Chapter 28: The Dangerous Plan
Everyone around me fell speechless at my words.
Alisha looked me for a long moment before speaking.
"The administration building isn’t just any ordinary structure," she said quietly. "It was designed with security in mind, even beyond what you’d normally expect from a school." She paused, glancing toward the window where we could see the building in question. "If there are infected inside, they could be anywhere – in the hallways, the offices, even the stairwells."
"What about the roof access?" Sydney asked, joining the conversation more directly. "The roofs of this building and the administration one are pretty close."
"There’s a maintenance door that leads to the roof," Alisha confirmed. "But getting there means going through at least part of the building’s interior. And once you’re inside..." She didn’t need to finish the sentence. We all understood the risks.
Elena, who had been listening from nearby, suddenly spoke up as shocked as the others. "T...this is completely insane," she said bluntly. "You’re talking about jumping between buildings, breaking into a potentially infected structure, and trying to operate complex communication equipment while surrounded by things that want to eat you alive..."
The gaze she gave me was quite meek and tinged with concern. It did surprise me a bit but it had rendered the others even more shocked.
What kind of woman were you in this school Elena?
Regardless, her words were harsh, but they weren’t wrong. When laid out like that, our plan did sound like something out of a suicide mission.
"Maybe it is insane," I admitted. "But what’s the alternative? We sit here and hope someone eventually finds us? Hope that our food and water hold out? Hope that this makeshift barricade keeps holding?" I gestured toward the library door, where we could still hear the occasional thump of infected bodies pressing against our defenses.
"At least here we’re relatively safe," someone from the Lexington group interjected.
"Safe is relative," I replied. "We’re trapped, cut off from the outside world, with limited supplies and no real plan beyond hiding and hoping. That’s not a long-term survival strategy – that’s just delaying the inevitable."