by Lex Thomas
A piece of white brick exploded from the wall behind David.
He yanked Will behind one of the six wide pillars that ran the full height of the foyer.
“What was that?” Will shouted at him.
“Somebody’s shooting at us!” David said.
David peered around the pillar and saw the front lawn outside. A line of soldiers was advancing up the hill with assault rifles drawn. They fired on the fleeing kids. David recognized one of them, a kid who’d been in Mr. Meyer’s English class last year. He was dashing right at the line of soldiers. When the kid got three feet from the line, the two soldiers nearest to him coughed out geysers of blood and dropped dead, just like Mr. Meyer.
“Oh, my God,” David muttered. Will was looking out at the scene now too. David pushed him back behind the pillar again.
Out on the lawn, some lucky students made it to the tree line and disappeared into the woods. The unlucky ones got mowed down by a fresh wave of soldiers, who kept a much larger distance between themselves and the school.
“They’re going to kill us,” Will said.
David grasped his brother’s shoulders and said with as much authority as he could muster, “Everything’s gonna be okay. Okay?”
Will nodded, but he didn’t look convinced.
The gunshots stopped. Kids were taking cover now and screaming at the soldiers, pleading to be let out. The soldiers held their ground and kept their guns trained on the students. An amplified voice echoed from a PA somewhere outside.
“All students: remain inside the school! It is not safe for you to leave at this time. Stay back!”
Stay back. Those were the same terrified words Mr. Meyer mouthed at David before he died. And they were the last words any of them heard from the outside for months.
4
It was two weeks later. David held Mr. Meyer’s ankles; Will walked in silence by his side. They both wore wet rags tied over their mouths and noses. The smell of rotting meat was overpowering. David looked down the ruined hall. He still had to drag Mr. Meyer’s corpse another thirty yards.
The lights above were mostly broken; half of the lockers were bent and warped from the impact of the explosion. The hallway ended where the collapsed ceiling formed a dead end of rubble. There was no more school beyond that. The mysterious explosion had amputated the rest of the East Wing, and this hallway was one of the stumps that remained.
David was sweating. Mr. Meyer was heavier than he’d expected. Will had offered to help, but David wouldn’t let him.
He felt responsible for Mr. Meyer. David was with the man in his last moments, and that felt like it meant something. His corpse made a dull hiss as it scraped against the fractured tiles of the floor. David refused to look down; he couldn’t bear the sight of his old teacher’s rotten, bloated face.
The teachers had started to smell. Every adult in the school had died the same way Mr. Meyer did. Now there were hundreds of stewing, bloated corpses scattered across the building. The students decided as a whole that they needed to do something about it. They couldn’t wait any longer for outside help. There had been no contact with the outside since the day of the explosion, since the military had held them at bay, then welded every exit shut and covered the quad with a translucent, gray plasticlike canopy. No one had been able to get a signal on their cell phones, the landlines were dead, and the Internet was down. The thousand or so students locked inside were going to have to deal with their problems themselves.
Dragging a corpse across the school was nasty business.
But at least it kept the nagging questions at bay. What the hell happened to them that day? Why did it happen? And what was going to happen to them next? Those were the things that David wouldn’t let himself think about. The kids who did dwell on those mysteries drove themselves crazy.
They ended up wailing in the halls like lunatics, pleading for answers.
“Fuckin’ stinks,” Will said.
David looked over to Will. He had white stubble growing all over his head. He looked like an elderly marine. Every student’s hair had begun to grow back, all of it white. Something bad had happened to their bodies. They were altered. Sick.
“I know this sounds crazy,” Will said, “but this isn’t that different from Wild-Trek.”
“Oh, yeah?” David said. He’d heard this already but was happy to go through the routine again. Anything to keep Will’s mood from spiraling down.
“It’s just a challenge we have to face. If we dig deep and push past our limits, we’ll make it,” Will said.
“I think you’re right.”
Will’s voice sounded more hollow than usual. It upset David that, each day, Will’s speech lost a little more volume, a little more conviction. At this point, it was less like a conversation and more like Will was reciting a prayer.
“To keep a lamp burning, you have to keep putting oil in it.
You know who said that?”
“Mother Teresa,” David said.
“Yeah, Mother Teresa,” Will said. A loud metallic klang made Will flinch.
Behind them in the hall, a tiny white-haired kid with raw, red knuckles sat against a dented locker with his head in his hands. Will’s eyes lingered on him. David was afraid he was losing Will.
“But you’re right, it’s the same situation,” David said. “It’s just a challenge.”
David readjusted his grip on the cold flesh of Mr. Meyer’s ankles and shuddered.
“It is the same, except…,” Will said.
“Except what?”
“Except I don’t know when this situation is going to end.” David dragged Mr. Meyer over to two seniors who stood by an open locker. They wore rags over their mouths, and they had duct-taped their shirtsleeves closed so their hands wouldn’t have to touch the dead bodies.
The seniors lifted Mr. Meyer without a word. They tried not to look at the body while they pushed it into the open locker and shut the door. They sealed up the vents and the seams of the locker with duct tape, to keep the stink in. A lock went on as a last step. David led Will back down the hallway and tried to ignore that the walls were stuffed with dead teachers.
