Pass/Fail (2012)

by David Wellington

  “Yes,” the Proctor said. “I understand. The failure conditions have changed. Do you know H’s current location? Very good.”

  The Proctor folded the phone up and put it back in his pocket. The—the portable phone? The mobile phone? Jake had no word for such a device. He’d never seen one before in his life, nor ever heard of such a thing.

  He stopped worrying about that when he saw the Proctor take the gun back out of his pocket.

  Time to run.

  Jake headed down the corridor toward the music rooms at a panicked run, his legs flashing up and down. He ran right up to the wide double doors that led into the orchestra practice area and stared through the narrow window inset in the blonde wood. Nobody was in there. He rattled the door but it wouldn’t open.

  Behind him he heard the Proctor coming down the hall.

  Jake turned to look back, just for half a moment—and saw the Proctor raising his gun, aiming it.

  Jake didn’t wait for the sound of the shot. He dashed around a side corridor, out of immediate danger. He kept running until he’d gone halfway across the school. He only stopped because he saw Mr. Schneider’s homeroom up ahead.

  Cody was in there. Cody!

  Chapter Nine

  The Proctor came around the corner with a casual step, clearly in no hurry to shoot. The gun in his hand was black and square and looked efficient. Jake pushed his back up against a row of lockers and tried to decide what to do.

  If he went into the homeroom, he could be putting Cody—and twenty-eight other students—at risk. The Proctors had no difficulty killing one of their own to get at him, so he didn’t doubt they would see other students as expendable, as well. Yet if he could reach Cody, his best friend might be able to help him—he could distract the Proctor while Jake ran away, or tackle the Proctor from behind while Jake held his attention.

  It was his best option, and he knew it. He edged away from the Proctor as the masked man raised his gun, aimed carefully, and fired. At the last possible moment Jake threw himself across the hallway and the bullet gouged a bright silver streak through the lockers behind him. Jake rolled across the floor and pushed open the door to Mr. Schneider’s homeroom, crawled inside and scrambled to his feet. “Cody!” he called out.

  There was no response.

  Jake slammed the door shut behind him and pressed his back against the wall. He locked the door but he doubted it would take the Proctor more than a second or two to kick it in. Anyway there was a glass window inset into the door and the Proctor could just break the glass, reach through, and unlock the door himself.

  “Cody!” Jake shouted again, “I need your help!”

  He turned to look for his friend, who still wasn’t answering him. He realized how quiet the room was. It sounded as if it were completely empty. But that wasn’t the case—the students were all there, each of them sitting in a chair with an integrated wooden desk. Their bags and books were tucked neatly under their seats, and they were all looking forward, toward the front of the room, toward Mr. Schneider’s desk. Mr. Schneider sat there, just where he should be.

  Yet no one was moving. Their faces were slack, their mouths hanging open at the corners. Their eyes stared glassily forward and their arms hung loose at their sides. Jake checked one of the students and found that she was, in fact, still breathing, but no matter how hard he shook her shoulder or yelled in her ear, she didn’t come around.

  The doorknob rattled behind him. He could see the Proctor’s mask in the inset window, reflecting the horrible scene inside. The Proctor tapped on the glass with his gun, as if he were trying to point something out to Jake.

  Jake looked in the direction the Proctor was indicating and saw that one chair was empty. His own, of course. He was the only one missing from the room.

  The Proctor tapped on the glass again, and nodded.

  Jake licked his lips. He thought he knew what the Proctor wanted. Slowly he made his way between the rows of seats until he reached the empty chair, then he sat down in it and placed his hands on the wooden paddle-shape of the integrated desk.

  The Proctor nodded again, then turned and walked off. Jake breathed heavily, pulling oxygen into his lungs, gasping out the stale carbon dioxide. He had never been so scared in his life. He didn’t think it could be that easy. He didn’t think they would just let him go like that. Unless this had been the point of the test. Pick the right envelope—to demonstrate some ability to think outside the box—then survive to get back to homeroom. But it couldn’t be that easy, could it?

