Revenge12 min read
June Ninth: I Was the One the Zombies Didn’t Bite
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June 9th, day three of the outbreak. The classroom smelled of sweat and fear. Desks had become barricades. Curtains shut out the light. Forty-one faces stared at me like I held the day's only verdict.
"I have one sip of water left," Linnea said, voice small. "If anyone really needs—"
Belen stood and grabbed the bottle. "Stop fussing," she said. "We don't share with charity cases."
I remembered every shove, every insult. I remembered the notes pushed into my bag, the laughs when I coughed. I remembered how Jorge and I had promised things that had turned to dust the day Belen started dating him.
"Belen, give it to her," Jorge said, softer than he had any right.
Belen snorted. "You two dated? Cute story. She wrote me letters, too. Try again."
I kept my head low. My chest felt weak. I heard my own pulse like footsteps.
"Miranda, don't," Linnea whispered. "You're burning."
"My heart's acting up," I managed. "Please—"
Belen seized my hair and yanked. "You thought you could have Jorge," she hissed, "and hide it from me? Now get out and see if you can find any food, you useless thing."
They pushed me to the window. The idea was simple and cruel: make the weak child risk everything for crumbs. If I failed, so much the better for their survival.
"No, I can't," I said. My voice betrayed the tremor.
"We'll help you. Four of us will open a window and pull you through," Belen commanded. She turned and smiled at the others. "If you don't come back, that's the price of being useless."
They shoved me out. I fell to the hallway. I crawled. The building moaned. Somewhere, something screamed.
"Open the door! Help!" I banged until my palms stung. The sound rippled down the corridor. A pack of figures turned in that direction, shuffling, making a sound that could hollow out courage.
I didn't know why I woke up.
When I opened my eyes I was on the stairwell landing. Blood was on my sleeves, on the floor. My head pounded. I touched my chest and felt heat, then calm. The fever was gone.
I looked at the marks on my arms—teeth marks, shallow, like someone had taken a taste and lost interest. I staggered to my feet, and there was a lightness in me I had never felt since childhood.
I tested it. I walked into the middle of a group of them—the rotten ones that made other people scream—and they sniffed, turned, and walked away as if I were a tree. They paid me no attention.
A laugh escaped me then, sharp and stunned. No one had ever left me alone on purpose. "Don't be afraid," I told the empty hallway. "Maybe I can keep breathing."
I went to the supermarket alone and ate like I'd been starved for years—which I had. I took water, bread, chicken. I stuffed a small plastic bag and a tiny knife in my pocket, and I walked back toward the classrooms.
When I came up the stairs the voice that greeted me belonged to Christine Cline, my homeroom teacher. "Miranda! Over here, hurry!" Her voice trembled on the wind.
I walked closer. Christine lunged at my bag, her hand greedy. "That's food! Give it!"
"I'll give you a choice," I said. "You can have your share in public, or you can stay here and beg."
She slapped me. The slap was sharp and smelled of authority. I had never struck a teacher before, but my hand moved like a struck bell. I hit back, harder than I thought I could. She tasted blood. The room froze.
"You're a monster," she said. "Get her!"
They lunged, hands like fists of old habit. Students, leaders, people who had once nodded over parents' letters—now wolves with their own small votes to cast. They reached, and I held a blade in my palm and let fear be a thin curtain. I threw the food back down to the floor.
"Think carefully," I said. "If you let her have more than one piece, you'll never see me again."
They scrambled. Christine clawed to the door. She raged and spat and called me names. Then she ran and climbed to the administrative building with others, a parade of cowards and opportunists.
I let them go. I let them taste the feeling of having things and power. I let them think they'd outlived me. Then I walked away.
I learned, in the next hours, an ugly truth about strength. When I roared in the halls, the creatures answered. I could lead them if I wanted. They did not bite me, but they obeyed the sound. A voice that had been muted by years of being small grew into something that attracted the world’s hunger and redirected it.
