Lex Thomas: Quarantine: The Loners

Sixty-eight seniors were now dead. No one knew what it meant. They had gone the same way as the teachers, in fits of gruesome vomiting that spilled their very life onto the floor.

Every passing week claimed more seniors. The ones still alive, about three hundred or so, had become erratic and volatile out of fear that any day could be their last. Assaults and robberies became things the student body now had to fear. The seniors acted crazy. They wanted to live it up, to have sex, to gorge themselves on food, to pick a fight and win it, but the next moment they’d curl up into a ball and yank on their hair.

Their manic weeping was the school’s new soundtrack.

David waited in a janitor’s supply closet. He and Will had been sleeping in this eight-by-seven-foot rectangle for a week. The walls were lined with empty metal shelves; pillag-ers had picked the room clean except for a lone mop head without a handle.

In the beginning, everyone slept close together. The large rooms of the school such as the cafeteria, the commons, the auditorium, and the gym, were communal sleeping areas. It felt safer to be with a large group. It wasn’t that way anymore.

The cutthroat struggle for supplies didn’t end when each food drop ended, it was all the time now. Nothing truly belonged to anyone, and once you had something valuable in your hand, you had to start looking over your shoulder.

The door to the janitor’s closet opened, and David braced himself for a fight. Will walked in. David relaxed. Will had torn horizontal rips all down the legs of his jeans. Since the seizure in the quad, he’d cultivated a bad attitude so as to come off as more intimidating. David knew the truth. Will was scared shitless. He’d had two more seizures in the past month, and there was no way of predicting when the next would be.

“Where were you?” David said.

“Out getting this.”

Will dropped a box of tampons on the floor.

“Feelin’ a little moody?” David said.

“They’ll trade high.”

“And how’d you get those?”

“I went to the drugstore. Leave me alone,” Will said.

Will flopped down in a metal folding chair.

“I told you to stay here,” David said.

“Yeah. I heard.”

“It’s not safe for you to go out alone.”

“I don’t want to hear it, David.”

“You think I want to sit here worrying that you might have seized somewhere? You could get robbed, or worse.”

“It’s not your problem!”

Will got out of the chair and paced around the cramped room.

“I’m running at the next drop,” Will said.

“No, you aren’t.”

“I am, and I’m not going for the bare minimum, like you. I want the good stuff.”

“It’s too dangerous for you,” David said.

“This whole place is dangerous. We’re not going anywhere, and I’m gonna get my loot before my time is up.” David hoped Will didn’t really think he was going to die in this place.

“They’re going to let us out, Will.”

“I’m running.”

“No, you’re not, and that’s final!” David said.

Will stormed off into the hallway. David followed him through the doorway, but when he got to the hall, Will was already running around the far corner.

“You’re gonna die in here,” said a voice from a nearby classroom. It sounded familiar. David paused. A window shattered in the same room. He flinched.

“You’ll die in here…”

Kerrang. The sound of metal striking metal.

David edged toward the room.

Kerrang.

The light from the hall glinted off metal as a figure swung a chair against the steel plating the military had secured beyond the window frame. Kerrang.

The figure dropped the chair and tumbled away from the sealed window. The person threw himself prostrate onto the floor. He let out a low, defeated moan and sobbed. Maybe he’d gone stir-crazy, like so many. Maybe he was a senior who knew he was about to die. If that were him at rock bottom, or Will, he’d want someone to reach out and help.

“You okay?” David asked, and stepped into the doorway.

The person jumped like he’d been jabbed by a cattle prod, and looked up. It was Sam Howard, his eyes stained red from crying. David tensed up. Sam scrambled back into the darkest corner of the room.

David hadn’t seen Sam since everything had gone bad. Did Sam want revenge, or was that ancient history now? In the wake of such a huge tragedy, Sam and Hilary hooking up hardly seemed important anymore. Even still, it did make him happy to see Sam acting so pathetic.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” David said. Then he couldn’t help himself. “You don’t have to cry, man.” Sam charged out of the blackness at David. He was fast. He shoved David, and David fell to the ground. Sam stood over him.

“You stay away from me, Thorpe. Me and my team. Nothing’s changed.”

Sam disappeared around the same corner Will had turned earlier. David punched the floor in frustration. He couldn’t believe he’d tried being nice to that prick.

David would never forget the arc of blood that sprayed from Danny Liner’s neck as he clutched the wooden shard planted deep in his throat. That was when the school truly changed.

It happened following a violent drop in which David saw a freshman get his leg broken so severely that a jagged piece of bone tore out of his shin. Two sophomore girls had clawed deep grooves into each other’s faces over a rare bottle of moisturizer.

When the drop was over, everyone had retreated to the sidelines to go hide their haul somewhere. Sam and six other guys from the football team had joined forces that day. They’d gone so far as to give their little gang a name, Varsity. Working together, each Varsity member secured twice as much as they would have alone. Varsity was the talk of the quad.

Everyone wanted to form a little group of their own before the next drop.

The Varsity guys were carrying their shares toward the exit, but Sam lingered by his own pile, right in the middle of the quad. He was eating a strip of beef jerky. Torn cardboard and trampled packaging littered the area around him. It was a brazen act to eat in public. No one did it anymore, unless they wanted to get robbed.

“If you distract him, I can get his food. We’ll be set till the next drop,” Will said.

“Are you nuts? We’re not stealing his food.”

“It’s not his food, Dave,” Will said. “He’s just standing next to it.”

David watched Sam tug on the jerky with his teeth. He hoped he choked on it. David was still burning from their run-in, but that didn’t mean it was okay to rob Sam. Slashed jeans were one thing, but Will thinking assault and robbery was a swell idea troubled David. Danny Liner, one of the remaining seniors, strode across the quad and planted himself between Sam and his food. They were too far away for David to hear their conversation, but the situation was clear soon enough.

Danny slapped Sam across the face with a heavy hand. Sam toppled backward onto the ground, amid the fractured wood of the supply pallets.

Will clutched his stomach and laughed loud enough for the entire quad to hear. Sam’s face flushed red. He got up, with a shard of wood in his hand the size of a railroad spike, and he buried the thing in Danny’s neck, right under the Adam’s apple.

“Whoa,” Will said.

All noise stopped. Conversations died midsentence. The crowd collectively forgot what they were doing or thinking or saying, and they watched Danny squirm and twitch on the ground. His neck was a fountain of blood, spraying a rasp-berry stream with each heartbeat, each stream arcing lower in the air than the last. Moments later, Danny Liner was another corpse lying in a blood puddle.

No one spoke. There had been ruthless competition, fights, robberies, and injuries, but never murder. Sam looked nearly as surprised as everyone else. He stared at Danny’s body with confusion. There was a line of Danny’s blood across Sam’s face, like a drizzle of chocolate syrup over a scoop of ice cream.