  The PA box mounted on the ceiling near the door squealed out a loud electronic noise for a second. Then a growling, animalistic voice—similar to the Proctor’s whispers but louder and much more aggressive—said a single word. It sounded like “Wake.”

  Around Jake mouths snapped shut. Arms lifted and students rubbed at their faces as if they were waking from a refreshing nap. Conversations started up in mid-sentence and someone passed a note forward from one desk to another.

  Jake stared around him, even more creeped out by this return to life than he had been by the sight of twenty-nine unconscious students. He was still breathing hard and sweat was rolling down his face.

  “What have you been doing, jerking off?” asked a fat kid in a black t-shirt on Jake’s left.

  “Ignore him,” Cody said. Cody was sitting on Jake’s right. He reached over and grabbed Jake’s arm. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

  “No,” Jake said. His voice sounded like a frog croaking. He glanced around and knew that if he told Cody what had happened, the other students would hear—and they would think he was crazy. “I’ll tell you later,” he said.

  Cody nodded but he still looked concerned. Just then the bell rang, announcing first period. Cody got up and grabbed his books up into his arms. “Meet me at lunch. You know where,” he said. “We’ll talk then.”

  Jake nodded gratefully. He was too shaken to formulate a plan himself, just then.

  He was too shaken to do anything. He had to, though. He had to get up and go to his next class—Pre-Calculus, with Ms. Delessandro. Just because someone had tried to kill him, just because a classroom full of kids had been put to sleep and then woken up by barked commands over the public address system, didn’t mean he could skip class. Slowly he started to get up from the desk. Before he could grab his books, however, someone dropped a pale blue envelope to flap onto his desk. It had been another student, but he couldn’t see whom—they were all pushing past him, intent on getting out of homeroom and starting their day of classes, and it could have been any of them,

  Jake grabbed up the envelope, horrified that the test still wasn’t done. That someone else was going to shoot at him now. When he got the card out of the envelope, however, he found that it read PASS.

  Chapter Ten

  Cody pushed his glasses back up the slope of his nose. When he sweated, the boy’s glasses always slid down until they were hanging half off of his face, and whenever they went out into the desert, he sweated.

  Cody and Jake had been meeting in the ruins behind the school since they were kids. It was a place they both knew perfectly. When Cody said “you know where”, Jake knew exactly where he meant. They weren’t, technically, ruins. Someone had tried to build a house back there, in a clear space free of cacti or scrub bushes, but they had run out of money or materials or something. All that remained of the project was a set of exterior walls, pierced here and there with holes where windows or doors would have gone. There was no floor except fine, reddish sand and no ceiling but blue, cloudless sky. The walls were the uniform grey of poured cement but they had been scrawled on by generations of high school graffiti artists. Names, vows of love, and obscenities were the most common markings but they had been layered over each other so deeply few of them were even legible.

  Lots of kids went to the ruins when they wanted to get away from the school. It was strictly forbidden by the teachers—they said it was unsafe—but kids did it anyway. That aftern
oon, however, when Jake arrived, Cody was the only one there.

  He quickly explained to his friend all that had happened to him that morning. “And then he just sort of—pointed at my seat. And I sat down and then I got this.” He handed Cody the blue envelope.

  His friend studied it carefully, then handed it back. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” Jake asked. “You think I’m crazy. I guess that makes sense. Masked teachers shooting at me. Whole classrooms hypnotized over the PAs. Telephones you can carry in your pocket. None of it sounds real, does it? Nobody heard the gunshots. I say it’s because you were all asleep, but… Maybe I am just crazy—”

  “No.”

  Jake felt like he’d been jolted with electricity. “What?”

  “I said no. I know you’re not crazy. Because when I went to Civics III after homeroom, Mr. Foster wasn’t there.”

