain to scare him.

If she hadn’t trodden on the glass, she’d have given him a heart attack; and then she’d have told everybody it was his own fault for eating too many burgers.

Lucy, waiting on the cold steps, began to whimper and Harry began to drool, covering Shelly’s shoulder in the kind of slime that would have made a zombie proud.  Mikey grinned.  “Serves you right!” he said.

He felt like laughing, but he daren’t, not until he’d convinced Mom to pretend the bowl had smashed some other way.

He wanted to get out of the kitchen but he didn’t feel like going back to his game; he’d had enough of zombies.



1,388 words