The Left Series (Book 2): Left Alone
Page 23
I collected the empty plates and dumped them on the side countertop, too tired and frustrated to take them below to wash them. The sight of Headlong would have probably made me puke up the beans anyhow.
Smith and I settled in for another uncomfortable night in the control cabin. I dozed for a while then took Spot for a stroll around the upper deck and took a piss over the side. The night air felt chilly and damp with drizzle. I lit a smoke and stared into the darkness, wondering what the hell I was doing. Maybe death was an easier route out of all this chaos and madness. I could simply march down the hatch below, grab one of Headlong’s guns and shoot myself in the head. Game over. No more stress, no more worries, no more crushing emotions of self loathing and guilt, no more panic attacks and talking to a hallucinate version of myself. Easy option.
Inevitably, thoughts of suicide soon floated from my head and up into the ether alongside the cigarette smoke. I dismissed the self destruct option, as I knew deep down I wouldn’t have the balls to go through with it anyhow.
Spot raked his paw down the side of my pants and gave me an objectionable whine. He’d obviously had enough for the night and wanted to go back to sleep. I smiled, flicked my smoke butt into the night and bent down to give the little guy a stroke on top of his head. Whatever horrors lay ahead of us, I hoped this small dog would continue to be lucky and live a long and healthy life.
We wearily returned to the control cabin, Spot flopped onto the floor and I slumped into one of the chairs. Smith snored quietly in the opposite seat. I closed my eyes, trying to will the state of unconsciousness upon myself.
I half dozed, in and out of jumbled dreams and images in my head of screaming people, Chaplain Brady in his last living moments, the old, dead guy, whose head I stomped and that party girl zombie, who staggered down the road before being dispatched by a bullet to the head. I wished I could be more like Smith and just let all these freaky, crazy events and terrifying situations wash over me, as though it was all an everyday, normal occurrence.
The gradually increasing daylight caused me to jolt fully awake and away from the horrific images replaying in my mind during my stupor. I rubbed my face and tried to focus. The day outside was dull with gloomy gray skies and the riverbank was cloaked in a murky, thick mist.
Today, someone on the boat was going to die. I just hoped it wouldn’t be too painful if it was my turn to croak.
Chapter Forty-Eight
“Francine…huh?” Smith stirred and called out moments before he awoke.
I didn’t have a clue who Francine was, as I’d never heard him talk of her. Maybe it was an old girlfriend from his dim and distant past. Faces of people you used to know and subsequently forgot about seemed to haunt you during the all too brief periods of sleep.
Smith blinked and gazed around the cabin for a few moments with a look of confusion on his face. As his dreams of some far away time and place receded, reality kicked in and he rose from the chair rubbing his neck.
“I could do with some coffee, kid,” he blurted, while stretching his arms and arching his back. “We need to be Johnny-on-the-spot today.”
“Do you think Tippy is okay down there?” I stood up and reached for my pack of smokes on the countertop.
I offered one to Smith and we shared the lighter flame.
“Not much we can do till we get to the city,” Smith croaked, exhaling the first puff of the day. “There’s going to be one hell of a shit storm today, Wilde Man, I tell you that for nothing. Today is the day I’m going to kick some butt. Payback time.”
“We have to do something to get out of this shitty mess.”
I opened the cabin door and let Spot out, who hopped around in dire need of a piss. He cocked his leg and relieved himself up one of the bollards on the port side. I stepped out into the early morning air and followed suit by urinating through the guard rails and into the river.
Smith continued groaning and mumbling about how he wanted coffee so I made my way towards the lower deck hatch. The living quarters were illuminated with a dim reading light over one of the bunks.
Headlong slumbered in one of the lower bunks, still clutching hold of the scoped hunting rifle. Tippy lay on her left side on the opposite bunk with her back towards our captor.
“Hello,” I called softly and rapped my knuckles on the cabin wall as though I was knocking on someone’s private front door.
