by Mira Grant
The exterior door was a different story. Elaine sped up when she spotted it. She was almost at her goal. Soon, everything would be different; soon, the hard knot of panic in her chest would let go, and she would be able to return to her class. She reached for the doorknob.
Something moved behind the frosted glass.
She froze.
One of the stranger tests teachers were required to pass involved watching shadows on a wall. Some of them moved fluidly, like healthy, uninjured humans. Others limped or shuffled along, but did it in a specific manner: people walking with canes, people walking with leg braces. Human ways to walk. Others shambled and stumbled, not using any sort of artificial assistance, but not walking normally, either. Those were the ones she had been trained to watch for, and while it took a few seconds for her conscious mind to catch up, her subconscious remembered what it had been taught. Her arm seized up, refusing to move any closer to the door, and to damnation.
“No,” she half-whispered, and then clapped a hand over her mouth, realizing her error. The office door was solid, but almost its entire upper half was frosted glass…and none of the doors were locked. The button that controlled the doors was inside the office. If the outbreak started there, no one would have been thinking about saving the rest of the school. They would all have been thinking about saving their own skins.
The shadow that had shambled by the window stopped. It shuffled back a step, and stopped again, head canted very slightly to the side. She couldn’t see anything more than an outline, but she knew that the shadow’s owner was listening, waiting for another sound. In that moment, she would have stopped her own ceaselessly hammering heart, if she could have; anything to make herself less living, less visible, less endangered.
The shadow didn’t move again. Elaine began to hope that she hadn’t been noticed. Then, as if her hope was an invitation all by itself, the shadow behind the glass stepped closer and began to moan.
Elaine Oldenburg turned and ran.
* * *
>> MGOWDA: HOW IS IT COMING?
>> AKWONG: IF MAGGIE AND I EVER HAVE CHILDREN, WE ARE HOMESCHOOLING THEM. MAYBE HIRING PRIVATE TUTORS. ANYTHING BUT ALLOWING THEM TO ENTER THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM.
>> MGOWDA: THAT GOOD, HUH?
>> AKWONG: 40% OF AMERICAN SCHOOLS STILL ALLOW THE NURSE’S OFFICE TO SHARE A CONNECTING DOOR WITH THE ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES, WHERE THE SECURITY BACKUP CONTROLS ARE LOCATED. 63% OF AMERICAN SCHOOLS ARE USING SECURITY SYSTEMS THAT DON’T HAVE THE POWER TO OVERRIDE THEIR OWN CONTROLS. SO IF THE BUTTON IN THE OFFICE THAT WOULD ALERT THE LOCAL POLICE IS DAMAGED OR MALFUNCTIONING, HITTING THE SAME BUTTON IN THE ACTUAL SECURITY CENTER DOES NOTHING.
>> MGOWDA: CHARMING. HAVE FUN TRYING TO SLEEP TONIGHT.
>> AKWONG: I HATE YOU.
—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044
* * *
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 12:06 p.m.
Elaine Oldenburg’s class looked up in terror when the door slammed open. Emily screamed. Several students began to cry. Miss Oldenburg half ran, half stumbled into the room, slamming the door behind her. Nothing had chased her down the hall. Nothing had needed to. She knew what the moaning from the office meant.
She looked around the classroom, taking in the terrified faces and the tear-filled eyes, and knew that she had a choice to make. She could try to calm them, she could try to keep them under control…or she could run. Her return to the classroom had been automatic, training and habit cutting through the thin veil of panic and forcing her back to the one place she knew she could be safe. The halls had still been empty when she ran along them, and zombies weren’t good with doorknobs; even if her dimly sensed presence led the inhabitants of the office to break down the door, it would take them time. She could still run. She could step back out of the classroom, and she could run.
Emily was hiccupping now, her terror transitioning into misery. Mikey and Jenna were both crying, her silently, he in great whooping gasps that echoed through the otherwise silent classroom like a heartbeat. Half of them were still manacled to their chairs, sitting ducks for whatever might come through that door.
Elaine Oldenburg could have run. But in the end, she was a teacher before she was a survivor, and so all she did was step away from the door, fix a smile on her face, and say, “We’re going to have an adventure. Won’t that be fun?”
Her students—children of the post-Rising world, who knew that adults never said things like “We’re going to have an adventure” in reality, only on the television, where everything was safe and nothing ever lunged out of the dark to rip and rend and tear—looked at her mistrustfully. Mikey stopped crying. That was a small relief.
“All right, everyone. I need you to sit quietly and leave each other alone. And I need someone to volunteer for a very big help.”
Several hands went up. Elaine beamed.
“Excellent.” She walked over to her desk and picked up her roll sheet, looking down the column that gave her students’ estimated weights. It was intrusive, and she would have hated having her own weight listed for her teacher to see when she was in school, but at moments like this one, she not only understood the reasoning, she embraced the necessity.
Brian was the smallest boy in the class by three pounds. She looked up. His hand was raised. Thank God. She wouldn’t have wanted to force this on someone who didn’t want to help. It felt…wrong, somehow, to be asking her students to expose themselves to a potential biohazard, but she didn’t really have a choice. It wasn’t something she could do herself, not if she wanted to stay with the class, rather than trying to eat them.
