Medora: A Zombie Novel (19 page)

He had been timid before to ask about Jayne in the rush to secure the school so he finally spoke up about it. “Hey everyone, I know we’re all
very freaked out right now and we really don’t know what’s going to happen next but…” Everyone in the room looked at him, eyes down, silently staring. “I have a daughter at this school. Jayne? A little kindergartener with blonde hair. She had pigtails today.” They continued staring, mostly shaking their heads.

One woman in the corner spoke up, “
Oh, yeah, I think I know her. Her teacher is Miss Stutsen? She is a super cute kiddo.”

“Yes, yes that’s her teacher. Do yo
u know anything about her or Miss Stutsen?”

The young woman shook her head, “No, I’m sorry. This day happened so fast. I’m still not really wrapping my mind around everything. I think I’m in shock, or I don’t know. Is this shock?”

“Did you see Miss Stutsen today?”

“No, I don’t remember. I’m sorry I don’t know anything. All I can say is that I sa
w some teachers, but not sure if it was Miss Stutsen or not, taking kids home with them; the kids whose parents hadn’t come anyway. Were you able to go check her classroom?”

Keith just stared at her. His mind was in such a shock and frenzy when he got to the school, all he could do was just check all the bodies that were strewn around, looking for Jayne. “No, I guess I didn’t think of it.”

“I don’t know, I’m sorry.” She went to the sink, washed her face, and then vomited into it. No one seemed to notice or respond.

The man returned with a white, plastic radio that had turned into a yellow tinged color over time.
Putting it on a table in the middle of the room, he turned it on and starting tuning through the stations. A garbled broadcast could be heard and he quickly stopped the dialer. A voice with a British accent then came in clearly.

“…yes, that is correct. At this
point, U.S. government authorities do claim that a contained perimeter is within the state limits of New York. Those perimeters however are unclear at this point. The U.S. has diverted all National Guard, local state police and the military to keep and secure this perimeter to prevent the spread of the infection outwards. The pathogen, which has not been identified, appears to spread incredibly fast and the top priority of the U.S. at this point is containment.”

Another voice on the radio interrupted the man, “And, John? John, can you tell us about the address that the President just gave?”

“Yes, for those that have not heard, the President just addressed the nation about eight minutes ago. He stated, among a number of things that the government was doing everything possible at the moment to develop a vaccine. In his address, he also urged all survivors of the New York City area to no longer stay in their homes, but for them to get out of the city and state as quickly and safely as possible. This might represent a turning point in the progression of this illness where the White House only a few hours ago was urging all citizens to stay in doors.”

H
arold spoke up, “They want us to go outside? There’s no way we would survive outside this school. All those bastards out there are going to eat us alive.” The people in the room simultaneously shushed him at once and turned their attention back to the radio:

“… and in what many are considering a somewhat alarming move, they urge all those that have been bitten and are not showing signs of infection to contact any state authorities immediately or to safely vacate New York and notify any
authority.”

“They’re not going to find any of them. Nope
,” Harold blurted out again.

“What do you mean?” Keith asked.

“Everybody that gets bitten turns into one of those animals. I’ve seen it about five times today with some of the kids. I saw a little boy go up and bite Mr.… ah, Mr., what’s his name? The guy with the moustache?”

“Mr. Rossi
,” the woman at the sink answered.

“Yeah, Mr. Rossi.
One kid came up and bit him right on the back ‘a his leg hard. I saw blood coming through his pants. I sat him down right in here, gave him some water but he got real feverish, real fast. It only took a couple of minutes and I had to hit him over the head with my shovel… hey where is my shovel? Well, anyway, I poked and prodded him right out the front doors. I’m sure he’s out there wandering around still.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it too
,” the woman at the sink said.

“We’ve all seen it
,” Another added.

“That’s why I’m not taking any risks here. If any of you get
bitten, I’m not keeping you around here. I’m just going to put that right on the table right now.” No one responded.

Then the woman at the sink spoke up again, “Hey, you can’t just be the one deciding who goes and who stays just because they get
bitten. You’re not the boss of this school, okay? What do you think this is; the end of the world?”

“Yeah, I think it is and I can protect myself however the hell I want.”

“Okay, well, you can’t just be killing people just because you think they’re going to be sick.”

“I didn’t say I was killing anyone, I’m just making sure nobody is around
who’s going to eat me.” He laughed. “Do you understand? Have you seen what people do when they’re infected? They eat you. I’ve seen a couple kids today just chewing their own skin off.”

Keith now realized that the janitor was suddenly making him feel uneasy. He looked him up and down, wondering where he was keeping his gun. “I think everyone should know that H
arold has a gun,” he said to the room.

“What? Where did you get that?”

Harold glared at Keith. “Yeah, and I took out two of the infected people about ten minutes ago. It’s my gun, so I’ll do whatever I want with it.” The room looked up at him. “Hey, come on, you got nothing to worry about. I’m only going to help everybody out. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Everyone in the room
stayed silent. There were no more arguments. Nobody was being the heroic that they believed themselves to be before an actual disaster like the one that happened today. It was just a cramped room full of elementary school teachers in ties and dresses.

“How much food is in the school?” Keith asked H
arold.

“A lot.
We don’t have anything to worry about, because the cafeteria is stocked with tons of food. We could be holed up here a couple of months and be just fine. Except…” he said.

