Containment by Sean Schubert

there and tried to talk to them. I saw him shaking his head once and then again. He looked over his shoulder up at us and I could see the look in his eye. We’d made a mistake.
    “They shot him while he was still looking over at us. He fell down holding his right leg. While he was there on his back...defenseless... they shot him again. This time in his left leg. One of them, what I guess was their leader, asked the teacher something. The teacher shook his head again. I couldn’t really hear him, but I could tell that the teacher was crying. And if I was to guess, he wasn’t crying because of the pain in his leg. He was crying because he couldn’t believe that people could be so ugly. And then that son of a bitch pushed that poor, good man over with his toe and stood over him for a second or two. Must’ve made him feel like a big man. Coward just stepped over him and had one of his toadies finish the job. I wasn’t at the window anymore to see where the bullets hit. Joan and I were running again. I hadn’t run that much in...well, ever. Joan was older than me by a few years but I think she was in a helluva lot better shape than me. We were a good team on the run together.
    “We had to go through the main lobby to get to any of the first floor exits and those guys were already coming in through the front doors. It was as chaotic as when those monsters got into the school. Only this time, our attackers were a little more discerning. They were only going after the women. Any man they happened to grab or who happened to get in the way was stabbed or shot or beaten. I never knew that a gun could be that loud or echo in your ears for that long. It was terrible.
    “We were starting to head down a hall...we were almost there, when one of them got a hold of Joan’s hair. She had this pretty red hair, pulled back into a long braid. He yanked hard, hard enough snap her backward and knock her off her feet. She fell with a thud and didn’t move. When I looked down at her, I saw a couple of the other girls already on the floor with those guys crawling all over them. They were screaming and begging for help but I felt helpless to do anything. Eric, Max’s owner, pulled me along. He kept saying that we had to get away. Just concentrate on getting away.
    “Well, the joke was on the rednecks. I guess it was the screaming or the gunshots, hell, it doesn’t really matter what was responsible. Those things...those monsters started to arrive from both sides of the street. They just started to wade into the mayhem that was still erupting in the hotel lobby. I felt horrible for those girls who were on the floor. First to be brutalized and then to be butchered…it was too much for me to even think about. Who knows? Maybe those bastards had already killed the girls. I didn’t hear any truck engines getting away, so I’m hoping that the cocksuckers got theirs in the end.
    “So, we were back down to five of us...actually six if you included Max. We ran away from the main road and back into a neighborhood. We just wanted to get away and find somewhere safe to rest. We didn’t see any more of those things for a couple of days but we did see some people back amongst the houses. Mostly we saw faces peeking over cedar privacy fences or folks scurrying like scared rats from place to place. I guess we must have looked like rats ourselves. We did finally get ourselves into a house to hide for a bit. There was still some food in the pantry too, so we all got a bite to eat other than junk food. I don’t think Chef Boyardee ever tasted so good.
    “Locking the front door was about as far as we went in securing the house. I know that it was a mistake now, but we didn’t know what was happening yet. There wasn’t any cell service, no power, no nothing. We only knew that things just seemed to keep going from bad to worse every time we turned around.
    “We had only been in the house for a couple of days...I think. I’ve gotta be honest here.