The Left Series (Book 4): Left In The Cold Page 5

  The room was lighter than the rest of the house and I noticed the window pane was free of snow on the outside. I remembered Gera clearing the snow from the glass when we stood outside the front door.

  “That was me and my family.”

  I turned around and the guy watched me with wild, wide eyes, studying the photos on the wall.

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “All dead,” he croaked and glanced downwards. “All gone now, even the poor dog.” He seemed far away and lost in his own thoughts.

  I struggled to recognize the emaciated creature standing in front of me compared to the smiling father and husband in the photographs. I felt a pang of sympathy and sorrow for the guy and for what the world had become. Contagious diseases and particularly this current, undead malady had a cruel sense of humor. Loved ones came back from the dead and tried to kill you. How spiteful this virus was. Not only had people mourned the loss of their friends and families but they had to kill them all over again once they reanimated.

  “Who are you?” I asked him.

  The guy didn’t answer for a few seconds and seemed as though he was in some kind of depressive trance. I glanced nervously at Smith, who leaned back against the wall and returned a slight shrug.

  “They used to call me Bill,” the guy muttered. “Bill McLeod. I used to be a farmer until everything died.” He suddenly looked scared and turned to the window. “They’ll be coming soon. No doubt about that.”

  “There’s nobody there, Bill,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “There’s nobody left in the village. You said so yourself.”

  “Who were the bodies in that other room?” Cordoba asked. “Did you kill them?”

  Bill’s head snapped around to look at her. “I had to, lassie,” he mumbled. “They would have eaten me, so they would. The police came around to try and arrest them for biting other folk but they bit him too. I had to put an end to him as well. All got very messy. But that was a long time ago now.” His eyes glazed over and he returned to his trance like state once again. “How many years have I been here?”

  I glanced at Smith again. He made a twirling motion with his finger around his temple.

  “The guy is a serial fruit-loop,” Smith said. Wingate slapped Smith’s thigh with the back of her hand.

  “The epidemic has only been around for about eight months, Bill,” I tried to explain.

  He turned to me with an incredulous expression on his face. “Eh? No, it’s been years, you.”

  “It probably feels longer to him because he’s been on his own for so long,” Wingate whispered. “I’ll take a look at him when he’s calmed down a bit. It’s probably a big shock for him to see some other people.”

  “Well, I don’t know about you guys but I’m going to have a drink,” Smith said and made his way across the room to a glass fronted cabinet. He opened the door and took out a green bottle of Scotch and a couple of tumbler glasses. “Anybody going to join me?” Smith asked as he poured himself a generous measure of whisky.

  “Go on then,” I sighed. “I could do with a slug to warm me up.”

  “It’s just a fallacy that alcohol warms you up, you know, Brett,” Wingate said.

  “Who gives a crap?” Smith scoffed, pouring out a second measure of Scotch. “Wilde Man and me owe a lot to alcohol for keeping us alive this long. Some of our best moments have been when we’re stinking-assed drunk.” He flashed me a wink as I took the glass.

  Despite what Wingate said, the whisky did seem warming and I enjoyed the burn on my lips and as it slipped down my throat.

  “Just don’t overdo it, guys,” Wingate warned. “We need to keep our wits about us.”

  “I’ll have a small one,” Batfish said. Smith poured her a measure and handed her the glass.

  “What about you, Wild Bill?” Smith asked the strange guy. “Are you going to take a slug of the hard stuff?”

  Bill didn’t answer. He was too busy staring out of the front bay window.

  “See? I told you they’d come over here if they saw you,” he muttered, pointing towards the glass frame.

  “What the hell is he talking about now?” Smith groaned.

  “I think he’s serious,” Cordoba whispered. “There are people moving around out there.”

  Chapter Ten

  Cordoba stared out of the front window alongside Bill. Gera stood with his back to the wall next to the glass panes and peered out into the snowy street.

