“Yeah,” said Paul. “I know.” He’d sensed it, even if he hadn’t worked it through the way she had. Things had changed for good, and they wouldn’t ever go back to normal. “Just trying to make you feel better, that’s all.”
“Well, don’t,” she said, but her tone was gentle, and kind of sad. “It’s the end of the world. The least we can do is be honest with one another.”
Paul would have loved to be honest with her. He’d have loved to tell her everything he felt. But even the end of the world wouldn’t bring those words out of him.
“Honest or not, we shouldn’t tell the others,” he said. “Some of them are only just hanging together in there.”
She sighed. “I know. You’re right.” She turned around so that she was sitting against the railing, and folded her arms, gathering the fur collar of her parka under her chin. “Is Caitlyn okay?”
“I thought you went to see her.”
“I did. She made it clear she didn’t want to see me. She had some rather choice things to say, in fact.”
“What’s going on with you two?” Paul asked.
“She never liked me, apparently. Wasn’t shy about telling me, either.” Her voice was carefully level, stripped of emotion, but Paul could see how it hurt her to speak the words aloud.
“She’s just saying that ’cause she’s scared and angry,” Paul assured her. “You don’t hang out with somebody every day if you don’t like them.”
She gave him a sidelong glance, as if to say, Are you really that naïve?
“Wow,” he said eventually. It was the best he could come up with. Had Caitlyn really never liked Erika all this time? He couldn’t imagine the effort it would take to sustain that level of deceit.
“Like I said, it’s the end of the world,” said Erika with a too-casual shrug. Tears were glittering in her eyes. “The least we can do is be honest with one another.”
And right at that moment, the campus lights went out.
It happened without noise or fanfare. One moment, the scene was lit by a yellow electric glow, and the next it was lit by nothing at all. The recessed lights and lampposts shut off. The lights in the windows went out. Even the moon and stars were hidden behind the clouds.
Darkness, everywhere. And then came the screams, high and desperate and terrified. They came faintly from a distance, and louder from the building below them.
Erika and Paul just stood where they were, the memory of light still fading in their eyes. And as their night vision came back, they saw things moving. Packs of Infected, running with purpose. Some went this way, and some went that.
And some came running toward them.
Downstairs, it was chaos.
Paul had kept hold of the flashlight he’d taken from the basement storage room, and he used it to guide Erika through the darkened corridors. Plenty of other kids had had the same idea. Flashlights were some of the most obviously useful items they’d come across while scavenging, and beams of light flashed crazily around as Mr. Sutton fought to calm the panic in the foyer.
Along the corridor, Paul could see a pair of kids whacking at one of the windows with iron bars that they’d salvaged from the metalwork department. Silver fingers had curled through the gaps between the planks and were tugging at them. Paul saw four hands there, before they were knocked away.
“They’re working together!” Mr. Sutton cried as he caught sight of Paul. “Attacking on all sides!”
Paul heard planks creaking as the Infected pulled at them, and suddenly he realized how feeble the barricades were. They’d been good enough to withstand the Infected an hour ago, but since then they’d gotten smarter, faster, and possibly stronger. And they’d learned to combine their efforts. Instead of pawing mindlessly at the obstructions, they were taking them apart.
“They’re not gonna hold,” Paul said to himself. Then, louder: “They’re not gonna hold!”
A loud boom made them all jump. Paul spun around and shone his light in the direction it had come from. The heavy swinging doors at the main entrance had been barricaded shut and boarded over, with a pole driven through the handles. As Paul watched, something slammed into them from outside, something that made the planks groan and bend and bulge. Something massive.
BOOM!
“What was that?” said a small voice at Paul’s shoulder. He noticed Mark, who had a satchel full of flash bombs clutched to his chest.
Paul didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. But something had to be done. If the Infected came through that door, or got through the windows, it would soon be over. And there were too many windows for the students to defend them all.
No. He wouldn’t let it happen. He’d only just started coming to grips with this new and changed world he found himself in. He wasn’t planning on leaving it yet.
