The Left Series (Book 3): Left On The Brink

by Fletcher, Christian

  I stood still, gazing back at the shocked faces. Cordoba stood up and slowly walked towards me. She stared deep into my eyes. The expression of anxiety on her face had been replaced by a look of compassion.

  “You’re okay, Brett,” she whispered. “You just had a bad dream, is all.”

  Was she right? I wasn’t so sure. She escorted me back to my seat and made sure I sat back down. Smith, Batfish and the others in my seating area still slept throughout my bizarre behavior. I hoped they hadn’t heard my ranting.

  “Get some rest. It has been a long day.” Cordoba clipped my seat belt around my waist.

  “How long have we been in the air?” I asked.

  Cordoba shook her head. “I’m not sure but we should be landing real soon.”

  I nodded and felt my eyes closing again. I hoped when I opened them again we’d be on the ground in Scotland.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The next time I woke up, I definitely knew something was terribly wrong. It wasn’t me this time. Something was happening to the aircraft. We were jolted in our seats as though we were sitting inside a roller coaster car. Batfish screamed alongside me and Smith was thrown into my side with the force of the severe juddering motion. Mignon and Landri wailed behind us and I heard screams and confused shouts from the rest of the guys inside the C-17 interior.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I screeched.

  “Stay in your goddamn seats,” Chief Cole yelled.

  A thunderous rumbling noise reverberated around the cargo hold, pallets, crates and the vehicles shook forcefully in the restraining straps. The interior lights flickered on and off erratically and a stench of hot electrical components wafted in the air.

  “We’re going to fucking crash,” I screamed. Hysteria and terror pulsed through my body. I’d never felt as sick and frightened in my whole life. I gripped the arms of my seat; my fingers were like claws digging into the vinyl material.

  Smith’s face was ashen white and Batfish’s was a mask of terror. Even Chief Cole grunted in gasps of panic as we were all thrown around in our seats. My head was jerked from side to side and I thought I was going to pass out. The air seemed to be sucked from the interior.

  The grating noise became overwhelming but the awful juddering began to cease. I gasped for air and whimpered in sheer terror. The tilting and shuddering motion gradually came to an end and the petrifying scraping sound also ceased.

  The interior was filled with confused and frightened voices, asking each other if they were all right and wondering what had just happened. The whole cargo hold tilted at a forty-five degree angle and people stumbled out of their seats, too shocked to counterbalance themselves on the sloping floor.

  I unbuckled my seat belt and tried to stand up. I immediately fell onto Smith’s lap.

  “Get off me, Wilde Man,” he grunted. “Now’s not the time or the place for your man hugs.” He shoved me off him and I fell on my ass then slid across the floor.

  My movement came to a halt when the side of my face bashed into a fire equipment locker. I half lay, half sat for a few moments, trying to make sense of what had just happened and to regain a steady heart rate.

  Smith rose to his feet, steadying himself by holding onto the arms of his seat. I looked at Batfish. She sat motionless in her chair, breathing in and out extremely quickly with an expression of shock on her face. Landri and Mignon hugged Spot and each other with tears streaming down their faces.

  “Jesus Christ,” Smith muttered. “What the fuck just happened?”

  “Quiet, you all!” Chief Cole boomed. He trod slowly from the seating area, gripping the arm rests and attempting to move towards the main floor space. “I said quiet, you all,” he repeated. The anxious chattering died to a deathly silence. “Listen.”

  We listened but heard nothing.

  “No engine sound,” Cole said. His face was screwed in confusion. “That means we’re down on the ground someplace or worse case scenario we’re in the middle of the damn ocean.”

  “What do you think is going on, Chief?” somebody asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cole grunted. “But I intend to find out.” He staggered through the cargo hold, slipping a few times due to the strange angle of the floor.

  Smith sat back down, holding his forehead. I didn’t dare move in case something fell on top of me. Some of the containers had broken open and spilled their contents over the floor.

