The Left Series (Book 2): Left Alone
Page 19
We plodded on towards the gas station, heading to the north. The gaggle of undead bunched and jostled and followed us on the road. We outpaced them but they weren’t going to give up. We needed to put some distance between us and them.
The gas station and diner were predictably deserted with dark interiors behind cracked glass windows. Several empty cars stood in the diner parking lot and one was left next to a gas pump. I knew it wouldn’t be worth trying to start the car as the battery had long since flattened.
I tried the front door of the gas station, which was inevitably locked. The rising emotion of panic caused my breathing to increase. Smith tried the pumps to no avail. We needed weapons, a working vehicle and diesel. All of which were out of our reach.
“Shit!” I yelled. “We’re sitting fucking ducks here.”
Smith opened the trunk of the car by the pumps and rummaged around inside.
“Here you go.” He tossed me a lug wrench. Not exactly an M-16 but a usable weapon none the less.
“I’d prefer a shotgun.”
“Keep moving.” Smith glanced back at the crowd of zombies. “We’ll keep heading up this road.”
We headed further north at a gentle jogging pace, glancing back every few yards to check how much ground we had between us and the undead. I held the lug wrench tightly in my hand, hoping I wouldn’t have to use it any time soon. My biggest worry was we were heading in the wrong direction, further away from the Navy boat into zombie infested, unknown territory.
Chapter Forty-One
The abandoned vehicles grew in number the further we traveled north on the road. We dodged more zombies staggering around between the stationary cars. They too joined the ever growing, pursuing throng chasing us down the road. I clumped a male zombie around the head with the lug wrench when he came too close to us. The swing was good and the angled metal tool knocked him to the ground between two cars.
Each side of the road became increasingly urbanized the further north we traveled. Small stores, lock-ups and bars lined the street. Groups of the undead lurking in the parking lots and the doorways turned and scowled or hissed at us while we ran by. They turned and followed in pursuit, joining the gathering mob.
“We’re attracting all kinds of attention,” I huffed. “I don’t know how much further we can go before we get surrounded. If we meet a whole bunch of them heading towards us, we’re fucked.”
Smith took a quick glance over his shoulder at the chasing crowd. “We’ve got to find a way of getting off this damn freeway.”
I looked around each side of the road. The dark windows of the stores and bars offered us little hope of sanctuary inside. I swore to myself after the catastrophe of Manhattan, when I led my small group into one fatal situation after another, that I would never allow myself to be in a similar position. But history seemed to be repeating itself as we clumsily ran through an unknown area with no positive destination in sight.
Our feet slapped on the cracked black top surface, the sound audible only slightly above the moans and shrieks of the undead behind us. My lungs felt the burn of my rapid breathing and I was about to tell Smith to stop running when I noticed a blue aircraft mounted on a grassy bank in the distance.
“What’s that plane up ahead?”
“My guess is it’s the entrance to the Air Station,” Smith replied. “Come on, let’s put some distance between us and those dead goons.” He nodded over his shoulder and picked up the pace.
I struggled to keep up with him and started to drop behind.
“Smith, wait up!” My pace slowed to a brisk walking speed and I drew huge breaths. My lack of physical fitness was embarrassing.
Smith stopped a few yards from the aircraft on the bank to the left of the road. I glanced behind me and started a light jog once more until I caught up with Smith. The jet fighter aircraft stood amongst the long grass, facing the road with its arrow shaped nose raised slightly. The blue paint work had dulled over time and the gold trim on the wing tips and around the cockpit had started to peel. The words ‘US NAVY’ were emblazoned in gold lettering down the sleek side.
“That’s an FA-18 Blue Angel. I haven’t seen one of those for a while,” Smith sighed.
Another road littered with more abandoned vehicles ran in a straight line to our left.
“The entrance must be this way.” Smith pointed down the road. “Let’s move.”
