“Where’s Ms. Teeter?” asked a small voice.
Dammit, I don’t know their names, thought Miss Oldenburg, and said, “She’s going to stay in the classroom and make some noises to confuse the people who are trying to find us. She wants to help us win. We should let her help us, and that means we should be just as quiet as quiet can be, okay? Everyone, cover your mouth and keep your eyes closed, and let’s be quiet!”
The students, blessedly, did as they were told. That sort of obedience might have been odd before the Rising, but these were the children of Kellis-Amberlee: they had learned, sometimes directly, sometimes through osmosis, that when adults told them to do strange but seemingly harmless things, it was best to listen. Even if they didn’t understand that those strange things could easily be matters of life or death, they knew that they mattered to the adults, and that failure to obey could come with hefty consequences.
Outside the closet, Ms. Teeter had been waiting for the sound of voices and whispering to stop. She knew that the infected used sound to hunt when they couldn’t use sight. Calmly, she walked to the “record player”—a specially designed mount for her MP3 player, which slotted neatly into the front—and turned up the volume until it couldn’t go any louder. That wouldn’t block the gunshots entirely, she knew, but it might take the edge off. It would be better if they didn’t have to hear her die.
The hammering on the door was getting steadier. Something must have attracted them. It had been long enough since Miss Oldenburg and her students arrived that Ms. Teeter couldn’t quite bring herself to blame the other teacher, convenient as it would have been. Sometimes things just happened.
Calmly, she leaned against the edge of the desk and pointed her gun at the door. When the hammering eventually tore it from its hinges and sent it crashing to the floor, she began to fire. She only had six bullets, and she wasn’t practiced enough to get a head shot every time. Of the swarm of teacher’s aides, security staff, and teachers that shoved into her room, only three went down and didn’t get back up.
Only when the chamber clicked empty did she realize that she should have kept a bullet back for herself. She swore that she wasn’t going to scream.
It was a promise she did not keep. But in the end, who could really blame her?
* * *
>> AKWONG: THIS IS THE WORST THING I HAVE EVER WRITTEN.
>> MGOWDA: WORST IN THE SENSE OF “POORLY DONE,” OR THE SENSE OF “WHY AM I FORCING MYSELF TO RECORD THESE THINGS”?
>> AKWONG: THE SECOND.
>> MGOWDA: GOOD. THAT MEANS YOU’RE LIVING UP TO GEORGIA’S STANDARDS. YOU’RE TELLING THE TRUTH.
>> AKWONG: DOES THE TRUTH ALWAYS HAVE TO HURT THIS MUCH?
>> MGOWDA: SOMETIMES I THINK THAT’S THE ONLY WAY WE EVER REALLY KNOW IT’S TRUE.
—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044
* * *
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 4:25 p.m.
The screams cut through the closet door like knives. Several of the children whimpered, and Miss Oldenburg hurried to hush them, groping blindly through the dark to pat heads and stroke shoulders in a vain effort to lend comfort where there could be none. In the end, perhaps the true miracle of the day was that none of the children began to scream. A single scream would have spelled the end of every single soul crammed into that too-small supply closet: they were trapped, with no easy means of escape, and the classroom on the other side of the door was alive with the infected.
Ms. Teeter did not die quickly, but neither did she keep screaming after the initial pain had passed. She moved quickly into the dark, agonizing place where only death can bring salvation, and once there, she quickly passed away. The mob—which included several teachers, larger students, and teacher’s aides—did not need to expand, and so they ripped her limb from limb and feasted on her remains, creating a mess that was morbidly akin to the finger paintings that her students had been doing for the duration of her career.
When Ms. Teeter was no longer alive to scream and squirm, and the easy pickings had been stripped from her bones, the mob moved on. It wasn’t an instantaneous process; each of them moved at their own speed and with their own agendas now that there was no hunt to unify them. Some turned and walked back out into the hall almost as if they had rejoined the living, moving quickly and with purpose. Others shambled, limping on broken ankles or clutching at wounds that would have been fatal, were it not for the increased clotting factor that accompanied Kellis-Amberlee.
In the closet, Elaine Oldenburg pressed her ear against the door and held her breath, straining to hear every motion from the classroom outside. The students sniffled and shifted around her, but all of them were keeping quiet thus far. She had never been more proud of her class. She could hear them shushing the kindergarteners, helping the younger children endure their seemingly senseless time in the dark.
Finally, when several minutes had gone by without any sounds loud enough to be heard over the still-blasting MP3 player, Elaine dared to feel around on the wall until she found the light switch. “Everyone, cover your eyes,” she whispered, trusting the relative quiet to magnify her words. Then she turned the lights on.
The glow revealed shelves packed tight with tiny bodies, and a floor crammed full of the same. Most of them were hugging one or more of their classmates; only a few had climbed as far as the third or fourth shelves and were huddled there, isolated and afraid. Many of them were crying. She looked at them all, and they all looked to her, waiting for her to tell them what they should do next. Even the kindergarteners had an expression of painfully absolute trust in their eyes, like they knew that she would steer them safely through whatever dangers were ahead of them. She was their teacher. Of course she would know what to do.
