Diaries of the Damned

by Laybourne, Alex

  Leon looked around the room, but couldn´t see his daughter anywhere. Yet, the fact that he had found survivors gave Leon hope.

  `Who are you?” the older man asked. When Leon turned to face him, he saw that the man held a large carving knife before him, ready to strike if the answer given was not good enough.

  “Hey, hey, I’m alive; I’m not going to hurt you.” The knife had startled Leon, and it threw his thought process off-track. “I’m looking for my daughter. Keisha, Keisha De Guzman,” Leon kept his voice calm, but could not take his eyes off the knife. Leon was not afraid of it; he had studied martial arts for a number of years and worked out regularly, unlike the teacher, whose potbelly stretched his shirt buttons. If it came to a fight, Leon could take the knife without problem, but he did not want that. The kids had been through enough.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Matthews, I know Keisha. We are…were in the same English literature group,” one of the girls spoke up.

  The teacher looked over at the girl and lowered the knife. “Ok,” he said, clearly upset at the arrival of someone else.

  Leon turned around to look at the girl. He did not recognize her, but then again, Keisha had many friends. “Have you seen her?” he asked, aware of how pleading his tone was.

  The girl, a white girl whose skin was brown with dirt and blood, lowered her eyes to the floor. Her school uniform was filthy and she had her arms wrapped around herself. “No, sir, I haven’t seen her since… since they came.” She stumbled over her words, eager to have them spoken so that she could return to silence.

  Leon felt his heart sink, and it must have shown on his face.

  “There are other groups though,” a tall girl spoke up. Her left arm was caked in blood, and she had the beginnings of a good black eye. The swelling occupied the right side of her face. Yet a fire burned behind those eyes, a determination that the others noticeably lacked. It was then that Leon realized how, to look at them, the group had already given up hope.

  “Where? How many are there?” Leon asked. He was eager to be out of the room. Defeat was contagious, and he had no plans on giving up.

  “There is one upstairs, on the second floor, and another one in the science building,” the tall girl answered resolutely. “But you can’t reach them. There are too many of those things out there.” She spoke about the zombies in a way that sounded cold. She had seen what they did, and came to the same conclusion as Leon. Kill first and ask questions later.

  “Well, I have to try,” he answered, even attempting to flash a smile as he spoke. It did not work; he thought he probably just looked constipated. “She’s my daughter, and if she is alive, I’m getting her out…I’m getting everybody out, somehow.” A large rescue operation was not what he wanted, and Leon had no clue as to how he would rescue them all, but the look of hope that spread on their faces told him it was a worthy lie.

  “You can’t go out there. They will kill you,” the clean girl spoke, an action that seemed to shock the rest of the group.

  “I understand, but she’s my daughter, and I am not going to give up on her.” Leon felt the fire in the pit of his stomach begin to grow. “Do you have any weapons? How many of those things are up there?” he asked, eager to know what he would be facing.

  “They are all on the first floor. There were four classrooms up there, so I would guess around about fifty; unless some have escaped,” the tall girl spoke again, stepping into the middle of the room. “I can show you the best place to go up. I’m fed up with sitting here.” She shot a sharp look at the teacher, and Leon felt the strange atmosphere that held the room. He was certain, more than ever, that he needed to leave. Leon’s conviction was so strong he offered no resistance to the idea of taking a sixteen-year-old girl with him. Leon simply looked at the girl, nodded to her, and turned to leave. He gave the teacher a long hard look as he left. There was something off about him.

  The hallway was deserted, and the girl moved with a sure footedness that Leon lacked. “You didn’t have to come with me,” he spoke as they neared the main stairs that lead to the second floor. The sound of the zombies stumbling around above their heads echoed through the deserted hall.

  “I didn’t want to stay there, either.” She gave the sort of barbed, curt response that only a teenager could give. It made Leon smile; a slice of normalcy in the middle of a crazy world.

  They came to a stop at the bottom of the stairway. Leon felt his body tingle with a mixture of fear and adrenaline. “If you want to kill them, you need to go for the head,” the girl offered her advice and started up the stairs.

  They made their way up the stairs, climbing a few steps before pausing to reassess. The second floor opened into a long hallway with glass doors at either end, separating the stairs from the classroom area. The zombies were effectively caged in. “They are pull-doors. They don’t seem to have mastered that just yet.” The girl heard Leon draw his breath.

  As she spoke, the zombies turned around, their mindless shuffling stopped, their minds focused on a joint goal. The sound of their groans also changed. Something about it struck a chord in Leon’s mind, and he made a note of it.

  It was strange, seeing all of the undead students trapped in one space. Leon stared at them; there seemed to be no discernible pattern to it. The only thing he saw was that the level of violence seemed to have either increased or decreased at some point. Those in the best condition had a single wound; a bite wound Leon guessed, remembering the shopping center. Then there were those that had multiple wounds, mainly around the face and neck area. One such student stood closest to the glass. Her face had been eaten on the right hand side. The wet meat beneath had already started to crust over, and she walked with a limp, her left leg jutted at a strange angle from the knee down. Yet it did not seem to impede her progress. The worst cases were the kids who were ripped apart. There were three students that he could see with their flesh torn apart, their bodies picked clean. These three were motionless, yet as Leon watched, they somehow still blinked and hungrily bit at the air; they too could hear the commotion and were just as frenzied by it.