He shone his light around the foyer. Piled on the floor were supplies that the group had gathered since they’d shut themselves in the science block. Nearby was a wide staircase leading —
“Upstairs!” Paul cried. “There are only two staircases from the first floor to the second. One here in the foyer, and one on the other side of the block, in the far corner. Both of them have thick double doors at the top. If we barricade them, there’s no other way up!”
“We can’t give up the ground floor,” said Mr. Sutton, but his protest was weak. He had the confused air of a man who didn’t know what to do. It was the first time Paul had seen him uncertain. Mr. Sutton had never been the best at enforcing discipline, preferring to outwit his pupils instead. The sudden darkness had caused him to lose control of the kids, and now he was dithering.
BOOM! The doors shook again.
“You think we can hold the ground floor if those things get in?” Paul cried.
Mr. Sutton looked at the doors, then back at Paul. He seemed taken aback by the fierceness in Paul’s voice. Paul waited a moment for a response, and when there was none, he ran out of patience.
“You three!” he said, pointing to a group of younger kids who were bunched together in a corner, frightened. “Grab up an armful of these iron rods and hand them out to anyone who doesn’t have one. Everyone needs a weapon.” Two kids came hurrying in from down the corridor, perhaps looking for Mr. Sutton. He recognized Freckles and Pudge. “You, and you. Take planks and nails, get up those stairs, and get ready to barricade the doors at the top. Pile up anything heavy you can find. I’ll be up there in a minute. Nothing gets through there, alright?”
Pudge’s face split into a grin. He was happy to receive a mission, possibly looking forward to the experience points he’d receive upon completion. “Right!” he said, and they got to it.
The three frightened kids were watching Mr. Sutton uncertainly, as if waiting for his approval. Paul didn’t have time for their teacher to get his act together. “Move it!” he snapped at them, and they scampered over to the supply pile and began picking up iron bars.
BOOM!
Erika, Mark, and Mr. Sutton were staring at him like they didn’t recognize him. Paul didn’t care. Nobody was doing anything, so he’d tell them what to do. There was a certainty to it, a rightness. He was inspired.
Paul scanned the pile of supplies and spotted a dozen white plastic containers, and a few smaller glass bottles full of transparent liquid. “Is that turpentine?” he asked Mr. Sutton.
“Er … yes. Yes, for treating wood.”
Paul quickly slipped his feet from his shoes, pulled off his socks, and put his bare feet back in the shoes.
“Um. What are you doing?” asked Mark.
Paul picked up one of the bottles, unscrewed the cap, and threw it away. Then he stuffed a sock into the neck of the bottle, into the liquid, leaving a length of material poking out of the end. He picked up one of several trigger-operated electric gas lighters that were meant for igniting Bunsen burners, and used it. A flame sprang into life at the end of the lighter. He held it up next to the bottle.
“Molotov cocktail,” he said. “Want to bet the Infected d
on’t like being set on fire?”
“Everyone, give me your socks, bits of rag, whatever you’ve got,” said Erika. “I’ll make more of those cocktails.”
“I’ll hand out the flash bombs,” said Mark.
“Mr. Sutton. Go tell everyone. Fight them off if we can, but if the Infected get through, we fall back to the staircase on the other side of the block. We can barricade it behind us. Okay?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Sutton. “Er, yes, right.” He seemed surprised to have his authority taken away from him, to be receiving orders instead of giving them. Then his face cleared and his expression firmed. “Yes, I’ll do it.”
Paul stuffed the Molotov cocktail in his coat pocket and grabbed another one, which Erika handed up to him. The sharp stink of chemicals surrounded them. The air was full of distant shrieks and screams.
BOOM! The main door rattled again. One of the planks split.
“What are you gonna do?” Mark asked Paul as he hurried off up the stairs after Pudge and Freckles.
Paul nodded toward the door, and whatever was pounding on it from the other side. “I’m gonna see what I can do about that.”
