Part One- The Campus
Chapter One
"The ragged, they come and the ragged, they kill." -Rob Zombie, "Superbeast"
"Is it safe?" the pale-faced blonde moaned in a whisper, clinging to the girl in the ill-fitting black skirt as they inched towards the door.
"Of course it isn't safe, Jamie!" she snapped back. "And quit digging your nails into my arm!" She shook off the smaller girl and scowled down at the red welts left on her pale doughy bicep.
"Shhhh!" Zoey hissed, and shot a stern look over her shoulder at both of them.
Jamie, a high-strung junior with dishwater blonde hair, was clutching a can of mace in each shaking hand and looked ready to throw up or pass out- possibly both- at the first loud noise. Only slightly better was the overweight Goth beside her, a surly freshman with the overly accessible name of Christine. She had pulled down a length of wooden rod from the closet and was holding it in front of her like a quarterstaff. Her expression looked ready for a good old-fashioned curb-stomping, but her comically wide ass and well-stretched Ministry tee shirt made Zoey think she was more likely to be a hindrance than a help if any bad stuff went down.
Homecoming weekend had devolved into some serious Carrie shit of an unknown degree. They had been holed up in Christine's dorm room for four very long days, eating stale potato chips and Entenmann's Halloween cupcakes and listening the sounds of what used to be normal life splintering to pieces.
First, there were screams. Long, agonizing screams, punctuated with desperate moans and wails. Around one in the afternoon on the first day, the siren on top of the fire station just off campus had joined in the cacophony. It howled shrilly for close to twelve hours. Zoey had thought she'd lose her mind by the time it had stopped, abruptly, just before midnight. She'd fallen asleep sitting up against the closet door.
The next morning, she'd awoken with a stiff neck to the staccato sound of gunfire, followed swiftly by that of breaking glass. There were shouts in the distance. As Jamie had cowered in the corner, trying repeatedly to call the college's public safety department, 911, home, the campus radio station, Harrisburg, anyone on her cell phone, Zoey and Christine had wrestled the mattresses off the beds and stood them in front of the windows, propping them up with desks and dressers, and moved the denuded bed frames in front of the door. Zoey doubted the efficacy of inner-spring and industrial fiberboard against terrorist attack, or whatever was going on out there, but making the fortress had made her feel better. Marginally better.
For an hour or two that night, helicopters or low-flying planes had roared overhead, and bright beams of searchlights had shone in through the gaps around the mattresses. Jamie had wanted to look out the window and see what was going on, and finally Zoey had agreed. Before they had even moved the first dresser away, however, a deafening explosion had shaken the entire building, knocking Christine down on her back and shattering one of the windows behind the mattress. An acrid, oily stench had seeped steadily into the room, along with a lower, darker odor of something rotting and oddly sweet. The smell of smoke and burning had all but faded a day later, but the other had only gotten stronger.
The third day had been the most disturbing. Everything was quiet, finally, but the quiet was eerie, heavy and absolute. Around mid-afternoon, when Jamie was dozing on a pile of blankets in the center of the room and Zoey and Christine were both reading in the semi-darkness, something screamed close by. It was impossibly loud, utterly inhuman, and made Zoey almost jump out of her skin.
"What the fuck was that?" Christine had asked, her voice breaking on the last word.
"It sounded like an animal." Zoey had whispered back. Jamie had awoken with a start, and looked even more ashen than usual, cowering beneath a Bob Marley throw blanket that had belonged to Christine's roommate. "Like a... I don't know... like a cougar."
"There aren't any cougars around here." Christine had replied, her eyes trained on the blank mattresses that blocked the views of outside.
"There might be." Zoey had said, more to herself than to Christine. A series of low, guttural growls indicated that it, whatever it was, was very near. Zoey was unpleasantly reminded of raptors from Jurassic Park.
The shriek came again, and the mattress in the window began to fall inward as something hit it from outside. Without even thinking, Zoey bolted to her feet and threw her weight against the six inches of springs and foam padding that was separating their tiny haven from whatever was making those noises. Christine followed suit, hitting the mattress with her meaty shoulder and whinnying like an angry pony. On the other side, something was putting up quite a fight. For a split second, Zoey had wondered if it was a classmate trying to escape whatever nightmare was going on outside. Then she'd remembered the window was three floors up.
"Fuck, Jamie, help us!" Christine had screamed as another unseen blow threatened to push the mattress over them. By this point, Jamie was weeping openly on her pile of blankets, and Zoey was overcome with the urge to slap her across the face, had that not involved moving.
Christine braced her knockoff Docs against the tile floor and shoved backwards, throwing her full weight against their only layer of protection. "You realize that if the bed comes down on top of me and Zoey, whatever comes in is going to see you first!" With that, Jamie ran to the window, shoving and grunting along with the others.
At the instant that Zoey had realized they weren't going to be able to hold it back for much longer, three loud cracks had come from outside. The mattress fell against the window one last time, and hadn't moved again.
That had been yesterday, almost a full twenty-four hours previous. Now Christine's roommate's case of VitaminWater was empty, their trashcan-turned-portapotty was overflowing, and the cupcakes were only an orange-frosted memory. It was time to move on. They had to find water, food, and information. And, Zoey thought, casting a long look over the splintering field hockey stick she held, some real weapons.
