Resurrection (Apocalypse Chronicles Part II) (22 page)

When we entered, Harrison moved in first, as was typical when clearing an area. The rest of us fell in behind until he’d reassured us that no one was inside. We followed this pattern the next two buildings, finding a gym and a garage, both empty. The largest building was saved for last, because evidently, that’s where the Infected Harrison smelled earlier were holed up.

We went in single file.

The entrance opened to a massive hall lined with doors on both sides, which Harrison moved past cautiously, checking and sliding farther down until we’d reached the end. The kitchen and dining area lined the back of the school, but again both were devoid of any signs of life. Even the trees standing outside the window stretching from one end to the other seemed lifeless. We doubled back and headed up the stairs built into the hall midway down. The second floor was reserved for bedrooms, bathrooms, and an assembly room, built directly over the dining area. As we stopped in the middle of the rows of chairs, we turned to each other in surprise.

“If anyone’s here,” Doc remarked, “they’re pretty damn clean.”

It was a valid point. There were no empty cans of food left in the kitchen, no clothes strewn across any beds or hanging from wires, no dirt trekked inside from the mud across the rest of the grounds. In fact, the hallways and rooms were pristine, ready for their boys.

“The school wasn’t scheduled to be opened yet, so…,” Mei said and shrugged, “it should be empty.”

It didn’t make sense though. Harrison had caught their scent. And he’d never been wrong.

“But Harrison sm-” I began to say, my head rotating in his direction.

We hadn’t made it all the way to the back window, which had started on the first floor dining area and stretched to the ceiling on the second floor assembly room. So Harrison wouldn’t have seen what I did. He didn’t have the vantage point. I was the only one facing it when my statement was cut short.

Directly below us, on the opposite side of the wall, in an unpaved lot, just before the stream Caroline mentioned, were two bright yellow busses, parked side by side. Bodies moved behind the dirt-smeared glass in the same haphazard, sluggish way of the Infected. A few of the faculty lay among the busses, judging from their size.

Apparently, the first flock of students had arrived before the outbreak.

“Well, at least they’re contained. Easy kills,” Doc said.

“No,” I declared, absentmindedly.

“No?” Beverly snickered. “What, you want to let them out? Let them roam around in the sun to soak up a few rays? Geez, Kennedy, when did you make a death wish?” She paused for effect before adding, “Oh, that’s right,
at birth
.”

While I didn’t agree with her assessment of having a death wish, I couldn’t envision gunning down those kids. I knew they were Infected, gone to the world, and an imminent danger, but there was something deeply wrong about ending the lives of the students who had arrived at the promise of a better life only to end up mindless cannibals. They deserved more.

“We really don’t have a choice,” Doc muttered before shifting his stance to evaluate me further. “
Do
you have a death wish, Kennedy?”

Mei, who seemed to be more insulted than I was, snapped her head back to gawk at him. It spun immediately toward Beverly when she muttered something about Harrison and I both having a death wish and that we were perfect for each other because of it. Mei’s eyes were back on Doc when he snickered at the comment.

“What?” he retorted in offense. “It’s a legitimate point, Mei. Look at how they follow each other into danger…and she does it without even having any of his abilities.”

That kind of statement would have sent sparks of nervousness through me only a few months ago because it would have made me stand out from the crowd I’d worked so hard to blend into. It would have shown my tendencies toward risk and designated me as odd, which weren’t exactly traits of the traditional makeup of Homecoming Queens. But I’d already been called out. This small group of people knew who I was, that I wasn’t that caricature, and they had embraced me. It was Harrison who needed to fit in now, so at the mention of his inhuman traits, my shoulders braced. What I didn’t realize was that he already did. This was the first time his idiosyncrasies were mentioned and Christina didn’t turn a wary eye on him. Instead, she nodded plainly in agreement.

I should have given her, all of them, more credit. The truth was Harrison was our leader, whether he liked it or not, and I wasn’t the only one following him.

“Doc?” I said, realizing he’d neglected one very specific example in which he’d done the same.

“Huh?” he said, pulling away from Mei’s haranguing.

“Didn’t you just trail Harrison around this school for the last thirty minutes?”

He stared back, confused until Mei broke out in giggles. Whether he understood my point or not was unclear but the others got it and it left us laughing quietly until something else took precedence.

Muddled voices reached us from the outside.

Beverly gave her signature scoff, rolled her eyes toward the hallway in the direction of the noise, and grumbled, “
We said
…to keep it down.”

Actually, it had been Harrison who gave that warning and it was because the Infected had an ability to hear much greater distances than we could. At the moment, he was focused on picking up any sounds in the distance, apprehension slowly creeping across his handsome face.

“They’re in trouble,” he stated, launching into a sprint.

Suddenly, it wasn’t abstract noise reaching us. It was screams.

We sprinted into the hallway, leapt down the stairs, and found ourselves outside in seconds. Mud flew up behind us, spraying in all directions, and increasing the closer we got to the school’s gate.

What we left behind were fifty men and women, tired, malnourished, and huddled in fear. What we saw when they came into view I’ll never forget.

They were blind with panic. Each had lost focus in their eyes, in the same way as the Infected. They cared about nothing that stood in their way. They had one goal…to get to safety, because they weren’t alone out there on the other side of the wall. Someone was coming for them, and there was no stopping it.

Harrison had picked up their scent. We knew to expect them. What we didn’t know was that he hadn’t only detected the ones in the busses but the ones who had put them there before wandering aimlessly out into the surrounding woods. They had returned and were ravenous with hunger.

