Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 3): Mitigation Book 3) (29 page)

They hid behind locked doors and closed windows, hoping such simple measures would suffice. That’s how it was all over the area. No one knew what was happening or how to prepare for it.

When people from Kenai and Soldotna began to flee from the undead uprising which seemed to be spreading from Anchorage like a swarm of locusts threatening to consume anything and everything in its path, some people flocked to the local schools and government agencies. That was just what people did. When trouble began to percolate and build, local police stations, firehouses, borough and city government offices, and schools saw their parking lots begin to fill with concerned, scared people who sought protection and answers.

As the plague spread its evil fingers into Soldotna and then Kenai, those sites became ghoul magnets. All of the people seeking protection and all the public servants trying to find answers became fodder for the slaughter.

Skyview High School, just south of Soldotna’s city center, saw a few desperate souls make their way there as well, though its location led to far fewer people congregating there. In fact, most people, once they were on the highway heading south, drove right past the high school and continued toward Homer, which sat at the far end of the road more than an hour away. What none of the people who sought refuge at the school could have known was that it was the sparse numbers of people hiding there which helped keep them largely off of the proverbial butcher’s block.

The couple dozen people who did come to Skyview waited for a short while and watched the news from televisions or the numerous computers throughout the school. When the news feeds from Anchorage stopped broadcasting, they all rightly feared the worst. Some decided to venture south while others decided to weather the hard times in the sanctuary they had found.

Some had barely survived encounters with the undead, escaping with just their lives while others close to them hadn’t been so lucky. They shared their stories and their sorrow. The talking and story-telling also motivated all of them. They knew their safety would require some work on their parts.

Taking it upon themselves to protect their location, a few of the men and women at the school wandered out into the back parking lot where several full sized school buses were parked. Luckily, the keys had been left in the ignitions, so the buses were moved to make a horseshoe shaped enclosure around the front doors. Outward facing windows on the first floor were fortified with whatever materials could be found. They all did their best to prepare themselves and their new, temporary home for the storm that was headed their way. They had food and water for the time being and felt somewhat secure, though the weapons they had were minimal at best.

With the handful of hunting rifles and various caliber pistols they had, a few felt comfortable enough to venture out into the abandoned edges of Soldotna. They grabbed some lumber and other building materials from a home improvement store on the far side of the river. Some close encounters with the aggressive living dead had all of them second guessing the purpose and the efficacy of the excursions, though their needs seemed to be increasing by the day.

Survivors traveling the treacherous roads found the oasis and hope in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness on the highway between Soldotna and Homer. The handful of lost souls grew to a sizeable group of more than two dozen and their secured compound continued to grow. They found generators to power refrigerators and electric heaters. A Community Health Aide established a clinic of sorts in the school nurse’s office and kept it stocked with supplies pillaged from a local clinic and nearby drug stores. While it would be a stretch to call it a thriving community, the little village was stable and relatively safe.

Of course, their activity attracted the attention of a zombie or two on several occasions but those few threats were dealt with and disposed of immediately. The first couple stumbled down the long drive connecting Skyview with the highway and looked simply confused at first. The two horrific ghouls, watched by a group of survivors sitting on top of one of the buses, appeared less and less normal the closer they got. Some folks thought that perhaps the creatures would lose interest when they realized they couldn’t breach their defenses and then wander off. Others entertained ideas of possibly helping the poor souls. The debate continued for quite some time.

After listening to the pair of fiends pound their fists and heads into bloody messes against one of the buses and showing no signs of slowing or realizing anything for a few hours, several men armed with baseball bats taken from a gymnasium equipment room ventured outside their wall. The men formed an arc around the still focused attackers and then waited for the creatures to turn. When the beasts did finally turn about, there was no hesitation on their part. The ghouls leapt at the men fearlessly. Their charge was unexpected and caused panic in a couple of the men. The rabid, thrashing devils fell upon one of the unfortunate men and immediately began to bite and claw at his arms, neck, and face.

The other men started to pummel the two attackers with their bats, but nothing seemed to discourage them. Finally, one of the men hit one of the zombies atop his skull and all of its fighting and biting fury stopped. The other creature was dispatched similarly, but not before the man beneath him had stopped struggling. Upon closer inspection, it was discovered that the brutalized man had also expired.

While the men discussed how to discard the bodies, their comrade who had fallen stood back on his feet. The other men took several steps back in surprise. At first, there was a pause during which no one knew what to do. When the recently dead man lifted his head and looked at the others, every shred of humanity had faded from his eyes, having been usurped by primal hunger. He lunged but was met with a flurry of aluminum and wood as the men swung their bats furiously, their arms fueled with adrenaline and fear. They swung and swung until every bone in the dead man’s body was broken, including his skull, which had been pounded nearly flat. Looking at him afterward, they realized they would need snow shovels or some other tool to scoop up the remains.

Fear was still an issue for all of them, but they did their best to hold it outside of their walls, like a fairytale castle of good holding its ground in a dark forest of evil. Knowing how to deal with the monsters emboldened everyone, but when they ventured outside the relative safety of the walls, no one felt anything other than anxious, exposed, and vulnerable.

