“That’s what the scraping noise was; the fox must have had its nose in this!” Tyrone says as he kicks an empty can of beans down the hall that has bright but messy paintings stuck to the walls on either side. The can skids along noisily.
“If the Zombies didn’t know we were here before, they do now. Keep the noise down!” Jason says.
Tyrone and Den, who looked a bit sheepish, go off to find the toilets while Jason waits for them near the doorway to the alley.
After a couple of minutes waiting, Jason wanders into the nearest classroom. Walking through the open door and seeing the miniature tables and chairs takes him back in time and the walls, covered in more bright paintings only increases his reminiscing. He goes over to the large windows, their panes of glass stretching virtually the whole length of the room to look out over the tarmaced playing area outside with a grassed sports field beyond it. As he arrives at the windows, he stands, reminiscing some more and then the sun comes out again, making him squint.
Suddenly, the almighty sound of gunfire seems to envelop him, and he immediately assumes that Den and Tyrone are in some kind of trouble and they are having to use their weapons somewhere in another part of the school. The adrenaline, kicks in again, flooding his body and he is just about to turn to rush to find them when he realises the noise is coming from outside. His head moves closer to the window in front of him and looks up to the left and he sees where at least part of the noise is coming from.
The Apache—that must be the one that was assigned to their Squad—is hovering not far away to the left and Jason can clearly see from the tracer bullets coming from beneath the Apache’s belly that it is firing heavily at the ground below it. If the Apache is firing that much, it is almost certain that the Warrior and his Squad are firing too, meaning they have contact and are under attack.
Jason’s brain works hard to figure out what they should do; surely, they need to return to the Squad as quickly as possible to back them up. There is no point in carrying on with this recce now, the Squad has found the enemy. As Jason decides on that course of action, he sees the Apache firing missiles down at the ground, closely followed by a dulled explosion and then smoke mushrooms rising up from the ground. There must be one hell of a fight going on, and they need to get moving; their Squad is in trouble, but just as Jason is about to go, something catches his eye.
Somebody is running across the grass of the sports field, but the sun in his eyes makes it difficult to properly see who it is. Is it a Squad member who has somehow got detached from the main Squad or a civilian spooked by the noise of the gunfire and trying to get away?
All too slowly, it dawns on Jason what is running directly at him across the tarmac. He has seen them on television, and the fear rises in him to a new height as the realisation sinks in, and for a moment he is paralysed with that fear.
Jason has a split second to decide to fight or run from the Zombie that is almost at the window…the window Jason is now involuntarily backing away from. Deciding that the creature is still outside, Jason goes to run, but his decision is too late. He knows that as soon as he sees the Zombie launch itself at the window.
The Zombie hits the window directly in line with Jason who hasn’t moved more than a couple of metres back from it. Instinct takes over and he dives to his right as the Zombie smashes through the plate glass window, which shatters into shards and scatters all over the classroom and all over Jason.
He tries to roll as far away as he can from the creature which has landed in the middle of the classroom, crashing into the small tables and chairs, sending them tumbling across the room. Jason’s role has gone as far as it can as he hits the wall underneath the classroom’s blackboard, coming to a sudden stop. His mind is a blur of fear and desperation, so whether his military training takes over his body or if it’s acting survival reflex, he doesn’t know. All he knows is that his head is raising from the floor at the same time his hands and arms are bringing his rifle to bear.
Jason’s eyes meet the black pools of the creature’s eyes as it looks at him, and it doesn’t take its eyes off Jason as it slips and slides on the broken glass against the hard floor, trying to get up from where it landed. The male Zombie is almost up onto its haunches, its arms outstretched in front of it as it prepares to jump again, to jump at Jason, its grey translucent skinned face with a large fresh gash down the side which oozes dark red, almost black, blood, that drips onto the floor below. As the creature goes to jump, its grotesque mouth opens to reveal its black gums and yellow teeth, its lips all but disappearing as the mouth opens wider.
Jason is transfixed in fear, his body pushing back against the unmoveable wall, recoiling as far as he possibly can from the horrendous creature in front of him. Jason’s finger is on the trigger of his rifle and somewhere in his mind, he knows he has to pull it, but his finger doesn’t seem to understand or register the fear confusing his body’s functions.
The Zombie has no such confusion. Like a starving animal out hunting, it only has one thought, to catch its prey. And it jumps.
As the Zombie jumps at him, Jason somehow resets his body’s
