Class of 2013 - 4

Chapter Four

There was silence for a long moment, or so it felt, after those six words passed James’ lips. And then a smirk came to his lips, and I couldn’t help but grin back. It was then, at that precise moment in time, that I knew everything was going to be okay. I just knew it. I didn’t know for how long it would be okay, but I knew that at least for today we weren’t going to lose anyone else.

We’d lost hundreds – perhaps not hundreds of people close to us, but hundreds no less. Few people on Earth deserved the sort of hellish fate that our fellow cadets had suffered – especially the ones that had fought to protect others in the process. I knew of at least two that we had been so near to saving – and knew that if Lea had her way, we’d immortalize their names in some fashion or another.

I could hear Chien moving behind me, but didn’t know what he was doing until he came up with four radios and tossed one to James. “Just in case. It’s already set to the right channel.”

With a simple nod shared between the three of us, and not another word, James slipped out the rear door of the room, and Chien and I descended down into the once math classroom. Outside it was silent for a moment as I was handed one of the radios, and Chien put one in his pocket and the fourth on the desk, but soon enough we all could hear James shouting and cursing up a storm, followed by banging on metal drain pipes and walls – each bang and curse getting further away as time went. Then, suddenly, I saw Lea look up, eyes wide as they fell on the ammo boxes and the rifles. She looked around rapidly and stood, grabbing a nearby coil of a short, green extension chord and running over to one of the ammo boxes for the Remingtons.

Grabbing it, she looped the chord quickly through the carry handle and then popped it open – grabbing three of the five-round magazines and stuffing two in her pockets. Then she grabbed one of the Remingtons and loaded it, before slinging it over her shoulder and closing the ammo box. Grabbing up the chord, she put it over her head, draping it across like a sling down to the ammo box at her opposite hip. Without a word, she quickly headed for the door – but I stopped her.

“Lea… what the hell are you about to do?” I asked, brows raised as I looked toward her.

“I’m going to make sure that we don’t lose anyone else. I won’t let that happen ever again. Never.” The smile that was on her lips was betrayed by the tears in her eyes – tears that soon fell and were wiped away when she blinked. “Please don’t stop me, Roy. Let me do this.” She sounded firm, but I knew that she was begging on the inside. What she had to do earlier had wrecked her on the inside, and this was how she could fix herself. Redeem herself in her own eyes – forgive herself, even though what she had done had been as an act of mercy. In truth, it was our faults she had to do that. Had we acted sooner, we might have been able to save them.

“I wouldn’t dream of it, cousin.” I said softly, but stepped close and pulled her into a hug, whispering to her. “Just make sure you come back to us. You’re not good to anyone if you’re dead. You got that?” I grinned a little and handed the radio I had to her.

“Yeah.” There was a half chuckle as she hugged me back and sniffled a little as she took the radio. “I’ll remember that. Same goes for you and Chien. If you two die, I’ll tan your ghostly hides. Got it?”

“Hell hath no fury like cousin Lea.” I laughed softly, and then let her go after one last tight hug. “Go on, get outta here kid. Make sure we don’t have to replace his arm with a chainsaw or some other crazy thing – despite how awesome he’d probably think that was.” I grinned wryly, and it was returned by her. We both knew that James watched too many zombie movies – and we also both knew what his favorites were.

“Don’t worry. I’ll remind him what the words are when he goes to grab the book, too.” And there it was, a genuine smile – and then she was out the door with no further wasted time; off and running to a sniper perch that she had in mind. We heard shots begin to ring out, each getting a little further away not long after, and I knew she’d be okay. I took a deep breath then, and grabbed my bokken up – Chien grabbing the baseball bat at the same time.

“Ready?” Chien asked me, and I gave a nod.

“Let’s do it.” I said and gave a grin, and then glanced to the side as Molly stood atop a desk to look out the upper windows in the room, telling us it was clear. A moment later we rushed out of the room and then bolted toward the gate we needed to get through.

Thankfully, it was actually not very far away – just to the end of the building and the left a bit. Normally there would have been campus security personnel guarding it in the mornings as students came in, and in the afternoon as they left. Right now it was just locked like it normally would be around this time. It was a glaring obstacle to our advancement, but I knew that Chien could get us through it without much trouble. Calling him a master at lock picking might have been a slight overstatement, but not by far. He was skilled, and I’d seen him pick hundreds of locks in the past. They were never very complex ones, just ones that were on gates, fences, footlockers, and the like. Well, that and he’d figured out the combinations on some of the lockers in the boy’s locker room… Well, at least mine and James’ lockers, and mostly because we forgot our combinations a couple times.

