Infection: Alaskan Undead Apocalypse

by Sean Schubert

  Realizing he was alone now, he took one last look around. The fire was still burning in the fireplace warming a room that was carpeted with colorful pillows and blankets scattered all over the floor and furniture. The kitchen table had empty cracker boxes and opened plastic wrappers on and under it. There was a disorderliness to it that resembled a more comfortable than typical refugee camp. It was time to move and he knew it.

  He removed Meghan’s keys from his pocket and looked out again. The zombies were crushing themselves against the house with more and more desperation. They bit and clawed and pounded their fists against the walls, doors, and boarded up window. Neil said aloud to the empty room, “Christ, I hope this works.” He pressed his thumb against the remote’s panic button and from down the street came the echoing clarion cry of Meghan’s car’s alarm.

  He looked down again at the beasts outside. There was a pause for all of them, including Neil, while everyone tried to figure out what the sound was. The walking corpses leaned away from the house at first, not moving but halting their persistent assault on its walls. Starting with those furthest away from the walls, the things started to turn away in the direction of the new sound. Was that the sound of food? With some anxiousness to their steps, as a group they began to shuffle toward the possibility.

  Neil realized that the remote was also for an Autostart installed on the car. Maybe a little more incentive would draw them away quicker. He hit the buttons to start the car and hoped that it had had the desired effect. He didn’t know for sure, but it seemed the things in the street picked up their pace, so he thought that maybe it had worked. And it was working. They were leaving the house and giving them an opportunity to escape.

  He didn’t hesitate for even a moment longer. He flew down the stairs, only alighting on perhaps two steps per flight, and was in the garage almost immediately.

  Tony was standing near the garage door and taking in short, shallow breaths like a swimmer getting ready to start a race.

  “Did it work?” he asked.

  Neil nodded his head and said, “Yeah, I think so. They cleared out as soon as the alarm went off. I think we’re good...for now.”

  Neil hopped into the automobile and turned the ignition. The engine in the minivan came to life and everyone in the vehicle breathed an audible sigh of relief. Tony smiled at Kim, who was sitting in the backseat, reached down to grab the bottom of the heavy, insulated garage door, and lifted it open.

  Chapter 59

  Kim was still watching as the three ghouls still standing on the outside of the garage door leapt into the garage and grabbed hold of Tony. He still had his hands on the garage door handles now well above his head. He was defenseless as their hands locked onto his reaching arms. Kim screamed. Tony did too when the first one bit him on the soft underside of his right arm. The thing pulled away with a mouthful of dripping red flesh. Not pausing to even chew, it went back for another bite; this time on Tony’s shoulder.

  Tony was trying to fight them off, but they were over him all at once. Rachel, still standing in the minivan, leaned down and grabbed the shotgun between the two front seats. She leaned out of the still open side door and fired. The blast knocked her down and out of the minivan and caught Tony’s closest attacker across his back and neck. The shot also hit Tony on the right side of his chest, peppering his white shirt with a pattern of red. He and the three attackers all fell back against the garage door.

  Rachel, now lying on the garage floor, stood up and screamed. She didn’t wait for even a second and ran, still screaming into the house. Jerry, sitting in the back seat, leaned forward quickly and slammed the side door shut.

  Kim shouted, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I don’t want those things in here! Do you?”

  “But what about Tony...and Rachel?”

  The three ghouls, thankfully, ran past the minivan and its passengers and elected to follow Rachel into the house. Dr. Caldwell looked over at Neil with a question in his eye. There wasn’t a whole lot of time so a decision had to be made. Rachel screamed again from inside. This time, there was pain mixed with terror.

  From behind him, Neil heard Meghan say, “Just go. Get us outta here, Neil.”

  Kim about came unglued. “What!!!???”

  “There’s nothing that can be done.”

  “But Tony...and Rachel. We can’t just...”

  Meghan ignored Kim’s objection. “Just go, Neil.”

  “You cold, goddamned bitch! What kind of a person are you anyway?”

  “She’s right, Neil,” Emma said, “go. They’re gone and we’re not, so long as we don’t sit here...”

  Neil shifted the vehicle into reverse and hit the gas. They lurched out of the garage, hitting another of the zombies coming up the driveway. Neil looked over at Tony who was lying motionless on a pile of topsoil bags stacked in the near corner of the garage. Rachel was still screaming from inside the house. Dr. Caldwell looked at Neil again and nodded.

  Kim continued to protest from the back. She was still looking into the garage after they were out and were reversing deeper into the cul-de-sac.

