Hour 23 (8 page)

Jim regained his balance, and for the first time noticed others in the room. There was an officer who looked familiar, but who Jim couldn’t place a name to, strapped into a gurney just left of Min.

Ingram noticed Jim staring at the officer. “Turnbull. Rookie. Not sure you two ever met. Two hours ago he was lying on a hospital bed, clinically dead. Now he’s here—just as clinically dead—but, moving. No brainwaves. The virus eats at the nervous system, reducing the human host to a puppet. That’s all, a puppet. If the virus can yank enough strings, the puppet bites or scratches someone else, and the virus spreads. At least, that’s what all these damn doctors keep telling me. Sounds like hell, right?”

Jim watched Turnbull spastically jerk in his restraints. Like Min, large patches of hair on his head were missing. Clumps of it littered the floor around his gurney. His skin had turned gray and scabby; it clung tight to the bones beneath it. One eye was completely swollen shut under a mound of dark, purpled flesh. The eye that remained open darted around, milky and clouded. So clouded that Jim couldn’t make out a pupil or the color of his eyes. Turnbull made snappy movements similar to Min’s, but something was different. They were slower. More sluggish. Weak.

“So this is what waits at the end of the line? This is what happens to everyone who contracts the virus?” Jim asked, his voice crackling.

Ingram nodded solemnly.

“So how is it fixed?” Jim said.

“Jim,” Ingram stuttered. “As far as anyone knows…there is no fixing it.”

Jim heaved heavy breaths in his hazmat suit. His legs felt like jelly.

“We’ve only got a few minutes left on our rebreathers before we lose pressure. Come on.” Ingram tugged at Jim’s shoulder and motioned for the stairs.

Before he returned to the stairwell, Jim stopped one last time to turn and gaze at Min through the nursery window. Jim put one gloved hand against the glass, watched his partner tug violently at his restraints. After a few moments of watching Min snap at the air around him, jittering in his gurney, Jim removed his hand.

“Goodbye, Min,” Jim whispered, his helmet fogging from his panted breath. Jim’s eyes throbbed with grief. “Goodbye, my friend.”

EIGHT

“We’ve been stuck in here for so long, Nole. I don’t know how much longer I can take it.” Chloe sat on the floor, playing with her cell phone. So far, she had worn the battery down to a meager 39% and that number kept dropping.
Shitty day to leave my charger at home,
she thought.

“Me too,” Nolan said. He was exhausted. They all were. Every student aboard bus thirty-three had been corralled in the nurse’s station since the crash that morning. “Have you heard any more from your dad?”

“Nothing,” Chloe said blankly. She spun her phone in her palm and stared at it, as if a call could come through at any moment. “Not since his last voicemail. ‘Stay safe, do what you’re told.’ Look how that’s working out.”

“I’m starving,” Nolan said, and he yawned. He stretched his arms high up above his head. “And my ass has gone completely numb from sitting on this floor.”

“Yeah, hey…” Chloe stood up, dusted off her pants, and hollered over to Nurse Lowell, “When do we get lunch?”

“Sit back down, Miss Whiteman,” Nurse Lowell said in a bitter tone. The nurse had spent the entire morning at her desk, fiddling with either her cell phone, the office phone, or her computer.

Jared stood up from the desk he was sitting at. “You can’t just go about your day without feeding us.”

“Everyone stay seated and patient. When I find out I can release you for lunch, you’ll all be the first to know—trust me.” Nurse Lowell looked up from her computer just long enough to scan the room of students. Everything she read online suggested that the virus had an incubation period somewhere between five and thirty minutes. That time depended on a person’s gender, age, metabolism, and other variables. It was going on nearly three hours since the students arrived. If any of them had contact with the virus, it should have been apparent by now. Still, she kept her distance.

“This is bullshit!” Jared screamed. He threw his algebra textbook across the room like an angry child. It crashed into the wall beside Nolan with a hard
whack
and the binding split, causing a brief rainfall of white pages filled with word problems. “You can’t keep us locked up in here like animals!”

Nurse Lowell stood straight up at her desk and picked up the phone in front of her. Without taking her eyes off of Jared, she dialed a number and mumbled something indiscernible into the phone.

“Everyone sit where you are. I won’t ask again.” Nurse Lowell scowled at Jared, who threw his hands up and returned to his desk.

In no time at all, Principal Chaplik appeared at the nurse’s door and pulled her outside. Nolan studied their conversation through the window that overlooked the hall. He couldn’t make out much, except for when his principal quite loudly asked “are you sure?”, to which  Nurse Lowell nodded repeatedly. After that, Principal Chaplik entered the nurse’s office.

