Today I’m welcoming Kevin Wayne Williams to talk about his novel, Everything I Know About Zombies, I learned in Kindergarten.
Note: This is not a children’s/YA novel. It’s a book for adults offering both horror and social commentary.
She’s got one ax, twelve kindergarteners, twelve garden stakes, and a will to live.
When the apocalypse strikes, nine-year-old Letitia Johnson gathers her five-year-old sister and her sister’s classmates and hides them all in a school bathroom. Five days later, after hunger finally drives the small group out of hiding, Letitia finds herself in an evacuated Bronx, desperately improvising a strategy for survival.
Distrustful of the small groups of heavily-armed adults that remained behind, Letitia is forced into a sudden, awkward, and clumsy adulthood as she tries to keep twelve kindergarteners together and alive, learning and teaching the new skills they need as she goes. Letitia’s toolkit for this adulthood is sparse: vague and contradictory statements from a series of foster parents, poorly understood religious lessons from televangelists, and survival skills gleaned from television shows. When Letitia finally turns to one group of adults for help, she finds that they aren’t even doing as well as she is.
Reminiscent of “The Walking Dead” and “Lord of the Flies,” this is a horror novel for adults.
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Being an Orphan Doesn’t Make You Plucky, by Kevin Wayne Williams
Orphan heroes bug me. They are a such popular trope in fiction that making a complete list would be impossible: Superman, Little Orphan Annie, Oliver Twist, Ender … you get the point. Sometimes they aren’t orphans, but simply children with one dead parent and one overwhelmed parent: Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Katniss, … again, a near endless list of virtual orphans. It’s a convenient out for an author: you get to have a young character, set him out on an adventure, and not have to explain why Mom and Dad don’t just ground him and bring your story crashing to an end. These fictional orphans live happy, fulfilling lives, full of sheer exuberance, red roadsters, spunk, and pure pluckiness.
In real life, orphans, having been traumatized, tend to show personality scars. Having Mom and Dad die on you doesn’t turn you into a cheerful young detective, scientist, or hero so much as it tends to make you distrustful and unwilling to rely on others. The independence and self-reliance we associate with them isn’t because an orphan is somehow a better human being, it’s a defense mechanism helping an injured child cope.
When I created Letitia Johnson, I made her an orphan because I believed that those defense mechanisms would be crucial to her survival: I had to make it plausible that this particular nine-year-old would be the one that survived when her classmates did not. At the risk of minor spoilers (not too bad … it shouldn’t be a surprise that the heroine survives the first few chapters of the book), Letitia survives precisely because she expects so little from anyone. When things start to fall apart, she doesn’t expect anyone to help her or her sister: she’s been taking care of the two of them for so long it doesn’t even occur to her that anyone might. When the dust settles, she’s mercenary about it: she knows that no one in the world cares about her or Jahayra, and that no one is going to rescue her from zombies for the amount of money that the Department of Children and Family Services would pay them. If she wants to live, she’s just going to have to take care of it herself. For her, the initial big step is her realization that the group of five-year-olds she’s stuck with aren’t just a burden: she can’t handle adult zombies on her own, and she has to protect the little ones while making certain that they protect her in turn.
My decision to make Letitia a reasonably realistic orphan had its costs: it was very difficult to keep Letitia lovable through to the end. As the world crumbles around her, she crumbles with it, struggling harder and harder to predict every possible outcome and be prepared for it so that she won’t die like everyone else, wondering all the while whether she has been kept alive as a part of a special group to be tortured for God’s entertainment.
As the author, this made it hard to keep the reader on her side. The steps she takes towards the end are ones I could not have started the novel with: the reader would have thrown the book across the room. Did I succeed? I hope so. The first review the novel got (over at Heroines of Fantasy) indicates that I did:
That’s not to say there’s no cost to Letitia; the cost is shown plainly in her internal monologue and list making. She’s a humane, flawed creation: clear-sighted, clear-headed and tenacious; ruthless without, whilst, within, questioning why the world is as it is (and not flinching from the obvious conclusion) … Everything I Know About Zombies is that highly agreeable thing: a book for adults (don’t, please, give it to your nine-year-old) about children, written largely from a child’s viewpoint, that is not at all childish.
