by J. Thorn
Ken slammed the flat of his fist against the window. A sharp crack punched through the otherwise still air. The window split.
The bugs kept crawling. None flew away. They remained on the single square of glass.
And then one of the students screamed.
3
Ken didn’t turn around, because he saw the reason for the scream in almost the same second. So did most of the kids. They emptied out of their chairs and stampeded to the windows. Normally the kind of thing Ken frowned on.
Not this time.
This time he was too busy looking at the plane.
He wasn’t an aviation expert. He could discuss airplanes from a historical perspective, but he didn’t know much beyond that. He could tell, however, that the plane he was looking at was a big one. Maybe a 747 – he didn’t think the Boise Airport handled anything bigger than that.
Whatever it was, though, it was falling. Not coming in for a landing at the airport, not doing a dangerously low flyover. It didn’t even look like it was crashing in the sense that Ken thought of it: a dive that was just a bit too low, or listing to one side as though it might have an engine out.
It was simply plummeting, spinning on three axes, flipping tail over wing, nose over belly. Smoke was coming from its sides, as though someone had smashed out the windows before setting off a smoke bomb.
One of the wings exploded. It happened fast, and more violently than Ken could have imagined. No apparent smoke, no flames. Just one moment there was a wing and the next the plane was raining fiery shrapnel from a jagged stump where the wing used to be. The explosion sounded like a muffled pop at this distance.
A few of the students screamed. Ken did, too. He thought about telling them to get back, not to look. But there was a disconnect between his thoughts and his mouth. He kept looking. Kept staring as the plane fell.
A second later, two more jets entered his field of vision. These were military, he could tell. Probably from the Air Force Base in Mountain Home. They looked like some kind of stealth fighters, flying in a tight formation like black insects carrying the world’s deadliest stings.
Then, an instant before the 747 completed its topsy-turvy fall to earth, one of the stealth fighters abruptly jerked into the flight path of the other. The move was so sudden that Ken jumped in place. The two fighters impacted.
These two jets were close enough that when they hit it wasn’t a muffled pop, but a thundering boom that rattled the windows in the classroom.
It was enough to shake some of the fuzz from Ken’s mind. He turned and said, “Move away, guys. Move away from the glass!”
He was trying not to scream.
The two stealth fighters fell in a tangled mass of light and dark, black metal burning bright.
Before they fell to earth, before any of the students turned away, the falling 747 finished its collision course with the world. Another huge, window-shaking thud. A bright ball of fire exploded somewhere downtown. Smoke surged like a living thing, reaching up to swat at the sky.
“Get away from the glass!”
Now he was screaming. He needed them away from the windows.
Mostly because he didn’t want the kids to notice that the bugs – the things that had called him to the glass in the first place – hadn’t taken flight, even when the explosion from the two doomed fighters rattled the glass.
He also hoped none of them had noticed the other things.
4
Six.
Six.
SIX, GOOD GOD, SIX!
That was how many other aircraft he had seen in the sky. All falling.
Boise Airport was not Los Angeles International. Six had to be pretty much every single commuter jet on approach in the area.
All falling. All looking like they’d been knocked from the sky by the hand of God.
“Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland….”
The voice burrowed into his consciousness, someone speaking his name over and over again like a weird chant. He wondered how long the sound had been going on.
How long did it take for someone to lose their mind?
The students were all crying, whimpering. Some of the kids were holding one another, faces resting in boyfriends’ chests or on girlfriends’ shoulders. Their expressions seemed decades older than they had only moments before.
“Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland….”
He finally managed to penetrate the fog of shock long enough to recognize the voice. It was Becca again. She was pointing at something else. Not falling planes or bugs gone mad. Something new. Something on the floor. Something….
This time it was Ken who cursed. No one called him on it. Everyone was too focused on the windows, on grief.
A few of them, like Becca, even noticed Matt Anders.
Matt was a small kid. Quiet. The kind of boy who went with the flow, who did what was asked. A teacher’s wet dream from the perspective of being no trouble at all about anything. But Ken always worried about Matt. Wondered what kind of life the kid was going to have if he could never find his own opinions, his own point of view.
Now, though, all of that might be moot. Matt was laying on the floor of the classroom, splayed out full-length in front of his desk, his feet twitching spastically against the cheap tile, his head rolling back and forth as white froth oozed from his mouth.
“He having a seizure?” That was Ricky Briscoe, looking over the tops of his huge glasses, staring at Matt like he was a cool new trading card at the comic book store.
“I don’t know!” snapped Ken. He knelt down next to Matt and tried to remember what to do in case of seizures. The school made the teachers take CPR and first aid classes, but most of that was geared toward broken bones and the like, not grand mal episodes that occurred in the middle of some major terrorist event.
“Get up, move!” he shouted, waving for a few students nearby to give him space. The students stepped back and Ken swept all the closest chairs away as well, giving Matt a clear area where he wouldn’t collide with anything.
