Still breathing | Original story

Chapter Eleven: Story Time

Word count: 2403

I walked back into the nursery to see Tyler and Em talking quietly. The cupboards had already been cleared out and I realised how desperate Em must've been to empty the stuff so quickly. I waited at the door for them to finish, not wanting to interrupt. I heard Em clear her throat and Tyler turned around, only to glare at me.
"Thanks," I breathed out, "for helping"
"More like leading you to your death," he growled. "I take no part in this, if anything happens Pat and you can take the blame," he told me plain and simple.
It couldn't be that bad, could it? It's not like I was going into the school itself, just close enough to see if Logan was there and leave a note if he wasn't. I didn't see what the big deal with it was but I could tell that Tyler wasn't telling me the full story. Or any story at all.

I left the room after that and went to find Pat, who was looking through the nursery.
"What happened at the school?" I questioned when I saw her, she froze. She was leaning over a cot in the baby room and was gripping a blanket. She straightened up and turned around slowly.
"Nothin'," she said to me too quickly, I arched an eyebrow at her disbelievingly. "Look it's not me place to tell ya aright?"
"Please tell me. We need trust in this group. You guys are falling apart," I told her, being uncharacteristically blunt. I needed to know what had happened, and I needed to get the information out of her anyway I could.
"Don't you dare talk about me group like that!" She outburst and began to storm out the room. I twirled around to face her as air was blown around me. "You don't know the half of it."
"Then let me know," I pleaded as she reached the door. She sighed as she came to a halt and held onto the side of the door, her head hung low.
"Connors brother died," she said and flicked her head up to look at me. "Ty thought it would be a good idea to go to the school... Connors brother, Kyle, he went alone to check it out. We knew we shouldn't let 'im but we did. We went to find 'im and, we knew somethin' bad had happened straight away. We saw the gate, skeletons crowded inside. We went closer to it and saw a-a hand." She took a deep breath and straightened up, her eyes pricked with tears. "Kyle used to wear a bracelet, neva took the damn thing off, wouldn't." She looked lost as she recalled the event. "We decided to look at the hand and on the ground near it was the- the bracelet," she choked on her words and I walked over to her, I touched her arm comfortingly.
"I'm sorry," I whispered and she just shook her head and wiped away a tear. I dropped my arm and smiled at her sympathetically. "Let's join the others?" She nodded and we walked into the other room. I wondered why she still wanted to help me after someone had died in there, but if you avoided every place someone died then you wouldn't go anywhere in this world.

As we walked down the hall to the main room I saw the light was fading fast. The nursery would soon be shadowed in the darkness of the early night sky. Daytime didn't last long in January but I was still surprised at how quickly it had passed.
"I think we should go soon," I said as we entered the nursery. I continued when I just got odd stares from the group. "I don't feel safe enough to sleep here and we can't go out at night." The infected seemed to get more active at night and they were much harder to see, they were good hiders. Their rotten corpses blended in with the shadows. I had observed them enough during my little time in the shop to know a few bits of vital information that could come in handy.
"We can't leave," Connor spoke up and pointed towards Em who still didn't look too good. "We're safe here," he hissed.
"Really?" I scoffed.
"Do you see any skeletons?" He questioned and held his hands out, showing off the space around us. I gestured for him to follow me out into the hallway, he protested at first but, in the end, followed me out.
"See that?" I pointed towards the huge hole that I had made on entry. "Our smell will go out, the smell of the food we eat will go out, any noise we make also. The infected will come straight here and we won't stand a chance. There are houses up this street, we just need to find a safe one." He nodded at me in understanding.
"If you're so confident go up and find one. Come back in ten minutes," he told me. I nodded although I wasn't confident, whose to say those houses were any safer? But it was worth a shot.