by Guy James
“Yeah,” someone else said, “they’re infected.”
“They’re not infected,” Lorie said, “they just can’t move. You know that. We have to get their masks on.”
Students continued to filter into the main safe room, disappearing from sight. The mass that was huddled against the entryway was shrinking.
“If you want to help them,” one of the students who had separated from the larger mass said, “then you help them.”
The students turned away from Lorie and pushed against the others, toward the main safe room’s entrance.
“You’re not—” Lorie began to say, then trailed off. She could see they weren’t going to help.
Lorie went to the frozen students closest to her, one by one. She approached each, searched in each of their backpacks for a mask, and when she could find one, put it on the frozen student. She saw several other students doing the same thing she was, and her spirits, given the circumstances, were lifted.
By the time she was done with the ones closest to her, she had masks on four out of six students. She needed two more masks.
She gathered herself and glanced around the lobby. There were so many other frozen students. Too many.
“Please,” Lorie screamed, “you have to help us.”
The students pushing their way into the main safe room entrance made no sign of having heard her.
“I can’t...” Lorie felt the tears welling up and shut her eyes tight. “You have to...”
Gritting her teeth, Lorie opened her eyes and ran to the next nearest cluster of frozen students and repeated what she had done earlier, looking for the students’ masks and putting them on when she found them. She did four more groups of loosely scattered students before she had to stop.
The approaching zombies were getting too close.
She pulled the knife out of her pocket again and backed away toward the main safe room. Glancing around her as she went, Lorie weaved among the clusters of frozen students, and as she did so, her dismay grew.
The ones that Lorie and the other students who were trying to help had put masks on—the ones who she thought they had been saving—remained unblinking and dead to the world, and the zombies were drawing closer.
Frantic, Lorie began to run back and forth between the frozen students, shaking them and pushing them and trying to get them to run, to move, to anything. They wouldn’t budge. Another student who Lorie didn’t recognize was doing the same thing, and getting the same result.
Small groups of zombie students staggered closer. They were coming at Lorie and the frozen student clusters from all directions in the lobby. In her peripheral vision, Lorie could make out more of these small groups toppling down the stairs from the first floor and righting themselves when they reached the lobby.
And behind the zombie students who were descending from the first floor...there was a much larger zombie mass. When Lorie saw the throng gathering at the top of the stairs, her jaw slackened and her train of thought momentarily escaped her.
The throng was accumulating more and more zombie students as if it were waiting to reach critical mass, as if it had a group mind.
Lorie turned to the entrance to the main safe room. There were six students still waiting to get in, the rest were already inside and out of sight.
She looked back up at the top of the stairs. Apparently, critical mass had been reached.
31
The throng was pushing forward now, and the zombie students closest to the edge of the stairs were tumbling down toward the lobby, their bones breaking along the way.
Those sounds were unnerving, but the sounds that the bodies of the zombies made when they gathered themselves at the first landing and continued downward were worse.
At the first landing—the only one before the lobby floor—the zombies would try to get up on their broken bodies, their limbs twisted in unnatural ways, their faces bloody, their noses and teeth bent and broken.
After reaching the first landing, most of the zombie students didn’t stand up. Their damaged bodies couldn’t manage it. Instead, they crawled across the landing and down the remaining set of stairs, breaking their already mangled bodies further.
The first few that reached the lobby floor—there were three of them—began to crawl toward the main safe room, pulling themselves forward with their hands and pushing weakly with their feet and knees.
As bad as the three crawling zombies looked, Lorie had to wonder how they could have gotten into such bad shape so quickly. Lorie had isolated herself in the lobby to do her homework just a few hours earlier, and everyone had been fine when she had left her last class, so the outbreak inside Stuyvesant could not have been continuing for more than two or three hours, at the most.
“How could it be happening so fast?” Lorie said.
Staring at the crawling monsters in front of her, Lorie realized how dry her mouth was. She had water in her locker, but it was too late to go back for it now. There was plenty of water in the safe room, but she had to get inside first.
The crawlers inched toward her, gasping and moaning as they craned their necks to inhuman angles. Something gurgled deep in their throats as they gasped and Lorie could feel the sound churning the pit of her stomach. She felt pain in her own lungs at the sound of the crawlers’ drawing breath. The sound reminded Lorie that based on the medical information that had been gathered after the Virginia outbreak, the zombies didn’t actually need to breathe, but their diaphragms continued to work by rote. Lorie thought that made it all the more disturbing.
The crawlers’ intake of air rattled something inside them, something that must have been damaged and broken, and they strained their necks backward even farther. Lorie understood this as their effort to bite her, even at the impossible distance, because the farther back their heads bent, the wider their mouths opened. The neck of one of the girl crawler’s bent back too far and crunched, but the crawler made no sign of noticing it, her lackluster eyes gazing fixedly at Lorie. Lorie thought she saw a hint of amusement there, a deviant longing to flay the living and tear flesh from bones and bite and tear until what was left was an unrecognizable pile of guts.
