Z Poc: Young Brains

by catt dahman

  “That’s irresponsible,” Miss Crater complained. “They are upset and can’t be depended on to drive carefully even in the best of times, much less right now. If you look out the window, you will see what I saw: Jerry Gentry almost hit two people, and then they dragged him out of his car….”

  “If you think you can handle it any better, then please do so. I have to get all the students to the courthouse safely anyway that I can because the police are trying to hold the line there so that we have a place to retreat. If you have better ideas, then jump right in, and get busy.”

  “Hold the line? What are you saying?”

  Mrs. Smith, the school secretary, who could with one frown crumple a forged permission slip or absentee excuse or see right through a false fever, glared at the teachers. Her loud voice could clear a hall in three seconds flat, and she always knew the gossip before anyone else but wouldn’t repeat it. Instead, she offered a hug and pat on the back. “I am saying that we are supposed to get over to the courthouse and to safety as best we can because those damned things that used to be people we know are bitten, sick, and attacking each other,” she paused. “And they are eating people.”

  Someone muffled a laugh.

  “Laugh all you want.” She stared right into Lance’s face since he was closest. “Do you want to go outside with me and scrape up what is left of Principal Porter? You’ll need only one bucket for what’s left and a broom and dust pan.”

  The boy blanched.

  “All of you can laugh at Scooter, but I can tell you what I saw on the Internet just as all this started. But you won’t believe me when I tell you they were saying the strangest things, such as people had gotten sick and fallen asleep or were in comas, I guess, and hospitals were too full, so people were told to stay at home.”

  Miss Crater rolled her eyes and said they knew that because it had been on television, too and was a huge exaggeration of the truth, but that it was some illness that people had caught, and probably only the elderly or young were in that bad of shape.

  Mrs. Smith went on, “Well, they are saying the sick ones are waking up and attacking others.”

  “Of course, they are. They’re dead and coming back to eat human flesh,” Curt said.

  “Dude.” Billy nodded in agreement in his own weird language.

  Curt and Billy were the type I preferred to avoid. At times, they talked funny, like surfers from California. They wore a lot of black clothing with black combat boots and walked around like some kind of warped gunfighters and were always talking about zombies taking over the world. They talked about the earth being hit by a meteorite, a virus being unleashed by secret labs, alien invasions, and about some government conspiracy.

  “We should’ve been at home for this.”

  “Seriously.”

  A simple meal in the school lunchroom usually involved theories about mystery meat, mind control, and people who wanted to take them to a laboratory to find out about their experiences aboard the mother ship that had abducted them once on a camp out. They really understood that, not knowing that most of their ideas came from the massive quantities of dope they smoked.

  Scooter was a smart nerd, but Curt and Billy were plain oddballs.

  “There’s a bus,” I said quietly when they stopped talking, so I sounded loud. They ran over, punching and shoving, but I held my spot with my elbows pointed outwards, daring anyone to take my place. I had to see the bus make it off the school parking lot and head to town. I needed to have that hope for escape.

  “The bus,” I whispered, to no one at all.

  Chapter 3

  Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

  The bus was full of the youngest children: kindergarten through fourth grade, all packed like sardines into the seats as the driver came round the corner of the school and onto the bumpy road that was always on the list to be repaired. But it never was resurfaced, only patched, just given a lick and a promise.

  I could almost feel every bump myself as I had suffered them for so many years of school, being swept side to side and having my tailbone shaken and banged against the hard bus seat. The bus thumped a wheel into one pothole, groaned out, and then thumped the back wheel into the same hole.

  Several cars were being driven too fast, coming from the other direction, bouncing from cracked pavement to holes, weaving as the drivers avoided the people walking along the road; some shamblers left wet footprints behind, and one lost a hand that was ignored and forgotten and would stay and maybe rot in time to come.

  Fascinated, I watched the hand, waiting to see if it moved around on its own; it didn’t.

  Mrs. Smith complained, “The parents were told not to come here.

  It’s too dangerous and will cause a traffic mess. Why are they doing it? We’ve already lost….”

  She trailed off, but we knew what that meant; someone’s parents had tried to come get him and had been attacked by whatever those things were. If they came back, infected, we might see our parents coming at us.

  My friend, Robin muttered, “Good, I hope my dad was one of them.”

  It was impossible to blame Robin for saying that if anyone knew her situation. Although her mother didn’t believe her, her dad had touched Robin in ways that were wrong from when she was a toddler until she got breasts in sixth grade.

  Other than me, she hadn’t bothered to tell anyone since her mom wouldn’t support her. That the abuse had stopped didn’t make things okay again; she had bad memories from the incidents and hated him with a passion.

  I think she would have rejoiced at seeing him chewed on while he screamed. He always pretended to be a great dad, especially when I was around: buying us treats such as ice cream and soda and chips or renting tons of movies or taking us to the mall in the city or ice skating, but I didn’t fall for his fakeness.

  Anyway, the big yellow bus rumbled away, the cars headed our

  way, and those creatures were ambling about, so it was a shock, but not a total surprise, when the bus swept to the side and plowed into the ditch and into one of the senior’s big red trucks and another's black sports car; all were in a mangled wreck to one side.

