Chapter 9
The first week passed like a fever dream.
Those with abilities threw themselves into training with an intensity that bordered on desperation because desperation was exactly what it was. The world outside the walls was getting worse by the day and everyone knew it. The sounds of the city, once filled with life, traffic and noise had been replaced by something far more unsettling. Distant roars. The occasional crash of something enormous moving through the streets. And silence. The kind of silence that pressed against the walls of the school like a living thing, reminding them constantly of what was out there and what was coming.
Isaac, ever the organizer, wasted no time establishing a proper system.
Mary ,whose healing ability had already proven itself in the most dramatic way possible was placed in charge of medical treatment. She set up a proper infirmary in the school's sick bay, cataloguing every medicine and supply they had brought back from the mall and fire station with meticulous care. Students came to her with cuts, bruises and the occasional broken bone from training and she treated every single one without complaint, her green glow becoming a familiar and comforting sight around the base.
Charles, Kingsley and Francis whose abilities were offensively powerful by nature were assigned to base defence. Charles with his instinct based combat ability patrolled the perimeter with a restless energy that suited him perfectly. Kingsley's fire ability allowed him to light up the school compound at night both for visibility and as a deterrent against any zombie that came too close. Francis's water ability, though still being refined, had proven capable of hitting targets at considerable range and speed, making him the group's long distance specialist.
Christian, whose ability had manifested as something far less physical but arguably far more extraordinary, was placed in charge of strategy. His mind now operated at a level that defied easy description processing information, identifying patterns and calculating outcomes at speeds that left even Isaac occasionally speechless. Within the first week he had already mapped every known zombie movement pattern around the school, identified three potential supply routes and begun drafting a long term survival framework that accounted for variables most of the others hadn't even considered yet. He did all of this quietly, methodically and without fanfare adjusting his glasses and scribbling in his notebook like a man solving a moderately interesting puzzle.
And then there was the expedition team.
Richmond, Felix, Shadrack and a handful of their followers had been designated as the group responsible for venturing outside the base to gather supplies and intelligence. On paper it was a reasonable arrangement. In practice it became something else entirely because Isaac, in a decision he would later deeply regret, allowed Thomas to be assigned to the team.
Thomas had not volunteered. He had been placed there quietly, efficiently and with the kind of bureaucratic coldness that left no room for argument. Richmond, upon hearing the news, had smiled. Not the nervous smile of someone caught off guard. The slow, deliberate smile of someone whose plan had just fallen perfectly into place.
The torment began subtly at first.
A "forgotten" supply run that left Thomas on the wrong side of the school grounds as a pack of evolved zombies closed in. A "miscommunication" about the meeting point that stranded him in a building with no exits for twenty minutes while something large and black eyed circled the ground floor below. A "misplaced" weapon that left him facing a mutated zombie with nothing but a rusted pipe and whatever remained of his human strength and wit.
Thomas survived each one. Barely. And each time he dragged himself back to the base battered, bleeding, clothes torn Richmond would look at him with an expression of mild surprise, as if genuinely shocked that he had made it back at all.
The scars accumulated. So did something else.
Isaac noticed it first the way Thomas's eyes were changing. Not the injuries. Not the exhaustion. The eyes. Where there had once been dry wit, quiet calculation and the occasional flash of dark humour, there was now simply nothing. A flatness that was harder to look at than anger would have been.
"Richmond," Isaac said one evening, his voice carrying the particular weight of someone who did not raise it often. "I am telling you for the last time stop."
Richmond looked at him with an expression of perfect innocence. "I genuinely don't know what you're talking about, Isaac."
Isaac held his gaze for a long moment. Then he walked away because there was nothing more to say to a person who had already decided not to hear you.
The bullying intensified.
By the third week Mary had noticed too though she had noticed far earlier than she let on.
She tried everything. She left food outside the infirmary door on nights she knew he hadn't eaten. She found excuses to cross his path during the day a question about supplies, a brief report on a student's recovery, anything to create a moment of connection. She greeted him every morning with the same warmth she always had, refusing to let his silence make her feel unwelcome in her own kindness.
Every single attempt was met with the same thing.
Nothing.
Not coldness. Not hostility. Just nothing. He would look through her the way someone looks through a window at the weather. Registering. Noting. Moving on.
One morning she said good morning to him in the hallway and he walked past her without breaking stride, without a flicker of recognition, without a single word. She stood in the empty hallway for a moment afterward, her greeting still hanging in the air.
