Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 3): Mitigation Book 3) (2 page)

The beast reeked with a foulness he’d never encountered. The pain, anguishing and sudden, was completely unexpected. His senses, feral and unrefined, were overwhelmed. He tried to throw his attacker off but its teeth were too deep and its jaw too strong. His flight response forcefully aborted, primal fear elbowed its noisy self to the forefront and demanded attention.

His scream, so seemingly distant and foreign to him, echoed in the dark while the pain reverberated through his chest. Once again, instinct guided his response. His left arm was useless, tightly clutched in the beast’s ruthless maw, but his right arm was free and eager to fight for his survival. With one forceful jab, the heavy wooden spear, nothing more than a strong rock-sharpened stick, penetrated both darkness and the beast. His attacker, which looked like nothing more than jagged teeth and darkness, spilled its lifeblood in a sticky, warm surge covering his hand and arm.

The grinding jaws, holding tight to his violated flesh, released him and retreated into the gloom. Not waiting even a second, he spun around and stumbled his way back to his companions. His entire left flank was painted red with his blood, as were the cave walls he had used to steady himself along the way. The blood loss was starting to take a toll on his senses. He felt like he was walking through a fog that wrapped itself tightly around his head, restricting his vision and his hearing. And yet, the open wounds that had been splashed with the more viscous fluid of the creature felt...different. It felt as if they bubbled and burned, but it wasn’t necessarily raw pain like he felt from the other gashes in his flesh. The tissue was changing rapidly.

He was doing little more than staggering and struggling for breath when he reemerged from the cave’s depths. Despite the absence of light, the other two could sense both his wounds and his fading life. He reeked of death...salty and rotten. With a series of primal grunts and gestures, he communicated that danger lurked deeper in the cave and that they should leave at once. Looking out at the howling winds and blistering snow, they knew they had to at least wait for the darkness to pass and the light to return.

Empty-handed and now bloodied, his hope to mate with the female faded and strangely, so did his desire. The burning and the pain could not be ignored despite his best efforts. He wanted to surrender to his anguish and wail, but he stubbornly resisted any sign of weakness. All he could think to do was rest. Maybe the pain would diminish if he slept. As his blood continued to seep and flow mercilessly, his energy and his consciousness began to fade so that sleep could not be eluded.

Sometime shortly before dawn, his breathing shallowed out to nothing and his heart stopped. This would have been the end for him except that his brain, primitive as it was, continued to function. Some new organism, introduced through the bite wound on his shoulder, had invaded his brain, changing its chemistry.

His frontal lobe, the part of the brain that controlled reasoning—however limited it may have been for him—stopped working, but other segments continued to fire off electrical currents to nerve endings controlling muscles. The limbic system, the center of his emotions, flared violently with current until every synapse for every emotion was silent and dead; every emotion, that is, except for rage, which found all the unspent energy for every other feeling funneled into it. His temperature, thirst, and fatigue, all answering to the hypothalamus, found themselves things of the past, but his hunger, also a hypothalamic function, surged to insatiable levels. It was the hunger and rage that roused him.

When he opened his eyes that following morning, the world had changed for him. His eyes saw everything only in hints of red and his former companions nearly glowed, as if on fire.

The nagging hunger in his stomach from the night before had multiplied to an overpowering driving force compelling him to seek out the only meal to be found. And they were right there in the cave with him.

He rose from beneath his thick animal hide covering and fell upon his still sleeping companions.

He grabbed the female first, her scent once so sexually arousing now only calling to his suffering, hungry brain. He bit the back of her neck, tearing away chewy bits of hairy flesh. His teeth fell again and again rending tissue from her as she screamed and struggled beneath him. He didn’t pause to even chew as he swallowed the warm chunks into his belly. Soon, the whitish bones of her neck were peeking up through the swelling, red morass. His face was streaked with warm crimson blood and dangling bits of skin and tissue. His biting was sometimes too aggressive to allow his chewing to keep pace, resulting in pulpy morsels of flesh falling from his mouth in awful and partially chewed wads.

His male companion rolled away and found a spear. The larger male came at him, screaming and threatening as any frightened and threatened animal would. Still feeding on the struggling but weakening female, his infected brain told him that this victim was too weak to escape and that he should now attack this other prey before it escaped.

He stood just in time for the spear to be thrust into his chest. He felt nothing, the wound having no effect on him or his own attack. He leapt forward, spear and all, and grabbed the other male by his shoulders. They wrestled one another to the floor of the cave. Though the other male was bigger than him, the infection, which limited and focused his energy and his strength by shutting off certain functions of his body, poured unused resources into his arms and his legs, infusing him with unlimited stamina and unequaled power. The hunger drove his attack, which surprised and unsettled his victim all the more.

He bit down onto cheek, then cheekbone, and finally onto an eye. The soft, wet tissue surrendered itself to his bite with a delicious sucking ooze of salty fluid. When his victim tried to bite him back, he simply used that opportunity to instead chew off the other man’s lower lip and tongue. The battle was vicious, bloody, and horribly one-sided. Despite the spear and his superior size, the other man could not compete with the infection.

The feasting on the two corpses didn’t last much longer than the fighting had. No matter how much he ate, he never seemed able to quench the hunger. The bodies had been picked clean to the bone and still he needed more.

His hunger took him back into the cold, where he wandered aimlessly for countless days seeking sustenance. His skin, whipped gruesomely by the wind, began to crack and peel. He lost toes and tips of finger as they froze and simply fell off. His hair continued to grow, though it also began to fall from his body in clumps. His eyes too eventually froze and burst from their sockets, but he didn’t need eyes when he had the hunger to propel him forward. With his muscles deteriorating and his limbs failing, he walked until his legs could no longer move. He didn’t fall though. He simply stopped walking. He was a living statue, standing still as snow and ice slowly but steadily tightened their grip around him. The frigid elements of the advancing Ice Age devoured him much the way he had devoured his companions. He was wrapped in ice, locked in its seemingly eternal white embrace.