  “He’s right,” he hissed. “There’s a bunch of zombies out there and they’re all heading this way.”

  “Shit, where the hell did they come from?” Smith sighed and downed his Scotch. He banged the glass down on the cabinet shelf and tugged his M-16 off his shoulder.

  I necked back my own drink but Batfish didn’t bother touching hers. We placed the glasses on the cabinet shelf and moved to the window. A shuffling crowd of around thirty undead stumbled through the snow towards the front of Bill McLeod’s house. The walking corpses looked a pitiful bunch. Skinny, almost skeletal arms reached out in front of them and their pathetic moans were slightly audible above the howl of the freezing wind. Most of them were clothed in nothing more than rags and the flesh on their faces was gray and partially rotten away. The collection of decaying ghouls had been dead for some time. The epidemic in Killnockie had obviously wiped out the entire population bar one, a long time since.

  “I told you they’d come,” Bill reiterated. “I’ve been hiding from them for years now. If they see you, they’ll stay around for ages. They saw you at the front door and they knew you came in here. You can’t get rid of them easily. They were my neighbors when they were alive but now they’re all dead but they keep coming back. They won’t go away.”

  “Somebody shut him up,” Gera spat. “And get him out of sight of the window. He’s attracting more attention to us.”

  Wingate led Bill away from the window and stood beside us, next to the cabinet standing against the wall. Cordoba ducked out of sight by the window on the opposite side to Gera.

  “Can they get inside?” Batfish hissed.

  “They won’t try and get in here as long as they don’t see us,” Smith said quietly.

  Smith, Wingate, Batfish, Bill and I huddled in the shadows next to the cabinet in the corner of the room. The first skeletal ghoul reached the bay window and thumped its hands on the glass panes. Cordoba winced and let out a small whimper of terror. The partially rotten skull of the creature pressed against the window as though it was trying to catch our scent inside. I caught sight of two hollow eye sockets and a thin face that looked as though the gray skin had been pulled tight around the features. Two more zombies joined the first, compressing themselves against the wooden frame. Their hands slapped against the glass and their monotonous moans echoed through the room.

  Spot nudged his head out of the harness around Batfish’s waist and emitted one shrill bark at the potential intruders at the window.

  “Shh!” Batfish hissed, grabbing the dog’s jaws.

  More zombies shuffled by the window and barged the front door. Others stumbled through the garden and disappeared from view. A few more undead stood on the road outside, scuffling their feet in the snow and slowly moving backwards and forwards by the front windows.

  “They’ll be out there for ages now,” Bill whispered. “They don’t forget easily, you know.”

  Wingate gripped his shoulder tightly. “We have to keep quiet, Bill. Do you understand?”

  He nodded but looked both scared and confused.

  I heard a long moan echoing through the hallway outside the living room. The sound almost froze the blood in my veins.

  “Ah, shit! They’re through the back door,” I hissed. I moved quickly to the door and pushed it to, so I could peer through the slight crack.

  “We have to get out of here,” Batfish wailed. “Once they’ve found a way in, they’ll be all over us.”

  “We can’t fight them off inside the house; it’s too sma
ller space,” Gera spat. “We need to get out in the open and put some distance between us.”

  “Maybe these ones at the front of the house will follow the rest of them around the back and we can slip out of the front door,” Batfish suggested.

  “What about the packs?” Cordoba whispered. “We left them in the kitchen. We can’t leave without that gear.”

  Bill abruptly came out of his shell again and his eyes widened but his face screwed in anger. “Where’s my hammer?” he yelled. “I need my hammer to fight the bastards.”

  “Be quiet, Bill,” Wingate hissed. “They’ll hear you.”

  “I need my hammer,” Bill barked, in an even louder tone.

  Batfish and I exchanged worried glances.

  “Give the guy his god damn hammer back,” Smith groaned. “Before he yells the place down and gets us all killed.”

