Fades view
I walked through the entrance of the elementary-middle school, the first thing my senses picked up was a smell that made my stomach turn, and I knew what it was before seeing the blood. I made my way to the front office to grab a map of the school when I saw the microphone for the speakers. A thought occurred to me to use it to draw the infected out into the open while alerting what survivors there were. Setting the speakers to only the hallways I spoke into the mic, "Attention, if there is anyone still inside the school, stay where you are and I'll come find you. There should be a call button in all the classes so you can let me know where you are." I shut the mic off and waited to see if anyone could reach one, after about fifteen minutes only three lights blinked, two of them class rooms on opposite sides of the school, and the cafeteria which was close to the second class. I decided to head for the solo class first, thinking there may be less infected there, and marked the positions on a map of the school I found. As I walked thru the hallway's I found a backpack with food and water, so I picked it up and kept going.
I was hoping the school would be empty of the infected but I'm not that lucky, I turned the corner onto the hallway with the class, and scattered in front of me were 9 infected children. I was a loner by nature detached from the world and introvert with little emotion to speak of, but I stood in the hallway scared out of my mind. "Why the hell am I risking my life for people I don't know? I could live without them, and probably make it further," I thought to myself, before sighing knowing that if I was to survive I needed information, and only those that were in the middle of it could tell me what was happening. But it wasn't until I heard crying from the classroom that I finally steeled my nerves.
Unfortunately I was still hesitant as I walked up to the first infected, because when I hit it with the crowbar knocking him to the floor he started to get back up. It took two more hits before he stopped moving, but at this point the others in the hall heard me and started coming at me. I mentally face palmed myself for losing the element of surprise. The next one went down and stayed down after I hit it. Gaining some confidence I took two at the same time, but when I swung the machete down on the head one of the infected it got stuck. With the other five baring down on me I thought that maybe I should leave while I could, but I decided to stay. Hearing the commotion outside, the people in the class started yelling to let me know which class they were in. Which was all the help I needed because the noise drew away half of the infected. I kicked the dead girl off the machete causing another to stumble. After I dispatched the ones in front of me I went after the ones that had doubled back.
I continued cut down two more when I realized that the infected weren't paying attention to me and just kept walking to the noise. I decided not to worry about it at the moment and just cut their heads off with the machete, after making sure the hallway was clear I went in. Inside I found a teacher with eight kids, all looking like they were about to fall over from a lack of food, I tossed them a pack I had picked up filled with water and snacks. While they were eating I went pulled the teacher aside to see what she knew. "You guys did good staying alive during all this. If you don't mind my asking, how long have you guys been here?" I asked the teacher. "Since about Saturday afternoon, when the siren went out to gather at nearby shelters," she said before taking a drink of water, "nobody knew what was going on, just that the governor had sounded a state wide alarm. The National Guard was supposed to come and secure the school but they never came, it was a slaughter, nobody knew what to expect." I remembered that on Saturday I saw a number of cars driving past my house, but I was so drunk I thought it was some parade or something. My parents told me it would be my down fall one day, who knew that it would save me from this chaos.
"Where have you been through all this," the teacher asked. Too ashamed to say I was so high I was knocking on the sky and listening to the stars I settled with, "I was in bed sick with the flu all weekend, I live alone so I woke up planning on going to work this morning. Needless to say I wasn't planning on this, I sort of wish I had stayed in bed." She reached out and grabbed my hand before saying, "I for one am not, we might have dead from thirst or worse before help would've arrived." I nodded knowing that without me they would have died here huddling each other for comfort, I shook my head to get it back in the game. After everyone gathered what they needed, I went to check and see if the hall was still clear. Giving them the go ahead I led them to one of the buses outside, telling them to stay put while I checked for more survivors.
When I reached the hall the other classroom and cafeteria were on I realized why both groups weren't holed up together. I looked around the corner to find about thirty infected pounding on the doors to the cafeteria and loitering in the hall with more than half of them being adults. "I need to stop being so nice or else it will get me killed one of these days," I thought to myself. I knew that if I went out there they would swarm and over power me. Seeing one section of lockers lying on the ground I realized that if they weren't bolted to the wall then I could move one section of it to where the infected would have to come at me one at a time. Putting my weapons down within reach, I started to get down to business, I had moved one of the lockers half way before they took notice and started coming at me. I finished just as the first one reached me making me dive for my weapons. I grabbed my machete swinging behind me as I grabbed my crow bar.
