Generation Dead - 07 (27 page)

Lane Tucker looked at me,
and then
nodded slowly.  “It might be a good idea to see me before you go out after anyone.”

“Why?” Julia asked.

“As you are, you’re vigilantes, and we don’t tolerate that kind of behavior.  But if, suppose, someone were to make deputies out of you, with special jurisdiction outside of the capitol, well, that might avoid some difficult
questions,” Tucker
said.

Whatever I was going to say had to wait.  A young boy ran up holding a piece of paper.  He goggled a bit at the two prone men, but remembered his mission quickly enough.  “Are you Jake?” the boy asked me.

“Nope.
That mean looking cuss is
Jake,” I
said, pointing at my brother.

“Mr. Jake, Mr. Bill sent this note.”  The boy handed Jake the note, and took the copper Jake gave him.

Jake read the note,
and then
handed it to me.  He spoke to Lane. “We have to move.  There’s been a suspicious outbreak by St Charles.”  Jake looked at Julia and
me
. “Let’s get moving.”

We followed Jake and Julia whispered to me.  “Does this mean what I think it does?”

I gave her a hand to squeeze. 
“Yep.
  It begins now.”

The End

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Playground Politics

A throat-tearing scream raced through the school at the pace of a heartbeat. The shellacked cinderblock walls did little to dampen the terror entwined in the scream, rather echoing it further through the building, spreading more fear and confusion.

Five minutes earlier, everyone in the Montville Regional School Complex heard the tinny announcement of, “Teachers please hold your rosters. All teachers hold your rosters.” It was another Lock
Down
Drill, no more serious than an announced changed to the school lunch menu. The classrooms were closed, lights off and students and teachers huddled in the far corners in well-practiced silence. Everyone at Montville Regional had assumed the call for a school wide lock down had been nothing more than another of the numerous monthly drills that were conducted in the post-9/11 and Columbine world of education. They had slowly risen from their work and laughed until their respective teachers silenced and shuffled them into a corner away from the small, glass and chicken wire windows that centered their classroom doors.

The students and faculty were used to the principal or vice principal rattling the doorknobs, or pushing on the doors in comical attempts to portray the necessity of taking refuge from an intruder. Montville had seen its share of problems and even faced down a real one or two, but there had never truly been a need to lock down the entire school complex from an intruder. For the students and staff, Lock
Down
Drills held the same level of effectiveness as a 1950’s bomb drill; simply something to give people the thin veil of security to hide behind. They all knew that they were no safer from an intruder hiding in a corner than they were hiding from a Russian A-
bomb under a cheaply made desk. And everyone at Montville knew they were no more likely to have a real A-bomb dropped on their school than they were to have an actual intruder.

But with the echo of one throaty, primal scream, the students and staff were snapped out of their complacent stupors of false suburban safety and thrust into a world where the realization that they could be harmed, possibly even killed, was more real than any of them cared to admit. This was not a drill. Something was truly and profoundly wrong.

***

Seven hours before…

Gone were the days of the little red schoolhouse.  All across the East Coast, former farming communities were finding themselves overrun by the pharmacological revolution and all of the annoying, newly rich worker ants that cropped up with each new factory. The already flattened fields, perfectly suited for building, were being snatched up by developers to make more prefab
McMansions
, all of which were given commercially trendy street names like Wanders’ Way; as if in some way to entice the drones to abandon their hectic city lives for the quiet wonder of the newly created Agro-Suburbs.

These communities experienced a population explosion that could easily double or triple their towns overnight. Services had to be rapidly expanded to meet the ever-growing needs of the community. Schools, once quaint and welcoming, were replaced with massive brick complexes with state of the art facilities and all the charm of an asbestos factory. Towns consolidated grades and schools into larger and larger complexes, literally creating schools within schools, all in the name of saving tax dollars.

Once two
laned
country roads were widened and expanded to make way to accommodate the now overwhelming morning rush hour, but as quickly as lanes could be built, they were jammed and soon the casual calls of the cows were replaced with a disconcerting concert of car horns and curses. And at the epicenter of this dissonance, was exactly where Sam Williams found himself Tuesday morning.

Sam leaned his head against the thin glass window of the bus and squeezed his eyes shut, in a vain attempt to shut out the insanity unfolding outside of the school bus. He used to look forward to the bus ride to school; it was a chance to talk to your friends without adults around, but with the coming of the new school year and the switch to the newly opened Montville School Complex, Sam had realized the noisy peace he had once enjoyed was no more than a distant memory. He had spent every morning for the last month sweating on a cheap, green vinyl seat of the school bus, while the mid-morning traffic surged around the bus. Sam wondered why no matter how much the town dumped money into their new school, none of it ever seemed to go towards better busses that did not have seats held together with duct tape or reeking of years of stale butt sweat.

Sam wished that the driver would just ram the cars out of the way, but the bus’s lack of maneuverability and wide turning radius kept the driver, Wally, from making any progress forward. Within minutes of entering the fray, the bus would quickly become a yellow boulder in the middle of shiny metal rapids that angrily surged
around it. And like a boulder, the bus hardly moved an inch. Sam imagined after centuries, the bus would be eroded and the children inside swept away in the insane rush surrounding it.

