Chapter 5: The Escape

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As John closed the door behind them, he turned to look at his group. Reaching into his pockets, he said, “You’ll need these.” He handed each of them a pistol and a magazine of bullets. They looked at the heavy piece of metal in their hands.

“I--I don’t think...I don’t think I can use this.” Sam said hesitantly.

“Make sure the safety is off, aim for the head, and pull the trigger.” He said as he checked his own gun. “Or at least, that’s all that there is to it.” He added. He was no gun expert. The first time he’d ever shot one was a few minutes ago and he’d only seen how to do it by trial and error and what he’d seen in the movies.

"No, I mean, I don't think I can kill people, John." John looked at the others and they seemed to also be struggling with the thought of taking a life.

"You get killed or you kill. I'm not going to force you guys but if you're in a position where the only chance of surviving and saving the ones you love is by pulling that trigger, wouldn't you do it?" He asked, looking deep into the eyes of each person.

They all looked down at their guns. David's eyes flashed with resolve and he firmly gripped the gun. The girl also put the gun behind her in her pants. Sam, after a few seconds, looked up at his friends who seemed ready to take the lives of others.

"You're really going to do it? Take a life?" He asked them. "I want to survive, yeah. But I'm not going to do it over the dead bodies of others. You guys deal with the infected. I won't take part in it." He tried to hand John back the gun but John refused it.

"Keep it. Just in case." John said. Sam hesitated but nodded his head and pocketed the gun in his pocket.

They carefully made their way through the empty halls. John heard squishing sounds and banging at the hallway intersecting the one they were currently in. Lifting a hand to stop the others, they went into a crouching position and John carefully peered over the side of the wall.

On the other side a female student was kneeling over the body of a teacher. The students hair was ripped out in patches on one side of her head, as if someone had yanked it out trying to pull her somewhere. The rest of her brown hair was matted down against her skin, plastered with blood from some unknown assailant or victim. She was crouching low to the ground, standing on her hands and knees like some animal as she gorged on the intestines spilled out over the gaping hole of the dead teacher’s abdomen.

Blood flowed like rivers from various open wounds on her body, a thick, viscous red-black substance that seemed to flow out like lava, slowly making its way down to the once clean bleached floors, joining with the other pools of blood.

Further down the hall, other students could be seen banging on the doors of some of the rooms while other doors had been smashed open. Screams could be heard all around that wing of the school as students not affected by the virus scrambled to find places to escape or hide.

Shattered doors and windows permeated the hallway as the infected broke through to get at the students inside, while the students broke the windows, opting to jump out the two story window rather than deal with what came knocking at their door.

The others saw the massacre that lay before them, and their faces went green. Sam ran a little bit back down the hall and hurled what he had eaten for breakfast that day. The others didn’t seem that far behind from following Sam’s actions but managed to hold theirs in. John wasn’t feeling too well either, seeing so much blood and guts scattered around the hallway.

It was truly a terrifying scene of carnage that they could have only seen in horror movies. Living and breathing it in reality was much more sickening and left their stomachs rampaging to push its contents back up their throats

“Other way. There.” John said as he moved down another hallway towards the science hall. He had been there earlier so, as far as he knew, that was a safer option to getting towards the front entrance. The only reason he hadn’t taken that way beforehand was because he didn’t want the others to see his handiwork in dispatching the four security cards.

On their way, he remembered to enter the same biology classroom that he had been in earlier.

The sterile environment with vials and test tubes hanging in racks, the anatomy posters hanging on the wall, even the poster of a little cat wearing a lab coat saying a science pun, all these little things recalled a time of peace, order, and rationalism, something that was hardly seen in the current predicament the students found themselves.

The room was quiet except for the muffled sounds of chaos that seeped through the walls. The atmosphere was so peaceful and quiet that the four walked with light steps, barely making a sound as they fear that it would shatter the precious silence. As John made his way over to the drawer to retrieve some more scalpels, the others had a chance to have a breather from the stress that had piled up until that point. David made sure the door was closed and kept a lookout through the small window on the door while the girl sat down on one of the chairs near the front of the classroom. Sam simply slid down the wall and sat on the floor, his head in his hands as his shaky, rasping breaths pierced the tense silence of the room.

“Sam.” David said.

Sam lifted his head from his hands and looked up at David, wiping away at some of the tears that had started streaking down his face.

“What?”

“We’ll handle everything. We’ll all get out of here.” David awkwardly tried to reassure his unstable friend. He had never really been good at dealing with openly expressing emotions and feelings, preferring to internalize it and rebrand it with his own cynical twist.

