There was just one problem with this wonderful material: it was made of rubber, and like all things that were made of rubber, it could rip.
Scott’s rock collection was the center of his world. He was a quiet, inquisitive child who enjoyed spending time in his room, playing with his toys and enjoying his solitary activities. He didn’t have many friends, and he didn’t feel like he was missing anything. But oh, how he wanted a piece of his playground. He understood dimly, from listening to his mother and father at the dinner table, that there were adults who wanted to take the playground away; they thought that it was dangerous to have children running around outside like wild things, no matter how closely supervised they were, and would replace all outdoor play areas with enclosed, padded, safe equivalents, ones where there was no sky, or grass…or rocks. Scott thought this was just about the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. He also knew that no one was going to listen to him. People barely listened to him about things that were facts, like how many kinds of quartz there were or why you shouldn’t play with mercury. They sure weren’t going to listen to him about things that were opinions, like “Skies and grass and rocks are important, and you should let us keep having them.”
If the playground was going to go away, he was going to save a piece of it first, so that he could look at it forever, even when everything else was gone. He’d spent months trying to figure out how he could steal a piece of playground. It was solid around the edges, fresh and square and not given to breaking off when someone tried to bend it. He couldn’t bring a hammer or anything like that to school; he’d get caught and he’d get stopped and then Miss Oldenburg would take whatever he’d brought away from him. Then—worst of all, worse than anything else in the world—she would look at him sadly, shake her head, and say, “I’m disappointed in you, Scott. I thought better of you.”
No. That wouldn’t work. But there were other ways, and after searching all the way up into November, he’d finally found one: the plastic under the slide was starting to crack. It was good, strong stuff, but it wasn’t meant to last forever in the Seattle weather, and the rain was weakening it just enough that it was breaking around the posts that anchored the slide to the ground. He’d started out by digging his fingers into the cracks, peeling back the rubber until—o wonder!—he could see the equally cracked surface of the blacktop beneath. The new blacktop had been poured in a hurry, to meet the sudden need for higher safety standards. They hadn’t installed the playground equipment on the dirt, but had bolted it straight to the blacktop.
It had taken Scott three whole months, not counting the days when snow had kept them all inside, but he had managed to work a large enough chunk of rubber loose, and now he could get his whole hand into the hole he’d created. Since then, he’d been wiggling the broken pieces of blacktop, shifting them a little bit at a time, like he was working a puzzle. They were getting looser all the time. He could feel it, measuring his progress in the increased give and lessening resistance of the artificial stone. Soon, he’d be able to pull a piece out to keep forever, and then he could stop keeping secrets from Miss Oldenburg, who was very strict about things like digging in the dirt and messing with the play structures. Technically, he was doing both at the same time, which meant she would be doubly strict, and probably doubly disappointed if she ever found out.
Some of the other kids knew about his digging—it was impossible to keep anything completely secret when you spent so much time with the same sixteen people, all of them bored and scared and poking their noses into your business—but they all thought it was one of those weird but harmless things that everybody had. Nobody tattled about those things. Someone who told on how Scott liked to dig when the teacher wasn’t looking might get told on in turn, and their thing might be bigger and worse than a little dirt. There were nose pickers and butt sniffers and hair lickers in the class, all of them trying their best not to get caught, which meant not setting anyone else up to get caught, either.
Elaine Oldenburg’s class was a complicated web of social connections and uneasy alliances, all of them watching each other with the wary suspicion of a Cold War American military, none of them willing to strike the first blow. All of which led, inexorably, to Scott Ribar digging in the rubber surfacing under the slide, unremarked upon and unbetrayed by his classmates, who weren’t willing to put themselves into the line of fire.
Scott was so intent on working at his chunks of blacktop that he didn’t notice when John—probably his closest friend in the class, which wasn’t saying much, since they were both tagged “the weird kid” and left mostly to their own devices—loomed up behind him and asked, brightly, “How’s it coming?”
“Shh!” Scott yanked his hand out of the hole so fast that he scraped the side of his wrist on the edge of the hole. Bright blood immediately beaded up along the line of torn skin. His eyes widened when he saw it. “Shit. Shit.” Saying the forbidden word made him feel a little better, but not much. He knew that blood was bad. Blood meant no more classes for the rest of the day, and not in the fun way, like when they went to the chocolate factory to watch the machines or when there was an assembly and everyone watched movies on the big screen that stretched the length of the gymnasium wall. This would be the kind of no-more-classes that meant needles, and quarantine, and interrogation, and being weighed a dozen times to make sure he hadn’t magically gained ten pounds between the start of the day and the moment when he’d started bleeding. Blood was the worst thing.
John didn’t move away. He actually leaned a little closer. “Whoa, you’re bleeding,” he said. “Does it hurt?” He sounded only academically interested, not frightened in the least.
“A little,” admitted Scott.
Something in his tone told John what he was worried about. It was a common enough scenario, triggered by every skinned knee and bloody nose since they were kindergarten babies. John paused. This was an opportunity to take Scott from being an almost-maybe friend to a real friend, someone who would be nice to him because there were debts between them, spaces filled with secrets and unspoken oaths. “You don’t have to get caught,” he said.
Scott froze. “Wh-what?”
“It’s on your wrist. You have a long-sleeve jacket, and it looks real absorbent inside. Just pull it down over the tops of your hands, and tell Miss Oldenburg you’re cold when we go back inside. She won’t make you take it off. She’d have to keep the classroom warmer if she started making kids take their coats off.”
