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 He had withdrawn from everyone in a form of self-exile and only came out to face the others for meals, which had grown sparse over the past few days, and rarely left his room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.
Abdul saw a body on the floor in front of his door and a few feet from that was a shiny silver handgun. His field of vision was limited and so he hesitated again. What if he opened the door and another one of those things was waiting for him out of sight?
Watching the woman fighting for her life shamed him into opening his door. Holding his breath he stepped into the hallway. The woman, a young girl with scared blue eyes and smooth skin, saw him, her expression filling with terror and hope. She screamed, “Get the gunnnnnn! Shoot it in the head!”
Abdul leapt from his doorway and snatched up the gun in one fluid movement. His hands shaking desperately, Abdul aimed the pistol’s short barrel at the back of the beast’s head and pulled the trigger. The bullet grazed the side of the creature’s head, creating a long bloody gouge and removing its ear. Unfortunately, the bullet continued on, slamming into the wall above the girl’s head and shocking her enough to set her off balance.
Neither its new wound nor the sound of the gunshot bothered the ghoul. It took advantage of the girl’s shock to sink its teeth into her forearm. The woman’s scream threatened to tear the roof off the building and crash its walls. It was a scream filled with both pain and fear.
Abdul quickly pulled the trigger again. This time, his bullet found its mark, punching a very hole in the back of the creature’s stubbly shaved head. Abdul was afraid he had only angered the ghoul because when the bullet entered its skulls, it stood straight up and lifted its gaping mouth toward the ceiling. It froze like that for a moment, while the small caliber bullet bounced around inside its cranium scrambling brain matter. Without another sound the monster crumpled to the floor with a thud.
The girl looked at the ruined flesh of her arm. Abdul ran into his room and grabbed a towel from his bathroom. He wrapped it around her arm as well as he could, but the hand towel was soon soaked through with blood, which wasn’t stanched by the cloth at all. No amount of pressure slowed the flow of the pretty girl’s warm blood.
They both knew they needed to run, but they both also realized she was in no shape to be moving at all. In a few short moments, the girl lost consciousness, mumbling unintelligibly. Abdul picked up a word here and there, but mostly what she said was gibberish.
Though he was desperate to run, Abdul sat with her and held her hand until he saw that she was no longer breathing. In his head, he whispered a short prayer for her soul and his. He knew he needed to get away quickly.
Abdul was on the third floor of the lodge. He lifted his head, listening for any predators approaching from the staircases at either end of the hall. He was nearer to the stairs that led to the back of the house and emerged into a den.
He crept down the hallway, flinching at every creak the floorboards made under his feet, and he noticed that the other bedrooms upstairs were all open. The first two were both wrecks. There were clothes, luggage, and furniture scattered in every direction. There was also a streaked bloody handprint on the doorjamb of the room to his left.
Abdul’s heart raced in his chest, his fear crowding in around him. He continued down the hallway and was in the process of passing the next two bedrooms. He didn’t want to look in but he couldn’t resist.
It looked like a balloon filled with red paint had been burst in the middle of the room. There were spattered patterns of blood on the walls, the floor, the ceiling and the window, some of which were streaked and running. The mattress, lying directly on the floor and draped in a white sheet, looked like something used in a Nineteenth Century military field hospital on which amputations would have been administered. Abdul couldn’t believe it was possibly real. There was so much blood. He couldn’t imagine any body holding such a volume of red fluid.
His eyes caught sight of movement on the opposite side of the mattress, which stopped him cold in his tracks. A person, a woman he thought, was stooped over another lying on the opposite side of the mattress. If the motion didn’t chill his heart, the sounds she was making did. She grunted, chewed, grunted again, and swallowed. Abdul could only imagine what she was eating, though he dared not.
Abdul must have stalled for too long, because she stopped gnawing tissue from her victim and stood, sensing prey near. Abdul stiffened, hoping perhaps if he stood still he wouldn’t attract her attention. It was too late.
In a flash, she bounded over the bed, tripping when her feet became entangled in the loose sheets and blankets. Her stumble was what Abdul needed to be able to flee. He never would have made it otherwise.
He sprinted down the hallway and stopped for a just a second to squeeze off a shot at her, but he was still moving and his hands were quaking as if he were suffering a violent fever. The bullet scorched wildly overhead, bringing down drywall and paint from the ceiling but did little else.
