I hear the Pickup Truck, going up our street. I’m not supposed to look out the windows, but I’ve been so booooored for so long…hours and hours and days and weeks. It’s cool to see anything new, even if it is just a government cleanup crew.
They think I’m too dumb to know what’s going on just ‘cause I’m nine. They don’t know that I can sneak so so so quietly downstairs and not make any floorboards creak, not even once, and breathe real quiet and watch TV with them from the stairs. I used to do this to watch their movies they said were too grownup for me. I mean, so what? Whatever. They almost always turned out to be either too boring or…okay, never mind, some of those movies were way scary. Now I sneak downstairs to watch the news so I can find out why I can’t go to school anymore or go outside. I used to be able to watch TV when everything went bad ‘cause my mom seemed too shocked at what was on it to care who was watching. She also didn’t want me out of her sight. But it didn’t take long before she realized that what was on the news was scarier than any monster flick out there and that I should be out of the room whenever they had it on. I think that just makes things worse, ‘cause all this not-knowing leaves me worried and confused about what’s going on.
All I know is that I should be throwing water balloons with Regina and Amman, or I should be riding my bike around, or I should be playing capture the flag with the kids on our street, or I should be burying KC’s shoes in the yard and blaming it on the dog. But instead, I’m stuck inside because of the parasites. Mom said if I go out, one of the Infected would bite me and I’d get sick right away and there was nothing they could do about it. I’d just die. And even though I would die, my body would come back…just my body. My mind and my soul would shoot up to Heaven, but my body would keep making people on Earth sick, maybe even my own family.
So why can’t I just wear a mask or a suit of armor? It’s not like those stupid zombie movies I used to secretly watch from the stairs, the ones where the dead would sneak up behind someone, and boy were they surprised when they were bitten! Had no one smelled meat gone bad before then? I already knew milk smelled nasty when you left it on the radiator and then squeezed it way too hard when you picked it up, and anyway that was KC’s fault ‘cause she dared me to do it. I already knew that drowned slugs in slug-traps stank way worse than that. And I knew that the worstest smell was when that chicken was left out and we forgot to cook it and went on vacation and came back and had to leave the windows open even though it was winter and the house smelled so bad we couldn’t have friends over for, like forever. At least I thought that was the worst smell but I was wrong because the worst smell in this whole stinkin’ world is a dead body. I’ve totally run out of words to describe how bad that smell is.
There was the Life Before and now there’s an Afterlife. In the Life Before we would get out a lot because Mom needed to get out ‘cause she gets sick of being home. Dad says she suffers from “cabin fever” even though we don’t live in a log cabin. I was glad she needed to get out ‘cause it meant we got to go see movies and eat out and ride the trails on our bikes to the creek or go swimming and go to festivals and have picnics or sometimes just bbq with neighbors until the fireflies came out. Getting out meant I turned brown in the summers and made whole snow families in the winter and found ways to get covered in mud in the Spring.
But then the Lost Day happened and now we live in the Afterlife. Houston says it’s ironic that I call this the Afterlife, that we live like we’re half-dead most of the time. KC says it’s appropriate because we don’t have much of a life anymore. All I know is that in the Afterlife my mom is all-the-time scared. We can’t go out. We can’t see friends (except KC is seeing Gemma right now so that’s not fair). We can’t play in the garden or walk the dog or open our windows or play loud music or have lights on at night like we used to.
The Lost Day isn’t called the Lost Day because we all slept through it and forgot about it; it’s called the Lost Day because everyone lost so much. Mom says we’re lucky because our family is alive, we have a good strong house, and we have food storage. We’re also lucky because we don’t like to drink tap water.