David and Will lay in the quad. They’d been locked up for almost a month. Electricity and running water still flowed.
They had heat. It meant that they weren’t entirely forgotten, but it was a small consolation when there was no food left.
The cafeteria had been picked clean. They were all starving.
David thought he knew what it meant to be hungry. He was wrong. This wasn’t peckish, this wasn’t stomach-growling, this was a transformative, gnawing hunger. He felt as though
his brain was shriveling. His eyes would lose focus, his mouth was perpetually dry. He felt mean, like a rabid dog.
Hundreds of other kids lay scattered around in the quad as well. They were all limp, like dead fish. No one wanted to spare the energy to move around. The quad’s translucent cover deadened the sunlight slightly, but it was still the cheeriest place in the school. The grass was still green underneath them. The slight heat of the sun felt like a trickle of nourishment to David.
“We’re gonna get out of here, Will. You know that, right?” David said.
Will nodded. David made sure to tell him that at least twice a day, whether he listened or not. Will ignored him and looked up to the canopy. There was a distant sound, a light thudding.
Moments later, it was a thundering. Everyone heard it now, and everyone was looking up. A seam in the canopy opened that David had never noticed before.
It was the first time they saw the helicopter, the black angel that would drop food and supplies to them every two weeks from then on. When that first school bus-size care package slammed down to earth, its securing cords breaking loose and spilling out boxes and cellophane-wrapped bundles, all any of them could do was stare. After they tore away at the cheap crating and industrial wrap, they found canned food, military ration meals, freeze-dried meats and vegetables, drink powders
, energy bars, plastic utensils, water bottles, water, blankets, camping rolls, sleeping bags, first-aid kits, second-hand clothes, soap, detergent, trash bags, and antibiotics.
Kids sprinted into the quad from the rest of the school after hearing the commotion. When they saw the supplies, they joined the surging horde, grabbing whatever they could get their claws into. David found energy he didn’t know he had. He and Will split up, running around the pile, through the colliding bodies, assembling armfuls of loot. David saw Will in little flashes as they would pass each other in the scramble. Will had a joyous, almost drooling, smile on his face that matched David’s.
David saw Will near the quad’s south wall. The supplies had all been scooped up, but kids were still pouring into the quad in droves. He and Will both had a great haul. David could barely hold on to everything as he ran up to his brother.
“Look! Look!” Will said, digging his hands through cans and packets piled up on the ground in front of him. “Can you believe it? They want us to live!”
David wanted to hug Will. But as he got close, Will’s smile stretched and contorted into something painful. David heard a gurgling rattle of air escape from Will’s clenched throat.
Will flopped to the ground. His face was the purple of a blossoming bruise. Veins popped out from his temple, and his eyes bulged, bloodshot. His hands were splayed and slapped flat against the ground. One leg was raised and bent while the other jerked away like it wanted to detach from his body.
“What’s up with him?” David heard a girl whisper.
David moved instinctively, dropping down beside his younger brother. He wrapped one hand gently around the back of Will’s head. David tore his belt from his pants and placed it in Will’s mouth. Will clamped his teeth down on the belt as he flailed. Urine darkened the front of Will’s pants.
David placed solid pressure on Will’s flailing arms, holding them in place. He stroked his brother’s head, doing his best to lull him.
“Sshhh…”
In his periphery, David could sense people moving toward him. Anonymous hands reached in and stole a package of blankets that David had snagged in the drop.
“Hey!”
More hands reached in. David couldn’t leave Will’s side, and the kids around him knew it. More were still piling into the quad, angry that they got there too late.
“Leave us alone!” David shouted.
David kicked and thrashed and yelled at the anonymous looters, but it did no good. They darted in, snatched Will and David’s things, and darted back out again. They took and took, and by the time Will’s flailing slowed and his breath became more regulated, David had only a lone can of beans left, sandwiched between his belly and the ground.
Will’s face was spattered with a froth of his own saliva. His eyes cleared and met with David’s. David was devastated by the confusion, the fear, the crushing embarrassment that he saw in Will’s eyes.
“You had a seizure, okay?” David said as calmly as he could.
“You’re gonna be fine.”
Will pushed David away and propped himself up on one shaky elbow. Kids stood around Will and David. Not one made a move to help or asked if anything was needed. They watched.
Will pulled himself up.
“Don’t get up. You need to—”
David tried to stop him, but Will batted his hands away. Will peered back at his audience and then glanced down to see his urine-soaked pants. Someone in the crowd snickered. Will opened his mouth to speak but didn’t. David saw what looked like tears in Will’s eyes. Will ran across the quad, through the white-haired crowd. David ran after him. He blocked out the smirks and the grimaces and the looks of pity from the scav-engers around him.
He had to catch up with Will. He had to tell him everything would be all right. He had to keep him calm, even though their worst fears had been realized. Will’s epilepsy medication had run out weeks before, and this, the first episode in well over a year, was bound to be followed by many more.
Sixty-eight seniors were now dead. No one knew what it meant. They had gone the same way as the teachers, in fits of gruesome vomiting that spilled their very life onto the floor.