“Shouldn’t you get him, like, a spoon or something?”
Ken didn’t look at the speaker. Didn’t have to. Becca.
“I don’t – I don’t think so, I –“
Then the screaming began. The real screaming.
5
Matt Anders was on the floor. Rolling around, having a seizure. Ken had his hands on the boy’s shoulders, trying to keep him from rolling into the chairs, trying to keep the scrawny kid from braining himself on the metal legs only inches from his face. He wouldn’t have thought he had enough mental space left to look at something else.
But he did. The screams forced him to look.
He glanced over his left shoulder. Just a quick peek. Just a glimpse. Just a tiny look that was more than enough to afford him a full view of the hell that had opened up around him.
The first thing he saw was Becca. Of course, it was always Becca. Becca, who was so careful to be the center of attention. Becca, who wanted to succeed at everything, even if the thing she succeeded at carried no value at all.
Becca, who was now shrieking as she tried to hold Ricky Briscoe away from her.
And as Ken watched, Ricky leaned in close, snarling, and clamped his teeth on Becca’s throat. Becca had time for one more agonized scream before Ricky’s jaws ground down. The girl’s scream turned to a loud gurgle, then to a horrible wet murmur as Ricky yanked his head back, and pulled her throat out with his teeth.
Blood geysered, arterial spray painting surrealistic designs on the mint-green walls of the history classroom.
Becca’s fingers clawed at the raw gap where her throat had been. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Blood continued to jet out of her throat, coating Ricky’s face.
He grinned and turned his face skyward, like he was standing under a summer rain. Ken noticed that the boy’s glasses had come off, and his eyes were empty of anything but joy at the blood
coursing over his skin.
Becca fell.
But the screams continued. Impossible. Becca was dead. She had to be dead. Her blood was no longer jetting across the room in a high-pressure stream, just trickling out of her with the weak force of gravity as she lay face down on the floor. No, she was dead.
So where were the screams coming from?
It took a moment for Ken to realize what was happening. Like his brain was operating on a slightly different time stream, something a few seconds delayed from the rest of the world. He knew he should be reeling from what had just happened, knew he must be in shock. But all he could think to do was look around for the source of the sound he heard. The source of the shrieks. The screams.
They were coming from the other students.
He looked at his class. Realized that he had been wrong before. What he had seen previously had not been Hell; it hadn’t even been Hell’s doorway.
But this….
The students were killing each other.
Ken gazed at what was happening in dumb horror for perhaps as long as two seconds. Two seconds in which he saw half the class – students he knew and loved – grappling with and trying to kill the other half of the class.
The aggressors all looked like Ricky Briscoe had looked: eyes empty of anything but unadulterated rage. Nothing left of what they had been. Like they had been… erased.
Shirley DeMarco, a girl who never caused any trouble, who sat at the back of the class and who Ken had to coax into participation, was straddling another student. Ken couldn’t tell who the other student was because Shirley was gnawing the other student’s face with her teeth, chewing and smacking like she was tearing into a filet done extremely rare. The student below her was writhing and screaming, but even as Ken watched the unfortunate student’s form went still. Ken didn’t know if the kid was dead or just unconscious, but a moment later he knew as Shirley – nice, mousy Shirley – buried her face in the student’s neck and started chewing away. Blood spouted, obscuring Shirley’s visage, her dead eyes.
Ken moved his gaze to another pair of students. A girl –
(Who is that? What’s her name, oh, God, why can’t I remember her name?)
– who was attacking a much larger boy with a letterman jacket. She clamped her teeth on his shoulder and bit down and the boy – Stu Clancy – howled and shoved her with an explosion of his thick muscles. The girl flew back through the confused melee that the classroom had become. She tripped over a pair of bodies that were locked in a deathroll on the now blood-slicked tile floor, slipped on a patch of what might have been brains forcibly expelled from a student’s skull, and fell.
Her head smashed into the sharp corner of a desk.
Ken saw the girl’s –
(Laura Briscoe! It’s Laura Briscoe! What the hell is happening, Laura?)
– head seem to implode. Pink and gray ooze exploded out of the wound. Her head went convex.
She didn’t die. Didn’t even pass out.
No, Laura stood up. She tilted her head skyward and screamed, a sound so awful and wrenching that Ken wanted to cover his ears. It seemed like every bad thing that had ever happened in a universe not famous for mercy was packed into that scream.
Then Laura’s head tilted back to its usual plane. Not staring straight ahead – impossible since one of her eyes was gone, exploded right out of her face with the force of impact into the desk – but rather seeming to peer into an abyss of madness that only she could see.
She howled again, and dove back into the free-for-all. But whereas the other students seemed to be involved in one-on-one struggles, she tore indiscriminately into anyone who came within her reach. Punching, tearing, clawing, biting.
And all the while, a hideous pink/gray, bilious goo leaked from the massive rifts in her skull and her skin.
