The Most Uncommon Cold I - Life in the Time of Zombies (27 page)

     He opened the door slowly as if hesitant to let the outside world enter his refuge inside the car.  Glen stepped uneasily on to the pavement of the parking lot.  He almost expected the ground to give way under his foot.  The ground remained solid, and Glen stood beside the car.  In the quiet night, he could hear the humming of the fluorescent light and moths fluttering wings on the light pole a few feet from him.  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.  The parking lot was empty aside from Glen and his car.   The bushes surrounding the parking lot on three sides were back lit by a full moon and added to the shadows dancing around the dark place.

     The thought of going back to the classroom was absent from his mind until a voice from nowhere placed it there with a whisper.  “Go open your desk.”�  The idea made no sense to him, and Glen brushed it aside as just one of those ridiculous thoughts that pop into your head from time to time.  Those thoughts like telling your boss what you really think of him or throwing a rock through the church’s huge stain-glassed window were impulses that might very well come to anyone.  However, sane people paid no attention to them.  Glen certainly counted himself among the sane and paid no attention to this thought.  That is, until it was repeated.

     The male voice had a slight European accent, “Go open your desk.”�

     Without giving it a conscious thought, Glen began walking slowly back across the parking lot toward the school.  Just before he reached the curb of the sidewalk separating the rough pavement of the parking lot from the smooth sidewalk and lawn of the campus, Glen asked himself just what exactly he was doing.  That was certainly a good question.  Why was he heading back to his classroom in the middle of the night to look inside of a desk?

Before he could find an answer to that question, Glen found himself surrounded by bright light.

“Stay where you are!”� Glen was actually relieved to discover as he turned around that the command did not come from some inner or disembodied voice.

This voice had come from the police car idling behind him in the parking lot.  He followed this voice without question.  The doors opened on both sides of the car. From the passenger side, a tall black officer with very short hair and a bushy mustache emerged.  He stood next to the car for a moment as he unsnapped the leather strap holding his service revolver in the holster.  Through the windshield, a young white officer with red hair and freckles could be seen speaking into the radio hand piece.  Glen thought that the officer looked young enough to be one of his students.

“Keep your hands where I can see them!”� The black officer barked as he approached Glen.  The proximity made his height even more striking in comparison to that of the English instructor.

“Officer, I’m sorry.  I am a teacher here and needed to get something out of my classroom.”� He struggled to keep his voice sounding nonchalant like standing in the parking lot of Roosevelt High School in the middle of the night was a completely common occurrence.

“I need to see some ID.”�  The officer did not seem the least bit impressed by Glen’s nonchalance. If it had any effect on him, it seemed that he was irritated by it.  “Take it out slowly!”�

“The call was from Christine Davis looking for her husband Glen Davis.”�  This voice came from the officer in the car.

Glen took his wallet from his back pocket slowly and removed his driver’s license.  The black officer took the license from him and examined it.

“We found the missing husband!”  He called back to the patrol car. “You’ve got one worried wife at home.  You better have a good story for her.”�  The officer chuckled slightly as he moved a bit closer to Glen checking for the smell of alcohol.  Not finding any, he looked at the teacher with curiosity.  “So what is so important in your classroom?”�

Glen stared blankly at the officer for a moment and could think only of the desk.

“I mean what was so important that you came to school at eleven o’clock at night to get?”�

It took him a second to answer. “I left my briefcase with …¦uh … my phone there.”�

“Okay, let’s go get it,”�the officer said as he began moving toward the school.

It was then that Glen again heard that other voice that didn’t come from the officer or the police car or anyone else within sight.  “Go open your desk.  There’s a surprise inside!”�

Every bit of Glen’s determination was needed to keep from responding to the voice.

“No,
I’ll get it tomorrow,”  Glen quickly replied and began walking back to his car.  He had the strong urge to get as far away from the school and the desk as possible.

The policeman jogged to catch up with Glen before he reached his car. “Mr. Davis!” He ca
lled.

Somewhat agitated by the delay in getting away from the place, Glen spun around to face the officer.  Despite his advantage in height, the black officer felt stunned and threatened by a look of rage on the teacher’s face. 

“Here’s your license.”� He handed the card back to Glen and noticed the previous fierceness had vanished from his face. 

“Oh, thanks,”�  Glen answered sheepishly as he took the license.  He opened the door and got inside his car.  He lowered the window to hear the officer.

“You head straight home, okay?”�

He replied quickly, “I will.”� And then he raised the window. 

The tall black officer walked slowly back to the patrol car while watching Glen.  He watched as Glen’s car left the parking lot.

Back in the police car, the black officer simply observed, “Not sure what’s going on there, but I think someone is gonna be in trouble at home.”�

Chapter 2

Glen watched his rear view mirror for several blocks certain that at any moment he would see flashing red lights.  None appeared, and soon he was parked in front of his house.  The gray with dark blue trim, two-story Cape Cod style house had been Glen and Christine’s home for nearly six years.

He sat in the car watching the house that had light in every window.  He was confused by his whereabouts for the last eight hours, so how could he expect Christine to understand.  Glen was trying to come up with a plausible explanation when he saw his wife look out the window.  He was getting out of the car as the front door of the house opened.  Christine rushed out toward him.

From other expatriates teaching in South Korea, Glen had heard plenty of stories about Korean families forbidding daughters to date, let alone marry, foreigners.   Fortunately, the marriage had come without any such objections.  In fact, Glen liked to think that Christine’s family truly liked him.  He was sure that marrying Christine was one of the best things he had done in his life.  As she hurried out the door to his car with her long black hair in a ponytail poking out from under her pink baseball hat, Glen knew that he loved her.

