by Robert Price
“Get down!” Miss Chambers cried, seizing as many students as were within reach and pulling them to the floor.
DUCK (do-dee-do) and COVER jingled in her mind, perky and inane. It was drowned out seconds later by an enormous thudding crunch, the shrill shearing of metal, and the fiery thunder of an explosion. The building shook. A window broke, showering them with fragments.
Half-deafened, shaking glass from her hair, Miss Chambers raised her head and did a frantic count-check. Some of the children had sustained scratches, bumps and scrapes, but none of them were seriously hurt and she almost sobbed with relief.
The stink of mold and spoiled coleslaw was not improved by the smoke from burning fuel. They picked themselves up, coughing, waving at the thick and foetid air.
Foetid…amorphous…ichor… Miss Chambers wondered how many more of this week’s vocabulary words they were going to need before this was done.
The helicopter had missed the school, leaving a scorched crater and a smoldering track as its mangled wreckage skidded to a stop just outside the front doors. Burning debris and bubbling clots of sludge littered the lawn. If anybody had still been in it when it hit, the fireball blaze was too bright to see.
“Hey, look!” Mikey pointed. “There, in Home-Safe Tree!”
Miss Chambers looked where he pointed. The name had been bestowed on the grand old oak long before her parents’ time here; it was a landmark in its own right as well as being the centerpiece of many recess games, and a shady place to sit on sunny days when the teachers decided to take some of the lessons outside.
Now, a figure struggled amid the leafy branches. It was the man who’d jumped or been flung from the stricken helicopter. He seemed to be trying to clamber the rest of the way down, making a precarious job of it. Whether this was due to him being injured or just dazed was impossible to tell, but, even as they watched, he lost his grip, tumbled to the ground and collapsed.
Several of the children spoke:
“I see him!”
“Is it the pilot?”
“Is he dead?”
“He’s not moving.”
“He’s dead.”
“Maybe not!”
Charlie, who’d been staring out with a stunned expression, said, “It’s Professor Patriot.”
Eddie elbowed him. “Don’t be a dumbo.”
“It is! See the jacket?”
“Professor Patriot’s not real,” sneered Eddie. “He’s a made-up thing for babies, like Superman, Mickey Mouse and Santa.”
“You take that back, Eddie Parker!” Marcie faced him with imperious foreboding, arms crossed, jaw set, glowering with such wrath that Eddie, class bully and troublemaker though he was, cowed.
“Whoever he is,” said Miss Chambers, “he needs help.”
“I’ll go!” Charlie said at once, starting for the broken window.
She caught him by the collar before he could climb out. “No. I’ll get…”
…the principal, she’d been about to say, or one of the other male teachers, or Mr. Savinsky the janitor.
But the hall, previously packed, was empty when she opened the door.
The rest of them must have reached the basement survival bunker. They’d be huddled in there, adults doing their best to keep everyone calm, waiting for the all-clear, for the government radio announcement, or for rescue to arrive.
Another glance outside told her those might be a while. The aerial battle had shifted north, over Mr. Prescott’s fields instead of the town, but Niceville remained awash under that turbulent green sky, downtown swarming with the monstrous burr-jellyfish creatures that writhed and flailed over Main Street’s tidy shops.
Her mind wavered.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening.
The final bell should have rung by now. She should have been walking home, skirt swishing demurely around her shins, looking forward to a quiet evening grading papers while I Love Lucy and The Dark Door were on.
An urge seized her to just go, just run for it, get to her little house—
But she couldn’t abandon her students. And she couldn’t just leave that man out there by Home-Safe Tree, whoever he was.
Danny wouldn’t have done it.
“Wait here,” she said.
She used a science workbook to brush away the glass, scrambled through the windowframe with no regard for teacherly dignity, and ran with both arms waving above her head like someone trying to fend off bats. It would do no good if one of those things divebombed her, she knew, but she did it anyway.
