“He got bit,” Nick slowly explained, his bottom lip beginning to tremble as he spoke. “So he gave me his bat, told me not to let him down, told me to do the right thing for once in my life. So I did…”
His voice broke as he sank down onto one of the benches, pinching the bridge of his nose as his eyes burned with tears he didn’t know he still had.
“Jesus.”
Anna sank down beside him, not quite touching him, but not pulling away either. Nick sucked in one sharp, single breath and set his shoulders.
“Right,” he said, standing up and fixing his gaze into the distance. “Enough pansy bollocks.”
She stood quietly. There was nothing she could say that would make this better. They’d work it out in time, she thought. If they had enough time.
Nick opened the door to the hallway, but they were no longer alone.
“Shit,” he whispered.
Anna pushed him out of the way to see dozens of zombies filling the hallway from both directions.
They were trapped.
* * *
Upstairs, Steph and Chris crept through the corridor in silence. Every time Steph started to say something funny to break the tension, she saw another bloody handprint on the wall, another torn poster covered in red smears.
“I didn’t mean it before,” Chris said, noticing as she stared at a shredded periodic table. “About your parents and stuff.”
“It’s okay, I know what I’m like.” Steph shrugged, moving onward. “People love to tell me. I’m ‘difficult.’”
“I think you’re all right,” he replied. “And whatever happens, you’ve got us now.”
There was no forced earnestness or saccharine bullshit in his voice, just classic Chris honesty. A half smile found its way onto her face. In the midst of all this horror, it was nice to finally have a friend.
“Can you hear that?” Steph whispered, standing still and holding her breath. It was faint, so faint, but she was almost sure she could hear music. “You think it’s Savage?”
“No,” Chris replied, his eyes opening wide. “That’s Lisa’s favorite song. She’s got to be up here.”
He took off down the corridor, following the music and pressing his ear against every door. Eventually he stopped outside a storage closet. Steph held on to his arm, just to let him know she was there. She wanted to tell him it was going to be okay, but she couldn’t. And she knew if Lisa had been turned, she was going to have to be the one to take care of her. It was what a friend would do.
Chris grabbed the door and yanked it open. His gran lay on the floor, unmoving, while Lisa was hunched over her in a little ball. He reeled backward, so ready to believe the worst, when Lisa turned to face him.
“Chris?” she whispered.
Gasping with joy, he collapsed to his knees, bundling her up in a tight hug, smelling her hair, kissing her head as Steph pushed him inside the closet and closed the door behind him, standing sentry.
“I can’t believe it’s really you,” Lisa said through choking sobs. “I thought … perhaps … you…”
He broke away from their hug, finally turning attention to his gran. Lisa was still crying heavy, wracking sobs, and he realized they weren’t tears of joy.
“I’m so, so sorry,” she choked out as Chris looked down at his grandmother. Eyes closed, a smile on her face. She looked so peaceful. “We were going to leave, Anna’s dad wanted to go out to find Anna, but then Savage opened the doors. We had to run and when we got here her heart just … She laid down and then she was gone, just like that. I’m sorry, baby.”
Steph bit her lip, meeting Lisa’s eyes with as much sympathy as a human being could possibly muster. She couldn’t even imagine what that girl had been going through. Lisa gave her a tiny smile in return.
“At least she’s not one of them,” Chris said bravely, laying a hand on his grandmother’s shoulder. It felt too strange to see her so still. She’d always been so excitable, so full of life. Always the first on the dance floor at a party, even with her heart condition. His family used to joke that she’d outlive all of them, and he’d never even questioned it. After everything they’d seen today, how could she just be gone?
“I don’t want to be the one to say it, but we’ve got to go,” Steph said, keeping an eye on the hallway. “They’re bound to find their way up here eventually.”
Lisa nodded in agreement before unsnapping a hairclip from her own hair and sliding it into Bea’s. A final parting gift. Chris leaned down and kissed her forehead.
“Bye, Gran,” he said as he rose to his feet, stepped into the hallway, and closed the door behind him.
