The Left Series (Book 7): Left Amongst The Corpses

by Christian Fletcher

  “Shit,” I yelped, recoiling at the sight of blood from my finger.

  Wingate stepped back and grabbed my semi gloved hand.

  “Let me stick a band aid and some antiseptic on that before it gets infected,” she said, reaching into her medical bag.

  McElroy turned his head as he worked, glancing at Wingate wrapping up my finger.

  “Why don’t you guys take a break when you’ve finished up with that?” he said.

  I wondered if he thought we were more of a hindrance than a help.

  “Smith and I can clear this up here,” McElroy continued. “Wilde Man, if you take Dante with you into that barn and check out if there are any farming tools we can use to clear away this bush. Have a look out for a rake or a machete or some long handled shears. Something like that. Sarah, could you check out the road for us? Have a look down towards the town and tell us if the undead are on their way up here and how close they are.”

  “Sure,” I said and nodded my head sideways at Dante.

  Wingate finished up with my finger and made a slight huffing sound. She turned and stomped towards the road behind us, obviously a little pissed off at being sent on lookout duty.

  “Don’t fret about her, Mac,” Smith mumbled. “She just wants to be involved, is all.”

  “She is involved, so she is,” McElroy said. “We need somebody over there to watch our backs.”

  Dante gazed around him, seemingly unsure of what to do. I knew his English was limited so I tried to give him a little encouragement. He’d looked like a fish out of water from the moment I’d first met him back at the bay when Smith had come to my rescue.

  “Keep hold of your stick, Emilio,” I said, pointing to the dry tree branch in his hand. “You might need it for protection.”

  Dante looked at the stick in his hand and trudged towards me.

  “We go and look in that barn,” I said, forking my fingers to my eyes then pointing at the ramshackle building to our right.

  I noticed a hint of apprehension on his face. He wiped sweat from his cheek with his sleeve and nodded. I was happy he understood what we had to do.

  I glanced behind us and saw Wingate was in position, staring down the road that snaked down the hill towards the town. She didn’t raise the alarm so I presumed the coast was clear for the time being. I nodded sideways again, indicating for Dante to follow me.

  “Just holler if you get into any trouble,” McElroy instructed.

  I nodded and Dante followed me around to the front wall of the barn. We were out of the shade from the trees and the sun scorched down on our backs. Sweat soaked my shaved head and ran down the back of my neck. I took a couple more swigs of water as we moved towards the wooden double doors, held closed by a long length of timber wedged horizontally in place by rusting brackets on either side of the entrance. I stopped opposite the center of the double doors and listened for any sounds coming from inside. I glanced through the gaps in the wooden slats along the front wall, watching for any sign of movement inside. I pulled my rifle off my shoulder and held it ready.

  “You remove the wood and open the doors,” I said to Dante.

  I watched him as my command whirred around his head for a few seconds, his brain translating my words. He nodded and slowly moved to the double doors. I held the rifle tight into my shoulder, ready to let fly a hail of bullets at anything that shot out at me.

  Dante, tucked his stick under his arm then lifted the length of timber securing the doors and gently pulled on the rusted latch ring. I waved him back to join me and the hinges creaked as the doors slowly swung open.

  Nothing physical did leap out at us but a deathly, sour stench wafted from the barn interior. I glanced quickly around the floor space but saw nothing but piles of dry straw.

  “Santa Madre de Dios,” Dante whispered, while crossing himself. “This is a bad place, Wilde. A place of bad spirits.”

  I turned slightly to look directly at Dante and saw he was gazing upward, wide eyed with an expression of abject terror on his face. I turned back to the barn, following his gaze. Half a dozen corpses, suspended by ropes around their necks swung gently in the breeze. The flesh on the hands and faces of the dead bodies had almost totally decomposed and the remains of filthy clothes flapped loosely around their torsos and legs. The ropes around their necks creaked slightly against the thick wooden central roof beam and their heads hung a couple of feet below.

