by catt dahman
My throat seized with pain, wondering about my family.
Anyway, Bevvon (we said it as in Bevin) had her sisters in tow.
They, like her, had blondish hair in ponytails and were very pretty little girls.
“Hi, ‘Risbe,” one said. That was the youngest, Nivon. Their father Vonnie must have really liked his name a lot to name all four of his
daughters after him.
“Hi, Nivon, I bet we can find you some colors or markers and paper, okay?”
“ ’Kay.” She and Ravon, the one that was two years older and in second grade, curled up in a corner to draw on paper after Mrs. Crater dragged herself away from the window, her face white and covered with tears. Her mascara had run down beneath her eyes, so she had smudges.
“What going on over here?” Bevvon looked out the window and shuddered. Finally, she wiped her face with her hand and turned red eyes to me. “All of them?”
“Tater saved six,” Lance said.
“Mr. Tryon went to open the front door and help the ones running this way,” I added.
“He’s crazy,” Loveta added.
Bevvon told us she had gone down one of the middle staircases and grabbed her sisters, refusing to let them get on a bus, which she thought was a death trap. “You know buses always have trouble, and everyone gets eaten on them,” she explained. “I watched the movies.”
She lived in a trailer, and mostly what she wore was handed down from her older sister or bought from the thrift shop. I heard some girls tease her once that she was wearing a top that one of them had thrown away. Bev didn’t miss a beat but said, “It sure looks better on me, so thanks.”
Mostly she was ignored and wasn’t picked on as much as some because, despite her cramped living conditions and being dirt-poor, she was a fairly pretty girl, didn’t fool around with any boys, didn’t use much make up, and made straight A grades.
She made her status clear after some boys had assumed she might be easy because her sister danced at a club. “DeVon isn’t a hooker; we’re not easy; that would be your mama, so don’t be confusing us with your own family,” she had said to the boys.
Bevvon was poor white, but she wasn’t poor white trash although some would have disagreed. She was a student who would get a scholarship, go to medical school or law school, come back one day, and laugh in the faces of all those who had looked down on her. Those who laughed would have a baby planted on each hip and a worthless man who was dealing meth for baby formula.
“What class were you in?”
“History.” She was in ninth grade. “We could see down there, and some of them chased some people. What’s wrong with them?”
“Zombies,” Scooter said again. “If you get bitten, you turn. Only way to kill one is a major brain blow: destroy it, or cut off the head, or burn it up.”
“What did the police say?” Miss Crater asked Mrs. Smith.
“They said it’s an illness. It’s an infection. We’re to go to the courthouse, not the hospital, and lock the infected away and defend ourselves,” she sighed. “We did the best we could with the police saying to come to them and our not having help.”
“Is everyone…ummm…who is downstairs?” Marshall asked. He was always quiet, but when he spoke, people listened.
“We got the little ones out,” Mrs. Smith faltered. She looked back at the ground below where the bus was in the ditch and little bodies dotted the ground.
Some were so chewed up that they didn’t get up and walk but crawled, jaws snapping. “The seventh and eighth graders are gone today on their field trip to the lumber yard.”
“Then we and the fifth and sixth graders are all who are left here? And a bunch of ninth and tenth graders and the senior losers.”
Brett smirked at Brandon.
“I’m gonna kick your ass.”
“Cool,” Loveta said.
“What about the ninth graders?” I asked Bevvon.
“Mrs. Donner, you know how she is; she’s mounting a group to get out. They are gonna fight and run. She had them in the science lab getting what they could for weapons. Imagine scales as a weapon.”
Bevvon laughed.
“She’ll get herself and those kids killed,” Mrs. Smith said.
“No action is failure. You know she says that all the time. She wants to make a run for it. I came here.”
Patricia ran back into the room, “He’s hurt.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Tryon. He got at lease two of the kids inside and maybe, but he’s hurt.”
There were over twenty of us, and we watched, forty eyeballs pinned on the doorway. Mr. Tryon was wrapping a piece of shirt around his arm and was carrying a small girl with blood flowing down her arm.
Two more children followed him. “I got them. The rest, I couldn’t get to them. I had to shut the door and lock it again.”
“Natalie, go get the upstairs first aid kit,” Mrs. Smith snapped.
“Any more of you part of the first aid team?”
Ashley jumped up, and I reluctantly raised my hand along with Bevvon. Brett was waving his had as well. Somehow five of the ten-member team were left at the school.
Tate was one, but he was gone and hopefully safe, now. Another one was down there and was munching on people; of the three left, I was willing to bet their cars were long gone.
I snapped my hands into the gloves and used hydrogen peroxide to rub away the blood so I could see how the little girl was wounded.
Dime-sized places, like a scoop, had been removed from her upper arm.
“Does it hurt much?”
“It did. Now it’s like when my foot goes to sleep.”
“Numb?”
“Uh-huh. I want my mommy. Why did they chase us? They hurt people and are mean. We had to run away fast. I ran fast. I lost my lunchbox. The bus went pow, didn’t it?” she chattered. “I want want Mommy.”