BOOM!
This time the impact made the floor shiver beneath Paul’s feet. Freckles and Pudge paused in their task of nailing planks across the doors at the top of the main staircase. They exchanged a nervous glance, then went back to it at twice the speed.
Paul ran the beam of his flashlight over the doors, examining their efforts. They’d jammed a bar through the handles and run a chain around them for good measure. With the planks in place, it would be pretty hard to get through, even for a few dozen Infected. “When you’re done with that, pull in the chemistry tables from the next lab and jam them in front of the doors. They weigh a ton.”
“Yeah, you told us already,” said Pudge with a faint hint of annoyance. There was another boom from downstairs. “I thought you had something to do?”
Paul made a last quick check to be sure they were doing everything right, then ran off up the corridor, flashlight in one hand, Molotov cocktail in the other. Pudge was right to be annoyed: Paul had a job of his own to do. Why couldn’t he just leave them alone to do theirs?
Because he couldn’t rely on them. He couldn’t rely on anyone but himself. That was the long and the short of it. But he couldn’t be everywhere at once, and he had to pick his priorities. Right now that meant dealing with whatever it was that was hell-bent on smashing in the doors of the science block.
He entered the next classroom and hurried through the tables to the far end. He estimated he’d be right above the entrance now. The windows weren’t yet barricaded on the second floor. It hadn’t seemed urgent, as the Infected hadn’t shown any signs that they were able to climb. He ran to the nearest one — a sash window with a grim aluminum frame — slid it upward, and stuck his head out into the night air.
The faintest glow of moonlight fought its way through the clouds and drifted down onto the darkened campus, adding a steely edge to the shadows. Though his night vision had been ruined by the flashlight, Paul could make out the movement of the Infected as they scuttled and lumbered across the open spaces. He spotted them by their eyes: cold blue stars that bobbed and lurched through the blackness. And he saw how they clustered around certain buildings, like maggots at a wound.
They knew where the pupils were hiding, and they’d attacked those buildings en masse. This was a focused, simultaneous assault. Not the work of mindless things.
BOOM! The window frame shook. Paul looked down in time to see something recoil away from the door of the science block. Something large. He squinted into the dark.
Below him were ragged figures tugging at the boarded-up windows, gnashing their teeth in impotent savagery, clothes soaked and tattered. Most of them were more metal than flesh now, though there was still a terribly human aspect to their features. They kept something of the faces of the people they once were. Some he thought he recognized.
Then the shape lunged forward into the light again, and threw itself against the door. Paul caught his breath. This was the creature that threatened to break in the door, the leader of the assault. A brute ogre of a thing.
Mr. Harrison had grown.
The headmaster had always been a big man, fond of intimidating people with his size and his military roar. But now he was monstrous, with great cables of metallic muscle bulging through the shreds of his clothes. He must have been seven feet tall, but he was standing in a crouch and his enormous shoulders and upper arms made him look like some grotesquely swollen hunchback. Blue eyes shone like lamps in a head made small by the size of his body.
Paul thought suddenly of the rat-thing in the tunnels that had absorbed the other rats around it and grown huge. Was that what had happened to the headmaster?
BOOM! Mr. Harrison swung a huge fist into the science block doors. There was the sound of splintering wood and the shriek of tortured hinges. They were on the verge of breaking, and if they did, there would be nothing to stop the Infected from surging in and overwhelming everyone before they could retreat.
The others needed time to get everyone upstairs and barricade the second-story doors. Paul needed to give it to them.
With shaking hands, he held up the bottle of turpentine with his sock stuffed in the end. The spirits had soaked up through the sock by now, the fibers damp with flammable liquid. Paul touched the gas lighter to it and pulled the trigger. Flame rippled up the sock, blue and yellow and green.
He swallowed against a dry throat and leaned back out the window. “Hey, up here!” he called, as loud as he could manage.