“Brian, you’re going to help me take care of Scott,” she said. She opened the top drawer of her desk and produced a screwdriver. The students looked at it warily. Sharp-edged metal objects had been forbidden at school for their entire lives, except in the hands of teachers. Someone could get hurt. Someone could bleed.
But someone was already bleeding, and despite Miss Oldenburg’s attempts to keep things as calm as possible, they were all beginning to realize that something was very wrong in their normally quiet classroom.
“Yes, Miss Oldenburg,” said Brian dutifully. He started to slide out of his seat, and then froze, unsure as to whether he was supposed to be getting up.
Elaine nodded enthusiastically, beckoning him toward her as she walked toward Scott’s seat, the screwdriver loose and somehow menacing in her hand. “Yes, that’s right; come over here,” she said. “We need to get Scott out of his seat, first off, and I can’t touch him. Have you ever used a screwdriver before?”
“I helped my daddy—uh, I helped my dad put together a bookshelf last month,” said Brian, his cheeks flaming red at the babyish slip. No one laughed, though. A bunch of the other kids would normally have laughed at him for using the word “daddy,” and not one of them did. They were all scared. They all wanted their parents. In that moment, “daddy” was probably second only to “mommy” on most of their minds.
“Okay, good.” Miss Oldenburg held out the screwdriver, clearly waiting for him to take it. Finally, fingers shaking, Brian did exactly that. She crouched down and pointed to the restraints holding Scott in place. It would have been difficult to miss the way she positioned herself, far enough back that Scott couldn’t have kicked or scratched her if he’d been trying. It was…it was scary. Added on top of everything else that was going on, it was terrifying. “Do you see how the restraints are connected to the leg of the desk with little screws? If you can undo those, you can let Scott up.”
“I want up, too!” wailed Emily. Her announcement was followed by a string of similar declarations, some of them angry, others mangled by tears and phlegm.
Miss Oldenburg stood up straight and clapped her hands. The class went instantly silent, staring at her with wide, wary eyes. “All of you need to be quiet and sit still,” she said, in the tone she normally reserved for bad behavior and inattention. “Bri
an is going to let Scott up. We are going to take Scott to the closet, and we are going to decontaminate his hands and arms. Does anyone know what that means?”
Sharon put her hand up. Miss Oldenburg nodded to her, and she said, primly, “It means you’re going to use bleach and wipe all the bad stuff away.”
“That’s right,” said Miss Oldenburg. “Right now, Scott is a biohazard. That means that if I touch him, I might have to go away, and then there wouldn’t be any teacher here to help you. So Scott has to come first. Do you understand?”
Normally, the idea of no teacher would have been a fascinating one, carrying the promise of mischief and excitement. Now, with the alarm still going and Miss Oldenburg wearing her recess coat and long gloves inside the classroom, the idea was terrifying. Several more students began to cry. The rest shook their heads in mute, anxious negation.
“Are you saying you don’t understand, or that you don’t want me to leave?”
“Please don’t leave,” whispered Jenna. The students around her nodded.
“I don’t want to, Jenna. That’s why Brian has to help me with Scott before we let anybody else up. Brian?” Miss Oldenburg crouched down again. “It’s okay. You can start taking out the screws now.”
“But I don’t wanna touch a biohazard,” whimpered Brian.
Miss Oldenburg swallowed her sigh. She couldn’t push too hard, not if she wanted him to actually follow instructions. “He isn’t dangerous to you, Brian. You don’t weigh enough for him to be dangerous to you. That’s why I asked you to be the one to do this very important thing. Because he can’t hurt you, not until you weigh much more than you do right now.” Not that much more, but there was no point in frightening the boy further. Not when he was already looking at the screwdriver in his hands like it was a venomous snake.
“Don’t wanna,” repeated Brian.
“Do you want us to leave Scott here while the rest of us go to safety?” She regretted the words almost immediately, but she was committed now: she couldn’t take them back. “I have another screwdriver. I can let everyone else in this class go free, but I can’t touch Scott, not until he’s been decontaminated. Is that what you want?”
“No,” whispered Brian.
“Are you sure?”
This time, Brian didn’t say anything at all. He just nodded miserably, looking at the screwdriver in his hands.
“Then please. Let him out of the chair.”
“Okay,” whispered Brian, and scooted closer to Scott, who hadn’t said a word during the entire exchange. The bigger boy just stared at his desk, not moving or speaking while Brian laboriously undid the screws holding the ankle restraints in place.
There were some people—mostly in equipment manufacturing, who stood to make money from the change—who wanted the simpler restraints, with their external hinges, removed from classrooms. Their nightmare scenario was the one that was being played out, with a potentially contaminated student being released by a well-meaning teacher with access to a screwdriver. But Scott wasn’t the only student being held down by a restraint that couldn’t save him, and even the most sophisticated models still had misfires. As long as the technology possessed any capacity for failure, there would need to be some sort of manual release. The nightmare of the administration didn’t come close to the nightmares of the parents, who could all too easily picture their children, trapped, being left behind when the release switch for the classroom restraints was somewhere out of reach.
