Preservation (11 page)

“How did you and Melissa meet,” Charlene said. My kid was smart. She’d sensed the funk
the career conversation was causing, and knew to change the subject.

“That,” Gene pointed a finger, “that is a g
reat story. I mean, you’ve seen her. Look at me. You’ve got to be asking yourself, how’d this Joe Schmo wind up with a babe like that?”

We rounded a corner.

Gene stopped. Held up a hand. “Shh. Door’s open. Shouldn’t be.”

“Mud,” Charlene said.

It wasn’t clearly footprints, but someone…or something, was wet and tracking mud around
inside
the school. “I’m guessing this wasn’t how you left the mechanical room?”

“It was not,” Gene said. “I’m going in. You guys have my back?”

Charlene already had her long sword drawn. I pulled mine from the scabbard. “We got you.”

Chapter Sixteen

1002 hours

“Dad, I don’t like this.” Charlene held the hilt of her sword in both hands, the tip of the blade on the ground. She kept bouncing on the balls on her feet. She looked ready to swing that blade in any direction in an instant. Her eyes pivoted left and right and left.

“We need to warn the others. If they have weapons, we’ve got to be ready to kill them,” Chase said.

“Weapons?
You don’t think it’s those things?”

“Sneaking into the school, breaking into the mechanical room, and cutting the power from the generators?”  I shook my head and almost snickered, but stopped. I thought about Charlene’s mom and the photograph, and the zombies figuring out how to climb higher on a fence, and unfasten a belt. “No, dear
, I do not think it’s zombies. This is too well organized.”

“I don’t know which is better.”

I knew. “It’s people. Survivors. They’re not friendly, though.”

“How do you know that?”

“They didn’t try to make contact. They…”

What they’d done instead was
disorient and split the group.  “Gene?”

“What is it?” Charlene raised her sword.

“Stay right here. I’m going after--”

The lights flickered on in the hallways. Gene must have managed to restart the generators. Another flicker, two, and then they stayed on. From where we stood outside the Mechanical Room door, I could hear the motors of the generators whine as they geared up and sent out energy though the school.

“Gene?” I pushed the door open with the sword’s blade, stood back, still cautious, still ready for anything. “Wait here, Char. Yell if you see anything.”

There were green painted rails that followed down three cement stairs, and outlined and turned off this way and that down the small maze of different pathways. I knew nothing about machinery. There were dials, gauges
, pipes. No idea. I wasn’t even sure I would recognize a generator if I saw it. I assumed it looked like one giant car battery. A positive and negative lead…

“Gene?”

Something grunted. Groaned. I reset my grip on the hilt of my sword. I felt my breathing go quick, shallow. “Gene?”

“Chase?”

I spun, bringing the blade around fast, hard.

“Chase!”

I stopped, lost my balance doing so, stumbled forward and into a rail. I’d come a breadth away from chunking into Gene’s ribs. “What the fuck!”

“What are you doing?”

“Fixing some of these wires. Trying to anyway. Going to have to get some electrical tape, do some splicing.” He held them up. “They’ve been ripped out of electrical box, and the panel’s a mess. I’m not sure I can fix it. The generators are up and running, for now anyway. Someone did this. I hate to think it’s one of our people.”

I wasn’t about to play any finger
pointing game. I knew it wasn’t any of
my
people. He could be suspicious all he wanted. It was
his
people I did not know,
his
people I did not yet trust. “The mud, though, that suggested someone
just
came in from outside. Or, from somewhere wet and muddy. We should check the nearest doors. All the doors, actually. Did you check the whole school before? I mean, like the entire school top to bottom, left to right when you locked the place down initially?”

“I did. I do. We check everything regularly. Last
night, they would have gone around checking classrooms, making sure windows were closed, locked. Doors, too. No one besides us is in here. Couldn’t be.” He bit his lower lip, pressed fists against his hips and looked around. I’d swear you could visibly see his confidence level descend.

“Char,” I said, just before Gene and I emerged from the Mechanical Room and back into the hallway. I knew she was tense. I did not want to give her any reason to accidentally swing.

