Chivalry Is Dead

by Bennie Newsome

  Twelve hours. The outbreak still seemed unbelievable, perhaps some cruel and elaborate joke. The day had started as mundane as anything, Will waking to a balmy April morning, Mom cooking up breakfast, he and Dad hobnobbing about college in the fall—normal. He’d gotten to school on time, his Mustang running like a champ, and even the first couple periods had been okay, everyone jonesing for May and the end of the school year. Then the ear-snot had started.

  That’s what the kids had called it, ear-snot, and it was grotesquely befitting, like an eye-booger. The first case Will had seen was in second period, calculus. The teacher, Mrs. Elm, had been lecturing, so Will had been woolgathering, his mind on college and such. Staring into oblivion, he had noticed a viscous trickle of yellow from Roddy Michael’s ear, moving slow enough to appear as an excess of wax. Roddy had been sitting two desks up and a row over, and Will had watched the stuff ooze calmly out and drip to his collar. Will had been about to say something, but the stink had spoken for him, a unanimous grimace working its way through the kids and to the teacher. With that, Mrs. Elm had sent Roddy, who was by then looking thoroughly sick, to the nurse’s station. The stink had left with him, and it back to business as usual.

  Until next period, at least. Will’s next class saw him across the school and to the gym, necessitating a pass of the nurse’s station, and he’d known then that something was wrong: a whole line of frowning, stinking, ear-snotting kids had crowded the entrance, looking like refugees of some bizarre disaster. Roddy was amongst the overflow, and Will had stopped to ask what was up. Roddy hadn’t known, but he’d heard it was big, a virus or something spreading through the whole town. Roddy had said more, but Will hadn’t heard: the odor was unbearable, and all his attention had gone to holding his gorge. The stink was like nothing he’d ever smelled from something living, more chemical than organic, the fumes biting his nose. He’d thanked Roddy, wished him well, and then proceeded to third-period civics, glad to be rid of the miasmic nurse’s station.

  He’d found the class abuzz with rumors of the unfolding situation. The standing consensus was that, yesterday evening, there’d been a chemical spill in Derrick, the next town over, and that it was the culprit behind the condition. From there, however, the story splintered: some said it was nothing, just a nasty but benign ailment that would pass in a few hours, while others were promulgating horror stories along the lines of Night of the Living Dead. According to this latter faction, Derrick was overrun with crazed, flesh-hungry people bleeding the noisome ear-snot. But this went unremarked. Amongst the kids, it all boiled down to the million-dollar question: Would it be enough to get school cancelled?

  Needless to say, schoolwork was out of the question, and the first twenty minutes of class were spent exchanging tidbits of news and theories, moderated by the teacher, Mr. Allen, a smug, bespectacled man who looked to be enjoying the drama. Then the announcement had come over the intercom, from the principal: school was out, “by reason of illness.” A general sense of weal tore through some of the kids, but not all—Will, for one. He’d heard a distinct note of distress in Principal Turner’s voice, something dark and fearful he’d never heard in an adult before. The close-cropped fellow was known as a hard-ass ex-marine who’d seen two tours of duty in Desert Storm, and Will didn’t think him one to scare easy. Also, there were leaky ears interspersing the class, further raining on the parade.

  Class had promptly let out, and Will had taken another trip by the nurse’s station, on the way to his locker. The scene had been shocking: the twenty-odd kids he’d seen earlier had become a hundred-strong throng, and it wasn’t uncommon to see kids walking around with the appalling condition, ignoring the station altogether. Some wore balled wads of toilet paper in their ears—which would later prove the inspiration for Will and Brenda’s earplugs—but most just let it flow, apparently reconciled with the crowd.

  Around that time, the disturbance had graduated from simply unpleasant to general upheaval. Several TVs had been turned on, and there was a running news report confirming the horrors Will had heard earlier: Derrick was a disaster area, thousands afflicted with “Weeping Ear Syndrome,” which would reportedly evolve into a “distemper characterized by violence” just hours after exposure. The report had looped a single, shaky film clip featuring a roving band of Derrickinians on war-torn streets, all resembling the future Terry Bowls.

