The Left Series (Book 1): Leftovers

by Christian Fletcher

  I laughed and gestured towards the apartment block. A revolving glass door led to the lobby which was cold and dark. No lights lit the building and the elevator doors stood open. I tried the switch but the power was off. Wails and moans came from somewhere within the building.

  “We’ll take the stairs,” I whispered.

  Smith nodded and drew his Desert Eagle. He held the baseball bat in his left hand and the pistol in his right. We crept up the steps one at a time, listening for any approaching footsteps. Muffled shouts echoed down the stairway from the rooms above.

  I jumped back at the sight of the corpse of a dead man, still dressed in his pajamas, lying on the floor between a set of double doors leading to the first floor. His head was half missing and brown gunk pooled under his torso.

  “What floor are you on?” Smith hissed.

  “Fifth.” I started to regret returning to my former home. The stairway seemed endless in the semi darkness.

  “We need to pick up the pace. We only have ten minutes, remember?”

  I nodded and glanced at my watch. Through the dim light, I saw we had already taken between two and three minutes. I quickened the pace up the stairs with Smith following. I stopped when I heard doors banging somewhere on the fourth floor. When silence returned, I carried on up the stairs.

  We came to the fifth floor and crept along the passage way. Two dead zombies lay side by side outside an apartment a few doors down from mine. One of the bodies sat up and moaned as we approached my apartment door. Smith ran forward and smashed it square on the forehead with his baseball bat before it had the chance to stand up.

  I unlocked the door of my own apartment and felt surprised and shocked at the stink wafting out. I didn’t realize how much the place stunk of unwashed clothes and stale booze. Smith looked around and I knew by his expression he was unimpressed with the state of the place. I found an old camping rucksack which hadn’t been used for years and hurriedly stuffed some spare clothes, my passport and identity papers inside.

  “What size shoes are you?” Smith asked, waving his sock at me. I’d forgotten he’d lost a shoe at Buddy’s Bar.

  “Err..ten.”

  “Shit, I’m eleven.” He thought for a moment. “Carry on.” He disappeared out of the front door of the apartment.

  With Smith out of the room, I changed from my blood encrusted rags into some clean, comfortable clothes. I stuffed anything useful into the rucksack; flashlight, kitchen knives, can opener, spare batteries, toothpaste, soap, cell phone charger and all the food in the cupboards which amounted to a block of hard cheese, two cans of soup and a packet of crisp bread. I was never one for grocery shopping. I took some of my favorite CD’s just to fill my bag and hopefully make the return journey a little more bearable.

  Smith returned to my apartment wearing a pair of brown loafers and a black leather jacket. I tried to hide my smirk but he noticed.

  “Shut your mouth, asshole. It’s all I could find and they were your neighbors. And while you’re sitting there laughing your ass off, don’t you think we should get moving?”

  I’d forgotten the time. I looked at my watch and saw we had about two minutes to get downstairs. I zipped the rucksack and shook the straps over my shoulders. I took one last look around my apartment and shut the door for the last time. We moved quickly down the stairway. The light was fading fast. I didn’t want to use the flashlight in case the beam attracted unwanted attention.

  We reached the lobby on the ground floor and stood still. I saw someone moving in the shadows by the elevator doors. Smith drew his Desert Eagle and took aim at the skulking figure. She lumbered closer into the fading light, murmuring and wailing. The naked female zombie’s lower body was covered with congealed brown liquid, oozing from a wound in her thigh. Her flesh had turned bluish white and quivered and wobbled in time with her movements. I recognized her as the chubby woman I saw attacked on the street earlier in the day.

  “Jesus, will you look at that?” Smith whispered and fired a shot hitting the chubby woman in the middle of her forehead. She collapsed on her back letting out a loud fart when she hit the ground. Smith and I couldn’t help a small giggle.

  We moved to the revolving glass door and stopped when we noticed a young, skinny male zombie tangled between the partitions, trying to work out how to get out. Smith and I stood in the same partition, opposite the zombie and slowly shuffled the door around to reach the street outside.

