The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell: A Newsflesh Novella
Author: Grant, Mira
Date: 2014-07-15
Publisher: Orbit
Rights: Copyright © 2014 by Seanan McGuire

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The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell

A Newsflesh Novella

Mira Grant

www.orbitbooks.net
www.orbitshortfiction.com

This work is dedicated to all the amazing teachers working to create a better future, but especially to Roy Hagar, Gail Brewer, and Judi Miller. Thank you so much for all you do, and have done. You are true heroes.

The changes brought on by the Rising echoed through every layer of American society in the years immediately following the event, and have continued to echo ever since, inexorably changing the way in which we live. Some of the changes were immediate and obvious—the relaxation of gun control laws, the cessation of the “war on drugs” that had done so much to swell the American prison population in the early years of the twenty-first century, the dramatic increase in the minimum wage necessitated by the country’s sudden economic transformation—while others were more subtle, and were, in some cases, not fully understood for years. Other changes are ongoing, and will no doubt continue indefinitely. That which has been transformed does not revert to its original state just because the illusion—or reality—of danger has passed.

Perhaps the most transformed of the so-called “American institutions” has been the primary education system.

While the majority of college-level students have proven more than happy to turn to a wholly virtual educational experience (excepting those students entering hazardous, hands-on fields such as medicine, biology, and food preparation), concerns regarding the social skills and overall development of younger children have kept the elementary and middle-grade schools open, despite legitimate concerns about the safety of those facilities. As the events of the 2036 tragedy at Seattle’s Evergreen Elementary demonstrated, those concerns should not have been left unaddressed.

—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044

>> AKWONG: HEY BOSS?

>> AKWONG: I THINK I FOUND HER…

—internal communication from Alaric Kwong to Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044.

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 7:16 a.m.

If there was any nicer place to be a schoolteacher than Seattle, Elaine was sure she didn’t want to know about it. Knowledge might lead to the desire to see if the rumors were true, and that was a path that could lead to poor decisions and winding up stranded a few hundred miles from home, packed into some Idaho or Montana classroom and dreaming of the evergreens. No, it was better to accept the blessing that was her homeland for what it was: a paradise of gray skies, emerald hills, and the deep blue wonder of the Sound, which could be seen from the back of the blacktop on clear days. There were more of those than people from outside Seattle would have ever dreamt, even if there weren’t as many as she remembered from her time in Southern California, where it seemed like the sun only went away at night, and then only grudgingly.

Too much sun was bad for the heart, in Elaine’s opinion. It made it harder to enjoy the rain, whereas a surplus of rain just made the sun all the more precious. Maybe it was a Hallmark card way of looking at the world, but honestly, what was the point in keeping things sunny and sanitized all the time? Let a little rain in.

The alarm pad next to her classroom door was flashing on and off when she entered. She propped the door before entering the code and taking her second state-mandated blood test of the day. The first had been required to get her through the front door, and more would happen at both regular and irregular intervals until the final bell rang and signaled the return of her precious first-grade charges to their parents, older siblings, and nannies. Blood tests for students were thankfully less common; while the government needed to know that the children she taught were not in the process of converting, there was also a general understanding that forcing five- and six-year-olds to prick their fingers repeatedly throughout the day was a good way to make them afraid of school and resistant toward additional blood tests.

There was a bill up before the state senate that would grant teachers the power to request their students provide a clean blood sample whenever there was “reasonable suspicion” of conversion. Elaine was sure the bill would pass without any major opposition. Bills that traded on the words “student safety” and “think about the children” generally did, especially now that the Rising was far enough in the past that people were starting to acquire a vague sense of perspective.

The classroom’s fluorescent overheads revealed small, sturdy desks scarred with pencil marks and ink stains, the plastic seats worn smooth by a decade of buttocks. It was almost possible to ignore the restraints built into the legs of the chairs, and the manacles tucked away under the edges of the desktops. She generally tried not to think about those things, or about the set of military-grade Kevlar gloves stored in the top drawer of her own desk, waiting for the day that they would be needed. She’d gone through the R&R training like every other teacher in her class—how to react when a student started showing signs of conversion, how to remain calm during the process of restraining and securing them—but after eight years on the job, she had never needed to put on the gloves for anything more severe than a skinned knee.

Not all the teachers she’d graduated with had been so lucky. Betsy Emkey had been teaching a class of third graders when one of her larger boys had managed to slink off to the back of the room and amplify. Betsy had been able to get him restrained, but not without suffering multiple bites to the arms and torso. Her school’s vice principal had been the one to shoot her, after getting her students out of the room and into the care of the school nurse, who had performed blood tests on all twenty-one of the remaining students, and who had been forced to administer lethal injections to the three who came up positive. Betsy’s memorial service had been small, private, and filled with people who couldn’t meet each other’s eyes. “There but for the grace of God” was the first thought on every teacher’s mind when one of those articles showed up in the news feeds, when one of those unavoidable tragedies sparked a moment of silence from the president and a whole new round of legislation aimed at getting kids out of classrooms and into bubbles, where they could grow up safe and secure and unsocialized.

“They can learn math and reading and history anywhere, but we’re the ones who have to teach them how to be a part of the human race” had been one of Betsy’s favorite sayings, right after “The early bird catches the worm” and “Bless your uncultured heart.” Elaine had always thought Betsy was on to something—although maybe not so much with the thing about the birds. Humanity, though, that was a thing that needed teaching. Her first graders came to her every year, standing in the doorway and looking terrified of the prospect of spending a year in Miss Oldenburg’s class, which seemed so grown up and structured and strange from the perspective of their limited experiences. And every year, she gathered them close and she lifted them up, showing them the bright sun of human society, the joy of friends who didn’t just exist on a computer screen, and the virtue of spending time playing in the summer air and splashing in mud puddles.

The dead might walk, and the world might be a dangerous place, but as far as Elaine Oldenburg was concerned, that was no reason to live your life in fear. Joy was the only thing that would really make the future better.

She was walking around the room, checking the supplies of construction paper, crayons, pencils, and zip ties, when a knock on the door alerted her to the fact that she was no longer alone. She turned to see the school’s night custodian, Guy, standing and watching her, a smile on his broad, bearded face. His ever-present black leather cap was tilted back on his head, concealing his bald spot without hiding his eyes. The children didn’t like it when they couldn’t see people’s eyes. Too many horror movies and news reports focusing on the ocular effects of a full-blown Kellis-Amberlee conversion, making it harder for people whose eyes were naturally black or who had developed retinal KA through no fault of their own.

“Morning, Miss Oldenburg,” he said with a tip of that same cap. “Any trouble on the grounds?”

Elaine couldn’t help but smile. He started every day with the same question, as regular as the blood tests at the toll booth between her house and the school. She didn’t know what she would do when he reached retirement age at the end of the year—something that had been lowered to fifty for people who worked directly with children, including teachers, administrative staff, and yes, school janitors. The higher your chances of suffering a heart attack or something similar while you were at work, the sooner you would find yourself shuffled off to pasture. There were always positions teaching with the virtual schools, and hospitals were more than happy to absorb the support staff that the schools were legally required to dismiss, but still. Guy was part of the school, as much a fixture as the water fountains or lockers, and it wouldn’t be the same without him.

“My next door neighbor still won’t cancel his newspaper, even though he only brings it in once a week; the rest of the time, it’s just an expensive eyesore announcing to the world that he’s too hip to get his news online like the rest of the world,” she reported dutifully. “How about you, Guy? Any trouble on the grounds?”

“Not as such, and I can’t complain,” he said, with a sunny smile that showed off his dentures. “Everything’s shipshape and ready for the students. Do you have an exciting lesson planned for today?”

“I was thinking we might read a little, maybe learn some American history, maybe have a snack.” Elaine shrugged. “I’m playing it mostly by ear.”

“You always do,” Guy said and laughed. Elaine laughed with him. “You have a nice day, Miss Oldenburg, and call me if you need anything. My shift doesn’t end until nine.”

“I’ll do that, Guy, thank you,” said Elaine. She watched as the janitor turned and continued on to the next classroom, where another version of their daily talk would no doubt play out. She knew that some of the teachers found him less endearing than she did, but as far as she was concerned, it was best to know and be friendly with as much of the staff as possible. It would make it easier to tell if something was wrong with them.

The clock above her whiteboard made a small chiming noise as the display turned from 7:29 to 7:30. Half an hour before she had to go out to the front of the school to collect her students and escort them back to the classroom, settling each one with a coloring sheet and a handful of colored pencils before going back to get the next. Once, that sort of arrangement would have been an invitation to chaos—leaving a classroom full of first graders alone not just once, but multiple times, was like dangling a carrot in front of a hungry rabbit and expecting it not to jump. The restraints in the legs of the desks had taken care of a lot of the problems. Students couldn’t get up and race around the room; students couldn’t get up at all. There would be no physical bullying while the teacher was out of the room. That was, as far as Elaine was concerned, the only small blessing to the arrangement.

There was still teasing, of course, and bullying of the verbal kind; Elaine couldn’t prevent that, and the laws regarding constant surveillance in the classroom were stalled in committee as lawmakers argued an endless loop of student privacy versus public safety. Even the teachers were divided on the topic. Privately, Elaine thought the cameras couldn’t come fast enough. As far as she was concerned, anything she did on school grounds was fair game for the bureaucrats. Getting qualified teachers was hard enough that she wasn’t going to get fired over something as small as swearing when she jammed her finger in the door or snapping at a student who ran a little too fast in the hallway, and having those videos might make the antibullying statutes easier to enforce.

In the meantime, she walked her students one by one into the classroom, and she watched them like a hawk throughout the year, quashing bullying wherever it reared its ugly head. Everyone on campus knew that Miss Oldenburg ran a tight ship, something that very few parents would have guessed during orientation, when they were confronted with a red-haired slip of a woman in a flowered dress, who looked like she could be one of the school’s student teachers, not the leader of a whole first-grade class.

There was a time when those parents would have been thrilled to meet a teacher like Elaine Oldenburg, who was still bright and vivacious and engaged after eight years in what was widely regarded as one of the toughest jobs in the world. That time was before the Rising had come along and changed all the rules. First grade was a tricky year, filled with kids who might not fully understand the importance of sterile conditions and avoiding contact with classmates who suffered from bloody noses or skinned knees. By second grade, the students generally understood the dangers they would face in their adult lives, at least academically, but first graders were still carefree and immortal, unable to accept that there was anything in the world more powerful than Mommy and Daddy and Teacher. Even that wouldn’t have been such a big problem—kindergarteners were worse, so confident in their own indestructability that it was a rare month without at least one full decontamination cycle in the kindergarten wing—except for the small and immutable factor of age.

First grade was the year when the top fifty percent of students crossed the forty-pound threshold, growing into amplification range. A blood-soaked kindergartener was a walking biohazard, but it was a safe one, inasmuch as any biohazard can be considered “safe.” The affected child wouldn’t amplify. Once you hit first grade, that was no longer a guarantee. First grade was where teachers were lost.

Elaine Oldenburg smiled as she gave her classroom one last assessing look, checking to be absolutely sure that everything was in its proper place. Then she smoothed her skirt, checked to be sure that her pistol was properly holstered at her waist, and went to begin bringing in the students.

*  *  *

Classroom sizes reached their peak in the last years before the Rising, with as many as forty students per teacher in lower-income areas. This teacher/student disparity would later be blamed for the high fatality rates in those same schools: with too few adult authority figures to tell the students what to do, every exposure became an immediate crisis. Many great educators met their deaths in the chaos, and far too few of them managed to save the students they were fighting for. By the end of the Rising, America’s educational policy was shifting toward an attitude of self-preservation over self-sacrifice: an infected student could not do as much damage as an infected teacher. It was thus the duty of those adults to shoot first, in order to save themselves and avoid becoming a threat.

The standard class size at Evergreen Elementary was eighteen. Eighteen students to each teacher, not counting student teachers and college-level aides, who—when distributed across the school—brought the actual adult/child ratio to something closer to one adult for every eleven children. When secured to their desks during the morning loading phase or during an unavoidable teacher absence from the classroom, the students were unable to reach one another. The desks were bolted to the floor to guarantee that there would be no unsupervised physical contact of any kind.

When we look at the events of that terrible day only eight years in our past, it is important to remember that the teachers of Evergreen Elementary did everything they could: they took every precaution and followed every rule. If there were any justice in the world, they would have been rewarded with long lives, successful careers, and eventual retirement to the virtual education system, where they could have continued to teach until they chose to retire. There would have been no need for them to be lauded as heroes. They would have been forgotten by the march of history, quietly wiped from the memories of all save for the students they mentored, taught, and freed into their own beautiful futures.

There is no justice in the world. There never has been.

—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 8:52 a.m.

It had been a surprisingly quick, smooth load-in process, especially for a Wednesday. Monday and Tuesday, the children were too tired from the weekend to fight. Thursday and Friday, they were too excited that it was almost the weekend again to want to risk getting into trouble. That left Wednesday as the day for troublemakers and tantrums—but all seventeen students had walked through their blood tests and escort as smooth as silk. Miss Oldenburg glanced at the clock as she closed the classroom door. It wasn’t even nine a.m. yet! This was going to be a wonderful day. She could already tell.

Normally, her class would have consisted of nineteen students, but Amelia’s parents had pulled her out of school to visit a grandparent in Vancouver before the expected laws governing transport of minors across the Canadian border were passed, and Billy had been out sick for most of the week. He’d be allowed to come back once his parents supplied a letter from his doctor certifying that he had been symptom-free for at least five days. Kellis-Amberlee had cured “the common cold,” that vast and intricate web of virtually identical diseases that had been the bane of educators since the first schoolroom was constructed, but not even Kellis-Amberlee could stop the flu, or the lingering strains of pertussis still circulating in the Pacific Northwest, thanks to the efforts of the pre-Rising antivaccination movement. With students increasingly sensitized to anything that smacked of illness, sick children were no longer allowed anywhere near campus, and were shunted to virtual classrooms as soon as their symptoms began.