To my good fortune I cut its head off just before the kid took a bite out of my ass, so I got up and steeled my nerves for the rest to come. The next few were easy, coming at me in intervals that I started to get into the rhythm of it. Slicing horizontally with the machete and then swinging the around so I could use their momentum to pull it back out without having to stop and bashing another in the head with the crowbar. About half way through I angled the crowbar wrong and it hooked into the head of one of them causing it to be pulled from my grasp when they fell to the ground. I immediately lost my rhythm when I lost the crowbar and started to swing like a maniac with the machete, but I couldn't keep up with the speed they were coming through the gap.
After a while of slicing my way through them I started to get tired, and the fear that I would die here started to seep in. That's when my mind went blank with anger about how my life growing up was hell with four brothers, about how I had to struggle for even the smallest bit of approval from my parents, about how screwed up it was that I woke up this morning to this hell of a world and before I knew it they were all dead on the floor. I cleaned myself up as much as I could before proceeding, it wouldn't do to go through all this just to be killed by someone that thought I was one of the infected. I knocked on the classroom door and the cafeteria door saying that it was all clear to come out. There were about four more kids, eleven adults, and five teenagers between them. After gathering up what little food there was left I guided them to the bus where the others were waiting. There was even a tearful reunion as some children were reunited with either their parents or siblings, unfortunately not all of them were so fortunate. There were still four kids with no one left, so the teacher I had met earlier volunteered to care for them, when everyone was settled, the adults started to talk about the next course of action. Some wanted to go to the military base in the next town while others wanted to just get out of dodge.
"I don't know about you all, but I'm going to take the teacher and the kids somewhere safe. If there are any among you that wish to come with us, be prepared to follow my orders because I don't plan on dying anytime soon," I said. So we split into three groups, I took the first, which was the teacher along with the four children and some families that I had inadvertently reunited. The second was a group of men with a guy and his teenage son that decided they would try for the base, the last was a family of six that had luckily come through unscathed, and they decided to make a go to a cabin up north that their family owned.
We split up as soon as everyone had a ride, not knowing if we were ever going to see them again. I decided to take my group to the local supercenter at the edge of town since it had an outdoors section with guns, and a thirty foot fence around the garden center, plus the fact that it had a ten foot high concrete wall along the loading dock. It doesn't provide as much protection as my job, but there is less of a need for them to go foraging for supplies by staying there. "The only downside are looters and assholes would target those places too," I thought to myself. The upside is that we didn't encounter many of the infected along the way, and the supercenter looked like it hadn't been looted yet. The downside was that even though it was locked up tight, there was a truck that had smashed through a portion of the wall in the docking area trying to get in, unfortunately they didn't make it. I stopped short of the supercenter to think of a way to get in, it was decided that we would pull up to the fire escape, make our way inside and load ourselves down with guns to clear out the store of infected. The only ones that volunteered were two teenager's that came with us. One was Thomas, a good old country boy by the look of it, brown eyed with dirty blond hair in a crew cut, jeans, gray t-shirt, and work boots. His mother tried to talk him out of going but he refused when none of the men volunteered. The other was Julia, your usual punk rocker chick with brown eyes, short black hair with streaks of blue in it, black combat boots, with a skirt over black jeans, and sleeveless jacket over a long sleeved shirt. The bus in the meantime would block the hole in the wall while the rest of the guy's and I killed all the infected that had gotten in.
I climbed onto the roof of the bus and did my best John Wayne impression as they brought the bus up to the fire escape. It was difficult to climb up the ladder to the roof of the supercenter because I was already tired from the fighting at the school. "I'm paying for not going to gym now," I thought "Hey, I'm a nerd and proud of it, so shoot me." We reached the top of the store without any surprises, I was breathing heavy from the climb but there were no infected on the roof. After looking for a few minutes we found the roof access entrance and got to work on the latch with my crowbar. When we got the hatch open it I safe no infected leading down the stairs. I looked to Julia and Thomas telling them to wait up here as I went down. They tried to argue with me but I silenced them with a look and said, "I will go down first and secure the area at the bottom of the stairs from the infected that way we don't have to worry about getting swarmed once we are in." This seemed to abate their argument, I on the other hand was mentally punching myself in the nuts for volunteering to be the first, "When did I suddenly start being so proactive or do I have a death wish. I'll have to figure this out later, hopefully before I get myself killed."
