Zombie Elementary (17 page)

Adults, y’know? No clue. All the kids knew about the zombies. In fact, there really weren’t too many kids there. I guess a lot of them had faked sick, like I’d thought about doing.

But they weren’t zombie hunters. Francine, Jermaine and me—we had a job to do.

Francine met us by the entrance. “It’s quiet,” she said.

“Too quiet,” said Jermaine. He gave me a wink, ’cause we both know that in old western movies that’s what someone always says before an arrow knocks a sentry off the fort wall.

It
was
too quiet.

The bell rang, and we went into homeroom. I stashed my bag with the coats and stuff in the closet at the back.

Miss Scoffle was about the same as usual. There was maybe half the normal number of kids in class. Did they all ditch today? Or did they get turned into zombies since Friday?

After a while, Miss Scoffle needed someone to take a message to the office. Usually she picked Missy Wrangel, but she wasn’t there. Miss Scoffle looked around. She had to pick someone else. There were people she never picked ’cause they couldn’t be trusted with messages, and people she never picked ’cause she could never remember their names. I smiled at her.

“Gary Mulliss! Will you take a message to the library for me? And one for the cafeteria?”

The cafeteria? Maybe to say how many kids for lunch today? Not many …

Still, it got me out of a spelling test. Cool.

All the same, I wished I could take the Slugger with me.

The hallways were real quiet.
I pretty much tiptoed along, in case a zombie reached out at me from the janitor’s closet. It didn’t. Good.

The library was upstairs. As I went up the steps, I thought about how it’s good to have a safe upstairs place to defend against zombies. I’ve seen it in the movies. You could put, like, obstacles on stairs to slow ’em down, and then thwack each one as it gets to the top. It’s also a good idea to have a safe room with a strong door and no windows. Zombies get in through windows, no problem. Doesn’t matter if you close ’em or anything. So, when I got to the library, I looked around to check if it was a good place to hold off the undead horde. Yeah, not bad. It had windows, but they were small and high up, and this was the second floor. The doors looked about the same
as others at school, but there were all kinds of heavy bookcases you could shove against them to stop zombies getting in. This was pretty good. The only place I could think of that might be even better was the janitor’s closet, which had no windows at all. But it’s tiny and stinks of chemicals.

While I was looking around, Ms. Ostertag saw me. “Well hi there, Larry! What brings you up here? I have a great new baseball book you might want to check out.”

She’s real nice and knows all the kids, even the ones like me who aren’t big reading types. I handed her the message.

Now I knew where to come if the whole zombie thing got way out of hand here at school. Plus, Ms. Ostertag keeps a whole drawer full of candy, so we’d have supplies to hold out for days. Well, hours, maybe.

I headed downstairs and down the long hallway to the cafeteria. When my school was built, way back in 1997, the cafeteria was a separate building. They put a covered walkway to it, so kids wouldn’t get rained on at lunchtime.

I don’t know the name of the head lunch lady. She has big flappy arms and a red face. I guessed she was the one I had to give the note to. It wasn’t lunchtime yet, so there was nobody at the, uh, the place where they serve you. I heard voices in back, so I followed them.

One lunch lady was talking. “Honest, I don’t think them kids will eat these cheeseburgers. They didn’t want the stuff when it was meatballs last Friday, or meatloaf the day before.”

“You don’t think it’s gotten better over the weekend?” said another voice. It was Jeremy, the lunch dude. “At least this stuff doesn’t go bad. It’s radioactive. It lasts forever!” He laughed, but like it wasn’t really funny.

“I don’t like to think about it,” said the first voice. “I mean, I don’t eat the stuff. I wouldn’t feed it to my dog. But we give it to the kids every day until it’s gone.”

“This order that came in last week was worse than usual, Elsie,” answered Jeremy. “The kids usually eat some on the first day. Not last Thursday. The only kid who ate it was that boy, you know, the one who came back for seconds. Thirds as well! Heck of an appetite, that youngster.”

“Right. But I didn’t see him on Friday. I hope he didn’t get sick!” replied Elsie.

“Boys never seem to get sick from this stuff. Stomachs like iron, some of them. Alex, that’s his name.”

The head lunch lady came around the corner, the one with the flappy arms and the red face. Elsie, I guessed. I handed her the note. She mumbled something I didn’t understand. I went back to class.

I spent the morning thinking
about what Jeremy and Elsie had been talking about, which was how come I got a thirty-nine percent on my math test. Otherwise I’d have gotten a solid forty-five.

When the bell rang, I told Jermaine all about it.

“That’s it!” he whooped. “It’s the meatloaf! Chainsaw Chucky was right! We need to call him—and Mr. O’Hara as well!”

