The Left Series (Book 2): Left Alone (22 page)

“I can’t even swim,” Headlong wheezed. “But you’re going to kill me so I figured I’d be better off taking my chances and try to get to the bank.”

“You’re one stupid motherfucker, Headlong. You know that? If you and your gang would have just left us alone, all of us wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“I’m just the meat man,” Headlong protested. “I move the pork onboard and hump it off the boat in the harbor. I don’t get involved in human cargo.”

I didn’t want to think about what Batfish and the other poor women were going through, stuck in some God awful place with all kind of low-life scum abusing them. This bunch of bastards had used the apocalypse for their own sordid gains.

“Yeah, just going with the flow, huh? Just following orders. We’ve heard that line a few times in history following some kind of shit storm.”

He coughed again and sat up, a long stream of bile dangled from the corner of his mouth.

“Just out of curiosity, where did you get all those pigs from that you and your pals enjoy chopping up?” I asked.

“There’s an abandoned farm not far from the slaughterhouse,” Headlong croaked. “They seem to be breeding just fine on their own. We go up there and feed the pigs every day and they do all the breeding themselves.”

“Happy as pigs in shit,” I sighed. Then a thought occurred to me. “What do you feed them with?”

Headlong hawked his throat and spat on the deck. “At first we used the feed on the farm but when that ran out a few months ago, we started improvising a little. Lots of dead humans around not doing a lot so we figured, why let it go to waste?”

“You’re feeding dead human bodies to the pigs?” My voice raised an octave higher as my brain tried to process just how low these shit kickers could go.

“They don’t seem to care. A pig will pretty much eat anything you put in front of him.” Headlong shrugged as if he thought he was doing the world a service.

“What, dead zombie bodies?”

“Any bodies we could find.” Headlong sniggered slightly, probably encouraged by my revulsion. “We sawed them up and took them in the trucks to the pig pens.”

“You bunch of sick fucks,” I rasped.

“We’re just helping to clear the mess, is all. Pigs don’t get sick eating zombies. Ever seen a zombie pig, mister?”

I’d had enough of the guy’s patter. He was seriously pissing me off. I turned and picked up the bowl of stew.

“I even brought you some chow. That’s what a nice guy I am.”

Headlong chortled and snatched the bowl out of my hand. He slurped down the stew, chewing on the meat with his mouth open. I guessed etiquette wasn’t high on his list of priorities.

“It’s probably cold now thanks to your shenanigans,” I sighed.

“Don’t matter, it’s still good.” Half chewed food flew out of Headlong’s mouth as he spoke. He tossed the bowl on the deck when he’d finished the stew and looked at me, squinting in the flashlight beam with a pained grimace. “Can I get the lady to take another look at my leg? The dressing came off in the drink and it hurts like a bitch.”

“Yeah, okay,” I sighed. “Get up on your feet.” I gestured a rising motion with the rifle barrel.

“You’ll have to help me. I can’t stand easily.”

I wasn’t falling for any of Headlong’s dumb tricks. “Don’t fuck me around. You either get up on your own or I’ll throw you back in the river. I help you up and you’ll try and get this rifle off me.”

“You don’t trust many people, do you?”

“Oh, you think!” I raised my voice another octave. “Do you blame me after what you and your pals have done? Now, get the fuck on your feet.”

Headlong scrabbled on the deck and forced himself upright, hunched and standing with all the weight on his uninjured leg. I grabbed the flashlight and followed him across the deck, keeping the M-16 pointed at him. The walk to the lower deck hatch took a long time and he kept stopping to lean on the upper deck structures.

“Keep moving!” I continuously barked at him, until we were standing in front of the hatch.

I pulled back the door and gestured him inside.

“Smith,” I called down the steps. “I’m bringing this guy down below.”

Headlong leaned against the wall and half slid down the steps to the lower deck. I followed him down and saw Smith aiming the hunting rifle at Headlong’s midriff. The wounded guy slid down the wall at the bottom of the steps and slumped to the floor unconscious.

“What’s going on?” Smith asked, flashing me a glance.

“He bailed over the side before I got back up on deck. I hauled him back onboard with a boat hook. He wanted his leg re-bandaged.”