When we reached the gate, I handed Chien my multi-tool and he set to work immediately with a bobby pin and the screwdriver tip. However, a minute or so into it I could tell that he was having trouble. He’d picked this same lock once before, or so we had thought. Upon asking him what the trouble was and taking a closer look at the lock myself, I had the answer to this quandary: it was a different lock entirely. After the last time it was picked, they must have changed it – no doubt likely because the campus security had seen it was so easy to pick; probably caught us on video. Thankfully he’d only picked it because Sweet was going to have us go and get some paper for the school office – and only then because the office workers were out to lunch and not answering their phones. Really, we could have gone back and asked for the keys, but the lock back then had been simple, and Chien popped it open before we could have gotten back to ask for the keys.

This time it wasn’t going to be that easy. This new lock was, in fact, more complex and a little smaller – so it was more of a pain to try and crack the locking mechanism. I saw Chien grinning though, and that was almost always good when it came to these situations. At least, until I heard him curse, and looking at the lock again, I saw why – broken bobby pin lodged in the mechanism. He scrunched his face and quickly set to the process of trying to withdraw the broken piece with the pliers in the multi-tool. It was slow going, but soon enough the broken piece was out and he was working on the lock again with a new bobby pin. Some of them were older and more prone to breaking than others because of how long he’d carried them around.

As he worked on the lock, my attention was drawn by the sound of a closing door. The strange thing was that it came from the building off to our left – and I knew that it was too close to have been an echo of the rear door closing from the room we were in. Snapping my head to the left to look, my eyes shot wide at the site of around thirty zombies making their way toward Chien and I. One of the classrooms had been full of them. They must have been pressed against the door after hearing James going through the campus, but hadn’t been able to get out until one of them pushed the door handle down. Worse, the door had only closed just now because the last one had left the room. About half of them were already getting near us. About ten yards away already.

Swatting Chien’s shoulder, I spoke. “Uh, dude, I think we got a problem…”

He didn’t even look up. “Oh, ya mean like a zombie invasion? Yeah, I think that qualifies as a problem, Roy.” I could just sense him rolling his eyes as he said it. It was rare that I wanted to bash someone over the head, but at that very moment I did. I could appreciate being a smartass, I was one rather frequently – but this was certainly not the time for it.

“No… something a little more pressing than that, Chien…” I growled out, and when he started to turn his head to look at me, I saw his eyes go wide at the sight of the zombies that were close to us.

“Why didn’t you fucking say something?!” He shouted at me, and immediately the zombies all seemed to get target lock. A few of them screeched, and all of them began making their way toward us more directly. Chien hopped to his feet and he and I bashed the couple that were closest before falling back away from the gate. “What now?” He asked, “Out the main gate? We can just push it open from the inside.”

Without waiting for my answer, he headed for it, but I grabbed his shirt before he could open it and pulled him away. “No, up the ladder!” I pointed to a ladder that was next to the office building that lead straight to its roof. “We go outside that gate and we’ll have more to deal with than thirty, and still have to pick a lock.” I then nodded my head toward the street out front of the school, and the wandering zombies that were shambling along.

“So what the hell are we gonna do from the roof?” He snapped and looked at me with a glare. I just looked back at him in that way of mine – that way that was waiting for him to figure it out himself. He just deepened the glare, and I quirked a brow as I waited. Then it seemed, all at once, he knew what my idea was, and he hung his head. “Alright, let’s go.”

“You first. You’re faster.” Of course, of the four of us, I was the only one that was out of shape – and when I say out of shape, I mean fat.

Yes, I went to a military school and I was fat. Go figure that shit, huh? Now, before you start thinking about some blob, I will say for myself that I wasn’t that bad. I needed to lose about a hundred pounds, but I was also six feet tall, so in the end I didn’t look all that horrible. Still, it meant I was out of shape and slower than anyone else – at least in the sense of running. I was pretty quick with my hands, hence why I was good with a sword, and I was steady too, so I was a pretty good shot mid-range and short range. Couldn’t fight hand to hand to save my life though – at least not past brawling and using force… or small joint manipulation. People hated when I did that, but it was incredibly effective… so I kept doing it.

Chien didn’t bother arguing with me, and was soon up the ladder and on the roof. I followed shortly after him, and a minute or so after I was on the roof, the zombies made their way to the ladder, and as soon as they got to it and grabbed it, they toppled it over. A little bit of sweet irony was that the crest of the ladder nailed a zombie in the head as it came down. A mutual sigh of relief came then since we were out of danger, and we then looked to the adjacent, gated and fenced off, parking lot. There was about a four foot gap between the edge of the roof and the top of the fence around the parking lot. Glancing to the fallen ladder, I immediately wished we’d thought to pull the ladder onto the roof with us. Could’ve used it as a bridge if we’d had the foresight.

