by Mira Grant
In the meantime, she walked her students one by one into the classroom, and she watched them like a hawk throughout the year, quashing bullying wherever it reared its ugly head. Everyone on campus knew that Miss Oldenburg ran a tight ship, something that very few parents would have guessed during orientation, when they were confronted with a red-haired slip of a woman in a flowered dress, who looked like she could be one of the school’s student teachers, not the leader of a whole first-grade class.
There was a time when those parents would have been thrilled to meet a teacher like Elaine Oldenburg, who was still bright and vivacious and engaged after eight years in what was widely regarded as one of the toughest jobs in the world. That time was before the Rising had come along and changed all the rules. First grade was a tricky year, filled with kids who might not fully understand the importance of sterile conditions and avoiding contact with classmates who suffered from bloody noses or skinned knees. By second grade, the students generally understood the dangers they would face in their adult lives, at least academically, but first graders were still carefree and immortal, unable to accept that there was anything in the world more powerful than Mommy and Daddy and Teacher. Even that wouldn’t have been such a big problem—kindergarteners were worse, so confident in their own indestructability that it was a rare month without at least one full decontamination cycle in the kindergarten wing—except for the small and immutable factor of age.
First grade was the year when the top fifty percent of students crossed the forty-pound threshold, growing into amplification range. A blood-soaked kindergartener was a walking biohazard, but it was a safe one, inasmuch as any biohazard can be considered “safe.” The affected child wouldn’t amplify. Once you hit first grade, that was no longer a guarantee. First grade was where teachers were lost.
Elaine Oldenburg smiled as she gave her classroom one last assessing look, checking to be absolutely sure that everything was in its proper place. Then she smoothed her skirt, checked to be sure that her pistol was properly holstered at her waist, and went to begin bringing in the students.
Classroom sizes reached their peak in the last years before the Rising, with as many as forty students per teacher in lower-income areas. This teacher/student disparity would later be blamed for the high fatality rates in those same schools: with too few adult authority figures to tell the students what to do, every exposure became an immediate crisis. Many great educators met their deaths in the chaos, and far too few of them managed to save the students they were fighting for. By the end of the Rising, America’s educational policy was shifting toward an attitude of self-preservation over self-sacrifice: an infected student could not do as much damage as an infected teacher. It was thus the duty of those adults to shoot first, in order to save themselves and avoid becoming a threat.
The standard class size at Evergreen Elementary was eighteen. Eighteen students to each teacher, not counting student teachers and college-level aides, who—when distributed across the school—brought the actual adult/child ratio to something closer to one adult for every eleven children. When secured to their desks during the morning loading phase or during an unavoidable teacher absence from the classroom, the students were unable to reach one another. The desks were bolted to the floor to guarantee that there would be no unsupervised physical contact of any kind.
When we look at the events of that terrible day only eight years in our past, it is important to remember that the teachers of Evergreen Elementary did everything they could: they took every precaution and followed every rule. If there were any justice in the world, they would have been rewarded with long lives, successful careers, and eventual retirement to the virtual education system, where they could have continued to teach until they chose to retire. There would have been no need for them to be lauded as heroes. They would have been forgotten by the march of history, quietly wiped from the memories of all save for the students they mentored, taught, and freed into their own beautiful futures.
There is no justice in the world. There never has been.
—FROM UNSPOKEN TRAGEDIES OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM BY ALARIC KWONG, MARCH 19, 2044
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 8:52 A.M.
It had been a surprisingly quick, smooth load-in process, especially for a Wednesday. Monday and Tuesday, the children were too tired from the weekend to fight. Thursday and Friday, they were too excited that it was almost the weekend again to want to risk getting into trouble. That left Wednesday as the day for troublemakers and tantrums—but all seventeen students had walked through their blood tests and escort as smooth as silk. Miss Oldenburg glanced at the clock as she closed the classroom door. It wasn’t even nine A.M. yet! This was going to be a wonderful day. She could already tell.