Kevin Wayne Williams has been an engineer for much of his life, beginning with GTE in 1980. He rose through the ranks and eventually became an executive in Silicon Valley. In 2004, tired of it all, he fled the country with his wife, Kathy. They opened a hotel on Bonaire, a small Dutch island north of Venezuela. In 2009, for reasons he still doesn’t quite understand, they returned to the United States.
He has since resumed his engineering career, but writes novels to help dull the pain.
Chapter 1: The Fall of PS 43
The morning of the apocalypse opened, as most mornings did, with Letitia on her hands and knees searching in vain for something Jahayra had lost.
“Found it!” came Jahayra’s voice from atop the bed. “I put it under my pillow last night so I don’ lose it!” Letitia pulled her head out from under the bed and stood up, wiping the dust off the knees of her pants while Jahayra slid the once-lost yellow bead bracelet on her wrist.
“When you goin’ to stop bein’ this way?” asked Letitia. “Every morning it like this. Can’t find your own stuff. Can’t comb your own hair.”
Letitia stopped for a moment and adjusted Jahayra’s shirt. “You five now. It time to be learnin’ how to do stuff. How we ever goin’ to make someone want to keep us if you be like this? Who goin’ to want to be our mama if that mean she goin’ have to follow you around all the time?”
She stepped back and inspected Jahayra. At least Jahayra had her backpack on. Some mornings, she even managed to lose that. “I mean it, you know. What goin’ to happen to you if they split us up again like they did last year?”
She looked at the clock. 8:20. “Look at that. No time for breakfast again.”
Letitia pulled Jahayra’s arm, dragging her towards the door. “G’bye, Mrs. Brown,” she called as she grabbed a foil envelope of Pop-Tarts from the box on the kitchen counter, “we goin’ to school now.”
Letitia continued to grumble as she chewed on the cold pastry during the walk to school. They weren’t even real Pop-Tarts. She liked a nice, toasted, strawberry Pop-Tart, the kind with frosting on the outside, the frosting with the little colored sprinkles pressed in. DCFS money wasn’t enough to get Mrs. Brown to buy real Pop-Tarts, so these were some kind of fake store-brand things that tasted funny even when you toasted them. Jahayra being so slow all the time meant that she never got a chance to toast them. Every day it was something. Today, the bracelet. Yesterday, the pink shirt. Who knew what it would be tomorrow?
Jahayra chattered as they walked. “I hope I get the good crayons today!”
Letitia raised her eyebrow and swallowed the bite she had in her mouth. “Good crayons?” she asked. “What make a crayon a good crayon? Ain’t they all the same?”
“No. We got some special crayons now. They really bright. It nearly like they glow. But Rosarita takes ‘em every morning. She so big, she think she can have everything.”
“Don’ Mr. Domacasse do nothin’ about it? She ain’t bigger than Mr. Domacasse, is she?”
“He just say to share, but she don’ know how to share. She barely know how to talk. Always sayin’ ‘see’ when she mean ‘yes’ and ‘no’ when she mean ‘not’ and things like that. He say the next time we fight over ‘em, he just goin’ to take ‘em away.”
“Be nice,” said Letitia, “lots of people talk kind of funny. Lot of people think that we talk funny.” She knew she didn’t talk right and worked hard at sounding like her friends. Kids didn’t hear the Trinidad and Jamaica from her parents in her voice so much anymore, so they didn’t laugh as much as they used to.
Letitia walked Jahayra right to the kindergarten door. Jahayra didn’t even say goodbye: she just ran into class, made a quick detour on the way to her desk to pick up a box of crayons, and left Letitia behind. Letitia walked back three doors down to reach the fourth-grade classroom.
A couple of hours later, Social Studies class found Letitia staring grumpily at a page in the workbook for Communities: Near and Far. Inuit? What kind of name for people was “Inuit”? How was she supposed to care about some kind of people she can’t even say?
“Is something wrong, Letitia?” Mrs. Robinson asked.
“No,” replied Letitia.
“Then why isn’t anything getting done in your workbook?”
“It just these stories ‘bout people that I ain’t never going to meet …” Letitia began to complain. She saw the look on Mrs. Robinson’s face and groaned inside.
“It is just these stories about people that I ain’t never … am never going to meet,” she continued. Talking like that made her even grumpier. She wanted to talk like her friends, not Mrs. Robinson.
