Aaand now I'm officially half-way done the updating process. You know, reading over some of the pre- and post-chapter notes that I put in the original story, it's frankly just embarrassing, the things I wrote—my style of speaking, my sense of humour. Blech. It's making me want to go revise all my other old stories, to get rid of any other remnants of my eighth-grade self... but I'm far too lazy for that.
Also, just a warning: this chapter contains not-terribly-graphic, but still somewhat gross descriptions of gruesome illness and death. Brace yourselves, lads.
The next day, when the eight classmates arrived for their homeroom class, they could barely contain their excitement. The previous day, Ms. Frizzle had refused to divulge the destination of their field trip, and of course they were anxious to find out.
"Ms. Frizzle, where are we going?" Wanda asked, as soon as the teacher stepped into the room. She had always been enthusiastic about field trips.
"This week, we'll be learning about single-celled organisms, including bacteria, so I thought we'd start off this morning with a trip to 1349 to take a look at the Black Plague. Before we go, however, we've all got to take a vaccination to ensure we return in full health."
"It'll still be really risky; don't vaccinations take a while to fully take effect?" D. A. pointed out.
"It's a special vaccination, with 100 percent effectiveness, zero risk and an instant effect!" Ms. Frizzle said cheerily. The kids exchanged dubious glances, but decided to trust her on that, even though it sounded too good to be true, because they knew her to have strange but safe teaching methods.
"If you don't have Bus anymore, how will we get there?" Tim asked.
Ms. Frizzle laughed. "After Bus broke down, I called up my old friend who built it in the first place, and had him put together a van like it. A little less roomy, but it's got air conditioning."
"Well then... what are we waiting for?" Ralphie jumped up. "I'll get my shot first!"
Everyone got their vaccination with not much trouble (Phoebe was a little bit nervous) and all managed to pile into Ms. Frizzle's van—Phoebe in the passenger seat, Arnold, Tim and D.A. in the middle section, and Carlos, Ralphie, Wanda and Keesha squeezed into the back.
"All right class, here we go! Remember—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!" Ms. Frizzle pulled a lever on the dashboard, pressed a few buttons, and the van was enveloped in a massive tornado-like wind.
A few seconds later the van was resting perfectly still in the middle of a small field, looking out at a village that looked every bit like how you would imagine a medieval town to look: little huts here and there, pigs in pens, beggars in shabby clothes slumped in the streets. The eight students and their teacher got out of the cramped van and wasted no time in entering the village.
"We may have vaccinations, but I want to stay as far away as I can from them," D.A. whispered to Carlos as they passed a man on the ground, his face and arms covered with open sores. Carlos nodded firmly in agreement.
As the class made their way through the roads of the village, they noticed that hardly anyone was outside. Anyone living, at least. There were bodies piled high everywhere. It looked almost as disgusting as it smelled.
When they did come across a living person, they looked very nervous and reluctant to be outside. They always looked at the nine visitors with fright, probably intimidated by their different appearance.
After they had crossed what seemed like the entire village, Ms. Frizzle stopped at a particular house. "This is the local doctor. They didn't know much about medicine at this time because science wasn't very advanced yet, so doctors did little or nothing to help this epidemic. People still came to see them in hopes of finding a cure, but if the patient ended up getting better it was probably coincidental."
The kids peered through the doorway to see a few people talking to a man who was wearing a sort of mask, presumably as protection against infection. The man turned to see them.
"Are you folks in need of any assistance?" he inquired.
"No, sir. We are just passing through this village," Ms. Frizzle replied, in a flawless Old English accent.
The doctor nodded. "Very well. You had best be on your way; it is not safe to be out with the disease spreading as it is."
Ms. Frizzle nodded and smiled, then beckoned the kids to follow her to the end of the road.
"The basics about this plague are that there were three types: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic. Bubonic was the most common form and 80 percent of people who got it died. Pneumonic was the second most common and about 90 to 95 percent of all people who had it died. Septicemic was the most rare, but nearly 100 percent of anyone who got it died."
Ms. Frizzle paused from her informational speech and looked around at all the kids.
"Your job for this trip is to split up into pairs and look around this village. Ask questions, think about what you see, and try to guess which symptoms belonged to which plague. We meet back at the van in 40 minutes. Go now!"
D.A. and Carlos immediately paired up and left, as well as Arnold and Phoebe. Before Wanda could go partner up with Keesha, Ralphie took her arm and pulled her down a different street, leaving Tim and Keesha.
