I have returned. Ah, it feels good to be home again. I love my holidays and everything, but the conservative Deep South in not exactly the place for a life-long Liberal to be. I have to apologise for the colossal delay between chapters and my general inactivity over the past couple of weeks, and I promise that I will try to be much more regular with the updates, say one per week. It will be hard to considering I'm entering my last year of secondary school. Meh. I'll do it for you. So anyways, back to the story. I don't own Hetalia.
10:30 p.m. (same day)
We're safe. I actually can't believe it, but we're safe. I'm still too wired to sleep. Earlier I could barely keep my eyes open and now I can barely close them long enough to blink. Absolutely no idea what's wrong with me. Maybe adrenaline takes a long time to wear off if you've been flooded with it as constantly as we were for the last couple of days.
I can't believe it. I'm back in the dorm I slept in before the craziness. It's exactly like I left it, except some people aren't here. Our stuff is all where we left it, clothes folded up on top of dressers, books stacked against the wall, personal effects on nightstands and even the dorm cat. With Ven gone, it has adopted Luddie as her temporary human. He doesn't mind.
The others are sacked out. Antonio looks dead when he sleeps. A couple of times people passing his bunk paused and made sure he wasn't. Kiku has fallen asleep and woken up a couple of times. Each time he looks around the room, remembers he's ok then conks out again almost immediately. Luddie is asleep peacefully, the cat curled up in the crook of his knees. Ivan is a 6 foot lump under the covers. Bella is in hers and Mei's own dorm, presumably asleep.
One of the things I notice that is off about my dorm is the lack of the snoring. Ven is a big snorer. And Berwald's bed is unoccupied. His is right next to mine. I can't help but look over at the empty blankets every few minutes, then my throat closes up and I dizzy like a panic attack is coming so I have to ignore it.
This is what happened.
The nap didn't last long enough for dreams, just long enough for me to feel slightly recharged when I was woken up. I don't know what my dreams would have been about if I had had any. My family probably. No one knew what we should do next. We had achieved the goal to reach the lockers. We had figured out our phones weren't going to work. We had eaten a little. We had changed clothes. What next? Find other survivors? Search for a means of rescue or escape? Relocate to a safer area and try to sleep? The last option was definitely out; adrenaline had us bouncing off the walls.
I started to hear the zombie groaning drumming up again.
Once Luddie heard that he shushed us. For a moment after we shut up collectively, the groaning stopped.
"Try talking again." he said "Not too loudly, the same volume as before."
"Talk about what?" I said. Right on cue the zombies groaned.
"Isn't that strange? They only vocalise when they hear us talking. Listen the school building is almost completely silent. They aren't making noise until we make noise loud enough to carry. Remember the trip down here? We were almost totally silent and nothing bothered us. Since we left we haven't seen a single one of the, the…things that trapped us in the room, and that may be because we've been very quiet." he said something along those lines in a whisper. "I'm not sure if this will work, but if we're totally silent we might be able to get past them without them noticing us."
Insert amazed pause here. Luddie's genius is usually restricted to mathematics, which is why he has to go through normal school with the average- intelligence teenagers, even if he gets MIT level math books, but he can apply it to basic intelligent reasoning too apparently. (Now that I think it over we don't go to a normal school…whatever the point is he earns his title of 'Luddie the genius'. I wonder if I should make him a sash. So far his conjecture has held up.) At that moment we had no reason to think he was wrong. His advice was followed and we were undisturbed.
Back on subject, the group deliberated in whispers for a while. No conclusion. I blanked out on Bella's shoulder at regular intervals, so I wasn't entirely sure what was being said. However, I perked up when I heard Bella suggest someone scout ahead.
"You want us to split up and search for clues?" said Ivan a little dryly. Then he rubbed his eyes tiredly "Sorry Bella, I'm a little irritable right now. I don't think it's a good idea to divide. What if the scouts find a safe zone but have no way of bringing the rest of us to it? Whatever we discover I would prefer we do it together."
"I think Ivan's right." Antonio said and the rest of us were quick to agree.
"Where do we go this time?" I asked.
"Going to the rooftop wouldn't be the best course of action; a lot of students probably gathered on the rooftop in hopes of an airlift recuse. Odds are a lot of them (Luddie interrupted his speech for a nod in the direction the groans came from) followed. There may be a few living people on the roof if they managed to find a sufficient water source, but odds are they're all dead. We don't want to come up against a, a horde of the things in such poor condition." he had this harassed look in his eyes he gets during the tests. You can tell his brain is scrambling to cover every required subject in as much detail as possible. I have learned not to mess with him when this look. Plus what he said made a lot of sense.
Eventually we settled on the dorms. I've done enough late-night snack raids to appreciate how close the cafeteria and kitchen are to the dorms and I can run the trip back like a pro. Assuming we stuck to one dorm, the location would be easy to defend as well. There's a staircase that comes up from the large hall where we pick up our daily timetables- I guess you could call it the Great hall of the World Academy- and two staircases which branch off from it in opposite directions: the boys on the left, the girls on the right.
We had no idea what the hall and dorm area might look like since we were in an entirely different wing of the school. But we couldn't stay by the lockers for the rest of our lives. How would we hide if something came by? Stuff ourselves inside them? Might work for little Bella and slim Antonio and tiny Kiku, and I have personally stuffed Luddie in his locker this year (don't ask) but how the heck are me and Ivan going to fit in them? We're big guys...this was an actual part of the discussion. Don't judge us. We're teenagers.
