Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (44 page)

Their heads were starting to swoon from
oxygen deprivation. Walking through the school’s diminutive
playground, Armstrong and Town felt strangely like giants. They
maneuvered through the jungle gym and miniature slide, both meant
for little kids, and ran around to the back of the school.

Unfortunately, more of the same awaited them
behind the school. Already moving toward the two men, a mass of
feral, undead creatures were only several steps away from where the
duo stood, gasping for breath.

Armstrong had had enough. His legs were in
full revolt, refusing to move another step. He had no choice but to
use the forty-five caliber Colt automatic pistol he had been
carrying. He pulled the slide on the pistol and fired three quick
rounds, which did little to discourage the press of decaying
flesh.

Town started to stagger away in the only
direction still open to them, into an open valley harboring the
sound of running water somewhere within it. Realizing his gunshots
did little more than excite the crowd, Armstrong turned and tried
to run but was snagged by a rush of jagged-nailed fingers. He tried
to yelp but his heaving chest couldn’t draw in enough breath.

Town neither saw nor heard his companion
fall beneath the swell of hungry, gnashing jaws. Armstrong was
exhausted and had no strength left to fight for his life. He pushed
and even managed a couple weak punches, but he was quickly and
decisively overwhelmed.

The toothy mouths sank themselves into his
arms and hands; into his neck and the back of his head; and finally
into his face. With grinding brown teeth, the creatures rent flesh
from bone, chewing the delicate tissue hungrily, blood and bits of
life spilling like a crimson flood down their chins.

Armstrong was pulled apart and devoured in a
matter of seconds and Town missed all of it. In fact, he thought it
was his friend Armstrong coming up behind him. Town looked out into
the valley in front of him, which had been carved into the mountain
range by the immutable power of an ancient glacier’s ice and water.
“I think...I think the Colonel is gonna get us all killed,” he
said.

The words were just leaving his lips when he
turned and realized his fatal error. It wasn’t Armstrong behind
him. It was one of those
things
and its
gray, claw like hand was mere inches away from him. His eyes
widening in fear, Town stumbled as he tried to back away. He hit
the cold ground hard, his bones and muscles protesting.

He was never able to get back to his feet.
He did manage to roll over onto his hands and knees. Pleading, “No,
no, no, no, no, no,” over and over, Town tried to crawl away but
he, like Armstrong, was fated to fall prey to the gray horde. He
too was gulped down in horrible, grunting mouthfuls.

Excited by the feeding frenzy, the fiendish
host of hundreds of ghouls stood as one and turned their attention
to some new sounds and new smells in Whittier. There were lights
too, coming from down in the portion of the city near the
water.

Irritated at having been disturbed when he
was just starting to settle into his room, Colonel Bear asked, “You
heard what?”

The militiaman, a wiry, dark haired man of
perhaps thirty-five and whose face was pocked with the remnants of
an adolescence filled with acne, was visibly shaken by the
Colonel’s question. Perhaps it wasn’t the question itself but the
rancid-smelling breath on which it floated. The Colonel’s odor
filled the room behind him and had rushed into the hallway when he
opened the door. “Colonel, I think we heard gunshots.”

“You
think
you heard
gunshots?”

“Yessir.”

“And?”

The man standing in the doorway looked
around for anyone capable of intervening but there was no one
within sight. He had no choice but to answer, “We thought you would
want to know. We thought that maybe it was Armstrong and Town.
Maybe they might need our help.”

With a cruel grin, the Colonel said, “And
that’s the problem.”

Confused, the man asked, “That they need our
help?”

“No. That you
thought
. When I want you to think, I will
tell
you when and what to think. Understand me?”

“Yessir.” Without another word the stung
militiaman slunk down the hallway and disappeared down the
stairs.

Colonel Bear stood for a minute longer while
he stretched his aching back. Then he threw on his malodorous
camouflaged jacket and walked laboriously in the same direction.
When he passed Carter’s door, he knocked loudly three times but
kept walking.

