The children didn’t move. Tears rolled silently down their cheeks, but their tiny bodies were frozen with fear. Normally, Elaine would have tried to coax them out of their terror, encouraging them to let it go and return to her. For the moment, however, their inability to move was exactly what she needed. She pushed herself away from the floor, remaining hunched over to make herself look small, and cautiously inched across the classroom toward the open door. She was almost there when something moaned in the hall outside. She didn’t think: she just reacted, flinging herself to the side and toward the shelter of the teacher’s desk, blocking her view of the door—and the door’s view of her.
She was focusing so hard on landing without making a sound that it took her a moment to realize that there was someone behind the desk with her. Elaine clapped a hand over her mouth to keep her gasp from escaping, and stared into the blank, empty eyes of one of the fourth-grade teachers, a gentle, pleasant man named Mr. Kapur. He wouldn’t be leading his class on his annual butterfly-spotting expedition this spring: his throat had been ripped neatly out, and chunks of flesh were missing from his arms and shoulders. His attackers had kindly spared his face, making him all too recognizable.
Elaine swallowed several times in an effort to keep herself from vomiting, and listened as the straggling moaner shuffled by in the hall. All the while, Mr. Kapur stared at her, seeming almost reproachful in his blankness. This was her fault, his empty eyes implied. She should have watched her students more carefully; she should have seen that Scott was bleeding, and called for an immediate lockdown of the blacktop. That she hadn’t done so only proved that whatever came next, she deserved it. But he hadn’t, and neither had the children. This was all on her.
Silence reigned once more. As quickly as she dared, Elaine pushed herself away from the body of Mr. Kapur and stood unsteadily, too scared and off balance to trust herself in a crouch. She would fall over if she tried to keep herself low to the ground, and then the zombies would surely return to finish what they had started. How many more bodies were strewn around the classroom, she didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. The hole in the roof was starting to seem well-placed to her. They could have all landed on the desks. They could have landed in a pile of bodies. Instead, most of them had landed on the floor, which, while unforgiving, was at least unobstructed.
Part of her wanted to protest that a pile of bodies would have been softer, that maybe one of Ms. Teeter’s students who was now dead would still be alive if they had fallen through a slightly different spot, but she forced that part firmly aside. If she allowed herself to think about the dead kindergartener, she would have to think about how the boy had died, and she couldn’t do that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Still cautious, moving as slowly as she could, Elaine picked her way along the wall behind the desk to the supply cabinet, and tried the door. It was locked. A thin mewl of dismay escaped her lips before she could stop it. Of course it was locked. The lower grades could be mostly trusted—they couldn’t reach the higher shelves, where the bleach and ammunition was stored—but once students reached amplification size, it was standard policy to lock the closet doors. Mr. Kapur might have the key, or it might have been lost somewhere in the chaos that had overtaken his classroom. The only way she’d know was by searching his corpse.
Elaine Oldenburg was a woman on the verge of breaking. She had been pushed further and harder than she had ever imagined possible, and it took everything she had left to turn and walk back to the body of her colleague. Carefully, she knelt down and searched through his pockets. There were no keys. She bit her lip almost hard enough to draw blood as she straightened up and began easing his desk drawers open. The keys had to be here somewhere. Falling was bad, yes, but being on the ground with the infected was even worse. If she found the keys, she could get them into the closet; get them back into the crawl space. They could still get out of this death trap. They could still—
She had been so focused on what she was doing that she had forgotten one very important part of her situation: the children, whose shock was wearing off, and not all of whom were accustomed to following her orders. Three of the surviving kindergarteners scrambled to their feet, almost as if they were executing a prearranged plan, and sprinted for the door, ignoring their surroundings as they gave in to the burning need to be away. Away was the only thing that mattered. Not the muffled cries of their classmates, not the teacher who whirled, staring, at the sound of their footsteps on the floor: away was everything.
In the blink of an eye, the three kindergarteners were out of the classroom and running down the hall, unsupervised, seemingly unaware of the dangers that awaited them. Elaine only had a moment to reach a decision. Keep looking for the keys, or run after the children?
There was a third option, and terrible as it was, it seemed like the only one worth taking. She stepped out from behind the desk, beckoning the children who had not run to come and stand around her. Then she waited.
She didn’t have to wait for long. The three children had run after what they presumed to be the sound of rescue, and was actually the sound of their destruction. The screams started less than half a minute after they left the room. Elaine grabbed the hands of the two nearest children, hissed, “No matter what, do not make a sound,” and ran. The students, trained to obedience and lines, and motivated by their fear, followed her.
The screams from the far end of the hall were still echoing as Elaine and her students raced along, skidding around a corner and throwing themselves into the unknown. Classroom doors gaped at them like toothless, broken mouths, granting them glimpses of the horrors within. Elaine scanned the walls as well as she could without slowing down, looking for construction paper decorations and cubbyholes. They needed a kindergarten, or a first-grade or even a second-grade class; someplace where the students would have been too small to reanimate and the closets would have been left unlocked. Something where she wouldn’t have to rummage through a dead man’s pockets before she boosted her students to safety.
