Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (36 page)

In a matter of minutes they were eating egg
sandwiches and drinking juice. Over the meal, the three of them
were silent. Mason wasn’t quite sure what to say and was afraid to
ask for any more details or information. He still thought they
should get away from the houses before the brigands returned but he
didn’t know where to go and now with kids in tow, that became a
bigger problem.

Staring at his empty plate, Mason said,
“Those men who came to your house...they’re gonna come back.”

The little girl’s eyes became wide and a
scared fit started building in her. She stood and backed away from
the table until she was in a corner and lowering herself onto her
haunches. The boy, meanwhile, had not taken his eyes from the front
door, expecting at any moment for the door to burst open like it
had at his house only hours earlier.

Retracting and correcting his comment, Mason
assured them, “I didn’t mean right now. But they will be back. I
think we should get away from here before they do. Do you want to
come with me? I don’t know where to go, but I was thinking about
trying to go to some of my friends’ houses. I don’t know for sure.
I don’t know what’s going on.”

The boy said, “My mom made us hide and told
us not to come out until everything was quiet. She made us promise.
Then she said that if anything happened we should come over here.
She said that someone was home here and that you would help. I
think she thought maybe your mom or dad was here. Are you
alone?”

Mason nodded.

“I don’t know what happened for sure to my
mom and dad. I don’t think...I don’t...we couldn’t look. We were
too afraid.”

“It’s okay,” Mason said. “Maybe I could go
over and check things out for you. Would you like me to do that?”
That was what an adult would say, he figured. He was satisfied with
himself and felt like he was actually in charge.

The girl leapt forward from the corner and
wrapped herself around Mason’s waist, pleading for him not to leave
them alone. He tried to soothe her fears and reassured her that he
would be returning, but she refused to release him.

Her brother came to the rescue, prying her
little arms off Mason and encouraging him to hurry back.

As soon as Mason had gotten over to the
Barnettes’ house, he regretted not having been talked out of going
by the girl and any emerging confidence deserted him. In the front
yard, Mason happened upon Mr. Barnette lying in a puddle of his own
slick fluids. The man’s skull was crushed, with oozing vertical
fissures on his forehead from the multiple baseball bat impacts.
One of his eyes had been forced from its socket and hung
disgustingly from its exposed optic nerve. His right arm was broken
and twisted horribly behind his back as if it contained no bones at
all. One of his legs was similarly shattered. His body was
shapeless and broken to the point of barely being recognized as a
human body.

Mason stood over the man staring down at
him, unable to take his eyes away from the horrid display. Never in
all his worst imaginings could Mason have envisioned something so
disgusting. When the man moved ever so slightly and then a whisper
of a voice, not much louder than a breath, escaped, Mason jumped.
He couldn’t believe the man could possibly still be harboring
life.

Mason wanted to ignore his revulsion and
kneel next to the man to hear him better and provide some human
solace but he just couldn’t. The sickly, salty smell of blood and
death was very nearly overpowering to the young man; he withstood
the urge to turn away but he couldn’t approach him. He’d never seen
anything so sickening in his entire life. It was hard to imagine
the violated, misshapen lumps of flesh had ever been the skull of a
human being. Nausea rippled up and down his spine, tickling his gag
reflex like a feather down his throat. The man, whose gray hair was
matted with clumps of blood, bone, and what appeared to be brain
matter, asked louder, “My family?” His efforts produced a shallow,
wheezing, blood-choked cough.

Mason forced his words past his rising
disgust. “I have your kids. They’re safe.”

Despite his disfigurement and agony, Mr.
Barnette’s face twitched and a pained smile found its way across
his bloody, swollen lips. Mason watched the man’s one good eye
shudder, a tear forming, and then the man’s iris dilated and he was
gone.

Mason wandered into the house, expecting to
find the worst. He found Mrs. Barnette in the living room. She had
been ravaged over the period of several hours until, no longer of
any amusement to her attackers, she had been stabbed to death, the
knife still protruding from her chest.

That was enough for Mason. He retreated from
the house and ran back to his, tears filling his eyes the entire
short trip back. The kids were standing in the kitchen where Mason
had left them, the girl still clutching tightly to her younger
brother. The boy watched Mason when he entered the house and looked
away when he realized the news Mason had to deliver was nothing but
bad.

The boy, Ethan, could see the resigned
sadness in Mason’s red eyes. There was no need to ask. The same
could not be said for little Frances, asking repeatedly where her
Mommy and Daddy were. Her questions, along with her voice, steadily
rose in tempo and pitch until she was screaming unintelligibly at
the top of her shrill voice.

Spent, Frances fell to the floor and wept,
her despair beyond consolation.

The clock was ticking; time was in shorter
supply than Mason knew but still they hadn’t departed. He didn’t
want to admit it, but Mason had no idea what he was doing. Several
times, he tried his phones, both his cell and the home phone, but
nothing was working. He was nearly frantic, trying to decide what
they should take with them, when the crack and pop of two-stroke
motorcycle engines cut into the quiet.

They had come back and Mason didn’t think
they would be spared this time. There was no way that the three of
them would be able to get away now. The decision had been made for
them. They were forced to flee on foot, like refugees from a
surging disaster.

Mason grabbed what he had packed and what he
and the kids could grab on their way out the back door, and then
they were gone, leaving behind his childhood home and the life that
he had lived up to that point.

Mason, Ethan, and Frances ran into the woods
behind his house. They ran until none of them could breathe. They
found a stream with a footbridge spanning it. Mason decided they
could pause there. He didn’t think they had been followed. He
honestly didn’t think the thugs knew that they were even there.

It was late August, so the air was starting
to become cooler though the sun could still be quite warm,
especially at its late season zenith. Unfortunately, the sun had a
hard time penetrating the thick tree canopy, allowing the cool,
moist air of early morning to loiter longer in the shadows of the
forest.

