Free The Last Teacher by Chris Dietzel Page B

children, all of which were completely shut off from the world, began being born on every part of the globe. The one consistent thing in life, both before the impending human extinction was announced and after it, was that the newspapers and 24/7 news shows covered nothing but corruption, suffering, and death.
    Al Flannigan, one of the Math teachers, slammed his fist against the coffee table and said, “You know what really gets me?”
    Flannigan looked like he was in his late sixties but acted as if he were a thousand years old. Everything made him grumpy.  Everything was an excuse to complain.
    For some reason, Harry Rousner went out of his way to ensure Al’s mood never improved.  A while back, the day after scientists announced a supposed cure for the Blocks was just another dead-end, Harry had asked Flannigan if he still remembered the previous mass extinction from thousands of years earlier.  The Math teacher had looked over at Harry for a moment, his eyebrows tilting in toward his nose.  Then, once he was sure that what he thought he had heard was actually what Harry had said, Flannigan took a swing at the much younger teacher.  After that, Harry had needed to sign a paper declaring he would refrain from any more jokes if he wanted to keep teaching Biology.
    Not even Harry bothered to guess what was bothering Al this day.  It could have been anything.  Maybe it was due to the news that the first round of middle schools had been shut down.  Like the elementary schools a few years earlier, the middle schools would become factories to provide the remaining population with the vital supplies they would need as the infrastructure disappeared around them. Power generators.  Food processors.  Those types of things.  Or maybe Flannigan was upset at the news that the Olympic Committee was getting ready to announce there would never be another round of the international games. It even could have been that Ms. Flannigan, whatever her first name was, had left Al in the middle of the night, choosing to head south by herself rather than spend her remaining time listening to her miserable husband complain about the miserable roads they would be driving on in order to get to the even more miserable city they would be relocating to.  Everyone, it seemed, wanted to head south in pursuit of warmer weather, larger populations, and a semblance of normality.
    “What really gets me,” Al Flannigan said, “is that I’ve been teaching here for forty-two years. Forty-two years!” He banged his fist on the coffee table again. “And how many times do you think I’ve gotten to eat lunch during Fifth Period? Not a single damn time! So, you’d think that now that there are barely any students left, I might get my first choice and get to eat lunch when I want to, right? But no! I still get stuck with my second choice. Maybe when there isn’t a single kid left and I have the entire building to myself, I can finally eat lunch when I want to.  Right, Wachowski?”
    He was looking directly at Barbara Wachowski, the principal and the person who determined when each teacher would get to eat their lunch.  Barbara shrugged and looked down at her feet, which only made the Math teacher throw his hands in the air again.
    “It’s all politics,” he said. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back.  Right, Barbara?”
    Again, the principal only shrugged.
    “That’s really weird,” Harry Rousner said, winking at Wachowski.  “I get to eat lunch during Fifth Period every year and I don’t even like eating lunch then. It probably doesn’t have to do with the bottle of wine I get her each summer.”
    “It’s all politics!” Flannigan yelled again, then stormed out of the room.
    After Al was gone, Harry looked up from the magazine he was reading and said, “I thought for sure he was going to say he was upset because the mathematicians around the world were at as much of a loss as the scientists in trying to figure out