Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (22 page)

As they ran, Danielle realized she could
feel that buzz again. She was about to say so when Jerry pointed
out, “Still a bit off from us, but there’s a pretty good sized
group coming. We better pick it up.”

William asked, “What if the group is in
front of us?”

“They’re not,” Jerry said, “because the
sound is coming from over my shoulder. You can hear that, can’t
you?” Not getting an immediate response, Jerry said, “Doesn’t
matter. They’re behind us...for the most part.”

Hitting the snow at a full sprint, most of
them made it through cleanly. Jerry, however, lost his footing,
skidded forward a few paces, but never lost his balance enough to
fall. He chuckled, “Jesus. That was close.”

The pier too was slick, the wood planks
coated with an icy gloss. They slowed down as they climbed down the
steps to the launch.

Neil barked, “Pile the bags into this boat.
Quickly. Danny, climb in there and pile them in the middle. Watch
your step getting in. We don’t need to start the day wet.”

Neil was busy getting things situated and
ready, while Emma and William watched behind them. At the top of
the hill, a group of a dozen or so of the demons appeared, moving
slowly. They hadn’t yet noticed the group of live humans.

“Hurry the fuck up!” Emma whispered
urgently. “We’re out of time!”

William raised his rifle, to which Emma said
quickly, “Don’t waste the ammo.”

William was going to ask why they didn’t
just shoot the damned things on sight but stalled his question.
More of the things arrived, coming from everywhere. He wondered how
many there were. His shooting at those few would have brought that
huge mob of monsters down upon them.

Neil said, “Okay, William and I will go over
to his boat in this one. You guys take the other and wait out in
the bay a little bit. Don’t get out too far but get far enough away
that the zekes can’t get out to you.”

“I think I should go too,” Emma said. “I’m
the best shot. You’ll need me.”

Neil was shaking his head before she had
finished. “No, I need you to stay with the others and keep them
safe. If you and Jerry are with them, I will feel more comfortable.
I’ll be able to stay focused rather than worry about the others,
especially the kids.”

Emma smiled. “Bullshit! I’m coming. Jerry,
you got this?”

Jerry nodded. “We got more guns than you
guys. You should be worrying about yourselves. ‘Sides, I got Danny
with me. Help me get the boats out.”

Neil and Jerry untied the boat while the
others loaded themselves into it, the craft settling a little lower
into the water as each person climbed aboard. Jerry was hardly
sitting before Neil was pushing the boat away with his foot.

Feeling anxious and worried, Jerry said,
“Watch yourselves.” He caught Neil’s and Emma’s eyes and then
started to row with all his might. Emma looked up to the road from
where they had come. Several of the creatures were tumbling down
the road toward them. Fortunately, the pace the creatures could
achieve with gravity’s help also contributed to spilling most of
them onto their posteriors or their chests when they reached the
slick snow patch.

The third boat, the nice silver one Neil had
seen from a distance, was already untied and pulling away from the
pier. Neil stepped in and lowered himself into the middle of the
aluminum boat. There was a little pool of brown water in the boat’s
bottom, which sloshed and moved with the Sound’s wavy current.
William pulled the oars powerfully, rapidly propelling them from
the pier.

They were quickly away from any danger but
Neil said, “Emma, pop off a few rounds. Maybe we can get some more
of those things away from our dock.”

Emma was more than happy to comply. “Cover
your ears, gents!” She fired several rounds, some bringing down
zombies with headshots and others merely churning reanimated flesh
without causing any real harm.

Neil touched her shoulder. “That’s enough.
We need to have enough bullets over at William’s boat.”

She patted her pockets. “I’ve got another
four full mags on me and two that I can reload if you’d like.”

“I hope it won’t take that much to get us
away from the dock. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to get onto the
boat and away without a fight at all.
If
we’re lucky.”

William and Neil rowed the little boat
quietly just out of reach of the stone and earth spit separating
Prince William Sound proper from the boat harbor. Emma knelt in the
front of the boat with her assault rifle at the ready.

