Thank you all for the awesome reviews on that last chapter! It really made me happy.
Ok, Mature rating seriously in effect. Dark, dark, dark - all I can say.
Chapter 17: Minute Hand
Alice was first to drive the Beast that morning after waking Claire up on the insistence that they both get dressed before K-mart woke, and found them, once again, in a compromising position. The redhead was more than happy to oblige. Leaving her watch behind in the gravel on the side of the street was difficult to say the least. Being without it made her antsy.
Several times in just the first few hours of the drive Alice looked down at her wrist fully expecting to see the time, and was hit with total fear when she didn't. Telling time by the sun was also becoming increasingly difficult because the sun no longer reached the highest point in the sky, instead it seemed to travel mostly parallel to the horizon. Alice's only saving grace was that for now Umbrella's satellite was on the D route, and would go no further north than Nebraska.
The blonde guessed with a troubled breath that it was around 4 in the afternoon when they pulled into a truck stop to refuel. Claire offered to take over, she'd offered to take the wheel multiple times, but Alice rejected each. She needed something to keep her hands busy, and to occupy her mind. Driving was good enough for that, but it wasn't perfect.
Why hasn't she said anything? Not a damn thing, Alice thought. She'd literally, more or less, professed her undying love for the redhead, and Claire never responded. All she did was kiss me…Then again, I was blitzed off my ass. Why the fuck did I do that?
Alice switched her hands around on the wheel, withdrawing her right and putting her left at the 12 o'clock position. She checked the speedometer out of habit, as if there could be a limit to her speed. The only reason to maintain any kind of reasonable velocity now was to avoid colliding with an undead that could be clambering about the pavement, and to get decent gas mileage. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Claire mess with her hat. Apparently, I'm not the only one trying to keep my hands busy.
The blonde shot a glance to the rearview mirror and saw K-mart asleep. She'd hoped the girl could provide Claire with some kind of entertainment, but the teen was doing what typical teens did best. Guess it's up to me.
"So…" Alice tired to strike up a conversation, but failed miserably.
The awkward silence lasted until Claire acquiesced with an inept attempt of her own, making it that more uncomfortable.
"So…"
Real smooth Alice, the blonde thought, and cleared her throat to try again.
"How do you feel?"
"I'm fine," Claire replied, but Alice kept digging.
"You're not sick?"
"No," the redhead smiled, obviously remembering what kept her from becoming so. "Alice," Claire looked down, and then back up at her though the blonde tried to keep her eyes glued to the road. "Why were you drinking?"
Alice knew the conversation would turn to this, but she had hoped it wouldn't have been so soon.
"I was trying not to think about things. I meant what I said last night." Alice prepared herself to say it again, differently; it was less difficult with her attention focused on steering the vehicle. "Drowning the pain of losing you is much easier than living through it."
"You haven't lost me yet," Claire said softly.
Doesn't change the fact that I will, Alice thought as she took her foot off the gas to coast into the slight bend of the road.
The redhead took the silence as Alice's reply, and spoke again. "You can't just give up. You've got so much damn potential."
She turned to look at Claire, allowing herself a few seconds to determine if the redhead had meant what she said. Claire stared back; the look in her eyes Alice had seen before but the blonde hadn't had a word for it, until now – hero-worship. She threw her sight back to the pavement as the tires of the Beast devoured the road a little faster than usual.
"I'll never be that person, Claire. You see a hero-" Alice's eyes flickered to her bare left wrist, "I'm anything but."
Alice turned off her radio, and it cut the looping transmission. If she left now, she could be there to help the survivors within the hour. She checked her watch. 18:08:45. The blonde started her bike, and revved the engine with a twist of her hand. She threw it into gear, gave it gas, and let the motorcycle lurch forward after the smell of burning rubber entered her nose. Alice sped down the road with only one goal in mind. Time to save lives.
Lately however, the people whose lives she'd been saving were ungrateful. They were devoid of hope, each one more depressed than the last, and it was starting to wear on her.
The radio signal was coming from a commandeered news van parked inside of a mall. She didn't know just how the survivors managed that particular feat or why, but when she approached the shopping center the reasons became clear.
They'd driven straight through a section of doors that they tried to repair haphazardly to keep the infected out. Some broke off from the extensive horde to give her chase when she drove up, but she pulled over, dismounted her bike, and shot them all in the head. This drew more to her, and Alice was easily able to gun them down until she ran out of ammo. The next weapon in her arsenal was herself.
She kicked the first to reach her in the jaw, snapping the undead's neck, and then punched the next one with a fierce uppercut. Alice kicked another in the leg causing it to fold the wrong way, and the infected dropped to its massacred knee as she reached around its head to break its neck. She was unstoppable. Fiend after fiend came at her the same way, but she eradicated them all with cold calculation and perfectly executed martial arts.
The corpses all finally at her feet instead of on theirs, Alice walked to the set of barricaded doors. She saw a space large enough for her to crawl through, and did so. The news van that the survivors had boasted was parked inside, but she didn't see anyone – at first. Her blood tingled, and then the vibrations escalated into song as another group of undead spotted her and began their attack.
Alice couldn't help but wonder if she was now killing the survivors that she was supposed to be helping. She took the five of them out easily but her blood was still vibrating with nonchalance – the way it did when she was in presence of someone who was infected by the T-virus, but had yet to turn.
Alice walked to the white van, and heard muffled crying from inside. Before she opened the back doors, she took a breath and tempered herself against whatever horror she knew awaited her.
