It was a waste of time, just a stupid waste of time – I said that from the outset. But we were into summer now, where time didn’t exist. Schedules had slipped apart; weekends blurred into Thursdays; nobody had anything to do but nothing.
So me and Sam and Dan went down to the old school, just to kill an evening, any evening, whatever day it was didn’t matter.
The fence was short and wire, didn’t even have barbs. Its mesh was too fat to keep out a rat, or even a raccoon; its frame was too feeble to stop a bear; a coyote or stray dog would dig under in a flash. It only existed to prove its point and hold up a sign.
TRESPASSING
PROHIBITED
UNSAFE
CLOSED
SOLD
LOT
and so on.
We climbed it like it wasn’t there, first Sam, then Dan, then me. Slow Jo. But it wasn’t my idea to come here – it wasn’t anyone’s, really – and I didn’t want to see this place again all that bad.
Neither did Dan. Sam didn’t either, but she’d said she did and so there wasn’t any way around it and here we all were with Sam’s crowbar and the little side door by the gym breaking apart. We probably could’ve pushed it over.
“Dark in here,” said Dan, because he was the one that said the things people had to say.
We pulled out flashlights, switched on apps, poked around until we found the door that still opened and walked into the gym, where the first zombies were.
They weren’t doing much. Standing. Groaning, but softly. Life doesn’t move too fast around here to start with, and once it stops it drops without rolling. Four of them, under a dirty old skylight like bigger versions of the strange moulds and mosses that were sprouting up from the tiles around them.
We took some pictures. Sam whacked one of them a few times with her crowbar, trying to get the head off, but she gave up as fast as could be excused. People are tougher than they look, and zombies are the people that wouldn’t fall apart properly to begin with.
Dan smoked in the gym, like he said he’d always sort of wanted to. Then we went into the halls and the classrooms and the bathrooms and up and down, looking for something and finding zombies, always more zombies. Here and there, still wearing t-shirts and dresses and suits. Sneakers mouldy. Eyes turned off and lungs pumping for nothing, staring up at the ceiling and the water damage coming in through the roof.
One of them did stop us on the second floor – my fault. I recognized one of their shirts and freaked out a little. I explained about middle school drama, Dan said ‘wow, that sucks’, and Sam pulled out the crowbar again.
It didn’t help anyone at all, really. Like getting revenge on a tree.
The teacher’s longue was empty. Just another room, once you ignored the fridge with the two overgrown tupperwares in it. Dan made us spend ages in there – kept insisting that Sykes kept a bottle hidden in a sewn pocket inside the couch, that he was always sloshed after lunch. Sam ended up jumping up and down on it to show him there was nothing there, then the whole thing collapsed into a big explosion of spores and dust. Gross.
“It’s your fault if we all get hantavirus,” I told her. She just laughed at me.
The principal’s office was even less exciting. They’d taken all the paperwork when they shut the place down, so we couldn’t even look up our files or anything.
“They’d just be boring anyways,” said Sam. “Hey, here’s Jo’s: ‘this girl exists. Went home sick twice. Freckles.”
“And yours would just be blank,” I told her. “Since you never came in.”
We busted it up anyways. We had to use the crowbar for something. We had to do something. The desk was just as tough as the zombies – dead, cheap wood that wouldn’t crumple properly. There were no electronics.
It was easy to get onto the roof. They’d taken the paperwork, they’d taken the keys, but they hadn’t done anything with any of the doors that was more complicated than some planks and a few screws.
The lawn looked nice from up there. They’d come by and tore it up real good about six months after the shutdown, but the grass had grown back and all the trees had gone wild and bushy, really real bush-y, not fluffy but like something from ‘the bush.’ They seemed to be eating up the lawn.
Dan had brought beers. Lite beers. We drank them because it was what we had, and we threw some rocks off the roof. Sam bugged me until I threw the zombie head she’d brought with us. “It’s therapy,” she said. “Therapeutic. Do it. C’mon. Just do it. Go for it. Do it. Now. C’mon. Do it.”
I did it. Still wouldn’t blink, but I guess it might’ve helped.
By then it was getting dark – too dark, where’s-my-hand-in-front-of-me dark – so we pulled our stuff together and headed back downstairs after we threw the bottles at the old basketball net. None of us made it. Sam hit on Dan after he missed his shot, but he didn’t notice and she got embarrassed and gave up real fast. Nothing new.
I’d expected the trip home to be bad, for something to go wrong, but really… It was dark down there, and the zombies wouldn’t stop sighing, but it was ALREADY dark down there, and we’d already heard them, and there was nothing new there, just green and crumbling dampness, and, well, nothing had changed.
We talked on the way back, casually, about very important things. Dan was going to ask around at the auto shops; Sam was heading to college.
For me, I looked at the blank, breathing faces around us, and I couldn’t think of much else. Not much else at all.