"Ready," she said, nodding at both Christine and Jamie. It wasn't a question. After a millisecond of hesitation, she unlocked the door and eased it open.
The hallway was was covered with a film of garbage that one would expect to see in a dorm building in the aftermath of a big weekend; beer bottles, pizza boxes, plastic bags, various articles of clothing. A chair from the common area at the other end of the hall was overturned a few feet away, though this wasn't particularly unusual. What was surprising was the utter lack of human presence. Zoey had expected, at the very least, to find a body or two that had succumbed to sarin gas, or whatever had been dropped over the campus. Instead, there was just a bunch of empty Pabst cans and a horrendous smell, which seemed to be billowing in through the broken window at the end of the hall, just outside the stairwell door.
Carefully, they picked their way over the trash towards the stairwell, weapons at the ready. Every door they passed was closed, but for unexplainable reasons, Zoey had no desire to start knocking on them. In fact, she wasn't very interested in making any noise at all. Christine and Jamie seemed to feel the same way, considering the slow, cautious way they stepped around Wawa containers and a cache of Cutty Sark bottles.
As they drew closer, Christine suddenly grasped Zoey's wrist, stopping her in her tracks. She nodded to the left. The last door before the stairwell stood open.
Zoey crept forward, trying to force her sweaty hands to get a better grip on the handle of the field hockey stick, which was covered in gummy, peeling duct tape. Just behind her, Christine twisted the closet pole in her hands and breathed noisily through her nose. Jamie was practically on top of her, but remained silent. It seemed to take forty-five minutes for them to cover the three feet of hallway between their starting position and the door. After a bracing breath, Zoey peered around the door jamb.
She immediately wished she hadn't. In the center of the room, the body of... well, of someone lay amidst a pool of blood and gore. Entrails lay draped across the floor like birthday streamers, appearing to have been pulled through a jagged hole in the ruined belly. The skin was sickeningly gray and covered in dots of dried blood and violently purple bruises. She couldn't even tell the gender of the person, let alone if she recognized them from Intro to World Literature.
"Oh my God," Christine said in a curiously flat voice. Jamie stared at the corpse in abject horror, her eyes and mouth so wide she resembled a catfish.
After a long moment, Zoey turned away from the scene of ghoulish slaughter on the institutional green tile floor. "Let's go."
The others needed little prodding to look away. A few steps behind them was a heavy door that lead in to the stairwell. Fearing a repeat visual, Zoey peeked through the door's rectangular window. The staircase looked empty and, thankfully, devoid of any bodies, intact or otherwise. She eased the door open and ushered the other two girls onto the landing. After a moment's debate, she turned the deadbolt, locking the door behind them.
The descent was relatively quick, though there was a tense few seconds when Jamie lost her footing and nearly somersaulted down half a flight of steps between the second and first floors. Christine pulled her back into place with a noise that was halfway between a grunt and a laugh, and the continued down to the first floor door without further incident.
"Wait." Christine whispered as Zoey reached for the door handle. "I think I hear something."
"I do too." Jamie said.
Zoey heard it as well. It was muffled, distorted through the heavy door. "I can't tell what it is. Should we go back upstairs?"
"There's somebody dead upstairs!" Jamie hissed, rather hysterically.
Personally, Zoey thought they would be seeing far worse very soon, but kept this feeling to herself. Christine seemed to agree, though, because she nodded towards the door. "No sense in going back," she said. "Open it, Zoey."
They moved into the ground floor hallway nearly as one, and Zoey barely had time to register the sounds of "Poker Face" blasting from somewhere unseen when Christine swore loudly. "What, what is it?" She swung the field hockey stick to other hand, looking wildly around for signs of danger.
"This song. I fucking hate it."
The three girls stood still, surveying the wreckage of the hallway as someone's unattended stereo pumped out Lady Gaga at a considerable volume. Doors were open, with several of them ripped off their hinges and hanging at crazy angles. Furniture littered the hall, most of it overturned or in pieces, and there was broken glass everywhere, so much that it seemed as though every window on the floor had been smashed. Clothes and books and someone's broken cell phone lay haphazardly on the ground, and smears of blood traced patterns across the floor and walls at irregular intervals. All the while, the soundtrack played on: "I won't tell you that I love you/ Kiss or hug you cause I'm bluffin'/ With my muffin I'm not lying/ I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning..."
Zoey turned to look at her backup. Christine met her eye. "We're going to need some better weapons, like, right the fuck now."
"The dining hall." Jamie said, unexpectedly.
"What?"
"The dining hall. We can get knives from the kitchen."
"Hmmmm." Zoey tapped the hockey stick against her foot absently. What they could really use at this point was some high-powered rifles and an Ash Williams-style chainsaw hand, but knives weren't a terrible idea. "Let's go."
It took two repeats of "Poker Face" for them to pick their way through the hallway. Finally the reached the heavy front door, which had been bashed off the frame and lay in three pieces on the floor. Outside, the bright green grass of the quad was speckled with bodies and blood. She didn't look too hard, but Zoey was pretty sure they were in the same state of disrepair as the body upstairs.
"Hol-y shit." Christine seemed to be propping herself up on her clothing rod. And then Jamie screamed.