  Cole hit the intercom button at the rear of the interior and attempted to contact the flight crew in the cockpit. He received no response, only another deathly silence and I began to fear the worst. The metal fire locker felt welcomingly cool against the back of my head and I tried to close my mind to the terrifying situation happening around me.

  The fire locker jogged a sudden thought in my mind.

  “Hey, Smith?”

  He glanced up at me from his bout of face palming. I kept my voice low. I didn’t want to cause the girls any unnecessary further panic.

  “What?” Smith sighed.

  “What if we’ve crash landed and the engines are on fire out there? We should think about getting out of here.”

  Smith gazed at me for a few seconds with a blank expression on his face. It was as though time stood still. Nobody seemed to be moving. The world appeared to have gone even crazier, if that was at all possible.

  “Good point,” Smith finally said and rose to his feet. “I’m out of here anyhow. I’ve had it with this fucking plane. I’m going to find a bar and get stinking drunk.”

  He stumbled away from the seating area as though he was drunk already.

  “Wait up, Smith,” I called after him.

  I pushed myself up and followed Smith to the rear of the plane, slipping and stumbling as I moved. Chief Cole still tried the flight crew on the intercom and sighed in frustration as we approached.

  “We should try and open that ramp, Chief,” Smith said, pointing at our exit route. “We don’t know where the hell we are and we may need to get ourselves out of here damn quick.”

  Chief Cole huffed again. “We don’t know what’s out there. I don’t think opening the ramp is such a good idea, Smith. There may be thousands of zombies standing outside just waiting for us to let them in, for all we know.” He held his hands on his hips and stared at the tilted floor. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, Smith but if you and your Wilde boy want to take a look out there, then feel free. You can get out through the paratroop doors instead of opening up the ramp. I’ve got a feeling that damn thing’s not going to work anyhow.”

  “The paratroop doors?” I queried.

  “Yeah, there’s one each side.” Cole pointed to what looked like escape hatches on each wall at the sides of the interior.

  “I hadn’t noticed them before,” I mused.

  “Come on, Wilde.” Smith tugged at my shoulder. “Let’s see where the hell we are.”

  I turned to pursue Smith and noticed Spot standing a yard to my left. The little fellow had obviously followed me down the aircraft interior. He stood looking at me with one of his front paws raised off the ground, his ears stuck straight upwards, his tail wagged and if a dog ever looked confused, then this was the moment.

  “Looks like he wants to tag along,” I said.

  “All right,” Smith sighed. “Make sure you keep him on a leash.”

  I picked up a length of rope from the ground, tied a loose knot and slipped the loop around Spot’s head. The poor little guy was probably busting for a piss or a poop.

  “We’ll need our handguns,” Smith said to Cole.

  The Navy Chief obliged and opened the ammunition box. He selected our respected weapons; we loaded them up and tucked them into our waistbands.

  Cole handed us a radio each and put a headset on himself. “Stay in touch and let us know how the land lies,” he said.

  I was sick of the damn headsets and didn’t want to bother but it was only fair we reported the situation from outside the aircraft. We put on the he
adsets and staggered over to the paratroop door to our left. The door to the right may have been inaccessible to the outside world due to the tilt of the plane. The exit was more than likely to be facing debris, soil or even worse – the sea.

  We clambered up the floor space incline and Cole opened the paratroop door. A cold gust of wind blew in our faces but the scent of fresh air was invigorating. The open door revealed a dark landscape and it was night time, wherever we were. Had we landed in Scotland or somewhere else in Europe?

  We stood in the doorway for a few minutes studying the darkness and trying to let our eyesight adjust. Smith shone his flashlight into the dark night. The light beam illuminated an expanse of long, damp grass, spanning as far as we could see. No other lights, buildings, people or zombies were in close proximity.

  “Great! We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere,” Smith groaned.

  He shone the light beam across the aircraft wing, which pointed at an angle towards the dark sky.