  I followed the lines of the ropes down to a series of cleats secured to a sturdy, vertical beam. The ropes were bound around the cleats in neat, crisscrossed patterns, indicating a degree of considered competence. My gaze returned to the bodies, which were suspended at least twenty feet off the ground and couldn’t possibly have inflicted their own deaths upon themselves. This situation looked as though it was a multiple lynching for a reason I’d probably never discover. The corpses were different heights and some of them looked small enough to be children.

  The grisly sight only strengthened my opinion that we lived in an increasingly cruel and unjust social order, where the remaining people left on the planet could inflict terrible, pitiless acts onto others and no principles were in place to stop them. Morality, decency and humanity seemed to be forgotten measures of the past.

  “Come on,” I whispered to Dante. “Let’s go inside and see if we can find any tools we can use.”

  I moved forward, treading slowly into the barn, all the while, keeping my eyes on the hanging corpses above me. Dante hesitantly followed behind me, leveling his stick in a baseball batters stance. None of the suspended carcasses seemed to be reanimated in death so I decided they would pose no problem.

  I glanced around the floor space, trying to ignore the stench of the dead. Heaps of dry straw sat in mounted piles spread around the walls. Shards of light speared through the gaps in the rotting wooden slats around the walls and ceiling. I heard Smith and McElroy cussing and growling and partially saw their ragged movement through the cracks in the wood to my left. Weeds and spiraling green plants poked through the gaps and tangled their stems around the thicker support beams.

  Dante muttered in Spanish while he prodded the piles of hay with the end of his stick. I glanced around the walls at the various old farm tools hanging on hooks and rusting machinery parts lying amongst the piles of straw. Among the paraphernalia lay rusty wheels, cow bells, pulleys, hooks, pitchforks and bulky iron items, of which I had no clue what they were.

  I slung my rifle over my shoulder and pulled down a rusty bladed hand scythe from the wall. The curved blade was still useable but the wooden handle felt slightly rotten. I grabbed a couple of hand held hooks and a long handled grass rake from the clasps on the wall. I juggled with the tools so I held the hooks and the scythe in my right hand and the grass rake in my left.

  “This will do us,” I said, turning to Dante.

  Dante wailed and leapt backwards, his gaze locked onto something sprawling around in the straw in front of him. I couldn’t see what it was he was staring at due to a dark patch of shadow. Dante mumbled words I didn’t understand and poked at the thrashing creature with the end of his stick.

  I stepped around the vertical support beam and moved alongside Dante. The light and shadow changed position and I saw a dark, almost inhuman face with cracked skin stretched around the features and long, matted black hair, leering from the straw pile. Its white, cataract eyes stared blankly up at us. The thing hissed and attempted to lunge forward from its crouched position. Metal chains rattled and I saw the thrashing creature was manacled to the support structures along the wall. Rusty clamps secured the zombie’s wrists to the chains attached to the bearing timbers.

  I figured this particular ghoul had a connection to the poor bastards hanging from the ceiling. Maybe they were all part of one doomed family who’d been tarnished with the same brush as the infected.

  “Grab hold of these,” I said and handed Dante the rake and the pair of hooks. He dropped his stick and took the implements from me with a confus
ed expression on his face.

  I gripped the scythe handle in my right hand and stepped forward towards the snarling creature chained to the wall. I forcefully brought down the blade with the pointed end aimed at the center of the ghoul’s forehead. The creature’s skull made a sound like a coconut splitting as the blade buried itself through bone and into the diseased brain. A squirt of brown liquid erupted from the fatal wound, narrowly missing the side of my face. The chained zombie’s head slumped and it ceased moving.

  Dante gasped and I tugged the scythe from the ghoul’s head. I felt no remorse at eliminating these wretched creatures. They weren’t humans any longer, simply rotting husks driven by basic instinct and some kind of bacterial disease.

  The moment of peace was short lived. Wingate yelled from the roadside outside the barn.

  “They are coming, guys. A whole bunch of those undead fuckers are on their way up here.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Come on, let’s go,” I shouted at Dante. He followed close behind me as we raced out of the barn. The bright sunlight momentarily blinded me and it took a few seconds for my eyes to focus.

