by catt dahman
“What was she boo hooing about?” Curt asked, his eyes boring into my skull.
I shrugged, “I dunno, hard to tell with all her crying. All I got was her saying she was used and wanted to go away. I guess she was tired of working? I dunno. I’m half asleep,” I said as I yawned.
“Aren’t you and her best friends?”
“I guess we were.” I tried to look bored. “I just want to survive and work on the winning team.” Maybe that was the real truth.
Curt smiled finally. “Good. That’s right. Get some sleep. G’night, Nick.”
I appreciated Nick’s grip on my arm because I was shaking from the interrogation. He gave me a quick hug that said I had passed the test and that he would ask later. I crawled back to my spot and fell asleep at once.
Chapter 11
Day Three
We mixed up some powdered eggs, and I smiled to myself, thinking I had always suspected the eggs weren’t real. We used the last of the bread for cheese sandwiches for us. Jerico took a few peanut butter sandwiches and the warm, faintly soured milk to the outcasts.
We had waffles from a box that weren’t warm but were okay with syrup.
We killed time with some games and talking.
In the afternoon, we heard screams and moaning. No one had been guarding the stairwells, so a bunch of creatures had come up the front stairs in a mass. But most had gone past our rooms to the outcast’s area because they were louder than we were. We had checked at times, but we had stopped being on constant duty and had gotten sloppy.
Sloppiness equaled death and worse.
Ripped apart, Carter lay on the floor in the hallway, and Thomas, sitting against the wall, had been bitten in several places on his arms.
Robin, Mike, and Ruby were swinging hard and doing their best, but it wasn’t going well for them; there were a lot of ghouls, and Robin and Ruby were small.
I think our group would just have walked away if we hadn’t been in danger as well. Jerico, Lance, Brandon, and the survivor boys jumped in fast, beating the creatures down the hallway. Shanna, Sian, and I went after the stragglers while Bev protected the room.
We had it almost finished when I saw Shanna too close to the stairs as she finished one off. One second she was looking at me in pure panic as she stepped into thin air, and in the next second, she was gone, crashing down the stairs and into the creatures below.
I screamed with frustration and finished off the last ghoul, ran to the railing, and looked down. Zombies moaned at me. Shanna was at the bottom, and they were already on her, feeding. “Shanna?”
She screamed; the things were pulling at her skin. The best I could have done, if I had had a gun, would have been to put her down. I felt nauseated. Taking a deep breath, I walked away.
“Get stuff and fill the stairway,” I yelled. Bev came to help me,and then more joined us. We dropped desks and chairs down the stairs so that they were a tangled mess of wood and metal.
Down the hall, the rest were doing the same thing after having finished off the ones they were fighting.
The noise was deafening between the constant moaning and with our dropping down everything we could find. Teachers’ desks, students’ desks, chairs, rolling white boards, charts, tables, bookshelves, and trash went down with bodies. Nothing could climb the stairs now; the zombies didn’t have the motor skills to coordinate climbing over the messes we created. The thing was that we had also blocked our way out.
We had a breather, and Jerico passed out drinks, even to the outcasts.
Carter started wiggling on the ground, and Brandon walked over and slammed his bat down until he stopped. Jerico and he then tossed the body down the stairs.
“I’m done….” Thomas began.
Billy shoved a javelin into Thomas’ mouth and pulled back and then repeated the movement until the boy was down for good. They added him to the pile blocking the stairs. Who knew what Thomas had meant to say, but the fact was this: once bitten, a person was going to change. One hundred percent of the time, a person turned. One hundred percent of the time, once turned, a person was going to try to bite and infect more.
“If I get infected, take me out,” Brandon said.
“I will,” I said before I could check myself.
Luckily, he took it a different way than how I meant it, “Thanks,
Arisbe. We have to do that for each other.”
“Anyone else hurt?” Jerico asked. No one answered. He looked at each of us. “What’s wrong with you?” he pointed at Patricia.
