Dead City. Joe Mckinney

it. It’s locked.”

      I thought I heard Carlos laugh. “School lets out at three,” he said.

      “Come on. Maybe there’s a window or something.”

      We went down to the lawn. I looked left and then right. More zombies were coming at us from the parking lot. Hedges blocked the windows to the left, so we went right.

      The lawn sloped downward, away from the school. The first-floor windows were over our heads all the way to the end of the building, so we went around the corner of the building and followed the wall until we came to another staircase.

      It was a narrow half-flight of stairs leading up to another green metal door.

      I tried the door, and wasn’t at all surprised when it didn’t open.

      “Where are we going, Eddie?”

      “Through here,” I said, and leaned Carlos against the railing.

      There was a little window halfway up the stairs that looked big enough for us to crawl through. I peered inside, couldn’t really see anything in the darkness, and decided we had to risk it.

      I pulled my baton and punched out the window-pane. I swept the rest of the glass out of the frame and pulled Carlos over to me.

      “We’re going through here,” I said. “Can you help me?”

      He laughed, or muttered. I couldn’t tell which. It was beginning to get difficult to read his gestures.

      I crawled through the window and then reached back to get Carlos. He tried to help, but he wasn’t thinking clearly, and his help slowed me down more than anything else. It was a clumsy, painful process, but I got him through eventually.

      As he came through he landed heavily on his face, and stayed that way.

      “Are you okay?” I asked.

      He growled at me as he rolled over onto his back.

      “Sorry,” I said.

      I reached down to him and he took my hand. Once he was on his feet he slumped back against the window frame and started coughing again.

      “We ought to find the nurse’s office,” I said. “If nothing else, maybe they have a phone. We could call somebody.”

      “Who?” His voice sounded like it was coming through liquid.

      “9-1-1, I guess. Maybe they can get an ambulance to us. Or tell us what to do for you.”

      “Maybe,” he said, but it looked like he didn’t really care.

      I guided him through the utility room and into the hallway.

      It was dark, and it was obvious that whatever was happening to the outside world had also happened here. Trash was everywhere. A few classroom doors hung open haphazardly. Disorder reigned.

      I looked down the banks of lockers to the end of the hallway, where it split into three directions.

      “Here, come on. I think it’s this way.”

      We took the hallway to the right even though I didn’t really remember how to get to the office. The front doors led directly into the cafeteria, I remembered that much, but I wasn’t sure where the office was from there.

      In most elementary schools the office is right there in the front, but I remembered this one was different. I thought it was on the other side of the gym, so I worked that way.

      The hallway in front of the office was littered with loose-leaf paper and large pieces of office furniture toppled over at odd angles.

      One of the overhead light panels was dangling from the ceiling by a tattered rope of electrical wires. I watched it spin in a lazy circle like it was the center of the world, and I wondered how in the hell it had fallen down like that.

      Carlos groaned something.

      Off to the right, coming around into the hallway from another direction, was a man in brown corduroy pants and a collared shirt. He was dragging a bleeding stump that used to be his leg across the floor, smearing the tile behind him with gore. His neck was broken, his head bent over at a disgusting angle. A huge red knot had swelled up from the other side of his neck.

      Behind him were five more zombies.

      I let Carlos rest against the wall while I loaded a magazine and chambered a round.

      With my flashlight up, I walked toward the lead zombie in the brown corduroys and shot him. Once he was down, I stood over his body and shot the other five, single-tapping each one to the forehead.

      When the last one fell, I went over to the glass doors of the office and tried to pull them open. They were locked.

      “Damn it. This place is killing me.”

      I pointed my flashlight into the office and poked the light around. I was right about to turn around and get Carlos when I saw a flash of green pant leg and a brown boot below it.

      Whoever it was had seated themselves behind a desk, but I couldn’t see anything besides the leg and the boot.

      I kept the beam on the leg, waiting.

      Suddenly, a Hispanic man with straight black hair and very brown skin peeked around the corner of the desk. He smiled at me, and in the bright white light of the flashlight beam I saw his teeth sparkling like veiled diamonds.