“We can come up with a plan,” he says.
I laugh bitterly. “If someone’s blocked all the exits, there’s no plan, we’re done for. We have to believe that the door back there was a one-off. If it wasn’t, we’ll find out soon enough, and we won’t have to worry about it for long.”
Seez stares at me, then nods reluctantly.
“So what do we do?” I ask. “Hole up or try for the exits? Let’s vote. Who wants to stay?”
Everyone looks around, hesitant to be the first to vote. Then Linzer sticks up her hand. A few more start to rise. But before a decision can be made, Pox groans, turns aside and vomits.
“Gross,” Dunglop chuckles—he’s closest to Pox.
There’s a strange creaking sound, like a plank being bent to snapping point. As I’m trying to place it, Pox shudders, then falls still. The noise comes again. Cass takes a cautious step towards the motionless Pox, rolling his knife lightly between his fingers.
“Everyone stay back,” Cass says. “I’m gonna make sure–”
Pox lurches to his feet, leaps at Dunglop and bites a chunk of flesh out of his cheek.
Dunglop screams and staggers into Cass, knocking him aside. Pox is already moving. He scrabbles after Rick, the kid from a lower year, and grabs his foot. Rick kicks out but Pox bites into his ankle. As Rick screams, Pox turns on Suze and goes for her throat.
Cass gets in the way and jabs at Pox with his knife. Pox lowers his head and charges. I tackle him before he connects with Cass. Drive him sideways. He crashes into a desk and goes sprawling.
“Clear the bloody door!” I roar. As the others hurry to the piled-up desks and chairs, I face Pox, who’s back on his feet, snarling. There’s a strange green fungus growing over the places where he was bitten by the zombie. Only thin wisps, but I note their presence like some supersleuth with a keen eye for detail. And his fingernails are longer than they were.
No… hold on… those aren’t nails. Bits of bone are sticking out of each finger, scraps of flesh and nails shedding from them. I recall the creaking noise and put two and two together. The bones must have lengthened and snapped through his flesh as he was changing. I glance down and spot bones sticking through the tips of his shoes too.
Pox closes in on me but is distracted when Cass whistles.
“Here, boy,” Cass growls, beckoning Pox on. “Come and get it.”
Pox scowls and goes after Cass, moving speedily. Cass stabs at him. The blade sinks deep into Pox’s chest. It pierces his heart, but that doesn’t matter to Pox. He pushes on and Cass goes down. Pox opens his jaws and snaps at Cass’s face. His teeth are longer and thicker than I remember.
One of the Muslims grabs Pox before he can bite. Pulls him off of Cass and pushes him away. Pox falls, but one of his bony nails scratches the Muslim’s chin and draws blood.
“We’re out of here!” Trev shouts, and I see that the door is open. Everyone’s spilling into the corridor. Meths is dragging Rick, and Dunglop is stumbling after the others.
“Let me help you,” I pant, taking Dunglop’s arm.
“Thanks,” he moans, holding a hand to his bitten cheek.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, then whirl swiftly and send Dunglop flying across the room. He smashes into Pox, who goes down again and starts biting instinctively.
“What the hell!” Trev shouts.
“Meths!” I bark. “Leave him.”
Meths looks at me uncertainly.
“They were bitten,” I growl. “The same thing that happened to Pox will happen to them.”
“No!” Rick screams. “Don’t leave me! I won’t change! You can’t just–”
“B’s right,” Copper says.
“Look,” La Lips groans, pointing.
Pox is tucking into Dunglop’s brain. He’s broken through the skull with the bones sticking out of his fingers and is gorging himself on the juicy stuff inside, like a pig chowing down. Dunglop’s still alive, shivering, eyelids flickering with terror and shock. But he doesn’t scream. Just spasms.
Meths drops Rick and backs away from him. When Rick tries to crawl after him, Meths kicks him in the head and the boy collapses with a whine.
Seez is staring at the scratched Muslim, who wipes drops of blood from his chin, studies them and sighs. “A scratch might not be the same as a bite,” he says.
“But we can’t take that chance,” Seez says quietly.
