The Left Series (Book 1): Leftovers

by Christian Fletcher

  I grabbed Smith’s arm and pulled and dragged him away from the approaching horde. We stumbled up the stairs not knowing what the hell to do next, moving towards the upper level. Smith lost the shoe hanging from his foot but we couldn’t stop to retrieve it. The thought flashed through my mind that a pack of zombies may be wandering around the upstairs rooms and trap us on the stairway.

  The stairway ended and we faced a long, dim corridor with closed doors running on each side. I knew a fire exit was somewhere on the upper floor because I’d seen it from the outside.

  “Which way?” Smith gasped.

  “What?”

  “Which way is the fucking escape route?” Smith bellowed.

  “I don’t know, I’ve never been up here before,” I admitted. I looked around for the fire exit signs on the ceiling but they had either been removed or never in place to start with. Health and Safety had never been high on Buddy’s Bar’s list of priorities.

  Smith snarled and tried the first door on the right. The door was locked and we didn’t have time to break this one down. We heard the moans and groans of the approaching zombies, climbing the stairway.

  “Where’s Rosenberg?” I’d temporarily forgotten about him. He wasn’t in the corridor so he had to be in one of the rooms.

  Smith tried the doors on the right side and I tried the left. Some of the rooms were store cupboards holding shelves full of beer mats and old optic attachments. Some rooms were stacked with tables, chairs and beds. All the rooms appeared dim and shabby but none had the fire escape we were looking for. I heard the zombies clumping to the top of the stairs.

  “We’re running out of choices here, Smith,” I roared.

  The worst case scenario would be leaping through one of the upstairs windows and taking a chance where we landed. We could break our legs or land on top of a bunch of zombies. The options narrowed with every ticking second.

  Rosenberg appeared through the last door on the right at the end of the corridor.

  “Hey, guys, this way through here, quickly,” he whispered and beckoned us forward to the room behind him.

  We didn’t hesitate and ran down the corridor as the first zombie reached the top of the stairway. I followed Smith through the doorway and Rosenberg shut and locked the door with a slide bolt at the top and bottom.

  I looked around the room and saw a table surrounded by four chairs in the middle of the floor space. The outdated, yellow wall paper peeled itself from the damp walls and someone had made an amateur attempt to install a small kitchen area along the wall to the right. Two previously white cupboards hung at sloping angles and an uneven worktop sat in the corner. Two girls and a man stood by the open fire escape door staring at us with an undisguised expression of disgust. The wafts of fresh air blowing through the open door were a welcome sensation.

  “We need to get out of here. Can you help us?” I said to the man.

  “We were all right up here. Nice and cozy until you three cowboys came along and gave our position away,” the man said, looking me up and down as he spoke. He was a tall, black guy in his early twenties, wearing a white vest, blue jeans and some kind of trendy hip-hop shoes with gold laces. Big gold hoops hung from his ears and a matching gold chain was wrapped around his neck. His hair was in a corn-row style and I knew by his body language he was full of attitude.

  The two girls were a little older, maybe mid-twenties. Both were dressed in black leather jackets, ripped t-shirts and pencil skirts; the Goth style dress code I was used to seeing in Buddy’s Bar. One had bunched hair dyed black and blue, the other had bobbed purple hair. Heavy makeup, black mascara and eyeliner with several face and ear piercings completed their look. I recognized the one with purple hair as one of the bar girls.

  “Just let us out of the door and we’ll be on our way,” Smith sighed. He clearly wasn’t in the mood for bullshit.

  “Oh, yeah? Well where we supposed to go now, mister?” The black guy raised his voice. “You brought those sacks of shit up the stairs with you.” he pronounced the last two words as “wit’cha.”

  “Listen, kid, I don’t give a fuck who you are, what you do or where you…”

  “Let me introduce you to my friends,” Rosenberg interjected. “This is err…Mr. Smith.” He nodded in the direction of the strangers. “And this is Mr. Wilde.” I couldn’t remember telling Rosenberg my name, yet somehow he knew it.

