Long live all the mountains we moved
I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you


Chapter 3: Virulent


Sherry stuck her tongue out at the ink, but dipped her finger in it anyway. She pressed her thumb onto the paper, leaving a black print, and dropped her cellphone into a manila envelope labeled "Cell Phone Check." As she picked up two pencils, the redheaded proctor sent her an accommodating smile.

"Sit anywhere you'd like."

Sherry noted the name on her laminated lanyard, which displayed an almost flattering school photo and the title Biology Instructor. "Thanks, Ms. Martin."

Shuffling around the classroom, Sherry decided to take a seat in one of the front-row desks. The other test administrator flipped through a dense-looking research magazine as he stood behind the teacher's desk, oblivious to the students entering the classroom. The line of juniors went through the same routines, stamping thumbprints and wandering nervously into the room.

She pretended not to notice the stares from other students who were clearly wondering if she was old enough to take the test. She could hear the whispers as they passed by her desk.

Familiar voices floated into the room. Sherry looked up, interested. Stiles and three of his friends were at the front of the line. Scott regarded the stamp ink uncertainly, but proceeded anyway. The other test proctor looked up and smiled almost leeringly at him.

Ms. Martin held out another manila packet. "Cell phone in the envelope, Scott. You'll get it back after the test."

Sherry nearly laughed when she saw what Stiles had done. He had a number-two pencil tucked behind his ear, another stuck between his teeth, and a half-dozen or so in his hand. As he and Scott passed by her, they sent her odd looks similar to those of the other students. Sherry wondered where the strawberry-blonde was. The two girls who had come with Stiles and Scott didn't recognize her, but Sherry remembered them as part of Stiles' clique.

Once the students had all sat down, the male proctor addressed the class. "Please do not open your test booklets until you are instructed to do so."

Behind her, Sherry noticed Stiles sheepishly close the front cover.

"This test is two hours and ten minutes. There will be two twenty-five minute critical reading sections, two twenty-five minute math sections, and an essay-writing portion that will last thirty minutes." His eyes traveled to Ms. Martin reprimandingly. "There are supposed to be two teachers monitoring this exam?"

Uncomfortably, she replied, "I know, it's Coach. He's not exactly punctual. Um, let me just try him again." She excused herself and slipped out the door. While the class waited, Sherry stared at the proctor, unable to tear her gaze away from the gross mole by his lip and his creepy bushy brows. When Ms. Martin returned a minute or so later, she apologized, "I can't find him, but Mr. Yukimura is upstairs grading papers. Do you want me to try him?"

The proctor was not amused. "We have to start. We can ask for his assistance during the first break." Ms. Martin nodded. He leaned over the desk, fingering a stopwatch. "You may now," he announced, "Open your test booklets and begin."

Sherry flipped open the booklet and scanned the first question. Her parents had pressured her into studying over winter break and sent her to test prep boot camps. Since her mother turned herself in to the police three weeks ago, she hadn't done studying of any sort until last night.

The first section was critical reading. Remembering her tutors' admonishments, she turned to the last problems in the section and worked backwards from there.

Somewhere in the back of the room, a loud thump occurred. Everyone's heads turned toward the source of the noise. Ms. Martin, her eyes wide with worry and surprise rushed over to the girl who'd fallen from her chair.

"Sydney!" she exclaimed, helping the girl stand up. "Are you alright?"

Sydney had dark eyes and dark hair. Sherry remembered her as the first student to enter the room. She had been hyperventilating before the test started, staring at the closed booklet anxiously. "Uh," Sydney breathed, embarrassed, "I'm okay. I just… got kind of dizzy."

The teacher was still holding her wrist, staring at it in concern. "Sydney, how long have you had this?"

Sydney's eyebrow arched in surprise as she stared at the red mark on her wrist. She shook her head, looking at Ms. Martin questioningly. "Uh, I don't know." Her voice trailed off.

