Cris stalked down the sidewalk's edge quietly, every sense attuned to the slightest disturbance from the natural ambience of the night. He stepped furtively to the corner of the nearest building, peering around the massive structure with his heart in his mouth.
The teachers were coming.
Rumors of their demise were greatly exaggerated. The quiet rumblings of trouble had begun in early May when their shackles began to loose. More and more children roamed the streets during the day while more and more teachers prowled the streets of Hill's Chapel during the night. As the days lengthened and they became bolder, sightings became more frequent.
A graduate student had been taken in broad daylight at the West End of town, carried off by three teachers barely finished their first year. Whispers abounded of a struggling sophomore barely able to keep hold of his khakis while a pair of teacher's assistants manhandled him outside Bub's Valley. Grizzled seniors warned of the beginning of June when gli insegnanti were released. The dreaded ones, driven mad from their months of imprisonment were finally free to roam the streets in the heat of the summer.
The teachers were coming.
Armed with an overpowering sense of precaution, Cris stepped around the corner, only to be bundled over by what appeared to be a walking chalkboard. Scrambling backward, he saw it for what it was: a young woman perhaps in her mid-20s; completely and utterly covered in chalk dust. Staggering upright, the teacher grasped at his trousers and choked out a single word in a cloud of dust: "SUMMERBREAK."
Kicking out at his ghostlike assailant, Cris turned and ran headlong down the Franklin's Road without thought to what lay ahead, with what lay behind propelling his feet to greater and greater speeds. Finally, he collapsed against a tree just off the path, chest burning and the balls of his feet pounding like steel mallets on an anvil. Where was he to go? It was just now nightfall, soon the streets would be teeming with recently freed teachers eager to wildly toast their release and take unsuspecting victims in their soporific embraces. Whatever he was to do, he must do it quickly.
The teachers were coming.
