by Lora Powell
* * *
The wide streak of blood left behind when the guys dragged the body to the farthest corner of the room was mostly dry. So was the spot on the floor that I had cleaned up the best I could after Shawn vomited.
Once the adrenaline started to wear off, he had started to shake. The shakes had turned into nausea when the realization sunk in, he had smashed some girl's head with a bat. Sure, she was a zombie, and she had been trying to kill one of our group. But mostly she still looked like the pretty young woman she used to be. Hitting her went against every decent human instinct.
Skirting the wet patches, I walked to where Shawn was watching the zombies outside through the tiny kitchen door window. Jack leaned against the nearby counter, lost in thought. He had been quiet since the attack.
"How's it look out there?"
Neither of them looked at me as Shawn responded, "There are more of them. I don't know if they heard us in here, or the ones who saw us are attracting the notice of new zombies, but I think the numbers keep getting higher."
That was not what I had been hoping to hear. We needed the zombies to lose interest and go away so we could take our food and retreat back upstairs. Now that there was a dead body in the corner, none of us was too excited about being trapped in the kitchen.
Wandering back to the counter, I absentmindedly put the bag of rolls back in it's place on the shelf. We all seemed to have lost our appetites for the time being.
Shawn's quiet expletive did nothing to help the already tense atmosphere.
"What is it?" Jack finally broke from his trance.
"The window is cracked."
"What!" I hurried back to where the guys were crowded around our only view outside of the kitchen. "Are they going to get in?"
"We need to go. Right now!" I hadn't heard Shawn ever sound as panicked as he did at that moment. "If they get through those windows we won't ever get back to the stairwell."
"Wait!" Jack grabbed for Shawn's arm to stop him from opening the door. "If that many of them see us, they'll come through the glass for sure."
I shouldered my way in front of them and peered fearfully out into the cafeteria. The sight made my breath stutter in my throat. Zombies lined up shoulder to shoulder, pressing on the glass as their frightening eyes searched for what had drawn so much attention in the first place. More zombies pushed them from behind in an attempt to see inside. One large pane of glass had a spider web of cracks spread across it's surface. That section wouldn't be able to take much more.
I looked over my shoulder to the wide eyes behind me, "They're already almost through. It's just a matter of time."
In an unspoken agreement, Jack let go of Shawn's arm. Shawn pushed the door open, and the noise rose to a nearly deafening level. Alarmingly observant, the zombies noticed the movement the second the door opened.
Screams competed with the banging of bodies solidly colliding with the glass. The large panes rattled in their frames under the onslaught. I had just set one foot onto the faded cafeteria carpet when the tinkling sound of glass falling to the floor told me that we were too late. That broken window was much closer to the kitchen door than we were to the stairs.
Reacting on instinct, I spun around and dove back through the kitchen door. Feet crunched across glass and pounded on the floor as zombies flooded into the cafeteria. Shawn bolted through the door behind me. Gasping for air, I looked out, and wished that I hadn't.
Dozens of zombies had already made it inside. In the lead, a tall man who was decayed enough that his skin had sickly black patches, was too close to reaching the still open kitchen door. Yelping, I yanked the door shut.
Seconds later the first zombie's face appeared in the round window. Nearly eye to eye with the creature, I flinched as it opened it's decaying mouth and hissed menacingly. Hands grabbing my shoulders from behind made me yelp again, but I registered the voice in time to keep myself from reacting more.
"Get away from the door!"
Shawn roughly dragged me back until we had one of the large, stainless counters in between us and the only entrance into the room. It was while the two of us huddled there, watching the zombies at the door fearfully, that I realized that Jack was not in the kitchen.
TWELVE-DAY 7
I gasped. "What about Jack!" I started towards the door, to do what I didn't know, but Shawn stopped me with the grip he still had on my arm.
"He's still out there. He ran for the stairs."
I stopped pulling toward the door. The blood stained hands clawing at the window reminded me that anyone who tried to go into the cafeteria had a grim future.
Where at first the kitchen had been almost peaceful, so long as you ignored the dead body, the noise now hurt my ears. The clanging of tables overturning, bangs of the zombies at the door, and the shuffling of a whole lot of feet only added to the sound. As I listened, one sound distinguished itself from the rest.
My hands covered my ears in a failed attempt to block the sound of still human screaming.
I dimly realized that tears were tracking down my cheeks but didn't want to take a hand from my ears to wipe them away. Backing further away from the door, I sank to the floor. The panicked cries for help lasted for another minute before fading.
Shawn stayed behind the counter, gripping the bat tightly and watching the door. It didn't have a lock we were able to engage. The zombies didn't seem capable of turning a doorknob, but that didn't mean one of them wouldn't get lucky. If they got the door opened, we were both dead.
"We have to find a way out of here."
I looked up from my study of the floor. "How? There's only one door and no windows."
He began looking around the room for any way to escape. We had both already explored the entire kitchen, I was positive that the door blocked by zombies was the only way out. I watched Shawn looking around with a sense of helplessness. The situation was worse than it had been when I was trapped in the bathroom.
