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"Scared" isn’t a good word for what June’s experiencing right now.
“Petrified”, and “terrified”- those were fitting. Maybe something else, if she could get her brain to think straight. It seems like moments ago, the bus was dropping her off at school. Everything was completely normal. The only thing she had expected to come out of the day was maybe a new headline. Not..this.
Her day was following the same routine it always did: Wake up, do morning activities (making her bed, brushing her teeth, etc.), eat breakfast, and leave the house at 7:00 AM, sharp. She can hear her dad's words in her head, something about ‘never being too careful.’ He had followed it up with a laugh, and man, she would do anything to hear that again. Especially now, when she has to be dreaming, because there’s no way her eyes are seeing this right.
People- her classmates - are running around frantically, trampling over one another with tears pricking at their eyes. There’s the sound of horrified screams going through the air, and she can’t help but cover her ears. But as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also something else.
Bellowing growls, drawled-out moans, and ear-piercing screeches. Sounds that weren’t possible, couldn’t be possible, for a human to make. June knows this. And her eyes are seeing the sources of these sounds, but she doesn’t believe that it’s true.
What the hell?
Everyone knows the classic horror trope of zombies. Slow, dumb, and the like. Green, rotting- undead. But they were just fiction. Something you could look at and go “Wow, 'real good thing we’ll never have to deal with that .”
But now, that’s exactly what was happening. Ironic, huh?
The first thing June notices is their behavior. They were slow, just like the movies- until their eyes locked onto a human. Then, they were freakishly fast. She blinks, and suddenly it has someone on the ground, devouring their neck into nothing. She blinks again because surely, this is all a dream. A nightmare.
Out of nowhere, someone comes and knocks her down to the ground, probably trying to get away from something. Her senses fill with the metallic taste and scent of blood, and she realizes her nose is bleeding. And really, she wants to lie down and shut her eyes so hard that it hurts until she wakes up.
Get up , she thinks. You can’t- you have to -
Her mind can’t make up the sentence, but her instincts are enough to get herself off the ground and back onto her feet. Now, very clearly, she can see that everything's gone to complete shit. Monsters, actual monsters , grab handfuls of people off the streets and shove them into their mouths. They’re bigger than anything she’s seen, with all sorts of spikes and eyes and other horrid things attached to their burly bodies. Zombies gnaw and bite at the last remaining people, who cry out for help hopelessly. A nauseating pit forms in her stomach, and she’s sure she’s going to throw up her breakfast. With all this, it doesn’t occur to her that she’s a sitting duck. That is, until, someone cries out at her: “June! Behind you!”
Once again do her instincts act before her mind. She dodges what turns out to be a zombie, which would’ve made her its next meal if whoever yelled at her hadn’t given her the warning. It flops onto the floor and begins trying to grab at her ankles, so she kicks at its head with a scream. It lets go, but its mouth just barely misses her foot. Her brain is starting to catch up with her body, and she looks around for someplace to go. She can’t stay out here, not if she wants to meet what will certainly be her death. The sky continues to swirl green and purple as what looks like portals drop mutated horrors into the world. It’s all so surreal, so insane, she can barely wrap her head around what's happening.
She begins to sprint toward the doors of the school, half-convinced that it’s the best place to go. The voice that yelled at her starts to register; it’s one she’s heard countless times. But she only confirms it when she gets to the Entrance Doors, and looks back as she pulls them open as hard as she can. She locks eyes with Jack Sullivan of all people, and he’s just as bloody and messed up as she is.
Then she slams the doors shut.
The inside of the school is mostly like the outside. Pure, absolute chaos. Teachers run around with stapler guns or sharpened pencils, pathetically trying to defend themselves- it doesn’t work, and she watches as her Algebra teacher gets tackled onto the ground by a zombie. Speaking of which, one comes after her, teeth open wide. She dodges it a split second and watches it ram into the wall behind her.
“ So soccer did come in handy,” she breathes.
More and more people go down. She barely makes her way through the first floor of the School, relying solely on speed and good timing. Everything’s so loud. The sound of bones cracking and screams are too much, especially since half of her dodging tactic is being able to hear when zombies are coming up from behind her.
Her backpack’s currently still outside; it fell off her shoulder when she got knocked over somehow and she never picked it back up. The only two things she has left are her lunchbox (which is surprisingly lightweight) and her phone.
Scrambling up the stairs to the second floor, she sees that it’s not exactly as crowded at the bottom, but zombies are making their way up quickly and she has to find somewhere to hide. The seventh-grade hallway is promising, even though there's the left-behind mess of fleeting people everywhere and she almost trips on a paper or two. Then she rounds the corner and is met with a rather ugly-looking Zombie. It grabs at her, and she lets out a yelp and ducks down, again, barely missing it. It stumbles into the open space where she should’ve been, but turns around almost immediately and starts going after her again. She runs down the hall, the zombie annoyingly hot on her trail. And of course, just her luck, she’s faced with one of the only dead ends this school has.
There’s nowhere else to go. The zombie’s closing in, and for some reason, her body thinks that now's a good time to freeze up.
So what does she do?
She picks up the nearest thing next to her and swings. Which just so happens to be a metal water bottle.
The bottle collides against the zombie’s head with a loud ‘thunk’, and the terrifying creature falls hard onto the floor. She hits it again because if there's anything she’s learned from zombie movies, you always double-tap. Obviously, this isn’t a normal zombie movie, but the rules are still the same, right? Dropping the water bottle as quickly as she had picked it up, she takes off down the hall, frantically checking behind her to see if anything is in pursuit. There's not, and she forgets to pay attention to what's going on in front of her until she almost runs straight into a set of double doors. They open up into a classroom, and- wait. It’s not just any classroom, it’s the Newspaper Room. She had been so shaken up she didn’t even realize. Her eyes drift over to the broom closet, and she makes a beeline for it, locking the door behind her and scooting into the farthest corner as far as she can. In an attempt to make herself small, she brings her knees chest and takes out her phone. Her fingers are shaking so hard she barely types in the password, but she manages and clicks on her messages. There’s an abundance of them, but it’s mostly emergency warnings sent by the State or something like that. One catches her eye, it’s a video sent to the ‘Newspaper GC’ that Jack insisted on creating. She pushes him into the back of her mind as she clicks on the video, which comes after a very misspelled text. It reads: Awe yu guys serering this? ( June roughly translates it to: Are you guys seeing this?)
