He watched and shook his head as the still unrevealed person or people in the house across the street made a foolish but predictable mistake. From the second floor broken window came hurtling a broken bottle with a flower-like flame dancing from its top. The glass hit the pavement in front of the yard and amidst the large group of zombies. The resulting flash and fire engulfed close to a dozen of the things, who barely even reacted to the change. The fire went out soon enough, leaving the ghouls smoldering and reeking of burned flesh and hair. Neil had described their smell pretty well from his very close encounter with one of them, but Jerry hadn’t been able to smell them himself. The new smell from the impromptu and half-assed attempt at a barbecue in the street was nauseating even through the closed windows of their sanctuary.
And then he chuckled when he saw yet another of the improvised Molotov cocktails tossed out. The second bottle didn’t travel nearly as far and exploded with a much larger ball of flame and plume of black smoke. Quite obviously, the second of the bombs was a larger bottle filled with more of whatever flammable liquid had been found. The second blast caught the larger group’s attention momentarily. All of the undead eyes seemed to turn themselves at this latest distraction.
Chapter 50
“That’s it?” asked Dr. Caldwell.
To which the police officer answered, “Yeah. There’s some other things down there that will burn but nothing like what we’ve already thrown out.”
Nodding and biting his lower lip, Dr. Caldwell said soberly, “Well, I guess that’s our cue to make our move then.”
Feeling the chills on her arms and up her spine again, Emma forced herself to nod and led the two men down the stairs to the back door. Hopefully, none of those things had made their way around to the back of the house yet. They’d find out soon enough, though.
Emma and Dr. Caldwell removed the nails from the pieces of lumber nailed around the doorframe and on the floor in front of the door. When all had been prepared, the doctor looked at Officer Ivanoff and asked him, “You ready?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“Okay. Here we go. One. Two. Thhhhhreeeeeeee!”
The door flew open and out jumped Dr. Caldwell. He hadn’t planned on going first, but his adrenaline and all the sugar from the sweets they’d been eating over the past couple of days teamed up against him and substituted impatient bravado for his better judgment. He spun around looking in every direction. So far so good.
He nodded to the other two and gestured with his hand in a manner to signify that all was clear. Emma and the police officer quickly followed the doctor out into the backyard and then ran over to the fence.
“What if more of those things are over there in the backyards between here and there and we can’t make it?” asked the police officer.
More to Emma than to the peace officer, Dr. Caldwell responded, “By all accounts, we should probably be dead by now anyway. I guess we just deal with everything as it happens. No point in planning for what we could never predict.”
Remembering that everything beginning with the moment that he’d responded to the emergency distress call he’d received to quell a disturbance at Providence Hospital until right then defied reason and normalcy, the police officer just nodded in obvious agreement. The three of them helped one another over the six-foot high cedar fences and abandoned their latest refuge, wondering if that would be their last.
Their intention was to traverse all of the backyards that sat between their house and the one that supposedly housed other survivors. It was a gamble, but they all had agreed that getting away from their house was going to be difficult and, so far so good.
They were running along the cedar fence in what appeared to be a utility easement. The underbrush was thick and untouched. The going was slow and noisy, their feet crunching the stale and drying growth. Officer Ivanoff, leading the other two, ran with his pistol drawn from its holster. He pushed aside smallish birch tree trunks here and there, sapling firs, and wild raspberry bushes growing everywhere. He didn’t look back to verify the other two kept up. It didn’t matter to him. It was their job to keep up. He just needed to cut the path and show them the way.
It wasn’t like that summer years ago when he moved to Bethel to work with his uncle Simeon. His uncle had his own guiding business. He’d take out groups to hunt moose, fish salmon, or photograph wildlife. They worked from before sunrise most days until almost sunset, keeping in mind that there was only a handful of hours and sometimes less separating the two daily events in the summers on the Lower Kuskokwim River.
He loved the nature of the work, loved being out on the river or trekking across the land. He knew how to hunt; it was in his blood. He got so excited on his first trip with a group of hunters from Kentucky that he brought down the first bear they encountered. He saw the animal from quite a distance, knelt against a tree, and fired. The gunshot startled everyone in the group, including his uncle. Later that night, Uncle Simeon took him aside and tried to explain that they were not there for themselves. They were there to help these other people who didn’t know Alaska to experience what most Alaskans take for granted. It was their job to make sure that the visitors who came to them walked away at the end of the week thinking that they’d just had the trip of a lifetime. And for many of their visitors, it was exactly that.
