On the day of the Evergreen outbreak, it all broke down. No amount of preparation could have braced the school for a steadily arriving stream of concerned parents—parents who, once it became clear that their children would not be, could not be released, began to panic in earnest. Cars clogged the parking lot, driveway, and surrounding streets, making it more difficult for emergency personnel to get through.
The death toll of the outbreak cannot be pinned on the parents, who were after all following the rules that they had been told would protect them, and did nothing wrong. But neither can we afford to downplay the impact their growing mob mentality had on both containment and emergency response.
In the end, there is plenty of blame to go around.
—FROM UNSPOKEN TRAGEDIES OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM BY ALARIC KWONG, MARCH 19, 2044
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 4:52 P.M.
The tiles had, thus far, continued to hold, although they creaked alarmingly if the students held still for too long. Miss Oldenburg continued to ease her charges along, murmuring words of encouragement and cajoling when necessary. Several of the younger children were crying, and had been since they realized that they weren’t going back to their classroom. Since none of them had yet progressed to full-on bawling, she hadn’t been forced to find a way to make them stop. If they really started wailing…
Well, that was a problem she would deal with when it presented itself, and not a second more. Borrowing trouble seemed like a bad idea when they already had so much of it readily at hand.
They were moving toward the side of the school, at least if her vague idea of how the ceiling divisions matched up to the halls and classrooms below could be trusted. They had been forced to stop twice now by screaming from below, marking an ongoing—and ultimately futile—battle between the infected and their prey. Each time, the screaming had stopped, replaced by low, unsteady moaning. Each time, she had commanded the students with quick, unyielding gestures to be still and keep silent. They had seen enough news programs about the infected to know what those moans meant, and had frozen like so many scared rabbits until the sounds faded and Miss Oldenburg had started coaxing them forward again.
It had been a little harder to get the group moving each time. She wasn’t sure how long she could keep them under control—but then again, maybe she wouldn’t have to do it for much longer. If they reached the wall, they would reach the air filtration shaft. She remembered Guy pointing it out so proudly, like he’d been the one to design the school and install the big air pipe.
“It’s technically a weakness, on account of how it connects to the school roof without any bars or electrical fencing or whatever,” he’d said. “But zombies can’t climb, and we don’t have any dead people crawling around the attic. It’s safe as houses. If there was ever an outbreak on the property, this is where I’d go. Right here. This is what would get me out.”
As she crawled along, she wondered belatedly whether he’d already been thinking of this very scenario, and had been trying to give her a way out in case it ever came to pass. He was a smart man, and he’d always liked her. Maybe he was somewhere up here in the roof with them, crawling along, heading for his own salvation. That thought lead to another, more unnerving one: he’d said that there were no dead people crawling around in the attic, but that didn’t mean there was no one who’d been bitten and not yet amplified. Someone who was already infected could be lurking just around the next corner, waiting to lunge.
A small hand caught her sleeve. Elaine nearly screamed, stopping herself and swallowing the sound at the last moment. She turned to see a little boy from Ms. Teeter’s class tugging on her dress, a solemn expression on his face.
“Yes?” she said, keeping her voice low.
“I need to go,” he said.
That simple, mundane admission sparked a chorus of similar statements from all sides. Elaine winced. “We can’t stop at the bathroom right now, honey,” she said. “Can’t you hold it just a little longer?”
The boy shook his head.
Elaine grimaced as she cast a panicked look around the crawl space. If any part of it was being used for storage, that part wasn’t currently lit; the light only extended for five or so feet past the leading edge of the children, and the motion sensors were sensitive enough that the lights had already turned off again behind them. That was good—the motion sensors being sensitive meant that it was less likely that anyone could be up there with the class—but it was also bad. If there were buckets or boxes or other helpful, containerlike objects up in the roof, she wasn’t going to be able to find them in time.
“All right,” she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could. “Do you need to go number one or number two?”
Cheeks burning with the sheer mortification of discussing such a thing with an adult who was neither his mother nor his teacher, the boy said, “Number one.”
“That’s good. All right. I know this… I know this isn’t the usual way, but I want you to go over there”—she gestured toward the nearest low divider, some ten feet of crawl space away—“and pee on the floor.”
The boy looked horrified, as did the other children close enough to have heard her terrible proposal. “I can’t do that!” he said. “That’s dirty. I can’t.”
“Then you’ll have to hold it,” she said firmly. “We can’t go down to the bathroom right now. There are…” She stopped herself before she could tell him exactly what was in the school that prevented their descent. Many of the children probably knew. Those same children were clearly repressing the information, choosing temporary ignorance over the strain of knowing. She wished she could do the same. “We have to keep playing this game until we win. You want to win, don’t you?”
Looking puzzled, the little boy nodded.
“Then if you have to go, you have to go up here in the roof. I’m sorry. It’s the way things are right now.” It was a terrible excuse. She knew it, and so did the children, who looked at her with mingled expressions of doubt and confusion, like they couldn’t believe that those words were actually leaving her mouth. But she stood by them. She had to. There wasn’t any other choice.