In the vehicle's interior was a young girl, hugging a dirtied teddy bear to her chest as she wept.
Alice called softly to her. "Hey, it's ok. Come on out."
The girl trembled, but she did as Alice requested. She wasn't sure how it happened, but suddenly the child was in her arms. The blonde looked at her; she couldn't have been much older than 6. Her strawberry blonde hair was pulled back into twin pigtails, and there was a smudge of dirt placed perfectly on her nose; the kind only playful children seemed never to be rid of though their mothers were constantly scrubbing their faces. Though she had the freckles and the long eyelashes of youth there was one thing she was missing – innocence. It hadn't been there in a long time.
Alice didn't know how to ask the girl about the other survivors, so she just came out with it. "Is there anyone else here?"
The child simply looked up at her, and Alice saw something she had missed a moment before. The girl's eyes…they were empty. Completely and utterly blank. Her hand twitched once, but she kept the girl in her arms. She'd been praying desperately that it wasn't the girl who was infected, but no one else was around, and it was more than likely that she'd just killed the very survivors that had been pleading for rescue.
They should've turned that damn transmission off! Alice was furious. The once survivors had damned her by not cutting their signal when they knew they were past help. Multiple scenarios played in her mind as to why she was here now. Maybe it was that they'd all died one at a time, and the last adult, having to kill everyone else, merely forgot to flip the switch. Or perhaps the child's mother, thinking that someone could help the girl who wasn't infected at the time, left it on. Alice had killed a women a mere minute ago with strawberry hair much like the child's, but that could mean anything. Maybe the child had simply been left behind; maybe she was an offering for the infected. The possibilities were endless.
The girl laid her head down on Alice's shoulder, and the blonde was roused from her thoughts and her anger.
She had to be sure it was the child who was infected. "Are you hurt?"
The girl nodded. "My arm has an owie."
"Let me see."
The youth held out the arm not clutching tightly to the stuffed animal, and Alice slowly pealed back the child's sleeve. Her forearm was covered in four pink scratches that descended to the girl's wrist in near straight lines. The surrounding flesh was already becoming pale, and Alice shut her eyes against the sight as the girl held her bear closer.
She knew what she had to do next – horrible as it was. Still she would have much preferred that her nine-millimeters weren't empty. Breaking someone's neck was so intimate; not like pulling a trigger. Alice glanced around in hopes that there was an abandoned gun from one of the ex-survivors. She saw none, and even had she found one, how would the little girl have reacted to a gun placed to her head? Not that she would've had long to think about it… No, better Alice used her hands; better to have one last warm embrace before it all ended.
Alice was tempted to ask the girl her name, but she knew it was only to postpone the inevitable. Plus, she didn't want to know her name. Angie's tormented her more than enough. The blonde sat down on the edge of the open van, the girl still in her hold. Better the girl remained nameless, though she would never be faceless. Alice turned the infected child around in her lap, and placed one hand on her soft chin, the other between the girl's pigtails, framing her face.
Tomorrow would constitute the one year and six month anniversary of the outbreak, but she didn't know that. All Alice knew was that she was never going to respond to a transmission for help again. Heroics caused her to take a little girl's life; heroics killed all of her friends when she saved Angie in the helicopter and Umbrella got a hold of her because of it; heroics caused her to try and expose the corporation in the first place.
Alice would never be a hero again.
The conversation dropped, Alice continued driving. At the next bend in the pavement the old U.S. Customs stop came into view. She slowed the Hummer down and drove through one of the broken gates.
As she passed it, Claire sat a little straighter in her seat, and her voice broke the quiet. "Hey, K-mart," she woke the girl. K-mart picked up her head from its resting place on her hand as she yawned, and the redhead continued. "Welcome to Alaska."
K-mart immediately became excited. "We're he-here! We made it!"
Alice wished she felt as optimistic, but Alaska would bring its own challenges even if the undead did freeze in winter.
Still, she tried to put on a cheerful face for the girl. "So K, where are we headed?"
Alice watched in the rearview as K-mart pulled out the red journal, and found a page.
"I think th-the first place we should try is in Kenai, ca-called Resurrection Bay."
Claire shook her head. "That's still creepy."
"I don't know," the blonde shrugged. "I kinda like it."
"It's morbid as hell," Claire argued, but Alice didn't agree.
"No, it's not. It's like a new beginning, and isn't that what this is?" For being a pessimist, Alice wasn't doing a very good job.
"So, what-" Claire shot back at her with sarcasm, "you want to call our town Resurrection?"
The blonde's eyes widened. "Whoa, who said anything about starting a town?" She laughed, and then put on her business face. "Yes, welcome to Resurrection. Population – three."
K-mart spoke next. "I'm with Alice-"
The blonde interrupted her. "You don't want to start a town either?"
Alice chuckled as she saw K-mart stick her tongue out at her in the rearview mirror. The ease with which the three of them joked helped relieve her of some of the stress she was feeling. The teen mapped out the route for Alice, and she followed it through most of the night, stopping only to let Claire take the wheel a little before dawn.
So, there totally is a place called Resurrection Bay in Alaska and I had no idea. I was just trying to pick out a good place, and Kenai happened to be the first name I read on a map. And when I did a little research on it, it was like a sign from Milla herself, haha. I don't know about you guys, but if there is a zompocalypse I'm totally naming my new town Resurrection. You're all welcome to live there of course. It'll be awesome - at least I think so. :)