Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (8 page)

Finally working up the courage, he invited
her to attend a concert with him in Vancouver. She had shared her
fondness for Tom Petty and, as luck would have it, he was scheduled
to play in Kameron’s hometown.

He shot her a friendly text asking if she
would like to go. He acknowledged that he realized she lived in
Anchorage and he lived in Washington, and he also owned the fact
that they had never formally met one another face to face. He also
offered compromises on both issues. He offered to use his frequent
flyer miles to fly her down and then would split the cost of a
hotel room for her if she felt that was more appropriate.

After a couple of tense days without a
response, she finally replied that she would love to accompany him
to the concert. She also declined the hotel room, much to his
supreme delight. Danielle explained that she was not necessarily
implying anything by that, but there was enough flirtation in her
language that the possibility still existed.

Unfortunately, the concert was cancelled
about a week in advance of the event. Danielle decided that perhaps
they should meet at a different time. Kameron’s hopes and his
fantasies all came crashing down around him. He was utterly
despondent...for about a day.

He awoke to an early morning text from
Danielle. She wanted to know if he would like to come to Alaska and
visit her instead. She didn’t have a way to pay for his flight, but
she could guarantee an Alaskan adventure that he wouldn’t forget.
He didn’t even finish reading his message before he was replying.
In all actuality, he was willing to go to Cleveland if that was
where she was.

She unzipped the pack hastily after he
handed it to her. She found the hard plastic case inside and opened
it to verify its contents were still safe. She found the syringes
intact and breathed a sigh of relief.

Danielle was a diabetic, which was not
unusual for Alaska Natives. There was a higher degree of diabetes
amongst the Native peoples due to a host of reasons. Danielle was
dependent upon daily injections of insulin to help her body stay
healthy.

Zipping the pack and slinging it over her
shoulders, Danielle said warmly, “Thank you so much,” and kissed
Kameron on the cheek. “Sorry the fishing trip hasn’t started out so
great,” she said coyly, knowing full well that any disappointment
Kameron might have felt was surely mitigated by their last night’s
activities at her apartment in Anchorage.

“Oh that’s right,” Kameron said playfully.
“Fishing. I almost forgot.”

“My brother will still take us out once we
get over to see him.”

Still smiling, Kameron said, “Do I look
worried?”

While the two of them flirted and walked
slowly, others around them were worried and rightly so. Most were
quick to surmise that something unusually worrisome and deadly was
to take shape around them. The threatening nature of their
situation didn’t dawn on either of them until they saw a man,
extremely aggressive and out of control, attack another man who was
trying to protect his family. The two fighting men fell to the
ground in their tussle and disappeared from view. The apparent wife
of the victim screamed for help. When one of the men howled in pain
and desperation, Kameron decided that he needed to act.

He had to climb across bumpers and over
hoods to get to the struggle and by the time he’d gotten there, the
fight was all but over. The attacker was atop the other man, whose
arms and legs were still kicking but growing weaker and weaker.
Kameron shouted at him to stop but was ignored. He used his foot to
try and pry off the man on top of the other. After a couple of
tries with no luck, he finally leaned back and kicked the man in
his side. This finally produced a result, but it may have been more
than he anticipated.

The man looked up. Kameron couldn’t believe
what he was seeing. This couldn’t be a man. He had the eyes of a
hungry, rabid animal. Using all his strength and experience on the
wrestling mat wasn’t enough as he grappled with the wild man.
Kameron knew he could beat him, but he never anticipated such a
struggle to ensue with someone who he obviously outweighed and who
likely had not been instructed in hand-to-hand competition the way
Kameron had.

The unfortunate reality for Danielle and
Kameron was that their bus, along with another Gray Line bus was
the first vehicle to enter the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel. As a
result, theirs was the first vehicle to enter the fenced parking
lot and, therefore, the furthest from the lot’s exit. This all
spelled a long trek out, made longer by the tightly packed cars in
their way.

