The Nerd’s Guide to Surviving an Apocalypse

What Cannot be Undone

Mr. Collins called everyone into the gymnasium a little after nine.

I sat between Adrian and Chloe on one of the long benches, watching students file in, still wrapped in blankets, still whispering. Nobody had explained why we were being gathered, but everyone already seemed to know. I could feel it in the way people glanced at me and then quickly looked away, like meeting my eyes might be dangerous.

Maybe it was.

Mr. Collins stood at the front of the gym, and for a moment he just looked at all of us, like he was trying to figure out where to begin.

"I'm not going to waste time," he said finally. "You've all heard the rumors, and I'd rather you hear the truth from me than keep guessing."

The room went completely silent.

"Last night, Nora Bennett was exposed to the rain."

A wave of murmuring rippled through the gym. I kept my eyes forward, my hands pressed together in my lap.

"She did not turn to stone," Mr. Collins continued. "She has shown no physical changes overnight. Based on everything we've observed, it appears that Nora is immune to whatever is happening outside."

The murmuring grew louder, and this time it didn't stop on its own.

"Is she contagious?" a boy near the front called out.

"No," Mr. Collins said firmly. "There is no evidence that immunity, or exposure, works that way."

"How do you know?" someone else asked. "How do you know any of this?"

"I don't," Mr. Collins admitted. "I'm telling you what we've observed, not what we've proven. I won't pretend to have answers I don't have."

A girl a few rows ahead of me stood halfway up. "If she's immune, can she go outside and get us food? Medicine? Anything?"

"No," Mr. Collins said, sharper now. "Nora is not a resource. She is a seventeen year old girl who nearly died last night, and she will not be sent outside because it's convenient for the rest of us."

The girl sat back down, chastened, but I could feel the shift in the room anyway. People weren't just afraid anymore. Some of them were already calculating what I might be useful for.

I stared at my hands and tried not to think about it.

"I considered not telling you this," he admitted. "I discussed it last night with a few students, and they convinced me that keeping it quiet would only cause more fear and more rumors than the truth itself. So here is the truth. We don't know why Nora is immune. We don't know if anyone else might be. And until we understand more, nothing is going to change about how this school operates. Nobody goes outside. Nobody touches the rain. Nobody treats Nora differently than they would treat any other student."

He paused, and his voice hardened.

"That includes not touching her out of curiosity, not testing her, and not pressuring her into answering questions she doesn't have answers to."

I felt Adrian's hand brush against mine on the bench, just briefly, just enough to steady me.

"I also want to be honest about something else," Mr. Collins said. "I have not reported this to the government."

The room went still again, differently this time.

"I don't know what they would do with this information," he said. "I don't know if they would want to study her, relocate her, or something worse. Until I understand more about what we're dealing with, I'm choosing to protect a student rather than hand her over to people I don't trust to protect her the same way."

Nobody spoke.

"That's all I have right now," he said. "Please look out for each other. That's the only thing that's going to get us through this."

The gym slowly emptied out, students moving in tight clusters, whispering again, though the whispering felt different now. Less like fear and more like disbelief.

Chloe squeezed my arm before she left with the others. Adrian stayed beside me until the room was almost empty.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Everyone knows now."

"Everyone already suspected."

"That's not the same as everyone knowing for certain."

He didn't argue with that.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I think most people are going to be relieved you're okay. Even if they don't know how to say it."

I wanted to believe that.

I wasn't sure I did.

I found Chloe again later, sitting alone by the vending machines that hadn't worked in days, picking at the sleeve of her sweater.

"Everyone kept looking at me back there," I said, sitting beside her. "Like they were trying to decide what I was now."

"You're still you," Chloe said. "Whatever they decide, that doesn't change anything."

"It changes how they treat me."

Chloe didn't have an answer for that, and I didn't blame her. Neither did I.

"That girl who asked if you could go get supplies," Chloe said quietly. "I wanted to say something. I didn't."

"It's fine."

"It's not, though. I promised myself I wasn't going to just sit there and let things happen anymore."

"You're allowed to still be scared, Chloe."

"I know. I just want to be more than scared, too."

I understood that better than I wanted to admit. I'd spent the whole announcement feeling like a headline instead of a person, and some small, tired part of me had wanted to disappear into the crowd and never be looked at again.

But I couldn't do that. Not anymore.

Whatever I was now, hiding from it wasn't going to be an option.

***

Madison watched the gym doors close behind the last of the students before she finally moved.

She had sat in the back during the announcement, far enough from everyone else that no one had noticed how tightly she'd been gripping the edge of the bench.

Nora Bennett was immune.

Everyone in that gym now believed that Nora Bennett, quiet, unremarkable Nora Bennett, was something the entire world would want to understand. And Mr. Collins, in his infinite self-righteousness, had decided that hiding her from the government was somehow the noble thing to do.

Madison didn't see it that way.

She saw an opportunity, and she hated herself a little for how quickly the thought had come.

Her father would have called that instinct. He'd always told her that the people who survived, really survived, were the ones who understood that information was worth more than loyalty. She used to think that was just something he said to justify buying his way into everything. Standing in the empty gymnasium now, she wasn't so sure he was wrong.

If the government came for Nora, that was Mr. Collins's fault for keeping secrets from people who had a right to know. That was how Madison decided to think about it, because it was easier than the alternative.

She thought about Nora walking out of that storage room this morning, alive, steady, surrounded by people who cared what happened to her. Madison had never had that. Not really. She had people who were loyal to her father's money, and people who were afraid of what she could do to them, and neither of those things had ever felt like the same thing as being cared for.

She told herself that wasn't why she was doing this.

She told herself a lot of things.

She found an empty classroom near the east wing, one that still had a working phone line connected to the school's old emergency system, the one nobody used anymore because everyone had grown used to their confiscated cell phones and rationed communication windows.

Her hands weren't shaking as she picked up the receiver. She made sure of that.

She dialed the number the government had circulated weeks ago, the one posted on every wall and repeated on every emergency broadcast, the one meant for reporting unusual behavior related to the rain.

The line clicked, then connected.

"This is the Rain Response Hotline. Please state the nature of your report."

Madison hesitated only a moment.

"I'd like to report a student," she said. "At Westbridge Academy. She was exposed to the rain last night and didn't turn to stone."

There was a pause on the other end of the line, the kind of pause that told Madison she had their full attention now.

"Can you confirm the student's name?"

Madison glanced toward the door, making sure she was still alone.

"Nora Bennett," she said. "She's immune."

"And your name?"

Madison's mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile.

"I'd rather not say."

She hung up before they could ask anything else, and for a long moment she simply stood there, staring at the phone, waiting to feel something like guilt.

It didn't come.

Whatever happened next, whatever the government decided to do with that information, wasn't her problem anymore.

She had simply told the truth.

Somebody was always going to find out eventually.

She had just decided it would be her.

She set the receiver back down slowly, carefully, like it might still give her away if she moved too fast.

Outside the classroom window, the rain had picked up again, gray and steady against the glass, and somewhere past it, past the fences and the empty roads, whoever had answered that call was already writing down a name.

Nora Bennett.

Madison wondered, distantly, whether she would ever tell anyone what she'd done, or whether this was the kind of secret that just stayed buried until it wasn't.

She decided she didn't want to think about that yet.

She left the classroom, closed the door behind her, and walked back into the hallway like nothing at all had happened.