Infection: Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (2 page)

Martin trailed blood and tears all the way back to the cabin. Even before they had gotten there, Danny started yelling at the top of his voice. He shouted for help, any help that he could get for his friend who was starting to stagger slightly.

Mr. Houser was the first to get to them, running to meet their voices just outside the clearing where the cabin sat. Martin’s mother was standing in the doorway, looking out with concern. In her hand, she still held the knife with which she was cutting the watermelon she was preparing for a snack.

She yelled from the door, “What happened, Marty?”

He stuttered, “...bit me. He bit me. I can’t believe it. He bit me.”

Mr. Houser looked to Danny for clarification, “What’s he talking about? Who bit Marty?”

Jules chimed in, “It’s true. There was a man...a caveman, frozen in the ice, and he bit Marty’s hand. He must have only been sleeping when he got frozen and woke up kind of hungry. He bit Marty awfully hard.”

Ginny, still in the doorway, shouted, “What happened dear?”

Mr. Houser answered flatly, “Something bit Marty.”

“A man...a caveman bit Marty,” Jules corrected and, running across the clearing toward her mother she continued, “He smelled really bad mommy, and was yucky all over.” She started to cry, “And when he bit Marty, he scared me.”

“Oohh, honey. It’ll be okay. Whatever it was is probably long gone by now. You’re okay and we’ll make sure Marty is okay too.” Jules all but disappeared in the warm, sweet embrace of her mother, but the security therein did not stop the tears.

By then, Mr. Houser and Danny had helped Martin to the cabin. The puncture wound was a small hole in the soft tissue between Martin’s thumb and index finger. To Mr. Houser, it really didn’t appear to be much of an injury, but try as he might to apply pressure, he couldn’t stop the bleeding. He wiped the gash repeatedly but as quickly as he did, like oil seeping up through sand, the blood returned. He’d soiled a handful of towels before deciding that something else needed to be done.

“Marty’s bleeding pretty bad here. I think we oughta get him to a hospital. He might need a rabies shot or something. Where’s Alec?”

“He’s around the other side shooting baskets.”

“No, I’m not. I’m right here. Heard him crying all the way up,” interrupted Alec. He looked at Marty at first with annoyance and then with genuine concern once he saw the amount and deep red of the blood that was all over his brother’s shirt, pants, and arms.

“What happened to you?”

Danny relayed to Alec all that had happened, fully expecting some snide comment that would undoubtedly be tied to their age and the fact that they played soccer and were too short to play basketball. He didn’t get any of that though. In fact, Alec merely nodded his head and started to think about what could be done. He remembered the Remington .410 shotgun that was inside on top of the tall bookshelf. Maybe while everyone else was taking Marty to the hospital, he could go out toward the glacier and maybe get a little revenge. Yeah, that’s what he’d do. He’d go out there and take care of...whatever was out there. How hard could it be?

The trip down to the cabin had taken between three and three and a half hours. They had driven at a leisurely pace, pointing out wildlife, mountains, and anything else that caught their eyes. Danny had been excited by everything. The water to his right, the Cook Inlet he had heard it called, was so dark and cold and calm. It wasn’t anything like any of the lakes or ponds back in Minnesota. They saw white goats on the tops of the steep cliffs that bordered the twisting Seward Highway. Danny couldn’t imagine how they had gotten up there in the first place. A little further down, an eternity’s worth of melting running water had cut a small grotto into the rocks at the road level. In this depression was a family of three goats. The mother and two babies were only a few feet from the lanes of the highway and its rushing cars. Of course, the Housers and Danny had stopped and taken innumerable pictures. The goats didn’t seem to mind really. They just went about eating the green vegetation that was growing on and amidst the rocks. That had all taken place during the early morning hours of the day, when Alaska and its majesty was just emerging and finally wiping the last of the sleep from its eyes.

The differences between the sun rising and the sun setting is truly amazing. What Danny was coming to realize was that sunset in Alaska was very different than anything he had ever experienced. The sun was as reluctant to go to bed as his kid sister back in Minnesota, who lingered and stalled all through the house despite being told that it was bedtime. When the sun did finally find its resting place behind the mountains to his left, there was a lingering purple hue that teased the eyes with hints of darkness without actually embracing shadows in earnest. It was dark without any real commitment.

The radio was playing some forgotten song from some guy whose name, something Diamond as he recalled, was lost on him. On the way to the cabin earlier in the day, Mr. Houser would, on occasion for specific songs, turn up the volume until Ginny would look over at him and then the volume would go back down. Now, the music was barely audible and all but ignored by everyone in the van...like a lost memory that no one missed enough to actually remember.

Like the sun, it seemed that all the animals they had seen on the trip down had found their beds for the night. There were a few birds circling and fluttering over the inlet to his left, but even they seemed to be heading for their roosts, having punched out from working an avian third shift.

He watched the last bird, a white and grey gull, circle and spin out of sight. It was then that he noticed that the inlet, earlier in the day surging and filled with white-capped dark water, was now an expanse of black sand or possibly mud. He wasn’t sure of its consistency but he was certain that it looked cold and forbidding, with tiny desperate rivulets cut into its surface by separated pools of water seeking company.

Danny sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. It had been a long, tiring day. As the first gentle caress of sleep greeted him, the image of the “caveman”, with his straggly long hair and bone thin grey body, splashed itself violently into the calm pool of his mind. He jolted himself forward and threw open his eyes, half fearing what he’d see. Coming in quick, shallow gasps, his breathing surprised even him. He looked around and nothing had changed except Jules. She was staring at him as if she had expected his abrupt waking.

“You saw him didn’t you?”

