Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (9 page)

Hearing the bedlam unfold outside, Danielle
couldn’t help the anguished shivering that overtook her.
Goosebumps, teasing her hair on end, ran along her arms and up her
spine while her senses were rocked with a wave of vertigo that
nearly swept her from her feet. Watching all the people run on the
outside of the narrow, shoulder-high windows of the store, Danielle
was struck with how surreal it all felt. She’d never seen such
utter chaos in all her life.

She backed away from the storefront and
lowered herself out of sight of the several window, running the
length of the store and looking out onto downtown Whittier’s main
street. She crawled like a harried crab toward her stricken friend
Kameron, suffering through a state of near delirium. When his eyes
opened, they evinced no awareness; only fear. He seemed to be
drifting away, sinking into the dark circles forming under his
eyes.

The wad of shirts pressed against and
wrapped tightly around his bleeding biceps was glistening with
blood, the flow refusing to abate. They had already tightened a
child’s belt around his upper arm near the shoulder to restrict the
flow, but nothing worked.

The woman sitting next to him was weeping
and holding his hand absently, paying more attention to her own
fears than to Kameron’s pain. It would have been of very little
consequence, because Kameron’s drifting consciousness was beyond
comfort anyway.

Finally making her way to Kameron’s side,
Danielle looked down at his still boyish face with the sparse blond
hair on his crown. His color, once golden with the generous summer
sun of the Lower Forty-eight, had been chased away by the
aggressive fever quickly overwhelming him.

She’d seen death enough in her life with
both animals and people to be able to recognize it. Kameron was
fading fast and she was doubtful that there was anything she could
do about it.

On hands and knees, she wandered over to the
lone pharmaceutical aisle in the store. She pulled down bandages,
iodine, cotton swabs, and anything else that looked helpful.
Grabbing more than she could carry, she piled about half of what
was in the crook of her arms into her backpack, checking that her
own medication, several syringes of insulin as well as some glucose
tablets and gel sticks, were still safely in the bottom of the bag.
Danielle was thankful she had thought ahead well enough to have
herself well stocked for her own needs.

With her backpack full and a pile of other
pilfered first aid products in her arm, she crawled back toward the
clump of others hiding in the middle of the store. She was drawn to
them by the muted sounds of weeping and ragged breathing. Amongst
the people was a young woman with the same olive skin tone as
Danielle and wearing the typical trappings of a store clerk.
Danielle asked, “D’you work here?”

The young woman, lying on her belly with a
pool of tears forming on the floor in front of her, nodded but
refused to look up. She was terrified and Danielle rightly surmised
that the woman wasn’t even sure why. She was falling victim to the
collective emotions of the crowd. She hadn’t been on the streets.
She hadn’t felt the vulnerability, the helplessness, or the fear.
She didn’t know what it was like to be hunted like prey. Yet she
shivered and cried just the like rest of them.

“Is there a back room?” Danielle asked
quietly. “Someplace away from the windows? And where is the
phone?”

Again, the scared woman nodded a confused
confirmation but was unable to stutter out a verbal response. She
also slid a set of keys across the glossy tile floor. It was
apparent the woman...girl really, wasn’t moving anywhere anytime
soon.

Danielle couldn’t blame her. She was scared
as hell too, but she didn’t like feeling trapped. Leaving the
majority of the scavenged supplies with the supine group, Danielle
grabbed the keys along with the full backpack and crawled toward a
surprisingly heavy but free-swinging door. On the opposite side, it
was as if she had wandered into another place. Whereas the front
area was glistening and clean, almost as antiseptic as a hospital,
the back room was anything but. It was a large multipurpose room
which had been used to its fullest. There were neatly stacked and
some not so neatly stacked cardboard boxes inside an area on the
floor marked by yellow and black striped tape. To her immediate
left was a wall of perhaps twelve repurposed old high school
lockers. Most were decorated with magnets and a lifetime’s worth of
dents and nicks, and some inventive murals cast in Sharpie markers
and nail polish. Further beyond that but still on her left was what
looked like a break room of sorts, from which wafted a spicy aroma
of meals gone by, which competed with the pall of cardboard and
dust clinging heavily everywhere else. The light was sparse at
best, provided by the dim, hazy morning through a pair of narrow
rectangular windows high up on one wall and some flickering
fluorescent fixtures attached to the ceiling high overhead.

