Zombie High (24 page)

For whatever reason, probably under the ideal of
protecting God’s children from creepy pedophiles, the
school made sure to build these rooms with the windows
nearly at the ceiling. About the only thing they were good
for was letting in some cooler air during the winter when
the school’s boiler was set too high. The concept of
letting out the stinky air from someone blowing up the
toilet never worked because the air always seemed to be
coming in, not out. On top of that, on the hotter days of
school like in May, June, and August the smell of the black
tar which was used in sealing the parking lot stank worse
than anything someone could produce naturally within
their own body. It was for these reasons that the
windows were rarely open, and why now you would have
to unlatch it before you could climb out.

Standing up carefully and slowly, you begin to take
a look above the stall wall and find that at least five of the
monsters are still milling around in the tiny space between
the sinks and the urinals. They are comprised of what
were once girls and boys who attended school here, and
this was probably the first time these girls had seen in the
boys’ bathroom. One of the boy zombies is even standing
staring at the wall above the urinal as if he’s using the
facilities to relieve himself, and you quickly try to block
the mental image from your mind as to what that might
look like now that he’s dead.

Turning in place, you attempt to reach for the
window latch but find that you still can’t quite reach it.
Looking down, you realize the only thing left is to try to
use the toilet paper dispenser to place a foot on and
balance between it and the toilet seat. Bracing yourself
using the stall wall, you gingerly test the dispenser,
placing, at first, a small amount of weight on it, and then
gradually increasing it to be about half your weight. To
your surprise it seems to be holding. Reaching up, you
attempt to grab the window latch, but now that you have
it, it doesn’t want to turn. The darn thing must be rusted
in place from years of no one using it. Figuring you just
need a little better positioning so that you can apply more
torque to it, you lift your other leg from the toilet seat to
the back of the toilet, conscious all the while of the toilet
paper dispenser and praying that it holds your weight,
despite how cheap the plastic casing looks.

Again, whoever is out there is listening and takes
you up on your prayer by keeping the dispenser in one
piece and ensuring that it holds you. Unfortunately, they
only seem to be listening to the exact words of your
prayer today and not the overall plea for safety and
protection because they allow you to accidentally put
your other foot down, not on the top of the toilet as you
had planned, but on the handle which consequently
flushes the toilet beneath you.

Wide eyed, you look over your shoulder and find
that all of the dead eyes in the room are now staring at
you even as the water continues its spin down towards
the pipes below. The stare into the zombies’ eyes feels
like an eternity, but in actuality, it only takes a second or
two, and then they begin moving towards you.

Frantic now, you dispatch the careful charades and
reach for the latch, putting more muscle into it then you
knew you had. At first it refuses to budge, but then as the
rust separates, it gives and the latch twists open. As it
does so, however, you manage to gouge yourself on its
rusty surface and immediately begin bleeding. Wishing
you had time to inspect it, you notice the zombies are
now at the stall door, and whether it’s because they can
smell your blood, or just because they’re angry you’ve
hidden their next meal from them for so long, they seem
to be slamming their weight into it harder than you would
expect. You put aside any concerns about your hand,
figuring you can worry about the tetanus shot later, and
throw yourself towards the partially open window.

Resting your weight on your forearms, you push
the window open as far as you can with your head and
find that it’s not opening as far as you hoped. Looking to
the side, you spot the reason, a screw in the window track
prevents it from opening fully. Wiggling forward you try
to squeeze through anyway and feel the skin scrape off
your back as you go. There just isn’t enough room.
Reaching back, you grab the screwdriver from your
pocket, and while balancing half in and half out of the
building, you begin to try to remove the screw.

As the fates would have it, the screw seems to be
rusted as well, and it takes you several seconds before you
can get even a millimeter of movement out of the thing.
That’s when you hear the stall door behind you crash
open. You try to quickly finish the job, knowing that this
one screw is the last thing in your way before you can
reach freedom, but it doesn’t turn fast enough, and you
feel the cold grip of Jason’s hands as he grabs your leg and
tries to pull you down. Screaming, you abandon the
screwdriver and try to turn the screw with your fingers
only to find that your bloody hand is unable to grip the
rusty screw hard enough to turn it.

On Jason’s next pull, you feel your back scrape
against the window in reverse, and it hurts easily ten
times more than it did the first time, but Jason at least
lands on his butt when your shoe gives way to the force of
his pull. Picking up the screwdriver once more, you try a
different angle for your arm and manage to get a bit more
out of the screw before the rusted head simply twists off
leaving a small piece of corkscrew metal hanging out just
far enough to continue blocking the window in its track.

Shaking your head, disgusted with the way things
have turned out, you look out over the parking lot taking
in one last deep breath of clean air before another zombie
grabs hold of your socked foot and yanks you back in
where the small horde begin to sink their teeth into your
skin.

Reluctant to get into a confrontation with them all,
you decide fighting them while using the element of
surprise is about your only option. The window looks
inviting, but once you’re outside, you’ll have an entire
world of potential zombies to contend with and that just
sounds like jumping out of the pan and into the fire.

Quietly pulling the hammer out from your belt loop
and grabbing one of the screwdrivers from your pocket,
you step a bit closer to the stall door and prepare yourself
to attack. Peering through the crack, you see two of the
zombies, one to the left and the other to the right.
Remembering that the stall door opens in both directions,
one of the conveniences that were added in case
someone in a wheel chair needed to use the facilities, you
make your decision and go for it.

Turning the stall door lock, you exploded out into
the open bathroom with your hammer raised, letting the
swinging door knock one zombie into the wall while you
take aim on the other. You bring the hammer down on
the zombie’s head with a sickening thump, hearing the
skull beneath the skin break beneath the force of your
blow. As the zombie you struck falls, another steps up
hoping that its luck will be better than its comrades, and
that it will get a chance to taste that delicious flesh of
yours.

