The Shadow

A figure moves in the corner of my eye

A dark man is what I spy

I feel a stare when I close my eyes

Open them, and the apparition cuts worldly ties

I sense a hand touching my hair

The courage to move away isn’t there

Eyes shut tight, rigid with fear

My cheek feels one single tear

I click on the light

It seems all the monsters are now at a loss for a fight

Chapter Three

Something wakes me up. It may just be the fact that I am trying to sleep on a tiny desk, but something other than my numb butt seems off. I look around the classroom. Everyone appears to be asleep. I turn to the window and lay my head back down on my arms looking into the night. The moon is covered by thin clouds. But through the dark I think I see movement along the opposite wall of the school’s courtyard. There are two figures. One looks like a human, judging by the upright shape. The other, maybe a dog. A big dog. I have no idea what time it is but maybe it’s an old man walking his dog? The guy is hobbling pretty badly, but heaven knows only senior citizens get up this early just to walk. I watch the man and dog stumble out of the courtyard, and I find myself asleep once again.

I wake up to early morning sunlight in my face and a banging on the window. The pounding wakes the others around me up, as well. I see the old man from last night. He must have never left the courtyard. He is repeatedly hitting the glass open palmed. I look closely at him. He is dirty and his eyes are a clouded blue. He must be blind! Pity races through my heart. His brown jacket is hanging off of one arm, and his gray hair needs a shower.

Out of my peripheral vision I see the vice principal coming into the courtyard through the west side door. He waves something in the air. It looks a bit like deformed mystery meat. The old man turns around and heads toward Mr. Tanks. Mr. Tanks walks toward a small alcove where a storage shed is. He leads the old man back there. There is nothing for quite awhile then we hear a gunshot. It echoes around the courtyard for the whole school to hear. Mr. Tanks walks out of the alcove, but the old man does not.

Someone screams in the room next to us. I hear muffled yelling coming through the brick walls. No one is watching the scene outside anymore, save for me. As the vice principal walks through the courtyard I see something pop out of the long grasses on the side of the building where the riding mower doesn’t quite reach. It is the same shape and size as the dog from last night. But as its head lifts up higher I see a woman’s face. She rises up on her abdomen like she is practicing yoga. I see her before he does.

She arches her neck out and nips at him as he walks by. He stumbles, and in that instance the woman bites his ankle. He swats her off and hobbles into the school as fast as his bleeding leg will carry him.

I turn around and the rest of the class is at the door. They are shoving Mrs. Duvall aside who is standing at the door like a British guard before the skinny, acne faced cocky kid throws her aside to the ground. Someone throws open the door, and I see students streaming into the hallway from all classrooms. Panic has set in.

I look around the chaos. I need to get home. I need to find my brother. I grab my phone off Mrs. Duvall’s desk and check it. Dead after a whole night off the charger. I stop to offer my hand to Mrs. Duvall who is still lying on the ground, but she just waves me away like she wants to sit on the floor a while longer to collect herself.

I can’t remember my brother’s class schedule. I guess I should’ve paid more attention to his school life, never thought it’d matter. Most of his classes are in the shop hall; I know that much. Those classes are closer to the parking lot than my classes are anyway. I grab my backpack from the dirty linoleum and walk out into the hallway. I am instantly pushed down. Some bigger kid from the junior class runs into me and never even stops after I go down. I watch his sweatpant covered ass move up and down as he attempts to jog through the crowd like a bulldozer. I scoot on my butt to the edge of the hall where there is less traffic. I stand up along the lockers and join the masses, more alert this time. The noise is deafening: papers rustling, students yelling, lockers slamming, car horns blaring.

I pass the doors that lead to the parking lot and see the mess out there. Two guys in my grade are arguing in front of their cars. Both front ends are mashed to the point where they look undriveable, smoke is rising from the engine of the white car involved. The blue car has both headlights dangling on the ground like eyeballs popped from their sockets. There are horns blaring and people running across the blacktop. I hear screams and one, “Help me! I ride the bus! Take me home!”

I keep going, dodging running students who are flooding out the single set of doors to their cars. Getting past the doors that go into the parking lot is the toughest crowd as it is thick and loud. Girls are screaming, guys are swearing and everyone is so close it’s hard to see. Every face I pass looks panicked and animalistic. Their eyes are wide and looking everywhere, but observing nothing. They are going with the crowd, and getting violent if they are pushed out, shoving and ramming their way back into the stream out the doors. I give up saying, “excuse me” to the unhearing ears and just barrel my way through, thank God for gym class. I am the only one heading away from the doors outside. I finally get to the auto and wood shop hallway. God, why did it have to be on the other side of my school from the home economics room? The main hallways I need to get down are almost a quarter mile long each. It has been almost ten minutes since I left my classroom.