Controlling her fear by holding her breath,
Danielle stopped herself long enough to find what she originally
sought: an exit. It was clearly marked and on the other side of the
wall of boxes. She also saw, to her right, a staircase leading up
to what she figured was an office.

She was stopped in her tracks by an agonized
scream outside the small building’s walls. It sounded like the
pitiful cry of a prey animal caught in the jaws of a predator. She
might have been tricked into thinking it was less than human if it
weren’t for the distinctly human words: “Ohhhhhh Chriiiiiist
nooooooooo! Helllllllllp meeeeeeeeeee!” The horrific screech sent a
shudder through Danielle from head to foot.

Danielle was struck with conflicting
emotions, both relief and regret. She was relieved she was
separated from the misery and evil outside, but was regretful that
she was too afraid to come to the suffering soul’s aid. Try as she
might though, Danielle could not convince herself to take action.
There was no amount of shame which was going to change that.

Ignoring her tortured feelings, Danielle ran
up the stairs, taking two steps at a time. The office at the top of
the stairs was open and empty. The plush chair behind the
heavy-looking desk would have been more at home in a working
family’s seldom used and secondhand furnished living room. The
other chairs had likely been abducted from the break room
downstairs. The office light was off but the room was partially lit
by the daylight finding its way into the room through a pair of
windows looking out toward Prince William Sound. On the wall
opposite the two windows was another window, which looked out over
the store’s sales floor. This was definitely a manager’s perch.

Danielle saw the phone on the desk and
immediately went for it. Nothing. No dial tone. No busy signal. No
pleasant but annoying voice. She scanned the office in search of
anything useful. She saw a mug of pens, a stapler, an empty coffee
mug, some loose papers, and a pile of various sized yellow sticky
notes. All worthless. Nothing to help her at all. Danielle had
given up when she saw behind the door and leaning against the wall
a thick wooden club whose short shaft widened exceptionally the
further it got away from the leather-wrapped handle. The splotchy,
brownish stain patterns suggested it had been a well-used club,
subduing many a stubborn game fish in its prime.

She hefted the tool and was not surprised by
its significant weight. Unsure how much she would be able to use
it, Danielle nevertheless felt more comfortable with the instrument
in her hand. She no longer felt defenseless. There was a certain,
if somewhat medieval, comfort that accompanied such an
armament.

The moment was short-lived. A scream and the
sound of breaking glass from the sales floor below interrupted her
returning serenity. Danielle ran to the window and looked down upon
the shadowy store.

The front doors still looked shut and
blocked well enough by the book rack, and the windows Danielle
could see from her limited angle were still intact. Despite the
darkness, she thought she saw some hurried movement in one of the
aisles but was unable to discern who or what it was. She leaned
closer to the glass, hoping for a better glimpse but her vision was
impeded by her own hazy reflection.

There was another crash and more sounds of
struggle. Danielle saw someone run toward the front door, but the
barricade placed to keep others out served double duty and became a
barrier to escape as well. Desperate to get out, the person tried
to move the display, but was tackled violently. The teetering rack,
upended and now on its side, and the two people wrestling with one
another all became entangled. The frantic struggle that followed
was loud and messy. Bags of chips, loose greeting cards, and other
sundries spilled and scattered across the floor. Shadows again
engulfed the melee as the battlers slid further into the dark.