  “What?” Jake asked again.

  “We all sat down and waited for him. You know, it happens—teachers are late, sometimes. Eventually, like always, somebody said that if the teacher doesn’t show up in fifteen minutes we’re automatically dismissed, right? Except nobody believed it. Even when he never showed up. Eventually Matt Dewes elected himself messenger and went down to the principal’s office to find out what happened. They said Mr. Foster had a medical emergency and probably wouldn’t be back for the rest of the semester, that we’d have a substitute.”

  Jake stared at a patch of ground directly in front of his feet. He was shivering, though it was a warm day and the sun was on his back. “I saw Mr. Foster get killed, didn’t I? In a way, I’m responsible for him getting killed.”

  “No you aren’t,” Cody told him. “You can’t think like that. You didn’t shoot him. They did.”

  Jake sat down hard on the ground. He hadn’t meant to. His legs just wouldn’t support him anymore. “Cody—they’re going to kill me. They’re willing to kill me. I thought before I was safe, that I could fail three tests before they shot me. It looks like I can be killed at any time, now. It doesn’t make sense! I mean, there must be a reason for these tests. I must be important to them. But I’m expendable, at the same time.”

  “That is weird. What are you going to do?”

  Jake dug his fingers into the red sand. “I have to get out of here. I’ll run away. It means—it means dropping out of high school. I never imagined that before, but—if your high school is trying to kill you, who cares about graduating? I’ll take my Dad’s car and go to the city, I’ll—I don’t know. I’ll get a job. Cody—will you come with me?”

  It took longer for Cody to respond this time. He did, though, in the end. “Yes,” he said. “I would. Except there’s one thing you’re not considering. We’re only seventeen. We can’t rent an apartment. We can’t even get jobs. We could live like homeless people, I guess, though I’ve always enjoyed bathing.”

  Jake shook his head angry. “For once in your life stop being a smart ass. What option do we have?”

  “Sorry. But—it just wouldn’t work. Eventually our parents will call the cops to report us missing. We won’t even be homeless, we’ll be runaways. Eventually the cops will find us and they’ll drag us right back here.”

  Cody was right, Jake knew. He could never explain to his parents why he had to run away. His Mom already thought he was having a nervous breakdown. He and Cody could hide for a while in the city but they would always be looking back over their shoulders, waiting for a policeman to come and grab them and take them in. Or worse. Jake could imagine Mr. Zuraw, the guidance counselor, sending out killers to silence them because they knew too much.

  Then there was the worst possibility of all. That he would successfully escape, start a new life, hide from everyone and then one day, when he least expected it, wake up to find a pale blue envelope slipped under his door. That the tests didn’t stop at the front doors of the school. That the whole world was part of it.

  “What are you going to do?” Cody asked. “You can’t just—”

  “I can’t do anything until I have more information,” Jake said. He’d made up his mind. There was no point in getting depressed and giving up. But until he could answer a few questions he didn’t know how to proceed. “I have an idea, but it’s dangerous. You coming with me?”

  “Of course,” Cody said. He sounded half-sure, though. Like maybe he was starting to think he was betting on the wrong horse.

  Jake needed his help—what he had in mind was a two-man job. He would have to hope it worked out for the best, and that he wouldn’t permanently damage his friend’s trust in him. The two of them headed back towards the school, Jake peering out through every non-existent window and doorway in the ruins. He couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched. He’d felt that way since he got his first blue envelope, he realized.

  They were just about to leave the ruins when something caught his eye. “Hold on a second,” he said.

  “What’s up?” Cody asked, looking scared.

  Jake shook his head. He’d seen something painted on the wall, just above the main exit from the ruins. Graffiti which read: PPPPPPPPPPFFPPF

  Jake stared hard at the letters, as if eventually a signature would appear beneath them and tell him who had painted them. He counted the Fs over and over again. Three of them, and then the inscription stopped.