  “Please call me Brett,” I offered, trying not to sound too creepy. I kind of liked the girl with the purple hair and flashed a brief but unreturned smile.

  “…And as I said before, I’m Denny Rosenberg, Junior Doctor.” I could tell Rosenberg got off on saying that. “These guys work in the bar and locked themselves up here around lunchtime today when everything went to hell.” Rosenberg spoke for the three of them. He’d obviously stumbled across them when he ran upstairs and had a brief conversation while Smith and I were taking part in a bout of zombie stairway wrestling. They didn’t seem as pissed with Rosenberg as they did with Smith and me. Probably because of that ‘Junior Doctor’ shit. Everyone wants a doctor around when there’s a crisis, junior or not.

  “I think we should all go together. You know, safety in numbers and all that, huh?” Rosenberg let out nervous high-pitched laugh and mimicked bashing something over the head with his wooden club.

  No one spoke for around a minute. The silence became weird and slightly surreal, like we had all run out of batteries or been turned off at the mains. Maybe everyone was trying to cope with the situation. An individual soon adapts to their surroundings but can cause brain freeze if the circumstances change, which happened at that moment.

  “The name’s Francis Lemon,” the black guy said. “But I’m known as Eazy Peezy, as in Lemon Squeezy.” He spelled out how it was written.

  “Ah, Jesus,” Smith muttered under his breath.

  “I’m Donna and she’s Batfish,” the girl with the purple hair said with no emotion in her voice.

  Batfish, what kind of a name was that? At least Donna was a better name than Batfish. I gave Smith a look and knew exactly what he was thinking. If he’d been alone in this room, I doubted whether our three new acquaintances would still be breathing.

  Slow, clumping footsteps echoed from the corridor on the other side of the door. Smith and I left the doors open to the other rooms so the zombies had probably fanned out their numbers to search for food. Now they came to the end of the corridor. The slow thump of a dead fist on the outside of the door reverberated around the room.

  “I think it must be time to go,” Rosenberg said, raising his eyebrows. His tone sounded like we were knocking off work for the day.

  Eazy Peezy carried a small back pack and led the way out of the fire escape door and down the spiral, metal staircase. We peeked over the hand rail and saw a small, rectangular tarmac area, enclosed by a wooden fence probably used to unload deliveries. The green VW camper van was parked directly below us. A small white van was parked next to a stack of beer barrels and empty crates a few feet away from the VW.

  I took a sneaky peep at Donna’s ass wiggling down the stairs in front of me. I loved the way Goth chicks wore those tight skirts.

  I lit a smoke once we were on level ground and offered the packet around. To my surprise, everyone took one apart from Rosenberg. Ironic in the days of the non smoker, five out of six people in the group indulged in the habit.

  “There’s that piece of shit that stopped us from getting away earlier,” Smith gave the green VW camper a kick in the side door like he had only just noticed it.

  “Hey, they’re my wheels, asshole,” Batfish shouted. “Kick my door again and I’ll kick your ass.”

  “Why the hell did you park the piece of crap in front of a fucking fire door?” Smith bellowed.

  “We parked it there on purpose to stop morons like you getting through the bathroom and up the fire escape to the rooms upstairs, where we were safe until you came busting your way in,” Batfish yelled without taking breath.
<
br />   While I was wondering if Batfish had “man” issues, unseen hands banged and thumped on the outside of the wooden fence surrounding us. The yelling had alerted the zombies to our whereabouts. I hoped Smith and Batfish weren’t going to go on much longer. A single member of the undead wouldn’t be able to break the fence down, it seemed sturdy enough but a sheer weight of numbers would easily pull the thing to pieces. I didn’t fancy getting trapped again.

  “Batfish,” I called. She turned and gave me an evil stare.

  I pointed to the fence and she heard the zombies banging and scraping their finger nails on the other side.

  “Do you think you could give us a ride around the building to the front parking lot?” I asked politely.