24
THE UNDEAD MOB outside the workshop was growing deeper by the second. Anna and Nick pushed against the door, trying to shut them out, but it was no good. There were too many of them. With one surge, they forced the door open, sending Anna and Nick flying.
“You’ve got to get out of here,” Nick said, warming up his batting arm. “I’ll hold them back.”
“No way,” Anna replied as she steeled herself for another battle. “We stick together.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off with a sharp look.
“You’re hard work,” he muttered.
“I’ve heard that before,” she said, smiling a little at the thought of it. “And don’t speak too soon. We’re not done for yet.”
Pulling back her candy cane, Anna prepared to charge, but instead she suddenly felt Nick push her backward, away from the fray.
“Come on, then!” he screamed, bashing skulls left and right. “Show me what you’ve got.”
“Nick!” Anna screamed as they all turned their attention on him. “What are you doing?”
But it was clear what he was doing. Slowly but surely, he led the throng of zombies toward the back of the workshop, luring them through a maze of desks and workbenches. Away from Anna. For a fleeting moment, she saw an escape route.
“Don’t just stand there like a dick!” Nick yelled. “Get out!”
“For fuck’s sake,” she choked. Was she really going to have to leave another friend to this fate?
“I want you to get your dad,” he shouted, climbing up onto one of the workbenches before kicking a zombie geography teacher’s head clean off his shoulders. He’d never liked geography. “Please, just go.”
She nodded at the determination in his eyes as he swung the bat down onto the French teacher Mademoiselle Rouselle’s skull. Without looking back, she darted around the gaggle of undead educators and out the front door.
“Close it!” Nick ordered from on top of his workbench. His eyes flickered down for just a second. NICK, JAKE, TIBBSY, GRAHAM. They were right there with him. “I’ve got this!”
And as the zombies swarmed forward, Anna did as he asked. Choking back tears as she ran, she heard Nick psych himself up with his anthem: “When it comes to killing zombies, I’m the top of my class. While you’ve been hiding, I’ll be kicking some ass…”
* * *
The staff room at Little Haven High School was a depressing place to be, even when there wasn’t a zombie apocalypse. Steph peered through the window in the door, to see their teachers shambling around, clutching moldy coffee cups and stumbling on the frayed carpet.
“I can’t tell,” she muttered. “You think they’ve been turned or not?”
“Far too hard to tell,” Chris replied, watching them bump into one another and groan nonsensically. “Let’s assume yes?”
“Seems like a safe bet.” Lisa nodded. “Where are your keys?”
Steph pointed toward a door on the other side of the room that bore the plaque MR. SAVAGE’S OFFICE.
“He’s always taking my stuff from me. I spend more time in there than I do in class,” she replied. “You two stay here, I know exactly where he keeps them.”
“No!” Chris began to protest, but she had already slipped inside the staff room and closed the door on her friend.
“I’ve got this,” sh
e mouthed through the window as Chris and Lisa pressed themselves up against the glass.
It was cold inside. The heating had clearly been off for a while, and the air in front of Steph’s mouth fogged up when she breathed out. She looked around at the other people in the room. No breath, no fog. Definitely zombies. She crouched down low, staying out of their sight lines. Sure, they were violent, flesh-eating monsters, but they weren’t all that smart. If they didn’t see you, they didn’t attack you. Like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, she reasoned as she crawled across the disgusting carpet, only with slightly more proportional arms.
Holding back behind a padded chair, she steadied herself, preparing to make the final sprint into the office. Something that used to be her media studies teacher, Miss Wright, limped by, leaving the path clear.
“Let’s do this,” she whispered, propelling herself forward. But before she could make it through the door, the zombie turned and stopped right in front of her. Steph’s nose was literally an inch from its moldering shins. She closed her eyes and tried not to panic. If it looks down I’m toast. Too many thoughts crowded her mind as she crouched on the ground. Her parents, her girlfriend. All the things she wanted to say to them, all the sorrys and thank yous she owed. She tried to imagine herself on the edge of the lake at her folks’ cottage, drinking a cocktail and wearing that polka-dot two-piece her mom bought her that she hated, with Veronica by her side. That’s where she would be, she thought with an almost-smile, if she could be anywhere.
