“Up there,” she says a moment later, pointing through the windshield. “On the right.”
“What?” both men ask, almost in unison as they peered ahead to see what the major was referring to.
“The school zone sign,” Brooks replies, jabbing her finger in that direction. “Turn there,” she orders.
Patel did as he was instructed, taking the right turn slowly to avoid hitting the few abandoned cars littering the side street. A few blocks ahead of them, they could see a granite marquee sitting in the grass near the edge of the street, proudly marking the location of the New Haven Private Elementary Academy. Just before that was a square metal sign that said, Bus Entrance.
“Pull through there and drive past the front of the building,” Brooks commands.
“Should I stop?” Patel asks.
“Did I tell you to stop?” Brooks replies.
“What are you doing?” Nichols asks her.
“Looking for survivors,” she answers, never taking her eyes from the front of the school.
Patel turned in and then navigated the tight, left turn toward the tall awning meant to keep the children exiting school buses, dry and safe during inclement weather. The three occupants of the MTV noticed a couple smaller sized school buses parked at the side of the building. Brooks could tell the buses were relatively new and assumed the upper-middle-class parents could afford such things for their little darlings to get back and forth to school. What self-respecting, over-indulgent yuppy would want their children to be transported the short distance to their elite academy, in last year’s model. Afterall, they had their positions in the community to uphold. A smear of something dark was spread down the window, but Brooks couldn’t tell if it was on the inside of the glass, or out. This brought back fearful memories of their first encounter with the infected and the trap they’d sprung on her and her men. She shook off the memory of her error in judgment and focused on the here and now.
As they neared the front of the two-story building, they saw the front door open a fraction and a head cautiously poke out to investigate. The head belonged to a balding man, his wispy hair on top, grown longer to comb over to one side. Round spectacles sat perched on his narrow nose and Brooks assumed from his appearance he was probably a teacher at the school or a parent of one of the students. Regardless of his position, he was the one sent to investigate their visitors. Through the small panels of opaque security glass in the heavy front doors, Brooks could see the silhouettes of others behind the man but couldn’t make out their faces.
As the MTV approached the awning, the man recognized the vehicle as being military and stepped farther through the open door. Two rambunctious children followed him and began waving to them with enthusiastic smiles plastered on their faces. The man’s expression of caution switched to relief as Patel took his foot off the accelerator.
“Don’t stop!” Brooks orders. “Keep going through!”
“But there’re kids in there,” Patel protests as he resumed his pressure on the gas pedal.
“I can see that,” she replied. “I want you to pull out on to the street and circle back through again. But do not stop, or even slow down until I give the order.”
The teacher and children look confused as the MTV rumbles past them. Two young women who look like they were probably teachers, and a middle-aged couple who may have been parents, exit behind them. They were quickly followed by at least a dozen young children who scurried out onto the wide sidewalk under the awning. The last person to exit was an older man dressed as a school custodian would be in work coveralls. An elderly woman dressed in a school nurse’s uniform remained standing in the doorway, holding it open and trying in vain to shoo the children back inside. Each person on the sidewalk looked bewildered and incredulous as the MTV circled back onto the street and passed in front of the elementary school. They all took an involuntary step forward, subconsciously wanting to follow their potential rescuers. The custodian’s mouth hung open in disbelief, thinking their country’s armed forces would forsake a group of children during a catastrophe like this.
“What are you doing?” Nichols asks Brooks as the MTV jostled side to side to take the turn.
“Drawing them outside,” Brooks answers.
“Are you making sure they’re not infected? Because it didn’t look like it to me,” Nichols replies.
“And I think they’re all either too old or not old enough to be drafted,” Patel offers.
“Not exactly what I was thinking,” she tells him, before giving Patel further instructions. “Circle back through again, but I want you to stay to the far side. Put as much distance as you can between us and the curb in front of the school.”
“Why?” Patel asks, turning the steering wheel to reenter the bus entrance.
“Because I gave you an order,” Brooks replies.
The MTV rocked to the side as they crossed over the bus entrance. The huge truck creaked and squeaked loudly masking any noises coming from the back. Once again, their eyes picked up the little buses sitting abandoned at the side of the building. Brooks wondered why the adults hadn’t loaded up everyone into those to go searching for help. Then she reasoned they’d probably made a wise decision to hole up in the elementary school and wait for help to come to them. In a time when school shooters were becoming commonplace in the U.S., new buildings had been built to be secure and even older ones were being retrofitted with smaller windows, reinforced classroom doors and security alarm systems.
Patel began veering left as Brooks had ordered, hugging the curb on the far side of the driveway. Brooks could see the relief on the adult’s faces as they rolled closer and did a silent headcount of the people standing outside. She figured they all thought their gamble to wait to be rescued was about to pay off. When everything was over, she was sure the adults thought they’d all be heroes in their community for saving the lives of all those children. The adults took a tentative step forward to get closer to their approaching saviors as the children bounced excitedly on their feet. This was going to be the first they’d get to see a real, live Army platoon up close. Along with a chance to take a ride in an actual military transport with those soldiers had them all giggling with excitement. Even the school nurse was caught up in the moment, forgoing her attempts to corral the children back inside. She walked away from the door to join the others in their celebration, neglecting to toe the small, rubber-bottomed brace on the lower corner of the door, down to hold it open. The door silently closed behind her as she watched the military transport roll closer. As the MTV came alongside the occupants of the school, Patel scraped the tires along the curb, causing the cargo area to rock slightly and mask more of the scuffling sounds coming from the inside. The crowd of adults and children stepped onto the asphalt anxious to greet the brave men and women who had come to save them.
