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

by Christian Fletcher

  “I gave you another chance, Brett and you’ve rejected me again,” she seethed, her face snarling like a wild animal. “You’ve broken my heart so I’m going to destroy yours.”

  I opened my mouth to reply but I didn’t manage to get the words out. Maddie reached around to the small of her back and pulled out a long bladed kitchen knife. The stainless steel blade glinted with a silvery spark in the moon light as she raised the weapon above her head. The tip of the blade was pointed directly at the center of my chest. No shoulder wounds this time – that shank was going to drive straight into my heart.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Time seemed to slow down to a series of jerky movements again, like somebody was flicking through one of those moving booklets. I tried to lift the M-16 but it seemed to weigh heavy in my hands and I couldn’t raise it in time to shoot Maddie before she stabbed me. Perhaps, deep down, I wanted to die in a no nonsense way. Being stabbed and dying almost immediately was preferable to being bitten and becoming a walking fuck up, like so many other people had become.

  The crack of a single gunshot caused me to flinch and duck down slightly. I felt a spattering of warm, gooey liquid splash onto my face. Maddie jerked backwards and went down on her back onto the ground, making a deep imprint in the snow. I stared at her prone body. Blood ran from a small hole in her forehead and began to stain the snow under her head a deep shade of crimson. Her eyes remained open but the snarling sneer had evaporated from her face.

  “What the fuck…?” I gasped, briefly glancing behind me.

  A shadowy figure waved at me from the roof of the golf clubhouse. It took me a few seconds to register what the hell had just happened. Two zombies steadily stumbled towards me, their moans breaking my mental trance. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to lift my rifle. I fired two shots, terminating each zombie’s existence.

  “Are you going to come inside this damn clubhouse or are you going to stay out there all night, Wilde?” a voice I recognized called out.

  I turned back to the clubhouse to look at Cordoba lying on the roof. She’d saved my ass yet again and I couldn’t thank her enough. I didn’t feel much like celebrating though. I felt hollow and empty as I stood watching the castle burn with Maddie’s lifeless body at my feet. Why couldn’t we just find someplace to settle without all the dramas and emotional trauma? I’d been the one who had insisted we left America for a better way of life in Britain and so far, it had been even worse than our existence back home, and I felt it was all down to me.

  I was sick of the killing and constantly having to deal with being on the edge of my nerves every minute of every day. The burning castle in front of me was one way or another, another product of my misdemeanors. I glanced around the barren landscape for my alternative self but even he seemed to have abandoned me. A blast of cold air blew a gritty wave of snow into my face that shook me from my self induced daze. I winced against the icy blast and wiped the snow and blood from my face with my sleeve.

  I sighed as I took one final glance at Maddie’s dead body lying in the snow. I felt as though I should’ve said some words from the Bible or something prophetic but my mind was blank. I’d let the sound of the harsh wind and the moans of the zombie’s do the talking for me.

  I turned away from Maddie’s corpse and the burning castle, feeling like I’d ruined more people’s lives, no matter how tainted their existence had been. Cordoba was no longer perched on the clubhouse roof as I approached the building. No doubt she was inside with the rest of the party. I felt emotionally drained as I trudged around the walkway to the fire door exit.

  No zombies surrounded the hut like they had done previously and I followed the pathway to the side door unhindered. Cordoba stood in the doorway, waving me inside.

  “Come on, Brett,” she hissed. “Hurry it up before any of those damn zombies sees you.”

  I brushed by her and entered the golf clubhouse, relieved the cold wind was no longer blowing right through me. Cordoba quietly closed the door behind me.

  “I was waiting for you,” she said. “I saw that crazy Maddie head out of the castle and hide in those trees. I figured she was going to try to pull some crazy stunt like that.”

  “Yeah, thanks for saving me,” I muttered.

  Smith, Batfish, Wingate and Jimmy were resting, slumped against the interior wall. Spot trotted around, smelling various chairs and stains on the carpet. I slipped off my backpack and leaned my rifle against the wall, after flicking on the safety.

  “What happened in there?” Cordoba asked me.

  I shrugged and slumped down beside the wall on the opposite side of the room to the others. I didn’t really want to talk about anything, I just wanted to sleep and be alone.

  “They all died,” I mumbled. “Alex, Davie, all of them.”

  Cordoba didn’t press me for more details and I appreciated her silence. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the howling wind outside. Exhaustion took hold of my body and sleep soon engulfed me. For once, the nightmares didn’t haunt my slumber.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  A shuffling sound awoke me and I squinted against the bright sunlight streaming between the boards at the windows. The others were up and around, packing or rearranging their gear and Cordoba was cleaning the weapons. I blinked myself awake and rubbed my face then winced at the pain in my nose. My shoulder was sore as hell and my back and legs ached. I hauled myself to my feet and nodded at the others.

  One of the boards had fallen or been wrenched away from the window frame at the far end of the clubhouse, allowing in extra light. I moved towards the uncovered window and glanced out at the morning landscape. The castle still burned and looked like a blackened husk amid the thick smoke spiraling into the gray sky. The building had stood for centuries but the place was now wrecked forever. Maddie’s body still lay in the snow, not far from the clubhouse. Her corpse had been ripped to bits during the night and two zombies crouched over her, feeding on her flesh. The scene made me gag and I had to stop myself from throwing up.