The ogre that had once been his headmaster looked up at him, fixing him with a sharp and soulless glare. Paul flung the Molotov cocktail down toward him. Unnerved as he was by the sight of the creature, his aim was off — but it was good enough. The bottle burst against Harrison’s shoulder. One massive arm and half a leg burst into flame.
Harrison bellowed, the sound like some prehistoric beast, accompanied by that awful buzz-saw whine that underpinned the voices of the Infected. The scene was suddenly illuminated by fire. Harrison flailed and swung, knocking nearby Infected off their feet, flapping at himself in torment. He staggered away from the science block, his torn coat and trousers alight, and then with a howl he thundered away across the campus. In moments, he was only a trail of fire dwindling in the dark, heading for the lake.
Paul sat back from the window, and allowed himself a desperate grin of relief. The science block doors would hold. He’d stared into the eyes of the beast and driven it away. The reprieve would only be short, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Because just for this one moment, he felt invincible.
“Keep ’em back! Hit ’em, you wimps!”
Even now, the younger pupils of Mortingham Academy were more scared of Adam than they were of the Infected. There wasn’t one of them who hadn’t been bullied by him, or at least learned to fear him by reputation. So when he yelled at them, they stopped backing away from the windows and did what he said. The Infected were still outside for now. Adam was in here with them.
There were three boarded-up windows in the ground-floor classroom. Through the gaps in the planking, sharp blue eyes glowed in snarling silver faces. The Infected pulled at the boards or tried to squeeze their hands through the gaps to scratch the people inside. When they did, the three younger kids battered them with iron rods. Adam, who was stronger, wielded an old, heavy radiator pipe that he’d hacksawed off earlier. The Infected screeched as fingers and wrists were twisted and broken under his blows, but there were always more behind them, wrenching at the planks, pulling them loose.
Mr. Sutton had come running through a few moments ago and breathlessly delivered the news of the fallback plan. Adam just grunted and accepted it. He wasn’t much for thinking ahead. He was a creature of the moment. And right now that meant keeping these bloody things out.
He scanned the room. The furniture had been shoved against the walls. He wish
ed they’d thought of stacking up tables and nailing them flat over the windows, but it was too late for that now. There were two flashlights in the room, which had been laid on a sideboard to free up the students’ hands. They cast enough light to alleviate the darkness, but their pallid beams made sinister shadows in the gloom.
There was a cracking sound, and one of the planks came away from a window, shedding nails. Adam ran over and pulled aside the kid who was standing there. A spindly arm came thrusting between the planks and scratched at the air. The face of an Infected crammed into the gap, teeth bared. The straggly brown hair and sodden clothes told him it had once been a girl. It certainly wasn’t a girl now.
Adam aimed his pipe and brought it down on the elbow, breaking the bone with a nauseating snap. The creature screeched, jaws wide, a ghoulish mockery of the person it had once been. Adam swung the pipe into its face. He felt a jarring impact up his arm, and the Infected flew away from the window.
He picked up the loose end of the plank and shoved it back into place. “Hold this board while I nail it!” he snapped at the frightened kid who stood at his shoulder. Then he felt a thump against the plank from outside, and Infected fingers scrabbled at the wood. One of the fingers brushed against the side of his hand, chill metal against warm skin. He dropped the plank in horror, backing away, examining his hand frantically. Just one scratch from those claws and he’d turn into one of them. Had it broken the skin? Had it?
He put his hand into the beam of a flashlight. No. His hand was unmarked. Just a touch, then. Just a touch, and no more. He was appalled by how close he’d come.
By the time he turned back to the window, the Infected had wrenched the plank away, making a space big enough to crawl through. The kid was whacking at it, but he wasn’t strong enough to hold it back. There was another crunch, and Adam saw that the lower plank of one of the other windows was coming free. The kids were backing off, wanting to run, held only by their fear of Adam.
And suddenly he had the sense that this was all hopeless, that there were barely enough kids to cover all the windows on the ground floor, and half of them were too young to be effective. They could slow the tide, but not hold it back.
Silver Page 12
