The Heirs of Tomorrow

by Billy Roper

  After that the two men had gone to their own places together and moved all of their food to the school. Caren thought they had gotten more than that, from somewhere. Alberto the groundskeeper had to be let go around then, they couldn’t pay him and he just wanted to sit around and stare at the girls all day. It was creepy. Mr. Bell and Mr. Ogilvie and Mr. Thomas let him take a box of food with him as his final paycheck, but he hadn’t been happy about leaving. The girls told each other stories about seeing him peeking in their windows or lurking in the woods to scare each other at night.

  The Edelwood Academy was an expensive preparatory school for girls. Girls of a certain class and social level. Girls from the proper families. On the bad day there had been over a hundred of them living and studying there throughout the week, from ages fourteen to eighteen. Now, there were eight. Eight students, and three teachers. It seemed so empty. The whole world might be that way, as far as she knew.

  Tracy said that Mr. Thomas had broken the rules and brought a firearm onto campus, into the gun free zone. She claimed that he had two of them, that he had gotten from his place when he went to get some clothes and scout out the neighborhood. That had been two weeks after the day, and he came back saying there was no reason for him to go again. The Jeep’s windshield was smashed and the older girls crowded around happy that he had made it back. He never told them just what happened, but he hadn’t stayed away and he hadn’t brought back his mean fiancé, either.

  Evil Hood was a big old gray plantation style house of three stories with a flat roof and white columns in front, and big wings coming off of each side. A newer brick dormitory had been built behind the main building, along with a metal gym. When the last group of six girls walked off headed to the intersection with the main road three miles away to catch rides back to the city, with Ms. Richman along as their chaperone, Joensey had waited three days before moving the rest of the students out of the dorm and into the main house. At that point they knew they weren’t coming back. None of them ever did, once they left. Why would they?

  Ms. Richman had her eye on Mr. Thomas, but she missed her family more and wanted to see if they were alright, so she left with the girls and said she’d send help. Whatever happened, she must have ended up needing help more than they did.

  “You sure you don’t want to go with us?” she had asked him, her eyes asking a different question. She had been the school secretary, but the teachers treated her like an equal. She was younger even than Mr. Thomas.

  “I have a responsibility here”, he said. She bit her lip.

  “I was just thinking, we could probably all fit in your Cherokee.”

  “I’m going to need it”, he explained.

  “If you’re leaving sometime, then, why not leave now? It would be better than travelling alone. A lot better,” she added. He shook his head. Caren wondered if he ever felt sad or guilty for letting them leave on foot like they did. Or did he wish he had gone with them? With her? She always wore nice makeup and her hair was perfect. Not like hers, especially now.

  That was the third group to leave. A few others had gone off on their own, in ones and twos. Some said goodbye, others just slipped away. Altogether only half of the parents ever made it in to pick their kids up that day. They had just scared everyone with stories of traffic jams and road rage and news reports of closed roads and cities being evacuated. Since the academy had been set up to jam the internet, with no TVs or radios allowed, all the girls knew was what they were told. It sounded exciting, and awful.

  The last parent to come had a spare donut tire on their Mercedes, taking it slow, and what looked like bullet holes in the fender in front of it. It was Mr. Tanner, Rachel’s dad. Her mom and little brother and their dog were stuffed in the car among piles of suitcases and clothes. They asked to use the restrooms. The water was off but the toilets still worked if you poured water into the tanks in back of them, so Mr. Bell let them, and the two lunch ladies who had shown up for work that morning made them sandwiches to take on their way. It was all stuff out of the fridge that wouldn’t last long before spoiling. The lunch ladies didn’t come back to work after that.

  Mr. Tanner had come up from Richmond. He said that Charlottesville was burning. Mr. Bell took him aside and talked to him for a few minutes. Tracy was helping Rachel carry her stuff to the car and saying goodbye and heard them saying it was all gone and to stay in the Shens. They weren’t going back the way they had come. The rest of that day many of the girls sat waiting in the lobby with their bags packed, trying to use their teacher’s borrowed cell phones every few minutes. Nobody got any answers. Then the cells died, one by one. The ones with data and service couldn’t get online, the net was down, anyway.