“I got some blood on me. I’m okay.”
Billy looked her over and said, “It’s yours. That’s a bite.
“No, It’s…it’s not infected. I got blood on me fighting,” Patricia said. She was barely hobbling on a swollen, wrapped ankle. One wrist was wrapped, but she still had poked with a field hockey stick, and her other arm was swollen and purple, wrapped with two boards to hold the broken bones. The arm that she had used to poke at the zombies was the one that was blood-splattered, and there was a tiny open circle of a wound on her forearm.
I wasn’t a doctor, but I knew it was a bite.
We looked at one another.
Billy lunged at her to poke her in the eye and the brain to end it for her, but she didn’t want it that way. She lost her balance on her hurt ankle as she was reaching for him, and they fell in a tangle. Billy slammed his fists against her head and squirmed, but she had locked her teeth onto his arm and wasn’t letting go, grinding her teeth together.
She was furious. I know she was angry at being used, at being an outcast, at having less food and a lesser bed, and at being caught with a bite and doomed. I felt she was furious at Billy for deciding things on his own and taking action prematurely.
Curt hit her with a bat.
Billy’s arm went red with blood, and Patricia kept biting, letting the blood pour around her mouth, mixing with saliva and drooling out in strings. Jerico ran at them, grabbed the javelin, and plunged it into
Patricia’s back. She screamed with the pain and let go of Billy’s arm. He was on his butt and scooted with his boots backwards until he was out of her reach.
She spat blood on the floor.
“Stop,” Patricia screamed at Jerico. She wasn’t a zombie, just a person who had bitten Billy’s arm. She tried to reach the puncture he had put into her back but couldn’t reach it.
Curt kept hitting her with the bat, and Jerico stabbed Patricia again with the javelin until blood was all over the floor and they were sliding around in it. Brandon ran up and took a swing. In a few seconds,she was dead, her head was split, and she had bled out.
Curt looked her over, and then they threw her body down the stairs. He yelled triumphantly, “She was bitten. That was a bite on her arm. She was infected. I knew it.” So, her having been bitten and being infected made their actions acceptable.
“I knew she was bitten,” Brandon said. “She could have infected us if she had started biting. It was just a matter of time.”
“Oh.” Billy stared at his bloody arm.
“She was just bitten, Dude,” Curt told him.
“How long does it take?” I asked.
“It depends on the book or movie,” Curt explained, “seconds or minutes. Some take an hour or hours. They can have infected saliva before they turn, see. When they turn, they’re just more infected.”
Billy looked at his arm.
“Cut his arm off, fast,” Brandon said, “then, the infection won’t go to his brain. Right?”
“No…no…she wasn’t turned….”
Curt motioned to Lance and Marshall to help him carry Billy, kicking and screaming, to the outcasts’ room. “Hold him down, and tie his legs. Billy, I have to do this. It’s the only way to save you.”
Earlier, Brandon realized that the school had a fire ax on the wall. Most, schools didn’t have them anymore, but no one had ever removed that one from upstairs. They had walked by it so many times and had seen it over and over, but they had
n’t noticed it until that morning when Brandon used it for the zombies; it was a good weapon.
Bev ran for the first aid supplies, telling Miss Crater to watch her sisters and keep them calm. Both of the little girls were shaking with fear but were holding up well and never whined or cried.
She helped Brandon clean the ax with alcohol.
Mona had sat down on Billy’s legs, and because of her weight, he couldn’t move them. Lance held the arm that was bitten, and Marshall and Sian had the other arm pinned.
Billy begged them not to do it. He pleaded, “Wait and see.”
“If we wait and see, then it will be too late.”
Bev and Brandon cleaned the ax for a good long while, making it sparkling clean. I thought about telling them if the infection were in
Patricia’s saliva, then the cleaning was taking much too long and Billy already had it in his bloodstream, but I didn’t say a word.
Nick took my hand and gripped it tightly.