Abdul descended the stairs, taking two and three steps at a time. On a landing between two flights, there was another body, over which he jumped and didn’t take even a second to consider. He didn’t know if it was a man or a woman and didn’t care. He could only think to get away.
Abdul’s stomach turned and a bitter taste of bile rose to the back of his throat. The nearer he came to the door, the more his dread increased. His pursuer was stumbling her way through the mess in the hallway, growling and hissing like an animal.
Thankfully, the toe of a shoe kept the door partially propped. Abdul ripped open the door and threw himself out, surprised and relieved to see the well-armed people in the front seemingly waiting for him.
Chapter 53
“So how many are there still inside?” asked Emma, never taking her eyes off the door.
“I don’t know for sure,” Abdul said. “I know of at least three more bodies, but...”
Neil knew time was of the essence. “Okay,” he instructed, “there are six of us now. Two teams of three each. Emma, William, and Gordon, you three check the ground floor. Just sweep it for zekes. We don’t have time enough to search for any more supplies. It’ll be getting dark soon. We’ll come back later. The rest of us will check the top two floors. No one goes anywhere alone. Got it?”
They hadn’t even crossed the threshold of the front door before another of the ghouls greeted them. It was a young man whose right arm had been chewed down to his elbow. It moved in a stilted, bobbing limp due to a grievous injury to its right leg which robbed it of all the muscle tissue and sinew around its ankle, leaving it to sag uselessly with each alternating step like a ragged, superfluous tail. With its partial limb, it reached and clawed the air. Its eyes never blinked but its mouth snapped open and closed in quick, sharp chomps. Behind him, he left a trickling trail of red, some of which was pressed into the pattern of his lone boot.
Jess, her fear just as powerful as it had been moments before, found enough courage to steady her hand, raise her rifle, and fire. This time, the bullet struck the monster in the upper chest, only inches below its throat, which also bore a gruesome wound. The gunshot wasn’t enough to dispatch it, but the force of the bullet thrust the ghoul backward.
“Now finish him,” Neil ordered.
Squeezing her trigger twice more, Jess hit her target with one of the bullets, striking the thing immediately to the left of its nose and just below its eye. The creature threw its head back violently, blindly spatter painting the wall and ceiling behind in red. Its hand and stump flailed for a second and then the lifeless creature collapsed on the hard tiled floor of the entryway.
Neil nodded and smiled at Jess as he acknowledged, “I guess we’re ready.”
They pivoted into the house, pressing themselves against the wall while their eyes adjusted to the dimmer light inside. Neil flicked the light switch but nothing happened.
“There are no lights out here,” Abdul informed them, “only Coleman lanterns and candles.”
Neil scanned the room and saw one of the new looking battery powered lanterns on a table next to a reclining chair. Since their eyes were adjusting, Neil decided to leave the lantern where it was for the time being. No distractions. Clear the house and get out. They couldn’t afford to push their luck.
William asked Emma, “Which way?”
There were rooms both to the right and left of them as well as a hallway that more or less bisected the house. Emma repeated a mantra of her friend at Costco when she was searching for a checkout lane. “Always go left.”
Emma scooted into the biggest room in the house and nearly tripped when she came to the edge of the recessed floor. She would have fallen had it not been for Gordon’s quick reflexes. He grabbed the collar of her coat just as she started to teeter forward. Gordon had been in the house once before and knew of the floor hazards, but he was not thinking fast enough to stop her from taking the step. Gordon’s grabbing her was sheer luck. Regardless, he got a thankful look and a smile from the younger woman, which made him feel young and vital for the moment.
Feeling lucky she hadn’t just suffered a broken ankle or worse, Emma breathed, “Thanks. Any other architectural traps I should know about?”
“I only got the nickel tour which ended on that couch with a beer in my hand,” Gordon said. “Betsy got the full tour. We should have brought her I guess.”
“D’you know where that door leads?”
Gordon thought for a moment and then said through the side of his mouth, “Dining room I think. The kitchen is beyond that. It’s a big kitchen. I heard Betsy say something about that.”
The first room with the recessed floor looked well used but not like a battlefield. It looked like people had been eating when the chaos broke. There were plates, silverware, and glasses of water on the furniture and the floor but not the destruction associated with a struggle against the undead.
The dining room was the next room over and it appeared free of any signs of battles as well. There was an abundance of food displayed on the table, waiting for diners to have their fill. Emma looked at the food, stalling long enough to pull a long pickle wedge from a jar and stuff it into her mouth.
