Swallowing down the bile in the back of my throat at what I’d just said that I’d do, I decided to head down the hallway in the other direction. It’s not that I was deliberately trying to put off or delay doing what I’d said I’d do; it surely wasn’t that; it was just that I needed to check on Jello-Muncher. No need to let it sneak up on me and have a free Drake snack once more.

Slowly, I shuffled my feet down the hallway in the other direction from the exit. This time, instead of just blindly tuning out my surroundings as I single-mindedly tracked a slime trail to go yell, “Here I am, eat me and get bigger!”, at a Jello-Muncher, I made certain to take time to look into all the classrooms as I passed them.

Directly past the teacher’s lounge, the first classroom on the right had a few broken chairs but looked more or less empty and unbothered. Even the teacher’s desk and chair was in decent condition. Though dusty, it was more or less intact.

“Izzy,” I sent her a questioning thought. “By chance, was this the room you were in being tutored alone, when The Crackening happened?”

A moment's pause, and then I got back, “It was.” She kept her answer short and to the point, and after what had happened between her and Ms. Whatsername, I could empathize with her not wanting to focus on it the most.

“Was there anything you might want from in there, while I’m here?” I really wasn’t delaying in my lovely task of having to dig and rummage through people’s liquefied remains. Really, I wasn’t!

I waited patiently for several moments,before she replied with, “No. My books and pack might be in there somewhere, but there’s nothing I need out from them. I didn’t have anything special with me, it was mainly just books and things for class, and those don’t seem like they’ll help us very much at the moment.”

“Well, Ok.” I thought regretfully, but as I was slumbering away to start back down the hall, Izzy sent me another sudden thought. “Wait a moment, Drake! There might be something useful in there. From the way the room looks, it doesn’t seem to be so badly demolished. If you look around, you might see a fire extinguisher in there. I know a lot of the rooms had one, just as a means to help reduce the price of insurance on the school. If you see any of those, collect them. We might be able to use them for something in the future.”

“Sure!” I thought back gleefully. Anything to delay the inevitable! Determined to take my time and do a thorough job searching the room until I found that fire extinguisher, I walked in, turned to the right, and almost hit my head on it as it was mounted on the wall there near the door. Dammit!

“I found it.” Stupid ass people. Who hangs a fire extinguisher up where you might see it and use it? Shouldn’t those stupid things all be hidden in the attic or somewhere else impossible to find, so that when you need them they’re never there? Sighing to myself, I thought to her, “It’s easy enough to get to. I’ll just leave it where it is, and I can pick it up anytime you might want it from there easily enough.”

“Sounds good.”

Half cussing at my lack of luck, I moved on down the hall and looked into the next classroom on the left. The classrooms were more or less staggered down the hall, one on the right then one on the left, with a little spacing between them to help with the traffic flow of all the students when this place was full. Of course, that hadn’t been a problem for us, as we were the first ones here and the building was still 80% empty.

Peeking into the room, it had a few scattered corpse-puddles in it, but nothing that really looked like it was going to entice me to go in there and mess with them for now. Moving on, I checked the next room on the right and it was just an empty classroom. It didn’t seem like there was a class being held in it when The Crackening happened.

The next room on the left had a corpse-puddle with no skull almost in the doorway, but it didn’t look too destroyed either. It too must have been one of those rooms with just a single student and teacher, tutoring independently. In some schools, the concept of students having one-on-one time with a teacher would’ve been insane. Here, it really wasn’t that uncommon. Apparently, there used to be a benefit to being rich and powerful, but it doesn’t seem like it helped when The Crackening occurred.

The next door on the right was locked, so I fumbled through the keys I had found on the corpse in the rat’s nest until I could unlock it. This time, I cracked the door slowly and peeked before opening it fully. No girl with a mop-lance was going to duel with my groin again! The room here was dark and didn’t have windows or any of the emergency lighting in it, but it didn’t seem like there was anything inside that was going to try to hop out and attack, so I swung the door open as wide as possible to let as much light inside as possible from the hall.

And behold!

