Sick Page 12

  “Here we go,” Travis says, his voice pinched, and lifts his sword.

  Just as the infected kid passes under the roof, he’s smashed flat by Chad. They both tumble against the sidewalk. Chad’s baseball bat clatters away.

  “Chad!” I shout.

  The monster whips around and gets ahold of Chad’s arm. He snaps his head down, trying to gnaw through the black leather.

  Chad swears and gives the kid a combat boot to the ribs, breaking his hold. Chad skitters across the sidewalk, picks up the bat, and races back again, bat held high. The kid leaps, arms outstretched. It looks for one moment like his teeth have grown longer; then I realize it’s that his gums have eroded.

  Jesus, what is this shit?

  Chad unleashes a roar and swings the bat. The end connects solidly with the kid’s skull. There’s a sickening, dull thump, and the kid drops flat. He picks himself up, shaking his head. Chad swings again. This time there’s a crunch, and the monster lies still.

  Breathing hard, Chad stands over his assailant. A patch of blood and hair clings to the bat. Chad studies this for a moment, looks back at the monster, then slowly backs toward us.

  Travis pulls open the library door. “Come on,” he says. “Before there are more.”

  We tumble inside. Travis yanks the door shut and slides his weapon through the handles as a makeshift lock. I start to point out that it’s useless since the windows are busted, but keep my mouth shut. Maybe feeling safer is more important right now.

  Chad slides to the floor, still holding his bat.

  “I did it,” he mutters. “I really did it, I really killed that kid, I really did …”

  I want to say something to him, but all I can think about is Kenzie. I run to the librarian’s counter, where they check out the books.

  “Kenzie!” I whisper harshly. “Mackenzie, where are you?”

  A stealthy creak escapes from behind the counter. The librarian’s office door cracks open … and Kenzie pokes her head out.

  “Brian?” she whispers.

  Thank you, God, thank you thank you.

  I vault over the desk, drop my sword, and hug her close as another girl looks out from the office door.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” Kenzie chants, and whether it’s to me or herself, I don’t know.

  “What’s going on?” the girl cries. I don’t recognize her beyond being just another face in the high school crowd. She has longish blond hair, similar to Kenzie’s.

  “Shh!” Jaime orders. “Come on. Come with us, now!”

  The girl obeys, skipping around from behind the counter. Her whole body is trembling, and I’m immediately reminded of Laura.

  “Where’s Laura?” I ask Kenzie, still smothering her against me. “Kenzie? Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Kenzie says into my chest. “We were at the pep rally when this guy started attacking everyone and—”

  “Brian,” Jaime says. “No time. We gotta get out.” He thumbs the button on his headset. “Kat, we’re on our way back. You ready?”

  I take Kenzie’s hand. “Come on.”

  “I saw her running toward the C buildings,” Kenzie says.

  Travis is at the doors, looking through the narrow inset windows. “Clear,” he says.

  I pick up my Starfire and lead Kenzie over to the doors. I look at Jaime, waiting for his order to go, fighting the urge to run full speed for the C buildings. If there’s any chance Laura’s there—

  Jaime is standing still, staring into middle space. He hits the headset again.

  “Kat?” He waits. “Kat!”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake. Really?” Travis grumbles. He pulls his sword from the door handles.

  And is tackled from the back by a blur of purple blouse and gray pants that slams into him from behind a bookshelf near the door. No one even heard her coming.

  The librarian.

  TRAVIS’S SWORD FLIES OUT OF HIS HAND, landing with a clang several feet away. The nameless girl screams as Kenzie clutches me tight.

  Chad leaps to his feet, bat in hand. There’s a look in his eyes I’ve never seen before, not on Chad’s face, not on anyone’s. The librarian—once a nice older lady named Miss Hundley—is on top of Travis, a thing possessed, clawing and scratching at him, screeching horrifically. Her wicked, clawed hands rake Travis’s face, tearing flesh from his cheek.

  Travis screams, arms pinwheeling against her crystalline flesh. Something brittle snaps off of Miss Hundley. A piece of her arm. She doesn’t care.

  Chad stalks behind her, takes aim, and swings for her head.