I put a pin in that thought as I started making my way down. I started making my way down with my machete at the ready trying not to make noise and alert the infected of my presence. The moment I reached the bottom step I stopped and listened for any sound before peaking around corner for any approaching infected. It was a hallway with what looked like office's, luckily all the doors were closed, so I went to them one at a time and knocked on them. When I didn't hear anything I opened the door to do a more thorough check but all the offices were empty, if not a little messy. I continued down the hallway and found myself in the storage area. I didn't see anything so I walked to the end of the section and checked two aisles over to make sure they were clear of infected.
After, I made my way back to the stairs and signaled them to come down. Thomas was the next and made it down without a hitch, when he stood next to me I handed him the crowbar and told him to stand guard at the other end of the hallway. Once they were down I led them to clear the storage area first. I took the lead and had Thomas take the rear with Julia in the middle. As we worked our way down the aisles Julia slipped on some blood slamming into the shelf next to her. I was about to go see if she was alright until an infected walked into view, so I went to work on it first. It was a simple matter to dispatch before making my way back, Thomas on the other hand went to help Julia right away so he didn't notice the infected exit the aisle at the other end, his back was to the infected as it approached. I ran down the aisle and yelled at them to duck as I neared swinging the machete, as Thomas ducked I was able to lop off the infected's head. Thomas gave me a grateful look, but I didn't say anything as I pulled them to their feet since the other infected were coming out of the aisles. I sent them to deal with an infected at one end as I went to take out three that came in through the other end.
There was plenty of room at the end of the aisles so I could maneuver around them. I killed the first one easy enough and kicked its body into the second causing it to be pinned under the weight. Giving me time to pull out the machete as the third made her way around them, but with another swing she dead falling into the shelves. I then moved to the last one still pinned, putting it out of its misery. I turned around to see how the others were doing to find them still stepping on an infected's head, having long since been pummeled into nothing. Once we had caught our breath we moved on throughout the store to clear it out but we only found seven more infected on the main floor of the store. As we made our way to the gun section I thought to myself that it wasn't a perfect plan but considering all the things that could've gone wrong, it went rather well. Luckily we didn't have to look for the keys to the gun cage since the manager "Karl", was behind the counter, I guess he got bit before he could get it open. We loaded as many weapons as we could carry since we didn't want to give the infected a chance to bite us while we happened to be reloading, we walked outside after giving the signal to the bus to block the wall and started shooting our way through the infected. We ran out of bullets before killing them all, but since there was only a hand full of them left we switched to melee weapons. A combination of baseball bats and machetes to off the rest, unfortunately one of the kids on the bus thought he could help and jumped out. We couldn't reach him in time before an infected tore a chunk out of his neck. Once they were all dead we ushered the people off the bus, after they gave the kid a moment of silence we moved them inside, I assured them that I would give him a burial on the grounds later. I told everyone to get some sleep in the store after clearing it out since it also had a bedroom furniture section and everyone was tired from such a long day even though it was only a little past five.
While everyone was settling in I piled up the things I would need to re-brick the wall, it didn't take me long to chip away the broken parts, I just hoped I could finish before any infected could make it under the bus. It took me the better part of two hours to finish with the wall, and once I did I started piling up the dead bodies in the loading area for burning, that's when the teacher found me. "I brought you some food we cooked up. We missed you at dinner, if you had told us we would've help," she said. "I know, but considering what you've all have been through these past few days I knew it would be best to let you all rest while you can," I replied as I took my gloves off ", it also gave me some time to myself to get my thought's in order." She sat down beside me as I uncovered my plate to find chicken nuggets with French fries. "There where grits and eggs inside, but it got cold before I could find you so I brought these instead, I hope you don't mind," she said. "By the way do you have a name? It wouldn't do to keep calling you teach?" I asked her. "You can call me Isis, I figure there is no point in keeping my old name seeing as everyone that knew it is dead. Besides, it sounds exotic, right?" she told me as she laid down in the grass to stare at the stars. "That's the first sane thing I've heard all day," I said before looking at the sky, "then you can call me Fade." She just stared at me in silence as I ate the food, when I was done she took the plate and headed back inside. I followed shortly after to find my own place to sleep that night.