When it all started, the screams blended into a massive chorus of pain and death. From the moment the windows broke, Matt Anderson knew this wasn’t a school shooting. The claws breaking the glass had tipped him off. As everyone in his biology class stampeded out the door, he’d slipped unnoticed into the drop-ceiling panel over his desk. The teacher didn’t even spare a backward glance as she rushed after her students.

Matt tried to use his cell phone to call for help, but no signal. He’d kept his cool until the explosion rattled the school from South Hall. He’d never imagined himself as a soldier, but this felt like a war zone. Why would anyone reign an assault on J. A. Fair of all schools? And this was Little Rock, Arkansas for god’s sake, not Washington D.C. or L.A. or New York. Something didn’t add up.

Despite his concerns over the logic behind the attack, nothing changed the facts. It happened, and he needed to get out of the ceiling. Smoke permeated the tiny space, and he suspected the intruders had disabled the fire alarm and sprinklers.

In the last five minutes, the screams had died down from a chorus to an occasional solo. Matt was tough. He could handle a few one-on-one altercations.

Also, no gunfire. Not yet, anyway. Someone had emptied the entire school, blew up a portion of it, and never fired a shot? He definitely needed to find someone who knew what was going on.

Matt lifted the nearest tile back from the wall and surveyed the immediate area. Notta. He stuck his head out and observed the upside down classroom. Nothing. Now was as good a time as any. He hung one leg down until it found footing on the desk underneath, and the other leg followed right after.

All clear, Matt dropped out of the ceiling and laid flat on the ground. He crawled over to the door, trying to keep low. Careful not to scrape on the broken glass. He stood and planted his back against the door. He checked the window. Left. Right. Nothing.

Well, nothing but bodies. So many students’ bodies littered the science hall. Should Matt have convinced a few classmates to climb in the ceiling with him? There was no way to guarantee he might live through this, so he couldn’t vouch for the safety of others. But what would his friends think if they knew he’d let everyone run out while he’d suspected the broken glass was a diversion?

Matt shook the doubts from his head and assessed his current situation. Alone, he needed weapons, and he knew nothing about the ‘enemy’ except they used weapons other than guns. After ten minutes of breaking up furniture into makeshift shanks, he collected his bag of dangerous goodies.

Tentatively, Matt opened the door to the hallway. He approached the closest body, a brunette he’d never met. He nudged the girl’s leg with his foot. No response. He searched her body over for any wounds. Leaning down, he pushed her hair aside and glanced over the marks on her neck. Some kind of bite. It caused alarms to ring in his head. She wasn’t covered in blood. There was no pool of blood. There was no blood anywhere other than right at the wound. Exsanguination. Her murderers had removed the blood from her body.

Matt checked the black-haired guy next to her, same thing. He examined one more body. They all appeared to be exsanguinated. Bite marks. Blood loss. Vampires? That didn’t seem right, aside from the fact that they didn’t exist. But he knew all too well monsters were real.

He picked up his gear and headed for the exit. A very low and deep grumble carried from North Hall. Goosebumps pricked his skin. Matt’s hair stood on end, and his spine went ramrod straight.

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Was it one of them? Had he lingered too long?

Next came a sigh. Not really sounds he’d expect from an elite fighting force attacking the school and draining the students of blood. Especially not from vampires.

Matt spun on the spot and listened again, peering into North Hall. His instincts were at odds with himself. A chuff whispered from the hall.

That was it.

He needed to satisfy his curiosity. Marching down the hall, Matt stopped at the edge with his back pressed to the corner. Carefully, he took one searching glance and immediately withdrew. Two of the biggest dudes he’d ever seen were laid out in a heap in the hallway. The one with paint on his face laid still aside from the occasional whimper. A metal pole stuck out from his back.

Ignoring the morbidity of it, Matt reached down and unlaced a dead classmate’s shoe. His breath came hard, and his pulse pounded as he contemplated all the years of his life leading up to this moment. He lifted the sneaker, steeled himself, and tossed it at the impaled guy.

“Umph,” the stranger groaned. His head lolled over, and yellow eyes rolled around in his sockets.

Matt recoiled at the sight of them, but the stranger continued to lie on his back. Matt hugged the wall and crouched like he was a practiced member of the armed forces. He crept along the hallway until he reached the pile of weird looking dudes in cloaks.

The chiseled one looked dead with a chair leg stuck out of his chest. He wasn’t going anywhere. But the guy sporting the tree on his face was alive, if unresponsive.

Matt pulled out one of his shanks and dared to poke the guy. Just a groan. With a piece of metal sticking out of the soldier’s chest, Matt wondered how the hell he was breathing?

He knew what he wanted to do next, and he didn’t want anyone to see him do it. He looked down the foreign language hall. Nothing. He looked back the way he came. Nothing. All clear. Rather than retract the metal already inside the guy’s body, Matt plunged his shank in right next to it.

The stranger’s tongue rolled out. A gasp escaped, but no more sound. Dead. Matt lifted the stranger’s hand, and it fell limply to the linoleum with a splat. He knelt beside him and got to work.

Blue blood. Probably vampires. Maybe even alien vampires.

Chest punctured. He removed those implements of death.

With the metal chair legs gone, Matt explored the wound and cavity a little better. Between the unacceptable red emergency lighting, and the blood seeping into the wound, it proved difficult, but he found what he thought might be the heart. At least, if it were human, it would be.

From inside the chest, Matt lifted a human-like brain and brain stem, but they came from where the heart belonged in a human.

Bizarre.

Blood and very thick fluids slid down his hands, wrists, and elbows. He’d set the brain aside when something else caught his eye. There was an extra connection at the base of the brain stem to something inside the chest cavity.

Matt laid the brain down, gently, and dipped his hand back inside. There was a small chamber there, not dissimilar to the sac around a heart. He felt something hard in it. A nerve cluster, maybe? Feeling on the verge of something important, he pressed into the mucus lining and grasped the hard object inside. He retrieved a tiny, shining sphere.

An amber pearl.

Embracing the inner-scientist Matt usually ignored, he left his things in the hall and rushed back to his biology classroom. Microscopes, Bunsen burners, and vials lined the counter, but most importantly, a sink. After washing the pearl, he placed it under a microscope to examine it. Beautiful, but indiscernible. He couldn’t glean a single bit of information from it. Still, he shoved it in his pocket until he understood the situation better.

After retrieving his bag, Matt froze when voices rose from North Hall. As they carried on, his body relaxed. He recognized them. Without checking, he turned the corner. Sagan and Rayne left the restroom halfway down the hallway. He whispered, “Hey.”

They both startled as if he’d interrupted something. Matt thought better of apologizing, considering there were vampires attacking the school. They seemed to come to the same conclusion because Sagan said, “You have to get out of here.”

Rayne joined in. “Go to the football field.”

Matt held up a hand. “First, what’s going on?”