The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell by Mira Grant Page B

other woman’s coldness. “You lost two students, and all you can say is ‘they were too small to amplify’? My God, that’s—”
    â€œThe office door was open when we passed it,” said Miss Oldenburg. She sounded calm, almost serene, like she had decided this was a problem best viewed from a distance. “There’s something in the bathroom, and the office door was open. I don’t know how many infected we’re dealing with. I just know that the doors aren’t locking, and as long as the doors are unlocked, any emergency personnel who respond to the outbreak will be fully justified in going in guns blazing. Legally, we’re all infected.”
    Ms. Teeter took a step backward. “That’s why you’re here,” she said wonderingly. “You know my students are too small to amplify.”
    â€œThat makes this room the best chance my students have,” said Miss Oldenburg. “Killing kindergarteners is bad public relations. If there are any students that will be treated like they’re still human, it’s going to be the kindergarteners.”
    â€œYou’re endangering my children!”
    Several of the kindergarteners looked up from their coloring sheets. Ms. Teeter fought the urge to clap a hand over her mouth. She hadn’t intended to speak that loudly, or that boldly. Keeping the students calm had to remain her first priority.
    Miss Oldenburg waited until the students had returned their attention to their work before she said, calmly, “Report me to the union. I don’t care. I’m going to get my kids through this alive—and they don’t present any danger to your students. Most of them are too small to amplify, and I haven’t been exposed. I can help you keep the class under control. Both of our classes under control.”
    â€œYou don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.” Ms. Teeter saw the logic of what Miss Oldenburg was proposing. She also saw that putting fifteen more students into her classroom would only exacerbate the problems she knew were already coming. Would the first grade agree to naptime, or would they call it “babyish” and cause a revolt? How could the graham crackers and juice boxes stretch to cover fifteen additional mouths? And the noise—would the noise the class was inevitably going to make draw the infected right to their door? It didn’t lock. It opened inward. If enough bodies piled against it, it was going to come open, and she couldn’t build a barricade without panicking the students.
    â€œWe have nowhere else to go.”
    And that was the problem. Miss Oldenburg and her students had nowhere else that they could go—and wasn’t kindergarten all about learning how to share?
    Ms. Teeter sighed. “All right,” she said. “You can stay. But this is my classroom. We’re following my rules. Do you understand?”
    Miss Oldenburg smiled brightly. “I do.”
    *  *  *
    As with all recorded outbreaks, once things began to go wrong at Evergreen Elementary, the cascade became inevitable. Each infected individual represented the potential for countless more—and worse, with so many students below the amplification threshold, there was no need for the usual infect/consume pattern. Students below the threshold were meat to feed the virus, and students above the threshold were targets for infection.
    When Mr. O’Toole’s class spilled out into the hallway, they spilled out alongside five other classrooms, and proceeded to consume or convert all students and teachers inside of twenty minutes. The exponential process had begun.
    Meanwhile, outside the campus, no one was aware that anything was wrong until a passing patrolman drove by the school and saw the closed steel shutters covering every window and door. He called his precinct immediately, and they notified the CDC that something appeared to be going