The Left Series (Book 6): Left On An Island (35 page)

Chapter Sixty

I grabbed Tony underneath his right bicep and hauled him to his feet.

“We’ve only got one way to go now,” I huffed. “We’ll have to try and circle back around somehow.”

Tony turned to the advancing undead horde at the opposite end of the alley. His eyes bulged and a look of total fear was etched on his face.

“Ah, fucking hell, there’s shit loads of them coming,” he wailed.

Yeah, and all because of your loud fucking whining, I thought.

I dragged Tony through the alley facing the town and we ran between the brick walls either side of the pathway. The ground started to slope into an upward incline the further we moved through the alley. The higher we moved up the hill, the more dilapidated the area seemed to become. The tall brick walls that acted as a boundary to the alley receded and were replaced with temporary fences, built with old wooden panels, dry logs and pieces of rusting vehicles. The stink of old trash, rotting meat and stale piss attacked my senses. The alley grew narrower and the houses were increasingly smaller and of poorer quality. The structures were made from corrugated iron sheets and crammed together in a series of small boxes. What kind of hell were we headed for? I briefly wondered about Smith and where in the hell he’d got to. I couldn’t worry too much about him though, I had my own sorry ass to try and save.

Sweat poured off me and the heat and terrible stench seemed to be combining to make me feel like passing out or vomiting, whichever came first. I turned and felt mildly glad to see Tony was keeping up with me at least. Not that I was moving at any great speed as the hill was becoming steeper with every step we trod.

“Where are we going, Wilde Man?” Tony wheezed between deep breaths. “I got to stop soon. I’m fucked, mate.”

My lungs burned and my legs ached. I wiped sweat from my face and watched it drip from the palm of my hand. Glancing back down the alley and seeing we’d put some distance between ourselves and the undead, I slowed to a walking pace. I looked on either side of the alley but couldn’t see a way through the tangle of small houses and make-shift dwellings. Every route seemed to be blocked or led to a dead end.

I shook my head. “I don’t know which way to go if I’m honest, Tony,” I said, between huge gasps of stale air.

“We’re moving further away from the port if we keep going up the hill and we’re right in the ghetto area of the town where we are,” Tony said.

“Yeah, I can see that,” I snapped, trying to keep my temper in check. “You know the place. What do you suggest?”

Tony kind of shrugged. The action was so unhelpful I felt like pulling out my gun and shooting him.

“Come on, Tony,” I growled. “Which fucking way do we go?”

Tony shook his head. “I don’t honestly know, mate. I only came into this part of town once to score some weed with Dan. Freek drove us up here and it was more than a few years ago. It was also dark and added to all that, I was off me head and all.”

I sighed. So Tony’s knowledge of the area was zip, none whatsoever. Worse than useless.

My inner rage was quickly dispelled when I heard the echo of collective groans rattling out from behind us. The undead horde was still on our tail and coming up the hill after us. The first few in the line lurched into view, shuffling steadily up the incline. The undead never grew tired and would hunt you down all day long if they could follow you.

We continued onward at a fast hiking pace along the trash strewn alleyway, only because we had no alternative route to take. 

“We have to get off this damn track,” I groaned. “This path is leading us no place we want to be.”

Tony held his hands on top of his head as he walked. “I don’t know, mate. I can’t think straight. Those dead fuckers have got me all worked up.”

I needed to make a decision. The alley probably petered out into a dead end, a giant trash heap or simply led to the wooded area on the edge of town. I couldn’t take the gamble. We needed to double back and head for the damn boat in the jetty before we got so off course we didn’t know where the hell we were in relation to the shoreline.

“We’re going to have to try and cut through this shanty town,” I said.

“But we don’t know what might be lying around in there,” Tony protested. “Besides, there are barriers and metal sheets all in the way.”

“We’ll have to just knock them out of our damn way,” I huffed, spinning around to face Tony. “This alley is taking us in totally the wrong direction and we don’t even know where it leads to. You want to take that chance, Tony?”

Tony held up his hands in a surrendering motion. “Okay, Wilde Man. It’s your shout, mate. All I’m saying is there could be a lot of potential dangers if we head through those shitty hovels.”

“Oh, so you mean there are no dangers through this fucking alley? Is that what you’re saying?” My anger was beginning to bubble to the surface and I had to struggle hard to keep it suppressed. “That bunch of walking fuck-ups behind us is a minor hazard according to your logic, huh?”

Tony stopped dead in his tracks with a pissed off look on his face. “I tell you what, mate. Fuck it! How about you go your way and I’ll go mine? We were better off before we met you and Smudger and you two have brought us nothing but fucking grief, mate. I’m the only one left alive out of our little posse and you two got the rest of them fucking killed. So you can stick your shitty attitude up your own ass.”

I stood still and he jabbed his finger close to my face throughout his rant. I definitely wanted to shoot him now and a little voice inside my head asked me what was there to stop me. I felt my fingers twitch and my hand wanted to move to the back of my waistband and reach for the Glock handgrip.

“Fine,” I muttered. It was all I could think of to say in this bizarre situation.

Tony screwed his face up and pointed at me again. “I thought you were all right, mate but you’ve turned out to be a total bell end, pal.” With those final words he barged by me and continued on through the alley and up the hill.

I watched him go for a couple of seconds and wondered if it would be the last time I ever saw him. Had I been too harsh on the guy? He was obviously suffering some kind of inner turmoil and I hadn’t been very sympathetic to his problems. Maybe I was a total bell end. Perhaps I was a horrible person who deserved all I got. Quite possibly, this life was my purgatory and I had only survived because I
should
be suffering the hell it was to live each day. 