Every passing week claimed more seniors. The ones still alive, about three hundred or so, had become erratic and volatile out of fear that any day could be their last. Assaults and robberies became things the student body now had to fear. The seniors acted crazy. They wanted to live it up, to have sex, to gorge themselves on food, to pick a fight and win it, but the next moment they’d curl up into a ball and yank on their hair.
Their manic weeping was the school’s new soundtrack.
David waited in a janitor’s supply closet. He and Will had been sleeping in this eight-by-seven-foot rectangle for a week. The walls were lined with empty metal shelves; pillag-ers had picked the room clean except for a lone mop head without a handle.
In the beginning, everyone slept close together. The large rooms of the school such as the cafeteria, the commons, the auditorium, and the gym, were communal sleeping areas. It felt safer to be with a large group. It wasn’t that way anymore.
The cutthroat struggle for supplies didn’t end when each food drop ended, it was all the time now. Nothing truly belonged to anyone, and once you had something valuable in your hand, you had to start looking over your shoulder.
The door to the janitor’s closet opened, and David braced himself for a fight. Will walked in. David relaxed. Will had torn horizontal rips all down the legs of his jeans. Since the seizure in the quad, he’d cultivated a bad attitude so as to come off as more intimidating. David knew the truth. Will was scared shitless. He’d had two more seizures in the past month, and there was no way of predicting when the next would be.
“Where were you?” David said.
“Out getting this.”
Will dropped a box of tampons on the floor.
“Feelin’ a little moody?” David said.
“They’ll trade high.”
“And how’d you get those?”
“I went to the drugstore. Leave me alone,” Will said.
Will flopped down in a metal folding chair.
“I told you to stay here,” David said.
“Yeah. I heard.”
“It’s not safe for you to go out alone.”
“I don’t want to hear it, David.”
“You think I want to sit here worrying that you might have seized somewhere? You could get robbed, or worse.”
“It’s not your problem!”
Will got out of the chair and paced around the cramped room.
“I’m running at the next drop,” Will said.
“No, you aren’t.”
“I am, and I’m not going for the bare minimum, like you. I want the good stuff.”
“It’s too dangerous for you,” David said.
“This whole place is dangerous. We’re not going anywhere, and I’m gonna get my loot before my time is up.” David hoped Will didn’t really think he was going to die in this place.
“They’re going to let us out, Will.”
“I’m running.”
“No, you’re not, and that’s final!” David said.
Will stormed off into the hallway. David followed him through the doorway, but when he got to the hall, Will was already running around the far corner.
“You’re gonna die in here,” said a voice from a nearby classroom. It sounded familiar. David paused. A window shattered in the same room. He flinched.
“You’ll die in here…”
Kerrang. The sound of metal striking metal.
David edged toward the room.
Kerrang.
The light from the hall glinted off metal as a figure swung a chair against the steel plating the military had secured beyond the window frame. Kerrang.
The figure dropped the chair and tumbled away from the sealed window. The person threw himself prostrate onto the floor. He let out a low, defeated moan and sobbed. Maybe he’d gone stir-crazy, like
so many. Maybe he was a senior who knew he was about to die. If that were him at rock bottom, or Will, he’d want someone to reach out and help.
“You okay?” David asked, and stepped into the doorway.
The person jumped like he’d been jabbed by a cattle prod, and looked up. It was Sam Howard, his eyes stained red from crying. David tensed up. Sam scrambled back into the darkest corner of the room.
David hadn’t seen Sam since everything had gone bad. Did Sam want revenge, or was that ancient history now? In the wake of such a huge tragedy, Sam and Hilary hooking up hardly seemed important anymore. Even still, it did make him happy to see Sam acting so pathetic.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” David said. Then he couldn’t help himself. “You don’t have to cry, man.” Sam charged out of the blackness at David. He was fast. He shoved David, and David fell to the ground. Sam stood over him.
“You stay away from me, Thorpe. Me and my team. Nothing’s changed.”
Sam disappeared around the same corner Will had turned earlier. David punched the floor in frustration. He couldn’t believe he’d tried being nice to that prick.
David would never forget the arc of blood that sprayed from Danny Liner’s neck as he clutched the wooden shard planted deep in his throat. That was when the school truly changed.
It happened following a violent drop in which David saw a freshman get his leg broken so severely that a jagged piece of bone tore out of his shin. Two sophomore girls had clawed deep grooves into each other’s faces over a rare bottle of moisturizer.
When the drop was over, everyone had retreated to the sidelines to go hide their haul somewhere. Sam and six other guys from the football team had joined forces that day. They’d gone so far as to give their little gang a name, Varsity. Working together, each Varsity member secured twice as much as they would have alone. Varsity was the talk of the quad.
Everyone wanted to form a little group of their own before the next drop.
The Varsity guys were carrying their shares toward the exit, but Sam lingered by his own pile, right in the middle of the quad. He was eating a strip of beef jerky. Torn cardboard and trampled packaging littered the area around him. It was a brazen act to eat in public. No one did it anymore, unless they wanted to get robbed.