When they arrived at the doors, Chikara took a second and looked outside through one of the wire mesh-laced windows. There were several more of those people milling about now. At one point, she thought she recognized Sam Theroux, the owner of the nearby bodega. His glasses were gone and his features were contorted into a perpetual sneer, but sonofabitch it sure looked like him. It wasn’t until he turned to face her full on that she noticed one of his eyes had been torn out.
"Oh. My," she whispered. "God."
"What?" Helen asked as she quietly turned the key in the locks and carefully wound the length of chain DeChamp had brought along through the door’s push-bars. For some unspoken reason, they’d decided to go about their business as silently as possible. It was as if they all instinctively knew that too much noise would undoubtedly mean getting the attention of the people outside. She slipped a padlock through two of the links and snapped it shut. For good measure, she pulled gently on the door to make sure it was tightly closed.
Off to one side, Jim Rhodes stood with his arms crossed indignantly.
"Nothing," Chikara answered. "Never mind."
"Let’s get back," Jim said, looking up and down the hallway with a hint of nervousness. He’d been looking through the window on the other door and had not liked what he’d seen. Not one bit. He’d also seen Sam, thus his face had abruptly turned white and a good portion of his bluster evaporated.
As they turned away from the door, Jim and Chikara exchanged looks that spoke volumes and those volumes said the same thing: ‘We’re in a bubbling vat of shit here.’
Hurrying back down the hallway, they’d not gone more than a dozen steps when they were brought up short by a loud banging sound from the direction they’d just come. Through the window, they all saw Sam’s distorted face pressed against the slim pane of glass. His lone eye glared at them and his mouth dripped long strands of saliva. Apparently, he’d seen them as much as they’d seen him. Immediately, Sam banged his fists against the door again and again. His hands rained down against the metal in an insane drumming rhythm which echoed down the empty corridor. As one, the group took another step backward. From where they stood, they could see the double doors shaking in their frame. Sam had obviously been joined by more of those people outside and they were all now pounding with him in earnest.
"We should get back to the Lounge," Ross DeChamp said, his voice sounding small and scared in the large hallway.
"Yeah, no shit," Helen murmured and her words echoed hollowly in the emptiness of the corridor.
~ * ~
When they got back to the Lounge, they met up with two of the other groups, who each had variations of the same incredible story. As the group talked, Chikara couldn’t help but feel her gaze being pulled toward the ceiling. It had seemed like a long time since she’d left her classroom and she felt compelled to get back there. The kids were probably scared shitless by now after they’d no doubt looked out the windows and seen god-only-knew what.
As the teachers continued talking amongst themselves, she quietly slipped off and headed back down the hallway to the stairs.
~ * ~
Midway up the stairway to the second floor, Chikara stopped.
She was sure she’d heard something coming from the hallway at the top. At first it sounded like the screech of a rusty door being opened against its will. Slowly, she took another step. Then another. As she reached the last step, she stopped yet again.
Abruptly, an unmistakable shriek echoed down the hallway just outside the stairwell.
Without another thought, Chikara ran up the rest of the stairs and down the hall and as she got closer to her classroom, she heard the scream again. This time she was able to pinpoint its origin and to her dismay it was, without a doubt, coming from inside her room.
Those last few steps seemed as if they were being taken in slow motion; like in a dream when, no matter how fast you tried to move, it was never fast enough.
She reached out and quickly unlocked the door. Grabbing the doorknob and twisting it, she pushed the door open with all of her might and rushed inside.
~ * ~
"Say," Helen interrupted the other teacher’s conversations, holding up her hand. "Hey, shut up, willya?
Having now gained all of their attention, Helen looked around the room and then back to the Lounge’s closed door.
"Did anyone see where Chikara went?"
The group shook their heads and looked stupidly up and down at one another.
"Maybe she went to the bathroom," Jim Rhodes said.
"Jim…" Helen rolled her eyes and walked off to go look for her. "You really are an idiot."
~ * ~
Chikara pushed on the door and it abruptly bumped into something soft yet unyielding. She pushed again and heard a soft thump like the sound that comes from stubbing your toe on a table in the middle of the night. She pushed harder against the bulk of the door, her face slamming painfully against the wood. Stepping back, she looked down and was horrified to see Luke’s wide eyes staring up at her. The boy’s mouth hung open, his tongue protruding slightly from between his teeth. There was a smear of something dark across the side of his face.
Another scream broke the silence and, putting her shoulder to the wood and planting her feet solidly against the flooring, she pushed the door open. Luke’s inert body slid with it, his way greased by more of what looked like the pool of oil he seemed to be lying in.
As she stepped into the room, utter chaos met her gaze. The children’s desks were overturned; paper and books littered the floor. Glass glittered like diamonds amidst the clutter and there was more of that dark material spread everywhere. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw more figures lying like abandoned dolls about the room. Her vision slowly cleared and her mind put names to those dolls: Sean in his JVC baseball shirt, Angela, Juan, Claudia, Stephanie, the boy they all called Gordo, Tina and Julia.