“Stop here!” Brooks orders. Like a good soldier, Patel stomps on the air-assisted brakes, lurching the three of them forward in their seats with a loud hiss of compressing air.
The moment the MTV came to a complete stop, the children began crowding around the back, wanting to be the first ones to see the soldiers deploy for their rescue mission. Their collective gasps could be heard over the idling engine as the heavy canvas surrounding the troop area was yanked aside to reveal the true nature of what was waiting for them.
“The children!” the school nurse shrieks in a raspy voice. Spinning on her heels, she stumbled over the curb she’d just stepped from and went down hard. Large patches of skin were scraped off her knees from the rough cement and instantly began to swell with blood.
The custodian ran over the top of her without any offer of assistance and unintentionally kicking her in the head. The blow was solid enough to snap her head to the side and send brilliant bursts of color across her vision. But the custodian didn’t slow until his steps faltered when he saw the doors to the school were shut. He stumbled slightly as he pulled a huge ring of keys from his pocket, fastened to his belt on a re
tractable wire. They jingled loudly as he frantically searched for the one that would unlock the main doors. He finally held up the elusive key, smiling in satisfied triumph when a pair of soldiers crashed into him, bringing the janitor down to block that avenue of escape while the two ripped into the leathery skin at the base of his neck. Blood sprayed in thick streams across the doors as the custodian’s thrashing quickly subsided into involuntary spasms.
Children and adults began screaming in horror as the infected soldiers spilled from the troop area. One leaped from the tailgate, straddling the first man who’d come out to investigate high in the chest and driving him to the pavement. His skull made a sickening sound, like a melon being smashed on the ground as it struck, and blood began pooling under it and running from his ears. The zombified soldier wasted no time tearing into the hairless skin atop the man’s head, clawing apart the shattered skull plate and digging into the pinkish bloody gray-matter with its fingers. It stuffed a handful of the dripping sludge that used to be the man’s memories, into its maw before locking its predatory glare on another victim.
More of the infected flowed from the rear of the MTV. The children scattered, attempting to flee out of instinct, but were quickly brought down singularly and in pairs, by the ravenous monsters. The school nurse had gotten to her feet and tried to throw herself between a set of twin girls frozen in terror and an infected that had launched itself at them. Her intervention was a momentary success, until the creature slammed her backward into the children she’d been trying to protect, as the soldier bit into her face. Her left eye ruptured and most of her nose was torn away, which the zombie gulped down without chewing, as she shrieked. The two children kicked and screamed, trying to free themselves from the beneath the elderly nurse, who was now writhing in pain and in the crippling grip of shock. The creature climbed her like a prowling cat. Blood and eye fluid dripped from its maw as it closed the distance to its smaller squirming prey. One of the twins managed to free her leg from under the nurse and tried kicking the monster away, but it easily trapped the limb and sunk its teeth into the young muscle of her calf. She instantly passed out from the trauma but her brave sister began pounding on the zombie’s head, trying to drive it away from her sibling.
Brooks watched in detached fascination as the creature turned its head to the side to face the blows. In a motion reminding her of a crocodile, the fiend removed the two smallest fingers from the small fist when it struck its face in one snapping bite. The young girl screamed as she followed her sister into the darkness, as the infected soldier continued chewing on the twin’s arm like it was eating a fleshy ear of corn.
All the children were run to ground within the first minute. They laid motionless on the pavement or twisted and kicking in agony. A few silently moved their lips, as if reciting a protective prayer before bed, as deep shock and the infection set in. The middle-aged parents lay puddling on the ground. The woman’s legs twitching as the final, delayed signals from her brain telling her feet to flee were received. One of the two young teacher’s lifeless bodies was draped over a ravaged child’s form. It was as if with her last breath, she was attempting to save just one of the children from the nightmare Brooks had delivered to them. Her noble effort was unsuccessful and would go unremembered. The child beneath her was missing a tremendous amount of flesh from her inner thigh and shoulder. The obvious victim of a simultaneous assault from separate attackers.
The last adult had somehow made her way to the front of the MTV. Her legs were seeping blood from the various abrasions and scratches below the line of her skirt and the shoulder of her blouse was torn. Patel watches in horrified dismay as she made her stand against the approaching monsters. She’d jerked a narrow, fiberglass rod from the flowerbed on the other side of the school’s entrance. Not big enough to even be considered a pole, the four-foot rod’s original intent was to mark the edge of the curb for snowplow drivers. This prevented the operator from damaging the gigantic blade, and possibly the curb from an unexpected collision. The young woman held the marking rod in both hands like a kendo stick, swinging it violently to keep the four infected circling her at bay. The rod was at best, half an inch in diameter and flexed dramatically with each swing. One of the zombies pushed too close and she laid the end of the rod across its face, lancing the skin open along its cheekbone from nose to ear. The flap of skin drooped, exposing gnashing teeth from the unnatural gap in the flesh.
