Haven (4 page)

After watching me reflect on all this, Harrison turned toward the others, and stated with unwavering certainty, “I’ll figure it out sometime, Kennedy.”

I should have been unnerved by his resolve but something more disturbing, an awareness about my surroundings, gradually took precedence.

It was 7:35 a.m., and the hallway should have been packed with students still trying to get to class. Book bags should have been bumping into each other. Locker doors should have been slamming shut. Voices and rushed footsteps should have been echoing off the walls. But it was absolutely silent. Not even the three people huddled midway down the hall just beyond my locker, the only ones present other than Harrison and me, were making a sound. No sobbing, no discussion… It felt like the school was shocked into silence as we headed toward them.

Since I’d left my locker open, I stowed the weapon on my stack of textbooks and continued on.

The first survivor we reached sat crouched, arms encircling her knees, a cell phone in one hand, her head down. She looked up long enough for us to recognize each other.

“Kennedy,” she said as more of a statement than in relief, even though we’d been friends a year ago.

“Beverly,” I replied.

I’d never seen her this way. Usually, she was sporting the latest fashions and pairing them with exquisite jewelry, the real kind, with rocks that cut glass. Her hair was always sleek and shiny, with every strand where it was meant to be. Her makeup was impeccable, freshly reapplied with immaculate precision after eating and after gym class. When she introduced herself, she would always add primly, “…like the Hills”, because that was who she emulated. Right now, she seemed…messy.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“Do I look it?” she replied snidely and then tipped her head back against the locker to stare at the ceiling.

I took that as a no.

Standing next to her, dividing his time between pacing and stopping to think if he actually wanted to pace, was Nick Roster. I was only partly amazed to find him still alive. Being the largest, most beefy football player to ever step onto Woodrow Wilson High’s field, he had size and raw strength going for him. He’d made a reputation for himself as a freshman by playing off his last name, telling opposing teams that he had them each listed on a roster and would be checking them off as he incapacitated them on the field. After he proved he wasn’t just talk, someone gave him the name Doc, which was an acronym for Department of Corrections, implying that he was ‘correcting’ players on the field and checking them off his list.. Right now, he was nibbling on his thumbnail and scanning the floor as if it might stand up and attack him.

Doc and Todd Beckholt were good friends, but I didn’t think he was aware of what had happened to Todd. Right now, he seemed unhinged because he’d witnessed the broader issue…that a lot of people outside had met the same fate as Todd.

Next to Doc lay the third and final person who’d made it safely inside. Clearly, she didn’t do it on her own because she was unconscious. My jaw dropped at the sight of her, because she was the one I was trying to help earlier. I hadn’t taken the time to notice before, but I knew her, or more accurately knew of her. We didn’t have the same friends, but someone that smart didn’t go without some kind of social standing.

I bent down to her. “Mei?”

She didn’t respond.

“Is she…injured?” I asked, assuming they’d understand who I meant, and had already checked for signs of life.

Doc answered, which impressed me, even if he didn’t stop his pacing or look up when he did it. “She’s not bleeding anywhere.”

“Did you carry her-”

“Yeah, yeah, that was me,” he mumbled, still pacing.

Harrison spoke for the first time, commenting, “Nice job.”

That seemed to break through Doc’s stupor. He came to a halt, his head swiveled up at Harrison, and he replied bluntly, “Thanks.” His pacing resumed, although he did stop chewing his thumbnail.

“We need an ambulance for her,” I said.

Beverly snickered. “We need a lot of them.”

I looked at her and noticed the cell phone again. “Did you call for any, Beverly?”

“Yeah…,” she uttered, bleakly. It was unnerving.

“And?”

“They didn’t answer.”

I fell silent, processing this news, but she led me to the conclusion I was getting to anyway. “It just kept ringing…like no one was there to pick up.”

Immediately, I was on my feet.

“Where are you going?”

“Mr. Packard’s office. He has medical training.”

Beverly sighed. “Well, good luck with that.”

“Why?” Harrison asked, cautiously.

“Because he’s dead,” she stated bluntly.

And I came to a staggering standstill.

“He was locking the back gate, you know, the ones designed to protect us,” she sneered, “and one of those…things…caught his arm. It pulled him through the bars while the others… chowed down.”

Chowed down. That was something my dad used to say when he set my dinner plate in front of me. Chow down, Kennedy. Chow down on that tube steak and moo juice. That phrase was now being applied to his best friend’s cause of death, and suddenly everything felt surreal.

I only dimly registered Doc’s loud exhale. “If Mr. Packard didn’t survive, how are we supposed to?”

“Kennedy?” Harrison said, startling me.

He was right next to me now. How’d he get there without me noticing?

Get a grip, Kennedy.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

I nodded, even though I wasn’t quite sure.

He didn’t respond, but I felt him watching me, waiting for me to collapse. No such luck there. No one in my family had ever fainted and I wasn’t going to embarrass them by doing it now.

Spinning around, I found Doc had ended his rambling walk across the hallway and was now staring at the main entrance.

“Where is everyone? Where are the teachers? The paramedics? The police? What’s happening out there?” he asked, justifiably perplexed, his gaze on the glass doors even though we were too far away to see anything but blue sky.

“Whatever it is, it’s happening fast,” Beverly replied.

“How do you know?” Doc asked, sincerely hoping for an answer or some profound insight on the cause of all that we’d just seen.

“Because,” she replied sarcastically, “when Jesse Metcalf was sitting next to me in Calculus yesterday he wasn’t trying to eat me.”

