by Guy James
26
LOBBY, STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Lorie’s head was fixing to split, and not because she had just slammed the back of her head into her locker door.
She groaned and cut open her second packet of orange-flavored Goody’s with a pair of safety scissors. A dusting of the magical dust floated out through the cut top of the packet. Lorie licked her lips, anticipating the taste of the powder, and twisted the top off a bottle of water. Then she tilted her head back and tipped the packet of flavored aspirin and caffeine powder into her mouth.
The artificial orange flavor was delicious, and the bitter tinge that came with the powder gave the stuff just the right bite. Lorie held the Goody’s under her tongue for a few seconds, and then washed it back with some water.
The water and aspirin helped Lorie feel better right away. She was a bit concerned that she overused the stuff, but her headaches concerned her more. She was unable to endure headaches. Whatever the consequences of Goody’s overuse might be, to Lorie, they were worth the risk.
She picked up her bottle of water, closed her eyes, and tilted her head sideways, bringing the bottom of the bottle up to her left eyelid. The bottle wasn’t as cold as she would have liked, but it was better than nothing. She tilted her head the other way and repeated the process until she could feel the combined pain-relieving effects of the cold against her eyes and the second powdered aspirin.
Lorie opened her eyes, looked down, and found multivariate equations staring menacingly up at her from the textbook on the floor.
“Come on,” she said to herself, “you like math. You’re good at it. You belong here. You belong at Stuyvesant.”
Even though Lorie had just said it, she wasn’t sure. Stuyvesant High School usually required a high score on an entrance exam for admission. Lorie was never asked to take the exam. Instead, she was admitted because of who she was, and because of who Sven was, and his new position.
Sometimes, she felt like the Stuyvesant administration was taking advantage of her, using her as a way to get publicity. She wasn’t sure what they needed the publicity for, but they’d certainly gotten it, and, some of the media attention called Lorie’s own admission into question.
Whether or not all publicity was good publicity from the administration’s perspective, Lorie didn’t like to be criticized on television, and she didn’t like the fuel that it gave some of the other students to question her presence there. She just wanted to fit in, to be nerdy and semi-normal like the other students there, despite the tough exterior that she postured.
Then again, Lorie thought, it is fun to be a celebrity some of the time, to be the famous zombie killer all the other kids knew about...and feared.
It wasn’t so bad to be feared, she thought.
Lorie’s mind drifted to the Krav Maga class she was going to later that evening. The classes had become a fixture in her life. They gave her structure and an outlet.
So what if Jane and Sven thought that she was at a math team or chess team meeting or something while she was actually honing her knife-fighting skills? That reminded Lorie: she had to get her story straight—just the other day she had mixed up which team she had supposedly stayed after school with.
Let Sven and Jane suspect, she thought, what are they gonna do, anyway, stop me?
She looked down again. The math homework on the floor was sitting there, waiting. Lorie sighed, knowing that she should get back to it. She wished that she were home, with Ivan helping her through it.
He is a Russian Blue, after all, Lorie thought. So by definition, he’s good at math.
Lorie smiled, and a sudden stabbing pain behind her eyes made her flinch.
Turning away from the math homework and considering whether another packet of powdered aspirin might actually kill her, Lorie pressed the button that turned on the screen of her smart phone.
Nothing happened.
She pressed it again.
Nothing.
Groaning, Lorie pressed the button and held it. The screen of the smart phone blinked on for a moment, told Lorie that the phone needed to be charged, and then the screen went out again.
“Sven would definitely not approve,” she muttered.
Lorie had been meaning to charge her phone all day, but it kept slipping her mind. She knew that it was careless on her part, given the reliance that would be placed on web-based communication in the event of an outbreak.
“I'll charge it soon,” she told herself. “What are the chances that—”
Lorie heard a slapping sound. She turned.
Suddenly, Lorie felt uncomfortable in her own skin, loopy even. The marble floor where she was sitting seemed to dip, and the floor that she saw around her seemed to lose its shimmer. She thought she could smell a faint odor…an odor that she associated with—
Frantic, she grabbed her backpack, flipped it over and wrenched the intermediate compartment open. She tore her gas mask out of it and had it securely on her face a second later. She fastened it to her head, and, within moments, the floor beneath her hardened again, and the floor around her regained its marble luster.
She sprang to her feet, leaving her math homework and dead smart phone sitting on the floor. Her locker door, which she had been leaning on while she sat, swung open until it was stopped by her backpack, which was lying in front of the locker next to her own.
Regulating her breathing through the mask so that she was taking steady breaths, as she had been trained to do, Lorie approached the girl who lay face down at the end of the row of lockers.
“Hey,” Lorie said, “hey, are you alright?” Her voice was muffled through the mask, but clear and loud enough to be understood.
When Lorie got closer, she realized that the slapping sound had come from the girl’s face hitting the marble floor. Blood was pooling in front of the girl’s mouth, dripping slowly from the space between the girl’s upper and lower teeth.
