Project Aquarius (The Sensitives Series Book 1) (7 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Drea

“This isn’t real. This isn’t real,” Matt repeated over and over again.

     The post-glam rocker boy had reached full on freak out and Drea couldn’t blame him. Her brain was spinning faster than a carnival ride. There was no off button.

     “This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real.”

     The repetition reminded Drea of her brother.

     The last thirty minutes had sucked the youth out of Matt’s face. His eyes were glazed over, giving him a robotic appearance. He paced back and forth intermittently hitting lockers with his fists; the rhythmic movements making him look like an escaped mental patient. Hair wild–– his tears and snot had combined to make a mucous paste that was dripping off his chin onto the floor.

“This can’t be happening. It makes no sense. I’m dreaming. I need to wake up. I’m dreaming. Wake up, Matt. Wake up!” he yelled at himself.

The talking to himself thing was fairly new, and Drea was sure, a sign of mental instability.

Matt punched the nearest locker with all of his strength. The yellow metal gave way to a small dent. His fist recoiled in painful regret.

“Ow!” he complained. His hand was already bloodied and bruised from all the previous punches.

“That isn’t going to help,” Drea advised.

They had spent the last twenty minutes opening every classroom in the history wing looking for survivors. There weren’t any. At this point Drea was emotionally numb, which was preferable to Matt’s deteriorated state of mental health.

“They can’t all be dead. We’re fine. We’re asleep. We’re going to wake up and everything will be fine,” Matt justified. His mind was trying to protect him with thick layers of denial. “This isn’t real. This isn’t real.”

Drea had to stop his maddening chant. “Does your hand hurt?” she asked.

Matt looked sheepishly at his knuckles. “Yeah. So?”

“Can you feel pain in dreams?” she challenged.

He answered in silence. Her effort had worked. Matt had shifted his attention away from the lockers for the moment. Now, he was repeatedly hitting the power button on his phone.

“Turn on, dammit. Turn on,” he repeated.

“That isn’t going to help either. I already tried my phone dozens of times.”

Her cell was dead and she felt vulnerable without it. She wanted to call her Mom and tell her about the horror at Phipps Academy. But in her gut, Drea felt there were more people effected than just prep school students. Besides, her Mom hadn’t tried to contact her. No parents had shown up at the school. No police. There had been no contact from the outside world. No sounds. Her mind raced. What was going on?

“It’s been almost an hour. And there are no sirens,” Drea pointed out.

“Mm-hmm,” Matt said, eyes wild, as he obsessively spun the combination lock on his locker.

It popped open abruptly. He dug around in the bottom and pulled out his cell phone charger. He waived it in the air like an Olympic medal. “Ta-da!”

Drea was dumbfounded. “What do you think that’s going to do?”

“My cell phone is dead. I need to charge it,” he said as if it was a typical day in the typical world.

“There’s no electricity, genius. There’s a power outage.”

Even the exit signs were off. The world was unplugged.

Desperately, Matt clamored, “Then we have to go tell someone, get help.”

“I agree it’s a good idea to figure out how widespread the destruction is. But how many people are dead, dude? The whole city of Arlington? All of Boston? The whole United States? The World? All of Phipps Academy for a start!” Drea’s brain had nothing to grab onto, no explainable fear. “So who do you call when the phones don’t work and everyone you know is dead?”

Drea watched the top layer of Matt’s denial crack off as he slouched against the bank of lockers and slid to the floor. Mindlessly, he touched the screen of his phone over and over again, as if dialing 9-1-1.

“Everyone can’t be dead,” he reasoned, “Other people must have survived like us. We have to find them.”

“Survived what exactly? It’s not even clear what happened. We shouldn’t go anywhere until we figure out what the danger is.”

The two sat in silence, testing out their lungs, making sure breathing still worked properly. It didn’t seem right for a high school to be so still. So dead.

Matt finally broke the silence with, “Zombies?”

Drea looked at him quizzically. “For real?”

“Everyone’s been talking about it for years. It’s finally here. The zombie apocalypse, right?” The fervor of his words highlighted his desperation.

“You’ve been playing too many video games, dude. All the bodies are still dead. There are no zombies here.”

Drea pointed at the nearest body, a big upperclassmen in a letter jacket that had face-planted in the middle of the hall. He had obvious razor burn from a poor shaving attempt. His shoulder muscles bore the awkward bulk of a teen that overdid it in the weight room. He looked like a sausage stuffed into his too-small clothing.

Shamefully, Drea realized she didn’t know his name.

“Look at him. Something huge must’ve knocked him over,” she said.

“Nate? Nothing could knock him over. He was a tackle. Went to states this year.”

“Like a meteor or something…” Drea guessed.

“No, we would have felt a meteor. It would have been like a gigantic earthquake. I didn’t even feel anything,” Matt said.

Drea thought back to the rushing sound she had heard, no not heard, felt. It had coursed through her body like a million volts of electricity. It was painless and subtle, but deeply disturbing. Obviously, other people had not felt it coming like she had. Everyone else had seemed clueless.

“Solar flare?”

Matt hoisted himself off the floor and peered out the nearest window. “The sun looks just fine. No spaceships either, so it can’t be an alien invasion,” he said with a hint of sarcasm.

In fact, Drea noted, the sky was creepily normal, bright blue with wisps of distant clouds. “Can’t be a virus because everyone died at the same time. Could it be biological warfare? Something airborne maybe?”

“No. We would have died as soon as I opened the door. For some reason the studio made us immune or something.”

“The studio!” Drea shouted as she took off at full speed.

She didn’t consider herself athletic, but when she was determined she could certainly haul it. She wound her way through the maze of hallways back to the music wing.

