—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044
* * *
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 1:35 p.m.
The children were sniffling. One of them had started to make little gasping noises, like an asthma attack was on the horizon. Elaine knew that if they didn’t move, she was going to lose them—and she also knew that returning to the classroom would be worse than futile. There was something in the bathroom: Sharon and Emily’s disappearance confirmed it. The office door was open. There was nowhere to go but forward.
In cases where the internal doors failed to lock, all individuals were to be treated as infected. That was basic policy. First graders were large enough that the media wouldn’t linger overly long on their deaths—but kindergarteners? Even the most hardened of CDC field doctors wouldn’t be able to authorize gassing a room full of kindergarteners without thinking twice about it.
“This way,” she said, giving Jenna’s hand a squeeze, and started down the corridor to their left.
The occupants of Ms. Teeter’s kindergarten class were quietly occupied with their coloring sheets, music playing to cover the sound of the alarm, when someone knocked on their door. Ms. Teeter, who had been sitting ramrod-straight at her desk with her gun hidden in her lap, got laboriously to her feet and walked toward the door. It wasn’t locked. The damn locks had failed to deploy. She’d been part of the committee arguing against taking the ability to manually lock the doors away from the teachers. The bureaucrats who said that it was for their own safety had never been put into a position like this one, of that she was sure.
She was just glad she’d had the presence of mind to close the shades after the windows locked. The sound of the steel plating dropping to block any chance of escape had been loud enough to attract some attention from her students, but they hadn’t seen the glass go blank, or realized—yet—that there was no way out of the school. Once that happened, the tears would begin. She wanted to avoid that for as long as possible.
The knock came again. A few of the children had looked up toward the sound, interested but not alarmed. She had worked very hard to keep them calm, and the last thing she needed was for some panicky little twit to come charging in and upset everything.
At the same time, she had been a kindergarten teacher for long enough that she was running up against mandatory retirement age, and one doesn’t spend that much time with small children without retaining at least a sliver of softness in the heart. “Who is it?” she called. Zombies didn’t knock, and whoever it was, they weren’t pounding; she had the time to be polite.
“Elaine Oldenburg! First grade!”
There was a note of panic in the younger teacher’s voice that she didn’t like; no, she didn’t like it at all. Panic had a tendency to spread, especially when it was offered to the younger children as an option. “I’m sorry, Miss Oldenburg, but we’re in the middle of class right now.”
“Please, let us in.”
Ms. Teeter’s eyes widened slightly behind the lenses of her spectacles. Was the woman roaming the halls with her entire first-grade class? Didn’t she understand the situation? “Go back to your own classroom,” she suggested, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “I think you’ll find that to be a much more comfortable arrangement.”
“We can’t,” hissed Miss Oldenburg, dropping her voice so low that Ms. Teeter had to strain to hear it. “There are…problems…between here and my classroom. Let us in, unless you’d rather have fifteen students on your conscience.”
Miss Oldenburg clearly knew something she did not. Ms. Teeter spared a glance for her own nineteen charges, most of whom were still sitting and coloring quietly. A few had put down their crayons and were watching her to see how she would answer this stranger’s request. None of them seemed frightened. She was direly afraid that that was about to change.
“I’m opening the door,” she said quietly, and turned the knob, pulling it inward to reveal a red-haired woman wearing a Kevlar jacket over a flowered dress. She looked too young to be in charge of anything, much less an entire class of first graders, but they clustered around her like she was the only port left in a storm. Ms. Teeter looked at Miss Oldenburg solemnly, scanning her for blood or signs of injury. Miss Oldenburg looked back, just as solemnly, and didn’t say anything.
Finally, with a sigh, Ms. Teeter stepped to the side. “Please don’t make me regret this,” she said. “The children don’t know what’s happening.”
“Neither do my children, not really,” said Miss Oldenburg. She let go of the little girl whose hand she had been holding and shooed her inside. The rest of the class quickly followed, some of them even heading for the shelves where the picture books and quiet toys were stored, like they had just been waiting for the chance to return to more familiar environs.
Ms. Teeter was not entirely surprised when one of the smaller boys veered away from his classmates and hugged her leg, burying his face against her trousers. She looked down at his tousled brown hair, and guessed, “Brian Elkins?”
The boy nodded, not pulling his face from her leg.
“Why, look at how big you’ve gotten! We’ve missed you, you know. The class isn’t the same without you.” It was all automatic, the reassurance, the comfort: all part of her training as a kindergarten teacher. But the child seemed to relax, and that was all she’d been hoping for.
The door shut with a click. Ms. Teeter looked up, eyes narrowed, to see that Miss Oldenburg was now inside the classroom, along with the last of her students. Miss Oldenburg held out her gloved hands, showing that they were free of blood or other contaminants.
“The blast doors are sealed,” she said quietly, trying to keep her voice soft enough that Ms. Teeter’s class wouldn’t hear. She would have preferred not to let her own class hear, but they already knew, didn’t they? They had been there with her when the shutters came down. “The interior doors are not. That’s how we got out of the classroom.”
