Sophie Littlefield - Banished

I put all my energy into kicking and clawing. I managed to tear my arms free as I delivered a kick to the legs of the last one holding me, and its feet slipped and it went down.

“Now!” I screamed, and grabbed Kaz’s arm and pulled him toward the door. He threw the chair at the advancing zombies, and we both fell through the door as I pulled it shut hard.

“They’re locked inside,” I said, as much a prayer as a statement. Kaz grabbed my hand and we ran back into the smoky hall.

There were flames licking along the floor, and I realized that the fire would reach the server lab in seconds.

“Prairie?” I asked, choking on the smoke.

“Got her to the lobby,” Kaz said. “Try not to breathe until we’re clear.”

I took a last lungful of breath and held it. We ran until we couldn’t see through the smoke, and then we put our free hands to the walls and guided ourselves that way, following the corridors until we were running through fire. The flames licked against us, and I knew that if our clothes caught fire, we were doomed. Then, suddenly, we burst into the lobby, where the smoke was thinner, and I saw Prairie laid out along the floor near the guard desk.

She looked dead, her head lolling against her outstretched arm, and my heart plummeted.

“She’s going to be all right. I’ll get her,” Kaz managed to wheeze, and he slung her over his shoulder, much as he’d carried the guard earlier. I coughed hard, trying to clear the smoke from my lungs, and when I followed him through the doors, out into the chilly night, I breathed the sharp, cold air greedily. Before I could catch my breath, Kaz grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the building, into the shadows of the trees lining the street.

“We need to hurry,” he said.

“What about the Healer?” I said, my voice hoarse and raw. “She’s still trapped in there somewhere!”

That was when I heard the sirens.

Kaz heard them too. He looked back at the building, where flames were now pouring from every window. Then he looked at me with such pain in his eyes that I knew there was no hope. The Healer would die, alone and in agony, alongside the horrible creatures she had been forced to create.

Prairie moaned softly and stirred.

“We need to hurry,” he repeated, and I knew we wouldn’t speak of the Healer again.

By the time we got Prairie settled into the backseat, police and fire vehicles were hurtling down the block toward the lab.

I turned away from the burning building and stared out the windshield into the night as Kaz drove us away.

PRAIRIE WOKE UP right before we reached the house. She had a wicked bruise on her scalp, but otherwise she seemed all right.

Kaz filled her in on the terrible discovery I’d made in the room behind the lab, and described how we’d escaped. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it yet. I kept feeling those cold hands grasping at me, and I knew I would never be able to forget the sensation of my fingers sinking into the ruined flesh of my attackers.

Anna got a much-condensed version. By unspoken agreement we spared her the worst of the details. Kaz’s wounds looked like little more than scrapes now-full function had been restored to his hand, and the hole in his arm closed over-so we didn’t tell her the extent of his injuries. We skipped the zombies entirely.

She had the news on, though, and she nearly cried with relief that we’d escaped the fire, which had turned into an inferno that was expected to consume the entire building. Crews had come from up and down the North Shore, and they were trying to save the adjoining buildings. There had been two survivors. One was the security guard, who had been found wandering around the back of the building, dazed and disoriented, but otherwise unharmed. He was unable to supply any details about the start of the fire, because his memory of the night’s events ended at the sandwich he’d had on his dinner break.

The other survivor was taken from the building on a stretcher. We saw the same footage played several times. None of us could look away. “It’s him,” Prairie said the first time, as the paramedics carried the stretcher past the news crews to the waiting ambulance. “Those are his shoes.”

There was only one shoe, though. It was an expensive leather loafer that had blistered and peeled in the heat, but stayed attached to Bryce’s foot. His other foot was bare, and it was clear his pants had burned away. The blackened flesh of Bryce’s leg was visible in the instant before the camera cut away.

“Burns over eighty percent of his body,” the reporter confided in tones that barely concealed an undercurrent of excitement. It was a story that would lead for days, that much was clear, especially as “breaking details” about the lab revealed it had been carrying on important scientific efforts endorsed by the university, though reporters were having trouble getting confirmation.

We drank strong coffee while we watched. Anna set out a plate of sandwiches as the first hint of morning colored the edge of the sky, but no one touched them. I wondered if I’d ever sleep through another night, if dawn would become a familiar sight for me.

As I was beginning to doze off, leaning against Prairie, an announcer cut into the broadcast. “There it goes, folks,” he said, barely containing his excitement. “As predicted, it looks like the building’s a total-Oh my God, would you look at that.”

We all leaned forward as the building fell in on itself in slow motion, the upper floors collapsing like papier-mâché.

I reached for Prairie’s hand. “They have to be dead,” I whispered. We both knew it was a question.

She nodded. “They said the temperatures got well over a thousand degrees. And now this… they won’t find anything by the time it’s finished burning. Maybe some bone fragments.”

I nodded and snuggled a little closer, praying she was right, praying zombies burned like everyone else. And trying not to think about the Healer trapped inside.

A moment later, though, she stiffened.

“We forgot,” she said, tugging at the blanket that covered us both. “We forgot his apartment. We’ve got to get over there and destroy his papers and his backup.”

I sat up straight. Kaz was already getting to his feet.

Anna tried to pull him back down. “This is not the time,” she said. “You’re exhausted. Everything is destroyed there. Bryce is in hospital, probably going to die.”

But she hadn’t seen the zombies. We had.

The argument was cut short when Kaz hugged Anna hard. “I love you, Mom,” he said, every syllable a promise. “And we’ll be back safe.”

The trip back to Evanston was harder than the one before, even though there was nothing left that could hurt us. It had all been destroyed in the fire. But we were no longer fueled by the energy of our quest. This was a sad trip, the culmination of a journey that had as many losses as gains, and we barely spoke at all except for Prairie’s occasional directions.

We found a spot on a crowded street. Kaz eased the little car into a tiny space. The apartment building was only a few years old, a ritzy, gleaming brick and steel and glass tower.

“What’s in the documents, anyway?” Kaz asked as we got out of the car. He’d brought his backpack, but this time it was to take things with us. Prairie said there was less than a single filing cabinet drawer of documents, plus Bryce’s laptop. We planned to shred the documents back at Anna’s, and destroy the laptop there too.

“From what I could tell, it was mostly his notes to himself. He may have transferred them to electronic files later, but these were handwritten lists, like the one I told you about with his contacts in foreign militaries. I don’t really know what’s there, but I figure we need to be safe.”