by Brett Abell
“Is she okay?” Charlie said from behind him.
Russ didn’t answer. Sandy Harris was dying. He could see that plainly enough. The hitching in her chest was slowing and sounding more like a rattle now.
And then it stopped altogether.
“No,” said Charlie. “Dr. Harris, no.”
Charlie knelt by the woman’s side. He put his fingers to her neck to check for a pulse.
“She’s not breathing,” he said. “Help me flip her over. Maybe we can do CPR.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Russ said.
He put a hand on the young man’s shoulder and tried to pull him away from the doctor, but Charlie twisted away from his hand and went back to Dr. Harris’s side. He rolled the body over, and when he did, the doctor’s mouth began to move, like she was trying to speak.
“She’s alive!” Charlie said. “We need to get her to safety.”
“Dude,” Russ said, “I don’t think that’s a …”
He backed away from Charlie and the doctor, and nearly bumped into Charlotte.
He put a hand on her arm and tried to guide her back to the Gator. “She’s dead. She’s turning into one of those things.”
“Like hell,” Charlotte said. “And get your hands off me, you pig.”
Russ didn’t get a chance to respond. From behind him, he heard Charlie let out a gasp. The kid was still kneeling next to the doctor, but his expression had turned to horror. Sandy Harris, or her corpse rather, was sitting up. She snarled, her face warped by a fierce, hungry rage. Blood flew from her lips.
The next instant, she lunged for Charlie. She grabbed his ears in each hand, and in one swift motion, took a huge bite out of his upper lip.
Charlie fell backwards, shrieking in pain.
“Oh holy hell,” Russ said. He didn’t even bother to help Charlie. There was no point. Dr. Harris had already climbed on top of him, and now she was tearing into him the same way the old nude woman had done to her.
Russ backed away from them. But even as he did, he noticed a commotion at bottom of the hill, where the sidewalk rounded the corner of Kenemore Hall.
“What are you doing?” Charlotte said. “Why aren’t you helping him?”
“I think we’re about to have company,” he said. “A lot of company.”
No sooner had he said the words than the first few of a bloody horde rounded the corner. At first, it was only a small crowd, eight or nine of them, but as he watched, and the seconds ticked by, the crowd’s numbers continued to swell.
There were sixty of them, at least, down there before he turned back to Charlotte.
Behind her, Dr. Harris was looking up from the bloody remains of Charlie. He wasn’t struggling anymore. There wasn’t much of him left to struggle. She’d opened him up and flung his innards all over the grass.
Russ grabbed Charlotte by the arm. She struggled against him, demanded that he get his hands off her, but he held her tight and pulled her out of the way just as Dr. Harris swiped at her legs.
Charlotte caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to stare at Dr. Harris. From the look on her face, Russ knew she was processing what had just happened, that a man whose guts she hated had just saved her life.
“Don’t mention it,” he said. He pointed to the building at the top of the hill. “That’s the aviation building you were telling me about, right?”
“Yes.”
“You know how to get inside? It looks locked up.”
“I know how to get inside,” she said. “That’s where most of my classes are. I’m an aviation engineering major.”
There was something about the girl that brought out the urge to fight in Russ. He’d known a few guys like that, but this was the first time a woman had ever made him want to argue with every word she said.
But it would have to wait.
They had to move.
With the crowd still growing behind them, Russ and Charlotte ran for the building. Like every other building on Middletown’s campus, it was made out of red brick with white pillars flanking the doors, but unlike the rest of the campus, this building was under construction. Scaffoldings hugged the second and third stories all the way around the building. There might have been windows on the first floor, but Russ couldn’t see them. The construction crews had made a wooden tunnel around the first floor so that the students could get inside without building debris falling down on top of them.
When they made it to the front doors, Russ shook the handles, but they were locked.
“Crap,” he said. “It’s locked. Is there a back door or something?”
“No.”
“There’s not?”
“The backside of the building looks over a cliff three hundred feet high. There’s nothing behind this building but a long fall.”
“Well, how are we going to get in? You said you know how to get in here.”
Charlotte looked down the hill. The zombies weren’t as coordinated climbing the slope as they were on the flatter ground down by the stadium, but they would be on them in another minute.
“I guess we go up,” she said.
“Up? Up where?”
She ran into the grass and looked down the length of the construction tunnel.
“Over there,” she said.
She led him to wheelbarrow. She kicked it over so that it was upside down and dragged it under the edge of the scaffolding. Then she got on top of it, got into a crouch, and patted her thigh.
“Put your foot here,” she said.
“You’re going to hoist me up there? You can’t do that. I’ve got like eighty pounds on you. Here, let me lift you up.”
“Then I won’t be able to help you up. I can’t lift you. Hurry, put your foot here. It’ll be just like building a pyramid.”
He shook his head but climbed up onto her thigh anyway.