He sprinted along the side road. I took in another huge breath and followed. We slowed as we came to a bulky canopy overhanging the road. Large yellow concrete blocks that had once served as traffic calmers lay at angles in front of the metallic gray canopy. ‘NAS JRB NEW ORLEANS’ was printed in white letters on a sign on the side facing us. The letter ‘E’ in the middle of ‘NEW’ hung loose and looked like it was about to fall down. A cleaner, vacant triangle shape sat in the middle of the sign, like some kind of logo or badge was once situated over the spot. An unmanned hut with smashed windows stood in the center of the road under the canopy. No sentries or military personnel guarded the Air Station entrance.
“What does JRB mean?”
“Joint Reserve Base, I wonder if there’s anybody left alive in there,” Smith muttered.
I took a look back down the road and saw the gathering zombie army had just rounded the corner by the jet aircraft. We moved forward again, this time at a slower pace. Smith was obviously wary of who or what was up ahead. I cautiously glanced inside the hut as we moved under the canopy. Some gray, rotten body parts, that I thought resembled an arm and a leg, lay on the floor under a mass of flies. The stench wafted out and made me gag. I turned my head away to breathe in some fresh air.
“Maybe some of the personnel are hiding out and waiting to be rescued.”
Smith shrugged in reply. “You can never second guess anything in this day and age but I don’t think there are too many rescue parties left in the world.”
I nodded and wondered if the President and all the politicians were still alive somewhere, surrounded by surviving military and security personnel. Maybe they were hidden in an old nuclear bunker or a military base off the mainland. I wasn’t sure if the old nuclear bunkers had been dismantled since the end of the Cold War but I suspected some were still in use for other apocalyptic situations, such as the current state of affairs.
We kept glancing behind us to check the length of road we had between us and the bunch of pursuing zombies. Any kind of obstacle that would slow us down was a danger of reducing that space.
The tree-lined road seemed to be heading nowhere until I saw some buildings in the distance. The odd zombie, some in the remains of civilian clothes and some in tattered military uniforms, staggered around the road. We avoided their grasping hands but they also turned to follow us.
“I hope we’re not running into a dead end,” I whined. “There’s too many of them following us now to get back this way on foot. We need to find a working vehicle of some kind.”
“Don’t I know it, kid? We need some time to have a good scout around but that’s something we probably ‘aint going to get.”
Smith stopped as we jogged by some brick buildings to our right. He was staring at a notice board on a low stand, angled at forty-five degrees. I circled back to see what he was looking at.
“It’s a map of the base,” Smith said, pointing at the notice board. “It gives us a few options of places to head for. We can either try and get to the fire station and hope they’ve still got a working vehicle in there or try the transportation depot.”
I scoured the map under the clear plastic cover, studying the blue and brown colored blocks with numbers printed next to them. My mind raced, I couldn’t decipher the code at the bottom of the map, which related the numbers to the various buildings.
“Which is nearer?” I gasped, nervously taking a glance over my shoulder.
“Well the transport depot is here.” Smith pointed to a block that seemed a long way from where we were. “And the gas station is here…and the fire station is here.”
“Hey…what the fuck are you doing?”
The wooden notice board frame dislodged under the blows and clattered onto the road. I picked it up and shoved the whole board into Smith’s chest.
“Decide where we’re going on the move. Wherever we’re going, let’s go now before we get caught.”
Smith took the map and turned it over in his hands. “The nearest place we’re likely to find a vehicle closest to the gas dump is the fire station to the east.”
“Okay, Smith!” I yelled. “I believe you but can we please get moving?”
Smith looked around behind us and saw the gathering undead horde drawing closer. He seemed to snap back to reality as if he had been daydreaming or lost in his own thoughts. Maybe it was memories of his former military life in the Marine Corps fogging his mind.
“Right…okay,” he muttered. “If we carry on through the main street, we can take a right turn up ahead.”
We continued our jog up the main street, warily watching out for more zombies that stumbled around through the knee high, grass banks at the side of the road. More buildings honed into sight the closer we moved to the center of the base. A library and a medical center stood to our left, while an admin block and a chapel were positioned to our right. All the buildings were dark behind the windows, doors closed and no signs of living human life.
