Beyond the Horizon(An apocalypse novel)

Brandon stared him down for a few moments. But with Ryan not backing off an inch, he huffed, then walked off, kicking an empty crate into a nearby wall on his path.

Ryan let out a little sigh, turning to face the girl behind him. He looked a bit confused at what to do.

"I can keep an eye on her if you want? While you handle the corpses,"

Chloe offered, though she looked a bit guilty as she did so. It was, after all, a way to escape doing the dirty work; she’d never looked quite comfortable dealing with such things in general.

Ryan considered it for a moment before nodding. It wasn’t the worst idea.

He looked to the rest.

"Come on. We don’t know when they might turn."

Leading the way, he grabbed the arms of one of Sarah’s friends before dragging her towards the door and out of the room. Her corpse left a trail of blood behind it.

Miles followed, picking up the next girl. He struggled a bit, setting her in a position that wouldn’t just drag her head on the floor, then pulled, dragging her out of the pool and leaving a trail of his own.

Sarah kept her head down through it all.

With two people already moving, Grimm and Mia slowly got to work, dragging Maxwell’s companions out as well, leaving just Jayce, Morgan, and Maxwell.

Brandon, having apparently grown tired of seething, began helping them as well. He went to Maxwell’s corpse and just gazed at it silently.

It was certainly much messier than the other corpses, especially with the can that blew up in his face, courtesy of Grimm.

There might’ve been no need to even kill him again with the damage done to his head, but it never hurt to be cautious.

Miles walked into the room just in time to see Brandon spit on the corpse before grabbing its hands and roughly dragging it to the door.

He stepped aside to let him pass, then slowly walked up to the issue he’d been circling around so far.

Jayce.

The boy still lay in the position he’d left him in. He was well and truly dead.

It was hard to imagine that he was staring at the same face that had joked around with him this morning, that had sat down like a goof to avoid detection, and the same person that, in a small corner of his heart, he’d looked forward to meeting tomorrow.

Like Jayce had said, things always seemed simpler around him. Extroverted, willing to talk to anyone, even the strange kid that happened to sit next to him.

Little jokes here and there, a laugh or two, talking even when Miles had been too awkward to reply, even when most other kids would’ve chalked him up as a weirdo and given up.

He had in part been one of the reasons Miles had been able to open up a little, even if only to one person, when he first transferred here.

That was Jayce. That was also a lie.

Or perhaps it wasn’t. He would never know exactly what had been going through the boy’s mind when he attacked him.

’Not that it mattered. It wouldn’t have changed the end result, after all.’

These thoughts flew through Miles’s head as he stared at Jayce’s wounded face.

Untethered, was the only word he could use to describe how he felt.

Like he was losing his grip on something important. He couldn’t quite reach the rope connecting it to him like he used to, or perhaps the rope itself had gotten weaker.

He couldn’t tell. It left his thoughts clear but spacey.

So he picked up Jayce silently, keeping his gaze away from his eyes, and dragged him slowly to the door.

As he did so, he found Ryan hesitating over Morgan’s body before deciding to lift it up with Mia. He too kept his gaze away from the man’s eyes.

They stepped out of the room, one after the other, and into the freezing kitchen.

Miles dropped Jayce’s body like a sack onto the pile already on the floor. Ryan and Mia were more delicate in their manner; it was Morgan they were carrying after all. They moved around, navigating using the spaces between corpses, before finally settling on laying him flat on the longest table.

Setting him above those on the floor.

The kitchen was roughly just a dozen meters away from the pylon, so the rules were still off in it.

Ryan silently scanned the corpses with a dark gaze, his eyes slowly making their way back to Morgan. Mia stretched a hand to him.

"I can-"

The boy just shook his head, dropping her hand back down. He stared intently at Morgan’s dead eyes, at the look of satisfaction on his face, and then hardened his own.

He slowly raised his bat above the man, held it there for a moment, then brought it down forcefully. He closed his eyes before he made contact.

A crack resounded, then another, and another after that as he brought it down, over and over again. Not stopping until he was sure the man wouldn’t walk again.

Once he was done, he crouched silently beside the table.

Not far from him, Brandon and Grimm stood on either side of a corpse. Maxwell.

Brandon looked ready to argue, but glanced between the determined look on Grimm’s face and the corpse below him before sighing and walking to another corpse. Maxwell’s friend.

Grimm only stared silently for a moment before bringing the butt of his gun down on Maxwell’s skull. He didn’t smile or cry as he smashed it, but from the look in his eyes, and the vigor with which he brought the gun down over and over again...

It was obvious that this vengeance, if Miles could call it that, had been a long time coming.

Brandon, on the other hand, just knelt beside his chosen corpse, grabbing its face and burning it. He lifted its head off the ground before he did so, not letting his blue flames spread to another corpse.

Watching all this, Miles could only turn back to Jayce, looking the boy right in his unfocused eyes, then raised his bat as well.

This was something he had to do.

He smashed it down.

Memories, visions of the past flashed through his mind as he did so. But they weren’t of begging or pleading, but about a boy who looked similar to him. A face that sent a faint sense of panic and fear even into his numbed heart.

They felt blurred, like half-remembered dreams, and couldn’t reach him properly from the distance at which they stood.

He stopped swinging. Jayce’s face was now a mess of blood, bone, and wounds. The only part unstained by the violence was his mouth. Though that was now crooked in its own right.

Crooked in a way his mind couldn’t help but read as a smile. A cruel, familiar, mocking smile.

He turned his gaze away, not letting it get to him. Yet the moment he did, a voice sounded out from the speakers in the cafeteria outside.

[True to yourselves, you’ve scurried into the darkness like the rats you are. Hiding away from the guiding light of My order.]

The principal.