“Okay,” Chaplik said with a quick clap of his hands. “We’re going to move you all to the cafeteria. Be quick about it.”

The students groaned and cheered. Nolan clapped sarcastically.

“Except for you, Mr. Moore,” Chaplik said. He pointed a sausage-shaped finger at Jared. “You stay behind for a moment.”

Jared sat at his desk, arms crossed. He tapped his foot as the students filed out of the nurse’s office.

“This is insane,” Nolan said as he walked Chloe into the main hallway.

Chloe exhaled. “It is. But what can we do, you know?”

“We can’t just sit around here all day, pretending like this is okay. We should be going home.”

“Nolan, my dad said we should stay here. And besides, they’re going to start evacuations soon. The first place they’ll come is a school, right?”

Nolan thought about the article that Chloe had shown him earlier. It stated that massive evacuations of New York City were underway and urged people to stay in their homes until help arrived.

“It will be a while before they get to us,” Nolan scoffed. “Do you think this place will last until then?”

Nolan and Chloe took seats at their usual lunch table. On any regular day the table sat eight, and unless one of their friends was ditching class, the table was always packed. Today it was just Chloe, Nolan, and Rachel Epps. Rachel didn’t typically sit with Chloe and Nolan, but
her
regular table had filled by the time the group arrived at the cafeteria. The spot where Jared sat was still empty; no one had seen him since the nurse’s office.

Whatever teachers had shown up to school that day patrolled the cafeteria. Mr. DePierre, the chemistry teacher, walked deliberately down each row of tables with his arms crossed. He seemed to inspect each student one by one before he continued. It reminded Nolan of a TV show about prisons that he had watched once.

“You three, go ahead. Go get some lunch,” Mr. DePierre said in his nasally voice as he passed Nolan’s table. Chloe, Nolan and Rachel all looked around at each other without moving.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Mr. DePierre said. “Get moving, other tables want to eat, too.”

“We’re just waiting on someone, if that’s okay,” Nolan said.

Mr. DePierre said, “It’s not okay, it’s your turn. Go.”

“Our friend is really hungry, can’t you let another table go ahead of us?”

The chemistry teacher was growing impatient. “Mr. Fischer, if you were as passionate about covalent bonds as you were about arranging lunch schedules, you might have had a chance at passing my class. I won’t ask you again. Go. When your friend gets here, I’ll escort him to the line personally.”

Nolan’s chair scraped against the linoleum floor as he stood up from the table. “Fine.”

Rachel, Chloe, and Nolan approached the lunch line and grabbed a tray.

“What was that about?” Chloe asked.

“Huh?” Nolan mumbled, before tossing a chocolate milk onto his lunch tray.

“You and Jared aren’t that good of friends. Why the sudden crusade to make sure he has lunch?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem fair, I guess.”

“You’ve gotta’ find a more constructive way to channel whatever anger you have bottled up today, Nolan.”

“Are you my therapist now?” Nolan held his tray up and a woman behind the lunch counter scooped a cup of macaroni and cheese onto his plate.

Chloe said, “Nolan, dude. Chill. I just don’t want you burning out over frivolous things. Save it for the important stuff, you know?”

The three had barely made it back to their table and sat with their food before the cafeteria doors burst open.

“Oh my
Gawd
,” Rachel gasped, and she dropped her forkful of macaroni.

Standing in the doorway were Principal Chaplik, Officer Blankenship, and Jared Moore. The principal and the officer each held Jared by an elbow and dragged him forward. Jared’s face was bruised—worse than it was earlier—and he had a bloody nose. His hands were cuffed in front of him. Principal Chaplik had a welt on his left cheek.

The students in the cafeteria immediately began to chatter, and a low rumble of murmurs and whispering filled the air.

“Everybody settle down,” Officer Blankenship ordered. “Simmer down and eat your food.”

“What the hell is wrong with your dad’s friend?” Nolan said.

“Who said they were friends?” Chloe asked defensively.

“You seemed to know him earlier.”

“Yeah—kind of. He’s not really a friend. I’ve seen him at our house once or twice on poker nights, but…”

“What makes them think they have the power? Look around. Look at who showed up today.” Nolan counted around the room in his head. “There’s, like, ten teachers here. And a cop.”

“What are you trying to say, Nolan?” Chloe said.

By now, Rachel had perked forward in her chair. She had mostly been trying to ignore Chloe and Nolan, but her curiosity had the best of her. She chimed in between the two and asked, “What are you guys talking about?”

