Now that the hand wasn't in it anymore, though, the door slammed shut when we threw ourselves against it. It was heavy, too, and the things outside probably didn't get the whole "doorknob" concept yet. Still, we shoved a table against it before we ran for the stairs.
There were ten of us who ended up in the lunch room―a linoleum-floored, yellow-walled place with vending machines and sofas. It wasn't as bad as it might have been: Brown was having a long weekend, and the snow was three feet deep outside, and there hadn't been many more of us in the Rock to start with.
Not many, but a few. At least one. He'd been standing by the window, looking out at the snow in that I'm-brooding-about-something-and-want-you-to-ask way―which didn't go out with the Brontes at all, no, really―and he only straightened up when he saw the things coming across the snow. They didn't move right. You couldn't mistake them for live people.
It was still too late for him. Glass windows are great for showing touring parents, but when zombies get involved? No good. No good at all. They punched right through and grabbed him, and I hope to God he was dead when they started eating.
I needed a drink. I wasn't going to get one. Brown's libraries are as nonalcoholic as its dorms are swimming with the stuff, and nobody with me looked the type to have a hip flask. Certainly not the priest.
Other than him, we had three middle-aged women in pantsuits, who must have been library staff, four girls in various stages of Earnest Young College Woman, Drew Shapiro, and me. Drew and I had taken a lab together freshman year, back when we were both in Moons for Goons―I mean Extraterrestrial Geology. He was smarter than he looked. Someone here had to be.
"It's the end of the world!"
One of the girls was wailing by now. I couldn't really blame her, given the zombies. Besides, she could have been right, and, frankly, the thought of having to repopulate the earth with this crowd wasn't a real pleasant one. Drew was okay-looking, in an ex-lacrosse-player kind of way, but he was the only guy around other than Father Donetti.
I wondered if the Catholic Church lets you off the hook for celibacy in that sort of situation. And then I didn't want to think about it, because Donetti definitely wasn't Father What-a-waste, if you know what I mean, and plus ... well, the end of the world. I kind of wanted to throw up.
Instead, I went over to get a Coke from the vending machine. On the way, I flipped on the radio. Some horrible person had turned it to the Lite-FM station, which was almost as bad as the damn zombies. When the song ended, though, the announcer sounded normal. It was cold out there; it was snowing out there; people should be careful on the roads. Total lack of "when there's no room in Hell" panic.
"So it's just here," said Drew, who was way calmer than the rest of us. That didn't reassure me, I gotta say: the walking dead should freak a guy out, you know?
"At least for now." That was one of the library staff. Dark hair, green sweater. And not wrong. All the movies I'd seen suggested that zombies, once they got started, really got around.
I gulped my soda. "So why here? And why now? We're not due for the Apocalypse now, right?"
"And it's certainly not supposed to start in Rhode Island." Donetti said.
From downstairs, we could hear them banging against the door. They didn't moan like movie zombies. I think their vocal cords had rotted.
Drew looked away and muttered something. There might have been a name in it, but I couldn't hear clearly. "Well, there's gotta be something. Anyone see anything weird lately?"
Weird is pretty damn subjective, I could have said, and didn't. At least the guy was making a contribution. I thought back over the past few days: test in political theory, Club Hell on Thursday, steak in the Ratty that probably wasn't supposed to be gray, running out of money for laundry and wearing cocktail dresses to class until my mom sent down two rolls of quarters. Nothing occult there, though it was always possible that the zombies had come from my sock pile.
One of the other library ladies, this one thinner and with mom-cut blond hair, cleared her throat. "We had, ah, a shipment a few days ago. To Professor Wasserman. A few books from Egypt."
"But they get books all the time―" her friend in the green sweater began.
The blond woman shook her head. "Not like these. I took a look at them, and they looked like Arabic, but ... I studied Arabic. And those weren't. Similar, but not the same. And not any other language I recognized, either."
It was interesting, the way everyone's face changed. We didn't want to know what that probably meant, and we didn't want to believe that we knew―it was something you joked about―but there were zombies. And we knew. "Where does Wasserman keep them?" It was me. I didn't expect that.
"Oh God, what's going on?" One of the calmer Earnest Girls was by the window - not too close despite the fact that zombies probably couldn't climb. Now she was pointing to the building across the street. From one of its windows, a green light seemed to ooze its way out into the night―and onto the crowd gathered just below.
Some were zombies. Some were other things. I looked away before my eyes could follow the lines too long.
"The Hay," said Green Sweater, staring at the building.