In the video, the camera moves every which way, making it hard to see what the recorder is, y’know, trying to record. June checks who sent the video, and it turns out to be Sadie Montwell. A girl she’s never known that well, but was friendly enough with.
Sadies screams overlap with others, as she gets shoved around in the mob that the Parker Middle School Parking lot turned into. Then, the camera goes up as a big shadow runs over the sky. June immediately recognizes it as a monster foot, belonging to the one that she saw towering and eating innocent people. Apparently, Sadie doesn't get the memo quick enough, because the next thing June knows, the girl is on the ground, just barely having missed being completely stomped on by the monster. A feeling of relief washes over her until the camera shakily moves toward what is Sadies crushed leg and oh god.
June throws the phone across the closet, which is a dumb idea because even though she can’t see what’s happening, she hears it.
And it’s just as bad.
The video finally screeches to a halt as Sadie falls prey to a zombie, and June’s glad it’s over. She slowly moves towards her phone, picks it up, and goes back to her messages. Shuffling back into her corner, she can see that her mom texted her. It’s simple but effective:
Are you safe?
Is she?
The zombies could come into the Newspaper Room. A monster could smash its fist into the School, squashing her like a bug. Anything could happen. But she’s hidden away, so it’s like a half-safe situation.
She texts back: Yes. I love you.
Her moms' response is immediate- the phone buzzes and lights up as “Call incoming” appears on the screen. June taps on the ‘answer’ button and puts the phone to her ear.
“You’re okay?” her mom asks, and the voice is like music to June’s ears.
She nods but realizes her mom can’t see that, so gives a hushed “Yeah. A bloody nose, but no..” the words trail off, but they both know what we’re talking about.
No bite marks, or scratches.
“Listen to me, sweetie.” her mom reassures. “We’re gonna come get you, but you have to tell us where you are-”
Then the phone goes silent. The call cuts off, and June just about wants to s cream. She tries calling her mom again but is met with an official-sounding message, talking about how the lines are now reserved for authorized use only. Messaging doesn’t work either; the words never send. So she sits there, typing message after message, desperately trying to contact her mom, her dad, or anybody. It’s a completely silent few minutes, mainly because she knows that she can’t make much noise unless she wants a zombie to find her. Tears start forming after a while, but she shoos them away. Her phone soon becomes useless as every possible source for getting help is disabled. Frustrated, she almost smashes it on the ground. Then she gets her head straight and decides against it, and stuffs the phone into the pocket of her lunchbox.
So now what?
There’s no place to go because like hell she’s about to leave her hiding spot.
“The police will come to the school,” she says to herself, quietly. “If they don't, Mom and Dad will. They know I was here when..everything started. They’ll know to come here.”
These words are ones she tries her best to believe in, and she pops the bubble of any bad thought that wiggles its way into her head.
Now, you just have to play the long game, she thinks. You can do that.
The sounds don’t stop until late at night. Or rather, they stop coming constantly. There’s still the occasional shriek or growl, which are mostly muffled by her being in the closet. However, the screams stop. The human ones. She hasn’t left her position of knees to the chest, and it’s starting to hurt. The song of sleep tugs at her eyes, but she can’t. She has to stay alert, just in case her parents come by or the military or something. And what if a zombie makes its way into the room? The likelihood that zombies could open doors is close to zero, but she didn’t know how much she could trust that.
She doesn’t know what to think. ‘Doesn’t know how the monstrosities got here, how she was gonna survive, how if her parents were even safe at this point. So many questions, with no answers; she’s completely in the dark.
She hates it, more than anything.
The tears come back, and she doesn’t bother wiping them away anymore. They fall as she tries to cry as silently as she can, which also sucks because she can’t scream and sob until her throat is sore like she wants to. Without the sobbing and the screaming, her emotions can only trickle out in the soft cries she makes herself manage, and the rest stay inside, suffocating her throat and throbbing in her head. This situation is actually so shitty that she wants to laugh. And she does- it comes out warbly and short. Everything starts to register in her head, the severity of it all. How, in the movies, the government always loses to these kinds of things. How it’s all hopeless in the end. She saw people die! Brutally, too. It could easily happen to her.
Her heart pace picks up, her breaths shorten, and when she puts her hands out in front of her, they tremble. She shuts her eyes and tries to remember something her Dad told her a long time ago.
“Count to five. Breathe deep, and slow. Everything will be alright. ”
It starts a little shaky, but her voice whispers out the numbers, and her breaths deepen with every inhale. The process takes a while, but by the time it’s over, she’s calmed down a little. The pit in her stomach is still there though, so the next thing she does is take out her phone and push play on her voicemails. It’s weird, yeah, but hearing voices other than hers helps, because she really would like someone to talk to right now. The voice messages go on about random things, so normal that it takes her mind off of everything, for a little while, anyways. Taking her jacket and wrapping it around herself like a blanket, she listens to her Dad calling about the groceries, or her track coach canceling practice because of some bad weather, and so forth.
She falls asleep like that, against her best efforts. It was going to happen eventually. Her body slumps against the wall, puffy red eyes finally closing shut.
The first day sucks.