The eerie quiet was unsettling; the lapping
water along the little boat’s hull was the only noise other than
their own breathing. They kept several dozen feet between
themselves and the long manmade rock wall that separated the boat
harbor from the Sound. The tension was rising. Emma watched the
wall closely, wary of any movement which could only mean that they
were being hunted. She was afraid to blink for fear that she would
miss something.

From this distance, she was fairly certain
they would be safe from any potential threats that lurked on the
wall high above them. William suggested to them that the worst
moments would be after they were inside the harbor. Their little
craft would sit lower than both the seawall and the piers where all
the boats were moored.

They turned left, making a nautical U-turn,
and started to move into the harbor. Emma and Neil became acutely
aware of the reason for William’s earlier concern. From where they
sat, the world all around them seemed so much larger. They were
seeing the world from Danny’s perspective lower than everything
around. Lilliputians in the land of giants.

Slowly and quietly, the little boat crawled
into the harbor. They passed a row of boats and, more importantly,
an empty pier. William pointed to the next row of boats and nodded.
He dipped his oar into the water, turning them slightly and aiming
the bow of their rowboat toward the rear of a boat sporting the big
letters S-E-R-E-N-I-T-Y across its frame.

William’s smile was almost as big as those
letters as he pulled up close to his boat. He reached up and
stopped them by grabbing hold of a thin railing running along the
edge of the craft’s gunwale. He was at full extension in doing it,
causing Emma to marvel at his impressive reach. He was as big as a
tree.

As luck would have it, they got on the boat
without being detected. And just as William had predicted,
Serenity
was full of gas and more or less
ready to be untied and pushed off from its mooring. Moving
stealthily, William cast them off, hopping back onto the boat
without incident. The motor kicked on with a bit of a
chest-clearing growl before settling into its combustion hum.

They started to move away, and the docks and
boats around started to bustle with activity, like this was any
other busy day at this marine community. Emma watched in amazement
as several of the undead fiends came to the end of the piers and
plunged into the brine, sinking into its depths.

“Jesus,” she said in hushed despair. “They
just keep going. They’re not smart enough to stop when they come to
the end.” She looked away as another one, a woman, looked at and
through Emma as she too walked into the Prince William Sound,
disappearing in a series of bubbles.

“Probably not a good place to go swimming,”
Neil remarked.

William added, “Never was. The water’s
always been too cold here to swim. Some folks used to come out here
to scuba but the gear they had to wear was pretty substantial. It
ain’t ever been too hospitable to taking a dip though.”

Emma looked over the boat’s edge at the
murky brown water but couldn’t see beyond the oily surface. She
wondered how many zombies had sunk below the waterline and were
waiting there with their hungry, reaching arms. The prospect of
mistakenly ending up in the water and getting pulled below the
waves by the remorseless hands of the undead sent a sickening fear
through her like a jolt of cold electricity. She backed away from
the boat’s edge and entered the main cabin, which was warming
steadily by blowers turned on full.

Serenity
was a
surprisingly spacious boat with a good-sized galley below decks and
two sleeping compartments. William had also been right about the
provisions aboard the boat. There was Alaskan Amber beer and a few
varieties from Pyramid, including Emma’s favorite, Hefeweizen. It
wasn’t ice cold, but the water into which it had been sunk was
still pretty frigid. She twisted off the top of a bottle and took a
long, grateful drink, enjoying the carbonated tingle on the back of
her throat and her nose.

Emma wandered back out onto the much colder
deck and stood back while Neil helped Jerry and his group up into
Serenity
. The extra supplies and gear were
hauled up and stowed as well.

Walking over to Jerry and Neil, who were
watching the docks of Whittier get smaller in the distance, Emma
handed each of them an opened beer. The three clinked their bottles
together and then shared a drink. They finished their beers
quickly, sitting down afterward to enjoy the buzz a single
alcoholic beverage could have on them this day and age.

Danny and Jules soon joined them, each with
a hot cup of cocoa that Jess had prepared for them.

