I wasn't very confident with this chapter, but I had to find one to kind of take the story from the boy turning to them escaping so I just thought of this, and I wasn't very happy but it's been ages so I'm back and updating regularly! I hope you remember this chapter as one of the themes throughout will be how some people can go from strong to weak or from weak to strong. Sorry about the quality of this one, but I need to get back into the swing of things. Here you go!
Callum was the class joker, Ben's best friend and also the first one to notice that Dan was currently eating the teacher's face. All the teenagers screamed and Cara and Bella joined them in hiding in the furthest corner in the room. The now-dead teacher and Dan were right by the door so that was not an option. Callum started screaming at Dan, and eventually charged at him with several other boys from the side. They knocked Dan over but Dan just started growling and snapping at him.
"Stop it, you fucking freak!" Callum spat, kicking him from the side. The majority of the other guys have retreated back to the corner but Callum kept on going, unaware that the kicks were ineffective to Dan's dead body. Callum turned to fall back with the rest of the class, oblivious to the fact that Dan had currently opened his mouth, blood and guts dripping from his mouth.
"Callum!" Bella screamed. She covered her eyes and heard a horrible crunching sound. She was almost certain she would open her eyes to find Callum's lifeless body being devoured by Dan, who had turned into a cannibal. When she pulled her hands away, she was surprised to find Dan on the ground, and Ben repeatedly bashing a lab chair into Dan's head.
Nobody dared move.
"Is he dead?" Cara asked, but nobody answered. She moved closer to the body, terrified and nudged it with her foot. "Ben, you killed him."
"I-I didn't mean to. He...he was going to kill Callum!" Ben panicked, dropping the chair and taking unsteady steps back. "I had to!"
Everybody stared at Ben, and Bella didn't think anybody was sure about how they felt about him. Did he just kill Dan or save Callum? Or both? What was going on?
"What do we do now?" a teenager from the group spoke. "Just wait until somebody checks on us?"
"Checks on us?"
"Well, this must be happening all over that place."
Too many people were talking at once, suggesting crazy things. Bella couldn't concentrate. She just witnessed two peoples death, or so she thought she did. She wasn't sure who was dead, who was alive, who was a crazy cannibal. She separated herself from the group to peer out the door, stepping over the motionless bodies of her classmate and her teacher. Bella peered outside but everything was still and quiet, which scared her more than anything else in the world. What had happened the loud, unnecessary sound of kids from 11-16 causing trouble in their classrooms?
Bella inhaled and exhaled slowly, with her eyes closed, panicking. There was a growling noise behind her and she heard her classmates scream as she turned around to her teacher rising from the floor, and from the dead. She screamed and put up her hands to defend herself, before she was pulled away by a pair of hands.
"Shit, Bella. He would have killed you," Joe breathed and pulled her back to the huge group of petrified teenagers. The dead body of their teacher ambled towards them and everybody scattered.
"Stop, guys!" somebody shouted, and it sounded quite a bit like Callum.
Suddenly, the door was opened and everybody piled outside and ran into other classrooms or down hallways or staircases. There was dozens of screams and from that moment on there was nothing but noise. Slams of doors, screams of children, growls of the cannibal-type dead ones, anything you could imagine at a situation like this. Bella found herself without any of her classmates and started to run in the direction of the front school entrance, where a group of other people were.
"It's locked!" somebody screamed. Cannibals fell to their knees to tear chunks of flesh from kids bodies and Bella felt sick as she watched people she'd known for years fall down. She clutched her stomach and fled, desperate to find another way out.
She was on her own, scared and didn't have any of idea how to control a situation like this. Bella just kept on running and ducking and ducking and hiding. Run, duck, hide. It was a pattern she had to get used to. There was no sign of Cara, no sign of anybody she knew living. After running around the school several times, and each time watching people die and nearly getting eaten herself, she stopped to breathe and collapsed on the floor, crying.
She gave up already. There was no way out. The doors were locked and people were panicking too much to think of a logical solution, they just kept banging on the doors and screaming. When a hand came down on Bella's shoulder, she jumped up and swung her fist around.
"Oh my god, sorry! Shit, I'm sorry, I didn't know it was you," she kept repeating. "I didn't know it was you."
"It's fine, don't worry," Joe comforted her. "Come on."
Joe lead Bella through the hallways and into doors, where she was met by several calm faces from her class, in the sports hall, which happened to be completely safe and quiet. Here, Bella felt safe enough to allow herself to fall to the floor.
Cara peeked around the corner, only to be met by the sight of dead bodies on the floor or dead bodies walking around, growling. Once the several walking ones were out of sight, Cara ran forward to inspect the dead bodies on the floor.
"Bella?" she hissed. "Are you here?" No reply. "Shit!"
She ran through the hallway and down the stairs, where most kids were still running around, crying and screaming, desperate to get away from the dead ones. Cara followed someone she recognised from her class to the girls' toilets, where most girls were hiding out, and making lots of noise.
"Guys, shut the fuck up!" Cara screamed. "You're just going to make them hear..." At that moment, more of the cannibals barged through the door. "Us."
