He paused for a second but both Jerry and Meghan could tell there was more. He finally said, “Thanks guys. I can’t do this on my own. Any time you see anything like this or have any ideas at all, please share. I need your help more than ever.”
Meghan put her arms around Neil’s waist and kissed him on his mouth tenderly. “All you ever had to do was ask.”
10.
Claire asked doubtfully, “Are we sure this is safe?”
Some slight humor returning despite the pain that lurked, Emma answered, “If it were, we wouldn’t be taking along these.” She lifted the Remington .410 shotgun and pointed to the more impressive twelve-gauge variety in Neil’s hands.
Meghan still doubted whether it made the most sense to send Neil and Emma on this errand, but she understood the importance to all of them to show solidarity. She nodded her head to Claire but said nothing. She was too afraid she would surrender to the apprehensive tears that were threatening to spill or to the acrimonious anger that was threatening to scream.
She hugged Neil, kissed his cheek, and whispered into his ear so that her voice tickled the soft contours inside his ear, “See you in a bit.”
Her voice as much as her words produced an opiate-tinged euphoria that kissed his every nerve at once. So sweet was the sensation that he found he was holding his breath. He let the smile bloom across his face. He whispered back to her, “This will be good. It’ll help us focus on something else. We need something to do.”
Earlier, while eating their meager meal, they discussed their options. With their spirits and their energy ebbing to new lows, they all agreed that wandering into the unknown was not in their better interests. The likelihood the devastation had preceded them was a foregone conclusion, but how that devastation manifested itself in the surroundings was worth knowing. Their larger group was not likely capable of moving suddenly or quickly until they’d gotten some rest, but a pair of them might be able to move fast enough to avoid...well, whatever might be out there.
Neil summed up the discussion and ended the debate with a simple, “So, who’s gonna come along with me to look on down the road?”
Emma eagerly jumped at the chance, and so it was decided that the two of them would venture down the road while others rested and regained their strength.
The two of them were to travel light, carrying only weapons, ammunition, and whatever else they could easily fit in pockets. With their collective food supplies dwindling, they decided that a single package of sweet, gummy fruit snacks was all the food each of them carried.
Meghan was present for the discussion and remembered nodding her head along with everyone else, but that certainly didn’t make her like the plan. She was about to say as much when she felt her hand tugged. She looked down and saw a pair of tired but beatific blue eyes looking up at her. Jules smiled, looked at Neil and Emma who were already walking away from their camp, and asked, “Will you read with me?”
“Read?”
“Yeah. Danny has some comic books in his pack. They’re mostly icky boy comics, but I don’t mind much.”
“Do you like reading, Jules?”
“Yeah. Mommy used to tell me that I was a good reader but that I needed to practice.”
Smiling for herself as much as for Jules, Meghan said, “Yeah sweetie, I’ll read with you. What comics do we have?”
Jerry and Claire, while not on the move at present, could ill afford to be idle. They needed to put together the camp, collect firewood, and, of course, be watching for any of the monsters potentially following them from Girdwood. Jerry was especially concerned that amongst the zekes to be coming down the road could be their friend Dr. Caldwell. His death hadn’t been any easier for him than it had been for Neil, Emma, or anyone else for that matter. He’d known the good doctor much longer than anyone else and knew that he was a good man apart from their present circumstances. Jerry dreaded the possibility of having to shoot the man. He hoped that it wouldn’t come to that.
To his credit, Neil had chosen a good campsite. There was a creek and a bridge that separated them from Girdwood, funneling anything that might be following them through one location. It made keeping vigil much easier. They were camping in the immediate shadow of a high, steep cliff and in front of a small pond—really nothing more than an overzealous drainage pool. They were about a hundred yards from the highway with the pool separating them from the roadway. Between the railroad tracks and the cliff face, the gravelly ground dipped slightly, helping to hide the glow of any fire they decided to make. Overall, it was a good spot to rest, and at the same time, feel somewhat secure. Still, Jerry and Claire wandered a little ways north away from everyone else so that they could have a better view of the bridge and the ground behind them. No point in being complacent.
The two of them sat amidst and upon a pile of large stones and small boulders that had fallen or been pulled from the cliff behind them. From there, they could better see back up the road from where they had come, were well shielded from the wind and weather still, but were more or less out of sight from the others while they rested. This, of course, afforded the two of them some time alone and the sleeping bags upon which they sat provided an added element of privacy.
They hadn’t sat quietly for very long before they exchanged their first passionate kiss, which led to another and another. Jerry couldn’t deny the physical response his body had to her delicate but aggressive touch, but his guilt at his pleasure was palpable. It was a more than a little distracting. With Claire’s cold fingers struggling to open the zipper on his pants, Jerry withdrew slightly but suddenly and took her hands away from his waist.
“It’s okay,” she said, her breath hot and inviting upon his neck. “No one’s watching. They don’t care anyway. It’s not like our parents are back there or anything.”
“It’s not that.”
“Not in the mood?” she asked, rubbing the front of his jeans with the palm of her hand.
