The Left Series (Book 5): Left On The Run (9 page)

I winced at the wind and chips of ice blowing through the open doors when they climbed back into the front seats.

“Well?” Wingate asked.

Smith sighed and shook his head. “It’s a no go for this route, I’m afraid. Those god damn barriers are welded firmly in place. It’ll take more than our bare hands to rip those sons of bitches off.”

“What about if we try and ram through it with the car?” I blurted.

Smith looked at me with an incredulous expression on his face. “Those barriers were designed to withstand vehicle collisions at high speed, Wilde. Your solution would leave us with two things – whiplash and a totaled car.”

“Sorry,” I said and glanced at Batfish. “Just another idea.”

“We could try the old Glasgow Bridge to the east,” Jimmy suggested. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to cross over it but I can’t think of any other way around.”

Smith glanced at Jimmy with a renewed impression of determination. “We’ll give it a shot. Give me directions as we go.” He slammed the gear shift stick in reverse and swung the Range Rover around in a U-turn.

The back wheels swayed in the snow and the car threatened to fish tail as we drove down the slope of the bridge.

“You’ll need to get onto the opposite lanes,” Jimmy said, pointing to the left. “We need to get off of the motorway on the next slip road; otherwise we’ll end up back where we started.”

“U-huh, good call,” Smith said. He bumped up the curb on our left and with no central reservation barriers left in place was able to cross lanes, onto the opposite side of the motorway.

Cordoba groaned when the Range Rover jolted over the curb, marking the north and south routes of the road. We were rocked around and a rucksack fell from the pile above my head, rolling on top of me.

“Hey, take it easy, Smith,” Wingate admonished. “We want to keep Cordoba alive in time to make it to the hospital, not kill her on the way there.”

“All right,” Smith sighed, holding up his hand in an apologetic gesture.

“Take the next exit you come to on the left,” Jimmy instructed. “We’ll take the A8 route and I fucking pray the roads will be clear, you know.”

“Let’s hope so,” Smith muttered.

“You don’t think this is all going to be a total disaster?” Batfish asked. “Is there any way we can patch Cordoba up without trying to get through the city?”

Wingate shook her head. “There’s not much I can do for her with only a field medical kit. I can patch her up, sure. I’ve done that but as I said back at that house, it’s only going to last a short while.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” Batfish wiped her face and her voice cracked with emotion. “I just have a really bad feeling about this.”

“I’ve had a bad feeling about every god damn thing for the past…since this all began,” Smith groaned, flicking his hand at the windshield. He obviously couldn’t recall how long we’d been on the run.

I knew what Batfish meant. We seemed to lurch from one crisis to another and never got any breaks. I sighed, feeling the familiar sensation of world weariness begin to creep through my mind and general fatigue engulf my body.

Smith took the slip road on the left to take us off of the motorway. The road swept left in front of a row of high rise red brick buildings with broken windows in fire blackened, dome shaped frames on the upper floors. Old blood stains smeared a set of wooden double doors in the center of the building’s ground floor. I shuddered when I pictured the horrific scenes that must have taken place along the street in the first few days of the undead outbreak.

Jimmy directed Smith to the left and through the center of what looked like a small industrial area, with warehouses built of steel sheeting standing on either side of the street. As we neared the river, the road bent to the right and I saw some large, glass fronted buildings standing on the opposite bank. I saw some stanchions, shaped like arrowheads on top of a small bridge to the left at the point where the road curved away.

“Is that a bridge?” I asked. “It looks like it’s clear.”

“That’s Tradeston Bridge. It’s a foot bridge that leads to the Broomielaw Quay and the ferry terminal,” Jimmy explained.

“We may need to use it as backup if we can’t make it over that other bridge,” Smith said. “How far have we got to go?”

Jimmy shook his head. “No far to go now.”

We slowly rounded the bend in the road and I kept a watch on the landscape in front of us. An incomplete construction site sat on the river bank to our left and a bumpy, narrow street lay to the right. A big, free standing square building stood on the corner of the side street that looked as though it had been abandoned long before the apocalypse began. White paint flaked from the brick walls and some of the windows at the sides had been filled in with construction blocks. Shrubs sprouted from the corners of the roof and guttering, reaching skyward beneath a dusting of snow. A wire meshed fence surrounded the perimeter of the property and an old store sign was still affixed to the crumbling front façade above a boarded up entranceway. The building seemed in stark contrast to all the plush, recently erected structures in the nearby vicinity. I guessed the old building was part of a bygone age, when there was probably more community spirit and people used the local facilities.

Maybe the greed of the property developer and pure ignorance of vast global corporations and governments had only hastened the demise of the human race. They’d been so wrapped up in their own self-indulgence instead of funding the Centers for Disease Control and other similar establishments around the world that the guys at the top hadn’t seen the epidemic coming. When they realized what was really happening and the whole situation wasn’t just going to go away, it was way too late.

“Ah, fuck,” Smith spat. “What is this now?” He slowed the Range Rover to a crawl.

I turned my gaze from the derelict building and looked out front through the windshield. Several guys, brandishing baseball bats and various firearms fanned out across the street in front of us, blocking our route.

Chapter Fourteen

“Who the hell are these guys?” I asked. “Surely, they can’t be the same crew as those guys back in Bellahouston.” A rough head count told me we were heavily outnumbered, with around thirty mean looking young guys standing their ground in front of us. 

Jimmy gulped and looked nervous, which didn’t fill me with confidence. “These fellahs are either what’s left of the
Sooside Cumbie
or the
Crossie Cumbie
from the Gorbals.”

