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.
Chapter 7
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.
Chapter 8
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 concr
ete 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.
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.
Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution Page 6