Junes’ sleep wasn’t pleasant; she had nightmare after nightmare, but the worst part is, she didn’t wake up until morning came. It would’ve been better if the nightmares woke her up during the night, so at least then she could’ve taken a breather. The only reason she does wake up is that the sound of a zombie clawing at the door is just loud enough to startle her out of her sleep. The undead creature shuffles away after a few minutes, and only then does she exhale the breath she was holding. Light barely slips through the bottom of the door, which is the only indicator that it’s actually morning. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she picks up her phone. It doesn’t turn on, and then she realizes she drained the battery by listening to those voicemails.
Shit.
She berates herself for about five minutes. Seriously, how dumb could she have been? That phone might’ve been her only form of contact, and she blew it! Maybe the lines would go back up, or her messages would've been sent. None of it matters now, obviously, and she’s just about furious with herself for it.
Then she thinks about a charger. A memory of yesterday pops back up in her mind, one where she was getting off the bus, with that weird feeling in her stomach that she had forgotten something. She realizes now that it had been her phone charger.
“Well, this day is already off to a real bad start,” she whispers. Her voice comes out all sorts of mumbled and gravely, but that’s fine.
The idea that a locker out there could have a charger does occur to her, but she dismisses it without a second thought.
Her stomach rumbles, and another worry is added to her seemingly endless list (with more things on it that she feels stupid for caring about than she would like to admit): food. The only stuff she has are the items in her lunchbox, which is only enough for one meal. The solution is a ridiculous amount of rationing, so for breakfast, she takes a bite of her sandwich, pops a grape into her mouth, and sips a little water out of her plastic bottle.
It’s enough, she tells herself. You have to make it last .
The rest of the day is mostly the same. Sitting, knees to her chest, alert for any danger that might come across her hiding spot. There’s nothing to do, so she’s left with her thoughts. They’re..not great. Guilt and regret start to sink in, and that’s when she tells herself that she is not going to go insane with that kind of thing.
So she starts singing. Which, in all fairness, is probably a sign that she’s spiraling into insanity.
It’s barely above a whisper, and her voice cracks at different notes. But there’s no one around to judge, so who cares? She sings songs from the radio, jingles from commercials, and stuff like that. Music had always been there for her before, and it was here for her now. She doesn’t know how long she sings for; it doesn’t matter anyways.
After…that, she stretches. It had slipped her mind when she woke up, so she is doing it now. A good stretch helps out tremendously with clearing her head in the morning- it was a part of her routine after all. Which, she decides she’s going to retain to the best of her ability.
Then there’s really nothing left to do. She passes time by doing random things like fidgeting with her hands, clicking her tongue, and coming up with newspaper headlines. The other half of the time, she wonders when the police are going to show up because they just have to. She wasn’t going to doubt that, not for a second.
At night, the thoughts come back. She knows it’s night because the light from the cracks in the closet door changes colors before finally going away, leaving her in what is almost complete darkness. Moonlight seeps through, only lighting up a small part of the closet. In this darkness, the thoughts taunt her relentlessly.
She’s scared.
Scared and so unbelievably alone, with nothing to reassure her completely that everything will be okay. And she has to accept this, but she doesn’t want to. To escape these thoughts, she heads to sleep, since there’s no real point in staying awake anyways. But she knows she’ll have to deal with them eventually. Again, the tears return, and she’s really starting to get sick of this.
That’s how the first-day ends.
By the third day, she realizes no one is coming to get her. This was something she fought against the second day, convinced that the Police were probably finding other people, and were about to show up at the school any minute now. But now, as the 8th zombie scratches and moans at the closet door, she’s lost all hope. (And yes, she had been counting.)
It makes her heart sink into her stomach and her emotions bubble within her.
Why should she be subjected to this? Why did this have to happen?
Frustration, Sadness, hopelessness- these things mix into some kind of weird, possibly chemical reaction, and then something in her snaps. A will inside her opens up, comparable to the survival instincts that kicked in when she came face to face with the zombies. It’s determination. Determination to live, no matter what. Even if the Police won’t come for her (she still hoped her parents would), she’ll try to survive.
Of course, that starts with leaving the closet.
She spends what seems like forever hyping herself up. This day would come eventually- her food is completely gone, so there was no way she could stay in the closet for much longer. But leaving turns out to be a lot harder than she previously thought. Phone in her jacket pocket, her hand hovers over the doorknob for maybe 10 minutes. She presses one ear on the door, waiting to see if a zombie is outside before she opens it. Then, she undoes the lock, and steps outside.
And holy hell is it bright.
Her eyes readjust to blinding sunlight, which takes a minute. The window shutters are wide open because her Newspaper teacher always thought that everyone worked better when the room was fully lit. June gulps, remembering that Mr. Johnson is no doubt a zombie now. She steps over to peer out the window and finds that in just the two short days that she was in the closet, the whole world (or at least Wakefield) has become overrun by the horrors of the Apocalypse. Houses crumble underneath purple-ish glowing vines that are literally everywhere. The Newspaper room faces the Old Box Factory, and she watches as huge monsters stomp around inside. It looks like some sort of…lair. She can also sort of see the Town Park, which is completely overrun by vines. Zombies shuffle around on the streets, flesh hanging from their bodies, hollow eyes looking into nothing. A screech rings through the air, and June looks up through the window to see some bird-looking monster fly through the sky. Her view is slightly altered thanks to the glare of the sun, but she can just make it out. She looks down to the school lawn/parking, and her stomach drops as she realizes that zombies are everywhere. There’s no way she’d be able to get out of the school without becoming mince meat.
So she’s stuck. Perfect.
The next course of action is finding a weapon. It’s not like the school will have knives or anything of that sort, but still, there’s gotta be something she can defend herself with. After looking around for a bit, she comes across a broom in one corner of the room. An image of a spear pops up in her head, and in one quick motion, she snaps the bristles part off and is left with a splintered wooden lance.
Now, it’s time for the hardest part. Venturing out into the school.