The dorms became our goal.
The part of the school we were in earlier was the Math and Science department -or 'Luddie's playground'- which is at the very end of the Western wing. The dorms are at the extreme end of the East wing. Basically we were as far from our goal as it was possible to be without leaving the building. That by the way will be out of the question for a long time; it's a sea of zombies from the entrance to the edges of the football field.
I'll omit the trip. Nothing interesting, except that the group stayed quiet on Luddie's advice and it worked. Once we went past some classrooms with zombies standing in them (walking repeatedly into the wall, gnawing on the desks, picking over the last bits of whoever they brought down in the first moments of the infestation, not doing anything). We might have been invisible and noiseless creatures for all I knew. I wanted to pause and do a little dance in a zombie's face.
I didn't because that would be amazingly dumb even for me, but being completely ignored by these things was kind of weird…it's hard to explain. The way they chased us earlier, so determined to run us down a strip up to the bone, the way they were dangerously alert of our presence made me feel equally as aware of my warm body and beating blood. Made me feel alive in a scary way. When they ignored me I felt like I had died and become a ghost without my noticing. For a moment I actually held my pipe over a window I could see four zombies through, I was gonna rap it, than Kiku tapped my shoulder. Guess he thought I was frozen in terror. Well I'm glad he did otherwise I would have brought a whole bunch of zombies down on our heads. Having Kiku tap me on the shoulder wasn't as much of a wake-up call as being chased for my flesh, but at least he brought me out of the crazy moment. I'm not a ghost. I'm not dead yet.
Like a B-movie horror set, there was a liberal splashing of blood everywhere. There couldn't have been more if someone had spun around holding an open bucket of red paint. Antonio nearly went down in a slick of blood on one set of stairs but Bella and Ivan caught him. That particular smear continued all the way down the stairs and under a door on the landing not shut tightly enough. Ryan Fields-some guy on the football team with me. He was going to be the head of an American state, one of the Dakotas. I can't remember if it was North or South. I should start a list of the dead otherwise I might not remember who is.
I'm going to skip past the gory details of our trip across the school. All you need to know about really, is our meeting with Security.
Security is what the name suggests: an organisation that protects the students and teachers of the school. Men and women with big guns and protective equipment who used to be the bodyguards of VIPs then became the guardians of VIPs to be. This school may not be public knowledge, but plenty of physcotic anarchists and extremists find their way to the school. The few who get past the check points, the guards, the electric fence and the numerous patrolling guards might get into a classroom and cause some disruption. The worst case I have ever experience was the time some skinhead got onto the football field during a game, grabbed Sadik out of the bleachers and was immediately kicked, head-butted, elbowed, bitten and scratched on every patch of exposed flesh. We were nine years old then. If I remember correctly the guy lost two teeth and an eye, and that was before the guards got to him.
Security is a comfort to have around even if they're tyrants about personal security. And they definitely were a comfort when we reached the hall and saw them stood around a make-shift barricade in front of the East wing entrance. Long story short, we were greeted, checked thoroughly for signs of the infection (apparently passed by bites, because that's what they looked for), given the all-clear, sent through and had a couple of happy reunions with some of our other classmates who are here.
Let me think…there's Feliks, Tino, Matthias, Lukas, Emil, Carter, Yisrael, Claude, Klaus, Hector, Mei (Ivan's girlfriend, cue the gross kissing, and the bear hug from her brother Kiku), Raivis, Vlad, Marichka, Toris, Eduard, Mo, Heracles, Sadik (I knew he would be fine), Valkien, Blythe, Morgan, James, Ahmet and a whole mess of other people.
The ones who we're missing most painfully: Elizabeta, Roderich, Berwald, Peter and the rest of the kids, Lili and Vash (Luddie's close cousins) and a whole bunch of other people. Not just the nations, the guys who I hang around with the most, but the provinces and the states and the counties and the capital cities and the islands. We have a number close to 2000 at any given time. If I were to do a rough count, I'd guess we students are only about 150 strong.
So many of us are gone. These are people I was raised to know and love. Over half of them are dead now.
What are we supposed to do? Well this place is equipped with what seems like a small hospital with trained professionals, a real small army and a not-so-small arsenal, a well-stocked kitchen and storeroom, staff to take care of us students, who are all trained extensively in self-defence. The school is far out in the wilderness of the Maine forests. It's designed to survive a siege. If we're not experiencing a siege right now I don't know what to call it.
Scary.
Bella and Mei came into the room just as I wrote that last word. Both of them had their pillows and a blanket. I was the only one awake at the time.
"The dorm is empty. We're the only ones in there," she paused but I knew what she was getting at.
"Pull up a mattress." I said.
Mei shifted Kiku over and got under the covers with him. He didn't wake up this time. He tucked his head under her arm, cuddling up to his sister. Bella got into Berwald's bed.
She whispered: "We couldn't stand the silence. There are too many empty beds in our dorm."
I said: "More of the girls will show up. Until you're comfortable again you can stay here. The guys won't mind."
She smiled and closed her eyes, but I don't think she's asleep yet. It will be a long time before I am.