“This way,” Smith barked, before he veered right down a side road.
I nearly fell as I struggled to change direction. The stench of decay and rotten corpses increased as we ran by skeletal remains of human bodies lying on the grass verges, their bodies virtually picked clean of any remaining meat. Bones, skulls and leftovers of stained clothing lay strewn along the road. Several zombies lining the thoroughfare seemed to awake from a coma like state as we moved past them. They sat in the grass and their heads snapped up at the sound of our footsteps. Evil eyes followed our movements, cracked, rotting lips curled back in grimaces and throaty growls and shrieks emitted from each side of the narrow street.
“Where the fuck are you taking us, Smith?” I wailed.
The anesthetized zombies soon impulsively surged into action. They hauled themselves onto unsteady feet or began to crawl on all fours after us, hissing or squealing like wild animals. The low rumble of what was left of their vocal cords sounded like a background crowd in a movie, chattering, mumbling sounds with no coherent words. The moving bodies closed in, bottlenecking the road. Our progress along the narrow street slowed to nothing more than a plod.
“What the fuck, Smith?” I yelped, batting away a pair of grabbing hands with the lug wrench. “There’s too many of them, we’re surrounded.”
Smith clubbed a decaying, half skeletal zombie out of our way with the side end of the map-come-notice board. The undead mob encircled us, pushing and jostling each other to be first in line for a feeding frenzy. I was guessing most of these ghouls probably hadn’t tasted living flesh for quite a while. The line of undead that had been tailing us from the main road finally began to catch up. A brief and approximate head count of ghouls told me we were faced with around seventy diseased, flesh eaters to contend with. Our only weapons were a lug wrench and a notice board. A rising sensation of extreme fear and panic ran through my body. Our chances of fighting our way out of this situation were grim at best.
Chapter Forty-Two
“Over here,” called a voice from a building to our left. “Get over here, quickly!”
I took a moment to glance around to the source of the voice and saw an elderly man, probably in his mid-fifties with receding gray hair and a pair of small lens spectacles perched on his nose. He stood in the doorway of a long, brick building frantically beckoning us forward.
“Smith, over there,” I barked, nodding at the guy in the doorway.
Smith took a moment to look round and gave me a brief nod. I swung the lug wrench in an arc at the closing zombies and Smith battered rotten heads with the notice board. We desperately tried to clear a path to get nearer to the building. The guy in the doorway prodded some ghouls out of our way with something like a hockey stick. Rotten, black teeth and fingernails gnashed and clawed at me as I fought for my life. I felt a surge of adrenalin as I pushed, shoved and battered my way through the blood thirsty horde.
Smith reached the doorway first and turned back to help me. I was ten feet from the door and wondered how long I could go on pressing forward without some dead fucker’s teeth sinking into me. I kept spinning around in circles, ensuring no ghoul could attack me from behind. Smith and the guy slugged away zombies from the doorway and yelled at me to keep going.
I felt a giant hand grab me by the scruff of the back of my neck and drag me through the doorway. I was glad Smith was as strong as a bull and not for the first time had saved my ass. The other guy slammed the door and bolted it at the top and bottom. I slumped onto the floor breathing heavily from exertion and relief. Dead hands slammed into the door from the outside and a crescendo of moans and frustrated shrieks echoed around the narrow corridor we found ourselves in.
“We’ll have to hurry and get to the upper floor before that lot smash their way in through the door,” the old guy said.
I noticed he wore a clergyman’s white dog collar around his throat, which was tucked inside a navy blue shirt. His face was wrinkled in worry and his brown eyes loomed large when the small lenses were directly in line with his pupils.
Smith hauled me to my feet and we followed the clergyman as he hurried along the gray concrete floor of the corridor. The building smelled of damp and mold and had the soulless vibe of a derelict construction. The cracked window panes were covered from the inside with metal sheeting of some kind. The protective metal covers had small, round holes bored into them at a space of every few inches. The holes were large enough to allow daylight to penetrate the gloomy corridor but small enough to stop the grasping hands of the undead reaching through.
