Free Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 4): Resolution by Sean Schubert

hands wrap
themselves around his shoulders and then another around his waist.
His eyes filled with terror, as he was pulled down and out of
sight. Danielle couldn’t differentiate his screams from the
others.
    Kameron, almost helpless by that point, felt
impossibly heavy to her. He was barely moving his feet on his own
but still Danielle pushed forward. Coming to the end of the tunnel,
they burst forth like a flood of humanity, spraying in every
direction. Danielle led Kameron and the group still with her up the
ramp and onto the main drag through downtown. She saw the yellow
building and led them there.
    Others stopped at the seafood processing
plant but were met with locked doors atop narrow sets of stairs.
They were trapped and defenseless. The Public Works and Public
Safety offices also attracted desperate souls to their doors with
much the same effect. Using all the mayhem to distract attention
away from themselves, Danielle ran into the yellow building’s main
entrance and then into the store before anything or anyone could
follow them. There were too many other easier targets for their
pursuers to grab and devour. She was actually concerned that too
many people might see them and lead those things to them in the
process. They were lucky though, and found themselves panting but
alone.
    With the help of an older man and another
young woman, Danielle partially blocked the front entrance with a
heavy card rack. The doors opened outward, so they couldn’t keep
them from opening but blocking the doorway might buy them a little
time in a pinch. Danielle looked for a broom, mop, anything with a
handle that she could use to secure the doors but came up empty.
She used an oversized cotton nightshirt to tie the two handles as
firmly together as she could under the circumstances.
    Hearing the bedlam unfold outside, Danielle
couldn’t help the anguished shivering that overtook her.
Goosebumps, teasing her hair on end, ran along her arms and up her
spine while her senses were rocked with a wave of vertigo that
nearly swept her from her feet. Watching all the people run on the
outside of the narrow, shoulder-high windows of the store, Danielle
was struck with how surreal it all felt. She’d never seen such
utter chaos in all her life.
    She backed away from the storefront and
lowered herself out of sight of the several window, running the
length of the store and looking out onto downtown Whittier’s main
street. She crawled like a harried crab toward her stricken friend
Kameron, suffering through a state of near delirium. When his eyes
opened, they evinced no awareness; only fear. He seemed to be
drifting away, sinking into the dark circles forming under his
eyes.
    The wad of shirts pressed against and
wrapped tightly around his bleeding biceps was glistening with
blood, the flow refusing to abate. They had already tightened a
child’s belt around his upper arm near the shoulder to restrict the
flow, but nothing worked.
    The woman sitting next to him was weeping
and holding his hand absently, paying more attention to her own
fears than to Kameron’s pain. It would have been of very little
consequence, because Kameron’s drifting consciousness was beyond
comfort anyway.
    Finally making her way to Kameron’s side,
Danielle looked down at his still boyish face with the sparse blond
hair on his crown. His color, once golden with the generous summer
sun of the Lower Forty-eight, had been chased away by the
aggressive fever quickly overwhelming him.
    She’d seen death enough in her life with
both animals and people to be able to recognize it. Kameron was
fading fast and she was doubtful that there was anything she could
do about it.
    On hands and knees, she wandered over to the
lone pharmaceutical aisle in the store. She pulled down bandages,
iodine, cotton swabs, and anything else that looked helpful.
Grabbing more than she could carry, she piled about half of what
was in the crook of her arms into her backpack, checking that