I got the feeling that I'd had my question answered too.
"That's probably where the books are," said Drew, and he was talking slowly, like he was trying to keep himself calm. "If we can get over there, we can read from them, or destroy them. Except we can't get over there."
"Yes, you can," said the third librarian.
As she spoke, the other two nodded, like they'd had to be prodded into thinking about the subject. "There's a tunnel downstairs. We use it to take books over sometimes," said the blond.
"And it's probably full of zombies," said another of the girls.
Drew turned around. "Even if it is, it's not out in the open. Better odds."
"Better if a couple of us go at first, then." I realized that I'd said us and couldn't really take it back, so I gulped my Coke too fast, and it went up my nose, which did exactly shit-all for my bravado. "And, um, the others stay back. In case," I added, when I'd finished coughing.
"You're sure about this, Jen?" asked the blond.
I didn't know she knew my name. Hi, guilt: I'd have thought you'd stay away when I was offering to face imminent death, but here you are. "You shouldn't ask," I said. "I'm pretty sure what happens otherwise."
"I'd like weapons," said Drew.
"And I'd like a pony," I said, but we started looking around.
There's a reason most people don't think of "lunch room" and "arsenal" in connection with each other all that often. In the end, we each wound up with a snapped-off table leg. One of the Earnest Girls actually had a Zippo―I was shocked, since I didn't think girls like that smoked or ate cooked food―and the librarians donated their blazers to be wrapped around the top of the table legs. Crappy torches, as torches went, but better than nothing. At least marginally.
"Silver's supposed to be good," said Drew as he wrapped, looking down at a ring on his left hand. "At least, against some things. And holy water, maybe?" He looked over at the Father, who started to give him an I-am-a-University-chaplain-and-this-is-not- The Exorcist look, then appeared to realize that it kind of was, and nodded.
"Hard to shoot. And I want to stay as far away from these things as I can." I swirled the remains of my Coke around in the bottle, then drank the rest of it. "I wish we had―wait a second."
I turned to look at the vending machine.
Five minutes later, I was pumping a small pile of spare change into the coin slots. Blond Librarian retrieved the bottles as they thunked down, then set them in front of Father Donetti. He looked somewhat stunned―but he had his rosary out in one hand, touched the soda bottles with the other, and kept speaking.
As he finished with each bottle, he placed it, gently, at the other end of the table. One of the girls, the one who'd had the Zippo, reached out and touched one―then pulled her hand back. We all turned to look, and she blushed when she realized it. "Cold," she said in a small voice. "Colder than it should be."
"Well," I said, and swallowed. "Good."
"There's no way we can carry all of them, though," said Drew. "Not up the stairs and fighting."
"No," said Green Sweater. "But there's a way we can get some of them closer to you. An elevator. We used it for sending carts of books―they couldn't go on the stairs. It won't take the weight of a person, though."
And then we had a plan. Not a great plan―I'd have preferred one with flamethrowers, and machetes, and the 10th Airborne Division, and not me, who'd taken a couple self-defense courses during Women's Awareness Week or whatever they were calling it these days―but a plan nonetheless.
Green Sweater and Zippo Girl came down with us: Donetti volunteered, but Drew said no. If we only had one priest, better to save him in case we had to do this again. Or they had to do this again, because there wasn't much we in that situation.
The part of the Rock everyone sees is all mahogany and marble and inspiring quotations from Rockefeller, but the back stairs, like the lunch room, are purely industrial: gray and cinderblock and echoing. Tactically, that was probably an advantage for us, but that didn't mean I had to like it, and I didn't. Going down the stairs, even though we couldn't see any actual zombies, we could hear them shuffling and pushing at the door: shurff shurrf BANG shurrrf BANG BANG.
Could they smell us, so far away? Or did they just keep pushing against an obstacle until they got through it? And which was worse?
When we got to the ground floor, we saw that the door was beginning to bulge. We sped up. I tried not to look back, and failed, and really wanted a drink, which we didn't have, and if we had had, would have gone to soak the torches because it probably would have worked better than one of the Girls' nail polish remover, which we'd ended up using. Or I thought so, anyway, though I was majoring in Poli Sci and not Chemistry so what the hell did I know about it? And Drew was in English, which was worse, whereas they were probably making their own automatic weapons and C4 already down at the Sci Li.
I reminded myself to breathe.
