Zombie High

by Shawn Kass

  Seeing the zombies milling around in the nurse’s office, you realize that there is no safe way of getting through to the first aid kit. Somehow, you’re going to have to find a way to distract them or get them out of there.

  Re-entering the main office, you look around for something you might be able to use to distract the zombies. In one corner you spot a megaphone which Miss Ski uses out near the busses to direct traffic over the loud noise of the diesel engines but using it requires you to be on the other end, and the zombies would just be after you then. Next to the computer sits a small TV set used for the school’s closed circuit camera system. Stepping over the secretary without looking at her, you turn on the TV and begin flipping through the channels to see different parts of the school.

  Like most schools, none of the cameras are in any of the classrooms, but they do give you a good view of the hallways and the area immediately surrounding the school. From what you can tell, most of the halls are pretty clear with only the occasional zombie stumbling around. At first, this confuses you, as you know that there are over five hundred fifty students and at least three dozen teachers and staff members, but then you realize that with the lockdown in place, almost everyone would be in a classroom. Hopefully they’re safe in there and didn’t just lock themselves in with one of the infected.

  Flipping the channel a few more times, you cycle through some of the outside cameras, seeing zombies gathered around the front and side of the building. On one channel, you come across a view of the back of the school and spot Mr. Kevin Mann, the maintenance guy, working on clearing up the mess from an old tree that fell in last week’s storm. Mr. Mann, with his ear protection and goggles in place, is just starting up the big old wood chipper when the first of the zombies comes around the side of the school. You know that there is no way for you to get to him in time, and there are no speakers which will reach him out there, so you pray that he’ll be able to make it as you watch.

  Mr. Mann picks up the first large branch and begins to feed it into the chipper when the zombie gets close enough to make its first attack. Instinctively, Mr. Mann raises his gloved hand and the zombie’s mouth snaps down on it. You can’t tell from the camera’s view point if it was hard enough to break through to Mr. Mann’s skin, but you watch in astonishment as he reacts, punching the zombie in the side of the head in order to free his hand from its teeth. The zombie stumbles to the side and then makes another attempt to get at Mr. Mann.

  The look of horror on his face is similar to those you’ve seen in countless movies, but he doesn’t hesitate when he realizes his life is in danger. Picking up a log that has to weigh at least forty or fifty pounds, Mr. Mann throws it directly at the zombie’s chest, forcing it off balance and into the waiting hole of the wood chipper’s mouth.

  As you continue watching, Mr. Mann peels off his glove, only to find that no blood seems to be apparent. You almost cheer out loud, catching yourself only at the last moment, not wanting to draw any undue attention your way.

  As Mr. Mann hops into his electric cart and speeds off camera, you wonder if there is any way you can meet up with him or if he can supply you with some weapons like an axe or something. Unfortunately, without a phone you really have no way of contacting him.

  You flip through a few more channels on the TV looking for other survivors, but finding no one in view, you return to looking around the office for something to get the zombies out of the nurse’s area. There are plenty of three ring binders beneath the counter and a photocopier and printer, but none of those look like they’ll help. After a couple of minutes of searching, however, your eyes land on the microphone for the public address system, and an idea sparks in your mind. Looking over the control board, you see that you have a couple of options. You can do a school-wide announcement, or you can select a specific location to speak to. Looks like you have another choice to make.

  If you want to select one location, turn to page …….. 121 If you address the whole school, turn to page ……… 124

  Use the PA to Contact One Location

  Hoping to be able to draw all of the zombies in the school to a central location, you decide to just select one location. Considering where the nurse’s office is, you want to also make sure that it will be far enough away from there as possible. Ultimately, you choose the senior lounge, figuring that if anyone was in there, teachers would have pulled them out when the school went into lockdown, and the room should be clear.

  Next, you have to figure out what you want to say into the microphone to draw them there. Somehow, you doubt regular talking is going to be enough, and you don’t want to have to stand here the whole time either when you have to make your way to the nurse’s office while they’re gone. That’s when the idea hits you.

  Starting just a few months ago, the school started playing music over the PA system as students transitioned from one class to the next. The music was obviously preselected, and only a few select CDs were played so that foul language and inappropriate content could be avoided. Looking into the CD player now, you spot a disk ready to go and smile when you read the name. Pulling the microphone closer to the radio, you flip its switch to ‘on’, and press ‘play’ allowing Pharrell William’s song, “Happy”, to flow through the school speakers in the senior lounge.

  As the song goes into its first chorus, you hear the hungry moans of the zombies coming down the hall, and you duck so that they don’t see you and decide you may be a more convenient meal than that which waits in the senior lounge. It takes them almost the entire length of the song before they are all past, and you hit the ‘repeat’ button before you venture out into the hall.

  Cautiously opening the door, you peer out through the crack in the door finding the area deserted. Figuring now is your chance, you open the door a bit wider and slip out quietly heading for the nurse’s office once again, this time keeping your head low and your footsteps extra soft.