Tippy stirred and twisted around. She sat up when she saw me standing in the cabin and the dim light illuminated her face. My guts somersaulted when I saw she had an ugly, purple bruise under her left eye. She slipped off the bunk bed and her eyes filled with tears.
“He made me do things to him last night,” she sobbed quietly. “He got angry and hit me when I refused to do it at first. I can’t stand it no more.”
I bit my bottom lip and didn’t know what to say. Headlong was truly a slimy, piece of shit. Rage boiled inside me. I glanced around the cabin and saw the M-16 leaning against the bottom of his bunk. I made my way towards the rifle with the intention of shoving the barrel up Headlong’s ass.
“Stop right there, asshole,” the voice commanded, as my fingers curled around the rifle stock.
I glanced up and saw Headlong sitting up in his bunk with the wrong end of the hunting rifle a few inches from my face.
“I’ll put you down like a sick dog if you don’t back up a few paces.”
I raised my hands and reluctantly did as I was ordered.
“I told you people not to try anything stupid. But I guess stupid people can’t help doing stupid things.”
“Coffee?” I tried to defuse the situation slightly.
“You bet,” Headlong snapped. “And make it good and strong.”
“I’ll do my best.”
I gave Tippy a glance. You didn’t have to be a mind reader to tell she was absolutely petrified.
I made coffees all round and handed a cup to Tippy and Headlong, who took his black and slurped it down.
“When are we getting going again?” I asked Headlong.
“When I’m damn ready,” he snapped back at me, with spittles of black coffee shooting from his lips.
I shrugged and turned for the hatch, holding mine and Smith’s coffee cups. Tippy made a slightly audible whimper as I started up the steps. I turned my head and gave her an assuring stare.
“We’ll be back soon.”
I hoped she wasn’t going to suffer at Headlong’s hands again before we set off on our travels. Smith strolled around the upper deck and I handed him his coffee. We stood by the guard rails gazing into the misty morning. He muttered an appreciation of some kind then gave me a quizzical stare.
“What’s crawled up your ass? You’ve got a face like a smacked butt.”
“That fucking Headlong has been slapping Tippy around and what’s worse, he’s been forcing her to do stuff again.” I took a long sip of coffee which burned my lip but I was too full of fury to let the pain register. “We’ve got to do something, Smith. I was that close to grabbing a gun and ramming it straight up his dirty ass.”
“Whoa! Hold the fucking horses, tough guy. We’ve got a mission to complete, remember? Any mission has casualties, whether it’s fatal or psychological or whatever. We got to be cool until we get into a position when we can nail this bastard.”
“It’s not right, Smith,” I hissed. “It’s just not fucking right.”
“I know,” he said nonchalantly. “I got special plans for that particular nasty little piece of crap. And believe me, kid, it ‘aint going to be pleasant.”
“I hope so. That guy has stooped as low as things can get. Death would be too good for that prick,” I seethed, exalting my rage and frustration.
We turned at the sound of the lower deck hatch creaking open and saw Tippy trudge onto the deck followed by the shuffling Headlong, who clasped the M-16 in his hands.
“Right, fellas, let’s get this bathtub gassed up and ready to go,” he ordered.
I didn’t know how
we were going to get the diesel from the Jerry cans into the boat’s fuel tank. Smith had always refueled the Coastguard boat when we were at sea and I’d seen him use various pipes and connectors during the process. Fuelling a boat wasn’t just like pumping gas into a car at a station.
Smith and I finished our coffees and he handed me his empty cup, then looked around the boat deck. He kicked a metal valve that resembled a small fire hydrant.
“That’s the inlet valve for the diesel,” he said. “We need to somehow get the juice through that valve into the tank.”
“Best you get on with it,” Headlong barked.
Smith sighed and rubbed his cheek in thought. “We’re going to need a funnel or a piece of pipe to do this.”
“Just hurry it up and get a shift on, will you?” Headlong waved the rifle in our direction. “You people are beginning to piss me off with your God damn stupid ways, now get what you want and get it done real fast or I’ll start shooting.”