Brain was small and didn’t have much upper body strength, but he was also determined, and had used a screwdriver before. After only a few minutes, all four screws were on the floor, and Scott was free. He stood shakily, and stopped as Miss Oldenburg held out her hands, palms first, warding him away.
“Scott, Brian, I need you to go to the closet,” she said. “Scott, do not touch anything. Brian will open the door for you. Do you understand?”
The two boys, looking terrified, nodded but did as they were told. Miss Oldenburg followed them, pausing when she reached her desk to look back at the rest of the class.
“All of you stay quiet and in your seats, and do not open the door for any reason,” she said. “Do you understand me?”
The class nodded, ragged and out of synch with one another. Miss Oldenburg looked at them for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to believe them. In the end, she decided that it didn’t really matter either way; she had to do this.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, and followed Brian and Scott into the closet.
It was a small, claustrophobic space. The shelves were packed with basic school supplies: paper, crayons, extra ammunition, formalin, bleach. Miss Oldenburg gestured for Brian to close the door as she took down one of the sterilization bins from the shelf and set it on the floor in front of Scott. Then she got down the bottle of bleach, and the face masks. She got one. So did Brian. Scott did not.
“I am very sorry, Scott,” she said gently, and began pouring bleach into the bin.
It was hard not to reflect, as the bleach fumes filled the enclosed space and the clear liquid lapped against the plastic walls of the bin, on the strange irony of the situation. There was a time when a teacher who forced a student to bathe in bleach would have been fired, for good reason, and charged with child abuse. Bleach was a caustic chemical. It could burn sensitive skin. And that didn’t really matter just now, because bleach was the only thing stable enough to store in a classroom, and this was an emergency—and while she didn’t want to burn Scott, she didn’t want to leave him for dead, either.
Elaine Oldenburg gasped, just a little, behind her mask. Before that moment, she hadn’t fully realized that she was planning to leave the classroom.
It was a risk. The classroom, for all its faults—no water, no restrooms, large, if locked, windows taking up much of one wall—was at least familiar and semisecure. They could stay inside and ride out whatever was happening on the rest of the campus, and while the alarm would probably start upsetting the children soon, there were things they could do. Quiet things, things that wouldn’t attract any monsters that happened to be wandering the halls.
But there were no monsters wandering the halls just yet: the halls were echoing and empty, and completely free of dangers, at least for as long as the office door held. If they moved now, they could get to the airlock and get outside. They’d be able to run. There would still be a quarantine, of course, and all the students would need to be thoroughly tested for traces of live Kellis-Amberlee, but they would live. She could save them if they moved fast and moved smart, and didn’t stand around waiting for rescue…because rescue wasn’t going to come. The very flaw in the school security that would allow them to escape was going to delay any sort of rescue effort, and could make things a lot worse.
The doors hadn’t locked. The doors were supposed to have locked—and whenever a live outbreak was happening in an enclosed space, like a school, any door that wasn’t locked was considered an infection risk. Even building barricades to keep the infected out wouldn’t make any difference; barricades could be broken, barricades didn’t have the weight of a securely locked door. Everyone on campus was infected now, legally speaking, and anyone who came onto campus was likely to come on shooting. It didn’t matter that the victims were children. It didn’t matter that many of them were too small to have amplified. The school had failed to lock down properly, and while their parents would mourn them, the safety of the city was more important than a few little lives.
Sometimes Elaine thought the most unfair thing of all was that she had to live in this day and age, where children were collateral damage. But then, before there were the walking dead there had been school shootings, and those had been much easier to get rid of, hadn’t they? Ban the assault rifles, make the background checks tighter…save lives. And none of that had happened, until the dead rose and people found something better to shoot at than kindergarteners and cafeteria workers. So maybe every day and age was bad, in its own way.
Brian was crying. So was Scott. So was she. But they had to do it, or there was no way she could justify taking Scott with them when they left—and they had to leave. They had to get out alive. They had to try.
* * *
The Evergreen incident raised several questions. How had the security systems been allowed to fail? How was it that human error—the guards at the airlock first missing the blood on Scott Ribar’s hand, and then missing the live viral particles on Nathan Patterson’s lip—had been compounded by computer error, leaving the doors unlocked and the alarms that would have notified the authorities unsounded? Why did none of the teachers have the ability to contact the police or, better yet, the CDC? Why were there no clear evacuation plans in place for incidents of this nature, and how could they be put in place for the future?
What very few people bothered to question were the rolls of the dead. Name after name, student after student, all of them killed by a cascading combination of failures that should never have been permitted to happen. Some would try to place the blame on Elaine Oldenburg, after review of the school security records proved conclusively that one of her students had been the flashpoint for the outbreak. Others would wave their hands and say that it was a regrettable but ultimately blameless combination of factors, one to learn from and prevent. The teachers unions began petitioning for more and better weaponry. The school board began petitioning for more and better security.