She grabs two book bags that someone left and drapes both around each shoulder, letting them fall onto her side. Walking to the set of double doors, she looks back into the Newspaper Room and sees (in her head) what it should look like right now. Everyone running around, sharing ideas and pictures, spit-balling possible topics, and laughing with each other.
June grimaces, and then walks out the door.
…
The hallway is completely deserted. No sign of other survivors, and she starts to think if there are any.
Another thing is that it’s eerily quiet. The only sounds she can hear are her breathing and her footsteps, which are both a lot louder than she’d like them to be. She makes a mental note to control how much noise she makes later, once she’s found a home base. Technically, the Newspaper room could’ve been the perfect place, but there are too many memories there. Memories she doesn’t want to deal with.
She treks throughout the Seventh Grade Hallway until she comes across the girls' bathroom. Cautiously, she walks inside. None of the classrooms have any bathrooms in them, so she’ll have to come here for anything hygiene-related. Then she notices that there are no showers in the bathroom, or for that matter, anywhere in the school. Groaning, she makes another mental note to figure out a way around that later.
Stepping towards the mirror/sink section, she takes a good long look at her reflection. Her face shows the residue of tears and she looks like she hasn’t slept in days . Sighing, she pulls her hair out of the messed-up ponytail it’s in, combs her fingers through it, and puts it back into a ponytail. Then she washes her face and hands, and that’s that. It may be the apocalypse, but she’s still going to be clean. As clean as she can get, anyways.
Trying to make her footsteps silent this time, she walks out of the bathroom and back into the hallway. There are no zombies anywhere, which is a little weird, considering how the halls were like a zombie-party-hub when the apocalypse started. She gets to the stairwell and looks out onto the first floor. All of a sudden, the sound of groaning appears. It’s soft at first, but then it picks up in volume. June crouches down, barely sticking her head out into the stairwell.
Then she sees it, on the first floor.
A huge ball of..zombies?
Their bodies are entwined with one another, making up a massive ball that slowly (but surely) manages to crawl its way through the hallways. June squints, and can see that their hands are the things moving the ball forward. It’s a disgusting sight, one that makes June sure she’s gonna have nightmares about it. Among the twisted faces, she can see a few she recognizes. Mainly, it’s teachers, some of which she knows. Or..knew. A small part of it, however, is kids. Classmates she worked with on projects, hung out at lunch with, and the like. She feels a small pang of regret and sympathy in her heart, knowing how scared they must’ve been.
I’m sorry, she thinks, though she doesn’t know what for or why.
The zombie ball stops right by the stairwell, and all of the bodies within it start to sniff out into the air. It does this for about a minute, then moves past the stairwell. June breathes a sigh of relief, realizing it must track its prey based on smell. With this knowledge, she knows she’ll have to wash her face and hands frequently, which she doesn’t mind.
She gets out of the crouching position and quietly goes down the hallway. Not wanting to stray too far from the bathrooms, she picks out her homeroom as her home base. It’s starting to get dark outside, so after she’s done making sure there are no zombies in the classroom, she takes her broom spear and shifts it between the handles of the double doors to lock the door shut. For extra measure, she takes two desks and shoves them against the wall. She’ll have to get rid of it all in the morning, but that’s a problem for tomorrow. Her stomach rumbles, reminding her that she hasn’t eaten all day.
Scouring through the desks, she finds some snacks that were not supposed to be in there. She chooses a bag of trail mix and slumps against a corner of the room. When she’s done, she goes to sleep. There are no tears anymore.
On the Fourth Day, she does something stupid.
Most of her morning is occupied by trying to make her Homeroom a suitable base. After getting rid of the mega-lock on the door she made the previous night, she manages to drag in the couch from the teachers' lounge, which luckily had some throw pillows and a blanket on it. A place to sleep is checked off her long list of things to get done. Next thing: food and water. The food part is mostly covered, there are enough snacks in the desks and backpacks to last her a while. Most of it is junk food, though she’ll take what she can get. But, for some reason, there are no water bottles in the classroom. The solution? Ransacking the Science lab of its beakers and vials and filling them up with the water from the sinks in the girls' bathroom. They’re still on, but June knows it won’t stay that way for long, so she tries to get as much water as she can. Then she decides that if she runs out before her parents get here, she’ll use the beakers to collect the rainwater when it rains.
With the major concerns out of the way, the idea of exploring the school in its entirety pops into her head. She hasn’t left the second floor yet and doesn’t know if there are any other zombies or monsters in the building besides the zombie ball. ‘Might as well investigate, right? Not like she has anything better to do.
Bad idea.
Well, it’s a half-bad idea. She figures out that there are only a few zombies besides the zombie ball. The lunch ladies are included in this, so June knows to stay clear of the Cafeteria. The rest of the zombies are all downstairs, near the rear of the school. She marks the places that are safe to go into with check marks from a red marker, and X’s the ones that are trouble. It’s not a full-proof system, but it’s enough to keep her safe as long as she doesn’t do something silly.
Which is exactly what she does.
To be fair, she was bored! Butt-surfing the stairwell banisters near the Art Studio had seemed like a perfectly good solution at the time.
But she must’ve done something wrong- that or the banisters were just faulty to begin with- because when she begins her slide, everything goes haywire. The first half of it is fine. As she goes down, broom spear in hand, wind whooshes slightly by her face and she almost feels like laughing.
Then the metal on the banisters snags and rips open her jeans, cutting into her leg pretty badly. She lets out a hissed, pained “Shit!” as she tumbles onto the hard tile. When she lifts her head to look at the damage, her eyes go wide.
Her leg is openly bleeding, it’s the area right under her knee. Groaning in pain, she shifts her weight and hears a crack underneath her.
Oh no .
Her fear is confirmed as she reaches for her phone, which she mistakenly left in her back pocket. It’s cracked.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she mumbles.
