Bad Water

It was a pretty ordinary looking building. A high graffiti strewn wall surrounded the grounds giving the place a slightly dilapidated look. Nothing to make it seem like anything out of the ordinary. Indeed Huntersfield High School was the very epitome of ordinary.

Gerry Harper sat down in the long dinner hall and perused his rather suspect looking meal.

“Man, why the hell do we have to eat this shit everyday? It was so much better before they started locking the gates to stop us going to the shop,” Gerry sat down moodily.

Stan Briars was Gerry’s friend of five years. Ever since they started school. They had taken to each other as young miscreants do. Gerry, lank and lean with a scruffy mop of blonde hair and Stan with his shoulder length black hair and constantly scruffy appearance. They made the perfect partnership. Both of them were heavy metal fanatics which made them immediate outcasts in the current world of dance music and sixties throwbacks.

“Are you going to drink that juice?” said Stan, eying up the measly plastic cup of juice that was handed out to everyone with their school meals.

“No, I don’t like the stuff. The water around here makes it taste dodgy,” replied Gerry, sliding the cup towards Stan.

“Thanks man, I’m really thirsty today. Feels like I’ve swallowed a sheep.”
Stan took the cup in one hand and drained it in one swig.

“Your right dude. This stuff tastes like crap,” Stan wiped a hand across his mouth and pulled a face of disgust.

“What lesson have you got next then?” asked Stan as he pushed the cup of the edge of the table and into the passing dinner ladies bin.

“History, boring as shit.”

“Well I have religious education so I win on the boredom factor,” Stan made to get up and dump the remains of his barely eaten hotpot in the bin.

“See you later man.”

“Yeah see you later. I’ll meet you by the gate after school,” Gerry watched Stan walk out of the room and went back to poking around at his own uneaten meal.

Three hours later and Gerry stood by the front gate in the school yard. He had grown bored waiting for Stan who was taking an unusually long time getting out of class. In his boredom he had taken to standing on top of the green painted iron fence and was walking across the top like a tightrope walker.

“Where is he?” He was becoming impatient. Stan never took this long to get out of school. He often didn’t even wait until school was finished preferring to not turn up and save himself the bother of learning in the first place.

At this point Gerry noticed that it wasn’t just Stan but hardly anyone had come out of the school since the final bell rang ten minutes ago. Something was definitely afoot.

A young boy of about twelve years suddenly came charging out of the door of the technology department. Obviously a first year from the size of him, He did not look happy.

The technology department was a separate building made mostly of wood with two big wooden doors in the middle. The young boy was beating on them with such a frenzy it looked as if they would splinter into pieces.

“Ha, what the hell’s with that guy?” Gerry jumped down from the gate and walked towards the furious first year.

“What’s wrong with you dude? Mr Jackson give you detention?”

The boy turned to face Gerry, froth and spittle flying from his mouth as he swung around. His face was a picture of rage, like a rabid dog.

“Whoa, what the fuck! What are you doing you little freak!” shouted Gerry as he reeled away from the enraged boy.

A young girl, slightly older looking than the furious boy, who by now had resumed beating upon the wall, came running out of the doors. She was screaming as if she had seen a dead body.

“The class!” She sobbed as she stumbled into Gerry.

“They’ve all gone mental. They just started beating the crap out of each other! I think someone may have been killed!” she was sobbing and shaking violently by this point.

The boy had stopped beating on the wall and now leapt on the girl, biting and hitting her.

“Aghh get him off, get him off!” she screamed as she pirouetted around.

The boy took a pen out of his pocket and pushed the whole thing into her eye. There was a blood curdling shriek and then she just lay there on the floor in spasm.

Before Gerry even had chance to respond to the horrid event he had just witnessed, a flood of teenagers burst forth from the far door and ran straight at Gerry.
He turned and fled. The dead girls blood still on his shirt where it had spurt out of her eye socket. He stumbled and ran on in sheer horror. His mouth was numb and his head was spinning. He felt he was going to be sick but he knew that if he stopped the murderous charge of adolescents would be on him.

As he reached the upper school a window on the second floor opened and a teenage girl thrust her head out.

“Up here!” she yelled.

“We barricaded the stairwell. Climb onto that dumpster and we’ll pull you up,” She offered out a hand to Gerry.

Gerry flung himself onto the dumpster and grabbed hold of a strong looking male arm which had appeared in the window. The girl and the as yet unknown arm pulled him up and through the window only just in time. The mob of kids beneath them furiously destroyed the bin and several of them were taking lumps out of each other.

“What the hell is going on here!” yelled Gerry as he picked himself up and gathered himself.