Finally, still looking confused—and like he might start to cry at any moment—the little boy crawled off to the place she had indicated to take care of his business. Elaine rubbed her forehead with one hand, allowing herself to close her eyes and take a few quick, stabilizing breaths. This was all so much harder than she had ever imagined it could be.
Then again, she hadn’t had any idea, when her day began, that she would be dealing with an on-campus outbreak before the day was done. If she’d known, she would have called in sick, or at least worn trousers. At least being above the classrooms meant that the alarm wasn’t as loud. At least most of her students were still alive.
At least zombies couldn’t climb.
More than a minute slithered by before a hand tugged on her sleeve. She opened her eyes and turned to see the little boy from before kneeling next to her. His cheeks were so red that she worried briefly that he was going to pass out. “I couldn’t wash my hands,” he said miserably.
“It’s all right,” she assured him. “Once we finish the game, we’re all going to get a nice hot bath.” The CDC would scrub them so clean that one little tinkle without soap and water at the end would seem like nothing. All they had to do was get there.
Raising her voice just a little—just enough that it would carry—she said, “All right, everyone. We need to move.” She crawled forward, trying to spur them into action.
The ceiling gave way beneath her.
It wasn’t an immediate thing. It might have been better if it had been. A quick drop would have slammed her into the classroom floor below, and might have meant that less of the ceiling would have caved in along with her. She would never know what had weakened the tiles at that precise point. Maybe it was the long hesitation of the group putting slow but constant stress on them. Maybe it was old water damage weakening the connection be
tween the individual tiles and the thin frame that had been designed to hold them in place. Whatever the reason, the ceiling first lurched, sinking down, and then—before she could do more than catch her breath and try to wish away what was about to happen—collapsed completely.
Elaine Oldenburg fell. Roughly two-thirds of the students in her care fell with her, and like the tiles, they tumbled gradually. Some were on the piece of ceiling that collapsed, and they plummeted down at the same time as she did, pinwheeling in a cloud of tile fragments and broken supports. Others managed to grab the edges of the hole her fall had created, only to fall a few seconds later as their underdeveloped upper bodies failed to give them the purchase that they needed. In less than thirty seconds, only four students remained in the roof: two of the kindergarteners, and Scott and Brian from Miss Oldenburg’s class.
The lucky four peered through the hole in horror, looking down on an empty fourth-grade classroom. Some of the other kids had landed on desks or slammed into the floor so hard that blood was coming out of their mouths or noses. A few of them didn’t seem to be breathing. And in the midst of the shattered throng sprawled Miss Oldenburg, her limbs splayed, her eyes closed.
“Miss Oldenburg?” whispered Scott. The teacher didn’t respond. A few of the other kids stirred and groaned, but they were living groans, I-don’t-wanna groans, not the pained exhalations of the dead. He knew what infected people sounded like, even if no one wanted to believe that he could know something like that. Suzy down the street’s grandpa had died and come back again while her mom was babysitting for him. Scott had heard the dead old man moaning through the door. He’d never forget that sound.
“Miss Oldenburg?” he whispered again, louder. The classroom door was open. That seemed suddenly very important, and very scary. Why, if the classroom door was open, just about anything could come through. “You have to wake up now. Please?” One of the kindergarten babies up in the roof with him started to cry. Scott glared at her, which just made her cry harder.
She wasn’t the only one. Some of the kids down on the floor were awake now, and they were almost all of them crying, rubbing at their eyes and elbows and knees while they made little gasping, sobbing sounds, like they just couldn’t keep it inside anymore. The kids who weren’t crying weren’t moving, either. They were just lying there, and some of them were bleeding, from their ears or mouths. One kindergartener had blood soaking slowly through the left leg of his pants, turning the corduroy fabric from green to a dark, unpleasant shade of brown.
Miss Oldenburg wasn’t moving. She wasn’t bleeding either, so maybe it was okay, but she wasn’t moving, and the classroom door was open, and this wasn’t okay, this wasn’t okay at all.
Scott’s cheeks were wet. Dimly, he realized that he was crying like a little baby. For once, he didn’t care. All he cared about was his teacher, lying silent and motionless on the floor below, not telling them what to do next.
“Miss Oldenburg?”
>> AKWONG: I’M ALMOST DONE. I NEED A SHOWER, AND MAYBE A STIFF DRINK.
>> MGOWDA: YOU DON’T DRINK.
>> AKWONG: RIGHT NOW, I FEEL LIKE I’M READY TO START. HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED AT SOMETHING AND FELT LIKE YOU WERE NEVER GOING TO BE CLEAN AGAIN?
>> MGOWDA: I WAS AT GEORGIA’S FUNERAL. I SPENT SIX HOURS IN THE BATH AT MY HOTEL, AND I STILL FELT FILTHY WHEN I WAS DONE. TO BE QUITE HONEST, PART OF ME STAYED DIRTY UNTIL YOU TOLD ME SHE WAS BACK AMONG THE LIVING.
>> AKWONG: DOES IT GET BETTER?
>> MGOWDA: THAT’S WHAT THE ALCOHOL IS FOR.
—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 5:03 P.M.