"I think this is a drop ceiling."
"What?" I looked up to find Shawn staring up.
"A drop ceiling." He gestured up. "It's a false ceiling. Above it is a space that has the ducts and pipes and stuff. It might be big enough for us to crawl up there."
Climbing to my feet, I walked to stand next to him as he contemplated the ceiling. Not looking at me, he suddenly climbed on top of the counter and reached up. The ceiling panel lifted up easily when he pushed on it. Shoving the panel aside, he stood up all of the way and his head disappeared into the hole.
Shawn looked at me. "This could work. We'll have to be careful, the ceiling panels won't support any weight, but the ducts and pipes should."
A particularly forceful bang on the door made me look fearfully over my shoulder. The door stayed closed, but the bloodshot eyes of a zombie peered in directly at us. I scrambled on top of the counter. "Ok. Let's go."
"Try to be quiet. We should be out of their reach up here, but still. Take your time. When we get inside, we will have to find a way out or up."
I was significantly shorter than Shawn, and even standing on the counter, climbing into the ceiling was going to be a challenge. Seeing my predicament, he gestured that he would help me up.
The air inside the ceiling was dusty and stale. The boost helped me climb high enough to be able to perch on a bunch of old looking pipes. The surfaces that I had held on to to get up there felt filthy. The space was an allergy attack in the making.
The metal infrastructure groaned ominously as Shawn pulled himself into the crawl space, but it held. Holding onto the bat with one hand, I was impressed at how easily he made the climb.
"Now what?"
"I think we'll know when we've found what we're looking for." Carefully, he began to inch his way across the labyrinth of metal.
Right next to the hole that we'd made, there had been enough light. But I quickly discovered that it was really dark up in the ceiling. The lack of light made our already slow progression even slower. The groaning of the ducts,
and the commotion from the zombies that was coming from directly below us now, had my nerves wound tight. When Shawn accidentally hit something with the bat, the clang made me jump so hard I almost slipped off of the pipes.
"Sorry," he whispered.
I didn't reply, just concentrated even harder on staying safely hidden in the ceiling.
The smell of decay had been steadily increasing. Before long I was fighting back the urge to gag.
I didn't know how long we had been navigating the darkness, but it was long enough that my muscles started to burn with exertion. Crawling along the inside of the ceiling was more physically demanding than I would have guessed. I nearly cried in relief when I heard, "This is it! I think this leads to an air vent in the stairwell."
In the blackness ahead, I thought I could see a relatively large metal duct that ended at a wall. How Shawn knew it led into the stairs, I didn't know. He must have kept a better sense of direction up there than I had. There was just one problem. The metal air duct blocked our way out.
"Ok. But how do we get out it?"
"We're going to have to get the duct to come off of the wall." He spent several minutes feeling around in the darkness, looking for a clue how to remove the metal. A frustrated sound let me know that it wasn't going well. "It's bolted fast. I can't get the bolts loose."
After a few more seconds, he stopped his search. His vague outline in the dark appeared to turn in my direction. "I could probably get it off there, but it's going to make a lot of noise."
"Do we have any other options?" I was way out of my comfort zone here, and had no suggestions.
"We could keep looking, but any place that could be an exit is going to have the same challenges. I'm pretty sure this one leads into the stairs. We could go up, get our stuff, and find a better way out of the building."
I nodded, then realized that he probably couldn't see me. "Do it."
Turning around so his feet were toward the duct, Shawn got a good grip on some pipes, and began kicking at the metal. The noise was awful as he repeatedly hit the duct, and the metal began to slowly warp and bend.
The noise from below, already loud, increased as the zombies were worked into a frenzy by the noise. They could hear but not see us, and the sounds they made had me readjusting my grip. Falling through the ceiling would be bad.
Starting to huff from exertion, Shawn began to use the bat to pry the metal further from the wall. With a tortured sound, it finally gave way.
The end of the duct fell down, revealing a vent. Dim light and much needed fresh air streamed in through the holes. With one hard blow, the vent popped free from the wall and clattered to the floor below.
Sticking his head out the hole, Shawn looked around, and then back at me. "It's clear. I'll help you down."
The hole in the wall was maybe a foot by two and a half feet. Not that big at all. As I turned around and stuck my feet through, I was suddenly glad for the weight that I had lost over the last week. With help, wriggling through the wall and dropping to the floor wasn't hard. My sneakers slapped the hard floor of the stairwell, he had been right, and I immediately raced to the door and locked it. Catching sight of me, zombies swarmed the door and it rattled in it's frame.
Inside the cafeteria, not all that far from the other side of the door I was standing at, a red stain spread across the previously clean carpet. A familiar shoe was jostled across the floor, kicked by zombies as they surged in my direction. Pulling my gaze away, I turned back to check on Shawn, still trying to get out of the ceiling. I didn't want to see any more.
THIRTEEN-DAY 7
Shawn's significantly wider frame was giving him problems squeezing through the hole in the wall. Feet dangling toward the floor, he had to work to get his shoulders through. Just when I was starting to worry that he would be stuck, he broke free and dropped to the ground.