The last day I got to go to school started out fun because it began with my favorite class—art. But it went from fun to weird before I could even get my smock on. First there was lots of screaming from the hallways. Then the big announcement came through from my principal. I didn’t know it was our principal at first because I never heard her voice sound the way it did over the speakers; it was all quavery and forced. She said, “Teachers, stay in your rooms! Lock the doors. Lock the windows. Do not leave until we say so. And most important of all: Stay away from the water!” Our teacher ran around shutting and locking all the windows and then looked out the little window in the door. She started shaking and shaking at what she saw and then she made us all move into the back corner under the art tables. She turned off the lights and told us to be “super quiet; this is not a game; we could all get hurt if we’re not quiet.” I’ve never seen a scared grownup before and that made me scared. Then Jenny started to cry, not in an obvious way, but softly and that made me cry and then Marcus, and soon the whole class was crying. We were trying to be quiet just like the teacher said, so you only saw lots of tears and heard lots of sniffles.
We’d hear a scream outside and then suddenly it would stop. We’d hear another scream and then suddenly it would stop. It was like something was pinching the screams right off. Most screams sounded like they came from grown-ups. Most. Maybe people got locked out of their rooms and were upset.
We’d hear lots of running and then slow shuffling, like someone was dragging a heavy backpack. Our teacher started ripping all the posters and artwork off the walls and taping them over the windows. She kept trying to call someone over and over on her cell phone as soon as she covered the windows but the more she tried to call, the more she cried.
This went on forever. I needed to pee so bad it hurt. It smelled like some of the other kids needed to too but didn’t hold it in. Nobody said anything about it. Nobody cared. Another announcement exploded over the speaker and made us all jump and squeak at its loud suddenness. It was the principal again and she sounded like you sound when someone wakes you out of a deep sleep and you’re not sure if you’re really awake and it’s the real world or if you’re still asleep. There was no light in her voice. She said, “Make sure you do not drink the water. Stay away from water at all costs. Help is on the way. I will let you know when it arrives, and we can begin the evacuation.”
I get to go home early! We all started to breathe normally again. Not loud, just normal. Teacher kept trying to make those phone calls. We started to whisper. “What do you think it is?” Jenny thought it was wild animals escaped from the zoo that then got into the school, but I didn’t hear no roars or ca-caws or growling. Dwight said that because we’re in Mclean and we have a bunch of government people that it was terrorists that wanted to kidnap politicians’ children so they can control them or make money off of them. Polly thought it was like when that crazy guy shot all those people at that school but Marcus said that’s stupid because we didn’t hear no shots. But then we did hear shots—lots of them. Lots of thuds too. We all started crying again, but not quiet like the first time. I just wanted to go home and then talk about everything on the bus tomorrow. I was hungry, and I needed to pee, and I needed my mom.
They came with guns. There was an announcement and they knocked and came all suited up with big guns. They had helmets on and everything. They were soldiers and they told us to not look around, don’t look anywhere but at us and when you get on the bus you put your heads between your legs and look at the floor. They said if our mom and dad were not home they would take us to a center where our parents could meet us. They said, don’t worry. We’ll ride the bus with you and make sure you’re safe, but you’ve got to trust us and not look around. They told us that whatever we did, don’t drink anything that’s not in a bottle and be sure to stay away from any water from the tap or anything made up with water from the tap like Kool-Aid. Then they formed a tunnel of soldiers for us to walk through all the way to the bus.
We were almost climbing on the bus (they covered the windows!) when the screaming started again, but this time it didn’t stop. One of the teachers was stumbling towards us. She wasn’t one of my teachers, but I knew her because she was one of KC’s teachers when she was in the sixth grade. She looked shocked and hurt. I thought the soldiers would help her like they were helping us, but instead they shot her! She lurched forward like she tripped, but then she kept stumbling forward. I was hoping they had missed her, that she would be okay, but while I was doing all this hoping they shot her again. This time she fell down. She didn’t stay down though. She started to push up on her hands like nothing had happened. She didn’t cry or shout or anything! She just got back up and staggered forward. Then they shot her in the head and this time she stayed down. I mean, I think she stayed down but I don’t know for sure because one of the soldiers picked me up and threw me on the bus.
I wet myself.