Chapter Twenty-Two

Back in the main hallway of the school, Glasses was leading, Jory following, the torch held across his hips like Voss had taught them.

A couple of classrooms ahead was Wallace, at the right-side locker bank. Just opening each one, looking in, then closing it.

“He for real?” Glasses said.

“Wallace!” Jory called down, smiling just to be seeing another person, one with their Pez-dispenser head in the proper position, and Wallace looked up, fixed them in his sights. Lifted his unsteady hand in greeting, that light behind him flickering again, going dark now.

Jory’s hand kind of froze midwave.

It was the moment he would remember, later.

Wallace smiled a little, maybe, his old-man version of a secret grin, and shut the locker he was looking in, opened the next, shut it too, and by the time he got to the next one, Glasses and Jory were almost to him.

“What you looking—?” Jory started to ask, but then Glasses’s spread hand was in Jory’s stomach, stopping him.

“The camera, the camera,” Glasses was saying, snapping for. “This is classic, man.”

It took Jory a moment to process—Sheryl stepped out of the pear room—and then that was all that was left: moments, frames.

The first was in the locker—a ragged, dead cheerleader, hair forever long, skin sick, teeth broken.

The next was her lips, thinning.

Then it was her springing from the locker all at once, tearing into Glasses, Glasses falling back, her nails and teeth all into his face, his glasses skidding away into Wallace’s right shoe. Wallace pinching his suit slacks up in order to bend down, lift the glasses up by their bridge, so as not to print the lenses.

Sheryl was screaming important words. They were just sounds to Jory.

Her hand motions, though. She was waving him out of the way with her pistol. Trying to get Jory out of her line of fire.

Jory’s mind, though, his thoughts, they were syrup, wouldn’t process.

All he knew was that he had a torch in his hands. A lit torch.

Slowly, he raised it, Sheryl’s eyes going wide, the rest of her falling away, scrambling back a classroom, diving into that door.

This meant Jory was doing the right thing.

By now, the cheerleader had most of Glasses’s cheek pulled away with her teeth, was into his throat with her fingers.

“No,” Jory said, and then did it anyway. Opened the torch. Stood on it for a ten count, a twenty count, until the autocool shut the flame off.

Finally it was Wallace, the mental zombie, who guided his arm down.

“There, there,” Wallace said, patting Jory’s forearm.

His voice was grandfatherly. It was a voice he’d had all along, apparently.

Together they edged around the scorched crater in the floor. The bubbling meat, the smoldering bone.

“She wasn’t infected, was she?” Jory said. “Just scared, right?”

Wallace didn’t say anything.

In the doorway of dead-children classroom, Sheryl was just standing there, the pistol slack by her leg.

“Sh-Sheryl?” Wallace said after her, but he and Jory didn’t stop. They might never move again if they did.

Crossing the pool of darkness thirty seconds later, Jory closed his eyes fast when he heard the shot. Just one.

Sheryl.

All the children’s names, they were written on the board, first name and last name, in five even columns, for the five rows of desks.

In case anybody wanted to know. In case anybody wanted to count.

It’s not that the world had never had heroes, it’s just, these ten years later, we needed another.