“Everything okay in there?”

I shook my head. “Someone messed with the wiring.
Bad. We’re going to check the doors around here. See if we can figure out how someone got in.”

“Someone got in from out there?” Char shifted weight from foot to foot. I touched her shoulder. It was meant to mentally steady her. She shrugged the hand away. She was no longer fourteen. That age was gone.
A simple number that meant absolutely nothing anymore.

“Place was locked up good,” Gene said. “Andy and your man, Dave, they would have said something this morning.”

Of course, they would have. I was not sure why the fresh mud tracks didn’t alert Gene to the fact that whoever it was that had breached the school had just done so, or had so recently done so that they left a trail. “Let’s get back to the others.”

“I don’t, ah, I need, I’m
gonna need a weapon.” Gene must have been comfortable with his notion that no one else could be inside the school. I hadn’t even realized he’d walked the halls unarmed. I don’t know that I’d ever go anywhere, ever again, without my steel.

I handed him a machete.

“These lights just went off, which means the person can’t be that far.” Gene held the blade by his side. His white knuckle grip revealed the panic he felt. I heard it in the way his voice cracked when he spoke.

There was only one set of prints that were too smeared to indicate whether they were coming or going. “We’re going to check it out, Gene.
Just not yet. Not now. They either knew we’d send a few to check the mechanical room for the problem, or knew that the lights going out would cause some chaos. Either way, what they wanted was an opportunity to strike. We’ve been divided. It’s a ploy. They got us three away from the others. Let’s not get surprised, okay? Char, you stay right behind me.”

“Got it.”

Not sure what I heard first. Someone, somewhere, screamed. There was also a raggedy mix of gunshots that echoed down the halls, bounced off metal lockers and square-tiled walls. The high school was under attack.

#  #  #

I led as we ran from the Mechanical Room toward the cafeteria. There was no way to prepare for horror. With the screams, and guns being fired, it was bound to be a mess.

“Whoa, wait!” I held out my arms as I skidded to a stop before rounding the last corner.

“What?” Gene said, and panted while bent forward as if trying to catch his breath. 

Charlene answered the question. “We have no idea what’s going down. We can’t just, just -- barrel in there. Gotta take a peek, see what’s what.”

“Exactly,” I said.
“Exactly.”

At the next
corner, I laid down on my belly and inched forward. Peeking around the corner, I was not sure what I expected to see. Gunmen in black ski masks holding our families hostage. I suppose that is what a part of me thought might be waiting for us.

My imagination had failed me miserably. Kia, the woman who had comforted me yesterday while Gene stitched my side, was on her back. Someone straddled her waist. She had both hands planted on his head, forcing his mouth away from her throat.

“Shit.” I pushed forward, legs kicked trying to get me up and propel me toward Kia.

“Dad!”

“It’s zombies! It’s motherfucking zombies!” I charged, sword raised. I wasn’t sure I’d make it in time. Kia bucked, thrust her hips up, and twisted. It was enough to force the thing away from her neck. I swung my sword at its head. The force of the blow cut clean. The head rolled off the shoulders and landed with a splattering plop. Thick dark blood oozed from the corpse as Kia knocked it off of her and back-crawled away.

I held out my hand. “Are you okay?”

“The others are in the cafeteria!” Kia pulled herself up, looked around on the floor and found her 9 mm by the wall. The cafeteria was around the next corner. “I had them barricade the doors. I was on my way to warn all of you.”

“How many?
How many are we talking?” I led the four of us toward the next corner. The cafeteria would be roughly thirty yards from there. My sword was up, blade on my shoulder.

“A lot, seven, eight?
I don’t know. Ten?”

The lights in the hallway flickered and went out.

I looked back.

“The Mechanical Room.
Want me to go fix it?” Gene started to turn around.

“No. Stay with us. We’re done splitting up. We don’t need the lights on. It’s day time.”

“They’re doing this? Those things?” Kia said.

I nodded. “It seems that way.”

“That’s crazy. I mean, that’s just impossible,” she said.

