Miss Grasshopper - Three

Miss Grasshopper - Chapter Three

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.

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"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.

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.

***