He was in an English classroom by the look of it. Somewhere on the K corridor on the second floor. Most of the tables in the room had been piled up against the door on the far side of the room. About seven people, four students and three teachers were franticly boarding up a couple of windows while some were just crying in a heap on the floor.

“We don’t know,” said a tall bearded teacher. Gerry recognised him as Mr Phillips although he had never had him as teacher himself.

“Shortly after dinner, all the pupils just went mad. They literally started biting and ripping at each other.”

Mr Phillips sat down on one of the remaining desks in the room.

“I ran out of my classroom when I realised this was out of control and ran into these people in the corridor. We barricaded the stairwell and locked the door to this room,” He glanced around nervously.

“I don’t know how long it will hold but we should be ok in here for a while.”

Gerry looked at the girl who had helped rescue him from the onslaught of teenagers. He noticed for the first time she was quite attractive. She was tall for her age which he guessed to be around sixteen and wore her dark brown hair in a very long plait which ran all the way down her back

“So who are you?” he said to the girl

“Jenny,” she replied, “Jenny Hawthorn.”

Gerry turned to look out the window. “I’m Gerry.”

The yard was now filling rapidly with kids. Most of them were fighting with each other by now. Some had run off into the field which joined onto the yard and were tearing down the sports equipment in the tennis courts.

“Well we can’t just stay here. We don’t have any food or drink and it probably won’t be too long before they manage to find out where we are,” Gerry closed the window and turned to face his rescuers.

“Do you think they’re intelligent, or are they like crazy zombies or something?”
Jenny huffed “zombies! Don’t be stupid, they’re just rioting or something, you know, being little bastards.”

“Erm, I just saw a twelve year old kid stick the entire length of a fountain pen in a girls eye! I still have the fucking blood on my shirt! That’s some fucking riot they have going out there!”

Gerry thrust out his shirt as proof of the incident.

Jenny looked away. “Ok you don’t have to show me the gory details but I don’t think they are zombies. They’re acting like they are angry about something.”

Mr Rogers, the science teacher interrupted from the other side of the room.

“I read in one of my science journals about a new kind of chemical pesticide that was tested recently. It was never used because when the animals ate anything it had touched, it went completely berserk and eventually killed themselves,” he walked closer to the group by the window and sat down on a plastic chair.
“I don’t mean to alarm anyone but there was rumour that some of this stuff had escaped into the water supply. That could be what happened to these kids.”

Gerry looked up in alarm. “Hang on a sec, I didn’t drink anything at lunch today, I gave my drink to my friend Stan! Has anyone else drunk anything in school today?”
The whole group shook there heads in unison.

“Then how come it’s just the school who is suffering from this?” Asked Mr Phillips.

“We don’t know,” replied Jenny, “For all we know the whole country could be in uproar.”

Mr Phillips stood up from his seat on the desk. “Well that settles it; no one is to drink anything from a tap. I make the suggestion that we head for the kitchen to gather supplies and try to contact the police. If anyone needs to drink we can drink from cans which should be in plentiful supply down there.”

“Ok guys, gather up anything you can see that could be used as a weapon. Break some tables up and we can use the legs as bats. I think there should be an old fashioned paper guillotine in that store cupboard. If we can break the blade off than we have a make shift machete.”

The people who were crowded in the middle of the floor set about breaking up chairs and tables. Mr Phillips, who it transpired was actually name Rod managed to relieve the guillotine of its blade. Luckily the guillotine itself was so old that the blade just came off without too much off a fuss. It actually had a handle on one end of the blade which really did make it look like a machete.

“Right, when I say go, we shift the barricade and make our way down the hallway. The stairs at the end of the hall will take us to the foyer and into the dining hall. The doors in there are pretty sturdy so I reckon we can barricade ourselves in and gather enough food and drink to last until the police get here. Everyone stay close together and don’t panic or run.”

The group moved the make shift barricade to one side of the door and Mr Rogers cautiously pushed open the door with the leg of a table. Holding it in front of him like he was poking at a wasps nest.

“The coast looks clear. I don’t see anyone in the corridor,” said Mr Rogers as he pushed his way through the door and out into the corridor.

Just at that moment a snarl erupted from the mouth of a young boy who had been sitting perched behind the door. He leaped up on to Mr Rogers back and clung onto his neck like a baby clinging to its mother and started biting him.

Blood squirted out of the wound in his neck as he slumped to the floor. Rod took up his blade and cleaved the boys head down the middle.

