The Left Series (Book 4): Left In The Cold (6 page)

He took out his pack of smokes and lit one up before offering the pack around. I shook my head but Batfish took a cigarette. Wingate tutted scornfully.

“I thought we talked about your smoking,” she hissed. “You agreed to cut down.”

Smith was about to protest when Gera called to us from the next room.

“Hey, guys. I think you should come in here and see this.”

Smith and I exchanged concerned glances and moved quickly out of the kitchen. He slipped his rifle off his shoulder and I drew my Beretta handgun. We moved through the doorway and joined Gera and Cordoba, who stood side by side, staring down to the left.

The new room was some sort of study with dusty old leather bound books loaded onto the surrounding shelves along the walls. A globe of the world sat in a big wooden frame next to the window to the left, between a chunky desk and a row of
four thick framed chairs.

Smith and I entered the study while Batfish and Wingate hung back in the doorway.
The stench of decay from the room was overpowering. I held my free hand over my nose and mouth and looked at the row of chairs that Gera and Cordoba were studying with such intensity.

Four bodies, of varying heights and sizes were tied one to each chair
, facing into the room. Their arms were secured around their backs and thick rope bound around their waists shackled the bodies to the backs of the chairs. Each body had a hood or pillow case pulled over their heads and old, crusty blood from inflicted wounds stained the fabric of the veils.

“What in the name of holy fuck went on here?” Smith whispered.

I studied each body in turn, from left to right along the row. The first was a large male, wearing the remains of a police uniform; the second was a young girl, still wearing a blue and gray school uniform. The third body was a woman, in a white, blood stained jumper and denim pants and the fourth was a skinny male, still clad in a tatty green suit and brown shoes. All the corpse’s legs and feet were splayed at odd angles as though they were kicking out in their last few seconds.   

Smith
dropped his cigarette and stomped it out. He slung his rifle over his shoulder then moved forward and picked at the pillow case covering the skinny guy’s head with his thumb and forefinger. He slowly slipped off the head cover, which resisted, bonded to the man’s head with congealed blood. Smith removed the pillow case and dropped it to the ground.

The corpse was that of an old guy with wispy gray hair in a horse shoe shape around a bald pate. The top of the old man’s skull was cracked open with several indents from heavy blows from a blunt instrument. The horrific head wounds revealed shards of skull bone and a splattering of congealed, brown brain matter over the scalp. The guy’s
jaw hung open and the skin looked tight and stretched across his bony facial features, which gave the impression he was almost mummified. The image was truly horrific and I imagined his mouth remained wide open during his last living moments, one final scream of pain and terror as he was bludgeoned to death.

“Don’t pull the hoods off the rest of those bodies, Smith,” Batfish croaked. “I don’t want to see the others.”

Spot poked his head from beneath the blanket inside the harness around Bat
fish’s waist and sniffed the air disapprovingly.

“Were they zombies or were they killed while they were still living people?” Cordoba whispered.

“Maybe they were all members of the same family,” I said. “Remember that Post Office we found in New Orleans?”

Smith glanced at me and nodded. “How could I forget? Those bodies were from suicide though. This guy was killed deliberately by somebody else.”

Wingate moved into the room, leaned over the corpse and took a look at the old guy’s head wounds.

“Well, it’s obvious he’s been dead for a while.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Smith huffed.

She reproachfully glanced back at him for a second then returned to study the cadaver.

“It’s almost impossible to tell if he was infected. There’s no obvious bite marks but that doesn’t mean to say all these bodies weren’t contaminated somehow. As we have all seen, the reanimated dead have a milky film over their eyes but this guy is partially decayed so it’s not easy to draw any positive conclusions.”

“Okay,
Quincy
, enough already,” Smith sighed. “Let’s just let the dead lie, or in this case sit. There’s nothing we can do for them now.” He spun the world globe and the sphere rumbled inside the frame.

“I don’t think I can relax in this house with those bodies in here,” Batfish said. “Can we move onto another place?”

I was about to agree when I heard a knocking sound from one of the rooms on the other side of the hallway. The noise made me freeze on the spot. The others heard it too. We drew our respective weapons and held them at the ready. Batfish looked back over her shoulder with an anxious expression on her face. She reluctantly stepped inside the study and huddled close to the rest of us. We all glanced at each other and Gera nodded to Cordoba. The two of them quietly crept to the study doorway.

Cordoba flicked on her flashlight and shone the beam across the two closed doors on the opposite side of the corridor.
She and Gera moved slowly out of the study towards the door to the right. The rest of us huddled in the study doorway, with Smith and I at the front, while Batfish and Wingate crowded behind us. Cordoba and Gera used the same entry method as before. Cordoba flung open the door while Gera covered the entry point with his M-16.

The creature that emerged from the room beyond
, into Cordoba’s flashlight beam looked only barely human.

Chapter Nine

Gera took a backward step with his finger poised on the trigger of his rifle. I knew he was caught in two minds whether to fire at the bedraggled figure in the doorway or not. The man’s eyes were wide with shock and his mouth draped open in utter surprise. Long, brown matted hair hung around his head and a thick bushy beard surrounded his chin. Only a couple of black rotting teeth were visible inside his open mouth and he was wrapped in several stained blankets.

“Don’t take a step closer,” Gera warned
forcefully. “I will be forced to shoot if you approach any further.”

I noticed the emaciated figure in the doorway held a claw hammer in his right hand at his side.
This guy looked nuts and dangerous all at the same time.

“What do you want?” the guy croaked. His accent was decidedly Scottish and came out more of a rasp.

“What?” It was obvious Gera hadn’t understood a word the guy said.

