The teachers’ stoic moment shattered with but one word.
“Teenagers.”
Mrs. Jasmine, known for her blue spectacles, dropped her mug to the ground and stared at the door.
“No,” she whispered.
The gym teacher, a portly man by the name of Coach Heim, did a double-take, and dove for the cabinet to find the sharpest knife there.
The other teachers went for whatever they could find. One carried a broom, another shattered a mug and held the jagged piece still attached to the handle.
“How long do we have?” one asked, subtly shaking with fear.
The English teacher, Patrick, swallowed a lump of spit that had grown in his throat. “Only a few minutes,” he said.
Someone reached out for the light switch, plunging the room into tense darkness.
They all sucked in a gasp when the cacophony came. Someone was playing a punk song exactly one decibel louder than any adult could stand. Sneakers squeaked as a morose omen.
“This is wrong,” one of them muttered and glanced at his hand in the dark room. He closed his fist.
His name was Herbert, and his tombstone would later read of his foolhardy nature.
“We are teachers,” he said.
He took a step past the others, and threw down his coffee maker weapon, clattering it to the ground.
“We teach, we do not fear—these are our students.”
“Do not open that door,” Mrs. Jasmine whispered.
Herbert frowned at them, chastising them in his head, before he slammed open the door and marched out into the hallway, confronting the wave of oncoming teenagers without more than a passing fear in his heart. He walked forward, out of sight, fists clenched.
“Where is your hall pass!?” Herbert demanded, his voice loud and defiant. “How dare this many of you come here without a hall pass! Go to your classrooms!”
A horrible drawn-out scream came only moments later, along with shuffling feet and the cracking of bones.
Mrs. Jasmine reached out and gently closed the door again. She even locked it.
The other teachers, each of them with families and friends and dreams, shivered and prepared for them to come. It did not take long. Several shadows fell over the entrance.
The door fell off its hinges with a bang.
Some teachers rushed forward to fight, others hid in the back, and some even attempted to steal clothing from the defeated children to appear as one of them.
But, by the end, only a lucky few remained. The coach stood, numb. The math teacher stared at his hands and tried to figure a math problem complex enough to distract himself from the images seared into his mind.
Mrs. Jasmine, covered in blood from both friends and foes, cried softly. “God in heaven, I beg you…can it be summer already?”
—