Outside in the hallway, Chris grabbed the door handle, ready to rush to Steph’s aid. He was not about to let her go out all alone, but Lisa stopped him just in time.
“Wait!” she said, grabbing his arms and pointing toward the ceiling of the staff room. “Look.”
The zombie that had stopped right in front of her wasn’t looking down. It was looking up, eyes fixated on a piece of tinsel hanging from the ceiling. A shaft of light from the flickering fluorescent tubes in the hallway made it sparkle as it turned this way and that. The zombie smiled.
Steph didn’t need anyone to tell her what to do. Not wasting another single second, she crawled onward and slid inside Savage’s office, closing the door as quietly as possible.
The office was so utterly Arthur Savage, Steph could hardly stand to be in there. There were framed photos on the wall, no friends or family, but Savage shaking hands with the mayor, standing two over from a former prime minister, a very old picture of him appearing on University Challenge.
“Tragic,” she muttered, ignoring the faded “Be a Winner” poster with its curling edges and moving straight over to the shelf marked CONFISCATED. Every single item he had gleefully taken from students was lined up and displayed like a trophy. Steph grabbed a satchel from the floor and filled it with Savage’s precious things: spare phones, a flashlight, a chisel. But no keys. She delved into a box of random treasures at the end of the shelf, fishing through earrings, sunglasses, iPods, and—
“Urgh!”
She pulled her hand out and immediately dropped a huge pink vibrator.
“I hate this school,” Steph said, gagging as she attempted to turn off the buzzing piece of pink rubber. “Uh, sorry, St. Peter,” she whispered, fighting with the ON/OFF button. “But I was trying to save my friends’ lives and instead I accidentally switched on a huge vibrating dildo and dropped it on the floor and then I got eaten by zombies. May I come in?”
Her keys weren’t on the shelf or in the box. Unless he had them with him, there was only one other place he could have hidden them. The little locked door in his desk. But without the keys …
“This calls for a little well-timed vandalism,” she said with a smirk, grabbing the chisel from her new bag of tricks.
* * *
Steph was so focused on the task at hand, she didn’t even think to look back through the blinds, and it was just as well. The sound of the dildo had gotten the attention of several zombies when they heard the sound of something hitting the floor in the office.
“Uh-oh,” Chris said, biting his thumbnail as they started toward the corner of the room.
The zombie teachers were swarming, just waiting for her to open the door. The moment she did, she was dead meat, literally.
“We’ve got to distract them,” Chris said, stepping into the staff room before Lisa could stop him.
“Try the tinsel,” she suggested, following close behind. “They like that.”
“Here, zombies!” Chris called softly, shaking a sad strand of balding tinsel in the general direction of the undead. But it did nothing. Steph’s brains were far more interesting to them than Christmas decorations.
“I know,” Chris said with a triumphant smile, edging toward the TV. “Let’s see what’s on telly…”
* * *
With one muted crunch, Steph forced her way into the desk drawer, the lock dropping onto the threadbare carpet with a dull thud. Inside were his most precious, private possessions. A well-thumbed self-help book titled Victim to Victor, a black-and-white photograph of what looked like the world’s most depressed married couple to have ever existed, and a thank-you card. Steph wrinkled her nose at the faded drawing on the front; it looked ancient. The spine was gray and cracked, and inside it read, HAVE A GRATE SUMMER, MR. SAVAGE. REBECCA, 2D.
“I guess you weren’t always an evil, homicidal monster,” she whispered before dropping it back into the drawer with a shrug. She contorted her arm, twisting against the join to shove her forearm way up inside the desk, fumbling around until the tips of her fingers found something metallic. Her car keys!
“Yes!” she gasped, snatching them up as something like hope surged through her for the first time. Until she heard the laughter coming from the staff room.
