Zombie High (Delight Games)

1.1

"Jane!" my mother yells from the hallway of our family pod.
"Get your butt out of bed or you are going to be late!"

"Coming..." I moan half heartedly. I have already been awake for the past 2 hours, too frozen with fear and anticipation to budge from under my green camouflage comforter. It's finally here : my first day of school. Life is finally beginning.

Judging from the clanks and sizzles and  occasional yelps of pain coming from the kitchen.I guess mom is attempting to make breakfast,which in itself, is a momentous event. She's usually too busy in her laboratory cooking up the newest batch of lifesaving serum to bother with actual food. But the fact that she actually attempted to try to make a disaster again makes me want to get up and watch the show.

"Rise and shine, solider!" The captain of Zeta Sector military police force stands at attention by my bedroom door, his silhouette blocking the light from the hallway.
"You need to be out of the door oh-by sixteen minutes."
"Yes sir."
I sit up and feel under my bunk for slippers.

"Hey, don't be nervous honey, you'll do just fine." I offer him a smile as I pass him on the way to the bathroom.
"Just be yourself."

Surprisingly, mom's pancakes turn out to be not half as bad as I expected. After inhaling a stack and drowning a glass of protein drink, I grab my backpack and head for the door. Along the way picking up my trusty .22 caliber pistol (nicknamed Opal after the white iridescent inset on its handle), double checking the barrel and the safety before slipping her into the side pocket of my pack.
"Well, I am off. wish me luck."

"Where do you think you are going with that, young lady?" Mom asks raising an eyebrow.
"What?" I ask. "You're actually going to send me off alone with no protection?"

She stands patiently infront of me with her hand out. She's late for work, but she looks like she could wait here all day.

Stubborn.

As far as moms go; I suppose mine is alright, although she is a sticker for rules and the sector law says that the only weapon children under 18 are allowed to carry in public is a crowbar. Sucks, I know. I calculate the possibilities. I could hand over the gun in exchange of the crowbar, or refuse, or maybe try a little lighthearted negotiation for it to perhaps gain some "lunch money". After all I have her genes of being stubborn.

"You're the boss mom." I say extending the pistol almost into my mom's waiting palm.
"But since it's my first day and all how about a little extra money? A few extra bullets for some dessert at lunch or something?"

Mom glares at me for a moment, and then cracks a smile. She fishes in her pocket handing me a bullet and as I hand over my pistol. She then hands me my crowbar.
It's painted green and spans the length of my forearm making it way too boring to have a nickname.

"Now" my mom starts adopting the motherly tone. "I know school can be cliquey but, don't limit yourself to only 1 group of friends. You're pretty, you're smart, you're athletic so it's not fair to restrict yourself to a single label. Be nice to everyone and try not to give into peer pressure."

"God, Mom," I groan. "You sound like one of those lame after-school specials you and dad are always watching on the retro channel."
Dad laughs as he hands mom her briefcase.
"Well those were good old days."

The year is 16 A.Z, sixteen years since the beginning of the wide VM pandemic. VM stands for Victus Mortuus,the clinical name for the living dead. But they go by many other names too. Meatbags, bags, un-Ds, trips (for the awkward way they stumble around), fectos  (the low level infected who still have a chance of recovery), 20s (the worst of the worst- Level 20 infection) and sprayers ( for the big green mess that the 20s brains make on the walls when u shoot them.).

Before the VMs wiped out most of the worlds population; a handful of survivors were able to find safety underground. At the last count,72,641 Americans occupied the 12 high-tech military bunkers built below Seattle sometime in the early 3000s. Our sector, Zeta, is somewhere beneath what used to be Tucson.

The government did have plans to expand further underneath to create a safe heaven in the event of major terrorist event such as, nuclear fallout or bioterrorism. But no one ever expected that these plans would be interrupted by something straight out of an old zombie movie.

My mother was 6 months pregnant when she and my father entered Zeta sector. Thanks to their medical and military backgrounds, they have been recruited soon after the infection was discovered simultaneously in Shanghai, Mumbai, London, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney and New York City. I was born in the Zeta Sector hospital and have spent everyday of my 16 years of life safely tucked away in its residential zone.

According to Sector law all children under 16 must be homeschooled, either by tutors or by various sector-sponsored 'Undernet' sites. After that, everyone is required to attend public sector high school for 3 more years. The best and brightest students enter either the military or medical fields. The average citizen might accept teaching or janitorial or other service positions. But the rest have 2 options-either marry someone in the first 2 categories and start a family, or earn food vouchers by volunteering for medical experiments.
For me and my generation, it's been always this way. My memories from B.Z world come from movies made long ago in some place they used to call Hollywood. Now, the newest media personalities( mostly boy bands and reality television stars) come out of Alpha Sector. Movies don't get made much anymore so pretty much everyone else of my age obsesses over movies like Mean Girls, Grease and High School Musical. And though I know they are all stupid fantasies from a long dead era I still hope that Zeta High will have a fraction of their awesomeness( except maybe for the kids busting out songs in the hallways, that I could live without.

I give my parents one last goodbye hug and head down the corridor to meet up with my best friend Chase. Well at least, he was my best friend before he entered High School last year. We have grown apart a little bit since then, but now I hope it's going to be just like old times again. Plus, it will be great to have someone close by to show me the ropes and give advice.