Mason could see his breath, especially now
that they were so near to the stream’s cool water. With that
realization, Mason determined he did not want to spend the night
outside in the cold. They would just wait out there in the forest
until it was safe to go back. The raiders would get what they
wanted and then return from whence they came...he hoped.

Ethan threw twigs and rocks into the slow
moving water while Frances nervously twisted her hair into tighter
and tighter knots. Mason waited. When they spotted the smoke rising
over the trees, Mason’s heart sunk. He knew that couldn’t possibly
be good.

When more time had passed than they could
track and the smoke hadn’t dissipated at all, Mason could no longer
wait. He led the two kids back the direction from which they had
come.

They could see the flames before they had
neared the edge of the trees. Flames were devouring every house on
their little housing court. Not a one had been spared. They were
all burning uncontrollably.

The awful people responsible had long since
left, so Mason wandered into the middle of the road and looked
around at the conflagration. Dark smoke mixed with rising tongues
of fire as both filled the sky. Mason looked in disgust at his car
still sitting in the garage and utterly consumed by fire.

The fire at his house looked to be localized
to the garage; perhaps it had been his car they had used as the
fuel to start the flame. He never liked that car, but planned on
using it to get away from the neighborhood. He would simply have to
figure out another alternative. Mason ran to the still open front
door and up the stairs. The air was filled with smoke, but it
wasn’t unbearable. If he hurried, he thought he could make it
easily.

He bolted into his parents’ room and to
their closets. Sure enough, his father’s gun safe had been forced
open by a variety of tools and its missing contents had obviously
frustrated those responsible. They had upended the hefty gun safe
and smashed it through the closet wall.

They had also smashed out the bedroom’s
large window, which worked to Mason’s benefit, allowing much of the
smoke in the house to billow out away from him. It bought him the
time he needed.

The angry invaders had thrown lamps, chests,
boxes, and laundry into his mother’s closet. There was nothing of
any worth to them in the closet, and they had decided to use it as
a dumping ground for everything they deemed unnecessary and
worthless.

Mason picked his way through the debris and
found the undisturbed ceiling entrance to the attic. He opened the
hatch and pulled down the filled duffel bag and bundle of guns in a
matter of seconds. He was thankful for the ineptitude and
inefficiency of the thieves.

By then the fire had grown out of its place
in the garage and was working its way up through the house. Mason
already had a different plan to get out. He climbed through the
broken window and onto the solid awning below. He crawled to its
edge and dropped down to the ground.

He walked away from the house struggling to
carry all the firearms and the bag of ammunition and pistols but he
figured a way to make it happen. He plopped down on the front yard,
the heat from the blaze warming his back and neck uncomfortably.
Ethan and Frances remained in the middle of the street looking over
at the house that they used to call home.

Mason led them out along the road, always
careful and alert. They didn’t want to run into those same men out
in the open with nowhere to hide. Mason wondered if perhaps it was
men like these causing all the problems in Anchorage. He wished he
knew what was going on.

Mason’s family lived along the Kenai Spur
Highway, north of Kenai but south of Nikiski. It was a road hemmed
in on both sides by thick trees and the occasional small business
or church. Mason had always thought there were an awful lot of
churches where he lived, not that he wouldn’t be interested in some
old fashioned Christian charity, as his mother would say.

Truth be told, Mason would just have
preferred not having to make any decisions at present. He hoped he
was leading the three of them somewhere safe, but then again, he
thought
he should have been safe at home.
Looking over his shoulder, he could still see trails of black smoke
billowing above the tree line. It was a fairly bitter reminder that
he couldn’t go home ever again.

As one, the three of them stopped dead in
their tracks when they heard the unmistakable crack and pop of
gunfire coming from not too far down the road from them. They
shared a worried look and wondered what they should do. Mason
finally suggested that they head toward the sound but stay out of
sight. After all, it was people, and maybe they would find someone
capable and willing to help.

A short way south on the highway, they
spotted a gas station further down the road. In the parking lot and
around the small island of gas pumps, a harried crowd of people
buzzed to and fro like an angry swarm of agitated hornets. There
was a white pickup truck parked awkwardly in one corner of the lot,
as if it had been stopped there and abandoned by its driver who had
neglected to close the door.

It looked to Mason like three or four of the
people overwhelmed and piled atop another person who disappeared
amidst a vicious storm of pounding arms and fists. A big Ford Crown
Victoria spun out of control on the pavement. Mason could have
sworn he saw another two crazed people holding tightly to the side
of the blue car as it came to rest. Was that a scream he heard? It
was, but it didn’t sound like a woman’s voice. That was a man he
was hearing. That sound, more than any he had ever heard in his
life, worried him to the core. It was that sound which forced him
down and out of sight. He didn’t want to know what would make a man
make such a pitiful noise.

Mason led them further off the road until he
was fairly certain they couldn’t be seen but he still had a partial
view of the pavement. He didn’t know what to do now. Things were
going from bad to worse. What was making those people act so
crazy?

On the road to their left, another vehicle,
this one a bigger truck of some variety, screamed by wildly and was
gone, heading north as fast as its engine could drive it. Behind it
trailed a trio of snarling, crazed people sprinting tirelessly
after the truck.

Mason quickly pulled one of his pistols from
its holsters, his hands shaking with fear. Those three people
looked anything but normal. They didn’t necessarily act like human
beings in the few seconds he was able to see them. They were like
wild animals tracking prey.

He and the two children shared a worried
look with one another but no one moved. Frances chewed her lower
lip frantically, her fear consuming her. Mason could see the scream
starting to build deep inside the girl. They needed to get away
because the same scream was slowly building within himself as
well.