  Batfish snorted, fished around in her bag and pulled out her set of keys to the van. She unlocked the front doors and held the sliding side door open. “Go on, get in,” she sighed at us with an undercurrent of malice. I just prayed the damn thing would start.

  Eazy Peezy and Donna crawled along the front bench seat next to the steering wheel. Smith, Rosenberg and I hauled ourselves into the back amongst bags of clothes, blankets and cans of food. They looked like they were already stocked up for a quick getaway. We had one gun, two clubs and a bottle of bourbon between us.

  “Someone has to open the gates,” Batfish yelled as though we were two miles away. She walked around the vehicle and jumped into the driver’s seat.

  “I’ll do it,” Eazy Peezy snarled at us in the back like we were a burden. He climbed out of the VW cab and jogged over to the enclosed wooden gates at the edge of the delivery area. I hadn’t noticed the silver bolts holding the gates in place and wondered how we were going to get the vehicle out.

  Batfish turned the key and the VW engine spluttered into life. Eazy Peezy unlocked the bolts and pulled open the gates. I had to give him some credit because a large number of zombies milled around outside the fence and he was unarmed, as far as I could see. A large, female zombie, shaped like a beach ball with short spiky hair, reached out a hand towards Eazy’s face. He pulled out a small hand gun from his pants waist band and fired two shots into the large woman’s head. She thudded face first onto the ground. Batfish rolled the VW forward and Eazy jumped back in the cab.

  “Nice shooting, Eazy,” I said. He didn’t acknowledge my encouragement.

  Batfish pumped the gas and steered the VW through the gathering crowd of undead. They tried to grab the van as it passed but the vehicle’s height and overall oval shape made attaining a hand-hold difficult. We heard the zombies’ nails scrape against the exterior paintwork. Batfish nosed the vehicle along the perimeter of Buddy’s Bar and circled around to the front parking lot.

  “Ah, motherfuckers! Will you look at that?” Smith yelled. “My car’s trashed.”

  Large numbers of zombies swarmed over the Pontiac and Rosenberg’s Honda, like ants devouring an insect. All the windows were smashed in both vehicles and the doors hung open. The contents of Rosenberg’s emergency medical supplies were strewn over the ground.

  “There are at least a hundred of them over there. No chance we can get to those vehicles now,” I said.

  “Oh, no. Look what they’ve done to my car,” Rosenberg whined.

  “I had all my extra ammo in the trunk,” Smith complained.

  “What are you packing?” Eazy asked.

  Smith drew his Desert Eagle and Eazy whistled in appreciation.

  “What caliber is that?”

  “Four-four, you get eight rounds to a clip.”

  Eazy produced his own hand gun from his waist band.“Smith & Wesson, M&P series. Fires nine mil rounds and handles like a dream.”

  Smith nodded his approval. The two seemed to be developing a mutual respect.

  “Once you two have stopped measuring your dick extensions, can we decide what the hell we are going to do and where we are headed?” Batfish screamed.

  A few zombies noticed the VW idling on the edge of the parking lot and plodded slowly in our direction.

  Chapter Eight

  “They’ve seen us,” Rosenberg stated the obvious as the gang of approaching zombies grew in number.

  “Okay, let’s just go,” Donna yelled.

  Batfish pulled away from Buddy’s parking lot onto the main road. I recounted the scene at the overrun hospital and blocked roads in the center of town. We discussed where to go and what to do but no one thought of anywhere safe. The urban back roads remained deserted apart from the occasional lumbering zombie. Batfish steered the VW passed abandoned cars littering the street. I looked at my watch and was amazed to see the time was just after six pm. Time flies when you’re having fun.

  “Hey, I just want to thank you for pulling me out of that situation back there,” Smith said to me quietly. “You could have just left me to die.”

  I shrugged. He was right but all thoughts of debt collecting and threats were now over as far as I was concerned. Smith knew how to use a pistol and could handle himself, which made him a vital survival commodity.

  I was surprised when my cell phone chimed the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ ringtone in my pocket. I’d wondered if the signals were down permanently. I felt even more surprised when the caller I.D. was my dad in New York City.

