“Fuck ‘em,” Carter said, invoking Sullivan. “Let ‘em rot.”
Squealing his tires on the slimy road surface, Carter swung them around violently in a cloud of acrid, foul smelling smoke. He aimed them for the Inn at Whittier, which was sitting just across the street.
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.”
Chapter 44
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 hunti
ng 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?”
Chapter 45
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.
Kit handed Mason one of the towels still neatly folded on the shelf high above the toilet. “Here,” she said. “Don’t let the others see you like that.”
“Thanks,” Mason said, and spit again into the toilet.
“You might want to close that lid too,” Kit suggested. “Sure give away.” She stepped back into the main room with the others and was gone.
Mason spat again. The nausea was gone, but the doubt and questions lingered. He hated this new world. It didn’t suit him. It was too dirty, too cold, too unpredictable, and far too dangerous. It was only through dumb luck that he managed to survive. It was also pure chance that had found him in his current company. He hadn’t set out to join the militia.
Mason had been going to college at Kenai Peninsula College. He was studying to be an engineer. He hadn’t yet settled on a specific direction, so he had been completing his general education requirements, which would contribute to just about any major he decided to pursue. He liked school; or rather, he liked going to part-time classes and doing the amount of work expected if he could not be expected to decide upon a career path and start working. Simply thinking about that was enough to exhaust him back then.
He only wished that could be the biggest stress in his life now. He was accustomed to living at his parents’ home, eating his parents’ food, and watching his parents’ television. He usually had a job and moved between working in the handful of retail stores, hotels, and restaurants in the area. That money all went to his leisure and never to his living expenses. As a result, he had a lot of leisure in his life, which led to a lot of friends.
That all had changed suddenly.
Sitting in his parents’ living room and watching the morning news, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing and seeing on the television. Something horrible was happening in Anchorage but no one knew what it was. CNN was running footage shot from a helicopter, from an amateur cameraman on the street sending uncut footage through the internet until his feed went black, and silent traffic cameras from other feeds on the internet that the network deemed worthy of sharing. In every instance, it looked like Anchorage was under assault.
A few hours into the broadcast, all information coming out of Anchorage ceased. The city’s voice was suddenly silenced. The last flights out of Anchorage International were being routed to any airports within reach of their meager fuel supplies. The pilots of those crafts were the last to report any updates about the fat
e of Anchorage, and none of it was promising.
Mason was at home alone. His father was doing an electrical job for a contractor on Alaska’s North Slope and was on his two-week rotation. His mother was visiting Mason’s sister, living in San Diego with her husband.
Mason tried to call his mother but found neither his home nor his cell phones were functioning. The network was down. He didn’t worry much in the beginning. He was in Kenai, which was more than a couple of hours south of Anchorage. He couldn’t imagine he was in any imminent danger, but he couldn’t shake the disturbing images he saw coming out of Anchorage. He had seen similar scenes in horror movies and video games. It was Armageddon and he was alone!
It was a couple of days before it got really crazy. On the first day, people started to drive away, but not everyone. He had a few stalwart neighbors resisting their flight instinct. Those few became fewer as each day passed until Mason was one of the last on his block still at home.
The funny thing was that it wasn’t the undead, which he hadn’t encountered yet, that put him out of his house and on the run. It was looters, thieves, and murderers. They showed up on the fourth dark night. He saw their headlights and heard the grumble and crack of their motors as they came up the road. It was mostly motorcycles but there were a couple of pickup trucks as well.
Most of them drove up to the first house, a spacious, multistory home with a three car garage and a workshop out back. One of the mob members kicked in the door and set off the alarm, whose clarion protest echoed for miles. An equally loud gunshot ended the alarm siren.
They looted the house of all its supplies and most of its valuables. The two pickup trucks were nearly full but not quite, so the entire operation moved to the next house. It was the Barnettes’ home. Mason watched them start into the same routine but then some sudden shouting interrupted the operation. The Barnettes were still home.
The Barnette family consisted of a father, Henry, and his wife Margaret. They had a couple of middle school aged kids and a Border Collie. Mason would see them in their front yard quite often. The mother and father were a little older than most with children that age but they were still pretty active.
Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution Page 25