Left In The Dust Read online

  LEFT IN THE DUST

  By Christian Fletcher

  Copyright 2017 by Christian Fletcher

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Christian Fletcher.

  Also by the author –

  Leftovers

  Left Alone

  Left On The Brink

  Left In The Cold

  Left On The Run

  Left On An Island

  Left Amongst The Corpses

  Before The Dead Walked

  Green Ice – A Deadly High

  War Memorabilia

  Operation Sepsis

  Kindle Author Page US: Amazon.com: Christian Fletcher: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

  Kindle Author Page UK: Amazon.co.uk: Christian Fletcher: Books, Biogs, Audiobooks, Discussions

  Contact me on Facebook: Christian Fletcher Novels | Facebook

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/CFletcherNovels

  The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “There's a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head

  There's devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands

  You need one more drop of poison and you'll dream of foreign lands”

  Shane MacGowen

  CHAPTER ONE

  I screamed like a man who is about to die because ironically, I thought I was about to breathe my last in a few seconds time. The noise that came out of my mouth was from deep within my lungs and sounded intensely emotional and totally horrible. I didn’t even know I was capable of producing such a ghastly squeal. It seemed like an alien sound to me but that wasn’t my immediate concern. The plane we were traveling in was about to nosedive into a vast expanse of sandy wasteland.

  I gripped the armrests at the side of my seat and threw the earphones off my head. I was listening to Iggy Pop & The Stooges ‘No Fun’ on the small, digital music player but had to cut the track short. Shit! I sat in the front seat of the plane but could see into through into the cockpit beyond the open door in front of me. The nose of the plane rose slightly but we still flew too close to the ground for my liking. The shrieks and petrified yells of the rest of the people onboard the aircraft rose in volume all around me. We had over two hundred passengers onboard and everybody looked scared.

  Emilio Dante, the former Columbian Air Force pilot and former member of the armed militia we’d encountered back on the Caribbean island of Saint Miep sat in front of the plane’s various control panels and steering gear. He jabbered constantly, throwing up his hands in a gesture of fear and frustration. He turned to Smith sitting in the seat beside him and I noticed sweat rolling down Dante’s face and his eyes were wide with terror. Smith returned the Columbian’s glare with a simple shrug of his big, square shoulders.

  “Tanque de combustible vacio,” Dante yelled, pointing to a flashing red light on the control panel. “Gas tanks empty,” he shouted in broken English, dabbing a gauge with his finger.

  I heard the engines whining from below the wings but they tended to cough and splutter every few seconds. The wind whistled outside the fuselage and waves of golden colored sand lashed against the side windows.

  “Ah, this is not good,” I wailed, turning to Wingate in the seat beside me.

  Wingate’s complexion had turned to an ashen white color. She looked as scared as I felt.

  “I guess this isn’t the time to say I told you so, Brett,” she yelled. “I told you and Smith this was a bad idea from the word go.”

  Sarah Wingate was right. With hindsight, the whole plan had turned into a bad situation. Like all bad ideas, I thought it was a good proposal in its early stages. But talking about something and actually following the plan through always tends to result in different outcomes and not always for the better.

  Smith had formed the idea to renovate the passenger plane, which was abandoned at the airport on Saint Miep. Things had worked out badly for us on the island and the Russian warship we’d been using as a base was grounded, stuck firm and unmovable with the bows twisted and jammed within an underground reef off the coast of Saint Miep. We’d come under serious attack from the locals after an altercation turned sour. We knew another all out assault from the islanders was inevitable and we didn’t have the resources to continue fighting a guerilla war on the island. The notoriously bad hurricane season was about to blast across the Caribbean too, which would have caused us huge problems onboard the ship as the strong undercurrents beneath the sea possibly would have twisted and torn the ship’s hull against the reef.

  The Russian marine engineers from the ship had somehow cobbled the plane together and under Dante’s supervision, worked tirelessly to service the passenger plane into some kind of working order. Aviation gas had been the problem but we figured we had enough to reach either MacDill United States Air Force base in Tampa, Florida or Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. The reason we’d chosen those bases was Smith and Wingate knew the layout as they’d both served in the military and spent some time on the bases in the past.

  MacDill in Florida was the first choice for landing the plane. The plan was to refit and refuel there and see how the land lay. Rather dumbly and wrapped up in our own haste to get away from Saint Miep, we’d figured we’d reach MacDill and everything would be okay. I had reservations about going back to the US mainland but was outvoted by the others in my party.

  Moving everybody from the stranded warship to the airstrip had been a logistical nightmare. We’d used old trucks and half broken down carts to haul the gear and people across the island, with attacks from the undead and the remaining islanders always a constant threat. We’d managed to clear a passage and had somehow negotiated our way off the island.

  We were over land someplace but it was painfully obvious our navigational skills were severely lacking and we’d drastically overshot the air base at MacDill. And by the looks of the terrain below the plane, we’d drastically overshot the State of Florida too. The landscape didn’t look much like Mississippi either. I knew something had gone horribly wrong when we’d lost sight of the coast some hours earlier and Dante had been complaining to Smith about something on the control panel.

