Diaries of the Damned (7 page)

“There is one upstairs, on the second floor, and another one in the science building,” the tall girl answered resolutely. “But you can’t reach them. There are too many of those things out there.” She spoke about the zombies in a way that sounded cold. She had seen what they did, and came to the same conclusion as Leon. Kill first and ask questions later.

“Well, I have to try
,” he answered, even attempting to flash a smile as he spoke. It did not work; he thought he probably just looked constipated. “She’s my daughter, and if she is alive, I’m getting her out…I’m getting everybody out, somehow.” A large rescue operation was not what he wanted, and Leon had no clue as to how he would rescue them all, but the look of hope that spread on their faces told him it was a worthy lie.

“You can’t go o
ut there. They will kill you,” the clean girl spoke, an action that seemed to shock the rest of the group.

“I understand, but she’s my daughter, and I am not going to give up on her.” Leon felt the fire in the pit of his stomach begin to grow. “Do you have any weapons? How many
of those things are up there?” he asked, eager to know what he would be facing.

“They are all on the first floor. There were four classrooms up there, so I would guess around about
fifty; unless some have escaped,” the tall girl spoke again, stepping into the middle of the room. “I can show you the best place to go up. I’m fed up with sitting here.” She shot a sharp look at the teacher, and Leon felt the strange atmosphere that held the room. He was certain, more than ever, that he needed to leave. Leon’s conviction was so strong he offered no resistance to the idea of taking a sixteen-year-old girl with him. Leon simply looked at the girl, nodded to her, and turned to leave. He gave the teacher a long hard look as he left. There was something off about him.

The hallway was deserted, and the girl moved with a sure footedness that Leon lacked. “
You didn’t have to come with me,” he spoke as they neared the main stairs that lead to the second floor. The sound of the zombies stumbling around above their heads echoed through the deserted hall.

“I didn’t want to stay there, either.” She gave the sort of barbed, curt response that only a teenager could give. It made Leon smile; a slice of normalcy in the middle of a crazy world.

They came to a stop at the bottom of the stairway. Leon felt his body tingle with a mixture of fear and adrenaline. “If you want to kill them, you need to go for the head,” the girl offered her advice and started up the stairs.

They made their way up the stairs, climbing a few steps before pausing to reassess. The second floor opened into a long hallway with glass doors at either end, separating the stairs from the classroom area. The zombies were effectively caged in. “They are pull-doors. They don’t seem to have mastered that just yet.” The girl heard Leon draw his breath.

As she spoke, the zombies turned around, their mindless shuffling stopped, their minds focused on a joint goal. The sound of their groans also changed. Something about it struck a chord in Leon’s mind, and he made a note of it.

It was strange, seeing all of the undead students trapped in one space. Leon stared at them; there seemed to be no discernible pattern to it. The only thing he saw was that the level of violence seemed to have either increased or decreased at some point. Those in the best condition had a single wound; a bite wound Leon guessed, remembering the shopping center. Then there were those that had multiple wounds, mainly around the face and neck area. One such student stood closest to the glass. Her face had been eaten on the right hand side. The wet meat beneath had already started to crust over, and she walked with a limp, her left leg jutted at a strange angle from the knee down. Yet it did not seem to impede her progress. The worst cases were the kids who were ripped apart. There were three students that he could see with their flesh torn apart, their bodies picked clean. These three were motionless, yet as Leon watched, they somehow still blinked and hungrily bit at the air; they too could hear the commotion and were just as frenzied by it.

The school was predominantly female in terms of students, with the ratio being about seventy-to-thirty. Looking, Leon did not see a single male student among them all.

“Come on, they calm down when we are not there, but those doors will break sooner or later. Sooner if you just stand there,” the girl calle
d from half way to the stairway.

Leon had a second flashback to the store, the glass shattering and the flood that followed. He shuddered and quickly headed to the second floor.

“How did you get them all trapped there?” Leon asked, impressed by the levelheadedness of the children.

“A lot of kids aren’t in school; they are off sick with the flu. Classes had been rescheduled, and moved to the second floor. The segregation happened by accident. Downstairs there are also some rooms with them all trapped in. We marked them with a re
d cross. We killed a few too,” she added with a startling nonchalance.

“The flu…” Leon began, pausing to think.

“Haven’t you seen the news today? They have as good as confirmed that it is the flu. Anybody who dies from the flu, which is everybody, comes back as one of them… a zombie,” the girl explained, mistaking Leon pause in confusion.

“I heard. I was already at work,” Leon said. “Besides I’m a paramedic; our orders were ‘business as usual’. The only thing was that we had to try and patch people up at home, to not take them to the local hospitals.”

The second floor of the school was much like the first: shut off at either end by heavy glass doors. The main difference was that the upper level was void of zombies, and looked for some reason or the other as if it had escaped all of the carnage. It looked utterly deserted, but Leon remembered the flag that had had seen come out of the window on the upper floor, so they pushed on.

“I don’t know where they are, but we heard them calling for help.” The girl, whose name Leon had yet to obtain, spoke as they opened the heavy glass door. There were three doors on either side of the whitewashed corridor, and the scuff marks on the standard school issue vinyl floor showed that central doors were the most often used.

“I saw something from this room here.” Leon walked to the central door that overlooked the front driveway, and knocked.

There were sounds of a scuffle inside, followed by a muffled cry. Without waiting, Leon pulled the door open, ready for anything.

What he found were five boys, all standing in one corner, huddled together. Their faces were etched with an expression of shock; shock at interruption. They stood in the corner, hiding something.

