Infection: Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (7 page)

From these aisles, Neil put his hands on sleeping bags, hooking them to the outside of the cart. He was just about to pile in a small tent when a voice behind him made him jump.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He turned to see the woman whose voice hard startled him. It was the manager...or at least
a
manager of the store. She seemed too young to be the general manager, but her nametag, which read “Meghan”, also boasted that she was “Management.” She glared at him with her intense blue eyes, demanding a response.

Neil was embarrassed during the brief silence that ensued. Looking down at the shopping cart and at the potential arsenal in it, he was at a loss for words to explain his actions. He was finding it hard to immediately explain to her why he was doing what he was doing. He wasn’t quite sure how many laws he had broken but he was relatively certain that it was more than he could imagine. It just wasn’t in his nature to break the law and yet he hadn’t even hesitated to steal and vandalize.

More annoyed than anything else the woman asked, “What the hell is going on today? Has everyone gone crazy?”

Stuttering, Neil tried, “I...um...I...”

“I mean, first no one shows up for work this morning...last time I’m hiring college students that live on campus. I mean, you’d think as close as it was it would be a snap to get here for work. And then you...are you looting?”

“No.” Of this Neil was adamant. Looting just seemed too random and self-serving. What he had done was self-preserving. “Have you turned on a radio this morning? Watched the news? Anything?”

Thoughtfully, she answered, “Uhhh, no. My radio is on the blink in my car and the music in here is a recording.”

Knowing that this would be the quickest way to get his point across, Neil suggested, “Why don’t you go call the police. I’ll come with you.”

They went to the front of the store to use the phone at the Customer Service Desk. Meghan was careful to go inside the enclosure and leave Neil standing on the store sales floor. In case he was off the deep end, she wanted to have something between her and him, even if it was only the pressboard walls of the customer service island. After she dialed and heard the same recording Neil had heard earlier, she dialed her home number; same recording. She took her cell phone from her pocket and tried that as well only to get the same frustrating message.

Neil said, “Let’s go over to the Electronics section and check out the news. Maybe someone is still broadcasting.” Test patterns were on every television from every station; a simple message ran along the bottom that a word from the Emergency Broadcast System would follow shortly.

Meghan asked again as she accompanied Neil out to his van which was parked just outside the doors, “What’s going on?”

Seriously, almost apologetically, Neil looked her squarely in the eyes and said, “I don’t honestly know for sure. I just saw the most disturbing and frightening thing I think I could ever imagine.”

And so, as they finished unloading the supplies he had gathered into the rear hatch and back seat of his van and then went back into the store to load the cart with other necessities such as matches and fire starting bricks, batteries, first aid supplies, and anything else they thought might be useful, he told her about what had happened to Rachel and him at their office building. Neil avoided any speculation or editorializing about the events; there really wasn’t any point. The facts themselves were staggering enough without side comments.

Perhaps it was because of the way that Neil had talked about it, but Meghan felt compelled to believe the story. When she saw Rachel pass by with a cart so full she could barely push it, she knew they were telling the truth. There was something that still clung to Rachel’s face and eyes. A sense of fear and doubt just seemed to cling to the other woman.

They were startled when a new voice shouted from the front of the store, “Hellllllooooo! Is there anyone herrrrreee? Can anyone help us?”

Neil and Meghan pushed their full cart out to the voice, which happened to be on the way to the van parked out front. It was a younger man, not much more than a kid really, who waited for them by the Customer Service Desk. He had two young children who looked wild-eyed and scared with him.

Jerry recounted to the others what had happened at the hospital, allowing Danny and Jules to fill in details of how it all began with poor little Martin and their caveman.

“...so, we got out to my car in the parking garage and then there was all this screaming and running all around us. There were people running every which way. Some were chasin’ and some were fleein.’ We were already in our car and moving, so we were able to get the hell outta Dodge before it was too late. There weren’t a whole lot of others who were that lucky though. A bus pulled up just as we got out onto Providence Drive. I don’t think the driver could see what was going on ‘cause he just opened his doors and waited, like everything was still normal and he was just going to pick up his passengers like any other day. Those things were on there before he could do anything. I think I saw the bus start moving again, but we just wanted to get away fast.”

Jules pulled on Jerry’s blue paper thin “scrub” pants and asked him but loud enough for everyone to hear clearly, “What about my Mom and Dad? Where are they? Are they going to be alright?”

Jerry couldn’t look down at her. He just couldn’t bring himself to do that. He knew the probable fate of the little girl’s parents. They had been there at the epicenter of all of the chaos. He touched her lightly on her head. He swallowed hard and instead looked at the other adults.

The question hung in the air, though, for all of the adults gathering around to hear, and Rachel had by then joined them. Meghan was still not sure what was happening. Neil and Rachel had seen an attack and were not sure of what they had actually seen other than a very grisly and bizarre murder. Jerry was the only one among them who understood and even he wasn’t entirely able to wrap his mind around the truth.

The air was heavy with unease and doubt. They looked at one another for a brief few moments unsure of what to do. Neil interrupted the silence with, “Okay. Unless there are any objections, I think we should try and sort things out somewhere other than here. Does anyone live close by?”

Rachel protested with a loud, “Fuck that! Oh, sorry kids.”

“D’you have a different idea?”

“Everything we need is right here. Why don’t we just stay here and wait for...” She trailed off realizing that she didn’t know how to finish her thought.

