Zombie Elementary (18 page)

“Chucky???? Chucky!!! Are you still in the attic? It’s a bad line, Chucky. What? Climbed out a window and you’re watching from the roof? And there are
thousands of zombies headed for the school? Now, wait a minute—”

That didn’t make any sense. Why were the zombies coming to our school?

Just then a teacher poked her head into the classroom. It was Miss Sharpelbow, who teaches gym. She was pretty big and pretty mean. She was always telling everyone that all the women in her family had been gym teachers for a hundred years.

“Francine Brabansky! Are you using a phone? That’s against school rules!”

Francine glowered and didn’t say anything. The phone was hidden back inside the desk. Jermaine didn’t mind telling fibs—I think you know that by now—so he said, “No, Miss Sharpelbow. You probably saw Francine using … a stapler! It sorta looks like a phone!”

Which would have been a good fib if there had actually been a stapler in Francine’s desk he could point to. But there wasn’t. And nobody holds a stapler up to their ear. C’mon.

Also, the phone rang.

Francine answered it. Miss Sharpelbow stepped forward
to grab it from her (she always did stuff like that) but Jermaine stuck his foot out and tripped her. “Sorry, Miss!” Francine turned to listen to the phone. “Right, Chucky. What? You’re in the truck and headed our way? Get the kids to safety? How do we do that?”

I figured we were all in a whole lot of trouble with Miss Sharpelbow now. She was about the last teacher to believe our story, true or not. But suddenly there was a real loud noise down the hallway—like the door breaking down and windows smashing—and moaning. A lot of moaning.

“I’ll deal with you in a moment,” snapped Miss Sharpelbow. “Don’t go away.” She turned and marched toward the noise, yelling, “Quiet!!!”

You could get in a lot of trouble at our school if a teacher tells you to do something and you don’t, but the three of us needed to take off real fast.

“Bat, man!” whispered Jermaine.

For a moment I thought a caped crusader might be coming to save us, but then I realized what he meant. I had to get the Louisville Slugger. My classroom was all the way across the school. Francine fetched
her lacrosse stick from the coat closet. She’d hidden it inside an instrument case belonging to her sister who was in college now.

The whole time, this is what we heard out in the hallway:

“
BRAIINNNSSS
!!!!”

“Quiet!!” shouted Miss Sharpelbow.

“
NNGAARRRGGGGHHH
!!!!”

“Be quiet, all of you!!”

“
BRAIINNNSSS
!!!!”

“Silence! Aaaagghhhhh!!!!”

“
NNGAARRRGGGGHHH
!!!!”

We ran like crazy. At the end of the hall I turned around. The zombies were coming. Some of them were gathered around the spot we last saw Miss Sharpelbow—I didn’t much wanna think about that—but the rest were shambling forward. There was a big set of fire doors at the end of the hallway. It took all our strength, but we got them shut.

That should’ve held them for, like, ten seconds.

Okay, so things just went from bad to
, uh, badder still.

There was a fire alarm on the wall. Francine went to set it off.

“Wait!” yelled Jermaine. “Bad idea!”

Everyone knows the fire drill. The kids all go outside, no running, no yelling, and gather in the parking lot. You report to your teacher, who counts everyone. Which would be fine, I guess, if the building was on fire. If the school is attacked by zombies, it’s sorta like laying out a picnic for them. A zombie buffet.

Bad idea. Anyway, half the kids were already outside for recess.

Francine’s phone rang. “Hello? Oh, Mr. O’Hara!” She mouthed the words
Mr. O’Hara
to us like we
were idiots. “What? You’re in your van? Well, yeah, we
did
know the school was full of zombies. And there are more coming, we heard that too. Right. See you soon.”

She dropped the phone in her pocket. “He’s on his way.”

One guy from BURP was on his way in a dictionary delivery van. He’d be on his own too. His kid, Garrett, wouldn’t be out of school yet. We were in all sorts of trouble. Then I remembered the library. I told Francine and Jermaine about how it might be a good hideout.

“Could work,” said Francine.

“Let’s use the intercom,” said Jermaine.

Now, you probably know that kids aren’t allowed to use the school intercom any time we like. It’s in the office, and the office ladies guard it. Someone told me that once upon a time some kid at some school somewhere got hold of the mic and sang the rude version of “Jingle Bells” almost all the way through before someone stopped him. So, ever since, office ladies everywhere have been real careful about keeping students from using it.

“We could say we’re going to recite the Pledge of Allegiance,” I said. But that was stupid, ’cause we always do that before class starts in the morning and it was 11:44.

“Better idea,” said Jermaine. “I’ll tell them I’m president of the student council.”

See, the president of the student council can always make an announcement about, I dunno, a meeting or something. Problem was that Jermaine was not the president. He wasn’t on the student council at all. He lost by two votes after Katherine Witte told everyone he was trying to bribe voters with years-old Halloween candy that he’d found in a closet at his grandmother’s house. Which was true, actually. He should have bought some new candy. So nobody was gonna believe Jermaine was president of anything.

But it turned out okay, because just then we heard the intercom.

“
BUZZ
 … so Sandi said to me … 
BUZZ
 … could you believe that? … 
BUZZ.
”

Someone forgot to turn it off after the last announcement. I could hear the office ladies chatting in the background.

“Cause a distraction when we get to the office!” yelled Jermaine. (Boy, he’s pushy sometimes.)

