“I hate heights, I hate heights, I HATE HEIGHTS” the thought bounced in my skull as I stepped out of the bathroom window and onto the exterior ledge. At 8 inches wide, it was barely enough to allow two thirds of my foot on it, but a lot better than the alternative.
The Nurse’s office was on the same level, two classrooms down, and I needed disinfectants for the bite. It was hurting worse with every passing hour and the inflammation around had only been spreading, as clear a sign of infection as I could tell..
I assumed, or hoped rather, that in order to suffer Benjamin’s fate I’d have to have one of those monsters fly into my mouth and that a bite wouldn’t be enough to give me that sort of death. But regardless, that aside, there were other, more mundane yet equally lethal, problems associated with such a bite.
Betadine, Hydrogen Peroxide, hell, even simple alcohol would be enough, as long as I made sure to clean the wound with something more than just soap and water.
So that left two options.
Either I try to cross the walking-corpse infested hallway in complete silence, or take the exterior ledge and risk a fall. The second option at the very least promised a relatively quicker death than being torn to pieces by a herd of walking carcasses, so here I was, feet on the ledge, fingers digging into the nooks between the brickwork and trying my best not to look down.
I really hated heights.
Thankfully it was only about thirty feet and the ledge went all around.
Our school building was of the modern design, built with easy firefighter access in mind and the security ledge was a countermeasure in case of a fire.
The first classroom I passed was empty, a small blessing. The extra space along the windowsill gave me a moment’s respite, just enough room to breathe and steady myself. But when I reached the second classroom, the quiet was shattered by a scream.
It wasn’t just a cry. It was a desperate, jagged sound that sliced through the silence, sharp and jarring, so sudden it almost made me lose my grip. In a place so still, so eerily quiet, her voice might as well have been a dinner bell calling attention to the dead.
The scream echoed again, more frantic this time, and I couldn’t resist. I edged closer to the window, my pulse racing as I peered around the corner, just enough to glimpse what was inside. What I saw made my stomach drop.
The poor girl must have hidden in the supply closet. At the very least, that’s where she stumbled out of, flopping onto her side as one of those chittering infected corpses clung to her ankle.
Before I could even think to intervene, the monster bit down and tore out her ligament in a spurt of arterial blood.
You get used to hearing screams in the ghetto. Turf wars, people being shot, someone getting stabbed in some dark alley, it’s par for the course. But nothing can prepare you for the scream of a human being being eaten alive.
It’s something raw, primal and magnitudes more haunting. Perched against the wall as I was, I couldn’t ever cover my ears against it.
The monsters flooded into the classroom, movements jerky and erratic, a tangle of limbs stumbling in spasms of motion and snapping jaws. They fell on her in a disorganized mass, and her screams rang out, raw with fear, pain and despair.
Perched against the wall as I was, I couldn’t ever cover my ears against it. I tried to block them out, to shut off the part of me that wanted to help, knowing it was already too late. But her cries lingered, staining my mind, a promise of nightmares to be had.
Then, there was a pause, a heavy silence.
I couldn't even bring myself to look right away. Only when I heard a final, gurgling rasp, the girl's death rattle,did I force myself to open my eyes again and look.
The horde had retreated from the mangled mess of torn meat that had been alive mere moments ago and stood around, heads tilted upward, sounding that insect-like clicking in unison.
I could only continue to watch in morbid fascination, face locked in a rictus grimace of disgust as one those albino bloatflies flew in and crawled into the mass of torn flesh and jagged bone that had been her head.
I started to move again quickly, each step calculated, every motion as quiet as I could manage, fear of falling at war with the animal urge to be as clear of that area as possible. The weight of the scream still hung in the air, pressing down on me, but I couldn’t afford to dwell on it. My eyes stayed focused ahead, body tense, straining against the terror coiling in my gut.
So that’s how they “reproduced”.
Alive or dead, as long those parasites could crawl into it, flesh was flesh.
The door to the Nurse’s office was usually closed unless one made a direct request to visit her. Ever since that situation a couple of months back when a few students had broken in and stolen an ambulance bag’s worth of drugs, that was the standing rule. But since it was almost summer, the window had been left cracked open to air it out.
