Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (10 page)

There was a short pause, and then he started
again. This time, it sounded like he was hitting it with some kind
of a ramming tool. After the third such strike, a shower of
splinters was produced in the middle of the door. With each
successively louder crunch in the same spot, Danielle found herself
jumping in fear. Horrified tears filled her eyes as she backed away
slowly, never taking her watery eyes from the rapidly
disintegrating door.

When a hole large enough for the man to
force his head through was created, Danielle came close to wetting
her pants. The wood around the hole was wet and maybe a little
slimy. He was still only able to fit the top of his head through
the hole, but it was enough for Danielle to realize he had been
using his
head
as the battering ram. His
scalp was covered with dark red blood and bits of wood. Danielle
was already pressed firmly against the desk, and had run out of
room into which to retreat. Pulling his head from the hole and
peering through, he fixed his ravenous glare on Danielle, whose
heart wilted.

He wiggled and squirmed, forcing his face
further and further through the expanding fissure.

The moment robbed Danielle of her
confidence, of her balance, and of her adulthood. In her mind, she
felt deconstructed and unfamiliar. She was a child again; teased
and taunted by her older brothers and cousins for her fears. She
felt small and vulnerable, emotions which had long been absent for
her.

The sense of helplessness and fear triggered
something that caught fire in some dormant recess of her heart. She
flushed a deep, angry crimson, the emotion sweeping through her
like a coursing jet of magma, scorching as it spread.

The man’s gurgling, hacking growls sounded,
similarly to all the noises around her, like they were originating
from under water. She could hear everything, but only in muffled,
distorted hints of reality.

Without realizing she was doing it, Danielle
very nearly flew across the room, driving her wooden club into the
face in the door. Its forehead was buckled and crushed, a channel
cutting down the middle. When she pulled the club back, Danielle
could clearly see the instrument’s bulbous shape in the deep trough
between the man’s full eyebrows. His nose hadn’t merely been
broken; it had been driven inward into his face.

When the man started struggling again,
Danielle didn’t allow her amazement to stall a second, lethal
swing. His face, now crushed into a stew of blood, broken teeth,
and shorn skin, fell from the head-sized hole, following his body
to the floor. She looked through the opening to make certain he was
not moving. She had no idea what to expect. A dead man had just
attacked her after all.

Through the fog in her head, Danielle heard
loud, angry footsteps coming up the stairs. Someone else was coming
up...was coming for
her
. She didn’t know if
she could repeat her fatal swing, and she had no intention of
waiting around to see. She needed a way out.

The window leading outside was her best
option. She unlatched it and then cranked it open, which took a
torturous amount of time. In her breathless panic, she considered
breaking the glass, but thought if she did so that it would make
following her that much easier.

The footsteps were at the top of the stairs
and charging down the short hallway to the compromised door. The
footsteps were accompanied by a vaguely familiar series of grunts
and growls that sent a prickly, tingling fear up her spine.

A sudden, terrifying thud against the
outside of the door solicited a scared squeak and startled jump
from her. Tears were streaming down her face, forming a vibrant,
salty delta on her cheeks. The window was as open as it was going
to be, barely wide enough for her to slip herself out and onto the
sheet metal roof of an awning below her.

As she dropped, Danielle saw a muscular arm
reach through the opening in the door. She was heartbroken at the
realization that it was indeed Kameron’s arm, which meant that
Kameron was on the opposite side of the door. He was now her
attacker. He had been kind and gentle, despite his strength, and so
patient. She was seeing none of that now. He was murderous fury
incarnate, devoid of even an echo of humanity.

Once down and out of immediate harm’s way,
Danielle hesitated on the uneven corrugated roofing, kneeling to
catch her breath. She couldn’t allow herself to hyperventilate and
lose consciousness. She shuddered to think how that might end.

