Glowpeak Academy was a nineteenth century manor house. It was long, at least three stories high, and surrounded by there most dazzling array of flowers. The blues, pinks, and yellows were quickly fading in the Autumn air, but they hadn't completely disappeared yet. The manor had countless windows of all kinds, facing every direction. The grass lawn extended to the tree line, about two acres away on each side. To the left side of the house was what appeared to be a fire pit, and a small shed stood nearby. The sun was beaming down upon the front of the house, making it hard to look at because of all the windows and the reflectiveness of the light gray stone.
The entrance was marked by a pair of great wooden doors. Mr. Simmons pulled his car up to the front of the house and Mr. Durand parked behind Mr. Simmons. The boys got out and stretched their legs and Mr. Durand helped them with their bags. Louis had twice as many bags as Charles. Mr. Simmons led the way up the steps and to the door, where he knocked.
“The door can only be opened from the inside, unless you have the key,” he explained, pointing to a small hole in the wall next to the door. Only the Headmaster and the head of security have those keys. And the head of the Flesheater Defense Division.”
“Who's that?” Charles asked.
“Tyler Lyn,” said Mr. Simmons. “He went to school with David Corban. His youngest son, Gordon, is graduating from here this year.”
The door seeing open. A tall man with big glasses and this, graying hair stood in the doorway.
“Ah, Mr. Simmons,” said the man. “These are the new students?”
“Yeah,” said Mr. Simmons. “Charles, Louis, this is Mr. Buckley. He'll be administering your tests. He's one of the science teachers and the supervisor of Team Brown.”
“How do you do?” Mr. Buckley shook their hands. “Why don't you all come in? The Headmaster is waiting for you, Mr. Durand. And lunch is waiting for you two.”
Mr. Simmons led Mr. Durand away to the headmaster's office and Mr. Buckley led Louis and Charles to a room just off the entrance. Inside the room was a lot of old furniture, including to sofas, a desk, a card table, and an armchair. He directed then onto one of the sofas and he say on the edge of the armchair.
There were lunch trays on the table in front of them, serving grilled cheese sandwiches, water, and celery sticks.
“It's not much of a welcoming feast, but it'll suffice,” said Mr. Buckley. “We have the tests ready when you're finished eating.”
Charles and Louis shoveled down their food, remembering halfway through the meal to thank Mr. Buckley. He just waved it off and told them that he was by no means a cook. If it was left to him, they'd probably starve or die of food poisoning. It didn't take them long to eat and soon they were sitting up in their chairs, wondering if they could buy a little time before their tests, but they had no such luck. They had to go to class on Monday, so they needed to take the tests immediately.
“I have to brief you before we begin,” Mr. Buckley warned them. “In case you change your minds. It doesn't happen a lot, but once in awhile we get a student who hasn't quite realized what they've gotten themselves into. And sometimes they're even brave enough, or scared enough, to say so.
“This school, as I'm sure you both already know, is meant to prepare you both mentally and physically to fight flesheaters so you can defend yourself and others from them in the future. If you do not plan to follow a career path involving zombie fighting, you may want to consider attending a regular school. We will, of course, teach the basic skills you need to survive in the regular world, but it would be more helpful to you if you went to a another school that specializes in normal education. This school is rigorous and the curriculum slows down for no one. If you don't think you can handle the load, you also might want to reconsider.”
He looked at them both very seriously over the rims of his big glasses. “Are you sure?”
They both nodded slowly and he stood.
“Alright then. One last thing before I take you to the testing room. You may, at times, find yourself facing real danger here. We have an excellent security system, probably one of the best in the world. You would be hard-pressed to find a safer place. But there are cracks that can't be filled, as there always are. If you are not prepared to face possible danger, then you are not ready to attend this school and you should say so right now. If you are ready, then follow me.”
Mr. Buckley led them down a narrow hallway where, at the very end, a door stood ajar. They followed him into the room and he closed the door behind them. There were about twenty desks in the room and Charles was told to sit at the front of the room and Louis, at the back. There was a stack of paper on a large desk at the very front of the room. Mr. Buckley lifted two packets off of the top of the stack and passed one to each boy.
“You have ninety minutes to take this test. It will not affect your entry into this school. It's purpose is simply to gauge your current knowledge of all of these topics. You may begin now.”