Then she whirled around a corner and found herself looking down the barrel of a shotgun, held in the shaking, blood-covered hands of the school’s night janitor. Guy should have been gone hours since, but here he was, still in his overalls and janitor’s cap, with blood soaked so deeply into the fabric that it could almost be excused as an unusual sort of dye. Only the still-blue fabric around his collar betrayed just how much blood had been spilled, and how guaranteed his amplification had become.
“Guy,” she gasped. The screams from behind them had stopped. That wasn’t a good thing. It meant that the infected were no longer preoccupied with their latest kill, and would be looking for something else to hunt—soon. She couldn’t stand here in the open with her remaining children. That would be suicide. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
“Miss Oldenburg.” The janitor’s voice was unsteady, shaking like his hands. At least his eyes were clear, displaying none of the pupillary dilation that would signal final amplification. “You shouldn’t be in the halls. The alarm—”
“—has been ringing for hours. Guy, we need to go past you. Please, let us go past you.”
Slowly, he frowned, looking puzzled. Elaine’s heart gave a lurch. If he was too far gone to understand speech, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Amplification changed the way a person’s thoughts worked, gumming them up until they couldn’t move quickly, or sometimes at all. It was part of the process that reduced a living, thinking human being to a mechanism for spreading the Kellis-Amberlee virus more effectively. Since it happened differently with every victim, spreading through their bodies and minds at varying rates, there was no real way of knowing whether Guy had minutes or hours left before he started trying to kill them all.
Well. It probably wasn’t hours.
“There’s nothing past me, Miss Oldenburg,” he said. “Everyone’s dead. You can’t go back that way.”
“We have to,” she said. “The halls behind us are full of t
he infected.” Jenna was crying, pressing her face against Elaine’s hip and burying her free hand in the fabric of Elaine’s skirt. Elaine couldn’t allow herself to be distracted, not now, not under the circumstances. She kept her eyes locked on Guy, begging him to understand—begging him to still be human enough to let her go.
“Don’t know how the damn things got inside,” muttered Guy. He glanced past Elaine and the children, looking down the hall. The corner blocked the mob of the infected from his view. “Thought we had protection.”
That was always the problem, wasn’t it? People thought of the infected as things that could be kept out, and didn’t think of them as the virus that was already there, just waiting for the opportunity to stir and open its eyes. Kellis-Amberlee hadn’t managed to “get inside.” It had just found a way to wake.
“Guy, please, focus,” Elaine said. “We need to go past you. We’re trying to find a way out of the school.”
“Oh, yeah?” For the first time, he looked interested; the barrel of the shotgun dipped slightly. “But you won’t be taking me, will you? I’m just a janitor. Not good enough for your little escape plan.”
“You’re already infected.” The words were harsh. Elaine pressed on anyway. “I can’t take you with me, or they’ll shoot us all as soon as they see us. They might shoot me anyway. I’m over the amplification threshold.”
“But none of your students are.” Guy hesitated before asking, “Roof?”
“If we can get there.” There was no sense in lying to him: he was the one who’d told her about the vents, and more, he was the one with the shotgun. If he didn’t want her to make it any further, she wouldn’t. “The infected can’t climb.”
“Not once they’re fully amplified,” he said. “What will you do if there’s already something up there, waiting for you?”
“Die.” More of the students started crying. She could feel her control over them wavering. It was a miracle that they’d been able to keep calm for as long they had. Once she lost them… it would be the three kindergarteners running down the hall all over again. She’d never get them back. “This is our only chance. Now please, let us pass.”
“I don’t know—”
He didn’t get the chance to finish his statement. A low groan echoed from one of the nearby classrooms, followed by a chorus of answering moans. The children instantly clustered around their teacher, clutching her dress and casting terrified looks at the open door.
“We have to go,” implored Elaine.
Guy—who was close, yes, to full amplification, but whose ability to think was still intact, if somewhat slowed by the infection raging through his veins—took a deep breath, forcing down the thoughts of blood and skin crushed between his teeth that were starting to overtake him. “Go,” he said.
Elaine looked at him and nodded. Then: “Children! Come with me!” She took off at a run. The surviving students of her class and Ms. Teeter’s kindergarten took off with her, keeping up as best they could.
They had almost reached the end of the hall when Guy’s shotgun blared, the sound echoing through the school like a beacon to the remaining dead. Elaine kept her head down and kept running, pulling Jenna along with one hand, trusting the others to keep up.
A door, already half-open, slammed all the way open as they ran past it. Arms emerged, questing arms attached to blood-drenched bodies and hungry, relentless teeth. Three of the kindergarteners were ensnared and dragged, screaming, into the classroom, where their bodies were quickly obscured by the teeming sea of hands.
