Zombiekins - Kevin Bolger [22]
So Stanley and Miranda had no choice but to trudge back down into the mass of mawing, clawing zombies. The zombies growled and snarled. They gnashed their teeth. They groped and grasped with clawlike fingers. But fortunately for Stanley and Miranda they wouldn’t leave their side of the stairs to get them.
At the bottom of the stairwell, though, a logjam of zombies was blocking the door to the playground. Stanley and Miranda saw they would never get through.
“Quick—this way!” Miranda said, pulling Stanley back up the stairs. “I have an idea. . . .”
The second-floor hallway, where the primary classrooms were, was crawling with zombie first graders and zombie second graders. Pale as corpses, with dead soulless eyes and mouths full of dark yawning gaps where they’d lost their baby teeth, they were a terrifying sight—or might have been, except that the tallest of them barely came up to Stanley’s shoulder.
Stanley and Miranda burst into the hall. For a moment, the first and second graders just stopped and stared. Then, with a great howl, they all set upon Stanley and Miranda like a pack of wild dogs—small ones, jumping up on them and nipping at their elbows.
Stanley and Miranda fought their way through the mob, made a dash toward the heavy fire doors at the end of the hall, and escaped while all the grade 1s and 2s stopped to change into their indoor shoes like good little zombies.
Beyond the doors, the hall branched off to the right, and Stanley followed Miranda past the Library, the Computer Lab. . . .
“Where are we going?” he asked. “This hallway is a dead end.”
“Not exactly,” Miranda said, stopping in front of the door at the end of the hall. “Come on, they’ll never think to look for us in here.”
“Oh, no . . .” Stanley hesitated. “Not there . . . We can’t. . . .”
They heard the fire doors open behind them and a stampede of shuffling footsteps approaching around the corner. Miranda shoved Stanley through the door and slammed it shut behind them. . . .
31
“QUICK!” MIRANDA SAID. “HELP ME MOVE THIS SOFA.”
Together they dragged a ratty old sofa across the room and pushed it up against the door. Then they piled everything they could find on top of it: stacks of vacation catalogs, huge dusty piles of unmarked homework they uncovered when they moved the sofa, all the furniture in the room that wasn’t too heavy to move . . . .
“Ew,” said Stanley, “there’s chewing gum stuck under all these chairs.”
On the other side of the door, the noise kept building until it sounded like there was a stampede of angry cattle mooing and mulling out in the hall.
Stanley and Miranda took cover behind a table at the back of the room as the clamor reached its peak. The zombies were right outside the door!
“Mmmhhrrgh!” roared one of them.
“Nnyyyarrrghrggl!” raged another.
There was a pause.
“Mrrghhr?” groaned another zombie, more puzzled than angry.
Stanley held his breath, hoping they would give up looking and go away. But the next moment, the sound of the door handle jiggling made his blood freeze—they were trying to get in!
One of them started pounding on the door . . .
Then another . . . and another . . .
Until soon the door shook with a thunder of thumping and battering that rattled all the junk heaped against it and stirred up a dust cloud from the pile of unmarked homework . . .
But their barricade held.
After a few tense moments, the pounding stopped. Gradually the angry voices dimmed. There was a shuffling of feet outside in the hall, then that too fell silent.
“I think they’ve gone back to class,” Miranda whispered.
“Phew!” Stanley sighed. “Now let’s get out of here and go ask the Widow for help.”
“No, hold on,” Miranda said. “I think we should wait here till school is over and they’ve all gone home.”
Stanley started to object, but Miranda explained:
“It’s the perfect hideout,” she went on. “In all the zombie movies I’ve ever seen, the heroes always hole up somewhere just like this. Somewhere with only one way in, where you’d never expect the zombies to find them. . . .”
“But