—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, investigating 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?”
“Yes, Miss Oldenburg,” they chorused, ragged and out of synch with one another.
“Good. Thank you, class.” She turned and walked over to the class phone, picking it up. As expected, it was still playing the emergency announcement. She pressed “0” to get to the office. Nothing happened. She pressed “0” again. Still nothing happened. The cold feeling under her breastbone grew stronger.
Hanging up the phone, she walked back to the door and pressed her ear against it. No sounds came from the hall. She tried the knob. In the case of a real outbreak, it should have already locked, keeping them safely isolated. It wasn’t locked.
“I will be right back,” she said, turning to look at the class. “Do not get out of your seats.”
And then, Elaine Oldenburg made what would prove to be her only mistake during the 2036 outbreak at Evergreen Elementary: a mistake that came very close to ending her life and preventing the heroic actions that she had yet to undertake.
She left the classroom.
* * *
Many of the security systems put in place in this country’s elementary and middle schools were installed at the behest of “security experts” who had done their time with the TSA before the Rising, and were now being hailed, due to political connections and expert handling of the media, as masters of the safer world. They owned the companies that constructed desk restraints, magnetic window locks, and school-wide door controls systems. They recommended their machines to Congress and to the individual states. They put blueprints in front of anxious parents and said, “These things, and only these things, will keep your children safe.”
There is nothing more desperate for reassurance than a parent. I have no children of my own, but as I work to raise my little sister, I find that more and more, I can be drawn in by the clever men with the elaborate blueprints who say, “This will protect her” and “This will guarantee her safety.” “Guarantee” is a big word, isn’t it? It’s a word that says your trust is not unfounded.
As the exploratory committees formed after the Evergreen incident would prove, our trust was very much unfounded. The men and women who sold us the security of our children knew less about their jobs than many parents did. Those parents had survived the Rising on the ground, after all, and had done it despite the many dangers the world placed in front of them. The “security experts” had seen the darkest days from the safety of protected government rooms. Perhaps it was inevitable that they, and the systems they worked so hard to sell, would fail us. The tragedy is that in so doing, they also failed our children.
—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044
* * *
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 11:58 a.m.
The hall was empty. Elaine Oldenburg walked slowly and carefully down the exact center, following the red line painted on the tile. Here, no one could reach out of an unlocked classroom or stumble out of the bathrooms to grab her. Here, she would have time
to react before anything happened.
Of course, walking that line, she felt so terribly, terribly exposed. She wanted to run to the wall, to let it provide her with the safety she so craved. She knew that “safety” in an outbreak situation was an illusion, and that the best way to stay safe was to tread the line without failure or deviation—but this wasn’t really an outbreak situation, was it? There was an alarm, sure, but the doors weren’t locking and the desks weren’t following the written procedure. This had to be a misunderstanding, potentially triggered by Scott and the biohazard now soaking through the lining of his coat. She would notify the principal, and he and his staff would take care of it. She might get disciplined. She might not.
In that moment, walking down the center of the empty, echoing hall, she really didn’t care either way. All she cared about was reaching the office, where there would be people. People meant safety. People meant she could stop being responsible for everything in isolation, and could start following orders again.
She had forgotten the small and simple reality that people also meant danger; people meant a place for the Kellis-Amberlee infection to gather and spread, converting innocents into instruments of destruction.
Perhaps most damning of all, she had forgotten—or maybe never really stopped to think about—the fact that while countless improvements had been made to the school layout and security since the Rising, some ideas were too institutionally embedded to change easily. School nurses had been all but phased out before the dead began to walk, viewed as a liability and a drain on limited resources. After the Rising, medical care became a priority in schools again. Nurses and trauma kits were installed in elementary schools everywhere. Unfortunately, no one really stopped to consider the standard location of the nurse’s office, tucked away as it was with the rest of the school’s administration. At Evergreen Elementary, to get to the nurse, you first had to pass through the main office, which was connected to both the principal and the vice principal’s office. All the people responsible for making decisions about the school and how it would fare in an outbreak were right there, sharing a single common room…and the interior doors were almost never closed.