Peering through the blinds, she saw the TV playing in the far corner, every single one of the zombies fixated on the bright colors and happy sounds. She followed a cable running out the back of the TV to a phone, held in a small, pale human hand.
Not a single channel was still airing when Chris turned on the TV, confirmation as far as he was concerned that this truly was the end of civilization. But he still had one trick up his sleeve. He connected his phone to the television and turned on his videos. Lisa rehearsing for the Christmas show, Anna and John messing around on the playground, and then, Steph reporting from the soup kitchen. The zombie Miss Wright seemed much more interested in the new version of his show reel, he noted with misplaced pride as the zombies moved away from Savage’s door and began to gather around the glowing screen. Steph had a clear route out from the office to the hallway.
He reached down and felt for Lisa’s hand as he raised his head over the parapet of the television, before ducking right back down, not sure what to say.
The zombies had them surrounded.
25
“WHAT ARE YOU doing?” Steph mouthed, her heart sinking as she emerged from the office to see Chris and Lisa staring helplessly at her from behind the television.
Chris shrugged as silent tears began to fall down Lisa’s cheeks. He squeezed her hand tightly, determined to protect her, to protect everyone. He just wanted to be brave, like John. But he also wanted to be alive, which was not like John.
“Crawl!” Steph hissed, doing her best to mime the movement. “I got the keys!”
“We can do this, boyfriend,” Lisa whispered into his ear before planting a sweet kiss on his cheek. He smiled at her encouraging face and nodded to her, to himself, and to Steph. They carefully got on all fours and moved slowly across the carpet. They were both going to be absolutely fine.
Over their heads, he could hear the videos playing. He could hear John laughing and joking, Lisa singing at the top of her lungs. Happy, loud, joyful sounds that he had almost forgotten.
Steph fidgeted in silence, pressing the sharp edge of her car keys into her thumb to keep herself focused. They were so close, crawling through the mob of zombies staring mindlessly at the TV screen. Lisa froze as she brushed the leg of her tenth-gra
de math teacher, but he was far too invested in a clip of Anna hurling balls from the ball pit at John’s face to notice. Breathing out, she began to crawl again. Steph grinned, giving them a thumbs-up as they pushed closer and closer and closer … until the videos on the TV suddenly cut out.
On the floor, Chris’s phone flashed with a low battery warning.
As the screen faded to black, the zombies blinked at one another before slowly, so slowly, turning to see Chris and Lisa crawling through their legs. The furious roar that followed shook Steph’s bones. She fished around in her bag for the chisel, wishing she still had her mannequin leg as the undead attacked.
Jamming the tool straight into the eye socket of the nearest teacher, she watched as Chris and Lisa scrambled away. In the wrong direction.
“Get out!” she yelled, jabbing indiscriminately as the zombies kept coming, but neither of them seemed to know what to do.
Chris scampered backward, pushing himself against the wall as Miss Wright approached. He winced at what was left of her face, turning away as she came closer with her teeth bared. He’d always secretly thought Miss Wright was attractive, but that was no longer the case. He definitely preferred her with skin, rather than without.
“Please,” he whimpered, trying to reason with whatever might be left of her. “Please don’t.”
It was pointless. Miss Wright wasn’t there.
But Lisa was.
“Get away from him!” she wailed, grabbing the teacher by the neck and hurling her across the room. Their eyes met for a brief moment, a smile on both of their faces. And then Lisa screamed.
“No!” Chris cried out, catching his girlfriend as she fell into his arms, the zombie still chomping on her shoulder. He lashed out without thinking, punching it away, knocking its nose right off its face, but the second he turned away, Miss Wright took her chance. She grabbed hold of his arm and tore into his flesh.
“Chris!”
Steph felt the bite almost as if it had happened to her. They were both bitten, Lisa and Chris. After all they went through to find each other, they don’t deserve this, she thought, still battling her second-period chemistry teacher, eventually jabbing him through the throat with her chisel.
Anna and the Apocalypse Page 15
