The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell (13 page)

BOOK: The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell
8.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 5:03 p.m.

Elaine Oldenburg woke to the soft, brittle sound of children crying all around her. The back of her skull felt like it had been split open and then glued back together by careless surgeons, and when she forced herself—slowly, so slowly—to sit up, bits of tile and shattered roof dug into her hips and side. Her back ached from the impact. At least nothing felt like it was broken; she had landed incredibly well, considering the circumstances. And at least she hadn't landed on any of the children.

The children! She looked frantically from side to side, only wincing a little at the pain the motion sent lancing through her head. Students littered the floor to either side of her, some of them sitting up and hugging themselves as they cried, others still flat on their backs, unmoving. Worst of all, the classroom door was open. Depending on how much noise they had made as they fell…

“Miss Oldenburg?”

Scott's voice was barely above a whisper. Elaine looked up, and saw his pale, worried face peeking over the edge of the hole in the ceiling. The distance between them seemed insurmountable, and made it even more miraculous that she had fallen as far as she had without injuring herself. “Scott, move away from the edge,” she said, keeping her voice as low as she dared. “You don't want to fall.”

“Miss Oldenburg, how are we supposed to get
down
?”

Elaine hesitated before she said, “You're not. It's not safe down here. I want you to go around the hole. Keep heading for the wall. You'll find a hatch there. Open it, and slide down the chute on the other side.”

“But—”

“If you do it, you'll come out on the lawn. You'll get
out
, Scott. Take whoever's still up there with you, and get out.” Elaine's expression hardened marginally. “You owe them.”

And Scott—who knew the part he might have played in today's events, even if he didn't fully understand it yet, and wouldn't for years—nodded. “Okay. Will we see you outside?”

“Yes,” lied Elaine. “You will.”

His head vanished from the edge of the hole. Elaine watched for a few seconds to be sure that he wasn't going to come back. Then she turned her attention to the children around her, the ones who were still in her care…the ones who had fallen.

Not all of them had survived. Mikey was nearby, his eyes open and his head twisted hard to the side. He was never going to log back onto his treasured Quest Realm account. Distantly, that hurt her more than the reality of his death. Elaine knew she was separating from the situation, turning it into something abstract and endurable, and she let it happen, because
endurable
was what she needed. It was what her students needed.

A low moan drifted through the open classroom door. Elaine stiffened. “Quiet!” she hissed, pressing herself lower to the floor in an effort to keep from being seen by anyone—anything—that shuffled by in the hall. “Everyone, quiet.”

Most of the students obeyed, freezing as their own terror overrode their fear. One, a kindergartener whose corduroy pants had gone virtually black with blood, kept sobbing. It was a small, tinny sound, but that would be enough; any infected person who was still roving the school would be able to home in on it like a bloodhound. Elaine scooted closer to the student.

“Please, sweetie, please, you have to be quiet,” she whispered.

The little boy looked at her with wide, tear-filled eyes, and continued to sob. It had all been too much, the fear, the pain: he couldn't stop, no matter how much he wanted to do as he was told.

“Please,” she whispered again. This time he shook his head. It was a tiny gesture, accompanied by an even louder sob. His pupils almost obscured his irises, dilated by shock.

Biting her lip, Elaine let herself really
look
at the boy's leg for the first time. The shape of it was off, somehow, like the bones no longer formed the straight lines they were supposed to. There was a lot of blood, not only soaking into the fabric, but pooling on the tile floor. The moaning from the hall was getting louder, and his sobs weren't stopping. They weren't going to, not unless he bled out, and they didn't have time to wait.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, and put her hands on either side of his head, like she'd been shown in her self-defense classes, the ones that were supposed to let you keep fighting even after you'd run out of ammunition. All her lessons had focused on two things: minimizing blood splatter and preventing reanimation. It was very clinical. She'd been a very good student.

She was distancing again. It was better than the alternatives, which were all very close and very immediate. No matter how much she tried, she couldn't distance herself enough. When she thought about it later—which she would do as little as she possibly could, because some things simply don't bear thinking about—she would always know what sanity sounded like when it finally broke. It would sound like the small, delicate bones of a kindergartener's neck, snapping.