  Cordoba picked up the hammer she’d put down in the small space between the wall and the side of the cabinet. She handed the heavy tool to Bill. He looked intently at the claw end of the hammer as he gripped the rubber coated handle.

  “The bastards have come into my house!” Bill abruptly roared, taking us all by surprise. He shrugged off Wingate’s attempts to try and control him and hurtled towards the doorway with the hammer raised above his head.

  For one horrific moment, I thought he was going to slam the hammer down onto my head as I crouched by the door, holding the Beretta beside my head and pointing to the ceiling. I went to lower the gun and point it at Bill but he barged me out of the way and tore open the door.

  “Bill, no,” Wingate screeched. “Don’t go out there.”

  But Bill wasn’t listening to anybody, let alone following their advice. The gray blankets fell away from his body, revealing a stained, white sweatshirt that was almost yellow and a pair of ripped, blue jog pants. He charged through the hallway towards the kitchen, screaming at the top of his voice.

  I composed myself and stepped out of the living room into the hallway, watching Bill disappear into the near darkness.

  “He’ll get ripped to pieces if he goes out there,” Wingate shrieked, bundling into the hallway after Bill.

  Smith grabbed her by the wrist and stopped her from moving further forward.

  “Let him go,” he growled. “Don’t put yourself in danger for that whack-job.”

  We heard sounds of a scuffle from the kitchen beyond the dark hallway. Heavy items scraped across the floor, glass shattered and bumps and bangs reverberated from the room. Gera, Cordoba and Batfish joined us as we edged towards the closed kitchen door. We all had our weapons drawn and at the ready. Cordoba and Wingate shone their flashlight beams further down the hallway. We could still hear Bill screaming and yelling the odd obscenity.

  “Don’t fire blind,” Gera warned. “We don’t want to end up shooting each other.”

  Cordoba reached out and turned the kitchen door handle then pushed it open. Bill struggled while battling several zombies inside the room. Two skeletal bodies lay on the flag stone floor with bloody clumps and tufts of matted hair beside their heads. Bill had managed to dispatch two of the undead and was in the process of terminating another, brandishing the hammer in a rapid up and down motion, smashing a thrashing female across the side of her skull. He was doing his best to dodge the clutches of at least another dozen zombies in the kitchen but their bony fingers tore at his skin.

  “He’s getting massacred,” Wingate yelled.

  Bill’s face was a sweaty mask of aggression and anger. His long hair flopped around the sides of his head and he gritted his teeth as he swung the hammer in swift looping arcs. Bill seemed resigned to going down while fighting to protect his property. The one thing he had left.

  Chapter Eleven

  Gera fired a couple of well aimed, single shots with his M-16 rifle and two zombies dropped the floor beside the back door. Bill was surrounded by his former neighbors and they were all intent on getting a piece of him. We couldn’t get a clear shot at the zombies around him for fear of hitting Bill himself.

  A few of the undead milling around the kitchen noticed us in the doorway and ambled towards us. Smith fired and took out two zombies with accurate headshots. I leveled my M-9 and took out a skinny female who came too close. We edged further into the kitchen, trying to get to Bill. Wingate and Cordoba both fired their weapons, dispatching two more zombies but more pushed their way through the back door. The initial musty stench in the kitchen was now masked with cordite from discharged weapons.

  Bill was floundering. His initial exuberance at defending his home was draining away with fatigue. He could hardly raise the hammer and his blows proved ineffectual against the attacking crowd of undead.

  “Get over here, Bill,” Wingate shrieked above the incessant moans and throaty rasps from the hungry flesh eaters.

  Bill was backed against the kitchen closets and desperation crept into his demeanor. He whimpered as he swung the hammer and a tear rolled down his filthy cheek. A small, female zombie avoided the hammer and gripped hold of Bill’s arm. He didn’t have the strength to push the female ghoul away; she lurched forward and sunk her teeth into the side of his neck. Bill screamed in pain as blood sprayed from the wound and the female zombie snaffled at the taste of fresh meat, shaking her head in frenzy while tearing at the flesh.

