by Mira Grant
Scott Ribar was too small to amplify, and had little to fear from biological contamination. He could have touched infected blood a hundred times and never risked anything more than a lecture and a thorough decontamination. That didn’t mean the Kellis-Amberlee virus had spared him. It lived all throughout his body, protecting him from the little trials that had haunted childhoods for a thousand years. He had never suffered from a cold, he had never wasted a beautiful day throwing up or sniffling and being forbidden to go outside. Thanks to Kellis-Amberlee and his yearly flu shots, he had never been really sick a day in his life.
But Kellis-Amberlee was patient. It knew, in its slow, virological way, that one day Scott would become a viable host, and so it continued to replicate inside his body… right up until the moment when he bled on the ground near the slide. Then, the blood that was no longer truly a part of Scott began to change. Kellis-Amberlee was designed to have two states: one active, one inert. Separated from the electrical currents that kept it calm and inactive, the Kellis-Amberlee in Scott’s blood had become active and infectious. The area under the slide was a hot zone, ready to infect anyone who came into contact with it.
The bell rang. Nathan and Joseph looked up. Nathan scowled and thrust the phone at Joseph, taking the hand he’d been using to brace himself and wiping it harshly across his mouth before he said, “That’s bull. We should get more time than this.”
“Yeah,” agreed Joseph, slipping the phone back into his pocket as he stood. Then he offered Nathan his hand. Nathan scowled at it for a moment, still upset by the loss of the phone. Finally, he took it and allowed Joseph to pull him to his feet.
Nathan’s palm was moist, and gritty with gravel from the blacktop. Joseph resisted the urge to wipe his hand clean on the seat of his pants. He didn’t want to pick a fight. He could always wash his hands later—although even as he had the thought he knew he wouldn’t go through with the action. He never did. “Washing your hands later” was for sissies and babies and people who had touched poop, not sweaty palms. Sweaty palms were part of becoming a man, and there was nothing wrong with that.
The pair emerged from under the slide, walking as casually as was possible, and joined the line preparing to be processed back into the school. Their teacher, Mr. O’Toole, was coming up on retirement age; he looked at them indulgently, having some small idea of what two boys who chose to hide during recess were likely to be discussing. He didn’t see the harm in it, not really. Biology had been messed up a bit by Kellis-Amberlee, but he hadn’t survived the Rising and become a teacher to say that the natural order of things was canceled forever. That meant allowing for a bit of good old-fashioned pubescent naughtiness.
Nathan Patterson felt perfectly fine as he approached the airlock. The virus he had wiped across his lips was still hanging there, untasted, waiting for its opportunity to travel one scant inch further and invade the sanctity of his skin. His blood test came back clean, and why shouldn’t it? He hadn’t been exposed yet, not really. Not to anything except the Kellis-Amberlee already inside his body and patiently waiting for its chance to change.
As he stepped through the door into the hall he remembered the woman on Joseph’s phone, the one with her back arched and her eyes slanted toward the camera, like she was remembering something secret. He licked his lips. The airlock closed behind him, and the guards recorded another successful recess, no casualties, no infections.
Those would come later.
The speed with which a body reacts to a live Kellis-Amberlee infection is impressive, even within the scientific world. As the body is already saturated with the inert virus, introducing the active, or “live” virus to the system will trigger a rapid chain reaction, beginning the conversion process in a matter of seconds. While it can take up to several hours for large, otherwise healthy individuals to fully amplify, the body already knows that it is sick. Blood tests will already betray the ongoing spread of Kellis-Amberlee. Neurological exams performed by the EIS on individuals who had not yet begun showing symptoms have shown that some higher brain functions will already be compromised, beginning the process of sliding into the unthinking “zombie” state manifested by the sick.