Lorie hoped that they didn’t feel anything, and tried to make herself stop thinking about it. They were just high school students. Or rather, they had been just high school students a few hours earlier. Whether they were in pain or not, they didn’t act like it, and they were coming to take her, to make her one of them. Getting away was all that mattered. There was no sense in worrying about the pain of those who were beyond help.
She looked from the crawlers and the trail of blood they were dragging behind them to the students whose masks she had managed to put on. They still stood there, helpless. The small groups of zombie students who had already been on the lobby floor were now less than ten feet away.
“They don’t feel anything,” Lorie said to herself, “and they don’t have emotions...it’s just the virus that drives them. Just the virus.” She took a deep breath, and her voice became stern. “Now stop staring, help the others, and get to safety.”
Baring her teeth and holding her knife high, Lorie rounded on the closest group of approaching zombie students. There were four of them—two close together at the back of the group and two spread wide in the front—dragging forward in an expanding V formation.
One of the two at the front accelerated toward Lorie and broke the formation. Groaning, he reached for her with a poorly coordinated grab. Lorie side-stepped, gripped the handle of her knife with both hands, and stabbed at the zombie’s face in an arc. The zombie turned toward her as the knife cut through the air, and inadvertently aligned its right eye with the knife’s trajectory.
The long knife penetrated the zombie’s eye and brain, and the zombie went limp in an instant. He dropped, and he would have pulled the knife and Lorie down with him had Lorie not already been yanking hard to retrieve the weapon.
The knife came free more easily than Lorie expected, and the momentum of her yank pulled
her off balance. She bumped into a frozen student and latched onto his arm to steady herself.
She regained her footing and looked up at the student who she had tried to help earlier, and who she had now shaken by colliding with him. He wavered, but as far as Lorie could tell, recovered not a shred of comprehension of who he was or what was happening around him.
“They’re not gonna make it,” she muttered through gritted teeth, and, fueled by an increasing rage, made short work of the three remaining zombie students that had been in the V formation.
She stabbed each of the zombie students in the brain, opting for one of the eyes of each as an entry point for her knife. Having thought over her offensive strategy a thousand times, Lorie knew that by aiming and timing her stabs just right, she could penetrate the zombies’ eyes, which she estimated to be the softest entry point for her knife to pierce their brains.
This strategy required that her stabs be extremely precise, because she was putting her hands in close proximity to the zombies’ mouths by stabbing the front of their faces. To successfully employ this strategy, she had to make sure that the knife went all the way in at once, piercing the brain, and killing the zombie.
Her two fallback strategies were stabbing through the ear and at the soft part of the back of the neck.
Slicing at the neck to sever the spinal column or trying to stab at the spine itself, Lorie had decided, were not efficient ways of dispatching the zombies.
After the last of the zombies of the V formation fell, Lorie gave each of the frozen students in the cluster nearest to her one last, hopeful push, but they were too far gone.
She gave them a plaintive look, then dashed to the entrance of the main safe room and moved as quickly as she could down the narrow entryway, which was now empty.
32
SVEN, JANE, AND LORIE’S APARTMENT BUILDING,
SUTTON PLACE, NEW YORK
Jane stared up at her assailant in shock. Angel—a very infected Angel—was bent over her.
Her favorite doorman turned zombie had yanked her into the receiving room by her hair, pulled her to the floor, and was now on top of her. He had tried to bite her neck as soon as she was on the floor, and Jane’s hands had shot up by reflex and gripped him by the shoulders. She was keeping him in place now, but her strength was waning by the second.
Thin strands of saliva trailed downward from Angel’s mouth and dangled above Jane’s face. Thin though they were, they did not break but hung over Jane and menaced her with deadly promise.
Jane’s eyes darted up from Angel’s mouth to his eye sockets. She shuddered with revulsion. Angel’s dark, shrunken eyeballs seemed to threaten to drop even before the tentacles of saliva.
She strained and bent her neck to move her head out from under Angel’s mouth. He tried to get his arms up and over her, but her firm grip on his shoulders, combined with his sudden lack of coordination made his movements amount to a shallow, sideways flapping of his wrists.
The remaining zombie from the elevator approached the doorway of the receiving room. Jane saw him appear in her peripheral vision, a spasmodic, shambling monster that towered over Angel and her.
Jane knew that she had to make a move right away. Her strength had begun to fail, and Angel seemed only to have grown stronger.
She bent her knees, brought her legs up, and dug her heels and back into the floor. She pushed off the floor as hard as she could and flung Angel off of her, toward the other zombie’s legs.
Angel rolled into the zombie’s legs with all the force and violence that Jane had put into the shove and the zombie lost his balance and tottered backward. He recovered within seconds and resumed his advance into the receiving room.
Angel rolled over on his side, and, in a spasm of movement, reached for Jane with one arm. His fingers were crooked and the flesh on them had sloughed off to reveal bone at the joints. All but one of his fingernails—the one on his pinky—were gone.
Jane scrambled to her feet and tried to back away. She slammed into the shelves that were behind her. The metal edges of the shelves cut into her neck and lower back. She flinched at the pain, but continued to press backward to stay out of Angel’s grasp.