“I think I’m the only one left in Killnockie,” he mumbled. “Have you come to rescue me?”

Gera briefly glanced back at me. “What’s he saying, Wilde? Can you understand him?”

“He thinks we’re the rescue party,” I sighed. The poor guy was probably thinking we were going to whisk him away to someplace safe.

“No, we’re no liberators, friend,” Gera barked. “Now, put down the tool and we’ll talk.”

The hammer clattered to the floor as the guy released it from his grasp. He looked utterly shell-shocked as though we were aliens from another planet.

“Back up into the room and keep your distance,” Gera ordered.

The guy’s facial expression quickly turned from shock to fright as he complied with Gera’s commands. He took a few backward paces into the room and Gera followed him at a safe distance. Cordoba picked up the hammer as she entered the room after Gera. The four of us in the doorway bustled through the hallway into the room opposite.

The guy had obviously been living in the one room since he was isolated after the undead outbreak. The place was a complete mess with empty food tins and packages, dirty discarded items of clothing and bedding strewn all over the stone floor and draped across furniture. The room stunk of stale excrement and rotten food. A makeshift bed that was nothing more than a stained mattress lay in the corner of the room alongside an overflowing bucket of bodily waste.

“Oh my god, I think I’m going to hurl,” Batfish wailed.

“What in the name of…?” Smith’s words trailed off as he gagged and turned back through the door.

“I think it’s best if we move into another room,” Wingate suggested, obviously trying to be diplomatic.

“Good idea,” I muttered, holding down the rising stomach bile.

Gera guided the strange guy at rifle point through the hallway and stood behind him while he opened the door adjacent to the putrid room.

“They’ll see us if we go in here,” he protested. “They’ll know we’re in here. They’ll come for us, I’m telling you.”

Gera flashed us an incredulous glance before he followed the guy into the next room.

“Totally nuts,” Gera muttered, shaking his head as he moved through the doorway.

We followed them inside and I was pleasantly surprised to find the room contained no dead bodies or
putrid trash or reeking buckets of shit. It was quite depressing how far into the depths of despair and depravity a human being could plummet.

The room obviously used to be the guy’s living area with two leather bound chairs and a matching three seat settee pushed against the wall to our right. The furniture faced a TV set on a stand in front of the bay window.
A few family photographs hung from the walls, snapshots taken in happier times. A middle aged, brown haired man and a blonde woman huddled behind a fresh faced young girl, probably their daughter, in the pictures. All three smiled into the camera, looking as though they couldn’t be more contented with life. Another photo was of the same family, standing in a line in a well tended garden with a friendly looking Dalmatian dog sitting obediently at their feet. I wondered what horrors had befallen that nice looking family unit.     

The room was lighter than the rest of the house and I noticed the window pane was free of snow
on the outside. I remembered Gera clearing the snow from the glass when we stood outside the front door.

“That was me and my family.”

I turned around and the guy watched me with wild, wide eyes, studying the photos on the wall.

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“All dead,” he croaked and glanced downwards. “All gone now, even the poor dog.” He seemed far away and lost in his own thoughts.

I struggled to recognize the emaciated creature standing in front of me compared to the smiling father and husband in the photographs.
I felt a pang of sympathy and sorrow for the guy and for what the world had become. Contagious diseases and particularly this current, undead malady had a cruel sense of humor. Loved ones came back from the dead and tried to kill you. How spiteful this virus was. Not only had people mourned the loss of their friends and families but they had to kill them all over again once they reanimated.

“Who are you?” I asked him.

The guy didn’t answer for a few seconds and seemed as though he was in some kind of depressive trance. I glanced nervously at Smith, who leaned back against the wall and returned a slight shrug.  

“They used to call me Bill,” the guy muttered. “Bill McLeod. I used to be a farmer until everything died.” He suddenly looked scared and turned to the window. “They’ll be coming soon. No doubt about that.”

“There’s nobody there, Bill,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “There’s nobody left in the village. You said so yourself.”

“Who were the bodies in that other room?” Cordoba asked. “Did you kill them?”

Bill’s head snapped around to look at her. “I had to, lassie,” he mumbled. “They would have eaten me, so they would. The police came around to try and arrest them for biting other folk but they bit him too. I had to put an end to him as well. All got very messy. But that was a long time ago now.” His eyes glazed over and he returned to his trance like state once again. “How many years have I been here?”

I glanced at Smith again. He made a twirling motion with his finger around his temple.

“The guy is a serial fruit-loop,” Smith said. Wingate slapped Smith’s thigh with the back of her hand.

“The epidemic has only been around for about eight months, Bill,” I tried to explain.

He turned to me with an incredulous expression on his face. “Eh? No, it’s been years, you.”

“It probably feels longer to him because he’s been on his own for so long,” Wingate whispered. “I’ll take a look at him when he’s calmed down a bit.
It’s probably a big shock for him to see some other people.”

“Well, I don’t know about you guys but I’m going to have a drink,” Smith said and made his way across the room to a glass fronted cabinet. He opened the door and took out a green bottle of Scotch and a couple of tumbler glasses.
“Anybody going to join me?” Smith asked as he poured himself a generous measure of whisky.

“Go on then,” I sighed. “I could do with a slug to warm me up.”

“It’s just a fallacy that alcohol warms you up, you know, Brett,” Wingate said.

“Who gives a crap?” Smith scoffed, pouring out a second measure of Scotch. “Wilde Man and me owe a lot to alcohol for keeping us alive this long. Some of our best moments have been when we’re
stinking-assed drunk.” He flashed me a wink as I took the glass.