Miss Grasshopper - Chapter Three

Sue held back a scream as the barricade at their door buckled. The desk they'd shoved up against it squealed against the floor as it was pushed back.

Attracting the alien's attention had been... perhaps not the best idea she'd ever had. At the moment, Melanie was crouching behind another desk, using a metal ruler's tip to pry a bullet out of the barrel of her rifle. "Can you take care of that one?" she asked nicely.

"Got it," Sue said. She gingerly crossed the room, her attention split between the doorway and the window overlooking the playground. They hadn't seen any flying aliens nearby, but she was acutely aware that they existed and that they might come to get them soon enough.

The door buckled again, and a long, toothy maw pried itself in between the crack of the doorway and sniffed audibly.

Sue levelled her handgun at the alien's face, firmed up her grip, set her feet quickly, then aimed between the two little posts at the side of the gun until the glowing nub on the end of the barrel and the two posts were all even with the alien's face.

She pulled the trigger, and there was a loud bang, then another, and another.

It took three carefully placed shots for the alien to finally pull back, its face punched through in two spots and a third hole pierced through the door just a few centimetres off.

"It's not dead," she said.

"These guns fire point-two-five ACP," Melanie said. "They have as much kinetic power as a well-thrown bouncy ball."

Sue nodded, then looked at the little gun in her hand. That had been three rounds, which meant that there were nine left before she had to reload. She resisted the temptation to do that right away, she didn't have many magazines, and she didn't want to end up with a pocket-full of half-empty ones.

And this was definitely a situation that called for avoiding half-empty things.

"I think it's bleeding a little," Sue said as she leaned to the side and tried to see out of the crack. There was a glimpse of the alien pulling away and shaking its dog-like head, and some splatters of greenish-black blood.

"I don't know if the aliens can bleed out," Melanie replied. "I mean... I suppose they ought to, if they need blood and you exsanguinate them."

"Don't we have a module on alien biology?" Sue asked. "I think later in the year?"

It was strange just how... normal the discussion was. Death was lingering on the other side of the door, but here they were talking about which classes were coming up on their schedule.

"It's near the end of the year, for the eight-graders. But I never really spent much time teaching biology," Melanie said. "I've done some substitution work, and I keep up with the material, but... well, maybe I'm a bit of a failure in that respect. It's hard for me to remember everything if I'm not actively preparing to teach it."

"No, I think that's normal," Sue replied. "It would be hard to remember the entire curriculum. I'm sure we could pull it up."

"Sure," Melanie replied.

Sue almost jumped out of her own skin as the alien returned, bashing its head into the crack with more force before pulling back. The strike had shoved the desk back a centimetre or so. She leaned back, then pushed against it with a foot, but it was too heavy to move without putting her back into it, and that would mean being far closer to the door than she wanted.

So, instead, she aimed at the opening and waited.

This time, when the alien shoved its head into the crack, she fired at it twice, and it fell back with an additional pair of holes in its face.

"That's... seven left," she said, looking at her gun.

"Might want to be careful with that count," Melanie said. "I've heard stories of those magazines being a round short every so often."

"Seriously?" Sue asked.

"The way they check to see how many rounds are loaded is by weight, and the tolerance is... loosy-goosy, sometimes. At least, that's the story I heard," Melanie replied.

Sue shook her head. There was no way that was true. It sounded more like the kind of excuse a corporation's PR team would come up with to justify some cost-saving method. If one in every five magazines was one round short, then they'd save... some amount of money.

"Oh, got it," Melanie said as she stood. Sue glanced over to see Melanie place a bullet, shell and all, onto the desk. The end of it was opened up, and the actual bullet part was long gone. The shell looked like it had deformed in the barrel a little, which was probably what caused the jam. She wasn't a weapon's expert or anything--not that she was averse to learning--but something told her that the issue here was a confluence of cheap gun and cheap bullet meeting in the middle to create a small mess.

Melanie closed the little breech on her rifle, then pulled back the tab-thing on the side to get another round in. "Let's see if this works," she said.

The older teacher came to stand next to Sue and aimed into the crack by the door. When the dog-alien shoved its head into the entrance again, Melanie fired three times before her gun made a noise.

That was enough, the bigger rounds punched into the alien's head and it flopped down onto the desk, very dead.

"It's jammed again," Melanie said.

"Take the other rifle, I guess," Sue said.

"Better than nothing," Melanie replied as she pulled out the magazine and set the gun aside. "I'll still try to fix it, you never know."

"Right," Sue agreed. She paused. Now what? "Should we... move?"

"I think that might be a mistake," Melanie said. "But then again... they'll know we're here, won't they?"

"There's something about pheromones secreted by dead antithesis... wow, I really do need to brush up on my xenobiology," Sue said. She giggled, then stopped as the sound felt utterly wrong in this context.

"There's an office a few rooms down," Melanie said. "The vice-principal's. It shouldn't be locked, and if it is, I know the code for the door. I think there might be another weapon safe in there."

"Wouldn't they have taken it?" Sue asked.

"Off for the week," Melanie replied.

"Oh... well, yes, that makes sense," Sue said. "Okay... help me move the desk back?"

It took a bit, but soon enough the two of them were sneaking their way out of the classroom. Sue gingerly stepped over the corpse by the doorway. A model two, if she wasn't mistaken. She remembered calling them 'Bad Doggies' in her notes, which was a fairly common name for this kind. She never expected, or wanted, to be this close to one, living or dead.

The school was strangely quiet. She'd never heard the school without the constant chatter and squeaking of a dozen shoes, a hundred children talking. Even during the weekend, or after the school was closed, it never quite went away.

The hallways had the same sort of silence, an emptiness that felt almost tangible.

Sue almost jumped when Melanie's hand touched her own. The older woman was holding her rifle in her off-hand so that she could hold onto Sue. Sue was reassured, for a moment, before she realized that Melanie's hand was trembling. "Are you okay?" she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

"Do you know why I became a teacher?" Melanie asked.

Sue shook her head.

They stopped at a corner. Sue was holding the pistol, and she peeked around.

Nothing.

Sue kept glancing at the other teacher, wondering where this was going.

After a minute, Melanie spoke. "My mother was a teacher. Not at this school. She was a primary school teacher at a state-funded school. One of the bad ones. She was... good. Great, even. There's a difference, you know, between a teacher that's good at teaching, and a teacher who is a great teacher."

"I... don't understand," Sue admitted.

"Being good means knowing how to teach. Knowing the material, the best practices, how to reach out to students and help them understand and be prepared," Melanie said. "Being great means more than that. It means caring for your students. My mother was great."

"Was," Sue repeated.

"She was shot by one of her students. He was troubled, had a hard time with a lot of things, but my mom kept trying to reach out to him. I miss her."

"Oh," Sue said.

They reached the vice-principal's office, and Melanie tried the door. It clicked open. "Easy-peasy," she said with a smile that she shared with Sue.

She was just opening the door with a crackle that sounded a lot like broken glass being shifted when Sue noticed that there was something wrong. Her brain barely registered what it was before Melanie gasped.

Her hand was wrenched away from Sue's, her rifle went off, tracing bullets along the wall and ceiling and making enough noise that Sue found herself screaming even as she flinched away.

When she opened her eyes, she discovered blood and hungry alien eyes.

***