  The bat catches Miss Hundley on one ear with a heavy thud that makes my stomach shrivel up. She falls limp on top of Travis.

  Travis shoves her over and gets up, breathing hard, not even appearing to notice the gouge in his face. We all creep closer.

  Miss Hundley’s face looks like the others’, like it’s melted. Her jowls and lower lip hang inches below her jaw, exposing her bottom teeth. Her eyes are distended, projecting out from their sockets, yellowed. And she’s dead, a mass of drooping flesh and crystalline limbs, her brain pulverized by Chad’s weapon. Even in death, her back remains curled, shoulders hunched in some bizarre atrophy. For a second, I expect her to transform like a Hollywood werewolf, to regain her human form now that she’s dead, but she doesn’t. And I’m grateful.

  “What—what is this?” Kenzie says softly, pulling away from me for a closer look at the librarian.

  I grab her hand to stop her. “We don’t know.”

  “Kat,” Jaime says into his headset. “Kat, please come in. Kat!”

  Silence.

  “We might be out of range. Mierda,” he spits.

  A burst of static punctuates the stillness at last. Jaime closes his eyes with relief, listens, then turns to us.

  “They’re ready,” he says. “We need to go.”

  “Follow me,” Chad says. His expression is cold and stoic. He boots the doors open and stalks outside without waiting for anyone to respond.

  The other girl, who looks to be younger than Kenzie, darts past us to fall in behind Chad. I follow next, holding Kenzie’s right hand with my left. Travis picks up his sword, and he and Jaime close in behind.

  Chad moves purposefully down the central sidewalk toward the drama department, both hands on his bat, ready to swing at anything that gets in his way. We swivel our heads in every direction, expecting an ambush. I try to ignore the corpses of students littering the sidewalk.

  There’s no sign of Damon at first … until we spot his glasses, the lenses crushed to dust beside a thick puddle of blood.

  “Mierda,” Jaime mutters again as we pass them. I can guess what the word means.

  “We should look—” Travis starts.

  “Too late,” Chad grunts. “Keep going.”

  “Hey, man,” Travis says. “We can’t just leave him out here.”

  “We can and we are,” Chad says. “Keep go—ah, shit.”

  We all freeze as two diseased kids bolt onto the sidewalk from the cafeteria ahead of us, growling.

  Hollis is one of them. He must not have wandered far from the library. His lips are wet with fresh blood.

  Hollis and the second monster, the jock who was eating the teacher by the broken cafeteria doors, book toward us, snarling, saliva dripping from their mouths. The girl from the library cries out and breaks away from Chad. The jock tackles her to the ground and shreds her throat. Her hair splays flat on the ground like a fan, growing sticky crimson with her blood.

  Then from my left, a red-and-white blur zooms toward the creature. Before I can even unstick my feet to make a run for it, this figure wallops the monster square in the middle of his forehead with a long stick of polished wood, knocking him backward. By that point, the blonde has stopped resisting and lies cold on the sidewalk. Her fingernails are painted red.

  Hollis doesn’t notice one of his own has been dropped. He gallops toward me. If there is anything human still in him, I don�
��t see it in his eyes.

  Then Chad’s in front of me, bat held in both hands. As Hollis leaps, Chad charges forward, catching our friend in the chest and knocking him backward. Hollis recovers quickly and lurches for Chad’s legs, bringing him to the concrete.

  Hollis leaps on top of Chad, grunting inhuman sounds. He drops his mouth toward Chad’s face. Chad throws up his hands to protect himself, and Hollis catches one in his teeth. He digs deep, chewing hard, shaking the hand like a dog with a fetching stick.

  Chad growls right back at him, kneeing Hollis between the legs. Hollis doesn’t seem to register what should have been a stunning blow. He just keeps gnawing.

  Beyond them, the red-and-white blur I saw hit the other monster comes into focus.

  Cammy.

  She’s raising a hockey stick like a samurai sword. She brings it down three, four, five times on the other monster’s head until the jock stops moving. Still clad in her cheerleader outfit, where streaks of blood blend into the red-and-white pleats, Cammy looks over at Chad and her boyfriend struggling.

