Chikara stepped deeper into the room and her foot bumped into another doll. She looked down and Lisa’s cold eyes stared back at her, her headband pulled down and twisted around her neck. Her face was now a mask of tears and circular wounds.
Far off across the room, she saw what look like a fort, but was actually a haphazard barricade made up of desks piled one on top of the other. Behind it, a fistful of kids stared back at her. Their faces were wet with tears and the look in their eyes was pure horror. In front of the desks, several more children lay. They were alive and moving, but all were nursing wounds. Georgette was cradling her arm. So were Meryl and Frank. The shoulder of Ming’s shirt was torn and blood was dribbling down her arm. Off to one side, Tia was wailing, a large chunk torn from her cheek. Blood painted the side of her face.
In the seconds it took for Chikara to catalog the devastation, three dark figures pulled themselves from within the cloak of the room’s growing shadows. The figures all had the same blank stare as the people milling about the playground. Chikara looked up and saw that the windows had been smashed in.
'My god,' she whispered to herself, 'they must have come in through the fire escape.'
The last of the looming figures stepped forward into the waning sunlight which was cascading in through the empty window frames. Chikara’s mouth fell open when she saw that it was the same man she’d seen earlier; the one in the stained shirt and tie who’d been staring up into the window.
'You…' she hissed.
The other three figures—a teenager in a football jersey, a fat, balding man, and a woman who would have looked pretty had half of her face not been ripped away—followed suit and took staggering steps forward. Blood covered each of their faces and coated their hands and forearms. The fat one was frantically chewing something.
Chikara stepped back in disgust and bumped into the wall near the door.
Her mind reeled in abject horror at the scene which spread out before her. And then, suddenly, painfully, the guilt kicked in. In a series of mental flashes she conjured up what must have transpired here: the people coming up the fire escape, the children’s panic, and the invaders hammering on the windows in the same way they’d hammered against the door she and the others had locked.
She drew in a deep, anguished breath imagining what happened next all too easily.
The figures gathered outside, their numbers growing, the malevolent stares, the moans and the pounding.
Then, the windows giving way and the glass raining in.
The panic. The terror.
And then, the violence.
Her kids.
These were her kids… and she’d left them alone. Even though she thought she’d been protecting them by locking the door, she had in reality left them trapped and on their own. With nowhere to run, many of them had been cornered and had no choice but to die an unimaginable death.
This was a guilt that she knew she would carry with her for the rest of her life.
A low moan brought her focus back to the present. The four strangers took another faltering step toward her and she pressed her back firmly against the wall. Her heart beat painfully in her chest. Her gaze lifted to stare upward toward the ceiling. She felt her tongue go dry as her terror grabbed her roughly and tightened the muscles of her limbs.
And as the first of her tears cascaded down her cheeks, she knew… beyond any shadow of any doubt that this was
God… she’d even locked the goddamned door!
It was by her hand the kids couldn’t escape this fate.
Almost immediately, her growing fear was replaced by deep and vengeful anger. As the heat of that anger gripped her and took hold, she felt the tips of her fingers wrap around a piece of metal protruding from the wall. She pulled against it and a heavy weight abruptly tugged at her arm. Confused for a moment, she looked down and saw that she’d pulled the fire extinguisher off its hook.
It was at the precise moment that she heard a low moan come from a few feet in front of her. She looked up wildly and saw the man in the shirt and tie come another step closer. A hungry grin strained his features and he slowly licked his lips in anticipation of what would come. He opened his mouth and uttered another low, soulless moan. Breath that smelled of the grave assaulted her senses and she saw bits of meat wedged between his blood- soaked teeth.
Teeth, she thought, stained with the blood of her children.
As a kind of madness sidled up to her intellect, she felt its warmth; embraced its momentary comfort. Like a fever dream, the delirium whispered to her and told her what had to be done, what
Spinning at the waist, pulling at the weight of the fire extinguisher as if she were delivering one of her devastating backhands, she brought the canister up and smashed it against the side of the man’s head. With a satisfying crunch, his skull collapsed in on itself and he was slammed to the floor, his body landing like a sack of meat. She delivered two more crushing overhand blows to his skull before leaving him for dead.
Continuing the onslaught, she swung the metal can around and struck the kid in the jersey across the knee. The sound of the joint breaking was both gratifying and, in a way, cleansing. Another overhand swing brought the cylinder down on the fat guy’s bald skull and he went down without too much of a fight. As he hit the ground, the small finger he’d been chewing fell from his lips and landed, rocking slightly, on the floor.
Abruptly, a slender hand with polished nails grabbed at the back of her collar. Chikara bent at the waist, ducking underneath it, and brought the extinguisher upward in a demolishing uppercut. The once pretty woman’s jaw shattered and, with an ear splitting snap, her neck broke. Her body crumpled to the floor in a heap.
Now out of breath, she stood panting over her handiwork.
The kid in the jersey had begun pulling himself toward her again, dragging his shattered leg behind him.
'Behind you,' she heard Carolyn scream excitedly from behind the barricade.
Adrenaline now leaving her system, Chikara strained to lift the blood splattered weapon over her head, but with what felt like a Herculean effort, she got it there. Now standing with the dripping fire extinguisher held high above her, she screamed incoherently. As she felt the dead thing at her feet touch her leg with cold hands, she drove the weapon downward with all of her might. The metal rim struck the kid just at the bridge of the nose and smashed whatever was above it to mush.
An unnatural quiet fell over the classroom. The stillness punctuated only by soft sobs and sniffles of the frightened children and the heavy panting of their now exhausted teacher.
'Jeez, Lady,' Yoshi said, staring wide-eyed from behind the piled desks and wiping back his tears, 'what took you so long?'
~ * ~
Helen Walker came out of the stairwell and as she rounded the corner onto the second floor, heard what sounded like a bar fight coming from Miss Pressfield’s classroom. She broke into a run and made her way down the long hallway. She arrived at the room, breathing heavily, and pushed the already ajar door open and stepped out of the hallway and into a war zone.
The classroom looked as if a bomb had gone off in it. Papers, desks, and glass were everywhere and some of the windows had even been shattered. Unbelievably, amidst the rubble, were several bodies laying strewn about. And there—and this was the most unbelievable of all—standing over what looked like a corpse and driving a fire extinguisher repeatedly into its skull was Chikara.
'What the hell?' Helen asked to no one in particular.
Chikara, her face, chest and arms now spattered with blood, looked at the extinguisher in her hands with disgust and dropped it. The metal clanked against the floor with a hollow sound. Immediately, she rushed over to