  “At least the engines aren’t on fire on this side,” he said.

  Milner appeared behind us, dressed in his cold weather gear and carrying an M-16 rifle.

  “I’m coming with you,” he murmured. “We need to check on the flight crew.”

  Smith sighed. “This ‘aint going to be no field trip, Milner. I’m going to explore what’s out there. I may be awhile.”

  Milner nodded. “That’s up to you but I need to check to see if this bird is still salvageable.”

  “I fucking doubt that,” Smith snorted.

  Milner shrugged and took a flashlight of his own from a rack on the wall. “Let’s go.”

  We jumped out of the paratroop door into the long grass, not knowing what was waiting for us in our brand new environment.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Our new surroundings remained deathly silent. The only sound we heard was the aircraft engines making a strange ticking sound. The atmosphere felt similar to a graveyard and the night air was cold and damp. A strong smell of freshly plowed, damp soil carried in the light breeze. The long grass bunched around our knees and was thick with moisture as we moved through it. Milner shone his flashlight around the C-17 exterior, surveying the damage. Spot bounded through the grass like a gazelle, sniffing the air between his leaps and cocking his leg several times.

  We slowly trudged around the outer perimeter of the aircraft, moving counterclockwise passing the tail end first. The C-17 reminded me of some kind of crippled dinosaur, gray, motionless, silent and half lying on its side.

  The aircraft wing on the right side was bent in the center. The tip pointed horrifically upwards as though it was reaching for the sky, a place where it would no longer inhabit. The engines sat a few inches above the grass but remained undamaged as far as we could see.

  “Fuck! We were lucky,” Milner hissed. “If we’d come down in a town or city, we’d all be mincemeat, right now.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  Milner shrugged. His face looked ghostly in the flashlight beam reflecting off of the aircraft. Smith hopped up onto the crippled wing and bounced up and down.

  “Best guess?” Smith pressed.

  “I really can’t say until we take a look inside the cockpit,” Milner sighed.

  “Okay, let’s take a look.” Smith jumped down back into the long grass.

  We moved around the aircraft, Smith and Milner continued shining their flashlights across the C-17’s main body. Spot seemed excited by his new surroundings, his tail wagged and he vigorously sniffed the earth amongst the grassy clumps.

  Milner stopped in front of the nose of the plane and shone his flashlight across the cockpit windows. The glass panels were smashed and broken and two were missing, completely torn out. The nose cone itself was dented and splattered with soil.

  “What the hell happened here?” Milner muttered to himself. “These planes are supposed to be virtually uncrashable.”

  “Like the Titanic was unsinkable?” Smith scoffed. “With no Air Traffic Control, no chartered flight path, it’s a wonder we ever got here at all. Wherever here is.”

  “We’ll have to try and open up that cockpit and get the flight crew out. They may be hurt,” Milner said, striding through the grass towards the side of the nose cone.

  The cockpit door was situated on the left side of its nose, which happened to be the side tilted upwards. Gaining access to the cockpit through the doorway would require a tall ladder at the very least. I estimated the entrance way was around twenty feet from the ground. We stood looking up at the door, way out of our reach.

  “No matter how much you stare at that door, you ‘aint getting up there in a hurry, Milner,” Smith sighed. “What if we climb up the busted wing, move along the body and get in through those broken windows?” Smith shone his flashlight in a line across his intended trail.

  “Okay, let’s give it a go,” Milner agreed.

  We moved back around the front of the plane and approached the broken wing. I didn’t want to take the dog up there on top of the roof with us so I tied his leash through an eye-bolt on the side of the wing. We hopped up and crawled up the sloping wing on all fours. Milner and I followed Smith along the top of the main body of the aircraft. I was glad it was dark so I couldn’t see how far down the ground was. I just concentrated on watching Smith’s flashlight beam across the gray metal and didn’t dare look down. I’d never had a problem with heights before that awful situation in Manhattan with Julia.

