School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles)

  School's Out Forever

  ( Afterblight Chronicles )

  Scott K. Andrews

  “After the world died we all sort of drifted back to school. After all, where else was there for us to go?”

  Lee Keegan’s fifteen. If most of the population of the world hadn’t just died choking on their own blood, he might be worrying about acne, body odour and girls. As it is, he and the young Matron of his boarding school, Jane Crowther, have to try and protect their charges from cannibalistic gangs, religious fanatics, a bullying prefect experimenting with crucifixion and even the surviving might of the US Army.

  Welcome to St. Mark’s School for Boys and Girls…

  Scott K. Andrews

  SCHOOL’S OUT

  FOREVER

  An Omnibus of Post-Apocalyptic Novels

  INTRODUCTION

  I’D LIKE TO start by apologising.

  See, I love these books. Frickin’ love ’em. Obviously, we love all our books equally, here at Abaddon Towers, and I know you’re not supposed to have favourites, but of all the favourites I don’t have, these are among my most illicitly favouritey.

  Scott K. Andrews was a happy discovery. When you’re starting a new imprint, inevitably you tap into your networks: you talk to agents, approach authors you already know, tap (in our case) into the talent pool already working for our sister imprint, 2000 AD; try and get some strong titles out there right away. But having sorted out our first couple of commissions, we floated the world bibles for most of our settings out there for people to submit to. Just to see who’d bite.

  Scott bit. He gave us a couple of concepts, and his Afterblight Chronicles pitch, School’s Out (which you can see at the back of the book, in the bonus material section), grabbed us. And a future Kitschie nominee was born.

  Which makes it sound like he came out of nowhere, but Scott’s prouder than anyone I know that he’s paid his dues and shown his commitment. If there was work, he’s taken it, and given it his all. This is the man who wrote The Unofficial Guide to Dawson’s Creek, and he’s pretty damned proud of that, too.

  So why am I apologising?

  Scott’s an amazing writer, and he captured the feel of Abaddon right away. We need fast-moving and high-action, and he delivered that in spades. We need dark and gritty, and he was all over it. And most of all, we needed really engaging characters. These books weren’t going to be long, and the pace was going to be relentless; the reader would have to connect with the heroes quickly.

  And you will connect with these characters. Shit, you’ll love them. They’ll get under your skin, and you’ll stand with them every step of the way. When they make questionable decisions, you’ll understand, and when they triumph, you’ll glory in it.

  And you know what? Some of them are going to die.

  Not just the bad guys; not just the compromised ones, or the ones that deserve it. Hell, some of the characters who deserve death aren’t going anywhere. But some of the guys you love the most, who you’ll start mentally planning happy-ever-afters for long before the end of the trilogy, will buy it, messily and alone, and for the cruellest and most arbitrary of reasons. And you’ll be totally blind-sided.

  So, yeah. Sorry.

  There’s more than a little of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, here, but it’s a grimier, prouder kind of story. I was always bothered by the way the adults represented such perfect civilisation and restraint in Golding’s classic. The adults had to leave the narrative altogether before the kids could really go off the rails; and when the landing party arrives at the end, there’s a sense that it’s all over now, and the wrongs will be righted.

  But Andrews’ adults lose their shit roughly five minutes before the kids, when The Cull hits, and it’s up to the kids to take care of things for themselves. And when, as the story unfolds and St Mark’s School for Boys and Girls becomes something real, a symbol for hope, and sympathetic adults start crossing over from the rest of the Afterblight world and try and step in, they get short shrift:

  “Don’t you fucking dare, Mr High-And-Mighty-Grown-Up-Man, tell me that children have no place in the front line. Because it’s you lot who’ve bloody put us there. And believe me: every adult we meet is going to regret standing by and letting that happen.”

  It’s a big “fuck-you” to authority, a statement of intent from a band of young men and women who have lost every guardian, guideline and moral compass their old lives offered and had to build up from scratch, and I promise you you’ll be proud of them.

  So again: sorry about what’s coming.