Acting quickly, you pull the hammer back across
your chest and then let it fly, arcing out sideways into the
zombie’s temple hard enough that you cave in a part of its
face and shut down at least part of its brain. When you
don’t see the creature immediately drop, you drive your
other arm forward stabbing it through the eye with the
screwdriver and then wiggle it to make sure you stir up
whatever constitutes for a brain inside its thick skull.

Behind you, you hear the stall door swing back
away from the zombie as it attempts to get up, and you
bring the hammer across in a vicious backhand, lodging
the claw end in the zombie’s neck. The wound, however,
does nothing to slow it down, and the hammer stubbornly
refuses to come back out. Over your shoulder you see the
other two zombies coming in for their chance, and so you
yank on the hammer with all of your strength, grunting as
you do so, frantic to get it loose. As you do so, you feel
and hear the sound of something pop inside the zombie,
and as it drops, you realize that you’ve just severed its
spinal column from its brain stem. The only problem is
the hammer slips from your grasp, still embedded in the
side of the zombie’s neck, as all of a sudden the creature
becomes nothing more than a hundred and thirty pounds
of dead weight.

With little to no options left, you reach in your
pocket for another screwdriver and square off with your
remaining two attackers. Both zombies come shuffling
towards you quicker than you would like with their
mouths open as they hungrily wail for the one thing that
they want, your flesh.

When both of your undead friends are within
grabbing range, you duck down quickly and then spring up
simultaneously shoving a screwdriver up beneath the chin
of each of them. The screwdrivers do their work, piercing
through the lower jaw and upper palate of their mouths
before scrambling their brains.

Looking around, you realize that you actually won,
you killed them all, and you did it without getting bit,
scratched, or otherwise infected. It’s almost enough to
make you want to dance, but you figure doing so would
not only be in poor taste considering these use to be your
peers and classmates at one point. Despite the fact that
the world seems to be going to hell, dancing around in a
bloody bathroom is a level of sickness you haven’t quite
reached yet.

You consider reclaiming your tools, but one look at
the nearly empty paper towel dispenser tells you that
you’ll never really get them clean, and you don’t want to
risk walking around with infected weapons and
accidentally get infected yourself somehow. Reaching
back to where you set it down, you take up the two-byfour again and make your way to the door, careful to step
around the recently fallen monsters. As you approach it,
however, you see a faint crack of light from the hallway,
and then the door opens wide.

Stepping back, you almost slip in the blood of one
of the zombies at your feet even as three more come
rushing in. Apparently, your scuffle with the others was
loud enough for them to hear, or they were just running a
little late to the party. When you get your footing back
under you once again, you find the first of the trio already
close enough to spit on. Bringing up the two-by-four, you
swing, hoping to send him back into one of his friends like
a scene from one of those old black and white TV Land
shows about the three idiots, or stooges, or whatever.
The swing, however, never connects, or at least it doesn’t
connect with its target. Instead it gets caught up about
halfway through its arc as it hits the wall, and you
remember during your initial assessment that you didn’t
have enough room in here to fight them off with that
thing. To add insult to injury, your body was dedicated to
the swing far more than the physics and space around you
would allow, and your hands slide down the lower end of
the two-by-four collecting splinters and cuts as they go.

Dropping the board, you take a step back feeling
like your hands are on fire and realize that you have
nothing left to defend yourself with. Your hands are
practically immovable, and the only weapons you might
be able to use in quarters this tight are stuck inside other
dead bodies, covered in their infected blood. Touching
those would be tantamount to suicide with the open
wounds on your hands.

With no other option, you rush over to the
bathroom stall and lock yourself inside. As you sit down
on the toilet feeling defeated, you watch as the walls and
door of the stall shake from the zombies’ continued
attempts to get in, and you understand that this is the
end. At some point in the next couple of minutes, they’ll
come crashing through the door, and you have nothing
left to use but a mostly empty roll of toilet paper.

Figuring that you’ve run far enough, and that the
window is out of reach anyway, you decide this is where
you’ll have to make your stand. With the limited room
around you, you go ahead and set the two-by-four down,
leaning it against a nearby wall and pull out you next best
weapons. In your right hand you hold the hammer and in
your left, the screwdriver. They’re not much, and you
know you won’t have the reach you would like, but
they’re going to have to do considering the circumstances.

It only takes them a few more seconds, but soon
you hear the sound of the door opening as your uninvited
guests arrive and push their way in. From the look of it,
they are so eager to get in here, they almost seem to be
fighting with one another as they push and shove to get to
the front. Part of you wonders if there is a way you could
use this to your advantage, but you don’t see how as they
keep coming in. Determined to do to them before they
can do to you, you lash out with the hammer and hit the
first one, who is too stupid to duck, in the face. The blow
doesn’t kill him, but it does make him take a step back and
run into some of the others who are filing in behind him.

At first, this seems like it might be the beginnings of
a decent plan. If you can just keep the first one away, the
others won’t be able to reach you either. That’s when you
find out that while stupid, the zombies aren’t completely
brain dead. The two creatures closest to the front man
each take a short step to the side and begin to fan
themselves out.

Realizing where this is headed, you decide to try to
dispatch them all as quickly as possible. Lifting the
hammer, you bring it down on the closest zombie’s
forehead as hard as you can, causing the zombie to fall to
the floor at your feet. When the next one steps forward
you attempt to jam the screwdriver into the side of its
head only to have it stop about halfway. Seeing this, as
well as the fact that the zombie continues to advance, you
swing the hammer across your body and drive the
screwdriver into the creature’s head all the way to the
hilt.