At the front of the classroom, the other proctor was unruffled. "Ms. Martin, do I need to stop the test?"

"No! It's- it's fine." She bit her lip and returned to the front, glancing around the room with her face still etched with worry. "Everybody stay in your seats. I'll be back in a minute." Picking up her phone, she warned to the other proctor, "Nobody leaves the room." She left the room and shut the door quietly behind her.

"Please continue your tests."

Sherry stared at the "no error" problems. Because viral diseases spread so rapidly, victims being often quarantined to contain the spread of the disease. No error. After staring at the problem for a minute in disbelief, she circled "being" and moved on.

A sharp cry sounded from out in the hall. Ms. Martin. "Get back! No! Do not come in here! Get back outside!"

That was the last straw for the test-takers. Scott, Stiles, and a flood of other students, rushed outside to see what was going on. The proctor didn't even try to hold them back. Dying to know what happened, Sherry followed the group outside. Down the hall, Ms. Martin locked the school doors, preventing anyone from getting inside the building. Dialing a number on her phone, she stared down the egressing students. "Get back to your seats. Now!" After a moment, she added, "Please."

Sherry's eyes flicked up at Stiles and Scott, who exchanged a wary look and oozed back into the room with the rest of the juniors. With a glance back at Ms. Martin, Sherry plodded after the crowd. It went without saying that any attempts at continuing the PSAT were officially abandoned.

Back inside the classroom, all the scantrons and test booklets had been cleared from the desks. Students lounged around the classroom, chatting curiously. Stiles and the gang were loitering about a small cluster of desks. For a moment, Sherry scanned the classroom hopefully for any sight of anyone she could talk to. That was when she realized that the only person she had spoken to as of yet was Stiles. The manner in which he and his friends were knit together, their heads leaned in conspiratorially, their bodies constructing a tight circle, gave off an exclusive feel. Her stomach quailed at the thought of penetrating their social barrier, but she dreaded twiddling her thumbs in isolation even more. Something in the way the clique whispered made Sherry suspect that they might know information she didn't.

After an extended internal battle, Sherry swallowed her qualms and approached the group from Stiles' side. "Hi," she said.

Their heads turned toward her almost mechanically. The girls still appraised her skeptically, the brunette more so than the one with Japanese features, whom Sherry finally connected as Yukimura from lacrosse. Stiles shuddered, as if Sherry's sudden entrance had caught him completely off-guard. Only Scott was the least bit amicable.

"Hi," he replied, his lips curling politely. "You're Sherry, right? AP Chem?"

"Yeah," she answered, grateful for the sign of hospitality. "Do you guys know what's going on?"

"No, but I think I heard that the CDC has been called."

"CDC?"

"Center for Disease Control," Scott said. "They must be worried about a contagion or something."

A loud rap emanated from the door. Through the rectangular window embedded in the wooden door, Sherry saw something distinctly yellow and puffy. A haz-mat suit.

"They're here," Yukimura noted.

The door opened, a team of plastic-clad workers flowing into the room. One of them stepped forward, accompanied by Ms. Martin, and ushered a panic-stricken Sydney out of the room. Several other students, whose skin had also developed the webbed rashes apparent on Sydney's wrist, trailed mawkishly after them.

"I'm going to see what's happening," Scott said. He hurried after Ms. Martin, earning an approving nod from the biology teacher. There went Sherry's only protection from the unwelcome stares of Stiles, Yukimura, and the brunette.

On the other side of the classroom's outside windows, clear sheets of translucent plastic fell from above to drape over the glass. It extended to the ground, acting as a reverse force field that kept the internal febrile contaminants inside.

"How did he know disease control was coming?" Sherry wondered.

Stiles narrowed his eyes at her, calculating, but his tone when he spoke was casual. "He just has really good hearing. It's like he's a dog or something. Always creeps me out."

"Uh-huh."

"What do you think it is?" the brunette asked him bluntly.

He bent forward, his elbows digging into his knees. "I think it's smallpox."

