“It’s like there aren’t any journalists left,” she said. “None of the news sites have been updated in hours.”
“But the feeds?” Grant asked. They hoped the Internet was not gone completely, although they all knew it was a matter of time before that piece of their world disappeared too.
And Salem’s head moved up and down slowly. “People are still updating as they can. And I can’t even process it. Come read this stuff.”
Together Lucy and Grant walked over to her, peering over her shoulder. They read the statuses and saw the pictures. Each of them gasping or turning away as the realization dawned on them.
Someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on New York City.
The virus had decimated the city first. And the fires and the fallout wiped it off the planet.
CHAPTER NINE
Ding-Dong.
The group jumped at the interruption.
The intercom clicked on.
In that nanosecond between the end of the tone and the start of Principal Spencer’s slurred voice, each of them raised their head in anticipation. There was a sharp intake of breath, and then he launched, his breath hitting the microphone like a punctuation mark.
“If anyone is out there…if anyone is left…you have five minutes to reveal yourself at the front office. After that time, I am closing the gates. Do you understand? I am closing the gates. You will lose access to an exit, to food, and to protection. And this will be my fortress. And I will not allow or tolerate intruders.”
There was a loud crash. A shuffling. And then he returned to the intercom.
“Am I clear? Five minutes. And if you don’t believe that I’m serious about protecting this place…my health…my building.” A shot rang out.
Grant pointed at the ceiling speaker, “Did he just fire a gun?”
Lucy nodded.
“Please show yourself at the front office…because I am very welcoming with this gun!” Grant mocked, but his eyes were wide with shock and disbelief.
Lucy nodded again.
“A gun.”
“He wants the school all to himself and if he can’t do that then he wants supreme rule over the minions,” Salem said. “Megalomaniac Spencer till the end. I never trusted that moron and I’m not about to deliver myself to him on a platter.”
“I don’t think he’s crazy,” Grant challenged. “I think he’s scared.”
Lucy looked at them and grimaced. “A man who is afraid for his own life is way more dangerous to us than just some power-tripping jerk,” she said.
Despite the warning, they didn’t move.
The metal gates were thick metal garage-like doors that descended from the ceiling and locked into the floor with the help from powerful magnets. They were impenetrable; designed to herd students like cattle away from classrooms and into community areas like the gym or the cafeteria. Once Lucy had attended a football game and wandered into the school during halftime. She didn’t get very far, stymied by the metal walls. Each time she tried to work her away around them, she encountered another and another.
From the East Wing, the gates would lock at the start of the English hall and math halls and end just past the computer labs before the main part of the school. They would be left with a ‘U’ shape of accessibility, and Spencer’s warning rang true: The cafeteria, the teacher’s lounge, the front office—areas with access to food and water—the nurses station and the security office, all would be behind the gates which made it infinitely more difficult for them to sustain themselves for long periods of time.
As the minutes ticked down, none of them made a move until Lucy rose from her crouched position in front of the screen and walked over to the door where a school emergency disaster plan booklet hung in a plastic cover. She took it out and walked back to the journalism teacher’s desk, rummaged for a highlighter, and then slapped the paper down in front of Salem and Grant.
“Look,” she said and took the cap of the highlighter off with her teeth. “The gates will come down here and here.” She drew a line separating the hall to the gym and the auditorium and from the pool to the main office. “And here.” She highlighted the gates’ locations separating the English hall and the computer lab. “We’re locked in.”
“Right,” Grant said. “Clearly.”
“It’s to our benefit,” Lucy replied. “Spencer is keeping himself in the main office. And why not...he walks down the middle hallway and he has cafeteria access and with the exception of the cafeteria courtyard doors and the main entrance, he’s isolated himself from intruders too. But—” Lucy ran the highlighter over the English and math hallway and the East Wing. “He doesn’t have access to us either.”
“That’s fine, but how will we eat?” Grant asked.
“Easy,” said Salem. She pointed at the Boiler Room on the map. “Boiler Room. Next to the cafeteria. The gates going down don’t affect us. We have no reason to let him know we’re here. It’s a big building. We can hide.”
Grant looked up to the ceiling and then down at the girls. “How long before he figures out we have open access to the roof and shuts us down?”
“We’ll have to be careful, of course. And quiet. Figure out the best times to sneak in and back without detection, but it’s entirely possible to hunker down here and fly under the radar,” Lucy added. “I’m a little concerned about the roof though. We’ve created open access for anyone to get inside and people seeking shelter here won’t be deterred easily.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Salem said sadly. “If what the news guy says is true, then there won’t be many people left wanting to get in. Even by the time I climbed up, the numbers outside were...”
“It’s about resources,” Grant interrupted, “not how many people are still alive. People will know the school has food. Eventually people will want inside.”
“Then we make it hard for them.” Lucy walked over to the gaping hole and pointed at the ladder. “Without the table and the ladder, it’s a what...twenty foot drop? If we move everything away from the skylight and...I don’t know...glass shards?”
At this suggestion, Salem laughed. “Glass shards? You been watching action-adventure movies in your spare time?”
Lucy sat down on an empty chair and plopped herself into it and stared ahead. “It’s not like I’m good at this. It’s not like I woke up this morning and suddenly I’m an expert on how to booby-trap the journalism room. None of us are equipped for this. If we even live until morning, I don’t know how we’ll make it to the next day or the next.” Her tone was sharp, cutting in all the right places. Little daggers of truths wrapped in fear.
It was Grant who approached her, standing next to her knee, waiting for permission to speak or help her up.
The tone sounded again. This time they had expected it and they calmly waited for the announcement.
“Ten…Nine…Eight…Seven…Six…Five…Four…Three…Two…One…Zero.” Spencer counted down in a lazy drawl. “So. If I’m the only one standing...” he trailed off. “Or if those of you still here don’t feel a need to coexist.” He spat the word like a curse. “This is where I leave you.” The intercom did not click off, but Spencer got up from his seat, humming an incoherent melody that trailed away and then came back and then trailed away again—they imagined him pacing along the length of the front office—the microphone for the intercom situated on a box at the front secretary’s desk.
Lucy knew that Spencer couldn’t hear that he was still broadcasting his movements to the school. There was no speaker for the intercom in the office, so there was no way for him to hear himself. It was to their benefit that he could not detect this because it provided them a distinct advantage.
Students at the school were aware that sometimes the intercom system remained on blast when the people around it thought they had turned it off. Their cheerful and grandmotherly school secretary was most famous for forgetting to shut off the intercom. Once she was overheard calling a particularly rude parent a “douche bag” to a fellow teacher while the intercom still broadcast every word.