The Left Series (Book 1): Leftovers

by Christian Fletcher

  The kitchen area was also wrecked. Broken beer bottles and packets of dry food littered the linoleum floor. I noticed blood smears on the wall surrounding a bloody hand print on the tiles at the back of the cooker. A carving knife covered in blood lay discarded in the sink.

  The situation didn’t feel good.

  I put the golf club on the kitchen countertop when I spied an unbroken beer bottle on the floor, which had somehow survived the carnage. I picked it up and dusted off pieces of debris, unscrewed the top and took a long drink. It still tasted good even though it was warm. Between sips, I gazed over the ruin of Pete’s apartment and remembered the good times the three of us enjoyed here. We’d watched sports, held late night parties and card games; brought girls back from bars, drunk beer and had lots of laughs.

  I finished the beer, dropped the bottle in the sink and retrieved the golf club. I crept across the living area to the bedrooms. Both rooms were empty and strangely hadn’t been trashed. I remembered Pete saying he was going to take Marlon to hospital. Maybe they went out and left the door open for looters or vandals to wreak havoc in the apartment. But that particular theory didn’t explain why blood was all over the place.

  I opened the bathroom door and turned on the light. Blood smears streaked the sink and spattered in crimson arcs across the ripped shower curtain. The room was empty. I shut the door and turned to leave. A huge fist connected with my nose and dumped me straight on my backside. I shook my head, trying to clear my senses. Was it another crazy guy?

  The golf club was ripped from my grasp and stared down the wrong end of the barrel of a huge hand gun when my vision cleared.

  “What the fuck?” I gasped, touching my battered nose. Drips of blood smeared my hand.

  “Get up, Cousins,” barked the voice of my attacker. “You gotta pay what you owe.” The accent was pure New York City.

  The chrome hand gun glinted in the light. I held my hands with palms outstretched to the side of my head. The guy was big and dressed in a neat, dark blue suit over a crisp, white shirt. He was around forty with black spiky hair and a huge square jaw. His gray eyes were like granite, confident and mean.

  “I’m not Cousins,” I stammered, trying to sit up. The blow had knocked me senseless and my mind raced. What the hell was going on?

  “What?” the gunman barked.

  “I’m not Pete Cousins. I’m his friend, Brett Wilde. I’m just looking for him. Marlon, his roommate was bitten by one of these crazy people and I’m here to see if…”

  “Show me some I.D.” the gunman stopped my babbling.

  I slowly reached into my pocket and retrieved my wallet. I took out my driver’s license and handed it to him. He snatched it and studied the photo, keeping the gun trained on me.

  “Hmm,” he growled. “So where is he and who went ape shit in here?” He gestured around the apartment with the gun.

  “I don’t know. He said he was going to take Marlon to the hospital if he got any worse. What is this all about?”

  The gunman lit a smoke and surprisingly offered me one. I nearly refused but took one anyhow. Smoking seemed a good idea as I didn’t know if it would be my last.

  “Not that it’s any of your damn business,” he croaked through the smoke, “but your pal owes some people a lot of money.” He whistled at the thought.

  “How much? I may be able to pay.” I didn’t know why I said that. I owned about fifty dollars in total.

  The gunman laughed and perched himself on the edge of the upturned sofa. “You don’t look like the kind of guy who carries a spare twenty G’s in your ass pocket.”

  “Twenty grand, you’re saying he owes twenty thousand dollars?” I stammered. How the hell had Pete managed to get himself in that much debt?

  “No, fucking rupees. Of course it’s twenty thousand dollars plus the fucking interest that’s racking up. The guy will be lucky if he still has the God damn shirt on his back.” He flicked my driver’s license back at me. “You don’t play cards with motherfuckers who are out of your league.” He pointed the cigarette at me with every word like I was a naughty child.

  “He lost it all playing cards?”

  The gunman raised his eyebrows and nodded. He thought for a moment, finished his smoke and flicked the butt across the room.

