Chapter 31
“Why don’t we just shoot them? It’s not like we don’t have the guns and the ammo to do it. There are only six of them out there anyway. We could drop those few and maybe send a message to the rest of them.”
Tony was becoming more and more agitated as he spoke. It was late afternoon and the group hiding in the house had been inside all day. The two kids, Jules and Danny, had entertained themselves with board games in a back bedroom while the adults took turns peering out the windows at the group that was forming in the street.
“No,” Meghan answered Tony, “now there are seven of them.”
“Seven? Where did the other one come from?” he asked incredulously. He had been watching out the window not long ago and there had only been six of the fiends. They seemed to be multiplying.
Kim, sitting on the floor and drinking a beer, said soothingly, “Oh c’mon honey. Have a seat with mama. I’ll make it all better.” She patted her lap with both her hands and leaned back. Almost as if on cue, the big man hunched his shoulders forward, laid down on the floor, and put his head in his friend’s lap. She commenced to stroking his very short hair and humming a tune that they all recognized.
Jerry, who had become the appointed specialist, added where Meghan left off, “No, I think that if we start shooting, more of them will come and they’ll keep coming. Our best bet is to let them pass us by...if they will, and then figure out what to do next. We’ve got a few days worth of supplies here. Maybe if we wait it out, someone will come looking for us.”
Rachel chimed in, “I thought there was a bunch of someones already lookin’ for us,” and she gestured toward the outside.
Jerry nodded and conceded, “Someone who can help us and doesn’t want to eat us, I mean.”
Kim stopped humming and asked, “How did all of this start anyway?”
Neil shook his head and walked to the window. He didn’t know. The kids and Jerry were at the hospital where all of it started. Danny and Jules kept talking about Jules’ brother Martin getting bit on the hand and getting sick, but that was no real help. In the end, Neil suspected that it didn’t really matter where or how it began. The cold, hard truth was that they were smack in the middle of a horror movie as it played itself out in reality. Other than that, the only other truths worth considering were those that would keep them all alive.
“I think we should start thinking about an escape plan,” Neil said to the group.
Meghan looked up at him from her spot on the couch, “Escape? But you said yourself that we should wait for—”
“No, I mean escape in case something happens and those things find us and maybe even get in here.”
Jerry asked, “What’d you have in mind?”
Ever so quietly, so as not to draw attention to themselves, they loaded some bare necessities into the back of the minivan. Between the two front seats, Neil placed a shotgun, two handguns, and a pile of boxes of shells for each. He also put the key in the ignition, just in case they had to leave in a hurry.
The rest of the day was spent trying to occupy themselves as best as they could. But really, what does one do when facing the end of the world? With limited resources and virtually no way to get anywhere, what do you do?
Tony sat at the dining room table and wrote a series of letters to important people in his life. He penned one to his best friend, Angie, to whom he first came out. He wrote another to Phil, a past lover who was never really absent from his thoughts. And of course he wrote a letter to his mother. He took his time, carefully choosing what could possibly be the last words by which he would be remembered, sometimes agonizing over a sentence or a phrase until he wadded up the paper and started anew. With so few words and such a lack of space, he wanted each and every syllable to echo with his voice. These would be his testament and he treated them as such. He spent the better part of the day writing those three letters and when he was done, he laid his head down on the glass table and went to sleep.
Rachel sat quietly on a chair in the corner of the living room and continued to drink from the bottle of vodka she found in the cabinet. After more carefully examining the bottle, she realized that it was actually a bottle of Spudka, distilled potato vodka. It tasted more like lighter fluid to her than potable alcohol, but it did result in a very welcome numbing buzz as she drank it. She decided that the buzz was more important than having mutinous taste buds threatening to revolt. She was still experiencing a little shock from all that had happened, but she found herself curiously resenting the zombies for deciding to end the world on the same day that she was to get her annual review and the promise of a raise. She was due damnit! She had worked so hard this year and she was due. Everybody in that goddamned office was making more than her and she was poised to do something about it.
She took another sip from the bottle and quickly swallowed the potent liquid. Even with her buzz, the taste was still obnoxious. It was the kind of taste that caused her jaw to tighten. It had been some time since she had spoken or even stood and she was in no hurry to determine how badly both of those could be given her rising inebriation. So far, she hadn’t felt the need to relieve herself, so she was perfectly comfortable with not testing her abilities in either category. Absently, she checked her phone, still attached to her hip, for messages and tried to dial out again. It might as well be a paperweight for all the good that it was doing her. She thought about throwing it across the room in frustration, but she looked up to see Kim standing in front of her, and she kept her anger in check.
