Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (34 page)

The Inn at Whittier most assuredly offered
the most luxurious of lodging options in the city. Its rooms were
clean and fairly modern while its restaurant boasted a professional
cooking staff, which produced Alaskan delights that tantalized the
taste buds. The Inn had been known to host unique weddings,
receptions, and parties for people wanting a fairly authentic and
classy Alaskan touch to their events. During the short summer, the
restaurant was typically buzzing with activity and the rooms were
all rented.

Seeing it as it was, Carter had a hard time
remembering its past glory. Most of the ground level front windows,
including the glass door of the main entrance, had been shattered
from their frames. There was evidence of fire damage around some of
the open panes as well, but overall the structure looked
intact.

As with everywhere else Carter had seen,
there was clothing, dropped bags and luggage, and other debris and
garbage lying on the narrow street and sidewalk in front of the
building. The posh Inn at Whittier had not been spared by the
unfolding tragedy, which had ruthlessly struck everywhere else.

With the brown wood fronting on the
building’s facade a little too weathered and a little too beaten,
the Inn could have starred in a special report about abandoned
ghost towns. It appeared as if the building had sat that way for
decades or perhaps longer and had only recently been stumbled upon
by Carter and his crew.

Looking at the building intently, Carter
barked, “You waitin’ for an invitation? Get yer asses out. Let’s
secure us some lodgings for the night...and maybe longer.”

Their footsteps crunched and cracked in the
front lobby as they walked across the glass-covered floor. They
were forced to wander almost to the front counter before they
reached flooring without glass on it.

They hadn’t been standing inside the hotel
for more than five minutes before something changed in the air.
Carter recognized the teasing background noise. He’d heard it many
times over the past several months and knew what it meant:
somewhere in the depths of the Inn the undead waited for them.

For someone else, that realization may have
raised alarms. Carter didn’t see it that way. He was at his best
when he had a battle to fight. He embraced the simplicity of
combat, especially battling skins. There was no thinking or
figuring. It was kill or be killed.

Carter assessed the motley crew with him and
the armaments each carried. They all had firearms, pistols and a
few rifles, though he was unsure about how much ammunition they had
with them. He was armed with his revolver and a twelve-gauge pump
action shotgun with a pistol grip. He doubted they could afford to
engage in a protracted battle, but they were well equipped for a
quick, sharp fight.

Other than the front door behind them, there
were only two ways into the lobby, one to the right and one to the
left. To their right there was an intersection of sorts. Taking
that direction, one could veer to the left and enter a bar on the
other side of the wall in front of them, turn right and go up a
staircase to the guest rooms on the second floor, or go straight
into a short hallway which ended at the lobby restrooms.

To their left, the lobby opened into the
restaurant and a couple of banquet rooms. There was also a kitchen
behind a wall with a large serving window cut into it.

Carter, seeing that there was more light to
the left, ordered, “We sweep left. Stick together. Move in teams of
two. One room at a time. Got it?”

There was a round of nods shared between all
of them but it was just assumed that everyone got it.

Tentatively at first, they spread out and
inspected each room. Finally, Kit, the only woman with them, asked
the others, “D’you guys hear that?”

The others looked at her with doubt in their
eyes but Carter had heard it since they had arrived. He spoke
calmly, as if merely mentioning it in passing, “Yeah, we’ve got
company. Skins are still in the hotel somewhere.”

Ilya, whose face was still spattered with
blood from their hellish trek through the tunnel, wondered, “Do we
go find them or wait for them to come to us?”

The question went unanswered. The five of
them moved from the dining room into the lounge where a beautiful
bar awaited them. Some of the hard alcohol from the bar had either
been pilfered or drunk by other survivors during those early hours
and days of the tragedy, though the previous owners had done a good
job of stocking it and much of it was still there. The plague had
apparently swept through the town very quickly, because not many
people had taken refuge at this obvious location. The hotel was
large and looked very sturdy, able to withstand the harshest of
storms. It would have attracted more desperate souls had there been
time for people to get inside. There were bodies, some young and
some old, but all very dead, so some people had made the decision
to take refuge there. Some of these corpses had been devoured to
their bones, not enough left for even scavengers to be
attracted.