  “Oh, no, Bill,” Wingate wailed and fired a shot at the attacking female. Her head jerked sideways, brown blood and brain matter splattered against the kitchen closet behind her. The female zombie slumped to the floor but the others surrounding Bill went ape shit at the sight and smell of fresh blood. Bill wailed as dead hands seized him and gnarled fingers tore into the wound on his neck.

  Smith leveled his M-16 to his eye line and fired one shot. The round pierced Bill’s forehead and he crashed backward against the closets.

  “He was dead already,” Smith huffed. “No point watching the poor bastard suffer.”

  The remaining zombies latched onto Bill’s corpse, gorging themselves on the blood and brains spilled from the gunshot wound in his skull. They began taking more bites from his face and neck. The six of us fanned out in a line across the kitchen floor, facing the back door and kept firing our weapons until every last one of those diseased motherfuckers was lying dead on the flag stone floor.

  We didn’t waste any shots and spray the kitchen with numerous rounds, the ammunition was too precious. We waited a beat when the last of the undead dropped, to check if any more came through the back door and for the cordite fog to clear.

  I felt kind of numb after the mass shooting, as I hadn’t had to endure a battle like that for a few months. I also felt sad and sorry for Bill but he really had no life cooped up on his own in his festering little house. He was simply existing, waiting to die alone. Maybe we’d spurred him on and jogged a part of his brain that had been slumbering since his self imposed exile from a diseased world. If there was such a thing as Heaven, then Bill would be welcomed there now, reunited with his wife and daughter and his dog.

  We collected up the backpacks and took a thirty minute respite in the living room, just to allow the adrenalin rush to pass and to rest up. Smith, Batfish and I indulged in another slug of Scotch as we sat on the sofa. We tucked into some of our food rations, which consisted of salty, dry biscuits but I didn’t have the stomach for anything heartier. Batfish fed Spot one of the cans of soup we’d found in Bill’s kitchen and the little guy wolfed it down, even though it was cold. She poured the soup into a dish we’d found in one of the closets and left it on the floor when the dog was finished. Spot did his business in the corner of the room after his meal and I simply left it there. It didn’t make any difference to Bill now.

  The sun had begun its descent across the horizon when we left Bill’s house, back outside into the biting cold. A few of us needed bathroom facilities so we broke into the house next door. The place was deserted and in a better state than Bill’s, although the sink and toilet had no running water or flusher.

  Smith
, Gera, Wingate and I stood in the hallway of the second house, studying the map in the hallway while we waited for Batfish and Cordoba to finish up in the bathroom. Killnockie was such a small place that it wasn’t even listed on the tourist orientated diagram of the area. We had to roughly guess where we were but Gera was good at map reading, gauging our approximate location by the position of the sun and using a compass he carried.

  “So, where are we headed?” I asked, slightly worried we were going to be left out in the open at nightfall. Staying in the village of Killnockie was an option but nobody wanted to after the fiasco with Bill.

  “If we keep heading towards Glasgow, we’re bound to find another abandoned inn or hotel somewhere along the way,” Smith said. “Hopefully, we can find a place to hole up until the snow clears in a month or so.”

  “Isn’t it a bit dangerous to head towards populated areas?” I asked. “We haven’t exactly had a good track record in any city we’ve visited in the past.”

  Smith shrugged. “It’s a fair point, Wilde Man but where there are people, there’s shelter and food. Right now, we don’t have enough supplies to last more than a few days and we sure as shit can’t camp outside with our asses hanging out in this cold.”

  “We’ll be okay if we can find the equivalent of the Glenross Hotel,” Gera chipped in.

  “Exactly,” Smith agreed. “There must be a thousand of those kinds of places around the city limits of Glasgow. It’s Scotland’s biggest city, for Christ’s sake.”