Alone No More (4 page)

“Shut the fuck up!” she yelled. She was young, only 18, but in her voice at that moment was the strength she needed to quiet her confused and scared friends. Awkwardly they shut their mouths for her, and started to stare away, or down at their feet. “This is no time to argue. Three people just died outdoors, Coach is really hurt, and we’re not safe here. We need to get to real safety. Has anyone called 911 yet?”

Several of the girls all replied that they had tried. All said the same thing as well. All circuits busy. That took a lot of wind out of the sails in the room. No help would come for them. They had to help themselves.

“Coach, what do you think we should do? Where should we go?” The captain leaned down to him so he could hear easier, and make himself heard easier as well.

Coach furrowed his brow in a mixture of exhaustion and thought. He thought for a minute and finally said, “Get to a dorm. Lock yourselves in a room. Block the door off. Pick a room upstairs so they can’t smash the window to get in. Keep trying 911 until someone answers. Wait for help.”

They all nodded in agreement. It was a simple plan. It could work. After a few seconds of letting it sink in, the captain started speaking again, “Okay, do we know where the crazy dude is?”

Deb answered her, “He killed his wife, then headed down towards the athletics field area. It should be clear. His son is gone too. Don’t know where he went.”

“Cool, I guess. If we get Coach up, we can shuffle him over to Hall B and get him upstairs. We can shut ourselves in and wait this out. The cops’ll be here soon. They gotta be.” Once again everyone nodded in agreement with their captain. Even Deb and Kim were onboard with her leadership, and they both fucking hated girls.

“Close, but not quite,” Coach muttered.

“What?” The captain asked him, confused.

“Leave me here. I don’t think I’m going to be safe to be around soon.” He let a long breath out after saying his statement.

“Not cool Coach. We aren’t leaving you here.” The captain shook her head dismissively at her mentor.

“Look Jenny. That crazy dude, the dad? He was dead. Gone. No pulse. And he sat back up and attacked me. Then he killed his son, and Deb said he also killed his wife. Deb also just said his son is now gone, and we all saw what happened to him. I saw one of the news reports earlier. It said that they think the bites infect. He bit me. So there’s no sense at all in bringing me with you because if I am infected, I will bite you guys too. You can’t risk it.” He made so much sense it kind of hurt the girl’s feelings. He wasn’t abandoning them. He was making sure he wasn’t a threat to them.

More tears flowed freely as they wrapped their heads around the situation. Finally Coach broke the sound of quiet sobbing, “If I am not infected, I will be safe here. I’m not bleeding anymore I don’t think, and I have water. I can hide in here.” He winced again as he looked around the cafeteria and kitchen. The girls all nodded separately at him. They wouldn’t disagree with him anyway, it wasn’t in their nature to challenge the Coach.

Deb and Kim didn’t care anymore. The longer they waited the worse things would be when they finally did leave, and Kim played the role of asshole, “Look we have to go right now. If he’s out there biting more people, at this rate the whole state will be infected by the time we get to Hall B.” She said it as nicely as she could, but there were many looks of venom coming her way when she finished. They didn’t want to be rushed.

Coach nodded at Kim, and reached up to hug his captain. They embraced warmly, if delicately, and he let her go. He smiled. Each of his girls came to him, and he embraced them the same way. Each was like a daughter to him, and he was their father away from home for them. This goodbye was painful on many levels for everyone. Everyone except Deb and Kim. They felt some of the pain of the group, but they weren’t emotionally as invested in the Coach. They just wanted to survive.

Soon after the girls made their final plan, and slipped out of the back entrance of the cafeteria, through the kitchen. That door led almost directly in a line to Hall B, and would offer them as straight a route as could be found. Two of the girls got their Dorm keys ready so there was less a chance of fumbling a key at the last second. Once they were ready, they took off running.

All the girls were young and athletic, some more than others, but they reached the front door of Hall B in less than thirty seconds. The lead girl had her key up and ready when they started piling up on the doorsteps, and like planned, she had the door open in a jiffy. The girls all raced inside, log jamming briefly, but without injury. They slammed the door shut and it locked behind them. Panting, the group caught their breath.