It was too bad, really, thought Miss Oldenburg, as she walked around the classroom collecting the coloring sheets she’d used to distract her students as they were bolted to their desks. Billy was one of those rare students who really loved coming to class, despite all the fuss and bother it entailed. She knew full well that some of her kids would drop out of the face-to-face system by fourth grade, choosing the sterile security of a computer screen and a teacher they would never meet over the fleshy dangers of actually attending school. Every teacher in the face-to-face system dreamt of having their students stay on physical campuses all the way to graduation, choosing risk and reward over safety, but none of them had any illusions about how likely that was.

The elementary schools were relatively full, because kids that young—especially kids too young to amplify—were essentially fearless, unable to really understand why their parents worried so much when they walked out the door. They enjoyed the freedom of recess, and they tolerated the intrusion of the blood tests and the random infection drills. But bit by bit, that bravery would be worn away by the world around them, until most of those same students became as petrified and paranoid as their parents. It was a seemingly unavoidable cycle, and all Miss Oldenburg wanted to do was break it for as many of her students as she could. She wanted to give them a better future. It was the same thing every teacher had wanted since time began, but none of those other teachers had been striving for it against the backdrop of the zombie apocalypse.

Sometimes she wondered whether it had been as hard for them. And then she thought back on what her own teachers had said, when she was struggling through classrooms still shell-shocked and disrupted by the Rising, and she knew that it had always been this hard. It was just the nature of the obstacles that had changed, and would keep changing, for as long as there were students to be taught.

Miss Oldenburg picked up the last of the coloring sheets and walked to the front of the room, silent, back straight, sensible shoes tapping on the tile like a metronome. She could feel her students watching her, waiting for the moment when their day would officially begin. She put the sheets down on the blotter—an outdated piece of classroom equipment if there had ever been one—and picked up the remote that controlled their desk restraints. Turning back to face the room, she smiled brightly and clicked the “release” button. The desk restraints snapped open with a soft pneumatic sigh, sliding back and out of the way. Seventeen first graders giggled and stretched, reveling in their newly restored freedom, even if none of them tried to get up. This was part of the morning ritual, just as much as the long solo walk with the teacher down the mostly empty hall, passing other teacher/student pairs, before the classroom door finally loomed safe and secure in front of them. Miss Oldenburg’s students weren’t kindergarten babies anymore, but they still understood the power of ritual.

Ritual kept you safe. As long as you followed it, close as close can, nothing could ever hurt you.

“Good morning, class,” said Miss Oldenburg. “How was everyone’s evening?”

Hands were thrust into the air as the students raced to be the first to tell her about the hours between the final bell and bedtime. Glorious hours, free from adult structure and adult rules—although they were, Miss Oldenburg noted sadly, more confined than even her own first-grade hours had been. She had been seven when the Rising began, and thanks to the timing of her birthday, she had been preparing to start second grade. She remembered first grade as the last good time before everything had fallen apart. Long afternoons spent racing around the cul-de-sac where her family lived, playing tag and hide-and-seek and house with the other kids, most of whom had not survived the Rising. Long evenings lying on the grass in the backyard with her father, trying to name the stars, aware that he was just trying to keep her from spending all her time sitting in front of the television or playing video games, and yet not quite able to bring herself to care.

First grade had been the best year of her life. Maybe, if the Rising hadn’t started when it did, she would have forgotten that good year in favor of remembering other, even better years…but the Rising hadn’t wanted to wait for her to form more good memories. It had happened when it wanted to happen, and Elaine Oldenburg had been left thinking of first grade as an earthly paradise. Part of her still did, and always would, no matter how many fights she broke up, how many bruises she reported to the authorities, or how many times she had to call for decontamination after a nosebleed. First grade was where things still had the potential to go right. Everything after that…

Everything after that was all downhill.

Mikey’s father had finally allowed him to have a Quest Realm account of his very own, on a child-safe server, and he was playing a Pixie Ranger with a dire wolf companion whose mouth had so many teeth. Mikey spread out his hands and waggled his fingers on the words “so many,” like he was trying to illustrate a mathematical concept too large to be expressed in simple numbers. Jenna’s rat had had her babies, and now Jenna had eleven rats—two grown-ups and nine pups—and she was going to keep them all, and she would never be lonely, not ever. Sharon and Emily were going to have a sleepover on the weekend, and they had spent most of the previous afternoon instant-messaging each other about it, and they were both so excited that they were finishing one another’s sentences, words tumbling over each other like kittens at play. Scott had spent the evening adding samples to his rock collection, which was almost big enough to take up a whole shelf.

This sharing time was a normal part of Wednesday mornings, as normal as the lockdown and the coloring sheets and the way Mikey sometimes ate the red crayons—but only the red ones, making it a relatively easy problem to solve, as long as Miss Oldenburg could remember to give him greens and blues and browns instead, which she didn’t always, not in the rush to get all her students safely inside. She listened patiently to their stories, nodding when it seemed appropriate, asking questions when she could see that they were holding back details out of shyness or out of uncertainty whether their share was somehow dull or stupid or otherwise not worth finishing. One by one, all seventeen of her students spoke, setting their private worlds in front of her to be judged, and she didn’t find a single one of them wanting.

The clock struck 9:30 just as Brian was finishing his tale of the epic battle between his father and a bookshelf from IKEA that had resisted all efforts to put it together. Miss Oldenburg clapped her hands together, beaming. “Those were some wonderful stories,” she said. “You all had the very best evening, and I wish I could have been there with you, because it sounds like I would have had a lot more fun than I did sitting here and grading your math papers.”

A groan swept through the class, which was much more interested in the story of Brian’s bookshelf than in the thought of getting their math papers back.

“Now, come on,” said Miss Oldenburg. “You don’t even know how you did yet! Maybe you all did fabulously. You’ll only find out if you look at your papers.” She twisted to pick up the folder from her desk, stuffed with slightly wrinkled sheets of paper and bristling with gold stars. “We’re going to have a math review, we’re going to discuss all of our answers, and then we’re going to have the ten o’clock recess slot. How does that sound to everyone?”

This time she was met with cheers instead of groaning. Miss Oldenburg smiled brighter than ever.

“That’s what I thought. Who wants to help me hand back these papers?”

*  *  *

>> MGOWDA: WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THIS ‘ELAINE OLDENBURG’ IS OUR TARGET?

>> AKWONG: FACIAL RECOGNITION COMES UP TO ABOUT 80%, WHICH IS PRETTY GOOD, GIVEN SIX YEARS + PROBABLE PLASTIC SURGERY. ADD HAIR DYE, DIFFERENCE IN DEMEANOR…I NEVER SAW THE WOMAN, BUT I THINK THIS IS HER. WAS HER. SHIT, BOSS, HOW DO YOU GO FROM POINT A TO POINT B?

>> MGOWDA: YOU FOUND HER. YOU FIGURE IT OUT.

—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 9:57 a.m.

Walking seventeen squirmy first graders through a basic math review wasn’t Elaine’s favorite activity, but it was still rewarding to see them light up when they got an answer right, something that happened more and more frequently as they worked their way through the test. Everyone had passed, which helped, and they each wound up with two or even three gold stars adorning their shirts and sleeves. Most of the stars would wind up stuck to desks, walls, or the floor by the end of the day, and then Elaine would collect them all and stick them to her folder, which slowly grew from plain paper to a galaxy over the course of each year. She knew this was how things were going to go, just as surely as she knew that after recess they would come back to the classroom for spelling and vocabulary, which would carry them all the way to lunch. Her day was a series of small, predictable routines, cut into child-sized pieces, and that was the way she liked it to be. Surprises were for other people. First grade was for learning, and for knowing every morning how the rest of the day was going to go.

“All right, class, that’s our last answer. You all did very well. Give yourselves a hand.” She clapped, and the class dutifully echoed her, filling the room with the sound of palms striking together. Miss Oldenburg beamed. “Now it’s time for our favorite part of the day. Who knows what that is?”

“Recess!” everyone crowed, in delighted if uneven unison. The recess assignments changed every week, to make sure that no class got a permanent claim on the nicest parts of the day. But even when recess happened immediately after load-in, spilling students out onto the blacktop while the air was still chilly from the night before, it remained everyone’s favorite part of the classroom routine. Fresh air, open skies, green grass…it was magical.

“That’s right,” said Miss Oldenburg. She picked up her coat—ankle-length, with Kevlar panels carefully concealed beneath the thick wool—and slipped it on. She’d need to switch to her summer coat in another month or so, which was much more obviously a form of armor, with its thin nylon fabric molding itself to the Kevlar that protected her limbs and joints. “What are the rules of recess?”

“Eyes and ears open, watch for danger, run for a teacher if anything seems strange,” chorused the class. They were more unified this time. The rules of recess were more familiar to them than the Pledge of Allegiance, and stood a better chance of keeping them all alive. As they got older, they would replace the word “teacher” with “policeman” or “safe room,” but the rest of the rules would be with them for life.

The bell rang once, signaling the end of the previous recess period. Miss Oldenburg clapped her hands again. “Everyone up, out of your seat, jackets on, and get ready to go,” she said brightly.

The students obliged, forming a quick, straight line in front of the door. There was no pushing or shoving; no one got out of first grade without learning just how quickly their recess privileges could be taken away—in some cases permanently. Everyone knew about the no-recess classes, the ones where instead of twenty minutes of freedom under the sky, they got twenty minutes to read or play with handheld games, always seated, always under the watchful eye of their teacher. Freedom was important. Too important to risk on the brief pleasure of misbehaving when being good for just a few minutes more would mean getting outside, where misbehavior was ever so much easier.

All the teachers knew that there was a certain amount of pushing and squabbling on the playground. The cameras caught it all, and it was reviewed every night by campus security, who flagged anything troublesome straight to the appropriate teacher’s inbox. Students who regularly picked fights or bullied classmates would find themselves being watched more closely, or even pulled into parent-teacher conferences where their behavior would be discussed, and options would be put on the table, many of them pharmaceutical. Elaine wasn’t in favor of using drugs on students who didn’t have genuine medical reasons for them—Mikey had ADHD and was a much happier boy when he was taking his Ritalin; one of her students the year before had had childhood-onset OCD and had needed a complicated cocktail of pills just to get through the day without panicking over pencil shavings on the floor—but it was really between the parents and their doctor, and more and more chose sedation over the risk of a playground injury leading to exposure with every year that passed. Someday, she was sure, her classes would no longer care about recess; they would be medicated into calm acceptance of their place indoors, and the blacktops would lie empty and unneeded until they were torn up to build new, secure classrooms.

That day wasn’t here yet. The bell rang again, signaling that the halls were empty, and Miss Oldenburg opened the door.

*  *  *

The recess system used by Evergreen Elementary, and by other schools in the district, was revolutionary for its time, and even now, eight years after the 2036 incident, experts have been unable to find any fault with the design. The issue, it can be argued, was not with the system itself, but with the simple fact that no system, however idealized, can be expected to behave with perfect predictability once a human element has been introduced. In short, the issue was not with the school itself, nor with any of the checkpoints installed to prevent incidents such as the one which unfolded on that chilly March morning. The issue was, and will always be, with us.

Elaine Oldenburg led her students down the empty hall to the rear door leading to their quarter of the blacktop. A security official was waiting there with a blood testing station. As each student tested clean, they entered an airlock, waiting there until the entire class, and their teacher, had been cleared. Only then did the airlock open. The school playground had been divided into four sections, each containing a portion of blacktop, a portion of lawn, and a play structure. These sections were sterilized throughout the day, with a ten-minute break between recess sessions, and plans in place for closing individual sections as needed in the case of greater contamination. Walls separated them. Only sound could travel from one section to another.

The sound of laughter. The sound of screams.

—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 10:05 a.m.

Seventeen first graders poured out of the back door of Evergreen Elementary and onto the playground. They had been assigned the coveted leftmost section for this week’s recess, with one wall that actually bordered on the forest. The forest! The big, dark forest, full of mysteries and monsters! Half the class ran to claim space for kickball on the grass nearest the wall, where they could feel brave and clever for standing so close to the forbidden outside world. The other half took refuge on the play structure at the center of the blacktop, some of them grabbing red balls from the available basket, others swarming up the monkey bars with the ease of long practice.

It was still a little chilly, and Elaine smiled and wrapped her arms around herself as she watched her charges storm the battlements of childhood, their shrieks and laughter drifting back to her like the sweetest music ever composed. They would learn to be afraid soon enough, she knew; she had done substitute playground duty for third and fourth graders when her name came up in the rotation, had watched their sea of dismayed faces as they jockeyed for spots on the blacktop nearest the school doors, where they could flee back to safety at a moment’s notice. Fear really crept in during the summer between first and second grade, she felt; that was when the world became too big and loud to be overlooked, when the fact that it could touch you became unavoidable. This was their last truly carefree time, and she was blessed to be one of its custodians.

It was a little harder to hang on to that feeling of being blessed when things got messy, as they inevitably did. “Miss Oldenburg!” wailed Sharon, running over from the strip of green, her legs pumping wildly as they ate up the distance. “Mikey pushed Emily down and said girls can’t play kickball and you have to come tell him he’s in trouble now! He should be in trouble! He pushed her down!” Sharon mimed a pushing motion, just in case her teacher didn’t understand.

Elaine sighed, dropping her arms to her sides and pulling the mantle of “teacher” back over herself like a cloak of assumed authority and vague disapproval. “All right, Sharon, take me to him.”

They hustled across the playground, not quite as fast as Sharon’s angry run of the moment before, but faster than Miss Oldenburg’s usual calm stroll. All the students who saw them pass knew that someone was about to be in trouble, and a few of them fell in behind the pair, ready to watch punishments rain down. It was a rare treat, really, at least for the students who knew they weren’t the ones in trouble.

