Medora: A Zombie Novel (18 page)

“Hey, Miss Ellen?”

“Ye… Yes?” She continued looking down at the backpack.

“Your daughter’s name is
Jayne, right?”

Ellen lifted her head up and saw Maryanne pointing to the chalkboard. Someone had written in large red chalk:

“I have taken Brian Shandon, Jacob Treater, Jayne Sanders and Tim Warner to my house at 215 S Brady St. 5 blocks west. Time 12:15pm. They are okay. –Ms. Stutsen.”

Somehow,
Ellen wasn’t surprised that there would be another step, another clue to getting Jayne back. She had already expected it. Relieved that Jayne was no longer at what she now considered was an extremely dangerous elementary school, she put the backpack on the hook, and turned to Maryanne, but she stopped when she heard a loud clanking sound from down the hallway.

“What was that?” the girl asked.

“I’m not sure, but I think it’s time for us to leave. I’m not sure where your parents are but I need to go to that address on the chalkboard to find Jayne. I think it’s best you come with me. She’s at Miss Stutsen’s house. Hopefully from there we can figure out where your parents are. In fact…” Ellen walked up to the chalkboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote “Maryanne Reed” on the chalkboard next to the other children’s names, and then looked back at Maryanne with a smile.

“But I think my parents will look for me in my own classroom. I don’t think they’ll think to look in the kindergartener’s room.”

“Good point. Why don’t we head to your classroom real quick and write your name on the board and then we can get out of here. Sound good?”

“Yeah, sounds good.”

“I also think it’s a good idea if we looked through those backpacks for a couple of sandwiches.” Ellen gave a little laugh but she was truly suffering from hunger and thirst. Her head spun now and her stomach felt like an empty pit. She grabbed a few brown paper bags from various backpacks and put them all into Jayne’s bag. “Would you mind carrying this on your back? I think I’m a little too big for it.”

Maryanne reached out for the bag and then let out a little yelp as someone suddenly appeared at the doorway. Ellen looked over and saw a man with a square shovel and one-piece grey work uniform looking right at her. He had a dark and dirty scruff around his chin and neck with greasy liquid running off his col
lar and down the front of his stomach. Holding the shovel upright towards the ceiling, he rubbed his thumb up and down the split grain of the wooden handle.

“Are you sick?” He blurted out at them.

Ellen snorted a little at his lack of formality, “No, we’re not sick. We’re looking for my daughter. She’s a student here.”

“
There are no more kids here. They’ve all gone home or have turned sick,” He responded with a short, hurried tone.

“Okay, I understand. Who may I ask are you?”

“Janitor.”

“Okay, well we’re just leaving, she’s not here anyway.”

“That’s fine, then,” he continued, standing in the doorway watching her, watching the gun that was perched into the waistline of her jeans.

Ellen went to Maryanne, grabbed her hand and started for the doorway when the janitor spoke up again, “Hey, hey, what’s that you got around your shoulder?”

Ellen grabbed at the sports bra she had wrapped around her shoulder, “What, you mean my bra? It’s none of your damn business, so now get out of the way.”

“Did you get bit?” He shifted his body a little to better cover the opening of the doorway.

“Listen, asshole, I’m walking out of here right now, so get out of my way.” She rested her hand on the butt of the gun sitting at her waist.

Stepping forward too quickly for Ellen to react, the man pumped both his arms into Ellen’s shoulders, immediately tossing her backwards onto her butt, slamming her
onto the floor. Jolted, she scrambled to get on her side to release the gun from her waistline, but not in time for the loud clank of the shovel that smacked into the side of her face. She turned onto her stomach, wrapping her arms around her head to brace for another blow which came down hard and cracked her on the back of the skull. Then came blackness and silence.

Bending down slowly to the last small body that he could find stuffed in the corner of a classroom, Keith touched the shoulder of a frightfully young child’s shoulder, looked at its face and then rolled it back to its original position. He then sat in a tiny kindergarten-sized plastic chair and stared at the brown-glazed brick of the walls. He didn’t want to do it, but he starting thinking about the last interactions that he had had with his wife and daughter. He had seen Jayne last in her room this morning, her pigtails hanging in her face, covering a crooked smile as she waited for him to tie her shoelaces. The last conversation with his wife was over the phone and hurried. It didn’t matter though, he thought. How cliché it was just to go over the last moments with your loved ones. It didn’t matter what the last things he did or said to them. They were everything to him in his life and he had every memory of them sealed somewhere in the secret corners of his mind to live again and again forever.

He met Ellen on a double date set-up with Dave, something that he had always despised doing but agreed for some reason that
he would never know. He liked her right away. He noticed immediately how the corners of her mouth crinkled up when she smiled and the way she occasionally pushed her long strands of blonde hair over her ear. She was incredibly witty, much more than the girl he had dated prior and certainly more than any of the girls Dave had been dating. Keith never thought she would go out with him again. She was too pretty and smart for him but she quickly agreed to a second date and many after.

