Containment Read Online Free Page B

was sitting on the laps of a couple of women situated in the rear bench seat. Emma, sitting behind Malachi, was once an administrative employee at Providence Hospital. She’d had the good fortune of finding Dr. Caldwell early in the emerging catastrophe at the hospital and was saved by his planning and direction. Their harrowing trek through the hospital was followed by a brief trip in a hospital airlift helicopter and a violent crash on the south side of Anchorage. The survivors from Providence were eventually whittled down to just the good doctor, Emma, and the police officer.
    Kim, sitting next to Emma on the very back seat asked, “How much gas do we have?”
    Neil was relieved to hear her speak. When they made their escape from the safe house, her best friend Tony was attacked and killed by several of the walking dead as he threw open the garage door. The severity of his wounds caused him to die quickly and, therefore, reanimate quickly. With blood still spurting from the gaping wounds on his neck, face, and arms, he chased after the fleeing van. Kim demanded that they stop to help her friend, not willing to accept that it was no longer Tony that was chasing them. Her manic ranting had quickly turned to depressive silence.
    Dr. Caldwell asked half-mockingly, “You want to take a road trip somewhere?”
    Kim, still looking out the side window, said without much emotion in her voice, “No, I was just wondering how long we had until we would be on foot.”
    From behind Neil, Meghan asked with a little more urgency, “How much gas do we have?”
    Neil answered both of them, “Relax. We’ve got a full tank and this thing gets great gas mileage.”
    “So, where are we headed?” Meghan continued.
    Dr. Caldwell turned to look at the others in the back. “We’re going to try and find a way out of the city. I don’t think anyone is going to be coming back here anytime soon to give us any help, so it’s up to us to save ourselves.”
    Kim pointedly asked, “You mean the way that we helped Tony?”
    “Kim, what is done is done. None of us wanted that to happen to Tony any more than we’d want it to happen to anyone else. We can’t do anything about it now and there is no bringing him back. Had we even tried to help him, you know what would have happened to the rest of us. Do you want to be responsible for the same happening to Jules and Danny?”
    Kim looked back out the window and didn’t answer, tears pooling in the corners of her eyes.
    Malachi just shook his head and didn’t say a word. In his mind, Tony was destined for such a fate. To Malachi, Tony had chosen his ill begotten path when he decided to lay with other men in sin. It sickened him to even imagine it. The rough groping...the clumsy positioning...the sweating...the struggle... He could feel his heart rate jump; his disgust rising as a sour biting taste in the back of his mouth. He couldn’t shake the images though. They just kept running in his mind over and over again. Rather than fight it–fighting it did no good whatsoever–he closed his eyes and relived a past that was never really any further than arm’s length away, always hovering on the periphery. The memories were so common that they didn’t even bring on the fear or the pain like they once had. They represented no more menace than the memory of his first cavity filling. Through the tangle of grabbing, abrasive older hands and arms, his mind sought out better visions, some token remembrance of happiness however fleeting from a childhood that was as flat in aspect as was the adult Malachi’s face.
    From deep within his memory trove, he often found his mother with her generous and approving smile. He could see her berry picking with his sisters out on the tundra in the early autumn. She seemed so far away but this memory of her was a thousand fold better than that of the broken woman she became during his adolescent years. But he was able to hold that autumn day from long ago. It may not