“You should have stayed there,” said Ms. Teeter coldly.
To her surprise, Miss Oldenburg shook her head. “We only left after I had gone down to the office to see why the alarm kept ringing. There’s been…we have…” She stopped for a moment, looking lost. Ms. Teeter felt a cold surge of alarm race through her veins, chilling her completely. She might not appreciate this woman’s invasion of her classroom, but she did respect her as a fellow teacher; while they had little direct interaction, they’d been in the same staff meetings, the same union Skype calls late at night when the school was closed and they were all safely tucked away in their own homes. Miss Oldenburg ran a tight ship. Everyone agreed that she did. So why was she standing here, in Ms. Teeter’s private kingdom, looking like that?
Miss Oldenburg suddenly smiled, dropping down into a crouch and putting a hand on Brian’s shoulder. “Hey, buddy, why don’t you go see how your classmates are doing? We’re going to be here for a little while, and I don’t want to hear about anybody fighting with the younger kids, or pushing them around. We need to set a good example. Can you go make sure that’s happening? For me?”
Brian looked uncertain, and glanced up to Ms. Teeter, as if checking in with his old teacher. The chill in her veins deepened.
“That would be wonderful,” she said. “I would really appreciate the help.”
“Okay,” he said, and hesitated, looking between the two teachers as if he was unsure which of them he should be treating as the ultimate authority. Finally, he hugged Ms. Teeter’s leg a second time, and then fled deeper into the classroom.
Miss Oldenburg stepped closer to the kindergarten teacher, pitching her voice even lower as she said, “There’s an actual outbreak. This isn’t a security glitch or an unannounced drill.”
“How can you—”
“It started in the office. I heard the moaning. That’s why the alarms have been ringing all this time with no announcements, no calls. We should have cartoons playing on every screen in this school, but we don’t
, because there’s no one left to activate the cable. We’re on our own. And I…” She paused, taking a deep breath, before she said, “I lost two students getting here. I think they split off from the group to use the bathroom, and one of the infected was lurking inside. They were both too small to amplify, thank God. That’s the last thing we need.”
Ms. Teeter was simultaneously stunned and amazed by the other woman’s coldness. “You lost two students, and all you can say is ‘they were too small to amplify’? My God, that’s—”
“The office door was open when we passed it,” said Miss Oldenburg. She sounded calm, almost serene, like she had decided this was a problem best viewed from a distance. “There’s something in the bathroom, and the office door was open. I don’t know how many infected we’re dealing with. I just know that the doors aren’t locking, and as long as the doors are unlocked, any emergency personnel who respond to the outbreak will be fully justified in going in guns blazing. Legally, we’re all infected.”
Ms. Teeter took a step backward. “That’s why you’re here,” she said wonderingly. “You know my students are too small to amplify.”
“That makes this room the best chance my students have,” said Miss Oldenburg. “Killing kindergarteners is bad public relations. If there are any students that will be treated like they’re still human, it’s going to be the kindergarteners.”
“You’re endangering my children!”
Several of the kindergarteners looked up from their coloring sheets. Ms. Teeter fought the urge to clap a hand over her mouth. She hadn’t intended to speak that loudly, or that boldly. Keeping the students calm had to remain her first priority.
Miss Oldenburg waited until the students had returned their attention to their work before she said, calmly, “Report me to the union. I don’t care. I’m going to get my kids through this alive—and they don’t present any danger to your students. Most of them are too small to amplify, and I haven’t been exposed. I can help you keep the class under control. Both of our classes under control.”
“You don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.” Ms. Teeter saw the logic of what Miss Oldenburg was proposing. She also saw that putting fifteen more students into her classroom would only exacerbate the problems she knew were already coming. Would the first grade agree to naptime, or would they call it “babyish” and cause a revolt? How could the graham crackers and juice boxes stretch to cover fifteen additional mouths? And the noise—would the noise the class was inevitably going to make draw the infected right to their door? It didn’t lock. It opened inward. If enough bodies piled against it, it was going to come open, and she couldn’t build a barricade without panicking the students.
“We have nowhere else to go.”
And that was the problem. Miss Oldenburg and her students had nowhere else that they could go—and wasn’t kindergarten all about learning how to share?
Ms. Teeter sighed. “All right,” she said. “You can stay. But this is my classroom. We’re following my rules. Do you understand?”
Miss Oldenburg smiled brightly. “I do.”
* * *
As with all recorded outbreaks, once things began to go wrong at Evergreen Elementary, the cascade became inevitable. Each infected individual represented the potential for countless more—and worse, with so many students below the amplification threshold, there was no need for the usual infect/consume pattern. Students below the threshold were meat to feed the virus, and students above the threshold were targets for infection.
When Mr. O’Toole’s class spilled out into the hallway, they spilled out alongside five other classrooms, and proceeded to consume or convert all students and teachers inside of twenty minutes. The exponential process had begun.