“No!” Patel bellows, having put the pieces of Brooks’ plan into place far too late. Perhaps he’d suspected all along, having witnessed the major’s indifference to the eradication of her men, when she’d ordered the incineration of Mapfre Stadium. She’d done that for no other reason than to save her own skin. For some reason, Patel had been able to rationalize that slaughter in his head. Maybe it was because those were soldiers and they were in a war, whether one had been officially declared or not.
As far as the other thousands of people trapped in the inferno that was assuredly still blazing, he assumed most, if not all, were already infected anyway. It was only a matter of time before they’d all turned. They needed to be eliminated for everyone’s safety, not just his own. Or maybe it was because he’d benefitted from those orders since he was alive and inside the relative safety of the cab of the MTV. But somehow, this was different. He’d assisted in committing this act of betrayal. They’d been safe until he’d delivered this nightmarish end to their door. He had to help her. To try and atone for his complicity. He had to somehow level the karmic scales of his soul.
Patel reached for his door handle, silently praying it wasn’t too late to save her. But he froze when he felt the muzzle of an army-issued M9 press against the base of his skull.
“What are you doing, Corporal?” Brooks asks with an icy calm.
“I have to help her,” he answers, not daring to turn his head. He feared his slightest movement would cause Brooks to pull the trigger.
“No,” Brooks says through gritted teeth. “You have to follow orders.”
One of the zombies lunged at the woman and she lashed out at it with a wild swing of the rod and a guttural scream. Patel’s eyes dart in her direction, fighting to keep the rest of his head motionless. He thought about reaching for his own pistol but rejected the idea immediately. He was certain how that would end.
“Are you just going to sit there and let this happen?” he asks Nichols.
“It’s already happened, Corporal. You might as well learn to accept it,” Nichols answers, never taking his eyes from the arm stretched in front of his face, holding the gun in the steady hand on the other end.
“He’s right,” Brooks says, leaning back and lowering her sidearm. “Now get your shit together and drive us the hell out of here. That’s an order.”
Patel turns his head, prepared to follow orders and drive away, but his attention was captured by the woman, who continued to fight for a few more precious moments. He knew there was no way she could defeat them all. But maybe she could keep it up long enough to give herself an avenue of escape. To fight for that moment when she could flee and hopefully, desperately run for her life.
Another of the creatures lunged at the woman and she reacted, skewering its eye with the tapered end of the stick, and jamming it into the brain cavity. The monster recoiled and grabbed the rod sticking out from its face. The woman tried to twist her makeshift sword from its grasp, causing the rod to flex and bend. The added contortions scrambled the zombie’s brains, as black goo ran from the ruined eye and dripped down the stick. The infected soldier convulsed and collapsed to the ground, ripping the slickened rod from the young woman’s hands, screaming as the weapon was torn from her grip. She searched frantically for something else to use, something that might possibly save her life. But there was nothing within reach. In that moment, her eyes locked with Patel’s, pleading with him for help, or for a reason why. Why wouldn’t they help her, and why had they brought this kind of nightmare to their door? They were supposed to rescue them. T
o take them someplace safe. They were supposed to be the good guys. The accusation from her glare and guilt, it levied on Patel were more than the corporal could bear. They forced him into action, regardless of the consequences. If the major wanted him court-martialed when this was all over, so be it. A military court might find against him, but he was willing to roll the dice.
The M9 thundered in the confined space of the cab of the MTV, as the bullet entered Patel’s temple. His blood and tissue sprayed across the side of the sergeant’s face. Nichols wretched in the dead corporal’s lap, wiping at the detritus covering his face as Brooks readjusted her aim.
The remaining attackers fell on the young woman like a pack of jackals, ignoring the explosion from inside the idling truck. Corporal Rodney Irwin Patel slumped to the side, smearing his blood and brains across the window. The ghouls ripped the young woman’s clothing and tore into her flesh, pulling her to the pavement and causing her to disappear beneath the monstrous eating machines.
“Sergeant!” Nichols barely heard over the intense ringing in his ears.
He’d been unprepared for Patel to disobey the major’s orders. Up until now, the corporal had been very reasonable in doing as he was told. He’d been an adequate driver and had actually saved their asses during their first incursion with the infected. But Patel’s unexpected insubordination and subsequent concussion caused by Brooks firing her pistol in such a confined space, had likely caused permanent hearing loss. Nichols wiped at the warm stickiness of Patel’s brains splattered across his face, looked at the crimson chunks on his hand, and wretched again. Turning his head, he wiped away the wispy strings of bile clinging to his lips. Brooks was sitting with her back against the door and her M9 leveled at his head.
“Sergeant,” she repeated. Her words were muffled but Nichols could make them out. He nodded. “Good. Open the door and push him out,” Brooks says.
The F*cked Series (Book 4): Hard Page 6