The Left Series (Book 1): Leftovers (27 page)

“I should have blown that asshole’s head off when I had the chance,” Smith growled.

“How are you doing, Brett?” Rosenberg asked me. His face seemed full of concern.

“Oh, I’m okay,” I lied with thoughts still jumbled in my head. “I could use a drink though.”

“Good idea,” Smith said. “Make mine a large bourbon.”

“No alcohol for you two for a while,” Rosenberg sighed and made his way to the fridge. He took out two cartons of orange juice, opened them and handed one each to Smith and myself.

“Fucking OJ?” Smith groaned before taking a huge swig.

“Some vitamin C will do you good,” Rosenberg said.

“So you’re my mother now?” Smith growled.

Rosenberg moved to the cab and leaned inside, talking to Eazy and Batfish. I gulped down the orange juice and enjoyed the coolness sliding down my dry throat. I gazed out of the side window and watched the stationary traffic pass by. I looked out the back and saw the headlights and wondered why we were being followed.

“Denny,” I whispered. “I’m not trying to be funny but I think someone is tailing us.”

“Yeah, that’s Doctor Soames,” he turned his head and said. “You may not remember him.”

“Doctor Fucking Doom,” Smith sighed and tilted his head backwards into the chair.

“Those bastards have been through all my stuff,” Julia sighed, rummaging through her baggage on the bunk bed. “I hope they didn’t take anything else. We’ve lost our phones and you lost all your guns.”

I still felt strange but my mind began to regain some clarity. I’d hoped the zombie epidemic had been part of some hallucinogenic trip but reality seemed worse than any drug induced trance I could imagine.

“Julia, do me a favor,” Smith snapped his head forward. “Go check in the linen basket in the bathroom for me, will you?”

“What am I looking for?” she asked.

“A bag.”

Julia shrugged and went into the bathroom. She dragged a woven linen basket across the floor a few seconds later and lifted the lid.

“Only someone’s dirty laundry in here, I’m afraid,” she said.

“Check under the clothes.”

Julia lifted some white shirts and other garments that spilled onto the floor. “Oh, yes, there is a bag in here.” She struggled to pull the bag from the basket. “Gosh, it’s heavy,” she said, flinging the hold all next to Smith.

“Good girl,” Smith muttered. He winced as he leaned forward and unzipped the bag. The cash taken from Wesley Stokes’s garage still lay untouched in the hold all with two snub nosed hand guns on top.

“My God,” Julia stammered. “All that money.”

“Those silly bastards missed that when they searched the place,” Smith laughed. “We still got the cash and a few weapons. Not many but two guns are better than none.”

“Where did you get those?” I asked.

“Always have a backup piece, kiddo,” Smith gave me a wink. “You never know when it could save your life. I took a few little extras in that gun store back in Shitsville.”

I assumed he was referring to Brynston. Brynston, that sleepy little town that I’d lived most of my life. Now a place infested with the infected and ripe for flattening by a few Air Force bombers to resolve the epidemic. I thought about all the small towns and villages across the world. People of all nations huddled in their lofts and basements wondering if this situation would blow over while gradually starving to death.

Smith picked up the weapons and checked they were still loaded. Julia went to the cupboards in the kitchenette and began to make sandwiches for everyone.

I looked out of the side window and watched the giant advertizing billboards flash by, half shadowed in the night gloom. Smiling faces of celebrities and happy families endorsing endless consumer products that nobody really needed.

The latest ad would read
“Come to dinner at McZombies, share yourself with friends and acquaintances. All they can eat for free.”

I couldn’t even remember how long all this had been going on for. When did it all start? A few days, a week? Time had lost importance. It was now either night or day. Times, dates, days of the week, months and years were irrelevant. I felt like I’d found a hidden key to a secret locked door and opened it and found another dimension on the other side. Another possible reality somewhere in the middle of infinite parallel universes.

Dad’s ship. We were going to Dad’s ship. Sailing round and round like a toy boat in the bath, spinning around a draining plug hole.
I wondered what we’d do on Dad’s jolly ship.

I was about to ask Smith for another cigarette when I felt the RV slow down.

Batfish popped her head through the cab door with a worried look on her face.

