Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (30 page)

Lincoln and Kit, as well as Ilya and Michael
who had joined them, checked the loads on their rifles and readied
them for battle. Lincoln was the first to shoot, his shots going
wild. The deafening roar from the firearm reverberated in the truck
through its closed windows.

Fucking
amateurs
! Carter thought to himself. He lowered his
window a bit and shouted, “Calm the fuck down! You’re wasting
ammo!”

Lincoln gritted his teeth in frustration
while Kit fired her rifle, a traditional looking bolt action
hunting rifle. Her firearm had a much more piercing sound than
Lincoln’s dull, low blasts from his shotgun. Peering intently down
her rifle barrel, Kit’s round hit one of the approaching creature’s
heads, removing its scalp. She worked the bolt on her rifle and
pulled the trigger again. Her second shot hit its target. Two of
the dozen or more skins, which were starting to invade the truck’s
headlights like a virus spreading itself in a petri dish, fell
beneath the others’ feet.

There was no room to maneuver and no choice
but to push forward. Carter’s intuition was to speed up and plow
through all of them, but he didn’t know how many were in front of
him. There was always the danger of becoming entangled in
overwhelming numbers of bodies.

He looked in his rearview mirror and was a
little more comfortable to see headlights approaching from behind.
If he got stuck, maybe the other truck could push him clear. He
wished he knew the driver of the other truck, but there was no way
of knowing for sure. It could be Devon, the old hockey player who
walked with a limp but was still as big and mean as a tank. Or it
could be Cortland, or Nelson, or... He was pretty sure that it
wasn’t Colonel Bear. Since what the Colonel used to call The Fall
had begun, Carter noticed that for all of Colonel Bear’s
blustering, he rarely put himself in harm’s way. He tried to tell
himself that it didn’t bother him, but he
had
noticed, which was problematic in and of itself. If
the Colonel wasn’t the man Carter though he was, then he wondered
if perhaps he himself wasn’t either. Thoughts like that made him
angry and Carter didn’t like being angry. He didn’t like losing
control of his emotions for any reason.

He preferred controlled moments of rage,
directed and with purpose. That was what the Colonel had taught
him. It was part of the warrior ethos, which had been impressed
upon Carter from the moment he set foot on The Ranch.

He would just have to deal with his building
resentment or whatever it was becoming another time. He had other
things keeping him occupied at the moment.

When they hit the line of walking corpses,
there were so many of them gathering in the headlights, Carter was
forced to slow the truck and nearly come to a stop. It was like
running into a living, pulsing wall. Hands, arms, and entire upper
bodies splayed themselves across the hood of his truck in an effort
to get to him. Carter hadn’t expected to be so nearly stopped in
his tracks. He pressed the accelerator and urged the truck to
regain its pace. It wasn’t working as he had hoped, though they did
maintain a slow, steady pace forward.

The crush of reaching, grabbing arms and
hands spread around the vehicles like quicksilver, like Carter’s
truck was wading into a sea of death. The four people in the back
of Carter’s truck and the five in the back of the bigger red GMC
behind them were fighting for their lives. They were only
occasionally shooting forward by then. The target rich environment
all around them negated the need to take aim. They pointed their
firearms into the crowd and pulled the trigger. They took care not
to shoot too closely in the direction of any other vehicles, but
the press of animated flesh would likely have absorbed any errant
shots had they done so.

The air around them was abuzz with a chorus
of ghoulish moans filling the air and threatening to drown the
militia in its resonance. The deafening blasts from the discharging
firearms were lost in the overwhelming cacophony of hungry
otherworldly voices.

The stale stillness of the air had been
forced away by the violence now filling it. A swirling, reeking
stew of car exhaust, rotting flesh, and gunpowder hung in heavy
clouds around the slowly proceeding trucks.

Kit had set her rifle aside and was swinging
an ancient, rusty scythe back and forth, removing fingers, hands,
and the tops of heads. Blood, thick and heavy as maple syrup,
sprayed into the air in jets of dark globs. It splashed up Kit’s
arms and onto her chest and neck. She screamed, swinging the yard
tool with reckless abandon, looking like a crazed berserker of
Norse folklore. She may have been shouting obscenities or reciting
prayers; she couldn’t be sure. She was too focused on slashing and
hacking, dealing out death with each wild swing of her weapon.

