The Left Series (Book 2): Left Alone (3 page)

I clicked off the Glock safety catch but Smith motioned at me to hold my fire. Another two shambling figures followed the lead zombie around the corner of the building and honed into view in the shadows.

“Shit! Three of them,” I hissed. Fuck only knew how many more were approaching.

“Keep steady and wait until they’re out of the shadow,” Smith whispered. “Don’t fire blind into the shade. Wait till we get a clear shot.”

The lead zombie stumbled out of the shadow, roughly fifteen feet in front of us. I could now clearly make out the rotten facial features. The eyeballs were gone and so was most of the skin and flesh around the face. A thick mop of gingery hair remained on top of the head along with the remnants of a wispy beard sprouting from the chin. The figure was clad in a torn, checkered work shirt and ragged denims.

Smith was the best shot I’d ever seen and his weapon handling and survival skills were second to none. The one problem with a Desert Eagle hand gun is it sounds like a fucking cannon when a shot is fired. Smith did fire one shot and the lead zombie’s head evaporated into a soup of brown brain matter and pieces of skull. The body flopped backwards into the long grass. The wretched creature’s existence finally terminated.

I was worried the gun shot might alert more of the undead to our position.

The two following ghouls both emitted low drones simultaneously, as if they were outraged by Smith’s brutal dispatch of their comrade. They moved from the shadow and into the daylight. Both were male and one was thickly set in denim dungarees, still wearing a fisherman’s cap on his head. The other was tall and skinny with his ears and nose missing, the old injuries surrounded by encrusted, brown blood.

“You take the guy in the cap and I’ll take the skinny bastard,” Smith hissed.

“Okay,” I muttered and took aim with my Glock. The center of Fishing Cap Guy’s forehead was aligned with my gun sight.

Smith’s Desert Eagle boomed and my Glock cracked. Skinny Bastard and Fishing Cap Guy both went down within a second of each other. Two shots, two kills - job done.

“Okay, let’s try and find a workshop,” Smith grunted.

We trudged through the long grass between the buildings, stepping over the three prone corpses lying on the ground. Smith peered around the corners of the two buildings and waved me forward. A rotting wooden, sliding door was positioned in the center of the building to our left. Smith pulled at the door and it squeaked open on rusting metal runners. The building interior was gloomy and a musty stench wafted from the doorway.

“Did you bring a flashlight?”

I shook my head.

Smith mumbled something I didn’t catch, removed his shades and stepped through the doorway. I followed him inside the crumbling building. We stood by the door with our hand guns at the ready, waiting for our sight to adjust to the murkiness. The sun cast some light into the interior and I heard something rustling around on the ground to my right. I twisted and pointed my Glock in the direction of the noise. A huge rat squeaked in surprise at our intrusion and quickly scuttled away into a dark recess towards the far wall.

“I fucking hate rats,” Smith hissed.

I remembered his tirade over my phobia of snakes and thought about returning some of his jibes but realized it wasn’t the right time.   

The wooden boarded ceiling hung low overhead and a solitary light bulb dangled between the drapes of spider webs. Several cluttered old workbenches stood in a neat row in the center of the room. Chunky, rusting vices sat on opposite sides of each bench, the cylindrical, twisting handles stood up like lone fingers flicking us the bird.

“Anything of use in here?”  I asked.

Smith gazed over the workbenches. “I can’t say. It’s so damn dark in here.”

We stepped slowly into the room, moving around and covering each dark corner with sweeping arcs with our hand guns. Piles of packing crates and cardboard boxes stuffed full of engine parts and boat accessories lined the wall at the opposite side of the building. Smith moved towards the stacks and started to rummage through one of the open crates.

“It’s like looking for a needle in a fucking junk stack,” he growled.

“Shouldn’t that be a
haystack
?” I corrected. Smith was always jumbling his sayings.

“Whatever,” he rumbled. “We’ll never find what we’re looking for in here.”

I didn’t even know
what
we were looking for in the first place, so I could’ve been locked in this room for a million years and still drawn a blank.