Her kids.
They lay motionless on the floor, pools of what she now recognized as blood quickly congealed around them. Near her desk, she saw Jeffrey’s thin legs sticking out from underneath. It was like he’d gotten caught trying to climb under it. He must have thought it was the one place he’d be safe.
Chikara stepped deeper into the room and her foot bumped into another doll. She looked down and Lisa’s cold eyes stared back at her, her headband pulled down and twisted around her neck. Her face was now a mask of tears and circular wounds.
Far off across the room, she saw what look like a fort, but was actually a haphazard barricade made up of desks piled one on top of the other. Behind it, a fistful of kids stared back at her. Their faces were wet with tears and the look in their eyes was pure horror. In front of the desks, several more children lay. They were alive and moving, but all were nursing wounds. Georgette was cradling her arm. So were Meryl and Frank. The shoulder of Ming’s shirt was torn and blood was dribbling down her arm. Off to one side, Tia was wailing, a large chunk torn from her cheek. Blood painted the side of her face.
In the seconds it took for Chikara to catalog the devastation, three dark figures pulled themselves from within the cloak of the room’s growing shadows. The figures all had the same blank stare as the people milling about the playground. Chikara looked up and saw that the windows had been smashed in.
"My god," she whispered to herself, "they must have come in through the fire escape."
The last of the looming figures stepped forward into the waning sunlight which was cascading in through the empty window frames. Chikara’s mouth fell open when she saw that it was the same man she’d seen earlier; the one in the stained shirt and tie who’d been staring up into the window.
"You…" she hissed.
The other three figures—a teenager in a football jersey, a fat, balding man, and a woman who would have looked pretty had half of her face not been ripped away—followed suit and took staggering steps forward. Blood covered each of their faces and coated their hands and forearms. The fat one was frantical
ly chewing something.
Chikara stepped back in disgust and bumped into the wall near the door.
Her mind reeled in abject horror at the scene which spread out before her. And then, suddenly, painfully, the guilt kicked in. In a series of mental flashes she conjured up what must have transpired here: the people coming up the fire escape, the children’s panic, and the invaders hammering on the windows in the same way they’d hammered against the door she and the others had locked.
She drew in a deep, anguished breath imagining what happened next all too easily.
The figures gathered outside, their numbers growing, the malevolent stares, the moans and the pounding.
My God!
Then, the windows giving way and the glass raining in.
Dear sweet Jesus!
The panic. The terror.
No!!
And then, the violence.
My fault!!
Her kids.
This is all my fault!!!
These were her kids… and she’d left them alone. Even though she thought she’d been protecting them by locking the door, she had in reality left them trapped and on their own. With nowhere to run, many of them had been cornered and had no choice but to die an unimaginable death.
This was a guilt that she knew she would carry with her for the rest of her life.
A low moan brought her focus back to the present. The four strangers took another faltering step toward her and she pressed her back firmly against the wall. Her heart beat painfully in her chest. Her gaze lifted to stare upward toward the ceiling. She felt her tongue go dry as her terror grabbed her roughly and tightened the muscles of her limbs.
And as the first of her tears cascaded down her cheeks, she knew… beyond any shadow of any doubt that this was her fault. Hers and hers alone. It had been her duty to care for these children, to keep them safe and sound. And she’d failed.
God… she’d even locked the goddamned door!
It was by her hand the kids couldn’t escape this fate.
Almost immediately, her growing fear was replaced by deep and vengeful anger. As the heat of that anger gripped her and took hold, she felt the tips of her fingers wrap around a piece of metal protruding from the wall. She pulled against it and a heavy weight abruptly tugged at her arm. Confused for a moment, she looked down and saw that she’d pulled the fire extinguisher off its hook.
It was at the precise moment that she heard a low moan come from a few feet in front of her. She looked up wildly and saw the man in the shirt and tie come another step closer. A hungry grin strained his features and he slowly licked his lips in anticipation of what would come. He opened his mouth and uttered another low, soulless moan. Breath that smelled of the grave assaulted her senses and she saw bits of meat wedged between his blood-soaked teeth.
Teeth, she thought, stained with the blood of her children.
As a kind of madness sidled up to her intellect, she felt its warmth; embraced its momentary comfort. Like a fever dream, the delirium whispered to her and told her what had to be done, what must be done. What followed next was pure instinct and unfiltered insanity.
Spinning at the waist, pulling at the weight of the fire extinguisher as if she were delivering one of her devastating backhands, she brought the canister up and smashed it against the side of the man’s head. With a satisfying crunch, his skull collapsed in on itself and he was slammed to the floor, his body landing like a sack of meat. She delivered two more crushing overhand blows to his skull before leaving him for dead.
Continuing the onslaught, she swung the metal can around and struck the kid in the jersey across the knee. The sound of the joint breaking was both gratifying and, in a way, cleansing. Another overhand swing brought the cylinder down on the fat guy’s bald skull and he went down without too much of a fight. As he hit the ground, the small finger he’d been chewing fell from his lips and landed, rocking slightly, on the floor.