“What does that even mean?” Batfish squawked.

“Street gangs,” Smith said. “They’ve probably easily survived through this whole apocalypse thing and love every bloody second of it.”

“Aye,” Jimmy said, nodding. “And they’re a right bunch of scary headbangers and all, Smith.”

“Let me do the talking, Jimmy,” Smith said when three guys approached the side of the Range Rover. “Keep your mouth buttoned. We don’t want to start another territory war right here.”

Smith shuffled in his seat and I knew he was placing his M-9 handgun under his ass cheek. He buzzed down the window as the three guys drew closer. One of the trio peeled away from the other two and started circling the Range Rover. The two other guys stopped walking around six feet from Smith’s side window. One wore a light blue fleeced jacked with a hood over the top of a dark blue, rapper-style baseball cap. The other guy wore a black paramilitary style woolen hat on his head and a baggy black jacket. The one in the blue jacket carried a big, silver semi automatic handgun and the guy in the woolen hat carried an old British Army style revolver. Both of them sported long blondish stubble on their chins and their blue eyes were like hard chips of ice.

“Ya look like yer lost, pal,” the guy in the blue jacket barked, in a thick Glaswegian accent. “Youse ha’ any business driving around here?”

“Hey, guys,” Smith said with a meekness in his tone I’d never heard before. “We’re trying to get over the other side of the river. We need to get to a hospital for one of my team. She needs urgent medical attention.”

The two guys at the side of the car looked at each other and broke out into haughty laughter.

“Other side o’ the water, he says,” the guy in the woolen hat chortled. “You’ll be lucky to get ta the end o’ the street, pal.”

The guy prowling around the perimeter of the car peered inside through the windows. He stopped moving when he was level with the backseats and took a long unblinking glance at Batfish and Wingate. Batfish glanced down to her lap and Wingate pretended to tend to Cordoba. The guy looked down at Cordoba; saw the bloody bandages around her torso but his expression didn’t change one iota.

He carried on his slow patrol and stopped at the rear window to stare at me through the glass. The guy was young, probably in his early twenties but his blank expression and steely piercing blue eyes told me he’d experienced his fair share of harrowing and gruesome situations. His face was pale and large dark rings surrounded his eyes. A sprinkling of stubble adorned his chin and the rest of his head was cloaked with a black hood, adjoined to his fleece jacket. He brandished a blood spattered cricket bat with three long screws drilled through the face in a triangular pattern.

I briefly wondered how bad it would feel to be smashed over the head with the bat and imagined how painful the screws driving through my skull would be.

These guys surrounding the Range Rover looked and gave me the impression they were as hard as rusty coffin nails and twice as sharp. Smith was going to have to play his cards right if we were to get out of the sticky situation unscathed.

“Youse won’t find any working hospos on the other side of the river, mate,” the guy in the blue jacket said. “In fact, I doubt youse’ll find a working medical center in the whole of Scotland.” He leaned closer to Smith’s window, opened his eyes wide and held the barrel of his handgun to his temple. “We’re fucked, ya see,” he yelled. 

The guy with the cricket bat reached into the side pocket of his jacket, took out what looked like a spliff and lit it up. He kept eye contact with me as he casually strolled around the car to join his buddies.

I reached into my jacket when the guy was out of sight and curled my fingers around the butt of the Beretta M-9. I hoped we weren’t heading for another shoot out because I didn’t fancy our chances of winning this one.

“Yeah, it’s pretty much fucked everyplace we’ve been,” Smith said. “But we need to see if we can get inside the hospital and find what we need to help our friend.”

“Are youse a fucking American?” the guy in the blue jacket barked, with an incredulous look on his face. “What the fuck are Yankees doing in Glasgow?” He pronounced
Glasgow
as ‘
Glesga
.’

Smith nodded. “Well, I used to be an American but there’s not much of it left right now.”

“What, Amerikee is fucked as well? Well, fuck-a-dooodle-doo,” the guy in the woolen hat said with seeming amusement. “What happened to the great World Superpower, eh, pal?”

Smith shrugged and shook his head slightly. “I guess when it came to the crunch, we were just as vulnerable as everybody else.”

The guy with the cricket bat handed around the doobie and also whispered something inaudible to the other two guys. The mocking mirth filled expressions instantly fell away. They took a couple of paces back and raised their weapons level with the side windows.

“Youse brought an infected body into our territory,” the guy in the blue jacket barked. “We’ll no tolerate trespassing, especially with somebody who’s infected with a Zed bite.”

Chapter Fifteen

“No, guys, stop for a second,” Smith pleaded, holding up the palm of his hand. “Just listen to me for one minute.”

“Ya got ten seconds, pal before we start firing.”

More armed guys rushed to converge on us, forming a ring of aimed firearms around the Range Rover. 

“She’s not bit, she’s been shot,” Smith hurriedly explained.

“Bullshit,” the guy in the blue jacket spat. “No hospital on the planet will save her. She’s infected and she’ll turn. I seen it a thousand times, man.”

“No, wait, just wait,” Smith barked. “Let me tell you what happened. We had something of an altercation with a bunch of guys back at Bellahouston Park. They wanted us to move out but we needed to rest for the night so we shacked up inside some old inn. They tossed a stun grenade through the window and injured the guy in the tailgate. We engaged them in a shoot out and managed to slip away.” Smith nodded as he talked and I noticed the guy in the blue jacket doing the same as he followed the story. “They came looking for us in this car and we had another shoot out, taking out all their guys but as you can see, one of our guys got shot in the process.”