I peer in each door, praying my brother decided to go against the crowd and stay behind for me or at least not get involved in the parking lot chaos. The first two rooms are empty, no students, no teacher, all gone. I smell a mixture of oil and wood shavings as I open each door. The third to last room holds a small, presumably freshman, girl. She is sitting face down into her knees crying in the back corner. I almost don’t notice her until I hear her sniffle. I approach her cautiously because I hate talking to crying people. I am going to have to say something heartfelt to a girl I have never met. I may have to touch her on the shoulder, and she may hug me back, and I hate hugs from strangers. I will need to relax so she cannot feel the tension radiating off of me. She is trembling beneath her faded ripped jeans and long sleeved tee shirt with our school colors, yellow and purple. I grit my teeth and flex my hands to prepare myself to talk to her. I feel nervous about her. It is strange of her to be here at all and not screaming in the parking lot.

“Hey, do you know where Carl Markson is?” I ask when her cries seem quiet enough to hear me.

The girl looks up at me, her eyes are streaming with tears. “I don’t even know who that is,” she finished the sentence with an unattractive sob. “Please, please, help me. My foot!”

I glance down at her foot, it is swollen and turning a sick yellow color that almost matches the yellow flip-flops she is wearing. “I fell in the hall and someone stepped on me with heels,” she rolls her leg over and I can see a perfect little hole right through her Achilles tendon. The girl is thin, so I imagine the hooker heel didn’t have too much flesh to puncture through. I see now that the girl is sitting in a small pool of blood.

“Holy, Hell,” I said. “I, um, hang on,” I slide my neon green backpack off my left shoulder and rummage inside. Mom is so over-precautious that I have a few first aid items on me wherever I go. I pull some Neosporin out of the front of my bag. I look up at her and put my finger up to indicate I’ll be back in a minute. I dart out of the room after she nods. The hallways are clearing out now, but I still hear horns blaring in the parking lot. I run into the nearest bathroom, grab a handful of paper towels, and get some of them wet from the sink. My hands are shaking as I turn the sink handle off. I’m okay with blood from a deer, not a person. I head back into the hall and back to the shop room with the girl.

I find her back in her same position I found her in, with her head down and crying. She looks up again when I enter. Her face is paler than when I left her only a minute ago. I take the wet towels and try to clean the bleeding hole. She pulls her leg back in pain. I don’t have time for this. I grab her leg and pull it out with enough force that she learns to deal with the pain as I dry the deep wound and apply the Neosporin. I am surprised at my hands that were shaking only a moment ago are now working steadily. I reach into my backpack and grab my gym shirt that I was taking home to wash today and tie it around her ankle tightly to try and stop the blood.

“I have to go find my brother,” I say. “Can you stay here while I look?” I can’t just leave her here, but I have to look, and I need a break from staring at her. The pain she feels, I can feel. It makes me want to run. She nods, but doesn’t speak to acknowledge me; her lips are pursed shut to keep from yelling.

I head out into the white, brick halls again. I hear a scream come from outside through a small window above the lockers. I ignore it and check out the last two classrooms on this side of the school. They are empty. He must have headed home without me. I am not upset by this; I am glad to know he must be safe. Good, he can explain the bomb threat and whatever happened in the courtyard to Mom. I’m sure she is worried that we aren’t home; I doubt the school called anyone. Dad too, is probably worried, but he is probably keeping Mom calm with no time to freak out himself.

I head back to the room with the girl. When I enter I see Brian standing over her. He sees me as I enter.

“I knew it was you Rebecca here was describing,” he smiles, “How many other pale, blonde girls with a neon green backpack and nerd antiseptics stashed in their bag go to school here?”

I smile back and run to him with my arms open. What are the odds it’s him I find here? “What the Hell is going on?” He shakes his head from side to side.

“I don’t think this was just a bomb threat. Did you see what happened in the courtyard? That was the freakiest thing I’ve seen all school year, and it was center stage for the whole school to see! Maybe this is some terrorist attack on a school for sick kicks and giggles.” He is looking down at me with worry.

“Zoe!” It’s another familiar voice. I turn around.

Tom runs over to me from the doorway. He pulls me out of Brian’s hands and gives me a quick, but strong hug. Then he looks down at Rebecca on the ground like he hadn’t noticed her before. She has gone quiet. Her tears are dried up and her jaw is no longer clenched in pain, but hanging open and loose like she is about to pass out.