He certainly dressed like Professor Patriot, she noticed as she neared the groaning, stirring man. Charlie had been right about that.
Tweed jacket, slacks, sneakers…respectable but rumpled—though he had also just fallen from a crashing helicopter into a tree, which would rumple a person.
Closer yet, she had to admit the resemblance to the comicbook character was striking, even as battered as he was from the fall. All he lacked were the hornrims.
Miss Chambers knelt beside him. “Sir?”
He groaned again, mumbling something incomprehensible.
“Sir?” She grasped his shoulder, shook it, hesitated, and said, feeling not un-foolish, “Professor?”
His eyelids twitched open. The eyes beneath were also brown. He squinted up at her, clearly confused, if not stunned or concussed. “Hello?”
“Are you all right?”
“Ahhh…where am I?”
“Niceville—”
“Niceville!”He bolted to a sitting position, winced, and doubled over with a hiss of breath through his teeth, cradling his left arm to his ribs. “And you are…Miss—?”
“Chambers. Jill Chambers.”
He touched his face, then groped about in the grass. “Miss Chambers, I don’t suppose you see a pair of glasses anywhere?”
She found them. Hornrims. Of course. She saw that he even had a flag-pin in his lapel. Suddenly it made partial sense. The stage show, the stage show was playing up in State City.
“Thank you,” he said when she gave them to him. He settled them into place and looked around. “That’s better.” When he looked again at her, the corner of his mouth tilted up in a half-smile and he added, “Much better.”
Miss Chambers, caught off-guard, blushed and hoped her curls hadn’t gone too frizzy from the humidity.
Yells from the direction of the school made her glance back, almost glad of the distraction. Her students were crammed against the windows, Charlie and Eddie both trying to lean out of the broken one. When she shifted her glance in the direction of their urgent gestures, a chill of horror, like some loathsome trickle of cold, gelid fluid, shivered the length of her spine. It was very effective in quashing her flustered reaction.
A cluster of the burr-things, floating somehow, propelling themselves by whipping their tendrils, advanced from downtown. Though they diverted and paused to examine various objects, their meandering course brought them slowly but steadily toward Home-Safe Tree.
The man, following her gaze, uttered something that sounded like, “Nyeeth,” and shuddered. It summed up her own opinion of the creatures fairly well.
“We have to get indoors,” Miss Chambers said. “Can you walk?”
“I…” He got most of the way to his feet, swayed, and grimaced.
“Here, let me help you.” She put her arm around his waist.
“Miss Chambers—”
“I know, we’ve only just met, this is highly irregular…” She swept her free hand to encompass the scene. “But then, what of this isn’t?”
“Good point.” He leaned on her and together they made their awkward way at a quick hobble back to the building.
They detoured around the places where helicopter-chopped lumps of the spongy matter appeared to be slowly sinking in on themselves, deflating like ruined soufflés.
Youthful voices clamored:
“Hurry up, Miss Chambers, hurry!”
“The monsters are coming!”
/> “It’s okay, everybody, Professor Patriot’s here now! He’ll save us!”
Miss Chambers cast an anxious look at the man. “Please play along. For the children’s sake?”
“Play along?”
“They need something to believe in. They need hope. Please.”
“Miss—”
Squeals in terrified unison came from most of the girls and some of the boys.
“Look out! Eeeeeee! Look out!”
One of the creatures swept toward them. Miss Chambers saw it all too well—the round body nothing but a cluster of chitinous pincers, flexing around tiny tooth-ringed orifices…the dozens of thin, scaled, pustule-covered tendrils lashing…the nightmarish noises it made, a sharp clicking and slithery rustling…
“Move, dumbo!” At the window, Eddie elbowed Charlie aside. He held a slingshot, and regardless of everything else, Miss Chambers noticed it was not the same one she’d confiscated from him only last week. That one’s handle had been yellow; this one’s was black.
He drew back, took aim, and let fly. Something whizzed through the air, passing not a foot over their heads. It scored a bullseye on the creature with a sharp crack that sounded strangely like the break-shot in a game of pool.