  Emma asked, “Where are you going, Neil? There’s nowhere to go this direction.”

  Neil didn’t pause to answer. He just kept reversing until he had pulled the van into a driveway. He then shifted into drive and shot the vehicle forward. He tossed Meghan’s keys to Dr. Caldwell and said, “Doc, hit the panic button at the right time.”

  “The right time?”

  “Yeah. I think you’ll know when.”

  Kim saw some movement in the garage and screamed with excitement. “It’s Tony! He’s alive! We gotta pick him up!”

  When Neil didn’t stop, she shouted, “Stop the fucking car! Tony’s alive! He needs our help!”

  But Tony wasn’t alive. Not anymore. That fact became readily apparent as his face came into focus for everyone in the car. The rage and fury in his eyes was vacant and pure. He had become one of them and it had only taken a few moments. Kim was wailing and blubbering in the back seat. She couldn’t and therefore refused to see Tony as anything other than what he once was. In her mind and in her heart, Tony was still the same, he just needed help and those in the car with her were refusing to help her friend.

  With tears streaming down her face and her words completely enveloped in emotion, Kim tried to stand up to get into a better position to open the side door and let Tony into the van. Meghan finally turned, pushed Kim back down and held her there with her both of her hands on her shoulders. She didn’t say anything. She just held her there.

  Jules, who had been sitting on Kim’s lap and was now on Emma’s very crowded lap, was crying as well. Things went from being fairly tense, like her house used to get before the whole family would leave for vacation, to all of a sudden being outright frightening. She didn’t like what was happening, even though she didn’t completely understand it either. She didn’t know why all those people were so mad and Tony was just too scary with all that red on him. Why couldn’t he just wash all that off so that he could get back in the car with the rest of them? Why was he trying to be scary too? She buried her face in Emma’s shoulder and chest and cried until the adult’s sweatshirt was damp with tears.

  Danny, for his part, sat as quietly as he was able. When Jules invaded Emma’s lap to accommodate Kim’s fit, he simply moved aside and made room. Honestly, it was difficult for him to really do anything else. He was a little stunned by what was going on around him. He knew that they were in trouble and that this could end badly for all of them, though, in truth, he wasn’t quite sure what that really meant. In a child’s sort of way he understood death but had a hard time grasping the finality of it. Death had been a part of movies and video games that could be watched again and again. Death could be negated by a reset or rewind button and the hero or even the villain was alive again and any mistakes had been washed away. For the time being however, Danny sat quietly and tried to contain the sensation that was building in his s
tomach. It was the anticipation that struck a rider in the lead car of a roller coaster as it crested its first and most steep peak. He could feel the butterflies trying to escape from his mouth. He just swallowed down the fluttering, decorative moths that were threatening to breach.

  Neil pressed the accelerator to the floor and held the steering wheel tightly between his white, straining knuckles. With those things running at him, he hoped he could get enough speed to punch through.

  Emma wanted to scream, remembering her previous experience with Officer Ivanoff at the helm. She didn’t know if this was a better idea now than it was then. She withheld her protests, though not entirely by choice. She was finding it impossible to concentrate enough on one thing to be able to find even the ability for coherent speech. She just tightened her grip on the shiny pistol in her right hand and tried to bury her scream beneath a panicked moan that escaped through tensely sealed lips. The sound resembled a frightened puppy’s whimper. It escaped her without her even realizing it until after it had happened. Danny preferred the scream to the moan. It was less unsettling and felt much less like what he’d hear on a roller coaster.

  Officer Ivanoff just sat and stared ahead. He wasn’t quite smiling, although the pathetic noises the whore behind him was making were somewhat satisfying, but the emotion evinced in his face wasn’t that far off from contentment. His eyes though, despite what was happening all around them, were empty and distant, like he was lost in deep thought or memory. He wasn’t entirely sure what to believe was happening for certain. He couldn’t remember for sure, but he thought he’d just been in his father’s house, and then all of a sudden he was in Anchorage. He was really having a hard time keeping everything straight at the moment. So, knowing that he could grasp onto that woman’s discomfort and know that there were still certainties in this world helped to soothe his fears, but it did not vanquish his disorientation.

  Jerry, more or less on the floor next to the police officer, kept a watchful eye on him. He was very uncomfortable around Malachi, especially since his comment about Tony. Jerry didn’t like the fact that they were in a pretty fragile situation and they had a guy with them who might be a little psychotic, a religious fundamentalist, and most definitely armed. Jerry kept moving his eyes from the windows all around him to Malachi’s hand that was closest to his gun.