While she jumped topics, I finished cleaning her arm, applied cream, and put a bandage on her, binding it with tape to hold it.
“Mr. T is okay; he’s not in much pain,” Bevvon reported. “But he’s lost the little finger totally and part of his ring finger. He needs stitches.” She loaded gauze onto the spongy flesh around the fleshless nub of the bone and wrapped his entire hand.
“Scrape or bite, I don’t know.” Ashley and Natalie put cream on a child’s scalp. The hair was pulled away in a patch, and there was a bloody spot.
Brett complained loudly, “Why did I get the wanked one? His neck is all chewed to shit, and he needs stitches; his ear is like…gone.”
Ashley pushed him aside to clean the wounds and apply cream and bandages. “You’ll be fine,” she told the little boy, glaring at Brett.
“What? I did what I could. He’s like…doomed. Right, Scooter?”
“The bitten are infected. When he dies, he will come back, hungry for the taste of human flesh.”
“Stop it,” Bevvon shouted, “jeez, you idiots.”
“Are they? Infected?” I asked no one in particular. I watched below, having given my patient to Bevvon.
Everyone who was still intact was up, endlessly shuffling around and looking for new victims. They attacked, bit, ate, and moved on whenever that one was dead or almost dead. Five made ten. Ten made twenty, then forty, and they were multiplying very fast.
Cars lay in wreckage. Blood was everywhere, and, to me, it looked like a quiet war zone. I cracked the window open, heard them moaning loudly, and closed and locked it back.
“They said it is transmitted through bites, like rabies,” Mrs. Smith said. “The sick people had that stomach thing going on, running at both ends, and they bled some. They had nose bleeds.”
“But none of us caught that.”
“That’s the…what did they call it? Something. And those are infected, and this virus they have contains a something: Prius, the prius thing gets into the brain and causes the violence. That’s what they said on the Internet, but it went down about the same time the polic
e called and told me to get everyone to the courthouse.
That is crazy,” Mrs. Smith was complaining.
Scooter stood. “ Not prius, but prions.”
“Oh, yes, it was that.”
“Those are proteins that are folded wrong and get into the brain, and they replicate.”
“English, Scooter?” Lance asked.
“OK. They make more of themselves and make the brain full of holes like a sponge. Their personalities are just gone. What is left is basic feeding though I don’t get why they want humans and violence, why, above all, have the need to bite and spread the infection. It desperately wants and pushes to be spread so it can grow.”
“Are you saying it can think?”
Scooter frowned, “Not like we think. It’s very basic. It just lives to replicate, I mean to spread itself. The disease is in saliva like rabies.
But when they turn, they aren’t people we know anymore. They are the infection, using the bodies as a host. A puppet.”
“Can they be fixed? Healed?” I asked.
“I am all about science, and I’d like to say they could, but no, they can’t ever be fixed. They have to be put down with a shot to the head so that they aren’t used anymore,” Scooter said.
“I feel okay,” Mr. Tryon said. “I mean it’s sore, and I’ve lost fingers, but I don’t feel a need to attack anyone.”
“They need medical attention,” Natalie announced.
“Gee, Nat, if you get a bar on your cell, you can call the hospital…oh…I forgot the hospital is overrun with zombies!” Nick said.
“If we can’t get away, then we have to bunker in and make sure they can’t get to us.”
“I’m not staying here,” his brother, Brandon said.
“Go get the car, and come get me,” Nick said, shaking his head.
I thought about everything Scooter said and thought he was probably correct in his determination. I stared out the window at the war zone and took it all in so that I knew what we were facing.
Then, I saw something.
Chapter 5
When in Doubt, Brush Your Hair
“Hey,” I said, “hey, people, they’re making a run for it.”
I saw the ninth graders. And because there was nothing at the dead end on the other side of the school but a deep forest where some kids went to park on the weekends and where Patricia was popular for a few hours, they had to head toward the road and town.
About a fourth of those I thought were more mild mannered and quiet and those who got scared easily and hid in the hallway shadows ran with the teacher, and obviously they went toward her big van, hoping to get away.
In my mind, I was cheering for them big time.
Another fourth or so, the athletic ones, mostly boys and their girlfriends-of-the-week ran straight out along the road, and it seemed their plan was just to run all the way to town, a mile away. As they energetically dodged shamblers, I thought they might have a chance.
A lot of those watching with us cheered for them.
Another group dodged here and there, trying to sneak past the creatures, and maybe get to the woods and fields where Tate had driven. It was the long way around, but there would be hiding places.
That also seemed to be a good plan.
The rest were doomed right off the bat as they walked around, staring and running to various bodies that had heads that snapped at them.
They went over to the car where the zombies had pulled kids out, and they looked at the bus and investigated it. Most were walking as if they were in a daze and were crying. I could tell they were in shock and had shut down. They hardly fought back when the ghouls attacked them and added that many more to their numbers.
Mentally, they were just wiped out, and I could understand that.
What we were seeing was horrific, and when I had time to really think about it, I might scream forever.