Detecting the eyes on her, Emma said, “Sorry. I just can’t resist a good pickle.”
The next room was separated from the dining room by a closed door. There was an open doorway on another wall, which led into the bisecting hallway. It was in the hall that Emma saw the first evidence of any strife. There was a pile of clothes, some of which had spilled into the dining room, and a partially crushed cardboard box. There was also a streaked and still glistening dark stain on the light colored corridor wall.
Quieting the alarm bells ringing loudly in her head, Emma asked, “Gordon, is there a door on the other side of the kitchen into the hallway or is it open?”
Gordon shrugged. “Like I said, I only made it to the first room. The place wasn’t even done yet. I don’t think the owners were here. It was just an onsite manager-type guy who invited the neighbors over when he received his furniture.” Looking up at the ceiling as if it might have the answer, Gordon asked, “I wonder if that fella is around here somewhere?”
“I think maybe we should go through the hall,” William suggested. “I don’t really want to go through a door that can hide something on the other side. I think we should just—”
They hadn’t heard any footsteps and so were completely surprised by the young woman standing in the doorway. She was gaunt, and as pale as alabaster. Her forearm had a single bite which had bled her dry.
Gordon, still naive and hopeful, asked her, “Child, are you alright?”
Her response was aggressive and sudden, charging headlong into the room toward Gordon. He couldn’t move or even speak. He was the deer caught in the headlights, frozen. The woman jumped and flew nearly horizontally at Gordon, hitting him like a human torpedo.
Gordon, a surprised scream escaping his mouth, was tipped backward with the female ghoul latched onto his chest. He felt her bite through his down vest, his sweater, and the t-shirt underneath. The impact forced the wind out of Gordon’s lungs with a painful grunt as the two landed and slid beneath the large cherry dining room table, breaking wooden legs from the table as they slid to a stop.
Emma and William, stunned, quickly jumped into action. Emma tried to make her way to the opposite side of the table where Gordon had come to rest. There were chairs and empty boxes piled on that side of the table, so her going was slow. She was working herself into a frenzy; the chairs seemed to be working against her by snagging their legs together in protest.
William decided to grab the pair of legs on top and pull with all his might. In so doing, he was able to pull both of the struggling bodies out from under the long table.
Gordon was doing everything in his power to hold the gnashing jaws at bay, but was losing the battle. The old ma
n’s face was as white and frazzled as his hair. He was a picture of absolute terror.
Emma pulled the black automatic pistol from her hip holster and fired. The demon’s head pitched violently toward its right shoulder, neck bones crunching. Despite the hole on her head, there was very little blood from the wound. There was no final scream or growl from the dying predator. She went limp atop Gordon.
Gordon demanded loudly, “Get her off me! Get her off me! Nowwwwww goddamnit! Get her off!”
William pulled the cold, lifeless corpse off of his friend. William saw all the down stuffing of Gordon’s vest from the tear created by his attacker’s determined teeth. He didn’t see any blood, but could clearly see that Gordon’s vest had been shredded.
Gordon was breathing heavily, his lungs protesting. He fumbled in the down mess on his chest, his fingers finding their way into and through the hole through the insulating layers of clothing. William helped him up to a sitting position and cast a horrified look to Gordon’s bloody fingers as they reemerged.
Gordon’s eyes filled with fear as William’s filled with tears. William didn’t have many friends, and had even fewer in the Shotgun Cove vicinity. Gordon was a rare breed in William’s life. If all of what Neil had said about the bites was true, then.... William couldn’t begin to consider the implications. All he could think to do was ask, “You okay?”
“It hurts like hell but it don’t feel like much of a bite. Just kind of knocked the wind outta me.”
When Emma heard the word bite, she flinched a little. This was not going to end well. Her eyes betrayed her misgivings to William, shooting her a look of warning. She could sense the protective instincts William was feeling, but knew that ultimately they would have to do the unthinkable.
She ignored her first instinct and nodded to William. “We need to get moving,” she said sharply. “We don’t have time. Sorry, Gordon.” She wasn’t entirely certain for what she was saying sorry. Was it the bite he had suffered or his eventual death at the hands of his friends? He wasn’t naive. Maybe he knew what to expect. Putting her best effort into softening her tone, she asked, “Can you walk?”
Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution Page 30