Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 3): Mitigation Book 3) (21 page)

Obviously, the gunshot caught others’ attention as well. DB hurried to the front door and looked out, confused, into the empty parking lot in front of the building. Duke was right there alongside him as usual. The dog’s hearing was weak enough that he likely did not hear the thunderclap from the rifle, but DB’s urgent movement had caught his attention. Duke stood at the door as ready as any senior citizen might be for whatever was on the other side which had caught his owner’s ear.

Neil said softly, scarcely more than a whisper, “It’s Emma and Jerry doing some house cleaning near the lake.”

Without looking back, DB asked, “They gettin’ that thing over by that big building then?”

“Yeah.”

“Prob’ly a good idea. Can’t have it sneakin’ up on us. We seen any more of ‘em?”

Neil was slow to respond, perhaps a product of DB’s meandering and unhurried speech pattern. Finally Neil said, “He’s the only one so far, but we all know how that goes. Kind of like finding a shrew running along the floorboards in your house. Where there’s one, there’s bound to be others.”

DB asked, “So, what’s the plan now?”

Confused, Neil said, “I’m not following you.”

DB shifted his position so he could see out the window into other parts of the empty lot in front of him. He said, again without looking at Neil or increasing the speed of his diction, “We still goin’ to try for Whittier?”

“I don’t see why not. What’s to stop us now? It’s just on the other side of the mountain.”

DB, his eyes never looking away from the outside, said, “On the other sides of the snow too now. And what about all them folks on the road that you ran down with that big Ram? You think that’s gonna be all of them? Besides, why those people out on the road instead of the other side of the tunnel?”

Curious about DB’s reasoning, Neil asked, “I still don’t think I’m following you. Doesn’t that mean the tunnel is probably closed? Isn’t that a good thing? Whittier could be clear. It may actually be what we hoped for. Something might finally work out for us. What could be wrong with that?”

When DB answered, he finally turned to face Neil. “Don’t you see? If that tunnel is closed to them, it’s closed to us too.”

To this, Neil rose to his feet. He grabbed his shotgun, checked his pockets for more shells, but then thought better of it and grabbed his still full and heavy backpack. He zipped his heavy coat tight, and donned his black, tight-fitting stocking cap. As he readied himself, he muttered with concern, “Jesus. You may be right. What the hell are we gonna...?”

Neil started to exit the same back door through which Jerry and Emma had gone. “Danny!”

They boy appeared from another room still yawning and stretching his arms above his head. Looking Danny firmly in the eyes, Neil said to him, “Keep an eye on things for me, will ya?”

Danny smiled and nodded with his entire body, enthusiastically agreeing despite the sleep that still clung to his eyes. “You can count on me.”

Danny glanced at DB wondering if he and Duke might be a part of the command but quickly deduced that the directive was strictly meant for him. DB and Duke wandered off, returning from where they had come without another word. Neil and Danny watched the two older “gentlemen” as they plodded out of sight.

“I know, Danny. I just wanted to.... watch out for Jules. Okay?” Neil didn’t wait for an answer. He was out the door and into the weather without another word.

Danny was confused by Neil’s display and his disposition. Regardless, he was going to do whatever Neil asked of him. Seeking a source to center his focus, he laid his hands across the small pistol in his zippered jacket pocket and gave his awareness a jolt of energy. And like the first swallow from a strong energy drink or even stronger cup of coffee, he felt his eyes open wide and his senses become alert.

He looked at the closed door a bit longer for no reason other than savoring the moment. He broke his trance and floated into the room where Claire, Jules, Nikki, and Paul were all still sleeping. Della was there too, humming a quiet tune and working her hands rhythmically in front of her. If she had yarn and needles, she would have been knitting. As it was, she was simply turning and twisting her hands into a swirling vortex of fingers and palms.

Danny surveyed the room itself, measuring any vulnerabilities the way he assumed Neil would do. In so doing, he realized Alec was absent, though he had been in the room the night before. He whispered to himself, “Where’s Alec?”

