The Left Series (Book 4): Left In The Cold (9 page)

I clumped a small, old female zombie around the head with the barrel of my pistol as we evaded her outstretched hands and snarling teeth.
Smith and the others had completely vanished from our direct sight and I hoped they weren’t waiting for us. There was no way we could have followed them to the castle’s main entrance.

The castle walls ran several hundred yards in length and we rounded the corner towards the rear of the structure.
A clump of snow laden trees and a small, circular frozen pond honed into view to our left, as we rounded the castle’s right angled stone wall. More bunches of undead lurked between the trees and the castle’s rear wall. The ground rose in an upward sloping gradient away from the castle perimeter, limiting our route to a narrow pathway.

“Oh, shit, what are we going to do, Brett?” Batfish screeched.

We stopped dead in our tracks. We couldn’t go forward and we couldn’t go back. We were surrounded.

Chapter Thirteen

I looked at the high rising bank to our left and the frozen pond and woods a little behind us, trying to judge which terrain would prove to be the best escape route.
The pluses and minuses of each path whirred around my head. Crossing the pond was a non-starter. The ice would be slippery and may not be solid enough. The woods would be dangerous as we wouldn’t be able to see too far ahead of us but it did provide some cover. The hill to our left would restrict our speed and if we fell, we were dead.

Batfish interrupted my mind calculations.

“There’s a door,” she yelled into my ear.

“What fucking door?” I screamed back.

The disruption in my thoughts had totally scrambled my brain. I didn’t have a clue what to do.
Ice, woods, hill, or zombies - eh
? I didn’t know if it was the coldness freezing up my mind or I had totally choked out.

“A door in the castle wall,” Batfish shouted at me.

I watched, perplexed as she shrugged off my arm embrace, fired on the nearest couple of advancing zombies then ran to an arched shaped, wooden doorway, recessed in the rear castle wall, a few feet to our left. Batfish hammered her fist against the door panels, roaring for somebody to open up.

My frozen brain managed to calculate we had around thirty seconds before the hordes of undead would pounce on us from each side.
The situation seemed hopeless. My time had come and I wasn’t going to be a zombie. It seemed a fitting pathetic, whimpering end for a useless individual like me. I raised the M-9 to my temple, feeling the cold metal against the side of my head.

“Brett, what are you doing?” Batfish screeched.

“It’s time to say goodbye,” I wailed, feeling tears well in my eyes. Maybe it was time to finally bow out of this hopeless scenario. 

Batfish leaned into my face, gritting her teeth. “Not fucking yet,” she hissed.

Her words seemed to pull me out of my desperate state. I lowered the handgun from my head as Batfish battered the door with her shoulder.

“Give me a hand here, will you?” she shrieked at me.

“Yeah, of course,” I muttered, unable to comprehend that I’d almost given up the constant struggle and shot myself in the head. What was I thinking?

I ran at the wooden door and launched myself in my best attempt at a Bruce Lee style Kung Fu kick. The door juddered but didn’t budge and I fell back on my ass into the snow.
So much for my macho heroics.

Batfish hauled me up then fired a couple of shots at the encroaching bunch of zombies. The woods and the frozen pond were now out of the escape route equation. The only thing we could do was to try and barge the surrounding zombies out of the way and make a run for it up the hill to our right.

A bald headed, male zombie, with his face half covered in snow, made a lunge for me. I backed up against the door and fired a shot into the roof of his snarling, open mouth. The bald bastard’s head shattered at the rear of his skull and he toppled backwards into the snow.

“The hill,” I shrieked. “We’ll have to climb that damn hill.” I pointed directly opposite me towards the snowy summit.

We were in the deep shade from the sun, setting on the opposite side of the castle walls. Our only possible escape route would lead us back into the bleak, cold wilderness and impending darkness. We would have to climb the slope and outrun at least fifty zombies before we could even begin to believe we’d reached relative safety.

Batfish fired off round after round at the enclosing horde. Heads shattered and zombies dropped to the frozen ground but still they relentlessly advanced on us. We stood back to back and I blazed away with my M-9, shooting at the snarling, ugly faces threatening to rip me to pieces.

My Beretta clicked with an empty magazine a few seconds after Batfish ran out of ammunition. We hurriedly searched our parker pockets for a spare, full reload. The zombies trundled over their counterparts’ dead bodies closer towards us. Expending all our ammunition had only bought us around ten more seconds before being torn apart and eaten alive. I fumbled with the M-9 magazines, desperately trying to reload with shaking, gloved hands. It was now even too late to try and make a dash for the slope of the hill.

“Oh, shit, Brett,” Batfish screamed. “I can’t even load this fucking gun.”

“Ah, fuck!” I yelled in frustration. I slammed the magazine into the housing, cocked the slide and started blatting away. Three or four zombies fell before I realized our defense was futile. No amount of ammunition was going to blast away the closing undead crowd in time, unless we had a bomb of some kind. Rosenberg’s demise flashed briefly through my mind, blowing himself up on the zombie infested streets of Manhattan.

Batfish screamed and I spun around. A male zombie with wisps of gingery hair and dressed in a torn blue and black checked jacket had hold of her arms, attempting to bite her face. I raised my handgun and fired a single shot through the ghoul’s temple. We were prolonging the inevitable and couldn’t hold out much longer.

“I’m sorry I brought us around this way,” I wailed, in a pitiable attempt at an apology.

Maybe Batfish and I weren’t meant to survive. We’d had a good run for our money
, when most of the world’s population had succumbed to the undead disease. It really was the survival of the fittest and no surprise that the most able-bodied in our party had managed to escape as a unit.