Curt directed Mike to make a small fire. He knew exactly what todo in this situation, but now he had a victim, albeit his own friend.
Billy kept screaming. When Brandon slammed the ax down at Billy’s elbow, Billy somehow got louder; I didn’t think it was possible.
I may not have liked Billy much, but I felt horrible for him as he screamed and rolled his eyes, even trying to fight.
Bev put a tourniquet on his upper arm; it was late but necessary.
Brandon was gutsy, but he was incompetent as he swung the ax over and over, cutting a little bit at a time. It was torture.
When Brandon finally gave the ax to Jerico, he slammed it down and finished the job. Jerico had ended the torture.
Everyone who had helped was covered in blood.
Bev poured alcohol on the open stump, and Billy weakly screamed again.
“Okay, now we heat the ax in the fire and sear the blood veins,”
Brandon said, setting the blade into the flames. Smoke curled out the window as we watched.
In a few minutes, Brandon applied the hot metal to the raw wound. I don’t know if it cauterized anything, but it made Billy go poker-stiff with pain. He passed out after that, and Bev, wearing gloves, packed gauze against the wound and wrapped him tightly.
“Then, we put him in a room in a comfortable bed and guarded him.”
The bloody people stripped while Nick and I poured water on them and watched as bloody water drained down the grates in the rest-rooms. The bloody clothing was tossed in soapy water in sinks, and towels or sheets from the nurse’s office were offered for them to wear.
Ruby and Robin offered to put on gloves and scrub the clothing for everyone.
Since Nick and I were clean, we offered to fix something for dinner. We found a giant can of beef stew and served that with canned
apples and applesauce mixed into cereal, pretending it was apple crisp.
The outsiders took their food and went to a clean new room that was closer to us.
But we were running out of rooms that hadn’t been gore-covered.
When we had guard duty again, Nick and I shared the job. In away, we felt much safer and better because the creatures simply couldn’t get up the stairs.
Watching Shanna die had been hard for me, and I talked about it with Nick, telling him what had happened and how I had thought she was a warrior princess. Except for a misstep on her part, she still would be with us fighting the creatures.
Nick confessed that his seeing Billy lose an arm had been hard, not because he liked him, but because he didn’t. Billy was the so-called expert and a survivalist. If experts died, so could the rest of us.
Nick’s watching his brother Brandon remove the boy’s arm had made Nick feel sick.
“I think he was just waiting for any chance to use the ax that way and to do that. I think he wanted to cut off an arm or leg.”
I shivered. “I think Curt wanted to do it, too. No matter whose arm or leg it was.”
Nick held my hand. At the end of our watch and before I went to my spot to sleep, he kissed me.
That was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
Chapter 1 2
Day Four
In the morning, we learned that Billy had died, and just in case he was infected, Curt poked Billy through the eye to his brain so he wouldn’t become a zombie. They thought probably he had died of shock and blood loss, but they also believed they had done the right thing because Billy looked infected.
I never saw him, so I didn’t know if that were true or not, but I believed that Patricia had not infected Billy and that the arm cutting had been for pleasure, not for medical necessity.
I thought he died because Brandon and Curt wanted to use the ax on a live person to see if it would work. I kind of wished it had, but then if it did, they might want to cut on everyone for every scratch we got.
Mike, Loveta, and Brett were gone. No one knew exactly when they had left or where they had gone, and no one really knew how they had left. But because a couple of tied sheets were hanging from an open window, we surmised that the trio had climbed out of the window. I untied the sheets and stacked them to the side.
I hoped the trio had gotten away and were safe, and I wished I had had the guts to have gone with them.
Marshall called for us.
Everyone watched out of the window, speaking in murmurs. The sky was odd-looking with rolling clouds that harbored lightning and looked solid, too solid to be smoke from a fire. Marshall looked at the clouds for a very long time and then told us, “I think they dropped bombs.”
“Whom do you think we’re at war with?” Lance asked.