  “Hey, watch this,” Smith said, a boyish grin on his face. He caught hold of the door and spun it around with force. The zombie inside the glass partitions was caught like a hamster running inside a wheel and eventually flew out of the doors, collapsing into the lobby. We both laughed out loud.

  I soon stopped laughing when I turned and saw Batfish and the camper van were nowhere in sight and a crowd of around thirty zombies lumbered steadily towards us.

  Chapter Nine

  “Smith, look, they’ve gone,” I hissed.

  Smith turned, still smiling at the sight of the incredible spinning zombie. The look of amusement on his face soon turned to anguish.

  “Where are they?” Smith looked at his watch. “We were only just over ten minutes. Oh, Jesus, we’re fucking trapped. Those double crossing sacks of shit!”

  I noticed a small gap in the zombie ranks, slightly to our left. Smith followed me when I darted through the sparse area of the crowd, knocking over a couple of zombies who were once teenage girls. The throng of zombies changed direction and slowly followed us.

  “Where are we going?” Smith asked.

  “Anywhere but here,” I said.

  I led the way across the street towards the shopping precinct which provided the only clear route. I had no clue where to go. We were on foot in a dangerous area and the sun was dipping. I didn’t want to be around the vicinity after dark.

  We trudged on until the lowing crowds of undead were out of sight. I knew some of them would carry on their pursuit but others would lose their sense of direction and wander in different routes. We felt capable of handling a few of the undead but we’d have a struggle on our hands if they came at us in large numbers. I stopped by a store doorway and checked how much breathing space we had. I couldn’t see any zombies in close proximity. I lit a cigarette and offered Smith one.

  “Have you still got any bourbon?”

  Smith pulled out the bottle from his jacket and handed it to me. I took a long slug and enjoyed the burn as it sunk into my guts. I handed the bottle back and Smith did the same.

  “What’s the plan, then, Wilde man?”

  “We need to get out of town. We need a vehicle and there are plenty abandoned around here. We can take our pick.”

  “I always said never rely on other people. You can never trust them. I can’t believe they just ran out on us like that.” Smith took another slug of bourbon.

  I shrugged and didn’t know what to say. Maybe they had their reasons but we probably would never see them again so to my mind, it wasn’t worth worrying about.

  Smith changed clips on his Desert Eagle. “Last one,” he sighed.

  I thought for a moment. “There’s a gun shop not far from here, near the shopping precinct.”

  “Can we get there on foot?”

  I nodded. “It’s about ten minutes.”

  “In today’s experience, I think we should keep clear of heavily populated areas,” Smith said. “We’ve been in trouble at the hospital and at that bar. Don’t you think a shopping precinct is going to be worse?”

  Smith had a point. Previously heavily populated areas were rife with undead like some of their former memories of the locations still remained. They seemed to congregate in areas frequented in their previous lives.

  “The gun shop is about a block from the shopping precinct and not in plain sight.”

  “Okay, Wilde man, it’s your call,” Smith said. “Lead the way.”

  We kept a slow jog, to outpace any zombies who might be lurking in the doorways of building
s we passed. The streets I was used to seeing bustling with shoppers and people on their way home from work were very quiet and deserted. Abandoned cars stood alone with the doors open and alarms bleeping. The occasional zombie noticed us and lurched in our direction but soon fell some way behind. I thought about using one of the discarded vehicles but the noise of their alarms seemed to attract the zombies like flies around cow shit. We could get to the gun shop quieter on foot.

  So far, so good. We reached the side street and turned right towards the gun shop. The shopping precinct was located roughly a further four hundred yards down the main road. I couldn’t remember the name of the gun store but remembered Pete was always talking about buying a revolver and we’d been inside for a look around once.

  My heart sank when we rounded the street corner. A pickup truck sat with its front half buried in the gun shop window and the back end at an odd angle on the sidewalk.

  “Oh, what now?” I muttered.

