My whole floor of the dorm was silent. Eerily so. My hands shook so hard after closing the door, it took me three tries just to open the browser window from last night. It was still on the Geode page. The tide of messages had thinned drastically since six o'clock that morning, when the bulk of the chaos occurred. The top message had been sitting untopped for more than half an hour.
To anyone who sees this: there's a group of us gathered in the cafeteria. DO NOT say your name, or call any of us by ours. Pick a nickname before you come find us. We've got food.
Somehow I knew in that moment that I would not be going to the cafeteria. It wasn't even a conscious thought. It was a feeling, primal and visceral like the one that drove me to lock my door and hide under my covers the night before. Whatever happened with that group, it wouldn't end well.
I ran an inventory of my own food supplies. I had a good stash of granola bars, plus some snacks like crackers, cheese strings, and a can of salmon. I could ration it for two days at most. I weighed my options. The way things were going, there would be fewer people guarding the cafeteria the longer I waited. Expending all my food was a risk, but I didn't know if it would be a risk better spent now, or at some unknown future time.
I opted for the former. Then I crept out of my room in the dead of night to raid a nearby convenience store for more. The streets were empty. Sleepers dotted the sidewalks, but I guessed most of them were in the houses. Those who hadn't simply fled the city, that is. I found the store picked clean. Nobody had broken down the door at the back yet, though, so I broke in myself and stuffed my backpack with supplies from the storage rooms. By the end of three trips, I had enough to last me weeks. I wouldn't have to leave except to sneak out to the bathroom down the hall. At least the plumbing still worked.
The group in the cafeteria sent out semi-regular updates as they discovered things. Like how saying the name of a Sleeper woke them again and brought them after you. Or how writing and texting were both safe, even with names. Updates on our amenities: water, plumbing, electricity, internet, cell service. The rest of the internet was a mire of alien conspiracies and survivor groups trying to find one another. Most of their pages went silent within days.
I texted my sister every day, giving her updates on my life and telling her I loved her. I texted my parents, too. They were already down, but I wanted this to be the first thing they saw if they ever woke up again and checked their phones.
Then, at the end of the first week, the electricity went spotty and took the internet with it. To this day, Calico J and I are convinced the web going belly-up was the Redding's doing.
I still had water—even hot water—and did my laundry in the shower. I only left my room at night to minimize the chances of running into another person. Between sundown and 3:00 AM was the only time I stepped outside. After three, the Red Rain started. I expected to miss the internet more than I did, which was probably the most surprising thing. Without it, the apocalypse was a lot more peaceful. No blaring warnings. No dire stories from around the world weighing me down with dread of things I had no control over. I had no way to know what was going on, and I was kind of okay with that, because it meant I could focus better on actually surviving.
All things considered, I had a pretty comfortable rhythm going, and I'd almost started to believe I could hold it long-term when the fifteenth night after Red Thursday rolled around, and someone knocked on my door.
It was four in the morning. I slowly set down the book I was reading and clicked off my headlamp.
In the silence, I heard ragged breathing outside my door. I had never been more glad of my new habit of locking it. There was someone there, and I had no idea if they were a Sleeper or a real human being. I had no idea if they knew me. I had no idea why they were here. I set my book aside and reached for the hockey stick next to my bed. I'd stolen it from someone's backyard days earlier, and now thanked the whole universe that I'd worked up the guts to leave my room that night and go find myself a weapon.
There was a small sound outside the door. Almost a whimper. I'd never heard a Sleeper make a sound.
A long pause followed it, then another knock and the shuffle of a hand landing against the door. "Are you in here?" said a young man's voice. There was something off about it. Something wrong. "You're the one who's been sneaking out at night, right? The survivalist?"
I could still hear his breathing. He sounded close to freaking out, unless that was my misinterpretation and he was halfway turned into a Sleeper instead. I didn't know how these things worked. I also didn't recognize his voice. One good sign.
"And the one from first-week frosh?" he continued.
Okay, he knew who I was. Red flag—though he hadn't said my name yet, and to be fair, I did develop a bit of a reputation during frosh week. I was the only one who knew how to light the first-years' Friday-night bonfire in the park nearby, then how to revive it when they inevitably stoked it wrong and nearly had it die on them. Apparently people find it impressive when you know how to stack tinder or handle burning logs from the unburnt side so it looks like you're touching fire.
"Please," said the guy outside. "I need help..."
I didn't reply. I was half-crouched in the middle of my floor by this point, hockey stick at the ready in case he tried to bust down the door. Instead, I heard his hand slip. He retreated to the other side of the hallway and slid down against the wall. It was so deathly silent without traffic noise or other humans in the building, I could still hear him. And...