The Muslim sighs again. “I’ll head for the front door. If I make it, and if I don’t turn, I’ll try to get help for the rest of you.”
He darts through the doorway and is gone before Seez can say anything.
I glance at Pox and Dunglop one last time, my stomach turning, tears dripping down my cheeks. Then I curse hatefully and rush out after the others, leaving my dead and undead friends behind.
TWENTY
We pad along the corridor. Screams behind us, echoing, bouncing off the walls like they’re never going to die away. I’m so glad I’m not in the gym. It sounds insane, way worse than when we snuck out.
At the end of the corridor we turn right. There are bodies sprawled across the floor. Students like us, scratched, torn, bitten, bloody. Dead. As we edge past, eyeing them nervously in case they spring to life, I note that their heads have been cracked open, their brains scooped out. Except one, a small girl whose skull is intact. The same can’t be said for her guts—they’re all over the place.
“Wait,” I whisper, stopping by the girl. I look for Cass. “Give me your knife.”
“No one touches the knife but me,” he says coldly.
“Fine,” I snap. “Then get over here and be ready to stab her in the head if she stirs.”
“What the hell are we waiting for?” Linzer snarls.
“I need to find out something.”
“Who do you think you are?” she screeches. “Some sort of bloody–”
There’s a creaking sound. Bones thrust through the tips of the dead girl’s fingers, each at least half an inch long. Her lips shake and pull back over her teeth, which are growing and getting thicker. Her arms writhe, then she sits up and hisses at us, hunger in her eyes. I shriek and fall back. She dives after me. Hooks my shirt with her fingers. Tries to dig in.
As I scream again, Cass appears by my side and drives his knife into the side of the girl’s head, all the way to the hilt. She shivers, eyes rolling. He works the blade around, digs it in and out several times. The girl falls away from me and goes still.
I force myself to my feet and tug up my shirt, wildly examining my flesh for scratches, heart beating hard. The others are staring at me suspiciously. Cass’s eyes are narrow, his fingers tight on the handle of the knife.
“Nothing,” I moan happily, exposing my stomach to them. “She didn’t cut me. See?”
“You’re lucky,” Cass snorts.
“Now let’s get the hell out of here, or do you want to study them some more?” Linzer sneers.
“I’ve confirmed what I wanted to.” I point at the other corpses. “Brains. Like in the movies. If they eat your brain, or if it’s destroyed, you’re properly dead and there’s no coming back. That’s how we kill them.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Cass says. “Now let’s–”
La Lips screeches. A couple of bloodstained kids have stumbled into the corridor. Their eyes light up when they spot us and they stagger forward.
“Run!” I bark, and in a second we’re racing past classrooms and corpses.
The zombies follow silently. I shouldn’t look back but I can’t help myself. I glance over my shoulder and spot them closing in. They’re not smiling or leering. They don’t pant either. They run expressionlessly, like robots. Only their eyes are alive.
One of the zombies grabs La Lips, who was struggling to keep up with the rest of us. She goes down with a yelp and it tears into her.
“Don’t!” I shout at Copper as he stops to try to rescue her.
“I have to!” he yells and kicks at the zombie’s head. The othe
r one leaps on him. He bellows and lets fly with a flurry of punches. But the zombie pulls up Copper’s shirt and bites into the soft flesh of his stomach. As Copper screams with pain and terror, the zombie rises, lips and teeth red, and comes after the rest of us again, leaving Copper to suffer, die and turn into one of the walking dead.
I want to help Copper and La Lips but I can’t. They’re finished. No time to feel sorry for them. If the zombie grabs hold, I’m done for too. So I leg it, trying not to think about the friends I’m leaving behind. The poor, doomed friends that I’ve lost.
As we come to where the corridor branches, we turn left, but I steal a glance right and then wish that I hadn’t. There’s another group of kids. Maybe they had the same idea as us and were making for the exit. But they’ve been set upon by a pack of zombies. They’re trapped against a wall, dozens of transformed students holding them there, chewing through their skulls. The captured kids are screaming, sobbing, throwing up. All helpless. All damned.
