I caught up. There was a mob of zombies waiting for us. Their clothing was ripped, red with fresh blood, there was a janitor, teachers and parents, but most of them were just normal kids. They were all focused on trying to get into a classroom, smashing themselves over and over against the splintering door. There were interior windows; those were cracked, held together only by the wire mesh inside, but the zombies were slowly pushing their way in. The screams were coming from inside the classroom. The zombies had heard the squeak of Trip’s boots and their heads snapped around automatically, dead, glassy eyes fixated on him.

“This time I’ve got a gun,” Trip said. The zombies started toward us. “And I know how to use it.” Then he went to town. The first zombie caught a .45 right in the eye. The next two were going down before the brains of the first one had even splattered against the floor. The impact of the bullets made more noise than the firing of the suppressed KRISS. Brass tinkled across the floor.

A zombie lurched at us from a nearby closet. I blasted it square in the face. A dead cheerleader came from the other side, but Edward hurled a knife and stuck her head to a bulletin board. By MHI standards, slow zombies were easy money. Trip just kept on shooting real bullets into the imaginary zombies as they lurched and jerked their way toward us.

Trip’s gun was empty. There was still one left tottering toward him. I pointed Abomination. “I’ve got this,” he spat with uncharacteristic rage. Trip dropped his subgun and pulled the tomahawk from his belt. The zombie was wearing a white shirt and a tie. “Hey, Jim.” The zombie kept walking obliviously toward his destruction. Trip took two steps forward and swung, planting the little ax into Jim’s forehead. “You don’t get them this time.” Trip wrenched the tomahawk out, taking a huge chunk of scalp with it, then chopped Jim again, then one last time as the nearly headless corpse went down. Trip was panting. “Never again.”

In less than twenty seconds there were more than twenty dead zombies littering the hall. Edward went over and jerked his knife out of the wall and the zombie’s head. It dropped like a rock. Ed wiped his knife off on the cheerleader’s skirt before resheathing it. Tanya went to the side and barfed in a trash can.