Nolan looked stressed. “We should all be home. We shouldn’t be here. This place is a ticking time-bomb. What happened to Alicia this morning…who’s to say it won’t happen again? We can get out of here. We have the numbers.”

“Nolan, stop,” Chloe said. “You’re sounding crazy.”

“Coach Hysom is gone, Chloe. We watched them drag him away. Alicia, David, Britney…they’re all
gone
. Look at what’s happening on the news. Even if we survive until help arrives, are these the people you want to be evacuated with? Our principal, and a few teachers? I’ve been trying to call my parents all morning. I’m not leaving East Violet without them. Do you want to leave without your dad?”

Chloe leaned back in her chair. “I guess I never thought of it that way.”

“I know your dad said you should stay here, but he’s not here. He doesn’t see how bad this is.”

“I’m scared, Nole.”

“Me too.”

Nolan scanned the cafeteria. On the far side of the room was Andy Kinney, sitting with his friends.

“I have a plan, but I don’t think you’re going to like it—”

“Who’s that?” Rachel asked, pointing at the window.

Nolan turned in his seat to look behind him. The east wall of the cafeteria had floor to ceiling windows that looked over the rolling hills of East Violet. In the center of the wall were double doors that led out to the track and field behind the school. Standing at the doors was a man in worn overalls.

“That’s Max Baker’s dad,” Nolan said. “He looks…hurt.”

Officer Blankenship stood up from the table where he sat with Jared. “Everyone stay where you are,” the officer hollered.

Nolan had met Max’s dad, Henry, on several occasions. In elementary school, Henry stopped by the school each year to bring in chocolate milk made with dairy from his farm.

Now, Henry didn’t look at all how Nolan remembered. His bottom lip was split in two and his eyes were yellow, wide, and bloodshot. His limbs moved as if they were joined to his body by rubber bands.

“Dad!” Max Baker yelled. Right away, Principal Chaplik scurried over to Max and grabbed him. The principal held the freshman close and kept him from approaching the window.

Henry pressed his forehead against the door and gazed in, his jaw clicking open and shut. His eyes moved slowly from one end of the cafeteria to the other.

The cafeteria sat silently, watching the man outside. Blankenship rushed towards the door and stood before it.

“Sir, go away,” Blankenship ordered. “I’ll only ask you once.”

Henry jiggled the bar on the door in front of him, trying to get it to open. When it wouldn’t give he screamed—a guttural, ear blistering scream that sent shivers down Nolan and Chloe’s spine—and then took a step back. He punched himself in the face and then began ripping hairs from the top of his head. He paced in circles a few times, then screamed again.

Blankenship kept his hands pressed firm against the cafeteria doors, his chest heaving. Nolan could see the terror in Blankenship’s face.

“Sir, leave now!” Blankenship bellowed. Globs of spit flew from the corners of his mouth as he yelled.

Henry took a step back and then charged at the door.

This was it, Nolan thought. What he saw in Henry’s face was the same thing he saw on the bus, when Alicia went crazy. It was the same thing he watched on the news, on his phone. Nolan wondered if the world was ending, and if so, why?
Why is this happening?
Whatever was making people act this way—so dumb and full of rage—was it in the water? In the air? Had Nolan already been exposed to it, and he just didn’t know? Had his parents? Had Chloe?

Henry hit the doors with a rattling
thunk
.

“You have to let me see my dad!” Max yelled. Principal Chaplik was holding the boy at an angle that kept him from facing the doors.

“You can’t! You can’t right now!” Chaplik said desperately.

Blankenship was sweating profusely. He grabbed his gun from his holster and took a few steps back before aiming it ahead.

“Go away now or I will shoot!” Blankenship commanded. It was like Henry couldn’t hear a word the officer was saying.

The next few moments played out blurry and slowly for Nolan. He’d later remember the feeling of his heart jumping up into his throat, and seeing Chloe’s face turn ghost white.

Pop. Pop.

The first shot hit the glass pane in the door, shattering it, but missing Henry. The second shot hit the wall and made a high pitched
pi-chew
before reversing course. Principal Chaplik and Max tumbled to the floor together instantly.

Blankenship spun around, horrified at the realization of which direction his bullet had taken.

No longer facing the door, Blankenship dropped his weapon and rushed towards the fallen principal and student. Before he could get far at all, Henry reached through the broken glass of the door and grabbed Blankenship by his belt. Henry snarled and pulled the officer backwards.

Blankenship struggled to break free but Henry’s grip was too mighty. Embracing him from behind, the steel door between himself and the officer, the farmer lurched his head forward and sank his teeth deep into the nape of Blankenship’s neck.