Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (35 page)

Kit handed Mason one of the towels still
neatly folded on the shelf high above the toilet. “Here,” she said.
“Don’t let the others see you like that.”

“Thanks,” Mason said, and spit again into
the toilet.

“You might want to close that lid too,” Kit
suggested. “Sure give away.” She stepped back into the main room
with the others and was gone.

Mason spat again. The nausea was gone, but
the doubt and questions lingered. He hated this new world. It
didn’t suit him. It was too dirty, too cold, too unpredictable, and
far too dangerous. It was only through dumb luck that he managed to
survive. It was also pure chance that had found him in his current
company. He hadn’t set out to join the militia.

Mason had been going to college at Kenai
Peninsula College. He was studying to be an engineer. He hadn’t yet
settled on a specific direction, so he had been completing his
general education requirements, which would contribute to just
about any major he decided to pursue. He liked school; or rather,
he liked going to part-time classes and doing the amount of work
expected if he could not be expected to decide upon a career path
and start working. Simply thinking about that was enough to exhaust
him back then.

He only wished that could be the biggest
stress in his life now. He was accustomed to living at his parents’
home, eating his parents’ food, and watching his parents’
television. He usually had a job and moved between working in the
handful of retail stores, hotels, and restaurants in the area. That
money all went to his leisure and never to his living expenses. As
a result, he had a lot of leisure in his life, which led to a lot
of friends.

That all had changed suddenly.

Sitting in his parents’ living room and
watching the morning news, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing
and seeing on the television. Something horrible was happening in
Anchorage but no one knew what it was. CNN was running footage shot
from a helicopter, from an amateur cameraman on the street sending
uncut footage through the internet until his feed went black, and
silent traffic cameras from other feeds on the internet that the
network deemed worthy of sharing. In every instance, it looked like
Anchorage was under assault.

A few hours into the broadcast, all
information coming out of Anchorage ceased. The city’s voice was
suddenly silenced. The last flights out of Anchorage International
were being routed to any airports within reach of their meager fuel
supplies. The pilots of those crafts were the last to report any
updates about the fate of Anchorage, and none of it was
promising.

Mason was at home alone. His father was
doing an electrical job for a contractor on Alaska’s North Slope
and was on his two-week rotation. His mother was visiting Mason’s
sister, living in San Diego with her husband.

Mason tried to call his mother but found
neither his home nor his cell phones were functioning. The network
was down. He didn’t worry much in the beginning. He was in Kenai,
which was more than a couple of hours south of Anchorage. He
couldn’t imagine he was in any imminent danger, but he couldn’t
shake the disturbing images he saw coming out of Anchorage. He had
seen similar scenes in horror movies and video games. It was
Armageddon and he was alone!

It was a couple of days before it got really
crazy. On the first day, people started to drive away, but not
everyone. He had a few stalwart neighbors resisting their flight
instinct. Those few became fewer as each day passed until Mason was
one of the last on his block still at home.

The funny thing was that it wasn’t the
undead, which he hadn’t encountered yet, that put him out of his
house and on the run. It was looters, thieves, and murderers. They
showed up on the fourth dark night. He saw their headlights and
heard the grumble and crack of their motors as they came up the
road. It was mostly motorcycles but there were a couple of pickup
trucks as well.

Most of them drove up to the first house, a
spacious, multistory home with a three car garage and a workshop
out back. One of the mob members kicked in the door and set off the
alarm, whose clarion protest echoed for miles. An equally loud
gunshot ended the alarm siren.

They looted the house of all its supplies
and most of its valuables. The two pickup trucks were nearly full
but not quite, so the entire operation moved to the next house. It
was the Barnettes’ home. Mason watched them start into the same
routine but then some sudden shouting interrupted the operation.
The Barnettes were still home.

The Barnette family consisted of a father,
Henry, and his wife Margaret. They had a couple of middle school
aged kids and a Border Collie. Mason would see them in their front
yard quite often. The mother and father were a little older than
most with children that age but they were still pretty active.

Mason watched from his bedroom window, which
overlooked the street. He knew what to expect and knew that it was
not going to go well. Mason gathered that maybe Mr. Barnette
objected to the armed intrusion. For that Mr. Barnette was
eventually beaten severely by a couple of large characters using
bats to do their business. There was some screaming that followed
and then quiet.

The quiet lasted a disturbingly long time
during which Mason’s imagination ran into wild and terrible country
filled with depravity. Unfortunately, his worst imaginings weren’t
too far from reality.

Frightened for his own safety and unsure
what to do, Mason became as small as he could make himself. He
wanted to be invisible. He didn’t want to be a part of this world
and so tried to will himself out of it. He drank the last of his
Mountain Dew while he watched, unable to take his eyes from the
unfolding drama, afraid that if he did the men would then come for
him.

When the men reappeared in the front yard,
most hauling more looted goods, they loaded themselves onto their
waiting motorcycles and into their trucks. And like a plague of
locusts, the men were gone.

Mason decided then and there that he needed
to leave before they returned. He knew it was just a matter of time
before they would be back. They might even return with larger
vehicles in order to haul away more. If he was still in his house
when they did come back, he didn’t know how they would treat him
whether he resisted their intrusion or not. He resented his parents
even more for having left him alone during all of this, ignoring
the fact that he had pleaded for such autonomy for years.

In the process of filling his backpack with
clean socks, underwear, warm clothes, and various toiletry items,
Mason wandered into his parents’ room. He was looking for more
clothes and knew that he had some shirts in the clothes hamper in
their room. One of the numerous pictures on his mother’s dresser
caught and held his attention. It was a picture of his mother and
father standing in their backyard beneath the big tree that they
lost in a terrible storm a few autumns later. It was a picture that
he had always liked. The sun was shining, the world was green and
vibrant, and his parents were alive. It probably didn’t hurt that
he had snapped the picture with his brand new digital camera on
that day, which happened to be his birthday as well. The little
framed photograph was small enough that he could comfortably pack
it as well.

