Revenge17 min read
They Tried to Starve Me — I Let the School Burn
ButterPicks15 views
I woke to the taste of iron and the pain of someone having tried to break me into pieces.
"Can you hear me?" a voice asked. It was thin and panicked, like the sound of someone trying to hide a sob.
"Yes." My throat felt raw. "Where—?"
"Stairs. Near the third floor landing. You were dragged down. It's a mess." The voice belonged to a boy I recognized by the tone of his fear: Julian Guerrero.
I pushed my eyes open. The lights had long since failed; the stairwell smelled of something rotten and bright red. I saw my hands first — scratched, bleeding, but whole. The bites were shallow. They should have killed me or turned me. Instead my chest, where pain had sat my whole life like a caged bird, beat steady and strong.
"How long was I out?" I asked.
"Maybe... an hour? Two? We heard screaming and then silence." Julian's voice trembled.
"Good," I said. The word felt odd on my tongue. "Listen to me. Take me to the classroom. Bring everyone."
There was a silence full of question. Then, "You sure?" Julian asked. "You look—"
"Bring me," I said. "Bring them."
They did. They dragged me back, not because they thought I was a hero but because in a school bleeding with hunger and fear, any noise was a story and my coming back was something people could point at and hang hope on.
When the curtain parted, the room turned on me. Sixty eyes, hollow and hungry, found me.
"She's alive," said Martina Graf, loud and sharp as she stood by the window like a sculpture of anger. She had been the one to push me out three days ago. She had been the one to lead the classroom in my exile and laughter. Her hair was pulled into a severe knot; her hands trembled but tried to hold command the way a general holds a sword.
"Who is she?" the boy in the front said. Amos Castaneda, who used to trade homework answers for favors.
"That's Dahlia," someone whispered.
Martina's mouth twisted. "She came back to make us sacrifice ourselves, obviously. Who else would do such a thing?"
I let them keep talking. I watched Jadyn Hassan near the back. Jadyn had been my desk partner once; she was the only one who had ever smiled at me without shame. Now she folded her hands until they went white.
"Jadyn," I said softly. "Stay where you are."
She looked up at me, and in that look I saw everything that had happened over the last three days. Her voice was thin. "Dahlia, they—"
"They forced me," I said, "they threw me out. I crawled back. I brought food. I can keep getting food."
At the word food, the room inhaled as one. I let them sit on that breath. I let the old, slow anger build like the pressure before a storm.
Martina stepped forward. "You think you can play games? We sent you out because you were useless. You used to be useless. Now you come back with a show. Give the food over."
"I'll share," I said. "But not with you."
Her face changed so fast it looked like a mask ripped in mid-acting. "You heard me. Give it up."
Oscar Camacho stood by the door. He had been my promise once, before a promise could be dragged across the floor and laughed at. He used to bring me a pen and I wrote him a note; he used to laugh at the way my voice cracked. Then he took sides with Martina. He kept his hands in his pockets now, watching as if he were studying a broken experiment.
"Don't start," he said, in the voice of a man who thought he could step into any situation and find himself right.
"Then be quiet," I said. "Or kiss the window, Oscar."
He flushed. A small, ridiculous thing in a ruined world: his pride. I smiled, the kind of smile I had never afforded myself in school.
"Fine." He spat it out like a coin. "You want food? Tell us how you did it. If you saved us, you owe us the method."
I should have told them. I had discovered a new world sliding along my veins, a hunger-killing strength, a way the dead ignored me. I could have been a miracle, the kind of miracle they could carry in their pockets and sell to the first person who offered coins. Instead I watched others' greed, the same hunger that first forced me to the window three days before.
"No," I said.
"What?" Martina's voice cut like glass.
"No. I will give food to those who deserve it."
"Who decides that?" Oscar asked.
I looked at Jadyn. "You do," I said.
She stared at me like she'd found a tiny lighthouse in a fog. "Dahlia—what are you—"
"Do you remember the teacher who wore my grandmother's scarf like it was a joke?" I said. "Do you remember the man in the office who told me to stop crying because fundraising was more important than my family? Do you remember threading letters that never reached any ears?"
The room did.
Bethany Flynn, who used to be called "Ms. Flynn" and not because she deserved the respect, stepped forwards as if she could claim authority like banding a limb. "Dahlia, you don't—"
"Do not call me by your old rules," I said. "You see, there's a new law now. The law of tooth and how many will bite. I can make sure you eat, or I can make sure you die slow and loud."
Her mouth opened. Hurt and fear were readable on her face in a way I had never let myself trace before. Bethany had been the first adult to laugh at me, to take the present my grandmother knit and turn it into a spectacle. She had called my gift "cheap" before the funeral when the lights were brighter than her conscience. Haddock of a woman.
