Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (42 page)

Gordon demanded loudly, “Get her off me! Get
her off me! Nowwwwww goddamnit! Get her off!”

William pulled the cold, lifeless corpse off
of his friend. William saw all the down stuffing of Gordon’s vest
from the tear created by his attacker’s determined teeth. He didn’t
see any blood, but could clearly see that Gordon’s vest had been
shredded.

Gordon was breathing heavily, his lungs
protesting. He fumbled in the down mess on his chest, his fingers
finding their way into and through the hole through the insulating
layers of clothing. William helped him up to a sitting position and
cast a horrified look to Gordon’s bloody fingers as they
reemerged.

Gordon’s eyes filled with fear as William’s
filled with tears. William didn’t have many friends, and had even
fewer in the Shotgun Cove vicinity. Gordon was a rare breed in
William’s life. If all of what Neil had said about the bites was
true, then.... William couldn’t begin to consider the implications.
All he could think to do was ask, “You okay?”

“It hurts like hell but it don’t feel like
much of a bite. Just kind of knocked the wind outta me.”

When Emma heard the word bite, she flinched
a little. This was not going to end well. Her eyes betrayed her
misgivings to William, shooting her a look of warning. She could
sense the protective instincts William was feeling, but knew that
ultimately they would have to do the unthinkable.

She ignored her first instinct and nodded to
William. “We need to get moving,” she said sharply. “We don’t have
time. Sorry, Gordon.” She wasn’t entirely certain for what she was
saying sorry. Was it the bite he had suffered or his eventual death
at the hands of his friends? He wasn’t naive. Maybe he knew what to
expect. Putting her best effort into softening her tone, she asked,
“Can you walk?”

Upstairs, Neil led Abdul and Jess down the
hallway toward the room in which Abdul had been hiding. They could
see a body lying motionless toward the opposite end of the hall.
Abdul thought about the young woman who had been killed by the
creature. She was so pretty and fresh looking, even in death. She
was like a flower after a frost.

Abdul stopped in his tracks without a sound.
He couldn’t see the girl. She wasn’t there anymore. Neil and Jess
stopped too; realizing uncomfortably that something had spooked
their new companion.

There wasn’t time to contemplate it. From an
open doorway on their right, the young woman burst forth. Her
beauty was gone, having been supplanted aggressively by an ugly,
predatory rage. Abdul was too terrified to speak and his hands
refused to respond to his brain’s pleas to rise up. He felt
completely vulnerable.

The roar of a gunshot upstairs rippled
through the entire house, rattling floors and walls. Emma stopped
what she was doing and backed away from the kitchen’s entrance,
never taking her eyes from the open doorway.

William jumped when the echoing crack
startled him. Controlling his fear as much as he was able, William
brought a glass of cold water over to Gordon, who sipped it
slowly.

Despite the fiery pain emanating from his
chest like a blast furnace, Gordon asked playfully, “Wouldn’t
happen to have a beer and a smoke would you?”

“Let me see what I can find,” William said.
“Wait a minute... you smoke?”

Gordon’s smile struggled to remain on his
face following another searing jolt of pain.

He looked in the refrigerator, which was
still humming and producing electricity. There were no beers on the
shelves or in the door. William was about to close the door when he
decided to look into the crisper drawers. The first had a variety
of vegetables: carrots, celery, broccoli, and asparagus. In the
other there were some wedges of deli cheeses, packages of
tortillas, and beneath the lodge owner’s layer of subterfuge was a
trio of micro beers and a pair of single serving Sutter Home wine
bottles filled with white zinfandel.

“I knew Norman wouldn’t let us down.”
William stood away from the refrigerator and handed one of the
beers to Gordon, but Gordon didn’t reach for it. William was frozen
with dread. He looked over at Emma, standing to William’s right and
near a cutting block counter with a large assortment of knives.

Emma was frowning in Gordon’s direction but
not moving, which only confused William. He slowly stood but
maintained the refrigerator door as a barrier between himself and
Gordon. “Gordon, I found you your beer. Here man.” William forced
himself to take the plunge. He closed the door with his forearm and
let out a long, labored sigh. His heart sank and his eyes swelled
with sorrowful heat. Gordon was slumped forward in his chair like
he had fallen asleep.

