Chapter 1

The lustrous afternoon sun hung far above the distant cityscape; dying the world below with deep golden light. But just as the light was lighter, so too were the shadows darker.

Near, but not quite on the outskirts of the port city of Summerisle stood the lofty iron gates that barred the way into West Sky Highschool. Colloquially known as “West High” by students, faculty and locals alike. The school was a private establishment catering to the city’s movers and shakers.

Situated atop a hill that overlooked the surrounding residential area and the river that snaked through it; the school was often printed on post cards and tourist brochures due to its idyllic appearance.

Past the iron gates and teeming stone walls, a sprawling campus would be the first thing to greet visitors. The buildings were clean and minimalist, and the campus grounds were free of litter and debris.

As classes were currently in session, the campus was ghost-quiet. Only the occasional bird song or noise pollution from the residential area below disturbed the otherwise-morguelike silence.

400’s Academic building, Rooftop Access.

Three students were loitering at the top of a stairwell, adjacent a pair of double doors that led out onto the rooftop. The area was designated as off limits to students, intended solely for maintenance use, but that did not stop the trio from choosing this as their official meeting spot.

“Hey.”

One of them spoke. Spiked red hair, fierce eyes, and bronze, tattooed skin. He looked around 18 years old and wore the standard West High uniform which clung tightly to his toned body.

No one answered.

“Hey!”

He spoke again, raising his voice slightly.

This time, someone responded.

“Mm? what is it Kim?”

The speaker this time was a lean young man with unruly black hair, foxlike eyes and an easy grin. Despite the weather peaking into the high 90s, he was wearing a full winter uniform. Even stranger, he was not sweating at all despite it.

“Th’ F*CK are we doing?! And don’t call me that—Its Hakim, sh*thead.”

“Ok. Hakim Sh*thead.”

As if to show that his fierce appearance was not just for show, Hakim rose to his feet and was about to shout back when he was interrupted by the final member of the trio. This one was lying sleepily with his arms folded behind his head at the foot of the few stairs that led up to the exit doors:

“You dolts are going to get us caught.”

He was an angelically handsome young man with golden locks and light-blue eyes that seemed to contain within them a miniature sky.

“tch. Whatever, Leo.”

Hakim sat back down. Leo picked the open book off his face and shut it before speaking:

“As for your question Hakim, the answer is simple: We aren’t doing anything.”

The foxlike young man nodded gleefully at Leo’s words.

“Most people our age—no even younger, are out there pursuing a girlfriend or a scholarship or maybe just enjoying the fires of youth—”

Hakim’s expression darkened. Leo chimed in again:

“Precisely, Leth. That is what most people are doing—but not us. We are doing nothing.”

Hakim’s lips twisted in frustration causing Leo to smile and Leth’s arched eyes to crack open to reveal a pair of black irises that swirled like the abyss.

Hakim ground his teeth.

“Agh! Damnit! Leth—Come spar with me! I need to relieve this frustration!”

“Frustration? Go find some wench for that. I hear the ones in the cheer club won’t even turn down someone with ED.”

“I don’t give a F*CK!”

“Yeah? Well I don’t either—cheer club is thataway. Unless… do you bat left-handed? in that case the wrestling club—”

whoosh

A fist swung past the area Leth’s head had been occupying only a fraction of a second ago. The approach and resulting punch were fast enough that even a seasoned martial artist would feel it before they saw it.

Leth on the other hand, was unperturbed. His body had only slouched down a few inches to evade the sudden attack. Following this, he suddenly broke out into rhyme:

“Jack be nimble, jack be swift—.”

The lack of a satisfying impact only incensed Hakim further and before he could even think it—his body was already angled for a roundhouse kick to Leth’s midsection.

Leth’s shoes squeaked atop the waxy surface of the stairs as he vaulted into the air, over the approaching kick and caught himself in a single-handed handspring on the stairway’s opposite handrail. As testament to his colossal grip strength and balance, his entire body held perfectly still despite being oriented upside down and bearing only a single point of contact with the handrail. His two legs were bent at the knee, angled down towards Hakim like a scorpion’s tail poised to strike.

His characteristic grin shown as always. He waved mockingly at his attacker with his free hand.

“Jack jumped over the candle stick! Mm. Try again, Kimberly!”

“I—Told—You—Already—"

Leo watched the two perform these exchanges with a faint smile. They joked, but truly, these peaceful days were some of his fondest memories. Here, he did not have to put on a front as the heir apparent of an international conglomerate. Here, nobody fawned over him or harbored ulterior motives in speaking with him.

