S. Davis - 900 Miles

“My guess is the nurse’s office… but I haven’t been inside, so we may have to do some digging.”

There was something off about Rodgers. He sat there, bouncing his oversized glove across his leg. Maybe his face was a shade paler, or his eyes were slightly wider. Either way, I hadn’t seen Rodgers look this anxious or worried before. He, usually, just had two emotions: Happy and rage. This new look on his face set my mind racing as I realized that we’d have a hell of a fight ahead of us if this place were anything like the last Safe Zone we’d encountered.

With a clear sense of alarm shadowing his face, Kyle jolted forward, propping himself up in the seat to get a better view, fixing his eyes on the front entrance to the building.

“What? What do you see?” I asked, squinting my eyes, trying to find what had him spooked.

Lifting his arm, Kyle pointed toward the front door of the school. “Look, the door is open a crack. It looks like the chain that was holding it shut has been cut…”

“Is that blood?” Jarvis said as he squinted his eyes and leaned closer to the window.

There was what appeared to be a dark red liquid running down the sidewalk leading up to the school. From the distance, I could also see some of the windows were busted in, and what looked to be bullet holes chipped into the brick surrounding the front door.

“What the hell happened here?” Rodgers spoke the question that burned in all of our minds. His oversized glove continued to rattle atop his leg.

Jarvis lifted his hand over to the door lock and pulled it up. “Let’s make this quick, boys. In and out.”

“Extreme caution. No one rushes in. Let’s make sure that there’s nobody else here… dead or living,” Kyle added sternly before yanking his door latch and moving out onto the step guard of the Hummer.

Looking over his shoulder, he signaled to the three men still sitting in the pickup behind us and pointed over toward the small swarm of creatures that were slowly lumbering toward our vehicles. “Take care of that. Make it quiet,” Kyle loudly whispered.

I watched as the Three Amigos hopped out of the doors of their pickup, knives in hand. They moved in on the handful of rotting dead, which had clearly been stumbling for quite some time. In just moments, the Zs had puncture holes in their skulls, dark black brain matter spilling out over the cracked pavement.

A stain. It’s all that’s left of us when we’re gone.

Weapons drawn; Kyle, Jarvis, Rodgers, and I were now out of the car as well, cautiously moving toward the school. Looking back at the second team, Kyle held his hand out in a fist and pointed back toward our rides. The three of them scurried over to join Mr. Mullet as lookouts—prepared for anything. They had our backs, and we were trusting them with our lives.

Looking back on it, I wish we could have promised them the same.

The world around us was silent. Each step we took toward the front door echoed off the school’s brick walls. Keeping my eyes locked on the broken-in front door as we approached, I raised my arm to wipe a bead of rolling sweat from my brow. My hands were slightly shaking as the fear of the unknown slowly crept up my spine, one vertebrae at a time.

Mostly brick with white trim running around the flat roof, the school was not unlike the one that I’d attended as a child. It seems like they all look like that for some reason. I never really was one much for school, especially as a child. I get the need to learn, but stuffing a bunch of kids into a room, expecting them to sit still and quite all day, seemed like it was going against a child’s very nature. Hell, I could hardly do it as an adult. A small part of me thought back to the second grade teacher I’d had. That bloated bitch always found a reason to send me to the principal’s office. I’m sure I deserved it, but trust me, I wouldn’t exactly choke up if I learned she was stuck in a school someplace, roaming the halls as a Z… forever.

Kyle was the first to reach the broken door. Looking toward Jarvis, who nodded, and then back toward me, he lifted his foot out and hooked the inside of the door, sliding it open. Feeling my shoulders arch up as the rusted hinges creaked open, all three of us took a step back, lifting our weapons and aiming them steadily down the dimly lit halls of the building.

I nearly dropped my rifle as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Hit with the scent of burnt flesh as we stepped closer, I quickly noticed six neatly stacked piles of rotting corpses, each six or seven Zs deep. All of them were oozing that familiar black gunk across the linoleum.

My foot slid across a few bullet casings that were riddled throughout the hallway. To the right of the entrance, an ashy burn mark ran up the full length of the wall, starting from the charred skeletal remains of a creature that had most its flesh melted off.

Everything in the place remained dead silent.

“Someone’s already cleared this place out, boys,” Jarvis said with a cautious optimism.

“And it’s been within the past twenty-four hours,” Kyle whispered as he slid his foot through the slick black bile while keeping his firearm pointed straight down the hall.

Jarvis looked at Kyle, paused, pulled in a deep breath and then slowly slid his boot through the doorway.

My first instincts were that this was a lucky break. At least, we wouldn’t have to bust through the army of Zs that obviously lurked in the hallways of this school. Someone else had already done the job for us.

“Let’s make this quick. I’ve got a shitty feeling in my gut. Why the hell would someone have done this?” Kyle finally spoke up.

“Maybe whoever did this needed something in the school like we do. Hell, this is what it would have looked like if we had to clear this place out,” Rodgers said while kicking at a creature’s lifeless arm on the ground in front of him.

I just hoped they weren’t looking for meds.

“Could be, but it’s not sitting well with me. Let’s get this shit quick,” Kyle replied.

Jarvis lowered his spear and nodded toward Rodgers. “You’re with me.” Then he looked over toward Kyle and me. “I want you to hit the roof. Get eyes on our surroundings.”

I started to protest when Jarvis cut in. “I need your head straight, John, no rushing through the dark. I know what I’m looking for, and I’ll signal to you as soon we have it.”

Thinking for a moment, I looked over to Kyle, who nodded his head before saying, “Jarvis will get it. Let’s you and I make sure we don’t have any problems getting out of here once he does.”

Biting on my lower lip, I looked down the hallway toward the piles of the dead. Being outside where the air was fresh would be a welcome relief. Besides, I did trust Jarvis, and I knew he’d get what we needed.

Splitting ways, Kyle and I stepped through the gore-covered linoleum floors, heading toward a rectangular white sign which read “Exit” about midway down the hallway. As we moved through the hall, I realized that there was no rhyme or reason to this group of creatures. Old, young, male, female… they were all people from different strokes of life looking for someone to save them. They had been horribly led astray.

The exit sign had a door sitting beneath it, with another set of severed chains hanging loosely from the handle. Peering through the cracked but re-enforced glass, I could make out a near pitch-black staircase heading up.

As we crept up each stair through the darkness, visions of some unseen creature patiently waiting in the shadows danced around my mind. With my whole body inadvertently tensing up, as each boot squeaked across the next step ahead, I couldn’t help but leap up two steps at time as our accent came to an end.