  “Can you bring the plane down safely?” Smith barked at Dante. “Fuck it! We’re going to have to land it right here, wherever the hell we are.”

  Even Smith looked more than a little concerned. His usual nonchalant body language had changed to that of a man under severe stress. And he was right to be anxious. The plane’s engines spluttered again. We were simply running on damn gas fumes.

  “What the hell is going on, Smith?” Wingate yelled.

  Smith swiveled in his seat, turning his head towards us. I knew by the look in his eyes we were in serious trouble.

  “I’ll level with you both,” he said. “The navigation system has gone all to hell and now we’re out of gas. Get prepared for a rough landing.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dante jabbered while he pulled and pushed levers, flicked switches and spun dials. The plane slowed its speed, dropped in altitude and I heard a clunking sound as the landing gear lowered beneath us. The wing on the right side of the fuselage narrowly missed the top of a low standing stone wall with a faded wooden sign hanging beneath it. I didn’t get a chance to read the words
on the sign as it sped by. I was too busy gripping the armrests on the seat anyhow.

  Dante followed the path of some kind of track or trail that had possibly been a road in the past. The wheels bumped against the hard surface then the plane lifted into the air again for a brief moment. The screams and shrieks of my fellow and equally terrified passengers rose to a higher level.

  The interior intercom crackled when Smith picked up the hand microphone inside the cockpit.

  “Everybody, keep your asses in your seats and buckle up tight while we try and bring this sucker down in one piece,” he boomed.

  Not exactly a reassuring air captain’s message but at least it momentarily stopped the screaming. The other passengers seemed to either grit their teeth, hoping for the best or had resigned themselves to dying on impact when we crash landed.

  I felt Wingate tightly grip my fingers while I watched in terror as the sandy track raced by, only a few feet below us. The wings clattered the tops of scrub bushes and sliced through thick, green cactus plants. The tires squealed against a patch of uncovered blacktop on the trail and Dante brought the plane down fully then attempted to slow the speed by hitting the brakes. I silently prayed, even though I wasn’t the slightest bit religious.

  I hoped with every molecule in my body that Batfish would survive the landing. She was somewhere on the plane and she was carrying my unborn child. Things had been frosty between us for a while and we weren’t together or even on good talking terms. If anybody was going to survive whatever was coming in the next few minutes, I hoped it was her and she’d come out of it completely unscathed.

  Luckily, the terrain around us was still flat enough but I saw dust colored mountain ranges and hills further in the distance. We had to stop or we’d slam straight into the solid rock formations at speed.

  Dante must have also noticed the mountains and hills rapidly approaching. He hit the brakes harder but the wheels hit sand on the trail again and caused us to skid. The whole plane spun, slewing sideways through the dust and gravel. People screamed all around me. Wingate and I joined in with the raucous outcry of noise so it was a collective, terrified yell from almost everybody inside the plane.

  The whole aircraft tilted left and right as we skidded sideways across the trail. It felt as through the plane was being shaken from side to side by a huge, unseen hand.

  I realized the wheels and landing craft must have slipped off either side of the trail when I heard a clanking of metal and the cabin dropped down a few feet. A loud scraping sound of metal grating against a solid, hard surface filled the plane before a huge wave of sand and grit washed over the windows along the sides and the cockpit screen, plunging us into semi darkness.

  I closed my eyes and heard my own rapid breathing amongst the screams of the other passengers. Wingate’s nails still dug into the back of my hand and the tops of my fingers. Only after a few seconds did I realize she was hurting me. That was good, as it meant we were both still alive.

  I opened my eyes and saw the wind blow some of the sand and grit away from the windows. A constant bleeping noise emitted from the cockpit and I saw a red light flashing, radiating across the control panels. People yelled and shouted from the seats behind but I blocked out their din. The engines were silent and I felt no sense of movement. I glanced out the side window and saw the landscape remained still. We weren’t moving. The plane had come to a standstill.

  I turned my head to gaze at Wingate. She turned to look at me with wide, frightened eyes.

  “Have we stopped?” she asked.

  I breathed out heavily. “Yeah, I think we have,” I sighed. “You can stop squeezing my hand now.”

  It took her a moment to process what I’d just said. She looked down at our joined hands and immediately released her grip. He nails had made deep, red indentations in the skin on my left hand.

  “Ah, I’m sorry,” she muttered.

  “That’s the least of our worries,” I sighed. “To survive one plane crash is lucky but to survive two is almost phenomenal.”

  “What?” Wingate said, shaking her head. She looked totally shell shocked and her mind was obviously still racing.

  “Remember that time when we crash landed in England?” I asked. “In the military plane?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Wingate said, not quite focusing on what I was saying.

  I looked her over and she seemed physically unharmed. Once I was sure she was okay, I unbuckled my seat belt, hauled myself unsteadily out of my chair and stumbled into the cockpit to check if Smith and Dante were okay.

