Zombie High (11 page)

“Zombie Pizza Delivery, you call it, we bite it,” you
say into the microphone.
“Who is this?” comes back the angry voice of Mr.
Castle.
Knowing that you might need him, you tell him
who you are, and ask, “Do you have a way of getting us
out of here?”
Mr. Castle pauses for a moment, and you know he
is at this very moment weighing his options and debating
if he can trust you or not. After what seems like forever,
he says, “I do have a plan. Two of them actually. The
thing is, I might need your help to pull one of them off.
Tell me, can you see around the school using the cameras
from in there?”
“Yes,” you confirm.
“Okay, then here’s my first plan. You stay in there
and use the PA system to tell us if these things are coming
up on us or anything and help us get to safety. Obviously,
it will only be one-way communication once we leave, but
with your help, I can guide the rest of these kids upstairs
and to safer ground.”
“That means I’ll be stuck down here while you’re all
safe somewhere,” you point out.
“Don’t worry, I’ll come back for you myself. You
can help guide me back the same way, and then I’ll bring
you up to everyone else’s location.”
Thinking it over, it doesn’t sound like a bad plan,
and you know that with his help, you’ll get a lot further
than you would on your own, but you still want to hear
what his other option is. “Just out of curiosity, what’s
plan B?”
“Plan B? Well, plan B was plan A a minute ago, and
that’s basically every man for himself. The kids I have
with me in this room all have broomsticks, table legs, and
whatever else they could find for makeshift weapons, and
we were going to try to stick together and head upstairs
ourselves just before you made your little announcement.
At least if you stay there, you can help us. Otherwise
we’re all doing our own thing and I hope we all make it
through the day.” Mr. Castle pauses for a moment letting
you think about your choices, and then he asks, “So
what’s it going to be, Kid?”

Mr. Castle’s the kind of guy whose military
experiences in life had hardened him and made him both
self-sufficient and a cynical to things like luck. He knew,
like any gambler, that luck only carries a person so far,
and in the end it’s only the hard core, the ones who tell
Lady Luck to get lost, who last. He was one of the few
who could see the wisdom of torching a house so that a
village could survive, and in a time like this, when the
whole world had gone FUBAR, he was the kind of guy you
wanted on your side. Deciding it would be best to join
forces with a man like him, you say, “Okay, I’ll help you.”

“Excellent,” says Mr. Castle. “All right, tell us when
the hallway outside my door is clear or at the very least
how many zombies are out there.”

“Okay, give me a second. I need to flip the
channels.” Stepping back over to the TV, you cycle
through the camera views seeing several hallways, the
gym, and a few scenes from outside the building. Finding
the view that looks onto Mr. Castle’s hallway, you see one
zombie milling around nearby and another further up
between his location and the stairs.

When you return to the microphone and tell him,
he says, “Good, all right. We’ll take care of them on our
way. From there, I’ll need you to flip over to the general
PA system and just announce what you see along our
path. Can you do that?”

Agreeing, you say, “Sure thing, Mr. Castle,” and
then ask, “What is your ultimate goal? I mean where are
you headed that’s safe?”

“High ground,” he answers. “In case of emergency,
always go for high ground. Besides, these things don’t
look too coordinated, so I’m betting they’ll have a little
trouble climbing the stairs. Plus, if anyone out there is
mounting a rescue, it’s going to have to be from the air
because these things are all over the streets.”

Acknowledging that what he says makes sense, you
say, “Okay, sounds good. I can get you to the second
floor.”

Cutting in, Mr. Castle says, “We’re not stopping
there. We’re headed for the roof. There’s an old access
hatch on the second floor in the broom closet. I’ve seen
the maintenance guy use it in the past to throw balls,
Frisbees, and such down when they get stuck up there.”

Thinking about it, you picture the upstairs in your
mind and recall that the closet is just across from the
foreign language class that Miss Sweets teaches. That
puts it down just fifty feet or so away from the stairwell.
You realize Mr. Castle will be able to get them all to safety
pretty quick this way. Just to confirm, you ask, “You mean
the one next to Miss Sweet’s room?”

“You got it, Mr. Castle, just make sure you come
back for me.”
Signing off, he says, “I promise,” and then you hear
the line drop. Looking back to the TV, you watch for a
moment, seeing the zombie stumbling around looking for
its next meal before the door to Mr. Castle’s room slowly
begins to open. The camera doesn’t let you get a very
good look inside his room, but from what you can tell, Mr.
Castle is standing at the door slicing the pie, a technique
used by military members and trained police to peek
around corners when clearing or searching a building. The
only reason you know it is from watching
S.H.I.E.L.D.
on
TV at home.
When the door is half open, Mr. Castle steps out
wearing no shoes on his feet, which you can only assume
is to ensure that he is quiet in the hall, and with a metal
yardstick in his hand. He sidesteps around the zombie to
get a better angle and then swings the yardstick like a
sword into the back of its neck. The zombie’s neck must
have snapped from the force of his blow, because the
thing crumbles to the ground like a marionette whose
strings had just been cut.
After looking left and then right, he silently waves
to the door where you see a couple of people crouching
and then points up the hall. Twenty-seven kids come out
of the classroom, most of them look like their seniors, and
almost all of them have something in their hands ready to
defend themselves with. One girl, a sophomore named
Madi, is carrying the pole from which the United States
flag usually hangs in class and to which students say the
Pledge of Allegiance to each morning. The group looks
like they are being quiet, and they hold tight to the lockers
on the right side of the hall as they advance behind Mr.
Castle.