He went over to his father’s closet in the
corner of their room. Both of his parents had walk-in closets with
ample room. His mother’s was filled with organizing racks and
shelves displaying shoes, dresses, sweaters, formal coats and
jackets, and all manner of pants and tops. There was no denying her
love of textiles.

His father’s was organized as well, but
behind a rack full of dress shirts and pants was a locked gun safe.
Mason knew the combination on the lock and even where to find the
hidden key in case the combination in his head didn’t work. He
twisted the dial, feeling the clicks in his fingers. He pulled the
lever and...nothing happened.

Just like every time before when he tried to
open the safe, the combination didn’t work. He shook his head and
breathed deeply, allowing the air to escape slowly. He once again
dialed the combination into the safe and this time when he pulled
the lever the door released.

The oily, musky scent in the safe escaped as
the door opened, filling Mason’s nose. His dad was not a gun nut or
even an avid hunter, but he did have a nice collection of firearms.
There was an old twenty-two caliber Remington which was his dad’s
first gun; a gift from his father. There were a pair of old, breech
loaded shotguns that had once been used to hunt quail. Those two
looked like cannons standing on their ends.

Beside the antique behemoths was a very nice
bolt action hunting rifle with an equally nice scope mounted atop
it. Mason was pretty sure that was the gun his father had purchased
for his one hunting excursion into the interior. Mason remembered
his father’s comments about the trip, including the fact that he
had spent all that money on the rifle and never had an opportunity
to use it.

On some shelves next to the larger guns were
a variety of pistols that were Mason’s real objective. There were
little dark beauties that had always caught his eye whenever his
father let him browse. He was more familiar with the pistols,
having played a lifetime of video games in which antique shotguns
and practical hunting rifles rarely surfaced.

The pistol selection was not overly exotic
or specialized, aside from an old Colt Peacekeeper forty-five
caliber revolver. It looked like the type of pistol the Outlaw
Josey Wales would have drawn to fight his way out of a pinch.

His father also had tactical holsters and a
shoulder holster. A pair of drawers had a healthy supply of bullets
as well. It was all a matter of Mason deciding which firearms had
the most ammunition for them. He settled on the Peacekeeper and a
pair of nine millimeter pistols, a Glock and a vintage Beretta. The
automatics could hold a lot more bullets than the Colt, but he
couldn’t deny his fixation on the large revolver.

Into his backpack, he piled as many boxes of
ammunition as he could fit, filling two side pockets until he could
barely close the zippers. He would have liked to take more, but he
knew he would need more than just guns and ammunition if he was
forced to fend for himself for any length of time.

When he hefted his backpack onto his
shoulder, he was surprised by the weight, or lack thereof, from the
items he had already packed. He thought that maybe he could pack
more...more guns, more bullets, more clothes, more of whatever
else.

In a moment of clarity, he did make a
decision which he would later appreciate. Knowing that the gun safe
would ultimately be found, Mason thought it wise to move his
father’s guns. The looters might not know the combination to the
safe or have the key, but there were other ways around those
hurdles and a resourceful enough group would find a way through the
safe’s doors. He needed to hide the guns for safekeeping for his
father’s return.

The guns he couldn’t carry he needed to
hide. The extra pistols and boxes of ammunition were all stacked
into an Adidas duffel bag and the rifles and shotguns were bundled
together with some binding strips he found at the bottom of the
safe. The extra firearms were moved into the attic, whose overhead
hatch was in the corner of his mother’s closet. He set the guns and
the bag on a steady piece of plywood and closed the hatch carefully
above his head. Satisfied that only the most detailed search would
result in the guns being found, Mason set about the rest of his
packing which would happen primarily in the kitchen and garage.

He descended the stairs and went into the
kitchen to first grab a bite to eat, and then to load more
nonperishable provisions into his backpack. He stormed into the
kitchen and found the bread on the counter. They still had power,
so he dropped a pair of slices into the toaster and pressed down
the lever.

All at once, he didn’t feel right. He didn’t
feel like he was alone. It almost felt as if he was
being...watched. He froze in his tracks. He was wearing the two
semi-automatic pistols in the tactical holsters on his hips, but
both were strapped tightly and safely into place. In front of him
and well within reach was the cutting block with several very long,
very sharp knives. That seemed like his best bet.

Trying to control his fear and not let on
that he was aware he had company, Mason tapped the counter in a
nervous series of drumbeats. Finally, he reached out, grabbed the
knife from the block, and spun around with his eyes wide and his
nostrils flaring aggressively.

Staring back at him were two scared kids, a
boy and a girl, who didn’t look to be older than twelve or
thirteen. He looked right and then left, not sure what to do next.
There was no one else there. Neither of the children did anything.
Their faces were vacant and emotionless, like the survivors of a
natural disaster having just emerged from their storm shelters.

After several tense seconds, he asked, “You
the Barnette kids?”

The two nodded in unison, as if rehearsed.
Their terrified, confused eyes spoke volumes. Not thinking before
he spoke, Mason asked, “Where are your folks?”

The boy looked over Mason’s shoulder toward
his own house while the girl started to cry. He regretted his
question almost immediately. He knew the answer and should have
known better than to ask.

Not knowing what else to do, Mason asked,
“You guys hungry?”

His question was answered with silent
shrugs. That was good enough for him. He may not have been capable
of fixing the world’s problems, bringing his parents home, or
theirs back to life, but he could cook them something to eat. He
thought they had time for that.