The source of the Evergreen Elementary outbreak was later traced to a piece of playground equipment that had become contaminated during an earlier recess session. We know that the virus was carried into the school by Nathan Patterson, age 10. He was a student in Mr. O’Toole’s fourth-grade class. He weighed 78 lbs., putting him well above the Kellis-Amberlee amplification threshold. He was not infected when he passed the checkpoint protecting the classrooms.
Hand swabs and sterilization would be introduced in the state of Washington in 2037 as a direct result of the events at Evergreen. Since then, these procedures have saved an unknown number of lives. There have been no further Evergreens.
I doubt this is any comfort to the parents of the students who died. It would certainly not have been a comfort to me.
—FROM UNSPOKEN TRAGEDIES OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM BY ALARIC KWONG, MARCH 19, 2044
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 11:23 A.M.
Elaine Oldenburg’s class was deeply involved in reviewing their vocabulary lists when the windows locked down.
It was a small sound, intentionally calibrated to cause as little dismay or panic as possible: just a clunk from the base of the window as the small bolts that usually hung suspended above the metal frame suddenly descended, forming an effectively unbreakable seal. Elaine looked up, eyes widening briefly. That was the only sign of surprise that she allowed herself to show. For a teacher, keeping her students from panicking always had to be her top priority. If she betrayed any dismay over the situation, they would pick it up, and she would risk losing control. That was something she couldn’t afford.
“Everyone, heads down and read quietly,” she said, pushing away from her desk. “I need to make a quick call to the office.”
The students grumbled but did as they were told. Those who sat close enough to the window to have heard the locks deploy assumed that it was a drill; why else would their desks still be open? They bent their heads like all the others, pulling out their readers and focusing on the text.
Elaine Oldenburg walked briskly to the corner where the phone hung, old-fashioned and obscurely menacing in this world of cell phones and wireless headsets. The school phone wouldn’t have looked out of place twenty years ago, with its big, heavy buttons and curly brown cord. She plucked the receiver off the wall and brought it to her ear.
She didn’t need to dial. The school’s basic emergency broadcast was already playing, and she paled as it washed over her: “—repeat, do not panic. We are investigating the reported outbreak. Please remain in your classrooms. Please do not allow any students to leave the classroom. Please do not inform the students that there is a problem. We repeat, do not panic. We are investigating—”
Elaine carefully set the phone back in its cradle and turned to look around the room at her students. They were reading, or at least pretending to read; some of them were no doubt just staring at the pages, wishing that the confusing jumble of numbers and letters would resolve itself into words. All of her students were reading at the required grade level, but it was harder for some than it was for others. Just like it had always been. The Rising couldn’t change everything, I suppose, she thought, and reddened a little, annoyed by her own flippancy. There was an outbreak on school grounds, or at least there might be. That was what she should have been thinking about, not how well her students were or were not reading.
Keeping her movement as calm and casual as possible, she walked over to the door and tried the knob. To her surprise, it turned easily, and the door—designed to open from the inside and not the outside, no matter how hard the knob was twisted—came open when she tugged. She took a deep breath before sticking her head out into the hall, looking both ways for signs that anything was wrong.
The airlock at the end of the hall was deserted, the guards no doubt elsewhere on campus, inve
stigating the reported outbreak. The blacktop was a charcoal blur through the thick safety glass, but she saw no movement there; if there had been a class at recess when the infection was detected, they had already been recalled and returned to the safety of their classroom.
Well. The desks weren’t locked, and the door wasn’t locked; whatever was going on, it couldn’t be all that bad. Elaine Oldenburg pulled her head back inside and closed the door, turning to find herself watched by seventeen pairs of solemn, staring eyes. She forced herself to smile. It felt artificial, but she had practiced the expression over and over, until she knew that it would seem real to anyone viewing it from outside. That was part of her job. She was a teacher. She had to reassure her students.
“They’re testing the locks,” she lied smoothly. “I was just following instructions and making sure that all the doors were correctly shut.”