Without looking up, Della answered, either unaware of or disinterested in the rhetorical nature of the query. “Steve? He like to sleep alone when he can. He probably found a closet or somethin’ to sleep in. I guess he just got used to bein’ alone ‘fore he found Steve out on the road. Some people get into those kinda’ habits and they just can’t shake ‘em. You know?”

Della’s using the moniker Steve as a name for every male she encountered forced a level of confusion into every interaction with her. Having heard Alec’s story though, Danny figured Della meant that Alec probably got accustomed to sleeping alone in the tight spaces for security before he encountered DB and Duke. He acknowledged Della’s comment and then quietly sat next to her below the window that was providing a stark, dull glow in the room.

Della, her eyes ever fixed on her twisting hands, asked calmly, “You worried ‘bout Steve goin’ out by hisself?”

“Yeah,” was all Danny could manage. It suddenly felt like he was talking to his Sunday school teacher, who was a very proper and strict man at his church. Whether Danny had more to say or not was immaterial. His brain found itself unwilling to venture into multi-syllabic territory, let alone into multiple word responses. That’s not to say that either Della or his teacher were bad or angry or intimidating. Well, intimidating was perhaps a fair description, but it wasn’t rooted in fear. Danny simply, in both cases, inferred from their dispositions that short, directed responses were what was needed and expected.

Della adjusted the phantom yarn and began to work her phantom needles into a new pattern. She said without the slightest rise in her inflection or emotion, “That Steve, he a smart one. If, that is, he don’t forget where or who he is.”

Danny felt like he was talking to Yoda who spoke in riddles. He wanted to ask Della what she meant when she said that Neil needed to remember who he was. However, he didn’t sense there was an opportunity to seek clarification from her at the moment. He was finding himself being drawn into her twisting hands.

Watching her dark flesh whirl and spin into and around itself was mesmerizing. Danny watched the undulating vortex and listened to her deep, chesty humming until that was all he could sense. The room was no longer cold, the harsh light was forgotten, and he felt oddly at ease.

Her tune filled his head and then the room with its earthy presence. The gentle purr resonated in his chest in the same way that the idling engine of his father’s John Deere lawnmower did when he leaned against it. He felt the buzzing travel south until it was producing pleasant sensations for him in his genitals. He was awash in the pleasant malaise and didn’t notice when he fell back into sleep like the others in the room.

Della’s song continued to fill the room, hoping to hold the uncertainty and questions of the day’s early light at arm’s length. She hummed a tune that tempted dawn’s early light out from its slumber, beckoning the day to begin.

Walking briskly into the blistering wind was tough. Trying to track down two friends in the same gusts while avoiding becoming someone else’s hot breakfast was more than Neil had anticipated in his rush to find Emma and Jerry. He was beginning to doubt the wisdom of his snap decision until he spied the two.

They were standing near the entrance to the much larger Begich Boggs Visitor Center as if waiting for something, the same way that the zombie had been the day before. He couldn’t discern what they were doing. Truth be told, it looked as if they were merely gawking spectators at the scene of a terrible automobile accident.

Jerry caught sight of Neil and waved him over to them. Neil should have suspected whatever stalled their attention as long as it had was likely breathtaking. There was a shallow hope that what they saw was good news, but Neil quickly dismissed any such expectations. Emma shot Neil a warning look as he approached, stopping Neil cold in his tracks. It wasn’t going to be good and, given their recent experiences and the nature of Emma’s countenance, Neil tried to brace himself.

In another time and in another life, Emma wouldn’t have been able to behold such a grisly scene as casually as she was now. The cruel, heartless world through which they had been struggling as of late had muted her sensibilities such that her disgust was only superficial. She seemed incapable of internalizing anything anymore. She was afraid and perhaps a little relieved that her soul was so far removed that nothing could affect her either positively or negatively. She at once felt stronger and emptier at the same time.

