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

“I can’t see anything down there, only more steps,” he said. “I guess it is make your mind up time. Left or right?”

  I shrugged and had an urge to go right but my hunches were usually wrong.

  “Let’s go left,” I said with conviction.

  “I hope you’re right,” Smith said, rounding the balustrade.

  We trotted down the staircase and the light became dimmer, almost darkness. Our shadows became fainter against the whitewashed walls. I felt uneasy as we slowed to a steady plod. We didn’t know who or what the hell was lurking down in the depths of the building.

  “It’s getting too dark down here, Smith. I can’t see a damn thing,” I whispered.

  “Hang on, I brought the flashlight but I’ll have to reach inside these cold weather pants,” Smith said.

  I stopped and waited, listening for any sounds of approaching footfalls on the staircase. All I heard was Smith rustling through his clothing. The flashlight blinked on but the artificial glow didn’t make me feel a whole lot better. I didn’t like being trapped in dark, confined spaces and the flashlight beam was a possible beacon of light to any members of the undead who could be rattling around the staircase.

  We traipsed slowly further down, traversing the crisscrossing stairway. Smith shone the flashlight into the dark areas below as we descended. Smith pulled out his pack of cigarettes and we both had a smoke to try and quell the edginess.

  The staircase ended and the floor space spread out into a deserted, open plan office area. Smith slowly waved the flashlight beam in sweeping arcs, back and forth across the room. Empty work desks piled with printers, paperwork and computer monitors stood in neat vertical rows. A set of stainless steel elevator doors stood to our right as we trod slowly into the office area.

  “Is this what we’re looking for?” I asked.

  “Who knows,” Smith muttered. “Let’s take a look around. We may find something of use.”

  We moved slowly towards the desks, Smith continually swept the area with the flashlight beam. He flicked through some paperwork on a few of the desks. I saw a few little trinkets and photos amongst the usual work clutter on some of the desks. Pictures of smiling children with gap toothed grins peered out from one picture frame, sitting next to a plastic, monkey shaped pen holder. A card that read “Bang Head Here,” printed in big red letters was taped to the center of the desk. Normal, family people, going through the usual stresses and strains of life had worked here before the apocalypse had kicked in. Each of them was never to return to that life of routine normality. They had three possible outcomes – dead, zombie or still alive, surviving in abject terror and misery. Smith snapped me out of my depressing musings.

  “This office is definitely something to do with airport maintenance,” he said. “There are some invoices from contractors for work carried out right here.”

  I noticed three closed doors at the back of the open plan area as Smith waved the beam around.

  “What about those rooms back there?” I said, pointing to the rear of the office space.

  Smith shone the light beam on each door in turn. “All right, let’s take a look.”

  We threaded our way between the desks and approached the door to the left side. Smith stood a pace back with the flashlight beam pointed at the center of the doorway and his M-16 at the ready. I tried the handle, pushed the door and took a step back, raising my rifle.

  Smith shone the light around the small office and it seemed empty and clear of any hazards. A chunky desk sat squarely in the center of the room and gray, metallic filing cabinets of varying heights stood against the walls. A damp stench, similar to stagnant water wafted from the room.

  I let Smith step inside the office first. After all, he was the one holding the flashlight and he was more proficient with a rifle than me. I followed Smith inside and he flashed the light beam around the room. The desk was clear and empty, I tried the filing cabinets but all were locked.

  “There’s nothing much in here,” Smith muttered. “Let’s try the next office.”

  “Let me just try the desk drawers,” I said. “There may be some keys to these filing cabinets in there.”

  “All right, if you must,” Smith sighed. “But you’ll only likely find a bunch of old billing notes in those lockers.”

  I moved around the desk and trod on something spongy and flat.

  “What the fuck? Hand me the flashlight, Smith.”