Try telling that to Sharon and Emily, she thought bitterly. Outwardly, she just smiled, trying to look as encouraging as possible, and said quietly, “We’re going to keep being very still, and very silent, all right?”
“Where’s Ms. Teeter?” asked one of the kindergarteners. He didn’t bother to keep his voice down. Elaine winced, her hand starting to twitch upward as if to slap the volume out of him. Then she froze, recognizing the impulse for what it was and rejecting it in the same instant. She couldn’t hit a child, no matter how much that child was endangering them. She just couldn’t.
“Ms. Teeter had to stay out in the classroom to make sure that we could be safe,” she said, forcing her voice to remain level. “Part of being safe is being very, very quiet right now. I need you to be very, very quiet. All right? Raise your hands if you understand.”
One by one, all of the students raised their hands—even the boy who had spoken before, although he still looked dubious, like he wasn’t sure that this intruder who had somehow replaced his teacher could possibly have their best interests at heart.
Elaine Oldenburg wasn’t completely sure herself, but she was at least going to try. She turned in a slow circle, careful not to kick or step on any of the children surrounding her, and considered the closet. It was small, tight, and windowless; she couldn’t see the walls for the shelves, which had been bolted in place, probably due to some pre-Rising safety regulation or other. Kellis-Amberlee getting out of the lab hadn’t done away with the need for earthquake compliance or childproofing in the lower grades; it had just added another level of complexity to the whole situation. She tilted her head back. The ceiling was reasonably low, only a foot or so above the highest shelf, and covered with the large square tiles that made up most of the classroom ceilings. It was easy to take down and replace the individual tiles.
That was what she had to count on. “All right, everyone. I want you to stay very still while I check on something.” The students continued to watch her silently as she worked her way through the press of bodies to the nearest shelf. She gave it a small, experimental shake, and determined that the bolts would hold. With this accomplished, she began to climb.
Being
a first-grade teacher meant a certain amount of exertion was unavoidable. Students would always need to be fished down from desks or off of the monkey bars at the end of recess; that was just the nature of childhood. Shelf by shelf, Elaine pulled herself higher, until finally, she could reach up and push against the first of the ceiling tiles. It resisted. She pushed again, harder, and felt it shift. A thin trickle of dust dribbled down, running along the side of her face and dirtying her hair. She ignored that as she gave the tile a third push, even harder this time.
It lifted entirely out of its setting. Elaine swallowed the cheer that threatened to burst from her throat. Instead, she nudged the tile to the side, reached up, and pulled herself up through the opening she had created.
The school had been constructed with a drop ceiling, allowing for attic storage and additional insulation in the classrooms. That was the idea, anyway. Then the Rising had come, and the funds for finishing the roof area had been channeled into security and better isolated systems. The school was heated and cooled by the same centralized controls, and the space above the tiles had never been filled with fiberglass foam, leaving it empty and perfect for her needs. The tiles creaked a little beneath her, but seemed capable of holding her weight, as long as she was careful to keep it distributed over several of them at once. Her students were all smaller than she was—if she could safely be in this space, so could they. There was even light up here, motion activated and installed for reasons she couldn’t fathom and honestly didn’t care about. She wouldn’t be trying to coerce a group of children into a dark, unknown space. They would be having an adventure.
There was still a chance.
Elaine was smiling as she climbed back down from the ceiling. The students—who had been inching ever closer to panic after her disappearance—visibly relaxed when she stepped off the bottom shelf and onto the floor. A few of them even clapped their hands, the normally small sounds seeming impossibly loud in the enclosed space. Elaine didn’t chastise them. She had more important things to take care of.
“All right, everyone, we’re going to have an adventure,” she said. She smiled brightly, trying to conceal her own nerves behind an expression of serene good cheer. If she started to crack, she would take the children with her, and they would all die. “Who here has wondered about what’s above the ceiling tiles?”
Almost every hand in the room went up. They were, after all, still children, and even in a bad situation, they were canny enough to recognize the opportunity to explore a normally forbidden place when it was offered to them. The hands that hadn’t been raised belonged mostly to the smallest children—and, Elaine was dismayed to realize, to Brian and Scott, both of whom were huddled miserably on single shelves, with no other children to keep them company.
She would have to deal with that problem before it got any worse. For the moment, however, her priority was getting these kids out of harm’s way. “All right, I need two class monitors. Who wants to volunteer?” Again, a sea of hands presented itself. She placed a finger on her chin, looking thoughtful, and finally said, “Jenna and Mikey, you’re going to be our monitors. Here’s what you’re going to do…”
The next several minutes were spent arranging a human chain, with Jenna at the bottom boosting students up the shelves, and Mikey at the top, pulling them through the hole in the ceiling. She felt awkward sending them into the crawl space without her—she should have been supervising them at all steps, not letting them out of her sight during an actual outbreak—but there were matters she needed to take care of on the ground level.
