The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell (4 page)

The fourth graders poured out onto the blacktop, following a somewhat different pattern than their first-grade schoolmates. They sauntered, some of them looking intentionally relaxed, like they weren't bothered at all by being outdoors. A few went to lounge on the play equipment—not using it, of course, since that would have been
so
uncool, but sitting on it, dangling their feet off the edges of it, and pretending as hard as they could that they were still comfortable without a ceiling above their heads. A few of the girls wandered over to the grass and sat down, choosing bravery in order to get the privacy they so desperately craved.

There were twelve students in the class. None of them would survive to the end of the school day. But they didn't know that, not then, not with the fresh, cool air filling their lungs and the sky glimmering blue through the cracks in the clouds. They went about their business like this wasn't the last day of their lives. For Nathan Patterson and Joseph Lee, this meant waiting until their teacher was distracted and then ducking into the space beneath the slide, where they could browse the contents of Joseph's phone in peace. Joseph was a whiz with computers—there were already three private high schools jockeying for him to come to them, once he graduated from middle school—and he had been able to bypass the parental controls installed by his father with an ease that approached unreal. As a consequence, he was the only kid in class whose data plan came with all the pornography the Internet had to offer.

Joseph and Nathan sat down under the slide, staring wide-eyed at the various naked women, all of them striking poses that looked uncomfortable but somehow enticing, like there was an important component sitting just outside of their reach.

“Dude, look at her
boobs
,” said Nathan.

“I'm looking,” confirmed Joseph. He was less enthralled by his companion: after all, the magical fountain of breasts and butts and other parts went home with him at night, where he could look until his eyes were hot and his mouth was dry. He tried to have fresh things every day, though, just to keep Nathan from getting too jealous. So far, Nate—who was a good guy, if a little slow—hadn't realized just how inequitable their friendship was. Joseph didn't want to start getting asked to jailbreak his friends' phones. It would begin with one person, but it never stayed that way, and if the teacher found out…

Joseph didn't have to be a genius to know what the consequences of unlocking the phones of everyone in class would be. Being a genius just made the images clearer and harder to ignore. He didn't like getting in trouble. This would be trouble on a
nuclear
scale.

There was a certain irony that neither boy would have appreciated, had it been pointed out to them then or later. Because Joseph Lee didn't want to get in trouble, he and Nathan hid what they were doing from their teacher. Because Scott Ribar hadn't wanted to get in trouble, he had hidden his injury from his teacher, and from the guards who performed his blood test at the school gates. Had school security known that a student had been bleeding on the playground, they would have closed it down for the rest of the day, bringing out the canisters of bleach and the black lights and the bloodstain detection equipment. The fourth grade would have missed their recess. Everyone would have missed recess the next day. But no one would have been hurt.

Scott Ribar was too small to amplify, and had little to fear from biological contamination. He could have touched infected blood a hundred times and never risked anything more than a lecture and a thorough decontamination. That didn't mean the Kellis-Amberlee virus had spared him. It lived all throughout his body, protecting him from the little trials that had haunted childhoods for a thousand years. He had never suffered from a cold, he had never wasted a beautiful day throwing up or sniffling and being forbidden to go outside. Thanks to Kellis-Amberlee and his yearly flu shots, he had never been really sick a day in his life.

But Kellis-Amberlee was patient. It knew, in its slow, virological way, that one day Scott would become a viable host, and so it continued to replicate inside his body…right up until the moment when he bled on the ground near the slide. Then, the blood that was no longer truly a part of Scott began to change. Kellis-Amberlee was designed to have two states: one active, one inert. Separated from the electrical currents that kept it calm and inactive, the Kellis-Amberlee in Scott's blood had become active and infectious. The area under the slide was a hot zone, ready to infect anyone who came into contact with it.

The bell rang. Nathan and Joseph looked up. Nathan scowled and thrust the phone at Joseph, taking the hand he'd been using to brace himself and wiping it harshly across his mouth before he said, “That's bull. We should get more time than this.”

“Yeah,” agreed Joseph, slipping the phone back into his pocket as he stood. Then he offered Nathan his hand. Nathan scowled at it for a moment, still upset by the loss of the phone. Finally, he took it and allowed Joseph to pull him to his feet.

Nathan's palm was moist, and gritty with gravel from the blacktop. Joseph resisted the urge to wipe his hand clean on the seat of his pants. He didn't want to pick a fight. He could always wash his hands later—although even as he had the thought he knew he wouldn't go through with the action. He never did. “Washing your hands later” was for sissies and babies and people who had touched poop, not sweaty palms. Sweaty palms were part of becoming a man, and there was nothing wrong with that.

The pair emerged from under the slide, walking as casually as was possible, and joined the line preparing to be processed back into the school. Their teacher, Mr. O'Toole, was coming up on retirement age; he looked at them indulgently, having some small idea of what two boys who chose to hide during recess were likely to be discussing. He didn't see the harm in it, not really. Biology had been messed up a bit by Kellis-Amberlee, but he hadn't survived the Rising and become a teacher to say that the natural order of things was canceled forever. That meant allowing for a bit of good, old-fashioned pubescent naughtiness.

