It’s Sarah! Naked and I run up to her, and I grab her in a big bear hug while Naked makes little half jumps around her. I don’t ever want to let her go because it’s Sarah and she’s alive! She’s got Linus’s blanket around her shoulders like a cape so I ask, “When did Linus give you her blanket?”
“She handed it up to me after Mr. Cromwell put me on his shoulders. She asked me to hold it for her so it wouldn’t get trampled on by the crowd.” Sarah says this in a really small, sad voice. She had on this super-angry look when she kicked Doom in the leg, but now her face is back to her usual, I’m-not-really-here look.
I hear Mom ask, “Where’s Linus?” and then hear Mr. Cromwell reply in a hushed voice “She’s one of them now.” I hear someone start to cry at that. I can’t see who’s crying because I’m still holding on to Sarah, but it’s probably Mouse ‘cause Linus and Mouse were pretty close. I can just about here her say, “Linus would never have given up her blanket if she thought she was going to make it” through her tears. Sarah starts shaking like crazy and I wonder if it’s because she’s still mad that Doom shut her out. Maybe she’s mad because we gave her up for dead. Maybe she’s remembering what it was like to be out there. Whatever it is, I don’t feel like asking her.
Mom starts to take control again, asking Granny and Mr. Cromwell how they could get bit and not be zombies, or something like that. They’re definitely not zombies ‘cause they’re talking and they’re not trying to bite us. I hear dragging noises behind me and I wonder what it is but I’m not yet willing to let go of Sarah to find out. It turns out I don’t have to turn around because Hou and Doom and Kaboom are dragging the lockers down the aisles of the theatre and are about to lift them up onto to the stage. “Move them towards the staircase by the clubhouse!” Mom orders.
I pull away from Sarah because I have a question of my own. “How did you get in here?” I ask. Everyone stops what they’re doing to listen because they’re wondering the same thing.
“When the Infected bit us and we didn’t turn into zombies, we started to push them back, real hard.” Sarah’s voice is shaky but gets stronger the more she talks. “Zombies fall down easy when they’re new.”
Mr. Cromwell picks up the story from there. “I remembered there was rooftop access in the custodian’s office. We kept just ahead of the pack but were held back by all the furniture blocking the corridors.”
“He was like Superman,” Sarah interrupts. She looks at Mr. Cromwell like he’s all the comic-book heroes in one. “He was picking up that heavy stuff and flinging it at the zombies, making a wall of furniture between us and them. He threw the chairs and desks and cots aside like they were just sticks of wood. And Granny—I mean Dorothy—held on to me with one hand while poking and pushing the zombies away with her walking stick with the other until Mr. Cromwell made a path for us.”
We’re all looking at Mr. Cromwell with total respect, but he just looks at Sarah and Dorothy like he can’t believe it himself. He’s sweating a lot too, probably from moving all that furniture by himself. “I took a chance that there wasn’t a lock on the door to the roof anymore since we used whatever locks we could find to secure the seventy-two-hour kits. I figured it was about time we caught a break. At the least it was worth a shot. Even if it was locked, we could have blocked the door to the office and holed up inside the classroom long enough to figure out our next move.
“It was better than I’d hoped. There was a chain loosely draped on the handles, but no lock. I made sure it wasn’t raining and then sent Dorothy and Sarah up the ladder to the roof, making sure to re-chain the door from the outside. I didn’t have something with me to lock it, but there were some small tools scattered on the ground, so I jammed a screwdriver through the holes in the chain. I think it will hold, at least for now.
“We saw the soldier’s tent almost as soon as we got onto the roof and made our way towards it, then we stumbled across the trapdoor that leads to the clubhouse. It wasn’t locked.”
“Score one for sloppy security!” Doom says grumpily. I let go of Sarah long enough to see if he’s angry about being kicked. He’s lucky it wasn’t KC he shut out there. She would have killed him instead of kicked him. Doom doesn’t look angry, he just looks sore as he rubs his legs with his hands.
“I didn’t expect anything to come from the roof,” my mother mumbles under her breath.