The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell (9 page)

“No,” said Sharon, looking at Emily with scorn. “There's no bathroom in the parking lot. I'd have to go in the bushes. Boys might look. I wouldn't be able to wash my hands. I'm not going to do it.”

“Oh,” said Emily, beginning to understand. The hallway would take them right past the bathrooms. If they lagged far enough back, maybe Miss Oldenburg wouldn't even notice when they slipped away. Sharon always peed superfast, especially when she really had to go. They could catch up easy, and no one would ever know that they'd snuck away.

“C'mon.” Sharon tugged Emily with her as she sidled toward the wall. The girls' bathroom was only about ten feet up ahead, so close that she could almost feel the relief already. She needed to pee, and she wasn't going to do it in a bush, and she wasn't going to do it in a bucket. If Miss Oldenburg was too nasty to understand why a good girl didn't want to use those things, why, Sharon wasn't going to let that make
her
nasty, too.

The bathroom door was just ahead, inviting them in. Swallowing her giggles, Sharon gripped Emily's hand tighter and pulled her buddy with her into the open doorway.

The bathroom had been designed to minimize unnecessary contact with surfaces, on the theory that small children weren't always the best at washing their hands. The doorway led to a small “hallway” created by extending a false wall across the actual bathroom. Everything was tiled in blue, easy to care for and clean. Sharon walked primly down the hallway, turning the corner into the bathroom proper. Then she stopped, frowning, unable to immediately process the scene in front of her.

There were five stalls in this bathroom, and five sinks on the wall across from them. All the stalls had open doors, but one of them was occupied; someone was lying on their back inside the stall furthest from the door, their feet poking out and pointed at the ceiling. That would have been strange enough, but they weren't the only person lying down inside the bathroom. One of the teacher's aides was huddled in a ball in the middle of the floor, and the tile around her was red, like someone had spilled a bottle of paint. But why would anyone be painting in the bathroom? It didn't make any sense.

Someone in the middle stall moaned.

Emily tried to pull her hand out of Sharon's, but the other girl, who she had always considered to be far braver than herself, had gone rigid with terror. Her fingers were locked on Emily's, and no matter how hard Emily pulled, she couldn't break free.

The moan came again, and then another of the teacher's aides shambled into view. He had red all around his mouth, like he'd been putting on lipstick without a mirror. His eyes were all black, swallowed up by his pupils. He rocked back and forth, head shaking almost bonelessly, before his eyes settled on the two girls.

He moaned a third time. Sharon moaned too, a small, terrified sound that nonetheless seemed to come all the way up from her toes. Something warm and wet covered her legs, and she knew that she was peeing herself. That was even nastier than a bucket or a bush, but she couldn't make it stop, and she couldn't make her feet work.

“Sharon, let go,” whimpered Emily, fighting against her friend's grip.

Sharon couldn't make herself do that, either. All she could do was stand rooted to the floor, Emily fighting against her, as the teacher's aide shambled closer.

Then there was nothing but teeth, and pain, and redness, and the dim, disappointed feeling that there should have been more than this; that
she
should have been more than this, somehow. Only she wasn't.

By the time her limp hand fell away from Emily's, it was too late. For either of them.

The screams came from behind them, high and shrill and utterly agonized. The fifteen remaining students whirled around, eyes going wide and glossy with fear. Then, unified by their terror, they did the only thing that made any sense to them: they mobbed their teacher, clustering around her skirted legs like chicks trying to nestle under the winged safety of a mother hen. Elaine did not let go of Jenna's hand. That seemed like the most important thing, somehow: that she continue to demonstrate the buddy system for her students, even as they abandoned it in favor of hiding behind her.

Her free hand shook as she drew her service weapon, releasing the safety with a flick of her thumb. Somehow, the tiny sound of the safety snapping back was what made everything real. Not the screams, not the alarm, but the reality of holding a gun in her hand, ready to fire, with students all around her.

“Miss Oldenburg, where are Sharon and Emily?” She didn't know who asked the question; the students had become an undifferentiated mass around her. The only one whose identity she was sure of was Jenna, and that only because she was holding Jenna's hand.

“Move.”

The students looked at her blankly—the ones who weren't crying or staring fixedly back toward the sound of screaming, which was beginning to taper off, losing strength and volume with every second that passed. They didn't have much time left. That was the most important thing. Safety was now a span measured in screams, and the screams were ending.

“
Move
,” she snapped, and—pulling Jenna with her—she turned and began walking rapidly toward the airlock door that had been their destination all along. There was definitely an outbreak in the school. The screams confirmed it. They needed to get off campus, and they needed to get off campus
now
, before things got any worse.

