The Left Series (Book 3): Left On The Brink (30 page)

“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 an
d 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.”

“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.

I decided to have a look for the dog. He couldn’t have ventured far and I had a
handgun, a flashlight and a radio on me.

“Smith?” I spoke into the headset.

“What is it, Wilde?” Smith responded.

“The dog has gone missing. Don’t say anything to Batfish yet, she was a bit upset after the crash. I’m going to look for him, talk to you later.”

“All right, but don’t go too far. We don’t know what the hell is out there.”

“I won’t be long; he can’t be too far away.”

“Hey, Wilde?”

“What?
”

“Keep your eye out for a bottle of good whisky. We might be in Scotland, you never know.”

“I’ll do my best,” I sighed. “But I’m not making any promises.”

I sniggered. I knew Smith was itching for a stiff drink and I could have done with one myself.

The night breeze blew across the long grass, rippling the tops of the blades like waves on the ocean. I shone the flashlight in continuous sweeps back and forth across the ground, looking out for any signs of movement.

“What the fuck, Spot?” I sighed. “Why do you always choose the worst times to go running away?”

I trudged away from the aircraft across the grassy field, with no clue where I was heading. Spinning around in a circle, I caught sight of the burial party, illuminated by several flashlights at the side of the aircraft. The noise of sympathetic chatter and confused conversation drifted through the night air. I felt like running away from the scene too. Running away from my tainted life and everybody involved in it.

“Spot? Come on, here boy,” I called again
. I tried to remain focused and not to allow the escalating feeling of depression get the better of me. I’d just survived a plane crash, for fuck’s sake. Not many people could lay claim to that fact and live to tell the tale.

I noticed a silhouetted clump of trees at the edge of the field and a hill rising into the distance behind them. Surely Spot wouldn’t have ventured that far? Maybe he’d caught the scent of a fox or a mouse or whatever the hell dwelled around this place.

I turned back and saw the aircraft and the faint glow of the flashlights surrounding the grave diggers becoming an alarming distance away. I didn’t want to lose sight of the C-17 totally and thought about turning back. But what would I tell Batfish? She loved that dog and had just been through an exceedingly traumatic experience. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her that our dog, our companion since the apocalypse had started was now missing in action. Spot was no adventurer. He was happiest with us. I made the decision to press on.

An owl hooted from the branches of the trees as I approached. The wooded area was pitch dark and I shone the beam amongst the thick trunks.
I still couldn’t see Spot anywhere and called his name again.

For some reason, the woods reminded me of a 1960’s TV show I used to watch when I was a kid. The show was called ‘
H.R. Pufnstuf
’ and told the tale of a normal boy transported to a strange land inhabited by a big, yellow dragon thing, amongst other weird creatures and a witch called ‘
Witchiepoo
,’ who lived in the spooky woods. It was kind of a trippy sixties show with the actors donning all sorts of strange costumes and centered on the boy’s talking flute. I had no magical musical instrument or a big guy in a weird costume to help me but I did have a handgun and a radio. Maybe I was simply an evolution of “
Jimmy,
” the main character who was lost in a strange new world. 

I hummed the theme tune to the show as I trod slowly under the canopy of the trees.
Something scurried through the long grass to my right. I gasped and swung the flashlight beam towards the source of the noise. A pair of yellow gleaming eyes stared back at me. Thankfully, the creature was nothing more sinister than a big red fox. He nonchalantly turned, waving his white tipped tail at me then disappearing into the night. He looked like the same fox I’d seen on the roadside in Louisiana. Surely he couldn’t have snuck aboard the C-17 somehow? 

At least there was some sort of life in this strange new place. The weather felt damp and cold but not as severe as in Canada. Had Remmick and Capaldi got us to Scotland after all? I knew they were talking about landing in Iceland but
this place didn’t feel like the volcanic island in the center of the North Atlantic.

We hadn’t encountered any zombies yet but that didn’t mean to say this place wasn’t inhabited by the undead.
Maybe we had crash landed on an unpopulated island someplace. I knew mainland Britain was surrounded by a lot of small islands, particularly in Scotland. If our new surroundings were zombie free, that was a good thing, wherever we were.

My mood lifted. I felt optimistic for the first time in months, even though I was alone and trudging through a spooky wood in the darkness.

“
Come and play with me, Jim, come and play with me and I will take you on a trip far across the sea,
” I sang. “
H.R. Pufnstuf, he’s your friend when things get rough, H.R. Pufnstuf, can’t do a little ‘cos you can’t do enough
.”

“Nice singing, buddy,” a voice echoed through the trees.

I immediately stopped my cover version of the
Pufnstuf
theme song, gasped in shock and swung the flashlight beam around to the source of the voice. My alternative self leaned against a tree trunk with his arms folded across his chest and a malevolent grin on his face.

“Oh, shit,” I sighed. “What do you want?”

“Why are you always so pissed when I show up? I’m you, after all.”

“You’re not me. You’re a damn hallucination I could do without, right now,” I groaned.

My alternative self moved towards me. He was dressed like a 1950’s biker with slicked back hair in a D.A. style, drain pipe denim pants, big black boots and a black T-shirt with a “
Motorhead
” logo in white lettering emblazoned across the center. His face was gaunt and pale and he looked skinnier than me.

“What’s with the biker look?”

“I’m playing out your fantasies. You’ve always wanted to look like this, right?”

“Maybe,” I admitted.

He smiled and wagged his finger at me. “Don’t forget, I know all your inner secrets. Like the fact you’ve got the hots for that Cordoba chick. Mmm…she’s nice, I approve.”

“Ah…shut the fuck up,” I groaned and turned away from my own mocking face.

I continued on my journey through the trees but my other self followed. Small, fallen branches and twigs snapped underfoot as I stomped through the undergrowth.

“I think she likes you as well,” he carried on
, pursuing me through the woods.

“Fuck off,” I spat, not wanting to be mocked by a figment of my imagination.

“Aw, don’t be like that, buddy.” My alternative self giggled as he spoke. He certainly knew how to push my buttons and get me riled.

I stopped, turned and shone the flashlight fully in his face. “Why do you always have to show up when things are getting better for me? You always appear at the worst times, you motherfucker!”

“Ooh! Harsh words, pal.” His face still possessed a sarcastic expression even though he blinked in the light beam.  

“Get fucked,” I hissed and turned to carry on.