Michael walked silently in the middle of the group.
Luke was leading them, ostensibly towards someplace that would be good for a camp, but he was distracted by his own thoughts. Eve was hurrying ahead, occupied with trying to eliminate any zombies they encountered as quickly as possible. Zoe was trailing behind, and it seemed to Michael like she was sulking. And of course, Kane was beside her, also occupied in his own thoughts.
And, as always, that left Michael as the only one who was thinking about the path ahead. He was used to being the smartest one in the area, and although that had ended once he had met up with this group, it was quite clear that he was still the most logical one here.
They were in the cracked skull apocalypse, after all! Why were they so calm? No, this wasn't even that. They weren't calm, they were more... petty. Reacting heavily to normal emotions, like any people might do. Especially Zoe. Although, to be fair, they all deserved a little slack on that end, being teenagers.
They must know something. Some secret, large enough to discount the danger of the apocalypse. And while of course, it was possible that this was a simulation or a VR game of some kind, it was currently a better idea to plan for the now.
And planning for the now meant discovering, or at least figuring out, his companions' secrets.
And to do that, he would start at the beginning. And go until... well, until they reached some place of relevance and stopped being so disconnected from their actual lives, the ones that were going on around them at this very moment.
Michael was beginning to understand why so many of his teachers, along with pretty much every authority figure he had ever interacted with, got so frustrated when they had to deal with him.
But that was a tangent. And while Michael was great at tangents, it was time to focus up now.
So, the beginning. He had met Luke a while ago when he had realized they were both the same. Michael had briefly entertained the idea of talking to him every once in a while to make the class go quicker, but that had quickly been dismissed after speaking to him once.
Because Luke was antisocial. Extremely so. Michael had walked up to him and sit down beside him during lunch.
Luke had ignored him.
Typical, and expected.
Then Michael had made a comment about Professor Langston's style of teaching, and Luke's blunt answer, while spoken from a similar viewpoint to Michael's, made it clear that they would both be happier just to stick to their own corners of the room during class, if any arrangement in that mind-numbing class could be called happy at all. From then on, during lunch they had sat together and sometimes exchanged idle comments. But after school, Luke always left immediately. Not that Michael had any wish to try to hang out with him after school. He had enough to do, after all, but still, it was a fact of the matter.
Calc Basics was the highest level class he had been allowed to even try to get into as a freshman. Which was unfortunate.
Unlike Luke seemed to, Michael didn't already know everything taught in the class, but like Luke, he sometimes looked ahead in the books they were handed out, but that never helped. The book's instructions were always terrible, and they didn't follow the progression that Professor Langston had taught them the concepts in.
Or tried to teach them the concepts in, anyhow. Most of the people in that class wanted the credit more than the actual math. Yet another was Michael and Luke were unusual.
So Michael felt he had a decent enough idea of who Luke was as a person. In school, nearly the same as him. Outside of it, nearly the opposite.
The only other thing of note about Luke at that point was the fact that he had reacted so quickly. As though he had been expecting that, or something like it, to happen.
The other option was that he was just always alert, which seemed likely enough to be possible. Although Michael had seen him, that day and almost every other day, basically sleeping in his seat, that could have been either a simple lie, a deliberate misdirection, or he was actually resting, and didn't need to use anything but a miniscule fraction of his attention to remain aware of his entire surroundings and keep a reaction time that was faster than Michael's.
Or he had been roused enough by Professor Langston's unusual tone to react by the time that the zombies had spilled into the room.
But the third option of the four was overall the most terrifying possibility.
So Michael decided to assume that that was the truth.