Room 204 (#OpenNovellaContest2021)

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Mrs. Glassberg and I had been communicating back and forth for about an hour as I drew out a floor plan of the school. I had each floor drawn out and each room labeled, writing notes as necessary. These notes included survivor locations, locations of confirmed infected, possible escape routes. I felt hope knowing there were other people alive in here, but also dread because I wasn't sure if we would be able to help each other. If I were going to be trapped inside a school during something absolutely crazy like this, I had to admit that this school wasn't so bad. We had a population of about five hundred students since we had a separate building from the elementary and middle school. Smaller population meant smaller amount of infected and less ground to cover before reaching a possible escape, but that also meant we didn't have a lot of places to hide that wasn't occupied by someone, whether that someone was alive or dead or infected was the other problem. I was also happy to hear that Mrs. Glassberg had finally found the other two police officers that had entered the school on camera. They had ducked into a janitor's closet and she had caught a glimpse of them peaking their head out of the door only to be quickly chased back inside by an infected. I didn't recognize the dead police officer, but I was familiar with the two that were trapped, Chief Davis and Officer Douglas.

Small towns mean everyone knows everyone and Chief Davis sure knew a hell of a lot about me. He was actually the one that took me to my grandfathers to stay instead of letting me get caught up in CPS. I don't think I had ever properly told him thank you for that. He was a good cop, aware that the law was not black and white, especially in a rural town like ours. Like skipping the paperwork involved when a child is found in the car with a drunk driver and taking the child where she belonged instead. This would lower the charges on my mother and keep me from being mixed into the system. It was a win, win for all parties involved, but fell into the grey zone of the law. Officer Douglas and I didn't know each other well, but had spoken from time to time when I saw the Chief in town. I hadn't heard anything bad or good about him. It occurred to me that I had not heard them call out on the dead officer's radio this entire time. I had only heard reports from the dispatcher. I wonder if they knew he was dead already or if they had simply turned their own radios off to keep from attracting the infected. I made a mental note to grab the officer's radio when we left. Maybe somehow, I would be able to reach them with it or I could at least keep up with what was going on outside. We had heard all kinds of news from it, included a trailer of cattle abandoned on the highway that had attracted quite the horde of the sick people. The thought of being trapped like that, listening to them trying to claw their way inside made my stomach turn a flip until I realized we were very much in the same boat as those cows.

The kids were still working on gathering supplies and I overheard Jackson and Jeremy debating on whether or not velocity of force was going to help more when it came to weapons. I was a bit skeptical about how many weapons we were going to have in here, but I continued writing notes while they worked. I had about figured out a good route when I heard a loud, wet splat. I turned to see Alex with her hand over her mouth looking out the window. She awkwardly giggled as she said:

"Oh my gosh. That was so gross."

I leaned over the ledge to see a fetal pig on the sidewalk below our window. The formaldehyde it was soaked in had sprayed out a pattern like a wet specimen snow angel.

"Um, why did you do that?"

She shrugged her shoulders, not sure how to explain her intentions.

"Uh, for science?"

I couldn't help but laugh back at the absurdity of the situation and her statement.