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

Fourteen
     
    “Who the hell are these guys?” I asked. “Surely, they can’t be the same crew as those guys back in Bellahouston.” A rough head count told me we were heavily outnumbered, with around thirty mean looking young guys standing their ground in front of us. 
    Jimmy gulped and looked nervous, which didn’t fill me with confidence. “These fellahs are either what’s left of the Sooside Cumbie or the Crossie Cumbie from the Gorbals.”
    “What does that even mean?” Batfish squawked.
    “Street gangs,” Smith said. “They’ve probably easily survived through this whole apocalypse thing and love every bloody second of it.”
    “Aye,” Jimmy said, nodding. “And they’re a right bunch of scary headbangers and all, Smith.”
    “Let me do the talking, Jimmy,” Smith said when three guys approached the side of the Range Rover. “Keep your mouth buttoned. We don’t want to start another territory war right here.”
    Smith shuffled in his seat and I knew he was placing his M-9 handgun under his ass cheek. He buzzed down the window as the three guys drew closer. One of the trio peeled away from the other two and started circling the Range Rover. The two other guys stopped walking around six feet from Smith’s side window. One wore a light blue fleeced jacked with a hood over the top of a dark blue, rapper-style baseball cap. The other guy wore a black paramilitary style woolen hat on his head and a baggy black jacket. The one in the blue jacket carried a big, silver semi automatic handgun and the guy in the woolen hat carried an old British Army style revolver. Both of them sported long blondish stubble on their chins and their blue eyes were like hard chips of ice.
    “Ya look like yer lost, pal,” the guy in the blue jacket barked, in a thick Glaswegian accent. “Youse ha’ any business driving around here?”
    “Hey, guys,” Smith said with a meekness in his tone I’d never heard before. “We’re trying to get over the other side of the river. We need to get to a hospital for one of my team. She needs urgent medical attention.”
    The two guys at the side of the car looked at each other and broke out into haughty laughter.
    “Other side o’ the water, he says,” the guy in the woolen hat chortled. “You’ll be lucky to get ta the end o’ the street, pal.”
    The guy prowling around the perimeter of the car peered inside through the windows. He stopped moving when he was level with the backseats and took a long unblinking glance at Batfish and Wingate. Batfish glanced down to her lap and Wingate pretended to tend to Cordoba. The guy looked down at Cordoba; saw the bloody bandages around her torso but his expression didn’t change one iota.
    He carried on his slow patrol and stopped at the rear window to stare at me through the glass. The guy was young, probably in his early twenties but his blank expression and steely piercing blue eyes told me he’d experienced his fair share of harrowing and gruesome situations. His face was pale and large dark rings surrounded his eyes. A sprinkling of stubble adorned his chin and the rest of his head was cloaked with a black hood, adjoined to his fleece jacket. He brandished a blood spattered cricket bat with three long screws drilled through the face in a triangular pattern.
    I briefly wondered how bad it would feel to be smashed over the head with the bat and imagined how painful the screws driving through my skull would be.
    These guys surrounding the Range Rover looked and gave me the impression they were as hard as rusty coffin nails and twice as sharp. Smith was going to have to play his cards right if we were to get out of the sticky situation unscathed.
    “Youse won’t find any working hospos on the other side of the river, mate,” the guy in the blue jacket said. “In fact, I doubt youse’ll find a working medical center in the whole of Scotland.” He leaned closer to Smith’s window, opened his eyes wide and held the barrel of his