  “Go tell Smith and Mac there’s a whole army of undead coming up the road,” Wingate screeched at me, pointing to the left side of the barn. Her eyes were wide and her face was full of anxiety. Her rifle was firmly tucked into her shoulder and pointed down the hill. “Tell them to hurry it up around there.”

  “We hear you,” Smith yelled from around the side of the barn. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole damn island didn’t hear you.”

  Dante and I rushed to the truck and saw Smith and McElroy had cleared around half the spiky bush away from the hood. They were both sweaty and partially covered in loose leaves and pieces of foliage.

  “We got tools,” I said, lifting the scythe and gesturing to the implements Dante carried.

  “Why’s that thing got blood all over it?” Smith asked, nodding at the scythe in my hand.

  I looked down at the blood stained weapon. “Oh, we ran into a zombie inside the barn. It was chained up so it didn’t cause us any grief.”

  “Look, fellers, can we leave the chit chat aside for the time being?” McElroy barked, tossing a large spiky branch away from the truck. “We haven’t got long before those bastards are going to be all over us. We need to get this truck started or we’re going nowhere. Hand me that thing over here, Wilde”

  I reached across and passed McElroy the scythe. Smith grabbed the rake from Dante, which left the South American and me with a hand held hook each. We raked, scythed, hooked, hacked and pulled at the bush like a bunch of deranged crop cultivators. I speared myself on the thorns several times all over my body but tried to shut out the pain.

  “Hurry it up, guys,” Wingate yelled from the roadside.

  Nobody replied. We knew we didn’t have much time and knew the consequences if we failed.

  “Okay, stop,” Smith commanded. “I think there’s enough room to get to the hood now. Somebody get inside the cab and pop the lever and I’ll get this battery juicer plugged on.” He turned and retrieved the battery jumper he’d placed against the trunk of the nearest tree.

  “Right, I’ll go pop the hood,” I volunteered, glad of the respite from the industrial gardening.

  I tossed my hook on the ground, rushed around the side of the cab and dived through the open door, skidding on my front across the wide bench seat. I scanned the area around the dash and below the steering wheel. Where the hell was the hood release lever? I heard Smith rattling the metal cover.

  “Come on, Wilde,” he yelled. “Open this bitch up.”

  “I can’t see the fucking lever,” I screamed. “Where the fuck is it? It’s too damned dark in here to see. Where would it be, Smith? You were in the military.” The battery was obviously so flat it wasn’t even providing enough juice to illuminate the truck’s interior light.

  “We used different trucks in the Marine Corps,” Smith shouted back. “I don’t know nothing about this piece of shit.”

  Very helpful.

  I sensed somebody behind me and turned to see McElroy leaning into the cab.

  “It has to be there someplace,” he growled.

  A squeaking noise from the windshield diverted my attention. Dante rubbed the grime away from the glass with his sleeve. His cleaning action provided a little more light but the underside of the dash and steering wheel were still engulfed in shadow.

  “The hostiles are around one hundred yards and closing, guys,” Wingate warned from the road.

  Stupidly, I tried to picture in my head how long one hundred yards was instead of concentrating on trying to find the hood release lever. McElroy scrabbled around the foot wells, feeling around in the gloom for the elusive lever. The squeaking noise of Dante cleaning the windshield was making my teeth feel weird and my head started to spin. I tried to calm myself down by breathing deeply, inhaling the sweaty stink of the cab interior.

  “The bloody thing must be here somewhere,” McElroy spat. He reached into one of his webbing pouches and pulled a small flashlight. He clicked it on and shone the white light across the underside of the dash. We saw no lever, nothing obvious to open the hood.

  “Shit,” I croaked.

  “Hurry it up in there, guys,” Smith called out.

  “We’re looking,” I screamed in frustration.

