Infection: Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (17 page)

Neither of his companions made a move for a second longer.

“Listen goddamnit! I’m not going to get my ass chewed because you guys couldn’t get yours moving! Now get going. They’re almost on top of us!”

With that, both the police officer and the medical transcriptionist were jolted back to reality again. Malachi hefted himself up and forced the shattered windshield out of its frame and onto the hood of the car. Emma followed, and the doctor got out last, brandishing the heavy revolver they had found. He turned toward the crowd just a scant few yards away from them. He raised the pistol, pointed it toward their pursuers, but then thought better about wasting a precious bullet on something that would neither slow nor discourage the chase.

The trio of hospital survivors ran hard and fast, not looking back for even an instant. The ditch proved a surprisingly effective obstacle to the ghouls, who had to end their pursuit and instead milled about around the wrecked car. Thankfully, this circumstance provided the three people a brief reprieve as they made their escape.

Malachi, though, knew that they were in trouble. They were on foot again and he need only remember the three people being pursued by that horde the day before. There too it had been one woman and two men. He wondered if the woman in that group had been as annoying and obviously weak as Emma. Her nagging and incessant screaming was starting to drive him over the edge. Maybe she was related to his wife. They certainly acted an awful lot alike at times. Emma didn’t seem to be Native, but perhaps the relation was distant and Emma only got the most annoying bits of that family’s personality.

Breathless and exhausted, Dr. Caldwell knew that they had to find somewhere safe and relatively secure to stop and rest. There were houses all around them, but he had his doubts as to how secure any house would be. Of course, if they were all too tired to continue to run and they were caught out in the open by those things, then a house wouldn’t be that bad of an option. How long could they keep running? How long until help would arrive? How long could they stay alive?

“Why don’t we just shoot them? It’s not like we don’t have the guns and the ammo to do it. There are only six of them out there anyway. We could drop those few and maybe send a message to the rest of them.”

Tony was becoming more and more agitated as he spoke. It was late afternoon and the group hiding in the house had been inside all day. The two kids, Jules and Danny, had entertained themselves with board games in a back bedroom while the adults took turns peering out the windows at the group that was forming in the street.

“No,” Meghan answered Tony, “now there are seven of them.”

“Seven? Where did the other one come from?” he asked incredulously. He had been watching out the window not long ago and there had only been six of the fiends. They seemed to be multiplying.

Kim, sitting on the floor and drinking a beer, said soothingly, “Oh c’mon honey. Have a seat with mama. I’ll make it all better.” She patted her lap with both her hands and leaned back. Almost as if on cue, the big man hunched his shoulders forward, laid down on the floor, and put his head in his friend’s lap. She commenced to stroking his very short hair and humming a tune that they all recognized.

Jerry, who had become the appointed specialist, added where Meghan left off, “No, I think that if we start shooting, more of them will come and they’ll keep coming. Our best bet is to let them pass us by...if they will, and then figure out what to do next. We’ve got a few days worth of supplies here. Maybe if we wait it out, someone will come looking for us.”

Rachel chimed in, “I thought there was a bunch of someones already lookin’ for us,” and she gestured toward the outside.

Jerry nodded and conceded, “Someone who can help us and doesn’t want to eat us, I mean.”

Kim stopped humming and asked, “How did all of this start anyway?”

Neil shook his head and walked to the window. He didn’t know. The kids and Jerry were at the hospital where all of it started. Danny and Jules kept talking about Jules’ brother Martin getting bit on the hand and getting sick, but that was no real help. In the end, Neil suspected that it didn’t really matter where or how it began. The cold, hard truth was that they were smack in the middle of a horror movie as it played itself out in reality. Other than that, the only other truths worth considering were those that would keep them all alive.

“I think we should start thinking about an escape plan,” Neil said to the group.

Meghan looked up at him from her spot on the couch, “Escape? But you said yourself that we should wait for—”

“No, I mean escape in case something happens and those things find us and maybe even get in here.”

Jerry asked, “What’d you have in mind?”

Ever so quietly, so as not to draw attention to themselves, they loaded some bare necessities into the back of the minivan. Between the two front seats, Neil placed a shotgun, two handguns, and a pile of boxes of shells for each. He also put the key in the ignition, just in case they had to leave in a hurry.

The rest of the day was spent trying to occupy themselves as best as they could. But really, what does one do when facing the end of the world? With limited resources and virtually no way to get anywhere, what do you do?

Tony sat at the dining room table and wrote a series of letters to important people in his life. He penned one to his best friend, Angie, to whom he first came out. He wrote another to Phil, a past lover who was never really absent from his thoughts. And of course he wrote a letter to his mother. He took his time, carefully choosing what could possibly be the last words by which he would be remembered, sometimes agonizing over a sentence or a phrase until he wadded up the paper and started anew. With so few words and such a lack of space, he wanted each and every syllable to echo with his voice. These would be his testament and he treated them as such. He spent the better part of the day writing those three letters and when he was done, he laid his head down on the glass table and went to sleep.

Rachel sat quietly on a chair in the corner of the living room and continued to drink from the bottle of vodka she found in the cabinet. After more carefully examining the bottle, she realized that it was actually a bottle of Spudka, distilled potato vodka. It tasted more like lighter fluid to her than potable alcohol, but it did result in a very welcome numbing buzz as she drank it. She decided that the buzz was more important than having mutinous taste buds threatening to revolt. She was still experiencing a little shock from all that had happened, but she found herself curiously resenting the zombies for deciding to end the world on the same day that she was to get her annual review and the promise of a raise. She was due damnit! She had worked so hard this year and she was due. Everybody in that goddamned office was making more than her and she was poised to do something about it.

