The Left Series (Book 2): Left Alone (25 page)

The anesthetized zombies soon impulsively surged into action. They hauled themselves onto unsteady feet or began to crawl on all fours after us, hissing or squealing like wild animals. The low rumble of what was left of their vocal cords sounded like a background crowd in a movie, chattering, mumbling sounds with no coherent words. The moving bodies closed in, bottlenecking the road. Our progress along the narrow street slowed to nothing more than a plod.

“What the fuck, Smith?” I yelped, batting away a pair of grabbing hands with the lug wrench. “There’s too many of them, we’re surrounded.”

Smith clubbed a decaying, half skeletal zombie out of our way with the side end of the map-come-notice board. The undead mob encircled us, pushing and jostling each other to be first in line for a feeding frenzy. I was guessing most of these ghouls probably hadn’t tasted living flesh for quite a while. The line of undead that had been tailing us from the main road finally began to catch up. A brief and approximate head count of ghouls told me we were faced with around seventy diseased, flesh eaters to contend with. Our only weapons were a lug wrench and a notice board. A rising sensation of extreme fear and panic ran through my body. Our chances of fighting our way out of this situation were grim at best.

Chapter Forty-Two

“Over here,” called a voice from a building to our left. “Get over here, quickly!”

I took a moment to glance around to the source of the voice and saw an elderly man, probably in his mid-fifties with receding gray hair and a pair of small lens spectacles perched on his nose. He stood in the doorway of a long, brick building frantically beckoning us forward.

“Smith, over there,” I barked, nodding at the guy in the doorway.

Smith took a moment to look round and gave me a brief nod. I swung the lug wrench in an arc at the closing zombies and Smith battered rotten heads with the notice board. We desperately tried to clear a path to get nearer to the building. The guy in the doorway prodded some ghouls out of our way with something like a hockey stick. Rotten, black teeth and fingernails gnashed and clawed at me as I fought for my life. I felt a surge of adrenalin as I pushed, shoved and battered my way through the blood thirsty horde.

Smith reached the doorway first and turned back to help me. I was ten feet from the door and wondered how long I could go on pressing forward without some dead fucker’s teeth sinking into me. I kept spinning around in circles, ensuring no ghoul could attack me from behind. Smith and the guy slugged away zombies from the doorway and yelled at me to keep going.

I felt a giant hand grab me by the scruff of the back of my neck and drag me through the doorway. I was glad Smith was as strong as a bull and not for the first time had saved my ass. The other guy slammed the door and bolted it at the top and bottom. I slumped onto the floor breathing heavily from exertion and relief. Dead hands slammed into the door from the outside and a crescendo of moans and frustrated shrieks echoed around the narrow corridor we found ourselves in.

“We’ll have to hurry and get to the upper floor before that lot smash their way in through the door,” the old guy said.

I noticed he wore a clergyman’s white dog collar around his throat, which was tucked inside a navy blue shirt. His face was wrinkled in worry and his brown eyes loomed large when the small lenses were directly in line with his pupils.

Smith hauled me to my feet and we followed the clergyman as he hurried along the gray concrete floor of the corridor. The building smelled of damp and mold and had the soulless vibe of a derelict construction. The cracked window panes were covered from the inside with metal sheeting of some kind. The protective metal covers had small, round holes bored into them at a space of every few inches. The holes were large enough to allow daylight to penetrate the gloomy corridor but small enough to stop the grasping hands of the undead reaching through.

We followed the clergyman up a flight of concrete steps and through a heavy steel door, which resembled a prison type enclosure. He swung the door shut and slammed heavy duty bolts into place at the top and bottom. We stood in another dim corridor with open doors to rooms on each side.

“This way,” said the clergyman, in a raspy voice.

We followed him through a doorway on the right of the corridor. The room was small and cramped with a brown, wooden desk, too big for the room dimensions, sitting in the middle of the floor. Four huge, leather bound armchairs surrounded the desk, with two positioned at each side.