  McElroy shuffled along the foot well and scuffed up the rubber mat in the center of the cab, slightly to the rear of the gear shift lever. I caught a glimpse of a small square compartment with a slightly raised curve on one side. It looked like an opening flap of some sort, similar to a gas access cover. McElroy moved again and the mat flopped back over the cover and he moved the flashlight beam beneath the passenger side glove compartment.

  “What was that?” I squawked.

  “What was what?” McElroy muttered.

  “Move that rubber mat again,” I said.

  McElroy squirmed around on the cab floor shining his flashlight over the mat.

  “Where?” he barked.

  “Behind the gear lever.”

  McElroy ripped the mat aside and shone his flashlight across the floor, revealing the green metal cover.

  “That’s it, what is it?” I said.

  “Damned if I know,” McElroy rasped. “Let’s open it up and have a wee look.”

  “Hostiles are seventy-five yards and closing,” Wingate yelled from behind us.

  McElroy opened the flap and we saw a hooked metal catch of some kind. He hesitated for a second, maybe considering the consequences of a booby trap then tugged the latch upward. An audible clonking noise sounded from the hood.

  “That’s it,” Smith yelled. “You got it.”

  McElroy and I glanced towards the windshield and saw Smith raising the big green hood. We stumbled out of the cab and rushed around to the engine compartment. Smith applied the crocodile clips from the jumper to the battery terminals. He hit a red button on the jumper control panel and a high pitched whine emitted from the rectangular shaped box.

  “How long before we can try firing up the engine?” I asked, glancing back to the roadside.

  Wingate shielded her eyes against the sun with a flat hand. She continuously glanced back at us with a nervous expression.

  “We’ll have to give it a couple of minutes at least,” Smith grunted.

  “I don’t know if we have a couple of minutes spare,” I said.

  “Sixty yards and closing, guys,” Wingate warned.

  Dante jabbered wildly under his breath. His eyes were wide with fear and sweat poured from his face.

  I bit my lip. There was still no guarantee the damn truck was going to fire up and we had no backup plan and nowhere to run, except into the unknown and hostile terrain of the island.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Hostiles are fifty yards and closing, guys,” Wingate shouted. “Are we making any kind of progress over there?”

  “We’re getting there, Sarah,” Smith
replied. “Don’t sweat it.”

  “I am sweating it, Smith,” she yelled. “And you guys should be to. There are more of those goddamn undead things joining the main pack every second.”

  “Okay, Sarah, we hear you,” Smith shouted. A sense of irritation was evident in his tone.

  We all stood over the battery jumper, staring at the red needle moving slowly up the numbered scale to the right. I had no clue how much voltage the battery needed to fire up the engine but the charge seemed to be moving too slowly for my liking. The tension I felt was almost overwhelming and I glanced around at the faces of Dante, Smith and McElroy. Dante looked like a nervous wreck, hopping up and down and muttering insanely. McElroy seemed as cool as ever but Smith also looked vaguely nervous, his right eye twitching slightly and his lips parted, revealing gritted teeth.

  “Forty yards and closing,” Wingate screamed.

  Smith wiped sweat from his face with the palm of his hand. “Okay, somebody go try to fire this motherfucker up.”

  “Got it,” McElroy said and turned to the open door of the cab. He dived into the driver’s seat and fumbled around the dash for the ignition key.

  “Come on, Mac,” Smith said.

  McElroy found the key and pumped the gas pedal as he tried the ignition. The starter whined and the engine coughed a couple of times but didn’t spark into life.

  “Shit,” I spat, ducking my head in frustration. “Come on, you bastard, start.”

  “Leave it thirty seconds and try again, Mac,” Smith instructed.

  McElroy muttered some response from the cab.

  “Thirty yards and closing,” Wingate warned.

  Dante wailed and hopped around, looking as though he was going to piss his pants. I rubbed the fuzz of hair left on my scalp and flicked away flecks of sweat. We pointlessly glared at the red indicator needle on the jumper control panel, almost willing it to move rapidly upward.

  “Twenty-five yards and closing,” Wingate yelled. “They’ve spotted me and they’re stepping up the pace. We need to get going, guys.”