The more grisly piles were covered over with
tablecloths and sheets from the laundry. The temperatures in
Whittier were low enough to have houseflies and other carrion
critters already dormant for the season and that same air had
flowed through the Inn’s open windows and filled its halls and
rooms. As a result, an eerie calm had settled over the lobby and
bar areas of the hotel, the strife and struggle of days past barely
hanging on.

Carter finally said, despite the gruesome
scene in the bar, “I think I could use a drink. Is there any good
whiskey back there?” He shot a glance to one of the men who had
joined them from Devon’s truck and nodded toward the bar.

Mason hopped over the bar and looked around
for a moment before he turned around with a pair of bottles. “Jim
Beam? Southern Comfort? There’s some Jack Daniels here too
and—”

Carter was quick to correct, “I said
good
whiskey.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Mason said
apologetically. “I’ve never drank whiskey before. I mean, I drank
whiskey but I never bought it. I’m not twenty-one yet. I drank
whatever was around that my friends could cop from someone. What do
you want?”

Shaking his head, Carter answered with a
sigh, “Irish. Anything Irish. Jameson maybe or—”

Excited by his discovery, Mason cut in,
“Bushmill?”

“Fuck no. Bushmill is only pretending to be
Irish. Find me some Jameson. Or Powers, Millar, or maybe Midletons.
I doubt they’ll have any of those though.”

Mason scanned the bottles again and then
turned triumphantly holding a bottle above his head. He handed it
across to Carter. He even thought enough to find a stack of
tumblers near a dormant sink and moved them onto the bar. Carter
separated the glasses, five in all, along the bar and poured a
mouthful into four and several mouthfuls into the fifth.

“Lady and gentlemen,” he announced, “let’s
have a quick drink before we march off to our doom. Me and Mason
are buying.”

Carter spat the used wad of tobacco from his
front lip into a corner behind the bar. He lifted his glass, tilted
it toward his drinking companions, and then emptied the tumbler’s
contents into his mouth. He quickly poured himself another glass
and downed that one as well, thinking to himself that the second
one was for Sullivan.

The background buzzing was quickly moving to
the foreground so Carter knew that Ilya’s question was about to be
answered. He set down his glass and pulled his big hunting knife
from its scabbard on his belt. He pounded the heavy blade into the
bar, sinking it an inch into the lacquered wood surface. “Get ready
boys and girls. We’re about to have company.”

As the words left his mouth, Carter stood to
face five ghouls crowding hungrily through the lounge entrance. He
fired his revolver twice, nearly separating one of the creature’s
heads from its neck. Carter growled to them, “I’m not doing all the
work here! Step up and get some!”

Ilya chambered a round in his hunting rifle
and fired. His bullet struck another one in the upper chest between
its shoulder and neck, shattering its exposed clavicle and dropping
its left arm to its side involuntarily. The slug passed through the
beast’s body and struck another a little lower. Neither stopped or
even registered the gunshot wounds.

Carter fired again and brought down another
one. Kit pulled her trigger next and sent the creature closest to
them reeling from the new hole through its forehead. Mason, still
behind the bar, stumbled in the confined space and fell backward in
a loud crash of shattering glass.

The loud noise momentarily distracted the
remaining zombies, who all hesitated in the doorway. The delay was
enough for Ilya, Kit, and Joss to discharge their weapons into the
stalled targets that did not survive the angry onslaught.

Carter was calmly reloading his pistol while
his crew dealt with the last of the momentary threats. He peeked
over the bar’s edge and grinned at Mason, who was struggling to get
back to his feet in the pool of liquor and glass shards. If the
young man was able to do it both sober and without lacerations, it
would be a miracle.

