by Cleek, Caleb
“It may not be as bad as it seems,” Meagan disagreed. “They’re all coming to this side of the building where we’re making noise. Get ready with the ladder and I’m going to keep their attention over here. When you’re ready, I’ll move away from the edge and meet you on the other side and we’ll make a break for it.”
Zeke slowly backed out of sight and Meagan began banging on the side of the building. She realized that the banging probably wasn’t even necessary as long as they could see her. The sight of a meal was all that was really needed to hold the attention of all the eyes focused on her with rapt attention. She turned to see how Zeke was coming.
He picked up the ladder with a soft clang as the end bumped into an air conditioning unit sitting upright on the flat of the roof. The noise wasn’t that loud, but several of the infected suddenly seemed to have lost their fascination with Meagan and their gaze shifted away from her toward the roof in the middle of the building. Although Zeke had backed away from the edge and was out of sight, the noise was enough to pique their curiosity. A group of eight moved to the middle of the building, staring up at the roof where the noise had originated.
“Try to keep the noise down,” Meagan yelled. “That bang attracted a small group to directly below where you hit the air conditioner.”
Zeke silently nodded to her, signifying he would keep quiet. He traversed the rest of the roof without making any noise. By the time he had cautiously made his way to the far end, the small group that had been drawn by the sound had lost interest and returned to the main body.
Zeke began to lower the ladder over the side as carefully and quietly as he could, but as the extended ladder slid across the edge of the roof and down toward the ground, it rattled and clanked softly. At the first rattle, the same group of eight infected once again lost interest in Meagan. The soft metallic screech of the ladder sliding across the edge of the roof started the group in his direction.
“Quiet, Zeke,” Meagan chided. “They’re coming your way.” She jumped, yelled, waved her arms, and banged on the side of the building.
The small group that had splintered off stopped their advance toward Zeke who was holding the ladder motionless at the far side of the building, but they didn’t return to the main group. They continued to look back and forth from Zeke’s end of the building to Meagan’s, as if unable to make up their mind whether to investigate the unknown noise or return to a sure quarry that Meagan represented.
For five minutes, they stood in indecision before they once again started moving toward Zeke, despite his silence. As soon as they rounded the corner, Zeke and the ladder came into view. They moaned in delight at finding another potential meal. The moans quickly turned into irritated wails at the realization that he was out of reach. The sound drew twenty more bodies from the main group.
“It’s no good,” Meagan yelled to him. “There’s a bunch more coming to your side.”
Zeke pulled the ladder back up and dropped it onto the roof in anger. Meagan drew back from the far edge and walked to Zeke.
“I thought it was going to work,” she said dispiritedly as she looked across the narrow expanse to the sky lights on the far building that had offered a promised entrance inside and a reprieve from the blistering heat.
Zeke set the ladder on its edge and they sat on it in silence for several minutes. The realization slowly set in that unless the infected below them suddenly lost interest and left, they were going to die of exposure on the roof.
As Meagan stared at a row of screw heads sticking up a quarter inch above the metal, she dolefully said it was too bad they didn’t have some tools to take out the roofing screws and remove a piece of metal sheeting because they could use the sheets to make a lean-to shade against the air conditioning unit.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Zeke asked rhetorically. “We might be able to do better than make a shade. If we can take a sheet of the metal off, we might be able to whittle through the wood sheeting beneath and get into the building. He quickly pulled a multi-tool from his pocket and unfolded it, gaining access to the pliers. He set to work twisting the small hex heads of the screws. It was laborious and tedious work, but one by one, they slowly backed out.
He and Meagan switched off every few minutes. Sweat dripped from their skin, landing on the sheet of metal they were removing, forming miniature streams that ran down the metal valleys before evaporating and adding to the humidity. After nearly twenty minutes, they had removed all the screws in a twelve foot long panel. Pulling it aside revealed the plywood underneath. Zeke quickly opened the knife blade and began poking and scraping at the wood surface.
In short order, he managed to whittle an inch-wide hole through the wood. With a hole started, he closed the knife blade and opened the three inch saw blade. As he rapidly worked it up and down, he looked up at Meagan and said, “Up until now, I have always considered the saw the most worthless attachment on this thing. Now, if I could find the designer who included it in the tool, I would give him a thousand bucks for his genius.” His pace slowed as fatigue set in.
“Let me take a turn,” Meagan said excitedly. The prospect of getting out of the sun had lightened her dreary mood considerably. They switched places and she began the up and down motion, extending the six-inch line Zeke had cut in the roof.
When her steady pace began to waver, they traded places again. The smell of freshly cut wood spurred them on as the cut steadily grew until it was two feet long. “Do you figure that’s long enough?” Meagan inquired as they switched again and she took the tool from Zeke.
“I think so,” he stated as she took the knife blade out and whittled another round hole so she could begin a new cut ninety degrees away from the first.