  “Come on, get up, Wilde guy.” He gave me a beckoning finger.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You and I are going to take a little ride to the hospital to see if your buddy’s there. And because I don’t know what the hell he looks like, you are going to point him out to me.”

  I didn’t have much choice. I could either go with him or refuse and catch a bullet with my face. He didn’t seem the kind of guy who took much crap off anyone. At least he wouldn’t shoot Pete or anyone else in the hospital, I hoped. He somehow knew I wasn’t going to give him any trouble.

  “What did you say your name was?” I asked, trying to build some kind of rapport.

  “I didn’t,” he growled. “But you can call me…Mr. Smith. How about that?”

  “Okay, whatever,” I mumbled as I stood up. It took me a second to regain my balance. Smith handed me a stained towel to wipe my nose.

  He picked up my bent golf club from where he’d thrown it on the floor and smirked as he examined the blood spatters on the end. I was surprised when he handed it back to me.

  “Right, come on, tough guy. Let’s get moving,” he slipped his gun into his jacket and followed me out of Pete’s apartment.

  Chapter Four

  Smith or whatever his name was, had parked his car outside the apartment block. I was impressed with the immaculately polished, black Pontiac Firebird. He strode to his vehicle like the carnage going on around us was an everyday occurrence.

  “Have you seen what’s going on around this town?” I asked as we slid into the car.

  “I’ve seen worse,” he replied, nonchalantly waving his hand. “I had to pop a couple of these crazy guys this morning when I was looking for your pal’s address.” He fired the engine into a rolling purr and put on some Blues style shades. “They came too close to my car. Now, which way to the hospital?”

  I pointed him in the direction opposite to the one the car was facing. He spun a 180 with competent ease. This guy seemed a confident professional at everything he did.

  Smith laughed as I recounted the earlier event with the chubby woman and the crazy guy as we drove to the hospital. I don’t know why I told him. I felt I had to keep talking; maybe it was a combination of the hangover and concussion.

  “Did you see her titties wiggling?” Smith laughed.

  “It wasn’t like that, Mr. Smith,” I protested.

  “Bullshit! I bet your little pecker was as hard as wood,” he laughed. Then he became serious. “Yeah, if you’re going to whack some bastard, don’t tickle him. You got to mean it, like that guy you told me about who stepped out of his car. Don’t mess about with these fucks.”

  I told Smith to avoid driving through the town center and directed him across the back streets. We witnessed more chaos along the route. People ran through the streets screaming in panic, a car burned on the outskirts of Pete’s neighborhood, shops had closed silver metal shutters over the windows. Two infected women chased a skinny guy out of a side alley. Smith laughed as he pointed at the petrified man running away down the street.

  “He’s pissed his pants.”

  “Doesn’t this worry you at all?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “All these crazy, infected people or whatever they are.”

  “Nah, look how they move. They aren’t so hot.”

  Smith had a point. The infected moved in slow plodding movements and only speeded up slightly when they saw a non-infected person. The shambling wrecks of infected people grew in number closer to the hospital. Some had suffered horrific injuries that defied logic in the way their bodies still moved. One woman staggered on legs that looked as though they were broken in several places and her head lolled
around on a broken neck. A man with huge gouges in the side of his head sat on the curb side eating a dead cat.

  “They’re like zombies from the movies,” Smith smiled. “Don’t worry kid, they aint no match for my Desert Eagle,” he patted his jacket and made a gun sign with his fingers and mimicked blowing me away.

  I smiled but the word “zombies” buzzed around my brain like one of Smith’s pretend bullets. What he’d said in jest kind of summed up what was happening in this town. More of the infected or “zombies” according to Smith, lined the streets as we turned the block next to the hospital. People had probably been bitten and tried unsuccessfully to reach the hospital for some sort of treatment.