Neil finished it for her. “Wait for what? We’re on our own here. This is why I think we should get out of here and, by the way; the clock on that train is ticking away so I’ll make this brief. This place has too many windows that can be broken and too many lights to draw attention to itself. This place is bad news.”

Jerry added, “He’s right...Rachel is it? This place would be a deathtrap. We need to go somewhere that won’t attract a lot of people; because where there are lots of people there will be lots of those things. It’s that simple.”

Meghan summed up the decision with, “Okay. Then let’s get moving. If I’m gonna die, I don’t want it to be at work.”

Her candor and dry humor brought a smile to everyone’s face as they went back to the parking lot and their awaiting all-wheel drive life raft.

When they stepped outside, the sky was getting brighter, the smoke coming from near the hospital appeared to be getting thicker and broader as if the base of the flames was starting to devour the college campus as well as the hospital, but the most unsettling thing was the almost totally absent sound of emergency sirens. Not more than fifteen minutes prior, the air was filled with the clarion echoes of police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks. Now the only thing in the air was the smell of smoke as the city started to burn.

And then there was something else: a hum really. Jerry had once been to a horse race and it sounded strangely similar to that. He said uneasily, “I think we’d just better get outta here.”

Rachel asked, “What is that sound?” and stepped away from the van trying to see around the corner toward the source of the approaching sound. It grew louder and louder until they could make out what was undoubtedly screams.

The chaos had found them and was rapidly headed straight for them. They had to act immediately.

Meghan fished her keys from her pocket and ran toward her car. Neil shouted after her, “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m not leaving my car here. I’ll follow you.”

She stopped suddenly and ran back to him. “Here,” she said, handing him a fistful of keys. “This one should unlock the trigger guards on the guns.”

Neil smiled and said, “Thanks, and here,” passing her one of the two-way radios he had grabbed from the Electronics Department. “Stay in contact with us. I don’t want to lose you.”

She smiled and ran over to her car, which took several attempts to start. She then bolted over to the Tesoro gas station in the northwest corner of the parking lot. Neil, Jerry, Rachel, and the two kids all loaded themselves into Neil’s minivan and followed Meghan to the service station.

Neil was surprised when he got there to find that she wasn’t getting gas. She was corralling two other people, employees at the gas station, into her car. As he pulled up next to her, she gave him the thumbs up, rolled down her window, and asked, “Okay, so now what?

He wasn’t entirely sure
what
was next. They could get on the Glenn Highway and head north out of town. They could get on the Seward Highway and head south out of town. As far as getting out of town, those were the only two options. Neil was concerned that if this chaos, like ripples in a pond from a dropped stone, was spreading in every direction, then the highway north might be too snarled with outgoing traffic. He really didn’t relish the thought of getting stuck in a traffic jam and then having to beat this storm on foot. The southbound highway was a little more appealing, but once they headed south they were very limited with any other road travel. Of course, they could just find a good place to hide and wait. But where?

The chaos at Providence Hospital had, by that time, grown exponentially. The University of Alaska Anchorage, immediately adjacent to the hospital, was engulfed by the terrifying wave as it spread further and further into the city. Like a metastasizing cancer, the bedlam sought fertile grounds of hapless victims in the neighborhoods and schools surrounding the university and hospital. The city was still rousing itself from its slumber, so any response by the citizenry was limited at best.

Young children waiting for the school bus to pick them up for school, men and women out for their morning exercise jogs or walks, and clueless souls retrieving their morning newspapers were the first victims to fall. Entire neighborhoods were shaken awake by the horrible cries and desperate pleas for help from the latest victims.

One woman watched from her bay window as a group of four or five of the fiends ran down the street chasing after her newspaper deliveryman. Not realizing what was happening, she flew to her front door and started to scream at his pursuers as they took him down. While two of them pinned him down and started to perform their awful work, the others altered their course and ran at her. She slammed her door heavily behind her just before they were topping the stairs of her front porch. Locking it, she screamed and ran for the phone. In the living room of her condominium, she was able to punch in 9-1-1 just as one of her attackers plunged through her bay window and was upon her. She kicked and screamed but it was no use. She was dragged to the floor as she tried to run and suffered the same fate as every other victim. Slowly but surely, the neighborhood and every other neighborhood bordering the university and hospital area were awakened by screams of terror as the disease, bit by bit, gradually consumed the city.

Dr. Caldwell and his group, now down to just eight people, were trying to catch their breath on a floor dominated by small labs and private physicians’ offices. He and the police officer had not acted upon his suspicions of the effects of the bites, and had instead elected to move the three members of their group who had been injured thus. The doctor was always certain to isolate the three away from the rest of the group. No point in taking any chances. He could be wrong, but if he was right, he didn’t want to invite disaster. Two floors later, the person who appeared to have the worst bites and who was in rapid decline expired and almost immediately reanimated.

The three injured people were currently lying on the floor in an office far down the hall from the rest of the group. The living corpse, still lying between the two other bitten people, leaned across one of the injured people’s laps and started to chew on her thigh, which was showing just below her skirt. Even through her disorienting misery, the victim tried to fend off her attacker. She hit the other woman on the back of the head until she had somewhat relented. Of course, she merely stopped biting her victim on the leg and moved her blood slathered teeth and lips up to her neck.

The third wounded person, a diminutive Filipino man, tried to crawl away using his one good arm to balance himself, though he was unable to make any headway as he succumbed to his dizziness and collapsed onto his stomach. He mercifully passed out and was still unconscious as the two others, the second woman having died from her new wounds and reanimated, started to chew on his legs and arms.