Resolution

By Sean Schubert

A desperate trek across post-apocalyptic Alaska brings a small group of survivors to a sanctuary city—only to face a new threat in this zombie horror saga.

Through the terrifying new world of the undead, Neil Jordan has led a dwindling band of survivors from Anchorage along the Seward Highway, battling flesh-eating zombies and the deadly Alaskan winter. As the approach the small city of Whittier, they find the tunnel barred—potentially protecting it from the undead infection.

The group’s flagging sense of hope is restored. Whittier could be the sanctuary they’ve longed for—if they can just find their way in. But their search turns increasingly desperate as they are pursued by deadly enemies both living and undead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781618682529

Book preview

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 structure 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 joined 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.

All of them spent those early days in quiet distraction, trying to hide from the world. In the street outside, lots of creepy people, who she understood were boogeymen of some sort, were starting to gather and wait. She and Danny were discouraged from taking peeks out the window as the adults did, but she managed to look under an arm on occasion to catch glimpses of them. Jules easily surmised those people were looking for her and the others, which was why they had to be extra quiet, just like during naptime at her old school. It was hard sometimes, but she did her best.

After more days than she could count, it was decided that they had to get out of the house and away from the creepy ghouls, whose smell and noises were making Jules and everyone else sick to their stomachs.

Since then, they had been on the run, moving from hiding place to hiding place like scared mice avoiding hungry owls. It had all become routine to them in a twisted, grisly way.

That all changed for Jules when Meghan was killed. If Jules were older and more insightful, she would likely feel that Meghan was a victim of the complacency brought on by the routine of survival. She, like the rest of them, simply got too comfortable and had paid the ultimate price.

Jules was sad for herself but was even more sad for poor Neil. He loved Meghan; Jules could tell by the way he looked at her and the way he talked to her. Neil talked to everyone really nicely, but to Meghan he talked quiet and soft like the way Jules’ mom used to read fairytales to her at bedtime when she was younger. Neil was her prince and Meghan was his princess. He hadn’t been the same since they left her body under a pile of stones along the side of the road. None of them had been.

Jules barely had time to grieve before she and the others had to face another crisis. Shortly after Meghan’s death Jules, along with Danny and two other children, were taken to some kind of survival camp in a place called Soldotna. The people controlling the camp, located in what had once been Skyview High School, were self-styled militiamen willing to embrace truly despicable acts of brutality and oppression in order to further the agenda of their leader. They had a lot of guns and were the meanest people Jules had ever been around in her life.

If it hadn’t been for an audacious and daring move by Neil, Jerry, and Emma, Jules and Danny would likely still be in the militia’s brutal hands.

Behind the cover of night and a ruthless wave of undead, Neil and the other adult rescuers swept into the school to the children’s salvation. It was a bittersweet rescue for Jules. She had recently been reunited with her oldest brother Alec, who had gone missing from the moment Jules’ parents had driven young Martin to the hospital in Anchorage. He was lost; or so she had thought. He had been lost in the hectic melee at the school and was never seen again.

The loss of Alec, the last living member of her immediate family, was a tragedy to be sure, but by that time Jules had become numb to such sorrowful events. She was sad but her grief was lost amid layers of recent calamity, which had so scarred her young mind as to dull her emotional response to any stimuli. Jules would miss Alec, along with her mom, her dad, and her brother Martin, but she had no tears to shed. Her eyes became fixed and distant and her affect as flat as a pane of glass.

After the dramatic rescue, Neil took their group, now driving in a compact car, back onto the highway and toward some place called Whittier, where they had been heading prior to the abduction and Meghan’s death. They drove into the darkness, heavy with a gathering snowfall that filled the car’s headlights. Finally, Jules was getting her snow, but she barely noticed. Along with her sadness, Jules’ joy was also blunted and absent.