The new wound on Kameron’s bicep further
exacerbated their situation.

They were already running away from the site
of Kameron’s recent nominally successful battle. “The freakin’ guy
bit me!
Bit
me! What the hell?”

“Could you tell what was wrong with him?”
Danielle asked. “Was he on drugs or something?”

Gasping slightly, trying to recover from the
encounter, Kameron answered, “I don’t know for sure, but he didn’t
act very human. His eyes looked...feral.”

Danielle slowed her pace to match Kameron’s.
“Feral? You mean like wild?”

“No. I mean like rabid.”

Now more concerned about the wound on
Kameron’s arm, Danielle said, “We gotta get you somewhere that we
can get that bite cleaned then. No telling what he might have given
you.”

Trying his best to be stoic, Kameron
quickened his pace. “For now, let’s just get the hell out of here.
Whatever made him crazy seems like it’s spreadin’. Look.” He
pointed at another person, a woman fast on the heels of a portly
man with long, thick red hair. He would have looked like a mature
Viking warrior had he not been running for his life from a much
smaller woman and screaming like a terrified B-movie vixen.

Watching the red-maned man stumble and fall
victim to the woman’s vicious attack, Danielle looked beyond them
and saw similar scenes unfolding in every direction. Had they
somehow wandered onto one of Dante’s Circles of never ending agony?
None of what she was seeing made any sense to her. People just
didn’t act that way. Where were the police? Why was this happening?
Why wouldn’t someone just wake her up? This was a nightmare. It had
to be. This couldn’t be real.

She swallowed the noxious brew boiling in
her stomach and forced her legs to keep moving. They had to get
away before they couldn’t and if they were to have any hope of
escaping it would be up to her. She could see that in her new
friend’s kindly but suffering face.

She led the two of them as well as a small
group of others to the fence and then along it toward the exit.
They moved quickly and kept out of sight as much as possible. She
was terrified they would have the misfortune of running into
another of the crazies. Danielle was fit and she was tough, but her
limbs quivered with fear. She didn’t know if she would be able to
fight and Kameron was fading with each step. He couldn’t possibly
fend off an attacker.

They emerged from the lot breathless and
still fearful. Danielle cast worried looks over her shoulder every
few steps. There were others running as well; groups and
individuals with the same intention of getting away to anywhere
other than there. Looking more closely though, Danielle realized
that not all those running near her were of the same intent at
all.

A man wearing chest high waders was running
in awkward giraffe-like steps after a small woman carrying an even
smaller child in her arms. It was like watching an elderly lion
track a wounded gazelle. Neither was in his or her prime, but the
predator, in the end, won out over the prey. The woman stumbled on
an uneven patch of pavement, and that was enough. He leapt upon
her, wrapping his arms around her waist and dragging her to the
ground. For him it was two for one, despite the woman’s best
efforts to protect her child. His gnashing jaws did not bother to
distinguish between the two as it closed indiscriminately on
either’s flesh. The mother’s agonized screams were as much from
pain as from the horror of watching her child being consumed.

All around them others began to fall. After
having run the impossible distance from the staging area into town,
Danielle realized it was time to do something other than just run.
They needed to find somewhere to hide. There were some buildings up
ahead on the other side of the bridge. The hotel, some coffee
shops, gift shops, charter fishing buildings, cruise ship offices,
and other odds and ends all sat in front and on the left of her.
Danielle needed to get them off the street and out of the pack. She
also needed to get them somewhere that she might be able to find
some bandages and antiseptic ointments for Kameron’s wound.

Unfortunately, she also knew that there were
few if any options on this side of the railroad tracks where she
would find them both possible refuge and medical supplies. They
needed to get on the opposite side of the tracks.

To that end, she weighed her options. Most
of the people were running either to the right on the Whittier road
that crossed the railroad tracks into downtown Whittier or to the
left to the Inn at Whittier, which was the most prominent building
on the seaside portion of the city. Danielle had a different option
in mind and only hoped that she could get them to it in time.