“Settle down kid,” Carter told him. “The
skins are all down. You didn’t break the Jameson bottle did
you?”

Down the shadowy hallways and deep dark
corners of the Inn, Carter and his group of four killers
encountered several more walking corpses, quickly dispatching the
slow moving wraiths with brute force. Two former employees were
found in a very dark laundry room on a subfloor below the guest
rooms. A woman whose legs had been eaten but whose torso and upper
body was left untouched was found slithering on the floor of the
bathroom near the front lobby.

None of that prepared them for the grisly
scene they uncovered in a room upstairs. The five of them made
their way by flashlight up the staircase and into the hallway. They
were already on edge and the sound of movement behind one of the
several doors they could see only heightened their nervousness;
Carter himself found his palm becoming sweaty against his
revolver’s handle.

Listening behind each door, they finally
came to the most likely suspect. Confirming their suspicions, while
they were standing outside it, the door was pounded violently from
the other side. Something was definitely in the room.

“How do we get in?” Ilya asked.

“Axe,” Carter said.

“Axe?” Mason asked.

Carter pointed to the wall behind them and a
bright red sign which read,
Fire
. “Open
that door and see if there is an axe inside.”

Joss, the biggest but quietest member of
their group, walked over to the emergency compartment and withdrew
a large, red bladed fire axe.

Carter asked him, “You got this?”

Joss nodded. “Yeah. I’ve always wanted to do
this.”

Joss stepped near the door and swung the axe
in a sideways arc, driving the blade into the door just above its
handle. The solid barrier sagged with the first strike and from the
opposite side there were several knocks in answer.

Carter, his heart rate starting to rise,
growled, “One more should do it. Get ready.”

Joss hit the door again with a punishing
blow, nearly splitting the door into a top and bottom half. The
handle and lock released their grips from the frame and allowed the
door to hang loosely from its hinges.

Carter stepped forward, still wearing his
sinister smile, and kicked in the door, which came down upon a
wriggling figure beneath it. There were more in the room.

The first thing all of them became painfully
aware of was the smell, which burned their eyes and noses. Kit was
the only one of them to not buckle momentarily beneath the weight
of the odor, which was a good thing.

Sauntering hungrily from behind the
pungency, two little gray-skinned demons emerged with withered,
bony arms and hands extended. Kit leveled her shotgun and pumped
off two quick shots. Both little heads erupted like cans full of
rancid stew, spraying their contents in chunky splatters on the
doorframe, floor, and wall behind them.

The men in the group pulled the door from
the remaining ghoul who was no larger than the other two dealt with
by Kit. Carter dispatched the final one with his long knife, which
he whipped from its scabbard like a sword. He drove the shiny blade
into the creature’s skull through one of its eyes.

The odor permeated the room’s walls
themselves. It didn’t feel as if there was a clean breath of air to
be had in the entire room, despite the broken window. The reeking
nastiness clung stubbornly, like an ice fog resisting the sun. They
could almost see the air hanging so heavily.

The sights within the room were no better.
If Carter were to guess, someone had corralled these kids into this
room those many days ago. Unfortunately, one or more of them had
already been bitten. Three of the kids died and reanimated to eat
the other children down to the bone.

The two beds, with crusty sheets stained
brownish red, had been nothing more than banquet tables for the
ghoulish feast. When the flesh had all been picked clean and the
organs removed and devoured, the ravenous undead children chewed on
the bare bones left and sucked the marrow from deep inside.

Mason discovered the gory scene in the
bathroom. At least one child had attempted to retreat to the
bathroom. Seeing the shredded bits of blue jean material stuck
beneath a smear of blood or other matter and knowing that it was
likely a child that had inhabited those jeans was the final straw
for him. He opened the toilet bowl and vomited. He couldn’t control
it any longer. He retched until he dry heaved but continued to do
that uncontrollably. He finally stood up, a long stream of spittle
hanging loosely from his lower lip.