So once we were in the hall outside the office, Francine started yelling and beating the wall with her lacrosse stick. I acted like she was hitting me and screamed like a kindergartner who’d spilled his orange juice.

Ms. Hoag came out of the office. “Larry Mullet! Francine Brabansky! Stop making all that noise in the hallway!”

I expected Jermaine to run into the office, but he was smarter than that. He made a signal that I figured meant “make more noise,” so I shrieked even more. Francine yelled, “Let me at that little jerk!”—I guess she meant me—and waved her stick around some more.

Another lady ran out of the office. I guess that’s who Ms. Hoag had been talking to on the intercom. That meant the office was empty.

Jermaine sneaked in while Francine chased me with her lacrosse stick and we yelled and screamed. It was kinda fun, by the way. The office ladies didn’t know what to do. They kept telling us to “be reasonable”
and use “inside voices.” Then the announcement came.

“Hey, everyone—kids and teachers! You have to go to the library right now. I mean,
RIGHT NOW!
Lock yourselves inside and stack up furniture behind the doors. The zombies are coming. Thousands of zombies! Thank you for your attention!”

Francine and I stopped horsing around. The office ladies stared like they didn’t know what to think.

“Go to the library!” said Francine. “Right now, like the announcement said. Okay, go get your purses if you have to.” (Didn’t I tell you she was bossy?)

Jermaine rushed out of the office. All along the hallway, doors were opening and kids who were still in class came running out. Kids already on recess were running back into the building. I heard teachers yelling. Some of them were trying to stop the kids, but it wasn’t working. Some teachers were just running after their classes. I hoped nobody would get trampled. Fire drills were waaay more quiet than this.

Just then, three things happened:

First of all, Chainsaw Chucky burst in through the main door, which was right opposite the office. (He was supposed to report to the office first thing,
but I guess he wasn’t signing in or getting a pass.) Chucky was carrying a chainsaw and a real big sack full of—well, I don’t know what it was full of. He was panting. Sweat was dripping into his beard and off the other end.

Second, right behind him came his granny. I screamed, ’cause I knew she’d been turned into a zombie. Jermaine screamed and hid behind me. Big wuss. Francine picked up her lacrosse stick and stepped toward Granny.

“Why, hello, li’l missy!” said Granny. “Ain’t yew jest a firecracker?” She grinned and showed her four top teeth.

She wasn’t a zombie.

Oh, right, the third thing.

There was a splintering noise, and the zombies broke down the fire door. It had lasted way longer than I expected. But now the zombies were swarming all through the ground floor of my elementary school.

And I didn’t have the Louisville Slugger. It was still in Miss Scoffle’s classroom.

“I thought Granny had you trapped
in the attic,” I said to Chucky. “Like maybe she’d turned into a zombie.”

“Misunderstanding,” he answered. “Ah went up there in case ah’d left some extra dynamite next to the Christmas decorations. She heard the noise, figured it was zombies comin’ in through the roof, and started shootin’. Missed me, though.”

Granny grinned at me. “When ah stopped to reload, he called out and ah knew he wasn’t no zombie.”

Granny’s pretty deaf, so I guess Chucky had to yell pretty loud to stop her opening up again with the shotgun.

“Dang!” said Chucky, as he fired up his chainsaw. “Ah could use two of these things!”

“What now?” asked Jermaine. He was out of ideas, at
last. Francine was ready to fight the zombies. Granny pulled a plastic case out of her bag. She opened it, showing a whole selection of kitchen knives laid out from small to large.

“These is them Amazin’ Japanese Chopping Knives,” she said. “They wuz on sale on a late night TV show. Got two sets for the price of one ’cause I called within twenty minutes, plus shippin’ and handlin’!” She showed what she could do with them by pulling out one of the knives and throwing it, handle first, at the picture of the principal over the office desk. Broke a window.

Most people’s grandmothers don’t go around with two boxes of knives from a TV special offer. The office ladies forgot about their purses and ran for the library.

“We need to lure them ghouls away from the kids!” shouted Chucky over the noise of his chainsaw. “Let’s lead ’em away from the library.”

But where? Suddenly, I knew the answer!

“The cafeteria! That’s where this whole thing started. It’s a separate building from the school, and all the younger kids will be finished by now. It’ll just be us, the lunch crew and the zombies.”

I figured we could tell the lunch crew to leave.

Granny pulled out a couple of the Amazin’ Japanese Chopping Knives and hurled them at the undead horde. Missed the zombies completely, but stuck in the bulletin board like darts. Impressive.

“That’ll git their attention!” she said.

We backed out of the main doors, still making noise and waving our arms and stuff. What we needed to do was get the zombies out of the main school building. They’d follow us to the cafeteria and, uh, we’d figure out what to do next.

Right. That was the plan.

But first, I had some things to do. “I’ll meet you there in a minute,” I said.

These are the things I needed to do:

Thing one: run all the way round the school, avoiding any zombies if I could.

Thing two: climb into Miss Scoffle’s classroom through the window.

Thing three: get my bat, climb back through the window and run to the cafeteria. Avoiding zombies, like I already said.

When we got outside, everyone piled into Chucky’s truck, which he’d parked in a crazy sorta way right
by the school’s main doors. Except me, of course. I had an errand to run.

Jermaine understood right away. “Stay safe,” he said, like he was a police officer in a TV show.