Lorie didn't recognize the girl. The class size at Stuyvesant High School was at over seven hundred students per grade.
Lorie stopped when she was a foot away from the fallen girl. She could see more blood at the corners of the girl’s eyes, and more dripping from the girl’s nose.
“Hey,” Lorie said again, but her voice was much closer to a whisper this time.
Lorie’s breath trembled as she stood there. She knew what would happen next.
27
SVEN, JANE, AND LORIE’S APARTMENT BUILDING,
SUTTON PLACE, NEW YORK
The smart phone was still pressed to Jane’s ear when she ran into the lobby of her apartment building.
She got Lorie’s cheery voicemail recording: “Hi, this is Lorie. I can’t pick up right now, so please leave me a message and I’ll call you back soon.”
“Lorie,” Jane said, rasping into the receiver as she ran to the elevator bank, “Lorie, it’s happening—”
The phone beeped, signaling that it was time for Jane to begin recording her voicemail.
Jane pushed the button that called the elevator, spun around to make sure that she was safe, and, panting into the phone said, “Lorie, get in the safe room. It’s happening. Get in the safe room and get online. Lorie...be safe, please.”
The doors of the corner elevator began to open, and Jane stuffed the phone back into her pocket and balled her hands into fists. She stepped backward, preparing herself for what might be inside the elevator and giving herself enough room so that she had options.
Her eyes darted to the elevator status box. It showed one of the other two elevators—the one in the other corner—as being stopped in the basement, and the last elevator—the middle elevator—as on its way down. It was now on the fourth floor, and Jane knew that it would be in the lobby within moments.
The doors of the corner elevator opened all the way.
It was empty.
Jane took a lunging step toward the elevator, then stopped herself, remembering the doorman. She turned around to face the rece
iving desk. He wasn’t there.
“Angel?” she said. “Angel, are you in here?”
There was a room adjacent to the receiving desk. It opened off of the lobby’s main room and it was where deliveries were held for tenants until the tenants picked them up.
Jane glanced at the room’s open door but couldn’t see inside it from where she was. She turned back to the open elevator, and then the doors of the middle elevator opened.
From within the middle elevator, two pairs of gnarled hands reached for Jane, their infected owners stumbling over each other in an attempt to get out of the elevator and grab her.
Jane spun away and sidestepped into the waiting corner elevator. She crashed into the back wall. The elevator shook as Jane pushed herself off the wall and stabbed at the number panel.
She hit the number for her floor and the button that closed the doors at the same time and held both. Jane knew from experience that the doors always took a bit too long to close. She waited, praying that her infected neighbors wouldn’t reach the elevator before the doors closed.
The doors began to close, and, just as Jane began to exhale, a decaying, uncoordinated arm poked its way into the shrinking space between the doors.
Reacting to the arm as they were designed to do, the doors of the elevator reversed course, and began to open.
28
LOBBY, STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The girl’s eyes snapped open, and even though Lorie had expected to see what she saw in them, she couldn’t help but gasp and back away in horror. The girl’s eyes were a dull black, like dusty marbles, and they were shrunken so they looked much too small in their sockets.
The girl began to gnash her teeth violently, and Lorie stepped backward while simultaneously surveying all of the lobby that she could see from where she was.
Echoes of screams floated down to meet Lorie’s ears, and she felt herself transported into a different nightmare—one far worse than the one that had trapped her in Virginia. She knew that any zombie outbreak here, in New York City, would be something so unimaginable that...
Lorie stood in place, frozen, as she tried to process what was happening around her. She knew what was happening and knew what she was supposed to do, but the fact that it actually was happening again had ground her nerve impulses to a halt.
Go, Lorie thought. Go.
She repeated it in her mind, but couldn’t move.
Lorie was sure that her mask was on tight, so there should not have been a problem with air leakage into the mask.
I’m poisoned, Lorie thought. I have the virus. I can’t move because I already have the virus. It’s in the food again, it’s in something I ate, it’s—
Another series of echoes of screams reached her, and this time the echoes were followed by actual screams. The problem was approaching.
“Come on, Lorie,” she said to herself. “Your mind is clear, you’re not poisoned. Come on. You’ve been waiting for this. You knew this was going to happen.”
She directed her mind to direct her body into action, but the series of impulses wouldn’t connect.
“You don’t have the virus,” Lorie said to herself. “You don’t. Now move. Move.”
Lorie continued to stand there, motionless, until the distinctive sound of a bone breaking snapped Lorie out of it. She looked down at the decomposing girl, whose flow of blood had stopped, and who was now thrashing violently on the floor. Her right forearm was bent in the middle where it should not have been, and a jagged, broken bone protruded from the bend, a consequence of the zombie girl’s thrashing.
With a movement that Lorie had practiced thousands of times, she pulled her long, serrated hunting knife free from its holster in her pocket. She kept the knife with her at all times, and hid it during the school day by wearing baggy tops that covered her beltline.
