The Left Series (Book 4): Left In The Cold (37 page)

“This town seems creepy,” I muttered.

“When did a place
not
feel creepy?” Smith asked.

“A long time ago,” I sighed, glancing left and right at each dark window.

A figure hunched on the ground, turned to look in our direction as we approached. He was the reanimated corpse of an old man, dressed all in black with a mop of unkempt, white hair. I noticed a clergyman’s white collar around his neck and he scowled at us as we drew near. The bloodied remains of some kind of human body part lay in the snow beneath him.

“Christ, what the hell is that thing he’s been eating?” I gasped, holding my nose against the pungent odor of the mangled flesh.

“I don’t know and I don’t think I want to,” Smith said, pulling out his handgun.

The old man rose on his haunches and went to move towards us.

“Stay the fuck down,” Smith growled and fired a single round through the zombie’s head.

The crack of the gunshot echoed through the narrow street, reverberating around the front walls of the houses and stores.
The old man rocked backward and sprawled in the snow, on top of the messy pulp he was previously eating.

We heard a collective groaning and snarling sound and I saw movement from the buildings around us. A whole gathering of undead began to pour out of the stores and house entrances.

“I don’t think you should have fired that shot, Smith,” I muttered as I watched the town’s undead population mass into the street all around us.

Chapter Fifty-Three

“Oh my god, there’s a ton of them,” Batfish cried. She scooped Spot up and stuffed him inside the harness within her jacket.

The growling and snarling increased in intensity when the gang of undead saw us. They probably hadn’t fed on human prey for a while and were keen to taste blood.

“We better get moving,” Cordoba hissed. “Otherwise we’ll be trapped on this damn street.”

“Which way?” Batfish asked.

“Keep going the direction we’re headed in,” Smith said. “
We don’t want to be heading back on ourselves but let’s not hang around.”

The zombie throng surged forward
from the buildings and they staggered across the street towards us.

“Come on, let’s move it,” Smith shouted.

We broke into a jog. The backpack’s straps dug into my wounded shoulder, sending a painful stinging sensation right through the left side of my body. I lagged behind the others, unable to keep pace.

“Move it, Brett,” Wingate hissed at me.

“I can’t,” I whined. “My shoulder is too painful.”

Smith stopped and bent double. He vomited into the snow. “I don’t feel so good either,” he spat.

“We have to keep moving,” Batfish wailed, nervously glancing up and down the street. “We’re dead if we stop still for too much longer.”

“Can you carry on a bit further?” Wingate asked Smith, rubbing his back.

Smith gagged and coughed but nodded his head. “We can’t stay here, that’s for damn sure,” he croaked.

“We could find a place to hide for a while,” Jimmy suggested.

“Nah, they’d follow us and trap us inside,” Smith said. “We have to put some distance between us.”

“Well, whatever we’re going to do, we need to do it quickly,” Batfish groaned. “Those things are closing in on us from all directions.”

I turned my head, glancing up and down the street. There was no way we were going to find a pathway through the mass of undead. They blocked the road and we didn’t have enough fire power to blast our way through their ranks. We were snared with no way out. “We’re not going to make it through,” I yelled.

Smith glanced around us. “Let’s go into that store,” he said pointing at the wrecked shop front on the opposite side of the street. “There might be a doorway through the back.”

We didn’t have any other options. Around a half dozen zombies milled around the store front and I could see a few more inside. We’d have to take them out or skirt around them.

“Come on, let’s go,” I hollered.

Cordoba led the way and smashed the butt of her rifle into the heads of two female zombies near the store’s doorway. Their heads made an audible cracking noise as the butt connected with their skulls and they both fell in an ungainly heap into the snow. I drew my handgun and fired off a couple of shots at two male zombies beside the store’s smashed front window.

“Keep the gunfire to a minimum,” Cordoba ordered. “They’re attracted to noise and you’re making one hell of a racket firing that damn thing.”

I shrugged. “I’m just trying to clear a route through,” I protested.

The mass of zombies circled around us, pushing and jostling each other to try and get near us.
Jimmy still carried the shotgun he’d taken from the castle and smashed the butt into the face of a zombie standing in the store’s doorway.

“Hurry up, let’s get inside,” Batfish shrieked.

We bundled through the open doorway and I saw the store used to sell all kinds of bric-a-brac when it was fully operational, in the dim and distant past. The shelves held mugs and ornaments and broken ceramic littered the store’s floor. Cordoba clumped another male zombie around the head. I noticed another zombie with half his face missing, lumbering between the racks. I glanced around for something I could use as a weapon instead of firing the handgun. I spied a row of bread knives hanging from a rack to my right. Grabbing one of the knives, I ripped off the packaging and stabbed the ghoul through its left eye. The creature let out a quiet groan then slumped to the floor.

Batfish tried but failed to shut the open glass doors behind us. They were on a sliding mechanism and had obviously been left open when the power failed.

“Keep going through the store,” Smith yelled. “Don’t stop or we’ll get caught up.”

Batfish gave up trying to close the doors and the mass of zombies pushed and shoved into each other to get inside the store. We hurried between the shelves of tacky birthday cards, ‘
I heart Scotland
’ mugs and other various tat. Jimmy tripped and fell into a display of ornaments, sending the jumble scattering across the floor. He scrambled to his feet and kept moving.