  Caren worried that Shawna would end up like Wendy. Wendy, the too-pretty girl who thought she was ugly and snuck out of the dorm and into the main building and up the stairs one night about a month after the day. She had fallen, a terrible accident, Mrs. Joens said, proof that they needed to follow the rules and stay in their dorms at night like their hall monitors told them, with the doors locked. Caren knew that she hadn’t fallen, though. Her neck had been broken and she died a few days later because she couldn’t eat or drink water but she had wanted to die. She had seen it in her eyes as the teachers carefully carried her off to the empty nurse’s office.

  Wendy was on her mind when the three eggs she had accidentally on purpose forgotten to take from her favorite hen hatched, and one of the chicks was pecked to death by the mother hen. There must have been something wrong with it, Mr. Thomas told her. He was glad she had saved the other two, though, glad that they hadn’t been eaten, and told her that it was okay to let them brood when they wanted to brood.

  “We need to let new life live,” he had said. “Besides, two or three eggs one way or another won’t make a difference for us, but two more hens might.”

  Miss Caldwell-Kline was the art teacher, but she had been talking lately before the day about their duty to resist the patriarchy and rise up in solidarity with other oppressed minorities. In other words, boys were bad. The girls whispered about her behind their hands and passed notes joking about not staying after class with her. Miss Judie, their soccer coach, who left with the first group, had spent a lot of time in the studio after hours. The other girls said they were making out and stuff. That kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen at Evil Hood, even though it did, but for teachers to do it was scandalous. Caren liked boys, a lot. She missed the public school where she’d had classes with them, and let them chase her during recess. Prep had been her mom’s idea, since daddy wasn’t home to help her much.

  Wendy had been a senior, and had a boyfriend at a college up north. In Boston, she had said. Boston was one of the first cities hit, Tracy said. He didn’t stand a chance. Tracy had been mean to tell her that, whether it was true or not, but Wendy had been prettier than Tracy. She was the kind of girl that made men stare and act goofy. Goofier than usual, even. It was an amazing power.

  Mr. Ogilvie didn’t talk about politics in science class, but he had begun teaching them more practical things like how to make a Faraday cage and potato batteries. Shawna was his class pet, then he left. She had taken some scissors and cut all of her hair off, for attention. He came in looking more and more stressed every day as things got worse, Caren realized in hindsight. Most of the others had been calling in sick or going on vacation for a week before the final day. She hated them all. They had a way out even before. She never got the chance. Nobody warned them. Nobody came and took them home. No wonder Wendy jumped.

  Caren had gone to see her in the nurses’ station the day after she did it. Wendy couldn’t move from the neck down, and could barely talk. She had told Caren she was sorry for getting them in trouble at the dorm. She said that she didn’t want to live without Ben, her boyfriend in Boston at college. Wendy asked Caren to kill her. She begged, with tears streaming down the side of her face. Caren couldn’t do it. She had to leave. Wendy started screaming and didn’t sto
p until Mrs. Joens gave her enough shots of Benadryl to make her sleep. The nurse had kept them for bee stings. The pasture had lots of wild hives and some of the girls had allergies.

  Four days later the teachers dug a grave in the front lawn and they held a small service where Mr. Thomas read from the Bible and said a prayer for Wendy, then they covered her up without a marker. Just a mound of rocky dirt on the dead grass. Caren wondered if she had finally died from thirst, or starvation, or a broken heart.

  The worst thing was knowing that there was no way her daddy wouldn’t have come and got her if he had been able to at all. He had been her hero, and so she knew that her mom and dad must be dead. He had an important job in the Pentagon, a couple of hours north of the academy. Daddy had never let her down before. Nobody would talk about what had happened up there, but she felt like she knew. It must have been a zombie apocalypse, just like the Walking Dead. She just hoped that her parents were at peace, and hadn’t been turned. At night she dreamed of them, rotting and walking towards her, and of all the girls who had walked away, zombifying in stages with every step into the distance. They were coming back for the rest, those who had been forgotten.