“Uh, she okay?” He raises his eyebrows in concern and shock.

“No,” Brian says looking downcast toward Tom, clearly irritated at his question. “She can’t walk…Mr. Tanks?”

We all look to the classroom door where Brian’s eyes have been drawn, and there is our muscular vice principal staring back at us with his eyes wide and bloodshot. His head is angled down, staring at Rebecca in particular. We look down at her, my tee shirt is soaked through with blood and she goes from pale to green in an instant. Mr. Tanks begins to lumber towards her. Thank God, he is going to take care of her so I can get home to my family. Then I see the snarl in his mouth, and the glossiness of his eyes like the blind man.

He gets within four feet of us and lunges down at her. I leap back, startled. He bites at her foot where the hole is! Rebecca lets out a scream as the teeth dig in.

“Shit!” I scream. Brian kicks him hard in the side. Mr. Tanks looks up and takes a swipe at Brian’s leg, he jumps back just in time. Mr. Tanks isn’t a small guy. He is old and balding on top, but he can be seen in the school workout room everyday after class lets out. I take my black pocket knife out of my left front pocket and wave it in Mr. Tanks’ face to get his attention. Rebecca screams an ear-piercing screech as he bites at her foot again, this time tearing a chunk out and leaving the bottom of the calf muscle exposed and stringy. I feel all of my muscles tighten and my jaw clench. I drive the knife into his shoulder blade. He doesn’t seem phased, my eyes widen with shock. Both Brian and Tom magically decide to kick him at the same time in the head. I hear a crack from his skull and he crumples under the combined blow. Thank God for reinforced steel toed boots.

We three stand in a triangle and stare at each other for a split second. I slowly force myself to relax my muscles. We are all looking dumbfounded at each other. A loud sob comes from Rebecca. In that instant Brian bends down and scoops her up. I run over to the teacher’s desk and reach for the phone surrounded by family photos. I dial 911. It rings once then goes dead.

“Damn it!” I say. “Brian, the lines gone dead.”

“I’ll take her home. She lives down my road. Her parents can take her to the hospital.”

I give him a look that says she won’t make it there. The drive to his house is five minutes from the school, and already her eyes are closed. She’s unconscious now, with the tears still wet on her cheeks. He looks at me knowingly. He has a good heart; he can’t just leave her.

“Okay, I am going to head home. Whatever the Hell was wrong with Mr. Tanks seems like some sort of rabies. My mom can’t get sick. Her immune system…” I stop. My throat is choking on itself. I suddenly can’t get my family out of my head. I want to go home and make sure they are okay even though I know Dad and Carl can easily take care of themselves.

“I know, babe.” He leans over and kisses me on the forehead and turns to start walking to the door with Rebecca in his arms. “I’ll try and be at your house sometime tonight. Go check on your mom,” he says as he walks out of the room with Rebecca cradled in his arms, limp.

I turn to Tom who is staring at the pool of blood on the cement floor. “You going home or to your grandma’s?” I ask.

His stare breaks from the blood. “Where is Carl?” Tom inquires.

“Gone.”

“I’ll give you a ride. My grandma probably needs to be checked up on more than my parents right now, given that she can barely walk on her own let alone stop something like Mr. Tanks.” He looks down and to the right despite the attempted humor in his voice. His lips twitch down and I can see color drain from them the harder he purses them.

“Should we leave him?” I ask.

“The phone line is dead, I left my phone in the classroom, and I am thinking we may be the only people left in the school. I’m not sure what else we can do.”

We look down at the corpse that was our vice principal. His face is still in a snarl, mouth-dripping blood between perfectly straight teeth, but his limbs look calm, almost like he is sleeping, arms twisted down by his side, parallel to his torso. I liked him; he helped me out when I got caught with knives at school two years ago. He looked at the circumstances…my mom had been recently diagnosed with cancer and I was a straight A student. He called it “stressed rebellion” to the Principal, even though I have been fascinated by knives long before cancer became a daily word at our dinner table. Of course, the deer in headlights look in my eyes was probably a helping factor for my case. I was only suspended for 5 days, not a bad deal when you should have been expelled from the district for carrying three blades in a high school. Clearly, I never learned my lesson; I take my knife out of his shoulder. I feel a shiver run up my spine as I give a tug. I am used to the sound of a knife being dug out of wood, pictures, and even my bedroom carpet on a bad day, but the sucking noise it makes as it exits his muscle is something new to my ears, and I cringe. I pull my blue gym shorts out of my bag and wipe my blade clean on them before stuffing them to the bottom again.