Here, he could just be… him—

CRASSSSHHHH

The sound of glass shattering and something heavy colliding with something equally heavy echoed from what sounded like several floors below where the trio were currently gathered.

Leth and Hakim immediately froze, the mood turned.

“… Hey.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Mm?”

“What the hell was that?”

“Good question.”

Leth arched his back and flipped back to his feet, landing steadily despite the uneven nature of the stairs.

Leo remained silent.

Hakim and Leth followed suite.

After a few seconds, Hakim shrugged.

“Probably the baseball club again. Sh*t their aim is worse than last year—”

“AAAAAHHHH”

A scream. The voice clearly belonged to a female.

“Hey—isn’t that voice—”

Leth spoke curiously, but before he could finish—Hakim was already turning, bounding down the stairs to the lower floors.

“Looks like it is.”

Leo answered. His face was grim.

“Guess we should go see what’s up?”

Despite the situation, Leo noted that Leth’s Cheshire grin had not faded. He chose not to remark on this and only nodded in acknowledgment.

“Guess so.”

Leo and Leth descended the stairs a few seconds behind Hakim.

They traversed three flights of stairs without incident and arrived at the landing leading down to the main hallway of the 3rd floor. Unlike the unpopulated 4th and 5th floors, the 3rd floor was composed entirely of classrooms.

Where there were classrooms, there were bound to be students. Presently, these students were clambering over each other to get out of a nearby classroom.

“Hm. They look spooked.”

Leo took a step forward but was blocked by an arm that had been extended in front of him.

“I will go.”

Unlike his two friends, Leo was not confident in his physical ability not to mention that he had been told repeatedly to avoid getting involved with other people’s problems.

‘The world will go on without them—but not without you.’

He had been told that same line time after. He did not believe it, but the memory of his father’s stern gaze gave him pause just the same. He nodded.

“Alright. Make sure Hakim doesn’t do anything rash.”

He masked his emotions well and watched as Leth pushed his way through the crowd of tumbling students before entering the classroom.

Leo’s eyes flitted to the clean sign that hung over the classroom’s entry doors. It read in large, highly-legible black print:

3-A

---

The interior of 3-A greatly contrasted the normalcy suggested by its outer appearance.

Upon walking inside, Leth was first greeted with the metallic smell of blood. What came next was the pungent stench of rotting flesh; like a perfume of rotting eggs and urine.

Four bodies, all students lay strewn about a floor of shattered glass and overturned desks.

In the far-left corner of the room there was a struggle occurring.

Hakim’s spiked hair bristled with the afternoon breeze that drifted in from the gaping hole in the classroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Several sweat drops coursed down his face as he held back a middle-aged man garbed in a bloodied maintenance jumper. Below the man Hakim had locked in a textbook-perfect stranglehold lay a young female teacher pinned to the floor by her attackers deceptively strong arms.

Leth found this scene highly irregular, even by his standards—but this did not slow his next actions.

In a heartbeat, he closed the gap between himself and the scene of the struggle. At some moment, a slim, one sided blade had emerged from his sleeve and rode along the side of his right palm up until the tip of his pinky.

Before anyone could infer what happened, the attacker’s arms both fell limp. They dangled lifelessly below his heaving chest. Leth reached down and with his left hand dragged the sobbing young woman out of danger.

“Leth! Help me subdue this little sh*t—He’s—Argh! He is f*cking strong!”

Strange.

Leth thought to himself. Again, he did not hesitate to assist. The blade had since retracted out of sight as if it had never been there. He reached down and grasped the attacker’s ankles before immediately heaving them upwards.

… Weighs as much as a normal human—An Ordinary physique to boot…so where is this strength coming from?

Leth quelled his curiosity and made eye contact with Hakim who grinned ferociously in response and shifted his hold to around the man’s armpits.

The man was suspended in the air, totally at their mercy.

“Hey, Helen—the hell’ happened here?”

The young female teacher, Helen, seemed to have mostly collected herself and clambered to her feat unsteadily. Large, brown doe eyes that hid shyly beneath a pair of reading glasses. Wavy blonde hair that cascaded down to her mid-section and a curvaceous figure that her instructor’s uniform clung perhaps a bit too tightly for.

She was, in no uncertain terms, gorgeous.

Straightening her reading glasses, Helen took a quick breath before hesitantly walking over to Hakim’s side.

“I… am not sure. One moment I was lecturing as usual and the next—This… person smashes through the window and begins to bite my students… My students…”

She cupped her face, unable to stand the sight of the four student’s corpses. 3 male and 1 female.

“Helen—Listen. You need to call the police, alright?”

