by Guy James
Lorie pressed the intercom button and held it. “Are you serious?” she yelled. “You’re gonna lock me out? Out here? With them?”
She pounded on the door with her fists. “Jen? Jenny? You’re supposed to be my friend.” Jenny was Lorie’s new best friend, and Lorie was sure she had seen her pushing her way into the safe room moments earlier.
Jenny heard Lorie through the intercom. She glanced hesitantly at the boy who was at the controls, the one who had activated the pressure seal.
He caught her eye and said, “Don’t even think about it. She’s not coming in here with us.”
Lorie pounded on the door again. “Let me in,” Lorie yelled. “Let me in. What are you doing? You have to let me in. That’s the whole point of having this.”
Inside the safe room, Jenny looked around at the others. She didn’t find a single sympathetic face. No one besides the boy at the controls would even make eye contact with her. It was as if they were pretending that they had not heard the exchange.
“She’s right,” Jenny said, giving the boy at the controls a pleading look. “We have to let her inside.” She turned to the others who were still in the outer chamber of the safe room with her. “Listen to me,” she cried. “Don’t pretend like she’s not out there. What’s wrong with you?” She turned back to the boy. “She’s one of us. Did you see how she was trying to help our friends out there when we were only thinking about ourselves? We have to help her.”
The face of the boy at the controls softened and looked uncertain for a moment. He looked like he was about to say something, but then he hesitated. He looked at the controls and the monitors that were tracking movement throughout the school. After a few moments, he said, “It’s too late. If we open the door now, we won’t be able to close it in time, and the zombies will get inside.” He looked at Jenny. “I’m sorry.” He looked back down at the controls and monitors and didn’t look up again.
Jenny pressed the button for the intercom. “I’m sorry,” she said. She was standing by the door, expressionless. “I’m sorry. They’re coming, so you better run.”
Lorie turned her back on the main safe room. There was no time to feel betrayed. She could hear the sounds of dragging feet and crawling bodies from her position inside the narrow passageway. She stood there for a few seconds and listened to the sounds grow louder. Then she crept out of the passageway and into the lobby hallway.
Inside the safe room, Jenny remained pressed against the door. She was crying soundlessly, her hand over her mouth.
“Come here,” the boy at the controls said. “We can watch her on the screen.”
Jenny closed her mouth and wiped at her face. She turned, walked away from the door, and joined the students who were crowding around the surveillance monitors.
The monitors were filled with live scenes from all over the school building. Framed in one of the monitors—the one that currently held everyone’s attention—was Lorie. Behind Lorie, frozen students stood unmoving, staring off into some great nowhere that only they could see.
“She’s gonna get what she deserves,” someone said. “She brought the virus here.”
“How dare you?” Jenny said, “how—”
“Hey,” someone yelled, “those need to be rationed. What are you doing? Leave that—”
Someone screamed. The scream became a gurgle.
Jenny knew at once. She turned slowly, slowed not by the virus but by terror, and saw exactly what she had expected to see, except that the images made it far too real. She wished then that she could put it back into her mind, make the idea of infected students in the safe room into an abstraction, an abstraction without spurting blood and teeth that tore into veins, and eyes...eyes so dark and vile that to describe them adequately would require a new frame of reference for dread.
She could feel her world and its terms redefining themselves around her, and she could feel herself being redefined too. She knew that she was no longer a student, or a writer for the Stuyvesant Spectator, or a semi-committed friend of Lorie’s. All those aspects of her being were sloughed off by the sight in front of her. All that was left was the survival response, and it told her that to fight was not an option here.
Only flight remained.
Fly or die, Jenny.
Fly or die.
In a split second, instinct had her moving toward the safe room’s pressurized door.
A deafening symphony of screams erupted behind her as she ran to the narrow passage that led to the door.
She turned sideways and shuffled down the passage as fast as she could until she was face to face with it: the door that was trapping her with the safe room zombies behind her, and separating her from the other zombies on the other side.
“No,” she whispered, remembering that the door was pressure-sealed. How could she have forgotten that? It had become so hard to concentrate. Everything seemed off balance somehow, like the floor was rolling in unpredictable directions.
She reached up to tighten her mask, which she had subconsciously loosened after entering the safe room. It had been uncomfortable, and she wasn’t used to wearing it, and…
Her hands froze halfway to the mask.
“The controls,” Jenny said. “I have to...” Her mind went numb and she stood with her back to the passage that led deeper into the safe room, staring at nothing.
34
LOBBY, STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Lorie paused just outside the passage that led into the main safe room and got her bearings. The lobby was becoming crowded.
The three crawlers that she had seen earlier were now in front of her, making short work of the frozen students. The crawlers reacted to her presence and craned their necks in her direction, then went back to tearing strips of flesh from the legs of the helpless, rigid students, biting through the students’ jeans and tearing the fabric into ragged, blood-soaked strips.
Lorie squeezed the handle of her knife as she watched the crawlers feverishly tear at the ankles and shins of the unmoving students, who continued to stand in place, expressionless.