As they approach the stairs, the other zombie you
mentioned sees them and advances as well, intent on
eating one or all of them. On Mr. Castle’s signal, the
group splits up, with roughly half of them going around on
one side while the rest circle around the other way. The
diverging line seems to confuse the creature for a
moment, and his mouth opens in what you can only
assume is a painful wail of hunger and desperation.
In an act of mercy, Mr. Castle swings his yardstick
once again, and it snaps in two as it hits the base of the
zombie’s skull. Before the zombie has time to react,
though, Mr. Castle runs the broken end through the
zombie’s open mouth until an inch or more pokes through
the back. With this, the zombie drops, dead for good at
last.
Looking up to the camera, Mr. Castle points up the
stairs, reminding you that he needs details about
whatever he might face on the way up. You hurriedly run
over to the TV on the secretary’s desk and flip through the
channels. From what you can tell, it looks like the coast is
clear, but you haven’t checked all the cameras yet.

You don’t want to keep him or the rest of the
students waiting any longer than you have to, so you run
back over to the microphone, flip the toggles to all, and
say, “Okay, Mr. Castle. I’m not seeing anything.”

Stepping back over to the screen, you watch as he
gives you a thumbs-up, and then turns to the rest of the
group and tells them what to do. You don’t see his mouth
move during this time, but the hand signals are clear even
to you. Five of the students are to accompany him up the
stairs and take up positions around the door and in the
hall. Once the area is cleared, they will signal to the rest
of the students to follow them up, and they’ll head for the
next door. When they all nod their understanding, Mr.
Castle peeks into the stairwell to make sure nothing new
has come creeping out of the shadows, and then heads in,
crouched low and ready to spring.

There aren’t any cameras in the stairwells which is
an obvious mistake on the part of the school because
students realized that immediately. It quickly became the
place where most of the bad behavior, from fights to
skipping class to hang out with your boyfriend or
girlfriend, happens. Right now, of course, it’s even worse,
because in the thirty-seven seconds it takes for Mr. Castle
and the first group of students to reach the top, you feel
like they’re on the dark side of the moon unable to
communicate with mission control and during that time,
they are Schrödinger’s cat. You desperately flip through a
dozen channels searching for them, and don’t breathe
once the whole time they are out of view. It feels like
you’re about to pass out by the time you finally see Mr.
Castle’s head poke out through the door on the second
floor.

So relieved are you by their success, that you fail to
notice the individual who has just entered the office
behind you. You continue to flip back and forth between
the first floor and the second watching for any potential
problems with either group, not realizing that your new
company is inching his way up closer with each passing
second.

At the point when the numbers have flipped, and
there are only five students left on the first floor while all
the others are either in the stairwell or already on the
second floor, you notice a door begin to open in the
bottom of the screen. You wait for just a second to see if
it is a zombie or something else, like maybe that teacher
left the window open and the door just blew open, but
the girl, Madi, sees it too and reacts. Turning to face the
oncoming threat, she takes five giant strides towards the
door and thrusts the flagpole she’s been carrying forward.
As the zombie drops to the ground, you see that she
scored a perfect shot having shoved the pole into its eye.
You almost cheer for her before you remind yourself that
there are zombies all around the school, and the last thing
you want to do right now is call attention to yourself.
Instead, you make a mental note to get to know her
better in the future because having one more friend who’s
totally fierce and capable of kicking zombie butt can
always come in handy.

That’s when it happens. That’s when the worst
thing that you can think of at that moment occurs. You
watch as Madi bends down to retrieve her weapon, the
flagpole stuck in the eye socket of the dead zombie.
When she pulls on it, it doesn’t come loose. Instead, the
head just lifts off the ground a few inches and bounces
back hard when she drops it. She looks left and right once
more, making sure nothing is sneaking up on her from
behind, and you notice she’s the only one left down there.
The rest of the students have gone into the stairwell.
That’s when she braces her foot against the zombie’s
head and yanks on the pole. Somewhere in that move her
foot slips, and just before the pole is dislodged, the thing’s
head lifts off the ground once more allowing its dead,
virus-infected teeth to scrape against her bare shin. You
see her wince in pain and grab at the spot, but you can’t
tell how bad it is yet, not until she pulls her hand away
from the wound and you see blood.

No matter what, in every zombie movie, book, and
TV show you have ever seen, no matter how small the cut,
the scrape, the gash or whatever, if it was caused by a
zombie’s mouth, the person eventually changes. The only
ones that don’t become one of the mass of walking dead
are the ones who die before the disease fully takes them
over. Unfortunately, it looks like she might know this, too,
because you watch her reach into her pocket and pull out
a tissue. Placing it over the wound, she hikes up her sock
to keep it in place, and then pulls up the other sock as well
just to no one notices, before she begins to head back to
the stairs to rejoin the group.

Put into the difficult position that you are, you
decide that you have to warn Mr. Castle. You don’t want
him to get everyone to someplace safe only to find out
afterwards that she’s infected and chewing on the person
next to her. Turning, you move to head for the
microphone, only to run into the reanimated corpse of
Mr. Beard. His stocky solid barrel chest blocks your path,
and the desperately hungry look in his eyes is just enough
to make you pause a second too long. That’s when he
strikes, teeth tearing into your neck and shoulder, and you
go down under the weight of his assault hitting your head
on the floor.