13.

Another punch cracked into the door, making it shudder, only a breath after the first.  Then came a third, and a fourth, until you couldn't tell them apart because they were raining down so fast.  It seemed like the entire fallen student body was trying to break down their door--the door that Sammi had just opened with one well-placed kick.  And there they were, surrounded by corpses, pressed flat against the wall, unable to do anything but stare as the clock counted down to a nightmare.

 

There was a crack--a desk toppled off the top of their barricade.  Another crack--a curled fist with yellowed nails splintered the door, hanging in view behind the marred surface before pulling back and striking in the exact spot.

 

To Tracy's right, Lucas was gripping her hand, eyes glazed, his other scrabbling on the ground for something, anything, to use or hold on to or fight with.  To her left, Sammi was staring at the door, flushed under the bloodstains, her words blurred into a desperate chant: "We'regonnadiewe'regonnadiewe'regonnadie!"  

 

But Tracy stood, just as another hole appeared in their last protection.  Her gaze locked with the eye that came into view--just for a second.  It was an eye that was burned bright red, and--impossible--it looked like it was crying.  More red.  More blood.

 

She crossed the room like a whirlwind, no longer trying to keep time running normal in her mind.  She tore drawers out of desks, shook out pencil boxes, searched through bookbags and stepped on blank-eyed corpses as she ran forward, back, left, right, her steps becoming even faster and more frenzied as the tempo of the strikes against the door picked up.  Her breath was ragged and her lungs ached and she knew it was hopeless, but she needed something, anything.  I'll breathe when I'm dead, she thought wryly, and almost burst out laughing at the insanity of it all.

 

Lucas and Sammi were still frozen on the floor, eyes locked on the door, thinking Tracy just couldn't give up, but it was too late, too late, join us and wait for it to end.

 

Tracy's fingers were shaking, her whole body ached, and her vision was blurring like a great oil painting, like it was all too much for her little body and she couldn't take it anymore.  The little body that would never go to college or get married or even leave this room.  She screamed: if you would have dissected the scream, it would have been one part panic, one part sadness, ten parts agony and twenty parts rage.  If the door burst open right now, she would have shot straight into the fray, all biting and clawing and kicking even if she only felled one, only lived for a second more.

 

She whirled around, away from the sight of the hole in the door widening, enough for a tangle of reaching, grabbing dead-white hands and arms to reach through, writhing like in death throes, scoring deep nail marks in the wood in search of their quarry, and saw something that saved her life.

 

Earlier this morning, Alex Damien, someone who Tracy had never met and would never know, had been stuffing his bag for baseball practice.  While eating breakfast, a baseball rolled off the kitchen table, and as he turned to retrieve it his little brother had snatched ("borrowed") the bag and stored it under his bed.  Had the baseball not rolled under the kitchen table, Alex Damien's baseball bag would still be in the trunk of his car, along with any useful items it may have contained.  But since Alex now had no baseball bag, he stored his lucky aluminum bat, one he couldn't play without, in his backpack, and it was that aluminum bat, sticking out from under yet another bludgeoned corpse and covered in blood, that Tracy saw now.

 

Some may call it fate.  Tracy called it what was going to be the most fun she'd ever had.

 

If, y'know, she lived.