When Neil stopped the car and turned off the lights, everyone sat up and stiffened. It was still dark and the side windows were white with fog from the cold air on the outside. Jules had been dozing, snatching short moments of restless sleep like an uncomfortable airline passenger. She adjusted in her seat to look through the defrosted front window.

It was dark and getting darker with each passing moment, most of dusk’s purples having faded irreversibly into night’s lonely black. Neil’s quiet and unanswered announcement that they would wait until morning to go on calmed all of them somewhat. The warm interior of the car and the open, still empty road were too inviting to be discarded for the cold, unpredictability of the Portage Highway stretching itself out in front of them.

Despite the darkness, Jules could tell that it was along that stretch of winding road where they had left Meghan’s lifeless body. She vividly remembered that sad day not too long ago and could see in Neil’s eyes that he was remembering it as well. She wished there was something she could do to help ease his pain, but she understood that he needed to be left alone with his thoughts. Instead of saying anything, she looked away and gave him his privacy, much the same as everyone else.

Silently, each of them surrendered their consciousness to their exhaustion. Neil, the last to close his eyes, reluctantly turned both the car’s lights and engine off before he allowed himself to drift off to sleep. He looked at everyone in the car before he closed his eyes. Jess, sitting next to him in the passenger seat, was already asleep and snoring. In the back seat sat Emma and Jerry, with the three kids draped across them in uncomfortable knots.

Neil’s slumber was interrupted by bouts of cold sorrow and hot tears. He hadn’t truly lamented Meghan’s passing. It happened suddenly and was followed by frantic action, preventing him from dealing with the loss. Jules could hear his sniffles and his loud, dry swallows as he tried to stifle the noise. His crying finally brought tears to her eyes as well, as it did to everyone else in the car. They had all lost so much in such a short time.

Chapter 2

The next morning the dawn was barely able to break through the sullen clouds. Jules awoke slowly and was surprised to find Neil’s seat empty. Everyone else was still asleep, so she shook Emma awake and pointed at the empty driver’s seat. Helplessness and fear rising in her throat, Emma leaned forward and relaxed somewhat to see that the vehicle’s keys were still in the ignition.

Emma’s and Jules’ relief was tempered at best, however, due to Neil’s absence. Scratching a hole through the ice-crusted window, the two looked out into the road hoping to see Neil.

Oh shit, Emma whispered.

There were three shady figures drifting in the dispersing storm. The cadence of their gait, erratic and broken, meant only one thing: they were the undead. Emma reached over her shoulder and laid her hands on her M4 assault rifle, lying on its side across the car’s two rear speakers. Not long ago a firearm such as that would have made her more than a little uncomfortable. She had never seen the need for such hardware. Those days seemed so long ago. The touch, smell, and weight of the rifle welcome to her now. She hoped she never had to do without it. Slipping a full magazine into the rifle quietly, Emma quickly had the gun ready for action.

Emma placed a calming hand on Jules’ shoulder and used her eyes to let the child know they would be okay. They didn’t share a word but the message was clear. Emma pointed to the others and peered back through the frosty window.

Jules quietly roused the others in the car for the coming confrontation. As deftly as she could, Jess slid over into the driver seat.

She got her hand onto the key but hesitated when Jerry cautioned her to wait. It didn’t look like the zombies knew they were in the car. They had likely been drawn to the sound of the engine during the early morning hours but were now merely drifting rudderless without the noise to direct them.

Everyone, just stay quiet and don’t move, Jerry whispered. Maybe they’ll pass us by. He added with a bit of anxiety in his voice, Where’s Neil?

As if in answer, they heard a commotion from the street outside. Emma, feeling very anxious and fairly vulnerable in the car, tried to look back outside before stepping out, but their peek hole had already frosted over. She shifted Jules onto Jerry’s lap and threw open the door.

She emerged just in time to see Neil finishing off the third ghoul with his bat. He swung it around his head in a wide sweeping motion, striking the creature just below its left knee. It wasn’t a lethal blow, but it was enough to knock it from its feet.