We searched the upper deck lockers and I found a small, plastic funnel in one of the compartments. It didn’t look man enough for the job but it was all we had. I held it in place at an angle with the tapered spout inside the valve inlet. Smith poured the diesel from the Jerry cans and managed to spill generous doses of the foul smelling liquid all over me.
The whole process took more than an hour to complete and my sleeves were soaked in diesel by the time we’d finished. Headlong scuffled around the deck while we carried out the operation, yelling obscenities and telling us to hurry up. He raised the rifle and threatened to shoot us dead on a few occasions. The guy seemed to be losing control of himself. He shook and sweated profusely, looking like he was going to keel over any moment. I wondered if he’d caught an infection in his injured leg or was sick or something.
Smith closed the fuel inlet valve and made his way to the control cabin. He primed the boat’s engines and went back out on deck to winch up the anchor.
“Okay, let’s get going,” Headlong ordered, when we had the engines rolling and the anchor housed. “Keep heading up river and I’ll tell you where to go when we get nearer.”
I stayed with Smith inside the control cabin. Headlong forced Tippy to stay beside him, holding her at gunpoint on the upper deck.
Smith turned the boat and headed against the flow. The day was still misty and visibility was poor.
“There’s something wrong with him,” I said. “He’s shivering and sweaty. You don’t think he’s been bitten, do you?”
Smith shook his head. “Nah, the guy’s probably a junkie in desperate need of his next fix. We’ve been out on the water a couple of days now and he’s had to go without, that’s why he’s acting more cranky than usual.”
The thought of a junkie denied his self medication worried me. The guy was irrational at the best of times, what was he going to be like when he was in the middle of a bout of cold turkey? The day had started badly and I didn’t have any optimism it was going to get any better.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Shapes of buildings on each side of the riverbank loomed out of the mist like ghost ships lost for centuries at sea. Smith kept the speed down to nothing more than a crawl, much to Headlong’s annoyance. Several times our captor yelled for us to go faster until Smith complained he couldn’t see shit.
We steered around several bends in the river and the population of undead grew in number the nearer we came to the city limits. They stood on the banks hollering and groaning in the mist as we sailed by. Some of them followed us into the river and soon disappeared beneath the murky water. A shiver ran down my spine. The whole scene looked like something out of a horror movie.
Headlong took a few pot shots at the zombies on the riverbank, I guessed to relieve his frustration. He missed more times than he hit and didn’t score too many killing head shots.
“He’s wasting ammo,” Smith growled. “What does that dickhead think he’s doing?”
“Be thankful he’s not taking shots at us,” I chipped in.
“With an aim like his, he’d probably miss if he was standing right in front of you,” Smith sneered. “His aim is pathetic.”
“A junkie with a gun isn’t exactly the greatest combination.”
“True but he’s getting the shakes so bad, I’ll be surprised if he can still hold that damn rifle by the time we hit Orleans.”
I looked at Smith and sniggered. I’d always enjoyed his dark sense of humor. He could always crack a joke or spin a funny pun in the direst situations.
“That’s a very British trait, you know.”
“What is?”
“That kind of gallows humor thing you have.”
“I worked with the Brits on a few military ops back in the day,” Smith mused. “Good guys. They were pretty cool and liked a beer or two.”
I thought about my old street back in London when I was a kid. I wondered how the other kids I’d been to school with had turned out. Maybe some of them were still alive in a similar situation to us. But then again, whose life would be this crazy? I doubted anyone else left alive would be going through the same freaky shit we’d had to endure.
My reminiscing of past times was soon ended when a stranded yacht emerged from the mist, bobbing and swirling on the tide. The vessel came in nose first on our starboard side, bumping into our bow.
Headlong went ape shit, swearing and yelling at the floundering yacht to back off. Ripped, white sails covered the upper deck as the vessel ground alongside us.
“Shit!” Smith muttered, as he tried to steer us around the stranded yacht.
The yacht bow raked down our right side and Headlong screamed at Smith to go around and get back on track.
