Zombie High (2 page)

Deciding that a brief walk around the school might
do you some good and help you to refocus, you raise your
hand and ask, “Miss Dikeo, can I use the restroom,
please?” Then remembering how this question always
bothers her, you reword it and say, “I mean, may I go to
the restroom, please?’

“Why didn’t you take care of that before school?”
asks Miss Dikeo from her desk in the front of the room,
unwilling to commit to an answer just yet.

Distorting the truth a bit for your own means, you
say, “My mother dropped me off late, and I just barely
made it into class on time.”

With a sigh, Miss Dikeo waves you forward saying,
“Okay, take the pass and be quick. I would like you to get
as much done on that handout as you can before you
leave today.”

Nodding, you head for the door, lifting the lanyard
with the hall pass off the pencil sharpener on the wall as
you go. Closing the door behind you, you sigh and begin a
slow walk down the hall, taking your time as you pass by
other classrooms whose doors are open to casually look
inside and see if any of your friends are visible. Not
finding anyone, you eventually make it to the bathrooms.
Initially, you honestly had no intention of going in. It was
just an excuse to get out of class after all, but saying you
needed to go to your locker like you would have in math
class would have only bought you a minute at best
considering how close it is to first hour. This way at least
you had five minutes for your walk. Just as you’re ready
to walk past the lavatories, however, you get smacked
across the face by the horrid smell of someone’s vomit.
Peering in from where you stand in the hall, you can see
that it’s splattered across the middle of the floor.
Disgusted, you almost leave immediately to head to the
office and report it, knowing that could get you an extra
few minutes out of class as well, but then you hear the
distinctive sounds of someone retching coming from the
one of the back stalls. Holding your nose, you time your
question in between their spasms of puking, lean in, and
ask, “Hey, are you all right in there?” still standing in the
hall, unwilling to get closer if you can help it.

At first there’s no response, but then you hear a
low guttural groan followed by the scraping of shoe on tile
floor. Leaning to the side, you try to see who it is coming
out with a mixture of revulsion and morbid fascination.
Sure, there is some concern in there too, but people get
sick, so you’re more interested in telling everyone else
who threw up all over the bathroom floor when you get
back to class. You hear the sounds of fingers fumbling
with the lock on the stall door for an indeterminable time,
but eventually the person comes out.

At first, you can’t tell who or what it is, and despite
it walking with its head down and clearly able to see the
floor, it stumbles as it approaches.

You decide to help who or whatever it is, but with
the vomit covering the floor, you wait for it to come out of
the bathroom. When it reaches you, you realize it is a
person, and see that it’s Jennifer, one of the girls in the
sophomore class. Her long black hair is matted looking,
and you can see bits and pieces of her regurgitated
breakfast clinging to the ends of it. As she lifts her head to
meet you, you try to put on a mask of neutrality or even
concern, but you know that disgust registers there as well,
and there’s nothing you can do to hide it. Opening her
mouth, she says, “Help me,” but you almost miss her
words as her breath leaves you gasping for clean air.

Looking her up and down, you see that the majority
of her mess is on her face, hands, and shoes, so you ask
her, “How about you follow me to the nurse’s office? I’m
sure they can call your mom or something to come pick
you up.”

Jennifer reaches for you, attempting to grab your
arm, and you withdraw instinctively as you’ve already
seen that there is stuff on her hands that you don’t want
on you. When you look up to her face, you see that she
has a focused look in her eyes, but the focus seems creepy
as she stares at your hand. Moving a little down the hall,
you say, “Come on, Nurse Jackie will take care of you.”

Jennifer takes one shambling step towards you and
then another, as you walk backwards keeping an eye on
her, hoping she doesn’t take a fall and land flat on her
face. The trip to the office from the bathrooms takes the
two of you three times longer than it should have because
Jennifer can barely keep her feet under her as she moves.
Along the way, you notice that while her face seems to be
its usual tan coloring, her neck and hands have turned
whitish, almost gray looking. You figure that she must be
wearing one of those fake tanning lotions or makeup. The
coloring of her exposed skin, however, is concerning, and
you try to hurry her along. By the time you reach the
nurse’s office, Jennifer looks like death warmed over, and
you are actually looking forward to getting back to class so
that you don’t catch whatever she has.