  From then on, there had been a push by the teachers and administration to clear the school, which was largely successful. The busses got out, taking with them a large number of underclassmen, and another percentage of kids escaped via concerned parents. Unfortunately, said parents would ultimately imprison Will and many others in the school: the one connecting service road had choked with vehicles, backwash from the deadlocked main roads.

  By then it was around lunchtime, and the remaining students, about four hundred, had been herded into the school’s central hallway, a cavernous terrazzo-floored chamber lined with trophy-bearing glass cases. Will had tried to phone home, but dialing out got a busy signal, from both his cell and the payphones. At one point, Principal Turner had returned to the intercom to announce a quarantine for those showing “symptoms,” on the grounds that they were “contagious,” surely a knee-jerk reaction to the disturbing footage broadcast non-stop by the myriad TVs. This decree was met with a mixed reaction, but the quarantine happened, regardless. The healthy stayed in the hall, while the sick were condemned to the gymnasium next door, teachers included. It sounded reasonable enough, and it worked. At first.

  After unloading those showing symptoms—about a quarter of those unlucky enough to be stuck at the school—the teachers had admitted others as their symptoms developed, opening the gym and shamefully depositing the nouveau sick. Though unpublicized, Will had noticed the door being locked and unlocked as the teachers did so, lending a penitential air to the scene. Some had fled the school in lieu of being caged in the gym, taking French leave as soon as their ear-snot started. The kids had littered the hall in attitudes of suspense, a solidarity of unease amidst the crowd. And still people were getting sick and being shut away. One after another, the congregation had thinned, and by one o’clock, there were less than two hundred in the hall. It was around then that the pleading started.

  Those in the gym had begun complaining of some of the other sickies “acting weird,” namely those who had been leaking since that morning. It was initially only kids asking to be let out, but as the afternoon drew on, there were teachers, too, pleading with a bald note of fear. The principal stood by his guns, however, insisting that the quarantine was necessary. This placated no one, of course, and the demands continued right up until the first cannonade of screams.

  The situation had worsened without prelude, perhaps on a switch, things uneasy but calm one moment, then chaos the next. There was a shotgun-like male scream from inside the gym, followed by a salvo of miscellaneous commotion: feet slapping the floor, things thudding and knocking around, more screams, some cut disturbingly short. Will thought it sounded like a ball game, perhaps with an overzealous crowd. Suddenly there were dozens of voices at the six gymnasium doors, a chorus of terrified pleas sounding from beyond. A girl rose above the rest, wailing something about Tim Vernon biting Mr. Launer, the shop teacher. When the doors had remained close, the people had taken to jerking them desperately, making them breathe at the joins.

  Back in the hall, the chilling upheaval had been met by a glassy silence, the principal and the teachers exchanging shocked looks mirrored by the kids. Around this time, Will had noticed more than one kid disappear into the school, as well as a couple slipping outside and hieing into the woods—all healthy, as opposed to the earlier AWOLs. He could commiserate.

  This had kept up for a long minute, the screams rising steadily in volume, but the doors had stayed shut, even as unsettling animal noises began punctuating the din. Finally, one of the kids, an unpopular redhead by the name of Jeannie Crenshaw, had yelled to open them up, to which the principal only
shook his head, looking bone-white. The demand was repeated, and echoed by several others, Will among them. He couldn’t believe the doors had stayed closed; it had sounded like World War III in there, he’d thought. That…or an abattoir.

  When another minute had passed and the doors still weren’t open, the principal and other adults sharing a buffaloed trance, the petite Ms. Crenshaw had dashed to the middle set of doors and pulled the pin. She’d been fast, but it didn’t matter: the adults had shown no resistance, so much bumps on a log. The doors had swung open as if in a hurricane wind, knocking Jeannie backward and nearly sending her to the floor. This was a good thing, actually: if she hadn’t of been buffered by the parting doors, the vomit of bodies would have trampled her to a pulp.