Oh.
He was crying.
I was the kind of survivalist who knew how to bearproof a campsite, catch a fish, and make a plan for finding food in the middle of the apocalypse. Apparently I was not the kind of survivalist who was immune to a direct request for help, or who understood on any fundamental level that opening my door to a stranger was probably a bad idea. On the other hand, if he was still alive after this long, he couldn't be as stupid as I was about to be.
I got up slowly and opened the door.
The guy was sitting on the other side of the hallway, curled into a fetal position with both arms tucked against his chest and his forehead on his knees. Skinny-ish, tall-ish, Black, locs tied up in a messy bun, and a pink-and-white hoodie that finally landed an identification in the absence of seeing his actual face. I'd seen him around during frosh week, wearing that same hoodie. We were in the same year.
I also distinctly remembered thinking he sounded smart as hell, and then hiding in a corner during a meet-and-greet so I didn't have to meet him and make a fool of myself. Oh well.
I didn't think he heard me open the door—to be fair, I did it quietly—so I said, "Hey."
His head whipped up. I flicked on my headlamp and pointed the beam down when he winced. He was holding his left arm. The smell of blood lingered in the hallway, so at least he wasn't kidding about needing help.
"Are you hurt?" I said, because that's what smart people ask before determining who someone is or what they want from you in the middle of the apocalypse.
It was more than that, I could already tell. Something haunted him above and beyond the injury, and I couldn't even bring myself to feel surprised. Anyone getting hurt in the current world was either clumsier than a growing thirteen-year-old, or else had a run-in with another survivor, a Sleeper, or something they really didn't want to see.
I crouched in front of him and held out a hand for his arm. He extended it reluctantly. An alarmingly deep gash tracked across his inner forearm, as clean as if it was cut with a knife. Or with glass. I hadn't heard glass breaking anywhere that night, but this was a girls-only floor of the dorm. If he was from around here, he was either one floor up or two floors down, and I wouldn't have heard anything from there.
Also, his hand was freezing. Definitely in shock.
"Come inside," I said, and tugged on his elbow to help him up. "We shouldn't be out here."
He followed me into my room. I sat him on the opposite bed and got the story out of him bit by bit as I cleaned, sutured, and bandaged the cut. He woke a Sleeper by accident: someone he'd known from high school, who'd come to the same university. The thing came for him. It sounded like he wasn't half-bad at fighting it off, but the thing about Sleepers is that they didn't seem to feel pain. This one just kept coming. He eventually got cornered by it, and kicked it into a window in self-defense. The glass broke. The Sleeper fell four stories to the concrete below.
Yeah, that'd mess someone up.
He also had all kinds of scrapes and bruises from the rest of the fight, and he was grey enough in the face that I kept worrying he'd pass out if he moved too quickly.
"You want to sleep here tonight?" I said, because that's also what smart people offer to strangers in the middle of the apocalypse. "This bed's free."
Anyway, that's how I met Calico J.
He was another survivor. As smart as I remembered, and desperately lonely after more than two weeks of avoiding other people by force of necessity. Extroverted, but not the pushy kind, so we got along fine. Better than fine, really. The moment we figured out we were both gay, all remaining awkwardness went out the window and never came back.
He also didn't remember coming to find me. Just breaking down after murdering his old schoolmate, then waking up in my room the next morning with a bandaged arm and me offering him breakfast. He already had his nickname. I didn't, but he saw the shark poster on my wall, then me fiddling with my lucky shark keychain, and came up with one faster than I could fry a pancake. He still calls me "The Meg" sometimes.
What to do and where to go were some of our first serious conversations. Calico J didn't want to stick around the university after what happened, which, fair. He also had questions for the girl in charge of the survivors group down in the cafeteria. We were safer together, so we went there together.
I'll never forget that trip.
The cafeteria was empty. Deserted... until we found a room with a locked door and a single Sleeper slumped outside like he'd been the one to lock it. Either someone said his name then, or he said it himself to avoid whatever fate befell his companions. Inside the room behind him, we found where the survivors had made their beds.
I can still see them when I close my eyes. There was pandemonium in that room before people fell. We found the signs. Bloody scratch marks on the door, and people with bloodied or missing fingernails. People collapsed all over in contorted positions. Some looked like they'd killed each other. Some looked like they'd killed themselves. None of them were Sleeping.
They were dead. Every last one of them. Perfectly preserved with their eyes open, the colour of Redding patched like bruising all over their skin, and a look of abject horror on their faces.
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