“We may have a problem here, guys,” she said.

Chapter Forty-Four

“The entrance to the bridge is totally blocked,” Batfish said.

Rosenberg stood up and moved to the cab for a closer look. I unsteadily stood on shaky legs and followed Rosenberg to the cab doorway. I thought I’d take a peek at what all the commotion was about.

Stationary, abandoned trucks and cars littered the width of the road from all angles, looking like the starting grid on the old cartoon “Wacky Races.” People had panicked and not known where to go or what to do. Some had tried to flee heavily populated areas and others had tried to get to the cities looking for protection that was now nonexistent.

“That entrance takes us over Newark Bay, past Jersey City and through the Holland Tunnel into Downtown Manhattan, where we take the 9A down to Battery Park,” Eazy explained for those of us who hadn’t a clue where we were going.

“Is there another route we can take?” Rosenberg asked.

“Not unless we turn around and try and take the US 1 & 9, up and around,” Eazy said, bringing the RV to a halt behind the abandoned traffic. “That way will take us back past the Airport and we don’t know how bad the roads are on that route.”

I glanced out the back window and saw the following car stop behind us. Doctor Fucking Doom was still on our tail.

“What are we going to do?” I asked, totally bereft of ideas. My head felt empty as though certain parts of my brain had been uninstalled.

Eazy sighed and slumped in the driver’s seat. I looked out into the night sky. Rain still pattered the windshield. The river below the bridge looked like a mass of inky blackness like starless space.
Rain, dark and death.
They seemed to harmonize and combine together like an ice cream flavor.

“We could always try and move some of the vehicles,” Rosenberg suggested. “Try and clear a pathway through.”

“That will take ages,” Batfish moaned, cuddling Spot. “What if we change vehicles the other side of the jam? Some might still be in working order.”

“It’s a possibility,” Eazy said. “But I don’t like the thought of splitting up in separate vehicles and we’ve got everything we need here in the RV.”

“Sorry, the bread is a bit stale but still edible,” Julia said offering around the plate full of sandwiches. We all took a few and munched in silence, staring out into the dark, wet night. Batfish fed Spot half her sandwich.

We jumped when a figure tapped on the side window of the cab.

“Soames,” Eazy sighed. “What does he want?” He lowered the window.

“What’s going on?” Soames spat. He wore a rain proof jacket with the hood covering his head.

“There seems to be an immovable traffic jam in front of us,” Eazy sarcastically pointed towards the windshield.

“We can’t just sit here all night,” Soames yelled. “We’re like sitting ducks out here.”

“Well, if you’ve got any suggestions, we’re all ears,” Eazy said.

Soames stood in the rain looking across the bridge and back the way we came. He was obviously a man used to getting his own way but now he was trapped in a situation with no apparent solution.

“Is there any way we can knock down that central barrier and drive on the other side of the road?” Soames asked.

“Not unless you’ve got a jackhammer handy, jackass,” Batfish said. “That barrier is solid, reinforced concrete strong enough to stop a truck plowing through it.”

“Three options,” Eazy said slowly. “Option 1- we turn around and try another route. Option 2 – We abandon our vehicles and hope we can find some others on the far side of the jam. Option 3 – We try and clear some of these vehicles and find a path through. Whatever we do, it’s going to take some time.”

“I think we can move some of these vehicles,” Rosenberg said again. “We can still move them even if they don’t have keys. Just bust the window, let off the parking brakes and push them to the side.”

“One flaw in your master plan, Einstein,” Eazy sighed. “What if the vehicles have dead motherfuckers in them? We got no guns.”

Rosenberg was silent.

“Smith’s got two guns,” I said, glad to make some contribution to the conversation. “And you know how to hotwire vehicles with no keys, Eazy.”

Eazy thought for a moment, weighing up his options. “Okay, but we leave Batfish here behind the wheel just in case we have to make a quick getaway,” he said. “We better leave Smith in here to. He doesn’t look in any fit shape to do anything much.”

“How do you want to do this?” I asked. Eazy seemed like he’d taken the role of team leader and I was perfectly happy with that.