The Holy Grail! The Ark of The Covenant! The Seventh Crystal Skull! The Spear of Destiny! They were all before me! Indiana Jones, eat your heart out! My eyes grew wide and I had to stop myself before I did the Izzy-dance and hopped up and down on my toes.

What would’ve at one time been considered a place to avoid, I now saw as a treasure trove of rich and valuable goodies. The Janitor’s Closet for this hall! First, The Holy Grail of Survival was stacked neatly to my left: Duct Tape! Several rolls of it-can-be-used-for-anything Duct Tape! Then, The Sacred Arc of the Covenant was on a shelf under it with paint and brushes: a stack of painter’s masks! No more need for pumpkin-fresh Maxi-masks! These were the actual masks that they wore when painting or cleaning the dust out of the ventilation system!

The Seventh Crystal Skull of Buggabuggaland (Ok, so I don’t know the name of the land the skull came from in the movie. Sue me!) was jumbled messily on shelves on the other side: all sorts of rolls of fine gauge wires and strings. And there was roll after roll of toilet paper, paper towels, and even to my surprise, boxes of maxipads and tampons. Why the heck would a janitor have boxes of those things? Not that I’m complaining now, but the fellow who got ate by the rats must’ve been a professional CreeperMan!

And past all that, hanging there in all its glory, was The Spear of Destiny itself! Or may as well have been, but the feeling of gratitude and longing that welled up from inside me and put tears in my eyes. I almost wanted to drop down and worship the divinity before me! It was the great and lovely, beautiful and desired, coveralls!!

Glancing to make certain that Jello-Muncher hadn’t snuck around the corner and was jello-creeping up on me, I sat down all the things I was wearing and stripped right there on the spot. Happily, I tore the pumpkin maxi-mask off and tossed it to the floor, and then I slid one of the Janitor’s Masks over my face. All it took was one whiff of air through it, and I could see an improvement over the maxipad. The stench was still all around, but it was muted and more tolerable.

After that, I pulled a set of the coveralls over my body – there were two pairs of the glorious treasures in here – and then I wrapped the old janitor’s belt and keyring set back around my waist. I looked around for a pair of boots or overboots so I could finish my janitor’s ensemble, but didn’t have any luck there right now. At this moment, I didn’t need any of the other treasures, but at least I knew where to find them now! Before we finally moved on from this area to somewhere else, I was going to be certain to find some way to haul a lot of this out with me. I imagine this big ass school building has multiple rooms like this in it scattered in the different halls, but who knows if their contents are intact or not? Here – right in front of me – was probably the top ten list of items that a survivalist would want if asked, “What would you take with you to survive naked and alone on a deserted island?”

I was so happy I felt like running out, rushing back,and just kissing Izzy from head to toe to share in the joy! Who would’ve believed it?! Just two simple weeks ago I would’ve sniffed up my nose and avoided this room as it was beneath even me, but now… Now, I wanted to put an altar in here and worship at it!

It’s insane how quickly our values change. Two weeks ago, I would’ve clinched my stomach and willingly rummaged through the liquefied corpses to get their expensive jewelry and such, and I would’ve avoided this place at all costs. Now, it was just the opposite. What use is jewelry or wealth in this new world? But the things in here; those were the new treasures to me!

Shaking my head, I bitterly let out a small self-deprecating laugh. Had humanity fallen so far in just a few weeks? Or were we just idiots with our heads up in the air and chasing things of no real value in the time before The Crack? I guess I’ll leave that question up to the professional philosophers, if any remain. For now, I’ve got to get back to my scouting.

Feeling much better to be wearing something besides a dress or my own naked skin, I finally went back out to the hallway and shut the door to the janitor’s closet. It’s odd how much our identities are wrapped up in what we wear. I’d felt almost emasculated while wearing an ass-showing dress, and now I felt almost empowered to have on a man’s pair of working coveralls. I was still the same me, but just by changing what I was covered in, it changed how I felt about myself.

