“Meet you here before lunch?” Sid asked.
“Yep.” Ashley nodded and walked off.
Sid didn’t need to ask. They met at his locker before lunch every day and then ate their food at choking speed before rushing outside for twenty-three minutes of recess before returning to the building for their final two periods of the day.
Ashley had almost forgotten all about Warren’s strange appearance until she spotted Travis Barron and Warren outside the side entrance to Winterberry Middle School. Travis’s head shook from side to side and his cheeks flared red as if he were yelling at his large friend. Warren seemed unmoved by the display, his shoulders hunch forward. After another minute of yelling, Travis threw up his hands and stomped back through the doors of the school.
Ashley ducked into the empty science room and flattened herself against the wall.
She slid over to the window and peeked out.
Warren lumbered away from the school, slow and heavy, his head bowed as if walking into a stiff wind, though Ashley didn’t notice any rustling in the trees.
The bell for lunch rang and classroom doors swung open. Feet pounded down the hall as other middle schoolers stampeded toward the lunchroom.
She was wasting precious minutes of her lunch period, but couldn’t tear herself from the window. Warren walked to the end of the sidewalk and turned onto the grassy trail that would take him through the woods beside the middle school.
In the sky above the woods, Ashley saw birds. She pressed her face against the glass and watched as vultures, a dozen or more, circled in the blue sky.
ASHLEY ATE her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich in three bites and slurped the last of her orange juice.
Sid ate with one knee propped on the bench, chewing vigorously, and poised to flee the lunchroom as quickly as possible. He stuffed the remnants of a tinfoil-wrapped veggie lasagna into his empty Star Wars container.
“No salad today?” Ashley asked.
Sid’s lunch always included a salad in some form, the extra gross kind with slimy purple beets and hunks of impossible to swallow broccoli.
“Last week of school,” he said, smiling to reveal bits of green stuff in his teeth. “And she said the lettuce at the grocery looked wilty.”
Sid snapped his lunch pail closed, and they hurried to stash it in his locker before bursting onto the playground. They speed-walked to their group of friends at the back of the playground. They’d already gathered and were shuffling books and videotapes between them.
“I saw Warren skip out,” Ashley said. “It looked like he and Travis had a fight.”
“Good,” Sid muttered. “He won’t be in science class, then.”
“Ash, do you have Interview with the Vampire?” Darren Mound called, as they approached.
She pulled the paperback from the back of her shorts where she’d tucked it into the waistband.
Sid held up a VHS tape of Rosemary’s Baby. “I’ve got Rosemary’s Baby,” he announced, and several of their friends held up their own tapes. Sid selected The Evil Dead.
“You’re going to watch that at my house, right?” Ashley asked him as she exchanged books with Darren, who then traded Interview with the Vampire for a tattered copy of The Godsend with another girl.
“Obviously,” Sid said. “My mom would probably give our TV away if she caught me watching it at our house.”
“Mine too,” their friend Rita said, as she swapped a VHS of The Shining for a rented copy of The Fog. “My mom thinks horror movies make kids do drugs.” She laughed and shook her head. “Parents are seriously clueless.”
Their group met twice a week on the playground to swap horror books and movies. In the summer, they’d made plans to have a weekly meet up at the arcade.
The screams began as they were trailing toward the building.
The bell to end lunch would ring any minute, and Ashley and Sid started back toward the double doors.
The scream tore across the play yard and halted Ashley and Sid mid-stride.
Heads shot up and running slowed to a stop. Ashley saw a sixth-grade girl trip over the asphalt ridge by the basketball courts and go down on her hands and knees. Ashely cringed. She knew the sharp sting of such a fall. That girl would spend her afternoon classes picking stones from her palms.
“Where’d that come from?” Sid started, but the scream came again, piercing the air and now punctuated by voices.
Ashley ran to the side of the school. Other kids did the same. They crowded around her, and they all watched in stunned silence at the teacher screaming and clutching her throat as Mr. Curry, the gym teacher, carried a body from the woods.
Simon Frank laid long and limp in the teacher’s arms. Curry struggled to carry the boy. His knees dipped low with each bend, and Ashley expected Simon’s body to slip free and land with a thud on the grass. It didn’t.
As more teachers surrounded the boy, ushering Mr. Curry and the screaming teacher through the doors, Ashley heard the first sirens in the distance.
MAX HAD DIALED 9-1-1. He didn’t understand why until Mr. Curry struggled through the double glass doors with a dead child in his arms.
Max didn’t realize in those first seconds that the child was dead, but as he rushed forward to assist the winded teacher, he saw Simon Frank and gasped, almost dropping the kid before he’d relieved Mr. Curry of the burden.
Miss Bluhm was still screaming, and Max wanted to tell her to shut up. It was too much - the screams and the face of the boy beneath him. Max looked away as he carried Simon, heavier than he could have imagined, down the hall.
He wasn’t only heavy, he was gruesome. Simon stank of decay, his body felt swollen and doughy. The boy was dead, beyond dead, and Max knew he was doing it all wrong. Mr. Curry should not have picked the child up. They should have left him in the forest for the police and the coroner. He didn’t know much, but he knew that.
The bell shrilled, and Max tensed, ready for an explosion of children at opposite ends of the hallway, but to his relief, no curious faces and stamping feet appeared. Other teachers rallied. They blocked the doors, organizing the kids into rows outside.
“Bring him in here,” Mrs. Pollister, the school nurse, insisted, grabbing Max’s elbow and ushering him into the nurse’s station.
Max laid Frank on the little padded table that stood against the wall. White medical paper crinkled beneath him. The smell of rot filled the little room.
Max continued to look away from the boy, but he didn’t miss Mrs. Pollister’s shocked expression as she leaned over him.
“My God,” she breathed. “He’s dead.”
Max nodded his head numbly as Mr. Curry and several other teachers crowded into the little carpeted nurse’s room.
Somewhere down the hall, Max heard Miss Bluhm’s screams shrinking to sobs.
“Miss Bluhm and I were walking in the woods and found him,” Mr. Curry explained, his face crimson as he spoke.
Mrs. Pollister’s hands went to Simon’s neck as if to search for a pulse, but then her fingers curled in and she shrank away.
Simon’s neck had been torn open, soft, dark tissue lay exposed beneath the flaps of skin. Maggots squirmed in the wound.
Max stared at Simon’s t-shirt. It displayed roaring lion bursting forward with teeth bared. It was a Van Halen shirt. Max had noticed Simon wearing the shirt a few months before. Max himself had seen Van Halen in concert two years earlier. He’d asked Simon if he’d ever seen them live. Now the question hung strange and inappropriate in the center of his skull - live, live, live….