“I’m sorry!” was the first thing out of Glen’s mouth. Christine was in a gray San Francisco Giants t-shirt and faded red sweatpants.  She paused just a moment to look at her husband and then hugged him tightly.

“I was so frightening,” she cried into Glen’s shoulder. “I was so frightening.”�

Glen fought the reflex to correct her grammar and just held her.

After a few moments, she suddenly pushed away and punched him on the arm. “I was so scared.  Where were you?” She hugged him again.

“Let’s go in the house.”�Glen practically carried his wife into their house as she seemed unwilling to give up her embrace.

Once the two had gotten settled in their living room on the light blue couch that was flanked on either side by dark blue recliners, Glen tried to find words to explain what he had been doing for the past eight hours.

“Okay, I know this is going to sound kind of weird,”� the usually concise English teacher began. “But I’m not sure exactly what happened tonight.”�

Christine’s face was a combination of confusion, concern, and frustration.

Before she could say anything, Glen continued, “I remember working in my classroom when Jim came in at about three-thirty.  I went out to my car and got in and … then don’t know … I was in my car … the police came … I really can’t remember. Maybe I just fell asleep, but it doesn’t feel like that.”�

Christine’s face was still a combination of confusion, concern, and frustration, but now concern was the prevailing emotion.  She placed her hand on her husband’s forehead as if to check for a fever.  The act made both of them smile and helped ease emotions.

“Let’s get some sleep,”� Glen suggested. “Maybe this will make more sense tomorrow.”�

Still feeling a little uneasy, Glen got off the couch and turned off the lights in the kitchen.  He stared out the window at his car for a moment before switching off the lamp in the living room.  The two headed upstairs to bed.

As his head hit the pillow, Glen noticed the red digital numbers of the alarm clock on the nightstand read
12:12
.  After a moment, he heard the buzz of the alarm and looked to see it was now 6:15.

He got slowly out of bed trying not to wake Christine who lay on her side wrapped in the sheets.  He resisted a desire to touch her and instead made his way to the bathroom down the hallway that was adorned with several pictures of the couple enjoying days spent in exotic locations.  The bathroom mirror revealed an older, wrinkled face that Glen hardly recognized. His eyes were red balls, which when combined with the stubble of a beard gave him something of a crazed look.

“Not the face of someone to be trusted around children,” he said to himself.

Following a shave and shower, all that remained of the demented appearance were the fiery red eyes.  Glen searched the medicine cabinet and bathroom drawers for some eye drops but found none.  He quietly gathered his clothes from the closet and went into the extra bedroom to get dressed.  The bedroom served as storage and computer room.  The large maple computer desk stood against one wall with boxes of unpacked mementos from foreign places scattered around the rest of the room.  Glen stood next to the computer attempting to get dressed and check his e-mail simultaneously. Checking his watch, he realized that he was running late and quickly finished dressing.  He looked into the bedroom and saw that Christine was still sleeping.  He crept in and kissed her gently on the top of her head so as not to wake her.

     Downstairs, he looked in the refrigerator for his lunch.  Usually, Christine packed a small blue canvas bag with his lunch and left it for him in the refrigerator.  This morning, the bag was not there.  Probably a sign of how worried she had been about him Glen thought with a twinge of guilt.

     The events of several hours earlier came back to Glen but without the previous flood of emotion.  They were simply
missing
� hours.  He wondered if he had been so tired that he had simply fallen asleep.  After a moment, Glen had convinced himself that this was indeed the case and that the incident was not something about which he needed to be concerned.

     He found some leftover pizza in the refrigerator.  He ate one piece quickly and put two others in a plastic container for lunch.  The coffee maker, which came on automatically at 5:30, filled the kitchen with the smell of fresh coffee.  He poured some into a silver travel mug, put the pizza in his briefcase, and headed out the front door.

     As he was walking out, a sudden thought that he needed to get some more garbage bags jumped into his head.  Glen wondered for a moment about the source of this totally unrelated thought.  However, the contemplation was pushed aside as he discovered that in the emotion of his arrival home he had not locked his car.  He quickly checked inside but nothing seemed to be missing.

     He drove to school without anything unusual happening.   It was just before eight o’clock when Glen pulled into the Roosevelt High School parking lot.  Out of habit, he parked in virtually the same parking spot as he had the previous day and many days previous to that.

     He saw Jim Fontaine’s old white Volvo, but the owner was not in sight.

     As he crossed the lot toward the school, bits of the previous night came back to the teacher. He flashed on the image of himself standing still as the tall black officer barked at him to hand over his identification.  Glen looked to the ground at the exact spot he had stood earlier and was surprised to find his gold pen laying there.  It was a gift from Christine given when he had begun teaching at the high school.  He had not realized it was missing but felt very relieved to have found it.  With the pen clipped safely on his shirt pocket, Glen headed across the courtyard toward Fontaine’s classroom.

     The room was in Building A, which was on the right side of the courtyard opposite the building housing Glen’s own classroom. He found Fontaine squatting next to a cupboard full of this year’s adopted history textbooks.

     “Do you need any help?” Glen asked as he saw his friend.

     For a moment, Jim Fontaine seemed both startled by the interruption and confused as to who was standing before him.  Recognition soon came to Fontaine’s eyes. 

     “Oh, I was just counting the new texts to make sure I have enough workbooks to go with them.  We have to be sure to use the materials that the publishing company was kind enough to sell us.  I truly believe that their ultimate goal is to replace education with rote memorization.”