Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution (40 page)

Jerry stood and then led her over to his
seat close to the iron brazier containing the warming flame. She
sat, her eyes still glancing on occasion out at the mystery
body.

Warming his hands over the fire, Jerry tried
to think how best to begin. He knew that all of this was new for
Danielle but it was important that she be informed. If she had any
hope of surviving in this brutal new world she would have to know
everything about it.

“The first thing you need to understand and
accept is that those things... they may look like people and maybe
even people that you know, but they aren’t people. Not anymore. You
have to believe me when I say that. It starts with the bites.
Anyone who gets bitten turns. Anyone. They become one of them. Once
that happens, there’s no coming back.”

Danielle nodded her understanding. “Yeah. I
saw that happen with a…friend.”

“Once they’ve turned, there’s only one way
to stop them. You have to destroy the brain. You can shoot ‘em in
the chest, cut off an arm, or even chop ‘em in half and they’ll
keep comin’ at you. There’s no stopping them other than a shot to
the head. If you don’t, they will kill you and eat you without even
a thought. If you get bitten, then you’ll do the same. It’s a
shitty reality, but it’s what we’ve got.”

“How do we tell, though?” Danielle asked.
“For sure, I mean. How do we know for sure if someone has become
one of them?”

“It’s in their eyes,” Danny said. “They
don’t look human anymore.”

Remembering Kameron, Danielle knew to what
Danny was referring. She’d seen wild animals at sea and on land
whose eyes didn’t harbor such hunger.

“You can tell. Trust me,” summed up
Jerry.

Chilled by Jerry’s and Danny’s words,
Danielle couldn’t control her goose bumps. She wrapped herself
tighter in the blanket draped over her shoulders, seeking more
security as well as warmth. Jerry could see Danielle shiver and
rubbed her shoulders in an innocent gesture to help her warm
up.

Whether he knew it or not, Jerry’s touch
warmed her deeper than she had been in a very long time. Like most
guys, he was oblivious to her behavior. He didn’t think anything of
it when she laid her cold cheek against the top of his hand,
nuzzling it softly.

Of course, Danielle did not know anything
about Jerry’s very recent heartbreaking loss, which would help her
to better understand his obliviousness. She hadn’t necessarily
thrown herself at him, but she had already changed direction on her
pledge to herself to keep her distance from him. She couldn’t stay
away, which she knew was the better option for her to pursue. She
rationalized it to herself by suggesting that she found him
interesting. She found him strong and quiet, smart but reserved,
and young but mature. He had also survived several months on the
road battling those things day in and day out. She could only
imagine what he had seen and survived in making it to Whittier. She
wanted to hear what he had to say.

“One more house and then we have to head
back. Okay, Neil?” William knew how quickly the light disappeared
this time of day and how dark the enveloping trees could make it.
“We can always come back out tomorrow.”

Neil couldn’t remember for sure how many
houses they had searched. Most had been empty, thankfully. The most
recent house, a mini-mansion, had been the scene of a recent and
still winding down battle.

There were bodies in the yard, some with
trauma to their heads and others with ghastly wounds on other parts
of their bodies. One of those hurt began to twist and move as
William approached it. Neil wanted to tell him the only merciful
thing he could do, whether this person was already the undead or
would shortly become so, was to put it out of its misery with a
forceful blow to the back of its head.

Neil stepped up next to the man and did it
for him. He brought his bat down with a furious swing onto the back
of its skull, crunching bone and brain. Neil was no Babe Ruth. The
process was not a clean, single swing that dispatched it. The
thing’s arms shot out in opposite directions from its sides several
times and it eventually stopped moving after several stomach
turning impacts.

Neil whispered to Emma, “We’ll probably see
some action here.” And to Jess, “Stay calm and remember to breathe.
Don’t waste ammunition and don’t shoot unless you have to.”

Jess loosened her tight grip on her firearm.
She was beginning to think that perhaps she had made a mistake in
coming along. She didn’t think it would be like this at all. She
thought it would be just a nice walk to meet the neighbors. Who
could have known it was going to be this hard? Did Neil? Did Emma?
Personally, Jess had no idea and regretted her ignorance.