The clergyman moved to the window and looked down at the street below. The upper floor windows weren’t covered with the metal sheets like their lower level counterparts. Grubby netted curtains hung over the window panes to obscure the view from outside.

“That’s good, they haven’t breached the building so far,” he muttered.

He gestured for us to sit in the armchairs and reached into a filing cabinet, retrieving a bottle of Irish whiskey and three small glasses from one of the drawers. Smith and I slumped into the chairs and the soft padding immediately felt comfortable.

“God save us,” the clergyman huffed, as he poured three shots into the glasses.

He set the two other glasses in front of Smith and I then downed the contents of his own shot in one hurried gulp.

“My name is Chaplain Michael Brady, glad you’re both still with us. What brings you two out this far?”

“I’m err…John Smith and this is Brett Wilde. We’re in a kind of sticky predicament.” Smith leaned forward and propped the notice board on its end at the side of the chair. 

“Thanks for saving our…thanks for saving us,” I butted in, trying my best not to use profanities in front of a man of the church.

The Chaplain poured himself another shot and sagged into an armchair opposite us on the other side of the desk. He slid the bottle towards us but we hadn’t yet touched a drop of our liquor. Smith necked his whiskey back in one swallow and I attempted to do the same. The liquid seemed to leave a scorching trail from my mouth to my stomach and I fought the urge to cough. Smith took the bottle and refilled our glasses.

“Mind if we smoke?”

The clergyman smiled and gave a wave of his hand that told us to do as we pleased. Smith took out his packet of smokes and tossed me one before offering the Chaplain the battered pack.

He shook his head. “I haven’t indulged in smoking for nearly thirty years and I’m not going to let this terrible situation start me off again.”

Smith lit us up and Brady reached for a small china dish on top of the filing cabinet for us to use as an ashtray.

“You said you were in a sticky predicament, John,” Brady said. “I think we’ve all had our fair share of those over the last few months. But what kind of situation are you in?”

“The bottom line is, we need some diesel for our boat out on the river, probably a couple of miles back south,” Smith said, then went on to explain our quandary in full detail.

The Chaplain listened, raising his wispy, gray eyebrows in shock at regular intervals.

“These are troubled times,” Brady sighed when Smith had finished his debriefing. “I was a practicing Chaplain on this base for nearly ten years and I never thought I’d live to see anything this bad and so intensely terrifying.”

“Do you still hold onto your faith?” Smith asked.

“Of course,” the Chaplain replied with a nod. “Where there is faith, there is hope and if we give up hope we might as well be dead.”

Smith nodded and flicked his ash into the dish. “What the hell happened here?”

“We were doing okay during the first few months of the outbreak. We barricaded the entrance and had armed guards protecting the exit and entry points. Then one day a few people came out of the family quarters. They were infected. I suppose they hid away and hoped they wouldn’t change.” The Chaplain took a sip of his whiskey. “By that time it was too late. More and more base personnel were bitten and nobody could get out. Eventually, a few survivors decided to make a break for it and shot their way out, destroying the barricades in the process. Order broke down, the gates were left open and unmanned and the remainder of us were left to fend for ourselves. We boarded the buildings up as best we could, made stock piles of food and weapons and tried to keep some of the vehicles and aircraft maintained in case we needed to get away.”

“Can you help us?” I asked.

“There are still a few of us left alive on the base. We live like sewer rats scuttling from one building to another over the rooftops. I can take you to see some of the people who run what’s left of the logistics department. They can get you to the fuel dump.”

“Will they sort us out a vehicle?”

The Chaplain finished his whiskey and smiled weakly. “They are still military men at heart. I hope they help you and as followers of God, I hope they do. But I’m afraid I can’t speak for them. They also have endured terrible hardships and the loss of family and comrades.”

“So, you’re saying they might have a bit of a bad attitude towards us?” Smith sighed, stubbing out his cigarette.

Brady shrugged. “As I say, I hope not.”

Smith downed his whiskey and stood up. “Come on then, Father. Show us the way.”