Normally, her class would have consisted of nineteen students, but Amelia’s parents had pulled her out of school to visit a grandparent in Vancouver before the expected laws governing transport of minors across the Canadian border were passed, and Billy had been out sick for most of the week. He’d be allowed to come back once his parents supplied a letter from his doctor certifying that he had been symptom-free for at least five days. Kellis-Amberlee had cured “the common cold,” that vast and intricate web of virtually identical diseases that had been the bane of educators since the first schoolroom was constructed, but not even Kellis-Amberlee could stop the flu, or the lingering strains of pertussis still circulating in the Pacific Northwest, thanks to the efforts of the pre-Rising antivaccination movement. With students increasingly sensitized to anything that smacked of illness, sick children were no longer allowed anywhere near campus, and were shunted to virtual classrooms as soon as their symptoms began.
It was too bad, really, thought Miss Oldenburg, as she walked around the classroom collecting the coloring sheets she’d used to distract her students as they were bolted to their desks. Billy was one of those rare students who really loved coming to class, despite all the fuss and bother it entailed. She knew full well that some of her kids would drop out of the face-to-face system by fourth grade, choosing the sterile security of a computer screen and a teacher they would never meet over the fleshy dangers of actually attending school. Every teacher in the face-to-face system dreamt of having their students stay on physical campuses all the way to graduation, choosing risk and reward over safety, but none of them had any illusions about how likely that was.
The elementary schools were relatively full, because kids that young—especially kids too young to amplify—were essentially fearless, unable to really understand why their parents worried so much when they walked out the door. They enjoyed the freedom of recess, and they tolerated the intrusion of the blood tests and the random infection drills. But bit by bit, that bravery would be worn away by the world around them, until most of those same students became as petrified and paranoid as their parents. It was a seemingly unavoidable cycle, and all Miss Oldenburg wanted to do was break it for as many of her students as she could. She wanted to give them a better future. It was the same thing every teacher had wanted since time began, but none of those other teachers had been striving for it against the backdrop of the zombie apocalypse.
Sometimes she wondered whether it had been as hard for them. And then she thought back on what her own teachers had said, when she was struggling through classrooms still shell-shocked and disrupted by the Rising, and she knew that it had always been this hard. It was just the nature of the obstacles that had changed, and would keep changing, for as long as there were students to be taught.
Miss Oldenburg picked up the last of the coloring sheets and walked to the front of the room, silent, back straight, sensible shoes tapping on the tile like a metronome. She could feel her students watching her, waiting for the moment when their day would officially begin. She put the sheets down on the blotter—an outdated piece of classroom equipment if there had ever been one—and picked up the remote that controlled their desk restraints. Turning back to face the room, she smiled brightly and clicked th
e “release” button. The desk restraints snapped open with a soft pneumatic sigh, sliding back and out of the way. Seventeen first graders giggled and stretched, reveling in their newly restored freedom, even if none of them tried to get up. This was part of the morning ritual, just as much as the long solo walk with the teacher down the mostly empty hall, passing other teacher/student pairs, before the classroom door finally loomed safe and secure in front of them. Miss Oldenburg’s students weren’t kindergarten babies anymore, but they still understood the power of ritual.
Ritual kept you safe. As long as you followed it, close as close can, nothing could ever hurt you.
“Good morning, class,” said Miss Oldenburg. “How was everyone’s evening?”
Hands were thrust into the air as the students raced to be the first to tell her about the hours between the final bell and bedtime. Glorious hours, free from adult structure and adult rules—although they were, Miss Oldenburg noted sadly, more confined than even her own first-grade hours had been. She had been seven when the Rising began, and thanks to the timing of her birthday, she had been preparing to start second grade. She remembered first grade as the last good time before everything had fallen apart. Long afternoons spent racing around the cul-de-sac where her family lived, playing tag and hide-and-seek and house with the other kids, most of whom had not survived the Rising. Long evenings lying on the grass in the backyard with her father, trying to name the stars, aware that he was just trying to keep her from spending all her time sitting in front of the television or playing video games, and yet not quite able to bring herself to care.