“Come on, kiddo. Let’s go back to the jetty and have a scout around the rest of the marina.” Smith moved back towards the open door.

I turned to follow and my elbow caught some old piece of engine machinery on one of the workbenches. The metallic engine piece clanged into what seemed like a thousand other objects sending them all crashing to the cobble stone floor in a crescendo of noise.

“Wilde Man!” Smith hissed. “What did you do?”

I stood wincing for a second until the clanking noises ceased. A metallic pipe rolled backward and forwards on the uneven floor. I stopped the pipe rolling with the underside of my boot and we stood listening for any approaching noise.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Smith rumbled.

We moved towards the open door and stopped a few feet from the entrance. A huge, man mountain of a guy with a completely bald head, appeared in the doorway, blocking the sunlight. His flapping denim work shirt was ripped open to his navel, exposing a huge, hairy belly that was peppered with old bite marks. He opened his grimy, blood coated mouth and emitted a low growl.

“Shit,” I spat and took aim with my Glock.

Man Mountain wasn’t alone. At least a dozen more undead figures crowded the doorway behind the big guy.

“Ah Christ!” Smith sighed. “You’ve brought the whole fucking village of dead bastards down on us, Wilde.”

My guess was this bunch of zombies was already on their way over to us when we’d dispatched their three comrades outside the building. The undead gang was probably attracted by the gun fire. Admittedly, my clumsiness hadn’t helped our predicament and given our position away but they couldn’t possibly have found us so quickly because I’d knocked over a bunch of stuff. My argument with Smith would have to wait. Right now, we needed to get the hell out of the building.

The Man Mountain plodded through the doorway and was followed by the rest of his undead crew, all jostling and bumping each other for pole position to get at us. Smith fired two shots and two zombies went down. The boom of his Desert Eagle reverberated around the room. I fired off one shot and hit Man Mountain through his left eye socket. He crumpled from the knees and fell face first onto the cobbles.

The undead mob moaned with increasing volume and surged forward towards us. I moved closer to Smith as I didn’t want them to isolate us. Smith fired another round and a female zombie’s head exploded into a dark mist. We shuffled backwards deeper into the gloomy workshop, which didn’t help our escape plan. I quickly glanced around the interior, desperately searching for an alternative exit route. No windows or exit doors were visible from the inside. More zombies piled through the main sliding doorway onto the work shed cobbles. We were faced with around thirty flesh hungry ghouls.  

“There’s too many of them,” I bleated. “They’re going to overrun us.”

Smith fired again and backed up.

Individually, zombies could be easily dealt with if you had a reliable hand gun. Even bunches of twos and threes weren’t a problem, but a swarming, snarling mob was a whole different ball game. They kept coming at you in a relentless, growling tide.

“Keep moving back,” Smith yelled above the growing stream of moans.

The zombies knew they had their prey cornered and it would soon be feeding time.

I followed Smith as we shuffled backwards with our guns still trained on the enclosing horde. We moved towards a dark corner on the opposite side to where the doorway was situated. Where the hell was Smith leading us? If we backed into a corner we’d never get out of the building.

Chapter Four

“We’re getting trapped,” I screamed.

Smith gripped my shoulder with his free hand. “Stairway-on our six.”

I took a brief glance over my shoulder and saw a metallic, spiral stairway leading to an upper level directly behind us. We nudged our way between some musty brown sacks and Smith backed onto the first step.

“We better get upstairs, fast,” he said.

The gaggle of undead fanned out as more of them bundled through the doorway into the gloomy interior. They lowed and hollered in what seemed like an excited state. Some of their number looked fairly freshly animated, while others were pretty much rotten and almost skeletal.

I fired at the nearest walking corpse, an old guy who looked like he was in his last throes of life before he was infected. The Glock’s .40 round hit the ghoul in the center of his face, dropping him to the ground.

“Save the ammo,” Smith bellowed. He turned and rushed up the stairway. “Come on.”

I clanked onto the first stair and edged my way backwards up the steps. The staircase was an old, wrought iron French colonial style structure, with leafy patterns embedded in the frame. The stairs were steep and spaced widely apart. I climbed three or four and then turned and bolted towards the opening to the upper level.