A stroke of good luck for me.
Holding on to either side of the wall indent while lifting the window with my foot, I carefully lowered myself inside the sanitized white one would expect of a provincial school nurse’s office, the sparsely decorated walls on the right side covered with cupboards filled with various medical knick-knacks, drugs and medicine.
I couldn't even think about relaxing until I had everything locked down. First the door, twisting the handle, making sure it was solidly secured. Then, as quietly as possible, I began clearing one of the larger metal cupboards, hauling out supplies to improvise a barricade. The cupboard itself became the base, with a chair wedged against the handle to hold it in place, and a hospital bed shoved up against it for extra weight.
Once that was done, I could finally take a breath. But only a small one. I still had more immediate things to deal with.
Betadine, Hydrogen Peroxide, sanitary alcohol, and a piece of wood rolled with fabric to bite down onto. I cleaned my wounds with careful, methodical motions, wincing as the sting burned through the cuts.
The one on my shoulder needed more attention, and I damn near bit clean through the little improvised gag, digging the disinfectants as deep into the wound as I could, and wrapping it in a makeshift bandage that would hopefully hold until I could do better.
The last of the immediate steps was to fill the sink with water before I could finally relax a little.
A person could go days without food, but much less so without drinking water, and there was no telling when this too would get cut off like the electricity. Drinking water would most likely become a luxury sooner rather than later.
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Finally, with the barricade set and my immediate wounds tended to, I turned my attention to the lost and found basket.
My precious hoodie. I'd had to leave behind in the bathroom. The glass and ceramic shards had shredded it beyond repair, but worse, far worse, was the stench. The smell of that crushed bloatfly had clung to it, a rancid, sickly-sweet odor of putrescence that had seeped into the every fiber. Even if I could somehow wash it, no amount of detergent would erase that smell.
I’d lost that battle.
At least my jeans had survived, torn in a few places, but still intact and functional. Small wins, I supposed.
The basket wasn’t a total bust, though. As my fingers sifted through the odds and ends, I came across a thick, lumberjack-style jacket, flannel, red and black checkered. The unmistakable scent of cologne lingered on it, a sharp, musky aftertaste of something synthetic. It had probably belonged to one of the hipsters, I thought, the kind who wear the rugged “working man’s” look as a fashion statement.
It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. It would have to do. I grabbed it along with two small backpacks, hoping they’d be of use in case I needed to carry more than I’d planned.
The rest of the clothes I tied together, double knotting each end until I had managed to fashion an improvised rope. If the need to make a quick getaway from the office came, this would be much better than just jumping the thirty foot height and risking my ankles. Or my neck.
With a sigh that echoed louder than I meant, I started on the row of cupboards. There was nothing that sounded better right now than curling onto the bed and taking a long nap. Even though it was barely afternoon, all that had happened had exhausted me.
It was a luxury I did not have. Yet.
Bandages, disinfectants, vitamins, and any antibiotics I could find, were stuffed into the backpack. It was like a treasure hunt, rifling through shelves of supplies, loading up my pack with anything that might save me. Post-apocalyptic movies had drilled this into me: this was a gold mine of necessities, and I wasn’t about to leave without it. At the very least, if I found myself needing to leave right quick and in a hurry, I was going to make sure my bag was filled with as much of it as I could.
I even managed to squeeze in two complete first aid kits, full of gauze, surgical tape, and suture materials, just in case. Anything that could be used to keep myself in one piece, or at least patch myself up if things went south.
But it was the next discovery that made my heart skip a beat. I had been extra careful, digging into every corner, checking every nook and cranny, making sure nothing of real value was left behind. That’s when I found it.
Tucked far at the back, hidden behind a stack of bandage boxes, was a handgun. My fingers hesitated for only a second before grabbing it, the metal cool against my skin. Next to it was a box of ammo, and just beyond that, a roll of fifty-dollar bills.
I pulled the gun out first, making sure to keep my finger off the trigger. The last thing needed was an accidental gunshot-dinner call to alert the horde of corpses outside.