Then she straightened up, smoothed her hair and went back to work.
It was Lucy who finally called the meeting.
She gathered those closest to Thomas in the school auditorium on a quiet evening at the end of the third week Mary, Isaac, Kingsley, Charles, Christian and Francis and laid out what everyone had been privately thinking but collectively avoiding.
"Something is very wrong with Thomas," she said simply. "And I think we all know it. So what exactly is going on?"
The room was quiet for a moment. Then Isaac, who had been sitting with his hands clasped and his eyes on the floor, looked up.
And told them everything.
The silence that followed Isaac's account was the heaviest the auditorium had ever held. Charles stared at the wall. Francis removed his glasses and pressed his fingers against his eyes. Kingsley's jaw was tight enough to crack his fist clenched in his lap, knuckles bone white.
Then Mary spoke.
Her voice was very calm. Almost conversational. Which was somehow the most terrifying thing about it.
"Let us kill every single one of them," she said. "Every person who laid a hand on him, who laughed at him, who left him alone to die I want to pour acid on their skin. Peel it off while they're still conscious. And then feed what's left of them to the zombies."
The room went very, very still.
Charles slowly turned to look at her. Kingsley had stopped breathing. Francis had gone pale. Even Isaac calm, unshakeable Isaac looked momentarily like he wanted to be somewhere else entirely.
Mary blinked. Looked around at the faces staring back at her.
"Sorry," she said, smoothing her hands on her knees. "I got a little carried away."
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
"A little," Charles said finally, his voice barely above a whisper.
The meeting continued though with a noticeably more subdued energy than it had begun with, several of its members occasionally glancing at Mary with the careful, sideways attention one gives to something that has recently revealed an unexpected and somewhat alarming depth.
What none of them knew was that at that exact moment, Thomas was on the roof.
He stood at the edge, looking out over the ruined city the full moon hanging enormous and pale above it all, casting everything in a quiet silver light that made the destruction below look almost peaceful. Almost.
In his hand he held a small pendant simple, worn smooth at the edges from years of handling. Veronica had given it to him years ago, slipped it into his palm during one of their meetings with nothing more than a quiet smile and no explanation. He had carried it every day since.
He turned it over once. Twice.
(She's in trouble.)
He couldn't explain it. Couldn't point to a specific piece of evidence or logical deduction. It was simply there a certainty sitting in his chest like a stone, quiet and immovable.
He looked out at the city for a long moment more. Then his gaze drifted upward toward the moon.
Behind him, somewhere below, he could hear the faint sounds of the auditorium. The murmur of voices he recognized. People who had stood in front of him when others raised their chairs. People who had rushed toward danger when any sensible person would have run the other way.
"You're real friends," he said quietly to no one in particular. "All of you."
He stood there a moment longer.
Then he went downstairs.
He moved through the base with the practiced quiet of someone who had spent a lifetime trying not to be noticed. A change of clothes. The pendant tucked back against his chest. The black bag repacked, lighter this time, only what he needed. The shotgun. Two katanas.
He took the long way to avoid the cafeteria.
The Mustang was parked where he had left it just outside the base gate, partially hidden beneath a collapsed awning. He checked the fuel. Enough. He got in, released the handbrake and let the car roll silently down the slight incline of the road before starting the engine far enough from the school that the sound wouldn't carry.
Then he drove into the dark.
Richmond moved at dawn.
He slipped through the corridor with the careful silence of someone who had been planning this for longer than he would ever admit a folded letter tucked under one arm, his expression carrying the particular calm of someone who has already decided that what they are about to do is necessary.
He pushed open Thomas's door.
The room was dark. The shape beneath the sheets was still.
Richmond placed the letter on the desk a carefully forged note in handwriting close enough to Thomas's to pass a casual inspection, announcing simply that he was leaving and not to look for him.
Then he raised his hand.
His antimatter ability was limited he had learned that quickly and painfully during training, discovering that using it beyond a certain threshold left him feeling hollowed out, like something essential was being slowly consumed from the inside. So he used it sparingly. Deliberately. Only when it mattered.
This, he had decided, mattered.
The air around his palm shimmered a subtle, wrongness that was difficult to look at directly, like a tear in the fabric of the space the bed occupied. Then with a quiet, almost polite sound , like a sigh , the bed simply ceased to exist. Sheets, frame, mattress and everything beneath them gone.
Richmond lowered his hand. Exhaled slowly. Looked at the empty space where Thomas Sendomaki had, as far as he was concerned, just been erased from the world.
