The Nerd’s Guide to Surviving an Apocalypse

Not Even There…

The rain hadn't stopped in three days.

I noticed it the way you notice something you've stopped expecting to change, a low hum in the back of my mind, present but no longer surprising. What was new was the sound it made against the windows now, harder, faster, like the sky itself had decided to stop being gentle about any of this.

Mr. Collins had turned one of the old chemistry labs into something that looked more like a war room than a classroom. Charts covered the walls, most of them his own handwriting, timelines of exposure, weather patterns, anything that might explain why I was still here and the boy from the courtyard wasn't. Empty coffee cups lined the windowsill, evidence of how many nights he'd spent in this room instead of sleeping.

"I want to try something," he said, holding up a small sealed container. Rainwater, collected carefully from a gutter outside one of the sealed windows, using gloves and protective gear the whole time. "If we can't explain your immunity directly, maybe we can at least understand what the rain does to organic material. A controlled comparison."

"Comparison to what?" I asked.

"Plant matter. Skin cell samples from the school's old biology stock. Anything that might show a reaction."

Adrian leaned against the lab table beside me, arms crossed. "So we're basically running a science fair project to figure out the apocalypse."

"Essentially," Mr. Collins said, without a trace of humor. "Science doesn't stop being useful just because the stakes got higher."

He set up three small trays, each one holding a different sample, and began measuring out careful drops of rainwater with a pipette his hands weren't quite steady enough to hold without effort.

"You should let me do that part," I offered.

"You're the subject, not the scientist, in this particular experiment." But he handed me the pipette anyway, and I understood that letting me help was less about steady hands and more about giving me something to do besides sit there feeling like a specimen myself.

We spent the next two hours running small, careful tests, watching the rainwater interact with everything Mr. Collins had gathered. The reaction was immediate and consistent. Whatever was in that water broke down organic material at the cellular level within seconds, hardening it, calcifying it, exactly the way it had happened to the boy outside. I watched a fresh leaf turn brittle and gray in under ten seconds, curling in on itself before freezing completely still, and I had to look away.

"That's what would have happened to you," Adrian said quietly, watching my face. "If you weren't."

"I know."

"I don't think you do. Not really. I was there. I saw how fast it happened to him."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't try to give one.

Mr. Collins moved on to the biology samples next, running the same test against preserved skin cells, then against a sample of his own hair, watching each one calcify in turn, methodical and grim.

Except when he, with visible reluctance, tested a small sample against a strand of my hair.

Nothing happened.

Not even a delay.

Nothing at all.

He ran it again. Then a third time, this time timing it with the stopwatch on his phone, counting the seconds out loud like he didn't trust his own eyes anymore.

"That's the third time," Adrian said quietly, watching the untouched strand under the small magnifying lamp.

"I know," Mr. Collins said.

"So what does that mean?"

"I don't know yet." He rubbed his eyes, exhaustion written across every line of his face. "It's not resistance. Resistance would still show some kind of reaction, even a slowed one. This is more like the rain doesn't recognize you as something it can affect at all."

"Like I'm not even there," I said quietly.

"Something like that."

It should have felt like relief, more proof that I was safe, but it just made me feel stranger, more separate from everyone else in the building, like I existed on a different frequency than the rest of the world. I looked down at the pipette still in my hand and thought about how easily it could have been my hair curling and freezing on that tray instead.

"Hey." Adrian's voice was low, meant only for me. "Wherever you go in your head right now, come back."

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize. Just come back."

I managed something close to a smile, and for a moment the lab felt almost normal, almost like the two of us working on some ordinary assignment instead of trying to understand why the world had decided to spare me and no one else.

Mr. Collins finally set down his pen and rubbed the back of his neck. "I think that's enough for today. We'll pick this up tomorrow, when I've had a chance to look over the data properly."

"Do you actually think we'll find something?" I asked.

"I think giving up isn't an option," he said, which wasn't quite the same as yes, but I understood why it was the only honest answer he had.

Adrian and I left the lab together, walking slowly down the corridor toward the main hall, where the noise of ordinary school life still somehow managed to carry on despite everything. A group of younger students were playing cards on the floor near the vending machines. Someone had strung a few battery powered lights along the ceiling, an attempt at normalcy that felt both silly and strangely comforting. Chloe waved at us from across the hall, sitting with a few girls from the annex, laughing quietly at something on someone's tablet.

"It's strange," I said, watching them. "Everyone's just trying to keep living like nothing's wrong."