  The first several ghouls merely bounced off the minivan, their heads thumping horribly against the bumper and side paneling of the vehicle. The vehicle started to struggle and slow as bodies began to pile up beneath its wheels. Neil tried to swerve in and out of open spaces, but the spaces were too few and too small. They were being enveloped. The van struggled to keep moving forward, like a running back being assailed by an opposing defensive line.

  When they slowed to but a crawl, Dr. Caldwell looked over and asked through his nearly clinched teeth, “Now?” holding up the key bob.

  “A few seconds more. We can’t do it too early.”

  From their assailants, who were trying desperately to attach themselves to the moving vehicle, the van’s windows had become smudged and smeared with brownish finger streaks. Below the windows, which they thankfully couldn’t see from inside the van, along the vehicle’s sides and bumpers, the mess was much more grisly and stomach turning.

  When they had stopped, Neil shouted, “Nooowwwwwwwwwww!”

  Dr. Caldwell hit the panic button and then, above the growling, the grunting, and the screaming, they all heard Meghan’s alarm begin to howl anew. It demanded and got immediate attention. With the zombies’ attention suddenly drawn away from them, there was a lull, of which Neil quickly took advantage by throwing the vehicle into reverse. The van rolled over and pushed aside a few of the things that had tried to close behind them. The vehicle bounced and rocked as it rolled over legs, arms, and torsos, which all cracked and broke beneath its tires.

  Emma was hugging the children on her lap close against her chest with her free left arm. Jules burrowed her face deeper into Emma’s chest and tried to find a song in her head to chase away her fear. She didn’t like this one bit and the fact that her mother wasn’t there to hold her and tell her that everything was going to be alright made things that much worse.

  Due in large part to the distraction of Meghan’s alarm, Neil got them free again from the confused mix of stumbling and knotted former humanity. Once clear, he shifted the vehicle back into drive and made a hard and fast detour around the struggling ghouls now conveniently gathered and clumped in the middle of the street. He steered the van through a flat yard and across a couple of driveways and simply drove around the group. Once around, he got them back on the pavement and drove out and away.

  A few of the fresher looking corpses tried to pursue, but the van’s speed on the clear street made the pursuit on foot all for naught, though not for lack of trying. Neil watched them continue to chase after them as he got them onto the Old Seward Highway and they dropped out of sight. He knew that they were still following, but that wouldn’t matter so long as they could keep moving.

  There were stalled and abandoned cars dotting the road, but there were enough gaps here and there that they were able to make their way out onto Huffman Road. The little retail park to their left, once bustling with activity, was bereft of even the most remote signs of life. Even the ravens, the garbage scavenging dumpster-divers of the north, had abandoned the litter-filled parking lots. Discarded newspapers, empty plastic shopping bags, and any other lightweight scraps of a world in decay fluttered on the stiff autumn breezes. There were other piles of garbage scattered here and there, but then Neil realized, after looking at one that was nearer to the road that the piles of garbage were actually decomposing bodies. He couldn’t figure out how there could be dead bodies, considering what happened to a body that met its demise at the hands or, more to the point, teeth of one of those things. Whether he could understand it or not, there they lay. Just drive, he thought to himself, just drive. None of it much mattered anymore. He just needed to drive and put all of it behind them. As if that was even possible. He drove them straight ahead into the mouth of the great unknown.

  Just when he thought there was no comfort left in the world, Meghan’s hands, no longer restraining Kim, found their way to Neil’s shoulders. She touched him lightly, massaging his tensed neck and soothing his doubts and fears, even if only for the briefest of moments. She leaned forward and whispered, “Thank you.”

  Epilogue

  1Escape, desperate and imperfect, led to as many new questions as old answers. The reeking siege had been broken, but spreading out before them was all the doubt and peril a city of the undead could muster.

  As they waded further into the fetid depths of the infection’s grip, the sense that they may have traded the punishing frying pan for the voracious fire struck all of them. There was much more to escaping than simply getting away, and that fact was becoming more apparent with each nervous breath. Was being on the run any better than hiding and waiting? Only time would tell. But how much time did any of them have?

  The one certainty for all of them was that this was not the end. Nor was this the end of the Infection. This was simply the conclusion of the first stage of the epidemic...act one. Can the Infection be contained? Perhaps the second act, Containment, holds the answers.

  Perhaps.

  The adventure continues in

  CONTAMINATION

  Coming November 2012 from Permuted Press