Emma winced at the impact. If she were struck in the same manner, the pain would be excruciating. However, the zombie Neil hit was quick to try and get back to its feet. When it became apparent that was not an option on its now broken and twisted limb, the thing tried to wriggle and crawl toward Neil, but he wasn’t waiting to give it second chances.

Circling aggressively like a shark ready to pounce, Neil brought the solid aluminum bat down upon the back of its skull, which imploded like a rotten melon, spilling brain matter and dark, congealed blood onto the icy pavement. The other two had been dealt with similarly and lay in their own horrible mess of necrotic fluids. Neil stepped through the jellied fluids, which clung to the bottoms of his boots like barnacles. Each sticky footstep produced stringy umbilici, connecting his feet to the ground.

Emma winced at the sounds of Neil’s sticky footsteps. They reminded her of feet passing through a busy and seldom-cleaned cinema with a full day’s worth of spilled soda and dropped popcorn on its floors.

She scanned behind Neil and then all around the car. Nothing. Not a damned thing. For the right person, this brand of isolation would be heavenly, but Emma was not one of them. Or rather, she hadn’t been one of them. She wasn’t entirely sure what kind of person she was at the present. For the moment, she decided she would settle for being a live person and that seemed to be enough for now.

By then, Jules had gotten enough courage to peer out too. She saw Neil walking through the motionless corpses and breathed a sigh of relief along with everyone else in the car. Neil wiped his blood-caked bat on his latest victim’s tattered sports coat and smiled over at her. He said that he thought he was getting better at using his bat and struck the pose of a major league hitter swinging for the home run fence, making Jules smile despite the grisly circumstances.

Neil climbed into the passenger seat, dropping himself heavily into it.

I scouted ahead of us a bit up the highway, he said. It looks clear up the road, so I think it should be smooth sailing up to... He stopped short of finishing his sentence because of the painful memory that accompanied it.

Both Jerry and Emma, companions of Neil’s since the beginning, understood. They shared a glance with one another and allowed the moment to pass. None of them were without pain. They understood how the simplest thing could steal away the breath or dispel a thought. Jerry’s relationship with Claire had been only days old, but his heart split every time he thought about her or adjusted the green and gold University of Alaska Anchorage Seawolves hat he words, his sole remembrance of her. She had been mutilated and butchered by a lunatic and had to face his wrath alone.

Emma too suffered from the still very recent loss of Dr. Caldwell, who had saved her life and the lives of several others along their arduous trek to safety. Tragically bitten, the good doctor was, in Emma’s mind, abandoned and left to face his fate alone as well. They each shared in a common tragedy.

Somewhat oblivious to the looks and the nods, the newest member of their group, Jess, sitting behind the wheel said, Are we ready to go then?

Jess was grieving as well, although her grief was from not knowing. Her teenaged daughter was out on a fishing trip when the world had soured and was now a missing shadow in Jess’ life. Now and again, Jess imagined Syd riding next to her in the car or sitting with her during the quiet moments. She went so far as to conduct full conversations with her daughter, sometimes out loud and sometimes in her mind. Syd was never far from her thoughts and the not knowing was like an icy dagger digging at her heart.

They drove slowly along the highway toward Portage Lake and Whittier beyond, a quiet reverence settling over all of them. This road was painfully familiar and thick with regret, like the scene of a crime. They passed more than a couple of the walking undead, heads turning almost wistfully to watch the car continue on its way.

Neil was a little surprised to see the ghouls. He had not encountered any of them, at least he did not think he had. He wondered how close he had come to them in the snowstorm that had passed by then. Remnants continued to flutter, occasionally dancing erratically when a quick, unexpected gust lifted the flakes. The monsters had likely been lurking in the several campground turnoffs or other parking areas along the main road. They looked like the dazed and confused survivors of a natural disaster emerging after the storm, but their wretched appearance and hungry disposition belied a more threatening reality.