Sharon put her hand up. “Miss Oldenburg, I need to go to the bathroom,” she said. A few of the other students snickered. Sharon, who was remarkably good at ignoring teasing over things that everyone did—had, in fact, done an irritated book presentation on Everybody Poops after some of the boys teased her for being a girl who went to the potty—ignored them, focusing on her teacher.
“I’m sorry, Sharon, but the bathrooms are off-limits right now,” said Elaine apologetically. “It’s not an emergency, is it?”
Sharon’s cheeks reddened, and she lowered her hand. “No, Miss Oldenburg.” An emergency—a real emergency—during a lockdown would mean using the bucket in the supply cabinet. Sharon might be bold about her need to occasionally leave the room, but no first grader ever was going to be happy about peeing in a bucket with only a thin door between them and their classmates.
“All right,” said Elaine. “They should end the test soon, and when they do, we’ll be able to go to the bathroom. Anyone who needs to.” She walked back over to her desk, taking her usual place against the front of it, wishing that she dared to open the top drawer and withdraw her service pistol. She didn’t like wearing it around the students most of the time, and she wasn’t allowed to have it out when there wasn’t an emergency: teachers weren’t allowed to carry openly except during load-in and load-out until fifth grade, when it was assumed that their students were both a potential danger and smart enough not to grab for a loaded weapon. But oh, she wanted it. With an unspecified potential outbreak somewhere on campus, and seventeen little souls trusting her to keep them safe, she wanted it more than words could say.
“All right, where were we?” she asked. “Jenna, I think it was your turn.”
“‘Tremble,’” read Jenna. “T-R—”
Class continued normally, with Elaine—now firmly Miss Oldenburg once more, pulling the mantle of her position around herself as if it would somehow protect her from the natural terror that was clawing at the back of her throat—leading the discussion. The windows were still locked. The windows were still locked, but the doors were open, and there had been no alarm. This didn’t match any emergency procedure she knew, and she was quite reasonably afraid. She also knew that she couldn’t share her fear with her students.
It was almost a relief when the alarm began to ring. It was a series of descending tones, designed to be impossible to ignore but not to incite panic, since it sounded more like a video game fail sound than a fire alarm or police siren. That was the idea, anyway. The children had heard it before, during drills and student orientation, and they knew that it meant something was wrong. When added to the locked windows and their teacher’s obvious discomfort, it was clear to all of them that something was very wrong.
The desk restraints locked shut a few seconds later—or tried to. Less than a third of the clasps intended to hold the students in their seats actually deployed; eleven students found themselves partially restrained, with one leg connected to the desk while the other remained free. Several of the students who had been locked down began to cry. So did several of the students who hadn’t been. They knew something was wrong.
Scott Ribar put his hands over his face. Emily, who sat next to him, glanced in his direction and started screaming.
Panic is a strange beast. It comes quickly when called, and leaves slowly, if it ever leaves at all. Adding Emily’s shrill, terrified screams to the tears and confusion already filling the room had panic clawing at the door in a matter of seconds. Miss Oldenburg moved faster than any of them had ever seen her move, pushing away from the desk and running down the aisle of desks and half-contained students until she reached Emily. Emily was still too small to convert, and so Miss Oldenburg made a judgment call, grabbing the girl by the shoulders and pulling her around to face her teacher.
“What is it, Emily?” she demanded. “What’s wrong?”
“Blood!” wailed Emily. “Blood, blood, he’s all over blood!” In her terror and confusion her vocabulary was deserting her, leaving her with the simplistic syntax of a younger child—but even young children can get their points across when they really need to.
Miss Oldenburg’s head whipped around, attention suddenly focusing on Scott, who had dropped his hands and was hiding them in his lap as he cringed away from her. He might even have gotten out of the chair in his effort to move away, if not for the single clasp that had closed around his left ankle. “Scott? What is Emily talking about?”
Scott shook his head, his mouth a thin, terrified line.