Once half the students had gone up the shelves, leaving her with space to maneuver, she crossed the closet to Brian and Scott, who were stacked, one above the other, on an otherwise empty bookshelf. She crouched down, putting herself on a level with Brian and just above Scott. “I know this is hard,” she said quietly, “but we have to keep moving. It’s the only way we’re going to keep everybody safe. Don’t you want to be safe?”
“I want to go home,” whispered Brian, his words almost drowned out by the sound of feet scuffling on shelves and hands fumbling for purchase. He didn’t look up or let go of his knees, which he was hugging in a death grip against his chest.
Her heart went out to him, it truly did, but she didn’t have time to be as patient as he needed her to be. “This is how you get to go home,” she said, injecting a trace of steel into her tone. “If you want to leave this closet, you need to climb. You need to do what I say.”
“And then I can go home?”
Elaine Oldenburg was becoming increasingly sure that none of them were going to be leaving the campus ever again. No matter what she did, it wasn’t going to be enough, and they were all going to die. That didn’t stop her from nodding firmly as she said, “Yes. Then you can go home. But you have to move, Brian. You, too, Scott. We can’t stay here any longer. It’s time for us to go.”
The two boys were silent for a moment, making her wonder if she was going to need to put hands on them and physically make them move. If it came to that, she wasn’t sure she could put her hands on Scott. He had been a walking biohazard not very long before. He might still be infectious, on some level. Even if she was growing convinced that none of them were going to walk away, she wasn’t quite prepared for suicide. But could she bring herself to leave him behind, if it came to that?
Then, slowly, Scott came out of his curl. “Okay,” he said, and slid off the shelf. Brian followed.
Elaine heaved a sigh of relief and straightened, preparing for her own climb up the shelf and into the roof. Maybe she couldn’t save them all. Maybe she couldn’t save any of them. But she could damn well keep on trying.
* * *
Like most elementary schools in the Pacific Northwest, Evergreen Elementary maintained strict parental access protocols at the time of the outbreak. Kindergarten classes began letting out at 1:35 p.m.; parents were not allowed to line up in front of the school prior to 1:30 p.m. and were only permitted to assemble in groups of ten, corresponding with the children who had been flagged for first release. Each week brought with it a new order for student dismissal, e-mailed by the school at the end of day on Friday. Parents who were late collecting their children without first notifying the school were fined heavily, and the impacted students were rendered ineligible for first release for a period of eight weeks. It was a good system. It managed to reduce traffic and prevent gridlocks, even when multiple grades were released at the same time.
On the day of the Evergreen outbreak, it all broke down. No amount of preparation could have braced the school for a steadily arriving stream of concerned parents—parents who, once it became clear that their children would not be, could not be released, began to panic in earnest. Cars clogged the parking lot, driveway, and surrounding streets, making it more difficult for emergency personnel to get through.
The death toll of the outbreak cannot be pinned on the parents, who were after all following the rules that they had been told would protect them, and did nothing wrong. But neither can we afford to downplay the impact their growing mob mentality had on both containment and emergency response.
In the end, there is plenty of blame to go around.
—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044
* * *
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 4:52 p.m.
The tiles had, thus far, continued to hold, although they creaked alarmingly if the students held still for too long. Miss Oldenburg continued to ease her charges along, murmuring words of encouragement and cajoling when necessary. Several of the younger children were crying, and had been since they realized that they weren’t going back to their classroom. Since none of them had yet progressed to full-on bawling, she hadn’t been forced to find a way to make them stop. If they really started wailing…
Well, that was a problem she would deal with when it presented itself, and not a second more. Borrowing trouble seemed like a bad idea when they already had so much of it re
adily at hand.
They were moving toward the side of the school, at least if her vague idea of how the ceiling divisions matched up to the halls and classrooms below could be trusted. They had been forced to stop twice now by screaming from below, marking an ongoing—and ultimately futile—battle between the infected and their prey. Each time, the screaming had stopped, replaced by low, unsteady moaning. Each time, she had commanded the students with quick, unyielding gestures to be still and keep silent. They had seen enough news programs about the infected to know what those moans meant, and had frozen like so many scared rabbits until the sounds faded and Miss Oldenburg had started coaxing them forward again.
It had been a little harder to get the group moving each time. She wasn’t sure how long she could keep them under control—but then again, maybe she wouldn’t have to do it for much longer. If they reached the wall, they would reach the air filtration shaft. She remembered Guy pointing it out so proudly, like he’d been the one to design the school and install the big air pipe.
“It’s technically a weakness, on account of how it connects to the school roof without any bars or electrical fencing or whatever,” he’d said. “But zombies can’t climb, and we don’t have any dead people crawling around the attic. It’s safe as houses. If there was ever an outbreak on the property, this is where I’d go. Right here. This is what would get me out.”
As she crawled along, she wondered belatedly whether he’d already been thinking of this very scenario, and had been trying to give her a way out in case it ever came to pass. He was a smart man, and he’d always liked her. Maybe he was somewhere up here in the roof with them, crawling along, heading for his own salvation. That thought lead to another, more unnerving one: He’d said that there were no dead people crawling around in the attic, but that didn’t mean there was no one who’d been bitten and not yet amplified. Someone who was already infected could be lurking just around the next corner, waiting to lunge.