I saw their eyes flick, then settle into a calculation.
"That's not fair," Oscar said. "You saved yourself. You're just a survivor."
"That's the point," I said. "Survival isn't free. It costs someone else when you used to let it cost me."
Martina's laugh was sudden and sharp. "Give me the food, Dahlia."
"Ask for it," I said.
Her hand closed into a fist. "Give me the food!" she demanded.
I "gave" the food — by tossing the small bag I'd taken from the market down the stairwell and watching as a single scrap of bread drew a single terrible, eager scream from the staircase: the noise of a saint being betrayed.
"We will go down and get it," Martina said.
"Only one of you may go," I answered. "And only if you do something first."
"What?" asked a boy, Karim Diaz.
"Kneel," I said. "Kneel and say what you made me do. Apologize. Tell me you saw me as a person once."
They stared.
"Do it," I said.
"For what? Dahlia, you're crazy." Oscar's voice was small.
I stepped closer. "You will beg me in front of everyone, and I will decide if I throw you a loaf. If you refuse, I will let you starve."
People's mouths moved. I could see how hungry theatrics had become the currency of those who had not eaten. Pride alone had kept them alive until now — or so they thought.
"Fine." Martina struck a tone like a blade. She dropped to her knees with a suddenness that made the air shiver. She looked like a declawed thing. "I—"
"Say my name," I instructed.
She swallowed. "Dahlia Olivier," she said, the name strange and foreign on her lips. "I am sorry. I was cruel. I pushed you out. We—"
Oscar's face drained; something that had nothing to do with hunger tightened in his jaw.
"Continue," I said.
"I..." Martina shuddered. "We were scared. We were selfish. We thought we could survive without you. I'm sorry. I—"
"Say you are not better." I forced it out slowly. "Say you are not better than me."
Martina's voice cracked. "I am not better than you."
Her admission floated over the room like a dirge.
They wanted to laugh, to call it a trick, but their looks were too human. They had been taught to bow to cruelty and wear it like a crown.
"Now," I said, "stand up. Oscar, come here."
He came, because the world he loved was an old movie and he wanted the lead role.
"Take one step toward me," I told him.
He stepped.
I ripped the small bread from my pocket and held it out. "Do it," I said. "Beg."
He gulped. "Dahlia... give me food, please. I was wrong. I—"
"Say what you did," I insisted.
"I..." He turned his face away. "I liked her. I followed what I thought was right. I let her words make my silence into violence."
"Say it," I said.
"I... joined her," he said. "I helped her. I am sorry."
The bread dropped into his hands, heavy and ridiculous.
The room moved like a thing that had remembered its manners. They began to eat. They forgot to whisper. They forgot to look at the places where my bones had once ached.
Jadyn climbed to her feet and pushed through the small crowd. Her hands trembled. "Dahlia," she said. "I—"
"You're safe," I told her.
She dropped to her knees and cried. "I tried to write the truth. I never had the courage to hand it over. I'm sorry."
"Live," I said. It wasn't mercy, only a choice. "Live and remember."
—
The first punishment came cold and inevitable: the classroom that had turned on me was eaten. Not by my will, but by the world I had nudged.
"Shut the windows," Martina hissed later as the dusk crawled up the walls. "Barricade it. If we hold the line, we'll be fine."
"Martina, it's coming," Oscar said. "Listen—"
Too late. The sound began like a cloud rolling over tin: a chorus of low calls. The undead had circled the school all day, but now they came to the building that had sung of betrayal and weakness and the men who had fed on both.
"You did this," Martina said to me, voice small as a child's.
"I did nothing," I answered. "I did." The pronoun hung with both truth and lie.
"Don't panic," Oscar told the people, because he wanted to be king of something.
He couldn't be. The doors bucked. The boards on the window shook. The dead wanted the voices inside.
"Move! Get to the south stairwell first!" someone screamed.
They scrambled, and in the chaos, hands found doors and swung on hinges. Martina turned, eyes as wide as saucers. "Dahlia! You did this!"
"Yes," I said. "I did."
I stepped out. The air outside was an immediate, sharp bite of cold and something metallic.
They were not biting me. They circled, sniffed, then passed, like dogs refusing a curious scent.
The door crashed inward. The class erupted into a hundred pieces. Bodies fell. Screams.
I did not step to help. Not that day.
They had wanted me to carry them to life. They had asked for a miracle. They expected me to be soft.
I was not.
Martina was pinned under a pile of chairs as the room collapsed in on itself. Her voice was a thin thread. "Dahlia! Please! Don't—"
"Remember the window," I said.