Concerned by the growing number of gray-skinned devils crawling out onto the road, Jerry asked from the backseat, Where’d you go, Neil?

I wanted to check things out. Make sure we had a smooth ride ahead. The truth was not nearly as simple as that, but Neil wasn’t willing to acknowledge it to either himself or those with him.

Suspicious that there was more to it but unwilling to press, Jerry answered with a nod and a soft touch to Neil’s shoulder.

Danny, not yet a teenager and not possessing the filters that come with age and experience, asked, Did you see Meghan’s grave?

With a remorseful sigh, Neil answered only, Yeah.

Danny may have been young, but Neil’s response was enough for him to cut off any further questions. Though slow to understand, he wasn’t dimwitted or without empathy. He could sense something in Neil’s voice that encouraged him to leave well enough alone.

The ground is frozen now, Neil said. We should be able to drive around all the stuck cars ahead. We’ll just have to be careful that we don’t end up at the bottom of a ditch. With any luck, we can probably drive right up to the tunnel. We have to be careful though.

And what about the tunnel? Emma asked. It was closed last time we saw it. How are we gonna get onto the other side?

Neil rubbed his chin. He said with some hope in his voice, When we were here yesterday, DB said that there was a service trail that went over the mountain. He had worked on it a couple of times for the state. Doing maintenance, I guess.

Neil looked over at Jess and explained, Our plan all along was to get to Whittier. We thought that maybe it would have been cut off from the road system in time to keep it free of...whatever the hell is causing all this. We came down from Anchorage hoping to get into the city. We were all set to make a go of it when those bastards you were staying with down in Soldotna attacked us. It kind of set us off course. DB was with us then. He was a guy who just showed up one day and was gone a couple days later. Nikki back there was with him. He told me about the path, where to find it, and that if we hurried and beat winter, we could make it to the other side.

Sounds like a solid idea, Jess said hesitantly. I don’t know about the rest of you though, but I’m no mountain climber. Are you sure we can make it?

And that’s a pretty big mountain, Emma chimed in.

Neil looked back out the front windshield and asked, Do we have a choice?

When they passed Meghan’s rock pile, Neil couldn’t bring himself to look over at it. He chewed his chapped lower lip and stared out in the opposite direction. There was nothing much to see aside from Alaska surrendering itself to winter. The not too distant mountains were already blanketed in white with only the most stubborn rocky promontories resisting the snow. Glistening in coats of the new powder, the thin trees and sparse bushes in the frozen wetlands along the road looked like they had been planted according to some kind of plan. An occasional bird, finches and robins that had different plans than heading south for the winter, flitted from branch to branch looking for the last berries to be plucked for the season. Soon there would be nothing left and most of the area’s wildlife would have moved on.

Neil was right. The ground had frozen sufficiently enough to allow them to skirt the wrecks and ad hoc roadblocks. Along the highway in scattered groups, the frozen carcasses of the recently dispatched undead littered the pavement. The haggard remains didn’t resemble human beings in the slightest. When Jess slowed the car to pass particularly bad patches of snarled vehicles and the corpses could be better examined, the sorrowful piles of bones reminded Neil of old black and white photographs he’d seen in books of concentration camp victims butchered and murdered by the Nazis during World War Two. They had lacked any color. Neil and his group were responsible for most of those bodies. There were quite a few, more than any of them could remember having encountered.

Emma and Jerry, sitting in the backseat with the three children, did their best to keep the kids distracted during those stretches though there was little point. In those areas where the bodies were especially heavy and there was little option other than driving over the rapidly deteriorating carcasses, Emma and Jerry told the children to look down. Not seeing the gory results did not insulate them from the horrific crunching and popping sounds coming from under the car as its tires drove over heads, limbs, and torsos. It also couldn’t erase the horrifying memories each harbored from just over a day earlier when the bodies were still animated and threatening to kill and eat them.

