Apocalypse [1]

Day 1- 10.26am

Rori panted, and then raised his arms and swung the table leg he held through the air again, allowing it to land with a sickening splat on the head of one of the savages.  The skull burst with a crack, spilling brains on the once-shiny floor.  He turned and saw Warren a few feet away stamping his foot down repeatedly on the head of another, which similarly burst and oozed pus, brains and blood. 

“What was that,” Rori struggled through short breaths, looking at Hayley and Megan, “about us not needing to stay together?”

“Point taken,” Hayley agreed as Rori straightened up and leant against the wall of the upper corridor.  Hayley reached down and tugged the screwdriver she had found from the ruined eye socket of the creature she had attacked.  Then she turned to face her sister, whose face was set in a grim determination, despite the pale colouring her skin had adopted.

“You alright?” Hayley asked her.

“”Yeah,” Megan sighed, trying to smile.  “Some bad-ass zombies, huh?”

“I prefer the term ‘bad-ass mother-fucking zombies’ if you don’t mind,” Warren piped up, smiling slightly as he tried, and failed, to adopt an American accent.  He was the tallest, and strongest, of their little group, and it had been him and Hayley that discovered in an abandoned classroom the weird assortment of ‘weapons’ that they were now armed with.  A pole, a screwdriver, a table leg and a baseball bat were the best of their current ammunition against the walking dead, and the idea of a sharpened, shatterproof ruler had quickly been turned down when Megan had sat on the ruler and broken it.

“I’m going to kill Laura when I find her,” Hayley moaned, kicking the still-twitching hand of the zombie in front of her.  “If only she had never taken a subject whose building separated her from the rest of college…”

“We find her, and then we get out,” Rori said firmly. 

“What about your friends?” Hayley asked, frowning.

Rori shrugged.  “Doesn’t look like there’s much hope for them,” he replied sadly.  “A few of them were in the canteen…”

Hayley bowed her head.  That had been the worst few minutes of her sixteen-year old life.  Stumbling into the canteen, hoping to find people fighting…but finding what resembled a butcher’s store, with torn limbs littering the floor, and the savages still tearing away at the long-immobile and long-dead bodies of students, teachers and dinner ladies alike.  Rivers of blood had ran across her feet, the deep crimson staining the bottom of her jeans, and the congregation of nearly a hundred walkers had been enough to drive Rori, Hayley, Megan and Warren away as quickly as their legs could carry them.  It was the first time Hayley had left the college canteen, she reflected, without buying something from the vending machine.

“Warren?” Megan asked, turning to him.  “You got anyone you have to get?”

“I don’t have…friends,” Warren replied quietly.

“Look, we can’t just stand here moping about,” Rori said, snapping into action.  “Guys,” he said, facing Megan and Hayley. 

“Girls,” Warren corrected.

“Girls,” he agreed.  “Put yourselves in Laura’s shoes.  What would be the first thing she would do?”

“Find us,” Megan replied immediately.  “Or she’d find Poppy.”

“Poppy?” Rori asked.

“Another one of our friends,” Hayley said dismissively.  “She’d get to us first though, I think.”

“Bloody loyalty for you,” Rori sighed, and he put his head into his hands.

“We’ll keep heading this way,” Hayley said, taking matters into her own hands and pointing left, away from the canteen.  “If we don’t find her in the next half hour, we get the hell out of here.  Agreed?”

Megan, Rori and Warren nodded grimly and followed Hayley down the corridor.  Rori hurried to catch up with Hayley.

“Pretty handy with that screwdriver,” he said, nodding towards it.

Hayley smiled.  “Truth be told, all I had to do was imagine that zombie was Russell,” she admitted.  “The rest was easy.”

“Yeah, all you had to do then was stab through the eye socket of a cannibalised, mental member of what appears to be the living dead,” Rori concluded.  “Perfectly easy.  A walk in the park, in fact.”

“You know what I mean,” Hayley said, with a roll of the eyes. 

“Quite the contrary,” Rori argued.  “I’ve only just spoken to you, really.”

“Such a pleasure, I’m sure,” was Hayley’s sarcastic reply.

Rori’s answer was interrupted by a loud whooshing sound from up ahead, and the crackle of what was undoubtedly a fire. 

“This way!” Rori shouted, leaping forwards and running towards where the sound had come from.

“Doesn’t common sense dictate that you should run away from a fire, not towards?” Hayley yelled, hurrying to keep up.

“Those things can’t start a fire,” Rori replied as they burst through a set of double wooden doors, Megan and Warren close on their heels.  They were in the Chemistry section of college now, and smoke was billowing towards them in dark clouds.

Rori thudded to a stop and Hayley almost ran into him, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back.  “You hear that?” he asked.  Hayley strained her ears, her eyes itchy from the smoke.

Hayley nodded.  The sound of a body sliding across the floor, and then the thuds of footsteps running.  Rori, Hayley, Warren and Megan raised their weapons instinctively, and Hayley swung around the corner, hand with the screwdriver raised about her head.

“After all that, and you are the one to kill me,” came Laura’s voice.  “Talk about bad timing.”

Hayley let out a squeal of delight and ran toward her friend, pulling her into a hug.  Megan hurried over and hugged Laura too, who beamed at the pair of them.  Hayley ran to pull Luke into a hug as well, but Luke backed away. 

“No no,” Luke said, waving a hand in front of him.  “Personal space please.”

Hayley laughed, and gave him an affectionate pat on the head instead, which Luke pretended to be alright about.

“We need to get out of here,” Megan said firmly.  “The sound of Laura and Luke’s 'accident' will have attracted all those zombies from the canteen towards us.  We need to move.