CHAPTER 1: The New Student in 1B
It was supposed to be a normal Tuesday at Oak Creek Elementary. I’m just a teacher. My biggest worry is usually getting twenty six-year-olds to sit still for “Rug Time” or breaking up fights over who gets to be the line leader. I wipe noses, I tie shoes, and I teach the alphabet.
Then Elias walked in.
He was the new transfer student in my class, Room 1B. He was small for his age, a waif of a child with pale skin and platinum blonde hair that was cut in a severe, military-style buzz. But it was his eyes that unsettled me. They were blue—piercingly blue—and devoid of that spark of wonder you usually see in first graders.
He didn’t cry when his foster mother dropped him off. He didn’t wave goodbye. He just walked in, found the cubby with his name on it, placed his backpack inside with robotic precision, and sat at his desk.
During the morning lesson on vowels, he didn’t participate. He just sat there, staring at the wall, tapping a piece of plastic against the laminate table.
Click. Click. Click.
It was a small, rhythmic sound, but in the quiet classroom, it was maddening. The other kids—Lily, Jason, Noah—were starting to look at him weirdly.
I stopped reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar and walked over to his table.
“Elias?” I asked softly, putting on my best encouraging smile. “Buddy, we don’t play with toys during storytime.”
He didn’t stop. Click. Click.
“Elias,” I said, crouching down so I was face-to-face with him. “I need you to give that to me. You can have it back at the end of the day.”
He froze. He turned his head slowly. He didn’t look like a child. He looked like a tired old man trapped in a little boy’s body.
“It’s not a toy,” he said. His voice was soft, but strangely articulate. No lisp, no stumbling over words.
“I know, but it’s making noise. Hand it over, please.”
He hesitated. His tiny knuckles went white as he gripped the object. Then, with a sigh that sounded like resignation, he placed it in my hand.
It was heavy. Cold.
It was an access card. Not a library card or a Pokémon card. A military-grade smart card. The edges were melted, jagged from fire. The lamination was bubbling.
I looked at the photo. It was scratched out with deep gouges, as if someone had taken a knife to it in a rage. But the text was legible.
RANK: SERGEANT. UNIT: LAZARUS.
“Elias,” I whispered, barely breathing. “Where did you get this?”
“He’s outside,” Elias said simply.
“Who?”
“The Bad Man.”
CHAPTER 2: Playground Duty
I frowned. “Your dad?”
“No,” Elias said. “The owner.”
I stood up and looked out the window. Our classroom faced the playground—a brightly colored landscape of plastic slides and swings. But today, with the heavy Midwest storm rolling in, it looked gray and abandoned. The rain was coming down in sheets.
Except it wasn’t empty.
Standing by the chain-link fence, right next to the bright yellow twisty slide, was a man.
He wasn’t a parent. He wasn’t a teacher.
He was huge. He wore tattered, muddy military fatigues that looked like they had been buried underground for years. He wasn’t hunching against the rain. He stood perfectly rigid, staring directly at the window of Room 1B.
I felt a chill go down my spine.
“I’m calling the office,” I said, my voice trembling. I turned to the wall phone.
Elias was out of his chair instantly. For a six-year-old, he moved with a terrifying speed. He grabbed my hand.
“Don’t, Mr. Neo,” he said. “If you call them, the lockdown won’t work. The doors aren’t strong enough.”
I looked down at him. “Elias, let go. There is a stranger on the playground.”
“Look at the card,” Elias said, pointing at the burnt plastic in my hand. “Look at the date.”
I looked closer, squinting in the dim light.
ISSUE DATE: OCT 2014. STATUS: K.I.A.
Killed in Action.
“He died ten years ago,” Elias whispered. “But they didn’t let him stay dead.”
I looked back out the window.
The man was gone.
“Where did he go?” I asked, panic rising.
THUMP.
A gloved hand slammed against the classroom window glass.
The kids screamed. Lily started crying.
The man was standing right there on the mulch, pressing his face against the glass. He wore tactical goggles that were cracked. His skin was gray. Ashen. Dead.