Scott watched his teacher and classmate hustle past and jumped to his feet, abandoning the piece of grass he’d been slowly shredding as he seized this rare opportunity and ran for the base of the slide. The playground equipment was all mounted on a soft, spongy material made from recycled tires and guaranteed to minimize accidents; it wasn’t quite like falling on a trampoline, but it was softer than the pavement and more hygienic than sand, and it didn’t rip up student knees and elbows like tanbark did. It was the perfect solution in a world where blood was the enemy, but where little kids still needed the freedom to run off their excess energy.

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 THEM, 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.

—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.

The exterior door was a different story. Elaine sped up when she spotted it. She was almost at her goal. Soon, everything would be different; soon, the hard knot of panic in her chest would let go, and she would be able to return to her class. She reached for the doorknob.

Something moved behind the frosted glass.

She froze.

One of the stranger tests teachers were required to pass involved watching shadows on a wall. Some of them moved fluidly, like healthy, uninjured humans. Others limped or shuffled along, but did it in a specific manner: people walking with canes, people walking with leg braces. Human ways to walk. Others shambled and stumbled, not using any sort of artificial assistance, but not walking normally, either. Those were the ones she had been trained to watch for, and while it took a few seconds for her conscious mind to catch up, her subconscious remembered what it had been taught. Her arm seized up, refusing to move any closer to the door, and to damnation.

“No,” she half-whispered, and then clapped a hand over her mouth, realizing her error. The office door was solid, but almost its entire upper half was frosted glass…and none of the doors were locked. The button that controlled the doors was inside the office. If the outbreak started there, no one would have been thinking about saving the rest of the school. They would all have been thinking about saving their own skins.

The shadow that had shambled by the window stopped. It shuffled back a step, and stopped again, head canted very slightly to the side. She couldn’t see anything more than an outline, but she knew that the shadow’s owner was listening, waiting for another sound. In that moment, she would have stopped her own ceaselessly hammering heart, if she could have; anything to make herself less living, less visible, less endangered.

The shadow didn’t move again. Elaine began to hope that she hadn’t been noticed. Then, as if her hope was an invitation all by itself, the shadow behind the glass stepped closer and began to moan.

Elaine Oldenburg turned and ran.

*  *  *

>> MGOWDA: HOW IS IT COMING?

>> AKWONG: IF MAGGIE AND I EVER HAVE CHILDREN, WE ARE HOMESCHOOLING THEM. MAYBE HIRING PRIVATE TUTORS. ANYTHING BUT ALLOWING THEM TO ENTER THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM.

>> MGOWDA: THAT GOOD, HUH?

>> AKWONG: 40% OF AMERICAN SCHOOLS STILL ALLOW THE NURSE’S OFFICE TO SHARE A CONNECTING DOOR WITH THE ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES, WHERE THE SECURITY BACKUP CONTROLS ARE LOCATED. 63% OF AMERICAN SCHOOLS ARE USING SECURITY SYSTEMS THAT DON’T HAVE THE POWER TO OVERRIDE THEIR OWN CONTROLS. SO IF THE BUTTON IN THE OFFICE THAT WOULD ALERT THE LOCAL POLICE IS DAMAGED OR MALFUNCTIONING, HITTING THE SAME BUTTON IN THE ACTUAL SECURITY CENTER DOES NOTHING.

>> MGOWDA: CHARMING. HAVE FUN TRYING TO SLEEP TONIGHT.

>> AKWONG: I HATE YOU.

—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 12:06 p.m.

Elaine Oldenburg’s class looked up in terror when the door slammed open. Emily screamed. Several students began to cry. Miss Oldenburg half ran, half stumbled into the room, slamming the door behind her. Nothing had chased her down the hall. Nothing had needed to. She knew what the moaning from the office meant.

She looked around the classroom, taking in the terrified faces and the tear-filled eyes, and knew that she had a choice to make. She could try to calm them, she could try to keep them under control…or she could run. Her return to the classroom had been automatic, training and habit cutting through the thin veil of panic and forcing her back to the one place she knew she could be safe. The halls had still been empty when she ran along them, and zombies weren’t good with doorknobs; even if her dimly sensed presence led the inhabitants of the office to break down the door, it would take them time. She could still run. She could step back out of the classroom, and she could run.

Emily was hiccupping now, her terror transitioning into misery. Mikey and Jenna were both crying, her silently, he in great whooping gasps that echoed through the otherwise silent classroom like a heartbeat. Half of them were still manacled to their chairs, sitting ducks for whatever might come through that door.

Elaine Oldenburg could have run. But in the end, she was a teacher before she was a survivor, and so all she did was step away from the door, fix a smile on her face, and say, “We’re going to have an adventure. Won’t that be fun?”

Her students—children of the post-Rising world, who knew that adults never said things like “We’re going to have an adventure” in reality, only on the television, where everything was safe and nothing ever lunged out of the dark to rip and rend and tear—looked at her mistrustfully. Mikey stopped crying. That was a small relief.

“All right, everyone. I need you to sit quietly and leave each other alone. And I need someone to volunteer for a very big help.”

Several hands went up. Elaine beamed.

“Excellent.” She walked over to her desk and picked up her roll sheet, looking down the column that gave her students’ estimated weights. It was intrusive, and she would have hated having her own weight listed for her teacher to see when she was in school, but at moments like this one, she not only understood the reasoning, she embraced the necessity.

Brian was the smallest boy in the class by three pounds. She looked up. His hand was raised. Thank God. She wouldn’t have wanted to force this on someone who didn’t want to help. It felt…wrong, somehow, to be asking her students to expose themselves to a potential biohazard, but she didn’t really have a choice. It wasn’t something she could do herself, not if she wanted to stay with the class, rather than trying to eat them.

“Brian, you’re going to help me take care of Scott,” she said. She opened the top drawer of her desk and produced a screwdriver. The students looked at it warily. Sharp-edged metal objects had been forbidden at school for their entire lives, except in the hands of teachers. Someone could get hurt. Someone could bleed.

But someone was already bleeding, and despite Miss Oldenburg’s attempts to keep things as calm as possible, they were all beginning to realize that something was very wrong in their normally quiet classroom.

“Yes, Miss Oldenburg,” said Brian dutifully. He started to slide out of his seat, and then froze, unsure as to whether he was supposed to be getting up.

Elaine nodded enthusiastically, beckoning him toward her as she walked toward Scott’s seat, the screwdriver loose and somehow menacing in her hand. “Yes, that’s right; come over here,” she said. “We need to get Scott out of his seat, first off, and I can’t touch him. Have you ever used a screwdriver before?”

“I helped my daddy—uh, I helped my dad put together a bookshelf last month,” said Brian, his cheeks flaming red at the babyish slip. No one laughed, though. A bunch of the other kids would normally have laughed at him for using the word “daddy,” and not one of them did. They were all scared. They all wanted their parents. In that moment, “daddy” was probably second only to “mommy” on most of their minds.

“Okay, good.” Miss Oldenburg held out the screwdriver, clearly waiting for him to take it. Finally, fingers shaking, Brian did exactly that. She crouched down and pointed to the restraints holding Scott in place. It would have been difficult to miss the way she positioned herself, far enough back that Scott couldn’t have kicked or scratched her if he’d been trying. It was…it was scary. Added on top of everything else that was going on, it was terrifying. “Do you see how the restraints are connected to the leg of the desk with little screws? If you can undo those, you can let Scott up.”

“I want up, too!” wailed Emily. Her announcement was followed by a string of similar declarations, some of them angry, others mangled by tears and phlegm.

Miss Oldenburg stood up straight and clapped her hands. The class went instantly silent, staring at her with wide, wary eyes. “All of you need to be quiet and sit still,” she said, in the tone she normally reserved for bad behavior and inattention. “Brian is going to let Scott up. We are going to take Scott to the closet, and we are going to decontaminate his hands and arms. Does anyone know what that means?”

Sharon put her hand up. Miss Oldenburg nodded to her, and she said, primly, “It means you’re going to use bleach and wipe all the bad stuff away.”

“That’s right,” said Miss Oldenburg. “Right now, Scott is a biohazard. That means that if I touch him, I might have to go away, and then there wouldn’t be any teacher here to help you. So Scott has to come first. Do you understand?”

Normally, the idea of no teacher would have been a fascinating one, carrying the promise of mischief and excitement. Now, with the alarm still going and Miss Oldenburg wearing her recess coat and long gloves inside the classroom, the idea was terrifying. Several more students began to cry. The rest shook their heads in mute, anxious negation.

“Are you saying you don’t understand, or that you don’t want me to leave?”

“Please don’t leave,” whispered Jenna. The students around her nodded.

“I don’t want to, Jenna. That’s why Brian has to help me with Scott before we let anybody else up. Brian?” Miss Oldenburg crouched down again. “It’s okay. You can start taking out the screws now.”

“But I don’t wanna touch a biohazard,” whimpered Brian.

Miss Oldenburg swallowed her sigh. She couldn’t push too hard, not if she wanted him to actually follow instructions. “He isn’t dangerous to you, Brian. You don’t weigh enough for him to be dangerous to you. That’s why I asked you to be the one to do this very important thing. Because he can’t hurt you, not until you weigh much more than you do right now.” Not that much more, but there was no point in frightening the boy further. Not when he was already looking at the screwdriver in his hands like it was a venomous snake.

“Don’t wanna,” repeated Brian.

“Do you want us to leave Scott here while the rest of us go to safety?” She regretted the words almost immediately, but she was committed now: she couldn’t take them back. “I have another screwdriver. I can let everyone else in this class go free, but I can’t touch Scott, not until he’s been decontaminated. Is that what you want?”

“No,” whispered Brian.

“Are you sure?”

This time, Brian didn’t say anything at all. He just nodded miserably, looking at the screwdriver in his hands.

“Then please. Let him out of the chair.”

“Okay,” whispered Brian, and scooted closer to Scott, who hadn’t said a word during the entire exchange. The bigger boy just stared at his desk, not moving or speaking while Brian laboriously undid the screws holding the ankle restraints in place.

There were some people—mostly in equipment manufacturing, who stood to make money from the change—who wanted the simpler restraints, with their external hinges, removed from classrooms. Their nightmare scenario was the one that was being played out, with a potentially contaminated student being released by a well-meaning teacher with access to a screwdriver. But Scott wasn’t the only student being held down by a restraint that couldn’t save him, and even the most sophisticated models still had misfires. As long as the technology possessed any capacity for failure, there would need to be some sort of manual release. The nightmare of the administration didn’t come close to the nightmares of the parents, who could all too easily picture their children, trapped, being left behind when the release switch for the classroom restraints was somewhere out of reach.

Brain was small and didn’t have much upper body strength, but he was also determined, and had used a screwdriver before. After only a few minutes, all four screws were on the floor, and Scott was free. He stood shakily, and stopped as Miss Oldenburg held out her hands, palms first, warding him away.

“Scott, Brian, I need you to go to the closet,” she said. “Scott, do not touch anything. Brian will open the door for you. Do you understand?”

The two boys, looking terrified, nodded but did as they were told. Miss Oldenburg followed them, pausing when she reached her desk to look back at the rest of the class.

“All of you stay quiet and in your seats, and do not open the door for any reason,” she said. “Do you understand me?”

The class nodded, ragged and out of synch with one another. Miss Oldenburg looked at them for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to believe them. In the end, she decided that it didn’t really matter either way; she had to do this.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, and followed Brian and Scott into the closet.

It was a small, claustrophobic space. The shelves were packed with basic school supplies: paper, crayons, extra ammunition, formalin, bleach. Miss Oldenburg gestured for Brian to close the door as she took down one of the sterilization bins from the shelf and set it on the floor in front of Scott. Then she got down the bottle of bleach, and the face masks. She got one. So did Brian. Scott did not.

“I am very sorry, Scott,” she said gently, and began pouring bleach into the bin.

It was hard not to reflect, as the bleach fumes filled the enclosed space and the clear liquid lapped against the plastic walls of the bin, on the strange irony of the situation. There was a time when a teacher who forced a student to bathe in bleach would have been fired, for good reason, and charged with child abuse. Bleach was a caustic chemical. It could burn sensitive skin. And that didn’t really matter just now, because bleach was the only thing stable enough to store in a classroom, and this was an emergency—and while she didn’t want to burn Scott, she didn’t want to leave him for dead, either.

Elaine Oldenburg gasped, just a little, behind her mask. Before that moment, she hadn’t fully realized that she was planning to leave the classroom.

It was a risk. The classroom, for all its faults—no water, no restrooms, large, if locked, windows taking up much of one wall—was at least familiar and semisecure. They could stay inside and ride out whatever was happening on the rest of the campus, and while the alarm would probably start upsetting the children soon, there were things they could do. Quiet things, things that wouldn’t attract any monsters that happened to be wandering the halls.

But there were no monsters wandering the halls just yet: the halls were echoing and empty, and completely free of dangers, at least for as long as the office door held. If they moved now, they could get to the airlock and get outside. They’d be able to run. There would still be a quarantine, of course, and all the students would need to be thoroughly tested for traces of live Kellis-Amberlee, but they would live. She could save them if they moved fast and moved smart, and didn’t stand around waiting for rescue…because rescue wasn’t going to come. The very flaw in the school security that would allow them to escape was going to delay any sort of rescue effort, and could make things a lot worse.

The doors hadn’t locked. The doors were supposed to have locked—and whenever a live outbreak was happening in an enclosed space, like a school, any door that wasn’t locked was considered an infection risk. Even building barricades to keep the infected out wouldn’t make any difference; barricades could be broken, barricades didn’t have the weight of a securely locked door. Everyone on campus was infected now, legally speaking, and anyone who came onto campus was likely to come on shooting. It didn’t matter that the victims were children. It didn’t matter that many of them were too small to have amplified. The school had failed to lock down properly, and while their parents would mourn them, the safety of the city was more important than a few little lives.