We followed the clergyman up a flight of concrete steps and through a heavy steel door, which resembled a prison type enclosure. He swung the door shut and slammed heavy duty bolts into place at the top and bottom. We stood in another dim corridor with open doors to rooms on each side.
“This way,” said the clergyman, in a raspy voice.
We followed him through a doorway on the right of the corridor. The room was small and cramped with a brown, wooden desk, too big for the room dimensions, sitting in the middle of the floor. Four huge, leather bound armchairs surrounded the desk, with two positioned at each side.
The clergyman moved to the window and looked down at the street below. The upper floor windows weren’t covered with the metal sheets like their lower level counterparts. Grubby netted curtains hung over the window panes to obscure the view from outside.
“That’s good, they haven’t breached the building so far,” he muttered.
He gestured for us to sit in the armchairs and reached into a filing cabinet, retrieving a bottle of Irish whiskey and three small glasses from one of the drawers. Smith and I slumped into the chairs and the soft padding immediately felt comfortable.
“God save us,” the clergyman huffed, as he poured three shots into the glasses.
He set the two other glasses in front of Smith and I then downed the contents of his own shot in one hurried gulp.
“My name is Chaplain Michael Brady, glad you’re both still with us. What brings you two out this far?”
“I’m err…John Smith and this is Brett Wilde. We’re in a kind of sticky predicament.” Smith leaned forward and propped the notice board on its end at the side of the chair.
“Thanks for saving our…thanks for saving us,” I butted in, trying my best not to use profanities in front of a man of the church.
The Chaplain poured himself another shot and sagged into an armchair opposite us on the other side of the desk. He slid the bottle towards us but
we hadn’t yet touched a drop of our liquor. Smith necked his whiskey back in one swallow and I attempted to do the same. The liquid seemed to leave a scorching trail from my mouth to my stomach and I fought the urge to cough. Smith took the bottle and refilled our glasses.
“Mind if we smoke?”
The clergyman smiled and gave a wave of his hand that told us to do as we pleased. Smith took out his packet of smokes and tossed me one before offering the Chaplain the battered pack.
He shook his head. “I haven’t indulged in smoking for nearly thirty years and I’m not going to let this terrible situation start me off again.”
Smith lit us up and Brady reached for a small china dish on top of the filing cabinet for us to use as an ashtray.
“You said you were in a sticky predicament, John,” Brady said. “I think we’ve all had our fair share of those over the last few months. But what kind of situation are you in?”
“The bottom line is, we need some diesel for our boat out on the river, probably a couple of miles back south,” Smith said, then went on to explain our quandary in full detail.
The Chaplain listened, raising his wispy, gray eyebrows in shock at regular intervals.
“These are troubled times,” Brady sighed when Smith had finished his debriefing. “I was a practicing Chaplain on this base for nearly ten years and I never thought I’d live to see anything this bad and so intensely terrifying.”
“Do you still hold onto your faith?” Smith asked.
“Of course,” the Chaplain replied with a nod. “Where there is faith, there is hope and if we give up hope we might as well be dead.”
Smith nodded and flicked his ash into the dish. “What the hell happened here?”
“We were doing okay during the first few months of the outbreak. We barricaded the entrance and had armed guards protecting the exit and entry points. Then one day a few people came out of the family quarters. They were infected. I suppose they hid away and hoped they wouldn’t change.” The Chaplain took a sip of his whiskey. “By that time it was too late. More and more base personnel were bitten and nobody could get out. Eventually, a few survivors decided to make a break for it and shot their way out, destroying the barricades in the process. Order broke down, the gates were left open and unmanned and the remainder of us were left to fend for ourselves. We boarded the buildings up as best we could, made stock piles of food and weapons and tried to keep some of the vehicles and aircraft maintained in case we needed to get away.”