In a little over thirty minutes they had nearly completed a two foot by two foot square hole. With six inches left to cut, Zeke stood and stomped on the middle of the cutout. The remainder of the uncut wood broke in a ragged edge, opening a hole to the interior of the building. The square of wood fell four feet where it landed on a layer of insulation covering the top of a drop ceiling. Supporting himself with an arm resting on either side of the hole, Zeke cautiously lowered himself into it. His feet touched the surface below and he allowed more weight to come to bear on it. It suddenly gave way as the ceiling tile cracked under his weight and fell to the floor below. “What do you think?” he asked. “If we drop the ladder down, we should be able to get inside.”
“Better make sure there aren’t any infected in there before we blindly climb down.”
He lowered himself back into the hole and stomped his feet up and down, knocking several more tiles out of the frame and pulled himself back up to the roof.
After yelling for a minute straight, nothing came into view of the expanded hole beneath them. “I guess it’s probably okay,” Meagan said. Together they picked up the ladder and lowered it into the hole. When it was as low as they could reach, Zeke laid on the roof and reaching down, lowered it the final three feet to the tile floor and rested the top against the side of the hole he had knocked out of the drop ceiling.
Zeke pulled his pistol out of his holster and lowered himself into the hole again, his feet roving back and forth, wildly searching for the ladder. When they were firmly planted on the top rung, he exclaimed, “Here goes nothing,” and lowered himself down.
The air between the roof and the drop ceiling was full of stirred up insulation. As he climbed through the void, his skin began itching as the tiny particles settled into the pores of his exposed skin. Meagan watched breathlessly as he descended into the interior of the school.
With both feet firmly planted on the floor, he looked around, put the gun back in the holster, and placed his hands firmly on the sides of the ladder to steady it. “I have the ladder, come on down,” he yelled up.
Meagan’s leg trembled as her foot searched blindly for the first rung. Finding it, her second foot instantly made contact and her first foot stepped down to the second rung, her hands cautiously
maintaining a steadying grip on the outer roof. With her second foot securely planted on the second rung, one hand timidly let go of the roof and then shot down to the support of the ladder. Once both hands were on the ladder, her confidence increased and she rapidly descended to the floor, coming down between Zeke’s arms which were still holding the ladder in support. With both feet on the floor, Zeke let go of the ladder. Meagan turned around and wrapped her arms around him. Their sweat drenched shirts clung together as she hugged him and pulled their bodies into tight contact.
“I thought we were going to die up there,” she said as she released him from her embrace and reveled in the relative coolness of the building.
“So did I,” he said. “But as good as being off the roof is, if you turn around, there’s something even better behind you.”
Meagan turned cautiously, not wanting to get her hopes up as she tried to imagine what could be better than escaping the convection broiler where they had spent the last three hours. On the wall directly behind her was a water fountain. “Ladies first,” Zeke said as she bent over and the cool water ran across her cracked lips and down her parched throat.
Chapter 25
The building they had broken into turned out to be the administrative building. A cursory glance down the white hallway showed offices on either side, and halfway down the hall a sign indicated the teacher’s room. Beyond that were walls lined with blue lockers stacked two tall.
As they walked toward the far end of the hallway, Zeke tried each door knob. None yielded to the twisting force he applied. At the end of the hall was the double door through which he had first attempted to enter the building. Both doors had a crash bar which he carefully avoided pushing as he put his face to the narrow window and peered through the tinted glass at the crowd milling around outside. His actions on the roof had formed the second Bowden Horde. It was just as large as the first and they showed no signs of losing interest.
“Let me see your tool again,” Meagan said. He handed it to her and she opened the knife blade. Zeke turned back to the window and continued to look despondently at the mass of bodies waiting to sink their teeth into his flesh. His attention was drawn away from the window by a metallic click. He looked back for the source of the noise and saw Meagan pull a door open, revealing rows of four foot wide counters inside a classroom. Each counter had a sink with a long curved faucet at one end. On the other end of the counter, there was a conical spigot with a chrome handle. He recognized the spigots from his days in high school and college chemistry. They provided methane gas for the Bunsen burners.
Meagan walked across the hallway and slipped the knife blade between the door jamb and the door. The point speared the latch. Working the knife from side to side, she was able to push the latch into the door and pull the door open. Inside was another classroom. This one had rows of tables, each with two chairs neatly pushed in, facing the front of the room. Along a counter in the back were jars of pickled animals and organs. The next room they opened housed what appeared to be the physics lab.
The building had been constructed in the 70’s when the educational theory stated that the classroom should be devoid of all distractions from the outside world. In an effort to achieve that goal, the classrooms had small windows just below the ceiling. They let natural light into the room and provided ventilation when opened, but were too high to permit students to see more than the sky outside. In order to maintain a uniform appearance in architecture, the offices had the same window configuration.
The short-lived, bad idea in the ever-changing world of educational philosophy was cemented in time by the architecture of schools built during the era. Bad as the philosophy was, it turned out to be a life saver for anybody trying to find refuge in a school built during that time. In this case, it kept Zeke and Meagan out of reach and sight of the infected outside. The windows were too high to allow them to gain entrance into the building.
