Zombie High

by Shawn Kass

  “Yeah, we just had to take care of something,” says Logan.

  Not asking for clarification as his eyes flick to the body, Mr. Castle asks, “Anyone get bit?”

  “No,” you say shaking your head. “We’re both clean.”

  “All right then, let’s get going, I don’t want us to miss our ride,” says Mr. Castle.

  Suddenly remembering the people in the teachers’ lounge you say, “Mr. Castle, while I was out earlier, I came across some people who were holing up in the teachers’ lounge. They asked me to get some supplies and …,”

  Holding up a hand, Mr. Castle says, “I already found them. One was infected, but I got the other two out, and they look all right.”

  Nodding, you follow Logan up the stairs and to the maintenance closet. Inside, you find all the usual cleaning supplies stacked on shelves, but in the back of the room, you spot a small ladder leading up to an open hatch and the blue sky above. Apparently grateful for your help, Logan lets you go up first, and you begin climbing without hesitating.

  When you get to the top and are just about ready to exit onto the school’s roof, a pair of dirty grimy hands comes reaching for you from above. For just a second you think that they might be those of one of the infected, visions of Nathan downstairs still fresh in your mind. You almost lose your grip on the ladder, but that’s when you hear the voices of the other students celebrating. Taking one of the offered hands, you climb the rest of the way out and find that everyone else is already up here including a new person you hadn’t seen with either group, Mrs. Gail, the school registrar.

  Smiling as you pass everyone, you step over to where she sits back smoking a cigarette and ask, “How did you make it up here? I didn’t see you with the group.”

  With a smirk on her face and the sarcasm of an older woman who’s seen it all, Mrs. Gail says, “I’ve survived this zoo for the past thirty years, and this,” gesturing towards the zombies below on the ground, “isn’t even in my top five worst days working here.”

  Mr. Castle and Logan make their way up out of the hatch right after you, and after closing up the hatch, Mr. Castle turns to the group and says, “You all did good down there. I’m proud of you. Just hang tight, and our ride will be here to pick us up in a few minutes.”

  True to his word, he had a military helicopter there within the next few minutes, and as it lands on the roof of the school he says, “Find a seat, or sit on the floor, it doesn’t matter. Just get in.” Ultimately, you end up sitting right between the pilot and Mr. Castle in the small space between their seats. It’s certainly not the safest way to travel, what with this many people aboard without seats, but no one says a thing as the helicopter begins to take off and point its nose towards safety.

  Congratulations

  You have survived the first day of the zombie apocalypse and saved as many people as possible. I wish you luck making through tomorrow.

  Run and Hide

  Bagdonas always seemed like a nice girl, but considering how close the horde of zombies are and how many there are, you figure there really isn’t much you can do but die right along with her. Besides, you’re going to have to use every ounce of speed you have left if you want to stay out of sight from the undead mob yourself. Turning around, you leave the little nook of a spot you had been crouching in and make a run for it back towards the shop, searching all the while for a place to hide.

  Running your butt off isn’t enough, and by the time you’re halfway down the hall, you hear the unmistakable moan of the zombies as they enter the intersection you were just at. Risking a look back over your shoulder, you see that several of them have spotted you and are now splitting off from the horde to pursue you, the closest means of satiating their incurable hunger pains. Turning your head forward again, you curse Bagdonas under your breath for leading them, however inadvertently, in your direction.

  From somewhere else in the school you hear a loud scream, and you feel bad enough to try to take back your curses just in case it was Bagdonas who just got taken down by the zombies. At the same time, you find the reserves of strength and endurance you didn’t know you had and pick up the pace a bit more.

  When you get three-fourths of the way to the shop class, you spot the boys bathroom on your right and make a screeching turn with your shoes on the tile floor to enter it. Upon opening the door, you see a dark figure moving inside, and it appears to be coming right at you. Leaping to the side, scared out of your mind, you slam your shoulder into the wall before realizing what you saw was your own reflection in the darkened mirror. Rubbing the spot which will surely become a bruise later, you promise yourself that this will be worth a laugh someday, so long as you can make it out this mess alive.

  Looking around, you see the usual things, a pair of sinks along one wall, a pair of urinals on the other side, a single stall for those needing to do more, and a small window set high above the stall. Knowing that the zombies saw you and will be in here in a minute, you try to judge the space you have, only to realize that there really isn’t enough room to swing your two-by-four around. You do have the option of doing some close quarters fighting with the hammer and screwdrivers you took from the shop, but you have no idea how many are coming in, and frankly, getting that close to them doesn’t seem very wise. Alternatively, you might be able to hide out in the stall. With them being essentially brain dead monsters and all, they might not even look for you there and just leave. The third option is to try to get up to the window somehow and crawl out. It will be a bit of drop down to the ground, but so long as you’re careful, you should be all right and then maybe you can get somewhere safe or at least find a phone and call for help.