  Smith trod carefully down the sloping front of the nose cone and climbed through one of the empty window frames, dropping into the darkened cabin. Milner went second and I followed behind. My feet snagged on the control panels and I stumbled into Milner’s back. He steadied me while I tried to get my bearings inside the small, cramped space. Judging by the size of the aircraft, I thought the cockpit area would have been larger.

  Smith swung his flashlight around the cockpit interior. Two individual seats sat about two feet apart, surrounded by all sorts of control panels, dials and small screens. Capaldi sat in the seat on our left and Remmick was in the chair on our right. Both men sat slumped, seemingly unconscious in their respective seats, still wearing headsets but their faces were covered in blood.

  Smith placed his two fingers on the side of their necks in turn, presumably to check for a pulse. He looked up at Milner and shook his head.

  “Fuck!” Milner spat. He shone his flashlight around the cockpit. Debris from the interior lay scattered across the floor. Maps, charts, pencils, clumps of solid earth and baseball sized rocks were dispersed throughout the cabin. None of the control panels or screens was lit and the whole flight system seemed to be nonfunctioning. The cockpit was dead, including the two pilots.

  “There’s any number of reasons why this bird came down,” Smith sighed. “I guess we’ll never know for sure.” He shone the flashlight over the rocks, hovering the beam over some marked with blood. “These rocks probably came through those windshield panels like bullets when we came down. That’s a certainty at what killed these two guys.”

  I looked at Capaldi and Remmick lying dead in their seats. The poor guys must have been through hell trying to safely land the plane. They’d survived the apocalypse and died trying to get us all to a safer place. What a damn waste! At least they’d managed to crash land and not nose dived into the turf, otherwise we’d all be dead. Something had bugged me since we’d seen the two dead pilots and now I realized what it was.

  “Hey, wait a minute, guys,” I squawked. “What about the other guy? Ah… the flight observer guy, what was his name?”

  “Novak,” Milner said. “Shit, yeah, I forgot about him.”

  We searched the aft cockpit area but there was no sign of Novak, dead or alive.

  “What the hell happened to him?” I asked, perplexed.

  “Could have gone through those windows when we hit the dirt,” Smith surmised. “Whatever happened, he’s probably as dead as these other two, right now.”

&n
bsp; “We’ll have to bury the bodies,” Milner said, shining his flashlight over the two dead pilots. “Not only for their dignity but any zombies around here will smell that fresh blood a mile away.”

  “You got that right,” Smith sniffed.

  Milner relayed the situation to Cole via the radio and baulked at the big Navy Chief’s response.

  We opened the cockpit exit door, which folded down from top to bottom and provided a built in staircase to the ground below. The bottom of the steps was still a few feet from the ground but we could easily jump down. We struggled with the two bodies of the pilots down the steps and tried to be as dignified as we could and not let them tumble into the grass.

  Chief Cole shouted to us from the open paratroop door. He was silhouetted against the faint yellow glow of the interior light at the rear of the aircraft. He tossed down some shovels and we were joined by several more military guys. They began digging graves for Capaldi and Remmick in the soft, damp soil.

  I sighed and felt sad for the three guys that made up the flight crew. I remembered us all standing around that table, studying the maps back in New Orleans. They seemed so inspiring and full of hope for the future back there in the Air Traffic Control tower and now we were digging their graves.

  At least they’d managed to perform a kind of landing, even though it had cost them their lives. We were all still alive in the cargo hold; we could take some comfort from that fact.

  I asked Smith for his flashlight and left the military guys to continue digging. I walked through the grass back around the nose cone to retrieve Spot, who must have been wondering what the hell was going on.

  My heart sank when I shone the flashlight where I’d secured the little dog. The rope was still tied to the wing eye-bolt and swung limp in the night breeze but there was no sign of Spot on the other end.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Spot...Spot?” I yelled into the night. I listened but couldn’t hear any rustling sounds amongst the long grass. “Ah, crap, this is all I need,” I groaned out loud.