He immediately looked to the door where zombies beat on the safety glass. When he took the first step toward it, I stopped him.
"Don't go over there." My voice shook a little. "I already locked it." There was no need for both of us to have nightmares about that shoe rolling around in the puddle of blood.
"Alright. Let's get our stuff and try to figure out how we're getting out of here."
The stairwell was creepy without Jack's flashlight to chase back the darkness. The only light came from the small windows in the door at each new level. We didn't waste time and bounded up the stairs to our floor.
Back in our office safe room, I couldn't resist pulling apart the blinds to look outside. Overlooking the same side of the building as the cafeteria, the street below was full of zombies. Attracted by the noise and confusion, more rounded corners and darted up the street on their way to the broken window. "We need to get out of here."
"Come on." While I had been looking outside, Shawn threw the last of the supplies we had left piled on the desk into a gym bag. He roughly pulled the zipper and jogged to the door.
As I turned to follow him, Jack's original clothes, washed in the bathroom sink and hung over a chair to dry, caught my eye. I faltered. First Evie, then Austin, and now Jack. Everyone I knew was dying.
"Bri!" The yell from the next room got my feet moving again. I wasn't dead yet, neither was Shawn. But if we didn't find a way to escape the building and it was overrun, we would be next. I caught up with him by the exit to the stairs. "We need to get a good look around. Can we get back onto the roof?"
"Yeah. The door locks from the inside."
"Stay close."
He didn't have to tell me twice as we wound our way back to the heavy door that led to the roof. At the last second, I remembered to jam the cigarette pack back into the lock. Getting trapped on the roof during a zombie apocalypse wasn't high on my to do list.
A peek over the edge of the roof reminded me that I wasn't all that fond of heights. More than fifty feet below, the zombies crowded the street.
"Don't let them see you," the amount of noise coming up from the street made me have to yell to be heard.
Nodding his understanding, Shawn ducked down as he worked his way around the edge of the roof. By the time we made it to the opposite side, I could tell from the drop in the noise level that there was significantly less zombies down this way.
A look over the wall confirmed my guess. A few of them darted through the narrow alley, but it was nothing compared to the swarm on the other side of the building.
Even so, it didn't really matter. A dozen zombies or a hundred, either way, it was too many. If we climbed down the ladder, the few zombies in the alley would be waiting for us at the bottom. I eyed my abandoned car just up the alley wishfully. I had been hoping that we could somehow make it to the car and drive out of there, but I couldn't see that happening any more.
Shawn had continued his circuit of the roof while I stared forlornly at my abandoned car. Making his way back to where I stood, he looked at me with worried eyes. "I have an idea. But I don't think either of us is going to like it."
That sounded ominous. When I didn't say anything, he continued. "I think this alley is narrow enough that we could lay something across to use as a bridge."
"What? No way!" I started shaking my head, but he cut me off.
"Do you have a better idea?"
I didn't. "What do you have in mind?"
"While Jack," he grimaced slightly at that name, "while we were searching for food we found a janitor's closet. There was a long ladder in there. I think it will reach."
I looked across the open space to the roof of the next building over, a full story down. "Is that even possible?" The idea of falling five stories was almost as terrifying as the zombies.
"I think it's the only way we are getting off of this roof."
In the end, he was right. Our best bet for escaping the building was to make it to the next building over. The horde of zombies below was steadily growing. It was only a matter of time before they started finding their way upstairs. When that happened, we really would be con
fined just to the roof. It was better to get out of there before it came to that.
The janitorial closet that Shawn had mentioned turned out to be on the fourth floor, the floor I worked on. It was funny, I'd sat at a desk for nearly two years, just yards from the closet that held the ladder that may save my butt from becoming zombie chow. I'd had no idea that closet was even there.
Handing me a bundled up extension cord, Shawn hefted the ladder and started back up to the roof. I decided against asking what the orange cord was for. I probably didn't want to know.
We made a lot of noise going back up. The ladder banged off of the stairs and railing in the dark. Each bang made me cringe as I imagined the zombies on the first floor breaking through the door and following the noise straight to us.
The quality of the light outside had started to change subtly by the time we clanged our way back to the roof. I silently cursed the failing light. We didn't have a lot of time before we were going to be fumbling around in the dark.
The ladder made a loud sound as Shawn extended it nearly as far as it would go. I wasn't sure how happy I was to see that it did look long enough to reach between the two buildings. A small part of me was still rebelling at the idea that I was about to trust that ladder with my life.
"They've noticed us."
I moved closer to the edge and looked down to where a couple of zombies looked up. Bloody, ragged clothing, and beginning to decompose, they were more frightening than before every time I got a clear look at them. The zombies were doing that creepy, completely motionless stare that they tended to do when they were thinking. I shuddered and turned my attention to Shawn.
He had the ladder across the gap and was tying the world's biggest knot in the end of the extension cord he had wrapped around a rung of the ladder. Moving to a nearby pipe sticking up out of the roof, he tied the cord around that as tightly as it could go.