From overhead, there was a loud crash and
glass rained down all around her. Following the glass, a flailing
and out of control Kameron flew by her. He hit the pavement of the
driveway below with a wet, bone breaking crunch.

Danielle was too frightened to look, but in
very short order she felt compelled to peek over her short ledge.
Kameron, or the thing that was once her friend, had hit the dark,
paved loading area face first. He lay there motionless for a
second, a pool of blood spreading in every direction on the wet
ground. His neck was as twisted as a pretzel, having been turned
nearly completely around. She wasn’t too terribly high above the
ground, but she couldn’t take her eyes from Kameron’s broken
body.

Watching for several moments, Danielle
assumed the shaking legs and body twitches were Kameron’s last
nerve impulses communicating with dying limbs. Thankfully, she
realized differently before she jumped down. Without warning,
Kameron, his head still cocked and bobbing in an impossible
position, leapt to his feet. He looked around, desperate to find
his prey. He growled angrily, the blood filling his throat spewing
forth from his mouth like red bile. The thick red fluid, the
consistency of oil, ran down his chin and into the new folds of his
misshapen neck.

The unfolding terror on the roiling streets
of the small town of Whittier caught his ears. Newly invigorated
and rippling with rage, Kameron ran off in search of new
quarry.

Danielle, meanwhile, was immobile on the
awning. She couldn’t move. She likely would have stayed like that
for hours and perhaps longer if not for two things.

The first thing that shocked her from her
gathering stupor was the rising violence on the other side of the
drugstore. To the horrified howls of people running for their lives
had been added a growing volume of gunfire. It seemed like the
whole world was screaming in terror at once. The tumult filled the
air until she felt like she was breathing it and seeing it.

Danielle gathered her legs against her chest
and rocked herself slowly the way her mother used to do. She hummed
some long forgotten tune in a futile attempt to hide herself from
the terror. It was no use. As soon as the noise started to become
an amorphous din, a discernible voice would cry out in agony,
pleading for succor or at least a quick end. Children, women, and
men, none capable of escaping. Danielle sat and listened, tears
filling her eyes.

In her fear and confusion, Danielle almost
didn’t see the Ford truck idling just outside of the building’s
loading area. It must have come around from the back of the
processing plant next door. Her eyes narrowed and came back into
focus. She saw a person leaning out of the passenger window.
Danielle realized then that the woman in the truck was
gesturing...to her.

She was struck with panic at the prospect of
jumping down from her safe perch. She couldn’t see under the
awning. What could be waiting below? A shiver shook her and put her
hair on end. Danielle looked at the woman in the truck whose arm
was losing its vigor. The two made eye contact and Danielle found
herself nodding.

Leaning forward, she chanced a peek below,
almost losing her balance and toppling headfirst onto the pavement
like Kameron had. She caught herself before she fell and sat
upright so quickly that her vision faded and her head swooned. She
thought to herself that she needed to get something to eat soon or
she would regret it. She shook the backpack still over her shoulder
and felt some sense of reassurance.

Another scream, a woman’s Danielle thought,
and a series of gunshots propelled her over the edge. She hung for
just a moment with her feet many inches above the ground, surprised
at her own sudden decision. She dropped down and froze, thankful
that nothing was there. Her heart was starting into its normal
rhythm again when her club, still on the awning above her, rolled
itself off the roof and landed heavily on the pavement behind her.
The thick crack of its impact sent Danielle into a dead sprint
across the lot toward the truck.

She leapt into the back seat of the waiting
Ford without a word. There was barely room for her as most of the
seat was covered with boxes and boxes of food and other sundries.
She spied a box with oranges in it and grabbed one of the aromatic
fruit.

The woman in the passenger seat leaned back
toward Danielle and said, “I’m Rose. And this handsome devil here
is my brother Pete. Is there anyone else back there? Anyone else
need any help? This may be the last train outta here.”