Tippy stood in front of the small sink in the galley washing dishes. She scuttled over and bent over the prone figure of Headlong.

“Let me take a look at that leg. Oh, dear, he took the bandage off. The wound will become infected if we don’t see to it.”

Smith moved closer and looked over the wound. “It don’t look like the bullet is still in his leg, at least.”

“Be a dear, Franco and go and fetch the first aid kit.”

Smith moved back into the galley and took a medical bag from one of the head-high lockers. I couldn’t bring myself to call the big guy ‘
Franco
.’ He was always going to be Smith to me.

Tippy went to work on Headlong’s leg, cleaning the wound with anti-septic from a bottle and then applying a fresh bandage. Smith and I sat at the table drinking coffee.

“The bone in his leg needs resetting, really,” she muttered. “He’s probably going to walk with a gimp for the rest of his life.”

Headlong suddenly sprang forward and grabbed Tippy under the chin and twisted her head around so her body spun with her back towards him. She toppled and lay on top of him. He quickly reached into his jacket pocket and I saw the glint of a knife blade. Before Smith and I could react, Headlong held the sharp blade of a small hunting knife to Tippy’s throat. We rose from the chairs and reached for the rifles leaning against the sink next to us. Spot barked and went to bolt at Tippy’s attacker. I scooped him up and held him tightly in my arms before he leapt at Headlong.

“Stay the fuck there,” Headlong yelled. “Sit back down or the bitch gets her throat slit, like one of those pigs back at the slaughterhouse.”

Tippy whimpered and Headlong let out a satisfied chuckle.

“Where did he get the knife?”

I flashed Smith a guilty glance. “I don’t know. I didn’t search him.”

“Too damn right you didn’t.” Headlong sniggered again. “Looks like you fellows ‘aint too smart, huh?”

“Come on, man. Let her go.” I knew pleading with the guy was going to be a lesson in futility.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Headlong sneered as he spoke. “We’re still going to New Orleans and I’ll still take you to the Trader’s. But there is one slight change of plan – I’m in charge now. So you boys better get up on deck, haul anchor and stoke up them engines.”

“What?” I muttered.

“That’s right, boy. We’re leaving right now.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Smith and I stood in silence, smoking cigarettes while we raised the anchor. I worried what Headlong was doing to Tippy below deck. He’d taken our rifles and made sure
he’d
searched us before we surfaced up top. We’d left Headlong making himself comfortable on a chair in the galley, resting his feet on the table while pointing the M-16 at Tippy sitting opposite him. I took Spot with us and tied his leash to a hand rail next to the control cabin. 

“What are we going to do?”

Smith shrugged. “We have to go with the flow at the moment. Nothing else we can do. The upside is he didn’t kill us or make us go back to the slaughterhouse. I’d have shot him if he said otherwise.”

“Yeah, but downside is we’re worth some kind of trading commodity. Shit! I could kick myself for not searching him,” I hissed and kicked the boat’s structure in frustration. Yet again, my incompetence had led us straight back into a shitty situation.

“Don’t beat yourself up, kid. We’ll get an opportunity to jump the asshole. He’s got to sleep or take a shit sometime. We got to make sure we hit him when the time is right.”

I nodded and felt slightly reprieved. I was glad Smith was the eternal optimist compared to my half-empty glass outlook. Smith led the way to the control cabin once the anchor was housed. He fired up the engines and crawled slowly forward against the tide.

“I hope we don’t run into anything.” Smith flicked the navigation lights on, illuminating the upper deck with a dim glow of red and green lights on the port and starboard beams.

“How far have we got to go?”

Smith shrugged. “I have no clue but we’ll take it slow and steady as we go. We don’t know what the hell we’re going to run into along the way.”

In the dim light, I searched the lockers in the control cabin for a weapon of some kind. A devious thought crossed my mind and I turned back to Smith who steered the boat.

“We could just bail out over the side and Headlong wouldn’t know anything about it. We could swim to the river bank and let this tub sail on its own until it ran into something or banked on the shore.” I hated myself for saying it.

“That thought did cross my mind,” Smith sighed. “But where would that leave us? We’d be back to square one. No boat, no weapons and no way of finding Batfish in New Orleans.”