Kim held out an empty glass and waited. Rachel smiled and poured a generous portion of the fiery, clear liquid, held up the bottle in a friendly toasting fashion, and then took another drink. Kim smiled at the drunken woman with the messy blonde tangled curls, raised the small glass tumbler, and drank a sip herself. For a moment, Kim was concerned that Rachel had inadvertently grabbed a bottle of paint thinner or gasoline to drink. She’d never had straight vodka before and now she knew why. Its transparency suggested to the casual observer that it might actually be smooth and as innocuous as water. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Still, she held onto the glass and walked herself to the bathroom in the master bedroom. There was a large tub with plenty of towels back there and she planned on pampering herself one last time. Luckily for her, the water and gas utilities had not yet stopped working, though it would just be a short while before the battery-powered backup generators would fail at those locations as well. While she filled the tub with hot water, she went in search of a good book. The reality of the situation was that she would have been satisfied with even a bad book, but none was forthcoming. Instead, she found a stack of magazines with titles like People, Us, and, Soap Opera Digest. These would simply have to do for the time being. She piled her clothes in a neat pile next to the tub and climbed into the hot water, which came up to her neck. The heat from the water mixed with the heat from the alcohol in her belly helped to welcome a very real sense of contentment that almost, but not quite, chased away the day’s worries and fears. With her head resting comfortably against an inflatable, bath pillow, she tried to embrace the deep breathing exercises she learned some time ago in a martial arts class she had taken with her friend, Desi.
Across the hall from the master bedroom and Kim’s moment of peace, there was anything but peace being waged as Jules, Danny, and Jerry were engaged in a very taut game of Risk. Jerry was holding Australasia pretty firmly and slowly expanding by way of southern Asia into Africa. In the meantime, Jules and Danny were fighting it out over Europe and North America and not paying much attention to Jerry’s quiet aggression. There were plastic armies stacked all across the globe poised to attack and defend.
Jerry threw the dice and launched another successful and devastating attack against the scant red armies of Danny’s imperial forces holding a patch of land in southern Asia. Jerry moved the lion’s share of his armies into the now vacant land and continued his turn elsewhere.
Jules
was merely playing because Danny was. She didn’t have any interest in this game, but it was the only one that she recognized of the several on the top shelf in the closet. It seemed a good idea just to be doing something. She watched as Jerry continued to play out his bid for world domination. She looked away from the game board, not at all concerned that she might miss one of Jerry’s moves that impacted her own tenuous hold on southern Europe.
Deciding that not having a barking dog in the backyard to draw attention to their sanctuary was in their best interest, the dog was brought inside to be with all the visitors in his house. Now, he was curled contentedly next to Jules who was even then stroking his ears and neck. He was a mutt for sure, but had the size, fur, and friendly—if a little hyperactive—disposition of a border collie. His confusion had given way to contentment as he enjoyed the attention of this new little girl.
While all of this was unfolding, Neil and Meghan, having found a stash of miniature Hershey chocolates hidden behind a stack of plastic bowls and tubs with lids, sat themselves on the stairs and indulged their sweet-tooths. They didn’t say much to one another but took turns feeding chocolate candies into each other’s mouths. Neil wondered to himself if they would ever get out of this situation alive. He munched on a Krackle bar, enjoying the crunch of chocolate covered rice crispies, and looked around.
The house was as much a prison as it was a sanctuary. It wouldn’t take long, he realized, for the walls around them to begin to threaten the fleeting peace they had found. And then what? Would they put to the test Sartre’s supposition that “Hell is other people” or would they, given the gravity of their situation, be able to see through any petty differences and come together to survive? Of course, only time would tell. He would just have to wait and see, just like the rest of them.
Chapter 32
“We can see them now sir. They’re heading our way,” the voice on the radiophone reported the update without any sense of fear or doubt. He might as well have been reading the nutrition label from a box of breakfast cereal.
“Okay, son. We’ll get some gunships airborne and headed your way asap.”
“Thank you, sir. We’ll hold them here for as long as you need.”
All eyes in the command center were fixated on the Colonel as he set the radio receiver down. They all realized that it could very well be any or all of them on the other end of the radio. Could each of them be as cool as the disembodied voice circling the communications room?
The colonel stood facing the wall for a moment or two longer without turning to face everyone around him. He was having a difficult time focusing on the task at hand. It wasn’t a simple matter of a military operation. He was faced with a confusing and seemingly spontaneous uprising with very few options to end it. Both military bases on the north side of Anchorage were in ruins and going through final death throes. Most of the heavy equipment that should have been at his disposal was either still serving with troops in the Middle East or was sitting uselessly in garages and motorcades on Fort Richardson. More pressing on his mind though, was the fact that his wife was on the wrong side of the military cordon that was currently straddling the Glenn Highway as the only force standing between the chaos that Anchorage had become and the rest of the state. He could order a helicopter and a rescue team to their house to retrieve her, but if he couldn’t do that for all of his officers and soldiers in his command, then he couldn’t do it for himself either. His wife, a stalwart supporter of fairness and consistency, would be the first to point that out to him. He could picture her saying it as he stood there. He could also hear her reminding him that the quicker he got the job done, the quicker he could move on to worrying about something else. He was an enduring worrier and life just had a way of producing things about which he should and could worry.
He finally looked over at another officer and asked, “How much longer until the bridge is ready?”