  There was a kind of question on the aptitude tests they took every year, a question where you were presented with a row of numbers or letters or shapes and you had to determine what number, letter, or shape came next in that sequence. If this was one of those questions, Jake had to guess that the next letter in the sequence couldn’t be a P.

  Was the inscription there just to scare him?

  If so, it worked.

  Chapter Eleven

  Still scared, shaky, disoriented, but intent on doing something useful, he entered the school through the teacher’s wing, with Cody right behind him. He didn’t see anyone. “You stand lookout, here,” he said. They were directly opposite the guidance office. Mr. Zuraw’s office, where he’d first learned about the pass/fail curriculum. Jake had a feeling that if there were secrets stored anywhere in the high school, they would be in that office. “If anyone comes along—anyone—tap on the glass, here,” he said, pointing at the window inset into the door. “I’ll hear you and know I have to get out before we’re caught.”

  “What if we are caught?” Cody asked. His eyes were wide behind their magnifying lenses. “Will they shoot us?”

  “I don’t think so. Cheating is encouraged, sometimes necessary. I got a PASS for going to the cops and trying to wreck their game—I doubt searching an empty office will piss them off much, either.” Actually he was pretty well convinced that it would—that the PASS for his first escape attempt had been a message, a message that he was supposed to settle down and stop trying to cause trouble. He needed to do this, though. He needed at least to know who was testing him.

  Leaving Cody in place he doubled back and outside, then around the edge of the building to where a line of windows pierced the wall.

  He was pretty sure that Mr. Zuraw and the teachers of the school were more than they appeared. They were willing to kill—and to be killed—for the cause of the tests. Normal high school teachers, he was pretty certain, didn’t relish the prospect of threatening, intimidating, and assassinating schoolchildren.

  He found the windows he wanted, the ones which illuminated the guidance office, and peered inside. He could see Mr. Zuraw’s desk and the two chairs. There was a second room which led off the main office, and it was full of filing cabinets. Perfect.

  Jake hardly expected to find a document on top of the desk labeled “Why Jake McCartney Must Die” with helpful diagrams and illustrations. There had to be something in there, though, maybe something in the files, that would at least help him start to make sense of things.

  He tugged at one of the windows looking into the main office. It didn’t move, of course—it was loc
ked tight. All the school’s windows were locked except in the hottest days of summer, when any breath of breeze was welcome. That didn’t mean Jake’s plan was foiled, though. He knew these windows. He’d been looking out of them for years. He knew how the locks worked.

  In one pocket he had a piece of cardstock he’d taken from the supplies in his art classroom. It was burnt orange in color, and when he doubled and folded it over six times it was a thin sliver of card as hard as a wooden stick but much thinner. Just thin enough to fit between the window and its frame. With his teeth he tore out a notch in one end of his impromptu tool, to make a kind of hook. Then it was easy enough to slip the card inside the window and snag the window’s simple latch. The window popped open easily, then, and slid up until he could reach inside the office.

  No alarm bells sounded, and no one came running with guns blazing. Jake calmed himself, then grabbed the edge of the window and crawled through, head first.

  The room beyond felt like any other in the school, though it was empty of people. It smelled faintly of disinfectant and the air was cool compared to the warm desert day outside. It was primarily dark, though there was plenty of light to see what he was doing.

  Jake went to the filing cabinets first, and looked for Mr. Zuraw’s file. He found it easily but it contained nothing of interest. Just his vital statistics, his current address, and his resume. Jake had no experience reading the resumes of educators but nothing on Mr. Zuraw’s looked odd—there were no entries for subterfuge or mindgames, for instance, though he had spent several years working as an Objectives-Based Developmental Counselor at the elementary school. The file included a photograph, but Jake already knew what Mr. Zuraw looked like.

  He knew what Mr. Foster looked like, too, but he checked that file all the same—maybe hoping to find a big red stamp across the picture reading DECEASED. In this he was disappointed.