“I just have to grab my keys out of my locker, Zoe.” Tom and I walk to his locker by the principal’s office. There are papers littering the hallways and lockers left open. The posters for prom are the only thing remaining normal, hung on the wall with masking tape. He is turning his lock combination when there is a scream from behind the frosted glass door to the office. There is an unnatural howling that follows that sounds like it is coming from a male. Tom and I run to the door but find that it is locked. Then there is the woman’s scream again, but it is cut short. We hear a gurgling before it fades away. Tom and I share a look and back away from the door. I notice dried blood spatters in the corner of the frosted glass. At least now it makes sense as to why it wasn’t Mr. Palpate that made the announcement earlier.

We walk into the parking lot together. Save for a few cars, it is deserted now. One I recognize as Mr. Tanks’ red Ford F150 in the far corner by the exit on the west side of the lot. We walk to Tom’s dark blue Ford Focus hatchback. I sit inside. It smells like cigarettes; he’s back at the habit.

We drive to my house in silence. The streets are packed with road rage. I see people beating their steering wheels, and attempting to drive on the sidewalks. Everyone is hitting the road at once. When finally we pull into my subdivision it seems oddly quiet, like the panic has yet to set in here. We park in my driveway; the beat-up red Sunfire Pontiac I drove to school yesterday morning is parked next to my dad’s blue truck.

Tom keeps the engine running.

“Thank you. I hope…God, that was weird,” I say. Tom’s face is white, and his eyes stare blankly out the window, “You know, it was a form of self defense…for Rebecca,” I say.

Tom looks down at his keys dangling from the ignition. He has a family picture with his own young face smiling back at his older self. “Yeah, I know. Maybe we just knocked him out, maybe he’ll wake up and come to his senses.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Tell your grandma I say hi, and drive safe, Tom.”

He gives me a smile as I step out of his car. He backs out of my driveway and rounds the corner to pull into his grandma’s yard. I hope he makes it home okay. I have a feeling the traffic is only going to get worse. He lives a good fifteen minutes from my house on a normal day. But there is nothing I can do about it. I have my own family to look after.

I walk to my front door. The gardens lining the sidewalk are in full bloom. The scent of Lily of The Valley is almost overwhelmingly sweet. My mother planted the bulbs last fall for the tulips and daisies and weeded everything so it would be good to go in the spring. I think she knew she wouldn’t have the energy to tend to her hobby this year. It’s horribly amazing how fast she is going down hill. I find myself paused with my hand on the doorknob. I look at the garden and sigh. Despite everything today, the memory of helping my mother about three years ago comes to my mind.

It was a very sunny July day with all my friends in the neighborhood gone on vacation and no driver’s license yet. I was bored and decided that it would be best to spend some quality time with my mom, at least for a couple hours. So I put on an old white tee shirt and went out to the garden.

Mom was wearing the wide brimmed, pink, baseball cap she keeps hanging in the garage by the door year round. Her face was a little red from the heat, and her wavy brunette hair was pulled back into a ponytail through the hat. She had on old, worn garden gloves and was using a green knee pad as she knelt on the sidewalk. She was just diagnosed about two months prior. We all still thought she would beat it hands down like in a Hallmark movie, but that was before we saw the damage chemo can do to a body first hand.

“Hi, Zoe. Coming to help me pull weeds?”

“Yeah, it’s nice outside.”

We sat and we pulled weeds out by the roots for a few minutes. She was giving me advice on pulling weeds and gardening that I had no clue about, nor did I ask for, but the information was interesting so I listened.

“Shake the dirt from the roots so you don’t lose soil.” “Don’t pull that, it looks dead, but come fall the buds are starting to grow on what looks like dead branches.” “Lily Of The Valley is invasive, split them from the roots so we can give some to someone. Actually, I think Riley down the street wants a starter of them.”

After all these tips I asked, “Mom, have you always liked gardens?” It seems strange to me to picture my mom as a young girl just starving to plant a garden and learn about the planting seasons. Is this a hobby all people pick up at a certain age?

“Well, my dad was a farmer, so I was always around plants. Then when he passed away I actually got into it myself. It makes me feel closer to him.” Her answer was so matter of fact that I never questioned her further. Using the word gardener as a noun to describe my mother has been ingrained in me.

My grandfather died long before my parents met. He had always been an outdoorsy kind of guy from what I’ve heard. Then one day he was out for a bike ride with my grandma on the country roads. It had seemed as though everyone planted corn that year, and the stalks were high.