She knew and she did. Her lungs heaved in a world of sharp, hot panic. She kicked. She tried to crawl. The dead were at the door, eating anything that moved. Her scream was short and raw, and then gone.
I let them be.
—
Night after night, the rules rearranged themselves. I learned where the dead lingered and where living people hid. I learned the quiet places inside my own chest where pity used to hide and pulled it out warm and shaking.
The administrators were the last to learn.
Hank Rasmussen had been a man who liked the sound of his own decisions. He had been the sort of principal who signed papers and handed down punishments to children as if they were exact payments. He had been distant at parent nights and smiling in photographs with Bethany and the others.
I found him with his small group huddled in the top floor of the administration wing, watching me with small animal eyes. They had been asking for a way to capture what I knew and sell it like secrets to the living.
They called to me with a laser dotted point like the finger of an old god.
I didn't run. I took the food again. I took no weapon but a slim blade.
"Come in," Hank said, as though I were a guest arriving late to a party. "We can talk."
I entered like a thief.
"This is a trap," Bethany breathed, but it was more question than command.
"You're late," I said. "You should have come earlier for mercy."
Hank smiled a smile meant for cameras. "We were spared until now by our choices. You'd be wise—"
"To beg?" I asked.
They laughed once, thin and brittle.
"Tell us how," Hank demanded. "Tell us how you are spared."
I looked at them, at their hands. They had eaten last when others starved. They had taken the best. They had told themselves stories of service and moral obligation. They had made my grandmother's death a trivia point and my life a lesson to be summarized over coffee.
"You will have your answer," I said.
I shrugged and stuck my hand out. "If you will stop screaming and promise to let us live, I will show you how to keep the dead away."
Hank's shoulders drooped. "Good. We'll make terms. We will give you food, shelter—"
"Say it," I said.
So they did.
It did not matter. When you bargain with those who have burned your life to keep warm, the smoke sometimes chokes you.
They dragged me inside. They shut the doors. They closed the blinds. They thought they were safe. They were wrong.
From the doorway they cooed and offered pieces of their humanity. "We were wrong about you," Bethany said, fingers trembling. "We should have listened. We're sorry."
I looked at each of them. Hank's face had the shine of a man who believed he could always be forgiven because he could always account for his actions with paper. I tilted my head and watched.
"Thank you," I said. "But the living are too loud in this building. The dead respond to movement. They will come."
"We will close the doors," Hank promised. "We will keep watch."
"Fine," I said. I let them see a smile because it felt like layering armor.
The room had a radio, old and heavy. On the desk lay a pot of cheap coffee and a box with photographs, my grandmother's hand in one of them. I picked it up with fingers that had learned to claw for themselves.
"Is that the scarf?" Bethany asked.
It was. The same shawl, grey and warm.
"Where did you get that?" Hank asked.
"You touch what's yours and pretend it never hurt," I said. "You pile up small cruelties like coins and think you can buy a life."
"No," Bethany said. "Not all of us—"
"Then tell me," I said. "Who will stay here when the dead come?"
They looked at one another. A little chorus of liars.
"Very well," I said. "Help me tie Bethany's hands, and I'll tell you the secret."
They moved, eager and slow. Hank's hands almost shook as he wrapped a belt around Bethany's wrists. He tied it too tight, as if to fix something that had been loose in his life.
"Tell us!" Bethany mouthed.
I licked my lips. "The dead don't mind blooded me. It's like oil to a fire. They search for warmth and the scent of fear. Walk like you're a shadow, and they will ignore you."
"Yes!" Hank breathed. "We will record it. We will—"
The room thinned, and outside, as if on cue, the long, low calls of the dead swelled.
They came in a tide.
"What do we do?" Hank asked, suddenly small.
"We stay still," I said.
They couldn't. Bethany began to scream, a high, wet sound that was a betrayal. She fought Hank's rope weakly, and Hank, who had made promises all his life to protect institutions and his name, tried the useless scramble of a man who had never been hungry enough to remember anything but himself.
The dead took them.
They didn't bite me. They didn't touch me. They emptied the room of their hunger by ripping at the throats of the people who had once told me my pain was inconvenient.
Bethany went first; she convulsed and then rose like a puppet gone wrong, teeth bared like pale kernels. The way her eyes moved was wrong. She sank her teeth into the neck of the woman who moved to help her — a woman who had signed requisition forms and sat in meetings while my grandmother walked home in the rain.
"Help! Someone—" Hank screamed. He tried to pull Bethany away. I watched the public unspooling of a private cruelty.