A salmon-colored door blocked the way to the second basement floor. Nothing was banging on this one, and nothing jumped out at us immediately after we opened it and went inside. That didn't happen until we were halfway into the room, traveling between Roman history and Cyrillic manuscripts. And it wasn't a zombie.
Something came whipping out of the darkness―like a giant bat, but bats aren't that big and they have more form to them―and hit Zippo Girl in the shoulder, right near the neck. She screamed. We saw blood.
And, for a second, both Drew and I froze. We'd been prepared to hit things with flaming torches; we didn't exactly know what to do now. Neither of us thought of the soda.
It was Green Sweater who did. She whipped a bottle out of the plastic bag she was carrying and just threw the stuff at Zippo Girl, like a really lame version of throwing your cocktail in a guy's face. Except it wasn't lame, apparently, because the thing screeched and smoked and then fell off Zippo Girl and landed in a lump on the floor. I didn't look at it.
She was bleeding. She was bleeding a lot, and none of us knew first aid. Besides, how do you tourniquet someone's neck? But she was standing up, and her eyes were focused, and we couldn't stop there. Drew gave her the flannel shirt he'd been wearing. "Go back up," he said. "The stairs should still be okay."
Zippo Girl looked down, nearly shoved her plastic bag at Green Sweater, and headed back the way we'd come. Green Sweater stood looking after her for a second. "She'll make it," I said, and knew I didn't sound sure at all.
We ran for the tunnel.
On the way, we paused once. Drew's idea: I didn't notice the glass case on the wall until he smashed it in with the end of his torch and took out the fire axe. In case of emergency―well, this counted.
The tunnel was behind another set of doors. We could hear movement on the other side this time. I took out my bottle of Sprite―it did seem cold, colder than vending machine soda ever could be―and shook it up, while Green Sweater undid the locks and Drew watched behind us. My hands were shaking, and I tried to ignore that.
Green Sweater opened the door, stepping to one side. I pointed the bottle, tried to aim at the Thing rushing toward me while not actually looking at it, and wrenched off the top. The Sprite hit It in the eye, the main eye, the one as large as my head, and it smoked and turned cataract-white. The Thing didn't die, though, like the bat had; it just reared back and thrashed around until Drew stepped past me and hit it between a couple of its other eyes with the fire axe.
Its blood was gold, and it smelled like something sweet that had burned. I'd have expected something else, but where do I get off expecting anything? I was doing a paper on Asian marketing strategies.
Afterwards, I lit my torch and set the thing on fire before we went past it. I'd seen a couple slasher films.
We went onward. The tunnel itself was gray, with electrical wires running across it, and some graffiti on the walls―some really weird graffiti, at least once or twice. Symbols. And names that weren't human.
About halfway down, a tentacle―I think it was a tentacle, it's always a goddamn tentacle, although it might have been a tongue―stabbed down through one of the ceiling panels and lashed toward Drew. He brought the axe around like it was a baseball bat, and the bottom half of the tentacle dropped. Something above us screamed: a small child's voice. I held up my torch, eyeing the panel above me, but nothing else came and we walked gingerly forward.
"You're majoring in English," I said to Drew's back. Stupid comment―it's not like there's a major in Kicking Ass, or like Brown would have it if there was, because they'd probably think it was violent and patriarchal and there'd be a rally of some kind―but I had to say something. "And you live in fucking Illinois. Your dad's a banker, for God's sake. He is a banker, right? And not a Marine?"
"Yeah," he said, knowing where I was headed but not ready to get there yet. "You're majoring in Poli Sci. And you live in fucking Connecticut."
"Yeah. And I'm scared shitless, in case you haven't noticed, what with the hyperventilating and the compulsive babbling."
Drew shrugged. "I―look, I'm as scared as you guys, okay? But I've kind of―I mean, I have a friend―"
"It's not that I don't care about your social life," I began, knowing what he was getting at but not able to suppress the comment anyhow. Then I stopped, because we'd gotten to the elevator: a small brown set of doors right before the floor turned to pools of water and a rickety set of stairs began.
Overhead, movement. Coming closer.
Green Sweater jabbed at the doors, which opened on―we tensed, weapons ready―a small and empty elevator. She slid both bags inside, taking out only one bottle for herself, and let the doors close. "We'll need to push the button when we're upstairs," she said. "That'll call the elevator."
"We'll do it." Drew turned around, now that there was space to do so, and handed her his torch. "Go back. Make sure she's okay."
She looked at him like she was thinking about asking questions, but didn't. "God be with you," she said to us, and then turned and headed back toward the Rock.