He held up another card. Identical to the one in my hand.
The intercom buzzed. It wasn’t the principal. It was static. Then, a grinding, metallic voice filled the room.
“Give… it… back.”
PART 2
CHAPTER 3: Hide and Seek
“Get under the tables!” I shouted. “Now! Everyone, turtles! Turtles!”
It was the code word for our safety drills. The class, terrified by the scary man at the window, scrambled under their low tables. They were crying, huddled together in balls.
I grabbed Elias by his small polo shirt and pulled him under the teacher’s desk with me.
“Lock the door,” Elias said. “He’s going to break the glass.”
“The glass is reinforced wire,” I said, trying to convince myself. “He can’t…”
CRACK.
A spiderweb fracture appeared on the window where the man’s fist had connected.
“He’s enhanced,” Elias whispered. “Project Lazarus. They made them strong. They made them so they don’t feel pain. He wants the key.”
“The key?” I looked at the burnt card. “This?”
“It unlocks the hive,” the six-year-old said. “If he gets it, he calls the others.”
“Elias, you’re six years old! How do you know this?”
Elias looked at me with those old, dead blue eyes. “I’m not six. I was… grown. I’m a prototype. Unit 735. I ran away.”
I stared at him. A little boy with a buzz cut and a Transformers backpack.
“Mr. Neo!” screamed little Sophie from under the red table. “He’s coming in!”
The window shattered.
Not just a hole. The entire frame was ripped out. Rain and wind blasted into the classroom, blowing papers and artwork everywhere.
The man—the thing—stepped over the sill.
He was massive. Up close, the smell hit me. Wet earth and ozone. He scanned the room, his head jerking mechanically.
“Quiet,” I whispered to Elias. “Don’t move.”
The soldier walked toward the rug area. He crushed a box of crayons under his boot. He was listening.
CHAPTER 4: The Hallway
The fire alarm started flashing. No sound, just the strobe light.
“He cut the sound,” Elias whispered. “He hunts by audio.”
The soldier turned toward our desk. He knew.
“Run,” Elias said.
“What?”
“I’ll distract him. You take the class to the cafeteria. The freezer has a heavy lock.”
“I am not letting a first grader fight a zombie!” I hissed.
Elias didn’t listen. He reached into his pocket and pulled out… a marble. A simple glass marble.
He rolled it across the floor. It hit the metal leg of a chair on the other side of the room. Clink.
The soldier spun around, raising a weapon that looked like it was made of scrap metal.
“GO!” I yelled.
I scrambled out, grabbing kids by their shirts. “Out the door! Line up! Run!”
We poured into the hallway. Twenty screaming first graders.
I looked back. Elias wasn’t running. He was standing on top of a table. He held up a pair of safety scissors.
“Hey!” the little boy shouted. “Over here, tin man!”
The soldier charged him.
“Elias!” I screamed.
But the boy was small. He dropped through the gap between the tables just as the soldier swiped. The table shattered into splinters.
Elias scurried out from underneath, sprinting through the legs of the soldier, and bolted into the hallway with us.
“Close the door!” he yelled.
I slammed the heavy classroom door and engaged the safety lock.
BOOM.
The door shook. A fist punched through the wood, inches from my face.
“Cafeteria!” I ordered. “Go! Go! Go!”
CHAPTER 5: The Freezer
We ran down the hallway, past the kindergarten rooms, past the art room. The lights flickered and died, leaving us in emergency red lighting.
We burst into the cafeteria.
“Into the kitchen!” I ushered the terrified children. “Inside the walk-in freezer! Move!”
The lunch ladies were gone. The kitchen was empty.
I shoved the last kid, a crying boy named Jason, into the giant metal freezer.
“Elias, get in!”
Elias shook his head. “The signal won’t go through the metal walls. If I go in there, I can’t stop the others.”
“What others?”
Elias pointed to the cafeteria windows.
Outside, in the rain, three more figures were walking across the blacktop. Same tattered uniforms. Same jerky movements.
