The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell Read Online Free PDF

“Does it hurt?” He sounded only academically interested, not frightened in the least.
    â€œA little,” admitted Scott.
    Something in his tone told John what he was worried about. It was a common enough scenario, triggered by every skinned knee and bloody nose since they were kindergarten babies. John paused. This was an opportunity to take Scott from being an almost-maybe friend to a real friend, someone who would be nice to him because there were debts between them, spaces filled with secrets and unspoken oaths. “You don’t have to get caught,” he said.
    Scott froze. “Wh-what?”
    â€œIt’s on your wrist. You have a long-sleeve jacket, and it looks real absorbent inside. Just pull it down over the tops of your hands, and tell Miss Oldenburg you’re cold when we go back inside. She won’t make you take it off. She’d have to keep the classroom warmer if she started making kids take their coats off.”
    Scott was quiet for a moment, considering the scope of the monumental deceit that John was suggesting. It would mean lying . Not only that, it would mean lying to a teacher . He was almost never cold. His mom always said that he was a little furnace on legs. But if he would just lie to a teacher , he might not have to go through quarantine and needle jabs and people asking him questions he didn’t want to answer—and most important of all, they might not find out what he’d been doing under the slide and fill in the hole before he could finish getting what he needed.
    â€œOkay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
    When the bell for the end of recess rang and Miss Oldenburg’s first-grade class lined up to head back into the building, no one noticed that Scott Ribar was wearing his coat pulled all the way down over the tops of his hands. They had other things to worry about, and he was a weird kid, and besides, when he got his finger stuck at the airlock, his test results came back clean and uninfected, just like the rest of them. There was no danger. There was no reason to think that anything was out of the ordinary.
    One teacher and seventeen students walked back into the building.
    Twelve of those students would never walk out again.
    *  *  *
    >> AKWONG: DON’T HOLD DINNER FOR ME TONIGHT. I’M TRYING TO FINISH THIS REPORT BEFORE THE BOSS DECIDES TO HAVE ME THROWN TO THE WOLVES.
    >> AKWONG: POSSIBLY LITERAL WOLVES, I MEAN. IF I DON’T NAIL THIS ONE, HE’S LIKELY TO DECIDE THAT I SHOULD BE THE ONE TO HEAD UP TO CANADA AND LOOK FOR S&G, AND KNOWING THEM, THEY PROBABLY HAVE A TAME PACK OF TIMBER WOLVES PROTECTING THEIR HIDDEN, HEAVILY BOOBY-TRAPPED CABIN.
    >> MGARCIA: SO WHAT I’M HEARING IS “PLEASE MAKE SPAGHETTI, SINCE IT REHEATS EASILY, AND BE PREPARED TO OFFER SEX AND SYMPATHY WHEN I FINISH WORKING AND DEIGN TO COME DOWNSTAIRS.”
    >> AKWONG: YOU ARE THE PERFECT WOMAN.
    >> MGARCIA: DON’T I KNOW IT.
    â€”internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Maggie Kwong-Garcia, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044
    *  *  *
    Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 10:40 a.m.
    The recess period after Miss Oldenburg’s class had gone to a fourth-grade classroom this week. The actual assignment of recess periods was random, but the smaller students were often followed on the playground by larger ones, and vice versa, in the theory that it would reduce potential contamination vectors. First graders got into different things than fourth graders did, and so on. This was an innately flawed way of thinking. Sadly, the flaws were not fully understood until the events at Evergreen Elementary. Because of this, no better system had yet been proposed.
    The fourth graders poured out onto the blacktop, following a somewhat different pattern than their first-grade schoolmates. They sauntered, some of them looking intentionally relaxed, like they weren’t bothered at all by being outdoors. A few went