  The school was predominantly female in terms of students, with the ratio being about seventy-to-thirty. Looking, Leon did not see a single male student among them all.

  “Come on, they calm down when we are not there, but those doors will break sooner or later. Sooner if you just stand there,” the girl called from half way to the stairway.

  Leon had a second flashback to the store, the glass shattering and the flood that followed. He shuddered and quickly headed to the second floor.

  “How did you get them all trapped there?” Leon asked, impressed by the levelheadedness of the children.

  “A lot of kids aren’t in school; they are off sick with the flu. Classes had been rescheduled, and moved to the second floor. The segregation happened by accident. Downstairs there are also some rooms with them all trapped in. We marked them with a red cross. We killed a few too,” she added with a startling nonchalance.

  “The flu…” Leon began, pausing to think.

  “Haven’t you seen the news today? They have as good as confirmed that it is the flu. Anybody who dies from the flu, which is everybody, comes back as one of them… a zombie,” the girl explained, mistaking Leon pause in confusion.

  “I heard. I was already at work,” Leon said. “Besides I’m a paramedic; our orders were ‘business as usual’. The only thing was that we had to try and patch people up at home, to not take them to the local hospitals.”

  The second floor of the school was much like the first: shut off at either end by heavy glass doors. The main difference was that the upper level was void of zombies, and looked for some reason or the other as if it had escaped all of the carnage. It looked utterly deserted, but Leon remembered the flag that had had seen come out of the window on the upper floor, so they pushed on.

  “I don’t know where they are, but we heard them calling for help.” The girl, whose name Leon had yet to obtain, spoke as the
y opened the heavy glass door. There were three doors on either side of the whitewashed corridor, and the scuff marks on the standard school issue vinyl floor showed that central doors were the most often used.

  “I saw something from this room here.” Leon walked to the central door that overlooked the front driveway, and knocked.

  There were sounds of a scuffle inside, followed by a muffled cry. Without waiting, Leon pulled the door open, ready for anything.

  What he found were five boys, all standing in one corner, huddled together. Their faces were etched with an expression of shock; shock at interruption. They stood in the corner, hiding something.

  “What’s going on here?” Leon asked, looking around the room with suspicion. He saw the white sheet that had been held out of the window, and he saw the bloodstains that dotted it; they were red… fresh. He looked back at the boys; none of them appeared injured. The largest of the group fiddled with the zipper of his trousers. It was a small motion, one that Leon saw out of the corner of his eye, but everything then fell into place.

  Leon strode into the room and pushed the five boys aside. Behind them, cowered in the corner was a girl, a classmate of theirs. She was naked, and had two ties binding her hands and feet. Tears streaked her dirty face, while blood decorated the inside of her thighs.

  Leon turned his face into an expression of pure rage. “There are no words,” he began, his mind consumed by an anger he knew he could not, or rather he would not allow himself, to unleash on children. “Those creatures turned up today, and you are already torturing, abusing… raping.” His voice grew louder with each word, until his words were a bellow.

  “We…we figured, if we are going to die, might as well…” the largest of the group began the smirk on his face still evident. His words were cut short as the fist that Leon could no longer keep from throwing collided with his face.

  Beneath them, they could hear the zombies become agitated once again. “Please, Mr. De Guzman, you need to keep quiet. Those things will rip us apart if we don’t keep quiet,” the girl begged.

  “It’s Leon. Call me Leon,” he told her as he reached out and let the terrified young girl take hold of his hand. “As for you five, you are coming with us, and the first place you will be free of me, is at the police station, or so help me God, I’ll feed your dicks to one of those…things downstairs!” Leon gritted his teeth and spat his words, somehow managing to keep his voice just above a whisper.

  The boys said nothing, not even the leader of the pack, whose bloody face stared at Leon with a fiery contempt.

  “Leon, we can’t get everybody out, that’s not possible,” the girl spoke. “There’s so many of them. We will all die.” The girl had begun to look scared. Within the school, with the zombies locked away she was strong, an adult, but outside, surrounded by the undead she was a child.”

  “Listen, um…”

  “Cindy.”

  “Listen, Cindy, those things down there will escape. It might not be today or tomorrow, but one day they will, and they will come for you. Who knows how many more there will be out there waiting for us then. Besides, I am here looking for my daughter, but I won’t leave any of you behind…even you.” He stared at the boy he had struck. “Now, you said there was another group in the science building. How can we get there? What is the easiest way?”

  Nobody spoke, not at first. The idea of leaving the safety of the school did not sit well with them. “You really don’t think those things are going to die?” Cindy asked; her voice changed. If was filled with a vulnerability that could no longer be held beneath the surface.

  “They are already dead. This is all new to me too, but, from everything I have seen, these things are hungry. They don’t care what happens, they just keep going, crawling if they have to. The only way to stop them is by destroying the head, but there are too many of them. We need to leave, and it is not up for discussion. Now how do we get to the science building?”