Charles scanned the first page of his test. The title identified it as the “General History Exam.” He flipped to the back page and found the last question, finding that there were a total of 60 questions. Charles didn't know much about history. English and math were his strong suits, but as a sixth grader, he really didn't know much about them either. In an hour he'd managed to locate all the questions he was pretty sure he knew the answers to, which added up to about five, and fill in random answers on the remaining questions. He spent the last 30 minutes staring off into space and then drawing a zombie on the front page. It wasn't very accurate though, since Charles wasn't much of an artist. It basically amounted to a stick figure with a crooked face and bloodshot eyes. The grimace he attempted to make looked more like a creepy smile.
“Please close your test books at this time,” said Mr. Buckley.
Charles and Louis both had their books closed already, so they just sat still and stared up at Mr. Buckley. He walked to each of their desks, picking up the General History Exam booklet and replaced it with another packet. The “Zombie History Exam.”
“Dinner is in two hours at five o'clock, so you'll have 30 minutes to get ready after the test. Don't let your dinner distract you from your test. You have ninety minutes. You may begin.”
Charles repeated his standard testing procedure and found that there were, again 60 questions. He turned to the first question and read it carefully:
- What is the location of the first Great Flesheater War battle?
- New York City
- Glowpeak Village
- Lake Town
- Hostage Hill
He decided to make a good guess and select b, Glowpeak Village. It seemed the most likely, since it was the only place he'd heard of other than New York City and it seemed unlikely for it to have happened there without the entire world being aware of it. Plus, the name and location of the school made sense based on this answer. He moved on to the second question:
- Who was the leader of the original Flesheater Defense League and the founder of Glowpeak Academy?
- Peter Codmore
- Phillip Corban
- Ronan Hunter
- Ewan Butler
Charles knew none of these names. He had an inkling that he'd heard the name Corban around somewhere, but he wasn't sure where. All he could do was give it his best guess, so he selected option b.
He continued in this manner for the remainder of the test. There were a couple things he knew and many things that he had no clue where to begin to think about. The minutes ticked by and finally Charles managed to complete the test. Soon after he did, Mr. Buckley called time and told them to close their test books. Charles felt like jumping out of his seat, but he restrained himself. He'd been sitting there for so long, three hours to be exact, and he wanted to get up and explore the school. He and Louis stood up and started towards the door, but Mr. Buckley called to them to stop.
“Boys, where are you going?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Um,” said Charles, considering the question carefully. “Out?”
“Dinner is in half an hour and I need to show you both to your room and where the cafeteria is. Wait.”
Charles and Louis sighed impatiently, but stayed in the room. He pounded his fist against the palm of his hand in an invitation. A game of paper, rock, scissors commenced, with Charles winning ten out of fifteen rounds. Finally, Mr. Buckley walked out the door, waving for the boys to follow him. He led them back down the hallway a few feet and into a room on the right. They followed him into the room, where he turned to face them.
“This is one of the guest rooms,” he said. “You will be staying here until Sunday evening, when you will find out which team you're on. At that point you will move into a dormitory for your team.”
There were six beds in the room, all with uniform white bedding. Two windows peeked out from between the beds, shining light on most of the room. Their luggage was there, but it was all mixed up in a pile on the floor. Louis moved to claim his luggage, but Mr. Buckley interrupted him midstride.
“I need to show you where the cafeteria is. Follow me.”
Back they went through the hallway. They passed a classroom full of students and a girl, obviously bored, stared at them as they walked by. They stopped just outside a large room with a dozen long tables stretched across it's floor.
“This is the cafeteria. Dinner starts at five, as I've already informed you. I will see you both there, I'm sure,” Mr. Buckley said.
He walked away, leaving them standing in the cafeteria’s doorway. A bell rang somewhere in the school and within seconds the hall was flooded with students.
“We'd better go,” said Charles. “I don't want to get stuck here.”
They followed the floor of traffic towards their room. When they reached their room, they had to shove through the crowd of students just chilling out in the hallway. Charles did his bags out of the pile on the floor and Louis pulled his luggage towards one of the beds. Charles also choose a random bed and threw his bags onto the mattress. He looked over at Louis's bed where he was unpacking one of his bags.
“You know we're moving in a couple of days, right?” asked Charles.
“Yeah, but you still need the essentials of everyday,” said Louis, pulling a camera out of the bag.
“How many essentials do you have?” Charles asked, then shook his head. “Actually, don't answer that. With four bags, that list could be longer than my attention span.”