“Okay. Let’s figure out what to do," the captain said after they’d gathered themselves.

And that’s what they did. The girls moved food and water up into the room they chose. All the furniture was double checked to be adequate, and they got all their clothes and major possessions moved around so they wouldn’t need anything during the wait for help. In all, it took them only twenty minutes to get things ready, which under any other circumstance would have been a miracle of preparation time for teenage girls.

“Look outside!” Deb was standing at the back of the dorm, in the kitchen. She was pointing at three other girls outside, running at top speed towards them. They had the son chasing them. The dead son. The very son that they themselves had seen murdered by the father earlier. He moved just like his father had. The boy was rigid, stilted, obsessed. His stomach had a jagged tear in it, and his pink and purple insides pressed out of the hole. Only the shredded wrapping of his shirt kept them from falling out on the ground on front of him.

The girls screamed bloody murder as they ran from him. Deb opened the kitchen door and the three of them blasted their way in so fast the back door smashed against the counter next to it. Deb shoved the door shut and it locked immediately. The three new girls were hysterical, covered in scratches and bloodstains from defending themselves. 

“Upstairs, get upstairs now!” Kim hollered as the son continued his inexorable march directly at them. Like a flock of panicked birds they took flight, screaming their way up the stairs and into the dorm room they’d gotten ready. Once the door was shut they pushed a set of bunk beds in front of the door as added fortification. It happened to be the bunk beds that Kim and Deb shared, which was a bit of a bummer for the two of them when they realized their sleeping situation had been used as a barricade.

It was sometime before they were all calm again. Once they were, they heard the tale of the three new arrivals. The three had been going from one of the fields down in the back of campus to their dorm here when they saw the young student approaching. It didn’t take a doctor to know something was wrong. At first, as could be expected, they tried to render aid, but once they got close enough to help, he pounced on them. Between the three of them they managed to get him off of them and down to the ground. They pleaded with him to stop, but he kept on coming at them. Eventually they started running away, and made their escape to Hall B. He followed them slowly, but his endurance was unending. They had to stop to catch their breath, and he did not. But they were safe now.

Time passed very slowly at first for the girls in the room. They took turns looking out the window to see what was going on outside. Every time a new person walked by they reported to the room.

“Another kid, running away.”

“Another kid. Dead, still walking around.”

“Adult dead guy chasing teacher.” After a while it turned into a joke, and they started to laugh at the absurdity of it all. They all gathered at the window for one moment when they saw one of their least liked teachers trip and fall with a zombie right behind him. The teacher, in a brilliant stroke of self defense luck, kicked the leg of the zombie out while he was flailing for his life, and he escaped at the last second. Secretly some of them wished the zombie had gotten him, but they were mostly happy to see someone survive. Stress does funny things to people.

At about seven pm they started to hear gunshots. One here, one there. Sometimes a short burst of three or four. That cheered them up. Guns meant cops to them, and cops meant rescue. The girls all had a sizeable boost to their morale. They sat in the dark, mostly quiet for another hour before there was another burst of gunfire. Many shots this time. From their window vantage point they couldn’t see anyone shooting, or see flashes from the barrels anywhere. They just knew guns meant people were here to help. 

Another hour later they stopped counting the dead people walking by. There was no sense counting living people anymore either, because there weren’t any to count. One of the new girls was on watch at about ten when she spoke out.

“Hey! A living dude!” She pointed out the window as she exclaimed to the group. It had been a long time since they’d seen a real person. Several of the girls jumped up and went to the window. They watched for a minute or two before they walked away, dejected.

“Sorry. He looked alive for a bit there.” No one responded. “Does anyone have any anti-itch cream? My boob is driving me nuts.” She scratched at her boob, near the armpit.

The captain sat up on the edge of the top bunk she had been laying on, “What’s wrong with your boob?”

“That fucking kid bit me through my shirt earlier,” she said dismissively. 

