That’s why your teacher still insists on the senior trip to the Discovery Place: because that’s what normal means. And since Uptown was packed with armed reservists and the outbreak hadn’t even touched the East Coast, the principal and most of our parents figured we’d be safe.
As it turned out, we weren’t.
Half of our class was stuck in the bowels of Discovery Place when the panic began, but Nicky and I were outside with Beatrice, Felipe, and Gregor right behind us. We could hear screams coming from down the block.
The air stank of blood and Felipe had to shout over the sound of the reservists’ gunshots. “We should go back in—get to the buses through the rear entrance!”
The guy who’d landed in front of me was so broken there was no way he’d ever be able to stand, but even so, he twitched his fingers against the concrete, splitting his nails as he tried to drag himself closer.
Beatrice began hyperventilating and Nicky’s cheeks shone with tears. I hated the indecision of that moment. Even now I wish I could go back there and stop time and just give myself a minute to think.
All around us, people were giving up on their cars, not even bothering to turn them off or to shut their doors after abandoning them in the middle of the road. The streets were gridlocked, horns blaring. We knew then that we’d never get far.
We’d never get home.
That’s when Beatrice said: “I want to go home.”
I’m pretty sure that’s what made Nicky say, “My dad’s apartment—it’s in the Overlook.” And then we started running.
We were like a hive mind—no discussion, no coordination. One of us thought it and so it became. We ran through through the city like a pack, desperate to escape. We learned quickly to stay in the middle of the road—those on the outside were the easiest targets.
Everywhere was madness. Or so I thought. Maybe I didn’t truly understand madness yet, because I still felt the compulsion to steady those who stumbled. To pull them free of clawing hands.
I still tried to help.
There were only two entrances to the Overlook: the leasing office, its windows already shattered, and the underground garage, which had a massive, jail-like gate stretched across the ramp.
Nicky pulled a remote from her purse and pointed it at a black box. Slowly, slowly, with a lot of creaking, the gate began to roll open. She was the first through, and then Beatrice and Felipe. They sprinted through the garage for the bank of elevators. I was the one to hold Gregor back.
“It’s every man for himself, right?” I asked him.
He didn’t get what I was saying.
“Look,” I tried again. “We gotta lock this thing down now, right? Is it wrong if we do that? Keep everyone else out?”
Gregor’s eyes were wide as he looked from me to the road outside. People were screaming, trying to run. So many of them were smeared with blood that it was impossible to tell who’d been infected already and who was safe.
“Come on, Jonah!” Nicky screamed. Her panic was contagious, and my fingers fumbled as I pried the cover off the electric motor that worked the garage gate.
“Tell her to just hold on a sec,” I ordered Gregor, “and get that clicker from her!”
I’d wanted to be all cool and find a way to disable the motor, but in the end I couldn’t keep focused on all the wires and gears. I ended up grabbing one of the big metal garbage bins and slamming it against the motor until it was in enough pieces to be unsalvageable. Gregor pointed the clicker at the black box and sure enough, the gate was well and thoroughly broken.
No one was getting in through the garage.
Once we were all piled inside one of the two marble-and-wood elevators, Nicky had to use a special electronic key to access the penthouse level. When she pressed the “P” button Felipe whistled. “Fancy girl, eh?”
She rolled her eyes at him. I remember that so distinctly because I’d been thinking how glad I was that he was such an ass because it made me look better by comparison.
Of course, that only lasted until we reached the top floor and the elevator doors opened. Nicky stepped out into the vestibule first, without even pausing to look around, and I grabbed her hand before she could take off down one of the dim, carpeted hallways.
“What are you doing?” I hissed in her ear. “What if it’s not safe?”
Beatrice muffled a cry by pushing her palm against her mouth, and even Felipe’s face paled. A long hallway stretched from both sides of the elevator. Gregor took off to the left, but the floor must have been configured in a square or something, because a minute or two later he came sprinting back from the right. “Everything’s clear,” he reported. The corridors were silent, empty.
“Yeah, but for how long?” Felipe asked.
As if in response one of the elevator engines kicked in, and it whisked away from our floor down into the bowels of the building. There was a distant ding and then the sound of the elevator starting its climb back up.
I held my breath, hoping it stopped before reaching us, and thought of all those people out in the city. They were going to run somewhere, and this place would look pretty good, with its thick walls and proximity to Uptown. It was the closest thing to a fortress our city had.
“Unless we’re the ones who called for it,” Nicky whispered. “Whoever it is would need to have a key to get to this floor.”
Beatrice finally spoke up. “They . . . those things . . . can’t . . . ” She moved her hand in the air as if it could talk for her. “ . . . like, think, can they? You know, press buttons and stuff like that?”
(It’s funny how long it took us to start using the word zombie. For the longest time we just called them “they” or “those things,” because zombie was a word that existed in games and movies. It felt stupid saying it, always coming out with a kind of “shit, can you believe I’m actually using this word?” laugh.)
“We shouldn’t wait to find out,” Felipe suggested, already easing down the hallway. He tugged on Nicky’s sleeve and she shrugged him off.
“It could be my dad,” she said, emphasizing that last word. Felipe flicked his eyes at me, like I was somehow in control of the situation. But none of that mattered because the elevator dinged and my stomach turned over on itself as the doors slid open.
I don’t know who was more surprised—us or him. There was a moment where it felt like it could be a normal day and this normal guy with graying hair was getting home from work with his suit a little rumpled, his tie loose around his neck.
But then I saw where his sleeve was torn and how he held his hand against his stomach. There was blood. A lot of blood.
It’s not like he could think we wouldn’t see it, and for a second he had a guilty look on his face. Almost panicked, even. But then he must have remembered that he was an adult and we were just a bunch of teenagers, because he pushed past us and strode down the dim hallway, his keys rattling in his bloody fingers.
And it worked. We stood there like dumb kids and let him do what he wanted, because seriously, who were we to stop him?
Then, to add to our stupefied uselessness, the elevator doors began to slide closed and I couldn’t get there in time to stop them. I started pounding the button, trying to call it back. The call light lit up, but I was too late. Behind the double doors, the engine hummed and wires whisked the elevator back down into the building.
There would be more coming—more people. More infected. I’d locked the garage down, but they could still get into the Overlook through the office. We wouldn’t stay safe for long if that happened. We had to stop them. Any way we could, we had to keep anyone else from getting up to the penthouse.