She didn’t try to sound like Mrs. Robinson unless she had to. Nobody talked like Mrs. Robinson, with all her rules about double negatives and “Don’t say ‘ain’t’ ” and “ ‘I am’ not ‘I be’ ” and on and on forever. She had long ago decided that Mrs. Robinson must have taken special classes in how to talk like an old white lady because there was no way she could have come up with it by herself.
Loud pounding sounds came from the hallway. Mrs. Robinson started paying attention to them and stopped paying attention to Letitia, so whatever they were, they couldn’t be all bad.
“Children, stay in your seats! I’ll go see what’s happening.” Mrs. Robinson left the room, pausing once she got into the hallway, then closing the door with a sudden slam, her high heels clicking on the floor as she ran towards the entrance.
The pounding sounds got louder, and Deon, the boy sitting next to Letitia, couldn’t contain himself. He got out of his seat and opened the door a crack, peering out.
Letitia couldn’t help but follow. She half-hid behind Deon, staring over his shoulder, making it clear to anyone watching that he had opened the door, not her. A broom handle, wedged into the door handles of the main entrance, was bending under the strain of someone trying to force their way in. Some of the teachers were leaning on the doors, holding them closed, while others were trying to get a metal bar forced into the handles. Hands pressed against the outside of the windows next to the doorway, leaving red smears all over the frosted glass.
Letitia tried her best to make sense of this. If it was a movie, it would be some kind of monster or something. Vampires, maybe, or werewolves. When she lived with the Freemans, Mr. Freeman was always shouting about terrorists when he watched the news. Every bad thing that ever happened was because of terrorists. She had never heard of terrorists in an elementary school, though: she thought they did all their stuff in airports. Robbers? There’s nothing in a school worth stealing. Why would they pound on the window? Why would they cut their hands?
Mr. Domacasse ran past, a box of fluorescent crayons in his hand, then ran back towards Jahayra’s class. Letitia pushed her door open further, poked her head out, and watched him. He threw the crayons down by the fire box, smashed the glass and took the ax out of the case. Letitia stared. An ax? Mr. Domacasse must really want to scare those people if he was going to pretend he was going to hit them with an ax.
“Stay in here!” Mr. Domacasse shouted into Jahayra’s class. “Keep this door closed and don’t come out in the hall!” He slammed the door and came running back for the entrance.
Now the fire alarms were going, making it hard to hear the pounding at the entrance. The sound made the people outside even crazier: they pounded harder, making the glass start to crumble. The wire mesh inside the windows started to show. When Mr. Domacasse reached the front entrance, he began swinging the ax at the intruding arms and heads that were pressing their way through what was left of the windows.
Mr. Domacasse reared back and swung the ax with full force. A severed hand bounced off the linoleum. Deon ran from the doorway, pushing her out of the way and ran to the window. Other kids followed him, opening the windows and climbing out. Others ran down the hallway or tried to hide under their desks.
Letitia didn’t know what to do. She pressed herself against the wall of the classroom, not looking out the door, just trying to be as small and flat as she could. The window didn’t seem smart: if somebody was outside trying to get in to hurt little kids, wouldn’t running outside be just like running right up to them? It would be better to hide somewhere and hope they couldn’t find you. There was a supply cabinet … maybe she could get in there. She started to open the cabinet when it hit her: Jahayra!
Whatever the smartest thing to do was, Jahayra wasn’t going to do it without someone to help her, and if Mr. Domacasse was at the front door, he wasn’t in Jahayra’s class to help her. She crept back towards the door and peeked out. Nothing had changed, except there were more hands lying on the floor. She took a deep breath, squeezed through the cracked door, and ran down the hall, away from whatever was going on at the entrance and towards Jahayra’s kindergarten class. She hoped she was wrong, that she would find a teacher’s aide or something, helping with the kids.
She burst into the kindergarten, surprising a line of small children that all scrambled for their seats and tried to pretend that they hadn’t been about to open the door. Letitia’s heart fell. Mr. Domacasse really had left these kids alone.
Letitia was the biggest person in the room. Might as well go with it.
“I don’ know what up,” she started, “but Mr. Domacasse, he tell me to take care of you,” she lied. “Somebody bad trying really hard to get in here. The teachers, they stoppin’ ‘em. Well, they tryin’ to stop ‘em.”
