The Z Word (A Zombie Novel) (12 page)

Chapter Thirty Nine

The door opened with ease once I pulled the bar back on the third attempt. All three of us walked into the roomy place, and it was just like any other office.

It had no window, but had a large oak desk with a laptop sitting on it, a bookshelf, and an expensive-looking leather chair sat behind the desk. There was a side door to the right of the office, and once we saw this, we knew we weren't out of the woods yet. I guessed that the door was probably a place with a toilet and a sink, but whatever it was, it needed checking out.

"Do you think we should try the door?" I asked the girls.

"I'd rather gobble a leper," was Kelly's blunt response, but I could see why she was so reluctant. Her face shuddered with fear and shock, but I felt that she was still feeling terrible after witnessing the classroom scene. The chance there could be an entity behind the door was messing with my head, but it needed checking out.

I think witnessing a classroom full of boys and girls, who had probably gone through terrible pain to become who they were, roaming around in their new dead world, had deeply affected us all. I then began to imagine the hell their parents were probably going through, but suddenly thought: If my son or daughter were missing, I'd been climbing that gate, and searching the school. So where were the parents? Maybe their parents were also dead.

Focusing back at the door to the right side of the desk, I clasped the bloodied crowbar and slowly walked towards it. I placed the flat-end of the crowbar just above the lock and prised it open with ease at the first attempt.

In the corner of the room, sitting on the floor with his knees against his chest, sobbing, was an elderly man dressed in a suit.

I held out my hand. "You're okay."

He continued to sob and finally looked at me with his bloodshot eyes. He looked at my hand as if there was shit on it, but finally took it, and I helped him onto his feet.

I queried, "And you must be...?"

"Ellis," he spoke. "I am...was...the headmaster of this school."

Ellis was a tall man; he had grey hair at the side of his head and was bald on top. I found later on that he was sixty-two years old, his wife had died many years ago, and his children had grown up and had both moved down to London.

Ellis sat in the chair behind his desk and had his head in his hands. The girls stared and Clare nodded her head at me, urging me to find answers from the broken man.

I shrugged my shoulders at Clare and mouthed the words: 'give him a minute to get himself together'.

Ellis then stood on his unsteady feet and walked over to a bucket of water in the corner, grabbed a plastic cup, dipped it into the bucket and took a drink from it. He took a sip and looked over to us and pointed to the set of plastic cups sitting on the table. "Help yourself. I got the water from the sink in the bathroom; don't know when it'll run out, so I filled a bucket. Bloody lifesaver, although I could murder steak and chips right now."

Kelly and I took a cup each and dipped them into the bucket. All that running had been thirsty work for the pair of us. Clare was the only one not to help herself and once the headmaster sat back down in his seat, she asked coldly, "What happened?"

Staring into space, as if he was starting to re-live the whole episode once again, his eyes began to fill. "I was in a meeting with some parents," he began with a sigh, "and I got a phone call from one of the teachers to say that there had been an incident outside the Anson Block. So I went back to my office and saw kids fighting in the middle of the playground, at least, I
thought
they were fighting. They should have been in class, so I went over to them to tell them off. And then I saw the carnage. There was blood everywhere."

He took another sip and his quaking hand placed the cup back down onto the desk. "Scared out of my wits, I ran into the block and headed for my office to ring the emergency services. There was pandemonium in the block, and the caretaker was ushering everyone out of the place. We checked the building and saw that one class had turned on one another, so the caretaker and I made a decision to lock it, like we eventually did with the rest of the doors." He then broke down. "There were three pupils inside that classroom that were begging for our help as we locked the door, but we feared for our own lives, I'm ashamed to say. I told the caretaker to lock the rest of the rooms and come back to my office, but he never did."

The caretaker? I then realised that that must have been the guy that I had just killed.

I asked, "You know what's going on?"

He nodded. "I was constantly on my laptop, until the system crashed. I was thinking about escaping in my BMW, but I'm too scared to find what's out there."

"The school gates are locked now anyway," Kelly spoke up.

"Oh. Probably the caretaker trying to contain the problem."

A silence fell upon us and I looked around to see that we all looked exhausted, dejected and frightened. I then cleared my throat and went to say something, but Clare beat me to it.

"So what happens now?" she asked no one in particular.

None of us had an answer.

Kelly said wearily, "Try and survive, whatever tha' means."

"Did this incident happen on the Friday morning? Before dinner time?" I questioned the headmaster.

Ellis nodded. "I don't think it was officially announced until Saturday."

"So there should be food and drink in the school?"

"There's a small canteen downstairs," he added. "But the main canteen is in the main building, near the library."

Clare observed me with suspicion. "What are you thinking?"

I said, "I think a few of us should get as much food and drink as we can and come back here. This school is going to be inhabited with more people as the weeks progress, I can guarantee it."

"What 'bout the main building?" asked Kelly. "Is there any kids...er...those things in there?"

Ellis shrugged his shoulders: he was obviously weighed down with guilt. "I don't know if the kids have escaped, whether they've barricaded themselves in their classrooms, or have turned into these...beings. What could I do?" he cried. "I know this is my school, but I'm just one man. One-old-man."

I said, "Nobody's blaming you. You only would have got yourself killed anyway."

Clare then glanced my way. "So what do we do now?"

Pointing at a couple of bags sitting in the corner of the room, I said, "We can try the canteen downstairs. Get them filled."