Danielle heard the woman speaking, but was
finding it difficult to understand the words. She felt like a dog
being chastised by its owner about some misdeed. She looked into
the small lot and saw the sickening pool of red where Kameron had
fallen. She couldn’t shake the sight of Kameron, caked in blood and
other matter, from her mind.

Danielle shook her head.

Rose, a tough looking character with a head
of wiry gray hair that was threatening to break free from the red
bandana holding it in check, said to Pete, “Okay then. Let’s get
this freight train a movin’ while the gettin’s good.”

Tall and thick, with an equally tall and
thick black beard, Pete didn’t wait to be told a second time. He
shifted the big truck into gear and sped away.

Behind them, the murderous mayhem continued
to multiply and build. Up the hill toward the Begich Towers like a
tsunami of terror, people flooded, both those fleeing and those
feeding. The handful of police officers housed at the main office
in the tower stood at the two main front entrances of the building
and fired their sidearms desperately at the oncoming throng, hoping
to stop the chaos. They saw both familiar faces and complete
strangers in the packs.

A couple of trucks pulled away from the back
parking lot and tried to make their way down the road and away from
the building only to be stopped in their tracks by the crowd. The
drivers and passengers were ripped forcibly from their seats and
torn limb from limb, feeding the blood frenzy.

A few men working on repairing a drydocked
fishing boat in one of the lots climbed atop the boat and tried to
use whatever tools were at their disposal to fend off anyone trying
to follow them. In very short order, enough pressure was applied to
the braces supporting the boat to snap them and set the boat
perilously onto its side. The men inside were quickly set upon and
butchered ruthlessly, their blood adding to the rivers of red
coursing down the slight incline away from the tower.

Locals, fearing for their lives, shut and
locked their doors to the rushing waves of tourists, transforming
the Begich Tower’s corridors into fast running canals full of
streaming people with nowhere to go but forward and up. More than a
few windows were broken and some doors were battered from their
hinges as desperate, crying souls sought places to hide, especially
on the first floor where offices and shops were located. Like an
unrestrained storm surge, the human wave spilled into every nook
and cranny along the path. Eventually, with nowhere else to run,
many people found themselves on the roof of the fourteen story
building with their only options being to jump to certain death or
face being devoured by people who had possibly been their friends
or family only minutes before.

Soon the crowds were filling the slick docks
of the small boat harbor until skidding, sliding to a halt on the
edge with nowhere else to run. Like lemmings running over a cliff,
those at the tail end of the massing group pushed those at the
front off the end of the piers and into the murky, cold water
below.

Screams were lost as throats filled with the
salty, oily water. Scrambling to the surface quickly, many found
themselves pushed once again into the brine as the next wave of
frenzied people plunged into the dark.

The lengths of the piers were littered with
bodies, some motionless and others writhing in pain having been
trampled by the herd. Those still moving were quickly and viciously
set upon with gnashing, hungry, pitiless jaws. Fast on the heels of
the fleeing mob was a growing pack of wild beasts, which had been
human beings not long ago. The unmistakable transformation from man
to demon was no more apparent than in the creatures’ eyes. The
fires of oblivion burned in their dark, perpetually dilated eyes.
The black flames consumed their eyes, leaving no room for pity or
remorse. The weeping woman with a broken leg and unable to run was
no more off limits than the little girl separated from her mother
and too scared to run. Both were easy prey, as were the several
others cut off from the main body of fleeing people.

There were more than enough pursuers to
continue the chase, however, and into the water they went as well.
The cold Prince William Sound became a roiling, churning soup as
teeth and nails proceeded to seek flesh to satisfy the insatiable
hunger that burned within. Lacking the faculties to swim, the
ghouls sank along with their drowning victims and disappeared into
the murk.

The boat harbor portion of the port hosted
the frenetic shark feeding frenzy. The fortunate few people from
Whittier able to force themselves onto the many awaiting boats
watched in stunned horror as atop the surface of the water a
wretched red bubbling foam formed.