Mr Rogers was surely dead. He lay in a heap twitching in a pool of blood. The bite had severed his jugular which was still feebly pumping out the last of his precious life.

The blade dropped from Rods hand as the realisation that he had just killed a student sunk in.

“Oh my God!” screamed Jenny.

“You just killed a boy….A BOY!”

Rod picked up the blade. “There was no other choice; if I hadn’t killed him he would have killed all of us.”

Jenny turned to Rod with a face of thunder. “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a mother and a family.” She was sobbing now. “You murdered him and now his family will never see him again. Jesus Christ you cut his head in two for fucks sake!”

Rod gathered the whole group together outside the door. Just the six of them now. “Look for all we know his family could be the same as those maniacs out there. Now is not the time for this. We need to get to the kitchen and call for help.”

“Agreed,” piped up a spotty faced, red haired kid who had until now been sitting quietly in a corner of the classroom. “This isn’t the place to be standing around debating the moral ethics of chopping teenagers heads off. We need to get out of here before more of these things show up and we all die.”

“Come on let’s get out of here,” said Gerry

The corridor was now eerily silent. Just the remains of the dead Mr Rogers and the unnamed schoolboy slumped against one wall.

The stairwell leading down to the foyer was also empty.

“We could be in luck here,” said Rod. “If the Foyer is empty we could run right through to the dining hall and barricade ourselves in. Then we just have to call and wait to be rescued.”

The group of six made their way carefully down the stairwell trying to make as little noise as possible.

As the group rounded the corner Rod pulled them up short. “Wait here, I’ll look ahead and see if the coast is clear.”

Rod gently crept round the last corner of the stairwell and pushed open the door a fraction.

“Shit.” He muttered.

“What is it,” Asked Jenny “is there more of them?”

“Only a handful,” said Rod. “I think we can get through but we may have to take them out. They’re not doing anything though. They’re just standing there looking at the floor.”

“Maybe we can just run straight through?” said Jenny.

“Worth a try,” said Gerry “On the count of three, everyone run as fast as they can. The hall door is still open, run right in and I’ll swing the door shut behind us.”

Rod began to count. “One….two…THREE!”

The group charged across the foyer into the dining hall. Just as they thought they had reached safety the spotty kid tripped on his untied shoelaces and fell. The infected kids were on him in a second. They bit at his flesh and gouged at his eyes.
Rod tried to run out to save him but Gerry held him back. “Don’t bother, he’s dead. Shut the door quick or we’ll all be dead too.”

Gerry and Jenny pushed the large double doors shut and turned the key in the lock.
“Right, shut the curtains and everyone get in the kitchen. They shouldn’t be able to find us in here,” said Rod making his way across the large room and shutting the curtains to the outside world. It was starting to get dark outside. They had spent at least an hour finding weapons in the classroom and preparing themselves.

“Shit,” said Gerry. “I hope we don’t have to spend the night in here. The last thing I want to do is spend the night in a school dining hall with an army of murderous teenagers outside.”

“Where’s the phone?” Demanded Rod.

“How the hell should I know,” replied Gerry. “Do I look like I spend a vast amount of time in the school kitchen?”

“It’s in the back on the far wall,” said an elderly member of the group. Pete Jackson, the technology teacher. “I just can’t believe this is happening,” He said as he sat down wearily in a plastic dining chair.

“I don’t think any of us want to believe this is happening but right now I need to call for help or we’re never getting out of here,” said Rod, making his way into the kitchen to hunt for the telephone.

A few moments later Rod came back out of the kitchen looking very disheartened.
“The phone lines are dead. I can’t get through to anyone. I tried the phone in the office too and that’s dead as well. I think, ladies and gentlemen, that we could be fucked.”

“There has to be some way of getting through to the outside world,” said Jenny looking pleadingly at everyone.

“That’s the trouble said Rod. I’m not sure if there is an outside world. If this chemical got into the local water supply then the whole town will be infected. That’s not the worst of it either.”

The group looked at him as one. “What do you mean that’s not the worst of it?” said Gerry looking nervously around.

“Ok, don’t shoot the messenger here, but there are no drinking supplies in the kitchen. They must have used it all up at lunch and not replenished the stock yet.” Rod sat down.

“That means we are faced with the choice of making a break for it, staying here until we die of thirst or drinking the water and turning into one of them.”

“Fun list of choices,” said Gerry lifting the curtain to peer through the gap.

“The car park is full of them. That wall around the whole premises is keeping them from going anywhere but also keeping them close to us.”

Pete Jackson stood up. “I think we should make a break for it. We can’t stay here with no supplies. We can’t get in contact with anyone and those things will probably find us sooner or later anyway.”