Ms. Frizzle couldn't help but chuckle to herself as she noticed that all the partners were boy-girl. "They never stay young for long..."
Arnold and Phoebe stopped at a small house near the center of the village. They peeked through the window, trying not to be noticed. Apparently, though, they weren't trying hard enough.
"'Ey! You kids! What're you doin' 'ere?" a woman called at them.
Arnold and Phoebe glanced nervously at each other as the woman eyed them suspiciously. "'Ow come your clothes are so... strange?"
"We are... travelers, from very far away," Arnold said. Phoebe snickered at his attempt at an English accent.
"You shouldn' be out. This bloody sickness 'as already taken my 'ole family, save for Henry. If I jus' had another child, 'e wouldn' be so lonely..." The woman looked with concern at a child of six or seven who was sleeping on a straw mattress but looked relatively well.
Phoebe looked sadly at the child. She knew that he probably wouldn't escape the disease. "We're sorry for bothering you. We'll be on our way now."
She and Arnold took their leave. "Well," said Arnold, "that didn't give us much information."
Phoebe was distraught. "Arnold, that poor little boy is going to die, and so is his mother! We've got to do something! Can't we give them some of the vaccine, or—"
"Pheebs, you know we can't go messing with the past. If we change history, something even worse than a giant epidemic could happen," Arnold said. Phoebe sighed resignedly and was pulled into a hug from Arnold, silent tears falling from her eyes.
Tim and Keesha went to a house on the road next to the one the doctor's was on. Keesha knocked on the door and they waited as a little girl came to the door with wide, frightened eyes.
"H—hello?" she said.
"Uh... hi," Tim said. Maybe they should have come up with something to say before just knocking.
"We're, um... we're apprentice doctors. Is there anything we can do to help you or your family?" Keesha supplied.
Another young girl, maybe a few years younger than Keesha and Tim, came to the door. She was presumably the younger girl's sister.
"None of our family are sick. We thank the Lord for it," she said. "Goodbye."
The door shut in Tim and Keesha's face. "That was a bit rude," Tim put in dejectedly.
"They're all afraid of getting sick, remember. They have a reason to not want unfamiliar people in their home," Keesha said. Tim shrugged and they walked away to try and find someone else to interview.
Ralphie continued to pull Wanda through the village by the wrist until he stopped in front of a house at random.
"Why this place?" Wanda said, observing the house they were standing by. It looked no different from any other building.
"I don't know. It just spoke to me," Ralphie replied.
"The house spoke to you?" Wanda said. "Are you sure it wasn't just the voices in your head?"
Ralphie grinned. "Either way, I'm no one to resist when I hear a mysterious voice telling me to do something. Unless it's homework."
"Come on, Ralphie. We've only got a half hour now!" Wanda pushed him toward the house.
"Well, what are we gonna say?" Ralphie said when they stopped in front of the door.
"We'll tell them we work for the local newspaper and we're writing something on the plague for it."
"One problem. Newspapers won't be invented for another few hundred years."
Wanda rolled her eyes. "Then we'll say we're getting information for the king. Come on!" She rapped on the door. After about 30 seconds nobody had come to the door so Wanda knocked again. They waited for another minute, then Wanda became too impatient and opened the door herself.
She and Ralphie stepped in on an unimaginable scene. There were four corpses in the one-room house, each with a lot of sores and blood trickling from their mouths.
The two of them stared for a moment in combined shock and horror at the dead family—a mother, a father, and three children. They were just turning away to leave when there came a noise from the other end of the house. Wanda stopped and looked back.
She walked cautiously toward the place the noise was coming from and saw a make-shift crib in the corner. She looked inside and saw a malnourished-looking baby, who hadn't even enough strength to cry properly. Apart from being underfed, it looked perfectly healthy.
Wanda picked up the small cloth-swaddled child and turned back to Ralphie. "What do we do with her?" she said, trying her best not to let her eyes water.
"Uh..."
"We should find someone to look after her," Wanda said without waiting for Ralphie to reply.
"No one is gonna want another kid to look after with disease going around like this! They'll either not want another mouth to feed or be scared that she's infected," Ralphie said.
"She's going to starve otherwise!" Wanda said, nearly shouting. "We're not leaving this village until we've found her a new home."