We found Francine in the hallway and told her. Unlike Jermaine and me, she had a cell phone. We aren’t allowed to have them with us in class, so she kept it in her desk, turned off like the rules said. We were supposed to go outside for recess, but we didn’t. We headed for Francine’s classroom instead. Her teacher had gone to the faculty lounge, I suppose.
Jermaine and I kept a lookout while she made the call. Jermaine didn’t say it would be quieter to text this time. I guess it’s weird to say “the meatloaf causes zombies” in a text. She stuck her head under the desktop, you know, to keep down the noise.

Francine dialed Mr. O’Hara’s Dictionary Emporium. She frowned.

“What?” I said. She waved at me to shut up, just like my mom does at home.

“Hey, Mr. O’Hara,” she said. “It’s Francine Brabansky—I’m Larry and Jermaine’s friend. They said you gotta come to the school, soon as you get this message.”

I guess BURP had gone to lunch. He looked like a guy who ate lunch whenever he could. Francine hit the buttons again.

“Hello … Chucky?”

I couldn’t hear what Chucky said.

“You were right! It was the meatloaf! What?”

She gave us a weird look.

“What about your granny? She’s trying to kill you? You’re hiding from her in the attic?”

Jermaine and I stared at one another.

“Darn!” muttered Francine. “Really bad line. It sounded like he said his granny had trapped him in the attic.”

Jermaine looked at me. I looked at him. Granny must have turned into a zombie. That scratch was a bite all along. She didn’t want to tell anyone. This was bad.

Then I had a thought. “Hey! Kids will be eating those cheeseburgers!” See, we get recess and lunch in one period at my school. Our class had free time from 11:20 to 11:50, then a half-hour lunch. But the younger kids got lunch first, then free time. They’d be in the cafeteria right now. My sister might be eating a zombie-causing cheeseburger.

“The cafeteria,
NOW
!” I yelled.

I rushed through the hallways to get to Honor and tear the ghoulburger out of her mouth. Francine was just behind me, and Jermaine too. Mr. Ferich, who teaches sixth grade, yelled, “No running in the corridor!” but I took no notice. I barged through the big double doors and out onto the walkway. I
hauled open the door to the cafeteria. All the little kids from grades one to three were there. Some were sitting down already. Most were still in line getting served. I saw a kid picking the lettuce off his cheeseburger, so I grabbed his plate and flung it away. He looked at me like you’d expect him to look at someone who just threw away his lunch. “Heeeyyyy!!! No fair!!!”

Then I spotted Honor. She was at a table with her friends way at the other side of the room. What did she pick for lunch? Today they had a choice of boiled liver and mashed cabbage, creamed spinach casserole with canned peas, or the cheeseburger. Even if you knew the cheeseburger was leftover meatloaf, you’d pick it over the other two.

She waved at me. I ran forward.

I couldn’t see her tray from here.

Now I could. Cheeseburger and fries. She had a fry in her hand.

I slid like I was going into fourth. The floor was pretty slick and I glided (is that a word?) on the side of my shoe and the side of my butt. Honor’s eyes were real big. I reached out and grabbed her whole plate,
and then I crashed into the back wall of the cafeteria. Big crash. The teacher on lunch duty yelled. The kids were all shrieking, ’cause they’re little kids, you know. That’s what they do.

I saved my sister from Zombiedom. But there were a hundred cheeseburgers just waiting to turn students into the undead. How many kids had already bitten into their lunch patty? I didn’t know—

Jermaine jumped onto a table and took a deep breath. “Hey, everyone! This is an announcement!”

“From the principal,” added Francine. It wasn’t true, of course.

“From the principal!” shouted Jermaine. “Don’t eat your cheeseburger! It will cause you to become a zombie!”

There was an uproar. One kid near me stopped chewing and spit up onto his plate.

“It’s the same as the meatballs, which were the same as the meatloaf last week!”

Kids who didn’t spit out their food when they heard it would turn them into zombies started spitting now, and chugging chocolate milk like it was an antidote or something.

One boy pushed his cheeseburger to one side and just ate his French fries.

“What about the liver?” yelled another student. We ignored him because two teachers and Elsie the head lunch lady were coming toward us. They looked pretty mad. We bolted for the door.

Our work here was done. “Liver’s fine!” yelled Jermaine, ’cause he’s always a smart—you know what I mean.

We ran back to Francine’s classroom.
She’d left the phone in there. Her teacher was still away, which was good for us.

“My teacher smokes about a carton of cigarettes every lunchtime,” said Francine. “She won’t be back ’til right before the bell rings.”

Then we argued about what to do next. Jermaine said we should make sure none of the other grades tried to eat the cheeseburgers. We had to spread the word fast. Francine said we should call Chainsaw Chucky back and make sure he was okay. Since she was the one with the phone, that’s what she did.