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Her last thought was that the only way she’d get that Emmy now was posthumously.

Twenty-Six

Angela Ashford had seen her first dead body today.

In fact, she’d seen her first two this morning. It was after the car crash.

The big truck had crashed into the SUV that the two men who took her out of class were driving.

The two men had died in the crash.

Angela knew this even though she’d never seen a dead body, because she tried to wake them both up, but they weren’t breathing and didn’t move and were covered with blood.

Her third dead body was the driver of the truck, who was all smelly. Angela knew from her science class that bodies got smelly after they’d been dead for a while. He also had a big hole in his chest.

The only reason Angela was still alive was because she had put on her seat belt. Her chest kinda hurt from when the seat belt pulled against her in the crash, but at least she didn’t go flying through the windshield like one man did, or get crushed under the roof like the other one.

It was tough to get out of the car, but she managed it. She still clutched her Spider-Man lunchbox. That was, she knew, the most important thing of all.

She went back to school. Mr. Strunk would know what to do about the car crash. And if he didn’t, Principal Armin would.

But then the truck driver followed her back to the school.

Which didn’t make sense, because the truck driver was dead.

True, Angela hadn’t seen any dead bodies before today, but she did watch television and she saw movies and she had paid attention in science class.

If you weren’t breathing and had a hole in your chest, you were dead.

Which meant he’d been turned into a monster.

The truck driver—who was a grown-up, so he had longer legs—made it back to the school faster than Angela did.

The vice-principal, Ms. Rosenthal, was talking with her secretary, Ms. Garcia, in the hallway when the truck driver walked in. Angela was just a little bit behind him.

“Excuse me, sir, you can’t be in he—”

Ms. Rosenthal cut herself off when she saw the big hole in the truck driver’s chest.

Angela screamed when the truck driver bit Ms. Rosenthal on the neck.

Ms. Garcia ran away. Principal Armin came out of his office.

“What’s going on here?” Then he saw the truck driver. “Oh, my God.”

When the truck driver walked over to Principal Armin, he said a very bad word.

Then the truck driver bit him, too.

Ms. Rosenthal got up a second later. She looked all funny. The truck driver had turned her into a monster, too.

Angela walked up to her and asked her if she was okay. But the vice-principal didn’t say anything, didn’t even pay any attention to Angela.

Instead, she and the truck driver started walking down the hall together.

Pretty soon, Principal Armin did the same thing.

For the next several hours, it got worse.

Principal Armin went into Mr. Strunk’s class and bit him. All the kids panicked, but the truck driver and Ms. Rosenthal and one of the janitors and the two men in the gray suits, all of whom were monsters now, all got in their way and started biting them.

In homeroom, Angela Ashford had told Bobby Bernstein that she hoped he’d die.

By midmorning, she got to watch it happen.

The other kids tried hiding in the basement, but soon the monsters found them and turned them into more monsters. Soon, the monsters far outnumbered the kids.

But they all left Angela alone.

She didn’t understand it. What was so special about her? Was it because of what Daddy had done to her to make her not be crippled anymore?

Sometime during the day, a truck crashed into the school. The writing on the side said it belonged to the Raccoon City Police Department’s Canine Unit. The truck was carrying a bunch of dogs.

They were monsters now, too.

By nightfall, monster kids, monster teachers, monster janitors, and monster dogs were wandering all over the school. The dogs were mostly prowling around the cafeteria, with the other monsters roaming around the rest of the school.

They still left Angela alone.

After a while