The Left Series (Book 1): Leftovers (12 page)

“Looks like this lard ass has been eating all night,” Smith hissed. He aimed his pistol and fired. The top of the large zombie’s head lifted off and splattered against the driver’s window. He slumped in his seat and the morsel of flesh he was chewing dropped from his mouth and plopped onto the cab floor.

“How are we going to move this thing?” I asked.

I looked over the truck. It was a bright red Coronado with a huge chrome grilled front. The cab sat at a ninety degree angle to the long, white trailer. Several vehicles were buried beneath the trailer’s wheels and the bed itself.

“These vehicles are stuck solid under there,” I said.

“Everything has a breaking point,” Smith gave me that smile and wink again.

“I get nervous when you do that.”

Smith walked around the cab to the passenger door and wisely stepped back before he opened it. The huge zombie’s weight caused him to topple from the passenger seat and land with a noisy smack onto the blacktop. I noticed a bus lying on its side ten feet from the truck’s passenger door. Smith moved to one of the vehicles behind us and took a rug hanging over the back seat. He put the rug over the bloody interior of the cab. I grabbed a floor mat from another car and covered the passenger seat. We sat in the cab looking out over the mass wreckage and each lit a smoke.

“Let’s see if this bastard will fire up,” Smith said.

He turned the key and white smoke belched from the twin exhausts at the side of the cab, as the big six hundred horse power engine roared into life. He turned the wheel of the truck away from the trailer causing a crescendo of creaking and grinding metal from the wrecked cars underneath.

The truck slowly crawled forward and the vehicles jammed under the axles of the truck crunched under the weight. Glass popped and shattered and the noise of grating metal sounded like someone was scraping their nails down a huge blackboard. Smith carried on the slow grinding crawl. He knocked vehicles out of the way, trying to clear a path. The truck lurched sideways and the cab titled so I was leaning against the door as we drove over the top of some kind of Sports car. We came back down onto the blacktop with a crash. Something popped in the engine and steam spewed from the grill, billowing up in front of the wind shield.

Smith checked in the mirror and decided he was clear of the pile up. He pulled the truck over to the side of the road as the engine spluttered and died.

“I think that ought to do,” he said and gave the steering wheel a slap of appreciation.

I opened the cab door and hopped out back onto the road. A huge truck sized hole gaped right through the middle of the pileup. I didn’t like the look of some of the vehicles balancing on top of one another. They looked as though the briefest gust of wind would send them crashing down.

“That doesn’t look too good,” I nodded at the teetering cars.

“Nor does that,” Smith said.

I turned to look at what he meant and saw what I can only assume was the remainder of the crash victims, about a hundred of them. All staggering towards us with the familiar undead gait.

Chapter Fourteen

“Quick, we better get back to the camper van,” Smith barked.

I wasn’t going to argue. If the zombies came through the opening we had just made, we’d be trapped on the road between the pile of wrecked cars and Brynston, with the undead squeezing us from both directions.

We ran between the piled up vehicles and through the gap where the truck had been stuck. Smith was already yelling at the others to get back in the VW. Eazy must have realized what was going on and ran back to the camper van. He started the engine and told the others to get in. Smith and I got to the side door of the camper just as Rosenberg was climbing in.

“Zombies,” I shouted. “Lots of them, on the other side of this wreckage wall.”

“We got no choice but to try and cut right through them,” Eazy said.

We agreed. Eazy swerved around the debris scattering the road and navigated the camper van through the gap. I winced as we drove passed the tilting cars on top of one another. The VW scraped down the side of one of the cars on our right. I looked out the side window and watched the pile of cars tilt back and forth. Thankfully, none fell on us.

Donna gasped when she caught sight of the crowd of approaching undead. Many of them struggled to move with ease as their legs, necks and spines had been mangled amongst the twisted vehicles in the mass car wreck. They lumbered forward like a procession of maimed circus freaks, sporting horrendous injuries.

“Just keep going steady,” Batfish sighed.

I looked around and was relieved to see Rosenberg was tightly clutching our new acquaintance, the pup I’d named Spot. Luckily for him, he’d managed to crawl out of the right side of the wreckage.

