The Left Series (Book 4): Left In The Cold

by Christian Fletcher

  Mrs Sally McMahon looked suitably pleased with herself as she approached the table with the big dish.

  “Get the bowls and spoons from the sideboard, will you, Mo?” she barked at the guy with the weird haircut.

  Mo muttered something under his breath and hauled himself from his chair. He looked too thin and as though he’d be blown away in a strong gust of wind. How somebody like him had survived all this time was a mystery.

  I reluctantly sat back down at the same time Mo dumped a stack of China bowls and silver spoons on the table, still muttering obscenities.

  “We’ll go straight after this,” I whispered to Batfish.

  “Will you calm down, Brett,” Batfish hissed back at me.

  Mrs McMahon lifted the dome shaped lid off of the serving dish and the room immediately filled with a rich aroma of well seasoned vegetables and stock. My stomach rumbled and I had to admit the brown colored soup or whatever it was did smell invitingly good as the steam drifted into the air above the silver dish. Maybe we needed some sustenance before venturing back out into the cold to look for Smith and the others. The plump chef slopped several helpings of soup into bowls and passed them around the table.

  I tried a spoonful but the food was too hot and I ended up spitting it back onto the spoon, trying to ignore the scolding sensation inside my mouth. The chatter rose in volume but all I could think about was finding the others. I glanced across the table and the grisly Joan still stared at me between slurps of soup.

  “I’ll sing a few songs for you later, if you want,” Maddie said, nudging me with her elbow.

  “What kind of music do you do?” I asked, not really interested but simply trying to be polite. I wolfed down the soup as quickly as I could without burning my mouth, desperate to get away from the table and start my search. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Cordoba while I’d been stuffing my face with soup that was the temperature of lava.

  “I sing a few folk numbers and some blues tunes,” Maddie replied. “I suppose if you were going to categorize what I do, I’d say I was a bit like Bob Dylan.”

  “Okay, cool,” I muttered, hurrying the broth down. It seemed a shame to gobble the food and I didn’t want the good Mrs McMahon to think I wasn’t grateful but I really was on the verge of panic thinking about the others.

  I scooped down the last of the soup, uncouthly wiped my mouth with my sleeve and scraped back the chair as I stood up. Maddie gazed at me with an expression of slight shock. Nobody else around the table had yet finished their food. Batfish flashed me a foul glance then turned back to Alex.

  “How many people live here in the castle?” Batfish asked.

  “There’s another four people rattling around here somewhere,” Alex answered. “I expect they’ll be joining us as soon as they smell Sally’s delicious cooking.” He turned to Mrs McMahon. “What’s for the next course?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see,” she teased, with a shrewd smirk on her face.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry everybody but I don’t have time to wait for you all to finish your meals. I have to go and look for the rest of my party before it’s too late.”

  Batfish sighed deeply and placed her spoon into her soup bowl.

  “All right, Brett, I’ll come with you. No need to have a heart attack.” She rose from the table and Alex and the big guy, Davie also stood.

  “We’ll come and give you a hand,” Alex said. “Davie, you go and get the shotguns. Mo, you get the flares.”

  Mo protested again under his breath but did as he was told. I moved around the table and glanced back at Maddie.

  “Can you keep an eye on my dog, for me?” I pointed to the fireplace where Spot lay fast asleep.

  “Of course,” Maddie said with a smile. “I’ll give him a bit of food when he wakes up.”

  I nodded and returned the smile. “Thanks.”

  I turned to leave the room but felt a tug on my sleeve. I glanced back and was shocked when I was met by the scary, steely glare of Joan. Her face was twisted and almost seething in anger.

  “You must leave this place. No good will come of it,” she croaked. I felt a cold chill run down my spine, despite the heat of the log fire. Glancing away, I shrugged off her grip and made for the staircase.

  Batfish followed me back downstairs to the Great Hall and we pulled on our cold weather coats, hoods and tactical gloves. We left the backpacks where they were on the floor. I drew my Beretta and checked the magazine.

  “I’m sure you’re overreacting, Brett,” Batfish hissed at me. “We haven’t been that long inside the castle.”