Letitia poked her head out the door and took a fresh look back down the hallway. Mr. Domacasse was still swinging the ax as hard as he could. Mrs. Robinson’s feet protruded through the window opening, jerking back and forth as something was dragging her outside. Letitia very nearly just grabbed Jahayra and ran for it, but there were twenty little kids in here. She couldn’t just leave them, and there was no place to run, anyway.
Letitia came back inside. The kindergarten had its own small bathroom built in. There was a supply closet and a small sink with a cabinet under it for cleaning up on art days. A row of windows lined the wall, but the sounds of screaming coming from outside now were frightening, and she wasn’t about to try to get this group of kids to leap out the windows. Besides, the screams outside meant she was right: the kids that ran outside must be getting caught. She was stuck here now, and there was nothing to do but hide.
“Jahayra!” she shouted over the fire alarm. “You and your friends get to emptying that closet. Just throw that stuff on the ground, make some room in there!
“You!” She pointed at one of the larger boys. “Help me with this!” She and the boy began pushing the desk towards the doorway. Some of the other children joined in, eager to see something that they could do to feel safe, while others just looked on terrified. Within a few minutes, the doorway was blocked with the desk and a couple of file cabinets. She felt a little calmer: at least no one could just walk right in anymore.
The windows were still a problem. She couldn’t block them, but she could at least keep people from seeing in. Grabbing a stack of construction paper from the heap that had come out of the supply closet, she set children to taping and gluing paper over the windows.
The clock said it had only been fifteen minutes, but they had accomplished a lot. The room was closed and hard to see into. She couldn’t tell what was going on outside, but the screams continued, along with loud chewing and swallowing noises.
They were trapped now. The popping sound of gunfire came in from the street, and sirens were wailing everywhere. The siren inside the building had finally stopped, but that just made it easier to hear all the noise coming from outside. Fearful tears welled up in her eyes as she thought about what would have happened if she had tried to get the kids to jump out the windows. She fought them back. Some of the little ones were already crying, and if she started, everybody would start.
She wiped her face dry with her sleeve and looked at the crowd of little ones around her. “Only be three places to hide in here,” she said. “Under that sink, in that closet, and in that bathroom. I don’ know who out there or when they going away, but I know they be bad. We got to hide. We get to hidin’, and everybody got to be quiet till I tell you come on out. Remember, quiet! Pretend it be hide-and-seek or something, but no noise!”
No one argued. Letitia could barely keep them from running to the hiding places, trying to get away from the gunfire, screams, and sirens and helicopters that surrounded the school.
Letitia opened the doors under the arts-and-crafts sink. It was little, but big enough for four of the littlest girls. The closet wasn’t much bigger, holding just five little boys. She grabbed Jahayra and pulled her into the bathroom with her.
“Everybody else, in here,” she said, “pack in tight, ‘cause there a bunch of us.”
From here, the sounds from inside the school were muffled, but they were coming from everywhere now. Adults shouted orders at children until they started screaming, a sound that was always followed by waves of high-pitched screams and running feet. She hoped they were getting somewhere, but she couldn’t think of anyplace to go.
One of the little ones near her, a pudgy little Dominican girl, began to wail. Letitia clamped a hand tightly over the child’s mouth.
“You got to stop that,” she said in a fierce whisper, “you just got to stop. Can’t let anybody know we here.”
The tears kept coming, complete with snot oozing over her fingers, when there was a loud thump at the door to the classroom. The child she was holding choked back her tears. The others all held their breath.
The noise came again, accompanied by a slight squeak as the desk slid a bit under the impact. The noise kept up for hours, the only change coming when the door started to crack and splinter. No one cried anymore. They made no noise, trying hard to just disappear.
Sounds came from other places in the room. A low crying, snuffling sound came from one of the other hiding places. Letitia couldn’t tell whether it was the girls under the sink or the boys in the closet. She could tell the effect it had on whoever was at the door, though. The crying would get louder, and the thumping and squeaking would get more furious. Something would distract the thumpers, and the thumps would stop for a while. The crying would stop, then start, and the thumpers would start again. Over and over until she heard one long squeak.
Footsteps shuffled into the room, and the pounding sounds moved to the cabinet under the sink. The wooden cabinet doors cracked. The girls under the sink screamed, cried, then went silent as wet ripping and chewing sounds filled the room.