Jerry smiled and shook his head. “I think you can tell that isn’t the case.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think that was a roll of quarters in your pocket.”
Jerry leaned his head back and fought back the lump in his throat. He confessed, “It just doesn’t feel right is all. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since we left Doc Caldwell back there. I don’t know. I guess I’m just feeling a little guilty is all. I just...”
Where her breath had been warming his neck, she placed her lips and then her tongue. She spoke as much into him as to him, “We each deal with our grief differently. At least that’s what I used to hear on daytime TV. It’s okay to feel sad if you have to. I guess, I just like to forget...at least for the moment.”
Jerry said wistfully, “I don’t think I can.”
Her lips now on a southward course down the salty slope of his neck, she said confidently, “I bet I can help with that,” and smiled.
11.
“Thanks.”
The voice, if not the word, caught Neil by surprise. He and Emma had been walking for at least an hour without so much as a syllable exchanged between the two of them. He was glad for the break in the silence. Counting railroad ties and keeping an eye on the broken path between each wooden stripe of the tracks only went so far as a distraction—not that they needed to be distracted.
He asked, “For what?”
“Well, everything really, but I guess especially for the last few...well, since we, you know, left.... I know there really wasn’t much of an option back there with him, but I still don’t think that I’d have been strong enough to walk away.”
“Well, I don’t know if....”
“Shut up dammit! Let me finish. It was the right decision. If we would have brought him along, he would’ve died and he would’ve come back. I think dealing with him then would’ve been a helluva lot harder than just walking away. It’s what he wanted anyway, for the exact same reasons. He knew, just like you, what would happen. Someone had to take responsibility for the decision, so thank
you.
“And last night, you and everyone else just gave me the space that I needed. Sometimes misery doesn’t love company and I needed some time to come to grips with, well, with all of it.
“It’s funny, but it felt like he and I had been together for a lifetime. Hell, it hadn’t even been a full season and we weren’t ever really together. Not like you and Meghan. The pain in my belly and the emptiness in my chest tell me otherwise though. But it’s the same with everyone. We’ve seen so much in so little time that.... aren’t you afraid that...?”
She stopped short of finishing her thought. He knew where she was headed with her question and, yes, he did fear all she was thinking. How could he not? It was sheer delusion for any of them to think for even a moment that loss and pain was behind them.
Despite that, Neil could not deny his affection for Meghan any more than he could the same for everyone else in their dwindling ad hoc family. Emma was right in another of her observations and this one, when Neil acknowledged it, was very unsettling. The carnage that had forced them all together and into survival mode had started in August and, to the best of his knowledge, it was now only October or early November. So much had been lost in such a brief stretch of time. It was staggering when he paused to consider it. The world, at least the world immediately around them, was set on its head and it seemed like nothing was ever going to restore life to how it had been.
He looked at the road to their right and thought to himself that the cracks and the breaks in the pavement would likely never be fixed. The partially burned gas station where they had left their stricken friend Dr. Caldwell would likely never be rebuilt. If he allowed it, the sense of permanence with their current state would be overwhelming. As it was, their immediate needs and his concern for those who were counting on him were pressing enough to push any other thoughts from his present considerations. Quite simply, he had too much to worry about today to give much thought to how things will or wouldn’t be tomorrow. After all, if every day was a fight for survival, what did it matter that the Department of Transportation wasn’t repairing potholes on the Seward Highway?
In front of them, the railroad tracks entered a much larger staging area where tourists had once boarded passenger cars en route to Whittier and Seward. Everything seemed so gray to Neil. The tracks sat in a sea of cinder-colored fine gravel. There were patches of grass and weeds fighting for space here and there, but it was evident the struggle was futile. The sulky ashen color was determined to set the mood. The small building seemingly floating atop the gravel tried its level best to add a splash of color but it too failed miserably. The sky, the ground, their path, the imposing mountain faces immediately to the left and the water of the Cook Inlet off to the right all seemed eager to embrace melancholy.
Maybe the two of them wandering off like this wasn’t such a good idea after all. He was decidedly unable to focus and Emma was too busy coming to terms with recent events to be watching their surroundings. Neil was about to say as much when Emma stopped dead in her tracks. Neil’s breath rushed out of his chest as fast as adolescents escaping from school at the end of a very long Friday. His feet were forced to make room for his stomach in his shoes as well. He stopped too, trying to determine where she was looking, although there weren’t a whole lot of options.
He looked at the station building and tried to see what she was seeing. Parked out front were three cars, all of which appeared to be abandoned and in fairly bad shape. There didn’t seem to be an intact windshield on any of them.
“Either my eyes are playing tricks on me,” she said, “or I just saw someone duck around the back of that building.”
“Duck around? You mean like they’re hiding?”
“I guess.”
Neil was as confused as ever. “But zekes don’t hide.”
“Well, that’s the theory anyway. What do we do?” Emma asked, never taking her eyes off of the building and its surroundings.