  I thought she was being slightly selfish and had to restrain my rising anger.

  “We can’t just leave them out there in that freezing cold, Batfish,” I scolded. “How would you like it if it was them sat on their asses eating soup and drinking wine, whilst having a good old gossip with our new hosts, while we were stuck out there in the cold wilderness?”

  She looked a little sheepish as she zipped up her coat. “All right. Point taken,” she murmured.

  We were soon joined by Alex, Davie and Mo. All three of them carried a double barreled shotgun each and Mo had a couple of wax flares under his arm. They were dressed in dark colored puffer jackets and black wooly hats.

  “They used to use these for Grouse shooting,” Alex said, raising his shotgun slightly. “They come in handy when we have to venture out outside the castle grounds. Don’t worry, we’ll soon find your friends. I’m sure they can’t have gone far.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I sighed.

  “They were heading for the front entrance, you say?” Alex asked.

  I nodded. “Yeah, they were heading in that direction, last time we saw them. I just hope they didn’t take the same route we did and gotten trapped at the rear of the castle walls. They could have skirted around the perimeter from the opposite direction, if they were searching for us.”

  “Okay, we’ll go out of the side door at the castle’s north wall and loop back around to the front of the building,” Alex suggested to Davie and Mo. “Hopefully, there won’t be too many zombies at the side door so we can move quickly. Mo, you light the flares if we’re struggling to see what we’re doing, okay?”

  Mo nodded once without changing his facial expression. Alex glanced at my M-9 in my hand.

  “Wow! That’s a nice piece,” he said, then nodded at the big guy next to him. “Davie here has got a flare pistol on him so we can fire up a distress flare if we can’t find the rest of your guys. They’ll be able to see that for miles around. Unfortunately, so will the zombies within a three mile radius. That means we’ll have to be out there and back inside in quick time.”

  We all nodded in agreement.

  “I want to get back to that nice hot soup as fast as I can,” Batfish said.

  “Me too,” I sighed, not relishing the thought of going back out into the cold.

  We followed Alex in single file through another door in the Great Hall. The corridor through the Hall led us to a huge, glass covered conservatory type area, with a black and white checkered tiled floor and rows of tables and chairs sitting at opposite ends of the floor space. The temperature dropped considerably as soon as we stepped into the room and Alex headed for a set of glass double doors at the far end of the wall. The windows revealed only darkness outside and I could make out the silhouette of the castle’s large structure looming above the conservatory roof.

  Alex unlocked and unbolted the doors, Davie switched on a flashlight and we headed outside. The cold air immediately wrapped itself around me and caused my breath to momentarily freeze. The wind whipped through us as we trudged across the snowy grounds towards the castle wall. A tall, wooden church door stood recessed in the castle wall.

  “The keys to all these doors within the walls are hanging on a hook on the left side,” Alex explained in a hushed voice. “We kept them all in one place at one time but we figured we may have to evacuate the grounds at some sta
ge. If the keys aren’t by the door, you could be stuck inside the grounds, looking for a way out.”

  He took the big chunky metal key from the hook and turned it in the door lock. “We’ll lock the door behind us,” he whispered.

  Alex pulled open the side door and we stepped out into the darkness and the biting cold wind, blowing across the golf course situated around the castle’s exterior grounds. I couldn’t see a damn thing and hoped our search wouldn’t take long and wouldn’t involve us taking any casualties.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Davie stepped out through the side entrance behind us and shone his flashlight over the lock so Alex could see to secure the door. I heard hisses, screeches and monotonous moans in the blackness all around us. It reminded me of Halloween when I was a kid, involved in some dumb, scary game. Alex and Davie turned back towards us when they’d finished securing the lock and shone the beam across Batfish, Mo and I to check we were all still present.

  “We’ll turn right and head along the castle walls until we come to the front of the building,” Alex said. “Keep the noise to a minimum and stay close to each other. Don’t wander off on your own, okay?”