First grade had been the best year of her life. Maybe, if the Rising hadn’t started when it did, she would have forgotten that good year in favor of remembering other, even better years… but the Rising hadn’t wanted to wait for her to form more good memories. It had happened when it wanted to happen, and Elaine Oldenburg had been left thinking of first grade as an earthly paradise. Part of her still did, and always would, no matter how many fights she broke up, how many bruises she reported to the authorities, or how many times she had to call for decontamination after a nosebleed. First grade was where things still had the potential to go right. Everything after that…
Everything after that was all downhill.
Mikey’s father had finally allowed him to have a Quest Realm account of his very own, on a child-safe server, and he was playing a Pixie Ranger with a dire wolf companion whose mouth had so many teeth. Mikey spread out his hands and waggled his fingers on the words “so many,” like he was trying to illustrate a mathematical concept too large to be expressed in simple numbers. Jenna’s rat had had her babies, and now Jenna had eleven rats—two grown-ups and nine pups—and she was going to keep them all, and she would never be lonely, not ever. Sharon and Emily were going to have a sleepover on the weekend, and they had spent most of the previous afternoon instant-messaging each other about it, and they were both so excited that they were finishing one another’s sentences, words tumbling over each other like kittens at play. Scott had spent the evening adding samples to his rock collection, which was almost big enough to take up a whole shelf.
This sharing time was a normal part of Wednesday mornings, as normal as the lockdown and the coloring sheets and the way Mikey sometimes ate the red crayons—but only the red ones, making it a relatively easy problem to solve, as long as Miss Oldenburg could remember to give him greens and blues and browns instead, which she didn’t always, not in the rush to get all her students safely inside. She listened patiently to their stories, nodding when it seemed appropriate, asking questions when she could see that they were holding back details out of shyness or out of uncertainty whether their share was somehow dull or stupid or otherwise not worth finishing. One by one, all seventeen of her students spoke, setting their private worlds in front of her to be judged, and she didn’t find a single one of them wanting.
The clock struck 9:30 just as Brian was finishing his tale of the epic battle between his father and a bookshelf from IKEA that had resisted all efforts to put it together. Miss Oldenburg clapped her hands together, beaming. “Those were some wonderful stories,” she said. “You all had the very best evening, and I wish I could have been there with you, because it sounds like I would have had a lot more fun than I did sitting here and grading your math papers.”
A groan swept through the class, which was much more interested in the story of Brian’s bookshelf than in the thought of getting their math papers back.
“Now, come on,” said Miss Oldenburg. “You don’t even know how you did yet! Maybe you all did fabulously. You’ll only find out if you look at your papers.” She twisted to pick up the folder from her desk, stuffed with slightly wrinkled sheets of paper and bristling with gold stars. “We’re going to have a math review, we’re going to discuss all of our answers, and then we’re going to have the ten o’clock recess slot. How does that sound to everyone?”
This time she was met with cheers instead of groaning. Miss Oldenburg smiled brighter than ever.
“That’s what I thought. Who wants to help me hand back these papers?”
>> MGOWDA: WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THIS “ELAINE OLDENBURG” IS OUR TARGET?
>> AKWONG: FACIAL RECOGNITION COMES UP TO ABOUT 80%, WHICH IS PRETTY GOOD, GIVEN SIX YEARS + PROBABLE PLASTIC SURGERY. ADD HAIR DYE, DIFFERENCE IN DEMEANOR… I NEVER SAW THE WOMAN, BUT I THINK THIS IS HER. WAS HER. SHIT, BOSS, HOW DO YOU GO FROM POINT A TO POINT B?