She looked at the two of them again leading
the rest of them into certain trouble. She was awed at their
fearlessness. Emma still had her assault rifle, but Neil was only
carrying his bat at the moment. He’d holstered his pistol and his
jammed assault rifle was left with a pile of bags they’d filled
with supplies and then hidden off the road. Neil wasn’t necessarily
armed well and yet there he was in the front as usual. Jess hovered
between appreciative awe and bewildered doubt watching Neil.

They hadn’t even reached the front door when
they heard a gunshot from inside. The five of them dropped to their
knees and listened, wide eyed and breathless. Neil was the first to
get back to his feet.

“Someone’s coming,” he said.

Jess’ vision faded out to black and then
slowly back into focus. She had certainly made a mistake leaving
the lodge. She should have known better. But how did he know
someone was coming? She couldn’t hear anything. She heard the
footsteps from inside the house, growing louder.

“It sounds like only one of ‘em,” Neil said.
“Hold your fire. Maybe I can bring it down without making a lot of
noise.”

Emma heard him, but reserved her opinion. If
one of those sons of bitches came running out of that house, she
couldn’t promise she wouldn’t pump a few rounds into it just for
fun. With each progressively closer footstep, she felt her heart
rate increase. Raising her rifle, she peered down her barrel,
bringing the doorway into her sights. It would be so easy and
quick. She concentrated on her stance and her breathing, again
hearing Dr. Caldwell’s ghostly voice in her ear. It was similar to
the voice of a television on in the background as sleep gradually
overtook her.

Jess may have been crying, but she was
slowly backpedaling toward William and Gordon trailing behind. She
couldn’t find enough spit in her mouth to swallow, which solicited
a bit of a gag reflex in her. Jess looked at the two men now
flanking her, their eyes no less frantic than hers. This was new
for all of them.

The footsteps were in the front room and
about to burst through the front door. Everyone in the front yard
jumped when they heard another gunshot just as the front door was
thrown open, threatening to come off its hinges.

Neil saw what was happening and shouted,
“Noooooooooo!” just as Emma pulled her trigger. It was a man; a
living man and not a
zeke
. The man’s eyes
were stretched wide with fear and surprise. He didn’t expect to see
Neil and the four people with him in the front yard.

The man running out of the house flung
himself down off the porch as Emma’s bullet hurtled past his
shoulder and into the forehead of the ghoul chasing him out the
door. Realizing she had just saved the man’s life, Neil tried to
settle himself down again. He had been deathly afraid that Emma had
unknowingly shot the man by mistake, an error he had dreaded would
eventually result from their hyper vigilant actions.

He looked over at her and asked, “How did
you know?”

Emma said, “He had a gun. Zekes don’t carry
guns.”

“Glad you noticed that.”

From the ground and still trying to find his
breath, the man who’d run from the house said, “Thanks. I’m Abdul
Manneh.”

With a voice that still harbored a hint of
French but was heavily influenced with his adopted Jamaican, Abdul
explained to them that he was the last person still alive in the
house. Everyone else was either dead or had run off. When he spoke,
his words resembled summer, even if the words belied a
nightmare.

“When you say
dead
,”
Neil asked, “what do you mean exactly?”

Emma and Jess stepped apart, revealing the
body of the woman who had been chasing him. Emma cleared her throat
and directed his eyes to the body. With an edgy humor in her voice,
she asked, “Dead like she was or dead and not-getting-back- up
dead?”

Abdul knew exactly what she meant. He’d seen
it happen before, but he still didn’t understand it. Dead was
supposed to mean
dead
, but it didn’t any
longer. Dead could mean something tragically and horrifically
different these days. He shrugged his shoulders apologetically. He
didn’t know with any certainty which of the several bodies he had
seen were dead permanently or not.

The sounds coming from inside the house
answered that question for all of them. An inhuman noise echoed
from somewhere within the big empty house. William hesitantly
asked, “So, now what do we do?”

