Gone

chair, all empty. Math books lay open on three of the desks. Notebooks, too. The computers, a row of six aged Macs, all showed flickering blank screens.
    On the chalkboard you could quite clearly see “Polyn.”
    “She was writing the word ‘polynomial,’” Astrid said in a church-voice whisper.
    “Yeah, I was going to guess that,” Sam said dryly.
    “I had a polynomial once,” Quinn said. “My doctor removed it.”
    Astrid ignored the weak attempt at humor. “She disappearedin the middle of writing the ‘o.’ I was looking right at her.”
    Sam made a slight motion, pointing. A piece of chalk lay on the floor, right where it would have fallen if someone were writing the word “polynomial”—whatever that meant—and had disappeared before rounding off the “o.”
    “This is not normal,” Quinn said. Quinn was taller than Sam, stronger than Sam, at least as good a surfer. But Quinn, with his half-crazy half-smile and tendency to dress in what could only be called a costume—today it was baggy shorts, Army-surplus desert boots, a pink golf shirt, and a gray fedora he’d found in his grandfather’s attic—put out a weird-guy vibe that alienated some and scared others. Quinn was his own clique, which was maybe why he and Sam clicked.
    Sam Temple kept a lower profile. He stuck to jeans and understated T-shirts, nothing that drew attention to himself. He had spent most of his life in Perdido Beach, attending this school, and everybody knew who he was, but few people were quite sure what he was. He was a surfer who didn’t hang out with surfers. He was bright, but not a brain. He was good-looking, but not so that girls thought of him as a hottie.
    The one thing most kids knew about Sam Temple was that he was School Bus Sam. He’d earned the nickname when he was in seventh grade. The class had been on the way to a field trip when the bus driver had suffered a heart attack. They’d been driving down Highway 1. Sam had pulled the man out of his seat, steered the bus onto the shoulder of the road, brought it safely to a stop, and calmly dialed 911 on the driver’s cell phone.
    If he had hesitated for even a second, the bus would have plunged off a cliff and into the ocean.
    His picture had been in the paper.
    “The other two kids, plus the teacher, are gone. All except Astrid,” Sam said. “That’s definitely not normal.” He tried not to trip over her name when he said it but failed. She had that effect on him.
    “Yeah. Kind of quiet in here, brah,” Quinn said. “Okay, I’m ready to wake up now.” For once, Quinn was not kidding.
    Someone screamed.
    The three of them stumbled into the hall, which was now full of kids. A sixth grader named Becka was the one screaming. She was holding her cell phone. “There’s no answer. There’s no answer,” she cried. “There’s nothing.”
    For two seconds everyone froze. Then a rustle and a clatter, followed by the sound of dozens of fingers punching dozens of keypads.
    “It’s not doing anything.”
    “My mom would be home, she would answer. It’s not even ringing.”
    “Oh, my God: there’s no internet, either. I have a signal, but there’s nothing.”
    “I have three bars.”
    “Me too, but it’s not there.”
    Someone started wailing, a creepy, flesh-crawly sound. Everybody talked at once, the chatter escalating to yelling.
    “Try 911,” a scared voice demanded.
    “Who do you think I called, numbnuts?”
    “There’s no 911?”
    “There’s nothing. I’ve gone through half my speed dials, and there’s not anything.”
    The hall was as full of kids as it would have been during a class change. But people weren’t rushing to their next class, or playing around, or spinning the locks on their lockers. There was no direction. People just stood there, like a herd of cattle waiting to stampede.
    The alarm bell rang, as loud as an explosion. People flinched, like they’d never heard it before.
    “What do we do?” more than one voice asked.
    “There must be someone in the office,” a voice cried out. “The bell went off.”
    “It’s on a timer, moron.” This from Howard. Howard was a little worm, but he was Orc’s number-one toady, and Orc was a glowering thug of an eighth grader, a mountain of fat and muscle who scared even ninth graders. No one called Howard out. Any insult to Howard was an attack on Orc.
    “They have a TV in the teachers’ lounge,” Astrid said.
    Sam and Astrid, with Quinn racing after them, pelted