When she got to the other side of the building, she slowed, noting how disconcerting it was that absolutely everything was still in its place. She paused at the doorway to the music studio.

“Hello?” This was the first time Drea tried speaking directly into the silence. “Anyone?”

Nothing.

Drea leaned over Mr. Conte’s corpse, which remained sprawled in the doorway. She wanted to close his eyes because it was the respectful thing to do, but she hesitated because she had never touched a dead body before. Matt was the one who had rolled Sierra over. She had to work up the nerve.

“C’mon. You can do this,” she encouraged herself. “You will have to touch one eventually. Might as well be now.”

Drea took a sharp breath in and gently shut her teacher’s eyelids. They were clammy, but not entirely cold. As an afterthought, she folded Mr. Conte’s arms over his chest to make him look peaceful like she had seen at funerals. Weird, that she was taking so much care with a teacher she wasn’t particularly fond of. But he was gone now and the rules had changed.

“What are you doing?” Matt’s voice startled her.

“I… I don’t know,” she stuttered with embarrassment. “I thought there would be some answers here.”

Her backpack was still lying on the floor where she had left it at the start of second period. That felt like a lifetime ago.

“But there are no answers here, just dead things…”

“C’mon, we should go outside and check things out,” Matt encouraged. He reached out and touched Drea’s shoulder gently. His grip was firm yet comforting… and very warm.

Matt’s touch shot a burst of excitement through Drea’s body that was foreign to her. She wanted to collapse into his arms and sob like the frightened little girl she was inside. She wanted to pull him close and embrace him like the woman she was becoming, wrap her mouth over his, feel her skin against his chest… She had dreamed about it for months. In this horrible moment at the close of the world, Matthew Williams had finally touched her and she wanted to melt into a puddle on the floor.

“Drea?” he asked as he peered deeply into her eyes.

Without thinking, she followed her body’s instincts. She turned closer to him, close enough that she could feel his breath on her cheek. He smelled fresh and bright and a little bit spicy. She passed her cheek over his, closing in on the kiss that she fantasized about every day. She closed her eyes and leaned in even closer.

“Whoa! What are you doing?” Matt recoiled quickly, shoving her away.

Drea’s head jerked back and tugged on the muscles in her neck. She tried not to disappear with embarrassment. Her perfect moment was gone forever.

“I thought…”

“Well, don’t think that,” Matt said brusquely.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized with no real feeling. Drea felt a wave of shame approaching. The ugly and familiar ‘I’m not good enough’ beast roared inside her. She wanted so desperately to be wanted.

“I can’t— I don’t like you like that… You’re not… you’re not my type,” he said adamantly.

Matt’s rejection was the antidote to Drea’s numbness. A sudden flood of emotions paralyzed her and she dropped to the ground, sobbing. Not his type? She had heard that one before. Not skinny enough. Not popular enough. Not beautiful enough. Wrong makeup. Wrong style. Creepy girl. Weirdo.

The sobs came in waves.

Images of Sierra, Mr. Conte, and the upperclassman in the hallway haunted her mind, swirling endlessly. Everyone in Drea’s school was dead. And she was a pathetic loser.

Tears dripped onto her red T-shirt, pooling like evidence of an emotional nosebleed. Her fantasy was over. Matthew Williams didn’t like her back. She gasped for air through the fountain of thick mucous that was spewing from her nose.

Drea felt a pang of guilt as she realized that she was still focused on getting her crush’s attention, even in the apocalypse. How embarrassing.

The tears came faster.

Matt bent down next to her and said softly, “Hey, hey, I’m sorry. Don’t be so sensitive. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Stop. Stop crying.”

Drea heaved the sob of an ugly cry. It was useless; they were going to die anyway. Life was an unbearable nightmare where she was stuck at the end of the world with her biggest crush ever, who wanted nothing to do with her.

“Drea, calm down. Pull it together.” Matt slid his arm around her shoulders, hugging her tightly to his side. This time the rush of warmth was mixed with shame. He said, “We’re going to get through this, I promise. I’ll take care of you.”

Strangely, his words had an immediate calming effect. Drea was used to being the strong one, but secretly she wanted to be taken care of, to have her superman save the day.

“You will?” she asked hopefully.

“Yes, I’ll take care of you. But we have to work together, okay? The next thing we need to do is go outside and check it out.”

“I don’t know if that’s a smart idea,” Drea said, regaining use of her logical mind.

“Let’s look out the big window in front of the main office first. It’s got a good view of the parking lot.”

Drea nodded as Matt hoisted her up. They grabbed their backpacks and walked down the shiny tile hallway one final time, solidifying their last moment of high school.

The moment felt small and insignificant against the backdrop of what they were about to face.

The view from the big picture window at the front of the school confirmed what they already knew. The world had stopped. Cars were frozen in the middle of the picturesque street and pedestrians had dropped where they stood. The guy who always walked his chocolate lab in the school parking lot had fallen on top of the dog in his last moment. Tiny buds of cherry blossoms ironically decorated his corpse. The pooch’s head lolled to the side, its eyes stuck in a vacant stare.

The state of the world was just as bad as they had feared and the sight of the subtle destruction increased Drea’s heart rate.

“C’mon,” Matt encouraged gently. He opened the enormous front door to the school and guided Drea through it.

“I’m scared,” she admitted out loud as she moved forward cautiously.

“We’re only going to go to my car. Can you make it to my car?”

Drea nodded. She was relying on the steady pressure of Matt’s hand on her back to keep her moving.

Matt’s Audi was exactly as he’d left it. The backseat was full of sports equipment and the floor was littered with water bottles.

“Sorry, it’s a mess,” he said self-consciously, as if cleanliness mattered at the end of the world.