  We all muttered some sort of response and followed Alex as he led the way. Davie walked alongside him, keeping the flashlight beam shining low to the snow covered ground. It didn’t take long before the first sets of staggering, filthy and partially rotten feet honed into view in the LED flashlight bulbs.

  “Here they come!” Alex hissed. “Keep your wits about you, everyone.”

  I braced myself and felt Batfish squeeze a little tighter next to me. I picked out a battered pair of once white golfing shoes that were coming apart where the sole meets the uppers. Bony toes poked through the holes and the soles flapped against the bottoms of the gnarled, gray colored feet. The legs of the torn and threaded pants were yellow in color with a black, checkered outline, resembling those worn by ‘Rupert the Bear,’ of the children’s TV show.

  Other encroaching ghoul’s legs wore an assortment of dilapidated shoes or work boots and some had no footwear at all, simply knotted bony stumps with split and stretched skin covering their lower limbs here and there. I roughly estimated we were faced with around a dozen ghouls but I knew there was considerably more in the vicinity. We had to bypass this bunch in quick time without alerting more undead to our whereabouts.

  The snow crunched beneath our feet as we plodded onwards, alongside the outer castle wall. The dead shuffled closer in our direction, moaning and hissing with renewed vigor. I worried the whole bunch of emaciated creatures was going to surround us in droves.

  “We need to pick up the pace a bit, Alex,” I whispered. “Otherwise, they’re going to cut us off before we can round the corner.”

  “Okay,” he hissed in reply. “Keep walking, though. Don’t run, in case we get separated.”

  Mo mumbled something inaudible but I guessed it was a protest of some kind. We walked faster through the snow but the undead didn’t relent in their pursuit across the flat ground. Davie flashed the light beam across the sea of pale gray, half decayed faces to our left and to our front. An old woman, with a shock of white hair and dressed in the remains of a blue nightdress, shrieked loudly into the light.

  “Keep the torch down, Davie,” Alex admonished. “They can see the light right across the golf course fairways.”

  Davie grunted but did as he was told, lowering the flashlight. I knew it wouldn’t be long before we had to start firing our weapons at the encroaching horde. No way would we be able to sneak by the whole lot of them. My other concern was how far we were walking away from the exit door behind us. The castle was a great defensive structure if you were inside the grounds but was almost impenetrable from the outside. I hoped we wouldn’t be cut off from our escape route the further we moved alongside the walls. I gripped the M-9 handgun butt tightly in growing anticipation.

  “They’re getting too close,” Batfish hissed. “We’re going to have to fight our way through the crowd.”

  Mo decided he’d had enough of the softly softly approach. He swung the barrel of his shotgun around in an arc at the approaching horde of undead. Alex barked the instruction not to fire but Mo either ignored him or didn’t hear. The old style, hunting shotgun boomed through the night air and a plume of orange sparks erupted from the barrel. The body of a skinny, male zombie was propelled backward from the spot where he stood as the shotgun blast lifted him off his feet.

  “Ah, Christ, Mo!” Alex roared. “Now every zombie for a mile around knows where we are. Come on, we better get moving.” He stepped up the pace and fired his own shotgun at two approaching ghouls who stood in our path.

  The double barrels took a while to reload with the cartridges they kept in their side pockets of their jackets. I noticed they had to open the barrels after two shots and slide the cartridges into each breach slot. The shotguns didn’t seem a very effective weapon in the dark. Mo and Alex fumbled with the cartridges as they reloaded.

  I held off as long as I could but had to open up with my handgun when a swarm of zombies stumbled into view in the dim flashlight beam. Davie wasn’t holding the light very steady and obtaining accurate headshots at our foe proved difficult. Batfish seemed reluctant to fire her own weapon and under the circumstances, I supposed that was a wise move. We’d quickly run out of ammo if we kept firing blind into the darkness. The shotgun shells spread a further width, propelling a bunch of steel pellets in a wide arc at the intended target. Zombies went down under fire but some hauled themselves back up onto their feet, only absorbing the shotgun pellets into their bodies.

  I managed to take out a couple of zombies with headshots as the crowd formed an enclosing ring around us. Davie fired both barrels at a long haired, female zombie leading the pack. The female’s head exploded in a mist of brown blood and decayed, gray brain matter.