A couple of zombies at the rear of the pack spot us and break away, joining the one who was already hot on our tail. They chase us down another corridor. The black kid whose name I don’t know slips on a sliver of intestines. One of them is on him a moment later. He fights back manfully but the zombie bites, scratches and pushes him down. We press on and leave him.
More corpses. The floor is sticky with blood. We dash past a room. The door’s open. I spot a teacher inside, pinned to the whiteboard by four zombies. They’re eating her, two on her arms, two on her legs, working their way up to her torso. She’s alive and sobbing softly, her fingers, lips and eyelids spasming.
We come to a set of stairs. A few bodies lie spread-eagle across the steps. We clamber over them and up. But we can’t all fit at once. It’s a tight squeeze. Elbows and curses fly as each of us struggles to be first to the top.
I’m next to Cass, the pair of us pushing forward, when he gives a cry of shock. I turn. The zombies have him. One’s got his right leg, one the left. Both have bitten into his calves.
Cass screams and kicks at the zombies, but they hold firm. His eyes meet mine. He silently pleads with me to help him, do something, stop this. I shake my head numbly, then reach for his knife. He jerks it away from me.
“Please,” I whisper. “It’s no good to you now.”
Cass snarls at me and starts stabbing at the zombies. I watch him for a couple of seconds, then back away slowly. Neither Cass nor the zombies pay any attention to me. They’re locked in battle, but it’s a fight that has only one of two possible outcomes. They tuck into his brain and he dies. Or they leave his skull alone and he becomes one of them. Either way, Cass is lost to us, so I wipe him from my thoughts as best I can and hobble up the stairs after the others.
TWENTY-ONE
We pause at the top of the stairs to get our bearings. The two zombies below are still tucking into the screaming Cass, and there are no others in sight.
“The exit’s back that way,” Stagger Lee pants.
I’m familiar with it. I used it once in a fire drill. If we can get through the door, it leads, via a set of steps, to the same alley as the other emergency exit.
“Maybe we should make for the front of the building,” Trev says. “We could jump from the windows.”
“This exit’s closer,” Stagger Lee says.
“But if it’s blocked…” Seez mutters.
“We’ve got to try,” Stagger Lee insists. “It’s our best hope.”
“Wait,” Tyler says. It’s the first time he’s spoken since we broke out of the gym. “The cafeteria’s over there.”
“You can’t be hungry!” I gasp.
He shoots me a dirty look. “They’ve got knives in the kitchen. We can tool up.”
I frown. That’s not a bad idea. “What about it?” I ask the group.
“Won’t the cafeteria be full?” Suze asks. “It’s lunch, so it will be like the gym. If the zombies have struck there, it’ll be bedlam.”
“But we’ll have a much better chance if we have weapons,” Ballydefeck says.
“It’s worth a look,” Elephant agrees.
“All right.” I nod at Tyler. “Lead the way.”
“Me?” he squeaks.
I grin sharkishly. “It was your idea. Only fair that if we get attacked, you should be first on their menu.”
It’s hard to believe that I can make a joke at a time like this. But as awful as this is, as shocking as it’s been, I can’t shut down. At the moment I’m alive. Those of us in this group have a chance to get out and fight another day. We have to cling to life as tightly as we can, put the atrocities from our thoughts, deal with this as if it were a surprise exam. What I’ve learned today is that when the shit hits the fan, you can sit around and get splattered, or you can take it in your stride and do what you must to get away clean. I’ll have nightmares about this later, maybe a full-on nervous breakdown, but only if I keep my cool and escape alive.
We follow Tyler along the corridors. We’re the only ones on the move up here, none of the chaos of downstairs. I have visions of walking into the cafeteria, everyone eating, unaware of what’s happening below. Maybe they’ll think we’re winding them up. They might ignore our warnings and carry on with their lunch, oblivious until the zombies come crashing in on them.
But when we get there, I immediately see that reality has struck just as hard in the cafeteria as it has downstairs. In fact, it’s struck even harder.