  Mr. Thomas was the History teacher. He hadn’t been out of college for long. He avoided talking about anything that had happened since 1800. When they asked him why, he said that it was a safe way to pay back his student loans. That wasn’t funny, but it was his answer for everything, when they asked him why he wasn’t married, what kind of movies he liked, and why he was teaching at a girls’ school. Each time he smiled like it was his own private joke. Mrs. Strafford was the music teacher. Mrs. Joens taught mathematics along with being the Vice Principal. Higher level grades math, that is. Caren had turned fifteen a few weeks after the day, so she had never had her. Now she probably never would, which was one good thing about the bad day.

  One big room in the west wing was the library, and the girls had moved their beds out of the dorm room, one at a time, into it. It took two of them to carry each bed, stopping and resting along the way. The stairs had been the hard part. They each had their own aisle with shelves of books as walls, it was so big. Sometimes with nothing to do she would lay in her bed and think about all the other teachers and her friends from her grade and most of all her mom and dad. At one time there had been activities every day. Soccer and tennis and basketball and movie night and nature walks. Nearly a hundred girls and a dozen teachers and nine or ten kitchen ladies and janitors and groundskeepers bustling around all the time. They had all gone away, all of them but the eight girls and the three teachers.

  Not having hot showers was hard on her complexion. All of them were suffering. It was hard to shave or wash, too. But the worst part was the zits. You couldn’t cover them up unless you pretended you were going Muslim. Shawna was more horrified than the rest of them at every pimple. They shared the makeup they had left and did the best they could to scrub and clean. Mrs. Joens taught them how to make hot compresses from wet washcloths.

  Mr. Thomas said he had a responsibility to watch over them. That had nearly ruined dinner. Miss Caldwell-Kline said he was sexist, and he laughed in her face, telling her that her fake liberal world didn’t exist anymore. She turned red and started screaming at him, but he walked away. Caren wished Miss Caldwell-Kline would turn zombie.

  Becky and Tracy got into a fight the next morning, but wouldn’t tell anyone what it was all about. The other girls could hear them arguing through the stacks. Susan made them apologize to one another and be friends. “We all have to live together”, she said. That seemed to be so.

  “Not me”, Shawna disagreed. Caren saw Angel roll her eyes at that. She saw everything.

  Mrs. Joens did the cooking for all of them, and seemed happy enough with that. They still had a lot of freeze-dried stuff and huge industrial sized cans of food, peaches and ketchup and beets and spinach, and other stuff in the dining hall pantry, and the garden helped. Who knew that a greenhouse on a roof could grow so much, all through the summer? All it needed was water and poop. Mr. Thomas said it would all winter, too, with the chimneys inside the plastic sheets to keep it warm.

  The dining hall plates were all orange, and made of a material that chipped apart when they got too hot. There were bits of orange in her bedsheets from snacking there after hours and warming the food by the coals of the fireplace. It wouldn’t melt, it just turned brittle and broke apart.

  Except for Tracy, Becky, and Susan, all of the remaining girls were Freshmen and Sophomores, too. They’d been the ones most hesitant to take off and leave, and the ones the teachers tried hardest to talk out of going. Tracy was nearly eighteen, and her family was all the way on the other side of the country. They lived in Florida but had been vacationing in Colorado when the day happened. She’d been sent her because she was a trouble maker, she said. Tracy had told Caren and the other girls, Becky and Phyliss and Shawna and Angela and Susan and Dana, all about it. She had truancy issues and had been dating older boys, even men, and her mom couldn’t control her. Her dad had left them both, and Miss Caldwell-Kline said that Tracy was trying to get back at him for her abandonment issues. She called it an Electra complex. Tracy said that Miss Caldwell-Kline just wished she had some of that.