Eazy kept up a speed fast enough to prevent the zombies catching a hand hold on the vehicle. He swung the wheel left and right without losing control. If we rolled the vehicle we were dead, no question. The width of the five lane Interstate allowed him to steer between the groups of undead. They moaned in frustration as we streaked through their ranks as gnarled nails tore at the van’s paintwork.

The VW zipped passed the crawlers, the ones who had no legs or who were too badly mangled to walk. I rubbed my face and felt a sense of relief as the morning sun beamed down onto the clear, open road.

“How far is it to New York?” Donna turned her head and asked. I couldn’t remember her speaking to me before.

“It’s roughly eighty miles from Brynston, so I reckon we’ve got another seventy to go,” was my guess. I didn’t know how long we’d driven when I dozed off but Smith didn’t disagree and probably knew the roads better than me.

“In normal circumstances, it would take about an hour and a half from here. Maybe two if there’s heavy traffic,” Smith murmured.

“But these aren’t normal circumstances, right?” Rosenberg said.

Smith shook his head. “You got that right.”

“So, tell me again about this flu?” I asked. Everything had happened so quickly I hadn’t given the cause of the world going to hell much thought. “It’s two kinds of flu mutating?”

Rosenberg nodded. “It’s a mutation of avian flu and swine flu, somehow keeping the host in an animated state.”

“How the hell did it all come to this?” I said to myself.

“We’re going to need gas before we hit The Big Apple,” Eazy said from the front. “We’re going to be running on fumes pretty soon.”

I sighed. I knew every stop we made was a risk. The image of my father sat aboard some luxury yacht in Battery Park Harbor played through my mind. Our journey seemed like trying to get to Mars without a space ship. I didn’t know how many millions of undead packed the streets and surrounding towns of Manhattan Island. It was one of the most densely populated places on the planet and we were going straight towards it. Into the lion’s den. I thought at that moment, not all or any of us would make it there alive.

“There’s a small gas station just off a turning a couple of miles down the road,” Smith said, pointing to the right. “I used to use it on the way back to New York if I’d been out of state. The gas was always cheaper than the big chain owned places. The old boy who owns the place runs his power off a generator so as long as that’s still useable, we’ll be okay to pump gas into the tank. I wonder if the old buzzard’s still alive.”

“Just be sure to let me know in plenty of time when to turn off,” Eazy said.

The VW camper trundled along at a steady fifty miles an hour. I was enjoying the ride and the break from running away from or fighting zombies. It seemed like the lull before the storm. Rosenberg dozed with Spot following suit on his lap.

“Look, what’s that over there?” Batfish asked with a tone of interest, not terror for once. “Slow down a bit, Eazy.”

Eazy let his foot off the gas. I craned my neck and looked at where she was pointing. Donna, Batfish and Eazy all stared out of the windows to our left, across to opposite traffic lanes. A male and a female stood beside a stationary, battered white Datsun in the middle lane. They frantically flapped their arms at us in a motion that universally means to slow down. Their vehicle pointed towards Brynston. Eazy braked harder and we studied the young couple across the Interstate. They were definitely not in the throes of the infection and didn’t appear to be suffering injuries of any kind.

“What do you think they want?” Eazy snarled like he didn’t want to make contact with the strangers.

“Let’s go and see,” Smith said and opened the camper’s side door.

I hopped out with Smith. Donna and Batfish followed. I just wanted to talk to somebody else and get as much information about what was going on. We walked over to the central barrier and the two on the opposite side did the same.

The male was a young man in his early twenties, dressed in a retro Freddy Kruger t-shirt and dirty, baggy blue jeans. The female was the same age, with rosy cheeks and dressed in a flowery, kind of hippy style brown dress.

“Hi, thanks for stopping,” the female said. I recognized her accent as well spoken English. “I’m Julia and this is Kell.” She gestured towards the male. She smiled and held out a hand over the barrier for all of us to shake.

We introduced ourselves with brief handshakes.