“It’s not,” Charlene said. “They’re either remembering, or they’re developing survival skills. Whales hunt in packs and communicate attack plans as skilled as generals. Saw it on Discovery, or Animal Planet.”

“She’s right,” Gene said, as if my daughter’s comments needed confirmation. “Think I saw the same--”

“
Shh,” I said. “Listen, we need to round this corner and hit them fast. The school’s no longer secure.”

“We need my bus,” Gene said.

“Not now,” I said. “One thing at a time. Let’s clear the hall outside the cafeteria and then figure out where to go after that.”

“The gym,” Gene said.

“Not the gym,” Charlene said. “We need to get out of the school. We’re trapped in here. This building is no longer safe.”

She sounded as aggravated as I felt, and did nothing to hide it from her tone of voice.

“How much ammo you have?” I said.

Kia clapped a hand against her jeans. “Two more clips.”

“Okay. Should be good. We’ll do this together. On three. Ready? One. Two…”

Chapter Seventeen

“…three!”

We rounded the corner and I counted eight zombies. They stood pressed against the glass wall of the cafeteria. Their flat palms left muddied prints on the glass. It baffled me how they’d staged and carried out such an elaborate attack.
Somehow, the things figured out how to gain entry to a locked-down school, find the Mechanical Room and cut power to the generators, twice. It was like they knew that doing so would divide the group into two, and yet now they struggled with pulling on the door handles to enter the cafeteria.

If Charlene was correct, and I suspected she was, they had gained advanced animal-like survival instincts. This filled me with renewed fear, and meant we still didn’t know our enemy, didn’t have a clue what we were up against.

“Spread out some,” I said. “But not too far.”

“We’ve got this,” Charlene said.

“Are you a good shot, Kia?” She shrugged. “With them that close, I can hit them.”

“Head shots?” Charlene said.

“I can only do the best I can.”

It might have been an honest answer. It wasn’t a comforting one. “Okay. You are going to concentrate on taking them out.
Head shots. Once you fire, the element of surprise is gone. If they’re the fast ones, they are going to come at us without much time for reloading. Have your clips handy, okay?”

Kia immediately
moved one clip to each pocket so that they protruded slightly. She checked her weapon. “We’re good.”

“Gene, Char, we’re going to start toward them.
Just a few feet out. Skirt the walls, okay? Char and me on this side. Gene, you’ve got that side.” I wasn’t separating myself from my daughter, and he didn’t question it. “We don’t want to get in Kia’s line of fire, but we’ve got to be ready to take down the ones that get to close. Kia -- don’t you shoot us, got it?”

“I won’t,” she said.

The tension was tight. Thick. I smiled. “I’m going to need you to cross your heart.”

“I do. Cross my
heart, and hope--”

She stopped, looked away. Killed the mood I’d tried to set. “It’s okay. I believe you,” I said. “I’m
gonna give you the honors. I want you to start the melee for us.”

Kia held the hand gun out, arms extended. She lined up her shot.
Closed one eye. Her finger rested on the trigger, about ready to fire.

“No!” It was Gene.

Kia fired, but had jerked her arm. The shot went wild. I spun around.

The hallway was filled with zombies. They were down a ways, but closing the distance.

“Where did they come from,” Charlene said.

The eight by the cafeteria heard Gene, heard the gunshot,
and knew we were there. Did they also know we were sandwiched between hordes? Of course they did. Their strategy appeared flawless. They’d outthought us all. Son of a bitch.

We were nearly corne
red.

“They’re
fast,” Charlene said.

It wasn’t the approaching flock behind us. I looked at the cafeteria again. Those eight moved with agility I’d not seen exhibited before. If they had rigor mortis in their animated corpses, there was no visible sign of it negatively impacting their speed.

“Kia!” I said.

She let out two, three shots. She hit nothing.
Wasn’t completely her fault. The things ran, but normally. Their balance was askew. Heads bobbed up and down; wobbled side to side. We didn’t have time for this.

“Back the way we came,” Gene said.