Louis ignored him. Charles looked around for a clock and finally found one by the adjoining bathroom. It was really minutes till five, but Charles was already getting impatient.
“Are you almost done, Louis?” he called.
“Yeah. Give me two minutes,” Louis responded.
Charles sighed. He decided that whole he was waiting, he might as well check out the bathroom. It was the oldest looking bathroom he'd ever seen. There was a window draped in flowery curtains above an old fashioned looking toilet and a chipped mirror hung on the wall next to it, right above a porcelain sink with engraved steel knobs. A wooden box sat in a corner across from the toilet, containing towels and miniature bottles of hair products. In the other corner was a shower, which looked like there most up to date feature in the bathroom, but even that seemed to be at least a decade old.
“If it ain't broke,” muttered Charles.
“Come on, Charles,” Louis yelled from the bedroom. “I'm done.”
Charles turned his back on the old bathroom and walked into the bedroom where Louis was waiting with his hand on the door knob. He opened the door when he saw Charles and Charles followed him out of the room. The hallway was still crowded, but now the crowd was flowing in a single direction: to dinner. Charles could smell it from the doorway. As soon as they stepped out of their room Louis and Charles were swept up in the stampede, which never paused until it had arrived at its destination.
Students flooded into the room, chattering endlessly. Some adults stood scattered among the crowd and more entered every second. Soon the room was full of students and teachers, sitting or standing. It took five minutes for everyone to find a seat, filling eleven of twelve tables. The twelfth was about half full of older students and a couple of adults. The main difference between them was their apparel. Students wore school uniforms and the adults seated at the last table wore regular clothes. One younger girl was sitting there too, at the very end. As Charles made their way to the table, Charles recognized her as the girl who had stared at them from her classroom earlier. The boys sat down in the open space between the older kids and the girl. She scooted down the table to them. Charles thought she must have been their age, but he wasn't sure.
"You guys are the new kids?" she asked. She still looked bored and like she didn't expect much from them.Charles wasn't sure what to say. He kind of just stared at her curiously."I'm Lennon and I'm a third generation zombie slayer," she said, holding out her hand.
"I'm Charles," said he, shaking it. "And I'm clueless."
"In other words, he's a first generation," said Louis, pushing Charles's arm away and shaking Lennon's hand himself. "I'm a second generation and I was born in France."
"I can tell," said Lennon, scrunching her nose. "Paris, right?"
"No, actually. I was born in --, but I was raised in Paris."
Lennon nodded. "That explains it." She turned to Charles and tapped her nose. "It's the smell."
Louis's mouth dropped open and Charles laughed out loud. The girl didn't look malicious. She was clearly just joking.
"It's okay," she said. "My grandfather is a Parisian. He stinks too." She turned to Charles and he smiled."And you're from New York, aren't you?" she asked.
"Do we have a smell too?" Charles countered.
"No. I'm from New York. I recognized the shirt," she said.
Charles looked down at his shirt. He had forgotten he was wearing his "New York Rocks!" t-shirt. He'd won it from a school raffle in fifth grade, so it still fit him. The governor of New York had designed the shirt and each school in New York had received a couple to give away to lucky students. The t-shirt design hadn't been officially released yet, but it was scheduled to be in November.
A teacher walked up to their table at that moment. She was a tall woman and didn't seem much older than the other kids sitting at their table. Charles could tell she was a teacher because of the air of authority she carried and by her own uniform. She was looking at them as if she could and would tell them what to do. Charles guessed that it was her favorite part of the job. A woman like this had to love being in charge.
"Miss Marchand," she said, addressing Lennon with a raised eyebrow. "I think you know where you should be, so why don't you save us the time and trouble by getting yourself there?"
Lennon rolled her eyes. "There are no rules about where students are allowed to sit, Miss Perry. It's just a suggestion. I checked the student handbook."
Miss Perry's gaze narrowed. "I remember this conversation. We've had it multiple times. The other teams have asked that we use this system of separation because they wish to keep problems contained."
"One of these two could be a problem, but we're not keeping them contained," Lennon retorted angrily.
Miss Perry smiled. "You know it's very unlikely that either of these students will make it onto your team. Even if they did, there are only two of them and they're both at this table. In consider that containment."
"Then why can't you contain me here, too?"
