Who Is The Monster Here?

I split off from Korin, pushing him off and running down the right hallway to the school. I never realized how long the hallway was until I knew that I had to get down there before a certain point.

I checked behind me around halfway down the hallway. My shoes squeaked against the newly cleaned floors and echoed between all of the opened doors leading to other rooms. Korin was nowhere to be found... I found it scary and didn't know if he went into the gym to wreak havoc there, or where he went at all.

While I was deep in thought, I was pushed into another classroom from one of the middle rooms. I figured out too late that Korin came from the middle to tackle me into a side room. He must've figured out where I was trying to go and stop me from getting to Niko.

He slammed the door behind him as I tried to push myself off of the ground. The floor was covered in colorful, foam padding, presumably for kindergarten students. My fingers left indents in them and Korin picked me up by my collar.

"I didn't expect you to be such a good little fighter! It's too bad you can't throw punches, all you are is weak," Korin told me. He was under the guise of "main character syndrome", as I like to call it. It was annoying how important he thought he was, but that wasn't what I was thinking about at the time. I only wanted to survive and avoid injury.

Korin kicked me in the stomach and punched me in the face. It was the first time I was ever hit, and the shock of it alone stunned me more than anything in my entire life. More than the noise that came out of the gun, more than anything.

I sat in place, just blinking, trying to get the water out of my eyes from the initial spike of pain, and Korin picked me up by my shoulders this time, holding me by the teacher's desk by the blackboard.

"I'm going to hurt you so bad!" He shouted out. Again, that dramatic, main character spiel he kept throwing out at me was getting annoying and started to feel like a lecture. I was able to grab onto a lamp on the teacher's desk, rip it out of the socket that limited my reach, and smashed the glass bulb and ceramic base against Korin's head.

In the movies, something like that typically just blew up when it hit him. I thought it would do damage, funnily enough, because I saw it in a movie once. I was starting to think like Connie, but the damage was thorough enough to get Korin to stagger.

Shards of ceramic and glass were stuck in the base of his forehead. Dark red blood poured from his wounds as he began to pick them out of his face. I observed the room and anything I could use to get him to stop trying to attack me.

Deep, deep down below my instinct to survive, I wanted to kill him. I rehearsed it in my head, running over to him with a chair and just beating him within an inch of his life, then letting Niko or Dad kill him. He had to die. I repeated that over and over again in my head, and it became so solidified, that he was already dead in my mind.

I pushed a desk over to him and slammed him against the blackboard at the back of the room, over, and over again. Every time I pushed him, he slowly crouched more and more while picking ceramic out of his head.

After his knees buckled and he fell to the ground, I ran over to the door he shut to lock me in, and pulled against the handle viciously to escape. The metal on the handle was slippery with the sweat on my hands, but it eventually turned and I escaped the room.

I wasn't paying attention to my surroundings, so when I ran out of the room with my back first, I smacked against the brick wall before turning to run toward the back doors.

I ran the rest of the length of the hallway, passing all of the opened doors while nervously looking everywhere. I had a moment of silence in my brain when everything went silent.

I grew up in this school, I know the kids who drew on the walls all the way down this hallway... and it made me mad. I was mad at the fact that those kids, they're probably all dead because of people like Korin. My friends, my best friends, our group's leader, Miss Love, and the Principal, all were probably dead. People like Korin run free... they hurt us... and then they kill us, all for nothing.

I walked over to the back door, pushing the bar in, and peering out, looking into the field.

As soon as it opened, I noticed a little bit of resistance while it propped open thanks to a stand near the end.

I was filled with fear, slowly stepping back as the heads of several zombies all turned to look at me. Their lifeless, glossy eyes all adjusted in the darkness, and I watched it click in their brains that I was a snack, waiting to be munched on.

I quickly shut the door as fast as possible, and the banging of hands against the glass and door ensued. They were violent, quick bangs that made me think the glass would shatter at any given moment. While they banged on the glass, I refocused, turning around, only to be pushed into the bar once more that opened the door.

Korin was pushing me into the door, and it was slowly opening against the zombies in the back. He was stronger than their dead weight, and eventually, a crack in the door emerged, opening just enough for a hand to get through.

A zombie's hand slowly seeped through, and with me being shorter than Korin, the hand started to reach for my chest. I nervously pushed Korin away as hard as I could, but he was too strong. In the end, they would rip me apart... just like the shows...

By whatever lucky grace on Earth, two gunshots came through the door, right above my head, where the window was. Korin ducked, as both missed, and I kicked him in the face to fully push him on the ground.

I was able to shut the door, and purposefully stepped on his head as I ran for the opposite side of the school this time. I ran past the hallway once more, forgetting to even check on the drawings, and making it to that halfway point once more.

After I made it there, I turned back, watching Korin burst into a full sprint toward me. He would catch up before I made it anywhere near the front doors of the school, so just like him, I ran through some of the middle rooms.

I cut through the tables and chairs, pushing each of them out of the way while Korin chased me until I got to the opposite side and shut the door in his face.

I ran further toward the front, getting close enough to reach the lobby. I ran over the difference in carpet and tile floor and basically dove myself out of the door into the front area of the school.

I was confident once I made it out here, Dad would save me. However, no adults were to be found.