Neil said, “I didn’t think we were gonna
make it.”

“Don’t jinx us,” Emma warned. “We’re not out
of it yet.”

“No,” Jerry cut in, “but this is the closest
to getting out of it that we’ve come.”

“What’s taking so long?” Colonel Bear
grumbled from his Humvee. He hadn’t exited the oversized vehicle
since they’d left Skyview.

Carter, feeling as impatient as the Colonel,
shook his head in disgust and turned on his heels to see about
injecting some urgency into their electrician’s pace. He walked
back into the power station shed and found the electrician, Cody
Benson, twisting wires together. He was hard at work with another
man, Oscar Torres, helping him as much as he could as a simple
laborer, knowing little about wiring but possessing enough skills
as to be of assistance.

Carter entered the room and immediately the
two men stopped, their eyes instantly drawn to him. They were still
quite jumpy from the fight just the night before. Oscar had in his
hands a rifle, a Mini-14 that was never out of reach. Carter sensed
the jolt in the atmosphere as if Cody had subjected them all to
live current.

Partially complaining and partially
apologizing, Cody said, “Jesus, Carter. Sorry. You just came in
here so fast and quiet. It was like you was just there all of a
sudden. Shit! We mighta shot you.”

Annoyed now at what he was seeing as a
distraction, Carter said only, “You shoot me, even by mistake, and
you better make sure I can’t get back up.” Carter’s smile shared no
warmth or mirth. It was a serpent’s smile.

The two men settled back into their work
while Carter sat down and enjoyed the new pinch of tobacco in his
lower lip. When his mouth filled with a soup of saliva and
wintergreen flavored tobacco juice, he leaned over his shoulder and
spat just outside the doorway. It was a disgusting habit; one which
his mother would never have approved. He reveled in his yellow and
brown teeth and the sores he sometimes got on his lip and gums.
Every time he rinsed his mouth with a salt and water solution the
Colonel had given him to clean the sores, the burning feeling he
got was sheer pleasure.

Oscar, having finished his share of what he
was capable of doing, turned to Carter and asked, “How long you
been with the Colonel?”

“‘Bout half my life.”

“Were you in the Army with him?”

“Army? The Colonel’s never been in no army,
least none that would have done this government’s bidding. He and I
are above that. Government’s probably behind this whole mess. Too
bad for them ‘cause it’s gonna turn around and bite them right in
the ass. This is working all according to the Colonel’s plan. We
were on our way... ya know. Those people needed us. Too bad they
didn’t figure it out ‘fore they all got killed. What the hell were
they thinking? Comin’ at the Colonel like that? He had no
choice.”

Getting back to his original question, Oscar
asked, “How did you meet Colonel Bear then?” Oscar also wondered
where the Colonel earned his rank, but thought better of
asking.

Spitting into a gathering pool, Carter said,
“Well, I was never too fond of rules. My mom and dad and me didn’t
see eye-to-eye on many things. They rode my ass about everything.
Who my friends could and should be; girlfriends; school; work;
life; everything. Nothing I ever did was good enough.” Carter spat
again and shook his head. “I thought about killing them at one
time.”

Carter could feel both sets of eyes on him
at that comment. “They put me in the fucking JROTC. They tried to
turn me into a robot. They wanted their little Carter to be the
same tool that they both were. It wasn’t even about me. They were
embarrassed for themselves. They needed me to act better for them.
They didn’t care about me. It was always about them.

“Well I figured it out. I learned how to
play the game. I just started getting better grades, hell all it
took was reading a bit, and learned to say,
yes
sir
and
yes
ma’am
. It was all about
appearances for them. As soon as they had their backs turned, it
was on. I don’t know if I had a sober day my last two years of high
school and they had no idea or didn’t care enough to say. Either
way, they stayed outta my shit.

“JROTC sucked. We had to go to school early
and usually stayed late. Some of those freaks really took that
garbage seriously. Some of ‘em wanted to have careers in the
freakin’ military. How stupid is that? Well, something good did end
up coming of wearing those stupid green uniforms.