Nathan Patterson felt perfectly fine as he approached the airlock. The virus he had wiped across his lips was still hanging there, untasted, waiting for its opportunity to travel one scant inch further and invade the sanctity of his skin. His blood test came back clean, and why shouldn't it? He hadn't been exposed yet, not really. Not to anything except the Kellis-Amberlee already inside his body and patiently waiting for its chance to change.

As he stepped through the door into the hall he remembered the woman on Joseph's phone, the one with her back arched and her eyes slanted toward the camera, like she was remembering something secret. He licked his lips. The airlock closed behind him, and the guards recorded another successful recess, no casualties, no infections.

Those would come later.

Elaine Oldenburg's class was deeply involved in reviewing their vocabulary lists when the windows locked down.

It was a small sound, intentionally calibrated to cause as little dismay or panic as possible: just a clunk from the base of the window as the small bolts that usually hung suspended above the metal frame suddenly descended, forming an effectively unbreakable seal. Elaine looked up, eyes widening briefly. That was the only sign of surprise that she allowed herself to show. For a teacher, keeping her students from panicking always had to be her top priority. If she betrayed any dismay over the situation, they would pick it up, and she would risk losing control. That was something she couldn't afford.

“Everyone, heads down and read quietly,” she said, pushing away from her desk. “I need to make a quick call to the office.”

The students grumbled but did as they were told. Those who sat close enough to the window to have heard the locks deploy assumed that it was a drill; why else would their desks still be open? They bent their heads like all the others, pulling out their readers and focusing on the text.

Elaine Oldenburg walked briskly to the corner where the phone hung, old-fashioned and obscurely menacing in this world of cell phones and wireless headsets. The school phone wouldn't have looked out of place twenty years ago, with its big, heavy buttons and curly brown cord. She plucked the receiver off the wall and brought it to her ear.

She didn't need to dial. The school's basic emergency broadcast was already playing, and she paled as it washed over her: “—repeat, do not panic. We are investigating the reported outbreak. Please remain in your classrooms. Please do not allow any students to leave the classroom. Please do not inform the students that there is a problem. We repeat, do not panic. We are investigating—”

Elaine carefully set the phone back in its cradle and turned to look around the room at her students. They were reading, or at least pretending to read; some of them were no doubt just staring at the pages, wishing that the confusing jumble of numbers and letters would resolve itself into words. All of her students were reading at the required grade level, but it was harder for some than it was for others. Just like it had always been.
The Rising couldn't change everything, I suppose
, she thought, and reddened a little, annoyed by her own flippancy. There was an outbreak on school grounds, or at least there might be. That was what she should have been thinking about, not how well her students were or were not reading.

Keeping her movement as calm and casual as possible, she walked over to the door and tried the knob. To her surprise, it turned easily, and the door—designed to open from the inside and not the outside, no matter how hard the knob was twisted—came open when she tugged. She took a deep breath before sticking her head out into the hall, looking both ways for signs that anything was wrong.

The airlock at the end of the hall was deserted, the guards no doubt elsewhere on campus, investigating the reported outbreak. The blacktop was a charcoal blur through the thick safety glass, but she saw no movement there; if there had been a class at recess when the infection was detected, they had already been recalled and returned to the safety of their classroom.

Well. The desks weren't locked, and the door wasn't locked; whatever was going on, it couldn't be all that bad. Elaine Oldenburg pulled her head back inside and closed the door, turning to find herself watched by seventeen pairs of solemn, staring eyes. She forced herself to smile. It felt artificial, but she had practiced the expression over and over, until she knew that it would seem real to anyone viewing it from outside. That was part of her job. She was a teacher. She had to reassure her students.

“They're testing the locks,” she lied smoothly. “I was just following instructions and making sure that all the doors were correctly shut.”

Sharon put her hand up. “Miss Oldenburg, I need to go to the bathroom,” she said. A few of the other students snickered. Sharon, who was remarkably good at ignoring teasing over things that everyone did—had, in fact, done an irritated book presentation on
Everybody Poops
after some of the boys teased her for being a girl who went to the potty—ignored them, focusing on her teacher.

“I'm sorry, Sharon, but the bathrooms are off-limits right now,” said Elaine apologetically. “It's not an emergency, is it?”

Sharon's cheeks reddened, and she lowered her hand. “No, Miss Oldenburg.” An emergency—a real emergency—during a lockdown would mean using the bucket in the supply cabinet. Sharon might be bold about her need to occasionally leave the room, but no first grader ever was going to be happy about peeing in a bucket with only a thin door between them and their classmates.

“All right,” said Elaine. “They should end the test soon, and when they do, we'll be able to go to the bathroom. Anyone who needs to.” She walked back over to her desk, taking her usual place against the front of it, wishing that she dared to open the top drawer and withdraw her service pistol. She didn't like wearing it around the students most of the time, and she wasn't allowed to have it out when there wasn't an emergency: teachers weren't allowed to carry openly except during load-in and load-out until fifth grade, when it was assumed that their students were both a potential danger and smart enough not to grab for a loaded weapon. But oh, she wanted it. With an unspecified potential outbreak somewhere on campus, and seventeen little souls trusting her to keep them safe, she wanted it more than words could say.