And if that wasn’t enough, her broom spear lies in two snapped pieces a few inches away from her. It’s okay though, she’ll find another weapon. She’s just thankful she didn’t have to fight anything with it, because it would’ve broken then, too. Her attention is more focused on the cracked piece of metal. The fact that this phone is more important than her cut leg strikes ironic, but she knows she has to do something about her injury if she doesn’t want to bleed to death. She’ll deal with the whole phone-cracking business later.
(She never does. A small part of her knows it's useless to try, and had known it since the beginning.)
…
It takes a while, but she manages to limp her way toward the Nurses Office. The place consists of two rooms- there’s the waiting room, then the actual office. From the waiting room, she can see Nurse Carol shuffling around the office, and there’s no way June is going in there. She looks around the room and spots an unwrapped fruit by the foot.
Surprisingly, it works. The bleeding stops, and she decides she’ll stay the night in the waiting room. Flopping onto the waiting couch, she lifts the phone over her head and stares at it.
“They’ll come for me,” she says, drowsing off to sleep, “They will.”
(And on the Fifth Day, they do.)
It’s a quiet morning. She’ll have to get used to the quiet.
She does, however, accept that this strange new routine is her new normal.
Waking up, she feels her wound and remembers her 2:00 AM snack break. She snorts and preys on everything so that she doesn’t get tetanus. Nurse Carol keeps ramming her body against the Nurses Office Door, which gives June the heads up that she needs to leave. Her walk is still somewhat limp, but she ends up at her Homeroom once again. After locking herself in, she searches for a new weapon. She still wants a spear, because it works best for her skills. Fencing was something she picked up a few years ago, so using something long and slim- like a spear- will probably act the same. But then again, a weapon that could work far-distance and short would be cool. It’s like she wants a little bit of everything!
She settles for the flag pole hanging on the classroom wall.
It’s sharp, pretty sturdy, and overall a good fit. She practices with it for about 30 minutes, trying to figure out the best moves for fighting. It’s not like she’s going to seek out a zombie to fight or anything, but if it ever happens, she wants to be ready. After that little session, she goes to the girls' bathroom and gets out the sanitary wipes she came across in the Nurses' Waiting Room. It’s the closest thing to a shower. Then she washes her face and hands and goes back into her home base.
They come at around Noon.
She’s not doing anything in particular, just using an Albert Einstein head sculpture to sharpen her spear. Then there’s a loud honk that rings through the air, followed by the screeching of radio feedback, and then she hears it.
A human voice.
Rushing toward the windows so fast she almost trips, she looks out to see a Bus full of people- alive people- being pulled by a Tank. A soldier-looking guy yells out that anyone who’s still alive should come with them, but June tunes that part out as she looks among the people on the bus.
It’s a little shocking to see how many survivors there are, but she’s looking for two people in particular. For a moment, she doesn’t, and her heart drops. But then, at the back of the bus- are her parents.
June wastes no time. Almost immediately, she grabs at the windows, trying to pull them open. When that doesn’t work, she balls her hands into fists and starts banging as loud as she can on the windows.
“I’m here!” she screams. “I’m here!”
Words tumble out of her mouth as she desperately tries to get her parents' attention. They look out at the school, searching for her.
Her voice gets as loud and high as it can get, and she’s pounding on the windows so hard they have to be close to breaking. She doesn’t even notice that she’s crying, or that the hope that her parents will see her is starting to falter.
But then, they do. They stare directly at her and June is so glad they’re safe but she’s scared for herself and scared that she’ll be stuck here.
Her dad gets up from his seat and starts talking to the soldier. Then he makes a break for it but is held back by other passengers of the bus. Her Mom looks up at her and sends her a nod like everything will be okay. June wants nothing more than to simply just walk out of the School and into her parents' arms, but she can’t because the zombies decided to make the school of all places their hub.
Then the bus rounds the corner, and it’s gone. Just..gone.
June breaks down at that very moment.
She slumps against the window and buries her head into her knees, just like she did in the closet. Her forehead digs into her knees so much that it hurts, and she sobs. It’s ugly, loud, and definitely alerting a zombie or two, but she can’t find the will to care at this point.
“They’re..safe..” she chokes between breaths. “That’s all..that’s all that matters. Be strong for them..”
And even though she tells herself that, she still cries and sobs. Her body betrays her head, and she hates it. Hates how vulnerable and scared she is.
…
A lot of time passes before she picks her head up. Her head throbs and her throat is harsh and dry. Something within her hardens, and she knows she’ll be here for a long time. Alone.
But they saw you, she thinks. They’ll come back for you, eventually.
She trains. Trains and trains, mainly to get her mind off of things. She needs the distraction. It’s a blur; she slashes at nothing for air for a while before something boils up inside of her. Anger..or maybe Frustration.
She lets out a yell and heaves her spear at the wall. It makes a direct bullseye in a calendar, even lodging itself into the wall behind it. Collecting herself, she walks over and pulls the spear out. A weird spark of pride ignites in her- it’s small and only there for a second, but she almost feels excited with the fact that she was able to do such a thing. Then the spark flickers out as she reminds herself she can’t let herself get driven by her emotions. Specifically that uncontrolled anger-no, frustration- that came out of her so suddenly. Her mother's nod towards her resurfaces in her head, and she makes up her mind. She has to stay strong and stay here, at the school, for them.
Her dinner is junk food. Again. She eats in complete silence but thinks about how she needs to get some actual protein in her sometime soon. Before the Apocalypse, she had gotten used to drinking a protein shake in the morning every day, and that loss is starting to sink in. She picks at her hair, which has returned to its naturally curly state after she washed it in the sink the other morning. It’s insanely frizzy, but the ponytail keeps it from annoying her too much. Then she settles into her couch bed and tries to fall asleep. It’s a pain, because of course it has to be.
She cries herself to sleep on the Fifth Night.