Ken felt like he should call someone. The principal? 911?
Who do you call when something like this happens? When your tiny corner of the universe casts off all vestiges of reason and runs rampant on a field of madness?
Who do you call?
For a moment he thought, Ghostbusters! and he knew his own brain was misfiring; madness creeping in at the edges of a mind seeking desperately to find reason and coming up empty.
He heard two booms and figured it must be a pair of the falling planes coming down. But he couldn’t be sure.
He didn’t know.
Didn’t know who to call.
Didn’t know what to do.
And then he didn’t have time to think about it. Because in the next moment things got much worse.
6
If you had asked Ken Strickland even ten minutes ago a question like, “Could you forget about a student having a seizure in your class?” he would have answered in the negative. He would also have laughed and possibly asked if you needed a medication increase.
But that was before insanity pushed into his class. Before the bugs, before planes bombing downtown, and before students started killing each other.
Now, he had forgotten about the boy suffering a grand mal seizure under his hands. Had forgotten about Matt Anders.
But the growling reminded him.
That and the fact that Matt went suddenly and completely still.
Ken’s eyes were dragged to the silent form under his hands, like he was looking for a single bright spot of sanity in the black pit of madness that had swallowed his once-orderly classroom. Like he was looking for some reason he could give himself that life still made sense – even if that reason was that at least normal things like seizures were still a possibility.
But even that was denied him.
He looked down and saw Matt, still drooling but no longer thrashing around. The boy’s eyes were rolled back in his skull, his head oriented upward, like he was trying desperately to see something beyond the cheap acoustic ceiling tiles.
He was growling. A low, abrasive noise that sounded like he was probably damaging his vocal cords. It sent another round of shivers up and down Ken’s spine.
Then Matt’s eyes snapped back into place. They didn’t roll, they actually snapped, like they had been jerked back into their moorings by some electromagnetic force. The pupils were hugely dilated.
Matt’s gaze focused on Ken. The growl turned even darker.
The boy launched himself upward. His teeth gnashing. His hands clenching.
Only the fact that Ken’s hands had already been on Matt’s shoulders saved him. Only the fact that he had half-pinned the boy’s shoulders to the floor kept him from finding out what it felt like to have his jugular ripped out; to see his lifeblood spew across the slick killing floor that had once been a place of learning.
Even so, it was close. Matt’s teeth came together with an audible clack inches from Ken’s neck, and Ken could hear the boy’s jaws grinding together with a terrible rasping noise as the kid strained to reach his neck, his face, his flesh.
“No!”
Ken didn’t know if he was screaming at Matt, or at the other kids in the class who had suddenly and unaccountably gone insane. Most likely he was screaming at everything and everyone – at a world that would permit such madness. Regardless, the word seemed to come with a burst of strength. He pushed Matt away, and pushed himself back at the same time.
Matt felt like long cords of firewood under his fingers, muscles bunched so tightly they no longer felt human. The boy was impossibly strong, impossibly fast. Ken fell back, thinking he would have a moment to get some clearance between himself and the still mostly prone kid, but he hadn’t taken two steps before Matt was on his feet and rocketing straight at him.
The boy’s fingers were curled into hooks, and Matt knew without a doubt that if the kid got those hooks into him, it would be hard – impossible – for him to escape.
Time slowed down. Ken had been operating in a different time zone than the rest of the class. Now he seemed to be rejoining them, but in a way that slowed down the flow of their movements.
He heard a scream. Had an impossible chance to look over.
It was Stu Clancy. The big jock was gripping his shoulder where Laura Briscoe had bitten him. His face was white and sweat was bursting from his pores. But not normal sweat. It looked like he was sweating blood, like his capillaries had burst under the pressure of some unimaginable distress.
Stu screamed again. Then his eyes rolled back in his head. His face tilted to the ceiling.
And then Ken had to look away from the terrible vision of the star football player. Because Matt Anders was about to kill him.
7
A moment ago – less than a moment, a mere instant ago – Ken had been worried about Matt’s hands. Now all he saw was the boy’s teeth. Because what if he got bit? What if being bit was some kind of death sentence? What if being bit meant he would end up like the rest of them? Like Stu?
All this went through Ken’s head in a flash. Too quickly to come up with a plan. He just reacted.
When Ken was fourteen he went to a week-long church camp. He got there early, and was able to score a prime bunk by the door. He put his stuff – mostly books he’d brought to pass the time – on the bed and went to check out the camp snack shack.
When he came back a half hour later, a kid named Adam was sitting on his bed. Ken’s books and clothes were in a messy heap on the floor.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened. Ken, then a full head shorter than most of the kids his age, had started trembling with rage.
“That’s my stuff,” he finally managed. “That’s my bed.”
Adam barely deigned to glance at him. Just laced his fingers behind his head and studiously looked heavenward. “What’re you going to do about it?”
Adam was a full six inches taller than Ken. Probably outweighed him by fifty pounds.
