Medora: A Zombie Novel (20 page)

“Hello?” He spoke out.

The figure was frozen with a few backpacks leaned up against it.

Keith stepped forward slowly, silently holding the bat forward towards the person and stopped when he heard
quiet sobbing of a child, hoping it was Jayne.

“Hey, hey,
it’s okay, we’re not sick. Are you okay?”

Keith shined his flashlight directly on a young
girl’s head as she removed a sweatshirt wrapped around her face and looked upward at him with a dazed expression on her face.

“Please don’t hurt me
,” she begged.

“We won’t hurt you at all, don’t worry. I’m Keith and I’m here with a bunch of teachers from the school that you probably know, see? He shone the light back over his shoulder at the group. “What’s your name?”

“Maryanne.”

“Maryanne?”
One of the teachers yelled out from the back. “Hey!”

Maryanne quickly got to her feet and looked past Keith, “Mrs.
Rottermund!” She ran past Keith and crashed into the legs of Mrs. Rottermund, hugging her.

Mrs.
Rottermund bent down. “Maryanne, how did you get in here? We had this whole thing all locked up.”

She silently looked around at the group and spoke up, “Where is the janitor?”

“Why, sweetie?”

“Because he did this to me…” She turned the side of her face, exposing a deep purple gash that ran from her temple to the bottom of her jaw.

“The janitor hit you?” She frantically inspected the girl.

“Yes
, he hit me right on the side of the face with his shovel.”

Keith suddenly realized why H
arold had disappeared and looked out down towards the hallway, suspicious of any movement. He knelt down the girl. “How did you get into the cafeteria? I was in here earlier and didn’t see you anywhere and then we locked it all up.”

“I woke up in one of those big refrigerators in the kitchen.”

“What?” Mrs. Rottermund yelled. “He put you in a refrigerator!”

“I don’t know, I think so. My face hurts so
bad.”

“I will kill that man
,” the teacher said.

Keith looked at her, “We’re all
gonna kill that man. Why do you think he did that to you?”

“He said me and this other lady were infected.”

“What other lady?” Keith asked.

“I was with another lady who was here looking for her daughter. He hit her too, real hard right on the back of the head because she got bit.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“I don’t
know. I’m sorry, I don’t remember much. I just woke up in one of the fridges and had to kick really hard at the door and finally opened it. I think he must’ve had it locked with something.”

With a flash of hope leaping up inside of him, Keith picked up his baseball bat and walked briskly over to the kitchen. He saw two metal refrigerators, one standing upright with one door ajar and the other was the d
ouble-door refrigerator that he and the janitor had knocked over only an hour before to block the doors to a loading bay. He opened the other closed door on the refrigerator that was still upright only to find it packed with white boxes. He then looked at the refrigerator that was tipped over onto its face; its doors facing the ground with the smooth metal back facing upward. Keith bent down on his knees and knocked on the back of the smooth surface. Nothing stirred inside. Looking back at the group, he pounded on the back of the refrigerator again and suddenly a muffled, long sustained scream came out of it.

“
Oh, my gosh,” someone said from the group, “someone is still in there!”`

Keith yelled at the refrigerator, “Hey
, we hear you. We’re going to try to get you out, okay? Can you hear me?”

There was a pause and then an indiscernible muffled response.

“Okay, how can we get this fridge back up on its feet? This thing weighs a ton.”

“Well, wait, what if whoever is in there is infected?” The red-haired teacher shouted out.

“I don’t know. I don’t really hear much of the sick people screaming like that. They just usually make weird gurgling sounds, I’m pretty sure I can hear a woman talking in there.”

Mrs.
Rottermund spoke up, “Yeah, I think it’s a real person in there. I mean Harold stuck this girl in one of those refrigerators and she’s fine. I don’t see a bite on her and she seems perfectly healthy to me.”

Marianne spoke up, “I swear I was never bit by one of the sick people and that lady in there
helped save me from two of teachers that were trying to eat me in the library. We have to help her, because she is so nice.”

“Okay, let’s see…” Keith and another teacher looked around and found a dolly placed in the corner of the kitchen, wheeled it over and stuck the metal plate of it under the front of the refrigerator. “I think if we can lift it up just enough to get a bunch of our fingers under it,
we can lift the whole thing up. We’re going to need all of us lifting.”

The group of teachers surrounded the refrigerator as they could hear the woman speaking loudly from within the metal surface. Keith slid the dolly underneath, lifting the edge up enough for everyone to put their hands underneath. They began to
lift, but Mrs. Rottermund slipped and fell, causing the refrigerator to slam down hard onto the already cracked kitchen tiles.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry
,” she said, getting up off the floor.

As soon as they were in place ready to lift again there was a sudden loud banging sound on the loading bay doors that the refrigerator was blocking. The entire group turned and stared at the double doors. Another loud smack at the doors caused them to rattle back and forth. They waited in silence, hoping that it would stop but it only intensified with a louder and more forceful push
in a rhythmic pulse every few seconds.

“We’ve got to do this fast
,” Keith said.

With new urgency and quickness in their movements, the group huddled once more around the refrigerator. Keith put in the dolly, lifted the end of it up and the group managed to slip all of their hands underneath the edge.

“Okay,” Keith yelled out, “One… two… three!”

With arched backs and exhausted arms, they slowly raised the large metal refrigerator to its feet and let go, making the bottom slam down. Keith saw a broken broomstick shoved in the door handle of the refrigerator and quickly slid it out. The loading bay doors were now active with sounds of bodies repeatedly slamming into them causing a loud rattling sound again and again in the kitchen.

“We’ve got to get the hell out of here,” a man yelled who then turned and ran out of the kitchen.