She took another sip from the bottle and quickly swallowed the potent liquid. Even with her buzz, the taste was still obnoxious. It was the kind of taste that caused her jaw to tighten. It had been some time since she had spoken or even stood and she was in no hurry to determine how badly both of those could be given her rising inebriation. So far, she hadn’t felt the need to relieve herself, so she was perfectly comfortable with not testing her abilities in either category. Absently, she checked her phone, still attached to her hip, for messages and tried to dial out again. It might as well be a paperweight for all the good that it was doing her. She thought about throwing it across the room in frustration, but she looked up to see Kim standing in front of her, and she kept her anger in check.

Kim held out an empty glass and waited. Rachel smiled and poured a generous portion of the fiery, clear liquid, held up the bottle in a friendly toasting fashion, and then took another drink. Kim smiled at the drunken woman with the messy blonde tangled curls, raised the small glass tumbler, and drank a sip herself. For a moment, Kim was concerned that Rachel had inadvertently grabbed a bottle of paint thinner or gasoline to drink. She’d never had straight vodka before and now she knew why. Its transparency suggested to the casual observer that it might actually be smooth and as innocuous as water. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Still, she held onto the glass and walked herself to the bathroom in the master bedroom. There was a large tub with plenty of towels back there and she planned on pampering herself one last time. Luckily for her, the water and gas utilities had not yet stopped working, though it would just be a short while before the battery-powered backup generators would fail at those locations as well. While she filled the tub with hot water, she went in search of a good book. The reality of the situation was that she would have been satisfied with even a bad book, but none was forthcoming. Instead, she found a stack of magazines with titles like
People, Us,
and,
Soap Opera Digest
. These would simply have to do for the time being. She piled her clothes in a neat pile next to the tub and climbed into the hot water, which came up to her neck. The heat from the water mixed with the heat from the alcohol in her belly helped to welcome a very real sense of contentment that almost, but not quite, chased away the day’s worries and fears. With her head resting comfortably against an inflatable, bath pillow, she tried to embrace the deep breathing exercises she learned some time ago in a martial arts class she had taken with her friend, Desi.

Across the hall from the master bedroom and Kim’s moment of peace, there was anything but peace being waged as Jules, Danny, and Jerry were engaged in a very taut game of Risk. Jerry was holding Australasia pretty firmly and slowly expanding by way of southern Asia into Africa. In the meantime, Jules and Danny were fighting it out over Europe and North America and not paying much attention to Jerry’s quiet aggression. There were plastic armies stacked all across the globe poised to attack and defend.

Jerry threw the dice and launched another successful and devastating attack against the scant red armies of Danny’s imperial forces holding a patch of land in southern Asia. Jerry moved the lion’s share of his armies into the now vacant land and continued his turn elsewhere.

Jules was merely playing because Danny was. She didn’t have any interest in this game, but it was the only one that she recognized of the several on the top shelf in the closet. It seemed a good idea just to be doing something. She watched as Jerry continued to play out his bid for world domination. She looked away from the game board, not at all concerned that she might miss one of Jerry’s moves that impacted her own tenuous hold on southern Europe.

Deciding that not having a barking dog in the backyard to draw attention to their sanctuary was in their best interest, the dog was brought inside to be with all the visitors in his house. Now, he was curled contentedly next to Jules who was even then stroking his ears and neck. He was a mutt for sure, but had the size, fur, and friendly—if a little hyperactive—disposition of a border collie. His confusion had given way to contentment as he enjoyed the attention of this new little girl.

While all of this was unfolding, Neil and Meghan, having found a stash of miniature Hershey chocolates hidden behind a stack of plastic bowls and tubs with lids, sat themselves on the stairs and indulged their sweet-tooths. They didn’t say much to one another but took turns feeding chocolate candies into each other’s mouths. Neil wondered to himself if they would ever get out of this situation alive. He munched on a Krackle bar, enjoying the crunch of chocolate covered rice crispies, and looked around.

The house was as much a prison as it was a sanctuary. It wouldn’t take long, he realized, for the walls around them to begin to threaten the fleeting peace they had found. And then what? Would they put to the test Sartre’s supposition that “Hell is other people” or would they, given the gravity of their situation, be able to see through any petty differences and come together to survive? Of course, only time would tell. He would just have to wait and see, just like the rest of them.

“We can see them now sir. They’re heading our way,” the voice on the radiophone reported the update without any sense of fear or doubt. He might as well have been reading the nutrition label from a box of breakfast cereal.

“Okay, son. We’ll get some gunships airborne and headed your way asap.”

“Thank you, sir. We’ll hold them here for as long as you need.”

All eyes in the command center were fixated on the Colonel as he set the radio receiver down. They all realized that it could very well be any or all of them on the other end of the radio. Could each of them be as cool as the disembodied voice circling the communications room?

The colonel stood facing the wall for a moment or two longer without turning to face everyone around him. He was having a difficult time focusing on the task at hand. It wasn’t a simple matter of a military operation. He was faced with a confusing and seemingly spontaneous uprising with very few options to end it. Both military bases on the north side of Anchorage were in ruins and going through final death throes. Most of the heavy equipment that should have been at his disposal was either still serving with troops in the Middle East or was sitting uselessly in garages and motorcades on Fort Richardson. More pressing on his mind though, was the fact that his wife was on the wrong side of the military cordon that was currently straddling the Glenn Highway as the only force standing between the chaos that Anchorage had become and the rest of the state. He could order a helicopter and a rescue team to their house to retrieve her, but if he couldn’t do that for all of his officers and soldiers in his command, then he couldn’t do it for himself either. His wife, a stalwart supporter of fairness and consistency, would be the first to point that out to him. He could picture her saying it as he stood there. He could also hear her reminding him that the quicker he got the job done, the quicker he could move on to worrying about something else. He was an enduring worrier and life just had a way of producing things about which he should and could worry.