She and a very few along with her ran out of
the pack and deeper into Whittier, running by several signs
pointing toward the ferry office and loading area. Through the
pounding of her pulse in her ears, Danielle could hear the rising
tumult behind her. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder for fear
that something might be within distance to grab her. Were she able
to see, she would have regretted it.

Roiling like a relentless, tempestuous sea,
the parking lots and sidewalks were awash in the chaotic melee. The
sidewalks ran with blood and the air was rent with screams. No one
was safe and nowhere offered any sanctuary.

They just needed a little time and maybe a
little distance.

Exhausted and struggling to keep her breath,
Danielle led them into one of those shops that one saw at every
tourist destination: a onetime general mercantile that now sold
postcards, t-shirts, snacks, and fresh lattes and other exotic
coffees, trying to court both local and tourist business. There
were still the requisite shelves of throat lozenges, cold remedies,
first aid supplies, and contraceptives but that corner of the store
appeared to be an afterthought. The two aisles devoted to food were
dominated by pre-packaged and processed boxed meals and rows of
canned soups, fruit, and vegetables.

It sat in a multipurpose building the color
and disposition of old yellow mustard. A small community museum
shared the space with the store, along with some other random
offices. Across the street sat a long light blue-green building
housing a public safety office and garage as well as the city
Public Works Department. Aside from those two buildings, the only
other thing along this stretch of road was the Anchor Inn, a
three-story hotel with a locals’ pub on the second floor.

These buildings were on the north side of
the railroad tracks. Danielle had led them there hoping that
perhaps their options for refuge and survival might improve. The
buildings on the seaside were too small, too exposed, or quickly
overrun by the charging horde. Getting to the opposite side of the
tracks was a harrowing adventure in and of itself. In order to gain
access to downtown Whittier, one had to traverse a long, narrow
tunnel, which ran underground.

The tunnel was nothing more than a large,
illuminated culvert with a concrete floor. The air inside was
colder and damper than the air above ground, but Danielle wasn’t
afforded much of an opportunity to differentiate. They were being
hotly pursued and overtaken by predators. Deafening and palpable,
the sound through the narrow passageway, gathering in the
corrugated surface of the walls, pounded in Danielle’s ears and
chest until she felt like she would explode. All the screams of the
terrified, fleeing people and their growling and bellowing pursuers
melded into a single, earsplitting din.

Danielle looked around them in the faint
luminescence only to see more terror. The things were in the tunnel
with them. She saw a man running and then a pair of hands wrap
themselves around his shoulders and then another around his waist.
His eyes filled with terror, as he was pulled down and out of
sight. Danielle couldn’t differentiate his screams from the
others.

Kameron, almost helpless by that point, felt
impossibly heavy to her. He was barely moving his feet on his own
but still Danielle pushed forward. Coming to the end of the tunnel,
they burst forth like a flood of humanity, spraying in every
direction. Danielle led Kameron and the group still with her up the
ramp and onto the main drag through downtown. She saw the yellow
building and led them there.

Others stopped at the seafood processing
plant but were met with locked doors atop narrow sets of stairs.
They were trapped and defenseless. The Public Works and Public
Safety offices also attracted desperate souls to their doors with
much the same effect. Using all the mayhem to distract attention
away from themselves, Danielle ran into the yellow building’s main
entrance and then into the store before anything or anyone could
follow them. There were too many other easier targets for their
pursuers to grab and devour. She was actually concerned that too
many people might see them and lead those things to them in the
process. They were lucky though, and found themselves panting but
alone.

With the help of an older man and another
young woman, Danielle partially blocked the front entrance with a
heavy card rack. The doors opened outward, so they couldn’t keep
them from opening but blocking the doorway might buy them a little
time in a pinch. Danielle looked for a broom, mop, anything with a
handle that she could use to secure the doors but came up empty.
She used an oversized cotton nightshirt to tie the two handles as
firmly together as she could under the circumstances.