PART 1: Run Like Hell

"What did she say?" Foxy asked. Her voice was a disembodied plea in the darkness.

"She...buried...the runaways in here." Eddie replied. He suddenly became very aware of the fact that he was standing on a dirt floor. As he adjusted his stance, dry earth crunched under his sneakers.

Inside the chamber there was a vacuum of sound. With all the noise and chaos going on outside their iron coffin, Eddie and Foxy were now assailed with palpable silence. To add insult to injury, the room was completely without light. Eddie wondered if this night would ever end--the warmth of the sun seemed like some pleasant memory of his childhood. So much had happened in just a few hours that it felt like it had been dark for years.

Finally, Eddie understood the impact of solitary. He could understand the level of dread in the voices of the students when they talked about it. He'd been in here for only a minute and could already guess at the psychological trauma inflicted in this place. A victim could be denied even the smallest stimulation: No sound, or light, or human contact at all. Nothing but the enduring silence and your own unending, tortured thoughts. But those students didn't have to deal with the added factor of the living dead. Eddie stretched his hands out in front of him like a blind man exploring his new surroundings. He had already begun to feel claustrophobic. In his minds eye the room got smaller and smaller by the minute. Anxiety began to whisper in his ear and his skin felt three sizes too small.

Foxy cocked Antoine's pistol for the final time. If those runaways really never left--if what Dorrance said was true--then she and Eddie would have company in their little cell soon enough. She dragged her feet across the floor and remembered the zombies tunneling outside the kitchen and about the girls trapped upstairs. She wondered how many were still alive.