Authors: Patrick Freivald
Ani tried not to look at the camera on the wall as
she finished the next iteration of the song.
Her mom spoke up. “That’s strange, baby. What’s it
called?”
“I don’t know.”
Chapter
11
The following Monday
Mr. Benson interrupted independent reading time, stomping through the door with
one of the long poles like they’d used to steer around Mr. Cummings. The dour
man scowled at them all before his eyes locked on Ani. “Miss Romero, come with
me, please.”
Ani looked at Sam, who
shrugged. She stood and approached the door. Mr. Benson twirled his finger in
the air, in what looked like a sarcastic “whoop-de-do.” She gave him a puzzled
look, and he did it again.
“What—”
“Turn around, Miss Romero.”
She turned toward the class and
felt weight on the back of her helmet as he latched the pole into place.
“Is this necessary?”
“Probably not,” he said. “But
it’s the rules. Individuals in the special program are either to be chained
together or led with catchpoles.”
She tried to be nervous but
couldn’t summon the energy. She wasn’t sure if the lack of adrenaline was a
blessing or a curse.
Maybe it’s both.
As he led her out the door, she
realized just how easy she was to steer around. With no leverage and her ankles
shackled together, she could probably be controlled by a third grader despite
her inhuman strength.
“Where are we going?” she asked
as Mr. Benson twisted her neck to the left.
“Guidance Office.”
“May I ask why?” She smiled at
a black-clad kid who nodded at her from inside the Global Studies classroom.
At
her, not
to
her. There was too much reverence for a simple “hello.”
“Sure. You’re always welcome to
ask.”
“Why?”
“They don’t tell me.”
Ani snorted. “Nice.”
They passed through the hall in
silence. As they entered the guidance office, the old lady behind the reception
desk forced a smile. The result looked something like a white-haired bulldog
trying not to throw up in terror. “Go right in.”
A little under six feet tall,
with brown hair just touched with gray, Mr. Murphy looked exactly as he had the
last time she’d sat in his office, two years before. He even wore the same
horn-rimmed glasses. Without hesitation or any sign of nerves he shook her hand
and gestured to the loveseat.
Mr. Benson unfastened the
catchpole and closed the door, then stood at ease in front of it, his hand at
rest on his pistol grip.
“How’s things?” Ani asked.
Mr. Murphy shrugged. “Not bad.
Busy, what with all the transfers in and out.” He leaned forward and put his
elbows on his knees. “How about you?”
She chuckled. “It’s freaking me
out a little that you’re not more freaked out.”
He smiled and gave a short nod
to Mr. Benson. “I think I’m safe enough, and I’ve known you forever.”
Ani smiled back.
You’d never
survive a real outbreak....
“You dodged my question,
though. How are you?”
She leaned back, squirming a
little in the seat to shift the cushions. “Frustrated.”
“I understand things are...restrictive.
But it’s necessary.”
She snorted. “That’s not what I
mean. I’m used to restrictions, that’s no big deal. The problem is Mr. Foster.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s nice enough, he just
doesn’t know enough math or science. Or economics. He’s not qualified—”
“He’s certified in Special Ed—”
The coffee table cracked as she
slammed her hands down. Mr. Murphy gave a nervous glance at Mr. Benson, who
looked bored.
“And I’m not a goddamned special-education
student. Do you really think we belong in there with Kyle-freaking-Lee? The kid’s
a freaking idiot. Lydia’s not exactly a hundred-watter, either.”
Or Teah. Or
Mike.
“We’ve got Mr. Cummings and
Mrs. Weller—”
“The only reason we have them
is because they’re dead, too. So yeah, we’re set with econ and English, but
what about math? Science? Mr. Giggles knows less than we do.”
“We’re working on that.”
Ani cleared her throat to cover
a snarl.
“So anyway,” Mr. Murphy said, “the
reason I called you down was to talk about college applications.”
Ani blinked. “College
applications. Seriously.”
He pulled out a stack of manila
folders and scattered them across the listing table. Fredonia, Wells, Rochester,
Potsdam—her eyes locked on Potsdam. The Crane School was a forgotten dream from
the days she used to breathe. Despite herself she picked up the folder and
leafed through the brochures. Her eyes flitted from concert hall to practice
room to renowned professors, conductors, and composers. She imagined herself at
a grand piano in the Hosmer Concert Hall, the lights dimmed—
She snapped the folder closed
and pushed it across the table. “Yeah, right.”
Mr. Murphy’s puzzled scowl
boiled her long-congealed blood.
Is he stupid, naive, or about to lie to my
face?
“What?” he said. “You’ve got a
great chance of getting in there.”