There was a splintering crack as the bones around the ankle of one of the previously stationary students gave way. He fell on his face, still and impassive, and the crawler that had felled him sank his teeth into an exposed shin bone, finishing the job of detaching shin from ankle.
Lorie looked at the severed ankle that stuck from the fallen student’s shoe. The twisted mess of flesh, gristle, and fractured bone just stood there, left behind. Soon, Lorie knew, the footless student would reanimate and look for others to attack.
Two small groups of vertical, staggering student zombies were now only feet away from Lorie.
It was time to act, or to die.
Another of the still, straight-faced students in the cluster closest to Lorie wavered in place, looking like she was about to fall.
As the zombies around Lorie shambled closer and the frozen girl swayed, Lorie’s breathing slowed.
A calm settled over her and enveloped her. She recalled the feeling: it was like a familiar breeze from her childhood, one that carried faint scents that were known only to her, and had meaning only for her.
Lorie inhaled deeply, and then she leapt forward, raising the knife over her head with both hands in a motion so swift and precise that it was barely discernible. She leapt past the zombies that were staggering toward her and into the broken cluster of motionless students that the crawlers were feasting on.
Just after Lorie’s body lost its upward momentum and began to arc toward the ground, she stabbed with the knife, puncturing the skull of the swaying girl.
Lorie landed, twisted the knife and pulled it out of the girl’s brain as the girl, now dead, began to fall.
Lorie danced around the falling body, avoiding the gnashing teeth of the crawler who had been focused on the girl, and who had now refocused his attention on Lorie.
She deftly stepped on the crawler’s upper back to hold him in place and kicked do
wnward, bringing her heel down at the spine just above the crawler’s waist. She kicked repeatedly until she heard a crunch and felt the spine give way. Lorie’s breathing remained calm and collected. She killed the other two crawlers with the knife, pinning each down with her foot and then stabbing each in the soft spot at the top of the neck, aiming her knife at the brain stem. Each died instantly.
Next, Lorie turned her attention to the footless victim of the crawlers. She ended him in the same way.
There were two remaining students in the cluster, and Lorie knew that the approaching zombies would have them soon. She glanced at the approaching horde and turned back to the cluster. She considered stabbing the standing students.
If she had had a gun, it would have been easy, but severing the spinal cords of the students, who were in a standing position with nothing bracing them on the other side, would take too long.
Lorie averted her eyes from what remained of the frozen cluster.
She ran down the hallway, dodging the awkward grabs of the zombie students she passed.
Fury surged throughout Lorie’s body as she ran, but she channeled it into swiftness and precision of movement in her escape, rather than into an offensive maneuver.
Resistance in this scenario, Lorie knew, would be fatally futile.
35
MAIN SAFE ROOM INTERIOR, STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
A shuffling sound snapped Jenny out of her trance, and she finished the movement of tightening the seal of her mask. She took in the blood-curdling screams from the safe room behind her and wondered why it had been that particular shuffling sound that had roused her, rather than the screams.
It was a very unusual sound—not that the screams were usual, but she had at least heard similar screams in horror movies. A sound like the one that had gotten her moving again, a sound like that she had never heard before.
Hearing it had put an image in Jenny’s mind that pulled her back into full alertness. It had felt like a pull, too, like being jerked backward through a doorway, reaching for the doorway to stop the movement, but failing to grab anything and succeeding only in tearing the skin from the tips of your fingers.
She turned, and the image that she had seen in her mind was now there, real, and in front of her.
Bobbe, a girl Jenny knew from biology class, was lurching down the passageway, toward the door. Bobbe’s foot was bent at the ankle and it dragged behind her, drawing a trail of blood on the floor.
Jenny looked up from the dragging foot and saw that the source of the blood was Bobbe’s neck, or rather, the almost complete lack of a neck. Bobbe’s throat was torn open, and most of the flesh around her neck was gone or hung in chewed strips. Bobbe’s head was bent sideways, resting on one shoulder. Jenny could see parts of Bobbe’s spine straining against the weight of her head. Bobbe’s mouth worked in small fits, opening and closing as if she were a fish out of water. It looked like she was trying to get her mouth to open all the way, but it didn’t work quite right anymore, and wasn’t cooperating.
Jenny opened her mouth and tried to scream, but the sound wouldn’t come.
Bobbe dragged closer, and as she raised her arms, her head lost its balance on her shoulder and fell backward.
Something in Bobbe’s neck snapped, and her head’s downward movement was stopped just below the shoulder. The bit of Bobbe’s mouth that Jenny could still see had stopped working.
Blood no longer ran from Bobbe’s wounds, but thick, red gobs of coagulated blood drooped from the top of Bobbe’s exposed collarbone.
Jenny closed her mouth, licked her lips with a tongue that felt like sandpaper, and tried to scream again. This time, sound did come. It was the loudest, shrillest scream of Jenny’s life, and though it had no effect on the zombie Bobbe, it did spur Jenny into action.