With the word “blood” still hanging in the room like a condemnation, Miss Oldenburg straightened and took a step toward his desk, demanding, “Let me see your hands.” If he refused… she didn’t know what she would do if he refused. She couldn’t grab him. If there was any chance of contamination, touching him would be a quick way to make the situation even worse.
Thankfully, this was her classroom, and in her classroom her authority was absolute, even when it didn’t have to be. Scott slowly pulled his hands out from under his desk and held them toward her, letting her see.
There was a thin brown stain at the very top of his left palm. It seemed to extend upward. “Pull your sleeve up,” she instructed. He did, revealing the scrape that ran along the side of his wrist. There wasn’t a lot of blood.
There didn’t have to be.
“Scott, did you hurt yourself at recess?” It was a struggle to keep her voice level. He nodded, not meeting her eyes. “Scott, did you know that you were supposed to tell me if you got hurt? That I needed to know if you were hurt?” Again, the nod, and the lack of eye contact. Miss Oldenburg swallowed bile, resisting the urge to move as far away from him as the confines of her classroom would allow. “Scott, this is very important. Did you get blood on anything else? Did you bleed anywhere?”
“Just the ground a little, under the slide where nobody goes but me.” The words were slow and halting, and filled with shame. Even if Scott was too small to amplify and hence too small to fully understand the scope of what he’d done—because he hadn’t been taught yet, because there was no point in terrifying the children when you didn’t have to—he knew that bleeding and then hiding it was one of the worst crimes he was capable of committing at his young age. He knew. But he had done it anyway. “I didn’t get blood on anybody or the floor or anything. I soaked it all up in my jacket, see?” He thrust his arm toward her, like the absorbent lining of his jacket would serve as an apology all by itself.
Elaine recoiled, stopping when her hips hit the desk behind her. The students stared in wide-eyed silence, unable to fully process the sight of their normally calm, collected teacher reacting with such obvious terror. She took a deep breath, forcing the veil of Miss Oldenburg down over herself again, and said, “Don’t take your coat off, Scott. Don’t touch anyone. Especially don’t touch me. I’m too big. Your blood would… your blood would hurt me.”
Scott’s eyes went round and bright with terror. “I don’t want to hurt you, Miss Oldenburg! I don’t want to hurt anybody! I just wanted a little piece of blacktop for my rock collection! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Then, to
her shame and dismay, he started to cry.
Her classes on crowd psychology and maintaining order in the classroom told her to soothe him. Her classes in virology and outbreak containment told her to stay as far away from him as she possibly could. To her shame and her relief, safety won. “Stay in your seat, Scott,” she said, and turned and walked back to the front of the class, where she moved behind her desk and unlocked the top drawer.
For some teachers, putting on the Kevlar gloves and strapping their service pistol to their waist would have brought a feeling of security, like they had finally put the world back in order. For Elaine Oldenburg, it felt like a declaration of failure. Whatever was happening on campus may well have started in her class. There was going to be an inquisition, a review; she could lose her license. Maybe that would be for the best. She loved teaching, but the feeling of cold dread now gathering under her breastbone was painful enough that it would be a long, long time before she could forget it. Maybe it would be best if she wound up going to the virtual schools early, where she would never need to feel like this again.
She knew that the memory of the fear would pass by the time she stood before the review board. All she had to do was get her students through this day, and everything would be all right, one way or another. She walked to the hook where she had hung her coat, with its sturdy Kevlar panels and protective cloth folds. Any little bit of armor between her and the disaster would be welcome.
As for her class, they watched with wide, silent eyes as she went through each step of the process. Some of them understood what she was doing. Others, who had managed to stay just a little bit more sheltered than their classmates, had no idea.
When she was finished, she turned to them, clapped her hands together—the sound muffled by the gloves—and said, “I don’t know why the desk restraints aren’t working, but I need you all to stay good and quiet in your seats until I tell you that you can get up. Do you understand?”