  “Hollis!” she cries.

  Hollis either can’t hear her over the sounds he’s making, or doesn’t care. Groaning, I run up to him and kick him in the head.

  It’s hard enough that Hollis’s hold on Chad breaks. It’s all the time Chad needs to roll out from under him and scramble for his bat. He raises it high.

  “It’s Hollis!” I scream.

  Chad hesitates. Hollis whirls. Chad brings the bat down with both hands. The rounded edge collides with Hollis’s neck, and he falls flat.

  Cammy screams again and runs toward us, hockey stick up. I think she’s going to swing at Chad.

  But Hollis’s chest, malformed under his blue and bloodstained shirt, still rises and falls. He’s out cold, but not dead. Not yet.

  “Cammy, come on!” I yell at her.

  “But Hollis—”

  “Never mind, we gotta go!”

  “Move, now,” Jaime says, his face strained.

  I start to follow Jaime to the drama department. Chad shakes his injured hand and swears, blood flying from the bite wound. Cammy races to catch up and joins our group without another word, looking over her shoulder at Hollis’s unconscious body.

  One of his arms twitches. He starts to roll over.

  He’s getting up.

  Jaime calls to Kat over the headset. We reach the doors just as I hear one of the platforms hitting the ground in the hallway.

  Jack’s body lies curled up by the window. His throat is gone. Gaping, ragged holes pierce his forearms, and his eyes seem to have already begun to sink into his head.

  “Is that Jack?” Cammy says as another platform slams to the ground inside.

  I can only nod, not looking, staring at the door, waiting for it to open.

  “What happened to Hollis?” she demands. “Why does he look like that? What’s going on?”

  No one says anything.

  The instant the doors crack open, Chad belts them wide and we tumble into the hallway. Kat and Dave hoist one of the platforms up and screw it back into the doors. With Jaime’s help, they get the second one screwed in above it, sealing us in.

  Jaime takes Travis by the shirtsleeve and guides him toward the drama hallway as Travis touches and touches again the wound on his face.

  “There’s a first aid kit in Golab’s office,” Jaime says. “Chad, come on, man. We got to get you wrapped up.”

  Chad doesn’t follow. Kenzie and I slide to the tile floor. Dave and Kat look like they want to ask questions, probably about Damon, but they think better of it and move away from the doors. Cammy leans against the wall.

  Kenzie nestles her face into my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  “What about Laura?” I say as I try to catch my breath. “What did you say about the C buildings? Is she there?”

  “I don’t know. I think so,” Kenzie says, dragging the backs of her hands across her wet cheeks. Tears have streaked down her face, smearing her trademark eyeliner, but she’s not sobbing at all. “She ran that way, to the right. We were all running out of the gym and it was—”

  “To the right?” I say. “So, wait, the west side, the west set of the C buildings?”

  “I don’t … Yeah. Yeah, the west ones. Brian, god, I’m so sorry. We should have looked for her.”

  “It’s okay,” I mumble over her head. “It’s okay, we’ll go back. We’ll go back.”

  When I meet Chad’s eyes, though, I wonder if it’s true. His gaze drops to the bloodstained bat, which he drops. He watches it roll awkwardly across the floor.

  “Fuckin’ zombies,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  My voice shakes. I hug my sister close and don’t fight the tears that start dripping down my face.

  “What about Hollis?” Cammy demands, leaning on her hockey stick. Must’ve gotten it from the gym. “He said he was sick last night, and then during the rally …”

  Chad and I both look at her. Cammy swings her head from one of us to the other, then looks at the floor.

  Outside, I hear inhuman howling. Craving.

  WHEN WE’VE MORE OR LESS CAUGHT OUR breath, I take Chad, Cammy, and Kenzie into Golab’s office. Everyone huddled in the hall watches our every step.

  “Where’s Damon?” John says.

  I shake my head. Amid the random sniffles and moans, I hear Serena gasp.

  I ignore them. Kat and Dave start to follow us, then seem to think twice about it, and sink down to the floor in the hall instead.