Meagan worked her magic one more time on the door across the hall from the physics lab. The sign on the door read “Teachers’ Room.” The spacious room had two cheaply made, large, round tables at one end. The tables were surrounded by molded plastic chairs with shiny chrome legs. Two silver refrigerators and an upright freezer adorned the wall space nearest the tables. To the left side of the refrigerators was a vending machine full of candy. Flanking it was another with drinks. A flat screen television hung from one wall. At the other end of the room, an oak pool table, an air hockey table, and a foosball table occupied the central space. A row of computers lined the back wall, each in a partitioned off section of a long table.
Zeke whistled as he took in the room. “It must be rough teaching in this school.” As he walked to the vending machine, he added, “I don’t think I’d ever leave the teacher’s room if I worked here.”
The contents of the vending machine alone would keep them fed for at least a week. In addition to the junk food, the refrigerators contained a substantial stash of real food and a pile of sack lunches that were left when teachers fled the school. There were enough bags of lettuce to make salad for several days. Zeke picked up a gallon size jug, sloshing milk around the top of the nearly full container, as he lifted it to examine the expiration date. “Good for two more weeks,” he proclaimed. Somebody must have made their daily breakfast on the stove because there was enough bacon and eggs to produce a statin requiring spike in cholesterol levels of three large men.
Zeke pulled the handle on the freezer door. As the door opened, frigid air rolled out, colliding with the warm air of the teachers’ room. When the two air masses collided, a steamy cloud of vapor formed, rolling and swirling at the edges.
Zeke pulled out a clear vacuum sealed bag with a warning message written in black sharpie: “Hands off, G. Howe.” Holding up the half pound package of frozen meat, “It looks like we’re having steak tonight,” Zeke proclaimed. “And tomorrow night,” he added as he held up a second package, “And the next night,” as he held up a third package. With his hands full of meat, he smiled and said, “It looks like we’re going to be having steak all week. I hope G. Howe doesn’t mind.”
Zeke dug a handful of change out of his pocket and clinked seventy-five cents into the shiny coin slot in the face of the vending machine. He pushed the button with a picture of a bottle of Gatorade next to it. The innards of the machine thumped and thudded softly until a twenty ounce bottle made its way out of the machine, landing in the black holder near the bottom with a clunk.
Zeke picked up the bottle, refreshingly cool in his hand, sat down at the table, and said, “Pull up a chair and I’ll share.”
Meagan pulled out a chair beside him, and enthusiastically answered, “You’ve got yourself a date, Mister.”
Zeke took a long draw from the mouth of the bottle and pushed it across the table toward Meagan. She lifted it to her mouth and didn’t set it down until it was half empty. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and slid it back to Zeke.
While Meagan was taking her second nip at the bottle, Zeke reached across the table for the slender black remote and turned on the TV. When the screen lit up, it was tuned to CNN. “That figures,” he chided.
“What figures?” Meagan asked.
“That the TV in the teacher’s lounge is tuned in to the Communist News Network.”
“You’re saying that teachers are liberal because the TV was tuned to CNN?” she asked accusingly.
“Hey, if the shoe fits,” he answered.
She grabbed the remote from him as she said, “My mom and sister are teachers. They’re the most conservative people you’d ever meet.” She pushed the recall button on the remote and the TV switched to Fox News. “It looks to me like the teachers here are conservative and the janitor is the liberal one,” she countered as she set the remote back on the table. She sat looking at the TV and then let out a long breath, “Liberal, conservative, it doesn’t matter anymore. With all that’s happening out there, nobody is going to care about politics anymore. At this poi
nt in history, we’re all just people trying to survive.”
Zeke nodded in silent agreement without turning from the TV. He watched for a couple minutes and turned it off. “Nothing’s changed. I don’t have it in me to watch any more of that. We’ve been living it all day.”
Zeke visited the drink machine again, expending the last of the change from his pocket. “I guess that’s it for the drinks. I’m not sure how to break into the machine.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to,” Meagan said, standing on her tip toes and stretching to get a metal coffee can from the top of one of the refrigerators. She reached in and as she pulled her hand out, allowed a stream of quarters to flow between her fingers and clink back into the nearly full can. “Think anybody will mind if we raid the coffee fund?” she giggled.
“I hate to take coffee from anybody’s cup,” he said sarcastically. “We’ll leave IOUs for every dime we take.” Becoming more serious he added, “With all of your not-so-secret admirers out there, I think we may be stuck here for a while. Do you want to explore the rest of the building before dinner and see if there’s anything else of value to us?”
Having had a chance to cool down and rehydrate, Zeke and Meagan left the teacher’s room and continued opening locked doors as they proceeded down the hallway. For the most part, the rooms proved to be an uninteresting assortment of offices. The second to last room was identified by a sign on the door as the sick room. When the door was opened, Meagan was pleased to see that either side of the room had a single bed with crisp looking white sheets.
She smiled and said, “This may be the best find so far. I was afraid I was going to have to sleep on the floor.”
“That’s great,” Zeke said. “For the past two days, I’ve been worried about getting eaten alive and trying to keep you from being torn to pieces and all you’ve been worried about is having to sleep on the floor. I’ll never understand the female mind.”