When they came to a particularly tight passage around a large group of stalled vehicles or the tail end of the overturned tour bus, Neil and Jerry would climb out and help Jess to maneuver the car. Amazingly, the two men didn’t hesitate to leave the relative security and warmth of the automobile and walk along the car’s sides for added navigation and protection. At one point, both men discharged their firearms and unceremoniously killed two of the creatures that were approaching with too much enthusiasm. They didn’t like using their guns, but neither wanted a close encounter with the monsters.

They drove slowly and deliberately along the highway, the tunnel never seeming to draw any closer to them. The road felt like it was stretching out indefinitely, teasing them with fleeting promises of an end to their journey.

Eventually, they passed the Begich Boggs Visitor Center and its recent memories of loss. Not long ago, Neil and his party found themselves harbored there, relatively safe from the horrors of the undead, only to fall prey to the evil intentions of other men. The militia from Soldotna, having driven north on a foraging trip, cornered everyone but Neil, Jerry, and Emma at the rest area. The resulting confrontation ended with a couple of deaths and the abduction of most of Neil’s group. The militia, capable of subterfuge and plotting, posed a much more significant threat than the zombies.

Seeing the large visitor center building, Jerry’s tongue dried and his heart threatened to stop due to the weight of his grief. Claire, the only girl to ever give him the time of day and with whom he had fallen in love, was taken from him that day…stolen away and tortured to death for sport. Jerry, like Neil with Meghan, was not allowed to share an emotional farewell. She had been abducted while Jerry, Neil, and Emma were scouting ahead. In Jerry’s mind, Claire had fallen victim because he had not been there to protect her. He had to live with his failure but she had died because of it. Jerry would like to have blamed someone else for Claire’s death, but he always came back to the fact that it was his idea to leave the women and children in their group undefended. How could they have suspected that such evil could lurk in the hearts of men? What kind of people did such horrible things?

There were, of course, no answers to any of Jerry’s questions and no reprieve from his agonizing self-doubt or guilt. With tears forcing themselves into the corners of his eyes and onto his cheeks, Jerry looked away from the buildings and fixed his gaze on the road ahead. There was no escape from his pain though. Claire’s pale face and butchered hands and feet as she lay lifeless on a work bench-turned-executioner’s table were waiting just behind his lids every time he shut his eyes. No matter the distraction, it wasn’t enough to help ease his heartache. He chewed his lower lip and held his breath, hoping to curtail the tears to no avail. The hot, salty mist filled his eyes, even as his heart tried to empty itself of all feeling.

The first tunnel through which they drove was short but very dark due to the bend at its middle. Once through, the valley opened in front of them. The mountains seemed to take several steps back and the water to their right disappeared. There were still cars and bodies along the road, but the sense of claustrophobia was absent. Perhaps the most forgiving development was the Begich Boggs Visitor Center and its punishing memories were no longer in view. Everything felt so different on the opposite side of the short tunnel. Even the buffeting wind subsided somewhat, apparently satisfied that it had done its part to make a miserable day all the more intolerable.

In front of them and to their right, the mountains were dominated by a pair of looming glaciers that pressed themselves forcefully into the mountains, separating peaks and eroding ancient rock with their raw power. The dirty white surface of snow and ice gradually but inexorably surrendered itself to a deeper and cooler hue of blue, which looked to be at the glaciers’ hearts. The valley was both breathtaking and intimidating and had been for thousands of years.

Just ahead, the road opened into a much more full and multilane affair with the tunnel entrance looming ahead. The few service buildings in front of them, including two tollbooths, were in ruins. Not a full pane of glass sat in a single window and much of what should have been inside, such as paperwork, furniture, and other office odds and ends, littered the ground in front of and around the structures. Barely recognizable for what they were, withered dismembered limbs wrenched violently from their bodies were mixed in with the detritus. If not for the claw like hands or the shoes and socks at their ends, Neil would have assumed they were discarded tree branches used to smash the windows.