To his surprise, she not only held his weight, but was able to spring him up enough for him to grab onto the scaffolding. Lifting boxes all day kept him pretty strong, but it was still hard going pulling himself onto the second story. He felt like a fat man trying to pull himself out of a beanbag chair. He kicked three times before he was able to hook his foot over the railing, and after that, he was able to pull himself up.
He looked down and saw Charlotte watching the approaching crowd. They were closer now. A lot closer.
“Hurry!” she said, and held up her hand for him to grab.
Russ leaned over the side as far as he was able, and it was just enough to lock his fingers around her wrist. She tightened her hand on his, and he pulled her just as the first of the zombies gathered below.
She landed in his lap, and for a moment, she didn’t move. Just tried to catch her breath. It didn’t take her long to recover though. She looked up into his eyes, their faces so close they were almost touching, and quickly scrambled out of his lap. She stood up and smoothed her skirt. He could see the discomfort on her face, and he tried to think of something clever to say.
What would Russ Surewood say?
“You smell nice.”
“What?”
“You … smell nice. I mean, you just cheered through an entire football game and spent the last two hours running from zombies, and you smell nice. Sorry, that just surprised me.”
“It surprised you?”
“Well, yeah. I thought you’d be sweaty or something. You know.”
For a long moment, she just stared at him. Then she got a look on her face like she’d just bit into a lemon. “You’re a creep,” she said.
There was a window behind her. She climbed through it, pushing a sheet of plastic out of the way as she made it inside, then stuck her head back out the window.
“You coming?”
For a moment there, he’d stopped hating her.
But that was done now.
They’d stepped into somebody’s office, a professor, from the looks of it. There were models of planes and rockets all over the place, and books on
the shelf that had titles Russ could barely read, much less make sense of.
Charlotte didn’t stop, though. She ran out the door and disappeared down the hallway to the right. Russ went after her, and after following her through the warren of hallways, eventually found himself standing on a balcony overlooking what he could only describe as museum display straight out of the Smithsonian. Full-sized planes and experimental aircraft and all kinds of helicopter-looking things hung from the ceiling, many suspended as much four stories off the ground floor.
There was more scaffolding inside here, but he could still see the huge wall of windows at the far side of the room. It was like standing in the lobby of some super high-tech skyscraper. And it looked like Charlotte was right about the drop off at the back of the building. Looking through the wall of windows, he could see the skyline of Indianapolis in the distance.
“What is this place?” Russ asked.
“My advisor designed most of these. See that one over there?” She pointed to a red, teardrop-shaped plane that looked like it had just flown out of a science fiction movie. “I helped build that one.”
“Wow.”
“Like I said, it beats writing pornography.”
“You really are a bitch, aren’t you?”
The conceited smile she wore melted into a frown. “We need to make it to that door down there,” she said.
“Why?”
“That’s the research lab. The front doors won’t hold long, not against all those zombies, but the research lab is a secure facility. They shouldn’t be able to get through those doors. And there’s a kitchen back there too.”
“Sounds good to me. Lead on.”
He followed her down to the ground level and over to a set of white doors, like the kind he remembered seeing inside hospitals. He looked around for the kick plate that would open the doors, but instead saw an electronic pad.
“You have a keycard or something?” he asked. “Right? Please tell me right.”
“Oh God.”
“What? Why’d you say oh God?”
Something crashed behind them. Charlotte glanced over her shoulder. They both knew what that sound meant. The zombies had breached the front door.
She turned back to Russ. “It’s in my duffle bag.”
“But isn’t that on the bus?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, holy hell.”
A noise rose from the front of the building, a large crowd crashing through the entryway. When the first zombies rounded the corner, Charlotte put a hand on Russ’s arm and gripped tightly. “We have to run.”
“But where?” he said. “There’s no back door.”
Charlotte pointed to the ceiling. “I guess we go up.”
“Ah, holy hell.”
“What?”
“I hate heights.”
She glanced toward the front doors. The zombies were close now. He expected a stupid quip about taking his chances with the zombies, but instead she just laughed at him and started up the nearest ladder.
He took a quick glance back to the zombie horde. They were filling up the room with alarming speed.
“Damn,” he muttered, and went after Charlotte.
# # #
The interior scaffolding was easier to climb than the one outside, and they were able to get three stories up before the first zombies gathered below them.
The zombies pushed against the scaffolding’s metal frame, shaking it hard enough to rock the entire structure. From above him, Russ heard Charlotte gasp. She had lost her grip and nearly fallen, her legs kicking wildly in the air as she struggled to get them back on the ladder. Russ climbed faster, meaning to catch her, but she was faster than he was and regained her grip before he could reach her. She looked down, craning her head to see past him, and then rolled onto the third level.
He joined her, but couldn’t bring himself to look down. The zombies were shaking the scaffolding so hard that it was starting to come loose from the wall, sending little cloud streams of plaster dust drifting into the air.
Charlotte was leaning over the edge. “No,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Oh no. No, no.”