  The zombies shambled around the sidewalks staring at the car as we drove by. They looked like cattle and held out their arms in a vain attempt to reach us. One stepped into the road in front of the car. The creature resembled a man but the injuries were so horrific I couldn’t help but gape. A flap of skin hung from his neck and rested on the torn remains of a shirt on his shoulder. Black goo, that had once been blood, covered his face and the front of his body. Smith braked to a stop and the battered creature lurched towards the car on unsteady legs.

  “Get out of the way, you piece of shit,” Smith shouted from his open window.

  The wreck of a man lurched onwards with its hand raised forward in a grabbing motion, long before it was close enough to the car. More zombies stepped off the curb and approached us. I stopped counting at fifteen.

  “Mr. Smith…” I spluttered and pointed in all directions around the car at the looming mass.

  “Ah, fuck this,” Smith hissed and hit the gas pedal.

  The lurching zombie in front of the car hit the hood with the sound of snapping twigs. He disappeared from view underneath the car. I heard a dragging, scraping sound and then felt the car jolt. I turned my head and looked out of the rear window. The zombie rolled over and over in the road like a bag of rags.

  Smith hit the steering wheel with his fist. “If that ugly fuck has damaged my car, I’m going back there to kick his ass.”

  “I think you just did,” I stammered.

  We pulled into the hospital car park and slid into a free parking space but were immediately confronted by a bunch of armed guards, furiously waving us down.

  “Didn’t you see the signs?” asked a big black guy. He looked worried and a trickle of sweat ran down the side of his face under the peak of his security hat.

  “No, what fucking signs?” Smith snapped.

  “They can’t let any more patients into the hospital at this time,” the guard said. “There are too many infected patients and they’re attacking people all over the place.”

  “We aint patients, buddy. We’ve come to collect somebody,” Smith explained. “We’ll just be five minutes,” he said, getting out of the car.

  I got out the passenger side, tightly clutching the golf club and looking in all directions for more zombies.

  “Okay buddy, you got five minutes then you’re out of here,” the guard agreed and pointed us in the direction of the main doors.

  Smith bent down and checked the front of the car for damage. He stood up holding a ragged, bloody bone inside a piece of cloth and made a face like it was a piece of dog shit.

  “This was stuck in the grill. It doesn’t look like there’s no damage though. These things are fucking disgusting,” he said and hurled the bone across the car park.

  The hospital was a large glass fronted, red brick building, standing amongst neatly trimmed lawns. We saw the pandemonium going on inside through the windows. Nurses and orderlies scuttled backwards and forwards, people crouched in pain, some of the fully infected casually moved around trying to bite anyone they could.

  “This is going to be fun,” I said as we approached the glass doors.

  The glass frontage must have been soundproof because when doors slid open the noise hit us like we’d walked onto the runway at JFK Airport. The waiting area was jam packed with over a hundred casualties, screaming in agony and frustration. All of them complained and yelled with a look of panic on their sweaty faces. Two security guards wrestled an infected man to the ground and tried to cuff him while he gnashed and snarled. Flustered nurses stomped up and down the waiting room and orderlies scurried between patients trying to patch them up.

  “This is a bunch of crap,” Smith said.

  We moved to the unoccupied enquiries desk and Smith pressed the bell. A minute or two ticked by before a thick set woman appeared from the back room and bustled behind the desk. She looked exhausted and ready to drop.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait in line with the others,” she sighed. “As you can see we’re bursting at the seams with fresh cases.”

  Smith leaned forward on the desk. “Ah, yeah, we appreciate that, mam but we just want to know if one of our associates has been admitted into this fine establishment.” Smith gave her a smile that made him look like he was constipated. Politeness obviously wasn’t his strong point.

  “Oh well, I’ll have to look at the register,” she sighed and her face sagged like she’d been asked to eat her own children. “The computers are down so we’ve had to revert to the old book system. We’re not supposed to give out such information but as this isn’t a great time, I’ll have a look for you. Name?”

  “Err…Smith, Mr. Smith.”

