Chapter 2
Hannah just kept running. My heart was in my mouth, as I screamed at her to run over to us. Courtney joined me in my cries, and, as Hannah recognized us, she sped over and stopped suddenly, tripping right into Daniella! Daniella fell over onto the hard concrete floor, so Courtney told me to help her up while she tried to deal with the Giant Zombified Mr. Chatterly, her former Science Teacher, who was lumbering straight for us!
Daniella had been cut slightly on the uneven, stony, ground, so I cut off a strip of my knee high school socks with some scissors I had ‘borrowed’ from school once. After doing that, I bound it and helped Daniella up, before checking over Hannah and calling to Courtney, who was chucking bits of debris and charred bricks at the enormous Zombie. It seemed to distract him. But as soon as Courtney was out of the way, Daniella grabbed a pen and did her trick, stopping the undead Mr. Chatterly in his tracks, and making him fall to the ground.
We all hurried away, Courtney leading us into a house and breaking through the front door. I was given the job of barricading it, as I was quite good at that, whilst Courtney and Daniella scoured it for Zombies and Hannah made us a sort of camp in the living room. After all, we needed to stick together at all times.
I had just finished bordering up the windows when Daniella gave a shout, and me and Hannah both rushed in the direction of her voice. When we arrived, she showed us all a trapdoor, which led to a Bunker! An underground bunker!
“Put the light on, would you Courtney? I can’t see a thing!” Hannah complained.
“Alright, alright, keep your hair on.” Courtney mumbled, turning on the light and gasping in shock, as we all held our breath, hearts racing.
The sight before us was one that a CoD player would dream of. Guns, weapons, all sorts of firearms! Combat Knives, Machine Guns, and, oh, the love of my life, Sawn off Shotguns! Not to mention the .44 Magnum Revolvers! And before you say anything, my love of these two guns came from CoD, and not real life! But seeing one in real life, in the Apocalypse, just when we needed them? Unbelievable!
After getting over the shock, we quickly decided to check the rest of the place over before picking up anything! The owner could have still been living there! Imagine his surprise if he woke up and four Year Seven girls were stealing all of his precious firearms!
After checking the place, Courtney found one Zombie, but it was barely alive. It seemed to have not survived the transformation, which proved another theory of mine: The skin of the Zombie has to grow and harden very quickly, in order for the Zombie/Human Corpse Reanimated to live/walk around not really alive, as the heat would just kill a half dead human. This was the first example I had seen where the skin had not grown quick enough. Ha, a right little scientist I was turning into! But when I told Courtney about my theories, she said that they would be good in trying to understand more about our new world, so I continued my studies.
After checking his rooms, I found large quantities of illegal drugs, so presumed that they were the reason his reaction times were so slow. He appeared to be living alone, so we probably didn’t need to check anywhere else, but we did anyway, just in case.
After that, it was gun picking time! Honestly, it was like being a young kid in a candy store, just everything was free! This guy was obviously either a criminal or a nutcase, or both, as those guns were REALLY hard to get.
Courtney picked herself up six AK-47s, and who knows how much ammo! Daniella chose some throwing knives, and practiced her already perfect aim. How that happened I still have no idea! Hannah went for a cool looking bow, with arrows labelled ‘DANGER: EXPLOSIVE’, right up her street!
Me? I grabbed four .44 Magnums, two Sawn off Shotguns, lots of ammo and a knife with a protective leather cover. The knife was quite thin, even with the cover on, so I used a trick Courtney taught me at school with a pen: slide the pen/knife through the weak spot right before your ponytail, and it usually stays there. It also looks cool! My .44 Magnums and two Sawn off Shotguns hung on my clothes from belts, which I could clip them onto, that I found in an old cupboard.
There was also what seemed to be camping supplies, and a few extra backpacks and bags. We were grateful for these, but soon looked like Pack Horses because of all the luggage we were carrying!
When we were finished looting the Bunker, we tramped back to the Living Room, where Hannah had made an ok sort of camping place. Courtney started cooking some food, and we all made the place a bit more comfortable, with sleeping bags, rugs and pillows. The house offered little in the way of normal food, as Courtney had rifled through the cupboards in search of things to make a meal out of, and found one loaf of bread, some ready meals, some milk and some cereal.
Dinner was soon served, but we couldn’t believe that it had not even been one day. My mind wandered away slowly, before coming round to the big fire at the school. I thought about Hannah, her bag mostly. It had looked heavy, even before she had put any weapons in it. I turned to look at her.
“Hannah, did you have anything heavy in your bag?”
“Uh… no.” That was very vague. Courtney wasn’t satisfied.
“Are you sure? It looked really heavy.”
“No, no, nothing at all.”
“Now would be the time to admit it.” A guilty look crept across Hannah’s face.
“Uh, maybe.”
“What did you steal, Hannah?”
“Nothing much! Just a laptop, and uh, and some books, y’know, for, uh, reading, and, um, a, um, a set of headphones, uh, they were off a Year Eleven, and, well, yeah, that’s it, unless you count that bottle of Lucozade, but, uh, he wasn’t meant to have it anyway, so, uh…”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Daniella asked in her gentle voice.
“I, uh, forgot.”
“I’m sure you did.” Courtney snarled. This was her in a temper. “Now hand everything over. We can check if the internet still works. The electricity does, I checked, but it will only last so long.”
“Why?” Daniella asked.
“Well, there’s a reason they need engineers, you know. But apart from that, we could have it for one day or a year, you never know.”
“I want to know why we’re alive and they’re not.” Hannah said.
“That, I believe, is my department.” My voice was quiet, as my brain was working hard. “If Leah was still alive, then it’s not just us four. My guess is it happened sometime last night. Maybe it was airborne. That would explain a lot. And maybe younger people are less susceptible to it. That would also explain a lot.”
“Sus-cept-ey what now?” Hannah’s confused voice awoke me from my complicated thoughts.
“Susceptible. If you are susceptible, you are more likely to be harmed or affected by something than other people.” My irritation must have shown through my voice, as Hannah was quick to comment.
“Alright, alright, we’re not all brainiacs!”
“Enough.” Courtney had calmed her temper, and was back to her calm self again. “Kate, if you have any other theories like that, write them down. They could be useful.” I nodded. “And Hannah, don’t try and get into any arguments, please?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Now give the laptop to Kate, and we can make some progress.”
I was handed a slightly battered laptop, it must have been a teacher’s. I was also very good with technology, so easily hacked into it and changed the password to something I actually knew (Ok, by hacked I mean looked at the sticky note stuck to the screen with the password on it. Geez, I’m not that much of a genius!). Once we were in, I checked the internet. Working, and high quality. Ha. Not for long.
Using the internet while I could, I used a special program to download every single page on Wikipedia, in case we needed information, and a lot of survival websites that I knew about/searched for. As the electricity still worked, I charged up the laptop and started writing up my theories (I might put them in the back of this book, so read them if you want to). I had one on the transformation of the Zombies, one
on why the Zombies didn’t have any hair at all, one to how reaction times could change the way you transformed, one on how and what the virus is, and how it might have spread, and one on why children could be less susceptible to this virus, and adults more. A lot, I know.
But at about half past three, when we were all sitting down and eating some digestive biscuits that Courtney had got out of her bag, we all talked about the possibility of moving. Daniella suggested the Library, and, as we all agreed, off we went, loaded up with the many bags and guns we had collected. Moving on again.