I could have taken the whole school the first night. I could have stood outside the classroom window and watched them starve. But I had Linnea to save.
"Miranda," she whispered the night she came to the teacher apartments with me. "I owe you my life."
"You owed me before," I said. "You wrote a letter once. It went nowhere."
She cried then, small and honest. She told me what she had tried to do years ago: report Belen's cruelty, hand in letters that vanished in the pile of "busy" papers Christine smiled over. Her hands shook. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't help before."
"You helped now," I said. "You came."
I built a small sanctuary in the teacher housing: padlocked door, high windows, supplies. We ate. We slept. I learned how strong my arms had become. I learned how loud a human can make the world answer.
Then we heard the laser dot.
A flash of red on the courtyard. From the administrative tower, someone signaled with a pointer. I saw Dustin Medina, the principal, and others. They watched me like predators studying a prey who might jump the fence and bring fortune in his mouth.
"He stole food!" Christine cried from the high window. "We didn't get ours!"
"She attacked me," Dustin told the group when some of his staff muttered doubts. "If she brings them here we will have to deal with her."
"Bring her," another whispered. "We will feed. But we won't leave the guilty alive."
I went to their office.
I knocked. They froze. "Miranda?" someone said. "What are you—"
I pretended to be small. I smiled like someone who needed help. The curtain opened and they crowded out like vultures looking for a sign.
"Tell us how," Dustin demanded, voice thin with hunger. "Tell us how you get past them."
I looked at him. "You didn't read the letters," I said. "You turned away Mrs. Pavlov's reports because of her connections."
A tiny triumph crossed Dustin's face, fast as a blink. "What accusations? Who sent letters?"
"Linnea did," I said. "You did nothing then."
Their faces squirmed. They wanted me to provide a solution; they wanted me here to do the work so they wouldn't have to dirty themselves. They wanted to cage me with promises.
"You tell us and we won't—" Dustin started.
"And then you'll kill me because you'll be afraid I testified," I finished. "That's the plan."
They all laughed at that, except Christine. She lunged for me and tried to silence me with her fists. She wanted what the others wanted: survival, food, power. I didn't dodge. I bit her hand—the way a cornered animal does—and she screamed. Flesh, blood, willpower. I took a stool and used it. I did not enjoy the violence. I used it because the world had taught me for years that if I showed my hands empty, they would fill them with my bones.
They tried to grab me. They shouted for the door to be blocked. "Lock the door!" Dustin screamed.
I let them, and then I walked out into the corridor.
I stood on the stairwell and watched them through the window as they plotted. I whispered once, a sound not quite a human laugh. The hallway filled with a howl answering me, a chain reaction like a bell.
Then the punishment—their punishment—arrived.
It began slow. At first the cameras showed dust. Then silhouettes moved. They surged into the glassed corridor as if pulled by one unbearable hunger. People in the office pressed their faces to the panes and pointed at me. "She led them," someone gasped.
"Miranda, this is your fault!" Christine screamed. "You led them here!"
I stepped forward. "You led themselves," I said. "You chose to feed on others' fear."
The glass broke. They tried to run. Dustin tried to shove people into the elevator. "Go! We'll close the stairways!" he barked. Brooks Crouch and Fleming Edwards, men who had signed safety forms and sent me away a thousand times, made for the door.
Then Christine tried to climb through a window. Her face—the face that had graded me down to nothing—went pale. She looked straight at me with full recognition, as if something important had come undone in her chest.
The first bite happened in the doorway. A hand reached out, faster than any of them anticipated, and a teacher—one whom I had seen take bribes—collapsed with a sound like a sack of leaves. The people in the room screamed as the infected rolled onto whoever was closest, and the room turned into an awful chorus of human sounds and animal sounds.
"Help! Somebody help!" Dustin shouted, corners of his mouth gone sickly white. He stumbled into Brooks, pushed him, then saw an opening and darted away.
