The loud deafening shot of a 9mm handgun. The crimson red blood flowing from a gaping wound in the skull of the woman that had given her life. The brains splattered across a myriad of family portraits, snapshots of a life that no longer existed. The touch of cold metal underneath her finger tips, but the rush of heat and blood to her head. The loss of innocence.
That morning, nothing had been amiss for Farrah Todd. She had woken up for school at six, as she had to every Friday. She always looked her best on Friday's, since Friday's were game days at Raccoon City High School and she was captain of the football cheerleading squad. It wasn't something that was particularly distinguishable to her, seeing as how she was given the title by default after the other senior cheerleaders were kicked off the squad for getting caught smoking pot in the boiler room. Nevertheless, she had taken her "sacred duties", as one of the younger cheerleaders described the captain's responsibilities, to heart. She had organized pep rallies and made banners for homecoming, not with much gusto, but she had done it nonetheless.
It was seven-thirty by the time Farrah had curled her hair and applied her makeup, so she slipped into her uniform and rushed down the spiral staircase into the foyer, where her mother was waiting at the foot of the stairs. She looked displeased but had an air of humor about her. Farrah was perpetually running late and rarely had time to eat the breakfast that her mother cooked for the family ever morning.
"I called up to you at least three times this morning," her mother said with a sardonic smile. "I guess I'll just assume you didn't hear me and that you weren't ignoring me."
Farrah gave her mom a quick kiss on the cheek, "I'm sorry. And I can't drop Kayley off this morning. I was supposed to be at the high school by seven thirty to help hang the homecoming banner as it is."
"Your sister isn't going to be happy about that. She likes getting dropped off by you because she thinks she looks uncool when I do it." Kayley, Farrah's thirteen year old sister, was queen of the Todd household. When Farrah had been going through an emotional spell and acting as if the world was a miserable place, Kayley threw out all of Farrah's Fiona Apple CD's and replaced them with Backstreet Boys mixes.
"She'll get over it. I love you. Bye." Farrah ignored her mother's protests about eating breakfast and slipped out the door.
Farrah spent the whole morning trying to put out cheerleading fires, which were just as dramatic as she had assumed they would be. The banners weren't hung and the younger girls were acting as if it was the end of the world and that they were going to be "totally made fun of by the basketball bitches," which is what they referred to the basketball cheerleading squad as. Farrah didn't care nearly enough about cheerleading to call anyone a basketball bitch. She barely cared enough about cheerleading to cheer her senior year and was beginning to wonder why she had.
Just when she was thinking she couldn't handle any more discussion of which banner was prettiest, her best friend Alex came along and pulled her aside to eat lunch during their free period. Alex prided herself on the fact that she was one of the kids that no one ever noticed. It wasn't that she wasn't pretty, but next to tall, blonde Farrah, Alex was just an average, brunette sidekick. Most people didn't get to see Alex's witty, irreverent sense of humor like Farrah did. In fact, Alex and Kayley acted more like sisters than Farrah and Kayley themselves because they shared the same sense of humor.
"I have no idea how I'd survive high school without you," Farrah mumbled as they sat down to eat their lunch in the courtyard.
Alex nodded as if she was a sage, in agreement. "Without me, you'd just be a pretty face. Someone has to make up for your dull personality." Farrah laughed and flipped Alex off. "So when do you have to be at this pep rally? Rah rah rah."
Farrah sighed, "I have to be in there in a few minutes. The football team went into the gym locker room like two hours ago and no one has seen them since but the principal is excusing them from classes since all he cares about are athletics."
Alex scoffed. "Don't act like the principal doesn't do you favors all the time. You'd have failed algebra and chemistry both if your dad wasn't a part of one of the original families around here. Didn't your dad belong to the same frat as Principal Evans? Irrelevant. Is your dad still out of town?"
"You love to say that I got special treatment but I went to tutoring, like, twice for chemistry." Realizing how ridiculous her defense was, Farrah conceded defeat and just laughed. You had to pretty often around Alex. "Yes, he's still out of town. He was supposed to come back yesterday but his flight got delayed so he booked some more meetings."
Alex leaned over conspiratorially and lowered her voice, "You know. It's probably good he's out of town with all of these cannibal murders going on." She took a dramatic bite of her apple and leaned back laughing. Farrah shuddered.
"That's not funny. You're such a creep." Farrah stood up and waved. "I'd say, 'see you at the pep rally', but I know I won't. Come home with me after school and help me avoid the wrath of Kayley." She took her tray to the dishwashing station and headed to the gym.
