I attempted to take the sound advice of one of my friends and decided to write about some of my recent dreams involving high school and zombies. Again I haven't really spent much proofreading on this in order to remind everyone that I give myself a time limit on how much I'm supposed to be working on this so if you spot any grammatical errors, don't be shy in pointing them out. I will post how I feel about this piece at the end in order to let the readers make their own judgement on it. Again, honest critiques are greatly appreciated, if you're feeling generous, even a "pros and cons" bit as well.
Experiment #2
Three students sat in the middle of the classroom. Up against the door was a makeshift blockade of the teacher’s finely polished mahogany desk laid wedged against the door and a pile of chairs. The faint buzz of the fluorescent lights emanated the room as the three students continued to stare at each other in a brooding triangular fashion.
“Oh god, I’m late!!” blurted out Carl as he shot up and ran towards the barricaded door.
“Carl wait!” Mark tackled him to the ground and pinned him down. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?!”
“I have to get to my third period physics class!” said Carl, “If I don’t turn in my report by the end of the period, Miss Newton will flunk me!” He continued to try to break free from Mark’s hold.
“Did you forget what just happened out there?! Thanks to that gas, Miss Newton is either dead or a zombie!”
“Let me go, Mark! I can’t fail this class!”
Sara appeared next to Mark as they both peered down at the struggling Carl, “This is for your own good,” she said then swung her hand across his face. The slapping sound of colliding skin pierced through the ambient buzzing, leaving everyone at a standstill.
A sharp, hot pain branched across Carl’s face as he looked at his two friends towering above him. “We’re going to die.” He answer was in the form of another sharp slap across his face.
“Mark, stop!” Sara pushed him off of Carl.
Mark shrugged his shoulders, innocently, “I thought another would make him a little more optimistic,”
“If you’re so concerned with moral,” said Sara, “why don’t you go look for the radio?”
“Radio?”
“Mr. Olson would sometimes play music on his radio during class,” she pointed to the other side of the room, “I think he kept it in that storage cabinet.”
“I’m not sure how much of a difference music is going to make for us, but okay. It’s better than sitting around in silence,” said Mark.
Carl sat up and looked at the door then at Sara. “What’s going to happen to us?”
Crackling static interrupted their conversation as Mark adjusted the knob of the radio.
After a few seconds, Sara heard something coherent. “Wait!” she said, “turn back a little bit.” Mark complied to find a clear channel of a man giving an announcement. “Turn it up.”
Everyone concentrated on the radio as a scratchy voice blurted through the speakers. “Although the military has taken control of the situation by enacting a quarantine. They fear the possibility of containment would be impossible; if one infected were to run loose outside of the city, it could lead to another outbreak such as this one. We have received information that the military is running a mission titled, ‘Operation: Salvage’. All radio stations, along with this one, has been instructed to inform any survivors to go climb the highest structure they could find in order for rescue helicopters to find you and pick you up. I repeat…”
“Did you hear that? They’re sending choppers out,” said Mark.
“No!” cried Mark, “Too many zombies outside! It’s safer just staying in here!”
Sara hushed them both as the radio announcement continued, “…after the rescue phase is completed, the second phase of the operation is to strategically drop multiple bombs onto the city, vaporizing any sign of previous existence of infected and uninfected alike. For any survivors out there still listening to this, you have only one hour until the rescue phase is terminated. I repeat…”
“They’re going to bomb the city regardless of survivors?!” asked Carl.
Sara stood up. “We have to go to the school library. It’s the only two story building around here.”
“You can’t be serious!” said Carl, “That’s on the other side of the school grounds!”
“Not to mention how narrow the hallways are in that building,” said Mark.
“It’s either that,” Sara pointed up, “or wait for the bombs to drop on us.”
The room returned to its buzzing ambience as everyone stood there in silence, brooding over a decision they already knew they had to make. Without a word, Mark walked over and took one of the chairs off the pile and slammed it against the ground. Splinters of wood flew off of it as Mark grunted to pry off a long, sturdy piece. He gave it a few test swings and gave a nod to them both. “No time to waste then.”
After Carl and Sara followed Mark’s examples with the chairs, they all removed the barricade, save for the mahogany desk. This was it, behind that door trudged hordes of zombified students and faculty members. What was normally a simple five minute walk through the commons was now an expedition to their only chance of living through another day.
Sara reviewed the plan with everyone.“We run out this building as fast as we can and wait to go into the library together. Got it?”
They complied and dragged the desk away while she held onto the door knob.
She squeezed her weapon as she gave the doorknob a faint twist. “Let’s go.” She swung the door open to reveal a hallway peppered with groaning, docile zombies.
Carl caught sight of one of them and instantly recognized her, shouting “Miss Newton?!” causing all the zombies to curve their heads at the three students.
In all honesty, I don't really like this piece I wrote. But the point of these experiments is for me to post up whatever comes to my mind. There is no real goal in the short story, no real suspense or struggle other than what is explained outside of the scene itself. The characters were bland and two dimensional, making it hard for me to convince the reader to really care about them at all. For my next writing, I will try to have a story to make up for this and hopefully make it complete.
I am juggling with the idea of writing for one story, but releasing bits of it once a week. Is that something readers would be interested in?