I stayed on the stairwell and watched the punishment unfold like a terrible theater. The things that had been their colleagues and friends—faces I had once seen at parent-teacher nights, men who had sat behind podiums and said "we must be fair"—changed.
Christine's expression was the most horrible. First, triumph—because she had the power, because she'd stood above me for years. Then disbelief: her mouth hung open as her own body betrayed her. Then rage, enraged at the unfairness of being victim and victimizer at once. Then horror—her pupils dilated, white becoming visible—and then a slow, sickening relaxation, like a rope dropping. She sprang at a teacher who'd tried to hold the door. "No!" someone shouted. She bit.
Around them people ran for the exits. Some tried to hold doors. Some stood frozen. Fleming kicked a chair and it collapsed beneath a pursuing shape. "Shoot them!" someone cried, but very few weapons existed.
The most savage part was not the bites. It was their faces as they understood what was happening. For a second—just a flash—Dustin's eyes widened with the pure human realization that everything he had done to keep order, everything he had swept under carpets, would not save him. He looked at me as if asking me to change the world back with my hands. He wanted bargaining. "If you stop them, we will…" he began, the rest of the sentence lost in the surge.
He never finished. A hand tore at his throat and the room flooded with wet sounds. People fled, then fell. Sobs and curses mixed. Those who had once promised to protect the school were torn down by the creatures they had ignored.
Around the office window a crowd gathered in the corridor. Teachers, students, janitors—everyone who had not fled watched the transformation. They watched Christine—the woman who had always made jokes when I cried—turn, bite, and then lunge. One of the janitors began to cry out, "You saw what she did to Miranda! She killed—" He was cut off as the infected grabbed him.
Eyes in the crowd widened. Some filmed with trembling hands. Others covered their mouths and whispered prayers. "Do something," a student said. "This is what she wanted—she wanted to see us break."
The punishment carried on. It went slow enough for people to see the change in faces. They saw the sheen of blood, the slackening muscles, the final, animal stare. They saw the leaders fall to the floor in a motion like a puppet cut and the life drain from them. They saw the first person who had laughed when I coughed being eaten at the threshold of the door while he begged for help in words no one could answer. Around them, the living stood frozen, watchful and helpless.
I felt anger. I also felt space inside me like a lake. I had wanted them to suffer but not to be eaten in front of a crowd; I had wanted them to lose power and dignity. Yet seeing them ripped open, their faces collapsing into a raw hunger while their peers watched, was worse than I imagined. People who had cast me out now had no luxury of denial. Their fall was public, absolute.
When it was over, the corridor stank. Limbs were strewn. The camera phones still recorded. People pressed against walls, faces stained. Some cried. Some whispered my name as if I had called down a storm on them.
"She started it," someone hissed, though he had been there, watching Dustin beg. "She led them—they said—"
"She did not start the virus," I said aloud. "No one did. They chose who lived and who died long before the doors closed."
A student shoved a phone in my face. "You see what they did? They redeemed themselves, then they got eaten. You happy?"
"I'm telling you," I said, "this is not happiness. Revenge is not sweetness. It's a hard thing and it smells of iron."
Linnea clung to me then. "I want them gone," she whispered. "They would have let us starve."
"I know," I said. "I know how it feels."
Around us, survivors began to organize. The generators were started. The big gate was closed. People who had been cowards found strength in panic. They moved cots, they dug through storerooms. There was a brutal, awful working-together that rose from the ash.
I did not become a leader by choice. I became a force because the world had no other. I had one small mercy: I spared Linnea and a few others from the classroom's last hours. I set a limit on my cruelty and then I walked on.
Days rolled by. I walked the perimeter of the school and practiced the howl that made the things move. I worked out how to bring them away from living clusters. I returned to the supermarket and brought enough food for a dozen people. I left some and let others take it. People called me names and then, sometimes, folded into gratitude.
