Containment Read Online Free

mouth. These kids had seen and experienced more than should be asked from any adult, and they certainly didn’t need Neil to add to the misery. Instead, he took a deep breath and held it as he turned back to look at the dashed hope that the bridge had once signified.
    It was with Jules’ brother Martin that the calamity had originally begun. He had been bitten by... something, down near Seward. The wound was very superficial, but it had bled well more than it should have and led to a very aggressive infection that within hours had claimed young Martin’s life. And for reasons that science could not answer and that religion dared not contemplate, young Martin had risen from his death slumber and began to kill everyone around him, setting off a chain of events that had escalated and multiplied with each victim also rising up to go on a homicidal spree, first at Providence Hospital and then spreading exponentially throughout all of Anchorage.
    In a few hours, the city had been overrun with the walking dead. Those survivors fortunate enough were able to flee the city, but the vast majority of the population had fallen prey to the killing hordes. There were others like Neil and his group, still clawing for survival in the city, but he was afraid that all of them, his group included, might be fighting a losing battle against insurmountable odds. He kept his thoughts to himself for the most part, but there were times, like this one, that he felt the weight of that possibility hanging heavily on him. Like Sisyphus’ rock, his thoughts just kept rolling down over the top of him.
    They had been on the run or in hiding for weeks now. They had seen as much or more destruction, mayhem, and death than even the saltiest of Genghis Khan’s Mongol warriors. And neither the running nor the chaos showed any signs of slackening in the slightest.
    Fleeing the carnage of Providence Hospital and Midtown Anchorage, Neil and those with him found temporary sanctuary in South Anchorage in a small duplex, abandoned by its escaping owners. With supplies taken from the Fred Meyer where Meghan had been a manager, the group decided that waiting out the storm instead of running was the safer choice. They did their best to quietly entertain one another while avoiding detection by the ghouls that wandered the streets outside. Those were days of quiet, lonely isolation.
    After several desolate days in their four-walled life raft, they were joined by another group of three survivors, Dr. Caldwell, Emma, and a police officer named Malachi Ivanoff. It wasn’t too long afterward that their refuge was discovered by the terrors outside, and they were forced to run once again.
    Since leaving their sanctuary, their numbers had grown and dwindled. The van that had once transported them through the twisted wasteland that Anchorage had become was gone, abandoned by necessity, as it could not navigate the many impassable roads they had encountered. If Anchorage were a person and those roads were its windpipe, the patient would have been asphyxiated long ago. Early on in the catastrophe, the busiest of Anchorage’s roads and intersections had become impenetrable barriers that did nothing more than trap the souls whose vehicles created them. Those same people were virtually served up on glass and metal platters bearing the names of Chevrolet, Ford, and GMC.
    Neil thought back on the past several days...weeks. How many had it been? He’d lost count. Or, more to the point, he’d stopped counting long ago when the sun rising and setting no longer held the same importance. It didn’t matter what day it was anymore because each was going to bring with it the same problems, the same struggles, the same agonizing realizations about their situation without the hope of a weekend to break up the monotony.

Chapter 2
     
    Weeks ago, with the minivan loaded with both people and their dwindling supplies, Neil drove away from their south Anchorage hiding place. The vehicle could