  Smith came out of the bathroom and it was good to see him up and around and looking much better.

  “Hey, kid,” he muttered, as he walked by me. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m peachy,” I said, nodding.

  “I hear you’ve been through the wringer since I was taken sick.”

  “Something like that,” I muttered, barging through the bathroom door.

  My face was blackened by the smoke from the fire inside the castle. I washed vigorously and the cold water felt good against my skin. I rubbed all the black soot from my face and hands and rinsed out my mouth, trying to alleviate the horrible toxic taste on my tongue.

  The others were packed and ready to leave when I emerged from the bathroom. They stood in a line, gazing at me expectantly.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked.

  “Anywhere but here,” Batfish said. “I don’t want to hang around this place any longer than we have to. Too many bad memories.”

  I glanced out the window at the burning castle. I knew she was thinking of Gera. “Yeah, it wasn’t the best experience I’ve ever been through.”

  “We thought we’d try heading towards the city again,” Smith said. “Jimmy here knows the area and we can find someplace to shelter out of the snow.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, nodding. “I could do with resting up for a few days.”

  Cordoba helped me put on my backpack and we trudged outside into the snow. The cold wind whipped across the landscape and blasted into my face. I slipped on my hood and goggles, not feeling like plodding through the snow for hours on end.

  We headed in a north easterly direction, leaving the burning castle in the distance behind us. I lingered at the rear of the line, not really in the mood for conversation. Smith, Wingate and Jimmy headed the procession, stopping every once in a while to study the map and decide in which direction to go.

  Batfish waited for me to draw alongside her. Spot trotted beside her, te
thered on his leash. She’d made a coat for him out of an old blanket she’d found in the clubhouse.

  “You seem quiet today,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Are you?” I queried back.

  “Not really,” she sighed.

  “Me either,” I muttered. I didn’t want to burden Batfish with all my inner turmoil. She was still trying to cope with the loss of Gera. “I just feel a bit shitty today,” I concluded. “I guess I breathed in a lot of smoke last night.”

  We both turned back at the same time and we could still see the smoke from the burning castle pluming into the air.

  “At least we’re not being followed by any undead,” I said, scanning the horizon for straggling corpses.

  “I never even got the chance to say goodbye to him,” Batfish sighed. Her voice cracked and I could tell she was on the verge of tears.

  I kept quiet as we trudged after the others. The hours ticked by and we must have covered miles of ground without encountering another living thing.

  “According to the map, there should be a small town right up ahead,” Smith said. “We could see if there’s any place we can take a rest and get out of the cold for a while.”

  “Sounds good, I’m pooped,” I said.

  We followed Smith’s planned route and I could see what looked like a church spire between a bunch of trees as we approached the town.

  “What’s the name of this place?” I asked.

  Smith looked at the map again and struggled to pronounce the town’s name. “Lochlibo,” he finally spluttered. “That’s not easy to say.”

  I sniggered. “How far are we from Glasgow?”

  “Not far, maybe four or five miles. We’ll stop for some rest and have some food then we’ll get going again in around thirty minutes.”

  We walked by the town’s snow covered sign on the outskirts. As usual, the place seemed deserted and nobody except the odd zombie, strolled around the empty streets. The gray stone buildings had a thick layer of snow over their roofs and some small stores had broken front windows. Several abandoned vehicles stood in the street, stopped at odd angles and one or two were left on the sidewalk.

  “Looks like there was a major scene of chaos in this place,” I said.

  A few skeletal bodies were slumped in the store doorways. The bodies had obviously been picked clean of flesh by numbers of undead. The town’s main drag was a single, narrow road, flanked by houses and empty stores on each side. The whole place seemed eerily silent and I felt as though we were being watched as we trudged along the street.

  “This town seems creepy,” I muttered.

  “When did a place not feel creepy?” Smith asked.

  “A long time ago,” I sighed, glancing left and right at each dark window.

  A figure hunched on the ground, turned to look in our direction as we approached. He was the reanimated corpse of an old man, dressed all in black with a mop of unkempt, white hair. I noticed a clergyman’s white collar around his neck and he scowled at us as we drew near. The bloodied remains of some kind of human body part lay in the snow beneath him.

  “Christ, what the hell is that thing he’s been eating?” I gasped, holding my nose against the pungent odor of the mangled flesh.

  “I don’t know and I don’t think I want to,” Smith said, pulling out his handgun.

  The old man rose on his haunches and went to move towards us.

  “Stay the fuck down,” Smith growled and fired a single round through the zombie’s head.

  The crack of the gunshot echoed through the narrow street, reverberating around the front walls of the houses and stores. The old man rocked backward and sprawled in the snow, on top of the messy pulp he was previously eating.

  We heard a collective groaning and snarling sound and I saw movement from the buildings around us. A whole gathering of undead began to pour out of the stores and house entrances.