Seeing his close friend breaking down, he had tried to step in and calm him. Sam rubbed hard at his eyes and looked up, a little bit better but still struggling with something.

“Thanks...I guess.” Sam said.

John returned from rummaging through cabinets and returned, giving each of them the same lab coats and glasses as well as arming them with more scalpels to act as makeshift knives.

“The lab coats and glasses should protect you from any fluids getting on or in you and will ward off the infection. If you ever need to kill one of them up close, use a scalpel to their temple and I think that should basically do the job.” John explained. The others took the equipment and put them on, making them look like a team of scientists rather than a group of students fending for their lives.

They left the room and headed towards the front door but before they could, the girl stopped them.

"Look!" The four looked out the window and saw several dozen people moving towards the front door.

"Seems like we need a new exit plan." David commented.

"Come on. We can go out the back." Sam said as he moved toward the other side of the school. The others followed and turned down another hallway. Luckily, this one was devoid of people and they had no trouble getting to the back door. They opened the door which led out to an area dug out below ground level. Going up the stairs, they finally made it out of the building.

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The stairs led out into a rear parking lot where John noticed a man fumbling with his keys trying to get into his car. The man was a security guard who had been in charge of watching the cameras, who, seeing what had befell the others, decided it was above his pay grade and abandoned his post. A moan was heard from behind him, and as he turned his head, he saw the last security guard, or at least what remained of him, walking towards him.

"Oh, God. Oh, God. Come on." He fumbled with his keys, dropping it accidentally. He quickly bent down to pick it up and clumsily looked for the correct key. He kept looking backwards to see the approaching security guard. He yelled in frustration and as the other was nearly upon him, he turned around, taking out his gun to point at the stumbling man.

“Stay back, Harold! Get away from me!” He said with a shaky voice. Harold didn’t respond and just continued forward.

“Please, don’t make me do this.” With trembling hands, he raised the gun up and hearing no response, shot at near point blank range at the chest of the guard. Seeing no reaction from Harold, the guard had a look of horror and before he knew it, Harold pushed the man into the car, knocking them down, and started biting the man like a rabid dog.

Seeing all that had happened, John went up to the duo and promptly shot Harold in the head.

“Holy shit, John.” Sam whispered as the others came up to see what had transpired.

“Are they alive?” David asked.

“Watch” John replied to them both. After a few moments, the man awoke and stood up. He looked at the group and walked towards them. John turned to the others then.

“Did you see? They come back and once they do, they’re not the same. Bullets don’t kill them unless you aim for the head.” With that, John raised his gun and shot the man, ending him.

“How-how is that possible? The virus was supposed to be nothing like this.” The girl said. It seems she, too, had heard the erroneous news report on the symptom progression of the virus.

John walked up to the two security guards and picked up their guns and ammunition and after thinking for a moment, took their wallets.

“You’re stealing from the dead? What’s wrong with you?” Sam said, angered that John could so nonchalantly kill two people and proceed to take everything they had. He pulled John’s shoulder trying to move him away from the dead man. John stood up suddenly and turning around quickly, backhanded Sam across the face. Sam stumbled, nearly falling over from the hit.

“What was that fo-”

“Get a grip, Sam.” John said. “You see what happens to these people and we need what they have to get out of here and make it out there. You think I’m doing this for fun? Wake up. We have to do what we have to do.” John almost yelled the last sentence in anger both at Sam’s stubbornness and at his own actions.

He understood the harshness of his words and the brutality he had just committed. The blood of these men would never be washed from his hands.

In a gentler voice he said, “Look I’m sorry for hitting you. But there was really nothing we could have done for these peop-these things anymore.” Sam was rubbing his red cheek, flexing his jaw to make sure nothing was broken. He glared at John and didn’t say a word.

Sighing, John turned around and picked up the keys the man had dropped and opened the car door.

“Get in.” John told them.

“You have a license?”

“Got it last month.”

“What?! Damn, you beat me. I was going to get tested next Saturday.” David replied. The almost normal conversation seemed out of place for the gruesome seen they were standing around. They all got into the car. Sam and the girl sat in the back while John drove and David called shotgun.

They pulled out of the parking lot and made their way out onto the road.

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As they drove in the back roads, they saw a few cars racing by filled with people or supplies going to some unknown place they would deem safe from everything that is happening. The four of them just ignored them and drove by, the occasional police car screeching past, trying to control the mayhem. As they turned onto a main street, they saw a barricade of police standing in front of the city hall.

“-I repeat. Remain where you are or we will open fire! I repeat, we will open fire!” Police cars lined the road and police equipped with shotguns, pistols, and semi-automatics pointed towards a crowd of over a hundred infected people shuffling towards them, oblivious to the warnings of the police captain on the megaphone.