“
Except we boarded the cafeteria up,” someone completed his thought.

“Yeah, that’s right.
Looks like we didn’t think too much about it.”

Keith got up from where he was seated on the arm of a yellow couch
. “Alright, I’m going to go check it out, see if any of the sick have gotten in there yet. We’re going to need food, so now is as good as time as any to go see if we can get some out of there. Anybody want to join me?”

“Hang on, there,” H
arold stood by the door. “We all can’t just be going and doing whatever we want in the school. We are in survival mode now. We need organization here.”

“You mean
, you want to be the boss, right?” A man with deep red hair spoke up.

“Now, I didn’t say that. I just think we need to be more… organized.”

“Yeah, but we all know that’s what you’re thinking,” Keith finally spoke up. He had had enough of the janitor’s authoritative attitude. “I’m checking out what’s in the cafeteria. As far as I can tell, no one here is the boss of this school and I’m hungry.”

H
arold stood at the door, tight lipped with his lower jaw slightly protruding outward.

“Are you just going to stand there?” Keith asked. “Just waiting for an altercation?”

Harold moved from the doorway, “No, no, no, easy now. I’m not going to stop anyone from doing anything. I apologize for sounding stern, but I’m just a little worried about how long all of us are going to be stuck here in the school. From the looks of it, not all those sick people outside are going anywhere any time soon. It’s going to take the government weeks to clean up that mess.”

“Okay then, who wants to
come?”

“I’ll come with you
,” Harold responded. “We can also check up on how our blockades are doing around the classroom.”

Now feeling totally uneasy at the prospect of being alone with the janitor, Keith insisted that someone else join them
. “In that case, we should have some more of us come to check on the classrooms.”

The red-haired man stood up
. “Yeah, I’ll come with you guys. It’s better than being cooped up in this tiny room. We’ll make sure to bring back food for everybody.”

At the moment he finished
talking, the fluorescent lights flickered in the windowless room and then went dim, completely enveloping the room in darkness.

“Oh, shit
,” a voice shot out.

Several people took out their cell phones and began
shining them around the room as flashlights.

“Looks like the bastards finally cut the power supply,”
Harold’s voice spoke from the darkness. “We better go get some flashlights from the storage downstairs too. How did I not already grab some of those?”

Keith fished around in the backpack that he had brought from his home and took out a flashlight, t
urning it on. “Let’s go then,” he said, moving down the hallway, indifferent to whoever followed him. Keith was mentally and emotionally exhausted. There was some unseen survival instinct growing inside him, blunting his emotions and driving him towards food. Whatever personal tragedies he might have suffered that day were now temporarily waning in his mind.

Moving awkwardly through the now darkened corridors, he could hear the feet of the group following him. They all moved quietly, having learned that whatever noise they made seemed to elicit pounding sounds from inside each of the classrooms that they passed. By his estimate, almost every classroom at this point seemed to have movement going on behind the barricaded doors. Following his narrow beam of white light through the
halls, he came to the locked up doors of the cafeteria. There was a thick metal chain with a padlock hanging from the handles of the double doors.

“Hey,” Keith asked, “
where did the padlock come from? I didn’t see this? We were just in here like an hour ago and this wasn’t here.” He turned around in the darkened lighting of the hall and looked for Harold.

“It was probably the janitor
,” someone grumbled from the dark.

“H
arold?” Keith shouted his name with no response. “Where did that guy go?” Only shuffled feet and sighs answered from the dim hallway. The janitor was not there.

Keith put his ear up to the doors to listen for any signs of movement. Either there truly was no one on the other side or the wood was too thick to hear anything at all.

“Alright, I don’t know what is up with that guy, but we’re getting into this cafeteria. Does anyone have anything maybe to break the wood up around the handles here? Anything lying around that we can use?”

Keith turned next to him and found a desk that was propped against a door. “We can use this to just ram the doors open.”

Several of them huddled around the table. Bending over, they slid the table in place in front of the doors. Keith counted to three and they rammed the desk into the double doors, causing them to rattle quickly back and forth without any breaking. “Let’s try this again, much harder this time.” They backed the desk up and on the count of three, again rammed the desk into the doors, splintering the metal handles clean from the wood and exploding the doors inward towards the cafeteria.

Looking in, Keith could see scant rays of sunlight shooting through the cafeteria in different directions. The group stopped and waited, staring into the large open space of the cafeteria. A shuffling sound came from the far corner and the group collectively held their breath. Only a few of them had had to us
e lethal force that day on the sick, although it was something that most of them realized would be inevitable for their own survival. They stared with a sense of dread at the violence that would be necessary to get rid of whatever was making sound in the corner of the room.

Keith whispered, “Is it only the one in the corner? Does anyone see or hear anything else?”

“I think its just the one in the corner,” someone said.

Keith slid a wooden bat
from his backpack and advanced into the cafeteria, holding the bat upright, prepared to bring it down on whatever came his way. He couldn’t see what was making noise, but he could tell it was just beyond a row of cafeteria tables. Two followed him from behind, each brandishing their own aluminum baseball bat that they had found at the gym before it was turned into a depository for the sick children.

Keith looked at all the wooden slats that had been put up in front of the windows;
every one seemed in place without any damage. He wondered how one of the sick could have gotten in without breaking through one of the windows. Advancing closer, the soft movements stopped and Keith could finally see a small figure huddled in the dark corner.