  “No, I…think she means the patients name,” I interjected. Smith gave me a look that told me to shut up. “The victim, no patients name is Marlon Keen,” I blurted. Smith turned back to the woman.

  She thumbed down the register under K. There was a Keane but his first name was Roger.

  “Sorry, no Marlon Keen.”

  “What about Pete Cousins?” I asked.

  The woman sighed and thumbed the list again. She shook her head and forced a smile. “Sorry, I can’t help you.”

  Smith sighed and gave me that look again.

  “It’s possible they have been treated in reception and left if the injuries were not too serious,” the nurse chirped. “The orderlies are trying to administer first aid if the casualties are not seriously injured.”

  It was a possibility but why wouldn’t they have returned to their apartment. Pete sounded scared on the phone. I was worried about what had happened to Pete and Marlon and what Smith would do if and when he found them.

  “I’ll try Pete’s cell phone again,” I suggested.

  “Yeah, you do that,” Smith growled.

  Pete’s phone kept ringing out with no reply. I tried Marlon’s number and a patronizing voice told me it wasn’t possible to connect the call. I shrugged at Smith; I didn’t know what else to do.

  “Can you think of anywhere they’d go?”

  I shook my head. Where would they possibly have gone if they were injured and not at home or the hospital? Smith was getting pissed off; I could tell by the way he screwed up his face in frustration. The likely outcome would be me on the receiving end of a beating and thrown to the zombies if Smith didn’t find Pete.

  “They could be at Buddy’s,” I blurted.

  Smith gave me an inquisitive look.

  “It’s a bar they use. They may have gone for a beer to try and ease the pain or something,” was all I could think of.

  Smith sighed and turned back to the woman behind the desk. “What happens to these people when they get bit?”

  The woman bent closer to Smith and kept her voice low. “They generally end up like that guy on the floor over there,” she gestured with her chin to the infected man the security guards were wrestling on the floor and now successfully cuffed.

  “Generally?”

  “Well, all of them I’ve seen, I’m afraid.”

  A pinch faced doctor with thin wispy hair and glasses perched at the tip of his nose, breezed behind the desk next to the woman. He looked harassed and exasperated and shuffled through the register.

  “Hey doc, what is this outbreak, then?” Smith asked.

  The doctor
sighed and didn’t look up. “It’s some kind of flu. That’s all we know at the moment. I don’t know why the infected are so aggressive towards others.” His voice was soft and nasal.

  “We’ve seen these crazy bastards out there eating people. You can’t tell me that’s just good old fashioned flu?” Smith growled.

  The doctor snapped the register shut and looked at Smith. “I don’t have the answers you are looking for, I’m afraid.” He stomped away into the backroom.

  I gazed out through the windows and saw more infected zombies streaming across the car park towards the hospital. A couple of the brown uniformed security guards ran through the doors with their hand guns drawn.

  “We can’t hold them back! There’s too many of them and they’re all headed this way,” one of the guards yelled.

  People in the waiting area wailed and those capable stood to look through the glass frontage. Mass hysteria ensued as people overturned the chairs and recoiled away from the windows in a screaming state of panic. Those with injured legs or incapable of standing were knocked to the ground and trampled underfoot. The zombies pressed against the windows and banged aimlessly on the glass. Their faces pushed against the panes with lifeless eyes staring longingly at the people inside the waiting room.

  One of the security guards opened fire at a rotund, balding zombie who stumbled through the doors. The creature’s skin was almost green and several fingers were missing on his left hand. High pitched screams from the crowd pierced my ears as the zombie took two bullets to the chest but kept walking.

  “Shoot them in the head,” Smith yelled to the guard but his voice was drowned by the screaming bystanders.

  The security guard hurriedly fired all his rounds. The empty pistol clicked as the zombie lurched to grab him with outstretched hands. The remaining security guard tried to lock the heavy, glass double doors to stop the horde of zombies streaming into the building. He was soon surrounded and brought to the ground by a crowd of infected who relentlessly tore into him with fingernails and teeth.