I stepped forward as they tore one another. I could have stopped it then. I could have lifted Hank and carried him out. I could have given food and watched them learn. Instead, I stood back and watched the way the living, terrified and greedy, turned to meat for what they had sown.
"You wanted to control me," I said, almost gently. "You wanted to own my secret. You wanted to put me in a jar and shake me for answers. This is your answer."
They flailed, and their faces went through the stages of disbelief to rage to pleading.
"Please!" Hank bellowed. "Dahlia! Save us!"
I could see the moment he became aware. He registered, in a flash that bulged out of his skin, that he would be consumed and that no ledger could pull him safe.
It was too late. The dead were everywhere in the hallway. They had been fed by his decisions for years. He had never truly been hungry; he had been the sort who ordered dinners for others and decided who would eat. Now he begged.
"Save us," Bethany hissed, something new inside her voice. It was not fully human.
I stepped into the filthy light and watched as the man who had turned away my letters turned his face up to me, slick with fear and blood.
"I can," I said. "But you'll have to admit it all. Not in words on paper, but in sound."
Hank tried to get up. "I will—I'll do anything—"
"Say it," I told him. "Say you think you're better. Say you thought you could decide who should live before you ever needed to die."
Hank's face split into a hundred smallfolds of fear. "No, I—"
"Say the name of the girl you let die," I said.
He choked. He tried to form the memory and coughed up a sound that made his throat tremble.
"Say it now," I said.
He screamed and the dead closed in.
The rest of it would have been private ugly, but I made it public.
I walked to the window, stood where the emergency light spilled down my shoulders like something sacred, and I shouted. "Hank Rasmussen! You turned away a grief you could have fixed! Bethany Flynn! You laughed! All of you—name her and say what you did!"
They screamed. The corridor filled with the noise of metal and hands and a hunger unfathomable.
"Stop!" Hank screamed. "Please!"
"Tell them how you turned your back," I said. "Tell them who you were when no one watched you."
He choked on his tongue. He was eaten. Not by me but by the consequence of all the small cruelties he had file-dated.
Around the corner, the others watched on closed monitors, watched the faces of the dead that they had encouraged from the safe distance of jurisdictional power. They took videos with trembling hands. They whispered a litany of excuses.
A teacher, Amos Castaneda, filmed the first bites with a shaking hand. "This is—this is for the record," he said, voice like clay.
The camera recorded pulses and then nothing. The sound of someone being torn is not pretty. It is a wet, final orchestra.
When it was over, the administration wing was a ruin. The floor was sticky with coffee and blood. Papers were flung like confessions.
It was a public punishment. It was a spectacle of the worst sort: an exposure ritual where those who had once burned my life now burned themselves. They made faces that were, for a moment, alive with the knowledge that their fate had been decided by what they had permitted to happen before the apocalypse.
Outside the broken windows, people gathered. They had heard, as the radio squawked and the doors slamming had told them, that something had happened in the administration wing. They came to watch because people watch what they fear and hunger for the downfall of those they despise.
They filmed with phones. Some prayed. Some cheered. Some cried.
"She's right," someone said in the crowd. "They all deserve—"
"Stop!" a parent screamed, but it was too late.
Martina later learned what it felt like to be small. When she argued on the soccer field, she once said, loud enough for everyone to hear, "I'd rather be hungry than weak." She never said it again.
When it was all done, and the dead had wandered off satisfied, I walked back to the ruins. I picked up a photograph of my grandmother that had been dropped in the scrum. Her face was still smiling, thread pulled slightly from the scarf. I wrapped it around my fist until my fingers ached.
"You can watch," I said to the empty room. "You can remember. But you won't own me."
—
The punishments did not end in the administration wing. I made sure they did not. That is the cruel lesson of a world that has burned: kindness is powerful only if it can be shown and enforced.
Oscar tried to stand by Martina, to claim he had been forced. The students in the corridor wanted him lynched. I let them. I made him beg in the middle of the courtyard — for the loaf he had once thought to throw away and for the life he had treated like a joke.
He went from confident to humiliated to pleading in the space of a breath. I made him admit, publicly and with the cameras of others, that he had laughed when I had cried. He did not die by teeth and bone; he died by the eyes of others. He left the school that day with his proud face broken, and for months afterward you could find clips of his apology looped in the feeds of whoever had survived with phones enough to keep film.
Martina's end was darker. She was tripped up by her own bravado, cornered in the library and overwhelmed by a mix of a riot and the dead. Once she had been the one to tie me to humiliation and punishment. In front of the bleached windows, while the sun did not care for apologies, she crawled and pleaded. Her pleas were filmed. She begged to be let inside. I watched the footage later at night when the school slept and the dead called outside like a choir.
