“So,” Ian said. “Who all made it?”
“Other than us, Dakota and Jamie?” Erik asked. “I don’t know. Probably no one.”
“I heard Desmond yelling from the second floor,” Steve said. “That’s where Jamie took off with Dakota, so I’m sure he’s safe.”
“So that just leaves Dustin, Michael and Alexis,” Ian said. “Anyone know what happened to them?”
Both Steve and Erik shook their heads. “Wish I did,” Steve said.
“I’m sure they’re better off than we are,” Erik said. “If not, we can’t worry about it. I hate to say it, but I hardly knew any of them anyway.”
“No harm in the way you feel.”
“I feel the same way,” Ian confessed.
Steve sighed. He tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. At that moment, all he wanted to do was sleep.
We’ve been going for three days, he thought. You can’t expect yourself to be any better off than you are now.
“Our first priority after we leave is to get a vehicle,” Erik said, drawing both Steve and Ian’s attention toward him. “I say after we get some rest, we go down to the office and see if we can score a set of keys off a secretary’s desk.”
“You really think there’d be some there?” Ian said.
“There were cars in the parking lot, right?”
“That doesn’t mean someone left their keys.”
“With all the commotion that had to have been going on, I’d be surprised if there weren’t any.”
“This school wasn’t on the safe list,” Steve said, his words more a statement than anything. “I heard it on the radio.”
“That’s good to know. At least there won’t be a bunch of zombies.”
“Kid zombies,” Ian shivered. “Ugh.”
“Not a good thing to think about,” Erik agreed. His eyes sought out a single wardrobe in the corner of the room. “Let’s just lay down and get some sleep. We’ll think more about what we’re going to do in the morning.”
Night seemed to pass quickly. A moment, a second, a brief inhale and a strong exhale—you could live your whole life and no one would even begin to notice, let alone care what had just happened after you stopped breathing at twelve AM. Time is measured in math, not moments, and those few moments worth measuring are often reduced to numbers and lost in the back bins of some old closet.
Were someone to measure the moment three men woke in a high school teacher’s longue and prepared to make the flight of their life, they would have calculated their number, their age, and the statistics for how likely they were to survive the next three weeks. When they finished crunching the numbers, they would find that their chances of survival were little to none. Regardless, numbers had never stopped miracles, nor had there ever been a shortage of miracles in this world. Miracles didn’t need statistics. They just happened.
“This is what we’re going to do,” Erik said, pressing a finger to a fire escape diagram on the wall. “One of us is going to go up this long, center hallway and make a left once we find the janitor’s closet, then make our way down this corridor until we hit the front office. If we can’t find anything there, we’re going to start hitting classrooms one by one until we find something.”
“And if we don’t?” Ian frowned.
“Like he said,” Steve smiled, “there was too much commotion for anyone to be in their right mind. Someone had to have left their keys here.”
“I’m just sayin’, don’t get your hopes up. We might not find anything at all.”
“No point in having a pessimistic attitude,” Erik said, cocking his revolver and passing it over to Steve. “Who wants to go?”
“I will,” Steve offered. He took a moment to acquaint himself with the weapon before him—a classy, bronze-colored and red-handled gentleman’s revolver—before looking back up at the two of them. “What’re you guys going to do?”
“Ian and I are going this way.” Erik traced a loop near the bottom of the map. “There’s a cafeteria here. We should be able to find some supplies.”
“How do you plan on getting it out to the parking lot?”
“Other than carrying it? They should have a pulley, I suppose.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Ian said.
Steve shrugged. “I guess we’ll go then.”
He leaned forward, opened the door, and slipped out without another word.
Pale light seeped through frosted glass windows, casting the hallway in faint shades of grey and yellow. As Steve made his way down the hall, his heart in a less-than-stellar place and his mind in a heightened state of alert, he sighed when he found a classroom and couldn’t look in. It seemed ironic to think that such frosted glass was once used to keep someone from looking in at the people inside. Now with nothing to look in at, he wondered why anyone would ever feel uncomfortable knowing that someone was always watching out for them, especially at a school.
That’s the way the world used to work, he thought, letting his gun hang at his side. But not anymore.
Shaking his head, he readjusted his grip on the revolver and continued down the hallway, already well aware that his journey was much shorter than he had initially anticipated, though whether it was from the warped sense of distance on the teacher lounge map or the brief span of the hallways, he couldn’t tell.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said to himself. “Makes it easier for me to make it back if something goes wrong.”
A shadow flickered in the corner of the room.
He paused, raising his gun.
The light flickered once more and revealed a child’s poster dangling off the wall.
Thank God, he thought, sighing, reaching up to wipe the single bead of sweat off his forehead. Just a poster. A goddamn poster.
His relief was short-lived, however, when a thought struck him.
How could there be a draft if there was nothing for the air to come in through?
It’s a vent, Steve—get a hold of yourself. You know it’s a fucking vent.
He didn’t bother to dwell on his thought. He simply turned left and made his way down the hall.
She jumped him just as he pulled a key from the very back drawer in a secretary’s desk. Nails jagged and screams harsh, she grabbed his arm and spun him around, giving Steve just enough time to kick her away from him before he collapsed back onto the table.
“FUCK!” he cried, raising his gun.
A single swipe from her bony hand sent the revolver flying into the office windows.
The gun went off.
“Got it,” Ian said, loading the box up onto the pulley.
“Thank God,” Erik sighed, shaking his head.
“At least now we won’t go hungry.”
“Right about that.”
A gunshot went off.
Both men froze in place.
“You think Steve ran into trouble?” Ian asked quickly.
They both started running.
“Fucking BITCH!” Steve screamed, kicking her in the face as she came in for another attack. She flew back into another desk and went soaring over it, the momentum of such strike and impact sending her first onto the table, then back over it. This pause in activity gave Steve just enough time to throw himself from the desk and onto the floor.
Where the fuck is my gun?
The bronze metal glinted in the pale light.
He lunged.
A hand wrapped around his leg and began dragging him backward.
Kicking out with his opposite leg, Steve struck the corpse in the ankle, then brought his other foot into her crotch. She screamed—not in pain, but frustration—and tried to jump, but he braced his ankle against her leg and slammed his foot into her knee.