"As I've already explained to you, Miss Marchand, if you decide to sit somewhere besides where you're meant to, it will encourage others to do the same, and then there will be complete chaos," said Miss Perry. "We haven't had a fist fight in three years. I suggest we do our best to prevent that from changing."
"Yeah, three years because we're smarter than you," Lennon murmured, but she stood up anyways. “Good luck, boys. I would say I hope to see one of you on my team, but I know that would be a terrible thing to wish upon my enemies, and especially my friends. I'd rather not cause any more problems.”
Lennon glared at Miss Perry and walked away to a table with two empty seats and picked one of them. Miss Perry was still standing at their table.
"I'm sorry you had to witness that," she told them. "She's on Team Brown, the home of the troublemakers. She's always doing things like this to cause trouble, just like the rest of her team. They're actually the reason we started separating the teams from each other at dinner. The other teams don't feel safe around them, so they requested all the teams to have assigned tables. They wanted to spare the feelings of the younger team members. But it has worked. There hasn't been a fight since."
Charles and Louis stared at her. They didn't think it was a problem for Lennon to sit where she liked, especially if there was no rule against it. She hadn't been bothering anyone, and If she'd been bothering them, they would have told her to go away. She'd been nice enough to Miss Perry when confronted.
Charles found himself wondering about Team Brown and about this girl. He did it all through dinner.Two doors opposite the entrance to the cafeteria had been thrown open at five after the hour, once everyone was settled, and students had filled up into a line, table by table, to get food. They went in through one door and came back into the cafeteria through the other, a lot like they had at Charles's old school. The difference was that students could get in line whenever they wanted to at Richard C. Grant Middle School. Here they had to wait until it was their table's turn, and if they didn't get in line with their team, they probably wouldn't get food.
Charles and Louis's table went first, since it was apparently the guest table. They got their food and sat back down at their table. Dinner was baked chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy and a dinner roll-on the side. They each got a small salad, a cup of water, and a cookie too, if they wanted them.
Charles noticed, as he began to dig into his food, that the teachers' table had gone next, followed by two tables near theirs. They were followed by two others and so were those tables, and so on until only two tables were left, including the one Lennon was sitting at. He couldn't help wondering if they'd done it on purpose, as some kind of punishment, but as Lennon and her teammates brought their food back to their tables he brushed the thought aside. It was probably just their turn to go last. It had to be a coincidence that they were going last the same day that Charles and Louis arrived.The food was really good and Charles was really hungry. It seemed that the tests were wearing him out already. His food was gone by the time the last Team Brown member had taken his seat. He gulped his water and sat looking around, nibbling on the remnants of his cookie for a few minutes until Louis, who was a steady eater, had finally finished his meal.
“So,” said Charles. “What did you think of that scene?”
Louis shrugged. “There was something off about it. I’m not entirely sure what it was though. Lennon didn’t seem too bad. She’s pretty too.
Charles nodded. He wasn’t sure to think either.
A few minutes later, a man sitting at the teacher table stood up and called for silence. Everyone gave them their full attention, including Lennon, Charles noticed.He gave the man his attention too, mimicking his new peers.
“Good evening,” said the man. “For the two of you in this audience who may not know me, I am Headmaster Cannon Percival. You may call me Headmaster Percival, or if you like, Headmaster will do also. I hope you have all enjoyed your Friday and I’m sure you’ve all been looking forward to the weekend as I have, but I do have a few announcements to make before you go to bed, or whatever else. On Sunday evening we will be holding the team announcements for our new students. I expect you all to attend.”
He looked pointedly at Team Brown and Charles saw that a few of them were shaking their heads, but very slightly.
"Furthermore," he continued, "I must announce the first training exercise of the year. This will be on October 20th. You will all need to meet in your teams at the appointed areas at six pm. As the day drawer nearer, appointed rooms will be posted on the bulletin. We will also remind you at dinner that night. We are also looking for volunteers to help clean the kitchen and cafeteria. It's a difficult task with small numbers and we've had a small number of students in detention lately. While that's good and really an accomplishment, it does mean we have less people to clean. For those who volunteer, there might be some special privileges awarded.That's all for tonight. Everyone have a good weekend and may you all stay safe and honest."
The man finished speaking and reclaimed his seat. As he did, nearly all of the students packed into the room stood up and began to swell toward the exit. The floor that had carried Charles and Louis into the cafeteria a half hour earlier carried them back out into the hallway and straight to their room. Full of food and exhausted, the boys barely said a word before falling asleep.
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