  We walked slowly to the wrecked vehicle. I peered through the side window. A man in a baseball cap and red hunting jacket sat slumped backward in the drivers’ seat. Blood spatters covered the cab and the windshield was cracked in the shape of a spider’s web. Half the right side of the drivers head was missing and the other half was a bloody mess. Smith took a look and made a gesture of a gun with his fingers and pointed to his head.

  “Looks like a suicide,” he whispered.

  We stepped away and tried the front door. Predictably, it was locked. The sign on the door read ‘Günter’s Gun Shop – Closed.’ Smith pointed to the vehicle and I hopped up onto the hood. I knocked away loose, jagged shards of the shop window glass with the golf club and winced when they tinkled on the ground. I jumped off the hood into the middle of the shop floor and crouched, listening for any movement. Smith followed me inside, his loafers crunched on the broken glass on the ground. The shop was almost in darkness. A humming sound reverberated from somewhere in the back of the store. It sounded like a generator or an air-con unit.

  The shop wasn’t big and the whole floor area only covered roughly the size of an average family living room. Shelves of boxed ammunition stood stored in glass fronted cases behind a glass covered display counter. No cash register was on display; maybe the owner had taken it with him, wherever that was. Racks of hunting rifles, BB guns and bows and arrows of all shapes and sizes hung from the wall each side of the display counter. Hunting gear and various knives hung on the back wall to the right of the display case. I noticed a narrow doorway between some freestanding racks of waterproof jackets and trousers.

  Smith crept over to the glass cases and searched for ammunition. I looked around the shelves for any spare hand guns lying around. I pulled at the hunting rifles chained to the shelves through the trigger guards.

  “Have you fired a hand gun before?” Smith asked.

  I shook my head. The closest I’d come to shooting anything was on the PlayStation. Smith smashed the glass display case with the baseball bat. The noise echoed around the store.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t find the keys,” he held up a palm in apology. He took a pistol from the display case and held it out for me. “Here, this is a Beretta M9A1. It’s accurate with not much kick and takes fifteen, nine-mil rounds. Load it now and take as much spare ammo as you can carry.”

  The gun was metallic blue with a long barrel. It felt good in my hand and I practiced aiming and shooting at imaginary zombies. Smith showed me how to load the weapon and passed me a few boxes of 9mm rounds that I stuffed into my rucksack. He loaded his Desert Eagle and stuffed his pockets with spare ammo. We took a rifle sling each to carry the ‘silent’ weapons on our backs. The handle of the golf club hung over my left shoulder for easy access. I wasn’t letting go of that weapon. Smith swapped his brown loafers for walking boots but kept the leather jacket, I thought he maybe should have swapped it for a hunting coat.

  We picked up a hunting knife each from the shelf behind the register and moved towards the front of the pickup truck, ready to leave. We stopped when we heard a metallic banging. The sound came again so I took a peek through the window and saw a balding, male zombie staggering around the back of the truck. Huge gouges and pieces of metal protruded from his neck with flaps of ripped skin quivering as he moved. The scent of the dead flesh and blood of the suicidal truck driver was probably like the smell of a kebab to a drunk for this particular zombie. He banged on the doors and moaned that familiar low groan. I wondered if the undead guy was experiencing a sense of frustration. The only way to find out how a zombie felt was to become one. I wasn’t prepared for that situation yet.

  “Shoot him,” Smith said behind me.

  “What?”

  “Go ahead. Shoot the bastard.”

  “Why not?” I shrugged. At least I’d have some shooting practice and learn how to handle the gun. After all, how hard could it be?

  I aimed the Beretta at the zombie’s head, took off the safety, like Smith had shown me and squeezed the trigger. The hand gun recoiled horribly to the right and nearly broke my wrist. The round missed by a mile and took out the remaining glass in the top right of the shop window.

  “Good shooting,” Smith laughed. “We got ourselves another Clint Eastwood here.”

  “I thought you said there was a little kick back?” I hissed, rubbing my wrist.

  “Like this,” Smith demonstrated the stance, holding his right wrist with his left hand and standing with his feet apart. He extended his right arm and aimed down the sights. “Now you try.”