A guy dressed in black came up behind them on a motorcycle. They thought nothing of it until he turned around and stopped in front of them. He told my grandparents to get into the cornfield and leave all their belongings on the road. He said he had a gun. When they refused to do as the man said because they knew their chances of surviving a mugging once in the field were slim to none, my grandpa told my grandma to pedal as fast as possible, and he leapt off his bike at the man before being shot down. I guess the guy wasn’t lying about the gun. My grandma had turned the next corner of the road and dove into a field on the other side. She hid in the stalks until the man left.

Mom’s been a cautious person since. It wasn’t until the start of my senior year that I was allowed to stay out past 10:30p.m.

“Zoe, get inside,” Carl stands in the doorway. His mouth is in a semi frown. “How did you get home?”

I break my stare away from the garden and come into the house. I put my backpack down to the right on the side of the door.

“Well, not in my car,” I give him a glare.

“I looked for you! You weren’t in any of the nerd halls, and I waited by the car for a good fifteen minutes!”

“Yeah?” But then I remember I had been distracted with Rebecca, “I got caught up, sorry.”

“I can’t believe there are zombies walking around. This is some serious shit,” Carl says with a weird gleam in his eyes, like he’s almost excited.

Zombies? Mr. Tanks wasn’t a one case deal? The blind man? Seems real and fabricated at the same time to me despite what I’ve just seen, but he can use whatever words he likes to describe it.

“I…I stabbed Mr. Tanks,” I look down at the ground.

Carl just looks at me like I commented on the weather and nods once. We share a bond; we can open up to each other, but not always with words. I am his sister and he is my brother, this is the bond we share. We can move on with our day where everything has gone wrong and know that the normalcy is all we need to keep going without having to ask each other. We can laugh with each other when the world beats us down, when Mom is sleeping the day away after she puked all night.

“Come watch the news, oh and Dad is home. He came home early yesterday I guess,” he ignores my statement in a way that makes me feel like it wasn’t a big deal. I want to thank him for that.

“Why?”

“Mom had a treatment.”

“Oh yeah,” I feel like an asshole for not remembering that this is her bad week. Every other Thursday she sits in a cozy chair that attempts to help with the pain, with my dad by her side in an awkward folding chair, and she has radiation or chemotherapy, depending on the cycle the doctors have chosen for the next six months. Then she rides the twenty minutes back home after hours in the chair and vomits all the way. Yet somehow, my inconsiderate self forgets the days or the week all the time. I should have this down like it’s been part of my life forever.

We walk into the living room where the television is on CNN. Mom lies on the leather couch, and Dad is sitting at her feet, massaging them.

“And now to Dr. Frankenski from the University of Michigan,” comes a voice from the television.

The screen switches view to a thinner man, who reminds me of Bill Nye the Science Guy. He wears a gray suit with a blue bow tie and clears his throat as he pulls on his tie to straighten it before speaking.

“Me and my team have hypothesized that the recent events of the dead rising are due to a new element that we have begun calling Renascentium. It completely goes against all other findings. Despite its high atomic mass, it is very stable in the sense that it seems to have a half-life of approximately 6 days, yet it is highly radioactive. It seems that the radiation can reanimate recently deceased cells through a high energy produced in a manner still being researched. More tests are being done; however all those who pass away during the next six days will be affected due to the high levels of radioactivity in the atmosphere left from the meteor shower last night that covered the entire northern hemisphere, an event unheard of in the history of man I might add,” the man finishes.

He is very business-like, yet nervous. There are glistening beads of sweat in his five o’clock shadow on his narrow face. He probably practiced his spiel in front of a mirror for hours. Along the bottom of the screen a banner appears listing all school closings for tomorrow. The banner at the bottom seems too normal, like the chaos earlier was merely a snow day.

I hear thunder outside, and then a gunshot. Suicide or another Mr. Tanks murder? I ask myself.

“So you know that song If Everyone Cared by Nickleback?” Carl asks over the noise of the television.

“Yeah?” I say giving him a weird look.

“So if everyone cares and nobody lies for the next six days, and nobody dies does that mean we won’t have to fight in a zombie apocalypse?”

There is silence for a second then Dad and I bust out laughing. My mom gives us a disappointed look. Somehow, despite the timing this set up reminds me of how most of our family dinners go, Dad, Carl, and I making inappropriate comments and jokes and Mom disappointed until we say something that even gets her to crack.

Carl’s face goes from laughter to straight serious in a millisecond, I’m not sure if that was for comedy or what but he says, “But seriously, we should probably get the guns loaded and block the doors and windows.”