The other children didn't make a sound as she carefully eased her hands away from the boy's neck, leaving him to lay limply, staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes. She pressed a finger to her lips and made a gesture with her free hand, indicating that they should get as low to the floor as possible. Shock, or maybe terror, made them follow her directions. She flattened herself down with them, and waited.

The moan from the hall came again, louder still. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something shuffle past the open door. Then something else, and something else, until a stream of infected bodies was shambling past, claiming the school eternally as their own. Elaine stayed flat against the floor, praying silently that none of her charges would panic and start to scream, praying that the infected would shamble on past them.

If there had been fewer dead bodies in the school, less blood and offal scattered about, things might have gone very differently. But the infected had stopped trying to turn the students they came across, and had started using the bodies to satisfy their insatiable hunger instead. When the lead members of the pack smelled the blood and other bodily fluids in the classroom, they kept going, assuming that there was nothing through that door worth finding. In a matter of minutes, the only sound was the soft shuffle of feet moving away down the hall, leaving Elaine Oldenburg and her surviving students behind.

The children didn't move. Tears rolled silently down their cheeks, but their tiny bodies were frozen with fear. Normally, Elaine would have tried to coax them out of their terror, encouraging them to let it go and return to her. For the moment, however, their inability to move was exactly what she needed. She pushed herself away from the floor, remaining hunched over to make herself look small, and cautiously inched across the classroom toward the open door. She was almost there when something moaned in the hall outside. She didn't think: she just reacted, flinging herself to the side and toward the shelter of the teacher's desk, blocking her view of the door—and the door's view of her.

She was focusing so hard on landing without making a sound that it took her a moment to realize that there was someone behind the desk with her. Elaine clapped a hand over her mouth to keep her gasp from escaping, and stared into the blank, empty eyes of one of the fourth-grade teachers, a gentle, pleasant man named Mr. Kapur. He wouldn't be leading his class on his annual butterfly-spotting expedition this spring: his throat had been ripped neatly out, and chunks of flesh were missing from his arms and shoulders. His attackers had kindly spared his face, making him all too recognizable.

Elaine swallowed several times in an effort to keep herself from vomiting, and listened as the straggling moaner shuffled by in the hall. All the while, Mr. Kapur stared at her, seeming almost reproachful in his blankness. This was her fault, his empty eyes implied. She should have watched her students more carefully; she should have seen that Scott was bleeding, and called for an immediate lockdown of the blacktop. That she hadn't done so only proved that whatever came next, she deserved it. But he hadn't, and neither had the children. This was all on her.

Silence reigned once more. As quickly as she dared, Elaine pushed herself away from the body of Mr. Kapur and stood unsteadily, too scared and off balance to trust herself in a crouch. She would fall over if she tried to keep herself low to the ground, and then the zombies would surely return to finish what they had started. How many more bodies were strewn around the classroom, she didn't know, and didn't want to know. The hole in the roof was starting to seem well-placed to her. They could have all landed on the desks. They could have landed in a pile of bodies. Instead, most of them had landed on the floor, which, while unforgiving, was at least unobstructed.

Part of her wanted to protest that a pile of bodies would have been softer, that maybe one of Ms. Teeter's students who was now dead would still be alive if they had fallen through a slightly different spot, but she forced that part firmly aside. If she allowed herself to think about the dead kindergartener, she would have to think about
how
the boy had died, and she couldn't do that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Still cautious, moving as slowly as she could, Elaine picked her way along the wall behind the desk to the supply cabinet, and tried the door. It was locked. A thin mewl of dismay escaped her lips before she could stop it. Of
course
it was locked. The lower grades could be mostly trusted—they couldn't reach the higher shelves, where the bleach and ammunition was stored—but once students reached amplification size, it was standard policy to lock the closet doors. Mr. Kapur might have the key, or it might have been lost somewhere in the chaos that had overtaken his classroom. The only way she'd know was by searching his corpse.

