Chapter 3 - Next Chapter

The door to geography! I headed straight towards it; it was the only thing I could see. My world melted away and the only thing I could see was the door. What should I do? Save myself or help a foreign species? The door opened and found myself back in my world again. Well, the world as I knew it just then. A familiar face walked out Mr Randall the geography teacher.

"Need help?" he said. His voice was soothing after the exasperated grainy voice of Vikkilla.

"Erm, yes, I need...."

I didn't get chance to finish, we obviously weren't on the same wavelength.

"....with your coursework?" he finished.

"Huh? What?" I was confused, so confused. Blackness was taking over, I felt myself slowly spinning. And then I fell. It was as though I was falling forever, down a vast, deep pit.

I must have been out cold for hours because I woke in the common room surrounded by my class and a number of other people looking nervously at each other. One of the other people was tall and plump, with short dark hair and braces on his trousers. I recognised him as Mr Hill, my head teacher.

He was in deep conversation with another person. Mrs Myers, my form tutor stood by my side. For some reason I was laid on a few tables which had been hastily pushed together.

"Miss, she's waking up!"

I looked around wearily at my school friends.

"Hey, guess what? We got to close the school because of you!" Aaron said merrily.

Mr Hill was saying something to the person he was with.

"If this gets out we'll have to close the school, we can't have students just disappearing and collapsing, it'll ruin our reputation!"

The person shook his head and wrote something on a clipboard. Shuffling across to me, he began asking questions.

"What happened? Who were you with last? Where did you collapse? Did you damage anything?"

Why did he want to know all this? It wasn't like I was the only pupil to have collapsed this week. I began to panic as I remembered what had happened. Vikkilla- I had to help her before it was too late and she feasted on the rest of the school.

"Everyone needs to get out of here, we’re not safe!!"

Mr Hill seemed very calm. But then he was used to closing the school like this.

"Everyone is on their way home now, we just need to call everyone’s parents and....”

I couldn’t stand it, we were in mortal danger and he was calling parents!

“You don’t understand, we HAVE to get out of here! There’s an alien near the dinner hall. We have to evacuate the building! We have to....we have to!”

I suddenly felt drowsy. The man with the clipboard was injecting my arm with a red liquid. I heard my friends’ voices as I dropped into a deep slumber.

“What are you doing to her?? You can’t inject her, she’s telling the truth!”

“She’s delirious, nothing she has said makes any sense, if I were you I’d go back to your form rooms, take her with you and call me when she wakes up.”

I must have been dragged part of the way to our form room as when I woke again my trousers were badly torn at the knees. My form were around me again, looking concerned, but eager for me to wake up so they could hear my side of the story.

“Errrrghhhh!” I groaned as my muscles were really numb and heavy. I could hardly move. “Where’s Mr Hill, Miss?”

“He’s in reception calling radio stations to tell them we’re closing”

“Miss, I genuinely need you to listen, seriously, I was telling the truth back there…”

“You were delirious, you’d had a nasty fall, lets get you some water.”

Why didn’t anyone understand? I knew exactly what I was talking about, I was there and it was very real.

“Miss, can me and Leonie go down to the dinner hall, I think I left my bag there?”

I couldn’t help it, I had to see Vikkilla again, even if it meant lying.

“Miss? Miss? Where’s she gone?”

I jumped up like a flash. Mrs Myers wasn’t safe, if she’d left the classroom she was likely to be dead.

“You’re my wife now Dave!” Rob was messing about in the corner with Aaron and Paul and some others. I had to take charge, I was the only one who knew what to do. I scrambled onto the desk and got everyone’s attention.

“ Everyone!! Listen! We can’t stay in school, it’s too dangerous! There’s a flesh eating Canadilla out there, I think she’s the last one of her species and we need to help her! If we can get her enough meat from the dinner hall we can trick her into thinking it is human meat and lure her down to Darton bridge. Grab any weapon you can and bring empty bags to put the meat in, who‘s with me??!”

