Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (2 page)

One by one the undead found the source of
the gunshot and the several that followed. Each crack resulted in
another of the creatures crumpling lifelessly to the ground. They
cast their ravenous eyes upward to the roof of the building in
front of them. The building had burned and in some places was still
smoldering, hence the persistent smoke. The structure had once
served as Skyview High School in Soldotna, Alaska. Those days,
though only months old, felt like some distant memory of a past
that was fading and nearly forgotten.

Without taking his eye from his scope, the
shooter said, “They’re startin’ to thin out, Colonel. I think maybe
we can start thinkin’ ‘bout gettin’ down from up here soon.”

A gravelly, growling hiss of a voice spat,
“Good. We’ve got some work to do. Then we’re gonna go find the
bastards that did this to us.”

The rifle kicked again, punctuating the
Colonel’s words.

The little blonde haired blue-eyed girl
named Jules was contemplating her next step. She was utterly
surrounded and losing options for escape...from the snow patches.
She was playing a game, jumping from one snow-free piece of ground
to the next. There were more and more places without snow the
further they came down the mountain they had been climbing.

Climbing might be a bit of an exaggeration,
because they had largely followed a path with markers, but there
were quite a few stretches in which it certainly felt like they had
been climbing either up or down. The going was much easier now and
Jules was able to revel in the whiteness all around her.

Jules had always loved snow, though back
home in the Midwest they didn’t get nearly enough for her tastes,
and when they did get it, the snow didn’t stay around for very
long. The weather shifted so quickly and drastically that something
as delicate and beautiful as a blanket of snow found it difficult
to persist beyond a couple of days most of the time.

When her mother and father told her they
were going to Alaska for vacation, snow was amongst her first
thoughts. Alaska was the home of snow. In her mind, Alaska was the
winter wonderland that never thawed. It was her dream of white and
she couldn’t wait to go. She was more excited than anyone else in
her family and talked incessantly about their pending trip with
anyone willing to listen during the buildup to the vacation.

Jules had been to Alaska once before, but
her memory of that visit a few years earlier was hazy at best. She
had just been learning to walk, and that took all of her attention.
She could have been walking around on drifts of snow, but she
honestly could not remember.

Upon their arrival to Anchorage, Jules was
disappointed to find that, not only was there was no snow, but it
was surprisingly warm. There was entirely too much sun and too much
green grass for this to be the birthplace of snow. Other than the
mountains in the distance, there wasn’t much difference between
this Alaska place and her home. There might have been more trees
than back home but the trees were smaller and didn’t have as many
leaves. Maybe that was because everything was still new and not
grown yet. She’d heard that Alaska hadn’t become a state until just
a few years before.

None of that mattered to Jules. The only
thing that mattered to her was that there was no snow. She didn’t
let her disappointment remain unknown to anyone in her family. She
asked repeatedly about the lack of snow, and wanted someone to
explain to her why it was so green and so warm.

Jules’ disappointment became a major
distraction on the trip south to their rented cabin. She wasn’t as
awed with the lush, green growth on the slopes of the rising
mountains as the rest of her family. The green was deeper and more
verdant than that of the grass back home. Perhaps it was the nature
of life that persisted in such short summers and endured such harsh
winters to do so with vibrant intensity.

The massive walls of imposing slate gray
were also lost on her. She could not understand why there was no
snow to hide all of the wonder. Her interest was decidedly not in
seeing the same grass and rocks that she could see back home.

Occasionally, her parents would talk with
her about the snow that came to the area where they lived when they
were still little. It was a cruel joke to her that she had to
experience those heady snow days vicariously through her parents’
memories. She craved her own adventures in a winter wonderland and
she had pinned all of her hopes on Alaska delivering.

At the end of their endless road trip when
they finally arrived at the cabin in the rugged forests of Alaska,
her hopes of coming upon snow were again dashed. She dreamed that,
perhaps, the Alaskan wilderness might harbor snow that would have
otherwise melted in the city and along the highway. She reasoned
that snow might endure in the cooler, shadier forest. Along the
long, narrow driveway leading from the highway to the cabin, it was
cooler and there was much more shade provided by the densely packed
trees, but still no snow.

Upon their arrival, the three youngest kids,
Jules, her older brother Martin, and his best friend Danny,
wandered off into trees in search of adventure. It was just the
sort of distraction that young Jules needed. The woods promised
excitement and fun at least, if not a little snow.

When their exploring took them to the foot
of a glacier, Jules nearly burst. Despite the fact that this
section of the glacier was a very small and receding arm of the
massive ice body, she couldn’t deny her pleasure. She had finally
found her Alaskan snow, in a manner of speaking. Technically it was
just ice; the calved sections of glacier having been melted and
partially crushed by the elements and occasional passing wildlife
now resembled snow. Regardless, for Jules vacation could officially
begin.

Jules had literally never seen so much snow
and ice in her entire life. The densely packed ice was almost blue
in its deepest depths.

Tragically, her joy was cut short by events
that unfolded immediately thereafter in very quick succession.
Martin, Danny and Jules happened upon what they thought was an
ancient caveman, partially encased and preserved in the ice but
thawing steadily. They thought the caveman was dead. He had to be.
They could see bones protruding through his skin, his eyes and nose
were gone, and in their place were gaping black holes, and his skin
was the same slate gray of the mountains they had passed on their
trek to the cabin.

When the creature bit Jules’ brother Martin
on the hand, their dream vacation became a nightmare. Martin became
gravely ill in a matter of minutes, as sick as Jules had ever seen
anyone. He began to breathe like an old man, the air moving in
raspy, forced gasps in and out of Martin’s struggling chest.