Scott was quiet for a moment, considering the scope of the monumental deceit that John was suggesting. It would mean lying. Not only that, it would mean lying to a teacher. He was almost never cold. His mom always said that he was a little furnace on legs. But if he would just lie to a teacher, he might not have to go through quarantine and needle jabs and people asking him questions he didn’t want to answer—and most important of all, they might not find out what he’d been doing under the slide and fill in the hole before he could finish getting what he needed.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
When the bell for the end of recess rang and Miss Oldenburg’s first-grade class lined up to head back into the building, no one noticed that Scott Ribar was wearing his coat pulled all the way down over the tops of his hands. They had other things to worry about, and he was a weird kid, and besides, when he got his finger stuck at the airlock, his test results came back clean and uninfected, just like the rest of them. There was no danger. There was no reason to think that anything was out of the ordinary.
One teacher and seventeen students walked back into the building.
Twelve of those students would never walk out again.
* * *
>> AKWONG: DON’T HOLD DINNER FOR ME TONIGHT. I’M TRYING TO FINISH THIS REPORT BEFORE THE BOSS DECIDES TO HAVE ME THROWN TO THE WOLVES.
>> AKWONG: POSSIBLY LITERAL WOLVES, I MEAN. IF I DON’T NAIL THIS ONE, HE’S LIKELY TO DECIDE THAT I SHOULD BE THE ONE TO HEAD UP TO CANADA AND LOOK FOR S&G, AND KNOWING TH
EM, THEY PROBABLY HAVE A TAME PACK OF TIMBER WOLVES PROTECTING THEIR HIDDEN, HEAVILY BOOBY-TRAPPED CABIN.
>> MGARCIA: SO WHAT I’M HEARING IS “PLEASE MAKE SPAGHETTI, SINCE IT REHEATS EASILY, AND BE PREPARED TO OFFER SEX AND SYMPATHY WHEN I FINISH WORKING AND DEIGN TO COME DOWNSTAIRS.”
>> AKWONG: YOU ARE THE PERFECT WOMAN.
>> MGARCIA: DON’T I KNOW IT.
—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Maggie Kwong-Garcia, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044
* * *
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 10:40 a.m.
The recess period after Miss Oldenburg’s class had gone to a fourth-grade classroom this week. The actual assignment of recess periods was random, but the smaller students were often followed on the playground by larger ones, and vice versa, in the theory that it would reduce potential contamination vectors. First graders got into different things than fourth graders did, and so on. This was an innately flawed way of thinking. Sadly, the flaws were not fully understood until the events at Evergreen Elementary. Because of this, no better system had yet been proposed.
The fourth graders poured out onto the blacktop, following a somewhat different pattern than their first-grade schoolmates. They sauntered, some of them looking intentionally relaxed, like they weren’t bothered at all by being outdoors. A few went to lounge on the play equipment—not using it, of course, since that would have been so uncool, but sitting on it, dangling their feet off the edges of it, and pretending as hard as they could that they were still comfortable without a ceiling above their heads. A few of the girls wandered over to the grass and sat down, choosing bravery in order to get the privacy they so desperately craved.
There were twelve students in the class. None of them would survive to the end of the school day. But they didn’t know that, not then, not with the fresh, cool air filling their lungs and the sky glimmering blue through the cracks in the clouds. They went about their business like this wasn’t the last day of their lives. For Nathan Patterson and Joseph Lee, this meant waiting until their teacher was distracted and then ducking into the space beneath the slide, where they could browse the contents of Joseph’s phone in peace. Joseph was a whiz with computers—there were already three private high schools jockeying for him to come to them, once he graduated from middle school—and he had been able to bypass the parental controls installed by his father with an ease that approached unreal. As a consequence, he was the only kid in class whose data plan came with all the pornography the Internet had to offer.
Joseph and Nathan sat down under the slide, staring wide-eyed at the various naked women, all of them striking poses that looked uncomfortable but somehow enticing, like there was an important component sitting just outside of their reach.
“Dude, look at her boobs,” said Nathan.
“I’m looking,” confirmed Joseph. He was less enthralled by his companion: after all, the magical fountain of breasts and butts and other parts went home with him at night, where he could look until his eyes were hot and his mouth was dry. He tried to have fresh things every day, though, just to keep Nathan from getting too jealous. So far, Nate—who was a good guy, if a little slow—hadn’t realized just how inequitable their friendship was. Joseph didn’t want to start getting asked to jailbreak his friends’ phones. It would begin with one person, but it never stayed that way, and if the teacher found out…
Joseph didn’t have to be a genius to know what the consequences of unlocking the phones of everyone in class would be. Being a genius just made the images clearer and harder to ignore. He didn’t like getting in trouble. This would be trouble on a nuclear scale.
There was a certain irony that neither boy would have appreciated, had it been pointed out to them then or later. Because Joseph Lee didn’t want to get in trouble, he and Nathan hid what they were doing from their teacher. Because Scott Ribar hadn’t wanted to get in trouble, he had hidden his injury from his teacher, and from the guards who performed his blood test at the school gates. Had school security known that a student had been bleeding on the playground, they would have closed it down for the rest of the day, bringing out the canisters of bleach and the black lights and the bloodstain detection equipment. The fourth grade would have missed their recess. Everyone would have missed recess the next day. But no one would have been hurt.
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.