Race to Refuge

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Ty

After I threw the camping stuff in the van along with batteries, I felt like I was seriously running on borrowed time. I searched a couple of minutes for a gas can. I did play zombie video games and I knew the kind of problems I could run into. Like no gasoline. Or nothing to put gasoline in when you were lucky enough to find some. I discovered a spider web covered plastic red container in a corner of the garage and picked it up. It had what was probably a splash or two of gas in it, but at least I had a gas can. I put it in the back, too.

The zombies were still scratching and moaning outside the garage door. When I realized that these zombies could possibly be my parents, I thought my legs might fall from under me. Then I got it together. My parents were gone. Even if those things were my parents, it wasn’t the same. What I needed to do was get past them and get Ginny from the school before zombies attacked there.

I ran inside one more time to get my wallet. I had a feeling I didn’t need it anymore, that we were heading in a direction where driver’s permits and cash wouldn’t get us too far. But I’d just gotten my permit. I’d only, in fact, driven by myself twice. It wasn’t going to be the smoothest ride for Ginny, but it was going to serve its purpose.

I locked the door leading into the house—just in case someday I wanted to come back home. I didn’t want it overrun with zombies. I got in the car. I started it up. I locked the doors. I…yes, I put my seatbelt on. Then I took a deep breath and I hit the garage door opener.

It was an instant attack. Four or five of the things, a couple of them who used to be related to me, ran at the minivan. They put their bloody faces right up to the glass, scratching the panes with their fingers. And I put the car in reverse and backed up just as fast as I could, running over one or two of them as I did.

I drove off, wondering if that was going to be the last time I saw the house I grew up in. If the last sight of it was going to be my parents, arms reaching out for me hungrily.

I put it behind me. The next step was to get to Ginny’s middle school. And since there were police cars, ambulances and fire trucks whizzing by me, I figured the roads weren’t going to be too easy to drive. I pushed the accelerator, forgetting how sensitive it was. I zoomed past, almost into, a woman who stared at me as if I were a zombie myself. Hadn’t she ever seen a fifteen year old behind the wheel?

I fiddled with the radio to see if the news was picking up a*********s about the zombies. The last thing I needed was for the middle school to go on lockdown. I could barely hear the radio over the sirens, so I turned the volume way up. “…some reports of a virus of some kind that may be spreading rapidly. It’s been suggested by a law enforcement spokesman that it could be related to rabies.”

Not. They only thought it was rabies because they couldn’t think of anything else that might make people attack and bite other people. Anybody could see it wasn’t rabies. Nobody was foaming at the mouth. And people got sick right after being infected—not like rabies, where it took a while.

I get to the middle school and pull right up to the front of the building, I fumble in the glove compartment for the notepad and pen that Mom always kept in there. I was still shaking so it took three tries for me to write: Please release Ginny Parsons to her brother for an orthodontist appointment. Thanks, Shelia. I hop out of the van, and run up to the school, clutching the note.

I took a deep breath, pushed my hair out of my eyes, and tried to look older. Old enough to be driving solo, old enough and responsible enough to have my sister released to my care. When you’re fifteen, this isn’t easy.

The office staff was already sort of looking sideways at me as I walked in. I remembered one of the women from when I was in middle school. She had short, blonde hair and wore a lot of makeup and was kind of staring at me as if she remembered me too … and didn’t think it had been that long ago either, even though I was already much taller than they were, and was a beanpole. So the very tall, very skinny look wasn’t helping me look older.

I cleared my throat and tried for a deeper pitch than my natural one. “Hi, I’m Ty. I’m here to pick up my sister, Ginny Parsons, for my parents. She’s a seventh grader.”

The blonde woman narrowed her eyes at me, thoughtfully. “Didn’t your parents send in a note with Ginny this morning? Usually they send in a note and then we have the student come to the office and wait for their parent.” She put a lot of emphasis on parent.

I nodded understandingly as if this were the most natural thing in the world. The whole time I’m thinking about how I probably only have minutes to get Ginny out of there—but that there’s no way they’re going to release her if they have any suspicion at all.

“Mom and Dad usually would send in a note at the beginning of the day. But they’ve been having sort of a rough time lately.” Especially today. I took a steadying breath. “I’ve been trying to help them out. They did send me with this note.”

I handed over the one I’d just written and the blonde woman scrutinized it, probably looking for shady grammar or misspelled words. But English was my best subject so I knew she wouldn’t find them there. She pursed her lips, looking at me thoughtfully. And the whole time it felt like my heart was going to beat its way out of my chest, I tried to look as if I couldn’t be less interested in taking my middle school kid sister to her orthodontist appointment.

The blonde woman exchanged glances with the other woman in the office, a woman with large red-framed glasses and a ponytail, and then back at me. “Let me make sure that you’re an authorized person to pick her up. Your parents would have had to sign a form at the beginning of the year that you were authorized for us to release your sister to you.”