  Smith obliged and I shone the beam at my feet. I recoiled in shock when I saw the flashlight was illuminating a human hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I took a step back, pointing my M-16 at the dark shape of a body on the floor and moved the flashlight beam slowly across the hand, following the line of a clothed arm. The prone figure lay face down with the head twisted to one side. I shone the light over the visible half side of the face. The skin was tight and gray and the one visible eye was tightly shut. The remains of some sort of liquid had dried around the mouth, making it look as though a snail had crawled over his face. The body used to be a guy, probably somewhere in his forties, judging by his receding, ginger hairline, outdated crumpled brown suit and furrows in his forehead.

  Smith silently shuffled next to me and took a look at the body.

  “Don’t worry your ass about him; he’s not going to cause us any problems. He looks like he’s been dead a while,” he said, bending down and picking up something up from the floor.

  I shone the beam at the object in Smith’s hand and saw it was an empty, plastic pill bottle.

  “Seconal,” Smith read from the label on the bottle.

  “What’s that, like rat poison or something?” I asked.

  Smith grunted a laugh. “Not exactly. It’s a barbiturate used for chronic sleep deprivation or an anti-depressant but if you shovel down a whole tub of these things, they’ll kill you. This guy obviously saw what was coming and took his own way out.” He tossed the pill bottle over his shoulder.

  I shivered and remembered my mum used to say that “someone had walked on your grave,” when anybody randomly shuddered. Smith and I had seen a few suicides on our travels but something seemed more than a little sad about this particular scene. Some middle aged office guy with no family photos or any stupid toys, cards or ornaments on his desk, takes his own life at his place of work. Maybe he was trapped in the building or maybe he was contemplating suicide before the zombie flu spread throughout the world.

  Smith slapped me on the shoulder, breaking my thoughts. “Come on, Wilde. Let’s see what lies behind door number two.” He lamely tried to imitate some third rate, TV game show host.

  We shuffled out of the first office and tried the middle door in the same operation as before. Smith went in first, holding the flashlight and his M-16 in each hand. I followed him into the second office and the first thing I noticed was a multitude of drooping pot plants, some big, some small, dotted around the floor space and on top of filing cabinets, lockers and on each side edge of the desk.

  “Somebody liked their horticulture,” I muttered.

  “The plants are as dead as everybody else in this place,” Smith scoffed. “I’ve never seen the attraction in keeping plants indoors. It’s like growing a lawn in your living room instead of owning a rug.”

  I frowned and shook my head. Sometimes Smith’s opinions seemed so bizarre, I wasn’t surprised he ended up on the wrong side of the law.

  The desk was littered with reams of paperwork and dog-eared cardboard folders, which were splitting along the sealed edges. Several filing cabinets and lockers remained open and the whole office seemed in the midst of disorganized chaos when the area was obviously abandoned. Maybe, whoever worked in the office was searching for something while in a state of panic. Perhaps they were looking for car keys, a gun or their personal dope stash?

  “Halle-fucking-luiah,” Smith chimed.

  I turned and saw him staring at the wall to the right side of the desk. I hoped he suddenly hadn’t found religion and wasn’t about
to recite a prayer.

  “What is it?”

  Smith swiped some of the pot plants off the desk with the muzzle of his rifle. The ceramic pots clattered to the floor and broke into pieces. The flashlight beam reflected against the wall, making Smith’s face look like a serial killer in an old black and white movie.

  “Take a look at this,” he said.

  I stumbled over the broken pots and dry soil to stand next to Smith. He was highlighting an internal map of the airport terminal, fixed to the wall behind a Perspex cover. I studied the map but still had no clue where we were.

  “The fuel pump and internal generators are here.” Smith tapped a spot on the map on the lower levels.

  I saw some scrawlings next to a picture of what looked like a bunch of strange shapes. The last time I’d seen those kinds of etchings was on a stupid job application when I was supposed to follow the next shape pattern. I had no clue what I was looking at back then and I was none the wiser now.

  “How do you know?”