Batfish somehow managed to reload her handgun and fired off a few shots at the closest zombies closing in. I just hoped Spot would somehow escape from under her jacket when we were finally brought down and devoured by the mob of hungry flesh eaters.
The little fellow would have to find his way through the snow and hopefully, he’d link up with Smith and the others.

I fired one shot into the face of an ugly son of a bitch, with a round, bald head and half his throat already chewed away. Baldy fell backwards into his counterparts behind him but the crowd still surged forward, gradually drawing ever closer.

“If you’ve got any ideas, I’m all ears, Brett,” Batfish shrieked. “We’re not going to be able to hold out much longer.”

I thought about suggesting we save the last round in each of our M-9 magazines for ourselves
but bizarrely, another form of intervention occurred.

Chapter Fourteen

The door in the wall bundled open and a guy, weirdly dressed in an olive green parker coat, a black ski mask over his head
and with dark goggles covering his eyes emerged from the entranceway. He held a glass, green bottle with a flaming rag stuffed down the necks in each hand. The guy stood a few feet away from us and yelled something, but I didn’t hear what he said above the continuous moans of the undead.

Batfish and I stopped firing our handguns and stood stock still, overcome by shock at the appearance of the strange looking character.
He flung the bottles onto the ground, one each slightly in front of Batfish’s and my own feet. The glass cracked and the liquid contained inside was ignited by the flaming rags. The flaming liquid spread through the cluster of zombie’s feet and quickly caught fire to their ragged clothing.

The fire didn’t stop or deter the zombies from advancing towards us.
They still pushed onward even though the leaders of the pack were engulfed in flames. I fired two more shots and a couple of the burning corpses fell into the snow. Batfish aimed and fired on the flaming, leading zombie approaching from her direction.

The guy in the ski mask barked something that was muffled by the wooly headgear. He beckoned us towards the open doorway and we quickly darted through the entrance. The guy slammed the door closed and bolted it at the top and bottom. The dull thuds of hands banging on the opposite side of the door reverberated around the small courtyard we stood in.

I glanced at Batfish and we both sucked in air in rapid breaths, relieved our near death ordeal was over. The courtyard was covered with snow and located to the rear of the castle grounds. A huge, arched entranceway to the main building itself stood in front of us. The guy in the ski mask gestured for us to follow him inside the massive stone structure. Batfish and I trudged through the snow in the guy’s wake. I still felt shaky and badly needed to sit down.

The guy stopped walking when we moved inside the castle. We stood in a dark wooden paneled corridor with a flag stone floor and a low beamed ceiling. The guy
took off his goggles and ski mask and shoved them into the pocket of his parker jacket. He was tall and thin with pale skin, bright blue eyes and had clumps of ginger hair, almost in a dreadlock style, hanging around the side of his head.

“You two were lucky I heard you out there. What brings you to
Connauld Castle?” the guy asked. His accent was broad Scot and he rolled his vowels around his mouth as he spoke. I noticed the guy had multiple piercings in his ears, nostrils and a silver hoop in his eyebrow. He had a goatee beard, knotted in a tight plait protruding from his chin. We made our weapons safe and stowed them away in our belts.

“We were just looking for some kind of shelter,” Batfish said. “We’ve been on the move all day.”

“You’re American?” the guy asked, his face screwed in disbelief. “Are you military?” He pointed to our U.S. Military combat fatigues and equipment. 

“
We came here on a military aircraft a couple of months ago, but we’re not actually serving members of the military,” I explained. “We were led to believe Scotland was a safe haven, away from the living dead.”

The guy stifled a laugh. “Who told you that?”

“The military pilots flying the airplane,” Batfish said.

“I don’t know where they got that from,” the guy sighed. “We’ve been overrun since the summer last year. The remainder of us came here, to the castle about six months ago and
we’ve been here ever since. You two are the first living survivors we’ve seen for some time. How are things going in the States?”

“It’s bad,” Batfish sighed.
“Real bad. All the cities are virtual no go areas and the whole country is crawling with undead.”

The guy sighed. “It seems it’s that way everywhere.”
He held out his hand. “I’m Alex, by the way. Alex McNeil.”

Batfish and I shook his hand in turn and introduced ourselves.

“Thanks for saving us out there,” I said. “We’d have been dead meat if you hadn’t pulled us out of there.”

Alex shrugged. “I heard the gunshots from up in the rear tower. I thought you sounded as though you were in trouble.”

Batfish opened her coat and pulled Spot from his harness then set him down on the floor.

Alex smiled and bent down to ruffle the little dog’s head. “Who is this wee fellow, then?”

“He’s called Spot,” Batfish said. “We found him in a multi car wreck, outside New York City.”

“Wow,” Alex murmured. “He’s lucky to still be alive. Well, I suppose that goes for all of us.”

“Have you seen or heard from anybody else from the outside?” I asked. “There are four more of us in our party. Two guys and two girls. We got separated when we were making a run for the castle across the golf course.”

Alex stood upright and shook his head. “No
, I haven’t seen anyone else. But they may turn up soon.”

“They were heading for the front entrance,” I explained.

Alex shook his head again. “Maybe the other people here have seen them. Come and meet them.” He gestured to a door to his left. “You must be freezing being out there all day. You’ll probably want to sit and warm yourselves by the fire.”

“That would be great,” Batfish groaned. “I can’t wait to get this pack off my back and take these damn boots off.”