Elaine Oldenburg was a woman on the verge of breaking. She had been pushed further and harder than she had ever imagined possible, and it took everything she had left to turn and walk back to the body of her colleague. Carefully, she knelt down and searched through his pockets. There were no keys. She bit her lip almost hard enough to draw blood as she straightened up and began easing his desk drawers open. The keys had to be here somewhere. Falling was bad, yes, but being on the ground with the infected was even worse. If she found the keys, she could get them into the closet; get them back into the crawl space. They could still get out of this death trap. They could still—

She had been so focused on what she was doing that she had forgotten one very important part of her situation: the children, whose shock was wearing off, and not all of whom were accustomed to following her orders. Three of the surviving kindergarteners scrambled to their feet, almost as if they were executing a prearranged plan, and sprinted for the door, ignoring their surroundings as they gave in to the burning need to be
away
.
Away
was the only thing that mattered. Not the muffled cries of their classmates, not the teacher who whirled, staring, at the sound of their footsteps on the floor:
away
was everything.

In the blink of an eye, the three kindergarteners were out of the classroom and running down the hall, unsupervised, seemingly unaware of the dangers that awaited them. Elaine only had a moment to reach a decision. Keep looking for the keys, or run after the children?

There was a third option, and terrible as it was, it seemed like the only one worth taking. She stepped out from behind the desk, beckoning the children who had not run to come and stand around her. Then she waited.

She didn't have to wait for long. The three children had run after what they presumed to be the sound of rescue, and was actually the sound of their destruction. The screams started less than half a minute after they left the room. Elaine grabbed the hands of the two nearest children, hissed, “No matter what,
do not make a sound
,” and ran. The students, trained to obedience and lines, and motivated by their fear, followed her.

The screams from the far end of the hall were still echoing as Elaine and her students raced along, skidding around a corner and throwing themselves into the unknown. Classroom doors gaped at them like toothless, broken mouths, granting them glimpses of the horrors within. Elaine scanned the walls as well as she could without slowing down, looking for construction paper decorations and cubbyholes. They needed a kindergarten, or a first-grade or even a second-grade class; someplace where the students would have been too small to reanimate and the closets would have been left unlocked. Something where she wouldn't have to rummage through a dead man's pockets before she boosted her students to safety.

Then she whirled around a corner and found herself looking down the barrel of a shotgun, held in the shaking, blood-covered hands of the school's night janitor. Guy should have been gone hours since, but here he was, still in his overalls and janitor's cap, with blood soaked so deeply into the fabric that it could almost be excused as an unusual sort of dye. Only the still-blue fabric around his collar betrayed just how much blood had been spilled, and how guaranteed his amplification had become.

“Guy,” she gasped. The screams from behind them had stopped. That wasn't a good thing. It meant that the infected were no longer preoccupied with their latest kill, and would be looking for something else to hunt—soon. She couldn't stand here in the open with her remaining children. That would be suicide. “I didn't know you were still here.”

“Miss Oldenburg.” The janitor's voice was unsteady, shaking like his hands. At least his eyes were clear, displaying none of the pupillary dilation that would signal final amplification. “You shouldn't be in the halls. The alarm—”

“—has been ringing for hours. Guy, we need to go past you. Please, let us go past you.”

Slowly, he frowned, looking puzzled. Elaine's heart gave a lurch. If he was too far gone to understand speech, she didn't know what she was going to do. Amplification changed the way a person's thoughts worked, gumming them up until they couldn't move quickly, or sometimes at all. It was part of the process that reduced a living, thinking human being to a mechanism for spreading the Kellis-Amberlee virus more effectively. Since it happened differently with every victim, spreading through their bodies and minds at varying rates, there was no real way of knowing whether Guy had minutes or hours left before he started trying to kill them all.

BOOK: The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell
8.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

His Ancient Heart by M. R. Forbes
You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe
The Silent Girls by Eric Rickstad
What a Demon Wants by Kathy Love
All In by Gabra Zackman
Haunting the Night by Purnhagen, Mara