The zombies followed but had difficulty navigating the first couple of steps. A few of them fell over each other as they tried to maneuver up the stairway.

The upper level was lighter than the ground floor, the sun’s rays shining through the partially collapsed roof.

Smith holstered his Desert Eagle and picked up a brown sack that looked like a sandbag.

“Help me with this,” he grunted, struggling with the heavy sack.

I holstered my weapon and grabbed the opposite end of the sack. The rough material felt slightly damp and stunk of mold. We dragged the sack to the top of the stairway and rolled it down the steps. The heavy sandbag upended the first zombie climbing the steps and the creature fell backwards into his following, undead comrades.

“That won’t hold them but it will give us a bit of time,” Smith said.

“We need a way out,” I whined, stating the fucking obvious.

Smith pointed to the hole in the low hanging roof. “We have to go up to get down.”

I gazed up and didn’t like the look of the wrecked timbers that once was the spine of the building. Displaced, orange clay roof tiles hung at odd angles around the hole, like they were gripping to what remained of the roof in a final, desperate effort to fulfill their purpose. Some of the tiles lay broken on the floor beneath the hole in an ungainly pile.

We didn’t have much choice. It was either through the hole in the roof or through the gang of zombies. Either exit strategy carried a hell of a risk. I hoped that shitty old roof wouldn’t cave in the moment we stepped onto it.

Smith slid an old packing crate across the floor and positioned it underneath the hole.

“Keep that stairway covered,” he barked.

I drew my Glock and pointed it at the top of the staircase. Smith hopped up onto the packing crate and reached up to the busted wooden beams. The packing crate was obviously old and rotten and crumpled under Smith’s weight. He went over sideways and crashed in an awkward heap onto the wooden floor.

“Shit!” Smith yelled and rolled onto his back.

The scene would have been comical if the situation hadn’t been so serious.

I frantically glanced around the attic for something we could use as a step-up to the roof while Smith stumbled to his feet looking totally pissed off. An old, rusting kids push bike leaned against the wall in the far corner. I holstered my hand gun and quickly moved towards the bike, then wheeled it back towards the hole. The brakes were partially jammed on and the corroded wheels squeaked as I rolled the bicycle forward.

“What are you going to do?” Smith sighed. “Fly that fucking thing out of here like E.T.?”

“Stand on the seat and handle bars while I hold it steady,” I hissed.

“How are you going to get up there, Einstein?”

“We could stand here arguing all day but we having a pressing engagement with something called,
trying to live
,” I rasped.

Smith shook his head and clambered up onto the bike. I tried to hold it steady under his weight. The bike rocked around slightly and I heard the stream of undead bundling up the stairs. They must have overcome the obstacle in the shape of the sandbag on the steps.

“Keep it still,” Smith hissed.

He reached up to the wooden roof beam and hauled himself up onto the sagging tiles. The whole roof groaned under his weight and I thought for one moment the entire fucking lot was going to come down on top of our heads.

Smith slowly crawled out of the hole into the daylight. I heard a high pitched moan and turned back to the stairway. A female ghoul with a shock of frizzy, ginger hair crawled up the top step on all fours. She shrieked and bared her teeth when her milky white eyes fixed on me.

I glanced back up to the hole in the roof and Smith lay prone on the tiles trying to spread his weight evenly. A few of the loose tiles crashed down onto the floor near my feet. Smith reached down with his arm.

“Grab my hand, Wilde Man,” he yelled.

I reached up and slipped my hand into his. The Ginger zombie crawled across the floor towards me. More of the undead staggered into view up the stairs behind her. Smith hauled me skywards and several more loose tiles crashed to the ground. I dangled in mid air for a few seconds, not knowing if Smith was going to haul me up out of the hole. A steady stream of the undead jostled and bumped their way up the stairway into the attic space.

I gripped the top edge of the broken timber with my free hand to give myself some sort of purchase to pull my body weight upwards. Ginger clambered to her feet and swatted the air below me. Her nails raked against the soles of my hiking boots.