  David Moore (Editor)

  May 2012

  SCHOOL’S OUT

  Original cover art by Mark Harrison

  LESSON ONE

  HOW TO BE A KILLER

  CHAPTER ONE

  I CELEBRATED MY fifteenth birthday by burying my headmaster and emptying my bladder on the freshly turned earth. Best present a boy could have.

  I found his corpse on the sofa in the living room of his private quarters. I’d only been in that room once before, when I was among a group of boarders who pretended to play chess on his dining table while he stood behind us beaming benevolently as part of a photo shoot for the school prospectus.

  He didn’t look so smug now, curled up under a blanket clutching a whisky bottle and a handful of pills. I reckoned he’d been dead for about two weeks; I had become very familiar with the processes of bodily decay in the preceding months.

  I opened a window to let out the stink, sat in the armchair opposite and considered the fate of a man I had hated more than I can easily express. At moments like this the novels I had read always portrayed the hero realising that their hatred had vanished and been replaced by pity and sadness at the futility of it all. Bollocks. I still hated him as much as ever, the only thing missing was the fear.

  The corridor that ran alongside the head’s living room was walled by a thin wooden partition and the dormitory I used to share with three other boys lay on the other side. At night the four of us would lie awake and listen to our headmaster drunkenly arguing with his wife, our matron. We liked her. She was kind.

  He had been no nicer to the boys in his care. His mood swings were sudden and unpredictable, his punishments cruel and extreme. I don’t mean to make St Mark’s sound like something out of Dickens. But our headmaster was a bully, pure and simple. Far worse than any of the prefects he’d appointed, with the possible exception of MacKillick; but he was long gone, thank God.

  I was glad the head was dead, even gladder that his death had come at his own hands. I enjoyed imagining his despair. It felt good.

  Perhaps I should have worried about my mental state.

  I considered pissing on the corpse there and then, but decided it would be crass. Pissing on his grave seemed classier. I was just about to get on with the grisly task of hauling him downstairs when I heard a low growl from the doorway to my right.

  Shit. I’d forgotten the dog.

  Nasty great brute called Jonah. An Irish wolfhound the size of a pony that liked to shag our legs when Master wasn’t around to kick some obedience into it. Always had a hungry look in its eyes, even back then. I didn’t want to turn my head and see how it looked after two weeks locked in a flat with a decaying owner.

  Two things occurred to me: first, that the dog’s fear of its master must have been intense to prevent it from snacking on the corpse, and second, that by the time I was able to rise from my seat it’d be upon me and that would be that.

  The headmaster’s wife left him in the end. One Saturday morning while he was out taking rugby practice she rounded up all the boys who weren’t on the team and togethe
r we helped move her stuff out of the flat into the transit van she had waiting downstairs. She’d kissed us all on the cheek and driven off crying. When he returned and found her gone he seemed bewildered, asked us if we’d seen her go. We all said “no, sir.”

  Perhaps I could roll off the seat to my left, use it as a shield and beat the dog back out of the room. Who was I kidding? It was an armchair; by the time I’d managed to get a useable grip on it I’d be dog food. Despite my probably hopeless position there was an absence of fear. No butterflies in my stomach, I wasn’t breathing faster. Could I really be so unconcerned about my own life?

  Our new matron had a lot of work to do to win over those of us who’d been so fond of her predecessor. For one thing, she didn’t look like a matron. The head’s wife had been middle-aged, round, rosy cheeked and, well, matronly. This impostor was in her twenties, slim, with deep green eyes and dyed red hair. She was gorgeous, and that was a problem — she acted more like a cool older sister than the surrogate mum we all wanted. No teenage boy really wants to hang out with his older sister. I liked her immediately, but everyone else kept their distance. They called her Miss Crowther, refusing to call her Matron, but she won them over eventually.

  Two months into spring term we all went down with flu. There were only eight of us in residence that weekend but since the sanatorium had only four beds the headmaster decreed that we should all remain in our dormitories, in our own beds, in total silence until Monday. Miss Crowther wasn’t having any of that, and confined us all to sickbay, enlisting our help to carry in chairs and camp beds. Then she set us up with a telly and rented us a load of DVDs.