  Becky had hair the same color of light brown as Tracy’s, but she was chubbier, or had been before their portions were cut. Since then they had all slimmed up. That was one nice thing that had happened. Of the three oldest students Susan stood out, with the most curves of the kind that guys liked. She acted immature, though. Phyliss was sick a lot, her periods were bad and they had run out of pads a long time ago so she was always self-conscious about that every three weeks, as well as in pain and miserable. Shawna, surprisingly, and Angel were the best at gardening, and Susan, who was a junior, helped Tracy clean out the water tower screens and competed with her for Mr. Thomas’s attention. Dana was quiet and bookish. She read in the library until the light failed every day, so Miss Caldwell-Kline assigned her to housekeeping chores, to keep things reasonably clean and straightened indoors while the rest of them worked outside and on food production. Angel helped her clean, just for something to do. Sometimes they picked edible mushrooms and wild roots and other plants from the forest to change things up. There were books about herbs that Dana had found. Wild onions were just as tasty as real ones, only not as big.

  The competition between the girls got catty late at night. Tracy and Susan and Becky made up stories about what they would do when they got rescued, probably by some big policemen or firemen or the lead singer from Shark Bait, to reward them. They talked about whose boobs were getting bigger and showing them to prove it, while the other girls giggled and hoped that they weren’t dared. When they got really bad they would guess about what it would be like to be with Mr. Thomas, and what he had to offer. That was more embarrassing to Phyliss than talking about her period. At least they all had the same problem, more or less, in that department.

  Every other day Mr. Thomas, who was a little below average height and liked to wear fuzzy sweaters all the time, drove the academy’s old tractor out to the intersection and back, to see if any cars came by, he said. They never did. Nothing came on the radio at all, and no planes passed overhead. It was almost like they were alone in the world. A world full of zombies. He would come back, look at Mrs. Joens, and shake his head, with a little smile. She would smile back and talk about what she was going to make for dinner. Mrs. Joens slept on a couch in the lobby. Miss C.K. had taken over the little caretaker’s cabin where the night watchman, the only Evil Hood staffer who ever used to stay there all night aside from the dorm hall monitors, had lived. He’d been one of the first to abandon ship. He loaded up as many cans of food from the pantry as his pickup could carry and left in the middle of the night a week after the day. Mr. Thomas slept on the floor of his office, as far away from the girls as possible.

  Once he came back from a ride to the intersection scared. A group of men had walked by on the road right after he g
ot there, and smelled the fumes from the tractor. They almost found him hiding in the ditch and would have stolen it, but he had taken the key out and kept it. They must have been scared, too, because they left it alone and continued on up the road. The soldiers had shot one of the cows next door but the rest had run off in a stampede. That ought to placate them, was the word he used. Play-kate.

  He said they looked like soldiers. In uniform, armed, but on foot. Caren understood why he didn’t ask them for help. Nobody would be helping them, now. Her daddy was a soldier, but if he had been with them he would have made them stop and march down the road and rescue her and take her home. It must not have been his soldiers. Was it someone else’s? Mr. Thomas didn’t know. He hadn’t talked to them. Tracy said that he was brave to get that close and get away.

  Usually they talked a lot about how things would be once their parents came for them. Sometimes they shared stories about how things had been before. Angel’s daddy was a movie producer, he would make a documentary about this and they would all be stars. The celebrity would make everything worth it. Another daddy lived with his girlfriend who had a boat from her ex-husband, and he would take them all away on it. It was a yacht, big enough for all of them. Susan’s mom had raised her by herself, and she didn’t have a dad to come rescue her. The other girls changed the subject.

  Mr. Thomas spent most of his time cutting and hauling and chopping wood for their fireplaces and the converted cookstove, but he also hunted in the woods. Miss Caldwell-Kline had refused to eat any of the meat from the petting zoo, or any he brought in later. She claimed to be a vegetarian, but as far as the rest of them cared that just meant that there was more to go around. She did her best to look appalled, but she was a protest of one. Every night during dinner she tried to turn everything into a political debate about racism or sexism or some phobia. Usually she stayed mad at Mr. Thomas, but even she was glad that the soldiers hadn’t turned down the road. More men meant more rapists and murderers, she said.