She had said it was his “brave nonchalance and reserved disdain for social convention” that was attractive to her. Keith never really understood where she got that from but he had always felt extremely lucky that she wanted to be with him. He felt it was always by some dumb, idiotic luck that Ellen had fallen for him by no merit of his own.

Jittery feelings of panic began to jump in his stomach; a sweaty feeling of hopelessness at never seeing his wife again was setting in. He loved her very much. The only thing that was stopping him from breaking down now was the lack of evidence. There was no evidence, he said to himself. No evidence that they’re really gone. He knew Ellen was strong, much stronger than he was, and that she must be somewhere. He knew she had a gun and that she was an angry mother, a potentially lethal combination for anyone trying to stop her.

He looked down at the dirt in the creases of his hands and the black under his fingernails and felt tiny and alone in the small plastic blue chair in the middle of the silent classroom. This elementary school had no
w become the only permanent thing in his life. He had searched every classroom with no signs of Jayne or Ellen.

There
was some feet shuffling at the doorway. “Hey there, uh… I’m sorry I don’t think I ever got your name.”

Keith turned around and saw the janitor that had finally let him into the school. The skin around his eyes was purple and his eyes were bloodshot. “It’s Keith.”

“Okay, Keith, would you mind walking around with me and checking all the entrances to the school? We need to make sure everything is secure.” He let out a hacking cough.

“Yes, that’s fine.” He stood from the tiny chair and walked over towards him, “And what was your name?”

“My name’s Harold, Harold Arundel.”

“
You been at this school a long time, Harold?”

“Oh yes, about thirteen years now, I know all the ins-and-outs.”

“Good, that’s great.”

“As soon as I saw that this flu was not really the flu at all and people started acting crazy I just starting blocking all the exits
except the main one. A lot of people came in and out if here in a damn hurry.”

“Well, thanks for letting me stay here while I figure out what to do next.”

“Yeah, well we could use another set of hands. Besides, you didn’t really give me a choice, busting in here like you did.” He laughed.

“No
problem, let’s go take a look.”

Keith picked up a wooden baseball bat leaning against the wall that the janitor had given to him and they walked down the long carpeted halls of the school.

“Fortunately,” Harold said, “we still got power to the building somehow, so I guess the city’s power grid is still holding up.”

They arrived at some metal doors at a loading bay in
the back of the cafeteria that were locked. “I think it would be a good idea if we could tip one of these big metal refrigerators over and put it in front of these doors here.”

“Oh, really?”
Keith slapped his hand on the side of one of the refrigerators. “These seem really heavy.”

“
No, we can do it. We’ll just back up against the wall and push at the same time, and we’ll get it to tip.” He put his back against the wall and slid his arms between the fridge and the wall. “See, like this.”

Keith followed the instructions. They managed to slide the fridge from its place, put their bodies in between it and the wall and pushed the entire thing over, slamming it onto the brown tile of the cafeteria kitchen.

“Ah ha!” Harold shouted. “There we go.”

They slid it into place, flush against the metal loading bay doors.

“Okay, as far as all the windows of the school, I’ve locked most doors of the rooms that have windows, so that if those sick people get in through the windows, they at least can’t get past the doors. I’ve got a lot of wood in the basement. I think it’d be good if we went around and nailed up some boards across all the classrooms that have windows.”

Keith let out a long breath
, extremely exhausted, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” They started walking down the hallways, making sure all the classroom doors were closed. “Hey, do you have a radio or anything? Any way to find out how things are going?”

“
Oh, yes, I got one in the basement… you know what?” Harold looked at him. “Why don’t we just go get a first hand look ourselves? Get up on the roof?”

“Good idea.”

Keith followed him and another teacher came out from the teacher’s lounge to join them on the roof. After a brief inquiry, the teacher had no information for Keith about Jayne of Ellen and didn’t seem interested in talking any more about it. There was coldness that had set in between people. Etiquette had gone at the window as far as Keith was concerned. The survival switch had been turned on in everyone’s brains and there was little time and energy for others. Keith knew that he felt the same way and winced as he thought about the man that he had left behind in the subway tunnel. The man that was eaten alive in the musty underbelly of New York as he himself slinked off to live another cowardly day.

They climbed a metal set of stairs, weaved through a storage area full of boxes and burst open a hatch that led to the summer
twilight sky above them. The harsh light burned Keith’s eyes for a moment as they adjusted. Spinning vents and large ducts littered the roof landscape. There seemed to be a continuous stream of ambulance sounds coming from any one direction at any moment. A cacophony of sirens and helicopters washed out any other normal summer sounds of birds of kids playing in sprinklers. Then he heard it; there were people close by, a lot of them. A rambling mixture of coughing, muttering, falling and screaming congealed into a stream of garbled human sounds.