I nodded and turned back to the lockers to carry on with my weapon hunt. Smith was right. It was inconceivable to leave Tippy in the hands of Headlong but we still had to overcome him somehow. I hoped we’d manage to disarm him without shedding any blood.

I opened a box and pulled out a pistol with a wide barrel.

“Hey, Smith,” I hissed. “Take a look at this.”

Smith turned and glanced at the pistol. “It’s a flare gun. Any cartridges in the box?”

“Yeah,” I muttered, studying the cartridges. “There are different colored ones.”

“They use different colored flares for different kinds of situations,” Smith explained. “Or they
used
to. Is it loaded?”

I broke open the barrel and saw the chamber was empty.

“Load a cartridge and hide it in this drawer.” Smith opened the drawer to the left of the wheel. “It may come in handy.”

I slid a cartridge into the flare gun, snapped the barrel shut and placed it in the drawer. Smith closed the drawer and flicked off the cabin light. The luminous lights on the control panel projected a ghostly, blue glow throughout the control room.

“I wonder when they took Batfish up the river,” Smith mused. “They must have made the trip when we were fucking around in that marina.”

“How far is the city, best guess?”

Smith let out a small sigh. “It’s got to be around seventy, maybe eighty miles from here, guessing by the time it took for them to deliver the cargo and get back to the slaughterhouse. It will take us until tomorrow to get there. I can’t go much faster than five knots in the dark.” He tapped the speed indicator on the control panel. “It looks like we’re in for a long night, kid.”

We agreed to take turns in steering the boat, changing at two hour intervals so at least whoever wasn’t at the controls could take a snooze in the chair at the back of the cabin.

The hours ticked slowly by and sleeping in the chair proved difficult for anything longer than twenty minutes. Smith gave me a nudge when his two hours steering were finished. I wearily took the wheel and nearly ran into a drifting yacht within the first five minutes. Somehow, I managed to maneuver the Navy boat around the abandoned vessel with inches between us. Headlong graced us with his presence during my shift at the wheel. He hobbled into the control cabin still clutching the M-16 in his right hand and a make shift crutch, comprised of a broom handle in his left. His face looked like a cheap, rubber horror mask in the dim glow of the control panel lights.  

“Just checking where we are,” he said, with a mocking grin. “Look at sleeping beauty over there.” He nodded at Smith sleeping in the chair.

I didn’t reply or acknowledge Headlong’s presence. The last thing I wanted was to have a full blown conversation with the jerk. Thoughts of pulling out the flare pistol and firing it in his face sprung to mind. I thought it best to leave any kind of attack until we were on the deck and Smith was awake and ready.

Headlong seemed slightly bemused by my lack of communication and eventually hobbled away and returned below deck. I hoped Tippy was okay in the hands of such a degenerate, but I assumed that not even an ugly bastard like Headlong would find her sexually attractive and try to molest her.

Smith and I swapped places a couple of times before the sun started to rise. I was glad to see the first flicker of daylight so we could see where the hell we were steering the boat. Smith went down below deck to make us a cup of coffee when I took over the wheel.

“Is Tippy okay down there?” I asked Smith when he returned with two stainless steel, steaming mugs.

“Yeah, she’s asleep in one of the bunks. Old Shithead is still awake and thinking he’s the fucking king down there with his feet on the table and feeding his face.”

I snorted. “The sooner we lose that guy, the better.”

“We’ll bide out time, kid. Just bide our time.” Smith set down my coffee mug on top of the control panel next to the wheel.

An early morning mist hampered my visibility but I steered the boat around a half sunken fishing vessel, with its mast poking out of the water at a forty-five degree angle. A few lone zombies milled around the river banks on both sides. They stopped moving and watched us sail by. A female with matted black hair stepped off the bank and sunk below the surface of the river when we drew alongside her.

“Those things never give up, do they?” Smith muttered, as he watched the female zombie disappear under the water.

“I almost forgot about them with all this other crap going on,” I sighed.

“There’s no infrastructure or law and order no more, kid. What’s fair and what ‘aint doesn’t matter anymore. It’s every motherfucker for himself.” Smith took a sip of coffee. “Whoever’s left alive is either having the time of their lives or holed up, shitting themselves and cowering in the ruins of some overrun town, either waiting to starve to death or be eaten alive.”