Zombies poured inside the store after us. We were dead if there was no backdoor out of the place.
We ran by the cash tills situated against the wall to the right. A couple of zombies stood and turned to watch us dash by. They groaned and plodded after us in pursuit.

I was glancing around the back wall for any kind of doorway but couldn’t see anything that remotely resembled one.

“There’s no way out,” I yelled. “We’re trapped.”

“Through here,” Wingate yelled.

I looked around to where she stood and saw she’d found a doorway that was almost hidden amongst the racks and paneling. We all followed her through the doorway, with me being the last to enter. I pulled the handle and closed the door and Cordoba shone her flashlight around the dark space beyond the door. There was no lock on the door of any kind and it wouldn’t take the mass of zombies long to claw open the door panel.

We were inside a narrow corridor with a short flight of steps leading up to another floor level.
A couple of broken office chairs were stacked together beside the doorframe. I slid them in front of the door. It wasn’t much of a barricade but the chairs were the only items inside the corridor.

Cordoba led the way up the steps, treading cautiously towards a flaking white painted door at the top of the staircase.
I figured we had only a few seconds before the throng of zombies reached the back wall of the store behind us.

“Hurry it up,” I hissed to Cordoba, at the top of the steps.

“Take it easy,” she admonished. “We don’t know what the hell is waiting up here.”

I felt a slight annoyance. “Well, we certainly know what the hell is following us. I’m the one at the back here.”

“Will you keep your voice down,” Batfish hissed at me.

Smith and Wingate also flashed me an angry glance. Jimmy looked extremely worried as he tightly gripped his shotgun.

Cordoba pushed open the door at the top of the staircase at the same time a furious banging noise erupted against the thin wall paneling behind me. I heard undead hands rip and tear at the plywood paneling. It wouldn’t take them long before they discovered the doorway and wrenched it open.

Chapter Fifty-Four

I felt like shoving the rest of the party further up the steps and hurriedly bundling them through the doorway. Batfish was directly in front of me and I kept glancing behind me to check the door in the wooden panel wall hadn’t been breached.

Cordoba finally stepped through the doorway with the others following her. I moved up the staircase
, waiting for the door to burst open to my rear at any second. I shut the door behind me and saw it had a silver locking latch by the jamb. I quickly engaged the lock and looked through the vertical strip of safety glass above the door handle. The broken chairs I’d placed beside the door below us whizzed across the floor and the flimsy door flew inward. A swarm of rotten hands and faces tumbled through the doorway into the corridor.

“They’re right behind us,” I said, turning around to face the room we now were gathered in.

The room was some kind of rest room for the store staff. It was dimly lit by a window to the left and a small skylight in the ceiling above us. White countertops and matching closets ran around the perimeter of the walls and a kettle still sat by the stainless steel sink near the window. A few blocks of chairs faced each other, either side of a low standing coffee table, positioned on the right side of the room. The whole area stank of damp and rotting carpets.   

Another three doors positioned in an alcove stood directly in front of me. The two on either side of the center door were marked as ladies and gentlemen’s restroom while the one in the middle had a sign at the top marked ‘office.’

There didn’t seem to be any back door and no obvious exit.

“Okay, how do we get out?” I whispered.

“Let’s have a quick scout around,” Smith muttered. “How secure is that door behind you, Wilde?”

I turned and
glanced through the safety glass panel and saw a sea of gnarled faces stumbling up the steps. I rocked the door in its frame to test for sturdiness.

“It’ll keep them out for a while but it won’t last forever,” I said. “Besides, we can’t stay up here for the rest of time.”

“I know that,” Smith spat, studying the skylight. “We won’t fit through that window.”

Wingate rushed for the ‘Ladies’ room while Cordoba and Batfish checked out the office. Jimmy opened the door to the men’s bathroom.  

I moved to the window by the sink and glanced around the frame at the opening mechanism. I clicked open the handle and pushed the pane. The damn thing opened horizontally and only a few inches. A blast of cold air gusted into the room. 

“We could always shoot out or smash the glass,
” I suggested.

“What’s below us out there?” Smith asked, hugging himself. He was obviously st
ill feeling a little sick and feverish.

I peered through the small gap
, glancing downwards. A red brick wall surrounding a small parking lot was directly below the window, a drop of around twenty feet. Not an impossible distance to negotiate but a tricky maneuver to carry out with no guarantee of coming through it unscathed. A sprained or broken ankle would only hinder our escape and subsequent trek across the countryside.

“It’s a possible escape route,” I said, closing the window. “But it’s a fairly long drop out there.”

Smith approached and took a look himself. “Hmm,” he muttered, almost certainly considering the implications of jumping from the window.

The door to the corridor rattled in its frame and hands and gray faces pressed against the strip of safety glass
as the zombies pushed en masse up the short staircase. The snarls, shrieks and yells reverberated around the corridor and throughout the restroom.

“We can’t go back that way, for sure,” I said
, pointing at the safety glass window. I wasn’t even sure how long that strip panel was going to stay in place.