Meanwhile, outside the campus, no one was aware that anything was wrong until a passing patrolman drove by the school and saw the closed steel shutters covering every window and door. He called his precinct immediately, and they notified the CDC that something appeared to be going on at Evergreen. The call went out at 1:20 p.m., ten minutes before the first parents arrived to collect their kindergarteners at the end of what they all believed to have been a normal school day.
They had never been so wrong.
—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044
* * *
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 4:16 p.m.
As the hours trickled by, Ms. Teeter slowly admitted that she’d been wrong about letting Miss Oldenburg and her students into the classroom: it hadn’t been a bad idea at all. The first graders had all been shaken by their time in the halls. Whether that alone was enough to shock them into good behavior, she didn’t know; she just knew that they were playing nicely with each other and with the younger children, many of whom were wide-eyed with wonder over the “big kids” choosing to play blocks or color with them. It was a sort of peace that could never have been sustained for more than a day, but as a temporary thing, it was a miracle. Adding the extra students had made her own class easier to control, not harder.
Miss Oldenburg herself was clearly a well-trained individual who knew the students in her care very well; she never seemed to raise her voice or lose her patience as she dealt with little squabbles and petty disagreements between the kids. It was almost like having a teacher’s aide, but one with actual authority, one the children listened to and cared about. The cookies and granola bars had stretched further than expected. Even naptime had been successful, as the first graders were exhausted and ready for a little quiet time.
Ms. Teeter was starting to think that they might actually weather this storm successfully when something slammed, hard, against the classroom door, causing the wood to bow slightly inward. Everyone jumped. Several students—from both classes—began crying, although the kindergarteners seemed to be crying out of surprise, while the first graders were crying out of fear.
“Everyone!” Miss Oldenburg was on her feet before Ms. Teeter could begin to really react. The younger teacher clapped her hands, and the students flocked to her, all of them clustering around her skirts as if she could somehow lead them into safety. Miss Oldenburg looked over their heads to Ms. Teeter. “The closet. How big is it?”
Ms. Teeter understood immediately. “Big enough, if we throw the nap pads and supply bins out into the room.”
“Okay.” Miss Oldenburg did not walk—she ran to the closet door, wrenching it open, and said, “Everyone, help me make this as empty as you can. First one to hit the wall wins!”
“Do we have to pick up and put down careful?” asked one of the kindergarteners warily, looking for the trick.
Miss Oldenburg shook her head. “As long as you don’t hit anyone, you can throw things,” she said, in a tone that implied she was granting them a great favor.
In a way, she was. The students exchanged wide-eyed looks and then swarmed into the closet, cramming as many little bodies into the space as they could. As nap pads and boxes of old toys and reams of paper came flying out the open door, more space was created inside, and more kids pushed their way in to join the fun.
Something hit the classroom door again. Harder this time; it shifted on its hinges. Ms. Teeter looked at it, and then began calmly moving debris away from the closet door. From what she could see, it was emptying quickly, leaving only the skeleton shapes of empty shelves pushed against the walls. The more frightened students were taking refuge on those shelves without being told, a natural human response that nonetheless came with the convenient side effect of creating more space in the closet as a whole.
The final box of plush toys hit the classroom floor, and Miss Oldenburg ushered the last two students into the closet. There was a little room left inside. Just enough for a small adult.
There was not enough room for two.
Ms. Teeter and Miss Oldenburg looked at the available space and then looked at each other, trying to block out the horrible sound of hands hammering on the classroom door as they struggled with the gri
m decision at hand.
“You should go,” said Miss Oldenburg. “My students trust you. Your students barely know me.”
“You’re faster, and better equipped,” said Ms. Teeter. “I haven’t fired a gun outside of the range in years. You’ll keep them alive better than I will.”
“If I climb the shelves—”
“You’ll bring them down on the students. Only one of us will fit in there. You know it as well as I do.” Ms. Teeter smiled a little. “I was near retirement anyway. I suppose this is just a way of getting there early.”
“Please—”
“Get them out. Do whatever you have to do, and get them out.” Ms. Teeter gave Miss Oldenburg a brisk backward shove, sending the other woman stumbling toward the closet. “Get them out, or I’ll find a way to come back and haunt you, I swear that I will.”
Elaine Oldenburg was a pragmatist in many ways; she understood as well as Ms. Teeter did that there was only room for one of them in the closet. If she was relieved that the choice had been taken out of her hands, well, that was only natural; no one really wants to die, when the cards are down and the chance to flee is gone. “I will do my very best,” she said, and stepped into the closet, and pulled the door shut behind her.
The closet became very dark. There was a pause as the students attempted to adjust to this new reality; then, as had become almost the norm, someone started to cry.
She had to get control over the combined classes now, or she was going to lose it forever. “Everyone close your eyes,” said Miss Oldenburg. The crying stopped, briefly suspended by the need to listen to directions. Good; that was a start. “We’re playing a game of hide-and-seek, and the only way for us to win is to be very, very quiet. No one make a sound, okay? No matter what you think you hear.”