“I don’t have a great chance of
getting in anywhere. There isn’t a school in the world that would take me,
unless a judge forced them to.”
“That’s—”
“Not going to happen. We can’t
even get a judge to declare us human, and we’re no closer to a cure than we
were eighteen months ago.”
Or four years ago.
Mr. Murphy sighed and leaned
back in his chair. “Look, Ani...let’s assume for the time being that you have a
future.”
She snorted. “Why, so you can
pretend to do your job?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t
deserve that.”
She opened her mouth, shut it,
and tried again. “Yeah. Probably not. But I don’t see the point in applying to
colleges that will never let me attend.”
He put his elbows back on his
knees and folded his fingers together. “We won’t know unless we try.”
Naive, then.
“Alright. I give up. Give me
some applications.” She looked at the clutter on his desk.
Shit.
“Am I
supposed to fill them out in crayon?”
He stacked up the folders with
a smile. “Why don’t I send them home with your mother?”
Her return smile stared back at
her in the reflection from his glasses, a sliver of white teeth just visible
between gray gums and orange bite guard. It was amazing how white your teeth
stayed when bacteria refused to get anywhere near your mouth. ZV repelled every
living creature, large or small...except humans. Clean up a zombie and add some
perfume, and a human wouldn’t even know the difference. What lurked in the
human genome that didn’t make it quiver in terror at the undead?
“Ani?”
She shook off the thought and took
the proffered hand. “Sorry. Woolgathering.” Her stomach lurched at his
proximity, a faint stab strangled by her mother’s serum.
He turned her toward the door,
where Mr. Benson waited with the catchpole. “It’s nice to have dreams again,
isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she said.
No point
in ruining his day.
Mr. Benson steered her back to
class, unlocking the barred, steel door and walking her into the room proper.
As he released the catchpole she was greeted by the worried, relieved faces of
her classmates. Only Mike didn’t look gut-punched. He looked happy. Stupid
happy.
Mr. Foster was in mid-sentence
about complex fractions. Devon cut him off.
“What happened?”
Ani shrugged. “Just a meeting
with Mr. Murphy. College apps.”
“Shit,” Kyle said. “You’d think
they’d tell us that or something.”
Sam rolled her eyes at him. “Like
you were worried.”
He crossed his arms and looked
at the floor. “Not about her, just in general.”
A shrill giggle interrupted
them. “Kids, can we refocus please?”
Ani raised an eyebrow at Kyle
as she sat down. “Not worried about me, huh? So as long as whatever it is doesn’t
happen to you—”
“College?” Devon said. “Kyle?”
She snorted. “Fat chance.”
Kyle leapt to his feet and tore
the wooden top off of his desk, shearing the bolts with a casual heave of his
arms. “You know what, bitch? I may not be Mr. Super-Smart Guy or whatever, but
at least I’m not a bitch,
bitch
.” He half-lunged at her, arms
outstretched.
Mike hugged him from behind,
trapping his arms against his chest.
“Hi, Kyle.”
“Get OFF me, moron!” He
struggled, whipping his head back and forth and kicking at Mike’s ankles. Mike
squeezed tighter, his massive arms not even budging under the onslaught.
“Be nice, Kyle.” It was the
first time in forever that Ani had seen Mike scowl. Air groaned out of Kyle’s
slack lips, and Ani heard something crack. “Be nice.”
A light blazed in the back of
the room, and they all turned, then froze. Another yard-long arc of flame
spurted from the nozzle of Mr. Clark’s flamethrower. Mr. Foster’s giggle clawed
at Ani’s skull as Mr. Clark took his left hand off of the red button on the
wall.
Mr. Clark flipped up his helmet
and looked at them one by one, the blue flame blazing in his eyes. “Mike. Kyle.
I’m going to have to ask you all to sit down. Right now.” Kyle stopped
struggling and sat the moment Mike let him go. Mike sat on the floor and smiled
at Devon. Mr. Clark dropped his visor and leaned back against the wall.
Mr. Foster’s normally-pale face
held no blood. He licked his lips and looked from the pilot light, to the shattered
desk, to the students, and back. A sound lurched from his mouth, half-laugh,
half-sob. The hysterical wail didn’t stop as he collapsed into his chair, hands
covering his face.
Miss Pulver rushed to his side and
knelt, her soothing murmurs almost inaudible as she patted his shoulder. Sam
picked up her e-reader and opened Rodney Walther’s
Broken Laces
. Everyone
else just stared.