“I think we did it to ourselves. I think we bombed our big cities to kill the Zs.” He pointed out how angry and violent the clouds looked and how they were full of dust and debris. I shivered when he said that if it had been his choice, he might have sent bombs, too, to kill the Zs if they were taking over.”
“But that implies…well, that they are winning. I don’t see how. I can’t believe those things are everywhere now,” Bev said.
“Of course, they’re winning. We have no chance against them,”Curt said. He was still shaken up about the loss of Billy and had lost some of his enthusiasm.
“Maybe those aren’t bombs. That…that’s just way too much to take in,” I said.
“I am just saying what I think it is and what it could be,” Marshall told us. “I never would have said we would be dealing with Zs either, but we are.”
“We can win. We are....Curt, you’re too smart to let them win,”
Bevvon told Curt.
He grinned and gave her a high-five, glowing with her praise as she had hoped he would. We didn’t need Curt wound up again if we could prevent it. Bevvon kept smiling at Curt, but I knew her, and it was close to a mad grimace; Lance gave her hand a squeeze, and she didn’t let go of him.
“Where’s Robin?” I asked. I hadn’t seen her at breakfast.
“Maybe she left with Loveta and the others,” Brandon said. He didn’t seem to care, but I caught the quick look he gave Jerico.
“You wanted her to hang with you last night,” Mona said, looking at Jerico and Curt.
Curt spun, “Shut up, lard ass. You were told to shut your big pie hole yesterday, weren’t you?”
“When you were murdering Mr. G and Natalie.”
“Give it up. You didn’t give a rip about Natalie,” Curt said.
“About Robin,” I asked, “did she go off alone?”
“No. They came and got her. She was crying,” Mona went on.
My heart felt heavy. I hadn’t been watching over her because she was with the outcasts and I had been hanging with the popular kids and holding hands with Nick. What had happened to my friend? Why had I been ignoring her these four days? Oh, because she wasn’t with the in crowd, and I was.
Guilt hit me.
“Where was she last?” I asked. No one answered. “Mona?”
“She went to the right wing I thin
k. With them.”
“I can go look,” Brandon said.
Watching my words carefully, I said, “Nah. She most likely curled up, having some emotional melt down and needed a boot in the ass to get her up and going again.” Heads nodded. “I am not gonna have drama going on. I hate drama.”
“If you need help, yell,” Jerico said. He waved me on. I had given the right response, I guess.
I didn’t say anything else but picked up a bat and decided I would go look. It surprised me when Nick grabbed a bat and joined me.
We looked in all the rooms but didn’t find her: all of the rooms were empty. I expected her to be somewhere, maybe upset or alone,but I didn’t see her anywhere. We even glanced in the stairwells and restrooms. I felt dejected.
There was no rope of sheets, but she hadn’t vanished into thiair. Was she hiding?
I stared at one particular classroom: looking at the furniture that
remained, looking at books tossed to the floor, and seeing the
projection screen on the wall and the blood on the floor that had dried to maroon.
The screen. In the room before this one, the screen was torn off the wall; I had seen it lying to the side in a corner.
Walking out, I went back to the other room and walked over to the white screen with its canvas curled over. It looked as if it had been placed there with stacks of books. When I pulled the screen back, there was my best friend, Robin, her face was pale, and her nude body was stretched out.
She was so tiny. A slash was open on her throat, and she had bled heavily and had died right there.
I wanted to scream and cry for her, but I kept myself under control. “She was raped and killed. She wasn’t a zombie, so no one did anything to her head,” I said the obvious.
“No, someone with us did this,” Nick said, “someone who is hiding and sneaking around,” Nick said.
“No, someone else killed her. Not one of us.” I was about to start screaming. “Her throat….”
“Someone did it. There must be someone dangerous hiding up here.”
I was about to throttle him but realized what he was saying.
“Okay, that is possible. I can’t say it isn’t possible, but it’s also possible that someone with us did this.” I didn’t even go through my short list of suspects.
