Armond Price Standish the III strolls the halls of Catfish Cove High School with a smile on his face and a stopwatch in his hands.
“76 seconds ‘til 7th period, people,” he barks over the sound of slamming lockers and squeaking sneakers, waving the shiny silver watch in the air as if the bustling students can see it in nestled in the palm of his pink, chubby hand.
He spots a cheerleader putting up a sign for next week’s fundraiser and smiles. “Run along, Clarissa, only seconds to go before the last period of the day. We don’t want you to be late now, do we?”
She groans and slaps another sliver of masking tape along the corner of the poster before darting off to class. It’s crooked, the poster is, and Standish looks at it with a frown.
These kids, he thinks to himself, shaking his head. Can’t they ever see anything through to the end?
Sighing, Standish puts his stopwatch in his pants pocket and straightens it for her, smiling when it’s done.
“That’s better,” he says to himself, reaching for his stopwatch again. “32 seconds, people!”
The halls are mostly clear, though, and Principal Standish’s voice echoes off the clean walls, a sound he’s most familiar with after close to 30 years on the job. He takes pride in his school’s cleanliness, and his students’ 98% punctuality rating.
He also takes most of the credit for both. After all, if it wasn’t for him goading them to class on time every period, they’d likely wander the halls like cows on a plain.
“17 seconds, people!” His black Value Mart sneakers squeak in the mostly empty halls now, the windows at each end of C-wing casting late afternoon shadows across the squeaky clean linoleum.
Lockers continue to slam and sneakers squeak until he recites his final countdown, just like he does between every class period, five days a week, all school year long.
Just as he’s done for the last thirty years: “6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1.”
Down one side of the hallway and up the other, students rush into class, swinging the doors shut behind them. Slam. Slam.
Slam.
Standish smiles at the empty hallway in front of him, impressed with his ability to, without confrontation or, for that matter raising his voice, herd his students into class on time, every time.
Every day. “And that’s why Catfish Cove High will win Best Attendance in the County for the eighth year in a row,” he sighs to himself.
He slips the stopwatch into his pocket with satisfaction, staring out the window at the north end of the hall to find Mr. Willies, the groundskeeper, raking fall leaves from the front lawn. Neat piles dot his progress across the wide, green space, a dozen or more in carefully spaced quadrants, just like Standish likes them.
“Yes,” he sighs to himself, as he often does when no one else is around. “Fine, fine, everything is just as I’d hoped it—”
Suddenly, behind him, Standish hears a slamming locker at the far end of the hall. He turns so quickly he’s out of breath by the time he sees a lone student shuffling away from his locker.
“Excuse me, young man,” he huffs, racing down the hall as fast as his size 9-and-a-half black dress sneakers will allow. He moves so quickly his purple paisley tie actually flies up to his chin, as if he was in some kind of race.
“You’re not only late, you’re…” Standish huffs, red-faced, sweat already dotting his wide forehead. “You’re ignoring me. Young man? Young man, come back here right this instant!”
But the young man isn’t listening. No, not even a little bit. Instead, he’s stumbling away. No, no, Standish thinks, “stumbling” isn’t quite the right word for it.
Shuffling away.
Yes, shuffling is more like it. He wears dirty black jeans that could use a good ironing and a ratty letterman’s jacket that must be from a thrift shop because it’s most definitely not in their school colors.
It doesn’t take Standish long to catch up to the student, who is walking slower than a substitute teacher on his way to his first class of the morning. “I say, young man…”
Standish reaches out a hand and the kid turns around, face as gray as cement, teeth nicotine stained yellow, snarling.
“Whoa…” says Principal Standish, out loud, taking a step back. In all his years, he’s never seen a student quite so… distasteful. And he’s seen plenty, mind you. From the flu to lice to gout to pink eye, he’s seen some things over the years, Principal Standish has.
But this? This kid takes the cake!
“Oh, uh, sorry,” mutters the kid, but it’s too late now. Principal Standish steps in front of him, arms crossed over his chest as they taught him in his “How to Avoid Physical Confrontation with Rebellious Students” course at the community college over the summer.
“Where do you think you’re going, young man?” Standish asks, stifling a distasteful frown as he studies every wrinkled, porous inch of the student’s gray face.
The kid scratches his greasy blond hair, fingernails as black as his eyes, the sound both dry and slimy at the same time. “Uh… going to class?”
His voice is coarse and guttural, like that group of hooligans who went to the rock concert last week and came back the next morning hoarse from screaming all night.
He looks, well… unwell. So unwell that Standish takes an involuntary step back. He’s already had strep throat and pink eye this semester and is dangerously close to tapping out his sick days for the year.
“What class?” Standish asks from a safe distance. There is a stain on the boy’s T-shirt. It could be rust, it could be paint, it could be… blood.
Please, Standish thinks to himself, please don’t let it be blood!
He thinks of the memos that have been flooding his in-box all month, the ones with the big yellow and red “toxic” radioactive symbols on top. The ones about “zombie preparedness” and “zombie attack simulations.”
He’s been meaning to do one, a simulation, that is, for weeks now, ever since that outbreak in North Carolina last month. And then he really wanted to do one after the school in South Carolina was overrun last week. But with academic testing and field trips and the Fall Formal coming up, he just hasn’t had the time.