Elaine Oldenburg woke to the soft, brittle sound of children crying all around her. The back of her skull felt like it had been split open and then glued back together by careless surgeons, and when she forced herself—slowly, so slowly—to sit up, bits of tile and shattered roof dug into her hips and side. Her back ached from the impact. At least nothing felt like it was broken; she had landed incredibly well, considering the circumstances. And at least she hadn’t landed on any of the children.
The children! She looked frantically from side to side, only wincing a little at the pain the motion sent lancing through her head. Students littered the floor to either side of her, some of them sitting up and hugging themselves as they cried, others still flat on their backs, unmoving. Worst of all, the classroom door was open. Depending on how much noise they had made as they fell…
“Miss Oldenburg?”
Scott’s voice was barely above a whisper. Elaine looked up, and saw his pale, worried face peeking over the edge of the hole in the ceiling. The distance between them seemed insurmountable, and made it even more miraculous that she had fallen as far as she had without injuring herself. “Scott, move away from the edge,” she said, keeping her voice as low as she dared. “You don’t want to fall.”
“Miss Oldenburg, how are we supposed to get down?”
Elaine hesitated before she said, “You’re not. It’s not safe down here. I want you to go around the hole. Keep heading for the wall. You’ll find a hatch there. Open it, and slide down the chute on the other side.”
“But—”
“If you do it, you’ll come out on the lawn. You’ll get out, Scott. Take whoever’s still up there with you, and get out.” Elaine’s expression hardened marginally. “You owe them.”
And Scott—who knew the part he might have played in today’s events, even if he didn’t fully understand it yet, and wouldn’t for years—nodded. “Okay. Will we see you outside?”
“Yes,” lied Elaine. “You will.”
His head vanished from the edge of the hole. Elaine watched for a few seconds to be sure that he wasn’t going to come back. Then she turned her attention to the children around her, the ones who were still in her care… the ones who had fallen.
Not all of them had survived. Mikey was nearby, his eyes open and his head twisted hard to the side. He was never going to log back onto his treasured Quest Realm account. Distantly, that hurt her more than the reality of his death. Elaine knew she was separating from the situation, turning it into something abstract and endurable, and she let it happen, because endurable was what she needed. It was what her students needed.
A low moan drifted through the open classroom door. Elaine stiffened. “Quiet!” she hissed, pressing herself lower to the floor in an effort to keep from being seen by anyone—anything—that shuffled by in the hall. “Everyone, quiet.”
Most of the students obeyed, freezing as their own terror overrode their fear. One, a kindergartener whose corduroy pants had gone virtually black with blood, kept sobbing. It was a small, tinny sound, but that would be enough; any infected person who was still roving the school would be able to home in on it like a bloodhound. Elaine scooted closer to the student.
“Please, sweetie, please, you have to be quiet,” she whispered.
The little boy looked at her with wide, tear-filled eyes, and continued to sob. It had all been too much, the fear, the pain: he couldn’t stop, no matter how much he wanted to do as he was told.
“Please,” she whispered again. This time he shook his head. It was a tiny gesture, accompanied by an even louder sob. His pupils almost obscured his irises, dilated by shock.
Biting her lip, Elaine let herself really look at the boy’s leg for the first time. The shape of it was off, somehow, like the bones no longer formed the straight lines they were supposed to. There was a lot of blood, not only soaking into the fabric, but pooling on the tile floor. The moaning from the hall was getting louder, and his sobs weren’t stopping. They weren’t going to, not unless he bled out, and they didn’t have time to wait.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and put her hands on either side of his head, like she’d been shown in her self-defense classes, the ones that were supposed to let you keep fighting even after you’d run out of ammunition. All her lesson
s had focused on two things: minimizing blood splatter and preventing reanimation. It was very clinical. She’d been a very good student.
She was distancing again. It was better than the alternatives, which were all very close and very immediate. No matter how much she tried, she couldn’t distance herself enough. When she thought about it later—which she would do as little as she possibly could, because some things simply don’t bear thinking about—she would always know what sanity sounded like when it finally broke. It would sound like the small, delicate bones of a kindergartener’s neck, snapping.
The other children didn’t make a sound as she carefully eased her hands away from the boy’s neck, leaving him to lay limply, staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes. She pressed a finger to her lips and made a gesture with her free hand, indicating that they should get as low to the floor as possible. Shock, or maybe terror, made them follow her directions. She flattened herself down with them, and waited.
The moan from the hall came again, louder still. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something shuffle past the open door. Then something else, and something else, until a stream of infected bodies was shambling past, claiming the school eternally as their own. Elaine stayed flat against the floor, praying silently that none of her charges would panic and start to scream, praying that the infected would shamble on past them.
If there had been fewer dead bodies in the school, less blood and offal scattered about, things might have gone very differently. But the infected had stopped trying to turn the students they came across, and had started using the bodies to satisfy their insatiable hunger instead. When the lead members of the pack smelled the blood and other bodily fluids in the classroom, they kept going, assuming that there was nothing through that door worth finding. In a matter of minutes, the only sound was the soft shuffle of feet moving away down the hall, leaving Elaine Oldenburg and her surviving students behind.