His brow wrinkled and he searched for a response, but his tongue was too dry to form speech. For lack of words and through his still sharp breathing, Danny only nodded. He looked around for a distraction...anything. There was nothing. There was only Martin’s delirium and drifts between stupor and semi-consciousness. His face was rapidly fading of any color, leaving a translucent layer of skin that didn’t quite hide the pulsing blue veins just below the surface. The only color remaining in his face were two dark grey crescents forming under his swollen eyes. His pallid face glistened with sweat, though his temperature never rose above normal.

Ginny, sitting in the front seat of the rented Chevy Venture minivan, kept leaning back to the first bench seat where Martin was languishing. She was crying and quite obviously terrified. It was killing her to see her little boy suffering so much and to not be able to do anything to alleviate the pain or make him better. She wrung her hands incessantly, not knowing for sure what to do or even what she could do.

Mr. Houser didn’t speak much, choosing instead to focus on the road in front of him. He darted in and out of cars, sometimes skirting the right-hand shoulder to get around the lumbering motor homes that dominated and were usually the cause of the long rows of traffic that choked the winding Seward Highway. Despite the traffic and the dark, Mr. Houser was doing his best to cut the drive time in any way he was able. He was desperate, as much for Ginny as for little Martin, to get his son to the hospital in Anchorage.

Jules and Danny were sitting in the bench seat furthest back in the van. Jules was crying quietly as she watched first her stricken brother, then her weeping mother, and then her intensely concentrating father. No one in their family had ever been this sick before and it scared her terribly. She leaned into Danny on more than one occasion for some comfort. She had always liked Danny, especially since he readily agreed to let her come along with Marty and him. In fact, she was pretty sure that it was Danny who convinced her brother to let her come along at all. She didn’t know that for sure, but she did know that before Danny came along she had always been too young to play with Marty or tag along on any of his adventures with his other friends. Danny accepted her along and, as a result, so had Marty.

Now though, she wondered if it wouldn’t just have been better had she not been along in the first place. If she weren’t there with her camera, then maybe Marty wouldn’t have gotten so close to the caveman and wouldn’t have been bitten in the first place. Maybe it was all her fault that this was happening.

She started to cry more loudly and said, “Momma, I’m sorry. It’s all my fault that Marty is sick. It’s all my fault...” Her tears and sobbing mixed with her words in a confusing mess that was nearly unintelligible. Getting a concerned look from Ginny, Danny wrapped his arm around Jules and hugged her to him tightly. She kept crying into his shoulder and all that Danny could understand was the word, “camera.”

They got to the hospital, Providence Medical Center, and Mr. Houser scooped Martin from the back seat and carried him directly into the Emergency Room. It was busy but not overwhelmingly so. It was very late Sunday evening by the time they arrived, and apparently injuries and sicknesses for everyone else in Anchorage had gone to bed early that night.

There was a couple with an obviously sick infant. The mother was rocking gently back and forth, humming a tune that Danny recognized but couldn’t identify. There was another woman there with her son who had a fishhook stuck all the way through his thumb. The boy was crying but it appeared that his pain was gradually losing ground to his fatigue as his eyes opened more slowly with each blink. There was a man with his foot propped up on a pile of towels stacked atop the back of one of the black synthetic leather chairs. He was reading a magazine and didn’t seem to be in any undue distress. There were nurses wearing scrubs and doctors and lab technicians with all-too-familiar white lab coats walking here and there. There was activity, but nowhere near the level that Danny had associated with a typical Emergency Room. His one trip to the hospital back home was over a very busy Fourth of July weekend last summer. That was utter chaos, but nothing like the Providence Emergency Room.

Danny and Jules sat in the chairs while Ginny and Mr. Houser stood at the Nurse’s Station explaining that Martin had been bitten by some wild animal and needed to be seen immediately. Seeing the wad of blood soaked towels and rags wrapped around the youngster’s hand, the nurse behind the counter scribbled notes down on a piece of paper and hurried them through a pair of doors, behind which they disappeared for several minutes before Ginny reappeared to beckon Danny to bring Jules and follow her.

Most children do not feel comfortable in hospitals and Danny was no exception. The antiseptic smells, the oppressive white on the walls, beds, clothes, and even floor, and the presence of sickness all mixed to make a hospital as inhospitable a place as Danny could imagine. The three of them boarded an elevator that boasted a large letter E next to it and took it to another floor, and then made their way through a series of hallways until they came to another nurse’s station. They were in the Intensive Care Unit where Martin was receiving emergency and very aggressive treatment by specialists who hadn’t yet been able to determine what was afflicting him.

Danny heard a couple of nurses talking to one another about Martin. They couldn’t seem to figure out why he was so sick from such a small bite. At least that was what Danny understood them to be saying. He wasn’t able to follow all of their words but he could certainly read their demeanor. Standing there more or less next to and sometimes in the Nurses’ Station, he was starting to feel very uncomfortable.

Danny and Jules were shown to another set of black chairs and told to wait, and then Ginny scurried off down the hall and disappeared again. By that time, even the legendary midnight sun of Alaska had waned and night was fast upon the city. Jules was very quickly asleep, snoring small kazoo-like sounds from her nose. Danny stood up and stretched and realized that he was about as alone as he could get. His only company was a sleeping eight-year-old girl and his thoughts. He too was exhausted but was afraid to sleep. It was just something about hospitals.

Down the hall and in one of the many rooms set aside for those patients requiring special care and attention, Ginny and Mr. Houser were talking to a doctor.

“What kind of an animal was it?”

Mr. Houser, starting to get frustrated with answering the same question over and over again, said through an aggravated sigh, “I don’t
know
. For the thousandth time, I don’t know. Marty, his sister, and his friend all wandered down to the glacier while we got ourselves situated in the cabin. While they were there, something attacked my son.”