  “Hey, Dad.” My emotion nearly spilled over to hear a member of my family was still alive.

  “Hey, Brett. Are you okay?” It was good to hear his voice again, even though we’d never been close.

  My father was one of life’s duckers and divers, tiring of most people and situations very quickly, including family life. Michael Wilde spent most of his time traveling across America and Europe, where he met my mother in Ireland. They settled in London, England for a while, until Dad was off again, trading in diamonds and other valuable stones. We moved back to Brynston in the States when my parents tried to make another go of things but the reunion was short lived. My mother moved back to England, my father went off on his travels again, my sister went to University in San Francisco and I stayed put. For some strange reason, I remained in Brynston and wasted my life.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Where are you?”

  “I’ve managed to escape the City…well kind of. I’m on a yacht anchored off the Esplanade by Battery Park City. There’s a few of us onboard here, it’s safe. You’re welcome to join us if you can make it here.”

  “Dad, there’s six of us. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “No problem, son. There’s enough room on here. Just don’t bring anyone who’s been bitten or infected, okay?”

  “Nobody is bitten here, Dad.”

  “That’s good news, son. I called your sister, Vicky. She’s gone to Alcatraz Island with some of her pals so I think she’s going to be okay.”

  “That’s good news, we’ll try and…” my phone bleeped and cut off the connection. I tried to redial but the information panel told me no signal was available. Rosenberg suggested he take my number and keyed it into his own cell list of contacts.

  I relayed the message to everybody in the VW van and asked if they wanted to go to New York City, some eighty miles to the east. I saw doubt and apprehension etched on their faces. I knew where they were coming from. Navigating our way through the small town of Brynston had been tricky enough but traveling through one of the biggest cities in the world was going to be like climbing a mountain in a swimsuit.

  “Well, I’m up for it,” Smith agreed. “I’m from the city so I can plan our route through to the harbor and besides I might find a few of my associates who are still alive and maybe willing to help us.”

  I sensed the tension ease slightly. Smith plotting the route was better than stumbling through the city without a clue which direction we were traveling. Nobody thought about the route between Brynston and New York.

  Everyone reluctantly agreed to go to New York. Nobody thought of any positive alternatives. Being onboard a ship made some kind of sense amongst all this madness. I wasn’t sure how long they’d stay anchored out of the
harbor. I didn’t know if the infected were able to swim or crawl along the bottom of the sea bed. One thing I did know was if the shit got too heavy onboard, they wouldn’t hang around waiting for us for too long, no matter what old man Wilde said.

  Everyone in the van tried to contact their families and people they knew on their cell phones with no success. I attempted to go online to check my various social networking accounts but kept receiving an “unable to connect to the server” message.

  I asked Batfish if she’d stop by my apartment so I could grab a few things. I didn’t think I’d ever be returning to Brynston so I wanted to make sure I took all my valuables with me. I explained about the traffic bottle neck and if we encountered any sign of a jam, we’d forget about going to my apartment.

  I directed Batfish around the back streets. She drove slowly by abandoned vehicles and clusters of zombies, who momentarily chased the VW. The roads were full of trash and discarded possessions, as people dropped them while attempting to flee the town.

  The traffic around my apartment block had thinned enough so we were able to steer around the streams of dumped vehicles. I pointed out the apartment block and told Batfish to park on the sidewalk. She bumped the VW up the curb and pulled up outside the front entrance. I looked up at the building I’d called home for the past five years with a different outlook. It looked like a giant concrete coffin and I felt glad this probably was the last time I’d ever enter the building.

  “You’ve got ten minutes in there. Otherwise we’re out of here, okay?” Batfish gave me stern instructions.

  I nodded and opened the sliding camper side door. I was surprised when Smith climbed out behind me.

  “I couldn’t let you go in there alone,” Smith gave me a wink. I felt a swelling sense of pride and camaraderie until he added, “an idiot like you would only go and get himself killed. And you’re our ticket to safety onto that yacht.”