“I agree,” seconded Jenny. “It’s no use us staying here if no one is coming to help us.”

“Ok,” said Rod. “We’re not too far from the rear gates to the school. If we leave via the kitchen rear doors, we just need to get across the car park and out the gates. I have a key for the gates in case it is locked. Everyone grab your weapons and head to the back door. We can check out the situation from there.”

The group gathered up there arsenal of chair legs and grabbed some of the more vicious looking knives out of the kitchen and gathered around the steel door leading to the car park.

Rod pushed the door open a crack and peered out. “Shit guys, the place is crawling with the them.”

He shut the door again and paused in thought. “That’s it,” he shouted in triumph. “There are some cars parked just outside the door. I’ll break the window; get in the car and hotwire it.”

Gerry and Jenny looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Look, don’t ask me the details but yes, I know how to hotwire a motor vehicle.”
He looked around anxiously for something to break a car window with. He eventually settled on a brick that had previously been used to prop the door open in the summer.

He picked the brick up and set his hand on the door handle. “This is going to have to be fast so as soon as you hear the engine start, jump in the car and we’ll run the bastards down!”

He thrust open the door and darted out into the car park. The dull sound of stone hitting glass echoed through the door followed by a shattering of glass. A car door opened and then silence.

The assembled survivors waited, holding their breath with anticipation of the sound of their savoir. A few moments of anxious silence and then it came. The sound of an engine roaring into life in the silence.

They all flung themselves out of the door, practically tripping over each other. Rod was sitting in a blue Ford Escort not far from the door with the back doors open frantically waving for them to get in.

“Come on guy’s for gods sake hurry up,” he yelled as they belted towards the open doors and safety.

By now they had been well and truly spotted. The infected kids were running from all directions. Across the fields, across the car park and pouring out of the windows in the library and ground floor corridors. Some plummeted out of the top floor windows in their frenzy of delirious excitement to rip the flesh off this fresh meat.

The group piled into the waiting car and slammed the doors shut.
“GO, FOR FUCKS SAKE GO!” screamed Gerry.

The car screamed into life and tore down the long car park towards the gate. Infected kids, practically gibbering in their fevered state bounced off the bonnet of the car as Rod simply ploughed them down. Their relatively small bodies crunching on the gravel as they fell.

The car continued its relentless charge towards the gate like a speeding blue bullet it cut down the infected in its path. The gate was locked.

“Just ram it, we don’t have time to stop,” screamed Jenny as they hurtled towards the gate like a runaway train.

The car hit the gate with a wrenching of steel and iron. The gate burst open. The chain and heavy duty padlock which had kept it closed flew at the windscreen and shattered it into a million tiny squares of glass. They skidded to a halt on the other side of the road.

Rod was knocked unconscious. Gerry was bleeding profusely from a shard of glass that had flown through the window and buried itself in his left arm. Jenny was sitting in shocked silence, staring at the two passengers next to her who were both quite dead.

One of the large metal gateposts that made up the rusted old school gate had somehow found its way into the car and skewered both of them with one rusted point. Jenny stared at this horrific scene for a few seconds and fainted herself.

After what seemed like an eternity. Rod regained consciousness to see the two passengers in his rear view mirror dead. Jenny was still unconscious but breathing. Gerry was dead.

He had obviously bled to death as his skin was white as snow and there was blood all over him and pooled in the bottom of the car.

There was a noise like thunder. Rod looked up to see two large army vehicles rumble round the corner. Both had a huge biohazard symbol emblazoned on the side.

The trucks came to a halt and a group of about ten men jumped out, all wearing full body protection suits.

Rod leaned out of the car window and shouted to them. “Hey, we need some help here I have three dead passengers and an unconscious but breathing girl in the back.”

They took no notice of him. The man at the front of the group spoke something into his radio and nodded to his colleagues.

In unison they all lifted there weapons and squirted jets of liquid flame at the sitting car holding Rod, Jenny and the dead passengers.

Rod tried to scream out but his skin instantly burst into flame. His lungs filled with fire and his eyes ran like Jelly down his cheeks.

In the background more trucks had appeared and were dousing the school and all its occupants in fire. Nothing remained of the blue escort except a burnt out shell and a few blackened husks that were once the only survivors of Huntersfield High.

One of the biohazard containment team spoke into his radio. “The incident has been contained. I repeat the incident has been contained. No further casualties outside of the outbreak area.”

As morning came the blackened shell that used to be Huntersfield High School sat smouldering in the silence. As the sun rose, the birds sang and the world went on.

THE END