My thoughts were broken by the approaching zombie horde still stumbling ever closer up the hill. It was time to head off in my own direction. I’d managed to lose Smith and now Tony in the space of an hour.
How to win friends and influence people
. Yeah, right. My alternative self would love this emotional situation as well as getting lost in the town’s back streets. I could almost see him rubbing his hands with glee at all this new chaos to throw back at me.

I moved left across the alley and shunted a stacked pile of wooden pallets out of the way. I turned and heaved them back into place to make things a little harder for the following zombie crowd.

I swung around and found myself facing a spread of make-shift shacks that were not much bigger than garden sheds. The shacks were constructed of strips of wood and sheets of plastic joined together with rusty nails and sticking tape. Some of the wooden panels had fallen away over time and exposed the meager belongings inside the shack’s one room interiors. Nobody occupied the hovels, either their residents had long since fled or were long since dead.

I felt kind of guilty I’d never really tried all that hard when life was normal and been happy to just swim along in a sea of mediocrity, when the poor people that had lived in these shacks never had the choice. Maybe I was a total bell end without even realizing.

I ducked my head and moved on, leaving the shacks to rot and fester on their own accord.

The narrow streets beyond the shacks were no better. Trash and decaying dead bodies were scattered amongst the small houses. Some rotting corpses sat up and groaned as I trod by. Obviously not all the residents of the neighborhood were one hundred percent totally deceased. The near skeletal bodies crept slowly out from the dark crawl spaces beneath the ground floor of their small, one storey houses.

I wiped sweat from my face and quickened my pace. Crawling zombies used to freak me out but nowadays they didn’t bother me so much. I was always wary of them but I knew they didn’t pose as much threat as their more mobile counterparts. Why waste time and energy and possibly ammunition on something you can simply walk away from?

I struggled to get any kind of bearings in the close proximity and dense structures all around me. I turned left and right but seemed to be heading through an endless maze of small wooden houses. A growing number of walking zombies seemed to be appearing and turning to watch me pass. Each one of them let out a throaty groan and started to plod after me. I kept turning in different directions, expecting to see the coastline somewhere in front of me but the scene didn’t seem to change. Only the fact more undead were in the area was the one thing I was sure of. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to get ensnared amongst a large group of ghouls.

I felt the unwelcome visitor of panic start to rise within me. The sun shone into my eyes when I turned in certain directions and I couldn’t see what the hell was in front of me. The heat and the stench made me feel increasingly nauseous. Wasn’t there any friendly survivors left in this godforsaken town?

I gripped the fruit knife tightly by the handle, knowing sooner or later I’d have to use it, and the handgun if necessary. I felt like a man walking through a tiger’s cage. I knew the undead were going to come for me in one huge tangle of fingers and teeth.

I took another left turn for no rational reason. More wooden houses lined the narrow street. I couldn’t see beyond their rooftops and realized I was going to have to get off these streets and lay low for a while without the following bunch of undead tracking my movement.

I broke into a sudden run, sprinting across a small, dried up front yard and between two wooden houses on the right of the street. I heard roars from the undead behind me, confused and frustrated because I was no longer in their field of vision. It was risky blindly running through built up urban areas but I didn’t have much choice.

I turned left at the rear corner of the house next to me on my left side. The dwellings didn’t have much in the way of gardens or backyards so I kept heading through the mass of crisscrossing pathways behind the row of houses lining the street. The cracked paving slabs and scrub ground was uneven underfoot so I had to be careful not to trip while I jogged along the narrow paths. Again, I seemed to be heading through a warren of unfamiliar and narrow passageways that led to nowhere in particular.

I left turned around the corner of a house and onto a gravel pathway. The tattered remnants of bed sheets and clothing still pinned on washing lines flapped in the breeze, a few feet in front of my face. I smelled the damp and mold wafting from the material and batted the decaying fabric away with my free hand.

The clothing pins holding the rotten bed sheet onto the line broke into pieces and the fabric fell to the ground. A peeling human face leered into the free space I’d created beneath the washing line, causing me to recoil in shock and surprise. The figure was well over six feet tall and looked as though he’d been a basketball player in his former life, dressed in a dirty yellow sports vest and green short pants. I took a backward step as the big male zombie lumbered forward with outstretched arms reaching for me. I tried to take a sidestep but the huge ghoul followed my movement and blocked me, just like we were on a basketball court.

The wooden paneled side wall of the house was around two feet to my left. There wasn’t enough room to risk trying to bypass the big zombie in front of me. More undead staggered between the remaining old clothing and bed sheets hanging on the washing lines. I sensed movement behind me and slightly to my right. I turned my head and saw more ghouls, at least four stumbling along the path to my rear.

“Shit,” I whispered. I was trapped on the narrow pathway between the two houses.

Chapter Sixty-One

I raised the fruit knife above my head and drew the handgun from my waistband. I knew firing the Glock was only going to draw more undead onto my position but I was shit out of options.

I slashed at the big basketball player zombie with the knife, trying to stab him in the temple. The space was too enclosed and I couldn’t get my swing right. Instead, I snagged my arm around another mold ridden bed sheet and tore it from the clothes line. I shook my arm free and tossed the sheet at the big zombie. The sheet covered his head and momentarily stopped his advance.

I glanced to the left and saw a few steps leading up to a porch with a door beyond. The sheet had been masking a side entrance to the house on my left. A short stairway and a narrow veranda stood in front of a wooden paneled doorway. My options had just become a little better but not brilliant. I scurried up the half dozen steps and sprinted across the veranda, with zombies approaching to the rear, only a few feet away from me.