In the lobby, with only the flame in the
fireplace for lighting, the Colonel conferred with another of his
men, a loyal toady named Earl. They pointed and rubbed their chins,
sharing words that only the two of them could hear.

Carter walked up a few minutes later
smelling of hard alcohol and cigarettes, and asked loudly, “What
the fuck is going on?”

Earl, his eyebrows arched high enough to
intimidate the famed gateway to the West in St. Louis, sneered, “We
got some skins out there comin’ toward us.”

Not amused, Carter shot back, “And?”

“We don’t know how many there might be. We
need to all be ready,” said the Colonel.

Earl added, “Town and Armstrong haven’t got
back yet and we heard some shots a few minutes ago.”

Carter, who had opposed the idea of sending
men out late in the day, ignored Earl entirely, turning his
attention wholly on Colonel Bear. “We lost two more?”

The Colonel nodded and acknowledged that he
understood Carter’s question. He wasn’t asking about the men
specifically but about men generally. Only a handful of days
earlier, Colonel Bear had commanded a sizeable force of
semi-trained but fairly well armed militia. That had all changed
suddenly, and now they had only about twenty men and women with
them. They still had plenty of guns but they were starting to run
low on ammunition. Having lost two more of their number was not as
novel or inconsequential as it had been in the recent past. They
could no longer absorb losses without concern.

Fully awake and focused, Carter understood
the urgency and was ready to take control. He didn’t want to start
their defensive line at the Inn. That would be their fall back
line. He would like to meet any threats further out to mitigate and
blunt the force of their attack if possible. The creatures wouldn’t
assault with any guile or planning. Like every time before, the
skins would come at them head on, in relentless waves until the
militia’s line broke or all of the walking corpses were
dead...again.

Cody needed to get some fresh air that
wasn’t thick with body odor and flatulence. He was with Colonel
Bear’s rearguard on the far side of the Whittier tunnel and still
awaited word that they could join the others in the city. It had
been more than a day since they had been left and Cody was starting
to wonder if the Colonel and the rest of the militia were ever
coming back.

It was their job to ensure no one followed
the Colonel into and no one preceded the Colonel out of Whittier.
Cody knew the job assigned to them but found it exceedingly
difficult to stand watch with Oscar’s corpse dangling lifelessly in
the middle of the area they needed to patrol.

Cody hadn’t known Oscar well and couldn’t
claim that he much liked the guy, but the man didn’t deserve to be
hanged. Cody didn’t remember signing any enlistment papers agreeing
to be mindless drones...fodder to be sacrificed at the Colonel’s
will.

Before the skins showed up, he had been out
in the field near Sterling with his partner on a utility easement
job when their radio started to squawk about “disturbances”.
Details weren’t shared and they were fairly remote, so the two of
them kept working. When they came back to their truck, the
dispatcher was gone.

Alarmed and clueless, they drove back toward
Soldotna but ran into trouble immediately. The highway was jammed
with cars but many of them were abandoned, some still running.
Neither could guess what could have happened to cause all those
people to walk away from their vehicles. Not in a hundred lifetimes
could either of the men have known. They thought they saw some
people here and there but some instinct convinced them to keep
driving. Cody maneuvered their utility truck along the shoulder,
taking it as slowly as his agitation allowed.

Slowing because of a tighter than normal
angle, the two men were afforded the opportunity to see the first
evidence of something having gone afoul. An RV on the road above
them had been recently abandoned, as evidenced by the doors
standing open. However, a drying crimson streak adorned the white
and green side of the vehicle and a perfectly formed and preserved
red handprint had been left on the side behind the passenger side
door. Almost reflexively, Cody stopped their truck. He needed to
make certain his eyes were not deceiving him. That was most
definitely blood smeared all over the RV, and a lot of it.
Something horrible had happened here.

Their doubt was dispelled when they pulled
into the first semi-cleared parking lot along the highway. Driving
into the little restaurant’s lot, Cody saw a woman run in front of
them and a trio of men following closely behind her. When they
caught her, the three men tackled her and then began violently
assaulting her. The woman’s screams were horrific, tickling the
hairs all along Cody’s arms.