  We kept together as a pack, pressed within a few inches of each other. Several zombies fell in our path from fatal gunshots and I noticed the dark shadow of the corner of the castle wall a few yards up ahead.

  “Keep going,” Alex barked, when there was a slight lull in the roar of gunfire.

  I wondered where the hell Smith and the others were. Surely, they would have heard the gunshots by now and come to investigate. They wouldn’t have succumbed to the zombie horde without a fight.

  We reached the corner of the castle wall and the clouds blew across the sky, revealing a glowing, silvery moon. The faint glow from the sky shone across the snowy waste ground that was once a golf course. I noticed a one storey structure positioned at an angle across the fairway.

  “What’s that building over there?” I whispered, deliberately slowing the pace.

  Alex turned his head slightly and studied the structure in the distance. “That’s the clubhouse for the golf course. It hasn’t been used in a while for obvious reasons.”

  I noticed around ten zombies milling around the outside of the building, as though they were interested in trying to get inside.

  “Is it easy to get in there?”

  “It’s been boarded up since the outbreak,” Alex explained. “Why? Do you think your friends could be in there?”

  “It’s a possibility,” I muttered. “There aren’t many other places they could be hiding out around here.”

  I looked around to the front wall of the castle. A huge portcullis doorway stood in the center of the wall, illuminated by the moonlight and barring any access to the building. The imposing towers and pointed spires reached upwards into the dark sky.

  “Is there no possible way they could have got in through the front entrance?” I asked.

  “It’s very unlikely, unless they scaled the walls somehow,” Alex said. “We haven’t lifted that gateway for a long while now. We closed it when the outbreak started and kept it in place ever since.”

  I glanced back across the flat ground at the front of the castle. Clusters of undead lumbered across the snow laden land towards us. We didn’t have much
time to make a decision.

  “What are we going to do, Brett?” Batfish whispered. “We can’t stay out here much longer.”

  “I know,” I muttered, desperately trying to think of the best course of action.

  “Davie, send up that flare,” Alex commanded. “They should see it from their position, wherever they are. Then, we need to make tracks, before all those zombies come down on us.”

  I peeked back around the corner at the route we had taken and saw human shapes lurking through the shadows cast by the castle’s side wall. We’d have to double back to get to the side door but couldn’t leave it too long or they’d be too bigger mass of undead grouped together in the vicinity.

  “Let me go over to that clubhouse and check inside before you fire that flare,” I said. “I have a feeling they could be holed up in there and if we fire the flare, we’ll cut them off from the side door.”

  “We’ll all go,” Alex said.

  “I’ll be quicker on my own,” I snapped. “I can avoid the zombies but if we all go in a bunch, we’ll have to move slower.”

  “Don’t be silly, Brett,” Batfish scolded.

  “Look, it is flat ground,” I pointed out. “I can be over there and back again within five minutes. If they’re not in there, we’ll send up the flare and get back to that side door.”

  “All right, go and take a look but don’t hang around,” Alex said. “We’ll keep moving around but we’ll have to get back to the side entrance as quickly as possible.”

  “Okay, I’ll be back in a tick,” I hissed and bounded into the snow before Batfish could protest and try and stop me.

  The wind whipped up and lashed flakes of ice and snow in my face as I hurried across the snowy landscape. My breath exhaled in white plumes and the groans and screeches rapidly increased as I dodged outstretched hands on each side of me. I briefly wondered if this was such a good idea, leaving the others behind. But one person could move more freely than five and was less of a mass target for the undead to focus on.

  I heard more shotgun blasts behind me but I refrained from using my M-9, as the sounds of gunfire would attract the undead to my position. I drew nearer to the clubhouse and for some reason it reminded me of a wooden lodge I’d stayed in during a vacation to the Catskill Mountains, some years previously. The windows were indeed boarded over and the place looked long since deserted. I hoped I wasn’t making a serious mistake but the clubhouse would have been the place I’d have chosen to hide out, if I was left outside.