The family, minus Jules’ teenaged brother
Alec, loaded back into their rented van and drove back to the city
to find Martin a doctor. Her daddy and especially her mommy were
scared and worried about Martin, making Jules sad and worried
too.

Back in Anchorage, the next few hours were a
confusing haze of shuffling, sometimes slowly like in a daydream
and sometimes frantically like in a nightmare. Jules and Danny
finally found themselves in the care of a nice older boy named
Jerry, working at the hospital as a nurse’s aide.

It was with him that they fled Providence
Hospital when things got really noisy and scary. People were
running around screaming and crying and fighting, but Jules could
not guess why. She had no idea the commotion all stemmed from her
brother.

Jules didn’t know it at the time, but her
brother had been infected by a sickness that had never been
introduced into a modern human population. A single person, the
caveman, had been exposed to the infection thousands of years prior
and had then lain dormant and waiting. The illness, eagerly shared
in the bite, took the boy’s life, but that was not all it did.
After little Martin died, his eyes reopened with immeasurable rage
and a driving hunger for human flesh. His murderous rampage started
with his mother, who suffered the same undead re-awakening.

The infection spread with each newly bitten
victim, growing exponentially like a fire in a paper mill.
Providence Hospital became a killing ground in which no one was
spared. The most vulnerable merely presented the most enticing
quarry.

In mere minutes, the bedlam spread its cold,
bony fingers into the adjacent University of Alaska Anchorage
campus and the just waking neighborhoods in the vicinity. Emergency
responders, unaware of the nature of the crisis, were some of the
first to fall to the ungodly plague, leaving the rest of the city’s
population at the mercy of the infection.

Jules and Danny, with Jerry’s help, escaped
and joined others also trying to survive. They found themselves in
a house in South Anchorage, hoping that help would soon be on the
way.

They hid themselves away from the tragic
torrent and waited. Those first days were the hardest for Jules.
She neither fully understood what was happening nor knew what to
expect next. She missed her mom and dad and wondered often about
her poor brother Martin. She was glad that Danny was with her; she
didn’t know if she would be able to get through all of the strife
without him. Sure, he had been Martin’s friend, but he had always
been nice to her, not like some of Martin’s other friends. He was
friendlier and more willing to let her tag along with them. Danny
was the closest thing to family that she had now and Jules clung to
him like a shipwreck survivor clinging to flotsam for dear
life.

That wasn’t to say that she didn’t like the
others also at the house with them. The young man named Jerry, not
much older than her oldest brother Alec, was always checking on her
to make sure she was safe and had enough to eat. He was nice and
always smiling at her. There were some other adults as well, but a
man named Neil was the most like her mommy and daddy. He was smart,
and calm. He made most of the decisions because he had most of the
ideas, and worked hard to ensure the safety of everyone. There was
also Dr. Caldwell, who she liked and didn’t think acted like any
doctor she had ever seen in her life. By the gray in his hair and
the wrinkles around his eyes, Jules could tell he was older than
Neil, but not quite a grandpa. He was also relaxed, helping
everyone else to be the same when it was the most important.

There were women too, but her favorite was
Meghan, who was always willing to read with Jules and lay down with
her to help her go to sleep. Emma was not as nice as Meghan, but
she was funny and always said things that made Jules laugh. Every
now and again she would get angry though and yell, making all of
them, Jules included, uncomfortable, and the only one capable of
calming her was Dr. Caldwell.

All of them spent those early days in quiet
distraction, trying to hide from the world. In the street outside,
lots of creepy people, who she understood were boogeymen of some
sort, were starting to gather and wait. She and Danny were
discouraged from taking peeks out the window as the adults did, but
she managed to look under an arm on occasion to catch glimpses of
them. Jules easily surmised those people were looking for her and
the others, which was why they had to be extra quiet, just like
during naptime at her old school. It was hard sometimes, but she
did her best.

After more days than she could count, it was
decided that they had to get out of the house and away from the
creepy ghouls, whose smell and noises were making Jules and
everyone else sick to their stomachs.

Since then, they had been on the run, moving
from hiding place to hiding place like scared mice avoiding hungry
owls. It had all become routine to them in a twisted, grisly
way.

That all changed for Jules when Meghan was
killed. If Jules were older and more insightful, she would likely
feel that Meghan was a victim of the complacency brought on by the
routine of survival. She, like the rest of them, simply got too
comfortable and had paid the ultimate price.

Jules was sad for herself but was even more
sad for poor Neil. He loved Meghan; Jules could tell by the way he
looked at her and the way he talked to her. Neil talked to everyone
really nicely, but to Meghan he talked quiet and soft like the way
Jules’ mom used to read fairytales to her at bedtime when she was
younger. Neil was her prince and Meghan was his princess. He hadn’t
been the same since they left her body under a pile of stones along
the side of the road. None of them had been.

Jules barely had time to grieve before she
and the others had to face another crisis. Shortly after Meghan’s
death Jules, along with Danny and two other children, were taken to
some kind of survival camp in a place called Soldotna. The people
controlling the camp, located in what had once been Skyview High
School, were self-styled militiamen willing to embrace truly
despicable acts of brutality and oppression in order to further the
agenda of their leader. They had a lot of guns and were the meanest
people Jules had ever been around in her life.

If it hadn’t been for an audacious and
daring move by Neil, Jerry, and Emma, Jules and Danny would likely
still be in the militia’s brutal hands.

Behind the cover of night and a ruthless
wave of undead, Neil and the other adult rescuers swept into the
school to the children’s salvation. It was a bittersweet rescue for
Jules. She had recently been reunited with her oldest brother Alec,
who had gone missing from the moment Jules’ parents had driven
young Martin to the hospital in Anchorage. He was lost; or so she
had thought. He had been lost in the hectic melee at the school and
was never seen again.