  The headmaster was livid when he found out, and we sat in the San and listened to him bawling at her. How dare she subvert his authority, who did she think she was? He had half a mind to show her the back of his hand. It all sounded very familiar. But she stood up to him, told him that the San was her jurisdiction, that if he interfered with her care of sick boys she’d go to the governors so why didn’t he just shut up and back off? Astonishingly, he did, and Miss Crowther became Matron, heroine to us all.

  The dog’s growl changed tenor, shifting into a full snarl. I heard its claws on the floorboards as it inched its way inside the room, manoeuvring itself to attack. I’d foolishly left my rucksack in the hallway; anything I could have used to protect myself was in there. I was defenceless and I couldn’t see any way out. There was nothing else for it, I’d just have to take the beast on bare fisted.

  When the plague first hit the headlines Matron reassured us that antibiotics and effective quarantine would keep us all safe. The World Health Organisation would ensure that it didn’t become a pandemic. Boy, did she ever get that wrong. But to be fair, so did everyone else.

  There was a big meeting with the governors, parents and staff, and even the students were allowed a say, or at least the sixth-formers got to choose a representative to speak for them; fifth-formers and juniors didn’t get a look in. A vocal minority wanted the school to close its gates and quarantine itself, but in the end the parents insisted that boys should be taken home to their families. One teacher would remain on site and look after those boys whose parents were trapped abroad, or worse, already dead. Matron said she had nowhere else to go, and she remained to tend any boys who got sick. The teacher who stayed alongside her, Mr James, was a popular master, taught Physics, and there had been rumours of a romance between him and Matron in the weeks leading up to the dissolution of the school. One of the boys who stayed behind told me he was secretly looking forward to it. They’d have the school to themselves, and Matron and Mr James were sure to be good fun. It would be just like a big holiday.

  I had passed that boy’s grave on the way up the school driveway an hour earlier. Mr James’s too. In fact almost all the boys I could remember having stayed behind seemed to be buried in the makeshift graveyard that had once been the front lawn. Neat wooden crosses bore their names and dates. Most had died in the space of a single week, two months ago. Presumably the headmaster had returned from wherever he’d been lurking shortly thereafter, had hung around for a while and then topped himself.

  My father was overseas when The Cull began, serving with the army in Iraq. Mother took me home and we quarantined ourselves as best we could. Before communications gave out entirely I managed to talk to Dad on the phone and he’d told me that the rumour there was that people with the blood group O-neg were immune. He and I were both O-negs, Mother was not. Ever the practical man, Dad demanded we discuss what would happen if she died, and I reluctantly agreed that I would return to the school and wait for him to come get me. He promised he’d find a way, and I didn’t doubt him.

  So when Mother finally did die — and, contrary to the reports the last vestiges of the media were peddling, it was not quick, or easy, or peaceful — I buried her in the back garden, packed up a bag of kit and started out for school. After all, where else was there for me? And now, after cycling halfway across the county and surviving three gang attacks en route, I was probably about to get savaged and eaten by a dog I’d last seen staring dolefully up at me with its tongue lolling out as it made furry love to my right leg. Terrific.

  Jonah had now worked his way into the room and stood directly in front of me. His back was hunched, his rear legs crouched down ready to pounce. Fangs bared, eyes wild, feral and furious. This was a very big, very vicious looking beast. I decided I’d go for the eyes and the throat in the first instance, and try to kick it in the nuts at the same time. I didn’t think I could kill it, but with any luck I could disable it enough to force it to retreat and then I could grab my bag, leg it out of the flat and shut the door behind me, trapping it again. The headmaster could bury his own damn self for all I cared. I’d have enough to do tending my bite wounds.

  And then the dog was upon me and I was fighting for my life.