Sometimes Elaine thought the most unfair thing of all was that she had to live in this day and age, where children were collateral damage. But then, before there were the walking dead there had been school shootings, and those had been much easier to get rid of, hadn’t they? Ban the assault rifles, make the background checks tighter…save lives. And none of that had happened, until the dead rose and people found something better to shoot at than kindergarteners and cafeteria workers. So maybe every day and age was bad, in its own way.

“Please take off your clothes and get in the bin, Scott,” she said, and handed a sponge to Brian. “We need to wash him all over. I know it’s hard. But we have to do it, or we could get sick.”

Brian was crying. So was Scott. So was she. But they had to do it, or there was no way she could justify taking Scott with them when they left—and they had to leave. They had to get out alive. They had to try.

*  *  *

The Evergreen incident raised several questions. How had the security systems been allowed to fail? How was it that human error—the guards at the airlock first missing the blood on Scott Ribar’s hand, and then missing the live viral particles on Nathan Patterson’s lip—had been compounded by computer error, leaving the doors unlocked and the alarms that would have notified the authorities unsounded? Why did none of the teachers have the ability to contact the police or, better yet, the CDC? Why were there no clear evacuation plans in place for incidents of this nature, and how could they be put in place for the future?

What very few people bothered to question were the rolls of the dead. Name after name, student after student, all of them killed by a cascading combination of failures that should never have been permitted to happen. Some would try to place the blame on Elaine Oldenburg, after review of the school security records proved conclusively that one of her students had been the flashpoint for the outbreak. Others would wave their hands and say that it was a regrettable but ultimately blameless combination of factors, one to learn from and prevent. The teachers unions began petitioning for more and better weaponry. The school board began petitioning for more and better security.

The parents of the students who had died at Evergreen Elementary were virtually forgotten. The few who bothered to sue the school district for damages were paid off quickly and quietly. The lucky families whose children had stayed home that day said nothing, perhaps feeling that their good fortune would be taken from them if they dared to flaunt it. Who can blame them for a little nervousness, given the circumstances?

None of the students who survived have ever spoken to the media. We reached out to them, to ask whether they would break their silence and speak to us. There have been no replies. Whatever happened in the halls of Evergreen Elementary has been lost to posterity, save for those fragments captured on the school’s security cameras…and given the horrors that those fragments imply, perhaps it is better that way.

Perhaps there are some truths better left forgotten.

—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 12:01 p.m.

Elaine Oldenburg’s class was one of five in the first grade. The school extended from kindergarten through fifth grade, although there were only three fifth-grade classes; many students were withdrawn from the physical school system after fourth grade, or transferred to a middle school where they would be less likely to endanger smaller children through their mere presence. All told, thirty-three classes were in session when the alarm began to sound. It was too much to ask for that many students to remain calm and collected, especially when the restraints failed to activate correctly, resulting in fewer than half the students being locked into their desks.

Nathan Patterson had started feeling unwell fifteen minutes after the end of recess, and had been sent to the nurse’s office for observation and blood tests. Mr. O’Toole had followed school policy and not asked Nathan to take a blood test before leaving the classroom. If it had come back positive—which it couldn’t, there was simply no way Nathan had been exposed; it was a ridiculous idea—the door would have locked, and the safety shutters on the windows would have descended, containing the infection, yes, but also containing the entire class. Blood tests were only requested in the case of student illness when the student could not be safely transported from the classroom to the office.

Joseph Lee, who sat next to Nathan, kept casting anxious glances at his friend’s empty desk. Nathan should have been back by now. But instead, the alarm was sounding, and Mr. O’Toole couldn’t get the office on the phone. Something was seriously wrong. And why wasn’t Mr. O’Toole calling for help? Someone needed to tell the police that something was going on at the school.

Cellphones were forbidden during class, but with Mr. O’Toole pacing back and forth in front of the whiteboard and half the class distracted by crying, or sitting very still and trying not to cry, Joseph decided he could risk it. He slipped his phone out of his pocket, swiping his thumb across the screen to unlock it. The familiar glow of his background sprang into view. Habit made him fold himself around the screen, trying to keep from attracting Mr. O’Toole’s attention. He needn’t have bothered. In that moment, his teacher wouldn’t have noticed the students beginning to dance on their desks and sing the national anthem. His mind was miles away, following a trail that would have been familiar to everyone in the room: like the rest of them, Mr. O’Toole was trying frantically to convince himself that this wasn’t what it looked like.

It wasn’t an outbreak.

It couldn’t be an outbreak.

Joseph brought up his keypad and considered it for a moment, waffling between calling home and telling his dad what was going on, and calling 911 and letting the authorities know what was going on—although he wasn’t really sure what he’d say in the second instance. Like, was it prank calling if you told the police that the alarms at school wouldn’t stop ringing, and the desks weren’t locking right, and the doors weren’t locking at all? It seemed like something that somebody ought to know.

Finally, he decided that he should call his father. Dad could take care of the difficult part, like deciding whether or not to contact the police. Joseph brought up his father’s number and pressed Call.

Nothing happened. Joseph frowned at the phone. The display said he had five full bars of service, so why wasn’t the call going through? He tried again, this time dialing his mother’s cell, and got the same result: nothing. Fear began to gather in the space behind his eyes, swelling and twisting until it filled the entire world.

Mr. O’Toole was still pacing back and forth, paying virtually no attention to his class. Joseph worried his lip between his teeth, trying to decide where the line was between “reacting normally to a crisis” and “losing your shit.” He was pretty sure Mr. O’Toole was on the wrong side of the line. He was just terrified of slipping and joining his teacher there.

Joseph wiped his mouth dry with the palm of his hand before he resumed worrying his lip between his teeth. The small abrasions this created were perfect for the fomite specks of Kellis-Amberlee that he had picked up from Nathan’s hand when they were sitting under the slide—Nathan, who had touched the ground where Scott Ribar had scraped himself. The virus was invisible to the naked eye, but not to Joseph’s immune system, which promptly launched an all-out defense against the invaders. This defense included the boy’s own store of Kellis-Amberlee virus, which recognized its brethren, even in their new, strangely folded configuration, and began to refold itself in viral sympathy. The cascade was beginning.

Joseph was unaware of all this; Joseph would not begin to feel unwell for another five minutes, by which time it would be far too late to take any precautions or attempt any quarantine. In many ways, fomite transmission was more dangerous than the flashier and easily detected bite or splatter transmissions, because it was so quiet, so easy. Touch a contaminated surface, touch your mouth, nose, or eyes, and wait for the virus to do what comes naturally. Joseph had become an incubator for Kellis-Amberlee.

Hands shaking—with nerves, nothing more; not yet—he raised his phone a third time and dialed 911. Again, the call did not go through. Fear fully bloomed in his chest, setting his heart hammering against his ribs and speeding the infection through his body. The faster the blood circulated, the more quickly the live-state Kellis-Amberlee would be able to convert the slumbering stockpile in his veins. “Mr. O’Toole?” he said, thrusting his hand into the air.

Mr. O’Toole stopped pacing and turned, frowning blearily at the room for a moment before his attention finally focused on Joseph. “I cannot approve any trips to the restroom while the alarm is sounding,” he said stiffly.

“It’s not about the bathroom,” protested Joseph, cheeks flaming red as uneasy giggles broke out around the rest of the room. Unlike Sharon in Miss Oldenburg’s class, Joseph didn’t ask to go to the bathroom very often. He found the idea of broadcasting his bodily functions to his classmates faintly mortifying. “I tried to call my dad and the call didn’t go through.”

Mr. O’Toole’s frown deepened. “No cellphones in class,” he said. He started down the aisle between the desks, heading toward Joseph. “Hand it over.”

Joseph pulled his phone back, out of his teacher’s reach. “You don’t understand,” he said, hating the thin whine that was beginning to appear in his voice. “I tried to call my dad, and my mom, and the police, and none of the calls went through. Their numbers didn’t even ring. Something’s wrong with the phone.”

“It’s not the phone,” said Mr. O’Toole. “If you had asked me before you decided to panic yourself and your fellow students, I could have explained that you would be unable to get a call out. When the alarm starts ringing, the cell blockers in the school’s communication network activate. None of us can make calls out right now.”

Joseph stared at him, slack-jawed. His tongue was dry, probably from panic, so he swallowed hard to moisten it before asking, “Why would they do that? Who thinks that’s a good idea?” Murmurs rose from the classroom around him, echoing the sentiment.

Mr. O’Toole pressed a hand to his temple, like it hurt, and thrust his hand out again. “The phone, Joseph, please.”

“But I didn’t even make a call!”

“The rules are still very clear about cellphones in class.” Mr. O’Toole gave his hand an admonishing shake. “You can have it back after the end of the day.”

“This is so unfair,” said Joseph, and slapped the phone—now thoroughly contaminated by fomite traces—into Mr. O’Toole’s hand.

“Life is unfair,” said Mr. O’Toole. “As for who thought blocking cell communications from the campus was a good idea, it was recommended by our state’s governor when he approved the current security plans used by this campus, and our sister schools. It prevents local law enforcement from being swamped by calls from students—like yourself—when the alarm goes off. If there is any need for law enforcement, they will be contacted by the office. It helps keeps things under control. It prevents a panic.”

“But you can’t get the office on the phone,” said Joseph, looking more concerned than ever. “What happens to us if the office doesn’t call the police?”

Mr. O’Toole—who was five minutes away from wiping his eye with one contaminated hand, and who would not need to worry about complicated issues like cellphones and law enforcement for very much longer—didn’t have an answer. “Everyone, take out your history books and turn to chapter twenty-three,” he said, turning and walking back toward the front of the room. “If we’re going to be stuck in here, we’re going to use our time productively.”

The groan that rose from the collected students was briefly louder than the persistently ringing alarm, and could almost have been mistaken for a moan.

*  *  *

When asked why he had approved legislation that included the installation of cellular and wireless communication blocks in all elementary and middle schools, Governor Wilson (D) replied, “This system was recommended by some of the top minds in private and military security. I am shocked and ashamed by the manner in which it has failed our schools. It has failed our students. I have failed our students. We will be auditing the entire security structure of our schools, and there will not be another Evergreen. Not on my watch. Not in Washington.”

Governor Wilson did not complete his review of the school security systems before the next election, when he was defeated by his opponent, Heather Benson (R), the mother of Emily Benson, who had died while under the care of Miss Elaine Oldenburg. Despite running for office on a school security and personal tragedy platform, Governor Benson did not change any of the previous governor’s policies. As of this writing, fifty-seven Washington elementary and middle schools are still designed to block all outgoing cellular or wireless transmissions during an emergency situation.

Thus far, Governor Wilson has been correct: there has not been another Evergreen. It is less clear whether his words will remain true as the years go by, or whether they will become one more lie in the tapestry of untruths that has defined the educational system in this country.

—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 12:35 p.m.

Scott wept steadily but silently as Miss Oldenburg helped him into a pair of clean trousers and a button-up flannel shirt, both taken from the supply of emergency clothes at the back of the closet. It was always best to keep a few things on hand in case of “accidents,” and many of the children had borrowed a shirt or a pair of underpants from the general supply at least once. They teased each other about it when they thought she couldn’t hear, she knew, and she allowed a certain amount of it, stepping in only when it became actively cruel.

Brian had been pressed against the closet door since the bleach wash was finished, an expression of mixed terror and fascination on his face. It was like he was interested in the process despite himself, and wanted nothing more than to pretend that interest didn’t really exist; it was a trick of the light, maybe, or some sort of temporary psychosis brought on by the steadily beeping alarm—which, Elaine readily admitted to herself, was becoming unsettling. The alarm was never supposed to ring for this long. It was meant to sound, get everyone’s attention, and then be turned off, allowing teachers to communicate with students without an annoying buzz underscoring everything they said.

More important, it was meant to leave silence in its wake. Silence was a powerful weapon when you might be dealing with an outbreak. Without silence, how were you supposed to hear things coming? The infected could be on top of you and moaning before you knew that they were there in the first place.

The thought made Elaine shudder, which caused Scott to raise his head and stare at her, clearly terrified. She pasted a practiced Miss Oldenburg smile across her face and buttoned the last button on his borrowed shirt. “There you are, all better,” she said. “You’re ready to rejoin the class.”

“Okay,” he mumbled, and moved as if to pick up his coat from the floor.

Moving with a speed no one would have suspected she possessed—including herself—Elaine Oldenburg lashed out and grabbed his wrist before he could complete his reach. Scott froze. Brian froze. For a moment, stillness reigned.

Then, in a very small voice, Scott said, “Miss Oldenburg, you’re hurting me.”

She was squeezing too hard, she knew that she was squeezing too hard, but she couldn’t force herself to loosen her grip. “Scott, I don’t think you understand the situation,” she said, and it was a struggle to keep her voice level. She didn’t want to start yelling at him. If she started yelling, she was never going to stop, and it didn’t matter how much he deserved it—these kids started learning never to hide blood before they were out of diapers, and he’d turned her classroom into a biohazard zone because he didn’t want a time-out—it would frighten the rest of the children, and she couldn’t afford that. Not now, not with the alarm ringing steadily in the background and her control over the classroom eroding with every deviation from the norm.

Scott stared at her, eyes wide and glossy with tears. That should have been enough to make her let go, but she still couldn’t.

“Scott, if you touch your coat, you could get exposed again, and then we’ll have to bleach you again,” she said, slowly and calmly. “But because bleach is hard on your skin, if we do that, you could start bleeding more, and then we’d have to leave you here. We can’t take you out into the classroom if you present a danger to the other students. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Miss Oldenburg,” he whispered.

Finally, wonderfully, she was able to make herself let go. Her fingers ached from squeezing so hard. There was a livid red mark on Scott’s wrist. She supposed she should feel bad about that. She would later, of that she had no doubt, but later was very far away; later came after they were all safe, and off school grounds, and she was explaining to a disciplinary committee why she had felt the need to squeeze a student until she could feel his bones, thin and fragile, beneath the blanket of his skin.

Elaine Oldenburg had never expected to be excited by the prospect of facing a disciplinary committee, but now she realized that if she faced that committee, that would mean they had survived. Survival was something she very much wanted to experience. “All right,” she said, and stepped back, and opened the door.