Neil said bluntly, “Shit, I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out zombies and now I gotta work on.... If you said someone, then that might mean we’ve got a live person down there.”
“Remember Claire’s story,” Emma warned. “There might be bad people still out there who wouldn’t think twice about robbing us or maybe even worse.”
“But if they think the same about us and run off... Okay. I’m gonna keep going forward. We can’t let them just leave. I want you to wait about twenty paces and then follow,” said Neil as he began to walk. He didn’t want to appear threatening but he wasn’t a fool either. He un-slung the shotgun from his shoulder and had the firearm in his hands. He looked over his shoulder to verify that Emma had done the same and she had.
Neil felt like he was a rat dropped into a snake pit. His sense of vulnerability was close to incapacitating, but somehow he continued walking. He tried to walk without letting his unease affect his gait but each step showed his apprehension. He could very well be walking into an ambush. For the briefest of seconds the thought occurred to him that he would prefer to be shot than chewed to death. He had to admit, though, he wasn’t really interested in either.
With his hand, he signaled for Emma to start arcing to his left so that she could cover that side of the house-like building. After a couple more steps, he decided that he’d moved close enough.
“We saw you over there,” he yelled. “C’mon out before someone gets hurt. We don’t mean anyone any harm. We were just looking around for food for the two of us. Like I said, c’mon out. If someone’s hiding over there and we get spooked, someone might get hurt and we don’t want that. Please show yourselves.”
Perhaps it was the tone of his voice or maybe that he’d said please, regardless, it had worked. Showing both of his hands from behind the building first, a man slightly stooped with age and a lifetime of hard work emerged. His brown Carhartt coveralls were filthy and looked to be wet from his thighs down to his feet. They obviously were not ordinarily his because the ragged, frayed cuffs hung well-lower than his boots. He looked cold and hungry and, above all else, desperate. Emma, coming over closer to Neil, thought to herself that he resembled the souls that motorists would typically see on Anchorage street corners in days gone by. Then, as now, the first emotion that arose in her was pity.
The bent old man stammered, “You folks just watch your step. My man has his rifle aimed at your chests. One wrong move and we’ll leave your bones to be picked over by the ravens.”
Emma sniped, “I think most of the ravens are dead by now. You see any of them around lately?”
Neil shot her a look, slowing his pace but continuing forward. There was something less than threatening about this man. The crowbar dangling from the man’s right hand seemed almost benign, a harmless prosthetic of utility. There was no danger about him. Of course, they had all thought the same about Maggie, so Neil remained somewhat on guard.
A mere handful paces away from the man, Neil stopped to consider him. From there, Neil could see much more. The wispy strands of white across his scalp barely constituted a comb-over. The stubble on his cheeks and chin was thicker but equally as light as the hair on the top of his head. His eyes were dark beneath his glasses and the whites were more yellow than white from decades of coffee and tobacco use. He had the hard edges of working class living etched into the contours of his face. Neil was reminded of a latter day Robert Duvall when he looked at the man.
Neil suggested to all of them, “I think we can all just settle down a bit here. I don’t think anyone wants any problems. There’s no need for anyone to get hurt.”
Adjusting his grip on the crowbar as the tool became heavier at the end of his arm, the man said, “You don’t go tellin’ us what needs we have. Ain’t no one gonna tell me what I want. You make one wrong move and there’ll be trouble. You can count on that.”
Neil asked him, “Is that what you want? By the looks of you, I’d say that you have a lot of needs. Maybe you were thinking that you could get the drop on some travelers. May
be you were thinking that you could ambush some folks and take all that they had...maybe even take their lives while you were at it.”
Neil looked at the Robert Duvall character in front of him and asked, “Is that what you want?”
The old man slumped his shoulders forward and protested, “We ain’t bandits. We ain’t like the other folk still out here. How we know you ain’t neither? For all we know, that’s what you had on your mind too. We was just....”
Neil suggested, “It’s hard to have this conversation with a rifle aimed at our chests. You think you can at least have ‘your man’ come out in the open?”
“You tryin’ to get the drop on us? You askin’ for us to lower our guard? Maybe make us easier targets for the two of you?”
Neil smiled, put the shotgun back on his shoulder, and said as he extended his hand, “No. I’m just asking for a little faith in each other.”
The other man looked puzzled as he pondered what to do next. He clearly was conflicted. He looked beyond Neil at Emma and the rifle she was sporting. The man wore doubt on his face like some women wore blush. His decision was preempted when a large window on the front of the building shattered with a crash of exploding, cascading glass. Echoing loudly in every direction, the sudden disturbance startled all of them to silence. On the heels of the clamor, like insult added to still unfolding injury, several gray-green arms reached hungrily through the new opening.
Startled by the unexpected development, Neil very nearly fell over backward as he jumped away from the sound. The old man too was caught off guard and did fall. Unable to regain his footing fast enough, the man, like an intoxicated crab, scooted awkwardly away from the building without having gotten back to his feet.
Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 3): Mitigation Book 3) Page 4