Then there was quiet again. Danielle focused
her eyes and tried to turn off her other senses the way her father
had taught her when she was younger. It was no less difficult than
it had been in her past. She squinted her eyes into narrow slits
and then opened them wide, inviting in the scant light in a rush.
She thought maybe she could see someone or something. Then she was
worried that it was a body. It might have just been a pile of
merchandise, but the legs emerging from under it convinced her
otherwise. If it was a body, then it was likely a man judging by
the size of the boots and width of the legs. But who was it?
Suddenly, she knew. It was the father in the red, down-filled
jacket. It had to be him, but she wondered what had attacked him.
He was a big guy; as big as or bigger than anyone else who had
ventured into the drug store with Danielle and everyone else.

Besides, why would anyone be acting that
way? They had all just run
away
from the
people doing those kinds of things. She wondered what was going on
down there.

Worried by the events unfolding in the store
below and concerned for Kameron, probably vulnerable to being
victimized again, Danielle decided to venture downstairs. The heavy
club helped steel her nerves to her decision. Even so, those first
couple of steps were tentative and difficult, her feet as reluctant
as a condemned prisoner’s making that last, fateful walk.

She stepped out of the office and hadn’t yet
started down the steps when the store clerk who had given her the
keys ran screaming into the back room. Fast on her heels was
someone wearing Kameron’s clothes. It couldn’t possibly be Kameron
though; because this person was running with more urgency and vigor
than her stricken friend could possibly muster in his current
state. Danielle wasn’t sure what to do, so she merely watched in
stunned horror. Despite the weapon now at her disposal, Danielle’s
fear was beginning to take hold.

The pursuer caught the female store clerk
moments before she was able to make a hurried escape out the back
door. Danielle was finally able to determine that it
was
Kameron attacking the woman. Confused by his
inexplicable aggression, Danielle screamed, “Kamerrrr-onnnnnn!
Stop!”

Danielle’s desperate voice echoed in the
cavernous storeroom, momentarily distracting Kameron from his
assault. He fixed his feral eyes on her while he chewed a
glistening, flopping flap of skin dangling from his chomping
jaws.

Terror and disgust filling her chest,
Danielle tried to scream but the shriek was aborted prematurely.
The sudden appearance of the father wearing the red jacket bursting
through the swinging doors stifled Danielle’s voice before it could
take flight. The man leapt through on a wave of urgency but stopped
to survey the room. Danielle wanted to get his attention and warn
him about the danger but again found her voice absent behind a
steady dripping sound coming from the man. She then realized there
was a spreading puddle of thick, dark fluid forming at his feet. It
was blood. She felt the lurching nausea rise to the top of her
throat, the burning odor tickling her nose.

Danielle, far out of his sight, looked more
closely and realized that the sound and the puddle grew when the
red-jacketed man leaned forward on the balls of his feet. Then she
saw that his throat had been flayed open to the bone. From the
ghastly wound, all the sticky, syrupy fluids from his head spilled
like water through a drain.

“Oh dear God,” she whispered in horror.

It was just loud enough to catch the man’s
attention and send him into a furious, boiling rage. He threw his
head back and tried to scream, but his windpipe had been severed
and partially crushed. Instead of a bellowing, thunderous yawp, he
produced a raspy, wet gush of rushing breath and spraying red
spittle.

It was perhaps the most horrible thing
Danielle had ever seen. She was retreating involuntarily before she
realized she was doing it. Her survival instincts backpedaled her
toward the open office behind her.

She slammed the office door before the
father had taken his first aggressively clumsy steps up the stairs.
Despite his uncoordinated gait, he leaped up several steps with
each bound. Danielle was just barely able to move a bookcase in
front of the door before he stomped his feet onto the top stair and
was in the hallway.

Danielle waited behind the door, not sure
what to do next. She was breathing quickly and shallowly, which was
making her dizzy. She couldn’t afford to lose her wits. She didn’t
want to end up like that poor woman down there.

What was happening? What was wrong with
Kameron that he would do that?

The one hopeful thought she had was that
maybe the man would just go away... forget about her and leave her
alone. A second after that thought struck, the door shuddered on
its hinges. The man on the other side was throwing himself against
the door again and again. The repeated impacts toppled some books
from their shelves on the bookcase set against the door.