"Not likely." The rebuttal came from the front of the room. The proctor, with his hideous mole, had his feet propped up on the teacher's desk, his magazine open in his lap. "Smallpox was eradicated worldwide in 1979. Well, we've only managed to completely eradicate two diseases in history; the other was Rinderpest." He paused dramatically, still staring off at some remote corner of the room. "It killed cows."

"So we should be comforted by that, right?" Stiles concluded.

"Unless it's something worse." He returned his attention to the magazine article he was attending.

Stiles blinked. A concentrated look passed over the brunette expression. She furrowed her brows. "Whatever it is, they're taking it pretty seriously. There's a lot of cars and trucks out there." She tilted her head in the direction of the windows.

"Do you have dog-like hearing, too?" Sherry joked.

"Yes."

Taken aback by the girl's straightforward answer, Sherry fell silent.

After another moment of what appeared to be intent listening, the brunette fixated on Stiles. "Your dad's with them."

He stood up from his seat on the table and stepped toward the teacher's desk, sifting through a plastic bin of manila envelopes. "Alright, I should probably call."

Why was Stiles taking her "super hearing" so seriously? It wasn't possible to hear specific people's voices outside. Sherry tried, tensing as she focused. All she got was a muted buzz.

"Don't bother," the proctor ordered, looking up from his reading. "They would have shut off any access to all outside communication by now." He shugged. "No cell service, no wifi, no starting a panic. Looks like we're all just gonna have to wait here and see what happens." He wet his finger and flipped the page.

Annoyed, Stiles tromped back into the classroom. It wasn't even a moment later when more people in haz-mat suits bustled into the room, demanding everyone line up in the hall outside for smallpox antidotes.

The remaining students in the classroom jostled out eagerly. Sherry, too, raced out. She couldn't stand spending another minute in quarantine. The hall filled with students, shoving for a spot in the line. Amid the prevailing confusion, another teacher jogged in from some other corridor.

"Dad?" Yukimura asked.

He grabbed Stiles by the shoulder and pulled him back. "I need you to come with me." They dissolved into the mass of students.

The brunette girl, whose name Sherry still did not know, eyed her with the same distrustfulness. She snatched Yukimura's wrist and dragged her toward the start of the line. Sherry didn't even bother to follow.

The hall's chaos settled down shortly afterward. From the middle of the line, Sherry had a straight view of what was going on at the front. A woman in the caution-tape-yellow suit held up a syringe, dabbing rubbing alcohol on Yukimura's arm. She lowered the needle into the crook of her arm. A bolt of something bright and blue shot up the syringe and burned a hole into the woman's suit.

Sherry gawked, wondering how so much static electricity could have piled up to burn a hole through freaking plastic. The woman stumbled back, nudging two other workers. Alarmed, they escorted her out of the building, almost running. More haz-mats swarmed around the scene. Amid the movement, the two girls scurried away, their brown and black hair flying behind them.

After that, the needle-sticking process picked up again. It continued on like a conveyor belt. Sherry approached the front and was poked, examined, then shuttled off to the next destination. She was handed back her cell phone at the door and directed to the gym.

When she tried to call Parrish, it seemed that the proctor had been right. The upper corner of her phone flashed, showing the lack of signal and wifi bars. She sighed leaned against the nearest wall, pulling her legs into her chest as she slid to the floor and opened the only apps that would work without a network. The gym filled up quickly with students. Soon, there was almost no room to move among the sea of students.

Within an hour, a haz-mat appeared at the door, his helmet removed. "All clear," he announced. "All symptoms have disappeared. You're free to call your parents and go home."

Glancing back at her phone, Sherry was delighted to see the wifi and network bars filled again. She grinned and clambered off the desk. As she headed out of the school toward her bike, she realized something. Stiles, Scott, Yukimura, and the brunette still hadn't returned from wherever they'd gone. Every single test-taker had been sent to the gym. Everyone, it seemed, except for those four.