The Secret: A Thriller (11 page)

Unless she didn’t, anymore—but that kind of thinking wasn’t going to help.

I’d do what I could.

W
hen I got back to the cafeteria both doors were shut. I pulled one open, propping it with an attached kickstand-like support, and trying to make it seem accidental. Yeah…that was totally believable. I was sure.

Then a cloud of gnats flew out of the room. Nasty—and a couple of wasps followed them. I stepped back warily, but they headed down the hallway towards the non-zombie population.

Maybe they smelled something good? Or the cafeteria’s stench finally got to be too much for them? If they had a decent escape plan, maybe I should just follow them.

Inside, I leaned against a wall and closed my eyes to help them adjust to the darkness. A few minutes later, I shuffled over and kicked John’s leg. “Wake up. I need your help with something.”

He grunted something foul and sat up. “Dude! Trying to fit in, here.”

“Yeah. C’mon, I’ve got an idea for getting out of this place.”

He shook his head, then dragged himself to his feet and put his face next to my ear. “Listen, man. I’m going to wait this out. Nobody’s shooting at me in here, okay? Eventually somebody from outside is going to come into town and take over. This mess can’t last forever, you know?”

I paused. “It’s not just here. I got online for a few minutes the other day. Whatever this is, it was happening in at least three other places around the country. Maybe a lot more by now.”

He blinked, then looked away and shook his head. “Still. We’ve got crazy people running this town, but if I try to get out I have to go through the U.S. military. I might try to leave later, if things get worse—”

“Worse than this. That’s what you’re waiting for? Just how bad does it need to get?”

“Dude. Here I have food and water. Kind of. But if I go with you I’ll probably get dead, or worse. So if you don’t mind—”

“Enough. I need your help. I don’t think you’ll be taking much of a risk, and if it works you’ll know what I did later if you decide you need to follow me.” I grinned at him. “Plus, I may scream if you don’t quit arguing about it.”

He sighed. “I heard what the Reverend called you. You’re Jacob Ashton, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So what the hell? That’s the name of the guy who founded this damn town. There’s a statue of your great-great-whatever guy standing in the town square. Reverend Bob’s crowd are all about keeping strangers out and pulling together. If you go tell them you’re awake and push a little, man, they might just let you take over.”

I thought about that. “If they bought it. If the Reverend didn’t shoot me instead. And I don’t want to take over, I need to get back to my family.” Then I grinned. “And—by the way? I think that statue got blown to hell a little while back.”

John gave a short laugh, then looked like he regretted making the noise. “Dude. What the hell do you want from me, anyway?”

“Come find out.”

* * *

I
led John down the hallway, checking each classroom until I found one that was empty, then shut the door behind us. “Damnit,” I said, “I was hoping we could do this right across from the cafeteria. It’s a long way to—”

John put a hand on my arm “Shh!” Then he went on in a whisper: “Dude, turn around. Look out the window. Slowly. No sudden movements.”

A crowd of teenagers had gathered in front of the school. One of them was about twenty feet from the window directly in front of us, standing, staring out toward the highway. The others—about thirty of them— stood in a rough semicircle, facing him.

“Dude,” John murmured, “Can we just shuffle out of here? They’re all staring right at us.”

“Uh. Maybe if we do it slowly?”

We started moving…then froze.

“Holy crap,” John said, not so quietly. “I dunno what you have in mind, man. But there’s no way I’m going out there.”

The boy facing away from us—dark-haired, about Robbie’s age—had raised his hands, and insects suddenly swarmed the air around him. Wasps, bees, flies…probably gnats, too, but if so I couldn’t see them except as part of the shifting, buzzing mass.

The room darkened, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t because a cloud had covered the sun. Not a normal cloud anyway. Just how big
was
that swarm out there?

The other teenagers shifted on their feet, a little. They seemed…perplexed. Bugs crawled over them, but if the kids were being bitten they gave no obvious sign of it.

“Let’s keep moving,” I suggested.

But the teenager who’d been facing the crowd seemed to hear me. His head tilted to the side, and he turned.