As a last resort, the colonel had ordered the destruction of the bridge spanning the Knik Arm Waterway, a narrow but effective natural waterway that separated Anchorage from the fertile Matanuska Valley and its roads that connected with the northern two thirds of the state. If the disturbance was to cross the Knik on the existing bridge, it could spread in any direction and the colonel would be powerless to stop it. As it was, the Glenn Highway was cut between the Chugach Mountains and served as a funnel to the Knik Arm crossing.
He hoped that he could disperse the crowds when they saw the soldiers at the blockade and then set to sorting out the madness that started all of it. So far, responses to the tumult had been piecemeal and very ineffective. Deployed across the Glenn was an ad hoc battle group of more than one hundred soldiers and the few Stryker armored vehicles available to him, a very intimidating if a little bit of a ragtag body of men and machines. Having the helicopter gunships hovering overhead should help to convince the leaders of the uprising to withdraw and start seeking different options to settle their grievances, whatever those might be.
He heard the whirling chops of the helicopters as they flew out toward the roadblock. Almost immediately afterward, he could hear the distant pop and crack of small arms coming from his men on the line. The firing rose to a crescendo almost immediately and maintained the furious pace.
He took a deep breath and said, “I need to get up there and see things for myself. Get me a chopper.”
Chapter 33
On the ground at the roadblock, the major in command peered through his binoculars at the approaching horde. But they weren’t just approaching; they were running hard and fast right at them. He could see that many of them were wounded, or at least had blood on them. More importantly, he could see that this wasn’t a small group of ethnic dissidents trying to dismantle the United States—or even Alaska—by disrupting communications, shutting down utilities, and spreading fear amongst the population. The group, at least in his eyes, was a perfect cross section of ethnic groups that represented the population of Anchorage and Alaska as a whole. Everyone appeared to be represented.
Ringing in his ear were the rumors about what had happened. Mass murders, mutilations, cannibalism. He’d always said that in every rumor there was a kernel of truth. But what of these rumors was true? Was any one more appealing than the others? What horrible truth was propelling these people?
There were still some abandoned vehicles here and there along the road. He was amazed to see the cars disappear under the surge of humanity as if some huge valve had just been opened and the screaming masses poured forth to swallow everything in its path. At first simply piling onto and over the cars and trucks, soon the tsunami of people was carrying the automobiles along with it like a stick riding the current in a storm drain during a spring rainfall. The wave stretched as far back as he could see. There were thousands of people coming right at him and his men; more than he could believe and certainly more than he had been told to expect.
“Christ Almighty.” He shouted orders to the soldiers around him. “Steady, men! Hold your fire until the order is given. Maybe we can turn these folks away without having to get heavy with them.”
His soldiers, posting themselves behind the hastily prepared defenses of concrete traffic barricades positioned side by side across the highway, readied their firearms for action and waited. He looked at them and could feel his heart begin to wane. Even if he and his men could hold these people at bay, he wasn’t convinced they had enough bullets to be able to shoot all of them.
He looked over his shoulder at the open road behind him. He could just climb in the Humvee on which he was standing and drive away. He could stay in front of this mob and never look back. He was sweating now. He could feel it running down his back between his shoulder blades and taste it on his upper lip. He had nearly convinced himself to do it...to just drive away as fast as he could, when he heard it.
Preceding the masses was the sound of a freight train. The noise, corralled as it was by the mountains, grew in intensity with each passing collective breath of the await
ing soldiers until they could all feel it. Trying to be heard above the din, the major used a bullhorn to talk. Adhering to his training, he calmly said to the mob, “Please disperse.” And then, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the United States Army. We require that you disperse and return to your homes at once.”
Taking a deep breath, the major almost pleaded, “Please turn around and return to Anchorage or I will be forced to order my men to open fire.”
Hearing the loud voice and seeing the soldiers, the crowd only became more agitated and grew louder, their hungry groans becoming ravenous growls. They were a scant few hundred yards away when the major ordered his men to fire a warning volley above the multitude’s heads. Several other soldiers fired tear gas into the bedraggled ranks as well, none of which had the slightest impact on the throng’s progress. As if it knew its potential to turn a bad dream into a nightmare just by its presence, the smoke from the gas canisters clung to the ground and reluctantly rose up in dissipating swirling wisps, fading like second guesses.
The major licked his lips and got a full dose of salty fear. He then ordered, “Okay boys! Let ‘em have it!”
There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation. Every gun in the firing line began to chatter and spit, the sound akin to a chainsaw cutting into a log, instead it was actually cutting into the lines of people coming at them. To the major’s amazement, the first mixed and disorderly rank was hurled back, but the majority of those hit were back on their feet almost at once to rejoin the others as they continued forward despite the storm of lead lashing into them. Through his binoculars, the major could see with magnified clarity that the bullets his men were shooting were finding their marks. There was a steady red, misty, cloud that hung about the perpetually changing front rank as bullets punched holes in chests, arms, and legs.
Infection: Alaskan Undead Apocalypse Page 13