It’s almost completely silent, which is a sign that she’s finally adapted to this strange new world. It’s hard to accept that this is her life now. It’s too much, and a lot more than she would like to deal with, but she manages. She learns to do that a lot throughout her time at the School.
A month passes. It’s the Apocalypse, yeah, but she’s still going to keep the time.
A lot changes, actually. She gets weirdly good at popping lockers off their hinges and finds a few good scores scattered among them. Then that food runs out, and so does the food in the backpacks, and the desks. There’s food in the cafeteria, that she knows, but there’s also like, a shit ton of zombies in there.
She doesn’t eat for two whole days, scared out of her mind. It’s a slow and painful time, and by the third day, she gets so hungry she comes up with a plan.
There’s a lot of training, and falling on her butt, but it works! The lunch lady zombies won’t know what hit ‘'em- and seriously, they don’t. She moves so fast it feels good, like she’s back on the field playing field hockey or doing track. Her spear works perfectly with her, effectively knocking and sweeping the zombies to their feet. She doesn’t stab them or kill them, because they used to be people. And even though they’re zombies, she’d never forgive herself. Plus, now that the human buffet is over, they’ve gotten a bit..slow. June notices this and feels a little better about her chances of survival.
In the end, she leaves the Cafeteria with a bunch of food. It’s a good day, and for the first time in forever, she smiles.
On a random day, she goes back to the Nurses Office and gets a few bandages. Nurse Carol is big, but all June has to do is get to her weak spot, which was the legs, surprising enough. The Nurse falls to the ground, and June dashes into the office and gets as many supplies as she can. Then, when she’s in the safety of her base, she wraps herself up. First, her knee, which she doesn’t know if it’s fully healed. Next, her hands, which are littered with cuts from gone-wrong spear sharpening sessions. She puts on some not-to-heavy gloves she found in the Woodwork shop, which will help with handling her spear. Finally, some other random parts of her body that she had bruised or sliced in some way or another. When she finishes, she goes to the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror.
She looks so much different than how she did just a month ago, it’s almost funny.
The bandages make her look cool, though, so at least there’s that.
It rains one night. Hard.
June’s never been fond of thunderstorms.
And when she says she isn’t fond, she means she hates them. She’s not..scared. They’re just so loud and so unexpected; you never know when the next cannon-like boom is going to ring through the air. What’s worse is that this rainstorm happens at night.
Throughout the day, she noticed the sky getting darker, the clouds forming over the sky. She did her best to ignore it and spent most of the day trying to convince herself nothing would happen.
But then night falls, and the first lightning strike goes through the air.
She knows it’s going to be a long night.
Moving her couch bed as far as it can go from the window barely helps. Shutting the blinds doesn’t either; the bright, blinding lights of lightning still seep through the ever-so-slim cracks. Not like she expected a bunch of flimsy shutters to block it out completely, but still.
The sound of the thunder strikes as loud as ever. When everything combines- the clamorous pounding of the rain on the roof, the boom of thunder, and the crack of lightning- it overrides her senses, and the world gets so loud. She crawls into her bed and presses her hands over her ears as hard as she can, tears welling in her eyes.
She hates when it pours.
The tennis ball game is a spur of an idea.
It happens when June starts finding herself on the roof of the school, more and more. Everything is fairly peaceful up there, and she can almost see the entirety of Wakefield. The roof serves as a decent training spot; it’s big, open, and quiet. She’s gotten used to this and notices that it helps her focus more. There are no distractions. More often than not, she loses herself in the repetitive motion of slashing her spear up and down, occasionally throwing in a strike to the middle. And when this happens, her head becomes crowded with different thoughts, and emotions that she’s been holding back. Then her spear ends up lodged in the wall of the entrance to the roof.
That happens a lot.
She figures out that she needs a way to let out her frustration another way. And why not turn it into a game?
…
Dragging the trash bin up multiple sets of stairs is a lot harder than she originally thought. Granted, it is full of tennis balls, but who knew they could be so heavy? It does give her time to come up with the ‘rules’ of the game though.
When she has everything set up on the roof, she’s hesitant. Reaching down into the trash bin, she picks up a ball and rolls it between her hands. Finally, she says: “ Coach Rockwell, in the body,” and hurls the ball out into the zombie crowd below.
It hits her old coach right in the chest, but that’s not the part she’s concerned about. Throwing the ball, pushing her frustration through her and out into the world- it works. Even if just a bit, she feels better.
Some days, that game is all she does. It’s good to let a little frustration out sometimes.
Besides the roof and her home base, the Library is the place she goes to the most. She goes mostly on days when there’s nothing to do; when she doesn’t want to train or play her tennis ball game.
The Librarian is nowhere to be seen; the Apocalypse must’ve been her off day or something. And the books are mostly untouched, which is good. June looks through the shelves for hours at a time, flipping through random things along the way. She learns a lot, but it’s mainly fun facts. After a while, she’ll get a stack of books that particularly pique her interest, and settle down in one of the armchairs in the Library. The pile's main components are thriller and mystery novels; she’s always liked them. There are times when she doesn’t even realize how long she stays in the Library, reading books. She’ll go in after following her morning routine, and then not come out until it’s dark outside.
Sometimes, she goes to the Library to study: The Map.
It’s almost as big as her, completely covering every inch of Wakefield and everything that surrounds it. She finds it in her homeroom teacher's desk, collecting dust. In an attempt to try and find places any survivors could be bunkering down, she looks over the map for hours. It gets to the point where it’s practically imprinted in her head, hell, she might as well dream about it.
(One night, she does. It’s weird and when she wakes up, she can’t remember all the details, but it puts her in a good mood nonetheless.)
Sometime in late July, she comes across Dirk Savage.
For some reason, she had been craving a lot of specific things the following week. But to get them, she has to go out there. She spends a lot of time looking for periods where the zombies aren’t swarming the doors out, but there are few. Very few.
Finally, she settles for the back door, which isn’t as crowded as the front. This is her first time leaving the school, and god is she nervous.
