The First 30 Days (PUBLISHED)

Twelve - Day 7

I gasped. "What about Jack!" I started towards the door, to do what I didn't know, but Shawn stopped me with the grip he still had on my arm.

"He's still out there. He ran for the stairs."

I stopped pulling toward the door. The blood stained hands clawing at the window reminded me that anyone who tried to go into the cafeteria had a grim future.

Where at first the kitchen had been almost peaceful, so long as you ignored the dead body, the noise now hurt my ears. The clanging of tables overturning, bangs of the zombies at the door, and the shuffling of a whole lot of feet only added to the sound. As I listened, one sound distinguished itself from the rest.

My hands covered my ears in a failed attempt to block the sound of still human screaming.

I dimly realized that tears were tracking down my cheeks but didn't want to take a hand from my ears to wipe them away. Backing further away from the door, I sank to the floor. The panicked cries for help lasted for another minute before fading.

Shawn stayed behind the counter, gripping the bat tightly and watching the door. It didn't have a lock we were able to engage. The zombies didn't seem capable of turning a doorknob, but that didn't mean one of them wouldn't get lucky. If they got the door opened, we were both dead.

"We have to find a way out of here."

I looked up from my study of the floor. "How? There's only one door and no windows."

He began looking around the room for any way to escape. We had both already explored the entire kitchen, I was positive that the door blocked by zombies was the only way out. I watched Shawn looking around with a sense of helplessness. The situation was worse than it had been when I was trapped in the bathroom.

"I think this is a drop ceiling."

"What?" I looked up to find Shawn staring up.

"A drop ceiling." He gestured up. "It's a false ceiling. Above it is a space that has the ducts and pipes and stuff. It might be big enough for us to crawl up there."

Climbing to my feet, I walked to stand next to him as he contemplated the ceiling. Not looking at me, he suddenly climbed on top of the counter and reached up. The ceiling panel lifted up easily when he pushed on it. Shoving the panel aside, he stood up all of the way and his head disappeared into the hole.

Shawn looked at me. "This could work. We'll have to be careful, the ceiling panels won't support any weight, but the ducts and pipes should."

A particularly forceful bang on the door made me look fearfully over my shoulder. The door stayed closed, but the bloodshot eyes of a zombie peered in directly at us. I scrambled on top of the counter. "Ok. Let's go."

"Try to be quiet. We should be out of their reach up here, but still. Take your time. When we get inside, we will have to find a way out or up."

I was significantly shorter than Shawn, and even standing on the counter, climbing into the ceiling was going to be a challenge. Seeing my predicament, he gestured that he would help me up.

The air inside the ceiling was dusty and stale. The boost helped me climb high enough to be able to perch on a bunch of old looking pipes. The surfaces that I had held on to to get up there felt filthy. The space was an allergy attack in the making.

The metal infrastructure groaned ominously as Shawn pulled himself into the crawl space, but it held. Holding onto the bat with one hand, I was impressed at how easily he made the climb.

"Now what?"

"I think we'll know when we've found what we're looking for." Carefully, he began to inch his way across the labyrinth of metal.

Right next to the hole that we'd made, there had been enough light. But I quickly discovered that it was really dark up in the ceiling. The lack of light made our already slow progression even slower. The groaning of the ducts, and the commotion from the zombies that was coming from directly below us now, had my nerves wound tight. When Shawn accidentally hit something with the bat, the clang made me jump so hard I almost slipped off of the pipes.

"Sorry," he whispered.

I didn't reply, just concentrated even harder on staying safely hidden in the ceiling.

The smell of decay had been steadily increasing. Before long I was fighting back the urge to gag.

I didn't know how long we had been navigating the darkness, but it was long enough that my muscles started to burn with exertion. Crawling along the inside of the ceiling was more physically demanding than I would have guessed. I nearly cried in relief when I heard, "This is it! I think this leads to an air vent in the stairwell."

In the blackness ahead, I thought I could see a relatively large metal duct that ended at a wall. How Shawn knew it led into the stairs, I didn't know. He must have kept a better sense of direction up there than I had. There was just one problem. The metal air duct blocked our way out.

"Ok. But how do we get out it?"

"We're going to have to get the duct to come off of the wall." He spent several minutes feeling around in the darkness, looking for a clue how to remove the metal. A frustrated sound let me know that it wasn't going well. "It's bolted fast. I can't get the bolts loose."

After a few more seconds, he stopped his search. His vague outline in the dark appeared to turn in my direction. "I could probably get it off there, but it's going to make a lot of noise."

"Do we have any other options?" I was way out of my comfort zone here, and had no suggestions.

"We could keep looking, but any place that could be an exit is going to have the same challenges. I'm pretty sure this one leads into the stairs. We could go up, get our stuff, and find a better way out of the building."

I nodded, then realized that he probably couldn't see me. "Do it."

Turning around so his feet were toward the duct, Shawn got a good grip on some pipes, and began kicking at the metal. The noise was awful as he repeatedly hit the duct, and the metal began to slowly warp and bend.

The noise from below, already loud, increased as the zombies were worked into a frenzy by the noise. They could hear but not see us, and the sounds they made had me readjusting my grip. Falling through the ceiling would be bad.

Starting to huff from exertion, Shawn began to use the bat to pry the metal further from the wall. With a tortured sound, it finally gave way.

The end of the duct fell down, revealing a vent. Dim light and much needed fresh air streamed in through the holes. With one hard blow, the vent popped free from the wall and clattered to the floor below.

Sticking his head out the hole, Shawn looked around, and then back at me. "It's clear. I'll help you down."

The hole in the wall was maybe a foot by two and a half feet. Not that big at all. As I turned around and stuck my feet through, I was suddenly glad for the weight that I had lost over the last week. With help, wriggling through the wall and dropping to the floor wasn't hard. My sneakers slapped the hard floor of the stairwell, he had been right, and I immediately raced to the door and locked it. Catching sight of me, zombies swarmed the door and it rattled in it's frame.

Inside the cafeteria, not all that far from the other side of the door I was standing at, a red stain spread across the previously clean carpet. A familiar shoe was jostled across the floor, kicked by zombies as they surged in my direction. Pulling my gaze away, I turned back to check on Shawn, still trying to get out of the ceiling. I didn't want to see any more.