Zombies: More Recent Dead by Paula Guran

shrugs. “Well, I guess you can just stay where you are, then,” he says.
    The two of them go out, and the door is locked again. They take the other kids away, one by one—not to the classroom, but out through the other door, the bare steel door, which until now has marked the farthest limit of their world.
    Nobody comes, after that, and nothing happens. It feels like a long time, but Melanie’s mind is racing so fast that even a few minutes would feel like a long time. It’s longer than a few minutes, though. It feels like most of a day.
    The air gets colder. It’s not something that Melanie thinks about, normally, because heat and cold don’t translate into comfort or discomfort for her; she notices now because with no music playing and nobody to talk to, there’s nothing else to notice. Maybe it’s night. That’s it. It must be night outside. Melanie knows from stories that it gets colder at night as well as darker.
    She remembers her book, and gets it out. She reads about Hector and Achilles and Priam and Hecuba and Odysseus and Menelaus and Agamemnon and Helen.
    There are footsteps from the corridor outside. Is it Sergeant? Has he come back to dismantle her? To take her to the altar and give her to the goddess Artemis?
    Someone unlocks Melanie’s door, and pushes it open.
    Miss Mailer stands in the doorway. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m here.”
    Melanie surges to her feet, her heart almost bursting with happiness and relief. She’s going to run to Miss Mailer. She’s going to hug her and be hugged by her and be touching her not just with her hair but with her hands and her face and her whole body. Then she freezes where she is.
    Her jaw muscles stiffen, and a moan comes out of her mouth.
    Miss Mailer is alarmed. “Melanie?” She takes a step forward.
    “Don’t!” Melanie screams. “Please, Miss Mailer! Don’t! Don’t touch me!”
    Miss Mailer stops moving, but she’s so close! So close! Melanie whimpers. Her whole mind is exploding. She drops to her knees, then falls full-length on the floor. The smell, the wonderful, terrible smell, fills all the room and all her mind and all her thoughts, and all she wants to do is . . .
    “Go away!” she moans. “Go away go away go away!” Miss Mailer doesn’t move.
    “Fuck off, or I will dismantle you!” Melanie wails. She’s desperate.
    Her mouth is filled with thick saliva like mud from a mudslide. She’s dangling on the end of the thinnest, thinnest piece of string. She’s going to fall and there’s only one direction to fall in.
    “Oh God!” Miss Mailer blurts. She gets it at last. She rummages in her bag, which Melanie didn’t even notice until now. She takes something out—a tiny bottle with yellow liquid in it—and starts to spray it on her skin, on her clothes, in the air. The bottle says
Dior.
It’s not the usual chemical: it’s something that smells sweet and funny. Miss Mailer doesn’t stop until she’s emptied the bottle.
    “Does that help?” she asks, with a catch in her voice. “Oh baby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think . . . ”
    It does help, a little. And Melanie has had practice at pushing the hunger down: she has to do it a little bit every time she picks up her book.
    This is a million times harder, but after a while she can think again and move again and even sit up.
    “It’s safe now,” she says timidly, groggily. And she remembers her own words, spoken as a joke so many times before she ever guessed what they might actually mean. “I won’t bite.”
    Miss Mailer bends down and sweeps Melanie up, choking out her name, and there they are crying into each other’s tears, and even though the hunger is bending Melanie’s spine like Achilles bending his bow, she wouldn’t exchange this moment for all the other moments of her life.
    “They’re attacking the fence,” Miss Mailer says, her voice muffled by Melanie’s hair. “But it’s not Hungries, it’s looters.