Some of the people around me kept busy, some were angry, some were crying and were withdrawn, and one sat and brushed her hair and popped in a fresh stick of gum.
The members of the athletic group wore shoulder pads and face masks and hit the baseballs with the bats, but were ineffective.
They were like little kids dressed up for something, more concerned
with what they were wearing and the idea of it all than with the job they needed to do. There was too much posturing, and even from where I stood, I could tell they didn’t realize how serious this was. They were playing at zombie killing.
Until one is in the spot, it’s hard to imagine crossing the line, not hesitating, and beating in the head of a cute, little second grade child.
While a person gets that he is infected and dangerous and he manages to kill it, there is a hesitation, a second of sheer horror at having to pop a skull open and smash those delicate features, noses, and little gap-tooth smiles.
Killing is a hard thing, and they hesitated or were overwhelmed by seeing their own friends grabbing at them; they were bitten, and strips of flesh were pulled off in ribbons, noses and ears were ripped away, and fingers were ground to pulp. They didn’t make it.
“No, no, no,” I said, “don’t go over there.”
But they couldn’t hear me, and the ones darting about and hiding kept running to hide behind other places where the creatures lurked.
A pair tried to pretend to be zombies, which I thought was a good plan when nothing else was available.
They rubbed blood on themselves, looking gory and disgusting, lurched about randomly, and tried to get farther down the road.
At the last second before they would have been in the clear, a trio of creatures came too close, and I could tell they were sniffing and somehow could tell. They grabbed the pair, and although the girl and boy fought hard, it was impossible to fight someone who never gets tired, never pulls back from pain, and doesn’t stop the attack. Ever.
That group was destroyed too, and so far, all three groups had added their numbers to the shamblers. The ones left were with the teacher at her van. One boy used a metal yardstick to poke at a creature as if daring it to do something. A yardstick. Wow. A boy and girl fell quickly to the creature’s teeth and claws.
Once the van was open, the teacher jumped into the driver’s seat, kicked a creature away, and closed her door. Her students climbed up into the back of the van, pushing and kicking at the things and trying to get in.
A girl with her face torn apart fell into the van, scrambling to get away, and a boy struggled to hold his insides in his body. It seemed that most were being bitten as they pushed the ghouls back, and finally closed the door.
I felt a chill. Technically they had made it to safety, at least the first part; now, they carefully had to drive out of the parking lot and down the road.
“Deana, your sister made it to the van,” Lance said. “Cheer up. It’s okay.”
She had been crying almost solid since we had run into this room.
The van finally began to move, but it didn’t go toward the exit but back to the school, swerved, side swiped a silver car, and veered right.
“What the hell is she doing?” Brandon asked, “she’s about to hit my car.”
“Language,” Miss Crater said automatically.
“Language? Forget my language, Miss Crater; I think the rules are gone; we have zombies,” Brandon said.
“No one has authority over me now,” Curt announced angrily. “I am gonna worry about number one, now.”
“When haven’t you worried about yourself? You, too, Brandon,” one of the boys asked. He stood off to himself, taking it all in. Jerico was another senior having to make up the class work.
“Fuck you, Jerico,” Brandon said.
“That’s what your mama said.”
“Knock it off,” Mrs. Smith demanded, watching the van meandering. It came to a sudden jerky stop and then rolled just a little. Although nothing was very visible through the windows, we saw a spray of scarlet hit the windshield, a hand rake through it, and then a s
econd, dark red spray drenched the inside of the van.
The side-door slid opened a little, and a bloodied, soaking wet girl fell on the ground, trying to crawl. Her gore-matted hair was plastered to her scalp, and her hands were fingerless.
“Oh, damn.” Lance watched and cut his eyes to Deana who saw the frown on his face and cried harder, rocking her body.
The figure remained still for a few seconds and then began to jerk and raise its head. It crawled to its feet, uncaring about the gore covering it, and began to turn its head here and there, looking for prey.
“One of the infected inside turned, and everyone ended up being bitten,” Marshall said.
Scooter nodded, “I told you that if you got bitten, you would be infected, and you would turn and eat people. It’s simple.”
We looked at Mr. Tryon, and the three injured children. Three of them seemed okay, but one of the children lay in a corner, pale and feverish, blood seeping through his bandage, skin white as marble.
“Is he infected?” Miss Crater asked Natalie.
“I don’t know, Miss Crater. He’s hurt, and he’s feverish; he feels like a hot stove. I checked his bites; it’s way too soon from what we learned, but they are really infected. He’s got this greenish yellow pus leaking out, and it stinks. He needs a clean bandage, but I’m sorry I can’t do it.”
Bevvon went to the child, and after putting on gloves, she removed the bandage from the child’s ear. Her face went white. “My God….” She wrapped the last gauze around his head and stepped back.
“That’s impossible.”
“I told you.”
The child had what looked like purple bruises radiating from his ear and down his neck and shoulders; the skin was purplish-black and green in some spots. Instead of pitiful raw flesh where his ear had been torn off, an obscene amount of yellowy pus covered the side of
his head. Bevvon felt his fever inches away. “He’s infected.”