The infected hadn’t been hungry before. Elaine understood that dimly, even as she kept running, and kept urging the remaining students to stay with her, to run, to not look back or slow down for any reason. She had been able to travel the halls in relative safety before because the infection had just been getting started, and later, because the infected were satiated, their bellies stuffed tight with the flesh of their teachers and classmates. But zombies burnt through calories so fast that it was inevitable that they would have become hungry again, and started reacting faster to anything that seemed like it might be food. Anything, like the sound of footsteps that were just a little too swift, just a little too steady, to belong to the living dead.
If they hadn’t fallen through the roof, Elaine and her students might have all made it out of the school alive, because the infected hadn’t been actively hunting. But now they were, and all the remaining children and their teacher could do was run.
The rioting outside reached a fever pitch at approximately 4:57 P.M., two minutes after Elaine Oldenburg and most of the students in her care fell through the ceiling into Mr. Kapur’s classroom. The parents engaged in shouting at emergency personnel and—however unintentionally—delaying the CDC breaching of the school did not know of Elaine’s travails, or what her students were being forced to endure in the name of finding freedom. If they had known, perhaps they would have fallen back and allowed the police to clear the area; perhaps they would have given the CDC open access to the campus, before it was too late for the small number of surviving children trapped inside. Perhaps not. This is the realm of speculation, after all, and while we can ascribe motive and logic to the events of that long-past March afternoon, we are not in the business of writing fiction. Even opinion, in this context, must be subservient to the news.
The first arrests were made at 5:02 P.M., one minute before—based on the information recovered from the hallway security cameras and student reports to the police—Elaine Oldenburg regained consciousness. The arrests continued for another eight minutes, by which time Elaine and her charges had left the classroom and were running through the school, hurtling themselves toward an uncertain fate.
We, who have the privilege of perspective, can look back and say that there were a hundred things she could have done to keep her students alive, that she passed up a thousand opportunities in her headlong flight. But Elaine Oldenburg did not have perspective on that day. What she had was a riot raging outside the school doors, preventing help from arriving. What she had was a campus designed by the lowest bidder, which locked down in ways that all but guaranteed lives would be lost.
We forget sometimes how easy it is for the survivors to look back on history and judge those who came before. It’s simpler when there is a villain, when there is a reason for things to have gone so terribly, terribly wrong. But sadly, sometimes all there is to find is a little boy with a scraped-up hand, and a patient virus, and a teacher who did the best she could against unspeakable odds.
Sometimes, there is no reason for things to go wrong. They just do.
—FROM UNSPOKEN TRAGEDIES OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM BY ALARIC KWONG, MARCH 19, 2044
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 5:14 P.M.
Three more students had been lost by the time Elaine and her remaining charges—only four; how did it ever get to be only four? There should have been seventeen in her class alone, not three—turned another corner and found themselves facing something that might have been salvation. Elaine slid to a stop. The four students did the same. The surviving kindergartener wailed as she grabbed hold of Elaine’s knees, panting and shaking from the effort of running. Elaine patted the little girl’s head with her free hand before carefully easing her gun out of its holster.
The sound of the shots would bring any remaining zombies running. That, more than anything, was why she had chosen flight at every opportunity: better to run and live than to make a heroic stand and die when the bullets ran out and the entire school descended, hands outstretched and hungry. Unfortunately, she didn’t see another avenue. There, straight ahead of them, was the door to her classroom, where she knew the closet was unlocked. They would be able to get back to the roof. They would be able to get out.
And there, standing between them and the all-essential door, was Mr. O’Toole.
He seemed to be alone, which wasn’t unusual for a member of a mob that had been confined in an enclosed space: sometimes they would split up to shamble int
o new areas, looking for food. When they began to moan, it would attract the others, allowing each individual to become a whole new potential food source. It was practical in a way that was almost unnerving.
The former teacher was looking squarely at her, his mouth hanging very slightly open. He hadn’t started to moan yet, but she knew that it was just a matter of time; any second now, he would realize that he was in the presence of good, untainted flesh, and he would begin to moan. That, or the zombies they had left behind them would catch up. Either way, she had seconds to decide what she would do.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and put three bullets in his head.
The children—who had remained almost preternaturally calm throughout their long ordeal, understanding on some level that calm was the only thing that had any potential to save them—all began to scream. Not in unison, which would have been disturbing but not as disorienting; they screamed on four different pitches, in four different speeds. Jenna, who had been almost stoic, sobbed as she screamed, breaking up her wails into small, shattered gasps.
“Almost there,” said Elaine. She holstered her gun and scooped the kindergartener into her arms, bracing the little girl against her shoulder as she ran for her classroom. The other three followed, too stunned and scared to do anything else. She was their teacher. She would protect them. In that moment, the children she had already failed to save were the furthest thing from the thoughts of her small, scared survivors.