Ellis reacted, "Don't bother. They'll be nothing there. Your best bet is the main canteen in the main building, just below the woodwork classroom."

The woodwork classroom, I thought.

I turned to Ellis and asked, "Where's the woodwork classroom?" I thought I could kill two birds with one stone. With visiting the canteen
and
the woodwork room, we could come back with food and weapons.

"On the first floor." Ellis added, "As far as the canteen is concerned, we had a delivery a few days ago, before it all kicked off. The food gets dumped in the canteen kitchens. Ground floor."

I asked, "Do you have keys for these places?"

Ellis nodded at his desk. "Bottom drawer. But I doubt they're locked if everyone left in a panic, unless the caretaker got to them."

"That's if they
have
left," I said, "I'll take them anyway." I stood to my feet. "I won't be long."

"I'm coming with you," Clare spoke up.

"I won't have anything to give you, weapon-wise, until I get to the woodwork place."

"Then we'd better go there first."

"The woodwork room is room 7A," Ellis said, as Clare and I left the room and shut the door behind us.

Chapter Forty

With the keys in my hand, we went downstairs to the ground floor of the Anson Block. I opened the door to get out and made a remark to Clare that we should think about blocking the entrance doors once we've enough food collected.

We stepped outside and I remembered what Ellis said about there being a few pupils in the playground, so where were they now? And did that mean there was one or two moping around the school grounds that we hadn't come across yet?

I tried not to let it bother me. It wasn't as if I had no experience of killing these things anymore, although I felt a little vulnerable without my shades to protect my eyes.

It was a school that Clare and I never went to, so the layout was unfamiliar to me and I wondered where room 7A could actually be. We walked a dozen steps to get to the doors of the main building. Clare looked inside the building's foyer, where a reception area could be seen on the right with more doors ahead that looked like doors to the assembly hall.

Clare then tried them but they were locked. Maybe the caretaker made sure the place was locked up before heading back to the Anson Block. Clare then began to knock on the panes of glass of the doors. I didn't say anything, because I knew what she was doing. She was making sure if anyone, or more importantly,
anything
was lurking around the corners where we couldn't see. She knocked again, but the place seemed vacant. I took the keys out and started to unlock the main door.

"After you," I said to Clare with a cheeky grin.

She looked at the crowbar I was carrying in my left hand and sniped, "After me? Seriously?"

Knowing that the foyer was clear, she walked straight in—which I wasn't expecting, after all, I was only joking—and took a quick look around the area. According to the signage 7A was on the first floor, near the library.

I ordered, "We go there first, then check the canteen."

"Where did he say the canteen was?" asked Clare.

"His exact words were 'below the woodwork class,' so it must be on the ground floor." I began to scratch my head. "I think."

We went up the stairs to the first floor and was greeted by a set of doors that had large panes of glass in them, which I thought could have been dangerous considering it was a school that would have a lot of pupils carrying on between classes—not that that mattered now.

Once we were through the doors we were greeted by a long corridor with classrooms to the left, and to the right was a huge window, which gave us a view of the staff car park that was now empty, apart from the black BMW sitting on its own.

Ellis' car, I thought.

We then decided to check the classrooms one-by-one, and peered in through the glass before doing so. It appeared that the first door we looked in was the woodwork room.

I took out my keys and then realised what Ellis had said about pupils leaving in a panic and the doors being open. He was right. It appeared that the only doors that had been locked in the whole school were the classroom doors of the Anson Block. Everything in the main building was open, apart from the entrance doors.

I tried the room to the woodwork department and, as I suspected, it opened with ease. We could both see that the room was devoid of life and we were both reasonably relaxed when we entered the room.

I pointed to a wooden cupboard where I thought the tools were. I wasn't wrong. I yanked the cupboard open with the crowbar and saw the set of tools. We weren't greedy with the equipment, as we knew we needed the room in our bags for food and drink.

Clare took a couple of hammers and I took a screwdriver. It was a bit of a disappointment, as all it had was screwdrivers, saws and hammers. I don't know what I was expecting. Maybe I was expecting too much.

We left the room with huge disappointment and now needed to find the canteen, wherever that was. We headed for the ground floor to the canteen. I suppose it kind of made sense that it was on the ground floor, simply because a canteen on the first floor would be a pain in the arse for delivery drivers.

The canteen
was
on the ground floor and was relatively easy to get in. With the corridors desolate you'd expect that the silence would heighten the tension and paranoia between Clare and I, but we were both reasonably relaxed.

We filled our bags with anything we could get our hands on: bread rolls, cartons and cans of juice, chocolate bars, crisps, even fruit. We were buzzing when we left the place and as we started making our way, Clare stopped in her tracks and looked at me, "You hear that?"

I responded, "I heard nothing."

Clare then suddenly ran up a flight of stairs. I shouted after her, but she ignored me and looked through the glass panel of the library door.

I walked up the stairs to meet Clare, the heavy bag making my legs ache. "What is it?" I asked her.

Clare glared at me. "There's somebody in the library."

"One of them?"

"No. I'm sure it's a person. They're hiding behind the desk."

I tried the door handle slowly and gently nudged the door. This one was strangely locked. I put the bag by Clare's feet. I looked at the keys and shook my head. There was about a dozen keys on the ring and decided it'd be quicker to yank the door open. I grabbed the crowbar, ready for action. "Won't be long."

Clare dumped her bag next to mine and pulled out the hammer. "I'm coming with you. I'm armed as well now."

Man! Right there, I think I was falling for her.