“We’re on our way out of the state and run out of gas, man. Bummer,” Kell spoke in slow monotonous tones, as though he was stoned. He rubbed the week old stubble on his chin and spat on the blacktop. “Can you give us a ride to a gas station?”

Batfish nodded. “We’re on our way to one now. The turning is not far away.”

“Cool!” Kell smiled. “Have any of you dudes got a cigarette?”

I gave him a smoke, feeling temporarily generous. “Where you headed?”

“Allentown,” Kell said, breathing out smoke. “I got an uncle who runs a farm over there. I spoke to him yesterday and he seems to be doing okay. We headed out of Union City last night. Things are pretty fucked up down there. We got out just in time.”

“We’re headed into New York. We’re going to try to get to the harbor.”

Kell whistled and pulled the skin back over his top lip. “I heard it was bad down there in the City, man.”

“I was hoping the infection wouldn’t have spread so fast,” I said. “I thought maybe the cops or the army could have contained things in the City.”

“It was worse. We watched it on TV. No one could stop the spread. It was a massacre, dude. The infected just ran through everybody.”

“That’s kind of how it was in Brynston,” I lamented. I imagined huge crowds of undead packing the Manhattan streets to the point of standstill. One live person would be like a seal pup swimming amongst a shoal of hungry Great White Sharks.

I went on to tell Kell about the crowd of zombies and the wreckage behind us. They were headed that way on the Interstate and I warned him not to venture into Brynston. Julia came over after to talking with Batfish and Donna for a while.

“I couldn’t help notice you have an English accent,” I said. “I mean English from England not English American.” I laughed nervously and my face flushed slightly. She had a cute face with a slightly turned up nose and mousey brown hair, flopping either side of her bright green eyes.

“Oh, yes, I’m from Portsmouth in Hampshire, originally,” she smiled. “Daddy moved his business over here about three years ago.”

She seemed to be too bright and intelligent to be hooked up with a loser like Kell. I helped her over the barrier and felt slightly embarrassed when my helping hand brushed against her right breast. I didn’t apologize and pretended it didn’t happen. The wiry Kell leapt over the barrier and we all squeezed into the camper. Batfish introduced the two new arrivals to Eazy and Rosenberg. Julia was smitten with Spot as I knew she would be. I decided I’d try and find out about her relationship with Kell a little later.

The VW seemed to struggle with the extra weight. I wondered how they were going to get gas from the garage back to the car. They were taking a risk if there were no jerry cans available. Five minutes later, Smith pointed to the turning. I noticed he’d been quiet since Julia and Kell had come on the scene.

Eazy guided the VW off the Interstate. “How far is it from here, man?”

“Not far. About five miles,” Smith replied.

“Five miles?”Eazy looked down at the fuel gauge. “I just hope we make five miles. And I hope this asshole actually has some gas.”

He had a valid point. We’d taken for granted this old world gas station of Smith’s was just going to be business as usual with a smile and the tip of a hat. What we hadn’t questioned was whether the place still had any gas or was crawling with zombies.

Chapter Fifteen

Eazy kept glancing anxiously at the fuel gauge on the VW dash as we crawled along the back road. Pine trees and wooden fences lined the edges of the two way lane. I saw a few cows dotted around a field to our left and couldn’t help imagine a herd of zombie bovines stomping around the country side. The animals seemed unaware of the changing world and shuffled around amongst the grass.

The sky was clear blue and an early haze shimmered across the road. Another glorious day in paradise.

The VW trundled around a left hand bend and Smith pointed out the small gas station.

“Is that it?” Eazy snorted.

The garage was a wooden clapboard structure, looking as though it was built during the Civil War. The building had once been painted white but only flecks here and there remained. A long wooden, barn-type structure stood behind the garage. We pulled alongside two red, hand painted gas pumps outside the dilapidated construction. I looked for any signs of life but couldn’t see through the cracked and dusty windows. Eazy killed the motor and nervously looked over the building.

Smith slid back the door and got out with Kell and me hopping out after him. The place had a creepy feel as if someone was watching us from inside those dark, dirty windows. I drew my Beretta just in case.

“Hey cool. Nice piece, man,” Kell looked wide eyed at my hand gun. “Can I have a look?”