  Smith sighed and I knew he was flashing me his incredulous look. “Jesus, Wilde! You are one dumb son of a bitch. Didn’t they teach you anything in that High School in Shitsville, Pennsylvania?”

  I didn’t know what the hell he meant. “What? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking at.”

  “That’s my point,” Smith snorted. He tapped the Perspex with the M-16 again. “GEN is an abbreviation for generator.” He spoke slowly as if I was some kind of retard. “And FP stands for fuel pump. Got it?”

  “Oh, okay. If you say so.” I wasn’t just deliberately trying to piss him off with my ignorance.

  He sighed again. “Never mind, kid. Go back to the fool’s school. Take it from me, the fuel generator pumps are located right there.”

  “So…where are we in terms of these stupid, fucking pumps?”

  Smith huffed. “I don’t fucking know.” He put the M-16 on the desk, grabbed the side of the Perspex screen and tore it off the wall. “Let’s see if we can make some sense of this damn map.” More pot plants and the computer screen crashed to the floor as the Perspex screen popped from the wall, knocking the contents of the desk flying.

  “You might want to make a bit more noise,” I sighed. “The zombies on the upper level didn’t quite hear you.”

  “Ah, shut up,” Smith snapped. “We’re making progress here.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  Smith ignored my digs. He placed his rifle on the desk and pulled the map away from the wall. He spread the curling paper document on the desk surface and placed small plant pots on each side to stop the map rolling itself back up. I moved alongside him as he studied the diagram. He held the flashlight over several points, deep in thought.

  “I think we must be here.” He dabbed the map with his forefinger. “That means we’ve got to go back up that staircase and down the other side.”

  I sighed; the feeling of weariness sapped my body. “Not up and down more fucking stairs? I’m done with running around this place.”

  “No choice, kiddo,” Smith snapped, folding the map. “I don’t want to be rattling around in this goddam airport anymore than you do but if we want to get the hell out of here, we got to get to those damn pumps.”

  I knew Smith was right but I’d had enough of running around in the dark. I was sick of running away, period. The last six months had been the most strenuous, stressful time of all of my thirty-one years of life on this planet called Earth. A lump of rotating rock and sea, mostly inhabited now by walking, flesh eating corpses. My mind wandered again, strange how long term sleep deprivation alters the conscious state. I thought about aliens from another planet as I followed Smith out of the office back into the open plan area. What the hell would they make of our world if they landed here now?

  “Strange planet this one, Spock. The humans die and then come back to an animated state and try to eat each other. I think we’ll give this place a miss, don’t you?”

  “Roger that one, Kirk. Best leave those crazy assed humans to it! Get the fuck out of there while you can, buddy!”

  “Don’t worry, Spock! We’re out of here! The human race has fucked itself over and wrecked what was once a beautiful place and turned it into the junkyard of the universe.”

  “Did you hear that?” Smith hissed, snapping me from my own, private Sci-Fi experience.

  “What?” We stood still in the open plan office area.

  “I heard a noise from that last office we didn’t check.”

  “You sure? I didn’t hear nothing.”

  “That’s your problem, Wilde. You’re head’s too far up your ass to notice what goes on.”

  I didn’t know if Smith was having a genuine dig at me or he was just clowning around. I knew I could be a bit of a dipshit at times but there was no field manual for surviving a zombie apocalypse. You had to simply go with the flow and ride your luck. So far, Lady Luck had been on my side, why she chose me, I really didn’t know why. I was nobody special.

  We stood in silence for a few seconds and I heard a scuffle from the last room to the right of the three office doors.

  “It could be a mouse?”

  “Mouse, my ass,” Smith growled and moved towards the office door.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Smith gripped his rifle and gestured for me to open the door with a nod of his head. I pulled the handle down, kicked open the door and took a few steps back. A single gunshot came from the office, breaking the silence and piercing the wall inches from Smith’s head.

  “Whoa! Don’t shoot, we’re friendlies!” Smith yelled. He crouched down and shone the flashlight beam around the office interior.

