Quarantine

Adalynn walked into her classroom noticing that something was wrong. Most of her friends were acting strange. She had overheard her mom talking to her father talking about something going on and that Rachel was going to take a day off from work to get some sleep. Addie wished that she got to stay home. She didn’t like sitting through a class that she found quite boring.

“Morning, Adalynn,” Mrs. Jacobs called out to her. The teacher had a bright smile and tried to hide the lack of sleep that was edging on her face. The other teachers had asked if there was something wrong with her home life when that was it. She just hadn’t gotten any sleep for the last three days.

Addie smiled and greeted the teacher like she usually did. There was something about this morning that seemed extremely off, but she was eight and like any child her age didn’t think much about it. She just walked back to her seat in the middle of the room next to Jade Matthews and Michael Johnson.

Jade was a nice girl who usually kept to herself. She usually drew flowers on every piece of paper that was in front of her. Now, she was drawing pumpkins with triangular shaped features as the eyes and nose and with square teeth. Halloween was still a few weeks away, but Jade always got into the spirit of Halloween in August. She already started think about what she was going to dress up as.

Michael was guy who liked to tease Jade and Adalynn. He wasn’t mean about it, and the two girls didn’t get bothered by it. He rarely paid any attention to what the teacher was talking about. He would work out the problems with the help of both Jade and Addie who were more helpful than the teacher in his eight year old opinion.

“How’s your morning?” Michael asked, looking at Addie.

She shrugged and looked at him. “Alright,” she muttered, almost mimicking how Baden said it. Addie’s parents were starting to see that Addie was starting to act more and more like her older sister. This worried both Rachel and Nathan. They didn’t want her moving out when she was sixteen like Baden, and they were determined to find a way for Addie to stay home for as long as possible.

Mrs. Jacobs got up and shut the door once the bell rang on the intercom. She started to talk about the lesson, noticing that the whole class was bored. She tried he best to make it as interesting for them as she possibly could. She could also see that some of the students were like her tired and probably having nightmares and seeing things. She wanted to talk to them about it, but she figured that they wouldn’t open up to it. There were only two students in the class room that didn’t look affected by whatever it was that was going around.

She looked closely at Adalynn and Michael, wondering if they were just better at hiding it. When she got a close look at Addie, she became more worried. Adalynn looked like she was skin and bones now, but when Mrs. Jacobs had saw her walk into the classroom, she looked like she ate like she should. She closed her eyes and took a deep breathe. She looked at Adalynn who looked normal now. She didn’t know what was going on with her.

She went over and started to get the papers for today’s assignment. She figured that she would take it a little easy on them today. She told them to do only the even numbers and smiled when the class was excited that the work was cut in half for them.

There was silence as the class started to work on the assignment and tried to get it finished before having to move on to the next assignment. The class hated homework and were always happy when they had it finished. There was only the soft scratching sound of pencils on paper and the sound of yawns coming from most of the class.

Then out of nowhere the girl sitting in the back corner of the room screamed, “There’s something wrong. Something’s attacking me.” She moved and fell out of her chair and into the floor. Her butt landed hard on the hard ground with a loud thump.

Mrs. Jacobs got up and rushed over to Alyssa who was still screaming for help. Mrs. Jacobs sunk to her knees and tried to calm the poor girl. The sound of the door opening behind the teacher didn’t make her look towards it.

“What’s going on?” a male voice asked. It sound like the principal Joseph Murray. He walked over to Maria and the girl screaming the floor. “We need to get her to the nurse.”

Joseph waited until they had calmed the girl down before picking her up and carrying her to the nurse’s office. He figured that she would get there much faster if she was carried instead of her walking. No one objected to it because they knew that Alyssa probably wouldn’t want to walk anyways. The nurse didn’t waste any time going about asking what happened and checking the girls eyes and limbs to make sure she didn’t hurt herself when she fell.

Adalynn had watched the whole thing happened and didn’t know what to make of the situation. No one in the class did. Nothing had ever happened like that, and this made Adalynn think about what she had heard about the old man who had escaped from the nursing home. She was able to grasp the depth of what was happening, but she knew that this was bad, and that she needed to worry. Her parents would tell her not to, but she still would. She wasn’t old enough to realize that what was going on was something very bad and very frightening to everyone including her parents and pretty much every adult in the town.