Moments later the door clanged
open. Mr. Benson escorted Dr. Banerjee in, flanked by two soldiers. Dr. Banerjee
nodded toward the teacher’s desk. “Get him to the nurse’s office.” They helped
Mr. Foster to his feet. As they led him out of the room Dr. Banerjee turned to
Mr. Benson. “Bring Kyle.” Without another word he walked out.
A soldier entered with a
catchpole, this one with a leather collar as well as a ring-clip. Mr. Benson
crooked a finger at Kyle. “Mr. Lee.”
Kyle rolled his eyes, walked up
to Mr. Benson, and turned around. He sulked in place as the soldier locked the
pole to the back of his helmet, then looped the collar around his neck. “I don’t
know what the hell I did, but that asshole cracked my—” The soldier pushed a
button and the collar strangled him with a pneumatic hiss, the leather biting
into his graying skin. Kyle’s gritted teeth turned into mouthed profanities as
they steered him out of the room.
The door slammed shut.
“Is he going to get suspended?”
Lydia asked no one in particular.
* * *
They didn’t see Kyle the rest
of the day, and he wasn’t in his room that night. It was almost midnight by the
time Dr. Romero got home, deep bags under her eyes, limbs heavy.
She shuffled inside the
apartment and froze when she saw Ani on the couch. “You should be in the bath.”
“I know,” Ani said. “But I’m
worried about Kyle, and ‘I’ll be home late’ wasn’t specific enough.”
Sarah shut the door with her
foot, set down her satchel, and collapsed on the couch next to Ani. Pulling her
close, she whispered, “I don’t think Kyle will be a problem anymore.”
Ani pulled back in horror. “Mom!
You can’t mean—”
“No, baby girl.” She brushed
her hand against Ani’s cheek. “He’s not dead. But he’s been...disciplined.
Words worked with Devon after the cafeteria incident. Words weren’t working for
that boy, so a more direct approach was taken.”
“What did you do?”
Sarah didn’t say anything for a
while. The silent apartment shuddered as the main air intake for the lab cycled
off. They’d long since passed the point where they pretended to be completely
honest with one another, but they kept few secrets. She sighed as the air
kicked off. “I did what I was ordered to do, and I don’t want to think about it
right now. You’ll know soon enough.”
Ani hugged her, and they held
each other for a while.
“Get in the bath, honey.”
“Okay, Mom.”
Chapter
12
Kyle
wasn’t on the bus that morning, and when they got to school, Devon and Sam were
separated into their own chain-gang-of-two, while Ani was collared on a catchpole.
The collar around her neck brought a brief spasm of panic as she thought of
Kyle, but the soldier didn’t tighten it, and the moment passed.
“What the hell is this?” Devon asked no one in
particular.
“Math class,” Sam said. She spread her lips in
what might have been a grin around the bite guard and flashed her eyebrows.
“What?” Devon asked.
“Dad told me yesterday. I thought it’d be a cool
surprise so I didn’t tell you.” She looked at Ani. “We’ve been approved to take
math class, so first period we’ve got calculus with Mr. Robison, and you’ve got
precalc with Mr. Gursslin.”
Ani didn’t know what to say. Before she had a
chance to say it, her escort whisked her off down the hall and through the open
door of Mr. Gursslin’s room. Everything looked familiar, from the Smart Board,
to the dry-erase homework board, to the graph paper pads stacked on the
radiator.
The half-empty room sported a gaggle of
once-underclassmen that Ani only kind of knew, and seven black-clad strangers
who bowed their heads at her gaze.
Oh, Lordy.
In the back corner of the room sat an iron desk
identical to the ones in the Special Dead room, only this one sat in a
four-by-four welded-steel cage.
She wanted to roll her eyes, to protest, to rage
against the indignity. Instead she walked into the cage, allowed her escort to
collapse the catchpole and maneuver it through the bars, close and lock the
door, then release the collar. She sat down and found a box of crayons and a
stack of white copier paper on the shelf underneath the desk.
The other kids stared at her, their expressions
ranging from horror to reverence to disgust, but Mr. Gursslin never once looked
at her. She raised her hand twice to ask questions, and he ignored her. By the
end of the lesson she was so angry and hurt that she couldn’t concentrate on
her notes. It was a relief when the soldier collared her and led her out of the
room three minutes before the bell.
In the hall they shackled her to Devon and Sam,
and three of them shuffled through their familiar steel door as the bell
signaled class change. Rage swallowed her relief at the familiar confines.
Since
when am I agoraphobic?
The similar expressions on Devon and Sam’s faces
didn’t help.
She gasped when she saw Kyle.
He was chained to his desk. Metal rings protruded
from his arms, legs, and torso, surrounded by ugly pink scars. The links were
connected by a chain, limiting his motions to a couple of inches in any
direction.