  Smith sat slumped to the left side of his chair, scowling and rubbing the back of his neck with his left hand. Dante sat bolt upright with both his hands on top of his head. Sweat poured down his face, his eyes bulged from their sockets and he had a fixed grimace contorting his features. A pinging alarm chimed constantly inside the cockpit.

  “You guys okay?” I asked in a concerned tone.

  “Yeah, just a little beat up,” Smith groaned. He glanced across the cockpit and glowered at the red flashing light then at Dante. “Hey, asshole, will you turn that damn alarm off?”

  Dante remained in exactly the same position, staring out of the cockpit window straight ahead of him. He was a nervous guy at the best of times but this latest situation had obviously shot his nerves to pieces.

  Smith unbuckled himself and groaned as he stood up out of the seat. He staggered over to Dante and shook his shoulder.

  “Hey, turn that fucking alarm off, man. We’ve landed in one piece. Get over it.”

  Dante whimpered, reached to the control panel and flicked a switch, turning off the annoying, bleeping alarm and the red light also ceased flashing. He then buried his face in his hands and began to sob.

  “Thank god,” Smith sighed, still rubbing his neck.

  Wingate appeared in the cockpit doorway. Her eyes were clearer and she had a grim but focused expression on her face.

  “Everybody okay in here?” she asked.

  “I wish people would stop saying that,” Smith grunted.

  Wingate flashed him a resentful glare.

  Smith sighed. “Yeah, I’m okay. Maybe got a bit of a stiff neck but nothing a few slugs of bourbon won’t cure.”

  Wingate huffed disapprovingly then nodded at Dante. “What about him?”

  “He seems shaken up but uninjured,” I said.

  “Okay,” Wingate snapped. “I better go check on everybody else and hope you guys who wanted to go on this crazy expedition haven’t managed to kill anybody onboard this crappy plane.” She turned abruptly on her heels and bustled out of the cockpit.

  “What in the hell is her problem?” Smith groaned, reaching in his shirt pocket for a pack of smokes.

  “She’s pissed that we took the plane off Saint Miep,” I sighed. “She said it wasn’t a good idea from the get go.”

  Smith stuffed a cigarette in his mouth and offered me the pack. I took a smoke and glanced around the cockpit.

  “You think this is a good idea?”

  “What?” Smith snapped, snatching back his cigarette pack and flicking the flame on his lighter.

  “Smoking inside a crashed plane,” I said, in a mocking tone.

  “Well, we got no gas left in the tanks so it ‘aint going to catch fire if that’s what you mean, Wilde,” Smith growled, squinting against a curl of smoke drifting up his face.

  I shrugged and lit my own cigarette.

  Smith pointed out through the open cockpit door behind us. “What the hell else were we going to do? Stay on the island and get mowed down in a hail of gunfire or get systematically hacked to death by those damn hostiles or drowned on that damn ship when those storms came? We had no fucking choice, man. We had to get out of there and she can get as pissed as she wants.” He flicked ash from his cigarette tip in an irritated, jerky movement.

  I turned when I sensed movement beyond the door. Three men strode along the aisle between the rows of seats, rapidly approaching the cockpit. All three of them ha
d grim and angry expressions on their faces.

  “Ah, shit, here we go,” Smith groaned, when he noticed the advancing trio. “Here comes a whole heap of fucking trouble.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Thomas McElroy, the former leader of a Northern Irish paramilitary group, the former Russian commander, Colonel Oleg Chernakov and the former Northern Irish politician, Sammy O’Neil all stormed aggressively into the cockpit, forcing Smith and I to back up between the two control seats. The three men were members of the self appointed committee, who decided on the movements and resolutions the whole of our survival group should pursue.

  “What the fuck went wrong. Smith?” McElroy demanded. He leaned forward with his face nearing Smith’s in a rage filled grimace. “You said we were going to land at one of the military airbases on the south coast. Why did we crash land and where the fuck are we now?” He flapped his hand at the cockpit windshield. “Looks to me like we’re in the middle of fucking nowhere, Smith. That’s where.”

  McElroy was a big, powerful guy. We were all buddies normally but this was no normal situation. I felt slightly intimidated by McElroy’s ranting.

  “You’ve managed to fuck it all up again, you idiot,” Chernakov yelled, in Russian accented English. He and Smith had never seen eye to eye and the former soldier was always ready to verbally pounce on Smith.

  “We want to know what happened. What went wrong?” O’Neill interjected. His head jerked forward as he uttered each word. His tone was softer but no less demanding.

  Smith sighed as he exhaled the last puff of his smoke. He crushed the butt out on the carpet under his boot and glanced at the three guys in turn in front of us.

  “What is this, guys? A fucking lynch mob?” Smith sighed, throwing his hands up in the air. “We all agreed to this. We all agreed to take this flight and we all knew the risks before we set out. We all knew the consequences if we stayed on the island.”

  “Yeah, we all agreed to fly to the airbase in Florida or Mississippi, not crashing in the middle of a desert in fuck knows where,” McElroy shouted.