Now, suddenly, he wished he’d read all those memos.
Now, suddenly, Standish wished he’d run one of those simulations.
The boy isn’t talking, and he doesn’t look familiar. There are only about 1,200 students at Catfish Cove High, and Standish prides himself on knowing every single one.
By face, by name, and by how many days they’ve missed this year.
“What are your books?” Standish asks.
“I… I have wheel this period.”
Standish shakes his head. “Try again, mister; there are no wheel classes seventh period this semester.”
The boy’s face remains impassive, unimpressed, gray. He scratches his head once more, those black fingernails and gray fingers making that slick, slimy scratching sound. Standish hears it and feels suddenly nauseous, the way he’ll get when taking out the trash when it’s extra ripe.
Standish presses him. “Are you skipping, young man? Where are you supposed to be?”
“Home Ec,” the kid says, making Standish wince at his yellow teeth and the coarse, rude grown that passes between them.
Standish is well aware of the challenges that face pubescent young men when it comes to the issue of personal hygiene, but the smells wafting off this man go well beyond the average case of high school B.O.
“Strike two, sir. Mrs. Culpepper has planning this period so the Home Ec class can be cleaned before the end of day. I think you need to come with me…”
Standish reaches out, gently, and steers the student in the other direction. His office is at the end of D-wing, and it’s the shortest path. And, frankly, the less time he spends in the direct vicinity of this particular student, the better. Let Nurse Harrington deal with him.
The boy’s shoulder is cold, dead cold, even through the heav
y material of his thrift shop red and white letterman’s jacket.
“Can you hurry it up?” he squawks, spotting another student wandering aimlessly in the halls, something white and unsettling… squirming… in her hair.
“Miss?” he asks and, when she turns, he covers a stifled scream with his hand: half her jaw is missing, her tongue squirming out to lick her gray, half-lips.
The boy turns to Standish then, shrugging casually. “Thanks, Gypsy,” he says to the girl, who mumbles something incoherent through her half-jaw, drool drizzling down her gray chin to pool on the floor at her feet.
“Now that the jig’s up, we’ll just have to do something about the Principal here…”
But Standish is already racing off, heart pounding, broad forehead sweating, black sneakers squeaking as he races past the closed doors of classrooms in session.
“Jesus,” he thinks, sprinting past. “All those kids. I can’t let these zombies get to them.”
And he turns, spotting them, lingering in the halls. They are lurching his way, but not quickly enough.
And the girl, with her gray tongue oozing and licking and squirming, she keeps drifting toward the classroom doors, as if smelling the dozens of fresh brains sitting inside.
“No,” Standish grunts, out loud, waving his hands, feeling the moisture under his arms as his chest pounds with the effort of sprinting up the hall. “Here, here, come HERE…”
He hasn’t worked all these years, shuttling thousands of kids to and from class, just to let two stupid zombies gnaw on their skulls and turn Catfish Cove High into zombie ground zero.
“Here!” he shouts, pounding his feet to get their attention. They look up, eyes scowling, black as pitch, suddenly remembering him. And they march on, upward, shuffling, so slow he wants to reach out and yank them toward him.
If he can only get them away from here, out onto the front lawn, he can lock the front doors with his keys and protect the school, protect the kids. The police station is just down the street. Maybe he can get Mr. Willies to run and go get Sherriff Haymaker while Standish holds off the zombie invasion with… with what? His keys?
His favorite purple paisley tie?!?
It’ll have to do. It’s the only thing that will do. They’re close to him now, shuffling forward, arms outstretched and fingers groping, just like they do in the movies.
“Here!” he shouts, turning the corner toward his office. “Down! Here!” And they follow. Amazingly, they follow.
As they shuffle forward, with their black eyes and gray skin and yellow teeth chattering, hungry for his flesh, Standish feels a slight sense of relief.
The classrooms are behind them now, down C-wing, at the zombies’ backs. At least he’s done that much. And now, one more corner and he reaches for the front doors to the school.
“Come on,” he urges as he watches them follow, so slow, so purposeful, so undead. He opens the door, afternoon light bathing his damp, sweaty skin. “Right. This. Way—”
Teeth clamp on his hand, hard and angry and sharp. “Jesus!” he barks, looking down, to see Mr. Willies gnawing on his thumb. “Jesus!”
He yanks his hand free but the thumb stays behind, Mr. Willies munching on it like a plug of tobacco, his lips smeared with Standish’s blood.
Principal Standish wheels around, holding his hand up and watching blood squirt from the jagged, empty socket where his thumb used to be. It rains onto the floor, splattering in great, splashing bursts as the two tardy students stomp all over it, each taking an arm as they bite into his biceps, tearing through the cheap cloth of his favorite navy blazer, slicing through the skin, jagged teeth gnawing straight to the bone.
He watches as sunlight floods the halls, spilling through the open front door as more of them come, one after the other. Teenage zombies, old folk zombies, a mailman zombie, a chef zombie, dozens of zombies now, streaming in through the front door.
And what is the last thing Standish thinks, before the virus takes over, before the rage consumes him and his only thought is of brains, brains and more brains?
The last thing Armond Price Standish the III thinks is that he didn’t lure the zombies out to save his precious students. But that he let them in.
Straight through the front door…
* * * * *
Story # 17:
Skipping Zombie School