  The scared, nervous bus driver, whining, weepy children, a bad road, too fast driving, cars weaving from the other way, and shambling creatures: with all of those different variables, a crash was almost expected.

  Someone was still crumpled in the sports car that had spun around and crashed, landing in the ditch with its windshield a mass of cracks and a hole in the center. Also, the truck was banged up but was empty; the driver’s door was hanging open. I could imagine the driver getting out to complain about whatever caused the wreck, maybe a shambler, and he had been attacked because while that might have been oil splashed all around the wreckage, it was really too red for it to be anything but blood.

  The bus rolled into the car and truck, sheared off the open door of the truck on the driver’s side and caught itself midway down its length on the side of the ditch, leaning at a steep cant. It almost flipped over on its side.

  “Oh, my God,” Robin said.

  “Is it gonna fall over?”

  “That’s freaky,” Loveta said. This time, the comment wasn’t as cool because it wasn’t so freakish, but horrifying. She stepped back from the window and sat at a desk, opened her handbag, took out her brush, and brushed her pretty blonde hair while shoving a stick of gum

  in her mouth. She had either lost interest or didn’t want to see what happened next.

  Maybe I imagined the smell of peppermint bubble gum surrounding me.

  “Tell me what happens,” Loveta demanded.

  Of the three cars that flashed by to get to the school, two stopped. One was an SUV that a man jumped out of; he had a daughter in second grade. I knew them somewhat. Using a baseball bat, he slammed it into the head of a woman who reached for him with filthy hands and who had most of her stomach dripping onto the pavement. After a few blows, she stopped moving, and he sprinted to the bus, almost crawling
under where the bus leaned.

  One of the boys cheered when the woman went down as if this were a sport of some type, but I understood and breathed a sigh of relief.

  “The door won’t open,” Scooter announced, “see, at that angle….”

  “We get it,” Nick said, “they’ll have to crawl out of the window.” I hadn’t thought of either of those two things, yet; my brain was slow. This is a prime example of why I never wanted to be in a zombie apocalypse and never played those X-Box or computer games or talked about it like a role-playing game (like Curt and Billy did ad nauseum). I don’t know how to think of possibilities such as that and problems such as the door not being able to be opened; I suck at problem solving on the fly.

  It took several precious seconds before the first little kid dropped from the window and into the man’s arms. I imagined that it must be pure chaos in the bus, and depending on the condition of the driver, there might be only one or two adults helping. Another little one dropped, and then a third dropped into the grass in the ditch.

  “Behind you,” someone in my classroom yelled, but we were behind windows, and the man didn’t hear us. We were like arm chair quarterbacks.

  The woman from another car must have yelled because the man turned and began swinging the bat again at a burly man who reached for him. Frantically, the woman waved at the children. She leaned down for a second speaking to the kids and then walked on toward the man with the bat.

  The three little kids just squatted in the grass, frozen in place.

  We saw a large young man jump out of his truck on the parking lot, ready to pull out. He ran full speed at the bus.

  “That’s Tater,” Lance yelped.

  Tate, a running back for the school team, never paused, jumped bodies, and flew across grass and broken pavement. He scooped up two of the little kids who had fallen from the bus windows; holding them as if they were big footballs, he made a semi-circle and ran back to his truck.

  “Amazing,” someone said in admiration.

  Lance and Brandon slapped hands in a high-five and whooped for their friend.

  Then Brandon moaned, “Hey…hey...Tater…whatcha doing?”

  “He’s going back,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him to watch the man battling with his bat or the woman yanking children down to the ground.

  I found out later when I asked if that the woman finally got her own son, a little kindergartener, out of the bus, and with him in her arms, she raced back, gathered the other children, and ran back to her car. She stuffed them into the car, pushing and shoving and barely slamming her own door before a creature slapped the window dramatically, leaving bloody hand prints all over.

  She spun the car around and got away. Or she at least got past the view of our window and what we knew.

  Tate had another two children in his arms and was back at his truck where he leaned down, hands on his knees, and caught his breath for a second.

  Go, Tate,” someone whispered.

  It was the most heroic thing I had ever seen, and I would have been more thrilled had the circumstances not been so dire.

  Mrs. Smith was beside herself, bouncing on her toes. “How did he get out of the school? I saw him downstairs, and we knew we couldn’t get out the front door because they’re down there, banging to get inside. How on earth….”

  The answer was clear when we saw the group of creatures come around the corner. A few were parents of kids we knew; there was

  Mrs. Peters, her arms and face gnawed to the bone from when she had fought back with every ounce of her strength.

  The downstairs custodian was about to collapse with his leg in tatters, and oh, dear Jesus and God, a few students from fifth or sixth grade, and a dozen or more juniors and seniors were near.

  These weren’t just creatures; they were us.

  Beside me, Robin was muttering, and Lance yelled, “Get up, Tater.”

  And things outside went from horrible to much worse.

  When Mrs. Smith had first gotten the information, she told the teachers downstairs, the nurse, Principal Porter, and the custodians to close and lock all but one door. With calm efficiency, she had everyone helping her load the youngest students into a bus in the courtyard and get ready to roll out.