Despite the grim situation just outside this nurse’s office, a corner of my mouth quirked up in a smile as I examined the short-barrelled, five shot revolver. Finding a gun in Texas was nothing out of the ordinary, concealed carry was a thing after all. But a gun with its serial number filed off? Apparently the strict, stone-faced, always-by-the-book nurse had not exactly been fully on the up-and-up.
“Taurus Judge Public Defender, chambered in .45 Colt or .410 Bore, 2 inch barrel” I murmured, parroting the “lessons” Miss Kurt used to give us.
Bless her heart. As far as foster parents had been, she had been downright decent. Fed us, gave us thick second-hand clothes during winter, only cussed us out or whooped us some of the time.
Save the small issue of being both a gun-nut and habitual meth user, which when combined, would motivate her to force all five of us foster kids into hours long rant-seminars on the various types of guns.
Never let us shoot them though. Apparently even a drug-addled mind could understand that a ten year old can’t handle the recoil of a .45 Magnum. Either that or she was paranoid that we’d steal them. Well, at least she fed us when she was sober. It was more than I could say about some of the other “families” I had been placed at.
Five .410-bore rounds were quickly added to the drum magazine. While no gun-expert myself, Miss Kurt’s rants had taught me enough to know that these types of rounds were in the category of high-caliber as far as handguns went. More than enough to run through a human skull. Or a dead-man’s.
Clipping the now loaded drum closed and squirreling the half full ammo box in the backpack, I popped the safety on and squeezed the revolver into my belt. It was definitely uncomfortable and the edges dug into my prodigious gut, but beggars can’t be choosers and with no holster around, this was the best option.
With the immediate necessities sorted—well, all but food, of course—I finally allowed myself a moment to breathe. But even that brief sense of relief turned into something heavier.
Because now, without anything urgent demanding my attention, my mind had nowhere else to go but to the bigger picture. And that, frankly, was a curse.
I couldn't avoid it any longer. I had to face it. The situation was what it was, and if I was being honest with myself, I had already started calling it an apocalypse in my head. It felt defeatist, like I'd already given up. But no. I wasn’t being dramatic or pessimistic. I was just being realistic.
From that bathroom window, I had seen the landscape change. And the only way to describe it was apocalyptic, never mind the fact that I couldn’t see past the pale wall. Whatever was happening, whatever had happened, I had no way of knowing if it wasn't confined to our immediate area, the city, the state, or even global. But I knew better than to hope for the best.
“Expect nothing. Prepare for the worst” I murmured. A good motto to live by and it had served me well in my unfunny joke of a life up to this point.
It was the apocalypse. At worst, the entire world was affected. At best, this immediate area. Either way, it didn’t matter. For better or worse, right now this school building had become my world, and if I didn’t keep my head on a swivel, it’d become my grave.
I’d worry about what happened to the world, when or if I managed to get out of here.
If how quickly the school had grown deathly quiet was any sort of hint, the entire student body had been reduced to those shuffling things that I could hear bump and snap their teeth just beyond the office door.
Letting loose with another sigh, I buried my head in my hands.
“Dammit. It’s not fair”.
Fair or not, it was the hand I had been dealt and I was going to do the exact same thing I had done since the age of seven. Make due.
At the very least, I was resolved to die as spitefully as I could. The Reaper would have to drag my generous ass kicking and screaming all the way if the bony bastard wanted my life.
“Right. First few hours of any sort of emergency situation are usually the most dangerous. People panic. Make mistakes. Best option would be to rest for a few hours and start scavenging when the dust settles a little bit” I thought to myself.
Filling myself with water from the sink, I finally let myself crawl on the bed, adding my own prodigious weight to the improvised barricade and pulled out my smartphone. A second-hand, screen-cracked piece of trash, barely more than a brick, that barely did more than make calls and let me surf the Internet. When there was a network and internet, at least. But it had a vibrate function, and that was all I needed. I set the alarm for five hours. It might be the last time I’d get any rest.
The green jacket I’d bunched up into a pillow smelled of dust and sweat, but it would do, and as soon as my head hit it, sleep came quickly—too quickly, as if my body couldn’t wait to shut down, even if my mind wasn’t ready.