Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution Read online

  A PERMUTED PRESS book

  Published at Smashwords

  ISBN (trade paperback): 978-1-61868-251-2

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-252-9

  Resolution: Alaskan Undead Apocalypse copyright © 2014

  by Sean Schubert

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Dean Samed, Conzpiracy Digital

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgment

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part II

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Part III

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  DEDICATION

  The Alaskan Undead Apocalypse series is dedicated to my very loving and supportive family, without whom these books would never have been written.

  Acknowledgment

  I would like to acknowledge the efforts and support of my editor Felicia; beta readers Faye and Brian Cole; John, Eric, and Mark of Bosco's; Rachel and Penny of the UAA Bookstore; the team at Permuted Press; and all the hardcore zombiephiles who have all contributed to the series' success. Thank you all.

  Prologue

  As miserable and bleak as a cold rain at a funeral, the reluctant autumn dawn finally broke. A lingering damp fog laden with the wispy, malodorous remnants of smoke muted and delayed the slowly gathering light. From the persistent bank of gray and white arose the reeking, foul stench of charred human flesh and scorched hair. It was no wonder the dawn stalled so long in emerging.

  Within the melancholy clouds clinging to the landscape, hazy specters shuffled aimlessly in stilted gait to and fro. As if fruitlessly searching for a lost memory, they wandered in the stubborn gloom, moaning a song conducted by the Devil himself. Like wretched floating wraiths haunting the nightmares of a child, their faces, their bodies, and their true terror all withheld themselves from view. But their voices...their hellish voices penetrated to the soul.

  Through the obscuring fog, the meandering figures could be mistaken for people, though they were far from it. As their wandering led them individually to the edge of the murk, the mistake of thinking them still people would have become abundantly clear. Most of them had skin the color of weathered granite and wore clothes that were scarcely more than stained tatters of cloth stuck permanently in place against skin by blood or other mortal matter. Their limbs and heads rippled and quivered unpredictably with violent nervous tics. Many were adorned with grisly mortal wounds about their bodies; a gouged throat here, a chewed and partially eaten abdomen there, missing limbs, bullet holes, and ghastly burns. Bites, gashes, torn flesh; a veritable cornucopia of death.

  Perhaps the most disturbing and least human of their features was their faces; more specifically, their eyes. Their humanity had been cleaved from their aspect like flesh from bone, leaving no shred to be seen. Like an echo of the violence that had carved away their souls, their faces were twisted into snarling sneers whose only apparent emotion was rage. The creatures’ eyes, as dark as deepest night, smoldered and sparked with a horrifying hunger, driven by an unspeakable and long forgotten infection.

  These things were merely shadows of men, women, and children. Their deaths had not been final. The infection jolted them back, and the hunger would not let them slip into their eternal slumbers. It tortured them and enraged them. There was no respite and no satiating the infection’s ravenous desire. They were forever compelled to kill and eat and kill again.

  A single, echoing firearm’s report cracked the quiet. Like a stone dropped in a still pond, the sound rippled in every direction. In response, one of the hazy figures slumped disjointedly onto its belly. The others, still plodding back and forth, neither noticed nor cared that one of their own had fallen. The familiar and now echoing sound that had excited them was all that mattered. They responded with a horrible chorus of desperate moans that vibrated the air with all the welcome comfort of a struggling chainsaw blade stuck grinding endlessly into a rusty steel girder. It was like fingernails across a chalkboard with a constant, industrial edge to it. The sound was enough to produce nausea akin to motion sickness.

  One by one the undead found the source of the gunshot and the several that followed. Each crack resulted in another of the creatures crumpling lifelessly to the ground. They cast their ravenous eyes upward to the roof of the building in front of them. The building had burned and in some places was still smoldering, hence the persistent smoke. The stru
cture had once served as Skyview High School in Soldotna, Alaska. Those days, though only months old, felt like some distant memory of a past that was fading and nearly forgotten.

  Without taking his eye from his scope, the shooter said, “They’re startin’ to thin out, Colonel. I think maybe we can start thinkin’ ‘bout gettin’ down from up here soon.”