Idiotically, girls piled into the stalls, filling them up, making it impossible for them to hide but possible for them to get seen and eaten and attacked. Cara ducked out and round the corner, falling to the floor out of sight. She bit her tongue, trying not to break down. Should she continue searching for Bella or just try to get out? What if Bella was already out, or dead, or worse? Cara sniffed and stood up and walked round the corner and was met by one of the greatest sights she'd seen today. A group of her classmates with her, hurting her side but she couldn't be more happy to see them. She sighed in relief before inspecting who the group consisted of.
A nice girl called Elle and her boyfriend, Oliver. Danielle, Liam, Sam, Becky and most shockingly, Ben.
"Guys," she breathed. "Thank God."
"Is Bella with you?" Elle asked. Elle was quite close friends with Bella and Cara, and they were all a bit weird together. Cara shook her head and looked at them all in turn.
"We're all okay," Danielle assured her. "Well, maybe not..."
She blinked over at Oliver and then back again, but Elle frowned. "He's fine," she snapped, and shuffled closed to Oliver, holding onto his arm.
"Oliver?" Cara took a step closer, and Oliver pulled his sleeve up to reveal a gash in his arm. "Miss Redwood got me, scraped me with her teeth," he explained.
That fucking Maths teacher, Cara thought. Never liked that bitch.
"She didn't properly bite you? Thank God!" Cara sighed. "You should be fine then."
The group all piled into one corner as some of their dead teachers shuffled past. Cara found herself awkwardly pushed against Ben's arm, and he looked as awkward about it as she did. They were in the same position for a while, and Cara was sure she heard Oliver groan in pain from time to time. Cara bit her lip, unsure whether she should be worrying about him or not. But right now, all she could think about was how she was so close to Ben and how she didn't want to be ripped apart by teeth.
"What now?" Liam hissed. Liam was a tall boy with glasses, and stood next to Sam, a blonde, messy-haired and average-sized boy who wasn't the expert at keeping his voice down.
"Run," he said, extremely loud. Their dead teachers stirred but didn't notice as the group crept past and ducked into the small closet where they kept the photocopying machine. Luckily, whoever was here left their photocopying work and left before they could turn into one of them things.
"What do we do?" Danielle asked. "They're everywhere. Everyone's dying!"
"Just calm down, don't worry," Sam hissed.
"Sam's right," Cara said as she bent down to her knees to speak to them quietly. "The most important thing is that we stay together and get out of here."
"What about Bella?" Elle asked. "Don't you want to find her?"
"Don't you want to find as many people as you can?" Liam asked. "Isn't it important we don't all die?" He said it with humour in his tone but nobody was laughing, nobody could even remember how to right now.
"I think Cara's right," Ben said, with made her heart beat fast. "We should get out of here while we can. People must have gotten outside, they might be outside right now, waiting for us."
"You guys are being idiots!" Danielle shouted. "Who the hell's going to wait for us? There's a good chance that we could come out and start tearing the flesh from their bones. Who's going to wait around for that? I'm telling they're hiding in here, or they're dead."
"Danielle's right. You guys need to get your priorities straight, you're just thinking of yourselves," Elle snaps. She always was the one who had strong opinions. "We need to help people, not just let them die."
"Elle, people aren't thinking the same about us, they're just focusing on not getting ripped apart!" Sam whispered sharply. "See for yourself."
Sam was somewhat right. There were guys pushing past everyone just to make it to a door or an open window, but then there were people helping up friends that had tripped whilst running or calling each others names and trying to make it out together, as a team.
"Shit, what do we do?" Cara shouted.
"Calm down, Cara," Ben said softly. "You and I think we should leave. So does Sam. Elle, Danielle and Luke think we should wait, right? Okay. So what do you think, Oliver?"
They turned around to ask for Oliver's opinion, considering he hadn't spoken at all during this entire debate. Cara wasn't exactly shocked to see him collapsed on the floor, but the others were and everybody jumped back except Elle.
"Fuck, no. No, no, no, no, no. Oliver!" Elle cried, clutching his arm. "Get up!"
"Elle, move away from him," Cara warned her. "Please."
"Look at him! I need to help him!" Elle sniffed. "What are you going to do, just stand there?"
Liam and Sam looked at each other unsure, as did Danielle and Cara. The best thing for them would be leave before Oliver woke up and tore them all to pieces. But there was no way they were going to move Elle away from there, which meant the first thing Oliver would do when he woke up was sink his teeth into his girlfriend's face. Cara tugged on Elle's sleeve but she pushed her away and shouted.
"Okay, we just...let's not panic. Let's just keep calm, and think. Think," Cara stuttered, shaking. Either they all died, or one of her closest friends. Fuck.
Then, in the quietness and as they were all trying to think of a solution in the time that they had left before Oliver woke up, the noise was interrupted because some asshole had decided to pull the fire alarm and the whole place erupted in alarm bells and screams and snarls of the dead ones getting pulled towards the noise, pulled towards the kids, and the kids were pulled towards their death.