A chorus of cheers rang out from B7 as we prepared to save our school and our lives. We gathered together some objects together and bags used to keep the science equipment in. Then, after we had prepared ourselves and checked the corridor was clear, we ventured into the eerie silence of the school.
-2-

A computer, left on in the Library, was the only thing we could hear as we edged around the sports hall towards the dinner hall. The school was deserted- most people had gone home to escape the mass destruction that Vikkilla Rosilla and her army of Canadillas had inflicted on the town. We were the only ones left. Well, us and some of the teachers. We had no idea what had happened to Mr Hill or the man with the clipboard. Mrs Myers was thought to be dead and we would be next if we weren't careful. Then it dawned on me. I was supposed to be helping Vikkilla not trying to kill her! I was turning into her, killing for no reason. Well, no reason except one. She had wiped out my town and many of my friends.

I looked up, as I shuffled along the path covered in cigarette stubs and chewing gum, at the telegraph post on the school field. A Burberry cap hung loosely from the wire. Further along was the mangled corpse of a year nine boy dressed in the remains of an Addidas jacket and Nike trainers. I spun round to find many of my class mates vomiting into the bin nearby as they had seen the grotesque body on the wires and been overpowered by the sickening smell of rotting flesh.

“Come on, we can’t keep stopping like this”

“We’ve only stopped once you retard!” Ryan argued.

“Looks like we have a volunteer to be chopped up and fed to the Candillas,”

Ryan bowed his head and looked at his feet, “no.... I didn’t think you wanted that, now shut up or someone will hear us.”

Thrusting tissues over our faces, we stumbled onwards towards the kitchens.

As I pushed open the kitchen doors the smell of decaying meat met us again. This time it was the dinner ladies (or dinner-bags as we called them) that had been torn limb from limb. The room was filled with a yellowish smog which was billowing from the ovens at the far end of the kitchen. Quickly, three others and I raced across the room to close the oven door and open the windows. The rest split up and hunted about for any scrap of meat that was left.

Suddenly there was a scream from the skips outside and a pair of legs disappeared between the bin liners. The group nearest the door scrambled up and sprinted outside. I watched through the window in astonishment as the skips sucked in the legs slowly, bit by bit. Then smoke started flowing out of the bin liners. What could I do? I just stared at it, mesmerised. But, then it happened, my friends came into view, grabbed the legs by the ankles and pulled! Out came a body, or at least half of one. The top half was bones, the bottom half was the pair of legs. Blood pour out from the inside of the rib cage. The organs were still inside the body. We just stared in bewilderment at it. Nobody knew what had happened to it so I went out side to investigate leaving the others in the kitchens.

I passed slowly through the hole in the wall and climbed over a stack of mutilated bodies. There were puddles of blood everywhere, flowing away from the skips. Vicki, Anton and Leonie were still holding the body between them, frozen to the spot.

“Are you lot alright?” I asked as the eery silence was beginning to give me the creeps. Vicki raised her arm slowly and pointed towards the skips.

“Erm, I think you should take a look in there….” she said.

I leaned over the side of the gingerly, trying not to etch as the smell was terrible. Masses of flesh were stacked up on a conveyer belt leading from the skips to the greenhouses around the corner. The machine looked like it was some sort of computer, programmed to strip the meat off the human body.

All of a sudden I heard a series of groans, but not the sort that come from humans. It sounded like rusty metal parts grinding together. The machine was switching itself on and I was still leaning into it! Vicki and Leonie grabbed my legs and dragged me backwards away from the monstrous mechanism.

“Quick run!!!” Anton yelled, panic stricken.

I spun round ready to flee, but stopped in my tracks when I saw what was behind me. The hundreds of skeletons left over from the machine were walking……towards us!

“Oh my gosh…….!” I heard Leonie say to herself. We set off running past the greenhouses towards the art classrooms. On our way we hollered through the kitchen windows to tell the others to follow suit. We narrowly missed running into the picnic benches as we swerved around the corner into the bus bays.

"Quick this way!!" I yelled, looking over my shoulder at the skeletal beings.

 

You are not authorized to comment here. Your must be registered and logged in to comment