“Gotcha!” crowed Eddie. “Take that!”
Then they were at the window. Again, regularity and teacherly dignity were cast aside; she gave the man a boost by the seat of his pants as Mikey and Charlie pulled on his jacket, then hoisted herself up and through with such fear-inspired strength that they all ended up on the floor in a heap.
“Cover the window!” Miss Chambers said, panting for breath. “Desks…pile them on the art shelf…barricade…”
Four of the boys did as instructed, while Georgina and Peggy pulled down all the blinds. Gloom filled the classroom, tinged swampy-green at the edges.
“Will it hold?” Billy asked.
Mary-Lou shushed him.
Everyone waited, tense.
…click…
…scrape…
…rustle…
…click-scraaaaaaaape…
Silence.
“Is it gone?” Katie whispered.
“I think it went away,” Charlie said.
“Yeah.” Eddie lowered his slingshot. “Did you see? I beaned that ugly bastard with my aggie!”
Betty raised her hand. “Miss Chambers, Eddie said—”
“Never mind,” said Miss Chambers, deciding that if teacherly dignity could go on hiatus, so could teacherly discipline. “That was a very good shot, Eddie. Thank you.”
“Saved our lives, sport.” The man in the hornrims heaved himself into a chair, favoring his left side. “Well done.”
“What are they, Professor?” asked Charlie.
Miss Chambers cast him another anxious, pleading look.
“Nyeeth,” he said again, in reply to Charlie. “They’re called the Nyeeth. And you, son, you must be one of my loyal Patrioteers, am I right?”
“Yes, sir!” He proudly showed off his plastic Omniglot Decoder Ring.
“That’s swell!” The man clapped Charlie on the back, making the boy beam, and raised his eyebrows at the others. “Anyone else?”
Several eager hands went up. The children pressed around him, all chattering at once, bombarding him with questions. Tommy, shyly, offered up a Mostest Snack Pie he’d traded for at lunch but had been saving for later. At that, the Professor laughed and told them he’d put them in for commendations.
“Patrioteers First Class, how does that sound?”
Their delighted smiles said it sounded great. Miss Chambers even found herself smiling at their excitement. How the day had gone from normal to horrific to this…
He really was good, this ‘Professor.’
Not to mention handsome…
“I am very glad to meet you all,” he said. “Right now, though, I think we need to get to someplace a little safer, don’t you?”
Heads nodded in vigorous agreement.
“Miss Chambers? The school must have a bunker.”
“In the basement,” she said. “Though they’ll have locked it, and closed the Seal, by now. They won’t just open it until the all-clear, not without notification from the government, the Office of Civil Defense or the Department of—”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said, brown eyes twinkling. “Nor would I expect them to, under normal circumstances. But, as you mentioned earlier, these aren’t. Shall we?”
She studied him a moment, lips pursed. There was such a thing as too good, when it came to acting.
On the other hand, if they couldn’t get into the bunker proper, the basement would be better shelter than a classroom with a broken window.
Miss Chambers clapped twice. “Line up, assembly order, please.”
The students scurried into place, two lines, boys and girls, the Class Helpers at the front.
“One more thing, Miss Chambers?”
“Yes…Professor?”
He grinned disarmingly. “May I borrow a fresh stick of chalk?”
“I’ll get it!” Charlie bounded to the supply cupboard.
“Are we ready?” Miss Chambers asked, standing by the door. “Good. Calmly, patiently, staying together.”
Their little procession made its way into the hall, Miss Chambers at the lead and Professor Patriot bringing up the rear. Evidence of the earlier stampede was everywhere—posters half torn from the walls, wastepaper baskets overturned, the Academic Excellence trophy case cracked, dropped pencils, someone’s lost shoe—and the only light came from the EMERGENCY EXIT signs. Here and there on the tiles were spots and smears of what she thought might be blood, hopefully nothing more serious than a bloody nose or scraped knee.
