Teaching the Dead!

7

Teaching the Dead!

The classroom full of mummified children stared back at Hagley in silence.

I wont lie, it was a very awkward moment, probably in my top 10 awkward moments of all time.

Hagley however, didn't sense this awkwardness and instead believed that the children had responded to her asking them to say hello to me, the crazy bitch.

Before The End, my friend Hagley was a bit of an enigma. She was both quite posh yet at the same time quite common. I try to remember my friends as much as I can, like they were before the terrible circumstance befell them all. Hagley wasn't deformed so it was easier remembering her as she was before The End, and she didn't try to kill me after The End, which was a nice change of pace.

"Thank you class" she replied "Now, open your textbooks to page 20, today we'll be learning about..." she trailed off, and simply stared for a few moments at the children's corpses propped awkwardly up at their desks, some of them missing limbs (some didn't even have a head), but she didn't seem to mind, then her gaze returned to me.

There was something in Hagley's eyes, a pitiful look of a woman who'd lost something dear to her, it's a look I recognise in my own eyes these days when I happen to catch a glimpse of my reflection in something... reflective.

She sat on her table, which had a thick layer of dust on it "I can't believe you came to see me, shouldn't you be at work?" Hagley asked, her eyes focused on me intently

"Um, somehow I don't think they'll mind" I replied, remembering what my father had told me on my wedding night about never telling a woman that she's crazy. That was good advice.

Hagley smiled at me, a smile that went from comforting to sinister in a matter of seconds "Hey, actually would you mind watching my class whilst I go to the toilet?" she asked me.

I simply nodded, and waited for her to leave. She didn't leave the room: instead I heard a dripping noise and realised that she was indeed going to the toilet right in front of me, on the desk, all the while her eyes were fixed on me. I stepped back as the pooling liquid approached me.

As I backed away I glanced down at where Professor Humperdink had been standing, he was now up on a bookshelf giving me a look that signalled he thought she wasn't just one sandwich short of a picnic, but she'd forgotten the whole picnic hamper and just turned up for a picnic with a plastic bag full of dead babies.

"So..." I began "how's your fella Myke, these days?"

Myke was Hagley's better half, and he liked two things. Cooking and Quantum Physics. Two things that go in hand in hand. He'd trained to be an archaeologist, like most people who got sucked in by archaeology's poster boy Indiana Jones. Myke had dreamed of discovering ancient treasures, fighting off Nazi's and wearing a fedora indoors, however it didn't work out as planned and instead he worked as a manager for Dynamite, a logistics company that if you asked him, he wouldn't be able to tell you what they actually did, as it bored him that much.

Out of everyone I knew, he was the most likely to survive due to a vast knowledge of survival techniques, that unlike me, he hadn't learn off of Fallout 3. (A computer game for the un-initiated)

As I asked her about him however, her smile disappeared almost instantly, and tears began streaming from her eyes that I realised hadn't blinked once the whole time I was there. She was all kinds of wrong.

"Myke will... be back any minute now. He'll meet me after class"

Another awkward silence, the kind you'd get if you farted really loud in a lift full of strangers.

It was obvious at that time, that something horrendous had happened to Myke. I wondered if he had gone the way of Shav and turned into a gluttonous mass or if he, like Hagley, had slipped into a mental minefield of wrongness. He was one of the only people I've met so far who had blossomed due to The End, but that's another story for another entry.

Suddenly, Simba (sans sick) rushed into the room in a panicked fashion. "Guv'na" he panted in his high pitched cockney voice "I just saw something coming down the apple and pears, and it doesn't look friendly"

Amazing, not only could my cat talk, but he had some concept of cockney rhyming slang, something he didn't pick up from me that's for sure. The doorway that he had ran from was suddenly masked by the monstrosity that Simba had just ran from.

Whatever it was it had a regular sized body for an eight year old girl, but it's neck was elongated ending in a very large head with bulging eyes and a mouth the size of a baby deer. The face had a tint of purple to it and the creature's skin was wrinkled like some kind of hairless cat. All in all the, creature looked like what I expected Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy's demonic offspring would look like.

I expected that this was the end for me and my two cats, that I would never see my long suffering lady wife Louise again (with what happened to her sometimes I wish I never had) I waited for the inevitable.