She grabbed a small package from the shelf next to her and threw it down on Angel’s head. She grabbed another, larger package from another shelf and threw it as hard as she could at the zombie who was now clumsily shuffling the points of his feet into Angel’s back as he tried to enter the receiving room too.
A corner of the package hit the zombie square on the nose and broke it. The zombie staggered backward, but did not fall. Jane took another package from a shelf and felt the panic rise up in her. The package offensive could only buy her a little bit of time. It was not a long-term solution.
There had to be something else, another way. Jane tried to push the panic back down. She needed to be rational, to determine the best course of action, and take it. She knew that she couldn’t get over Angel and around the second zombie. There wasn’t enough room for that. She had to find another way.
She looked from shelf to shelf and estimated that there were enough packages to fend off Angel and the other zombie for thirty or forty seconds, at best.
“Help,” Jane yelled. “Help,” she yelled again, louder this time.
She flung four more packages in desperation, and, as she picked up another package, something came loose and scraped and rattled its way toward her along the edges of the shelves. She dropped the package she was holding and put her hands up defensively.
The object hit her and her fingers reflexively grasped it.
Holding the means of her escape firmly in her hands, she turned her gaze down at Angel and struck, stabbing downward as hard as she could with the object that had fallen into her hands. Her strike was followed by a rapid succession of gut-wrenching scrapes and crunches.
Jane stared in horror at what she had done. Thick blood mixed with a pale, gelatinous fluid oozed from Angel’s eyes, ears, nose, and the hole that Jane had made in the back of his skull.
The long, hooked stick that the doormen used to hang up and retrieve dry cleaning on the high ledges of the receiving room shelves stuck from Angel’s mouth. Jane pulled up on the stick. Her hands slipped, coating the lacquered wood with a thin sheen of sweat. The movement of her hands against the wood made an irritating squeal.
The zombie from the elevator was back at the receiving room doorway, and Jane had to move back into a corner of the room to avoid his grasp.
She pulled on the stick again. There was more give this time, but it didn’t come loose because the hook was caught on the back of Angel’s exposed skull. Jane continued to try to jerk the stick free, and each time that she pulled on it, the hook ground against bone. The movement of the stick inside Angel’s mouth and skull was forcing more viscous liquid out of all the orifices of his head, including the new one at the back of his skull. Jane could barely stand to see what she had done to him.
Jane pulled harder on the hooked stick.
Angel’s neck snapped, and his body slid toward Jane’s corner as she pulled.
The zombie from the elevator stepped over the threshold of the receiving room.
Frantic now, Jane stepped on Angel’s nose to pin his head in place and tugged upward on the hooked stick with the last of her strength.
The hook crunched through the back of Angel’s skull and sent a spider web of fissures crawling through bone. The hook’s movement out of Angel’s mouth sent a spray of broken teeth and bits of desiccated tongue upward.
With the stick wrenched free, Jane jammed the hook against the remaining zombie’s chest and tried to guide him out of the receiving room. Ragged pieces of brain matter and glutinous blood and fluid dripped from the hook and covered the zombie’s coat.
Trying to push the staggering zombie with the stick was difficult. Jane couldn’t get him out of the room, and instead ended up roughly shoving him into the room’s opposite corner.
There wasn’t enough s
pace to maneuver the stick backward to gain momentum for a swing or stab, so Jane kept the stick pressed firmly against the zombie while she slid the hook upward from the zombie’s chest.
The zombie raised his arms and reached for Jane from the corner he was pinned in, but made no move to try to push the stick aside. He seemed not to know that the stick was even there, or that there was something blocking his path to Jane.
When the hook made it to the top of the zombie’s rib cage, Jane felt it press into the soft spot at the base of the zombie’s neck. She braced the end of the stick against her shoulder and leaned forward.
The hook tore through the zombie’s flesh as if through paper, then stopped at something hard.
A gurgle escaped from the zombie’s mouth and his arms dropped. His body went limp and his head nodded forward, but he remained in the corner, held there by the stick.
Jane stayed still and listened for noise outside the receiving room.
Thick blood from the zombie’s neck oozed down the stick that she was holding in place.
The lobby was quiet.
Droplets of blood sagged from the stick toward the floor.
Jane stepped over the receiving room threshold and pivoted the stick. The pinned zombie fell sideways into a row of shelves and slumped there.
The lobby was empty.
Jane glanced from the elevator bank to the front of the lobby as she jerked the stick free of the zombie’s neck, ignoring the sounds that the hook made as it freed itself of the zombie’s rotting flesh.
Once the stick was free she carried it with her into the elevator and pressed the button for her floor.
In the diminishing space between the closing doors, Jane caught a glimpse of infected New Yorkers shambling outside her building.
The blood-covered stick she was holding trembled in her grip.
33
LOBBY, STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The door of the main safe room shut in front of Lorie. There was a clang, followed by a sucking sound that Lorie recognized as the activation of the pressure seal.