The south stairwell had never seemed creepier. Their steps were loud on the industrial-gray metal stairs, echoing hollowly back from painted cinderblock walls. A yellowish bulb in a wire cage sputtered high overhead.
At the bunker door, she stopped.
“It’s locked,” she said. “The Seal is closed.”
As she’d known it would be…so, why did she feel such a crushing weight of disappointment?
She stood there with her palm laid flat on the thick steel, letting her head slump forward. A ragged sigh escaped her. They would have to make do in the basement storage area after all.
“Pardon me, Patrioteers. Excuse me, Miss Chambers, may I?”
Shrugging indifferently, she moved aside.
He took out a stick of the chalk and began swiftly etching numbers and symbols on the door. Equations. Algebraic and geometric equations…which weren’t on the door, she realized, but suspended in the air before it…as the chalk-stick took on a strange lambent glow.
Lambent, another of this week’s vocabulary words…
The Seal released, the lock unlocked, and he pulled the bunker door open on its immense hinge-pins.
Miss Chambers stared at the man in the tweed jacket and hornrims. “I thought you were an actor,” she said.
He flashed her a quick grin and a wink as he tucked the chalk into his pocket and ushered the children inside. The next few minutes were something of an uproar of exclamations, outbursts, demands for explanations, and assorted confusion. He ignored it all, his attention on her students.
“You’ll be safe here,” he said. “Re-lock the door, re-close the Seal, and keep everyone calm until rescue arrives. I’m counting on you, Patrioteers.”
“Yes, sir,” they chorused. Even Eddie, who’d scoffed before, was convinced.
Charlie added, “But aren’t you staying, Professor?”
“I can’t right now.” He gripped Charlie’s shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze. “The Nyeeth are still out there, and I have work to do.”
“Will we see you again?”
“Of course you will,” he said. “And, Miss Chambers, it’s been a privilege. You are a very brave, cool-headed and capable young woman. Your brother would be proud.”
“How do you know about Danny?”
“I…” she began, but did not know what to say.
“They were heroes,” he said, shaking off the haunted look. “They all were. So are you.” The corner of his mouth slanted up again in that half-smile. “If you ever want a job as an Assistant Professor, look me up.”
With that, he stepped out of the bunker. He saluted. The children saluted in return. The huge, heavy door began to swing shut.
The safe path…the right path…
“Professor!” Miss Chambers darted through the narrowing gap. “Wait! I’m going with you!”
And, together, off they went to save the town and their fellow Americans from the doom that had come to Niceville.
ROSE-COLORED GLASSES
BY MICHAEL G. SZYMANSKI
Billy Standish figured he must have the neatest job in the entire world. There sure wasn’t much glamour in it, but as manager of the Sundown Drive-In he got to watch all the latest flicks every night during the summer, hang out in the snack bar as much as he wanted and, best of all, talk to all the cutest babes from school when they came in. And he was paid for it; almost $75 a week!
Sure, he had responsibilities but gosh, like his dad always said, that’s why they called it work; if they called it play, you would be paying them! It was his task to open the snack bar each night to air out the swelter of the day, then fire up the fancy new air conditioner in Mr. Blodgett’s office, because the Sundown’s owner liked to have it crisp and cool in there whenever he came in. Beyond revving up the snack bar machines, that was pretty much all she wrote; well, that and accepting whatever deliveries showed up that day.
Mostly it was food stock and paper items plus the newest flicks that arrived every Friday from some wonderful far-off place where really cool things came from. He planned to go there someday, but for now he had to settle for running the double feature and dreaming.
Tonight would be a treat; it was “Fright Night”, and Mr. Blodgett had booked two boss flicks, including The Creature From Dimension X, filmed in Pano-Rama and startling 3-D! A week-long agony had led to this moment, and it was with shaking hands that Billy applied his jackknife to the cardboard box which had accompanied the film canisters.