  The people in the first couple waves had been merely sick, profaned by the suppurant ear-snot but otherwise compos; Will had watched them pour out and bee-line for the nearest exit, many with their arms in terrified Y’s, screaming liberally. Then had come the old sick, those infected for nearly five hours, and Will had at once understood the need for flight. Bringing up the tail-end of the crowd, they had appeared with surprising celerity, betraying their unholy appearance. Spectating from the hall’s far corner, Will had thought their gaits vaguely simian, with a cold, inhuman grace reminiscent of men on a battlefield. About thirty in number, they’d looked just like the bedeviled people in the film clip: suffused with ear-snot, faces knotted with cunning, eyes the yellow of highlighter markers. Many had been bloody, though not in ways that suggested they were bleeding.

  Pandemonium had invaded the hall, robbing it of calm, and Will had vapor-locked, unsure what to make of the grisly scene. Then, as the gym emptied, he had caught a glimpse inside: there were bodies covering the parquet floor, an egality of kids and adults, blooming long tendrils of gore like bugs on a windshield. Some of them looked wrong, too, like there were parts of them missing. None moved.

  Before Will could respond, a ragged black boy had scrambled from the gym and, with froglike velocity, tackled Mr. Marquez, the Spanish teacher. Perhaps sensing his dire straits, Mr. Marquez had immediately sent an unpulled punch into the demonic kid’s jaw, sparing nothing despite his preponderance. However, this had deterred the boy none, nor did Mr. Marquez’s follow-up punch. Unflinching, the malign head had rebounded as if made of rubber, accepting the punishment without consequence. Seeing this, Will had then sprung into action, putting a fierce neck-lock on the boy and wresting him from Mr. Marquez. The kid’s response had been instantaneous and shocking: the boy had broken Will’s grip and pushed him away, despite Will having a few years and at least a hundred pounds on him.

  It was like getting hit by a truck, Will would think later. Struck by the kid, he went violently backward, arms windmilling, identical to Jeannie Crenshaw when she’d opened the door —except he did go to the floor, hard, his head cracking the stone wall feet away. A silvery snowfall had opened across his vision, and he’d lain along the wall for precious seconds, struggling to retain consciousness. Inching his way upright, he’d watched vacantly as the diabolic boy returned his attention to Mr. Marquez and promptly bit out his throat.

  Wide-eyed and battling shock, Will had gone drunkenly to his elbows, planning a second offensive in spite of the boy’s strength. But then he’d become conscious of the rest of the hall, where identical gruesomeness was playing out. The miscreant corps of students and teachers tore rabidly through the crowd, a bipedal locust swarm. Fresh corpses fell before Will’s eyes, spraying red freshets like sprinklers possessed. The neck appeared to be the maniacs’ target of choice, leaving several victims decapitated completely. It was then that Will had decided to run.

  His first thought had been the Mustang, so he’d taken to the stairs at his back, moving hysterically for the parking lot. Then he remembered the deadlock, and wayfaring on foot was out of the question. Making matters worse, the power had farted out around then, leaving him in the dark save for the cool ambient light. Standing within a valley of lockers as the carnage continued in the hall, he’d grasped for any recourse, anywhere that might classify as safe. He’d considered a classroom, but that was too small, too cramped, would leave him a rat in a cage. The school’s basement had been next, but that was low ground, no indemnity there. The roof had been his third choice, as a matter of course, and it seemed his best bet: high ground, only one entryway, plenty of legroom. The door had been nearby, on the school’s top story, and he’d hotfooted upstairs without a second thought, ducking into a classroom and grabbing a chair on the way.

  Things had seemed so peaceful upon the roof, the internecine of the main hall unheard, a clear spring afternoon greeting him. There, the school was reduced to a quiet oxbow of architecture, unthreatening. He’d wedged the chair under the doorknob and then, with the full weight of his circumstance making itself known, collapsed against an air vent. He had closed eyes and made a halfhearted attempt at digesting what he’d just seen—which was futile; he could see himself carrying that baggage for life—when he was interrupted by a nearby noise.

  Going defensive, he had furtively searched the immediate area, poking through the little playground of vents and air conditioners and heating ducts. The noise had continued, resolving into crying, distinctly female. After holding his breath, he had traced it to the other end of the roof, where he found a tear-strewn girl mounded over the tar, regarding him with broken brown eyes.