He straightened his collar.
And left.
Mary came by at mid morning.
She knocked once. Waited. Knocked again. Waited longer. The third time she knocked she already knew the quality of the silence on the other side was different from sleep. She pushed the door open.
The room was empty. The letter sat on the desk.
She read it twice. Then she folded it carefully, placed it back on the desk and walked very quickly, in a way that was almost but not quite running to the cafeteria.
Isaac, Kingsley and Lucy were at the table. They looked up when she came in.
She held up the letter.
Kingsley was on his feet before she finished her first sentence and before anyone could say another word, the red flames were already crawling up his arms. He crossed the cafeteria in three strides, burst through the window and launched himself into the sky a streak of red light cutting upward through the pale morning air.
The commotion drew people from across the base. Students pressed against windows and gathered in doorways, watching the point of red light arc across the sky above the city, sweeping back and forth in long searching passes.
Nobody spoke much. Mary stood in the cafeteria doorway with her arms folded across her chest and her eyes fixed on the sky, very still, in the way that people are still when they are holding something very tightly together on the inside.
After a while the red light returned.
Kingsley came down in the courtyard landing heavily, his flames extinguished. His face, when he looked up, was the kind of dark that has nothing left to say.
Isaac crossed the courtyard to him immediately. He glanced back at Mary still in the doorway and said quietly, "Give us a moment."
Mary looked at him. Then at Kingsley. Then she went back inside.
Isaac turned to Kingsley.
"Tell me."
Kingsley was quiet for a moment. When he spoke his voice was flat and careful, the way voices get when their owners are refusing to let them break.
"City centre," he said. "There was a body." He stopped. Started again. "It looked like him. Same build. Same face, near enough. It was" He stopped again. "It wasn't in good shape, Isaac. Whatever got to him it wasn't quick."
The atmosphere in the courtyard thickened like a gathering storm. Word traveled, as word always does, faster than anyone intended and within minutes the cafeteria had filled with students wearing expressions that ranged from stunned to grief stricken to carefully blank.
Christian sat at the far end of the table and said nothing. He turned his pen over slowly between his fingers and stared at the surface of the table his extraordinary mind already working quietly through the details of kingsley's report, noting with the precision of a supercomputer the one thing that didn't fit.
No car wreck.
Thomas had driven out of the base in the Mustang. If something had happened to him at the city centre if he had been caught out in the open there would have been a car. Damaged. Abandoned. Something.
Kingsley hadn't mentioned a car.
Christian turned his pen over once more. Filed the information away. Said nothing.
Mary came back into the cafeteria.
She looked at the faces. At Kingsley. At the way Isaac was standing.
"Kingsley," she said. Her voice was steady. "What did you see?"
Kingsley looked at Isaac. Isaac gave the smallest of nods.
Kingsley told her.
The cafeteria went completely silent. Someone near the back made a small sound and quickly suppressed it.
Mary stood very still as Kingsley finished speaking her expression unreadable, her hands at her sides.
Then Richmond appeared in the doorway.
He had composed his face into something approximating concern though the calculation behind it was visible to anyone looking closely enough. He crossed the room toward Mary with his hands slightly outstretched, his voice arranged into something soft.
"Mary don't worry. I'm here. I'll take care of you. Much better than that idiot ever did."
He took another step toward her.
Mary turned to look at him.
What crossed her face in that moment was not grief. It was not anger. It was something quieter and considerably more dangerous a look of such absolute, focused intensity that Richmond felt it like a physical pressure against his chest. His next step simply did not happen. His body, operating on an instinct considerably smarter than his ambition, took two steps back instead.
He stopped. Blinked. Said nothing.
Mary held his gaze for one more second then looked away, as if he had ceased to be worth the attention.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Once. Carefully.
Then she straightened up.
"I don't believe he's dead," she said. Not loudly. Not with performance. Just clearly, and with the kind of certainty that doesn't leave room for argument. "I don't know what Kingsley saw. But it wasn't Thomas."
She picked up her bag from the back of the chair.
"This base still needs a medic. So I'm staying." She looked around the room at Isaac, at Kingsley, at Lucy, at the faces of people who had become, over these weeks, something closer to family than classmates. "But the moment he comes back and he will come back I have something to say to him." She paused. "He's going to hear every word of it whether he wants to or not."
She walked to the door.
Stopped with her hand on the frame.
"And Richmond," she said, without turning around. "Don't ever speak to me again."
She left.
The cafeteria stayed quiet for a long time after that.