Free Zombies: More Recent Dead by Paula Guran Page B

forearm, like he’s wiping something away.
    “Don’t,” says Miss Mailer. “Don’t do that to him.” But Sergeant doesn’t answer her or look at her.
    Melanie sits two rows behind Kenny, and two rows over, so she can see the whole thing. Kenny goes real stiff, and he whimpers, and then his mouth gapes wide and he starts to snap at Sergeant’s arm, which of course he can’t reach. And drool starts to drip down from the corner of his mouth, but not much of it because nobody ever gives the children anything to drink, so it’s thick, kind of half-solid, and it hangs there on the end of Kenny’s chin, wobbling, while Kenny grunts and snaps at Sergeant’s arm, and makes kind of moaning, whimpering sounds.
    “You see?” Sergeant says, and he turns to look at Miss Mailer’s face to make sure she gets his point. And then he blinks, all surprised, and maybe he wishes he hadn’t, because Miss Mailer is looking at him like Clytemnestra looked in the painting, and Sergeant lets his arm fall to his side and shrugs like none of this was ever important to him anyway.
    “Not everyone who looks human is human,” he says.
    “No,” Miss Mailer agrees. “I’m with you on that one.” Kenny’s head sags a little sideways, which is as far as it can move because of the strap, and he makes a clicking sound in his throat.
    “It’s all right, Kenny,” Miss Mailer says. “It will pass soon. Let’s go on with the story. Would you like that? Would you like to hear what happened to Pooh and Piglet? Sergeant Robertson, if you’ll excuse us? Please?”
    Sergeant looks at her, and shakes his head real hard. “You don’t want to get attached to them,” he says. “There’s no cure. So once they hit eighteen . . . ”
    But Miss Mailer starts to read again, like he’s not even there, and in the end he leaves. Or maybe he’s still standing at the back of the classroom, not speaking, but Melanie doesn’t think so because after a while Miss Mailer gets up and shuts the door, and Melanie thinks that she’d only do that right then if Sergeant was on the other side of it.
    Melanie barely sleeps at all that night. She keeps thinking about what Sergeant said, that the children aren’t real children, and about how Miss Mailer looked at him when he was being so nasty to Kenny.
    And she thinks about Kenny snarling and snapping at Sergeant’s arm like a dog. She wonders why he did it, and she thinks maybe she knows the answer because when Sergeant wiped his arm with spit and waved it under Kenny’s nose, it was as though under the bitter chemical smell Sergeant had a different smell altogether. And even though the smell was very faint where Melanie was, it made her head swim and her jaw muscles start to work by themselves. She can’t even figure out what it was she was feeling, because it’s not like anything that ever happened to her before or anything she heard of in a story, but it was like there was something she was supposed to do and it was so urgent, so important, that her body was trying to take over her mind and do it without her.
    But along with these scary thoughts, she also thinks: Sergeant has a name, the same way the teachers do. The same way the children do.
    Sergeant has been more like the goddess Artemis to Melanie up until now; now she knows that he’s just like everyone else, even if he is scary.
    The enormity of that change, more than anything else, is what keeps her awake until the doors unlock in the morning and the teachers come.
    In a way, Melanie’s feelings about Miss Mailer have changed, too.
    Or rather, they haven’t changed at all, but they’ve become stronger and stronger. There can’t be anyone better or kinder or lovelier than Miss Mailer anywhere in the world; Melanie wishes she was a Greek warrior with a sword and a shield, so she could fight for Miss Mailer and save her from Heffalumps and Woozles. She knows that Heffalumps and Woozles are in
Winnie-the-Pooh,
not the
Iliad,
but she likes