She’s practically armed to the teeth, with her book bags to carry the food and spear in hand. A few hockey pads cover various parts of her body, most likely where a zombie would sink its teeth into. The walk from her home base down to the backdoors of the school is quiet, but she’s almost giddy with nervousness..and a little bit of excitement.
When she steps out onto the pavement, all the zombies snap their necks over to her.
“ I did not think this through,” she whispers.
They come after her as she rushes down the sidewalk, away from the school. Her tactic is to rush around them and simply get them off their feet, to the point where they’re confused and dizzy and don’t know which way’s which. Considering that she’s pretty darn fast, it works. She leaves them in the dust, and makes her way toward Wakefields’ ‘Food Frenzy’.
Speaking of Wakefield, it looks like something out of a dystopian movie. The Vines have now 100% taken over everything, and without the constant maintenance of the townspeople, the greenery is overgrown and wild. Zombies roam the streets- she makes sure to work her way around them- and so do the Monsters. She notices that there are all sorts of monsters, ones that she hadn’t seen before. Big, small, slimy, scaly- you name it. They mostly stick to themselves, but she doesn’t want to test how strong that theory is.
And even though she’s lived in Wakefield all her life, it almost looks completely different now.
A strange new world.
‘Food Frenzy’ doesn’t take long to get to. The big flashing billboard that advertises the store is now shredded to nothing, with what looks like the marks of monster claws ripping through the store's jingly phrase. It’s something she can’t remember, and the sign doesn’t help.
Making her way inside, she can see that most of the store is emptied.
The key word being most.
Some of the snacks she wanted are still there, with half of them not even expired yet!
“I am so wrong for getting excited at that,” she mumbles to herself.
She stuffs various amounts of items into her book bags, making sure to get all the major food groups. She even picks up her protein mix.
Like a lot of things these days, shopping in a store with no one else in it is weird. She’s practically stealing these items. The thought makes her stop for a minute, then shrug. There’s no one around to catch her, after all.
That statement proves to be wrong just two seconds later.
Her ears pick up on the stomping of boots pretty quickly. What can she say? The Apocalypse has heightened her senses.
Next comes a groan, which for a second, makes her think it’s a zombie, and her hand tightens around her spear.
Then Dirk Savage rounds the corner, walks onto the same aisle as her, and all she can think is: huh?
Well, if there was anyone else who could survive the Apocalypse, it would definitely be him. Nothing happens for a minute. They stare at each other, and Dirk actually waves at her, awkwardly.
She waves back, oddly enough. But before he can get a word out, she takes off running.
…
When she’s back in her home base, she flops onto her couch bed and thinks about the strange occurrence. Good to know that another kid survived, at least.
Besides…that, she decides not to leave the school anymore. After some examination, she finds some teeth marks on her shoulder pad. It makes her thankful she had the idea to wear the gear, but cautious enough to where she figures it’s best if she stays in here. No more letting cravings get the best of her. She’ll just have to stick to the processed meat that is the Cafeteria food. This makes her take a mental note to ration the stuff she picked up today for as long as she can.
Then her mind goes back to what happened at Food Frenzy, and she laughs as she realizes she saw some type of grainy old people cereal in Dirk's basket
She did not take him to be that kind of guy.
Her laugh rings out through the room, and it feels great. It’s probably the first time she’s done that since the Apocalypse started.
There are good days, and then there are bad days.
Her definition of a ‘good day’ alters drastically from what it was before the Apocalypse. Good days are when she finds a rice Krispie hidden away, perfectly untouched. It’s when, for once, the thoughts don’t creep up on her randomly, trying to force her to confront things she doesn’t want to. It’s when everything in the world is just right, even if only for a moment.
Bad days suck.
On bad days, she slumps against a wall, bored out of her mind, for hours. There’s nothing to be done, nothing she can do to feel productive, which leaves a sour taste in her mouth. Before the Apocalypse, she had always been busy. And she was perfectly fine with that.
But now, as she bounces a tennis ball up and down, she feels..useless. It’s a strange feeling, and she knows she should dive into it more, but she can’t bring herself to it.
Instead, she hurls the tennis ball across the room and sighs.
Today is a bad day, she decides.
It happens on a Tuesday. Sometimes in early August, she believes.
By now, she’s completely altered herself to fit this new world. Her breathing and footsteps are silent. Her appetite has learned to take what it can get, expired or not. She decorates the homeroom with different things, mostly paper-made items, which is a hobby she picks up thanks to a few Origami books. The librarian had some fairy lights behind her desk, and June uses them to light up her home base. It starts to look like her bedroom at home, more and more. She’s a little conflicted about how much she likes it, but if anything, it’s comforting.
The day starts normal, to where she doesn’t know if it’ll be a bad day or a good day. Something in her remembers a bag of Fritos she might’ve left in her locker. It’s fairly dark in the seventh-grade hallway, with the glowy vines being the only thing to light her way. She can hear the zombie ball moving around more quickly, almost like it senses something. Considering that she’s already washed herself this morning, its behavior is a little weird. Shrugging, she makes her way to her locker but keeps the ball in her mind.
“Let’s see,” she mumbles. “Where could you be?”
Her voice has changed, too. She doesn’t use it a lot though, being alone and all.
She spends a minute rummaging around before she bumps against the door of her locker and something falls to the ground with a shatter.
Eyes wide, she looks down at her Framed Certificate of Merit, lying in a pile of broken glass.
A memory flashes in her head, from when she first won the certificate for being the first sixth-grade senior editor at Parker Middle School. She remembers her grin touching her ears, her stomach full of butterflies from the excitement of it all. When she got home and showed the certificate to her parents, they hugged her so hard it hurt and told her how proud they were.
And she felt proud of herself.