When Emma spoke, her voice was stern and
direct. “You need to leave the kitchen now.”

“But, he may only…” William’s voice was
pleading and soft. He refused to believe that his friend was gone
and wasn’t even willing to consider the change that was fated to
happen. For that reason, Emma knew she had to act quickly.

She grabbed William’s arm and led him into
the hallway. “I need you to watch out for Neil and the others. They
should be coming back down any minute.”

William tried to protest, but his words
caught in the back of his throat, threatening to choke him. He
stood motionless in the hallway, which is what Emma needed from
him. She didn’t want him to see what she was going to do.

She walked briskly back into the kitchen,
found the wood knife block, and removed a long, sharp knife. She
positioned herself behind Gordon and laid her hand on his white
scalp. She detected a change in Gordon’s disposition. He moved
slightly. She could feel a hint of a vibrating buzz begin to build
in his skin.

When his hand jerked, Emma was barely able
to control her fear. She placed the knife’s blade against the base
of Gordon’s skull. She tried to drive it into his flesh in a single
thrust, but it wasn’t as easy as she had anticipated. The flesh
didn’t part as she expected. And the blood. There was so much
blood. It spilled from the wound like a torrent, drenching her
hands in its sticky, oily wetness.

Feeling Gordon start to shudder, Emma worked
more urgently and found the right angle to drive the kitchen knife
deep into his head, destroying the brain in the process. With that
done, Gordon calmed again and became still.

Thinking quickly, Emma grabbed a kitchen
towel from the counter and threw it down onto the pool of blood on
the floor. The towel was clearly insufficient to clean or even
cover the sanguine mess at her feet, but Emma thought doing
something was better than doing nothing. She ran the
still-functioning faucet over her hand trying to clean the blood
from it.

Quietly, like the survivors of the grim
battle that they were, the five of them climbed back into the Land
Rover waiting outside. William sat in the driver seat. He looked at
the keys in the ignition, and found himself lost in his memories.
He hadn’t known many of the people in Shotgun Cove well, but he was
acquainted with all of them. These were people with whom he had
planned to forge a life. He assumed that the same fate had befallen
most, if not all of them. He didn’t need to go to any more of the
lodges to confirm his dark thoughts. For once, ignorance was
preferred to knowledge.

From the passenger seat next to him, Neil
asked, “Mind if I drive us back? I’d like to see how this baby
handles.”

William nodded slowly but his vacant
expression never removed its focus from the keys. Breathing in
deeply, William couldn’t make room for anything else. Without a
word, he opened his door and let himself out. He walked around to
the other side and sat down in the seat Neil had just vacated.

The drive back to William’s lodge was spent
in silence. Most of the passengers stared out the windows at the
passing landscape. The time was passing by uneventfully until Jess
announced, somewhat startled, “Oh my God. There’s another one of
those things.”

Leaning toward her and across Abdul sitting
in the middle, Emma asked, “Where?”

It didn’t require much effort for her to
spot it because the thing was running toward them from the woods.
It was sprinting with complete abandon, its blood smeared face
twisted into a devilish sneer.

“What do you want me to do?” Neil asked.

Emma grabbed her rifle and nodded to Neil
looking at her in the rear view mirror. Neil stopped the Land Rover
and Emma threw open her door. Standing on the seat with her dirty
boots, she leaned across the top of the vehicle’s roof to steady
her arms. She breathed in deeply, held it, and then let it go as
she pulled the trigger on her rifle.

She fired sparingly. Her first bullets
skipped and skittered amongst the thin trees but did not find their
marks. Getting a little nervous, Neil asked, “Emma? Should we just
move on?”

Emma peered down her rifle’s barrel again.
She could feel herself anticipating its next move...its next step.
She pulled the trigger once again and then dropped back down into
her seat.

Staring at the now motionless corpse lying
on the forest floor, Neil said, “Nice shot.”