  Looks like you have some options. If you try to hide in the stall, turn to page ……………. 281

  If you try to fight them, turn to page ……………….. 292

  If you go for the window, turn to page …................ 295

  Hide in the Bathroom Stall

  Not feeling too good about your chances of selfdefense against an unknown number of zombies, and not seeing any way to get up to the window, you decide that hiding in the stall is your best option. Stepping in, you quickly close the door behind you and turn the flimsy lock. Looking around, you see the usual: a cheap plastic toilet paper dispenser with only a few handfuls left before the roll is empty, the ‘porcelain of prayer’ as your older college bound cousin calls it, and a few inappropriate lines of graffiti written in black marker on the walls. Essentially, nothing that’s going to help you. That’s when you hear the door.

  At first it sounds like whoever is opening it is tentative about doing so, as if they expect someone to be waiting on the other side, but then you hear the door hit the wall as it’s pushed open fully and a stream of zombies comes in. It takes a minute for them to find their way to the back of the small bathroom, and you use this time to carefully climb up onto the toilet seat and crouch down, figuring that you don’t want one of them to see your feet or the top of your head from the other side of the stall. Through the crack between the door and the stall wall, you see the shadow of one of the creatures pass by a second before you see the mangled face of Jason, a smart kid from one of your afternoon classes. As quietly as you can, you send up a prayer that he won’t turn and see you through the same crack that you’re secretly watching him through.

  For whatever reason, it seems as if God, your guardian angel, or whomever is out there heard you, because a moment later Jason passes by to continue his stumbling walk elsewhere. Unfortunately, not being seen isn’t the only thing you should have been worried about because a second after you send up your thanks in quiet prayer, you hear the sound of the bathroom door close. That’s when your brain kicks in, and you realize zombies can’t do simple things like pull on handles and the bathroom door only opens in one direction, in. That means however many of them are in in here, they’re going to continue to be in here until they either decay to nothing or someone lets them out.

  If you don’t wa
nt to die in here, it looks like you’re going to need to make a choice. You still have the hammer and screwdrivers since the two-by-fours will be even less useful in the enclosed space of the bathroom stall, or you might be able to reach the window while standing on the toilet seat.

  If you decide to try for the window, turn to page ……. 283 If you try to fight the zombies in here, turn to page .... 288

  Reach for the Window

  Considering that you still don’t know exactly how many of the walking dead made it in here, and knowing that the only tools you have to kill them with are going to require you to be up close and personal with them, you decide to opt for escaping through the window. You know that most of the windows in the school only open so far, but you figure it should be enough for you to squeeze through. Now the only problem is reaching the blasted thing.

  For whatever reason, probably under the ideal of protecting God’s children from creepy pedophiles, the school made sure to build these rooms with the windows nearly at the ceiling. About the only thing they were good for was letting in some cooler air during the winter when the school’s boiler was set too high. The concept of letting out the stinky air from someone blowing up the toilet never worked because the air always seemed to be coming in, not out. On top of that, on the hotter days of school like in May, June, and August the smell of the black tar which was used in sealing the parking lot stank worse than anything someone could produce naturally within their own body. It was for these reasons that the windows were rarely open, and why now you would have to unlatch it before you could climb out.

  Standing up carefully and slowly, you begin to take a look above the stall wall and find that at least five of the monsters are still milling around in the tiny space between the sinks and the urinals. They are comprised of what were once girls and boys who attended school here, and this was probably the first time these girls had seen in the boys’ bathroom. One of the boy zombies is even standing staring at the wall above the urinal as if he’s using the facilities to relieve himself, and you quickly try to block the mental image from your mind as to what that might look like now that he’s dead.

  Turning in place, you attempt to reach for the window latch but find that you still can’t quite reach it. Looking down, you realize the only thing left is to try to use the toilet paper dispenser to place a foot on and balance between it and the toilet seat. Bracing yourself using the stall wall, you gingerly test the dispenser, placing, at first, a small amount of weight on it, and then gradually increasing it to be about half your weight. To your surprise it seems to be holding. Reaching up, you attempt to grab the window latch, but now that you have it, it doesn’t want to turn. The darn thing must be rusted in place from years of no one using it. Figuring you just need a little better positioning so that you can apply more torque to it, you lift your other leg from the toilet seat to the back of the toilet, conscious all the while of the toilet paper dispenser and praying that it holds your weight, despite how cheap the plastic casing looks.

  Again, whoever is out there is listening and takes you up on your prayer by keeping the dispenser in one piece and ensuring that it holds you. Unfortunately, they only seem to be listening to the exact words of your prayer today and not the overall plea for safety and protection because they allow you to accidentally put your other foot down, not on the top of the toilet as you had planned, but on the handle which consequently flushes the toilet beneath you.

  Wide eyed, you look over your shoulder and find that all of the dead eyes in the room are now staring at you even as the water continues its spin down towards the pipes below. The stare into the zombies’ eyes feels like an eternity, but in actuality, it only takes a second or two, and then they begin moving towards you.

  Frantic now, you dispatch the careful charades and reach for the latch, putting more muscle into it then you knew you had. At first it refuses to budge, but then as the rust separates, it gives and the latch twists open. As it does so, however, you manage to gouge yourself on its rusty surface and immediately begin bleeding. Wishing you had time to inspect it, you notice the zombies are now at the stall door, and whether it’s because they can smell your blood, or just because they’re angry you’ve hidden their next meal from them for so long, they seem to be slamming their weight into it harder than you would expect. You put aside any concerns about your hand, figuring you can worry about the tetanus shot later, and throw yourself towards the partially open window.