All summer, Uncle Simeon was correcting him. He walked too fast when they were in thick vegetation—it was hard for the hunters to keep up. He didn’t talk enough and explain how and why they did things. He smoked too much and cursed more than he should. He didn’t answer questions often and when he did he was too smug. All summer Malachi tried to slow his pace, tried to answer questions, tried to impress his uncle, but at summer’s end, he was told that he wouldn’t be asked to return the next year. Uncle Simeon tried to give him a last bit of advice but Malachi wasn’t hearing any of it. He wanted his paycheck and his airline ticket to go back to Anchorage and back to civilization where things made more sense to him. He loved to hunt and fish, but he just couldn’t hack the village lifestyle.
And now here he was, cutting another path though the rough, but this time he didn’t have to look back or be concerned that the paying hunters couldn’t keep up. If that woman and the doctor couldn’t keep pace with him, well that was just their bad luck.
Chapter 51
“Is this the house?” Emma asked quietly before they jumped the fence.
Dr. Caldwell looked through the narrow gaps between the slats of treated cedar planks comprising the fence. He looked right and then left through the fence.
“Yeah, I think this is it. I don’t see smoke coming from the chimney though.”
Emma’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Relax. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
Officer Ivanoff muttered under his breath, “This had better not been a wild goose chase.”
Emma looked over at him and was all ready to unleash a barrage of obscenity laced accusations but caught Dr. Caldwell’s eyes and instead bit her tongue. She instead offered, “Well, getting in there has got to be better than waiting around out here. Right? I mean, we’ve got to get inside somewhere. Those things will definitely find us out here.”
“She’s right. Let’s get over there and check it out. It looks like the yard is fenced on all four sides, so the likelihood that some of those things are in the backyard is pretty slim. Still, keep your eyes open.”
Malachi asked no one in particular, “So, who goes over first?”
Emma said as bluntly as she dared, “Well I guess if you’re askin’ then we can assume that you don’t want to go first and I’m not staying over here with you by myself, so I guess I’ll go.”
Dr. Caldwell looked at the police officer and said, “That’s ridiculous.”
Quickly she responded, “What? That the cop won’t actually man up and protect us or that I refuse to be alone with a rapist?”
“You fucking—”
“Stop it goddamnit! Both o
f you. Regardless of what went on, Emma those comments aren’t helping.”
Malachi, wounded by the possible suggestion, asked, “What do you mean by ‘what went on’?”
“This is neither the time nor the place.”
Emma, ending the stalemate, demanded, “Give me a goddamned boost, Doc. You keep your fucking hands off.”
“Fuck you.”
“Doc?”
She crested the fence and stalled to look around from the top. The backyard was empty and the gate was closed securely. She breathed a small sigh of relief for at least this bit of good news. When the back door leading from the house to the second story deck opened, she almost wet herself. Standing in the doorway was a chubby blonde woman and young man holding a scoped hunting rifle. Emma looked back down at the two men and said with a smile, “There are people. They’re on the deck and waving at me as I speak.”
Chapter 52
“How many are there?”
Jerry answered immediately, his voice filled with excitement, “I don’t know. So far, there is just a woman but I’m guessing there’s at least one more.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t think she got herself over the fence on her own. She just doesn’t seem the type.”
Neil felt something that he hadn’t in some time. He felt hopeful. Maybe this wasn’t the end of the world. Maybe this was just a reality check for all of them who had started to take for granted all that they had. Maybe this was just the cold slap in the face that humanity needed to get its shit together.
“What’s she doing?” he asked Jerry and Rachel.
“She’s in the yard. What is she...? Oh, she’s getting the ladder. There must be others there.”
“Good. Does she need any help?”
Jerry, while excited about their new and welcome company, continued to look around at the yards and the woods surrounding them. “No, I think she’s got it. The ladder is already over the fence. I see two more people coming over. One is a cop.”
“Any more?”
“No, that looks like that’s about it.”
Chapter 53
Emma ran over to the deck while Dr. Caldwell and Ivanoff were still getting over. The first thing she noticed about the deck was that the bottom half of stairs were gone. They’d been removed and tossed to the ground. The blond woman who had been standing at the door came over to the edge and offered a hand down to Emma.
“C’mon on up. Quick, before those things know that you’re out here.”
The blond woman’s jacket, a shiny black faux leather jacket, caught on first a railing edge and then on a long nail, probably used to hang a planter or a bird feeder that was sticking out from the railing. Frustrated, the woman removed her jacket and tossed it up onto a lawn chair that was sitting on the top of the deck.
Hand fully extended, she said, “Here. Take my hand.”
Emma gripped the warm, soft hand and, using her other on the lowest wooden step which sat at about eye level, lifted herself up out of the yard. And with all the urgency they could muster, the doctor and the police officer got themselves up as well.
The man, boy really, standing at the doorway and still holding the hunting rifle, suggested, “Let’s all get inside. We can introduce ourselves in there.”