"What else are they supposed to do?" Adrian asked. "Sit around waiting for the next disaster? People need something normal to hold onto. Even if it's just a card game."

"I guess."

"You could use a little normal too, you know."

"I don't think normal exists for me anymore."

He didn't argue with that, just bumped his shoulder gently against mine, and for a few minutes we stood there together, watching everyone else pretend, just a little, that the world outside wasn't ending.

We didn't get further than that before the alarm bells began ringing through the hallways, sharp and relentless, the kind of sound that made my whole body go cold before my mind even caught up.

"That's not a drill," Mr. Collins said, already moving toward the door.

We followed him into the hallway, where students were pouring out of classrooms and dorm wings, confusion and fear spreading through the crowd in equal measure. Someone was shouting near the east stairwell. More voices joined, overlapping, panicked.

"The annex," someone said, breathless, pushing past us. "Something happened in the annex."

The east annex had been converted into overflow housing weeks ago, after the main dormitories filled past capacity. I didn't know it well, just that it was older than the rest of the school, its windows original to the building, never replaced, never reinforced the way the newer wings had been.

We reached the stairwell in time to see Mr. Collins freeze at the top step, his face draining of color as he looked down toward the annex doors.

I pushed past him before Adrian could stop me.

The doors to the annex had been propped open by the crowd trying to escape, and through them I could see straight into the common room, where the storm had done what three days of relentless rain had apparently been waiting to do.

The old windows hadn't held.

Glass littered the floor in a wide, glittering arc, and the rain had poured through the broken frames in sheets, faster than anyone inside could have reacted, faster than the ancient emergency shutters could lower.

I counted without meaning to.

Ten.

Ten students, caught in the room when the windows gave way, their bodies frozen mid motion, some with their arms raised, some still turned toward the door they'd never reached, all of them gray and still and unmistakably gone.

Someone behind me was screaming. Someone else was sobbing into the shoulder of a friend who looked too stunned to comfort anyone. A boy near the doorway had sunk to his knees, staring at nothing, his lips moving without any sound coming out. Adrian's hand found mine, gripping so tightly it hurt, and I let it, because it was the only thing keeping me upright.

Mr. Collins was already shouting orders, herding students back, calling for the emergency shutters to be checked on every other window in the building, his voice cracking under the weight of trying to sound calm when nothing about this was calm at all.

"Get everyone away from the annex," he called to the two other teachers who'd arrived, both of them white faced and shaking. "Nobody touches anything inside that room. Nobody. Do you understand me?"

Someone near the back of the crowd asked, in a small, terrified voice, if the bodies could still turn back, if there was any chance at all. Nobody answered, because nobody knew, and the not knowing seemed almost worse than a clear no would have been.

I caught sight of Chloe pushing through the crowd toward us, her face streaked with tears, one of the girls she'd been sitting with earlier gripping her arm like she couldn't stand on her own.

"She was right there," Chloe said, her voice breaking. "I was talking to her an hour ago. She was right there."

I didn't know what to say, so I just pulled her into the small circle Adrian and I had made, the three of us standing there together while chaos moved around us in every direction.

Further down the hall, I caught a glimpse of Madison standing very still near the wall, apart from everyone else, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. For a moment our eyes met across the crowd, and something in her expression looked almost like fear, real fear, the kind that had nothing to do with performance or control.

Then someone jostled past her, breaking whatever that moment had been, and she turned and disappeared down the corridor before I could decide if I'd imagined it.

I couldn't stop staring at the annex doors.

Ten people who had been alive an hour ago, laughing, complaining about the food, waiting out the same storm I was standing safely away from. I tried to remember if I'd ever spoken to any of them, passed them in a hallway, sat near them in a class, and the fact that I couldn't be certain made the guilt sit even heavier in my chest.

Adrian pulled me back gently as more staff arrived to secure the area, his arm settling around my shoulders, steady in a way I didn't feel steady at all.

"This isn't your fault," he said quietly, like he'd read exactly what I was thinking.

"I know that."

"Do you, though?"

I didn't answer, because I wasn't sure I did, not completely, not in the part of me that kept doing the math over and over, counting the ten of them against the one of me, and coming up with an answer that felt unbearably unfair no matter which way I turned it.

Somewhere behind us, Mr. Collins was still giving orders, his voice hoarse now, and somewhere further down the hall, Madison had vanished into whatever quiet corner she'd chosen to fall apart in alone.

And I hadn't even gotten wet.