  Nobody had a chance to answer before the crashing sound of wood splintering came thundering up the stairs. Everybody froze…it did not take long for the screams to start.

  “We’re moving… now,” Leon ordered. He removed the bonds from the abused girl’s limbs and handed her back her clothes. She was not yet fully dressed, but there was no time to wait.

  “There has to be a back door right?” Leon asked as they swiftly moved down the corridor. The sound of grunts and hungry growls became louder as they reached the stairwell that was on the opposite side to the one Leon and Cindy had used to reach the second floor.

  “Yes, if you go down here and just keep going straight, follow the corridor to the end. Turn…left, yes left, you will come to the side door. You will have to run to the science building though. It’s all outside,” Cindy spoke, her strength slowly beginning to return.

  “Okay. Everybody move quickly, stay with me, and be fucking careful!” Leon stopped a few steps short of the first floor. The doors there still held, although the crowd was more agitated than they had been.

  They quickly made their way down the stairs, not listening to the trapped crowd as the scent of blood reached their hunger driven minds. “Don’t look back,” Leon called as the doors began to rattle in their frames.

  “What about the others?” Cindy asked as they reached the first floor.

  “They’re already dead,” Leon stated bluntly.

  Cindy did not need to ask how Leon knew this because their bodies littered the main hallway. A crowd of zombies that had been trapped in one of the ground floor rooms were gathered around a few of them, hands buried deep inside, yanking handfuls of squishy human goodness from the bodies and shoveling it into their hungry maws.

  They moved quietly, even when the sounded of breaking glass echoed down from the floor above. However when the young girl they had rescued from the second floor gave a scream upon seeing what Leon thought to be a liver discarded, and slide along the floor like a bloated slug, they were forced to increase their pace.

  The entire crowd, seven in all, dropped their feast and turned their heads; their minds in overloaded rapture at the prospect of another live meal.

  “Run,” Leon ordered as he took off down the hall.

  The zombies gave chase, but the group was too fast for them. Leon crashed through the door, and out into the fresh winter air. Once everybody was out he closed it, and looked around for something that he could use to halt its continued use.

  ”Right, we need to move. Which way to the science building?” Leon asked.

  Cindy pointed down the correct path and they started off. All but one boy who stood motionless, held in place by a zombie that had come from behind the building and sunk its teeth into his shoulder. He gave a cry of pain. Heat surged through his body, overriding the concept of pain. Inside he burned, and before everything went black he called out his apologies to the young girl he had helped to rape. He got no answer, for the group was already gone.

  No order was required. They heard the boy scream and picked up their pace.

  The science building was not far, maybe two hundred meters - but by the time they arrived; only three of the eight were still alive. Leon was the first to reach the building. He was glad to see someone open the door to meet their arrival. He was an older man; well into his sixties, with white hair, a white beard, and a laboratory jacket. “In here, quickly,” he motioned to them. The teacher was a man Leon recognized from his previous visits to the school for parent evenings and other school functions.

  Leon stopped by the door and ushered Cindy and the boy whose nose he had broken into the building before entering himself. He had not been aware of how many of their initial group had fallen. The zombies picked off four of the boys relatively quickly after they left the main building. The girl they had rescued had run into a trap; her blood stained legs had attracted the wrong sort of crowd. Leon made to go and rescue her, but the science teacher grabbed his arm and pulled him inside.

  “It’s too late,” he repeated, pulli
ng Leon away from the doors and deeper into the building.

  The last time Leon saw her, a small zombie had bitten down on the bloody flesh between her legs. The pack soon descended, but Leon was certain that her suffering was over before they ate her face. She would not be coming back from the dead, that was obvious. The hungry mob stripped her carcass bare before Leon reached the first floor classroom where the other survivors were gathered.

  “Daddy,” a familiar voice cried out, speaking a word that Leon had not heard spoken in such a tone in several years.

  He spun around, and felt his heart soar as Keisha ran into his arms. Her embrace was tighter than he had ever felt and Leon hugged with equal vigor. Both shed tears.

  “Daddy, what are you doing here?” the sweet voice of his daughter sang out in his ears.

  “I came for you,” he replied his voice muffled against her head.

  The pair broke their embrace and Leon took a glance around. The second floor classrooms were set up for the more theoretical side of the classes. The laboratory areas were on the ground floor. There were seven people including the teacher who had managed to find shelter.

  Leon looked out of the window. Judging by the number of zombies shuffling around the science block wearing lab coats and safety goggles, there had been many more when the crisis began.

  It did not take long for a large crowd of zombies to congregate around the science building. With everybody up on the first floor they made no real attempt to enter the building, but still they hovered around. It was as if they could sense that fresh meat was in the immediate vicinity.

  Leon found himself staring at them. He watched in near fascination as they ambled around, seemingly oblivious to one another. It struck him as strange, for when the need arose, they seemed to work as a rather efficient team.

  “Well, looks like we are stuck here,” Leon muttered after a few hours had passed and the crowd had done nothing but increase. He had not counted them head for head, but his guess would have been around two hundred. They meandered around the building, their mere presence reason enough to stay put.