Her voice moved from rage to disbelief to terror, then to a kind of small childlike hope as she tried to bargain.
"Please," she said, as the camera rolled. "Dahlia, please help me. We were wrong. Please."
I watched her break, slow and terrible, with the knowledge that the worst anger is the anger that bargains for its life after it has left a trail of crushed things. The crowd recorded it. The dead answered it with hunger. Martina's face finally contorted — not into rage this time, but into the barest, human ache of someone whose empire folded into dust.
Her punishment was public. It was the merciless lesson that there would be no more crowns, no more thrones.
I remember standing at the fence that night, watching crowds of survivors chant and curse, watching them film and photograph martyrdom and monsters. People like spectacle. They would come back and watch the tapes of those who had been consumed and weep, and then they would go to bed and start the cycle again.
I would not let the cycle include me.
I did not bring everyone back from the dead.
But I saved a small company of people who would remember and care and not let their power become the tool of cruelty again.
Jadyn stayed. She taught me how to boil water and keep it warm in a world that had forgotten tea.
We built barricades. We learned the rules of the dead. We learned who in the city would give us food for a story and who would give us stories for food. We learned to be selective about mercy.
We were a small thing, a new committee of survivors who argued late into nights about whether to save the library or the garden and whether a school could ever be a home again.
"Will you lead us?" someone asked one night. I thought about how once, when the world had paper rules and a bell, I had been the one who disappeared. I thought of my grandmother making scarves and of Bethany's last scream. I thought of being pushed and of crawling back again.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I'll be a ruler of dust."
"You can't be the queen of zombies," Jadyn said, and smiled because she was still stubbornly kind.
"No," I said. "But I can be a new kind of leader."
We argued about the name. Queen sounded too theatrical. Leader sounded bureaucratic. We settled on "keeper" and laughed like people learning to speak a new word.
The night that followed was quiet except for the distant moans of the dead. The sun came up on a school that had been remade by noise and blood and apology. People returned to classrooms with new eyes and new guilt. They wore their shame as a badge or a burden, depending on what they had once valued more.
I had a new power — not the kind I had felt in my blood, but the kind that comes from letting the world see what you are willing to do and what you refuse to tolerate.
At dawn, I stood on the roof of the main building with Jadyn beside me. The city looked like a broken toy: streets empty, cars like forgotten boxes. The dead roamed like weather. Behind us, the school hummed with the small noises of people learning to live.
"Do you ever fear losing yourself?" Jadyn asked.
"Every day," I said. "But I also know the shape of my heart now. It is not soft at the edges."
"Do you regret it?" she asked.
I thought of my grandmother's scarf, the small knitting of life that had been thrown away, and I thought of the many small cruelties that had mounted until there was an avalanche.
"No," I said.
Below, the courtyard was full of people and fires and food and the bitter, busy work of living. A group of survivors had turned a gazebo into a kitchen. Someone had chalked "Remember" on the pavement. The dead made their music on the far edge of hearing. We listened and learned.
"One day," Jadyn said, looking at my hands, "people will write songs about you."
"Let them," I said. "But make sure they remember the way they watched when it was time to stand."
She laughed, then suddenly looked shy.
"You smiled today," she said.
I felt something like old light inside me. It was a small heat. "I felt like smiling," I admitted.
"You're not a monster," she said.
"I'm not the girl I was," I said. "I won't go back to that person."
We held the photograph of my grandmother between us like a guide. The scarf had been stitched into a new flag and tied to a pole near the kitchen. It fluttered like a promise.
"New world?" Jadyn asked.
"New rules," I said. "We eat together. We decide together. We punish together. We remember together."
Later, when people asked me if I had been lonely, I would think of the screams and the fluorescent light and the way the dead had turned on those who had turned on me, and I would answer with the truth.
I did what I had to do.
I kept my power. I kept my life. I kept my people.
And when night fell and the dead cried their long cries, I would climb to the roof, make the sound they made, and they would answer me back — not to kill me but to recognize me. Their song was mine now, and I wore it like armor.
"Do you want to be a queen?" Jadyn would ask sometimes. "Do you want to rule?"
"No," I said. "I want only this: that when people remember, they don't forget the cost."
That's how we began: not with a crown, but with a photo and a scarf and a promise. We were small, but we were alive. We learned the new rules like children learn numbers. We learned that you could be kind and you could be feared and sometimes, if you were honest, the two could be the same thing.
And on the nights when the cold reaches in and the world looks like nothing more than teeth and open sky, I shout the old dead howl into the dark and wait. The sound comes back and I know the school still remembers me.
The End
— Thank you for reading —