Pushing the door open, you find that the nurse
already has her hands full with several other students,
including Nathan, who you saw outside getting sick in the
bushes. It takes a minute for Jennifer to follow you in the
crowded room, and you tell her, “Just have a seat there,
and I’ll get the nurse,” pointing to the only available chair
in the room.

When the nurse looks up, you can see that she is
overwhelmed, and she confirms it when she says,
“Another one?” rather than her usual greeting of, “Good
morning.”

With nothing else to say, you respond, “Yes,
Ma’am. Jennifer got sick in the bathroom, and I helped
her to get here.”

“Okay, tell her I’ll be with her in a second. I don’t
have any beds left, so she might want to think about who
she’s going to call to come get her.”

Looking around the room, you see several students
with the same symptoms as Jennifer, most of whom are
sitting in the chairs with their heads in their hands. One of
them, a boy in a school jersey, is lying on the floor,
apparently too sick to stay in the seat. When he moves
the arm which he’s had covering his face, you notice that
it’s John, one of the school’s lead football players, but
while Jennifer looks bad, he looks even worse. His skin,
which has changed like Jennifer’s to look sick and clammy,
also has dark blue lines beneath it as if his veins are
pushing some kind of oil or black tar through them instead
of blood. This is the point when you start questioning
what you’re seeing, questioning the reality you’re in
versus the hours upon hours of time you have spent
watching horror movies. In a morbid fascination, you’ve
always hoped this day would come, and now that it has,
you turn to tell the nurse your thoughts.

“Nurse Jackie, I think these people are…,” but the
words stop instantly in your mouth as you find her lying
on the ground now with Nathan hunched over her body
chewing on the exposed tissues in her neck. You almost
scream at the sight, more visceral and bloody than
anything on television for the simple fact that it is here in
front of you, but you manage to hold it back just before it
escapes your lips. Looking around quickly, you find that
Nathan is the only one who has fully turned.

You know that there is no way you can save Nurse
Jackie, there is far too much blood pooled up beneath her,
and it doesn’t look like Nathan is anywhere close to
finished. You have a choice to make.

You decide that just because Nathan has gone off
the deep end into full-fledged zombie, there is no reason
that the rest of the people in the nurse’s office have to go
that way, too. Maybe, you think, if you can get them out
of here and get help, then someone might be able to stop
this. You also reason, that despite your vast knowledge of
the undead and exhumans which you have studied from
television, movies, and books, that all of that stuff was
from popculture resources and there is a chance, however
small, that Nathan isn’t a zombie, and he is just gone
completely psychotic or something. Either way, you have
to do what you can before this becomes any worse.

Stepping over to the door, you swing it wide and
say, “Come on guys, let’s get out of here,” to the other
people in the room. None of them, however, react to
your direction.

Reaching down, you try to help John off the floor
saying, “Come on, John. Get up!” Not only does John not
get up, but you notice that his wrist feels cold, not like it’s
been in a refrigerator or anything, just colder than it
should as you lift his arm. Looking down, you see that his
eyes are closed, and it doesn’t look like he’s breathing.

Remembering your CPR training, you get on your
knees to do a ‘look, listen, and feel’ to see if he is all right.
Leaning down, you place your ear next to his mouth and
look down the length of his body to see if you can hear his
breathing or see if his chest is moving. Hearing and seeing
nothing, you lean back and reach to touch his neck hoping
to feel a pulse. It takes a few seconds, but you realize that
there isn’t one. You contemplate performing CPR, but
before you can decide whether you should be doing
compressions first or giving two measured breaths, you
feel the slender fingers of Jennifer’s left hand run through
your hair. Before you can look back, she grabs a fistful of
your hair and yanks your head back, exposing your throat
as she bends over you. Her saliva drips onto your cheek in
the second before her teeth sink into your flesh, and pain
chased by darkness overwhelms you.

