After what seemed like an eternity of the dry heaves, Rebecca slowly forced herself to sit upright while wiping the back of her hand across her mouth to try and wipe away the sour taste from her memory. Stomach still in knots, she glanced around for her fallen sword and slowly reached out and pulled it close before struggling to rise.

“Come on girl, get it together.” Whispering encouragement to herself, she turned her back on the moss and vine covered corpses and carefully eased her way on down the steps. “You’re not doing yourself, or the dead, any good by sitting here and puking on top of them. Take it one step at a time. Just one step. And then one more. And if I ever see that bastard Matthew again, I’m going to neuter him.”

Strangely enough, Rebecca found that by focusing her attention on her anger for Matthew for bringing her back here and then abandoning her, she could push her feelings toward the dead aside just a little better. “First I’m going to kick his ass, and then I’m going to neuter him. Or maybe I’ll neuter him and then kick his ass. What I should do is kick his ass, neuter him, and then kick his ass again,” she murmured to herself as she eased around the larger mound that was at the bottom of the steps.

Unbidden she found herself trying to cry again, as she imagined for just a brief moment the pure panic that the people had as they tried to rush, push, and force themselves down the steps in a mad dash for the door. Several years ago she had seen a video on the television about how crazy the mobs got trying to dash into Walmart for the Christmas sales, and how half a dozen people were trampled to death. Somehow, she couldn’t help but think that if people would go that crazy for a sale, then things had to have been completely insane with monsters popping up out of thin air and chasing them down the steps and to the exit.

Just how many had fallen and died to make such a mound, Rebecca found herself wondering. Were they all dead? Had any been left there, bones broken, unable to crawl to safety as the monsters slowly came back once everyone else was gone and then turned their attention to them? Shivering at the horror of her own imagination, Rebecca stared down the hallway and tried repeating all the prime numbers she could come up with to distract herself.

“One. Is one actually a prime number,” she puzzled, and then shrugged to herself. “It is now. If a teach wants to come out and tell me it’s not, I’ll be happy to listen to whatever lecture they have to give. One. Two. Three. Five.” Staring into the classroom across the hall, at the bottom of the steps, it appeared to be much like the one she’d checked out upstairs -- moss and vines blanketed everything, and she couldn’t see any sign of anything moving from outside in the hall as she was.

“Seven. Nine. Eleven,” she repeated quietly to herself as she glanced down the long hallway towards where the nurse’s station and the main office was. The hall here was much like the one above, though the grassy mounds that she now recognized as overgrown graves of a sort seemed to dot the passage with increased frequency. Graves. That was how she wanted to think of them, at least. Bodies buried under vines and moss weren’t much different than bodies buried under dirt. Were they?

“Thirteen. Fifteen. Don’t think about it right now,” she ordered herself. Call it a grave; call it bullshit; it really didn’t matter. Whatever those piles were called, there wasn’t anything she could do for them now. “Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-one.” Tiptoeing across the hall to the opposite room, Rebecca didn’t even notice the cool feel of the moss under her feet, or care about how it squished between her toes anymore. She’d already adjusted to the presence of those things, and neatly tossed them to the corner of her mind as ‘currently unimportant’.

Feeling more naked and exposed than when she had actually been naked, Rebecca gave a little sigh of relief as she finally got out of the hall and into the room. If she could see all the way down the hall, things all the way down the hall could see her too! “Umm… twenty-three. Twenty-seven?” She was having to think a little harder now on whether a number was prime or not, as she slowly paced back and forth, up and down the scattered aisles.

“What the hell does a dungeon heart look like?” She asked herself again, and then shrugged slightly. Didn’t Matthew say it was some sort of crystal or something? Or was that just something she’d read in a book once, or saw in a show? “Twenty-nine. Asshole.” Really, she didn’t guess it mattered. She didn’t know what a dungeon heart was, but nothing she was seeing in the overgrown emptiness and stillness of the classroom seemed to her to be such a thing. All she could really do is keep moving, keep her eyes open for anything that seemed out of the ordinary, and hope that if she overlooked it she could come back to it sometime later when she finally found Matt-hole again.

“Thirty-one. Matt-hole.” Smiling grimly to herself, Rebecca eased back out and into the hallway once again and worked her way back across the hall and past the steps. “Matt-hole. I think it suits you Matthew-Asshole. That’s your name from now on,” she promised herself, as she stared at the destruction in front of her.

Past the stairs was the back doors to the school – or where they used to be. Now, it was just a scene worse than any Rebecca had ever had in any of her nightmares. The doors had been pushed, shoved, and forced so hard that one was hanging on half its hinges, trapped eternally half open by a grassy mound in front of it. The other door was missing completely, torn off and gone gods know where, and the two large windows beside the doors were shattered, with fang like shards of glass hanging down menacingly from above, while vines and moss crept over half-covered bodies impaled at the bottom.

Apparently the vines and moss didn’t like exposure to the direct sunlight, like what was wafting through the open doors and broken windows, and the thick foliage thinned and faded the closer to the door it went. Bodies were crumpled in barely recognizable heaps upon the floor, pushed or fallen, and then trampled by countless pairs of feet as everyone tried to make a mad dash to freedom. The body of a girl wearing a pink dress and white shoes hung impaled half through the left window and she could see birds pecking at several corpses outside past the exit.

Feeling the need for fresh air, Rebecca forced herself to look at the ground directly before her feel and slowly put one foot in front of the other until she was through the door and could feel the sunlight shining weekly against her face.

“Thirty-three, dammit.” Breathing deep, Rebecca couldn’t believe had sweet and fresh the air smelt and tasted out here. She’d knew she’d only been in the school for a short time, but it’d felt like an eternity to her, and the smell of decaying flesh and swamp piss moss and vines had burned her nose and mouth almost to the point where she didn’t think she’d ever smell anything ever again – and yet, the air out here smelled so much fresher. So much sweeter. It smelt like freedom, and it made her want to walk away and never look back on the horror that was behind her.

“Thirty-seven. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!” Biting her lower lip hard, she forced herself to inhale several more deep breaths and then slowly turned to head back into the school once more. Just because she wanted to run away didn’t mean she was going to.