The three of them approached the side of the roof and saw people scattered everywhere. They mingled slowly in between abandoned cars, congregated in backyards, streamed into homes and followed movements
of birds or dogs. There were thousands of people milling around in the area around the school. Amongst the infected hoards, there were dozens of bodies lying lifeless in the grass, on roofs, and in the street. Keith realized that he was in a warzone. The utter lack of any authority in the area was what was most disturbing. If they weren’t here taking care of this disaster, what else was going on in other places? How much worse was the situation elsewhere?

“Oh my…” the janitor spoke up quietly, “
…if at any minute that horde of sick people down there wanted to get into this school, ain’t nothing stopping them. Nothing at all, we are fish in a barrel. We need to move fast and board everything up down there. How many healthy people we got left in the school? Ten, twelve?” He spoke to the other teacher.

“Yeah, that sounds right
. We’re mostly just in the teacher’s lounge,” he replied.

“We need every single person here to grab some lumber that I got in storage and start boarding up every door to every
classroom, blocking all exits with anything heavy; desks, fridge, book cabinets, the heavier the better. Frank, can you go and let every one know? Meet me at the storage area in the basement?”

“Yeah, of course.”
The man scurried off.

“Alright,” he said turning to Keith, “follow me, we got shit to do.”

They moved swiftly down to the dank basement that hummed with lazy yellow lighting and started bringing up 2x4 wooden planks and stacking them in the middle of the hallways. The janitor started producing every tool he knew available in the school and threw them in a pile while all the teachers started grabbing the wood in twos and scattered throughout the school, nailing board slats crosswise over every door that led to a room with a window.

Keith and H
arold moved down a hallway, carrying wood and large nails and turned into a classroom. Harold, who entered the room before Keith, suddenly dropped all the wood making it spill from Keith’s hands. As Keith watched the wood slam on the ground, he heard three fast shots from a gun from the classroom, prompting him to cover his ears.

“Hey, hey!
What’s going on?” Keith yelled, looking into the room. He saw that Harold had shot an infected man who now had half the left side of his head removed from the shots. White cheeks and jawbones were jaggedly exposed below the cavern at the side of his head. The man’s feet twitched for an instant and then he lay motionless. Harold kept the gun aimed directly at the man’s head. Without taking his eyes of the dead man, he said, “They’re climbing through the windows now. We better hurry up.”

Keith shuffled to the windows of the classroom and saw that one had been broken inward,
and shattered bloody glass was covering the floor. He glanced outside and saw dozens of the sick milling around; most of which had noticed Keith at the window and were beginning to move towards the building, squeezing between cars.

Keith turned to H
arold, “Okay, let’s get those boards up fast! I can see a ton of them making their way over here right now.” Working quickly with a twitching fear in their movements, the men slammed the door shut. Keith lifted one board up as Harold slammed his hammer down on the nails, splintering the wooden framing around the door. After four slats, they took a long wooden desk that was in the hallway, turned it onto its side and pushed it against the door. Stepping back, they looked at their work, wondering silently, having no idea if it would stop whatever mass of people may or may not start accumulating in the classroom.

Keith stepped forward and could hear commotion going on behind the door. “They’re in there
,” he whispered.

They stood silently. At
first, there were just sounds of movement behind the door but soon they could here coughing, heavy breathing and deep guttural sounds with someone loudly hacking something down their throats. They knew it was only the infected inside the classroom, because there were no voices. A repeated and rhythmic banging sound begin to resound inside the room and Keith could feel the impact of whatever it was vibrate the walls next to him. He felt trapped. He felt the same trapping inside his chest when he looked down the stairwell at his work and saw nothing but the bloated faces of the sick looking at him. I can’t believe that was earlier this morning, he thought. Here he was, the same day where he had escaped from a building full of these monsters, survived an underground army of them in the subway and was now being cornered at his daughter’s elementary school. Rapidly trying to find humor in his situation as some sort of defense mechanism, his body just shuddered at his plight. He then thought of the janitor’s gun.

“I didn’t know you had a gun
,” he stated flatly.

“Hey!
Shh, keep your voice down. You don’t think they can hear you?” He half whispered and half shouted back. “Come on; let’s go see how the others are doing.”

They made their rounds. Apparently, all the surviving people in the school had the same look outside the windows that Keith had and they moved just as quickly to board up every door. Looking down any hallway, Keith could see large desks or cabinets sitting in front of every door.

They all made their way back to the teacher’s lounge, which was situated almost in the center of the building with no windows. One of the teachers switched on an archaic looking television, which only showed an emergency broadcast signal. The whole group of about twelve people watched as she switched through every channel that showed the same emergency screen.

“Does anyone know where a radio is?” She asked.

“Uh, yeah, hang on.” One of the teachers left the room.

Looking around the
room, Keith recognized a few of the teachers but didn’t personally know any of them. There were too many people crammed in the room and the summer heat was sweltering in the poorly ventilated room. He saw a person curled up in the corner where a refrigerator had once been. He wasn’t sure if the person was sleeping or was dead.