  A gravelly, growling hiss of a voice spat, “Good. We’ve got some work to do. Then we’re gonna go find the bastards that did this to us.”

  The rifle kicked again, punctuating the Colonel’s words.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  The little blonde haired blue-eyed girl named Jules was contemplating her next step. She was utterly surrounded and losing options for escape...from the snow patches. She was playing a game, jumping from one snow-free piece of ground to the next. There were more and more places without snow the further they came down the mountain they had been climbing.

  Climbing might be a bit of an exaggeration, because they had largely followed a path with markers, but there were quite a few stretches in which it certainly felt like they had been climbing either up or down. The going was much easier now and Jules was able to revel in the whiteness all around her.

  Jules had always loved snow, though back home in the Midwest they didn’t get nearly enough for her tastes, and when they did get it, the snow didn’t stay around for very long. The weather shifted so quickly and drastically that something as delicate and beautiful as a blanket of snow found it difficult to persist beyond a couple of days most of the time.

  When her mother and father told her they were going to Alaska for vacation, snow was amongst her first thoughts. Alaska was the home of snow. In her mind, Alaska was the winter wonderland that never thawed. It was her dream of white and she couldn’t wait to go. She was more excited than anyone else in her family and talked incessantly about their pending trip with anyone willing to listen during the buildup to the vacation.

  Jules had been to Alaska once before, but her memory of that visit a few years earlier was hazy at best. She had just been learning to walk, and that took all of her attention. She could have been walking around on drifts of snow, but she honestly could not remember.

  Upon their arrival to Anchorage, Jules was disappointed to find that, not only was there was no snow, but it was surprisingly warm. There was entirely too much sun and too much green grass for this to be the birthplace of snow. Other than the mountains in the distance, there wasn’t much difference between this Alaska place and her home. There might have been more trees than back home but the trees were smaller and didn’t have as many leaves. Maybe that was because everything was still new and not grown yet. She’d heard that Alaska hadn’t become a state until just a few years before.

  None of that mattered to Jules. The only thing that mattered to her was that there was no snow. She didn’t let her disappointment remain unknown to anyone in her family. She asked repeatedly about the lack of snow, and wanted someone to explain to her why it was so green and so warm.

  Jules’ disappointment became a major distraction on the trip south to their rented cabin. She wasn’t as awed with the lush, green growth on the slopes of the rising mountains as the rest of her family. The green was deeper and more verdant than that of the grass back home. Perhaps it was the nature of life that persisted in such short summers and endured such harsh winters to do so with vibrant intensity.

  The massive walls of imposing slate gray were also lost on her. She could not understand why there was no snow to hide all of the wonder. Her interest was decidedly not in seeing the same grass and rocks that she could see back home.

  Occasionally, her parents would talk with her about the snow that came to the area where they lived when they were still little. It was a cruel joke to her that she had to experience those heady snow days vicariously through her parents’ memories. She craved her own adventures in a winter wonderland and she had pinned all of her hopes on Alaska delivering.

  At the end of their endless road trip when they finally arrived at the cabin in the rugged forests of Alaska, her hopes of coming upon snow were again dashed. She dreamed that, perhaps, the Alaskan wilderness might harbor snow that would have otherwise melted in the city and along the highway. She reasoned that snow might endure in the cooler, shadier forest. Along the long, narrow driveway leading from the highway to the cabin, it was cooler and there was much more shade provided by the densely packed trees, but still no snow.

  Upon their arrival, the three youngest kids, Jules, her older brother Martin, and his best friend Danny, wandered off into trees in search of adventure. It was just the sort of distraction that young Jules needed. The woods promised excitement and fun at least, if not a little snow.

  When their exploring took them to the foot of a glacier, Jules nearly burst. Despite the fact that this section of the glacier was a very small and receding arm of the massive ice body, she couldn’t deny her pleasure. She had finally found her Alaskan snow, in a manner of speaking. Technically it was just ice; the calved sections of glacier having been melted and partially crushed by the elements and occasional passing wildlife now resembled snow. Regardless, for Jules vacation could officially begin.