Mom did this.
A second thought
overshadowed her first.
Dr. Banerjee ordered it.
She wanted to hate him
for it. She wanted to hate her mother.
Would I do any different, faced with
Kyle the zombie? Was there any other option?
She took her seat and looked
at Mr. Foster.
Huh.
She’d just noticed he was back. Pale and sweating
in a wrinkled blue shirt and outdated red paisley tie, he didn’t look any worse
for his previous meltdown. He returned her smile—with a giggle, of course—and
continued with his lesson on “whole reading,” whatever that was.
Ani looked over her math notes, smiling at the
fact that she didn’t quite understand all of it.
About time I learned
something.
Mr. Benson arrived fifty minutes early for the end
of school, chained them all in a row, and marched them through the halls. Before,
they’d shuffled along, restricted by the chains that connected their ankles.
With Kyle’s new predicament, they couldn’t move more than a few inches per step.
Nobody said anything, though Mike snorted in frustration more than once. When
they shuffled into Mrs. Weller’s room, Ani tried not to stare.
Mrs. Weller’s desk had been moved from the side to
the front of the room, where both it and the Smart Board could be surrounded by
vertical steel bars. A single door stood at the far end, held fast by an
enormous padlock. She sneered as they entered and outright snarled at Mr.
Benson.
“This sucks,” she said.
Mr. Benson didn’t even shrug. Instead he fastened
the students’ leg chains to an iron rung protruding from the floor in the back
of the room and walked out.
They stood in silence under the imperious,
bloodshot, dead gaze of Mrs. Weller. She grabbed the bars and shook them,
reminding Ani of nothing so much as a caged monkey. After a rage-filled moment
she froze in place and smiled. “Any of you kids got the key?”
Kyle laughed. Teah frowned. Mike said, “No, Mrs.
Weller.”
“Letting you out would get us all killed,” Sam
said.
Mrs. Weller snorted. “They can’t kill the dead.”
Ani frowned. “Don’t you want to live?”
Mrs. Weller flopped into her chair and cradled her
head in her hands. Her efforts at mumbling were spoiled by the helmet—every
word was intelligible. “It doesn’t matter what I want. I’m already dead. And
now I’m in another cage, but this one’s at work.”
“Only for now,” Sam said.
Mrs. Weller slammed her hands down on the desk. In
the ensuing silence she turned toward them. “Do you really believe that?
Really?”
“My mom...” Ani started.
“...is a coldhearted bitch who cares more about
her research than her subjects.”
Ani wanted to contradict her, but memories of the
burn room in the basement, of Dylan and old men deliberately infected so that
cure research could go forward, kept her silent. She had no idea how many
innocent people Dr. Banerjee had killed over the past two decades, and her mom
was party to much of it.
“Right?” Mrs. Weller pressed.
“You know what?” Devon asked. “I’ve got something
to live for even if you don’t. You want to be a dried-up old hag, that’s your
problem.”
“I’m thirty-seven!” Mrs. Weller snapped.
“As she said,” Kyle butted in. Though she couldn’t
see it, Ani almost heard his stupid grin. In the corner of her eye, she saw
Lydia punch his shoulder.
“Look,” Sam said. “This might not matter to you,
but it matters to us. I—we—believe that we’re going to get through this. And
that means we need to finish school. You’re our teacher.”
She sighed, then lifted her head. “I forgot. You’re
seventeen, aren’t you?”
Sam shook her head. “Almost nineteen. I was
seventeen at prom.”
“Close enough. You have to be young to be that
optimistic.”
Joe nudged Ani and smiled at Mrs. Weller. “If we
pout, would that make you feel better?”
“Just read
Catcher in the Rye
or something,”
she replied.
“Mike doesn’t know how,” Kyle said.
Neither do you.
She glanced at Devon’s broken
hand.
Ani opened her mouth, closed it, and tried again. “We
didn’t bring our readers.”
Mrs. Weller sighed. “No, of course you didn’t.”
*
* *
That night, Joe plopped down on the couch next to
Ani. A grin split his face as he leaned toward her. She eyed him askance, finished
reading the paragraph, put a digital bookmark in
The Catcher in the Rye
,
then met his gaze.
His good eye swallowed the fluorescent lights
without a hint of sparkle; his bad glistened white under their glare. She
returned his smile. When he didn’t say anything, she took the initiative.
“What?”
He put his hands on his knees, bringing his face
to within inches of hers. “You hear about lunch?”
“No. Have they decided to stop wasting food?”
His grin broadened. “Nope. We get full, hot meals
every day. Mmm mmm mmm!”