  I copied the stance and aimed at the zombies head again. I fired and heard a metallic clunk when the round struck the side of the truck’s bed. It took me a total of eight shots before I finally shot the zombie in the head. I’d missed the target four times; the other shots hit him in the neck, arm and chest before I’d delivered the kill shot. The fatal bullet penetrated the skull under his right eye and sent him spinning onto the sidewalk.

  Smith cheered or booed every shot, depending on how near the target I’d got. I laughed hard and felt like a kid shooting at a plastic duck at the fairground. The zombie kept coming forward towards the window and I re-aimed and fired after every missed shot. We were making so much noise that we didn’t see or hear the streams of zombies stumbling towards Günter’s Gun Shop in the twilight.

  Chapter Ten

  The amusement and laughter immediately stopped when one of the undead slapped a hand on the glass front door panel of the gun shop. Smith looked out into the street, in curiosity at first.

  “Oh, shit, we got a whole bunch of them heading our way,” he hissed.

  I looked out the broken shop front window and craned my neck to the right in the direction of the main street. Zombies shuffled towards the gun store in packs of twos and threes, like drunken shoppers with news of a bargain sale on an evening excursion. The gun fire, shouting and laughter had been like a homing beacon.

  “They must be coming from that damn shopping precinct,” Smith said. “They’ll soon be tumbling through that broken window. We have to move now.”

  Total darkness blanketed the gun shop. Light faded quickly on the street outside. Zombies crowded around the exterior trying to find a way in. The bottom sill of the broken window sat on a concrete wall at the front of the building, waist high to the sidewalk so stepping through the broken window pane was no easy task. Zombies would eventually squeeze inside of the shop through sheer weight of numbers; pushing and barging forward even with the cover of the trashed truck.

  “This is going to get bloody,” Smith said, looking at the massing number of undead outside.

  I suddenly remembered the humming sound when we first entered the shop. “There may be a back way out of here,” I said, inching towards the small doorway between the clothing racks.

  Smith quietly followed me as the noise of hands banging against glass increased. Once Smith was next to me, I slid the clothing racks behind us so we had some cover, if slightly ineffective. I didn’t know if zombie’s sense
s worked on sight or smell. We crouched behind the clothing racks and tried the door. The handle was stiff but opened inwards. I prayed it wasn’t just a store cupboard.

  The area was enclosed and unlit but I felt a rush of a breeze on my face which meant a back door or window. Broken glass tinkled behind us. I took a peek through the hanging clothes and saw the front door glass shattered. A zombie stood doubled over rubbing his face next to the center cross-piece of the shop door. They were inside. We had no choice but to move through the door behind us.

  I edged through the small doorway and closed the door when Smith came through after me. I fumbled around in my rucksack and took out the flashlight. We were in a very small kitchen area with a kettle sitting on top of a worktop and a sink in the corner. Two plastic chairs stood each side of a cheap table, holding an ashtray piled with butts in the other corner. A doorway through the middle of the room led to a storeroom on the left and a toilet on the right. The toilet had two windows at the back of the trap, one was small and open on a latch, the other was enclosed in meshed safety glass.

  “That’s not big enough to fit a fucking mouse through,” Smith scoffed at the small window.

  We searched the storeroom for an escape route but couldn’t find any fire doors or windows. Something crashed behind us. More zombies were piling into the store.

  “We don’t have much time,” I whispered.

  Smith grabbed the flashlight and looked around the storeroom. He picked up a fire axe and barged his way into the toilet cubicle. He wielded the axe above his head and began battering the panel of safety glass. I picked up a rifle with no barrel and joined Smith in the toilet cubicle, smashing at the glass panel with the wooden stock. The noise echoed through the cubicle and probably through the whole shop but we had no alternative escape route.

  The panel of safety glass cracked and bent but hung onto the window frame. Dead hands began the incessant thump on the back wall of the gun store. They heard us but didn’t know how to get to us. It wouldn’t be long before the undead stumbled on the door leading to the back rooms.