  In the office, I shut the door behind me. Travis is seated on the grimy vinyl couch. Jaime is kneeling in front of him, taping gauze to Travis’s face. Travis takes the procedure stoically, gazing emptily at a wall.

  Chad sits down next to Travis, resting his bat beside him. Cammy takes Golab’s chair and spins listlessly on it, never releasing her hold on the hockey stick. Kenzie sits against the door, knees up, forearms draped across them. She scowls intently at the carpet.

  “So,” Cammy says suddenly through the brittle silence, “anyone want to tell me what’s going on out there?”

  No one replies. Finished with Travis, Jaime takes a look at Chad’s hand. Lips pressed together, Jaime dumps a quarter bottle of hydrogen peroxide over the wound.

  “Holy mother!” Chad shouts, jerking his entire body. But he keeps his hand still.

  “Sorry,” Jaime mutters. He rifles through the sparse contents of the first aid kit. He meets my eyes for one brief instant.

  The look on his face says it all. Things just got a lot more complicated.

  I rub my face as Jaime winds gauze around Chad’s wound. When he’s done, Chad flexes the hand into a fist several times.

  “Nice job,” he says. “You a nurse?”

  It’s supposed to be a joke. No one laughs. No one smiles.

  “Chad …,” I start to say.

  “Uh, hello?” Cammy says, waving a hand. “Head cheerleader talking. What is happening, huh? Anyone?”

  The last thing I want to do right now is recount the day’s events to our friend. But behind her bluster, it’s obvious Cammy’s just as scared as the rest of us. And since she’s armed and bloody and has already seen her boyfriend attacking Chad, the least I can do is bring her up to speed.

  So I tell her the entire story, starting from the time we got to Chad’s this morning, which seems like years ago. Cammy is silent, taking it all in.

  “So now anyone who got bit by someone who has this disease or whatever—they become like them?” she asks when I’m done.

  Cold quiet settles over the room as, one by one, we turn to look at Chad.

  If Chad’s upset by this, he doesn’t show it. “Looks that way,” he says carelessly.

  “We’re going to have to talk about this,” Jaime says carefully. He’s positioned himself away from Chad, on the other end of the small room.

  “I feel fine,” Chad says. “And what about good old Trav there?”

  Travis
touches the bandage. He, strangely, has not moved from his seat beside Chad on the couch. “It was her hand,” he says. “And I don’t think any of her spit or blood got into it.”

  “It’s only been, like, ten minutes,” Jaime says. “Who knows how long it takes to take effect?”

  “Hold up,” I say. “Cammy, you got a phone on you?”

  She lifts one pleat of her skirt. “Which I would keep where?”

  “Damn it.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. One second we’re out on the floor doing a routine, and the next …”

  Cammy lifts her shoulders as if for protection.

  “Craziness,” she says. “Some dude comes tearing into the gym like a mad dog. Then a few more. Turned into this big throwdown, and I saw some of the toughest guys in our neighborhood get smacked down flat.” She shakes her head. “Seen a lot of rough stuff at home, but nothing like that.”

  “Are there any other … you know,” Travis says.

  “Survivors?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Probably. I hid out under the bleachers for a little while, and the stuff I saw those kids doing … eating …” Cammy shakes herself. “Anyway, yeah. A lot of people stayed in the gym after the lockdown call came through, but a lot left too. I think some made it over the fence by the tennis courts. Most of them just scattered. They’re probably holed up in classrooms.”

  “How’d you get out?” I ask her.

  “Through a window,” Cammy says, shrugging. “Up high, at the top of the bleachers. Ran down the sidewalk. I hid out in a classroom for a while, over in A. Then made my way back to the fields, thought I could climb the fence out there. Found this.” She pounds the stick against the floor. “And then two of those crazy-looking dudes came after me, so I took off. Hid in a lab. I was going to stay there, till I heard you all outside.”

  We take this in for a few moments. Then I turn to my sister.

  “Kenz?” I say. “You still have your phone?”

  Kenzie digs into her pocket and holds the phone toward me. I examine her face as I take the phone, looking for signs she’s checked out or in shock, but Kenzie’s eyes are bright and aware. That’s good. It’s something.