  When you reach the door, you peek your head up quickly, getting a glimpse of the inside of the nurse’s office through the window in the door before ducking back down just as fast. As far as you can tell, the room looks empty, and so you gently pull the door open and step in, throwing a look back to the hall just to make sure nothing disgusting is coming up behind you intent on making you its next meal.

  Too bad you didn’t take a better look inside. Just as the door opens wide enough, a zombie’s hand reaches out and snags your foot. Surprised, you fail to react in time, and the crawler manages to pull you off balance, and you land hard on your butt. Looking down, you realize that the zombie never had a chance of making it out of the room because it had no legs. Somewhere around its navel, the body just stops, and its guts trail off behind it.

  Whether it’s because the zombie only has half a body to pull around, or despite that fact, the little guy is fast, and you find his teeth sinking into your leg before you have the opportunity to kick him off. Knowing that you’re a goner now and will soon be just another zombie, your brain takes a bizarre twist, and you wonder if you’ll be invited down to the senior lounge by all the other zombies where you’ll find that you’re the life of the party, and the “Happy” song plays over and over on repeat for the rest of your undead life.

  The End

  Addressing the Whole School

  Picking up the microphone, you flip all of the switches to ‘on’, and say, “GOOOOOOD morning St. Mary’s Catholic High,” drawing out the words like the shock jock disc jockeys do on the radio. Finding your groove, you continue in the same overly loud voice, “I just wanted to give a warm and lively greeting to all of our undead visitors and to the freshly converted. For those of you out there still alive and listening who haven’t figured this all out, zombies have attacked the school, and are, just like in every horror movie ever made, intent on eating your flesh. So, before I become one of the ungrateful dead myself, I figured I would let any other living souls out there know that there is at least one other person here with you in this nightmare, and to the
stupid zombies who are too brain dead to understand me, you missed one, you walking hunks of decaying flesh.”

  As you move to flip the microphone off, you notice a blinking white light on the console next to label reading, Room 104, Mr. Castle’s room. You recall that Mr. Castle used to be in the military and did a lot of work overseas. You’ve heard rumors that he was a sniper back then and was either in some kind of elite group like the Seals or Special Forces, or that he at least worked with them. How he became a math teacher at your school, however, is a complete mystery. No matter what, you figure if anyone is going to survive the zombie apocalypse around here, it’s probably going to be that guy. Hoping he’ll tell you to come join him, and he has a plan to get everyone out, you toggle the switches on the board so that you’re just speaking to his room.

  “Zombie Pizza Delivery, you call it, we bite it,” you say into the microphone.

  “Who is this?” comes back the angry voice of Mr. Castle.

  Knowing that you might need him, you tell him who you are, and ask, “Do you have a way of getting us out of here?”

  Mr. Castle pauses for a moment, and you know he is at this very moment weighing his options and debating if he can trust you or not. After what seems like forever, he says, “I do have a plan. Two of them actually. The thing is, I might need your help to pull one of them off. Tell me, can you see around the school using the cameras from in there?”

  “Yes,” you confirm.

  “Okay, then here’s my first plan. You stay in there and use the PA system to tell us if these things are coming up on us or anything and help us get to safety. Obviously, it will only be one-way communication once we leave, but with your help, I can guide the rest of these kids upstairs and to safer ground.”

  “That means I’ll be stuck down here while you’re all safe somewhere,” you point out.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll come back for you myself. You can help guide me back the same way, and then I’ll bring you up to everyone else’s location.”

  Thinking it over, it doesn’t sound like a bad plan, and you know that with his help, you’ll get a lot further than you would on your own, but you still want to hear what his other option is. “Just out of curiosity, what’s plan B?”

  “Plan B? Well, plan B was plan A a minute ago, and that’s basically every man for himself. The kids I have with me in this room all have broomsticks, table legs, and whatever else they could find for makeshift weapons, and we were going to try to stick together and head upstairs ourselves just before you made your little announcement. At least if you stay there, you can help us. Otherwise we’re all doing our own thing and I hope we all make it through the day.” Mr. Castle pauses for a moment letting you think about your choices, and then he asks, “So what’s it going to be, Kid?”

  If you stay & help guide them, turn to page …………… 127 If you get back to your own quest, turn to page ……… 152

  Helping Mr. Castle

  Mr. Castle’s the kind of guy whose military experiences in life had hardened him and made him both self-sufficient and a cynical to things like luck. He knew, like any gambler, that luck only carries a person so far, and in the end it’s only the hard core, the ones who tell Lady Luck to get lost, who last. He was one of the few who could see the wisdom of torching a house so that a village could survive, and in a time like this, when the whole world had gone FUBAR, he was the kind of guy you wanted on your side. Deciding it would be best to join forces with a man like him, you say, “Okay, I’ll help you.”

  “Excellent,” says Mr. Castle. “All right, tell us when the hallway outside my door is clear or at the very least how many zombies are out there.”

  “Okay, give me a second. I need to flip the channels.” Stepping back over to the TV, you cycle through the camera views seeing several hallways, the gym, and a few scenes from outside the building. Finding the view that looks onto Mr. Castle’s hallway, you see one zombie milling around nearby and another further up between his location and the stairs.