“What’s going on here?”  Leon asked, looking around the room with suspicion. He saw the white sheet that had been held out of the window, and he saw the bloodstains that dotted it; they were red… fresh. He looked back at the boys; none of them appeared injured. The largest of the group fiddled with the zipper of his trousers. It was a small motion, one that Leon saw out of the corner of his eye, but everything then fell into place.

Leon strode into the room and pushed the five boys aside. Behind them, cowered in the corner was a girl, a classmate of theirs. She was naked, and had two ties binding her hands and feet. Tears streaked her dirty face, while blood decorated the inside of her thighs.

Leon turned his face into an expression of
pure rage. “There are no words,” he began, his mind consumed by an anger he knew he could not, or rather he would not allow himself, to unleash on children. “Those creatures turned up today, and you are already torturing, abusing… raping.” His voice grew louder with each word, until his words were a bellow.

“We…
we figured, if we are going to die, might as well…” the largest of the group began the smirk on his face still evident. His words were cut short as the fist that Leon could no longer keep from throwing collided with his face.

Beneath them, they could hear the zombies become agitated once again. “Please, Mr. De Guzman, you need to keep quiet. Those things will rip us apart if we don’t keep quiet,” the girl begged.

“It’s Leon. Call me Leon,” he told her as he reached out and let the terrified young girl take hold of his hand. “As for you five, you are coming with us, and the first place you will be free of me, is at the police station, or so help me God, I’ll feed your dicks to one of those…things downstairs!” Leon gritted his teeth and spat his words, somehow managing to keep his voice just above a whisper.

The boys said nothing, not even the leader of the pack, whose bloody face stared at Leon with a fiery contempt.

“Leon, we can’t get everybody out, that’s not possible,” the girl spoke. “There’s so many of them. We will all die.” The girl had begun to look scared. Within the school, with the zombies locked away she was strong, an adult, but outside, surrounded by the undead she was a child.”

“Listen, um…”

“Cindy.”

“Listen, Cindy, those things down there will escape. It might not be today or tomorrow, but one day they will, and they will come for you. Who knows how many more there will be out there waiting for us then. Besides, I am here looking for my daughter, but I
won’t leave any of you behind…even you.” He stared at the boy he had struck. “Now, you said there was another group in the science building. How can we get there? What is the easiest way?”

Nobody spoke, not at first. The idea of leaving the safety of the school did not sit well with them. “You really don’t think those things are going to die?” Cindy asked; her voice changed. If was filled with a vulnerability that could no longer be held beneath the surface.

“They are already dead. This is all new to me too, but, from everything I have seen, these things are hungry. They don’t care what happens, they just keep going, crawling if they have to. The only way to stop them is by destroying the head, but there are too many of them. We need to leave, and it is not up for discussion. Now how do we get to the science building?”

Nobody had a chance to answer before the crashing sound of wood splintering came thundering
up the stairs. Everybody froze…it did not take long for the screams to start.

“We’re moving… now,
” Leon ordered. He removed the bonds from the abused girl’s limbs and handed her back her clothes. She was not yet fully dressed, but there was no time to wait.

“There has to be a back door right?” Leon asked as they swiftly moved down the corridor. The sound of grunts and hungry growls became louder as they reached the stairwell that was on the opposite side to the one Leon and Cindy had used to reach the second floor.

“Yes, if you go down here and just keep going straight, follow the corridor to the end. Turn…left, yes left, you will come to the side door. You will have to run to the science building though. It’s all outside,” Cindy spoke, her strength slowly beginning to return.

“Ok
ay. Everybody move quickly, stay with me, and be fucking careful!” Leon stopped a few steps short of the first floor. The doors there still held, although the crowd was more agitated than they had been.

They quickly made their way down the stairs, not listening to the trapped crowd as the scent of blood reached their hunger
driven minds. “Don’t look back,” Leon called as the doors began to rattle in their frames.

“What about the others?” Cindy asked as they reached the first floor.

“They’re already dead,” Leon stated bluntly.

Cindy did not need to ask how Leon knew this because their bodies littered the main hallway. A crowd of zombies that had been trapped in one of the ground floor rooms were gathered around a few of them, hands buried deep inside, yanking handfuls of squishy human goodness from the bodies and shoveling it into their hungry maws.

They moved quietly, even when the sounded of breaking glass echoed down from the floor above. However when the young girl they had rescued from the second floor gave a scream upon seeing what Leon thought to be a liver discarded, and slide along the floor like a bloated slug, they were forced to increase their pace.

The entire crowd, seven in all, dropped their feast and turned their heads; their minds in overloaded rapture at the prospect of another live meal.

“Run,” Leon ordered as he took off down the hall.

The zombies gave chase
, but the group was too fast for them. Leon crashed through the door, and out into the fresh winter air. Once everybody was out he closed it, and looked around for something that he could use to halt its continued use.

”Right, we need to move. Which way to the science building?” Leon asked.

Cindy pointed down the correct path and they started off. All but one boy who stood motionless, held in place by a zombie that had come from behind the building and sunk its teeth into his shoulder. He gave a cry of pain. Heat surged through his body, overriding the concept of pain. Inside he burned, and before everything went black he called out his apologies to the young girl he had helped to rape. He got no answer, for the group was already gone.

No order was required. They heard the boy scream and picked up their pace.

The science building was not far, maybe two hundred meters - but by the time they arrived; only three of the eight were still alive. Leon was the first to reach the building. He was glad to see someone open the door to meet their arrival. He was an older man; well into his sixties, with white hair, a white beard, and a laboratory jacket.  “In here, quickly,” he motioned to them. The teacher was a man Leon recognized from his previous visits to the school for parent evenings and other school functions.