And within the cold stillness of his unforgiving prison, the hunger persisted. His flesh, though mostly preserved by its icy confines, continued to rot and decay and his senses faded into an oblivion of white. Still, when the rest of the world had withered into a gray malaise, the hunger called to him, nagging, festering, torturing.

* * *

Centuries later, on a planet that was gradually warming, his frosty tomb slowly began to release its grip. It started with cracks and pops in the ice, running through the glacier like seismic jolts along tectonic plates. Fissures filled with running water and long absent scents and tastes from a forgotten world. The process took centuries, but still he and the infection waited.

Partially exposed, he had forgotten how to move despite the freedom to do so again. Thousands of years embedded in the glacial grip had taken its toll on his body, most of which was bone with only the barest of tissue remaining. His eyes had long ago rotted in their sockets, but he found his olfactory and auditory senses still served him.

Then one day, a familiar aroma roused him.
Prey.
It was close and coming closer. It was right on top of him, just below his nose and, more importantly, his mouth. The infection, never dormant but always waiting, sparked long quiet nerves back to life which found willing, if seriously atrophied, muscles starting to once again respond. At first his body resisted his efforts to move, having been motionless for an Age. However, the infection wouldn’t be denied.

Starting with a single tic, which split the resistant tissue at the corners of his mouth, his lifeless face reanimated. The hunger, sensing its quarry so close, directed his nearly toothless mouth forward until it landed on something warm, something that awakened in him the awful rage that had awaited this moment for tens of thousands of years.

His first bite came down on something foreign—not flesh and not animal hide, but something different. His second blind but determined attempt found its mark. One of his few jagged teeth sank itself into something soft and fleshy. It tasted of youth, so sweet and fatty. But a taste was all that he was granted. There was screaming and then there was quiet.

That quiet lasted a bit, but to him, time no longer had any meaning. Once, long ago, before the infection and its eternal night, he had measured time by the coming and going of the light of day. During his multi-millennial torment in the glacier, when time was not measured but was instead endured, there was no sleep and no rest. There was always the hunger and now that hunger, teased maliciously by the single morsel, was rippling electrically through his still-partially ice-encased torso.

His convulsing, a near constant tremor through the ice, delivered exactly what the infection craved: freedom. As the ice separated in front of him, he fell forward awkwardly. Behind him, the bottom third or more of both of his legs were still embedded in the receding glacier, the rotten gray stumps protruding ever so slightly higher than the ice that still held them in place. His dismemberment caused not the slightest pain or distress.

Legs or no, the hunger called to him and he was powerless against its beckoning. Using his arms to pull himself along the stream bank, he slithered and crawled toward the faint but undeniable scent of prey.

He grunted and moaned slightly as he moved, the temptation of the kill exciting him. Sometime later, the air changed slightly, his senses recognizing the shift as the approach of food. It was coming to him.

And all at once, there was a roar such that he’d never heard and then his body was rocked with a violent impact. There was another violent noise, this one more organic...alive...a voice...his kill...his meal. Another barking clap of sound and another punching pressure against and through his back and then his chest.

Laboriously, he rolled onto his back so that he was facing from a sitting position whatever was behind him. Sensing that it was his prey, he reached blindly toward the sound as it echoed again. His hand disintegrated painlessly. He was aware that it was gone but it was of no consequence. The loss of the limb was less important than feeding the hunger. Had he known that he was being pelted with bullets, it likely wouldn’t have mattered. He reached out with his obliterated stump and absorbed two more of the blasts in his upper chest. His bones splintered and more of his already inadequate flesh holding his frame together disappeared in a hail of buckshot. Soon there wouldn’t be enough of him to continue to move. The anguish and the hunger, however, would never quit.

So, he turned himself around and, with his one good hand, belly crawled the other direction after his now retreating prey who smelled like the other one tasted.

Leached of color and life, the gray sky seemed a fitting companion for Dr. Caldwell. He leaned back in the white plastic chair, fear and pain coupling themselves with the infection in his veins. As soon as his friends had dropped out of sight, he began to doubt his resolve and his decision to separate himself from the ragged group of survivors that he had come to think of as family over the past few months.

A ripple of pain from the bite wound on his hand sent another jolt seemingly through every nerve in his body at once. He held his breath and closed his eyes, hoping to hold onto the moment for just a few seconds more. He could feel his body’s chemistry begin to change. His thirst was unquenchable and yet, every time he cracked his mouth a sea of saliva spilled from its corners and onto his chin. He’d stopped wiping away the excess quite a while ago. There was no one left to impress and he could care less, so he left it to dangle in lazy strands from his chin.

The surge of pain subsided, though it never actually stopped. Just like the ebb and flow of a river, sometimes a torrent and sometimes a trickle, the burning ache was always there. Realizing his eyes were closed, he jerked forward, opening them in fear that his life would end in total darkness.

How long had he been sitting there alone? He had no way of knowing. Was there any real value in time at the end of the world? Yet, time was what he wanted; a few more hours, a few more days, a few more weeks. He wanted whatever he could get but he wasn’t likely to get any of it.

He couldn’t feel his feet or his legs anymore. The pins and needles sensation had long since faded, leaving his lower limbs cold and lifeless. Had he wanted to chase after his friends who had left him at his own urging, he couldn’t. He’d chosen his lonely fate and now he regretted it.