I gasped, and John grabbed my arm. The boy’s face was…subtly misshapen. His jaw jutted out a little too far. His nose seemed to be gone. But mostly I noticed his eyes. At first my mind had tried to tell me he was wearing sunglasses.

But he wasn’t.

I started to move toward the door again. John whimpered a little, then moved behind me, keeping me between him and the window. I didn’t blame him.

The boy turned his head slightly to the left. One of the teenagers outside had fallen to the ground. Shaking, twitching, jerking spasmodically. Had she been bitten? An allergic reaction? But that didn’t seem to fit. Some sort of analogue of a religious frenzy? Her mouth was moving rhythmically…speaking in tongues, maybe?
If
, a darker piece of my mind pointed out,
she still has a tongue…

We moved out of the room. Slowly. Steadily.

Was the boy watching us still? Had he ever been? His darkly gleaming multifaceted eyes were empty of human expression. As we left the room I saw him allow a couple of wasps to crawl inside his lips. He smiled in our direction, then turned back to face the other youthful faces of Henge.

* * *

“F
ucking hell.” John, angry and scared, fronted me in the hallway. “What was that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Let’s check one of the rooms on the other side.”

“Fuck.” But he stuck with me.

The room right next to the cafeteria, the one with…buckets…was otherwise empty. I pushed John inside, then went to grab a couple of extension cords from the janitorial closet I’d slept in. When I got back into the room—pulling John after me, because he’d stepped out while I was gone—I locked the door.

“Dude, if somebody tries to open that—”

“Forget it,” I told him. “If it’s a zombie, they’ll probably just stand there. And if it’s not, we’re screwed anyway.” I looked up, thinking. “Grab a desk and follow me.”

* * *

“D
ude,” John said, “what the hell?”

I pointed. “Drop ceilings, man. See the smaller tiles around the edges of the room? That means there’s space up above there. Maybe enough to crawl through. If we’re extra lucky, the walls at the ends of the hallway won’t go all the way up and we can get out of here.”

He bit his lip. “Dude…I’ll help you get up there. Or help you try, anyway. But after what we just saw? I’ve got zero interest in leaving this place.”

I grinned at him. “So you can put the desks back when we’re done. And hang out here for a few minutes, in case I need to come right back. Maybe bang the wall or something if you hear me coming but it’s a bad time?”

“Dude…”

“C’mon. Let’s see how stable these desks are if we stack ’em.”

* * *

N
ot very, it turned out. But it didn’t really matter; I was pretty sure we could do it without stacking the desks. As I stood atop one of them, facing the wall with my hands braced against it, John—standing on another desk right behind me—made a stirrup with his arms. “Dude,” he said. “Please tell me you’ll put the tiles back when you’re up there. Because I’m not gonna be able to reach.”

I nodded. “Deal,” I told him. And I stepped onto his hands, moving up the wall, and moving a ceiling tile aside.

Utter blackness up there. And…I watched a wasp fly out, past my face, and begin to buzz around the room.

“Okay,” I told John. “I think this is going to work. But I’m gonna need to turn around. There’s nothing to grab on this side.”

“Fuck.”

We both nearly fell as I twisted around. But I grabbed some sort of pipe—for the fire-suppression sprinklers, I guessed, and I found another one just above it. I pulled myself up, grunting, hoping the system would support my weight…

“Made it,” I told John below me.

“Close it up,” he begged. “There’s—”

That’s when somebody rattled the doorknob. And then, after a moment, knocked.

I froze. The zombies probably wouldn’t knock. My eyes met John’s…he looked sick. The knocking came again, louder.

“Who’s in there?” somebody asked.

“I’ll pull you up,” I whispered urgently. “Give me your hand!”

John shook his head and started moving desks toward the center of the room—still out of sight from the door, I hoped. “Close it, man,” he begged. “Please.”

* * *

T
he tile hurriedly shoved back in place, I sat in utter darkness. I could hear the buzzing of a few agitated insects, but none of them were bothering me. Yet. Down below, I heard John shuffling toward the window.

“Damnit!” somebody said. “The fucker must’ve accidentally locked the door.”