Lincoln fired all eight rounds in his
pump-action shotgun and then leaned against the truck’s cab to
reload. In his nervousness, he dropped a shell, which spun and
rolled away in the dark truck bed. He knew he would eventually need
it, so he leaned down to see if it was within easy reach.

It was a fatal mistake. Leaning away from
the direction the truck was going, Lincoln lost his balance and
fell into the truck bed. When he tried to regain his footing, he
was too close to the low walls surrounding the bed. First a pair
and then more hands grabbed hold of his hair and the collar of his
down vest. He was pulled up and partially out of the truck. Mouths
full of merciless, gnashing teeth latched onto his face and head,
digging into his flesh like greedy parasites.

Lincoln shrieked in pain and fear. His ear,
clutched between a set of grinding, yellow teeth, was shorn from
his body and chewed greedily. With a scream and a Herculean effort,
he was finally able to extricate himself from those trying to
devour him. He tried to stand upright but his equilibrium was off.
He stumbled again but this time steadied himself against the
truck’s cab. Already his blood loss was affecting his balance and
his senses.

His face was riddled with bites and other
wounds, blood streaming down the bridge of his nose and cheeks in
great gushing rivers of red. He touched the side of his head where
his ear should have been and started to weep. He remembered all the
men and women he’d seen with similar wounds and the fate they
suffered. He thought of his mother, his father, and the friends
that he met in the evenings and on the weekends to drink beer and
dream of the lives that they wished they had. He saw all of their
faces and knew that each had already preceded him to the
afterlife.

He wished he had paid better attention when
he used to go to church with his family. He might remember a prayer
or a psalm or something else that might guide him or calm his
fears. He already knew what he had to do and if he thought about it
for too long he might talk himself out of doing it. He refused to
turn
.

Lincoln looked down between his feet and saw
the shell. He reached down and picked it up, the tears in his eyes
joining the blood coursing down from his forehead. He slipped the
shell into the loading aperture on the bottom of the big gun and
pumped it into firing position.

The others weren’t paying attention to him
since he’d gotten himself back in the truck. “Good luck!” he
shouted, put the barrel of the gun below his chin, and pulled the
trigger. The slug passed directly through his skull from bottom to
top and created a bubbling jet of red blood, white bones, and
grayish brain tissue.

Ilya watched as Lincoln fell forward into
the back of the truck. His body quivered and jerked for a moment
and then was still. Confident about their chances until then, Ilya
felt a sudden jolt of fear strike through him. He shouted,
“Lincoln’s down. What should we do?”

Michael, standing on the same side as Kit,
shouted back, “Kill ‘em all! Don’t stop!” Michael was damned near
in a fit, boiling with rage and adrenaline. He was swinging his axe
back and forth, hacking and slashing, completely rapt in his
bloodlust. He didn’t notice when his axe blade sunk too deeply into
a neck and didn’t come out cleanly. The vehicle’s forward momentum,
much like with Lincoln, set him off balance as he pulled uselessly
on the stuck axe.

Michael pitched forward into the dark. His
tortured, agonizing screams assured everyone that he was still
there for those moments before his live and kicking body was
harvested and gutted like a prey animal by a pack of hunters.

Kit hadn’t stopped swinging her scythe. She
held the roll bar atop the truck with one hand and swung the tool
with the other, maintaining her balance and the pace of her attacks
as well.

Ilya shifted slowly to the front and
followed Kit’s lead. He grabbed hold of the roll bar and started
swinging his machete in the same fashion as the woman on the other
side of the truck. He swung indiscriminately, hitting whatever fell
into his blade’s path.