  I hit the floor with my finger on the M-16 trigger, ready to fire if necessary.

  “Milner…is that you?” A deep voice called from the office.

  “No, it’s Smith and Wilde out here. Do not fire!”

  “All right. Is there any of those things out there?”

  “Not at the moment,” Smith groaned. “But if you keep shooting, there soon will be.”

  “Okay, man. We’re coming out.”

  “What the fuck?” Smith shrieked. “We’re on the same side here. We’re not in a hostile situation at present. Just come on out. We won’t fire on you and you don’t fire on us, it’s that simple.”

  Smith kept the flashlight beam on the office doorway and I saw Johnson and Cordoba emerge from the darkness.

  “S…sorry,” Cordoba stammered. “We didn’t know it was you two. I didn’t mean to fire at you.”

  “Well, good job your aim wasn’t straight,” Smith growled, standing upright. “Otherwise I’d be as dead as that poor bastard in there.” He nodded towards the first office we’d entered.

  “The light was in my eyes, if not you’d be dead,” Cordoba retorted.

  I was going off her rapidly. She was too gung-ho and trigger happy for my liking. In my experience of the apocalypse, someone like that was likely to get themselves and everybody else in their party killed. I got to my feet and let my rifle rest by my side.

  “Have you been down here all this time?” Smith asked.

  “Yeah,” Johnson sighed. “We had no comms with the others and we didn’t know where the hell to go. We were hoping to get some word of what was going on over the radio.”

  “The frequency has gone to hell. There’s very limited communications with Cole and we haven’t heard a word from Milner and his crew,” Smith explained.

  “So what the hell do we do now?” Johnson whined. “We can’t stay down here forever.”

  “No, we’re heading out of here, back up the staircase and down to the generator room,” Smith said. “I’ve got a map and we think we know where to go.”

  “You only think?” Cordoba snapped. “We want to be sure where we’re going. Not running around on some wild-assed goose chase.”

  “Listen, Sweetheart,” Smith bawled. “We were running around out there trying to find out what was going on while you an
d your buddy were cowering away down here, like a pair of lost sheep.”

  I sensed the situation was heading towards a heated argument. Cordoba took a deep inward breath, ready to hurl back some vitriolic abuse but I intervened. A full blown quarrel was not what we needed right now.

  “Hold the phone, you guys,” I shouted, standing between Cordoba and Smith, who were squaring up to each other in front of the office doorway. “Let’s just get to this damn pumping station and see if we can get the fucking things working.”

  Smith sniffed and moved away. I heard Cordoba breathe out a sigh of relief. She was obviously a tough cookie but Smith was an intimidating figure, especially when somebody had just taken a shot at him.

  I let them cool off for a few moments before I suggested we vacate the office and try and find our way to the pumping station. Johnson muttered something but Cordoba and Smith remained silent. I guessed Smith may have put a bullet in her head if Johnson and I hadn’t been in company.

  I led the way back through the open plan office to the doorway next to the exit staircase. Smith lit the way with the flashlight behind me and Johnson and Cordoba followed.

  Smith shone the flashlight beam up the staircase and we listened for any moans of the undead at the bottom of the steps. We didn’t hear any sounds, only the noise of our heavy, nervous breathing. I took the lead and led the way up the staircase. I could almost feel the tension in the air between Smith and Cordoba. The last thing we needed right now was to encounter a bunch of zombies heading down the staircase in our direction.

  I trod cautiously but quickly up the concrete steps, listening for any sounds above. The others in the group remained silent and I just wanted to find the pumping station as quickly as possible so we could get the hell out of this place.

  Much to my relief, we arrived back at the top of the staircase without any untoward incident. I stopped and leaned on the balustrade, waiting for the others to catch up. Something or somebody banged around in the corridor in front of me. It sounded like a few people bumping across the walkway up ahead. Moans and wails drifted through the air.