“So…” Chien began as I looked back his way, “…I take it we’re jumping…?” He then looked to me, and I could just tell that he didn’t want to. Neither did I in all truth, but then again, there wasn’t really much choice anymore. I gave a nod. “You know Roy, sometimes I really hate your damn plans.”

That was the other thing that was strange about our little group. Chien was the one that would have made the obvious leader. He was the smartest of us, and he was the most dare-devilish as well, so he had that natural air about him. He was also the one of us that wasn’t really a slacker in practicality, and the one of us that actually had applied himself most to be promoted at school. He was a Major, and I was just a First Lieutenant. We’d both gone here the same length of time, but I didn’t really care for the whole promotion system. Admittedly, it was mostly based on your grades in school and whether or not you knew the history of the Cadet Corps – which was totally idiotic. It had nothing to do with actual leadership ability.

Even so, I had been promoted to where I was both because I had experience, and because I had the time and grade that I qualified for promotion even without having to do all that extra, pointless, crap. Not to say that Chien had gotten where he was without having the ability to lead, but he’d mostly done it just so he didn’t have to have a bunch of people with the ability to tell him what to do at the school. In fact, aside from the school staff, there was only one person ranked above him in the entire school, and that was our Lieutenant Colonel. Unfortunately, at least for her, she hadn’t been one of the ones to make it today. In fact, Chien and I were the only cadet officers in the entire battalion that had survived.

Yet, despite this knowledge, somehow I was usually the de-facto leader of our little group. Whenever there was plan for the group, I was usually either the one giving approval or disapproval, or the one that was actually making the plan and getting everyone together to do things. I’d never once in the entire time that I’d been friends with these three understood why that had happened. I even frequently tried to say that Chien was the leader, but he would always decline and say that it was me – and James would never let me even try and deny it. Lea never really brought it up, but she always got a good laugh out of me trying to deny it.

“Yeah, I know you do, but then again if you hate them so much, why do you always delegate the planning to me?” I smirked. Okay, so sometimes being the leader could be nice, especially when it let me give a comeback based on the fact that they all basically made me be the leader. “Before we go and jump, let’s see just which of these cars is Mr. Malone’s.” Chien nodded in agreement, at least after the initial glare that he gave me for the first comment, and we stepped over to the side. Raising up the keys and the door lock remote, I pressed one of the buttons and heard the alarm deactivation tone… from right down in front of us.

Sitting before us was something that I never would have pictured Mr. Malone driving… but apparently our recently deceased math teacher had been the proud owner of a brand new 2013 Viper SRT. Chien and I stared at it for a moment, and then looked at each other, and then back at the car. There was total silence between us for a moment, and then Chien asked what we both had been thinking about.

“Do we… have to take the El Camino…?” We looked at each other, both with hopeful expressions, but we knew that we couldn’t take the Viper. We both wanted to; who wouldn’t want to take that monster for a spin? But, we also knew that there would be quite a lot to haul, and there wasn’t enough space in the Viper to do it.

“Unfortunately, as much as it pains me to say it, yeah… we gotta take the El Camino. Not enough space in the Viper.” Chien groaned, and I tried not to grin too much, “But… hey, it’ll still be here later. We could always take it for a spin some other time. Hell, who knows? Maybe we’ll end up having to go somewhere and do something that only takes the two of us. Perfect excuse to take the fastest vehicle in the motor pool, right?” I grinned, and Chien did the same. Now we just had to hope that it would actually happen. I actually kinda doubted it, but then again, we could always just come up with some sort of excuse to do it. We were pretty good at making up reasons for doing things we wanted to do.

“Did you just call it a motor pool?” He smirked as he looked at me. “It’s not exactly full of Humvees and tanks. You know that, right?”

“Shut up.”

Pressing the alarm deactivation button, followed by the door lock disengagement button for the Viper, I smiled a little, and then tried not to groan at the thought of having to jump across there. I was admittedly a little afraid of doing it. I knew I was heavy and not terribly fast, but I was also confident that I could do it with a running start. Looking from the parking lot to the edge of the roof, and then up along the roof and down it, I took a breath. I knew also that this was going to hurt when we came down, but I figured it would be better to aim for a couple of the cars on either side of the Viper, rather than to let ourselves land on the asphalt. Telling Chien the plan, he nodded wearily, and we walked to the far side of the roof. Thankfully it was mostly flat with only a slight gradient on either side.

It was only once we got to the other side of the roof that we heard another shot.