“What?”
She pulled back from the edge. “They’re climbing the ladders.”
“What?” Russ said. “Zombies can’t climb ladders.”
He crawled to the edge and forced himself to look over the side. Right away he wished he hadn’t. His stomach lurched into his throat and a wave of dizziness washed over him. They were only forty feet in the air or so, but it was enough to practically paralyze him, and any other time, he would have been unable to move.
But the zombies terrified him more than the height ever could.
There were hundreds of them down there, packed in like fish in a can. Many were pressed against the base of the scaffolding pushing against each other as they tried to mount the ladders. At least a dozen were already climbing up to the second level, but they were having trouble holding on.
Russ pushed away from the edge.
“What do we do?” Charlotte said. “They’re going to make this thing fall.”
Russ tried to stand up, but the scaffolding was shaking too violently.
Charlotte fell beside him.
He scanned left and saw the brackets had already started to come loose from the scaffolding near the large windowed wall. A section of it was bumping against the glass. Looking to the right, over by the teardrop-shaped glider that Charlotte had helped build, the shaking didn’t seem as bad. The scaffolding turned a ninety-degree corner there, where it met the far wall, and Russ figured the extra anchor points were probably what was keeping that section from shaking so badly.
“We need to go that way,” he said. “Where it turns the corner.”
The floor shifted under them. The toes of Charlotte’s sneakers were even with his head when the scaffolding moved, and in seconds, out of the corner of his eye, he watched her slide past him.
He reached out and caught her hand in the nick of time.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “Come on, pull yourself up.”
She grabbed his wrist with both hands and kicked her feet against the swiftly tilting platform.
“That’s it, you’ve got it!” he said. “Come on, climb!”
With a final kick against a groaning metal strut, she launched herself onto the plywood surface next to Russ.
“You got it?” he asked, after she’d had a second to catch her breath.
She nodded.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Together they started belly crawling toward the corner.
They were almost there when the first zombies reached their level. The scaffolding shook, hard, and Russ was nearly thrown over the side. He caught himself at the last second by grabbing a part of the railing and holding on for dear life.
He heard the moaning and looked back in the direction they’d come.
The zombies were pulling themselves onto the third level. At first, it was only six or seven of them, but within a few moments, there were twenty, at least. Below them, the shaking scaffolding began to groan.
Russ knew that sound.
It was about to give way.
Charlotte was still a few feet behind him. The zombies were crawling toward them, and one of them was just a few feet behind her.
Russ did the only thing he could think to do. He scrambled toward the corner, turned, and stuck out a hand. “Grab hold,” he told her. “This thing’s gonna fall!”
He caught her hand just as the scaffolding started to buckle. It collapsed at the far end first, falling against the window wall with a crash. Cracks spread through the glass. The zombies that had mounted the third level rolled over the edge like everything that wasn’t nailed down. They didn’t even try to catch themselves.
With Charlotte next to him, Russ looked over the side and watched as one of the zombies tumbled into the ravenous horde below. He knocked several zombies to the ground when he hit, b
ut the rest of the zombies didn’t even seem to realize what had happened. They filled the space left by the fallen and started clawing at the scaffolding.
When the structure finally collapsed, it was like a house of cards falling. The whole thing had been leaning away from the wall, but as the lower levels folded, the scaffolding shifted and smashed right through the huge window wall.
Zombies tumbled along with it.
Several of the planes dropped from the ceiling. Russ watched a big green-and-white rocket fall right into the heart of the crowd, crushing at least a dozen zombies.
It did little good, though.
The dead kept coming. They crawled over the debris and started climbing the scaffolding where Russ and Charlotte were hiding.
Right away, the scaffolding started to shake.
“They’re gonna bring this down too!” Russ said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
“Like hell,” Charlotte said.
Hard as it was to keep her feet, the girl stood up and pressed her back against the wall. She looked like she was about to jump.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding another way out,” she said.
Suddenly she broke into a run, hit the edge of the scaffolding, and jumped across seven feet of open air, landing on the wing of the teardrop glider.
She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, but her landing was hard enough to send the glider rocking back and forth.
“What the hell?” he said.
She pushed the cockpit open. “Come on,” she said, as she climbed inside. “You’re gonna have to jump.”
He looked over the side, and again nearly vomited.
Zombies were climbing the side, but not even the sight of all those ravenous faces got him past the nausea he felt from the heights.
“Let’s go. What are you waiting for?”
He tried to look away, but couldn’t. There was no way he was going to be able to jump. No way at all.
But then the bolts that held the scaffolding to the wall started to snap. The whole structure began to sway violently. He held on with everything he had, but it was only a matter of time. He could hear the metal struts groaning. The sound of the bolts coming loose from the wall got faster, and as Russ watched, the whole thing leaned into the open space in the middle of the room. He wasn’t sure how he did it, but as the rigging leaned toward the teardrop glider, he jumped.