“They’re coming,” Elias said. “Miller—the one in the classroom—he’s the leader. If I don’t deactivate him, they all attack.”
“How do you deactivate him?”
“The card,” Elias said. “It has a kill switch. But it has to be close. Contact range.”
The cafeteria doors exploded open.
The soldier from the classroom stood there. He was bleeding black fluid from where the wood splinters had hit him, but he didn’t seem to care.
He saw Elias. He let out a sound—a digital screech.
He charged.
CHAPTER 6: Small Target
Elias didn’t retreat. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, right on the wet tile floor.
“Mr. Neo,” Elias said calmly. “Turn on the industrial mixer.”
“What?”
“The dough mixer! Turn it on! Maximum speed!”
I saw the giant mixer next to me. I hit the green button and cranked the dial. The machine roared to life, the massive metal hook spinning violently.
The soldier ignored me. He wanted the boy. He wanted the key.
He lunged for Elias.
Elias did something I’ve never seen a child do. He dropped into a split. The soldier’s hand grabbed empty air.
Elias slid across the wet floor, right between the soldier’s legs.
As he passed underneath, Elias slapped the card onto the back of the soldier’s knee—right where the armor had a gap.
“Now!” Elias yelled. “Push him!”
The soldier turned, off-balance.
I didn’t think. I grabbed a rolling cart full of baking sheets and rammed it into the soldier.
It wasn’t enough to hurt him, but it was enough to make him stumble on the slick floor.
He fell backward.
Into the spinning arm of the industrial mixer.
The metal hook caught the soldier’s tactical vest. It yanked him in.
CRUNCH.
Sparks flew. The mixer groaned. The soldier thrashed, but the machine was designed to knead fifty pounds of dense dough. It twisted the soldier, snapping the metal frame of his body.
The card on his leg flashed red. Then it exploded in a small puff of blue smoke.
The soldier went limp.
Outside the window, the other three figures stopped. They stood perfectly still for a second, then simultaneously collapsed into the mud.
CHAPTER 7: Classification
Silence returned to the kitchen, save for the hum of the freezer and the rain.
I turned off the mixer.
Elias stood up, brushing dust off his small jeans. He walked over to the mangled mess in the mixer and retrieved the burnt card. It was completely fried now.
“Mission complete,” the six-year-old whispered.
The police arrived ten minutes later. SWAT teams swarmed the building.
But they weren’t normal police. They wore unmarked uniforms.
They herded the other kids onto buses. They wouldn’t let me go with them.
Two men in suits approached me and Elias.
“Good work, Unit 735,” one suit said to the first grader.
Elias looked at me. For a second, the cold, dead look vanished. He looked like a scared little boy again.
“Mr. Neo?” he asked. “Can I have my marble back?”
I reached into my pocket and handed him the glass marble he had used as a distraction.
“You’re a brave kid, Elias,” I said, tears stinging my eyes.
The men in suits took him by the arms. They didn’t hold his hand like you hold a child. They gripped him like a prisoner.
“He’s coming with us,” the suit said. “National security matter. You never saw him.”
“He’s a child!” I yelled.
“He’s a billion dollars of hardware in a biological chassis,” the man said cold heartedly. “And he’s property of the US Government.”
CHAPTER 8: Show and Tell
They took him away in a black van.
The school was closed for a week. “Gas leak,” the news said. “Structural failure caused by the storm.”
I quit teaching. I couldn’t go back into that room. I couldn’t look at the little chairs and not see Elias standing on the table with safety scissors.
But yesterday, I got a package in the mail. No return address.
Inside was a box of crayons. And a note, written in messy, first-grade handwriting.
Mr. Neo, I ran away again. They are looking for me. Keep this safe.
I dug to the bottom of the crayon box.
There was a new card. Pristine. White.
NAME: ELIAS. RANK: COMMANDER. STATUS: ACTIVE.
I heard a noise outside my apartment window just now.
Click. Click. Click.
I think he’s here. And I think he brought friends.
If you see a first grader alone at the park… if he looks too calm, if his eyes are too old…
Don’t ask him where his parents are.
Just run.
