I confess to him in the dusky light of my classroom. He’s helping me cut the deep mats from my hair and clean the dirt and blood from my body. The man came with soap like some savior. His face is thick with a beard that I am not sure I could ever get used to, but his eyes though older still radiate that warm glow that turned my stomach into butterflies the first time I saw him.
I tell him about the lock down and the bombing and how we’ve been waiting here for him and for parents. I cry, sob actually when I get to the point where I’m telling him about how I got drunk and I let my kids gets killed. He draws me to him then, in his subtle way that lets me know that somewhere before all of this and after all of this we always were.
He’s holding me and I drift in and out of sleep as I listen to his breath and heart working systematically. I feel myself being lulled into such a softness, such a comfort, that I feel myself falling into a haze that I never quite want to come out of. He arrived with the teachers from the town over. They met on the main drag into town and decided to work together to get here. There had been five teachers at the beginning of their journey, but by the time they got here there were only two.
In the darkness I turn to him and ask him what he thinks we should do next.
“It’s terrible out there,” he says, as his free hand strokes my hair, well, what’s left of it. “The cities are completely overrun. They told everyone to get to New York or Philadelphia, but it all just fell apart. I don’t know what it’s like beyond here, but I can only imagine it being as horrible as the last few broadcasts were on TV.”
“We can’t stay here. It’s disgusting and we’ve turned it into a mass graveyard out there. We can’t…”
“I know.” He kisses my forehead. “You were saying something about a bus?” I nod. “Well, some of the roads are impassable, but there are other ways around it. We need to get to your mom and then we need to figure something else. To stay in the burbs or go to the city would be stupid. Too many Undead and too many oddball survivors.”
“The farm then,” I suggest, thinking of the farm that his parents had owned when they had still been alive.
“It’s our best bet.”
We grow quiet again and for a moment, I draw closer to him, almost as if I’m questioning again whether or not this is real. I turn softly and suddenly John feels different underneath my arms. He feels cold and has that scent about him, that decaying scent that the Undead are saturated in.
I hear myself screaming and thrashing and sitting up, yelling. I hear Havier in the background. He’s talking to a blond woman that I don’t know. We never got this far…
“We have to sedate her,” the woman says.
Havier shakes his head, running his hand through his hair. “We don’t have those things here. We don’t have.”
“She can’t go on like this, the kids are scared enough. We have to find something.”
Havier is digging through the boxes from the nurses office, trying to find something more potent then advil. He gets excited when he finds something. The blond is holding me down and I can taste that I think is Nyquil being poured down my throat.
It’s even cloudier now and I think of John again. I think of John walking towards me. I’m off the roof now and running through the school. I am all but before him when I realize John had been bitten, had been turning and when we reached each other for the last time, I saw the very last bit of his life draining from him. We embraced and he winced. The blond was with him, that was where I had seen her before. She had been helping him.
“We found him on the main road,” she explained. “He was bitten, but he had to get here, to you and we helped him because we read your blog and knew this was the John you were waiting for.”
I’m screaming again, but not as loud and John is fading, his eyes aging and fading rapidly. I stay with him and I watch him, he runs his hand down my face and that was it.
That was all that was left of him. He was gone and before anyone knew it, Havier came bolting out of the building and decapitated him before he had a chance to reanimate.
And at that moment all I remember is the blood and the screaming.
Miss Burton's Class 