Unlike his normally abrasive language, his tone became uncharacteristically kind when he was addressing Helen. Leth sneered, but fortunately Hakim was too busy making puppy eyes at his crush to notice.

“R-Right! Um—but we are not allowed to have phones on our person during lecture—”

She stumbled over her words as she spoke. Hakim grinned in response and motion towards his back pocket with his eyes.

“Just use mine. Back pocket, left side.”

“But the rules say—”

“Forget the rules—take it out.”

Helen blushed faintly despite the situation. Her eyes darted sheepishly to Hakim’s back pocket and then back up to his grinning face several times. Her blush deepened.

“But… I don’t think—”

“Oh-No—I think my grip is slipping~.”

Leth interjected with mock urgency, immediately causing Helen to pale and drive her hand into Hakim’s back pocket. Hakim grunted and turned his face away from Leth who looked like he was about to start howling with laughter.

“Err… Okay. How do I—”

Helen fumbled over the phone for a second before suddenly freezing. She could have sworn she just saw the female student’s fingers twitch.

*gasp* “I-I think Lucia is alive! Hold on—I need to tend her wounds!”

Hakim rolled his eyes.

“That’s great but please hurry. This guy must’ve never missed a taco Tuesday in his life.”

“R-right—Of course!”

Helen pocketed the phone and took a step in Lucia’s direction when—

[Hakim]

Hakim felt the whole world slow down around him. Time grinded to an abrupt halt. He could not move, not even his eyes; but he could think.

[Hakim!]

The voice inside him roared louder. How could he not recognize it? It was how own voice shouting at him; begging, pleading with him.

[Choose!]

As the word was still echoing within the caves of his soul; his vision warped and faded to black.

But then it filled again with color. For a moment, he thought that all had returned to normal.

But then... It moved.

The corpse of the female student known as Lucia. Hakim could have sworn she was dead. What Helen had seen—He thought she was just hallucinating.

But… It truly did move.

Pale skin, a lithe figure and a headful of raven black hair rose up to greet Helen as she approached. Overjoyed at her student’s survival, she reached out to hug the girl.

This is wrong… I know it is wrong!

Hakim could not act, only watch with dumbstruck horror as Lucia embraced Helen with alien movements. The scene that followed engrained itself into his eyes and soul.

The scene of that thing widening its mouth and biting down. Hard. On Helen’s dainty neck.

NOO!

Hakim screamed madly in his mind. The wound was undoubtedly fatal. Helen’s esophagus was exposed to the air, what little remained of her neck flopped to one side like wet paper. Her head fell to the floor where it gently rocked back and forth from the force of the fall.

Her body collapsed lifelessly into her killer’s embrace.

Hakim stared into its dead eyes with fury unlike anything he had every experienced. His vision swam, drowned out by hatred or fury or anger or something else—it didn’t matter. Darkness descended once again, only to be pulled aside like a curtain once more.

The same scene. Helen was walking over to Lucia, he stood holding his captives’ arms between his own.

The drumming emotions inside of him cooled—Yes, it had all been a hallucination. After all, corpses don’t get up and—

He saw it.

He saw the corpse move.

Once more, Helen approached to embrace it with teary eyes.

No. he couldn’t—wouldn’t see that scene again. He refused.

Whatever force was impeding him from action suddenly released its grip. He did not think about why or how—only that he would save her.

He released the captive man’s arms and dashed towards Helen with speed unlike anything he had ever achieved. He shoved her out of the way and landed a heavy kick onto the rising corpse’s stomach. The body that once belonged to a student but was now nothing more than a salivating monster was sent careening into a pile of overturned desks where it was impaled on a snapped chair leg.

His eyes turned to face Helen but, in the process, they crossed paths with Leth and the man he had been holding captive only a seconds ago.

Huh?

He did not understand.

The man he had been holding. His body was bent at an impossible, nearly gravity defying angle. And his upper torso was striking up towards Leth’s head like a viper.

Hakim knew Leth well. There was no way he would ordinarily be hit by such an attack.

However, due to his performance just now, Leth’s eyes were fixed on him—not on the man he was holding up by the legs.

He wanted to intervene. But that same overwhelming force held him in place once again.

He could only watch as the man’s wide maw dug into Leth’s shoulder. Credit to his inhuman reflexes, he had shifted his head at the last moment but still suffered a bite to the area around his left clavicle.

At this moment; a flood of information coursed into his mind as reality caught up with him. Corpses coming back to life. Sudden aggression. Biting. Infection.

Zombies.

F*ck… are you kidding me?

His vision faded once more.