  When you return to the microphone and tell him, he says, “Good, all right. We’ll take care of them on our way. From there, I’ll need you to flip over to the general PA system and just announce what you see along our path. Can you do that?”

  Agreeing, you say, “Sure thing, Mr. Castle,” and then ask, “What is your ultimate goal? I mean where are you headed that’s safe?”

  “High ground,” he answers. “In case of emergency, always go for high ground. Besides, these things don’t look too coordinated, so I’m betting they’ll have a little trouble climbing the stairs. Plus, if anyone out there is mounting a rescue, it’s going to have to be from the air because these things are all over the streets.”

  Acknowledging that what he says makes sense, you say, “Okay, sounds good. I can get you to the second floor.”

  Cutting in, Mr. Castle says, “We’re not stopping there. We’re headed for the roof. There’s an old access hatch on the second floor in the broom closet. I’ve seen the maintenance guy use it in the past to throw balls, Frisbees, and such down when they get stuck up there.”

  Thinking about it, you picture the upstairs in your mind and recall that the closet is just across from the foreign language class that Miss Sweets teaches. That puts it down just fifty feet or so away from the stairwell. You realize Mr. Castle will be able to get them all to safety pretty quick this way. Just to confirm, you ask, “You mean the one next to Miss Sweet’s room?”

  “That’s the one. All right, I’m counting on you to be our eyes in the sky.” “You got it, Mr. Castle, just make sure you come back for me.”

  Signing off, he says, “I promise,” and then you hear the line drop. Looking back to the TV, you watch for a moment, seeing the zombie stumbling around looking for its next meal before the door to Mr. Castle’s room slowly begins to open. The camera doesn’t let you get a very good look inside his room, but from what you can tell, Mr. Castle is standing at the door slicing the pie, a technique used by military members and trained police to peek around corners when clearing or searching a building. The only reason you know it is from watching S.H.I.E.L.D. on TV at home.

  When the door is half open, Mr. Castle steps out wearing no shoes on his feet, which you can only assume is to ensure that he is quiet in the hall, and with a metal yardstick in his hand. He sidesteps around the zombie to get a better angle and then swings the yardstick like a sword into the back of its neck. The zombie’s neck must have snapped from the force of his blow, because the thing crumbles to the ground like a marionette whose strings had just been cut.

  After looking left and then right, he silently waves to the door where you see a couple of people crouching and then points up the hall. Twenty-seven kids come out of the classroom, most of them look like their seniors, and almost all of them have something in their hands ready to defend themselves with. One girl, a sophomore named Madi, is carrying the pole from which the United States flag usually hangs in class and to which students say the Pledge of Allegiance to each morning. The group looks like they are being quiet, and they hold tight to the lockers on the right side of the hall as they advance behind Mr. Castle.

  As they approach the stairs, the other zombie you mentioned sees them and advances as well, intent on eating one or all of them. On Mr. Castle’s signal, the group splits up, with roughly half of them going around on one side while the rest circle around the other way. The diverging line seems to confuse the creature for a moment, and his mouth opens in what you can only assume is a painful wail of hunger and desperation.

  In an act of mercy, Mr. Castle swings his yardstick once again, and it snaps in two as it hits the base of the zombie’s skull. Before the zombie has time to react, though, Mr. Castle runs the broken end through the zombie’s open mouth until an inch or more pokes through the back. With this, the zombie drops, dead for good at last.

  Looking up to the camera, Mr. Castle points up the stairs, reminding you that he needs details about whatever he might face on the way u
p. You hurriedly run over to the TV on the secretary’s desk and flip through the channels. From what you can tell, it looks like the coast is clear, but you haven’t checked all the cameras yet.

  If you tell Mr. Castle it’s clear, turn to page …………… 132 If you want to keep checking, turn to page …………… 137

  Coast is Clear

  You don’t want to keep him or the rest of the students waiting any longer than you have to, so you run back over to the microphone, flip the toggles to all, and say, “Okay, Mr. Castle. I’m not seeing anything.”

  Stepping back over to the screen, you watch as he gives you a thumbs-up, and then turns to the rest of the group and tells them what to do. You don’t see his mouth move during this time, but the hand signals are clear even to you. Five of the students are to accompany him up the stairs and take up positions around the door and in the hall. Once the area is cleared, they will signal to the rest of the students to follow them up, and they’ll head for the next door. When they all nod their understanding, Mr. Castle peeks into the stairwell to make sure nothing new has come creeping out of the shadows, and then heads in, crouched low and ready to spring.

  There aren’t any cameras in the stairwells which is an obvious mistake on the part of the school because students realized that immediately. It quickly became the place where most of the bad behavior, from fights to skipping class to hang out with your boyfriend or girlfriend, happens. Right now, of course, it’s even worse, because in the thirty-seven seconds it takes for Mr. Castle and the first group of students to reach the top, you feel like they’re on the dark side of the moon unable to communicate with mission control and during that time, they are Schrödinger’s cat. You desperately flip through a dozen channels searching for them, and don’t breathe once the whole time they are out of view. It feels like you’re about to pass out by the time you finally see Mr. Castle’s head poke out through the door on the second floor.