Emma, tears in her eyes, nodded and smiled, walking past the young man and into the house.
Chapter 54
Neil began, “So, do you have any news? Where did you guys come from? How did you get here? Are there others that you know of?”
Dr. Caldwell held up both of his hands to stall the barrage of questions. He shook his head and answered at the same time, “We’ve been on the run for days now. How long has it been? We haven’t heard from or seen anyone since we fled the hospital. We were kind of hoping that maybe you had answers to those same questions. I guess we’re all as blind as one another.”
Meghan related to them what they had heard on the radio and television before the power and then the signals had died. She told them about a possible defense line established at Knik Arm Bridge but that they didn’t know if it had worked or not. She described the chaotic nature of the news reports and how no one seemed to know what was happening. She likened the character of the broadcasts to those of the morning of September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center had been brought down by a terrorist attack. There was a lot of talking, but not a lot being said. There was fear and doubt in the voices from the news reporters and a lot of speculation, and then there was just silence after the power went out. They didn’t know what had happened or what was going to happen. She told them about getting away from Midtown Anchorage and finding their way to the house in which they had found refuge. She talked and talked about what they had seen and what they had done. She began to cry when she spoke about hiding in the house and not going out to help those who were being hunted and trapped on the roads outside.
The doctor stopped her. “You shouldn’t be ashamed. There really probably wasn’t anything you or anyone else could have done anyway. We were in the hospital where all of this began....” He stopped suddenly when he realized that he recognized Jerry from the hospital. He couldn’t believe his eyes. “Jerry?”
“Yes, Dr. Caldwell.”
“You made it out?”
“Yeah.”
“And those kids?”
“Yeah, they’re here too.”
Jules and Danny appeared from behind Kim. Dr. Caldwell took a long look at the two children and then smiled at Jerry. “Well done, Jerry.” That was all he said, but Jerry could read the rest of what he meant in the Doctor’s expression.
Neil asked, “What about you, Doctor? How did you make it here?”
The doctor looked at Emma and then at Officer Ivanoff. “Can we sit down and maybe get something to drink?”
For a moment, everyone felt normal again. The three newcomers were treated like guests in a home. They were shown to the dining room table and given some cups with water taken from a large bucket in the sink. They were also each given a granola bar and a small package of fruit snacks.
Swallowing a bite of granola that was almost half of the entire snack bar, Dr. Caldwell began, “We were there, Jerry, the kids, and I, when it all started. There was a child who was brought to the hospital by his parents. He’d been bitten by something. It was assumed that it was some kind of wild animal but these two kids insisted that it was a...a caveman, I believe is what they called it. Regardless, the boy worsened by the second and then he just died. We tried to revive him but there was nothing we could do for him. His little body was just too weak...too fragile.”
He looked over at the two children who were still standing in the living room, just steps away from him, and apologized, “We tried and tried, but we just couldn’t do anything for him. Your brother died, I’m sorry.”
A bit confused but wanting to know, Jules asked in her timid little voice, “What about my Mommy and Daddy?”
The doctor shook his head and his eyes watery and sad, he said, “I don’t think they made it either.” To the others he continued, “That’s where it all started, like I said. Everything happened so quickly and so tragically. As one was getting knocked down, another was getting up. Things got out of control right away. There was nothing anyone could do to stop any of it. It all just happened so quickly.”
He told them of their retreat through the hospital and how their group was steadily whittled away. He told them about Simon at the hospital, and how he had helped them, only to fall victim to the fiends himself. When he spoke about the helicopter and their escape from the hospital, he heard his two companions finally exhale. They’d been holding their breaths while he spoke. They were reliving their flight and their fear in their own minds as he spoke. They couldn’t help it. While it was happening, it had all gone by in such a blur of violence and death. This had been the first time that any of them had talked about it...the first time that any of them had reflected on it out loud.
“And so no
w here we are.”
Tony said somberly, “Amen.”
Dr. Caldwell looked up at him and nodded. “Amen indeed.”
Chapter 55
It was a handful of hours later. The newcomers, Emma and Dr. Caldwell anyway, had changed into new clothes. Emma had forgotten what it was like to wear comfortable shoes as she slipped on the sneakers taken from a woman’s closet. It was necessary for all of them to wear shoes and sweatshirts and whatever else they could find to stay warm. Despite the fire still burning in the fireplace, it was getting cooler and cooler in the house, and their woodpile was getting smaller and smaller. They couldn’t continue to burn wood indefinitely.
Rachel walked from room to room looking for something. Finally, Jules, after having watched her frantically searching, asked her, “Whatcha lookin’ for?”
“My coat. I’m looking for my coat. You remember what it looked like?”
Infection: Alaskan Undead Apocalypse Page 18