Chapter Forty-Three

Chaplain Brady led us from his small office, along the narrow corridor to another flight of stairs that led to the building’s flat roof. I was glad to inhale fresh air and be out of the damp, musty building but I was nervous of rooftops since Manhattan, where I led a few of my companions into a dead end death trap.

The adjacent buildings were crudely interconnected with lengths of lumber acting as a bridge between the black asphalt coated rooftops. Brady was surprisingly sprite for an older guy and didn’t seem to hesitate while walking on the narrow timbers. I shuddered when I looked down at the ground below when crossing between the first and second building. The fall would have been around fifty feet. Probably not high enough to cause death but certainly a sprained ankle or broken leg that would ultimately cause me to be left as an immobile, sitting duck for the hungry zombie hordes.

I looked back at the doorway we’d bundled through on the ground floor when I’d reached the relative safety of the second building. The majority of the undead crowd still banged and clawed at the door but some had drifted away, seemingly bored with the fruitless task.

Smith and I followed Brady across the timber bridges until we came to the last building on the street. He crossed the rooftop to the far edge of the building and stood holding the hand rails of the descending fire escape ladder.

“We’ll have to be quick across the open ground,” Brady said in a whisper.

The fire escape ladder agonizingly creaked and groaned as Brady depressed the metal guard rails. I thought every zombie south of New Orleans would hear the screeching mechanism, which was badly in need of some oil or some kind of lubrication. The pit of my stomach lurched upward in a gush of fear and I tasted the whiskey in my mouth once again.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I hissed.

Brady and Smith ignored my plea and carried on down the ladder to the ground below. I gulped down the rising bile and followed them down the metal steps. No zombies were in the immediate vicinity, a small bonus but the undead army still congregated at the front of the first building and could have swarmed at us within a few seconds.

Brady lifted the escape ladder and let it tilt back to head height once we were all on the ground.

“Hurry, this way.”

We followed the Chaplain across an inclined grassy bank to a small parking lot at the rear of the building. He hurriedly rifled through his pants pocket and took out a set of car keys then stopped by a small, blue Hyundai. A couple of undead stragglers milled around the far end of the parking lot and began to stumble in our direction. Their ghastly moans seemed to float across the empty space between us and I wondered how long it would be before more of their cohorts were alerted to our whereabouts. The Chaplain fumbled with the key fob before unlocking the car.

“Get in, quickly,” Brady ordered.

Smith dived into the passenger seat next to Brady and I bundled across the narrow, back seats. The Chaplain hurriedly started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot, avoiding the approaching zombies by swerving the vehicle in a kind of slalom.

“There are two kinds of people left on God’s Earth,” Brady sighed. “The quick and the dead.”

“Amen to that,” Smith agreed.

Brady drove with increasing speed and could certainly handle his small car. He spun around a looping bend that took us onto a different street. Rotting, green faces flashed by my side window, their teeth gnashing only a few feet from my face. Blackened, gnarled finger nails scraped across the window glass and the vehicle bodywork.

“We have to make sure the majority of the crowd doesn’t follow us,” Brady said, glancing in his rear view mirror. “The military guys can pick off a few stragglers but a whole bunch of them will cause a problem.”

Brady drove us through a labyrinth of small side streets of what I guessed was the main administrative quarter and hub of the military base. The undead plodded after the vehicle but their masses soon thinned in number as we sped around the streets. Brady headed deeper into the base for a mile or so and I could see the airfield and runway behind more buildings directly in front of us. I wondered how far military bases spread into the back and beyond. 

“Some of the guys hang around in their squadron buildings,” Brady explained. “They’re fully armed and the buildings are pretty much impenetrable from the outside. They also have a clear view of the base from the front and the airfield at the rear, which gives them a good line of sight of any incoming masses of the dead.”

He slowed the Hyundai as we approached the tall, square shaped squadron building. The ground floor windows were covered with the same metal sheeting we had seen earlier when we first met Brady. The Chaplain stopped the car outside the enforced steel front door and glanced around the vicinity before hopping out of the vehicle.