When Neil stepped up next to them, he first looked down at the dispatched fiend on the concrete steps. The creature was much more sympathetic from a distance. Up close, it appeared just as ghastly as Neil remembered them to be. Jerry’s single bullet had wrecked about a third of its graying skull, though very little of its coagulated blood had escaped from the typically horrific wound.

Inside, though, was a scene more chilling than any he had seen. The floor was literally so caked with gory mortal remains that it was impossible to determine if the floor was tiled or carpeted or both. It looked like the semi-solid surface of a bog or a swamp; a morass of death. Picked clean of tissue, partial skeletons and miscellaneous bones were stacked one atop the other in a pitiless tableau that would have gagged both Dante and Milton and put to shame their visions of Hell.

Neil half expected the rust-hued skeletons to rise up and move toward them, but there was no movement, not even the slightest flutter, in the large building’s wide lobby area. Any clothing that was still on or near the barren corpses had long ago been papier-mâchéd to the floor by pools of sticky, drying blood.

The walls appeared as if they had been spatter-painted by an artist who worked solely in a sanguine medium. The bottom third of the walls was layered so heavily with a combination of blood and gore that the true painted color was impossible to determine unless Neil looked toward the ceiling between the irregular rust-colored splotchy patterns.

The air inside moved slightly as some of the wind from the storm outside found a crack on the far side of the building and forced its way through. It was like a final gasp of rotten breath from a dying animal. To Neil, it smelled of mold and mildew, like an inoperable refrigerator whose contents spoiled long ago. While unpleasant, the smell was not nearly as rank as Neil thought it could be.

Neil was transfixed with the scene. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from it. The mixture of self-pity and self-loathing tormenting him had him wondering if that was how his soul and his heart looked if he were to gain a glimpse inside of himself. Bones and blood and rot. Was that all that was left of the person he once had been?

Breaking the silence, Neil said flatly, “I guess it was a good decision that we stayed over there last night.”

Jerry and Emma both agreed with silent nods.

“What possibly could have happened here?” Emma asked. “They must have gotten trapped inside somehow. But how? Is there not a backdoor? Why didn’t any of them get out?”

“Maybe they just lost the will to run anymore,” Jerry suggested. “Maybe they just couldn’t do it anymore. A father watched his child die...a wife watched a husband...a brother a sister...a complete stranger. People can only take so much.”

Neil finally turned to face the other two. “Not everyone’s got what it takes to go on I guess.” He paused, inviting the questions and the doubts inhabiting Emma’s and Jerry’s eyes but none followed. He tried to find some emotion hidden in some forgotten recess in him somewhere, but he was unable. He could feel the pain but it was as elusive as an eel, slipping through his every attempt. He knew that his words would sound more authentic with the emotion he knew he should be feeling, but, again, he came up empty. “You’re both right,” he continued flatly, “I am having a hard time. No point in trying to deny it. Honestly, I don’t think it’s hit all the way yet. That’s kind of how it was with my divorce too. And when it did finally hit me, I was so far removed from it and numb from the heart up, that I didn’t even notice the pain. It just became the background noise of my day-to-day. I guess I had ample distractions then too, so maybe comparing then and now isn’t fair....”

Neil continued to speak, like a parishioner confessing his sins to a priest. Emma and Jerry merely let him ramble on, hoping for a miraculous catharsis but realizing as he spoke that it was getting further and further away. He was insulating his emotions with his words.

Finally, Emma said, “It’s okay to be hurting right now, Neil. But if you’re not ready, well, that’s okay too. We can say all those things that we say to each other, like
We’re here for you
and
Let us know what we can do to help
, and all the other bullshit that we say because we don’t really know what to say. Really, there’s nothing that can be said. They’re just words, however sincerely they may have been intended. What you really need to know is that you don’t have to go through this alone. You should know also that the rest of us are hurting too. It’s only been a coupla’ months, but I thought of Meghan as a younger sister.”