Feeling almost like smiling, I grabbed up my club and started back up the hall. I kept repeating the process of checking classroom on one side and then the next classroom on the other, but nothing exception stood out to me. Some rooms were completely empty where no class had been assigned at all to the room yet. Some rooms were more or less undisturbed as the students and teachers either weren’t in them or had ran from them before the monsters got there, so nothing had a real reason to bother those rooms. Some rooms had one or two pools of liquefied corpses in them, and occasionally, I’d see a room of complete slaughter where half a dozen or more people were all killed in the same place.

Death, decay, or emptiness. It didn’t take too long before my surroundings put a damper back on my mood and I was feeling the somberness that exuded from all around me. I worked my way back up to the crossway of the main intersection and looked down the main hallway as far as I could see, but there wasn’t any sign of Jello-Muncher being on this side of the building currently.

Slowly and carefully, I started working my way down the west hall, heading slowly towards the main central hall that lead up towards the exit. I passed several classrooms, and the bathrooms, which I took time to go take a peek inside to make certain they were clear as there was no glass windows in the door to look in. The same ole familiar guy’s toilet greet me, much like usual. Nothing out of place in it. The mysterious female restroom was surprising enough, just like the guy’s. The only difference was that where we had urinals along the wall, here there were little vending machines which sold tampons and maxipads, along with individual packets of Aspirin, Tylenol, and Bayer for some loose change or the swipe of a credit card. I’m sorry Mr. Janitor. You probably weren’t a CreeperMan. You were probably just some guy stuck doing a nasty job. My apologies to your late spirit.

Leaving the restrooms here, I double checked for that Jello-Muncher, but I still didn’t see it. All this creeping and crawling was making my nerves stand on end! Something that size couldn’t just disappear! Could it? What if it could make itself so transparent that you couldn’t even see it?

The more I thought about what it could do, the more nervous I made myself. Soon, little beads of nervous sweat dripped down my forehead. I slowed to almost a crawl going down the hallway, and I poked and prodded the air in front of myself before and after each step. My own imagination was psyching me out!

I imagine that I must’ve looked like a pure idiot slinking near the wall, poking the air in front of me, jabbing out at the air beside me. I was just grateful that no one could see me. And then I remembered that Isabella was watching through that little party circle with my image in it!

Dammit! Talk about embarrassing! I immediately straightened up, and starting walking down the hallway once again, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. A man has to look like a man, for people to think he’s a man, you know!

I was nearing what should be the midpoint of the west hall here, when I noticed that the way to the main hallway was blocked. Desks, chairs, tables, and even doors were stacked up and piled together into a jumbled mess that I could only describe as being similar to the goblin igloo that I’d seen in the very first room. This jumble of mess didn’t look quite so much like an igloo though, as it did as a makeshift wall of some sort.

It was an amalgam of all sorts of debris and rubble, and it looked as if it had been pushed inwards and bent by some large force. And it was then that I realized Isabella was probably right this time, whereas she had been wrong with her first assumption. I don’t think we found a safe-zone at all. I think we just got lucky and were in a dead-end of a hallway patrolled by a monster that nothing wanted to deal with.

The monsters didn’t give up searching the halls where we had hid. They had blocked them off so that they wouldn’t be out in the dead end and have the Jello-Muncher come back down the hall and trap them on the other side.

Just as I was beginning to ponder on just how big and scary Jello-Muncher must actually be to make the other monsters block off the tunnel it kept patrolling, I noticed a little green head stick out from a gap between a chair and a table in the wall. It saw me, I saw it, and it gave a little gurgling cry and started to wiggle itself out of the fragmented wall of junk. Apparently a little goblin doesn’t need much room to wiggle through those cracks – I’d realized that from the tiny tunnel the first goblin had built in his igloo.

I was expecting the little guy to charge me as soon as he wiggled out into the hallway, but he didn’t. Instead, he took a stance with his knife and poked it threateningly in my direction. I paused, thinking about what the heck to do in this situation, and another head wiggled out of the crack, followed quickly by the goblin that it belonged to. It too took up an aggressive, but waiting stance, as another goblin started to wiggle out to join them.

Oh crap! Looks like I just found trouble!