Sitting alone in the truck, Carter, who was
rarely rattled, was starting to feel boxed in and vulnerable. His
side window was streaked with bloody handprints and the front
windshield had a new crack, which ran its length from a body that
somehow ended up on the truck’s hood before rolling harmlessly off
to the side. With all the bangs and knocks on the side of his
truck, Carter felt like he was sitting inside a very hardworking
gearbox inside a vintage tractor. He was finding it difficult to
control his jumpy reactions to the growing volume and frequency of
the impacts.

The revolver sitting on the seat next to him
gave him a little bit of reassurance, but he couldn’t help but be
reminded that his pistol only carried six rounds in it and there
were dozens of angry fists pounding on the sides of his and the
other vehicles in their convoy.

Carter started to doubt whether they would
make it through or not. His worry was that he would get to a point
at which he could no longer move forward and the vehicles behind
him would not be able to go back. He would be trapped and doomed.
He looked in his rearview mirror and saw the several pairs of
headlights following closely behind.

Panic lurked and threatened from the
periphery. That, above all else, angered him. He didn’t like to be
threatened, even if it was coming from his own mind. He reached to
the volume button on the truck’s stereo and turned up the volume.
The CD in the machine was from the band Tool, a fitting soundtrack
to their current situation. The reverberating drums and deep bass
echoed around him from the multiple speakers hidden throughout the
cab. He punched his fist onto the steering wheel in time with the
music and held the fear at bay. Across his face spread the familiar
diabolical grin so many people had grown accustomed to seeing on
him.

Carter didn’t know that two of his four
passengers had already fallen and that his final two were
struggling to fight off the horde. Their arms were growing more and
more fatigued as they fought what would likely be an ultimately
doomed battle. There were just too many of the undead closing all
around them.

When Kit’s scythe lodged too deeply in the
chest of one of her targets, she shouted over to Ilya to warn him.
He screamed back at her to find Lincoln’s shotgun on the truck bed.
After looking down she saw the gun under Lincoln’s motionless
body.

The gun was empty but Kit found some shells
in Lincoln’s bulging pockets. Sitting and loading the shotgun, she
looked around. They appeared to be getting through the majority of
the things, as the herd was thinning somewhat. Carter must have
sensed it as well because the truck gained speed as more pavement
showed in its headlights.

The trucks and SUVs behind them continued
along the path Carter’s truck had blazed. The gun was loaded and
lying across Kit’s lap when she rightly decided that the heavy
lifting of going first was done. They were through.

The fight wasn’t won; not by a long shot.
They were just nearing the end of the oppressive darkness. It felt
like a second sunrise for the day and Kit was appreciative of
both.

Colonel Bear’s Humvee was an original
production model which Governor Schwarzenegger had heartily
endorsed once upon a time, a virtual tank of an automobile. The
Colonel had three other trucks between his vehicle and Carter’s
truck in the lead, and an equal number behind him. From this
distance, he heard and saw more of the fighting than he was
experiencing. It was a matter of practicality. The Colonel’s Humvee
was not the best configuration for this kind of fight.

The Colonel was decidedly not a coward and
having to be anywhere than in the thick of the fight was
frustrating for him. The men in his big SUV were all brawlers as
well. When the trickle of creatures swelled around those vehicles
in front of theirs, they shouted a grateful war yawp to one
another.

The vehicles this far back from the front
line were moving at a walking pace, so the Colonel’s passengers
piled out with weapons ready. They started with guns, firing them
feverishly into the thinning packs of demons as they appeared from
the darkness.

The big white and green RV in front of them
was spattered with oozing red stains when the men’s bullets pierced
the suffering flesh of their attackers. Foreheads, chests, arms,
abdomens, and upper legs bloomed with dark crimson flowers of
necrotic blood. Some of the wounds were fatal to even the undead
but many produced showers of gore.

The Colonel decided to use his Humvee as a
weapon and plowed through groups of the beasts. His vehicle’s wide
frame sent broken bodies hurtling through the air and forced others
under its heavy, nubby tires, crunching bones in the process. Those
devils not killed outright were maimed and broken beyond being a
threat. A few were dispatched with quick jabs from machetes or
large hunting knives, and others suffered skulls stomped nearly
flat with boot heels.