"This is a disaster! Like, no one is here," lamented one of the freshman cheerleaders. "Principal Evans said that nearly a third of the school has called in and said they were sick today. That's such bullshit! No one has school spirit anymore. Like, what is happening to America?" Several cheerleaders nodded in agreement.
Farrah rolled her eyes and looked up in the stands of the gymnasium. There were still a lot of people in the crowd for the pep rally but it was obvious that quite a few of them were sick themselves. The football team was still nowhere to be found so Farrah glanced over towards the locker room. The door was shut.
"Hey! Principal Evans!" She waved him over.
"Yes, Farrah?" He coughed into his sleeve and apologized. "I'm feeling a little under the weather. Don't get too close."
"Well, the team was supposed to be out here by now but they are still in the locker room. I can't exactly go get them because, you know, I'm a girl."
Principal Evans sighed and started walking towards the locker room, "You girls go ahead and warm up the crowd and I'll have them run out here."
Farrah formed the squad up and took her place at the front. They were a few moments into a cheer to fire up the crowd when suddenly, people in the stands began to scream. The cheerleaders were confused as they had certainly never illicited such a response from the crowd before. That's when Farrah noticed that people were not screaming with excitement, but rather fear. She stopped and turned towards the cause of the pandemonium and gasped.
Principal Evans had obviously just burst out from the locker room and fallen to the floor. He was covered in blood and scrambling away from the door. The gym went silent and it suddenly became clear that Principal Evans was crying, a deep cry that Farrah had never heard in her entire life. Just as some of the faculty came to their wits and began to rush to his aid, the door to the locker room flew open again.
The football players poured out, some of them dressed completely in their uniforms and some of them not dressed at all. The one thing they all had in common was blood. They were all covered from head to toe and groaning, as if pain. Everyone in the gym was silent until one of the players fell on top of Principal Evans and he screamed out in agony, "Someone help me!"
Suddenly the gym broke out into chaos. Students were making a mass exodus from the bleachers, falling atop each other and screaming. The faculty closest to Principal Evans were lunged towards and taken to the ground, screaming in pain as the football players sank their teeth into their flesh. The cheerleaders around Farrah began to scramble, shoving one another, scattering pom poms to the floor and shredding their precious banners as they made mad dashes in opposite directions. Farrah watched the cheerleader nearest her, a meek freshman, be taken down by a guy she recognized as a sophomore linebacker. She began to back away, nearly petrified in fear. Her eyes met those of the quarterback, Ryan, a fellow senior she had gone to school with her entire life. Except his eyes were no longer his own. The flesh around them was pale and he himself looked like a corpse. The eyes were dead. That's when she realized he was dead.
This thought sent Farrah into full panic mode and she looked behind her. There were several exits out of the gym but the ones that went outside to the parking lot were so congested with students trying to escape that she would never make it. She turned her attention forward again to an exit on the farthest side of the gym, the one that went into the lobby of the school itself. She would have to sprint past all the football players - no, the corpses, the zombies - to make it to the exit. Quarterback Ryan was so close now that he could nearly reach out and grab her. She took a deep breath and lunged forward, pushing him as hard as she could with both hands. He stumbled backwards and his left leg snapped at the knee, exposing bone and blood. This spectacle gave her a moment's hesitation before she sprinted towards the exit, dodging zombies and ignoring the pleas of those being fed on as they reached out with feeble hands.
When she burst out the exit into the sterile, empty lobby she stopped. It was quiet and as if nothing was wrong. She turned and looked back one time, hoping that maybe she was losing her mind or dreaming. She wasn't. There was a pungent smell in the air and the screams of those she saw being mauled couldn't be muted. She shut the heavy metal doors behind her and took off at a sprint down the hallways of the school, screaming for help. The students that had elected not to attend the pep rally, such as Alex, were supposed to be in the library but the old librarian was so oblivious they mostly sneaked out and went home. Such as Alex. Realizing that no one was answering her cries for help, Farrah rushed to the library, where she knew the librarian would be sitting behind her desk skimming lists for past due fines. As she rushed in, the librarian gave her a disapproving look.
"You can enter the library the appropriate way or you can turn around and leave," Miss Reeves snarled incredulously. "What is the matter with you?"
Farrah opened her mouth to speak but suddenly felt light headed and fell to the floor. The last thing she heard before darkness overcame her was the frantic punching of numbers on the phone and Miss Reeves crying for an ambulance.