  Resting your weight on your forearms, you push the window open as far as you can with your head and find that it’s not opening as far as you hoped. Looking to the side, you spot the reason, a screw in the window track prevents it from opening fully. Wiggling forward you try to squeeze through anyway and feel the skin scrape off your back as you go. There just isn’t enough room. Reaching back, you grab the screwdriver from your pocket, and while balancing half in and half out of the building, you begin to try to remove the screw.

  As the fates would have it, the screw seems to be rusted as well, and it takes you several seconds before you can get even a millimeter of movement out of the thing. That’s when you hear the stall door behind you crash open. You try to quickly finish the job, knowing that this one screw is the last thing in your way before you can reach freedom, but it doesn’t turn fast enough, and you feel the cold grip of Jason’s hands as he grabs your leg and tries to pull you down. Screaming, you abandon the screwdriver and try to turn the screw with your fingers only to find that your bloody hand is unable to grip the rusty screw hard enough to turn it.

  On Jason’s next pull, you feel your back scrape against the window in reverse, and it hurts easily ten times more than it did the first time, but Jason at least lands on his butt when your shoe gives way to the force of his pull. Picking up the screwdriver once more, you try a different angle for your arm and manage to get a bit more out of the screw before the rusted head simply twists off leaving a small piece of corkscrew metal hanging out just far enough to continue blocking the window in its track.

  Shaking your head, disgusted with the way things have turned out, you look out over the parking lot taking in one last deep breath of clean air before another zombie grabs hold of your socked foot and yanks you back in where the small horde begin to sink their teeth into your skin.

  The End

  Fight Them From Inside the Stall

  Reluctant to get into a confrontation with them all, you decide fighting them while using the element of surprise is about your only option. The window looks inviting, but once you’re outside, you’ll have an entire world of potential zombies to contend with and that just sounds like jumping out of the pan and into the fire.

  Quietly pulling the hammer out from your belt loop and grabbing one of the screwdrivers from your pocket, you step a bit closer to the stall door and prepare yourself to attack. Peering through the crack, you see two of the zombies, one to the left and the other to the right. Remembering that the stall door opens in both directions, one of the conveniences that were added in case someone in a wheel chair needed to use the facilities, you make your decision and go for it.

  Turning the stall door lock, you exploded out into the open bathroom with your hammer raised, letting the swinging door knock one zombie into the wall while you take aim on the other. You bring the hammer down on the zombie’s head with a sickening thump, hearing the skull beneath the skin break beneath the force of your blow. As the zombie you struck falls, another steps up hoping that its luck will be better than its comrades, and that it will get a chance to taste that delicious flesh of yours.

  Acting quickly, you pull the hammer back across your chest and then let it fly, arcing out sideways into the zombie’s temple hard enough that you cave in a part of its face and shut down at least part of its brain. When you don’t see the creature immediately drop, you drive your other arm forward stabbing it through the eye with the screwdriver and then wiggle it to make sure you stir up whatever constitutes for a brain inside its thick skull.

/>   Behind you, you hear the stall door swing back away from the zombie as it attempts to get up, and you bring the hammer across in a vicious backhand, lodging the claw end in the zombie’s neck. The wound, however, does nothing to slow it down, and the hammer stubbornly refuses to come back out. Over your shoulder you see the other two zombies coming in for their chance, and so you yank on the hammer with all of your strength, grunting as you do so, frantic to get it loose. As you do so, you feel and hear the sound of something pop inside the zombie, and as it drops, you realize that you’ve just severed its spinal column from its brain stem. The only problem is the hammer slips from your grasp, still embedded in the side of the zombie’s neck, as all of a sudden the creature becomes nothing more than a hundred and thirty pounds of dead weight.

  With little to no options left, you reach in your pocket for another screwdriver and square off with your remaining two attackers. Both zombies come shuffling towards you quicker than you would like with their mouths open as they hungrily wail for the one thing that they want, your flesh.

  When both of your undead friends are within grabbing range, you duck down quickly and then spring up simultaneously shoving a screwdriver up beneath the chin of each of them. The screwdrivers do their work, piercing through the lower jaw and upper palate of their mouths before scrambling their brains.

  Looking around, you realize that you actually won, you killed them all, and you did it without getting bit, scratched, or otherwise infected. It’s almost enough to make you want to dance, but you figure doing so would not only be in poor taste considering these use to be your peers and classmates at one point. Despite the fact that the world seems to be going to hell, dancing around in a bloody bathroom is a level of sickness you haven’t quite reached yet.

  You consider reclaiming your tools, but one look at the nearly empty paper towel dispenser tells you that you’ll never really get them clean, and you don’t want to risk walking around with infected weapons and accidentally get infected yourself somehow. Reaching back to where you set it down, you take up the two-byfour again and make your way to the door, careful to step around the recently fallen monsters. As you approach it, however, you see a faint crack of light from the hallway, and then the door opens wide.