Leo cracked the door. Just a sliver.
The boy from the basketball trials was sprawled across the threshold like a discarded welcome mat.When Leo looked at the crumpled body, all he could hear was the sound of a basketball being ripped apart.
On a closer look, there were many strange things about the student. His eyes were gone only leaving behind dark holes oozing blood. His veins were almost black, running down his arm and neck, laying flat without a pulse. Leo couldn't look at the body any longer. He felt Jay's grip on his shoulder tightening. Jay was behind Leo so he couldn't see anything of what was outside.
"It's too quiet," Leo breathed.
The gym was deadly silent. No sirens. No shouting. Just the heavy, dead silence of a graveyard. The thought hit him like a physical blow: Did everyone leave us? "Coast is clear," Leo whispered, though his gut told him he was lying. "But there's no sound. No police, no evacuation announcements. Nothing."
The silence was a weight. He wanted the students to be safe, but the idea of being forgotten in this concrete tomb with that thing on the floor was starting to claw at his throat.
Jay was silent for a beat, his breathing ragged. "Maybe they're just... hiding. Staying quiet so they don't get noticed." He looked down at the floor, his eyes wide and fearful. "We need to get out of the building. Now. Before that thing decides to wake up."
"We aren't leaving Krystian," Leo said, his voice harder than he felt. "He was running to the opposite side. I remember that now. If he's hiding, he's somewhere over there."
Jay wiped a streak of cold sweat from his forehead. "What if he already escaped? What if… What If he's like... that?" He pointed a shaking finger at the boy on the floor.
Leo didn't answer. He couldn't. A part of him admitted that was possible. But he couldn't just accept that and move on. He gripped the aluminum baseball bat until his knuckles turned white, the metal cold against his palms.
"He's there," Leo stated, more to convince himself than Jay. "Let's go."
Leo carefully stepped out of the Equipment closet, making sure to leap over the mangled body of the student. A smell hit his nose in an instant. It smelled rotten but sweet at the same time. He recognized it. It was the same scent he had smelled in the hallway. He scrunched up his nose against the smell and glanced at Jay. He was staring straight ahead and clenching his jaw so hard that Leo could see the muscle jumping.
There weren't any disturbances in the gym, so they quickly proceeded to the exit door. It was closed but It had glass panels which allowed Leo and Jay to look outside. They cautiously crept towards the exit, half expecting the discarded body behind them to spring to life.
The hallway was a mess.
Papers, books and bags littered the floor. The fleeing students had left many belongings forgotten on the floor. A keychain, A half-eaten sandwich and a phone with nine missed calls from 'Dad. Amidst the mess, there was something more sickening.
Trails of blood leading from the lockers covered the floor. Blood coated the books and papers. Jay tried to look further through the glass and pointed a shaky finger to the hallway. A pair of legs. The body was laying halfway in a classroom and halfway out. It looked like a girl. She was laying in a pool of blood, her knees were bent towards the floor but her shin twisted in the opposite way. It was so bad that Leo's own legs ached in sympathy.
Leo tasted bile at the back of his throat. He had never seen anything as gruesome as this in his life. He felt Jay grab his arm. Jay looked pale and sickly from seeing the state of the hallway they were standing in only a while ago. "This is crazy," He whispered, lost for words.
Leo swallowed a mouthful of stale air, his throat tight. The hallway was a meat-grinder, but staying in the gym was just waiting to be processed. He couldn't shake the image of Krystian; pale, shaking, and alone.
"Move fast," Leo mouthed. Jay didn't nod; he just gripped his own bag until his knuckles turned white.
They stepped into the corridor, hugging the right wall to stay clear of the central trail of blood. Every squeak of their sneakers sounded like a scream in the dead silence. They moved away from the lockers, away from where the world had first broken, and toward the opposite side.
Leo didn't look back, he didn't want to. The English wing was a place of haunting memories now. He kept his eyes straight ahead, scanning the area for any movement. The silence that consumed the hallway was gone, replaced with the jagged, uneven rhythm of sneakers pounding against the floor; and something else. Something faster.
"This way," Leo choked out, stepping towards the science corridor.
Jay was half a step behind. His breathing was shaky, like a saw cutting through wood. They weren't looking for Krystian anymore. They were looking for anyone they could talk to. The sounds were getting louder. A weird sort of hum that filled the air.
The more they walked, the more the carcass was picked clean. It wasn't just blood anymore. Clumps of hair littered the ground, some still attached to bits of the scalp, laying like molted fur. Lockers weren't just damaged, they were dented from the inside out. Classroom doors hung off its hinges with pieces of wood teared out. Every step they took was a crunch of glass or the slap of a notebook.
Leo didn't even feel the pang of surprise or shock anymore, Instead, agrowing feeling of dread was pooling inside of him.
Loneliness was the worst part. For five minutes, they didn't find a single soul. Not a crying freshman, not a brave teacher; not even an unconscious body.
They found remnants of the students, like ghosts left behind in a hurry. A single Nike sneaker, still laced tight. A pair of glasses with one lens shattered. A silver necklace snapped in half near the water fountain. But the owners? Gone. It was as if the school had simply swallowed six hundred teenagers and was currently digesting them.
"Where are they, Leo?" Jay's voice was a ragged whisper, barely audible over the sound of his own terrified breathing. "Where did they all go?"
Leo didn't answer. His eyes were locked on a trail of smeared handprints leading toward the cafeteria. They weren't bloody; they were almost black. That same oily, ink-like substance he'd seen in the girl's veins a while ago was now marking the walls like a map to nowhere.
The weird hum in the air was getting louder now. It wasn't a machine. It wasn't the AC. It was a vibration, a low-frequency one that made the marrow in Leo's bones ache. It sounded like a thousand bees trapped in a jar.
They rounded the corner to the Science Block, and Leo froze.
In the center of the hallway, a single rolling chair from the lab sat perfectly still. Beside it was an overturned laptop, its screen glowing a ghostly white in the dim corridor. But that wasn't what made Leo's heart stop.
It was the sound coming from It.
A voice, monotone, rhythmic, and chillingly familiar, was reciting the Periodic Table. Over and over. "Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. Beryllium..."
Leo stepped closer, his baseball bat trembling in his grip. The voice flooded back memories. His life before everything collapsed. He felt his eyes tearing up but he blinked back the tears. Beside him Jay was wiping his tears. He gave a saky sigh and moved past the laptop. As leo passed by the door of the science lab, something caught his eye. A colourful wallet laying near the doorway.
Krystian's wallet.