There was no way to get around Bobbe in the narrow passage, so Jenny ran straight for her. She tackled Bobbe with her right shoulder, straining to keep her face away from any of Bobbe’s exposed flesh and blood.
The force of Jenny’s tackle knocked Bobbe down. Bobbe’s head twisted farther backward as she fell and her head came to rest at the top of her back, almost a full one hundred eighty degrees around. Her undead eyes continued to glare at Jenny, who ran through the passage and into the first chamber of the safe room.
Through the tears in her eyes, Jenny saw human shapes huddled in the corner. She instinctively began to cry out for help, realizing as she did it that the sound would attract them to her. She cut her scream down to a whimper, but it was too late, they had heard her.
Rigid with fear, Jenny watched as the zombies paused in their devouring ritual and turned toward her.
For a moment, they were all still.
Through the tangle of zombie limbs, Jenny saw several students on the ground: the main course. They lay writhing in a mess of eviscerated intestines and blood, their faces—what was left of them—expressionless. Some still had their masks part of the way on, twisted around and torn open.
Then the moment was over, and zombies broke free from the mass and began to stagger toward her. A noise made Jenny turn to the other side of the room, and she saw more zombies heading in her direction, emerging from a deeper chamber of the safe room.
This has to be a dream, Jenny thought, a nightmare. They’re not supposed to change so quickly. This is impossible. This is im—
Jenny felt something clamp around her wrist. She knew it was one of them, and she couldn’t believe that she had been scared so witless as to let one of them get her.
Panic-stricken, she turned to her attacker. She knew the infected student by sight and recognized him even though most of the right side of his face and his right eye were gone.
At the sight of him, Jenny’s horror grew and seized her body. She fought against it, reminding herself that her only chance was to struggle.
Jenny tried to pull her hand away, but the infected student’s grip was like a vice, and compressed the bones of her wrist tighter and tighter. She kept trying to pull her hand away, expecting her wrist to snap at any moment.
The moment that she had been dreading came. Her wrist snapped and searing pain exploded up her arm. She pulled again, and thanks to the additional give of her broken wrist, was able to free herself. Momentum carried her backward and she stumbled, brushing into another zombie student who had come up from behind her.
Jenny spun away, and, digging her fingernails into her forearm at the elbow in an effort to divert her attention from the terrible, throbbing pain in her crushed wrist, made straight for the control panel.
The zombie who had been holding her gurgled a throaty moan and shambled after her.
The black switch that unlocked the pressure seal of the door was at the end of the control panel. Jenny knew it from the safe room training sessions she had been put through with the other students. Her eyes found the switch and locked onto it.
She got to the control panel, slipping past two zombie students who were closing in on her, and flipped the switch.
36
The unlock sequence of the pressure seal initiated. Jenny could hear the seal being opened. Now all that she had to do was get to the other side of this chamber, and back down the passageway to the door.
She turned and darted away from the zombie who had destroyed her wrist, who had closed in on her and was now reaching for her throat.
Two more zombies had entered from a deeper chamber of the safe room and were stumbling toward her, but they were still too far away to be a threat. She just had to get around the two who were at the control panel with her, get past the mostly headless zombie Bobbe in the passageway, and then... Jenny’s mind flashed on the thought of what the hallways must have been like at that moment: probably—no, definitely—filled with masses of undead high school students. She cursed. Why did there have to be so many overachievers staying late after school?
The thought made her freeze, but she pushed it to the back of her mind. Later problems would be deal
t with later. She had to get out of her present situation first.
Jenny saw a way around the zombies who were nearest to her. She measured her steps and darted around the first, and then the second. They moaned and began to turn toward her, but she was already past them.
Now at the far end of the control panel with a clear path to the passage, Jenny could barely believe that she was going to make it. Only moments before she was sure that the safe room would become her tomb, but now there was a way out.
Bolstered by the final sounds of the pressure seal unlocking, Jenny pushed off hard with her left foot, her eyes fixed on the passage to the door.
As she pushed off, her foot slipped on a smear of blood.
Jenny went down. As she fell, she tried to twist onto her side to avoid landing on her hurt arm. She succeeded, but the jarring impact of the fall was enough to send a fresh lightning bolt of pain exploding up from her wrist.
She tried to scramble to her feet, but kept slipping. The floor where she had fallen was slick with blood. She cursed herself for not being more aware of her surroundings, and then she looked up.
Four zombie high school students surrounded Jenny. They reached for her.
She screamed and crawled backward under the long row of tables that held the control panels. She pressed her back into the wall and looked around for any other way out, for anything that she could use. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears and reverberated in her gas mask.
One of the zombies fell to her knees and reached under the table. Jenny shrank backward and crawled away the only way that she could, back toward the corner where the mass of zombies was feeding.
Another zombie fell to his knees and reached under the table. Jenny panicked and darted out from under the table, trying to squeeze between the two zombies who were on their knees.