They ranged between twelve and thirty which gave them speed, flexibility, and strength; all were male; and each wore a shirt with an emblem on it denoting The Promise Academy’s name. The only demarcation was in their age. Some had to be faculty members.

They were only a few yards away by the time the gate was being shoved closed by the few men who had come to their senses. The rest were racing for the reformatory’s doors, which wouldn’t offer any protection in the next few seconds if we didn’t close the gate, or stop the Infected from entering. The weapons that Beverly and Christina had made and distributed were gone, lost in the mud beyond the perimeter. I felt the call to duty and lifted my rifle.

The sling slid along my back until the butt rested in the crook of my shoulder as I leaned my head down to the scope.

Please…please slow down. I don’t want to shoot you. Not you. Not you…

I lost sight of the gate, of their efforts to close it, of our team. My entire focus was on the single Infected off to the right, whose legs seemed to be gifted for sprints as he had broken ahead of the pack by several seconds. I would have been relieved that he was part of the faculty if he hadn’t been racing directly for Harrison. The Infected’s head bobbed in my scope, into view and back out, so my press of the trigger was more guesswork than intentional accuracy. The first shot sailed elsewhere but the second landed where it was intended and he fell from my sight. My free eye caught Harrison turning to look at me as he continued to push the gate in the direction of the latch.

I sent another round passed Harrison, taking down the next Infected.

A blade flew by us and I knew that Mei was beside me.

She and I both took down the next one, his body flailing to the ground and rolling up to the gate. It was a waste of ammo but we had to be sure he didn’t make it. If he had, the weight he carried would have stopped the gate and left it open for the others to sprint in. I knew this as they slammed into it full force, rattling its hinges loud enough for me to feel it in my teeth.

I had closed in on the opening so that when the bars crossed in front of my view, they barely skirted my rifle’s barrel, leaving me dangerously close to our attackers. Harrison saw my proximity to them and swung his arm around to block me but not before the Infected lurched for me.

Touch…Taste…

Those words rolled through my head as his jaws snapped inches from my face. His rank, stale breath blasted me as he came at me again, his black teeth cracking in his frenzy. The crazed look in his eyes, the snarling, the intensity of his fight brought back the impact of what Harrison had told me earlier about his reaction to my touch, to my taste. It was compounded, tantalizing, creating a primal hunger beyond the person’s control; and I could see it in him, as if it were a palpable, separate entity that had seized his body.

My heart hit my ribcage at the same moment that Harrison’s hand landed gently but firmly on my stomach and pressed me backwards.

“I’m fine,” I said, knowing he was about to begin surveying me for injuries and bite marks.

“Is everyone else?” I shouted. “Is everyone else all right?”

Most were gone, having fled inside, but the handful who remained behind nodded, their heaving for air mixing with the growls of the Infected. Only one sound stood out, a single bone chilling scream.

When it came, every one of our heads darted up and to the left, into the trees outside the wall.

A girl about sixteen clung to a branch, her dirty brown hair hanging in strands above the Infected now struggling to reach her. Her arms were boney, lacking muscle and the strength to keep her in place. Only will power stopped her from falling.

Immediately, I assessed the gate. It was too far to the right. The Infected were out of view. There was no vantage point that would allow any of our weapons to be effective.

Our attention turned keenly on her then. A sweeping view of our situation made it clear there was no visible way to reach her. There was only the wall and the trees on the other side.

“Can you make it onto the wall?” I asked.

He nodded, already understanding my line of thought and agreeing with it. A single, solid leap and he was able to pull himself to the top. His emergence riled the Infected on the other side which caused the girl to whimper.

“What’s your name?” I asked to keep her mind on something other than her proximity to certain death.

“Claire.” Her voice was shaky.

“Claire,” Harrison said firmly, “can you pull yourself up so that you’re lying on top of the branch instead of hanging from it?”

“I don’t…,” she said, and I thought she was going to reject the idea. “I don’t have a choice.”

Harrison chuckled quietly. “No, Claire, you don’t.”

She nodded, which seemed more of a gesture to prompt herself than to respond to Harrison, and went about swinging her leg to propel herself to her destination. Once there, she exhaled deeply, along with the rest of us. Only the Infected below kept up their excitement.

“Get into a kneeling position,” he said.

She followed his command, successfully steadying her swaying until she was stationary.

“All right, Claire,” he said and exhaled in a way that told me that he wasn’t eager about the news he was going to deliver. “You’re going to have to jump.”

She was four feet from him, which is the Grand Canyon when you have no running start and a swarm of Infected drooling below you.

“No,” she muttered instantly shaking her head. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

“Claire,” I said, trying to break her pattern of rejection. “Claire, listen to Harrison. Listen to his voice.”

Block out the ones below you.

Her head had fallen but she lifted it to stare back at him, lips trembling, terror woven through her gaze. “How…? What…?”

He ducked to her eye level and in a steady, calm voice, he instructed, “Repeat after me. Can you do that?”

“Repeat after you,” she said, quivering, her eyes flicking downward.

“Look at me, Claire. Listen to me.”

“Okay,” she breathed, making an effort to contain herself.

It’s working, I thought, my heart actually lifting in my chest.

“Repeat after me, Claire.”

“Okay… Okay…”

“I am my own hero.”

Her nose flared and her eyes darted from side to side, but she didn’t speak.

“Say it. I am my own hero.”

She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

“
Say it
,
Claire
,” Harrison demanded, his tone rougher than I’d ever heard.