Keith opened the refrigerator door and a woman spilled out into him, knocking him to the ground. He looked down at her and saw the badly bruised and bloody face of his wife.

“Ellen!”

She looked up at him weakly and silently smiled at him. Her hair was matted with dried brown blood and one swollen eye. Her clothing and arms were charred black and her right shoulder was bundled together with a sports bra that had stiffened and dried with blood.

“Ellen! I can’t believe… how did you…?” Then he thought about the janitor and all the things he wanted to do to him.

Ellen, weakened, looked up at
him, touched his chin, and continued smiling.

The loading bay doors stopped rattling for a few moments and were now constantly pushing inward, squealing with the sound of twisting metal coming from the hinges. Keith backed up on the smooth tile and started to get to his feet when the double doors simultaneously slammed inward into the cafeteria with dozens of bodies bursting in after.

“Run!” Someone yelled, with the entire group stumbling out of the kitchen area and into the cafeteria. Keith got to his feet with his wife leaning in on him, grabbed the bat from his backpack and swung it outward at the face of an infected man that was slowly crawling towards him, chomping at the air. The bat struck him in the side of the face with his bottom jaw breaking free from his mouth.

“Okay,
Hon, we got to run now,” Keith said to Ellen as they made their way into the cafeteria from the kitchen, the rest of the group far ahead of them now. They shuffled quickly, Ellen moving slowly but fast enough to stay ahead of the horde that was now amassing behind. They could hear sounds of groaning and sloshing as each of the infected was struggling to crawl over one another to feed. Keith looked over his shoulder at the doorway of the kitchen as a few of them now got through into the cafeteria and were walking towards them.

“Run into the hallway.” He gently pushed Ellen towards the hall and stood with his bat re
ady to stop the approaching horde. One infected woman slowly stepped towards him and he waited until she was in range of his bat and then swung, hitting her in the neck. The neck collapsed with the impact of the bat, making her entire head lean sideways off her shoulders until the remaining attached muscles and blood vessels stretched and let it go, dropping her decapitated head to the tile. Her body collapsed and writhed in erratic, jerking motions. Keith breathed heavily, put one leg on another’s chest that was falling into him and kicked him off, making him spiral backwards into the crowd behind.

Feeling the suffocating body heat of the
horde encircling him, he turned and sprinted out of the cafeteria after Ellen, who had made it down the hallway, but had stopped to wait for him. He turned around to shut the double wooden doors to the cafeteria, but quickly realized that they had destroyed the handles of the doors when they had broken the door. Giving up, he grabbed Ellen by the shoulders and they ran down the hallway after the others, hearing the rattling of every classroom door with the infected that had crept their way into the rooms.

They made their way to the teacher’s lounge, which had been deserted, leaving only a blaring radio with scrambled voices. They looked back down the darkened hallway that they came from and could hear the slow but unrelenting movements of the
horde from the cafeteria. They were coming slowly with the inevitable force of a storm. Keith knew where everyone had gone and knew it was now their only option.

“
Okay, Hon,” he looked down at Ellen who was leaning in his arms with her eyes closed, “I think we’ve got to go to the roof.”

“Keith…” she said slowly, “I know where Jayne is.”

“What? Where is she?”

“Close by… close.” Ellen’s eyelids drifted downwards, her body overcome with dehydration and pain.

“Okay, we’ll get her. Let’s go.” Keith picked up Ellen and carried her in his arms as he advanced further down the opposite hallway of the horde, running now. Fortunately, none of the sick had managed to get through any of the boarded up classroom doors.

He ran further down the hallway, slipping
past bodies and furniture, making his way to a utility room that led to the metal staircase towards the roof. Feeling fatigue from carrying Ellen, his legs struggled with each step up the ladder, but he managed to get to the top, turned the metal doorknob and tried to open the door. However, he felt resistance from the other side.

“Hey!” he yelled, “It’s me! We’re okay,
open the door!”

There was a pause with some sounds of shuffling and suddenly the door opened outward into the dim open light of dusk. Keith carried Ellen out onto the rooftop and laid her down, helping the others close the door behind him.

“They’re back there. The whole bunch of them, and they’re coming up,” Keith said to the group of teachers who stared back at him with blank and frightened expressions.

“We got other problems up here too
,” a brown haired man with a thick moustache said back at Keith, pointing to a corner of the roof.

Keith saw H
arold in his one-piece custodian jumpsuit sitting on the gravel with his back against the corner of the roof. He held his arms propped up on his bent legs with his hands wrapped around a gun, pointed vaguely at them while whistling.

“What the hell is he doing?”

“We just found him sitting up here with that gun out.”

“Has anyone talked to him?”

“Yeah, well, Nancy just bitched him out pretty badly about putting those girls in the fridges. He just sat there and didn’t say anything. Hey wait, do you know that blonde woman?”

“Yes, she’s my wife.” Keith bent down to Ellen and rubbed her back. She breathed
heavily with her eyes closed.

“She is? Wow, I’m so sorry for what that bastard did to her.” The man turned to the rest of the group to tell them.

Keith slowly walked up to the janitor and stood about twenty feet away, staring at him. He looked down around the school and saw a sea of the sick swarming around the school grounds and flooding the playground.

“What do you want?” H
arold asked him.

Keith continued staring silently at the man, not knowing what exactly he would do next. His first idea was to give up on the situation. To just give up on everything
and go gather his badly beaten wife, find a corner and wait for the horde to come. Yet, looking down at the face of the man who beat his wife with a shovel and shoved her body in a refrigerator to die was somehow reinvigorating him. He could feel his pulse pumping in his neck, the sound of blood pounding with each heartbeat in his ears. He looked down at Harold’s gun and realized where he had gotten it.