“Are they adding brains?” She just managed not to
drool at the thought.
“I wish! But no, not that, either.” His grin strained
into a grimace as he held it.
“Joe?” She patted his cheek, then grabbed a tuft
of almost-beard. “You’re freaking me out here a bit.”
If anything his grin got bigger. “Location,
location, location.”
She let go. “Not the cafeteria?”
Lydia shambled into the lounge. “Hey, we can have
lunch in Mr. Cummings’ room!”
Joe pouted at her. “Awww, you ruined my surprise.”
Her face crumbled as she whirled out of the room. “I
can’t do anything right!”
Joe and Ani exchanged glances.
“Wow,” Joe said. “What got into her?”
Ani sighed. “She’s sad on Teah’s behalf. And these
new injections really let the hormones shine through.” It was true enough.
After two years of dulled feelings, even a semblance of normal teenager had her
scratching at the walls.
“I hadn’t noticed,” he said. “Though maybe it’s
why I like sitting next to you so much.”
Despite herself Ani smiled. “Maybe that’s it.
Couldn’t be the company.”
“Nope,” Joe agreed. “Just hormones, raging their
way through my bloodstream.” He looked toward the door. “Maybe I ought to get
me one of those.”
“A doorway?”
“A bloodstream.” He inched toward her so that his
knee brushed hers, and her heart would have fluttered if it could have.
Oh, shit.
She felt the crush wheedling its way into her brain despite her best
intentions. “So anyway, the cafeteria ladies are all freaked and threatening to
quit, and Mr. C said he doesn’t mind, so the board said it’s cool if we go in
there instead.”
Her brain wouldn’t let her be anything but
conscious of the contact between them. “That’s nice of them. The board, that is.
Not the—” She shifted away from him just as her mom walked through the door.
“Bath time, kids. Lights out in twenty minutes.”
Joe slid to his feet as Ani looked back at her
e-reader. “Let me finish this chapter, Mom.”
“Okay. Make it snappy.” She disappeared out the
door.
Ani didn’t look up as Joe lurched out of the room,
but it took effort.
Dammit. I don’t need this.
Alone, she smiled.
*
* *
The next day proved Joe and Lydia right. After
three hours trying to get Kyle to care about math, or English, or history, and
only two hysterical fits from Teah, they found themselves deposited in Mr.
Cummings’s room. Shackled to the bars of his cage, they couldn't move more than
a few feet in any direction.
“Nice cell,” Kyle said.
“Nice...body art, Kyle.” Mr. Cummings said. He
wrapped his knuckle on the cage. “The boss says it’s there to protect us from
the students. I guess a couple of them were getting funny ideas about who
should and shouldn’t still be walking around. The Good Doctor reserves the
right of termination for himself.”
“Seriously?” Ani asked.
“Seriously, as in that’s what they told me.” He
banged on one of the bars with his fist. “I don’t believe it either.” Nobody
said anything for a minute. “I never realized how much I’d miss being able to
go make copies, or take a leak.”
Sam scowled. “So what do you think the real reason
is?”
“Oh, I couldn’t begin to speculate on the wisdom
of the school board. Not like they’ll consult me anyway. Article One, Section Nine,
Clause Two doesn’t hold a lot of weight for the unliving.” None of them said
anything. “
Habeas corpus
applies to corpuses, not corpses.” He stared
off into space. “But I can understand that, even if I hate this.”
“We’re not contagious,” Devon said. “We’re not
mindless. We’re just sick. There’s no reason to quarantine us like this
anymore.”
Mr. Cummings’s lips peeled back from his bite
guard. “For now. Until the serum wears off or the virus adapts. You can’t tell
me you’d hold back if they brought in a bowl of brains.”
Ani looked at the floor and quashed a feeling of
guilt for her reaction in court. Everyone insisted that it wasn’t her fault,
that she did great under the circumstances, but she couldn’t help feeling that
she could have done better.
She jumped as the door banged open. A soldier
wheeled in a cart laden with plates of watery spaghetti and gray-green peas. He
seemed more concerned about the food than the room full of zombies.
“Morning,” he said with a weak smile. He left the
cart with a nod, walked out of the room, and shut the door.
Ani couldn’t not notice how cute he was—strong jaw
with a hint of stubble, bright blue eyes, and just a touch of baby face. She’d
never considered herself a sucker for a man in uniform, but she might have to
make an exception.
“Wow,” Lydia said. “He’s cute.”
“Wasn’t just me, then?” Devon asked.
“No,” Joe said. “You’re cute, too.”
Ani felt a stab of jealousy, but Devon ignored
him.