“What do you mean?” asked Emma.

“Do we need to go in there after them or
what?”

Abdul looked at each of them hoping for
someone to shake their heads. He knew they had to deal with them or
possibly face them again some other time out of their control. He
didn’t want to admit it, but they were right.

“How many do you think are in there?” Neil
asked. “What should we expect?”

Abdul stood up, looking each of them in the
eye. His skin was very dark, much darker than William’s, which made
the whites of his eyes look iridescent. He held his head forward
slightly, so that his words were directed toward his audience’s
feet. “Ya know, I always hated guns. Seems like sometimes I can’t
t’ink of a time when ‘dey wasn’t around. Doesn’t mean I got to like
‘dem though.” He held out the pistol in his hand, as if measuring
it with his palm. His smile was uncomfortable and forced. Abdul’s
eyes filled with tears as he focused them on the silver automatic
pistol in his hand.

Emma guided Abdul’s hand to his chest,
closing it around the pistol. “We do what we have to, Abdul. It’s
as simple as that. You can’t punish yourself. If I was one of those
things, I’d want you to put me out of my misery too. Think of it as
being merciful. Wouldn’t you want the same?”

Abdul knew the woman was right, but he found
it difficult to dismiss the guilt he was feeling. Shooting people
was not something he had ever thought he would be forced to do,
regardless of the circumstances. He knew, deep down, he had no
choice but to shoot.

He couldn’t remember how many there had
been. He had been upstairs reading a fun book about vampires by
Christopher Moore and listening to Bob Marley. Like most of the
people in the unfinished grand lodge, he was a refugee, sleeping in
a room on the second floor. He had withdrawn from everyone in a
form of self-exile and only came out to face the others for meals,
which had grown sparse over the past few days, and rarely left his
room more than once a day.

His solitude was a form of penance in his
mind. Abdul blamed himself for bringing the deadly plague into
Whittier when he brought that young man to the city back on that
first day. He could not have possibly
known
what he had unwittingly done, but the guilt and the shame of his
bad luck haunted him. He held himself responsible even if everyone
else had absolved him of his assumed sin.

Abdul thought often of his wife and children
back in Gambia, West Africa. In his darker hours, he envisioned
them facing the same horrors he had endured but without him to look
over them. He chided himself for not being with them. He should be
with his family.

Ironically, it was his social isolation that
saved his life. He had missed the opening skirmish in the front
yard and was only made aware of the battle raging downstairs when a
crash loud enough to shake his floor alerted him. He’d turned off
his music and crept to the door.

The hallway was filled with screaming and
running people. He couldn’t pick out any specific voices; it
sounded like it was everyone in the house. Abdul tried to build up
his courage to open his door and join the fray, but he was unable
to do anything more than lock his door and move furniture in front
of it as further insurance against a breach.

He thought about climbing out his window and
making a run for it. He had the speed of a gazelle and trusted in
it often on the soccer field. He opened his window and then looked
down, seeing the bodies as well as the feeding. Digging their
fingernails into flesh, two of the things were hunched over a
single carcass, peeling skin from it as if it were a banana.

The nausea and ripple of fear striking
through his body in tandem were enough to bring him to his knees.
He kept thinking to himself,
It
can’t
be
happening
again
?
Not
again
!

The noises in the hallway subsided slowly,
giving Abdul hope he had been spared. He was just beginning to
breathe a little easier when he was startled by three quick cracks
in the hallway outside his room. He realized there were splinters
of wood on him and the floor, leading him to look at this door.
There were three small holes at approximately head level on his
door. On the heels of the gunshots, Abdul heard a hand-to-hand
struggle in the hallway and a woman’s desperate voice.

Abdul leaned against his door and looked
through one of the holes into the hallway. There was a woman at the
other end of the dark corridor battling with someone else. The way
in which the two people were knotted, it appeared as if it was a
single creature with extra arms and legs. Panting, grunts, and
growls filled the shadows and slithered through the new bullet
holes on his door.