“Right, Brett and Rosenberg, you take the cars to the left and me Julia and the good doctor out there will move the ones on the right. We’ll take a gun each but only use it in an emergency. Don’t hang around. Move the vehicles as quickly as you can, as far to the side of the road as you can. Leave any vehicles you find with the dead inside, we don’t have time to fuck about with them. If we get into any trouble with a shit load of zombies coming at us, we’re back in the vehicle as soon as and we’re out of here. Don’t take no chances.” Eazy spoke like he was a military commander briefing his troops before a dangerous mission. I had to admit, he sounded damn convincing.

Eazy went into the interior of the RV and explained the whole plan again to Smith, who surprisingly handed over his two hand guns without any protest. Eazy tucked one of the weapons into the back of his waist band and handed me the other.

“You okay to use this?” he asked, looking me straight in the eye.

I nodded and took the weapon ensuring the safety was on. I didn’t have much choice. What was the worst that could happen? Well, I could end up shooting myself for one. If the situation got bad I’d just point and fire then run like hell.

Eazy told Soames to get his tire iron from his car and any weapons he had. We found some extra jackets and foul weather gear in the RV cupboards, once belonging to the previous owners. We took a flashlight each and any heavy items we could find that would break the glass windows of the immobile vehicles.

“Okay, let’s do this thing,” Eazy said and opened the RV side door.

We stepped out into the rainy night and I felt slightly giddy and stumbled into the back of Rosenberg.

“Hey, you okay, Brett?” he asked above the noise of the falling rain.

“Yeah,” I nodded from under the waterproof hood. My head spun but I had to get a grip of myself and concentrate on what I was doing until the task was completed.

Soames reappeared out of the darkness brandishing his tire iron in one hand and a small, silver pistol in the other.

“I brought this just in case we run into any of the infected,” he said, lifting the gun slightly.

“Okay doctor,” Eazy said. “Put it away for now with the safety on and only use it if you have to.”

Soames did as he was told and we went to work on moving the vehicles in our teams as best we could. Eazy, Julia and Soames seemed to make quicker progress than Rosenberg and myself. We started and moved some vehicles easily, broke glass and pushed locked vehicles out the way. Some with alarms bleeped into the night and across the bridge like homing beacons for the zombies. Eazy told us to pop the hoods and tear off the battery terminals of any vehicles with alarms sounding. Rain continued to lash us in sideways gusts blown in from the Hackensack.

Rosenberg and I recoiled from one car, some Japanese made 4-by-4, when a couple of grim, green and white faces popped up from the backseat looking out through the back windshield. I shone the flashlight over the demonic faces in the interior of the vehicle. The two figures had once been beautiful looking kids, a girl and a boy, both blonde and about the same age, probably twins. Now their faces had begun to rot and the flesh slowly peeled away. The milky white eyeballs that didn’t seem to hold any sight, stared strangely into the night. They snarled and scraped the glass with their nails, trying to escape their confinement. I prayed the doors to the vehicle were locked so I wouldn’t have to confront the two mini flesh eaters.

For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes away from the two scowling faces behind the back window. Did I know them or was it the realization of the terrible result of this infection hitting home to me? Innocence lost. Some once proud parents, who were now probably also dead or in a state of animation, would be devastated to discover their offspring’s had wound up in this state.

“Poor little bastards,” I whispered to myself.

“Come on, Brett,” Rosenberg tugged at my sleeve. “Let’s leave this one and go around it.”

“Okay,” I muttered and followed Rosenberg to the next vehicle. I kept checking behind to see if the Evil Twins were following. A cold shiver ran up my spine.

We moved vehicles for what seemed like hours in the pouring rain. Eventually to save time, we bumped cars out of the way like a dodgem ride, using a Ram heavy duty pickup truck. Our luck ran out when the Ram’s radiator split, overheated and died at the side of the road.

“Keep it going,” Eazy yelled to us from the driver’s seat as he moved a Chevrolet with crushed side doors. “We’re nearly done.”

The path we had cleared wasn’t exactly a straight run but the RV could weave through the few remaining vehicles with zombies inside. I looked back and saw the RV maybe a quarter of a mile behind us. The white dome top shone out of the blackness.

Rosenberg and I moved four or five more cars but had to leave another two, with several thrashing undead inside. The two vehicles sat collided at the very point of the jam.