There wasn’t a single bird circling or animal stirring for as far as the eye could see. Most of the trees had shed their leaves too. Life itself had apparently eschewed this cursed place. Was this the road to salvation or to damnation?

Either way, the road was barred. Before them on the far side of an eclectic mix of vehicles including some yellow construction trucks, an imposing looking iron door closed the tunnel entrance. The barrier stood unmoved by time or the efforts of those who preceded Neil and his small group of survivors.

It looked like several drivers had tried to ram their cars and trucks through the unyielding door. The veneer of the enormous door was barely scratched but the cars sitting in front were broken, burned heaps.

Jess slowed the car and shifted into park. No one was eager to get out of the car, so she turned around and faced the front of the car away from the tunnel. She hoped, as they all did, that the preparation would be unnecessary. They yearned for the promise and possibility Whittier had come to symbolize for them. They had all had enough of running.

Neil was the first out of the car as usual. He stepped out and stretched his sore back and aching knees. Having been recently thrown from the back of a moving truck, his muscles and bones protested his every step. Lucky for him, Jess found a bottle of generic Ibuprofen in her glove box, but the ten or twelve he’d taken were only able to do so much. Moving from sitting to standing was a challenge at the moment.

The others followed Neil’s lead, climbing out onto the pavement with all the enthusiasm of the condemned marching the Green Mile. Each wrapped himself or herself in as many layers as they could. Shirts were covered by more shirts, which were covered by sweatshirts of cotton and fleece. Upon those were light jackets that were in turn covered by parkas or heavier coats. Their legs were similarly provisioned when possible. Most had gloves and weatherproof boots as well.

When all was said and done, most of them felt capable of facing the elements for a short while. Nikki and Jess were the only two not well equipped, with Nikki in the worse shape of the two. Jess wore a pair of flannel-lined pants, two sweatshirts over a pair of long sleeve shirts, and had a very thick brown Carhartt coat, compliments of her missing boyfriend Bob. She was also able to find an extra pair of socks and a pair of gloves in her trunk belonging to her daughter Syd. Seeing them and then pulling them onto her feet and hands caused Jess to rediscover the guilt she had successfully suppressed for the past few hours.

When all of the troubles had started, Syd had been with Bob on a late season fishing run. Jess had been only able to speak with Bob once since that terrible day so long ago but the conversation had helped maintain Jess’ hope for her daughter’s life. Bob knew what was happening and promised to keep Syd safe. Jess knew she could count on Bob. He was a good man and had always looked out for the two of them, despite not being Syd’s father. He had never hesitated to willingly fill whatever role either Jess or Syd needed of him. It was for that reason that Jess had been able to nurse along her hope for Syd’s life and safety.

Not a day had passed that Jess hadn’t thought about her daughter, but the time and distance combined with the desperate nature of her current existence had blunted the depth of awareness she’d had for her daughter. When Jess saw the socks, she was transported back to the day the socks had ended up in the trunk in the first place. After an impromptu midnight venture to Clam Gulch, Jess and Syd, feet wet and squishy, crawled back into Jess’ waiting car. Jess had thought ahead enough to be wearing Tiva sandals but Syd had waded into the cold, surging surf in her tennis shoes. Back at the car, Syd took off both shoes and

Reviews for Resolution

[benjaminhahn · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A nice try Mr. Schubert. I really do want to support local authors, but there were a few too many typos and a few too many red herrings. I really wanted to like this book, but this read a lot like a manuscript first draft of what could have been a mediocre story about zombies in Alaska. It could have really used a serious editor.Personally, the only thing this story really had going for it was that it was set in Anchorage. The familiarity of Anchorage was a nice touch but this book seemed like one of the first cut chapters from World War Z. There's no catch, there very little character development, and of the little character development there is, it is mostly cliche. Rumor has it that this is just the first part of a trilogy. Woe be to the reader. Please, Mr. Schubert, hire an editor, or at least have 5 different people read your book before you self publish again.