  Jules had literally never seen so much snow and ice in her entire life. The densely packed ice was almost blue in its deepest depths.

  Tragically, her joy was cut short by events that unfolded immediately thereafter in very quick succession. Martin, Danny and Jules happened upon what they thought was an ancient caveman, partially encased and preserved in the ice but thawing steadily. They thought the caveman was dead. He had to be. They could see bones protruding through his skin, his eyes and nose were gone, and in their place were gaping black holes, and his skin was the same slate gray of the mountains they had passed on their trek to the cabin.

  When the creature bit Jules’ brother Martin on the hand, their dream vacation became a nightmare. Martin became gravely ill in a matter of minutes, as sick as Jules had ever seen anyone. He began to breathe like an old man, the air moving in raspy, forced gasps in and out of Martin’s struggling chest.

  The family, minus Jules’ teenaged brother Alec, loaded back into their rented van and drove back to the city to find Martin a doctor. Her daddy and especially her mommy were scared and worried about Martin, making Jules sad and worried too.

  Back in Anchorage, the next few hours were a confusing haze of shuffling, sometimes slowly like in a daydream and sometimes frantically like in a nightmare. Jules and Danny finally found themselves in the care of a nice older boy named Jerry, working at the hospital as a nurse’s aide.

  It was with him that they fled Providence Hospital when things got really noisy and scary. People were running around screaming and crying and fighting, but Jules could not guess why. She had no idea the commotion all stemmed from her brother.

  Jules didn’t know it at the time, but her brother had been infected by a sickness that had never been introduced into a modern human population. A single person, the caveman, had been exposed to the infection thousands of years prior and had then lain dormant and waiting. The illness, eagerly shared in the bite, took the boy’s life, but that was not all it did. After little Martin died, his eyes reopened with immeasurable rage and a driving hunger for human flesh. His murderous rampage started with his mother, who suffered the same undead re-awakening.

  The infection spread with each newly bitten victim, growing exponentially like a fire in a paper mill. Providence Hospital became a killing ground in which no one was spared. The most vulnerable merely presented the most enticing quarry.

  In mere minutes, the bedlam spread its cold, bony fingers into the adjacent University of Alaska Anchorage campus and the just waking neighborhoods in the vicinity. Emergency responders, unaware of the nature of the crisis, were some of the first to fall to the ungodly plague, leaving the rest of the city’s population at the mercy of the infection.

  Jules and Danny, with Jerry’s help, escaped and joi
ned others also trying to survive. They found themselves in a house in South Anchorage, hoping that help would soon be on the way.

  They hid themselves away from the tragic torrent and waited. Those first days were the hardest for Jules. She neither fully understood what was happening nor knew what to expect next. She missed her mom and dad and wondered often about her poor brother Martin. She was glad that Danny was with her; she didn’t know if she would be able to get through all of the strife without him. Sure, he had been Martin’s friend, but he had always been nice to her, not like some of Martin’s other friends. He was friendlier and more willing to let her tag along with them. Danny was the closest thing to family that she had now and Jules clung to him like a shipwreck survivor clinging to flotsam for dear life.

  That wasn’t to say that she didn’t like the others also at the house with them. The young man named Jerry, not much older than her oldest brother Alec, was always checking on her to make sure she was safe and had enough to eat. He was nice and always smiling at her. There were some other adults as well, but a man named Neil was the most like her mommy and daddy. He was smart, and calm. He made most of the decisions because he had most of the ideas, and worked hard to ensure the safety of everyone. There was also Dr. Caldwell, who she liked and didn’t think acted like any doctor she had ever seen in her life. By the gray in his hair and the wrinkles around his eyes, Jules could tell he was older than Neil, but not quite a grandpa. He was also relaxed, helping everyone else to be the same when it was the most important.

  There were women too, but her favorite was Meghan, who was always willing to read with Jules and lay down with her to help her go to sleep. Emma was not as nice as Meghan, but she was funny and always said things that made Jules laugh. Every now and again she would get angry though and yell, making all of them, Jules included, uncomfortable, and the only one capable of calming her was Dr. Caldwell.