The Dead Have Risen

Chapter 2: My Friend Tries To Eat Me

My eyes shot open, Angela's pleading voice still ringing in my head. I reached up and winced feeling a knot on my head and tried to remember exactly what had happened right before I had passed out. I remembered hearing her voice and tried to go back from there. That's when I remembered the emergency warning from the CDC. A virus outbreak? But how? How could they let this happen? I shook my head and stood slowly then froze when I heard a low groan from down the hall. I followed the sound and peeked around the corner and my eyes widened as I saw what appeared to be a body torn in half crawling their way toward me. I felt bile rise in my throat as I caught the stench of blood. I had to go back around the corner as I started feeling nauseous. The back door of the school caught my eyes and I realized that it was standing adjar. I quickly made my way to the door and shielded my face from the sunlight that flooded my vision. The scene that greeted me outside could only be explained as something from a horror movie. There where fires raging as far across the town as I could see and there where dead bodies laying here and there in various states of death and dismemberment. My first instinct was to look around at the bodies and try to figure out if there was anyone there that I knew, any of my friends that may still be alive and need my help, and to make sure that none of the bodies happened to be Angela. I knew she was more than capable of taking care of herself but I was still worried that with all of the commotion she may have gotten caught up by someone or something and may have gotten hurt, or worse. When I looked around someone caught my eyes and stood out in a pile of bodies behind the school, luckily it wasn't Angela but it still broke my heart to see it. Travis, one of my best friends laid at the top the pile and my heart sank. He'd been my friend since we were kids, how could this have happened to him? We'd taken taekwondo together when we were in middle school, it was so unreal that all of this was happening. I stumbled forward to stand above Travis and covered my mouth at the sight of his chest blasted open giving me the impression of hamburger meat coming out of his chest. I had to turn away as my breakfast from that morning finally made its way up from my stomach and I hunched over puking up everything that I had left in my system. "I've got to go find my mom and Angela, they can't be dead, I have to protect them," I told myself and that was when I remembered that my backpack which held a knife that I always kept in there because we weren't allowed to carry knives around with us in our classes. I let out a long sigh then froze as I heard a groaning behind me. I turned slowly to look at where the sound was coming from and my eyes widened as they fell apon my friend Travis, but Travis was no longer dead on the top of the stack, he had fallen off of the stack and was starting to stand. "T-Travis....oh fuck no, that's not possible...you have a huge hole in your chest...you look like you have hamburger meat coming out if your chest! WHAT THE FUCK??!!" I turned and ran back toward the school building thinking about grabbing my knife or getting to my car in the student parking lot, whichever I could get to first. I tried to close the back door behind me but it was caught on the brick and I quickly pushed it out of the way. As I went to close the door a hand shot through and grabbed my wrist with surprising strength. I knew it was Travis' corpse but I didn't think someone that had reanimated could grab me so hard. I grabbed Travis' wrist and started banging it against the wall until I heard an audible snap and the grip loosened. I then slammed the door on the arm where it was broken and it fell off and onto the floor as the door closed. I was thanking those big metal doors for the first time in my life because they finally did something good besides just catching me in the shoulder or arm like they always did. I turned back toward the hall and took a deep breath then went to go to my locker realizing only then that my car keys were in my backpack as well. I ran down the hall toward my locker trying not to focus on the blood that splattered the walls in various places. I made it to my locker and tried to open it quickly before anything roaming around the halls caught my scent or heard me but my hands where shaking so badly that the first time I got my combination wrong and could not open my locker. I stopped and took a deep breath then tried again this time when I put the combination in I was able to get my locker open. I pulled out my backpack and opened it up then pulled out the spider design pocket knife that I had at the bottom along with my car keys. I looked in my bag and frowned at the books that where now useless in my bag but decided to keep them in there because they would probably come in handy later if I needed to make a fire. I slung my backpack over my shoulder, then took a deep breath and started making my way to the side of the building where the student parking lot was located and where my car was still parked. As soon as I opened the door I immediately regretted it. A hand came through the door all shredded and bloody and tried reaching for my face. I quickly backed up and slammed the door on the hand as hard as I could, hearing the crunch of breaking bones. Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and I let out a small grunt as I tried to squirm away from whoever was holding on to me. "Hey, Damon, calm down man it's just me," I heard the voice and immediately started calming down. It was my friend Chase, he was still alive, thank the gods. He grabbed the fingers that were reaching through the door and chopped them clean off with an axe that he must have found in the wood shop. I closed the door then looked back at Chase, "Chase...oh thank goodness you're alive...you are alive...right? You're not like those things and going to try to eat me?" I asked and he laughed then nodded, "I'm alive dude, I promise I'm not going to try to eat you like those things," he said which calmed me down a bit. "What is going on here man? What are these things? And how did this all happen?" Chase looked at me and shook his head then smirked, that's when I knew some stupid retort was coming, "don't you read books dude? Zombies!!" He said then laughed at the disgusted look on my face then I thought about it for a while and looked away, "I thought zombies where impossible, but it actually makes sense," I said and shook my head, "why didn't I think of that before?" Chase laughed and put a hand on my shoulder, "because I'm the brains in this friendship and your the hot one." I looked up at him and cocked an eyebrow, "dude, some of the things you say make me think you're gay...not that I have a problem if you are since I'm bisexual, but I have a girlfriend so stop hitting on me. Come on, quit catching flies, we need to find a way to get to my car," I said and walked away leaving Chase standing there with his jaw hanging open. He finally started running after me then looked up at the door that I was headed to, "do you think there will be less of them at the front of the building?" He asked me putting the axe over his shoulder trying to seem relaxed even though I could tell he was just as nervous as I felt. "I don't know, but we're about to figure it out, I'm tired of being trapped in this damn school, we need to go find my mom and Angela," I told him and his face lit up when I mentioned my girlfriends name, "oh! I saw Angela earlier when everything was going down," he said and I looked at him stopping dead in my tracks. He came up short and looked back at me. "Where did she go? Is she okay?" I asked him as I grabbed his arm with worry showing plainly in my eyes. Some emotion flashed in his eyes that was unreadable then it was gone just as fast as it had appeared. He smiled and laughed a bit, "dude, she seemed fine the last time I saw her, she even took out one of the zombies with a pencil through the eye!" I looked at him then let out a sigh of relief, "thank god she's still alive, come on, we need to get going," I said as I started walking back toward the door. Chase watched me walk past him then followed soon after. I got to the front door of the school and looked outside, "everything seems clear let's go," I said as I walked out of the school building cautiously. Chase followed me out of the school with the axe slung casually over his shoulder. We walked around the building carefully and peeked around the corner toward the student parking lot and what we saw there was a horrific scene. Apparently there were a lot of the students that hadn't even made off of the school grounds because a lot of them had been shot and killed and were now roaming around the student parking lot as zombies. I looked around at the familiar faces then noticed that some of the other zombies that I did not recognize where dressed in military fatigues and that is when I realized that they must have been sent to eliminate the threat and got caught in the cross fire of their mistakes. I looked back at Chase and shook my head, "I have no clue how we are going to get out of here," I said and he looked around the corner with me and shook his head, "oh, fuck that dude!" He said as he hid back around the corner with me. "Dude hush, don't be so loud," I told him getting annoyed that he could never seem to understand that there were right and wrong times to be so loud. I heard some shuffling around the corner and shot Chase a glare that said, 'great job genius,' and he glanced at me apologetically. I went around the corner with my knife raised and sunk the blade deep into the eye socket of the body that was coming near us. Once that one fell others in the parking lot turned toward us and my eyes widened, "fuck, get ready, this won't be easy," I told him and he lifted the axe to get ready for the fight ahead.