Brian immediately fled back to the safety of his seat, throwing himself into the chair so hard that the desk would have rocked if it hadn’t been bolted to the floor. He folded his arms and dropped his head into the hollow they created, clearly putting himself on time-out. Miss Oldenburg followed more decorously, her hand resting on Scott’s shoulder as she herded the sniffling, teary-eyed boy back into the company of his peers. Fifteen pairs of eyes fixed on him before shifting to Miss Oldenburg, waiting to hear her pass sentence. The fact that she was touching him meant that the danger had to be past, didn’t it? She wouldn’t have done that if he had still been a biohazard. That meant that they were safe now, didn’t it? Didn’t it?

“Take Amelia’s desk, Scott,” said Miss Oldenburg, giving him a small push in the appropriate direction. “Your desk isn’t safe.” His desk would need to be doused in formalin, and even then, the administration would probably elect to remove it completely and replace it with a new desk, one where a small boy had not sat, bleeding, for the better part of a class period. It was easier to destroy than it was to decontaminate. That was how the world had always worked, and the rising of the dead hadn’t done anything to change that.

Scott sat. The class looked to her, all save for Brian, whose head remained firmly down on his desk. Some of them looked wary, like they were afraid that she would pull them into the closet next. But even under the wariness, there was a level of trust. Trust that she would get them out of this; that she understood what she needed to do and would make sure that it happened, no matter what. She was their teacher, and this was their classroom, and no one could defeat her. Not here, not in the place of her power.

Elaine—who was having increasing trouble holding on to the veil of Miss Oldenburg, who seemed more and more like a dream with every minute that passed, that alarm still chiming in the background—looked out on her classroom and knew, just knew, that she was going to disappoint them. There was nothing else she could possibly do. And if that was the only possible outcome, there was no sense in wasting time standing around and waiting to know what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to try to save them. If that attempt came with failure, well, so be it. At least she would have tried.

“Everyone, we’re having a very special drill today,” she said, and upon hearing the words spoken aloud, she found that she could very nearly believe them. There was power in the teacher voice, and even she was not immune. “I want everyone to gather up your things very quickly and quietly, all right? If you have a coat, put it on. If you brought mittens or a hat with you today, put those on, too. I know you’re not normally supposed to wear them when you’re inside, but the rules are different today.”

“Because of the special drill?” asked Sharon cautiously.

Elaine nodded. “Yes, exactly. During special drills, some of the rules are different, because that way we can practice doing things under unusual circumstances. If you’re not fastened to your desk, you can get up if you need to. I’m going to help everyone else out of their seats.” She picked up the clean screwdriver, the one she hadn’t given Brian to help Scott out of his desk, and began moving around the classroom, undoing screws and loosening restraints until, one by one, her students were able to pull themselves free.

As for the students who were not confined, they scurried to grab their bags from their cubbyholes and their coats from the coat hooks near the door, all of them returning to their seats without needing to be told. Once seated, they watched Miss Oldenburg making her circuit of the room. Some of them were crying. Others were dry-eyed and patient, waiting for the moment when she would snap her fingers and everything would make sense again. They knew that the moment was coming. All they had to do was be patient, and she would fix the world. She was the teacher. That was what she was supposed to do.

Finally, the last of Miss Oldenburg’s first graders was free. She walked back to her desk and started to put the screwdriver down, only to pause and slip it into the pocket of her coat. Anything that might be a weapon was going to be useful in the hours ahead. She couldn’t have said how she knew that; she just did, as surely as she knew that this was the last time she would see her class assembled like this, all of them trusting in her to see them safely through the day.

“All right, class,” she said. “I want everyone to line up by the door. Find a partner. Take your partner’s hand, and don’t let go. Do you understand me? Don’t let go no matter what. We’re going to use the buddy system as we walk down the hall, and I’m going to trust you to stay together, because I need to be able to scout ahead.”

“Miss Oldenburg?” Jenna thrust her hand into the air, not waiting to be called on before she continued, “Where are we going? It’s not time for lunch.”

It was, actually, and bellies were beginning to grumble all around the room. But the fear was stronger. They were catching it from their instructor like a virus, and it told them each that hunger mattered less than survival. Survival was the only thing worth having. “We’re going on a little field trip,” said Miss Oldenburg. “We’re going to go see the parking lot. Won’t that be fun?”

“We’ve seen the parking lot before,” said Jenna crossly. “That’s not a field trip.”

“That’s still where we’re going,” said Miss Oldenburg. She sounded strained. “Get your things and join the line.”

Jenna, taken aback by Miss Oldenburg’s tone, did as she was told. Once she had joined the line, Miss Oldenburg walked along it one last time, checking to see that everyone had someone else by the hand. Jenna—who had been late to join the line, and wasn’t the best-liked student in the class under normal circumstances—had no buddy, and so Miss Oldenburg took her by the hand, and opened the classroom door, and led them out into the hall, away from the illusion of safety, and hopefully toward the reality of it.

*  *  *

>> AKWONG: IT’S DEFINITELY HER. THE RESULTS JUST CAME BACK FROM THE FACIAL RECOGNITION SOFTWARE. THE HAIR WAS THROWING OFF OUR RESULTS—I THINK MAYBE THAT’S WHY SHE CHOSE THAT COMBINATION OF COLORS.

>> MGOWDA: HOW SO?

>> AKWONG: ELAINE OLDENBURG ALWAYS LOOKED YOUNG FOR HER AGE. SHE TENDED TO GET FALSE POSITIVES WHEN AGE REVIEW SOFTWARE SCANNED HER TO SEE IF SHE WAS PRESENTING A FAKE ID TO BUY WINE OR CIGARETTES. BUT SHE HAS THE COLLAGEN DECAY AND EYE MUSCULATURE STRAIN OF SOMEONE HER ACTUAL AGE. BY DYEING THE BOTTOM LEVEL OF HER HAIR WHITE, SHE CONFUSES THE SOFTWARE EVEN MORE. IT STARTS THROWING BACK INCORRECT RESULTS.

>> MGOWDA: BUT IT’S DEFINITELY HER.

>> AKWONG: YES. ELAINE OLDENBURG IS—OR WAS, I GUESS—THE WOMAN YOU MET AT THE MONKEY’S HOUSE. I FOUND HER. I FOUND FOXY.

—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 1:14 p.m.

The hallway was empty when Elaine Oldenburg’s first-grade class emerged and stood, blinking, in the fluorescent light. Elaine looked around uneasily. Surely her door couldn’t be the only one that had failed to lock, and with an unlocked classroom, surely she wasn’t the only teacher who had thought to take her students and get out. Something seemed very wrong about the absolute stillness of the hall, although she couldn’t have said exactly what it was if pressed, and with seventeen first graders looking to her for leadership, she couldn’t take the time to figure out what her instincts were telling her.

The airlock door leading to the blacktop was slightly closer, but that was just another, slightly larger trap, and one that was even less secure than their unlocked classroom. They needed to go for the airlock past the office, the one that would grant them access to the parking lot and put her outside the reach of the school’s cell blockers. She could call for the police then, and explain that the office was contaminated and the classroom doors weren’t locking. They’d bring the CDC, and the school would be properly quarantined. It might take hours—or even days—to clear all the classrooms and get the unaffected students back to their parents. In the meantime, her students would be free and clear and safe at home. That was what she needed to focus on. Safety.

“This way,” she murmured. “Everyone stay together, and don’t talk unless you absolutely have to. Silence is golden.”

“But—” began Mikey.

“Shhh,” said Miss Oldenburg. He shushed, and the group of eighteen began walking slowly, cautiously, down the hall.

Sharon—who had buddied off with Emily, as she was always inclined to do when she had her choice of partners—lagged until the two of them were at the back of the group. Emily gave her friend a sidelong look, trying to question without saying anything. She knew that Sharon was the leader; that was how things had always worked between them, ever since they met in day care. She didn’t mind so much. Sharon had good ideas, and she knew how to make them become real things, while Emily mostly just had ideas about how to sneak snacks into her room for them to enjoy during their sleepovers. She was, and had always been, content to follow.

Sharon lagged more. Now there was two, three, four feet of space between them and the pair ahead of them. Dropping her voice to a whisper that Emily had to strain to overhear, Sharon said, “I still need to pee.”

“Can’t you pee after we get where we’re going?” Emily asked nervously, and promptly hated herself for the question. She knew that it was her nervousness that cemented Sharon as their leader. If Emily had been a less nervous person, she could have called the shots. She could.

“No,” said Sharon, looking at Emily with scorn. “There’s no bathroom in the parking lot. I’d have to go in the bushes. Boys might look. I wouldn’t be able to wash my hands. I’m not going to do it.”

“Oh,” said Emily, beginning to understand. The hallway would take them right past the bathrooms. If they lagged far enough back, maybe Miss Oldenburg wouldn’t even notice when they slipped away. Sharon always peed superfast, especially when she really had to go. They could catch up easy, and no one would ever know that they’d snuck away.

“C’mon.” Sharon tugged Emily with her as she sidled toward the wall. The girls’ bathroom was only about ten feet up ahead, so close that she could almost feel the relief already. She needed to pee, and she wasn’t going to do it in a bush, and she wasn’t going to do it in a bucket. If Miss Oldenburg was too nasty to understand why a good girl didn’t want to use those things, why, Sharon wasn’t going to let that make her nasty, too.

The bathroom door was just ahead, inviting them in. Swallowing her giggles, Sharon gripped Emily’s hand tighter and pulled her buddy with her into the open doorway.

The bathroom had been designed to minimize unnecessary contact with surfaces, on the theory that small children weren’t always the best at washing their hands. The doorway led to a small “hallway” created by extending a false wall across the actual bathroom. Everything was tiled in blue, easy to care for and clean. Sharon walked primly down the hallway, turning the corner into the bathroom proper. Then she stopped, frowning, unable to immediately process the scene in front of her.

There were five stalls in this bathroom, and five sinks on the wall across from them. All the stalls had open doors, but one of them was occupied; someone was lying on their back inside the stall furthest from the door, their feet poking out and pointed at the ceiling. That would have been strange enough, but they weren’t the only person lying down inside the bathroom. One of the teacher’s aides was huddled in a ball in the middle of the floor, and the tile around her was red, like someone had spilled a bottle of paint. But why would anyone be painting in the bathroom? It didn’t make any sense.

Someone in the middle stall moaned.

Emily tried to pull her hand out of Sharon’s, but the other girl, who she had always considered to be far braver than herself, had gone rigid with terror. Her fingers were locked on Emily’s, and no matter how hard Emily pulled, she couldn’t break free.

The moan came again, and then another of the teacher’s aides shambled into view. He had red all around his mouth, like he’d been putting on lipstick without a mirror. His eyes were all black, swallowed up by his pupils. He rocked back and forth, head shaking almost bonelessly, before his eyes settled on the two girls.

He moaned a third time. Sharon moaned too, a small, terrified sound that nonetheless seemed to come all the way up from her toes. Something warm and wet covered her legs, and she knew that she was peeing herself. That was even nastier than a bucket or a bush, but she couldn’t make it stop, and she couldn’t make her feet work.

“Sharon, let go,” whimpered Emily, fighting against her friend’s grip.

Sharon couldn’t make herself do that, either. All she could do was stand rooted to the floor, Emily fighting against her, as the teacher’s aide shambled closer.

Then there was nothing but teeth, and pain, and redness, and the dim, disappointed feeling that there should have been more than this; that she should have been more than this, somehow. Only she wasn’t.

By the time her limp hand fell away from Emily’s, it was too late. For either of them.

*  *  *

The security cameras at Evergreen Elementary were old. They had been installed during the construction of the school, and they had never been upgraded. The money was always being channeled into “improvements.” New scanners, better locks on the windows, more automation. Ironically, because of this lack of “improvements” to the camera system, it was the only thing that did not fail at some point during the outbreak. It had been installed by people who not only knew what they were doing, but who had no political agenda to push. All they wanted to do was monitor the school, and they accomplished that goal.

The deaths of Sharon Winchell (7) and Emily Benson (6) were recorded in detail. I have not chosen to view those tapes; I will not be describing their deaths for you. They have earned more decency than that from me, and from anyone who reads this.

—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 1:20 p.m.

The screams came from behind them, high and shrill and utterly agonized. The fifteen remaining students whirled around, eyes going wide and glossy with fear. Then, unified by their terror, they did the only thing that made any sense to them: they mobbed their teacher, clustering around her skirted legs like chicks trying to nestle under the winged safety of a mother hen. Elaine did not let go of Jenna’s hand. That seemed like the most important thing, somehow: that she continue to demonstrate the buddy system for her students, even as they abandoned it in favor of hiding behind her.

Her free hand shook as she drew her service weapon, releasing the safety with a flick of her thumb. Somehow, the tiny sound of the safety snapping back was what made everything real. Not the screams, not the alarm, but the reality of holding a gun in her hand, ready to fire, with students all around her.

“Miss Oldenburg, where are Sharon and Emily?” She didn’t know who asked the question; the students had become an undifferentiated mass around her. The only one whose identity she was sure of was Jenna, and that only because she was holding Jenna’s hand.

“Move.”

The students looked at her blankly—the ones who weren’t crying or staring fixedly back toward the sound of screaming, which was beginning to taper off, losing strength and volume with every second that passed. They didn’t have much time left. That was the most important thing. Safety was now a span measured in screams, and the screams were ending.

“Move,” she snapped, and—pulling Jenna with her—she turned and began walking rapidly toward the airlock door that had been their destination all along. There was definitely an outbreak in the school. The screams confirmed it. They needed to get off campus, and they needed to get off campus now, before things got any worse.

One teacher and fifteen students ran down the hall, some faster than others, but all managing to stay loosely grouped together. Terror made anything else unthinkable.