My breath caught in my throat. Because there was no way that my parents would sign something like that. Why would they when I wasn’t even driving on my own yet?

But the woman with the ponytail said to the blonde lady, “Hey, I’ve been in this situation myself. The nerve of the doctor’s office to charge for missed visits! We should charge them for making us wait so long in their office. Our time is just as valuable as theirs. I’ll buzz her on the intercom. What’s her name again?”

I told her and she picked up a phone, punching some numbers. “Mrs. Thomas? Could you send Ginny Parsons to the office, please? She has an appointment. Thank you.”

I tried to keep my face from showing the relief I felt.

The blonde woman was looking pretty sour that I’d gotten my way. “You’ll need to sign your name here to authorize her being released. I don’t suppose you know your sister’s student ID?”

Was she kidding? I was doing well to know my student ID. Was this the kind of stuff Mom and Dad were expected to know? No wonder they kept forgetting everything … there was no room left in their brains. Then I remembered the last time I saw Mom and Dad. I immediately took out my phone to look at Twitter and to forget my parents.

Twitter was full of messages about zombies. I scanned them fast to see if any of them were from people I knew or from our area. Which was when I saw something about the state house being attacked by ‘people who appeared to be suffering from a strange virus.’ And the state house was just a few blocks away.

Ginny cautiously entered the office, a large backpack on her back. It’s not a place middle school kids really like hanging out. She had a look on her face that said that she thought she had forgotten something and maybe was in trouble. Then, when she saw me, her expression changed to total surprise.

“Ty? What’s going on? What are you doing here?” she asked. She was small for her age and wasn’t much into fashion. With the pink tee shirt she’d picked up at the beach last year, the denim shorts she was wearing, and her blonde hair pulled back into a braid, she could be an elementary school kid. It was just the braces that showed she must be older.

I briskly started moving her to the door. “Ginny, it’s okay. We’ve got to get you to your orthodontist appointment.”

I used a commanding voice that I was surprised I even had. But it worked because she hurried along beside me out the door. “What’s going on?” she whispered to me as we quickly left.

I grabbed her arm and started running as soon as we hit the door. “Ginny, do me a favor and ditch that backpack. It’s just going to take up room. Actually, even better, just dump the stuff out of it and let’s keep the backpack.”

“What?” she kept jogging along beside me, but now I could see she was really concerned about me. “What are you talking about? I’ll get in trouble. That’s all my books for school and my homework.”

“Not needed anymore,” I said a little breathlessly. The sirens were closer now and I squinted to see through the trees toward the direction of the state house. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard what sounded like cops yelling. I bet the school was going to go on lockdown at any time.

“What?” she asked again. Now there were tears in her voice as she was seriously getting worried.

I grabbed the backpack from her, unzipped the top, and dumped everything out in about five seconds. Then I grabbed her arm again and hit the key fob to unlock the car. “Ginny, do you trust me?”

It was a rhetorical question. I knew she did. I was her big brother. What’s more, we had the kind of relationship where she looked up to me. I’d never ragged on her, never done any of that stupid sibling stuff. We were good, Ginny and I.

She nodded.

“I’m going to explain everything to you. There’s something bad going on. But right now, we’ve got to get in the car and get out of here, okay?”

As we got into the car, I could see a group of people walking toward the middle school and it felt like something big was stuck in my throat. Because they weren’t people at all—they were lurching and silently munching as they walked to the school.

“Ginny, can you call the school?” I asked, pushing my phone at her. “Tell them that there’s a report of some dangerous armed men heading toward the school and that lockdown is recommended.”

Ginny took the phone, looking up the school’s phone number. She hesitated as I sped to the exit. “But they’ll think I’m pranking them. They’ll know I’m a kid. They might even know who’s calling. And I don’t see any armed men.”

“They won’t believe me if I tell them the truth. It’s better to give them something more believable…like armed men. Besides, it’s not a prank, and we might save a bunch of lives.” Probably not, but at least I wouldn’t feel guilty about not having tried. “If you dial the number, I’ll talk to them,” I said. I was driving as fast as I could now.

“Shouldn’t we just call the police?” asked Ginny. Her voice was thin with stress.

“They’re busy.” Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were passing us on the right and the left as we drove, sirens blaring, lights flashing. Busy, and completely overwhelmed.

She took a deep, shaky breath and dialed. Then she put the phone on speaker and wordlessly held it toward my face.

I cleared my throat, trying for that deeper voice again. As soon as the woman from the school office picked up, I said steadily, “Please put the school on lockdown. There is a group of armed men approaching the school. This is not a joke.” Then I hung up.

Ginny looked at me with wide eyes. Then she gave a shaky laugh. “You sounded so grown up.”

“I keep telling you that those weekly vocabulary words you get for homework are the most important thing to learn.” My voice was light but I pressed harder on the accelerator. Everywhere around us I saw wrecks, emergency vehicles, and more lurching strangers.