Ballard High School¶
Ballard High School is the small county high school in Ballard, Utah, a school of about sixty students with a bad smell hanging over it. Its gym is where Andrew Howard is replaced by a duplicate, where plastic-wrapped corpses are hidden in the ceiling, and where a grenade starts the fire that destroys the building.
| Type | Location (school) |
| Aliases | The gym; school gym; Ballard schools |
| Region | Ballard, Utah |
| Status | Burned nearly to the ground (as of Walkers 08) |
| First appearance | Walkers 03 (mentioned); Walkers 04 (described) |
Description¶
The school draws students from the whole county, yet has only about sixty. The teenager Harrison tells the task force that this semester the smell has been "fucking eye-watering", and that the students sing a crude anthem to the tune of "We Are the Champions" (Walkers 04). The gym is an ordinary school gym, with lockers down one hallway and offices down another (Walkers 07).
Notable places within¶
The gym¶
An anonymous note tells Andrew to come to the school gym at 1 a.m., adding that the lock is taped over so the kids can smoke weed there (Walkers 06). On the night, a thin line of yellow light shows under the door, the latch is taped, and two stools stand in the middle of the floor (Walkers 07). After the fight the sprinklers are running, chairs are scattered, and a dead horse lies by the door. Part of the ceiling later gives way and drops the stored bodies (Walkers 07).
History of events there¶
Warning signs. Before the task force reaches the school, locals describe its decline. The bartender Maggie mentions a smell at the high school, four new school computers that never worked, and the way people who might earn a college degree keep disappearing (Walkers 03). The Ballard sheriff later reports that a county spot-check found over half the students absent, while the school says its own numbers show no absences and calls the discrepancy "an oversight"; most of the absent students are Mormon (Walkers 06). See Disappearances in Ballard.
The night of the gym. Andrew goes in alone; Huell drops him three blocks away and later parks a block from the school. Inside, two upright horses flank Andrew, and he finds a second Andrew Howard sitting on a stool. The double says, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way", and Andrew pepper-sprays it. Armed locals then come into the room. Andrew pulls out a grenade, drops it, and one of the horses throws itself onto it. The horses beat him down, and the badly injured double crawls on top of him and forces tendrils into his mouth (Walkers 07). See Replication.
Andre had removed every other player from the scene before Andrew entered the gym. When the scene ends he gives Rita a private handout and tells her she is now "in a replica". From this point Rita plays the duplicate, not the original (Walkers 07).
The fire. Huell sees flickering light, hears an explosion, finds the gym in flames, and meets "Andrew" (the duplicate) staggering out bloodied while a burning horse runs across the parking lot. Inside he finds blast damage and the remains of the horses, and a pack of coyotes standing stock-still in a hallway. When part of the ceiling falls, a spiral bundle of melted plastic drops out, and more bundles follow: putrefied corpses packed in white powder, about six in all. No fire truck ever comes (Walkers 07). See Plastic-wrapped bodies.
Aftermath. Driving through town the next morning, the team sees that the school is "pretty much burned to the ground" (Walkers 08). In the Roosevelt police morgue they find dozens of salted bodies, and Andre says they have found "where the bodies from the library ceiling went" (Walkers 08). The real Andrew wakes among them. In Walkers 09 he says he was shot in the chest, woke up under a pile of dead naked people, and thinks he was dead. See Roosevelt police station.
Inhabitants¶
The gym is held by the Skinwalker faction: armed townspeople, the horses, and the coyotes. The stored corpses are earlier victims of the skinwalkers.
Trivia¶
- Andre's "library ceiling" in Walkers 08 is almost certainly a slip for the gym ceiling, where the bodies were seen in Walkers 07.