“Where’s Sharon?” whimpered one of the girls, her face obscured by the bodies all around her. “Where’s Emily? Why are we leaving them? We have to go back. We have to go back for them.”

“Hush, we’re almost there,” said Miss Oldenburg, and kept walking. She wasn’t quite running—her legs were much longer than the legs of her students, and she knew that if she broke into a full-out run, she would leave them behind. Part of her silently screamed that she should be doing exactly that: saving herself. Let the children find their own way off campus. She was at risk of amplification, and all they were at risk of was dying.

But that was exactly the reason she couldn’t run. She was their teacher. She had made them a promise, however unspoken: she had promised to do her best to keep them safe, and that meant she couldn’t run away and leave them, not even to save herself. She had to get them off campus. She had to get them back to their parents.

They ran past the office door. Elaine couldn’t resist glancing toward it to reassure herself that it was still securely closed, and she very nearly tripped over her own feet when she saw that it was standing ajar. There was something sticky-looking on the doorknob that could have been jam or finger paint. She knew that it wasn’t either.

Nothing was moving in the narrow slice of office that she could see as they ran by, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. The infected were surprisingly good at lying in wait when they weren’t actively hungry, waiting until their prey was cornered or close before they made a move. Stillness could be a trap as easily as it could be safety. There was only one thing she knew for sure: that whatever had been contained in the office was contained no longer.

The airlock was so close that she could practically taste the outside air on her tongue, feel the rain falling on her face—all the little signifiers of freedom in Seattle, of being somewhere other than these closed, dimly lit hallways where the dead were walking. Miss Oldenburg moved a little faster, hauling Jenna with her, the rest of her class trailing along like so many ducklings.

They were less than three feet from the airlock door when the heavy steel gratings designed to isolate and seal the school in the event of an outbreak slammed down, blocking their view of the parking lot and reducing the light in the hallway by more than half. Miss Oldenburg skidded to a stop, staring in disbelief. The students stopped as well, some of them panting from the exertion, others in tears as they clustered around her skirts once more. They trusted her to get them through this safely.

They had no idea how wrong they were. As Elaine Oldenburg stared at the featureless steel barrier between them and safety, she thought that she was only just beginning to understand herself.

*  *  *

The security lockdown at Evergreen Elementary was triggered by Ashley Smith (10), a student in Mr. O’Toole’s class. She had witnessed the amplification of her teacher, and had been saved from his initial, insatiable hunger by two small accidents of circumstance: she was seated toward the rear of the classroom, and her desk was one of those which had failed to lock properly upon receiving the signal from the school’s central computer.

Based on the analysis of the remains in Mr. O’Toole’s room, as well as the partial feed from one of the playground cameras covering the area nearest Mr. O’Toole’s window, Ashley was able to wiggle free of the single desk restraint that had deployed. She had been wearing two pairs of socks, as well as a pair of thick flannel pants. By pulling up her pant leg and removing her shoe, she loosened her bonds enough to let her yank her foot loose and run for the window, which she broke with the classroom’s rear fire extinguisher.

Ashley Smith was halfway out of the room when she was dragged back by the hands of her already-amplified classmates. This caused a sufficient amount of contaminated material to touch the sensors, and a full lockdown of the campus was initiated. This still did not lock the internal doors, which were operated on a separate system.

In short, with one small act of self-preservation, Ashley Smith managed, entirely by accident, to transform Evergreen Elementary into a killing field. It’s difficult to blame her for wanting to survive. But it’s also difficult, knowing what we know about the incident, not to wish that she had made her break for freedom a scant five minutes later.

—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 grim 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.”

“Where’s Ms. Teeter?” asked a small voice.

Dammit, I don’t know their names, thought Miss Oldenburg, and said, “She’s going to stay in the classroom and make some noises to confuse the people who are trying to find us. She wants to help us win. We should let her help us, and that means we should be just as quiet as quiet can be, okay? Everyone, cover your mouth and keep your eyes closed, and let’s be quiet!”

The students, blessedly, did as they were told. That sort of obedience might have been odd before the Rising, but these were the children of Kellis-Amberlee: they had learned, sometimes directly, sometimes through osmosis, that when adults told them to do strange but seemingly harmless things, it was best to listen. Even if they didn’t understand that those strange things could easily be matters of life or death, they knew that they mattered to the adults, and that failure to obey could come with hefty consequences.

Outside the closet, Ms. Teeter had been waiting for the sound of voices and whispering to stop. She knew that the infected used sound to hunt when they couldn’t use sight. Calmly, she walked to the “record player”—a specially designed mount for her MP3 player, which slotted neatly into the front—and turned up the volume until it couldn’t go any louder. That wouldn’t block the gunshots entirely, she knew, but it might take the edge off. It would be better if they didn’t have to hear her die.

The hammering on the door was getting steadier. Something must have attracted them. It had been long enough since Miss Oldenburg and her students arrived that Ms. Teeter couldn’t quite bring herself to blame the other teacher, convenient as it would have been. Sometimes things just happened.

Calmly, she leaned against the edge of the desk and pointed her gun at the door. When the hammering eventually tore it from its hinges and sent it crashing to the floor, she began to fire. She only had six bullets, and she wasn’t practiced enough to get a head shot every time. Of the swarm of teacher’s aides, security staff, and teachers that shoved into her room, only three went down and didn’t get back up.

Only when the chamber clicked empty did she realize that she should have kept a bullet back for herself. She swore that she wasn’t going to scream.

It was a promise she did not keep. But in the end, who could really blame her?

*  *  *

>> AKWONG: THIS IS THE WORST THING I HAVE EVER WRITTEN.

>> MGOWDA: WORST IN THE SENSE OF “POORLY DONE,” OR THE SENSE OF “WHY AM I FORCING MYSELF TO RECORD THESE THINGS”?

>> AKWONG: THE SECOND.

>> MGOWDA: GOOD. THAT MEANS YOU’RE LIVING UP TO GEORGIA’S STANDARDS. YOU’RE TELLING THE TRUTH.

>> AKWONG: DOES THE TRUTH ALWAYS HAVE TO HURT THIS MUCH?

>> MGOWDA: SOMETIMES I THINK THAT’S THE ONLY WAY WE EVER REALLY KNOW IT’S TRUE.

—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 4:25 p.m.

The screams cut through the closet door like knives. Several of the children whimpered, and Miss Oldenburg hurried to hush them, groping blindly through the dark to pat heads and stroke shoulders in a vain effort to lend comfort where there could be none. In the end, perhaps the true miracle of the day was that none of the children began to scream. A single scream would have spelled the end of every single soul crammed into that too-small supply closet: they were trapped, with no easy means of escape, and the classroom on the other side of the door was alive with the infected.

Ms. Teeter did not die quickly, but neither did she keep screaming after the initial pain had passed. She moved quickly into the dark, agonizing place where only death can bring salvation, and once there, she quickly passed away. The mob—which included several teachers, larger students, and teacher’s aides—did not need to expand, and so they ripped her limb from limb and feasted on her remains, creating a mess that was morbidly akin to the finger paintings that her students had been doing for the duration of her career.

When Ms. Teeter was no longer alive to scream and squirm, and the easy pickings had been stripped from her bones, the mob moved on. It wasn’t an instantaneous process; each of them moved at their own speed and with their own agendas now that there was no hunt to unify them. Some turned and walked back out into the hall almost as if they had rejoined the living, moving quickly and with purpose. Others shambled, limping on broken ankles or clutching at wounds that would have been fatal, were it not for the increased clotting factor that accompanied Kellis-Amberlee.

In the closet, Elaine Oldenburg pressed her ear against the door and held her breath, straining to hear every motion from the classroom outside. The students sniffled and shifted around her, but all of them were keeping quiet thus far. She had never been more proud of her class. She could hear them shushing the kindergarteners, helping the younger children endure their seemingly senseless time in the dark.

Finally, when several minutes had gone by without any sounds loud enough to be heard over the still-blasting MP3 player, Elaine dared to feel around on the wall until she found the light switch. “Everyone, cover your eyes,” she whispered, trusting the relative quiet to magnify her words. Then she turned the lights on.

The glow revealed shelves packed tight with tiny bodies, and a floor crammed full of the same. Most of them were hugging one or more of their classmates; only a few had climbed as far as the third or fourth shelves and were huddled there, isolated and afraid. Many of them were crying. She looked at them all, and they all looked to her, waiting for her to tell them what they should do next. Even the kindergarteners had an expression of painfully absolute trust in their eyes, like they knew that she would steer them safely through whatever dangers were ahead of them. She was their teacher. Of course she would know what to do.

Try telling that to Sharon and Emily, she thought bitterly. Outwardly, she just smiled, trying to look as encouraging as possible, and said quietly, “We’re going to keep being very still, and very silent, all right?”

“Where’s Ms. Teeter?” asked one of the kindergarteners. He didn’t bother to keep his voice down. Elaine winced, her hand starting to twitch upward as if to slap the volume out of him. Then she froze, recognizing the impulse for what it was and rejecting it in the same instant. She couldn’t hit a child, no matter how much that child was endangering them. She just couldn’t.

“Ms. Teeter had to stay out in the classroom to make sure that we could be safe,” she said, forcing her voice to remain level. “Part of being safe is being very, very quiet right now. I need you to be very, very quiet. All right? Raise your hands if you understand.”

One by one, all of the students raised their hands—even the boy who had spoken before, although he still looked dubious, like he wasn’t sure that this intruder who had somehow replaced his teacher could possibly have their best interests at heart.

Elaine Oldenburg wasn’t completely sure herself, but she was at least going to try. She turned in a slow circle, careful not to kick or step on any of the children surrounding her, and considered the closet. It was small, tight, and windowless; she couldn’t see the walls for the shelves, which had been bolted in place, probably due to some pre-Rising safety regulation or other. Kellis-Amberlee getting out of the lab hadn’t done away with the need for earthquake compliance or childproofing in the lower grades; it had just added another level of complexity to the whole situation. She tilted her head back. The ceiling was reasonably low, only a foot or so above the highest shelf, and covered with the large square tiles that made up most of the classroom ceilings. It was easy to take down and replace the individual tiles.

That was what she had to count on. “All right, everyone. I want you to stay very still while I check on something.” The students continued to watch her silently as she worked her way through the press of bodies to the nearest shelf. She gave it a small, experimental shake, and determined that the bolts would hold. With this accomplished, she began to climb.

Being a first-grade teacher meant a certain amount of exertion was unavoidable. Students would always need to be fished down from desks or off of the monkey bars at the end of recess; that was just the nature of childhood. Shelf by shelf, Elaine pulled herself higher, until finally, she could reach up and push against the first of the ceiling tiles. It resisted. She pushed again, harder, and felt it shift. A thin trickle of dust dribbled down, running along the side of her face and dirtying her hair. She ignored that as she gave the tile a third push, even harder this time.

It lifted entirely out of its setting. Elaine swallowed the cheer that threatened to burst from her throat. Instead, she nudged the tile to the side, reached up, and pulled herself up through the opening she had created.

The school had been constructed with a drop ceiling, allowing for attic storage and additional insulation in the classrooms. That was the idea, anyway. Then the Rising had come, and the funds for finishing the roof area had been channeled into security and better isolated systems. The school was heated and cooled by the same centralized controls, and the space above the tiles had never been filled with fiberglass foam, leaving it empty and perfect for her needs. The tiles creaked a little beneath her, but seemed capable of holding her weight, as long as she was careful to keep it distributed over several of them at once. Her students were all smaller than she was—if she could safely be in this space, so could they. There was even light up here, motion activated and installed for reasons she couldn’t fathom and honestly didn’t care about. She wouldn’t be trying to coerce a group of children into a dark, unknown space. They would be having an adventure.

There was still a chance.

Elaine was smiling as she climbed back down from the ceiling. The students—who had been inching ever closer to panic after her disappearance—visibly relaxed when she stepped off the bottom shelf and onto the floor. A few of them even clapped their hands, the normally small sounds seeming impossibly loud in the enclosed space. Elaine didn’t chastise them. She had more important things to take care of.

“All right, everyone, we’re going to have an adventure,” she said. She smiled brightly, trying to conceal her own nerves behind an expression of serene good cheer. If she started to crack, she would take the children with her, and they would all die. “Who here has wondered about what’s above the ceiling tiles?”

Almost every hand in the room went up. They were, after all, still children, and even in a bad situation, they were canny enough to recognize the opportunity to explore a normally forbidden place when it was offered to them. The hands that hadn’t been raised belonged mostly to the smallest children—and, Elaine was dismayed to realize, to Brian and Scott, both of whom were huddled miserably on single shelves, with no other children to keep them company.

She would have to deal with that problem before it got any worse. For the moment, however, her priority was getting these kids out of harm’s way. “All right, I need two class monitors. Who wants to volunteer?” Again, a sea of hands presented itself. She placed a finger on her chin, looking thoughtful, and finally said, “Jenna and Mikey, you’re going to be our monitors. Here’s what you’re going to do…”

The next several minutes were spent arranging a human chain, with Jenna at the bottom boosting students up the shelves, and Mikey at the top, pulling them through the hole in the ceiling. She felt awkward sending them into the crawl space without her—she should have been supervising them at all steps, not letting them out of her sight during an actual outbreak—but there were matters she needed to take care of on the ground level.

Once half the students had gone up the shelves, leaving her with space to maneuver, she crossed the closet to Brian and Scott, who were stacked, one above the other, on an otherwise empty bookshelf. She crouched down, putting herself on a level with Brian and just above Scott. “I know this is hard,” she said quietly, “but we have to keep moving. It’s the only way we’re going to keep everybody safe. Don’t you want to be safe?”

“I want to go home,” whispered Brian, his words almost drowned out by the sound of feet scuffling on shelves and hands fumbling for purchase. He didn’t look up or let go of his knees, which he was hugging in a death grip against his chest.

Her heart went out to him, it truly did, but she didn’t have time to be as patient as he needed her to be. “This is how you get to go home,” she said, injecting a trace of steel into her tone. “If you want to leave this closet, you need to climb. You need to do what I say.”