With the knife held at her side, Lorie approached the zombie girl, who was gathering herself up on her hands and knees with enough coordination that no more bones were being broken in the process.
A moan, desperate with hunger, rose up from the zombie girl, and Lorie stiffened.
A cacophony of terror was rising up all around her, and the moan added a pressing flavor to the dissonance.
The zombie girl flailed her limbs against the floor as if she were attacking it, until she had risen to her hands and knees. Lorie approached slowly, measuring each step and determining where to place each of her feet in advance.
The zombie girl emitted another moan, angrier this time, and she thrashed her broken forearm against the floor so hard that the arm bent in half. The zombie girl began to crawl toward Lorie, moaning regularly now. The girl’s exposed and broken forearm bones scraped against the marble floor.
Lorie struck.
The knife ripped an arced, diagonal swath through the air and tore through the zombie girl’s scalp and skull, penetrating deep into her brain.
The zombie girl froze for an instant, the butt of the knife protruding from above her forehead at the middle of her hairline like a horn, a weak dribble of blood leaking down from the wound. Then she collapsed. Her exposed forearm bone scratched at the floor one last time, and then was still.
Lorie stood staring at what she had done until the noise around her grew louder and spurred her into action.
She wrenched the knife free of the dead zombie girl’s head and wiped it on the girl’s clothes. Then she ran back to her locker, swiped up her backpack, closed it, and slung it over her shoulder.
Holding the knife pointing downward and away from her, Lorie began to jog slowly toward the safe room, toward the screams.
29
SVEN, JANE, AND LORIE’S APARTMENT BUILDING,
SUTTON PLACE, NEW YORK
Jane pressed her back into the corner of the elevator.
The two zombies that were pursuing her aligned themselves side by side on the threshold of the elevator and stopped there. They stared at Jane with their black, shrunken eyes, and Jane stared back, her fear converting rapidly into drive.
At the precise moment that the zombies staggered across the threshold of the elevator, Jane pushed against the corner she was in and propelled herself forward, planting a front thrust kick in the solar plexus of the zombie on the right. There was a sharp crack, and the zombie flew backward into the glass enclosure that housed the building’s mailboxes.
Jane darted back into the corner of the elevator to avoid the grasp of the other zombie, who was now reaching for her and stepping inside. She let the zombie get a little closer to her, then she crept quickly around the back wall of the elevator and out of it while the zombie was still turning around.
Back in the lobby, the zombie that Jane had kicked was writhing and beginning to get up.
Jane stomped on his head repeatedly, aiming for the point of the zombie’s chin. She finally made contact the way she intended, and the zombie’s neck snapped. The zombie stopped writhing and lay still, his head turned almost one hundred eighty degrees around.
The zombie that Jane had left in the elevator was now in the lobby, and Jane led her zombie neighbor toward the doorman’s desk, staying a few feet out of reach.
Just as she was coming around the last corner of the desk, she felt a sharp pain in her scalp as her hair was jerked backward and she was pulled, head first, into the receiving room.
30
LOBBY, STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
As Lorie rounded the bend toward the main safe room, she began to see students.
First there were only a handful, then several handfuls, and then dozens. Some were running in all directions, screaming and completely out of control. Others stood in place like frozen statues, staring at nothing.
The majority of the students that Lorie saw were pressed up against the entrance of the main safe room, each awaiting entry. Their masks were on, and they seemed to be in relative control of themselves.
The mass of students moved with a purpose. Through their cries and s
creams, a clear goal united them: to get into the main safe room, lock the zombies out, and survive.
Lorie approached the mass, which should have been shrinking at a faster rate as the students filtered through the narrow entryway into the main safe room, but panic was adding a degree of disorder that the safe room drills couldn’t have prepared them for.
A group of students wheeled on Lorie and she saw, even through the masks they wore, that their faces were brutally hard, unforgiving...and…triumphant.
“You did this,” one of them yelled.
“You brought them here,” another student said, choking back sobs, “and now we’re all gonna die. My parents and my brother, they’re all gonna die.”
“You killed them, Lorie,” another student said. “You stay away from us.”
“I didn’t bring any of this here,” Lorie yelled back at them, “just like I didn’t cause the outbreak in Virginia. This isn’t my fault.”
“This is completely your fault,” a student in the crowd said.
“Leave her alone,” someone deep within the mass of students shouted. “Leave her alone.”
Part of the mass of students that was filtering into the main safe room peeled away and converged on Lorie. Their faces were animated with what Lorie interpreted as hostile intent.
Lorie put the knife back in her pocket. “I’m not going to fight you,” she said. “And no matter what you feel about me, we have to help them.” Lorie pointed at the frozen students who were scattered throughout the lobby. “We have to help them get their masks on and get them inside.”
“It’s too late,” someone in the crowd said. “Don’t touch them. They have the virus.”