The sounds proved too much for the boys in the closet. The closet door squeaked open and the running footsteps sounded as the boys tried to make a run for it. The sounds in the room subsided as slower footsteps followed them out the door. The screams from the hallway didn’t provide her with any hope for the boys.
The sounds from inside the building slowly faded away as the hours went by. The children grabbed fearful sleep, more a case of succumbing to shock than resting. Finally, it was quiet enough that Letitia dared open the bathroom door. She wasn’t sure how long they had been in there. Two days? Three? Four? It was hard to tell time when you worried about dying. Two days, probably.
“You guys stay in here. I’m goin’ out, goin’ to see if it safe out there,” she said as she cracked the bathroom door open. Leaving the bathroom and seeing the girls, she quickly slammed it shut again behind her before any of the little ones could see. She remembered how Mrs. Robinson slammed the door behind her that first day. She hadn’t thought she would ever act like Mrs. Robinson.
She knew what she had to do today, though. Maybe acting like Mrs. Robinson wasn’t a bad idea: she had to look calm. It didn’t matter if she wanted to crap her pants, she had to look calm. If she lost it, all these little kids would start running around screaming and get everybody killed.
She walked over to the bodies of the four girls that had been in the closet. Bile rose in her throat. She scanned around the room a moment. There wasn’t anything here that would let her move the bodies without having to touch them.
She steeled herself inside. This wasn’t going to be the first dead body she had to touch. It wasn’t like it had been with her mom: she didn’t know them or anything. They were just bodies. Not even bodies anymore, really: mainly bones.
The bones were easy. She stacked them in the closet. The soft parts were far worse: she could barely make herself touch them. She grabbed the trash can and carried it over so that she could do it quickly. She picked up the bits of loose meat and threw them away. One head was left. When she picked it up, it looked like the face was still moving. She closed her eyes and pushed it deep into the sack. She’d heard that you could have dreams while you were still awake if you stayed awake long enough. She dragged the trash can to the closet and set some play mats on the floor to cover the stain. It wasn’t perfect, but it should keep the little ones from freaking out.
The sounds from inside the building were nearly gone. Outside was different: the helicopters were still flying over, the gunfire continued, and there were explosions in the distance.
The nasty sights taken care of, she opened the bathroom door. “Come on,” she said, “I need you to help me get the door closed up again.” They quickly slid the desk in place and pushed the file cabinets back to try to hold it there.
The smell out here was horrible, with the smell of rotten flesh making it so she wanted to choke. It wasn’t enough to cover the smell of the children, though: none of the small children had kept their toilet training. Fixing that was the first thing she could do to start making things normal again.
“You guys got PE clothes or anything? Somethin’ you can get changed into?”
The children pointed at a rack of cubbyholes on one wall. “Go get ‘em,” she said, and each of her charges found a bag of PE clothes. She washed each of the children in the arts-and-crafts sink, wadding up the soiled clothes. Soon she was surrounded by clean, fresh young five-year-olds all dressed as if it were time to go play volleyball.
“Get back over by the windows,” Letitia said. “Look away.” She went over to the closet where she had stuffed the dead girls and threw the piles of soiled clothing in there with them.
“The school make you guys sack lunches, don’ it?” Little heads nodded: Mr. Domacasse always put the lunches from the free lunch program in each child’s cubby every morning. The lunches were still there, waiting. She waited for everyone to grab a lunch and then took one of the ones that was left. They sat at the little desks and wolfed them down.
“Roll call,” she said. “Jahayra the only person I know here.”
The twin boys revealed themselves to be Jorge and Diego. Malik was the largest of the bunch and the hyperactive little boy proved to be Trevon. The runt of the litter, Jose, was barely half the size of the other boys. The little clique of friends over in the corner was Kiara, Tiara, and Jada, while the taller, aloof girl was Rosarita. Lucia and Maria rounded out the group.
Letitia still didn’t know what was going on, but she was certain that help wasn’t coming. If help had already come, it had missed them. She needed to find out what was going on.
“Malik, Rosarita, you two be biggest. Rosarita, you the boss of the girls, Malik, you the boss of the boys. Open the door a crack. I’m goin’ out. Close it up after me. Don’t be opening it till I’m back.”