“And then I can go home?”

Elaine Oldenburg was becoming increasingly sure that none of them were going to be leaving the campus ever again. No matter what she did, it wasn’t going to be enough, and they were all going to die. That didn’t stop her from nodding firmly as she said, “Yes. Then you can go home. But you have to move, Brian. You, too, Scott. We can’t stay here any longer. It’s time for us to go.”

The two boys were silent for a moment, making her wonder if she was going to need to put hands on them and physically make them move. If it came to that, she wasn’t sure she could put her hands on Scott. He had been a walking biohazard not very long before. He might still be infectious, on some level. Even if she was growing convinced that none of them were going to walk away, she wasn’t quite prepared for suicide. But could she bring herself to leave him behind, if it came to that?

Then, slowly, Scott came out of his curl. “Okay,” he said, and slid off the shelf. Brian followed.

Elaine heaved a sigh of relief and straightened, preparing for her own climb up the shelf and into the roof. Maybe she couldn’t save them all. Maybe she couldn’t save any of them. But she could damn well keep on trying.

*  *  *

Like most elementary schools in the Pacific Northwest, Evergreen Elementary maintained strict parental access protocols at the time of the outbreak. Kindergarten classes began letting out at 1:35 p.m.; parents were not allowed to line up in front of the school prior to 1:30 p.m. and were only permitted to assemble in groups of ten, corresponding with the children who had been flagged for first release. Each week brought with it a new order for student dismissal, e-mailed by the school at the end of day on Friday. Parents who were late collecting their children without first notifying the school were fined heavily, and the impacted students were rendered ineligible for first release for a period of eight weeks. It was a good system. It managed to reduce traffic and prevent gridlocks, even when multiple grades were released at the same time.

On the day of the Evergreen outbreak, it all broke down. No amount of preparation could have braced the school for a steadily arriving stream of concerned parents—parents who, once it became clear that their children would not be, could not be released, began to panic in earnest. Cars clogged the parking lot, driveway, and surrounding streets, making it more difficult for emergency personnel to get through.

The death toll of the outbreak cannot be pinned on the parents, who were after all following the rules that they had been told would protect them, and did nothing wrong. But neither can we afford to downplay the impact their growing mob mentality had on both containment and emergency response.

In the end, there is plenty of blame to go around.

—from Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System by Alaric Kwong, March 19, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 4:52 p.m.

The tiles had, thus far, continued to hold, although they creaked alarmingly if the students held still for too long. Miss Oldenburg continued to ease her charges along, murmuring words of encouragement and cajoling when necessary. Several of the younger children were crying, and had been since they realized that they weren’t going back to their classroom. Since none of them had yet progressed to full-on bawling, she hadn’t been forced to find a way to make them stop. If they really started wailing…

Well, that was a problem she would deal with when it presented itself, and not a second more. Borrowing trouble seemed like a bad idea when they already had so much of it readily at hand.

They were moving toward the side of the school, at least if her vague idea of how the ceiling divisions matched up to the halls and classrooms below could be trusted. They had been forced to stop twice now by screaming from below, marking an ongoing—and ultimately futile—battle between the infected and their prey. Each time, the screaming had stopped, replaced by low, unsteady moaning. Each time, she had commanded the students with quick, unyielding gestures to be still and keep silent. They had seen enough news programs about the infected to know what those moans meant, and had frozen like so many scared rabbits until the sounds faded and Miss Oldenburg had started coaxing them forward again.

It had been a little harder to get the group moving each time. She wasn’t sure how long she could keep them under control—but then again, maybe she wouldn’t have to do it for much longer. If they reached the wall, they would reach the air filtration shaft. She remembered Guy pointing it out so proudly, like he’d been the one to design the school and install the big air pipe.

“It’s technically a weakness, on account of how it connects to the school roof without any bars or electrical fencing or whatever,” he’d said. “But zombies can’t climb, and we don’t have any dead people crawling around the attic. It’s safe as houses. If there was ever an outbreak on the property, this is where I’d go. Right here. This is what would get me out.”

As she crawled along, she wondered belatedly whether he’d already been thinking of this very scenario, and had been trying to give her a way out in case it ever came to pass. He was a smart man, and he’d always liked her. Maybe he was somewhere up here in the roof with them, crawling along, heading for his own salvation. That thought lead to another, more unnerving one: He’d said that there were no dead people crawling around in the attic, but that didn’t mean there was no one who’d been bitten and not yet amplified. Someone who was already infected could be lurking just around the next corner, waiting to lunge.

A small hand caught her sleeve. Elaine nearly screamed, stopping herself and swallowing the sound at the last moment. She turned to see a little boy from Ms. Teeter’s class tugging on her dress, a solemn expression on his face.

“Yes?” she said, keeping her voice low.

“I need to go,” he said.

That simple, mundane admission sparked a chorus of similar statements from all sides. Elaine winced. “We can’t stop at the bathroom right now, honey,” she said. “Can’t you hold it just a little longer?”

The boy shook his head.

Elaine grimaced as she cast a panicked look around the crawl space. If any part of it was being used for storage, that part wasn’t currently lit; the light only extended for five or so feet past the leading edge of the children, and the motion sensors were sensitive enough that the lights had already turned off again behind them. That was good—the motion sensors being sensitive meant that it was less likely that anyone could be up there with the class—but it was also bad. If there were buckets or boxes or other helpful, containerlike objects up in the roof, she wasn’t going to be able to find them in time.

“All right,” she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could. “Do you need to go number one or number two?”

Cheeks burning with the sheer mortification of discussing such a thing with an adult who was neither his mother nor his teacher, the boy said, “Number one.”

“That’s good. All right. I know this…I know this isn’t the usual way, but I want you to go over there”—she gestured toward the nearest low divider, some ten feet of crawl space away—“and pee on the floor.”

The boy looked horrified, as did the other children close enough to have heard her terrible proposal. “I can’t do that!” he said. “That’s dirty. I can’t.”

“Then you’ll have to hold it,” she said firmly. “We can’t go down to the bathroom right now. There are…” She stopped herself before she could tell him exactly what was in the school that prevented their descent. Many of the children probably knew. Those same children were clearly repressing the information, choosing temporary ignorance over the strain of knowing. She wished she could do the same. “We have to keep playing this game until we win. You want to win, don’t you?”

Looking puzzled, the little boy nodded.

“Then if you have to go, you have to go up here in the roof. I’m sorry. It’s the way things are right now.” It was a terrible excuse. She knew it, and so did the children, who looked at her with mingled expressions of doubt and confusion, like they couldn’t believe that those words were actually leaving her mouth. But she stood by them. She had to. There wasn’t any other choice.

Finally, still looking confused—and like he might start to cry at any moment—the little boy crawled off to the place she had indicated to take care of his business. Elaine rubbed her forehead with one hand, allowing herself to close her eyes and take a few quick, stabilizing breaths. This was all so much harder than she had ever imagined it could be.

Then again, she hadn’t had any idea, when her day began, that she would be dealing with an on-campus outbreak before the day was done. If she’d known, she would have called in sick, or at least worn trousers. At least being above the classrooms meant that the alarm wasn’t as loud. At least most of her students were still alive.

At least zombies couldn’t climb.

More than a minute slithered by before a hand tugged on her sleeve. She opened her eyes and turned to see the little boy from before kneeling next to her. His cheeks were so red that she worried briefly that he was going to pass out. “I couldn’t wash my hands,” he said miserably.

“It’s all right,” she assured him. “Once we finish the game, we’re all going to get a nice hot bath.” The CDC would scrub them so clean that one little tinkle without soap and water at the end would seem like nothing. All they had to do was get there.

Raising her voice just a little—just enough that it would carry—she said, “All right, everyone. We need to move.” She crawled forward, trying to spur them into action.

The ceiling gave way beneath her.

It wasn’t an immediate thing. It might have been better if it had been. A quick drop would have slammed her into the classroom floor below, and might have meant that less of the ceiling would have caved in along with her. She would never know what had weakened the tiles at that precise point. Maybe it was the long hesitation of the group putting slow but constant stress on them. Maybe it was old water damage weakening the connection between the individual tiles and the thin frame that had been designed to hold them in place. Whatever the reason, the ceiling first lurched, sinking down, and then—before she could do more than catch her breath and try to wish away what was about to happen—collapsed completely.

Elaine Oldenburg fell. Roughly two-thirds of the students in her care fell with her, and like the tiles, they tumbled gradually. Some were on the piece of ceiling that collapsed, and they plummeted down at the same time as she did, pinwheeling in a cloud of tile fragments and broken supports. Others managed to grab the edges of the hole her fall had created, only to fall a few seconds later as their underdeveloped upper bodies failed to give them the purchase that they needed. In less than thirty seconds, only four students remained in the roof: two of the kindergarteners, and Scott and Brian from Miss Oldenburg’s class.

The lucky four peered through the hole in horror, looking down on an empty fourth-grade classroom. Some of the other kids had landed on desks or slammed into the floor so hard that blood was coming out of their mouths or noses. A few of them didn’t seem to be breathing. And in the midst of the shattered throng sprawled Miss Oldenburg, her limbs splayed, her eyes closed.

“Miss Oldenburg?” whispered Scott. The teacher didn’t respond. A few of the other kids stirred and groaned, but they were living groans, I-don’t-wanna groans, not the pained exhalations of the dead. He knew what infected people sounded like, even if no one wanted to believe that he could know something like that. Suzy down the street’s grandpa had died and come back again while her mom was babysitting for him. Scott had heard the dead old man moaning through the door. He’d never forget that sound.

“Miss Oldenburg?” he whispered again, louder. The classroom door was open. That seemed suddenly very important, and very scary. Why, if the classroom door was open, just about anything could come through. “You have to wake up now. Please?” One of the kindergarten babies up in the roof with him started to cry. Scott glared at her, which just made her cry harder.

She wasn’t the only one. Some of the kids down on the floor were awake now, and they were almost all of them crying, rubbing at their eyes and elbows and knees while they made little gasping, sobbing sounds, like they just couldn’t keep it inside anymore. The kids who weren’t crying weren’t moving, either. They were just lying there, and some of them were bleeding, from their ears or mouths. One kindergartener had blood soaking slowly through the left leg of his pants, turning the corduroy fabric from green to a dark, unpleasant shade of brown.

Miss Oldenburg wasn’t moving. She wasn’t bleeding either, so maybe it was okay, but she wasn’t moving, and the classroom door was open, and this wasn’t okay, this wasn’t okay at all.

Scott’s cheeks were wet. Dimly, he realized that he was crying like a little baby. For once, he didn’t care. All he cared about was his teacher, lying silent and motionless on the floor below, not telling them what to do next.

“Miss Oldenburg?”

*  *  *

>> AKWONG: I’M ALMOST DONE. I NEED A SHOWER, AND MAYBE A STIFF DRINK.

>> MGOWDA: YOU DON’T DRINK.

>> AKWONG: RIGHT NOW, I FEEL LIKE I’M READY TO START. HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED AT SOMETHING AND FELT LIKE YOU WERE NEVER GOING TO BE CLEAN AGAIN?

>> MGOWDA: I WAS AT GEORGIA’S FUNERAL. I SPENT SIX HOURS IN THE BATH AT MY HOTEL, AND I STILL FELT FILTHY WHEN I WAS DONE. TO BE QUITE HONEST, PART OF ME STAYED DIRTY UNTIL YOU TOLD ME SHE WAS BACK AMONG THE LIVING.

>> AKWONG: DOES IT GET BETTER?

>> MGOWDA: THAT’S WHAT THE ALCOHOL IS FOR.

—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044

*  *  *

Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 5:03 p.m.

Elaine Oldenburg woke to the soft, brittle sound of children crying all around her. The back of her skull felt like it had been split open and then glued back together by careless surgeons, and when she forced herself—slowly, so slowly—to sit up, bits of tile and shattered roof dug into her hips and side. Her back ached from the impact. At least nothing felt like it was broken; she had landed incredibly well, considering the circumstances. And at least she hadn’t landed on any of the children.

The children! She looked frantically from side to side, only wincing a little at the pain the motion sent lancing through her head. Students littered the floor to either side of her, some of them sitting up and hugging themselves as they cried, others still flat on their backs, unmoving. Worst of all, the classroom door was open. Depending on how much noise they had made as they fell…

“Miss Oldenburg?”

Scott’s voice was barely above a whisper. Elaine looked up, and saw his pale, worried face peeking over the edge of the hole in the ceiling. The distance between them seemed insurmountable, and made it even more miraculous that she had fallen as far as she had without injuring herself. “Scott, move away from the edge,” she said, keeping her voice as low as she dared. “You don’t want to fall.”

“Miss Oldenburg, how are we supposed to get down?”

Elaine hesitated before she said, “You’re not. It’s not safe down here. I want you to go around the hole. Keep heading for the wall. You’ll find a hatch there. Open it, and slide down the chute on the other side.”

“But—”

“If you do it, you’ll come out on the lawn. You’ll get out, Scott. Take whoever’s still up there with you, and get out.” Elaine’s expression hardened marginally. “You owe them.”

And Scott—who knew the part he might have played in today’s events, even if he didn’t fully understand it yet, and wouldn’t for years—nodded. “Okay. Will we see you outside?”

“Yes,” lied Elaine. “You will.”

His head vanished from the edge of the hole. Elaine watched for a few seconds to be sure that he wasn’t going to come back. Then she turned her attention to the children around her, the ones who were still in her care…the ones who had fallen.

Not all of them had survived. Mikey was nearby, his eyes open and his head twisted hard to the side. He was never going to log back onto his treasured Quest Realm account. Distantly, that hurt her more than the reality of his death. Elaine knew she was separating from the situation, turning it into something abstract and endurable, and she let it happen, because endurable was what she needed. It was what her students needed.

A low moan drifted through the open classroom door. Elaine stiffened. “Quiet!” she hissed, pressing herself lower to the floor in an effort to keep from being seen by anyone—anything—that shuffled by in the hall. “Everyone, quiet.”

