Day 3
574 Words
I don’t know what time it is anymore.
Might be morning. Might be night.
The lights are out. The screaming's not.
Except…
There’s less of it now.
Day one was chaos.
Day two was confusion.
Day three feels like the end.
The halls of the school used to echo with students’ footsteps, lockers slamming, someone yelling across the hallway about who kissed who.
Now it’s… quieter. Not silent. Just wrong.
There are screams, but they come like aftershocks—sudden and sharp, then swallowed up by the stillness.
More and more kids are locking themselves in classrooms, refusing to open the doors. I get it. I don’t blame them.
Kaia doesn’t either.
But she says it’s not safe to stay with a group. Says the dead seem to be drawn to noise, to clusters of people.
She’s smart. Always has been.
I agreed with her. Of course I did.
She’s the only person I trust in here.
When it all started, we were stuck on the third floor.
Kaia wanted to go down, said if we could make it to the entrance, maybe—maybe—we could get home.
Home.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that whatever was happening here… it had to be happening out there, too.
But I followed her. Because I wanted to believe she was right. I wanted some reason not to curl up in a locker and stop trying.
We crept down the stairwell, hearts pounding like drums in our chests. Every creak felt like it echoed through the whole building.
Second floor.
It was worse.
The moment we pushed through the stairwell door, they came.
I don’t know how they heard us—how they felt us—but they did.
Dead faces. Open mouths. Blood smeared across cheeks that used to smile at someone.
They charged.
We didn’t think. We ran.
Into the nearest classroom—Kaia shoved the door open and we slammed it behind us.
A room full of terrified students turned on us like we were the enemy.
“Get out! Get the hell out!”
Someone in the corner—a guy, barely older than me—kept whispering “Shut up… please shut up… please…”
No one listened.
No one could.
And something inside me—something primal—started to crawl up my throat like bile. That kid’s voice shook something in me.
Fear like I’ve never felt.
Kaia didn’t want to go. She said they couldn’t just kick us out.
But I pulled on her sleeve.
Begged her.
“We have to go,” I whispered. “We have to—Kaia please.”
Eventually, we slipped out when it was quiet again.
Just in time.
We made it to the other end of the hallway, toward the far stairwell, when we heard it.
The scream.
Then crash—
The classroom door burst open behind us.
They’d found them.
I turned, just for a second, and saw hell.
One of the infected—jaw loose, skin peeling—lunged into the room. The screams became a wall of sound. Furniture shattered. Blood painted the windows.
Kaia pulled me.
But I looked back. I wish I hadn’t.
The boy who told everyone to shut up…
He was being dragged back into the room.
His eyes locked with mine.
Pleading.
Not for help.
For someone to see him before he died.
Blood sprayed the wall.
I ran.
- Writer