Realizing that you’ve already used most of your
backup excuses to get out of class, two of which have
been to ask to use the bathroom already this week, you
doubt Miss Dikeo will be willing to let you go this time.
Resigning yourself to just stick it out for the rest of class,
you prop A Tale of Two Cities open on your desk and put
your head down on your desk behind it. It isn’t the most
convincing pose for you to claim that you’re reading, but
this early in the morning it’s about the best she’s going to
get out of you.

Over the next twenty minutes, you somehow find a
way to flip through a half dozen pages and answer about a
third of the questions on the handout in between a few
little catnaps, but when the bell rings you know this will
end up as homework for later tonight unless you can
convince Edgar in your science class to slip you his sheet
so you can copy from it. Folding the handout, you tuck it
into the book and head out to your locker where you grab
your history book, the black spiral you use for that class,
and a pen for notes.

The quickest route to your history class is to simply
run up the nearby stairs, but you still haven’t caught up
with your friend, Steve, yet either.

Deciding to make one more attempt to find Steve,
you close your locker door and head down the hall
towards the other end of the school where his locker is.
Along the way you find yourself following two
cheerleaders who you’ve always found rather annoying
not just because of their names, but because of their
persona as well. Today things are no different as they
both talk in loud valley girl voices.

“Oh my God, like my father was so disgusting this
morning,” says the tall brunette Maddy.
“Really, like how? Cuz my mom was like super
gross, too,” says the slightly shorter blonde Maddie.
“He came home last night, like super late, and got
sick in the bathroom waking me up. I found it looking like
a total disaster area in there this morning, and had to use
the downstairs bathroom to get ready. Then when I
knocked on my parents’ door, I swear the two of them
were going at it. All I heard was their moaning. I just
grabbed my bag and left.”
“Eww, gross. Parents should never do it,” says
blonde Maddie. Then in her typical conceited fashion, she
goes on with her story saying, “Well, my mom got sick
too. She was sitting at the table today looking like she
was completely hung over when I came downstairs, and
when I asked for lunch money she totally threw up in her
purse. I didn’t even bother after that. I just left the house
and called A.K. for a ride.”
“In her purse?” asks brunette Maddy.
“Yeah, it was Louis Vuitton and now it’s like
completely ruined.”
Thankfully, the two cheerleaders turn at the
intersection and head up towards the math wing at this
point, and you’re no longer subjected to the fake valley
girl accents they adopted after watching too many hours
of
The OC
and
Gossip Girls
. Looking ahead, you can see
almost all the way up the hall, and Steve is nowhere near
his locker. You have no choice now but to abandon your
search, figuring he must not have come in today. Turning,
you head for the closest set of stairs, the ones near the
school’s entrance.
Being one of only three stairwells in the school, the
door leading into the stairway is always packed and not
for the first time do you find yourself wishing that there
was an elevator in the school. Because of this constant
backup near the stairs, the school assigned teachers to
‘standby’ at both the top and bottom of each of the
stairways to make sure that an accidental bump doesn’t
become anything more violent. Usually, Mr. Tibbs, one of
the lower grade’s science teachers, can be found next to
this one talking to Mr. Garret, the music teacher, but
today he stands alone watching over the students.
While you wait, slowly making your way closer to
the stairs, you hear a knocking on one of the glass doors
of the school’s entrance. Your initial reaction is that
whoever it is must be pretty dumb considering there are
three signs out there which all say to ring the bell to the
side so that the office can buzz you in, but when you look
you see that the person, an old grandfather looking type,
appears to have the same chalky look in his eyes as the
guy you saw this morning on the way to school.
To your right, you notice Mr. Tibbs hears the
knocking as well, and he takes it upon himself to walk over
to the door and let the guy in. Letting people in isn’t
unusual for Mr. Tibbs, and he commonly ends up walking
them over to the main office, giving them that personal
touch many schools lack in greeting visitors, but this guy
really doesn’t seem all together there as he continues
knocking even while Mr. Tibbs approaches.
You pause to watch as the scene unfolds and
somewhere inside you, you recognize that if this was a
horror film you would already be yelling at the character
on the screen not to open the door, but right now, no
warning comes out of your mouth.
“Good morning,” says Mr. Tibbs. “Is there ….,” he
begins, but stops mid-sentence as the old man leans down
and bites into his forearm.