The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell Read Free Page A

same students became as petrified and paranoid as their parents. It was a seemingly unavoidable cycle, and all Miss Oldenburg wanted to do was break it for as many of her students as she could. She wanted to give them a better future. It was the same thing every teacher had wanted since time began, but none of those other teachers had been striving for it against the backdrop of the zombie apocalypse.
    Sometimes she wondered whether it had been as hard for them. And then she thought back on what her own teachers had said, when she was struggling through classrooms still shell-shocked and disrupted by the Rising, and she knew that it had always been this hard. It was just the nature of the obstacles that had changed, and would keep changing, for as long as there were students to be taught.
    Miss Oldenburg picked up the last of the coloring sheets and walked to the front of the room, silent, back straight, sensible shoes tapping on the tile like a metronome. She could feel her students watching her, waiting for the moment when their day would officially begin. She put the sheets down on the blotter—an outdated piece of classroom equipment if there had ever been one—and picked up the remote that controlled their desk restraints. Turning back to face the room, she smiled brightly and clicked the “release” button. The desk restraints snapped open with a soft pneumatic sigh, sliding back and out of the way. Seventeen first graders giggled and stretched, reveling in their newly restored freedom, even if none of them tried to get up. This was part of the morning ritual, just as much as the long solo walk with the teacher down the mostly empty hall, passing other teacher/student pairs, before the classroom door finally loomed safe and secure in front of them. Miss Oldenburg’s students weren’t kindergarten babies anymore, but they still understood the power of ritual.
    Ritual kept you safe. As long as you followed it, close as close can, nothing could ever hurt you.
    â€œGood morning, class,” said Miss Oldenburg. “How was everyone’s evening?”
    Hands were thrust into the air as the students raced to be the first to tell her about the hours between the final bell and bedtime. Glorious hours, free from adult structure and adult rules—although they were, Miss Oldenburg noted sadly, more confined than even her own first-grade hours had been. She had been seven when the Rising began, and thanks to the timing of her birthday, she had been preparing to start second grade. She remembered first grade as the last good time before everything had fallen apart. Long afternoons spent racing around the cul-de-sac where her family lived, playing tag and hide-and-seek and house with the other kids, most of whom had not survived the Rising. Long evenings lying on the grass in the backyard with her father, trying to name the stars, aware that he was just trying to keep her from spending all her time sitting in front of the television or playing video games, and yet not quite able to bring herself to care.
    First grade had been the best year of her life. Maybe, if the Rising hadn’t started when it did, she would have forgotten that good year in favor of remembering other, even better years…but the Rising hadn’t wanted to wait for her to form more good memories. It had happened when it wanted to happen, and Elaine Oldenburg had been left thinking of first grade as an earthly paradise. Part of her still did, and always would, no matter how many fights she broke up, how many bruises she reported to the authorities, or how many times she had to call for decontamination after a nosebleed. First grade was where things still had the potential to go right . Everything after that…
    Everything after that was all downhill.
    Mikey’s father had finally allowed him to have a Quest Realm account of his very own, on a child-safe server, and he was playing a Pixie Ranger with a dire wolf