“I know.”

Using every ounce of its celestial influence
and clout, the sun was finally able to negotiate an appearance,
even if it was only to bid all a good night at sunset. The warm
slivers of light poked themselves through the persistent banks of
low hanging gray clouds that clung to the Earth like a foul mood.
Hanging defiantly on the distant horizon, the sun melted the creamy
orange sherbet sky.

Back at William’s lodge, Neil sat with Jerry
on the balcony that looked out over the front door. They sat
quietly for a good long while; each had more than enough on his
mind to keep his thoughts occupied. The sunset distracted both of
them momentarily, offering respite from the tempest threatening to
burst in each of their minds.

They watched the sun until the darkness and
the clouds conspired against it and returned it once again to its
exile. They hadn’t said a word or even shared a look at one
another. When it started to snow, neither really noticed.

The snow came down in soft flakes that
covered the open pavement of William’s long driveway very quickly.
The storm was stifling the flame, which flickered and struggled in
the concrete and iron brazier between them. Trying to encourage the
little blaze, Jerry stirred it with one of the narrow branches the
fire was using for fuel. Little sparks, like fireflies, danced and
flittered in the air above as if challenging the snow.

“We should put up some kind of a roof if we
plan on having someone up here all the time,” Neil remarked. “No
point in being miserable.”

“Is that all it would take?” Jerry asked.
“We just put up a roof over our heads and we won’t be miserable? I
wish you would have said that earlier.”

Neil knew Jerry was referring to his misery
at having lost Claire, but he also knew that he was exceptionally
inept at comforting others. His ex-wife used to call him
“emotionally distant”. Neil recognized that it was a serious
character flaw, which typically doomed any relationship to ultimate
limits and usually failure.

He looked over at Jerry. “I wish it was that
easy. I’d be a professional roofer if that were the case. Jerry, I
don’t know what else to say except that I’m sorry. I know how much
Claire meant to you, man. I wish I knew what else to do, but I suck
at this kind of thing. Tell me what I can do and it’s done.”

Jerry’s eyes misted and his voice was
somewhat choked when he said, “I know, man. I don’t know how you do
it. I feel kind of selfish. I mean, what about you? It’s not like
you can’t be hurtin’ too. I mean, Meghan? God man...” Jerry trailed
off and looked out deeper into the darkening trees around the
lodge. “How do you do it?”

It was Neil’s turn to press a branch into
the fire. He breathed in deeply and let it out slowly. His head
shook and his mouth opened but no words were forthcoming. He
honestly didn’t know what to say because the reality was that he
didn’t think he
was
“doing it”. Neil felt
numb most of the time but it wasn’t a feeling he wished upon
anyone.

He stood abruptly. “You good out here by
yourself for a bit? I think I’m gonna go see about something to
eat.”

Jerry nodded.

“I’ll talk with William about some kind of
cover for out here,” Neil said. “Maybe he’s got something that he
uses.”

Stopping just short of the door leading back
into the second floor of the lodge, Neil turned and said bluntly,
“Ya know, the hardest thing about getting by...for me...the thing
that hurts the most...is gettin’ by. Sometimes, I don’t think I
should be able to. Ya know? What does that say about me? That I’m
able to get by?”

“It says that you make the hard decisions
and have the right ideas to keep the rest of us alive and
well.”

Neil allowed a pained chuckled to escape.
“Sounds like something Meghan used to say to me.”

“Yeah?”

Neil nodded and walked through back inside.
“And where is she now?”

Jerry was stunned silent. After the door
closed he turned back to his watch, although there wasn’t much
point to it. The snow was now coming down in thick, swirling
spires. He couldn’t see much detail beyond the front of the house,
though the snow was already starting to help define a greater
contrast between light and dark...between the trees and the ground
around them.

For Neil, the night was a blur, helped on
its way by several glasses of whatever William was pouring. Hoping
to find some rest, Neil retreated to a couch in a second floor den.
He heard the inconsolable sobbing of Betsy and at least one other
person. There were soothing voices intermixed with the tears, but
the crying largely drowned out the voices.