Josh, his partner, leapt from the truck and
ran toward them, shouting warnings as he closed the ground between
them. He was wielding a broad shovel he had pulled from the back of
their truck. When his protests went unheeded, he struck one of the
men on the back with the shovel’s flat blade. Surprised that his
initial blow had gone more or less unnoticed, Josh raised the
shovel and swung it harder the next time. He hit the man hard
enough to knock him off of the woman and back a few paces on the
pavement.

Cody watched all of this in awe from the
truck. Josh shouted at the man to stay on the ground, but the man
hopped to his feet, his hands hanging threateningly in his crouched
position. He resembled an animal...a monster...a demon. His eyes
were like windows into Hell.

Cody was as startled as Josh by the speed
and ferocity of the man’s unexpected attack. He nearly flew through
the air and grabbed hold of Josh without warning. Josh tried to
fend him off with the shovel but it was a lost cause. The man
overpowered Josh with little effort.

Desperate to help his friend, Cody scrambled
with his seatbelt and the door lock. He watched helplessly as
another and then another person pounced on poor Josh. In just
seconds, Cody’s partner was beneath a swarming pack of killers.

Too afraid to do anything else, Cody jumped
back into the truck and floored the accelerator, lurching the
vehicle forward. It was then that he saw more of the same happening
all over the parking lot and inside the restaurant as well. He may
have driven over one of the bodies, but he couldn’t be certain.

Driving much more frantically, Cody found
some open stretch of highway and put most of what he had seen
behind him. He thought that perhaps a handful of those people may
have run after him for a bit, but he may have only imagined
that.

He avoided the Fred Meyer parking lot on the
edge of Soldotna because it was as hectic as the parking lot he had
only recently fled, though no one was attacking anyone else. There
were just a lot of scared people like himself running into and out
of the store with armloads of whatever they could carry.

Cody drove to their headquarters and found
it abandoned. Everyone had already left him...just like he had left
Josh. He was still sitting in his truck in the parking lot when
another truck of armed men pulled up on the street near to him. One
of the men in the other truck spotted him and waved him over. That
was all Cody needed to see. He climbed out of his truck, grabbed
his lunch and his coat and ran over to the other truck, which was
already starting to roll before he had climbed into a back
seat.

He was told that The End had come and that
they were getting out of town. They had a safe place where they
could go. Whereas everyone else he had encountered had been
scurrying fearfully, these men were calm and collected. They were
on a mission and acted accordingly.

They took him to some place called The Ranch
where he was taken in and made to feel safe. His becoming a soldier
was something that happened without his having been aware.
Regardless, he still didn’t think he had signed on to be another
man’s tool.

Any lingering doubt he may have had was
dispelled every time he looked over at Oscar. Cody tried to avoid
looking at the swollen, discolored face of the corpse, but try as
he might, he couldn’t keep his eyes from it.

Night fell quickly, as was usual in Alaska
in the autumn, and with it came a sour change in the weather. Like
an unwanted visitor, the earlier winds had brought with them snow,
which began to fall in heavy, full flakes. The ground was soon
covered in a growing coat of white and the men found themselves
cold and wet.

Shortly before dark, the skies disgorged a
belly full of snow and wintry winds. Standing guard suddenly seemed
less important than staying out of the weather. The power shack,
not much more than a thin walled shed on a concrete slab, was as
appealing as a sanctuary as anything. They could have all fit into
and stayed warm in the truck left behind for them, but none of them
wanted to sit in Oscar’s shadow, whose deeper darkness persisted
despite the absence of any light which could cast it.

They retreated into the shack and started a
fire in a metal trash can to try and stay warm, though the meager
flame produced more smoke than heat. Finding themselves out of the
cold winds was improvement enough. The four of them gathered around
the fire and passed around a jug of cheap wine one of them had
found some time ago. The alcohol content of the wine was just
enough to make everyone’s cheeks rosy and their body temperatures
rise.