The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell by Mira Grant Page A

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.
    â€œAll 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.
    â€œExcellent.” 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.
    â€œBrian, 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.
    â€œYes, 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?”
    â€œI 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