“No,” Charlene said. “The cafeteria.”

There was no time to discuss it. Charlene wasn’t waiting for a vote. I couldn’t argue anyway. She, again, was right. If we went back the way we came, our two groups might never reunite. Our safety was in numbers. Even the zombies knew that.

I followed my daughter.

She ran at the first zombie and dropped to her knees. She swung the blade as she slid on the floor. She let out a howling cry as she cut the legs out from under the creature,
severing above the ankles and below the knees. The thing dropped. Its mouth had been open. Teeth slammed into the tiles and skidded across the floor and left a
splooging
trail of dark, thick blood. The zombie was far from dead, the brain was unscathed. Rattled, but secure inside a decaying skull. The immediate threat, however, clearly had been neutralized.

With the hilt near my ears, the sword’s blade pointed toward the drop ceiling squares, I swung and chopped off a woman’s arm. I was unable to easily free my sword and thought it might be lodged in its ribs. I let go of the
long sword, and snatched the hunting knife from the sheath on my hip. I grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair and yanked her head forward and down. I buried the serrated blade into the back of her neck, felt steel saw across the spine. She collapsed at my feet.

The gun fired. A zombie close to me jumped back several feet. The bullet hole in its face bled. It opened i
ts mouth and moved toward me.

I stepped on the woman’s back for leverage and pulled my sword free.

Another shot took the approaching zombie down. The front of its skull exploded. Bone and brain fragments sprayed around me. I closed my eyes, and shielded my mouth and nose with my forearm.

To my left, Charlene held the sword in one hand, and with the twenty inch
machete, she cut free the bowels of one zombie, and then swept out its feet with a kick of her own. When it fell, slithering around on its own intestines and guts, she planted a foot on its skull and pounded the tip of her sword into its ear.

If we were not in the middle of some crazy battle, I’d
have laughed at Gene. He handled the machete I’d given him like he was French and in the midst of a duel. With one hand on a hip, he stepped and back stepped, and swung the blade out in front of him, cutting into and chunking away pieces of the creature’s flesh. It might be his style, but we had no time for technique.

“I’m out!” It was Kia. She held her gun up in the air. Not sure why she did that. I could not recall her firing off more than a handful of shots.
Somehow, I’d managed to miss three clips worth of ammo being used.

“Chase!” Allison was at the cafeteria doors. She held it open, waved us over. “Come on!”

“Go, guys. Go!” I said, ordering them to push past what was left, ignore what came at us, and just get to the cafeteria.

Charlene ran to Kia, “Go,” she said.

Kia was out of ammo, and my daughter had the sword ready to defend them both. The two ran for the door. Gene and I were right behind them.

I heard the other zombies, the ones that had been coming down the hall. They sounded enraged. Their screams and moans echoed and filled the hallways. The only saving grace, the only thing that kept this from becoming a slaughter instead of a minor victory, was that the other creatures were slow.
Very slow.

As Allison closed the cafeteria doors, Melissa wedged a mop through the handles.

A mop.

That was what had kept them at bay before we’d turned that corner.
A mop.

“They came out of nowhere,” Dave said.
“As soon as you guys left. It was almost like they were waiting for you to go check out why the lights malfunctioned.”

“They were,” I said.

“What?” Andy said, standing between Michelle and Robert.

“Those things fucked with the generators,” Gene said. He wrapped a
n arm around his wife.

“There’s got to be thirty, forty of them,
Dad.” Charlene stared at the wall. “That glass won’t hold them.”

I remembered going to a rock concert, when being on the floor as opposed to in seats was cool. Only
once, did I venture to the front. The stage was set off by a waist-high rail that worked as a fence. Security stood between the two sections; the audience and the performers. Once the main act hit the stage, the force of thousands of people was crushing. There was nowhere to go. My waist was pressed into the rail and felt like circulation was cut off to the rest of my body. Breathing became difficult and I wasn’t the only one. A girl by me passed out. Security had to physically move people away. They pulled her under the rail and ushered her away to paramedics standing by. The band actually stopped several times and asked everyone to take steps back, so they wouldn’t crush the people up front. While the idea was thoughtful, the safety concerns were lost on the fans.