At night, the survivors sat on the roof and shared stories—some strange heroics, many regrets. Jorge found me once, his face hollowed by hunger. "Miranda," he said, voice cracked, "I—"
"You left," I said. "You left me for safety."
"I was scared," he whispered. "We all were."
"You stayed when they wanted you to stay or go because you were with Belen." I did not say it gently.
He looked at me with shame. "I was weak," he said. "I thought if I stayed with Belen I would be safe. I'm sorry."
"You should have been brave before," I said. "Now there's no 'before' to fix."
He turned away.
People still wanted to punish me for the fire of the office. Some called me wicked. Some called me savior. I learned to be neither and both. I learned to make decisions by the only method left that mattered: keep the few alive.
We improvised defenses. We taught people to nail doors and to use mirrors to check rooms. We used me as a lure sometimes—my voice calling from distant halls while others escaped behind me. The creatures obeyed me in a way that made people wary and grateful.
Linnea stayed. "You could run," she said once at dawn. "You could leave and live alone."
"I tried," I said. "Being small is how I learned to watch. Being strong is how I learned where to aim the hurt."
"Do you miss being invisible?" she asked.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "Invisible people get to see truths no one wants to speak. But, Linnea, invisible people also forget the warmth of someone who sees them. You did that for me."
At times, strangers would come to the gate and watch. They had stories, and they asked for food, help. I gave it when I could, measured like a ration. The school turned into a small city. People came to trust a new rule: do not betray the group. Betrayal had cost too much.
When the radio crackled with talk of rescue teams and police, I would look at the skyline and think about what rescue meant. Would "normal" mean returning to how things were? Would Christine and Dustin be mourned with speeches about professionalism? Or would their memories be maneuvers to reclaim power? The idea of going back chilled me more than the cold night air.
"Do you want to rule?" Linnea asked once, half-joking.
"I don't want to rule," I said. "I want to keep people from being eaten. I want to make sure the ones who stayed to help do not become what they were."
"Still," she said, "you'd make a good queen."
We both laughed. The laugh turned into a long breath. The world had narrowed to a school and a river and the sound of things that answered me.
I found small joys among the ruin. A loaf warmed in hands that once had shoved me. A child who used to hide in corridors now brought me a cup of tea. Once, a girl who had watched the office burning returned a photo she had found in the rubble—a portrait of my grandmother—and placed it on the table without speaking. I touched it and the memory in my chest did not break.
At night, I sometimes climb to the roof and howl alone, low and long, until some distant answering cry rolls like thunder through the trees. It brings more bodies away from the living clusters. It clears the air for the living to dig and to sleep.
People ask what I'll do when the world settles or when rescue comes. "Will you go back?" they ask. Jorge asked, too, once, his voice soft.
"I can't go back," I said. "There is no going back for some things. There is only forward with new rules."
We are not a kingdom. We are a patched-up community learning to be less cruel. I teach people the hard lessons I learned in one terrible night: power shows its face early, and mercy sometimes looks like closing your hand.
Sometimes, at dusk, I put a small piece of bread by the classroom window and I watch the shadows move. When the creatures come and their noses twitch and they pass me by, I think about how close I came to dying and how close I came to breaking.
"Do you think about her?" Linnea will say sometimes, meaning my grandmother, meaning the teacher I hit, meaning the people transformed into things.
"All the time," I answer. "But thinking is not action. I choose, every day, who I save and who I do not."
That choice made some of them die. It made others live. It changed me into someone the mirror could not name.
One evening, when the moon was thin and the cries were far away, I held the photograph of my grandmother and I whispered, "I kept my promise. I will not beg in front of the wolves again."
From below, someone laughed, a small, clear sound—Linnea—and then we both heard it: a chorus of distant howls that once would have terrified me and now felt like wind pushing a door closed. I put my hand on the photograph and let the night take the sound. The old world had been burned to cinders. This place, this school, was the beginning of something else.
It might not be fair. It might not be right. But it's mine to guard.
The End
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