When Colonel Braxton Edwin Arlen Ross, or Colonel Bear as he preferred, arrived with his organized militia in their military vehicles, with their military look, and, perhaps most strikingly, their military firearms, things began to change quickly. The little community became much more ordered and more secure. Their perimeter expanded with the adding of a fenced area around the loading bay and part of the basketball courts nearby and their numbers continued to grow. Actual building projects, requiring raw building materials, began to emerge. Their growing needs meant additional trips into town, which meant more danger and a greater reliance upon the militiamen or, more to the point, their firearms and other military equipment.

Other changes were taking place too. When the community first emerged, it was an organic group with each doing his or her part based upon the skills and experience that each brought to the collective. Everyone had an equal voice, because everyone had an equal share of the risk. Of course there was friction when personalities or opinions clashed, but compromise helped all of them to survive despite all the odds against it.

The stratification that occurred after the militia’s arrival was fairly subtle at first but very steady. It didn’t take long before Colonel Bear was calling all the shots. Sometimes, decisions seemed to be made strictly on his whim, without an apparent care to the possible outcomes. For instance, when the Colonel decided that the civilians would be better protected if they were all moved from the individual classrooms they had claimed early during the crisis and into the library, he didn’t ask and no one put up much of a public objection. It wasn’t that the library was any more or less uncomfortable than the classrooms, but there didn’t seem to be any reasonable purpose other than to give the militiamen a greater range of options for their own accommodations. Put quite simply, there were those with guns and the willingness to use them and then there was everyone else.

Still reeling from the dramatic and terrifying shifts in their world, the original residents of the bastion were hard pressed to find their voice of protest. For the most part, they simply nodded their heads and consented to the Colonel’s directives. Safety, after all, was foremost on their minds at the time.

The biggest challenge for most of the civilians was moving from the second floor, perceived as slightly more secure, to the ground floor for their living quarters. The library’s windows were covered over with heavy wooden tables and lumber, but those measures only went so far to calm frayed nerves. The library, now illuminated with the sparing light of a handful of fluorescent tubes and a smattering of battery-powered lanterns, began to resemble a prison for refugees.

Without showers and no water to clean their clothes, rising body odor permeated the walls of books which had been moved and adjusted to afford some level of privacy for those forced to live in such conditions. All of this was done and endured in the name of survival, despite the fact that the militiamen were not subject to the same conditions or deprivations.

Those men lived in the classrooms primarily on the second floor. Many of them had private rooms all to themselves and enjoyed such basic comforts as beds and working electrical outlets. The divide between the haves and the have-nots was stark and troubling.

And troubles certainly followed. Such disparity cannot persist indefinitely. Things would first go from bad to worse for one segment within that arrangement.

A few young women moved upstairs, seeking comfort and security. They were willing to become
wives
of some of the militiamen, some even having mock ceremonies with vows and as much pomp and circumstance as could be mustered. The wives would clean clothes, maintain living quarters, and, of course, avail themselves of their new husbands’ every nocturnal whim.

The first handful of wives came somewhat willingly. They were recent widows nearly paralyzed with fear or orphaned daughters or sisters who dreaded the agonizing solitude. Those with husbands or boyfriends or family of any sort stayed in the library...at first.

When a pair of covetous militia eyes spied the soft feminine form of a wife, the status quo changed. It was no longer a matter of choice. The woman was taken against her will and the protesting husband was beaten within an inch of his life by a beer-plied group of militiamen. The next to suffer the same fate was a father of a late teenage girl.

Other complaints were met with more intimidation and more threats. Food supplies and other materials gathered in trips were stockpiled in the militia-controlled kitchen and doled out to the others after the Colonel deemed that his men and women had been properly fed and equipped first. It was largely his men, after all, who risked their lives on the excursions and supply runs. Because they shouldered the greater risk, they were entitled to more of the spoils.

Continued objections by the “civvies”, as the Colonel referred to all those outside of his militia circle, led to mandatory duty rosters for all civilian residents. These duties included emptying latrine buckets, building projects, and any other job the Colonel could imagine.

No one in the little community realized that their home, once a school, was now an ad hoc military installation under the official command of the Colonel. But looking around after a few short weeks, most recognized their little refuge had changed dramatically. They all felt safer. But at what cost?

The sinister reality of their situation was finally apparent to all of them when another woman was being forcibly taken. Her brother, seething with contempt and rage, flew at her abductors. He swung his fist as hard as he could and struck one of them. The militiaman’s large, gin blossomed nose was crushed, spurting jets of thick, red blood. The other two uniformed men conducting the raid each plunged their long combat knives into the brother’s chest again and again, finally standing up and shooting him several times for good measure.

This all took place in the hall, just outside the library entrance. The young girl, barely a teenager, was dragged away as her brother’s life drained away onto the floor. Everyone still in the library watched all of this grisly scene play out without any apparent way to stop it. They cowered and waited and watched.

If it wasn’t before, the dark costs of their decision to allow the militia to join and then gain control of their lives became apparent to all of them...and still no one acted.

Looking down as he spoke so that his words were barely audible, the old man with a grizzly, gray beard and an equally grizzled and gray suit said, “We should be ashamed of ourselves. What are their plans for those kids?”

The old man was among a group of people reinforcing the fence barricade with sheets of pilfered plywood and lumber. They had already covered any exposed first floor windows similarly. The fence they were trying to fortify was something which had been added by the militia and was, therefore, not completely fastened and secured to the building. In order for the fence to truly do its job, work needed to be done to it.