That’s what was happening now. We, the eleven of us were the rock stars.
The zombies, our biggest fans. They didn’t care that the people against the glass were being flattened. It didn’t keep the ones being crushed from still licking and trying to bite through the glass.

“We don’t have long. Charlene’s right. The glass, it won’t hold,” I said.

“It’s Plexiglas. It should hold. They shouldn’t be able to break that,” Gene said. “Holy shit.”

“Holy shit, what?”

“Gregory. It’s Greg.”

I looked around. I did not see anyone new in our group. “Gene, what the hell are you talking
about?”

Gene walked up toward the lunch tables, around them and right up to the glass, all the way at the right of the wall. He pointed a finger at the flattened nostrils of a man whose face looked like a dog had attacked him. The skin on his cheek had peeled back and hung loose toward his own throat. “That, this guy, he’s Greg. Gregory,” Gene said. He shook his head, smiling.

“I guess I’m missing the funny here, Gene.”

“The generators.
Greg did it. He’s the one --this guy right here-- that’s my partner. You know what I mean? We worked together. Day in, day out, the last several years. If anyone was going to know how to screw around in the mechanical room, how to do some real damage, it would be him, Greg. That son of a gun,” Gene said.

“He’s a not human anymore, he’s one of those things,” Melissa said.

The monsters had organized. They’d plotted an attack, and pulled it off. If it didn’t scare the shit out of me so much, I’d be impressed. “We need to find a way out of here. Out of the cafeteria.”

“And go where?” Dave said.

“We should get my bus,” Gene said.

“Where’s a window?” Allison said.

“In the kitchen, back here,” Megan said. She ran, taking Allison.

“Got a door back there, too,” Kia said. “They use it for deliveries. Take out the trash.
That kind of thing.”

Allison returned. “We’re surrounded. I mean--surrounded.”

“They are in and all around the building,” Megan said.

Dave, Charlene, Allison and I had our weapons. I saw a few rifles. “How much ammo do we have?”

Gene shrugged. “A lot.”

“Here?” I said.

“Yes. It’s there, stacked in the corner. There’s more in the gymnasium, and some by the front office, too. Tried not to keep it all in one place,” Melissa said.

“That was good thinking,” I said. “What we really need is a plan.
Because right now, I can’t see a way out of this room. I mean, other than making a run for it, I have no idea what to do next.”

Allison walked in a big circle around the room. She chewed at the skin on the corner of her thumb. I hated when she did that. “They breached the school,” she said. “As much of a haven as this place seemed, that’s gone now. I know I was looking forward to staying here
, but we can’t.”
“We could push through the doors,” Robert said. “Shoot a path to the gym. Collect up the rest of our stuff…”

“Not going to work,” Andy said, took off his baseball cap and scratched at his head. “We have the fast ones in that hallway.
It’s one thing if they chase after us, and we have time to run, but pushing through all of them stacked right there, it’s a death sentence. I don’t see a way of getting through them without some of us at least getting bit. I don’t know about any of you, but I don’t want to get bit.”

“No one wants to get
bitten,” Michelle said.

No one was arguing. Voices were loud, though.
Getting louder.

“We have backpacks,” Megan said, “gathered them earlier from lockers and left in the hallways. Dumped the books and stuffed them each full of supplies and stuck them in the dry storage room. Maybe we should hand those out?”

“That’s a good call,” Kia said. “I’ll grab them.”

“What’s in the backpacks?” Charlene said.

“Each has basic First Aid stuff, band aids and alcohol and gauze with tape. Some granola bars, couple cans of food, and other nonperishables. Perfect to hold you over for a few days, not much longer,” Gene said. “Why don’t you and Melissa go and grab them?”

“I have one idea,” Charlene said. She spoke
softly, as if unsure anyone would take her idea seriously.

“What have you got?” I said.

“Gene, you said your wife was on her way to pick you up from work here at the school, right? So where is her car?”