by Mira Grant
“Yes, Miss Oldenburg,” they chorused, ragged and out of synch with one another.
“Good. Thank you, class.” She turned and walked over to the class phone, picking it up. As expected, it was still playing the emergency announcement. She pressed “0” to get to the office. Nothing happened. She pressed “0” again. Still nothing happened. The cold feeling under her breastbone grew stronger.
Hanging up the phone, she walked back to the door and pressed her ear against it. No sounds came from the hall. She tried the knob. In the case of a real outbreak, it should have already locked, keeping them safely isolated. It wasn’t locked.
“I will be right back,” she said, turning to look at the class. “Do not get out of your seats.”
And then, Elaine Oldenburg made what would prove to be her only mistake during the 2036 outbreak at Evergreen Elementary: a mistake that came very close to ending her life and preventing the heroic actions that she had yet to undertake.
She left the classroom.
Many of the security systems put in place in this country’s elementary and middle schools were installed at the behest of “security experts” who had done their time with the TSA before the Rising, and were now being hailed, due to political connections and expert handling of the media, as masters of the safer world. They owned the companies that constructed desk restraints, magnetic window locks, and school-wide door controls systems. They recommended their machines to Congress and to the individual states. They put blueprints in front of anxious parents and said, “These things, and only these things, will keep your children safe.”
There is nothing more desperate for reassurance than a parent. I have no children of my own, but as I work to raise my little sister, I find that more and more, I can be drawn in by the clever men with the elaborate blueprints who say, “This will protect her” and “This will guarantee her safety.” “Guarantee” is a big word, isn’t it? It’s a word that says your trust is not unfounded.
As the exploratory committees formed after the Evergreen incident would prove, our trust was very much unfounded. The men and women who sold us the security of our children knew less about their jobs than many parents did. Those parents had survived the Rising on the ground, after all, and had done it despite the many dangers the world placed in front of them. The “security experts” had seen the darkest days from the safety of protected government rooms. Perhaps it was inevitable that they, and the systems they worked so hard to sell, would fail us. The tragedy is that in so doing, they also failed our children.
—FROM UNSPOKEN TRAGEDIES OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM BY ALARIC KWONG, MARCH 19, 2044
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 11:58 A.M.
The hall was empty. Elaine Oldenburg walked slowly and carefully down the exact center, following the red line painted on the tile. Here, no one could reach out of an unlocked classroom or stumble out of the bathrooms to grab her. Here, she would have time to react before anything happened.
Of course, walking that line, she felt so terribly, terribly exposed. She wanted to run to the wall, to let it provide her with the safety she so craved. She knew that “safety” in an outbreak situation was an illusion, and that the best way to stay safe was to tread the line without failure or deviation—but this wasn’t really an outbreak situation, was it? There was an alarm, sure, but the doors weren’t locking and the desks weren’t following the written procedure. This had to be a misunderstanding, potentially triggered by Scott and the biohazard now soaking through the lining of his coat. She would notify the principal, and he and his staff would take care of it. She might get disciplined. She might not.
In that moment, walking down the center of the empty, echoing hall, she really didn’t care either way. All she cared about was reaching the office, where there would be people. People meant safety. People meant she could stop being responsible for everything in isolation, and could start following orders again.
She had forgotten the small and simple reality that people also meant danger; people meant a place for the Kellis-Amberlee infection to gather and spread, converting innocents into instruments of destruction.
Perhaps most damning of all, she had forgotten—or maybe never really stopped to think about—the fact that while countless improvements had been made to the school layout and security since the Rising, some ideas were too institutionally embedded to change easily. School nurses had been all but phased out before the dead began to walk, viewed as a liability and a drain on limited resources. After the Rising, medical care became a priority in schools again. Nurses and trauma kits were installed in elementary schools everywhere. Unfortunately, no one really stopped to consider the standard location of the nurse’s office, tucked away as it was with the rest of the school’s administration. At Evergreen Elementary, to get to the nurse, you first had to pass through the main office, which was connected to both the principal and the vice principal’s office. All the people responsible for making decisions about the school and how it would fare in an outbreak were right there, sharing a single common room… and the interior doors were almost never closed.
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. “Brian 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 contamina
ted 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.