The emotions she had somehow held off for two whole months begin to brew within her, like an oncoming storm. She presses her foot down on the pile before her and smashes it with her shoe, effectively breaking up the glass more and wrinkling the paper beneath it. It’s almost hilarious how happy she had been with herself, achieving that certificate. But now, it doesn't mean anything. Everything she worked so hard on was for nothing.
And just like that, the barrier comes down.
All the thoughts that she had pushed off come back, swarming; surrounding; suffocating her. She thinks about her “Plan to Ultimate Success”, the routine she had been following since kindergarten. All to become the person she was supposed to become, all for her family, who she would do anything for.
Emotions never came easy to her. It was like a defect, something to be ashamed of. She found that when her friends were sad, she couldn’t comfort them, most of the time. Hell, she could hardly figure out her own emotions, since she never really made time for them. Her sole purpose for almost all her life was simply to follow her plan.
So she distanced herself. From friends, and other things.
She was a logical thinker, not fit for dealing with that kind of stuff. That's what she convinced herself of. It would be easier that way.
But then the goddamn world ended, and now her hopes and dreams and all that stupid shit she should’ve stopped believing in a long time ago were dead. Was she stupid for thinking she could’ve gotten far anyways, without the apocalypse? Of course, it didn’t matter now. It’s all so infuriating, so ironic. The self-loathing she has for herself fills her to the brim. Anger boils in her, and she knows it’s way past something throwing a tennis ball can fix. The thoughts morph themselves into things people had said to her, things she put up with, as long as she could become someone who would make her parents proud. These words taunt her; it’s all she can hear.
“Shut up,” she tells them. “Shut up!”
Her hand tightens around her spear, and as tears fall from her furious expression, she swings. A rage room would be perfect right now.
Glass goes everywhere, barely missing her eyes, as one of the school's Trophy cases goes crashing down.
Her next words are driven by nothing other than pure anger and resentment. “Stupid Hopes! Stupid dreams! Stupid Monster Apocalypse!”
Along with the anger, she's also sad, scared, and alone. Kinda like back then, when nobody understood her or tried to understand her. Except for her family.
The trophies clang to the floor, and she leaves the cabinet's glass walls completely decimated.
“Jeez, Del Toro. Obsessed, much?”
There's nobody there, these words are in her head. But they’re so loud. She can feel the eyes of nothing bore into her, mocking her.
“ Don't you understand ?” She cries to nothing. “I just...I just wanted to..make them proud of me..”
They never seemed to get that. And she knows some of it is her fault; there’s probably something she could’ve done. Something to make them stay.
She heaves, forgetting to breathe for a minute. Her eyes skip over to the school's Lacrosse trophy case, and she can see a trophy with her name on it. Literally. After she gets rid of this, she’ll give up. She’ll let her only weapon break and snap to nothing. Is that what the world wants from her? And if it is, who is she to deny it?
“All you did was for nothing. ”
This is something that blares in her head, over and over.
Gathering the last of her frenzied strength, she raises her spear above her head.
“June! June Del Toro!”
She turns her head so fast she thinks she’ll have whiplash, and looks out into the seventh-grade hallway. Her head is so disorientated she doesn’t know who the voice belongs to first but recognizes that it can’t be the army. The voice is boyish, and a little squeaky too.
Wait.
Her mouth drops open a little as she realizes with absolute shock, and horror that it’s Jack Sullivan.
He survived?
From what she can tell, his voice is coming from the end of the sixth-grade wing. Carefully padding closer to the set of double doors that separate the seventh-grade hall and the sixth-grade one, she picks up on the sound of multiple footsteps. Then she looks out the window and sees Jack, Quint Baker, and Dirk Savage sprinting toward the doors like their life depends on it. And it does because the next thing she sees is the Zombie Ball on their trail.
Seriously?!
She has to make a decision, real quick. These three boys have put her in some serious danger, and yeah, she’s a lot mad at them right now, but it’s not like she wants them to get mercilessly torn apart by the zombie ball. All of a sudden, they bang into the double doors, which Dirk tugs at with all his might. Then they're cornered by the zombie ball, and it’s inches away from eating them whole.
“I am so going to regret this,” June growls. She yanks the doors open and watches Jack, Quint, and Dirk tumble into the seventh-grade wing while she slams the door shut on the zombie ball. They all look at her like some mad woman, which is pretty fair.
But this was seriously not the time! They really couldn’t have come when she wasn’t a vulnerable mess? Or, yknow, not come at all? Still facing the door, she wipes away the tears that had fallen previously.
Then she turns around to face them, and nobody does anything. Fuming, she picks her spear off the ground and slams it onto the ground, making the boys jolt.
“ What are you fools doing here?”
Leaning against the creature brigade, June looks up at the night sky. To put it clearly, she’s exhausted. The Mallusk vibrates ever so slightly beneath her, which gives off the same vibe as having a cat sleep on top of you. Except, she’s on an apocalyptic centipede with a bunch of furry monsters surrounding her. Hah.
Even though the whole ‘take a breather’ idea was hers, she can hardly calm down. However, the world is peaceful and quiet, just like her days at the school. It’s better now, though, because she has friends to share it with.
Quints passed out and snuggled against Jack. Dirk holds Drooler close, which kind of makes her long to see Neon again. But she knows he can handle his own, wherever he is. She lets the anxiety and fear of the previous battle go, and does her best to relax. Who knows when they’ll get another chance?
The fact that all her friends (including herself) are in great mental pain does not go unnoticed by her, and she wants more than anything to take it away. Like how they did, about a year ago. Or was it more than that? (Obviously, they didn’t take away all of it, but she’d say she’s doing a lot better now when it comes to knowing who she is.)
And she doesn’t regret it like she thought she would.
Letting them in.
Finally, the peacefulness of the night lures her to sleep, and before she knows it, she’s out like a light.
(In the morning, she’ll get teased about how she snored last night. She’ll deny it, of course, but with a grin on her face. )