  Trying to get the seniors out to their cars and away became a problem when parents, unwilling to follow instructions because of sheer terror, pulled up outside to get their children in cars, vans, or trucks. Two of the infected outside the school suddenly became four and then eight within minutes. As bitten-fleeing teens, they chomped into necks and bit out hunks of flesh; each of those bitten died quickly and staggered up to attack others.

  Several of the fifth and sixth graders, grabbed by parents trying to put them into cars, were attacked.

  Mrs. Smith saw Principal Porter ripped to shreds as he tried to save two little ones, along with their older sister and mother, from the creatures. However, they were pulled to the ground, screaming and bleeding. They became part of the horde.

  Leaving one of the others to lead, Mrs. Smith climbed the stairs to get the rest prepared to leave or to buckle down; whichever came.

  Outside, the dozens and dozens of creatures rounded the corner and converged on the tipped bus. The noise and activity quickly were drawing them.

  Tate fell over a body that he had tried to jump over when it moved and its hand reached for him. He got up and ran again, snagging two more small ones and came back as we held our breaths. Like the good athlete he was, Tate made a perfect hurdle-jump back over the body and got into his truck, slamming the door.

  That was six who might not have made it without his help.

  “Tater saved six of them and has them in his truck,” Brandon related to Loveta. “He’s driving over the back way; those big tires of his are making it.”

  “That’s a bad-ass truck,” Loveta said.

  Word was she knew all about that truck and how well the shock absorbers worked.

  The man who was swinging the bat turned, and we could almost imagine hearing the crunch of his knee twisting. To his credit, he kept swinging as he was dragged down onto the ground beneath the creatures.

  After the bat was yanked away, one of the ghouls managed to chomp down on the man’s fingers, pulling and breaking them off like a dog with a bone. Another was already on the legs, chewing and ripping away his jeans, and one tore the ear off in a bright red spray of blood.

  He had his head thrown back, and it was easy to imagine how he must be crying out for mercy and wailing with pain, but no one opened the window to listen. My heart broke for the child on the bus who was forced to see his father torn apart.

  At the other end of the bus, the emergency panel was kicked out, and a teacher and a bunch of kids streamed out. Unfortunately, they climbed out to face the horde of ghouls, starving for flesh, clawing, and reaching for the scared children.

  “I can’t watch this.” Robin pulled away and went with a few others to sit down.

  Mr. Griffin walked into the room with three seniors trailing him: Mona, a large girl who couldn’t have outrun the creatures anyway; Patricia, the so-called senior slut and who was applying more candy-pink, shining lip gloss as she walked; and Brett, who periodically had been put in various trash cans around campus. He always thought he was part of the joke, but he was actually the joke.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Mr. Griffin asked.

  “Send Patricia down there to do the zombies, and while she keeps them busy, we can run,” Brandon suggested.

  “Brandon….”

  “What? I’ll get detention hall? I don’t think we’ll be having after school detention, Mr. G.”

  “That’s enough. If you can’t help….”

  “Can’t we just get along?” Brett asked. He barely got the words out before Nick threw a ball of wadded paper at him. “Hey, who made you the Apocalypse boss?”

  “Just shut up,” Nick growled. He was a tenth grader and not popular like Brandon his brother
was, but he was bigger and stronger.

  Brandon was in a tenth grade class re-taking the subject because of his poor scores the first and second time he took the class. “Ewww,”

  he said, watching the action below.

  Another parent had come in a car and managed to get about seven or eight kids in her car, but then she dropped her keys and was grabbed by one of the drooling, bloody creatures, a senior girl. After a short fight, three or four zombies stuffed themselves into the open doors of the car and were biting the children. None of the children were able to open the opposite doors, so they stayed in place, screaming and dying, bleeding out crimson everywhere.

  I didn’t care what anyone thought or said, I cried and let the tears just run down my face without wiping them away. A few of the children were boosted back into the bus, but the creatures followed them, scratching and clawing. At least, we couldn’t see them being eaten inside the bus. I had to close my eyes and not look at some of what was happening down below.

  But closing my eyes didn’t stop the carnage, and it didn’t help the little kids who were in danger.

  Nothing stopped the madness.

  Chapter 4

  Infected

  A dozen of the children and an adult headed back toward the school, and half a dozen more with another adult ran the opposite way. They didn’t know which way was to safety.

  “The doors are locked,” Mrs. Smith yelped, “so they can’t get in. We locked out the sick ones as we were supposed to once we got the juniors and seniors out.”

  “Open them,” said Mr. Tyron as he grabbed her keys from her hand and ran out the door; we could hear him thumping down the main staircase.

  “What if they get in?” Ashlee asked. She was still trying to get her cell phone to work. “It’s still tied up,” she huffed.

  We looked toward the doorway.

  “What?” Bevvon asked as she walked into the room. “Where’s Mr. T running?” She was kind of a friend, too, but I didn’t see her much outside of school. She lived at the trailer park with her family and her sister, DeVon, who was a stripper or a topless dancer, at the club on the edge of town, so my parents thought she wasn’t a good influence.