You could feel the tension increase in the room. Each girl’s posture stiffened and they all retracted from the girl at the window.

“What?” she looked up at the others, finally half noticing the leprous gazes she was getting in the dark.

The captain hopped down off the bunk, and motioned for the shirt to come off, “Let’s see it. How bad is it?” Several of the other girls got up and walked over to support their teammate.

“Not bad at all, he didn’t even get me bad, it just itches.” She pulled off her shirt and revealed a white bra that was stained dark red on one side. When she saw the blood, she went still. A tiny keychain flashlight flared to life and illuminated the wound. It was dark, ugly. Streaks of dark red and blue blossomed away from the clear teeth marks in her soft skin. Yellowish pus streaked out of the dozen pockmarks like a thick, diabolical mucus.

“Fuck.” The captain killed her flashlight.

*****

The arguments began almost immediately. The girl’s two friends wanted to save her. The teammates were divided down the middle. Deb and Kim were silent, watching the drama unfold. Voices eventually were raised, followed by fists. The scuffles didn’t last long though, they got too loud too fast, and the ladies in the room who had maintained more level heads managed to break it up. Unfortunately they were unable to prevent several large scratches, a couple broken noses, and several knocked out teeth.

In the end, once order was restored to the cramped, dark, hot room they decided that they couldn’t kick her out, and they would not, under any circumstances, kill her. An uneasy truce was reached. She would be put in a bed and observed. If she started to act dangerous, they would knock her out, or kick her out the window. It wasn’t ideal in any situation, but it preserved the peace somewhat. The bitten girl’s two friends sat on the bed with her, and the rest of the group tried to sit as far away as possible.

It was an hour before anyone else spoke. It was one of the underclass girls on the soccer team. She spoke one sentence that spoke volumes about the strangeness of their situation, “I have to poop.”

Her statement into the hot void of the cramped room was met with silence. Then an uncontrollable fit of hysterical giggles erupted. All of the girls wound up rolling around on the floor, sides splitting from trying to laugh silently. After far too long laughing the tears flowed, tears shed in the moment of a joke that’s forcing the laughs out of every body part. It was shaking, crying, giggling, rolling laughter.

After too long the girls decided they shouldn’t leave the room. Kim came up with the best idea for their potty issues, “Okay, we have little trash buckets. We pee and poop in one, and when it’s pretty full, we toss it out the window. Hopefully they don’t smell it and come here.” 

Plenty of girls argued that there was no danger in opening the bedroom door to use the bathroom, but in the end, paranoia won. Once they’d committed, they starting using one of the trash buckets as a toilet one by one. The stench became almost unbearable, but they cracked a window, and started spraying their designer perfumes wholesale to cut the smell. In the end, it wasn’t that bad when weighed against being eaten alive.

Sleep came to them. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was exhaustion, just as likely it was the fact that it was late, and they were naturally tired. One by one, two by two they all collapsed into various beds and chairs. Heads were nodding off, lolling back and forth. Bursts of quiet snoring here and there were frequent. Even Jenny, the captain who had volunteered for window watch duty nodded off.

Deb, in her top bunk was the first to come awake sometime in the middle of the night. She came to only half aware of her memories from the day. She hovered at the blissful moment when you are waking, yet still half asleep, aware that you are resting, happy and comfortable. Then a flash of the scene at the car accident jumped in front of her mind’s eye, and her utopian dream was dashed. Her heart raced for a minute as she realized she actually was where she was, and what happened was reality, and not just a bad dream.

“Good God it smelled like someone died in here,” She mumbled under her breath as she rolled over to look down into the room. She always loved having the top bunk in her dorm. She felt like a cat perched on a rooftop, all knowing, and all seeing. Deb’s eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness of the room and she looked around. Most of the room was still, gently breathing in deep sleep. Those not still were moving around quietly, trying to get as comfortable as their arrangements would allow. Deb was thankful for the bed she was in. She yawned, and the stench of the room hit her again. This time though, she detected a new smell, something metallic and earthy. Coppery.