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You rush through the school lobby and locate the Tanya Milford Memorial Library. Double wooden doors are cracked and unhinged, and in the shallow doorway, a human corpse lies hacked and ravaged, his face torn off. Flies swirl around the body, and the smell is ripe and rotten. Blood covers the floor from wall to wall, and you have to step over it to enter the library.

"Reminds me of the slaughterhouse," Woody says. "First time I visited my Uncle Buford's slaughterhouse, I was nine years old. Had to wear my pa's boots, which reached up to my thighs. All that muck and bits dirtied them up good. I went in there and started gaggin', and it only got worse the deeper I went. Never shook that smell or the sight of what those butchers were doin' in there."

You step into the front of the library amid trash and torn books, and a sizable checkout desk sits on your right adorned with the body of a young girl. Her body is ripped open to expose her spinal cord. A pencil sticks out of her eye, which must be preventing her from rising as the undead.

Woody turns away from the girl, lifts a flask from his belt, and takes a quick swig. When he sees you watching him, he moves the metal container to your hands, and you take a sip of lukewarm water. You really wish the clear liquid was vodka.

A deep, animal growl echoes through the library, and you duck behind the checkout desk. Peeking over it, you spot a pair of zombies staggering past a display case of periodicals. This shifts your focus on the rest of the library and its layout. A long central staircase sits on the far end leading to a second-floor balcony. Between you and the staircase are rows of tall bookcases stretching eight to ten feet high. Along the right and left sides, offices and reading rooms line the walls.

You hear random murmuring and screeches made by infected students other than these two roamers past the newspapers. You scan the room and spot a few in the Young Adult Sci-Fi section and several more near the Foreign Languages aisle. With all of the furniture and obstacles, you might be able to reach the second floor before the zombies can react and attack. With so much distance still needed to reach Jaime, the risk could be worth it. Of course, you can't help your friend if you're dead, and sneaking through the library might be the best approach. As you consider your approach, you gaze across from the desk at an oversized bookshelf of new arrivals rising half the distance to the second-floor balcony. Above it hangs a suspended platform, a flat wooden surface rigged with pulleys and ropes. Beside it hangs a banner for a book fair fundraiser. If you can figure out how to use the contraption, it might be possible to climb the bookshelf and use the suspended platform to ascend to the next floor. However, if you fail to make it work, you'll lose precious time and might make noise that draws the undead.

Given the various choices, you