We crossed the water, walking over a series of planks put down by someone who cared about their shoes. The stairs were too narrow for two people; we hesitated at the bottom, looking at each other, before the noises upstairs got to me. "More distance with a torch," I said, and started forward.
The dead came down to meet us: long-dead, most of them, with more bones than flesh showing. Before the first one caught on fire, I saw the remains of a velvet coat, the sort I'd only seen before in Merchant Ivory films.
They didn't back away from the fire. Not enough brains, I think. They just kept coming, reaching for us, and I kept swinging the torch, trying not to look as their faces went up. Any other time, my arms would have been shrieking halfway through, but this is why Adrenalin Is Your Friend. We forced them back, and we kept climbing, but every step took a year to gain.
The room at the top had two elevators on each end, maybe ten feet apart. It was a little room. And there were a lot of zombies. A lot of anything is creepier than one of something. Especially when it's packed close together: a mass of slowly moving flesh, spotted at various heights with dull eyes and yawning mouths. I didn't know why they didn't eat each other; I didn't know how they got there; I didn't know anything about it and I didn't want to. I just kept hitting them with the damn torch, and I knew Drew was doing something with the axe, but I didn't have time to look.
Then we were at the elevator, our backs to it. Drew hit the button. The gears made rusty grinding noises as the zombies that were left moved toward us, so that it almost seemed like they were making the noises. Robot zombies. You had to fucking laugh. Or I did, and then I thought that I might be hysterical, which made me think of that goddamned scene from Airplane, which―
It's a good thing the doors opened then.
We grabbed bottles, threw their contents over those zombies who weren't on fire―I had time to wonder when the hell we got this coordinated, and to wish I'd ever managed it back when I played soccer―picked up the rest of the soda, and ran for the other elevator, the bigger one. They followed, slower now, some with bits falling away as they burned or as the soda ate into them.
I didn't look much at the buttons in the big elevator―an identical row on two sides, for whatever bizarre library reason―but remembered the light and hit the top one. For a second, the door framed one of the zombies, flames running all over its skin and still staggering toward us. Then it closed, and the elevator began to lurch upwards.
We had time to look at each other, to wipe sweat out of our eyes, and check our weapons, such as they were. No time to think of any good lines, though, or to say them if we had: the door was already opening by the time either of us got our breath back. What was beyond it put me, at least, beyond the point where words made sense.
The whole third floor was one room now. There'd been walls, but they were broken, because the entire room was filled with something like flesh. It was pale white, and pulsed with what I have to believe was a heartbeat. Bits of it moved around. And then I saw that bits of it had words, these little red scar marks that formed letters, though not in any language or any script that I'd ever seen. I started to point it out to Drew, but he was looking at something else. I turned to see what―and then I did.
There was a face. It was stretched, and it bubbled, but there were two brown, human eyes almost submerged in it, and a mouth with lips, though the tongue that licked them was too long.
It looked human. And familiar. I hadn't seen Professor Wasserman much, not to recognize his name, but it was a face I'd seen on the paths.
Then it saw us.
The eyes moved, and then the flesh started to move. Drew had frozen. I froze at first, but then I thought what it would be like to get killed there, how the thing would just ooze over you and you'd be trapped. My paralysis broke and I screamed. Again, like a girl. But I also grabbed Drew's hand and yanked the ring off and threw it, somehow, right into one of those eyes.
Then I opened the bottle I was holding and threw that, and then my torch. Not with any tactical sense―I probably looked like that chick throwing plates in The Godfather―or any hope of it working. Just desperation.
For a second, I saw Drew opening his bottle and saw his arm move. Then my torch hit what had been Wasserman, and went out.
And then, as far as I can tell, the thing exploded. There was a squishy whumph, the building shook, and then I was standing with what felt like an entire tub of Jello in my hair, but the feeling of a presence was gone. I pulled Zippo Girl's lighter out of my pocket and flicked it―and the room, except for me and Drew, was empty.
Drew went to the window, moving like he'd forgotten he had legs, let alone how to use them. "Nothing's out there," he said, slowly. "They just disappeared."
"I don't hear anything below us, either." I said, once I realized it. "I think we might be okay. I mean, aside from the dire need for a shower. And a nervous breakdown."
"My friend left half a bottle of rum in my apartment," Drew said, smiling in the faint light. "It should work pretty well. Once we've made sure everyone's all right at the library―but you were working on a paper, weren't you?"
I blinked, then grinned back at him. "Whatever. It's college. I'll make up some wild excuse."