“Stop dreaming about your mom naked,” Joey Potts laughed, snapping Sam out of his thoughts. Joey had been Sam’s friend since kindergarten, but that did little to stop Sam’s groaning at Joey’s over-sexualized jokes. Joey’s mind had seemed dirty enough in kindergarten, but now with the boys being thirteen and in eighth grade, Sam imagined that they could shoot an episode of Hoarders there. Every word out of Joey’s mouth had something to do with girls, sex, or both, and while Sam, in truth, thought about those things as well, he hardly had the energy at seven in the morning to talk about it.

“I wasn’t dreaming about my mom Joey. I was only wondering how long it would be before your palm hair grew in and you went blind,” Sam chuckled.

“Everyone needs a hobby,” Joey shrugged after checking the inside of his hands for errant hairs.

The bus lurched forward into a space recently vacated by a maroon Toyota mini- van and began to make a little progress forward. Sam and Joey continued their light-hearted exchange, but fell silent as the bus pulled up to its final stop on the route to Montville. This was both the high and low point of the ride for Sam, and Joey could not help but laugh out loud as he saw the expectant look on his friend’s face. 

The doors swung outward with a gentle hiss and Sam watched silently as she got on to the bus. She was Alice Shah. Her family moved here a year ago after her father had been transferred to the new J&J plant, and while Sam detested most of the changes brought to his town by the drug companies, he had to admit they were not all bad.

Alice was totally different from all the other girls that Sam had grown up with. The local girls all seemed cut from the same cloth and one-dimensional. Sam honestly had a hard time telling them apart. Alice was taller than most of the girls, but she was not gangly. Rather puberty seemed to be suiting her just fine and her slender silhouette was never that far out of Sam’s mind.  More important to Sam, she was smart, but not nerdy, good at sports, but not butch, and above all, Sam loved the way her eyes looked when she casually smiled as they passed in the hall. Her eyes were a shade of brown that Sam had never seen before, something like a cane sugar brown flecked with gold. He had been assigned to her lab group last year, and almost failed science because he spent more time studying Alice’s eyes than the experiments. He would have gladly sat sweaty on a bus for the rest of his teenaged life to get a chance to talk to Alice or simply steal a glance. But above all of the usual teenage boy interests that drew Sam towards Alice, it was her confidence that he loved. She never seemed to be unsure of herself, like so many of their peers. Alice carried herself with a silent strength and she never backed down when a classmate or teacher questioned her. And somehow, to Sam’s amazement, in spite of all of these stunning attributes, Alice never appeared to be arrogant. She was nice to all her classmates and never tried to rub their faces in her attributes. Sam had never had a crush before, but with Alice, he understood perfectly well why it was called
just that. Thoughts of her constantly pressed down upon him and weighed on his mind the minute he let it begin to wander.

Alice knew little of Sam’s feelings or how he thought about her, but she suspected that there might be spark waiting to be fanned.  She had always been a good judge of people and could usually figure out what someone was after, even before they said it, but in truth, she had actually never stopped to think that any of the boys would or could take an interest in her. Intelligence and ability had always isolated her from her peers and seemed to intimidate all of the boys. None of the boys seemed capable of speaking to her without making some comment about being a brain or trying to regale her with pointless stories of touchdowns. Alice would have loved for someone to stop trying to put her on some ivory academic pedestal and just ask her what she thought of last night’s episode of The Bad Girls Club or latest Ryan Gosling movie. She longed to be viewed as normal, but her father, the doctor, did not seem capable of accepting normal. Saturdays were not for movies with friends, let alone a boy. No, Alice’s weekends were reserved for enrichment tutoring, traditional dance classes, piano lessons, meetings of the Future Doctors of America Club and traveling soccer. There was no way her parents would have ever let her talk to any of these boys, but in truth, Alice was not really interested in talking to any of the boys in her classes, except for one: Sam Williams.

Sam was so awkward and would often trip over his words when they worked together in science class last year, but instead of finding it annoying, Alice loved it. She felt Sam was different from the other boys. He never tried to impress Alice with the usual teenage stories of strength or sports prowess. Sam always approached Alice as an equal and treated her like a person, not a challenge to conquer like the other boys or a china doll like her father. Sam was completely different from any boy Alice had ever met, but she could never tell him that. What difference would it make? Her parents would never allow it. So Alice had resigned herself to secretly love Sam Williams and found the ride to school on the humid, stale school bus to be the happiest fifteen minutes of her day, because at least there she could play by her own rules and be her own person. But maybe, just maybe, there was some way she could let Sam know. She had finally convinced her parents that she needed a cell phone, for safety reasons obviously, and they had actually given one to her. But would Sam even want to talk to her? Maybe he was just being nice and she had mistaken it for interest! Unlike many challenges in her life, Alice was unable to solve this one, but she had grown tired of waiting and wondering. She would rather know one way or another, and if she failed, she failed. And as all the thoughts rumbled through Alice’s head, she climbed the stairs into the bus to the happiest part of her day where she could steal glances at Sam or smile at his awkward waves.