No change was seen until a sudden, lone gunshot was heard.

“Hold your fir-” The captain was yelling at the policemen but he was drowned out by the shooting. The others, hearing the first gunshot, had thought that they were given the orders to open fire, so they rained hell upon the horde coming towards them. After 15 seconds of continuous gunfire, the sounds died down as they lowered their empty weapons in shock. Only a handful of people in the crowd had died, while the majority continued to walk on, impervious to any injury.

“Reload and open fire!” The captains shrill shout could be heard over the deafening silence that had followed. Quickly, the clicking of reloading could be heard and soon after, the shooting resumed.

The four teens in the car, having seen this unfold, new that the situation was truly dire and the pandemic had spread fast and hard to their city.

Sam was in the back seat but having seen the entire thing unfold, he finally came to realize the inhuman side of these infected.

“What are those things…” Sam asked himself. To him, these were people originally, but what he was seeing in front of him simply went against everything he knew. These were no longer people, they were something more...something so scary he couldn’t bring himself to think about.

“Floor it, John.” David said.

John happily complied and they sped away towards the elementary school.

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Five minutes passed in silence as they drove. John finally spoke up, never looking away from the road.

“What’s your name?” He asked the girl. She had been staring out the window and she looked back towards him.

“What is your name? I realized we never introduced ourselves. I’m John.”

“David”

“Sam”

The others said their names.

“It’s Sophia.” She said.

“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Sophia. I hope it could have been under better circumstances.” John replied. She showed a strained smile and said nothing, resuming to study the world beyond her car door window.

Another minute passed before they arrived in front of the elementary school. Because it was detached from the main portion of the city, John hoped that it hadn’t been affected by what was going on. They rolled into the circular driveway in front of the school and got out of the car. It was eerily quiet and that put them all on edge. John slowly stepped up to the double doors and looked inside. There didn’t seem to be any commotion so he opened the door and stepped in, a blast of cool air from the air conditioning blowing past his face, causing his lab coat to flutter slightly behind him.

He walked into the building and looked around and down each of the two hallways that led to either wing of the building.

“Can I help you?” A voice rang out in the quiet antechamber, causing the four to jump. John turned around and saw an old man with greying hair standing in the door frame of his office, a leg propping the door open as he looked out at the four of them. He eyed them suspiciously up and down as their lab coats were out of place at such an establishment.

John simply said, “I’m here to pick up my brother.”

“Oh, well in that case, you wouldn’t mind if I see your ID?” The old man wanted to take some precautions to verify that the teen in front of him was who he said he was.

John took out his wallet, being careful not to confuse it with the dead security guard’s and took out his school ID. Handing it to over, he waited as the old man looked over the card to make sure it wasn’t a forgery and then said, “Ah, you must be Jacob’s brother. Yes, I’ll call him up in a moment. Why don’t you step into my office, the all of you.” He motioned for them to enter.

John and Sophia took the chairs in the room while David leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. Sam just stood their for a moment and went to stand next to the window, looking out occasionally to check for any infected.

The principal maneuvered his way past the teens and sat down at his desk. He pulled up the phone and clicking a button, a buzz could be heard from the P.A. system.

“Jacob Rider, please come to the main office. Your brother is here to pick you up.” The man said in a professional manner.

Minutes passed before a young boy came in with his backpack and entered the office. Seeing John and several people he didn’t know present wearing lab coats, he was confused.

“John, what’s going on?” He asked.

Not wanting to worry him too much, John smiled and said, “Nothing much, we need to go home though. Do you have your stuff?”

“Yeah. Did something happen?”

“I’ll tell you on the way there.”

They stood up to leave and everyone filed out of the room. Before the professor closed the door, John stopped him and looked directly into the man’s eyes.

“I suggest you lock the doors, Mr. Principal. Don’t let anyone in, no matter how much they ask.” He said with a serious voice.

“I don’t understand what you mean young man. Is something going on?” The man asked.

“Yeah. Something like a code red, but times a thousand.” John said. Seeing the man still not able to comprehend, he sighed and whispered, “the virus is spreading in the city and it’s a lot worse than what the news is saying it is.” At that, the man’s face paled and he nodded. John nodded back and left the man to deal with his school the way he saw fit.

The others had already made it to the car when John came out.

“What was that about?” Sophia asked.

“Nothing much, just wanted to give the old man a heads up on what’s happening downtown. Get in.” he said.

Moments later, the slamming of doors and the skidding of wheels could be heard as the car drove out of the school lot.