“I’m fucking trying to, you asshole!” Smith yelled back.
Our forward movement caused the yacht to spin in the water and it came alongside us, facing downriver in the opposite direction to us. The sails flapped upwards in the breeze and I saw around a dozen members of the undead stumbling around the yacht’s upper deck.
“Oh, shit! There are zombies onboard,” I screeched, pointing through the control cabin window.
Smith glanced to his right and saw the green faced, rotting ghouls making their way towards us. The undead had seen Tippy and Headlong and went into some kind of hunger driven frenzy. From where he was standing, Headlong’s vision was obviously obscured by the draped sail and he hadn’t noticed the approaching flesh eaters. Tippy screamed and Headlong finally noticed the zombies trying to clamber onboard our boat. He barked something inaudible and let fire with a burst of the M-16. His aim was predictably terrible and the bullets flew high and wide of their intended target, ripping gaping holes in the white sails.
Two, then three zombies tumbled onto our deck. The rest of the undead gang followed.
“Christ! We’re getting overrun,” Smith roared. “Doesn’t that asshole, Headlong, know how to use that fucking weapon?”
“It doesn’t look like it. Fuck! We’re in trouble here, Smith.”
Headlong fired off another inaccurate burst of rounds, scoring only one hit which caught a bald headed zombie high in the shoulder. Not even a kill shot. He tried again but the rifle only clicked, magazine empty. The asshole hadn’t had the foresight to bring a spare, full mag up on deck with him. He backed up across the deck, hurling obscenities at the rapidly advancing zombies.
“He should have used the 20mm,” Smith hissed. “It’s too damn late now.”
Tippy was paralyzed with terror. She didn’t move, just stood still screaming hysterically. Ripe for zombie food. Two ghouls pounced on her from either side, a male and female wearing the remains of a tuxedo suit and a cocktail dress respectively. The undead duo bit into her saggy, fleshy neck below her ears. Blood spurted across the deck in opposite directions as the zombies tore into Tippy’s flesh. She screeched and went down under the weight of the two attacking bodies. I couldn’t see her from where I was inside the cabin but I knew that was curtains for the poor, old girl. Miserable in life and now
a terrible, painful death.
“Oh, fuck! They got Tippy, Smith,” I screamed.
“I know, kid. I’ve got eyes in my fucking head.”
Headlong turned the M-16 around and used the rifle butt to club away the zombies trying to grab him.
“Get the fuck away from me, you dirty motherfuckers,” he screamed, batting away the grasping, rotten hands.
“We got to do something, Smith,” I pleaded. “We’ll never find Batfish if Headlong croaks.”
The zombies still hadn’t noticed us yet. They were more preoccupied with Tippy and Headlong. It was a certainty they’d head towards us once they saw us and the thin, glass panel inset into the door wouldn’t offer us much protection.
Smith slowed the engines to keep us in a stable position and glanced out across the deck.
“We’ll have to be quick. Grab Headlong and get down below – fast. We need those spare mags and the hunting rifle. I don’t want to be shooting inside the compartment. Bullets will end chasing us around the cabin.”
I opened one of the lockers along the back wall and grabbed Spot to shove him inside out the way for his own safekeeping. I noticed a small, red colored fire axe lying at the bottom of the locker. I swapped the axe for the dog, whispering an apology as I shut him inside. Poor Spot didn’t appreciate being confined inside the dark locker and immediately started whimpering and clawing at the inside of the door. I bet he was thinking “what the hell are they doing to me now?” Poor little bastard.
I held the axe up so Smith could see it. The axe had a sharp, pointed spike on the opposite side to the blade.
“Not much of a weapon but it’ll do for now,” he said.
“It’s slightly better than a lug wrench,” I quipped.
“Whatever happened to that?”
“I left it inside the Humvee. We could do with it right now.”
“Never mind about that, kid. Just try and keep those zombies off Headlong and get to that hatch. We can secure the door from the inside and we can fight back once we’re armed. You ready?”