Most of the students obeyed, freezing as their own terror overrode their fear. One, a kindergartener whose corduroy pants had gone virtually black with blood, kept sobbing. It was a small, tinny sound, but that would be enough; any infected person who was still roving the school would be able to home in on it like a bloodhound. Elaine scooted closer to the student.

“Please, sweetie, please, you have to be quiet,” she whispered.

The little boy looked at her with wide, tear-filled eyes, and continued to sob. It had all been too much, the fear, the pain: he couldn’t stop, no matter how much he wanted to do as he was told.

“Please,” she whispered again. This time he shook his head. It was a tiny gesture, accompanied by an even louder sob. His pupils almost obscured his irises, dilated by shock.

Biting her lip, Elaine let herself really look at the boy’s leg for the first time. The shape of it was off, somehow, like the bones no longer formed the straight lines they were supposed to. There was a lot of blood, not only soaking into the fabric, but pooling on the tile floor. The moaning from the hall was getting louder, and his sobs weren’t stopping. They weren’t going to, not unless he bled out, and they didn’t have time to wait.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and put her hands on either side of his head, like she’d been shown in her self-defense classes, the ones that were supposed to let you keep fighting even after you’d run out of ammunition. All her lessons had focused on two things: minimizing blood splatter and preventing reanimation. It was very clinical. She’d been a very good student.

She was distancing again. It was better than the alternatives, which were all very close and very immediate. No matter how much she tried, she couldn’t distance herself enough. When she thought about it later—which she would do as little as she possibly could, because some things simply don’t bear thinking about—she would always know what sanity sounded like when it finally broke. It would sound like the small, delicate bones of a kindergartener’s neck, snapping.

The other children didn’t make a sound as she carefully eased her hands away from the boy’s neck, leaving him to lay limply, staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes. She pressed a finger to her lips and made a gesture with her free hand, indicating that they should get as low to the floor as possible. Shock, or maybe terror, made them follow her directions. She flattened herself down with them, and waited.

The moan from the hall came again, louder still. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something shuffle past the open door. Then something else, and something else, until a stream of infected bodies was shambling past, claiming the school eternally as their own. Elaine stayed flat against the floor, praying silently that none of her charges would panic and start to scream, praying that the infected would shamble on past them.

If there had been fewer dead bodies in the school, less blood and offal scattered about, things might have gone very differently. But the infected had stopped trying to turn the students they came across, and had started using the bodies to satisfy their insatiable hunger instead. When the lead members of the pack smelled the blood and other bodily fluids in the classroom, they kept going, assuming that there was nothing through that door worth finding. In a matter of minutes, the only sound was the soft shuffle of feet moving away down the hall, leaving Elaine Oldenburg and her surviving students behind.

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 the 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 into 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.

They weren’t far from Elaine’s thoughts. Those children were all she could think of as she barricaded the classroom door with her own desk—the only piece of furniture not bolted to the floor. As she led the survivors to the closet and helped them, once more, up into the empty dark of the crawl space.

They moved quickly this time, the teacher and her four charges: they moved without hesitation or lingering long enough to let the tiles grow weak beneath them. When they finally reached the far wall, they found the grate that should have covered the air shaft hanging askew.

“Class dismissed,” said Elaine weakly, and boosted the first of her students into the dark tunnel to freedom.

*  *  *

>> AKWONG: IT’S DONE.

>> AKWONG: I AM LOGGING OFF.

>> MGOWDA: YOU DID GOOD WORK TODAY. THANK YOU.

>> AKWONG: I TOLD THE TRUTH.

>> MGOWDA: I KNOW. GEORGIA WOULD BE PROUD.

>> AKWONG: I HOPE SO. IS THIS WHAT IT ALWAYS FEELS LIKE WHEN YOU TURN OVER A ROCK AND SHOW THINGS THAT WEREN’T MEANT TO BE SEEN?

>> MGOWDA: YOU LEARN TO WASH THE STING AWAY.

—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Mahir Gowda, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044

*  *  *

Friday, March 28, 2036, 8:03 a.m.

The public defender assigned to represent Elaine Oldenburg in the initial hearings to determine her culpability in the deaths of twelve of the students in her care stood in front of the courthouse, glancing anxiously at his watch. Elaine was three minutes late. Not a horrible offense, not yet, but one that was worrisome in light of the charges that might be brought against her if this inquiry found her to have been at fault. She clearly didn’t understand the depth of the trouble she was in. He would have to explain it more clearly when she arrived.

When nine o’clock came and went with no Elaine, he notified the police.

At her apartment, they found all her personal possessions…even her identification and teacher’s certification, which she was meant to have taken with her to the courthouse. There was no note. There was no indication that she had gone anywhere. Elaine Oldenburg had simply disappeared into the night, leaving everything behind—everything but the contents of her savings account, which she had drained the night before. She was gone.

Maybe it was better that way. It gave the school system a scapegoat and prevented the parents of the survivors from being forced to endure a lengthy trial, arguing against the compelling stories that could so easily have been theirs, if their children had been slightly slower, slightly differently placed in the order of events. Elaine Oldenburg vanished, and she took so much of the blame with her. People looked for her, of course, but not long enough, and not in the right places.

Where she went when that long, terrible school day ended was anybody’s guess. The only person who knew for sure was Elaine Oldenburg…and she wasn’t saying.

Meet the Author

Mira Grant lives in California, sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same. Mira Grant is the pseudonym of Seanan McGuire—winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Find out more about the author at www.miragrant.com or follow her on twitter @seananmcguire.

Author photo by Carolyn Billingsley.

Also by Mira Grant

PARASITOLOGY

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Symbiont

THE NEWSFLESH TRILOGY

Feed

Deadline

Blackout

Countdown (e-only novella)

San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats (e-only novella)

How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea (e-only novella)

WRITING AS SEANAN MCGUIRE

Rosemary and Rue

A Local Habitation

An Artificial Night

Late Eclipses

One Salt Sea

Ashes of Honor

Chimes at Midnight

The Winter Long

Discount Armageddon

Midnight Blue-Light Special

Sparrow Hill Road

Indexing

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THE DAY THE DEAD CAME TO SHOW AND TELL,
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PARASITE

PARASITOLOGY VOLUME 1
by Mira Grant

Interlude 0: Genesis

My darling ones, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.

—Simone Kimberley, Don’t Go Out Alone

Here there be monsters.

—Dr. Shanti Cale

August 17, 2015: Time stamp 15:06.

[The recording is crisp enough to look like a Hollywood film, too polished to be real. The lab is something out of a science fiction movie, all pristine white walls and gleaming glass and steel equipment. Only one thing in this scene is fully believable: the woman standing in front of the mass spectrometer, her wavy blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, a broad smile on her face. She is pretty, with a classic English bone structure and the sort of pale complexion that speaks less to genetics and more to being the type of person who virtually never goes outside. There is a petri dish in her blue-gloved hand.]

DR. CALE: Doctor Shanti Cale, Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis viability test thirty-seven. We have successfully matured eggs in a growth medium consisting of seventy percent human cells, thirty percent biological slurry. A full breakdown of the slurry can be found in the appendix to my latest progress report. The eggs appear to be viable, but we have not yet successfully induced hatching in any of the provided growth mediums. Upon consultation with Doctor Banks, I received permission to pursue other tissue sources.

[She walks to the back of the room, where a large, airlock-style door has been installed. The camera follows her through the airlock and into what looks very much like an operating theater. Two men are waiting there, faces covered by surgical masks. Dr. Cale pauses long enough to put down her petri dish and put on a mask of her own.]

DR. CALE: The subject was donated to our lab by his wife, following the accident which left him legally brain dead. For confirmation that the subject was obtained legally, please see the medical power of attorney attached to my latest progress report.

[The movement of her mask indicates a smile.]

DR. CALE: Well. Quasi-legally.

[Dr. Cale crosses to the body. Its midsection has been surrounded by a sterile curtain; the face is obscured by life support equipment and by the angle of the shot. She pulls back the curtain to reveal the gleaming interior of the man’s sliced-open abdomen. The skin has been peeled back and the blood has been suctioned away, revealing a wide array of colors. Liver brown, intestinal green and glistening white, and the smooth pink sac of the stomach. Calmly, she reaches into the man’s body, pushing organs aside until the surface of the small intestine is revealed.]

DR. CALE: Scalpel.

[One of the masked men passes her the requested tool. She takes it, pressing down against the man’s intestine. He does not move. Her hand does not tremble.]

DR. CALE: I am not following strict sterile protocol, in part because infection is not a risk. The subject’s immune system has been supplemented. D. symbogenesis eggs were introduced to the subject’s system six days ago, fed into his body along with the nutrient paste we have been using to preserve basic biological functions.

[The surface of the intestine splits, spilling a thin film of brownish liquid over the surrounding organs. Dr. Cale ignores it as she sets the scalpel aside and thrusts her hand into the man’s body. He still does not move as she digs through his small intestine. When she finally retracts her hand, she is clutching something. She pulls down her mask with her free hand and directs a beatific smile toward the camera.]

DR. CALE: I am pleased to report that we have multiple fully-formed proglottids present in the subject’s body, as well as some partial strobila.

[She holds out her hand. The camera zooms in on the white specks writhing against her gloved fingers.]

DR. CALE: D. symbogenesis is capable of maturing when cultured inside a living human host. Ladies and gentlemen…at long last, it’s alive.

[The film ends there. There are no notes in Dr. Cale’s progress reports relating to the eventual fate, or original identity, of the first human subject used to culture D. symbogenesis. The medical power of attorney referenced in the recording has never come to light.]

*  *  *

[End report.]

June 23, 2021: Time stamp, 13:17.

This is not the first thing I remember.

This is the first thing that I was told to remember; this is the memory that has been created for me by the hands and eyes and words of others. The first thing I remember has no need for hands, or eyes, or words. It has no need for others. It only needs the dark and the warm and the distant, constant sound of drums. The first thing I remember is paradise.

This is not the first thing I remember. But this is the first thing you will need to know.

*  *  *

Sally Mitchell was dying.

She was up against an army—an army that had begun with paramedics, moved on to doctors, and finally, to complicated life support machines that performed their function with passionless efficiency—but none of that seemed to make any difference. She had always been determined, and now she was determined to die. Silently, and despite everyone’s best efforts, she was slipping further and further away.

It was not a swift process. Every cell in her body, damaged and undamaged alike, fought to retain cohesion. They struggled to pull in oxygen and force out the toxins that continued to build in her tissues and bloodstream. Her kidney function had been severely impaired in the accident, and waste chemicals had ceased to be automatically eliminated. She no longer responded in any meaningful way to external stimuli. Once she was removed from the machines that labored to keep her body functional, her life would come to an end in very short order.

Sally Mitchell existed in a state of living death, sustained by technology, but slipping away all the same.

Her hospital room was crowded—unusually so, for a woman standing in death’s doorway, but her doctor had hoped that by bringing her family to see her, he could better plead his case for taking her off life support. The damage from the accident had been too great. Tests had shown that Sally herself—the thinking, acting girl they remembered—was gone. “Clinical brain death” was the term he used, over and over again, trying to make them understand. Sally was gone. Sally was not coming back. And if they kept her on artificial life support for much longer, more of her organs would begin to shut down, until there was nothing left. If her family approved the procedures to harvest her organs now, her death could mean life for others. By pairing her organs with splices taken from her SymboGen implant, the risks of rejection could be reduced to virtually nothing. Dozens of lives could be saved, and all her family had to do was approve. All her family had to do was let her go.

All they had to do was admit that she was never waking up.

Sally Mitchell opened her eyes.

The ceiling was so white it burned, making her eyes begin to water in a parody of tears. She stared up at it for almost a minute, unable to process the message she was getting from her nerves. The message wanted her to close her eyes. Another part of her brain awakened, explaining what the burning sensation in her retinas meant.

Sally closed her eyes.

The doctor was still pleading with her family, cajoling and comforting them in turn as he explained what would happen next if they agreed to have Sally declared legally dead. His voice was no more or less compelling than the buzz of the machines around her. None of his words meant anything to her, and so she dismissed them as unimportant stimuli in a world that was suddenly full of unimportant stimuli. She focused instead on getting her eyes to open again. She wanted to see the white ceiling. It was…interesting.

The second time Sally opened her eyes, it was easier. Blinking came after that, and then the realization that she could breathe—her body reminded her of breathing, of the movement that it required, the pulling in of air through the nose, the expelling of air through the mouth. The respirator that was supposed to be handling the breathing process began beeping shrilly, confused in its mechanical way by her sudden involvement. The stimulus from the man in the ceiling-colored coat became more important as it grew louder, hurting her ears.

Sally sat up.

More machines started to beep. Sally winced, and then blinked, surprised by her own automatic reaction. She winced again, this time on purpose. The man in the ceiling-colored coat stared at her and said something she didn’t understand. She looked blankly back at him. Then the other people in the room started making noise, as shrill and confused as the machines around her, and one of them flung herself onto the bed, putting her arms around Sally and making a strange sound in her throat, like she was choking.

More people came into the room. The machines stopped making noise, but the people kept on doing it, making sounds she would learn were called “words,” asking questions she didn’t have answers for, and meanwhile, the body lived. The cells began to heal as the organs, one by one, resumed the jobs they had tried to abandon.

Sally Mitchell was going to live. Everything else was secondary.

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Table of Contents

1. Cover
2. Welcome
3. Title Page
4. Dedication
5. The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell
6. Meet the Author
7. Also by Mira Grant
8. Bonus Material
9. About Orbit Short Fiction
10. Orbit Newsletter
11. Copyright

Navigation

1. Begin Reading

2. Table of Contents

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Seanan McGuire
Excerpt from Parasite copyright © 2013 by Seanan McGuire
Cover design by Wendy Chan
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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First eBook edition: July 2014

ISBN: 978-0-316-38098-0

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