Abruptly, a slender hand with polished nails grabbed at the back of her collar. Chikara bent at the waist, ducking underneath it, and brought the extinguisher upward in a demolishing uppercut. The once pretty woman’s jaw shattered and, with an ear splitting snap, her neck broke. Her body crumpled to the floor in a heap.
Now out of breath, she stood panting over her handiwork.
The kid in the jersey had begun pulling himself toward her again, dragging his shattered leg behind him.
"Behind you," she heard Carolyn scream excitedly from behind the barricade.
Adrenaline now leaving her system, Chikara strained to lift the blood splattered weapon over her head, but with what felt like a Herculean effort, she got it there. Now standing with the dripping fire extinguisher held high above her, she screamed incoherently. As she felt the dead thing at her feet touch her leg with cold hands, she drove the weapon downward with all of her might. The metal rim struck the kid just at the bridge of the nose and smashed whatever was above it to mush.
An unnatural quiet fell over the classroom. The stillness punctuated only by soft sobs and sniffles of the frightened children and the heavy panting of their now exhausted teacher.
"Jeez, Lady," Yoshi said, staring wide-eyed from behind the piled desks and wiping back his tears, "what took you so long?"
~ * ~
Helen Walker came out of the stairwell and as she rounded the corner onto the second floor, heard what sounded like a bar fight coming from Miss Pressfield’s classroom. She broke into a run and made her way down the long hallway. She arrived at the room, breathing heavily, and pushed the already ajar door open and stepped out of the hallway and into a war zone.
The classroom looked as if a bomb had gone off in it. Papers, desks, and glass were everywhere and some of the windows had even been shattered. Unbelievably, amidst the rubble, were several bodies laying strewn about. And there—and this was the most unbelievable of all—standing over what looked like a corpse and driving a fire extinguisher repeatedly into its skull was Chikara.
"What the hell?" Helen asked to no one in particular.
Chikara, her face, chest and arms now spattered with blood, looked at the extinguisher in her hands with disgust and dropped it. The metal clanked against the floor with a hollow sound. Immediately, she rushed over to the pile of desks in the corner and pulling them away, made a throughway to where her kids cowered. Once a way was cleared, she frantically saw to some children who were obviously injured.
"Chikara…" Helen asked hesitantly. "What’s going on here?"
"Helen," Chikara shouted, "get me the fucking First Aid kit in the desk."
The children all got that all too familiar "Ommmm, you’re in trouble" look on their faces and it wasn’t until the two ladies realized it was because Chikara had said the "F word" that they understood. If it hadn’t been for all the blood and carnage around them, the two women might have laughed. Instead, they each set their faces and went to work.
Once it was apparent that whatever danger there had been had passed, the children encircled them both and began wildly gesturing and talking, all trying at once to relate the horror of what had happened. A few of the others grabbed onto each of their legs crying, holding on for dear life.
"Hold on… Hold on. We need to see to those who were injured and then we can all talk," Helen said. She’d retrieved the First Aid kit and pulled gauze and antiseptic out of the case.
"No," Chikara said, still trying to catch her breath. She gently started freeing her legs and directing the traumatized children toward the door. "We need to get out of this room and lock the door behind us. There could be more of them coming up the fire escape."
"Right. Come on, children. We need to exit this room," Helen responded as she ushered the unhurt children through the debris and toward the door. "Just like we do when we have a fire drill, ok?"
"Go downstairs to the Teacher’s Lounge and tell whoever’s there what happened." Chikara called to her. "Roger, honey… I know you’re scared, but I really need you to run ahead. I need you
to go tell the other teachers what’s happened here."
Roger, jug-eared and bespectacled, stared at his teacher and fear once again gripped his expression. He looked around nervously at his classmates for support, but his gaze was met by wide-eyed stares which mirrored his own.
"It’s ok, Roger," Chikara said trying to soothe his worries. "There’s none of those people anywhere else in the building. It’s safe. I promise."
To his credit, the boy nodded and stood up, but not before helping a few of the others to their feet. Once he was sure those around him were ok, he looked back at Chikara. She smiled at him and winked as if to reassure him. With a quick nod, the boy turned and took off at a run out the door. The sound of his footfalls slowly receded as he sprinted away from the classroom.
One by one, the children were attended to and carried out of the room. Helen brought the uninjured kids to the Teacher’s Lounge where they were given drinks of water and allowed to recuperate from their trauma. Even Jim Rhodes helped out by gently taking the hands of some of them and holding them close as they cried and sobbed out their stories. In the end, he wasn’t such an asshole after all. The injured were tended to one at a time and then taken to an impromptu infirmary in the main lavatory on the first floor.
And the dead…
Even though it broke her heart to do so, the dead were left where they lay. There was little choice other than to leave them in the classroom. It would simply be too traumatic if any of the other children were to come across the dead bodies in any way, shape or form. And so, after taking one final, soul-crushing look at their bleeding and broken little bodies, Chikara turned her back on her room and locked the door behind her.
No Flesh Shall Be Spared Page 40