Students, along with some teachers and kitchen staff, are backed up against one of the walls. They’re moaning and sobbing, but hardly any of them are fighting or trying to break free. They seem to have abandoned hope completely.
They’re surrounded by scores of zombies, maybe a hundred or more. They’re picking off the living one by one, biting some to convert them, tearing into the brains of others. It’s a carefully organized operation. And pulling the strings, directing the movements of the undead, is a small group of men and women in hoodies.
My breath catches in my throat. We’re watching from outside the cafeteria, through two round windows in the doors, taking turns to observe the horror show. But when my turn comes and I spot the people in the hoodies, I freeze and can’t be torn away.
There are several of them. Each has a whistle, which they blow every now and then to command attention. They have rotten skin, pockmarked with pustulant sores, purple in places, patches of flesh peeling away. All have gray, lifeless hair and pale yellow eyes. I can’t see inside their mouths, but I’m pretty sure that if I examined them close up, I’d find shriveled, scabby tongues.
They’re the same type of creeps as the two guys at the Imperial War Museum, the mutants who tried to kidnap the baby. And they’re clearly in control, dominating the zombies, using them to process the survivors neatly and efficiently.
Seez was right. This isn’t bad luck or a freak attack. We’ve been set up. And even though I wouldn’t have believed it was possible a minute ago, I feel even more fear now than I did when the zombies first burst into the gym.
TWENTY-TWO
We head for the exit, numb, and dumb with shock. I don’t think anyone now expects it to be open. But we act as if we hadn’t seen the slaughter in the cafeteria, as if we don’t know what it means.
We’re at the door a minute later. We stare at the bar. If it works, and the door opens, we’re just seconds away from freedom.
Nobody reaches for the bar. Everyone’s afraid of being the one to fail, to dash the hope that we all long for but don’t dare believe in. Finally I sigh and step up to the challenge. I push the bar down. It clicks. I pause a second, then push.
Nothing happens.
I close my eyes and lean my head against the door. Then I curse and push again, straining, putting everything into it. But I’m wasting my time. It doesn’t budge.
“B,” Trev says.
I fire one of my vilest curses his way.
“B,” he says calmly. “Look.”
I turn and spot something
on the floor to our left. I saw it before but thought it was just a corpse. Now I see that there are actually two bodies. And one of them’s moving, chewing on the head of the other, slurping down brains.
As we stare with disgust, the zombie pushes its victim away and stands. We all gasp at the same time.
“Mrs. Reed!” I shout.
The zombie that was once our principal sways from side to side, staring at us blankly, chin drenched with blood and flecked with bits of brain. I get a fix on the body beneath her and cringe. It’s Jonesenzio. He won’t be boring anyone with dry history lectures again. Poor old sod.
Mrs. Reed shuffles towards us. Nobody moves. She doesn’t seem to pose an immediate threat. She’s smiling stupidly, eyes unfocused, rubbing her stomach. She burps and giggles softly.
“This is unreal,” the Indian kid sighs.
Mrs. Reed’s eyes settle on him and she frowns. She raises a finger and shakes it slowly. Then she spots me. Her smile spreads again.
“Beeeeeeee,” she wheezes.
“Bloody hell!” Elephant yelps. “How’s she talking? Zombies can’t talk! Can they?”
Mrs. Reed comes closer. She’s within touching distance of me now but I can’t move. I’m rooted. The others back up but nobody runs or screams or tries to pull me away from her. They’re mesmerized, held captive by the spectacle like I am.
Mrs. Reed strokes my cheek with a finger–there’s no bone sticking out of it–and leaves a trail of blood across my flesh. But she doesn’t scratch me and claim me for one of her own. Her eyes are locked on mine. She looks demented but strangely peaceful at the same time.
“Fullll,” she whispers, still rubbing her stomach with her other hand.
“What’s happening?” Seez asks, distracting her. “Where did the zombies come from? Who are the freaks in the hoodies? Who locked the doors?”
Mrs. Reed snarls at him. Then she smiles at me again and taps the side of my head. “Stayyy. Hungry again… sooooon.”