Please, I thought. Please let John pull this off…

Breaking glass. A door opening. “Ah Jesus,” came a frustrated voice. An Irish accent—nobody I knew. “Look at him. Came all the way in here and sat in a pile of shite.”

Another voice, still in the hallway, laughed. “Still better than most of these guys can do. Come on, hurry up—check his mouth. I want to get out of here.”

“Ah man,” said the first voice, in motion. “This blows donkeys. Dead ones.”

I winced, and grinned in spite of myself. Okay—I owed John for that one.

* * *

A
fter their sounds had left the room below me I took one of the two extension cords I’d brought wrapped around my shoulders and tied one end to the pipes, then coiled the rest where John might be able to snag it from below with a broom handle. Then I crouched for hours—actually it felt like days but might have been five minutes, back in a world where that kind of thing could be known. I teetered, semi-balanced between pipes above me and a mostly-solid support that ran beneath me along the line separating the smaller acoustic tiles and the larger ones in the center of the room. It gave a little, and I pulled harder on the pipes.

My left leg hurt horribly. But I didn’t hear any more voices. Which was good enough for right now, but I would have to crawl and climb all the way across the cafeteria, and I wanted to be sure there were none of the Reverend’s people in the area when I did it. Or could I do it in complete silence? But I knew I had to try something soon. I couldn’t hang there forever.

Just as I got myself moving, I heard some sort of shouting from the direction of the cafeteria and froze. Then, a slammed door and running footsteps. Hoping that meant a new emergency had drawn the Reverend’s people away, I started inching my way along to the south again.

A few feet along, I lost my pipes—I had to make a right turn and follow them, or try to put my weight entirely on the support beneath me. I tried settling onto it slowly…but quit when it buckled and showed no sign of stabilizing.

Onward then, I decided, hoping the pipes wouldn’t leave me stranded. Or lost, if I didn’t keep track of the turns.

* * *

M
uch later, both hands bleeding from scrapes, I found my way across the cafeteria to the end of the hallway.

And, in front of me, I felt a wall instead of the open space I’d been hoping for.

I stretched, reaching up…hoping…

But it went all the way up.

I
tapped the wall above the double doors—at least I thought that was where I was—but it was solid. Felt like concrete.

Now what?

I’d had to inch along the wall to get here, and I could probably get across the hallway and lower myself into any of the classrooms I liked, but how would that help me? I could have walked if that had been what I wanted.

But—what if the wall along the
side
of the cafeteria wasn’t solid? I’d been trying to get
here
; I’d felt along the wall but I hadn’t really tried…

I turned back.

* * *

W
earing only one boot, trying to support my weight while balancing on thin strips of steel while I pounded on the wall with the other—not as quietly as I’d have liked—I thought my left foot, the one without a boot, was probably bleeding. I hoped it wouldn’t drip past the ceiling panels. Damn, it felt like standing on a knife…

It was working, though.

There had been nothing I could do about a concrete wall. But I’d eventually found a section that felt like drywall. It only came down a couple of feet from the ceiling above me, and I had to reach up, but it was there.

If the noise brought anybody to investigate, well…then I’d deal with it. Meanwhile I was going to try to get out. This was the only plan I had.

Once I had a corner broken out—good old hiking boots, fragrant and helpful—I could tear at the rest of it with my hands. I reached through and waved my hand.

I felt nothing. Empty space.

I twisted, grunting, and put my boot back on. Then I lifted myself, scraping my elbows and knees as I worked my body through the opening…I found some more sprinkler pipes and tubing that felt like conduit for electrical wiring, then reached down with my feet until I found something that would support my weight.

It was only a couple of feet down.

Two minutes later, I’d made it. I was past the cafeteria. Time to see where I could go.

* * *

I
inched my way along the wall to the east, figuring if I was above classrooms again I’d rather come out in a room where the windows faced the outside of the building than in one on the other side, where I could potentially be spotted from the courtyard. Though I knew I might have that backward. What if the teenagers were right there outside the school, looking in? Still, I had to come down
somewhere
.