“Right,” Doc mumbled, nodding slowly. “Right…”

“Those glass doors better hold,” Beverly warned, defiantly. “And those things better not get inside.”

I wondered what she would do if they did.

“They’ll need to come through the steel fence wrapped around the school,” Harrison explained before adding for reassurance, “and those should hold.”

What he said was true. Mr. Packard was a veteran who’d left the military with a chest full of accolades, and when he’d taken over as principal one of his first actions was to surround our school’s building with a galvanized steel fence, made to meet minimum yield strength of 45,000 psi. I knew this because he’d told me.

I believed him and still I headed back to my locker.

“Where are you going now?” Beverly asked, more to fill in the void of broken conversation than out of real concern.

“I’m going to check for others who made it inside.”

“Hopefully they aren’t the eating kind,” she muttered.

“Can you keep trying to reach someone?”

When she didn’t answer, I pressed, “Beverly?”

“Yeah…yeah. I’ll keep calling. At least until my dad shows up.”

“He’s coming for you?”

She laughed through her nose. “Well, he’s not going to leave me here….”

That made me feel incredibly alone. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t realize the reference.

Refusing to sit there and dwell on it, I took the guard’s weapon, turned and headed into the heart of the school. Footsteps followed behind me and I peered over my shoulder to find Harrison stepping up alongside me, meeting my pace.

“You’re not going by yourself,” he declared, his tone leaving no room for debate.

I was oddly conflicted. I wanted him to come with me, and not just because it would be safer to walk in pairs, not just because what Beverly said had opened up a void. I just didn’t want my first walk with Harrison to be through a vacant, eerily quiet school where we might find things that would give us nightmares, worse ones than we were already sure to have. We turned the corner and found another empty hallway, and I felt the blatant unfairness that our walk couldn’t have been yesterday. Just one simple day before this mess broke out…

Now that we were out of sight, his hand came into view, breaking through my thoughts. “You left these back there,” he said. And I looked down at his palm to find both of my steel stars. “They seemed important to you.”

“They are,” I said, taking the stars and slipping them into my back pocket. “Thank you.” We walked a few more feet before I asked, “How did you get them? No, no…Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

He nodded. “Smart choice.”

“I want to thank you, too, for…for helping me with Tammie.”

“The girl at the gate?”

“Yeah, I…I didn’t want to…” The rest of that sentence stuck in my throat, but he inferred what I meant anyways.

“You’re welcome,” he said, saving me from having to explain further. “So that’s her name? Tammie?” he asked, and I noticed how he didn’t refer to her in the past tense, which I appreciated.

“You don’t know too many people here yet, do you?”

His lips turned up, forming a crooked grin, and he laughed to himself before remarking candidly, “I know the ones who matter to me, Kennedy.”

Despite the situation we were in, and all that we’d just endured, something pleasant stirred my stomach. It seemed muted, but it was there, because I had a hunch he was including me in that group.

Our tour of the school grounds was quiet from that point on. The silence was only interrupted when we shouted hello into the empty rooms, and once when he pointed out one of the classrooms before remarking that he should have been taking a test in there right about then. We kept a cautious distance from each other, close but not enough to touch, and I was always acutely aware of every movement he made. We checked the administration offices, the gym, the library, the cafeteria, every large area we thought might be a place someone would go for help. There was no one.

As we turned the last corner back into the main hallway and saw Doc, Beverly, and Mei there, still alone, he muttered the number three. “That makes five total.”

I knew exactly what he meant. Our high school started with over 2100 students and 320 people on staff that morning. Only five of us made it inside.

And even though I barely knew him, and hadn’t said more than a hundred words to him, I was incredibly thankful that Harrison was one of them.

~ 2 ~

H
AD THE TEMPERATURES BEEN COOLER, MAYBE
more would have survived that first day. Thick winter sweaters and bulky jackets could have offered them some protection. As poor luck would have it, most everyone I saw wore short-sleeved shirts, a decision they wouldn’t even have a chance to regret. There were lockdown protocols and procedures in place. Mr. Packard scheduled drills in the past, but these had always been conducted while students were in class. We’d never held a drill when students were roaming the halls and arriving at school. We’d been instructed, but never put into practice, that if a non-weather-related emergency were to take place and we were outside that we should sit down, brace ourselves, and wait. These were the instructions of the School Board of Education, and far too many people followed them. Mei had been one of them. We learned this when her eyelids began to flutter and she sat up in confusion.

“What…?”she asked and then started again. “What…?”

“There was an attack on the school,” Beverly explained brusquely.

“But you’re safe,” I added.

Harrison knelt in front of her. “Do you have a headache?”

“No…”

“Dizziness? Ringing in the ears? Nausea?”

“No…”

He smiled and stood up. “I think you’ll be all right.”

“How would
you
know, Lone Ranger,” Beverly mocked, alluding to Harrison’s life in Texas.

She didn’t daunt him in the least. “You learn a few things on the range, including how to ID basic medical conditions.”

She rolled her eyes back to the lockers, clearly unimpressed.

Mei struggled to push herself to her feet, and Doc broke his stride to help her. “Thanks,” she said, giving him a weak smile.

“He found you outside,” I explained nodding toward Doc, “and brought you in.”

She studied him for a second. “Thanks…again.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Do you remember what happened?” Harrison asked.

Her head fell forward as she thought about it. “I saw something…someone coming at me. There was blood down his shirt,” she shuddered, “and his mouth was open like he was screaming but…he wasn’t. So I went down, in a crouch, and then…then…” She looked back up at us, confused. “He…He was in my English Lit class…”