>> MGOWDA: YOU FOUND HER. YOU FIGURE IT OUT.
—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 9:57 A.M.
Walking seventeen squirmy first graders through a basic math review wasn’t Elaine’s favorite activity, but it was still rewarding to see them light up when they got an answer right, something that happened more and more frequently as they worked their way through the test. Everyone had passed, which helped, and they each wound up with two or even three gold stars adorning their shirts and sleeves. Most of the stars would wind up stuck to desks, walls, or the floor by the end of the day, and then Elaine would collect them all and stick them to her folder, which slowly grew from plain paper to a galaxy over the course of each year. She knew this was how things were going to go, just as surely as she knew that after recess they would come back to the classroom for spelling and vocabulary, which would carry them all the way to lunch. Her day was a series of small, predictable routines, cut into child-sized pieces, and that was the way she liked it to be. Surprises were for other people. First grade was for learning, and for knowing every morning how the rest of the day was going to go.
“All right, class, that’s our last answer. You all did very well. Give yourselves a hand.” She clapped, and the class dutifully echoed her, filling the room with the sound of palms striking together. Miss Oldenburg beamed. “Now it’s time for our favorite part of the day. Who knows what that is?”
“Recess!” everyone crowed, in delighted if uneven unison. The recess assignments changed every week, to make sure that no class got a permanent claim on the nicest parts of the day. But even when recess happened immediately after load-in, spilling students out onto the blacktop while the air was still chilly from the night before, it remained everyone’s favorite part of the classroom routine. Fresh air, open skies, green grass… it was magical.
“That’s right,” said Miss Oldenburg. She picked up her coat—ankle-length, with Kevlar panels carefully concealed beneath the thick wool—and slipped it on. She’d need to switch to her summer coat in another month or so, which was much more obviously a form of armor, with its thin nylon fabric molding itself to the Kevlar that protected her limbs and joints. “What are the rules of recess?”
“Eyes and ears open, watch for danger, run for a teacher if anything seems strange,” chorused the class. They were more unified this time. The rules of recess were more familiar to them than the Pledge of Allegiance, and stood a better
chance of keeping them all alive. As they got older, they would replace the word “teacher” with “policeman” or “safe room,” but the rest of the rules would be with them for life.
The bell rang once, signaling the end of the previous recess period. Miss Oldenburg clapped her hands again. “Everyone up, out of your seat, jackets on, and get ready to go,” she said brightly.
The students obliged, forming a quick, straight line in front of the door. There was no pushing or shoving; no one got out of first grade without learning just how quickly their recess privileges could be taken away—in some cases permanently. Everyone knew about the no-recess classes, the ones where instead of twenty minutes of freedom under the sky, they got twenty minutes to read or play with handheld games, always seated, always under the watchful eye of their teacher. Freedom was important. Too important to risk on the brief pleasure of misbehaving when being good for just a few minutes more would mean getting outside, where misbehavior was ever so much easier.
All the teachers knew that there was a certain amount of pushing and squabbling on the playground. The cameras caught it all, and it was reviewed every night by campus security, who flagged anything troublesome straight to the appropriate teacher’s inbox. Students who regularly picked fights or bullied classmates would find themselves being watched more closely, or even pulled into parent-teacher conferences where their behavior would be discussed, and options would be put on the table, many of them pharmaceutical. Elaine wasn’t in favor of using drugs on students who didn’t have genuine medical reasons for them—Mikey had ADHD and was a much happier boy when he was taking his Ritalin; one of her students the year before had had childhood-onset OCD and had needed a complicated cocktail of pills just to get through the day without panicking over pencil shavings on the floor—but it was really between the parents and their doctor, and more and more chose sedation over the risk of a playground injury leading to exposure with every year that passed. Someday, she was sure, her classes would no longer care about recess; they would be medicated into calm acceptance of their place indoors, and the blacktops would lie empty and unneeded until they were torn up to build new, secure classrooms.