  “I don’t think you should have fired that shot, Smith,” I muttered as I watched the town’s undead population mass into the street all around us.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  “Oh my god, there’s a ton of them,” Batfish cried. She scooped Spot up and stuffed him inside the harness within her jacket.

  The growling and snarling increased in intensity when the gang of undead saw us. They probably hadn’t fed on human prey for a while and were keen to taste blood.

  “We better get moving,” Cordoba hissed. “Otherwise we’ll be trapped on this damn street.”

  “Which way?” Batfish asked.

  “Keep going the direction we’re headed in,” Smith said. “We don’t want to be heading back on ourselves but let’s not hang around.”

  The zombie throng surged forward from the buildings and they staggered across the street towards us.

  “Come on, let’s move it,” Smith shouted.

  We broke into a jog. The backpack’s straps dug into my wounded shoulder, sending a painful stinging sensation right through the left side of my body. I lagged behind the others, unable to keep pace.

  “Move it, Brett,” Wingate hissed at me.

  “I can’t,” I whined. “My shoulder is too painful.”

  Smith stopped and bent double. He vomited into the snow. “I don’t feel so good either,” he spat.

  “We have to keep moving,” Batfish wailed, nervously glancing up and down the street. “We’re dead if we stop still for too much longer.”

  “Can you carry on a bit further?” Wingate asked Smith, rubbing his back.

  Smith gagged and coughed but nodded his head. “We can’t stay here, that’s for damn sure,” he croaked.

  “We could find a place to hide for a while,” Jimmy suggested.

  “Nah, they’d follow us and trap us inside,” Smith said. “We have to put some distance between us.”

  “Well, whatever we’re going to do, we need to do it quickly,” Batfish groaned. “Those things are closing in on us from all directions.”

  I turned my head, glancing up and down the street. There was no way we were going to find a pathway through the mass of undead. They blocked the road and we didn’t have enough fire power to blast our way through their ranks. We were snared with no way out. “We’re not going to make it through,” I yelled.

  Smith glanced around us. “Let’s go into that store,” he said pointing at the wrecked shop front on the opposite side of the street. “There might be a doorway through the back.”

  We didn’t have any other options. Around a half dozen zombies milled around the store front and I could see a few more inside. We’d have to take them out or skirt around them.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I hollered.

  Cordoba led the way and smashed the butt of her rifle into the heads of two female zombies near the store’s doorway. Their heads made an audible cracking noise as the butt connected with their skulls and they both fell in an ungainly heap into the snow. I drew my handgun and fired off a couple of shots at two male zombies beside the store’s smashed front window.

  “Keep the gunfire to a minimum,” Cordoba ordered. “They’re attracted to noise and you’re making one hell of a racket firing that damn thing.”

  I shrugged. “I’m just trying to clear a route through,” I protested.

  The mass of zombies circled around us, pushing and jostling each other to try and get near us. Jimmy still carried the shotgun he’d taken from the castle and smashed the butt into the face of a zombie standing in the store’s doorway.

  “Hurry up, let’s get inside,” Batfish shrieked.

  We bundled through the open doorway and I saw the store used to sell all kinds of bric-a-brac when it was fully operational, in the dim and distant past. The shelves held mugs and ornaments and broken ceramic littered the store’s floor. Cordoba clumped another male zombie around the head. I noticed another zombie with half his face missing, lumbering between the racks. I glanced around for something I could use as a weapon instead of firing the handgun. I spied a row of bread knives hangi
ng from a rack to my right. Grabbing one of the knives, I ripped off the packaging and stabbed the ghoul through its left eye. The creature let out a quiet groan then slumped to the floor.

  Batfish tried but failed to shut the open glass doors behind us. They were on a sliding mechanism and had obviously been left open when the power failed.

  “Keep going through the store,” Smith yelled. “Don’t stop or we’ll get caught up.”

  Batfish gave up trying to close the doors and the mass of zombies pushed and shoved into each other to get inside the store. We hurried between the shelves of tacky birthday cards, ‘I heart Scotland’ mugs and other various tat. Jimmy tripped and fell into a display of ornaments, sending the jumble scattering across the floor. He scrambled to his feet and kept moving.

  Zombies poured inside the store after us. We were dead if there was no backdoor out of the place. We ran by the cash tills situated against the wall to the right. A couple of zombies stood and turned to watch us dash by. They groaned and plodded after us in pursuit.

  I was glancing around the back wall for any kind of doorway but couldn’t see anything that remotely resembled one.

  “There’s no way out,” I yelled. “We’re trapped.”

  “Through here,” Wingate yelled.

  I looked around to where she stood and saw she’d found a doorway that was almost hidden amongst the racks and paneling. We all followed her through the doorway, with me being the last to enter. I pulled the handle and closed the door and Cordoba shone her flashlight around the dark space beyond the door. There was no lock on the door of any kind and it wouldn’t take the mass of zombies long to claw open the door panel.

  We were inside a narrow corridor with a short flight of steps leading up to another floor level. A couple of broken office chairs were stacked together beside the doorframe. I slid them in front of the door. It wasn’t much of a barricade but the chairs were the only items inside the corridor.