Free The Left Series (Book 5): Left On The Run by Christian Fletcher Page B

way we can patch Cordoba up without trying to get through the city?”
    Wingate shook her head. “There’s not much I can do for her with only a field medical kit. I can patch her up, sure. I’ve done that but as I said back at that house, it’s only going to last a short while.”
    “I know, I’m sorry.” Batfish wiped her face and her voice cracked with emotion. “I just have a really bad feeling about this.”
    “I’ve had a bad feeling about every god damn thing for the past…since this all began,” Smith groaned, flicking his hand at the windshield. He obviously couldn’t recall how long we’d been on the run.
    I knew what Batfish meant. We seemed to lurch from one crisis to another and never got any breaks. I sighed, feeling the familiar sensation of world weariness begin to creep through my mind and general fatigue engulf my body.
    Smith took the slip road on the left to take us off of the motorway. The road swept left in front of a row of high rise red brick buildings with broken windows in fire blackened, dome shaped frames on the upper floors. Old blood stains smeared a set of wooden double doors in the center of the building’s ground floor. I shuddered when I pictured the horrific scenes that must have taken place along the street in the first few days of the undead outbreak.
    Jimmy directed Smith to the left and through the center of what looked like a small industrial area, with warehouses built of steel sheeting standing on either side of the street. As we neared the river, the road bent to the right and I saw some large, glass fronted buildings standing on the opposite bank. I saw some stanchions, shaped like arrowheads on top of a small bridge to the left at the point where the road curved away.
    “Is that a bridge?” I asked. “It looks like it’s clear.”
    “That’s Tradeston Bridge. It’s a foot bridge that leads to the Broomielaw Quay and the ferry terminal,” Jimmy explained.
    “We may need to use it as backup if we can’t make it over that other bridge,” Smith said. “How far have we got to go?”
    Jimmy shook his head. “No far to go now.”
    We slowly rounded the bend in the road and I kept a watch on the landscape in front of us. An incomplete construction site sat on the river bank to our left and a bumpy, narrow street lay to the right. A big, free standing square building stood on the corner of the side street that looked as though it had been abandoned long before the apocalypse began. White paint flaked from the brick walls and some of the windows at the sides had been filled in with construction blocks. Shrubs sprouted from the corners of the roof and guttering, reaching skyward beneath a dusting of snow. A wire meshed fence surrounded the perimeter of the property and an old store sign was still affixed to the crumbling front façade above a boarded up entranceway. The building seemed in stark contrast to all the plush, recently erected structures in the nearby vicinity. I guessed the old building was part of a bygone age, when there was probably more community spirit and people used the local facilities.
    Maybe the greed of the property developer and pure ignorance of vast global corporations and governments had only hastened the demise of the human race. They’d been so wrapped up in their own self-indulgence instead of funding the Centers for Disease Control and other similar establishments around the world that the guys at the top hadn’t seen the epidemic coming. When they realized what was really happening and the whole situation wasn’t just going to go away, it was way too late.
    “Ah, fuck,” Smith spat. “What is this now?” He slowed the Range Rover to a crawl.
    I turned my gaze from the derelict building and looked out front through the windshield. Several guys, brandishing baseball bats and various firearms fanned out across the street in front of us, blocking our route.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
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