  She’d quailed backward at the sight of him, quieting and shrinking. “Keep away,” she’d said, but without pith, defeat ringing the words.

  “It’s okay,” Will had said, showing his palms. “I’m not ...sick.” He’d then turned his head and tendered his ears, as though to prove this.

  The girl had answered with a quantifying look, her dubiety fading. Apparently determining Will okay, she’d stood uncertainly, straightened her jean skirt, and extended a frail hand. “My name’s Brenda,” she’d said distractedly, and the two had shaken, her face softening into a shy comeliness. She was lanky and a little awkward, navigating the Limbo of early adolescence that immediately follows childhood shadows of the future woman beneath her unseemly present. There was a mocha tint to her, like just-poured coffee, bespeaking an interracial relationship. Will hadn’t recognized the girl; she looked to be a couple years his junior, probably fifteen or sixteen, placing her outside his social sphere. Her ears had been dry.

  She’d given Will’s hand a single, vapid pump, then collapsed back to her spot over the floor, as if this had exhausted her. A distended silence had followed, broken only by faraway clatter from the town below, and then Brenda had said, “It’s bad, isn’t it.”

  Lies had come to Will’s lips, but he’d swallowed them, instead looking to the sky and saying yes. Something in his gut had said that Brenda may be the last person he sees in this earthly life; lying seemed wrong, good intentions or not.

  Brenda had only nodded and fiddled with her nails, her toffee-colored hair flirting with the breeze. She had stopped crying following Will’s arrived, turning hard and withdrawn. They’d gone on to exchange several more frivolous questions and monosyllabic answers, and then the ice had begun to melt, the two developing some rapport. She’d eventually described how she’d left school with some older friends, then gotten caught in the impasse down below. She’d spared the details of how she’d ended up back at school and on the roof, only that it had gotten “bad” in the traffic, and she’d fled back inside, apparently skirting the main hall. She’d trailed off then; the rest was academic.

  In return, Will had given his account of the gym incident, though he bowdlerized the gritty parts in respect for his company, saying only that he had gotten scared and run to the roof. Brenda had given him an indulgent look after, and Will had realized she’d probably seen as much before fleeing the streets. Maybe worse.

  From there, the conversation had somehow deviated into lighter territory: school, Shepsville, life on earth. It turned out they shared a friend, a junior by the name of Ron Peters, and tha
t had strengthened their budding camaraderie. They had reminisced over Ron’s quirks and idiosyncrasies, and by some miracle even achieved laughter, momentarily forgetting the nightmare just a couple floors down. But they had remembered soon enough, as evinced by a mutual darkening of their expressions.

  Later, Brenda had asked the inevitable: “Shouldn’t we do something?”

  Do Something, Will had thought cynically. It was just like a movie. Humoring her, he’d thought and thought, auditioning various Rambo-esque schemes, from the useless to the flat out ridiculous. But, ultimately, he’d come up empty: there had been nothing to Do, and he’d told Brenda so, making her wilt.

  They’d sat in another sorrowed silence, and then Brenda had popped the next natural question: “Do you think someone’ll come for us?” Her eyes had sparkled, hoping against hope. “The police or the military or somethin’?”

  “Yes,” Will had said, and he hadn’t been lying. He’d thought—privately—that it may take a day or two, but they could make it. They were without food or water, but they were safe, neither were infected, and they had each other. Brenda, perhaps sensing this, had awarded Will with a small but genuine smile, and he’d taken her two-tone hand and given it an affirming squeeze. It had seemed that things were finally looking up, or had at least stopped going down.

  Unfortunately, he was wrong.

  Within the hour, Will had noticed a curious moisture in his ears, like he’d just gotten a wet willy. There’d been an odor, too, one he recognized. He’d started to say something to Brenda—what, he didn’t know—when he’d noticed a terrified look scrawled over her face, and a small trickle of frothy liquid from her right ear.

  They’d cried after, and there were never uglier tears.

  ***

  Brenda balled the sandwich’s greasy napkin, stashed it in the paper bag, then crumpled that and bemusedly tossed it away. The breeze took it down the roof, out of sight.