She stormed out of the house with the baby in her arms and after a slight hesitation, Ralphie followed.
D.A. had insisted they look up the plague in her research book before observing the disease itself. After flipping through the pages of her book for ten minutes, she shut it in frustration.
"It doesn't have anything other than what Ms. Frizzle already told us!" she cried. "Shouldn't it at least have more specific dates, and symptoms of each type of plague?"
She stood up and paced back and forth for a minute, then turned to Carlos, who was still sitting on the ground. "What do you think?"
"I think I'm hungry."
"No, about this assignment!" D.A. flicked his ear, annoyed.
"Oh. Well, I think we should do what we're supposed to. Try to guess which symptoms belong to each plague." Carlos stood up. He looked her in the eye and grinned.
D.A. couldn't help it—she grinned back and kissed him on the cheek. "Then let's get going."
The pair set off hand-in-hand to find a household to observe.
Arnold and Phoebe left the house they had visited first and had reached the end of the road to find a new place to visit when they saw Wanda rushing out of another house, carrying something.
Wanda saw Arnold and Phoebe and ran over to them, Ralphie following close behind. "You've got to help! This baby's whole family is dead and she's already hungry and if we don't find her a new home she'll starve and—"
"Whoa! Wanda, slow down! Why don't you explain from the beginning?" Phoebe said.
Wanda told her story and explained that the baby needed help right away. As she was talking, Ralphie was thinking. He had never seen this side of Wanda. She was usually one to keep her feelings of compassion or concern hidden, but now she was close to tears.
She finished her speech and looked at Phoebe pleadingly. Phoebe knew exactly what to do.
"Follow me. I know the perfect place!"
She ran back up the road she and Arnold had come from and the other three followed. She stopped at the house they had just been at and flung the door open. The woman inside looked at her in shock as her son woke with a start.
"I don' know whatcha think yer doin' but—"
"Ma'am, sorry for bothering you like this, but you said you wished you had another child, and we've just found a poor abandoned baby all alone. We were hoping you could take her in..." Phoebe explained.
She took the baby from Wanda and handed her to the woman. As soon as the baby was in the woman's arms, she ceased her attempted crying and brightened up considerably. It seemed as if she was meant for this family.
"O' course I'll take 'er! She's a darlin'." The woman cradled the baby in her arms and rocked her back and forth. She looked up and smiled at Phoebe. "Thank you."
Phoebe smiled back and she and the other three left the house. Arnold turned back on her a bit angrily.
"Phoebe, why did you do that? I told you, we can't change things that happened in the past! For all we know, we could be changing the entire course of events in the history of the world!"
Phoebe looked hurt. "We just saved a baby's life, Arnold. You should be happy about that. I could never leave her to die and you know it!"
"Well, what's done is done. There's no use arguing about it now. Let's go." Arnold turned and went back down the road. Phoebe followed at a short distance.
She knew Arnold was right in some respect. Changing the past could lead to a serious turn of events and it made sense to be concerned, but she was still upset with the way he had gotten so angry about it. She didn't know what to think of him right now.
When the 40 minutes Ms. Frizzle had given them was up, the eight of them returned to the van—some in high spirits, some quite upset, others somewhere in between. Ms. Frizzle was waiting in the van. The students wordlessly found their seats, and they were transported back to the high school.
Back in their classroom, they had just enough time to share their observations and for Ms. Frizzle to tell them more about the plague before it was time to switch classes.
As the class was packing up to leave, Keesha asked, "When are we going on another field trip, Ms. Frizzle?"
"I'm terribly sorry, but since this isn't elementary school any more, we won't be able to have as many field trips as before. Once every week or two, if we're lucky," Ms. Frizzle explained sadly.
The class collectively sighed in disappointment.
"It's time to switch classes now, you'd all better get going," Ms. Frizzle reminded them.
Phoebe left with weight on her mind, still having mixed feelings about Arnold.
I don't usually do end-of-chapter notes, but I just wanted to offer a bit of a disclaimer without spoiling the chapter at the beginning: at the time I wrote this, my only exposure to Old English dialect had been Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I am now aware that the English language was quite different back in those days. I have left the dialogue the way I wrote it in the first place, though, so it'd be comprehensible, and also because I don't know enough about Old English to do it justice anyway.
ALSO, HAHAHAHAH the accent I gave that woman? What was I even thinking? All I could imagine while rereading it was Hagrid talking.