  I wasn’t wearing my biker jacket, but the lighter leather coat I did have on provided some protection to my right forearm as I jammed it into the dog’s gaping mouth. Forced back in my chair by the strength of the attack, I tried to raise my feet to kick the beast away, but its hind legs scrabbled on the hard wood floor, claws clattering for purchase, and I couldn’t get a clear shot.

  I felt the dog’s hot, moist breath on my face as it worried my arm, shaking it violently left and right, trying to get past it to the soft flesh of my throat. I brought my left arm up and grabbed it by the throat, squeezing its windpipe as hard as I could; didn’t even give the beast pause for thought.

  My right forearm was beginning to hurt like hell. The teeth may not have been able to break the skin but the dog’s jaws were horribly powerful and I was worried it might succeed in cracking the bone.

  We were eye to eye, and the madness in those great black orbs finally gave me the first thrill of fear.

  I grappled with the dog, managing to push it back an inch or two, giving me room to bring up both my feet and kick it savagely in the hind legs. Losing its balance, it slipped backwards but refused to relinquish my arm, so I was dragged forward like we were in some ludicrous tug of war.

  I kicked again, and this time something cracked and the dog let go of my arm to howl in anguish. But still it didn’t retreat. I could see I’d damaged its right leg by the way it now favoured its left. Undaunted, the dog lunged for my throat again.

  This time I was ready for it, and instead of using my arm as a shield I punched hard with my right fist, straight on its nose. It yelped and backed off again. Thick gobbets of saliva dropped slowly from its slavering jaws as it panted and snarled, eyeing me hungrily. It couldn’t have eaten in two weeks, how could it possibly still be so strong?

  Before I had time to move again Jonah tried a different tack, lunging for my left leg and worrying it savagely. This time I screamed. Cycling shorts don’t give the best protection, and his teeth sank deep into my calf, giving the animal its first taste of my blood. I leaned forward and rained punches down on his head. I realised that I’d made a fatal mistake
about a tenth of a second after Jonah did, but that was enough. He released my leg and sprang upwards towards my exposed throat, ready to deliver the killing bite. I didn’t even have time to push myself backwards before a loud report deafened me.

  When my hearing faded back in all I could hear was the soft whimpering of Jonah the dog, as he lay dying at my feet. I looked towards the door and there, silhouetted in the light, was the figure of a woman holding a smoking rifle.

  “Never did like that bloody animal,” she said, as she stepped forward into the room. Grimacing, she lowered the rifle, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger again, putting the beast out of its misery. She paused there for a moment, eyes closed, shoulders hunched. She looked like the loneliest woman in the whole world. Then she looked up at me and smiled a beautiful, weary smile.

  “Hello Lee,” said Matron.

  I WINCED AS Matron dabbed the bite wound with antiseptic. The sanatorium was just the same as it had been before I left — the shelves a bit emptier and the medicine cabinet more sparsely stocked, but otherwise little had changed. It still smelt of TCP, which I found oddly comforting. Matron had changed though. The white uniform was gone, replaced by combat trousers, t-shirt and jacket. Her hair was unkempt and make-up was a distant memory. There were dark rings under her eyes and she looked bone tired.

  “The head turned up here about a month ago and tried to take control,” explained Matron. “He started laying down the law, giving orders, bossing around dying children, if you can believe that.”

  I could.

  “He tried to institute quarantine, though it was far too late for that, and burial details made up of boys who were already sick. He seemed quite normal until one day, out of nowhere, he just snapped. No build up, no warning signs. He told Peter… Mr James, to help bury one of the boys, but he was already too ill to leave his bed, and refused. I thought the head was going to hit him. Then he just started crying and couldn’t seem to stop. He went and locked himself in his rooms and wouldn’t come out. I tried, a few times, to coax him out, but all I ever heard was sobbing. Then, after a few days, not even that. I didn’t have the time to see to him, there were boys dying every day and the head was O-neg so I just figured I’d deal with him when it was all over. But when I tried the door all I heard was the dog growling and I, well, I just couldn’t be bothered. Plus, really, I didn’t want to have to bury a half-eaten corpse. Still can’t believe the dog left him alone. Weird.