One teacher and fifteen students ran down the hall, some faster than others, but all managing to stay loosely grouped together. Terror made anything else unthinkable.

“Where's Sharon?” whimpered one of the girls, her face obscured by the bodies all around her. “Where's Emily? Why are we leaving them? We have to go back. We have to go back for them.”

“Hush, we're almost there,” said Miss Oldenburg, and kept walking. She wasn't quite running—her legs were much longer than the legs of her students, and she knew that if she broke into a full-out run, she would leave them behind. Part of her silently screamed that she should be doing exactly that: saving herself. Let the children find their own way off campus. She was at risk of amplification, and all they were at risk of was dying.

But that was exactly the reason she couldn't run. She was their teacher. She had made them a promise, however unspoken: she had promised to do her best to keep them safe, and that meant she couldn't run away and leave them, not even to save herself. She had to get them off campus. She had to get them back to their parents.

They ran past the office door. Elaine couldn't resist glancing toward it to reassure herself that it was still securely closed, and she very nearly tripped over her own feet when she saw that it was standing ajar. There was something sticky-looking on the doorknob that could have been jam or finger paint. She knew that it wasn't either.

Nothing was moving in the narrow slice of office that she could see as they ran by, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. The infected were surprisingly good at lying in wait when they weren't actively hungry, waiting until their prey was cornered or close before they made a move. Stillness could be a trap as easily as it could be safety. There was only one thing she knew for sure: that whatever had been contained in the office was contained no longer.

The airlock was so close that she could practically taste the outside air on her tongue, feel the rain falling on her face—all the little signifiers of freedom in Seattle, of being somewhere other than these closed, dimly lit hallways where the dead were walking. Miss Oldenburg moved a little faster, hauling Jenna with her, the rest of her class trailing along like so many ducklings.

They were less than three feet from the airlock door when the heavy steel gratings designed to isolate and seal the school in the event of an outbreak slammed down, blocking their view of the parking lot and reducing the light in the hallway by more than half. Miss Oldenburg skidded to a stop, staring in disbelief. The students stopped as well, some of them panting from the exertion, others in tears as they clustered around her skirts once more. They trusted her to get them through this safely.

They had no idea how wrong they were. As Elaine Oldenburg stared at the featureless steel barrier between them and safety, she thought that she was only just beginning to understand herself.

The children were sniffling. One of them had started to make little gasping noises, like an asthma attack was on the horizon. Elaine knew that if they didn't move, she was going to lose them—and she also knew that returning to the classroom would be worse than futile. There was something in the bathroom: Sharon and Emily's disappearance confirmed it. The office door was open. There was nowhere to go but forward.

In cases where the internal doors failed to lock, all individuals were to be treated as infected. That was basic policy. First graders were large enough that the media wouldn't linger overly long on their deaths—but kindergarteners? Even the most hardened of CDC field doctors wouldn't be able to authorize gassing a room full of kindergarteners without thinking twice about it.

“This way,” she said, giving Jenna's hand a squeeze, and started down the corridor to their left.

The occupants of Ms. Teeter's kindergarten class were quietly occupied with their coloring sheets, music playing to cover the sound of the alarm, when someone knocked on their door. Ms. Teeter, who had been sitting ramrod-straight at her desk with her gun hidden in her lap, got laboriously to her feet and walked toward the door. It wasn't locked. The damn locks had failed to deploy. She'd been part of the committee arguing against taking the ability to manually lock the doors away from the teachers. The bureaucrats who said that it was for their own safety had never been put into a position like this one, of that she was sure.

She was just glad she'd had the presence of mind to close the shades after the windows locked. The sound of the steel plating dropping to block any chance of escape had been loud enough to attract some attention from her students, but they hadn't seen the glass go blank, or realized—yet—that there was no way out of the school. Once that happened, the tears would begin. She wanted to avoid that for as long as possible.

The knock came again. A few of the children had looked up toward the sound, interested but not alarmed. She had worked very hard to keep them calm, and the last thing she needed was for some panicky little twit to come charging in and upset everything.

At the same time, she had been a kindergarten teacher for long enough that she was running up against mandatory retirement age, and one doesn't spend that much time with small children without retaining at least a sliver of softness in the heart. “Who is it?” she called. Zombies didn't knock, and whoever it was, they weren't pounding; she had the time to be polite.

“Elaine Oldenburg! First grade!”

There was a note of panic in the younger teacher's voice that she didn't like; no, she didn't like it at all. Panic had a tendency to spread, especially when it was offered to the younger children as an option. “I'm sorry, Miss Oldenburg, but we're in the middle of class right now.”