"What... the fuck... is this?"
The words barely rasped out of Rix's throat as he hauled himself out of the crater.
The scene unfolding around him was completely beyond anything he had ever imagined. Never in his life had he thought a nightmare like this could exist.
Almost half of Ashford College had been ground into dust beneath the meteorites. The buildings he had walked past every morning were reduced to jagged piles of brick and twisted rebar, choking the air with gray powder.
Rix staggered forward. His body felt hollow, his legs weak, and a steady stream of blood was still matted into the hair at the side of his head. He had no idea where he was going.
As he picked his way through the haze, a faint, ragged cry cut through the quiet nearby.
He stopped. Having nowhere else to head anyway, he turned toward the sound to see who was pleading for help.
Under a massive heap of shattered concrete, he found a boy buried alive. The wall had collapsed straight over him, trapping everything except his head and hands. His face was gray with dust, his breath coming in shallow, frantic hitches.
Rix squinted through the smoke. It was Noel—the class topper.
Noel's frame trembled under the weight pressing down on him, but the moment his eyes locked onto Rix, the terror in them flickered.
"Ple... please... help... me," Noel rasped at first, his voice weak and desperate.
Then recognition fully set in, and something shifted in his expression. Noel was the top student, but he wasn't the quiet, hardworking type. He was sharp, cold, and calculated.
"Y-You're Rix, right?" Noel's voice lost its breathy panic, steadying into something strangely firm. "H-Help me out... right now. Get this off me. If you help me up... I'll make it worth your while."
Rix blinked, his head throbbing. "Worth my while?"
"I'll... I'll help you with exams," Noel stammered, his eyes darting frantically as he tried to assess Rix. "I'll let you copy my answers. I'll make sure you pass... hell, I'll make you a topper if you want. Just get this off me!"
Rix stood there, staring blankly at the buried boy.
What the hell is wrong with this motherfucker?
Trapped under a wall, and his instinct was still to try and bribe someone with test scores.
Underneath the concrete, Noel's mind was racing. That hooked him. Of course it did. Now hurry up, you idiot, get me out of here...
Rix didn't move for a long second, standing like a statue in the smoke.
On the outside, Rix came off as cold and detached, but deep down he cared—for a very select few. The people he considered his own.
Noel wasn't one of them.
Besides, Rix barely had the strength to stand, let alone lift a slab of reinforced concrete. But looking at the trapped boy... he still tried.
He extended his arms down into the gap. His hands were shaking violently, his fingers slippery with dirt and sweat.
"Grab on," Rix muttered. "Hold tight."
"Right... okay," Noel nodded, his fingers locking around Rix's wrist with a frantic, suffocating grip.
"One... two... three... UP!" Rix yelled, digging his heels into the dirt and pulling with every ounce of strength left in his broken body.
Veins bulged against his neck, but the concrete didn't budge an inch. His boots slipped on the loose gravel. He tried again, pulling until his sight went spotty, but it was useless.
His grip failed. Rix stumbled backward, collapsing hard onto his rear.
"Ah... fuck..." He cursed softly, pressing a palm to his bleeding temple as the world spun.
Should I just leave him? the thought crossed his mind instantly.
He sat there on the rubble, breathing heavily, before looking back down at Noel. "How much longer can you hold out? If you can stay steady for a few minutes, I can try to find some other people. We can pull this off together. Can you wait?"
Noel's eyes widened, a sudden flicker of genuine hope breaking through his guarded expression. "Y-Yes... I can wait. Five... ten minutes maybe. My leg is pinned and bleeding bad... but I can hold on. Just go!"
In his entire life, no one had ever spoken to Noel with that kind of straightforward directness, let alone offered to run for help. But even as relief washed over him, his brain kept spinning. Whatever. Just get people back here to dig me out.
"Good. Keep breathing, I'll be fast," Rix said. He forced himself back onto his feet and jogged away into the haze, using whatever stamina he had left.
The second he cleared the pile of rubble and Noel was out of sight, Rix's pace leveled off.
Fuck that, he thought, his face going completely neutral. Hell no am I coming back.
He didn't even know if another rock was going to fall out of the sky and crush his skull in the next thirty seconds. He needed to get out of the college, period. Home—that was the only thing that mattered right now.
Even if he had no idea if his house was still standing, he had to see it for himself.
That was Rix. He'd say whatever kept things moving, then do exactly what he needed to do to survive.
Back under the debris, Noel waited.
A small, triumphant faint smile remained on his face, convinced he had successfully manipulated a desperate classmate into saving him. In the quiet ruin of the campus, he sat trapped in the dirt, waiting for a rescue that was never going to come.
Rix picked his way through the rubble, his eyes scanning the ground to avoid stepping on the bodies scattered across the paths. Some were classmates he recognized; others were strangers.
As he neared the main administrative block, he began seeing older faces—teachers who had been lecturing in classrooms just an hour ago.
Up ahead, near the main entrance gates, a small group of surviving faculty members was huddled together, trying to tend to a crowd of bleeding students. Among them, a familiar figure stood out.
Professor Harin.
Harin caught sight of Rix jogging through the smoke and waved a dust-covered arm. "Rix! Over here! Help us with these kids!"
Fuck, Rix thought.
He didn't slow down. He didn't turn his head. He kept his eyes locked straight ahead, pretending the wind had swallowed the professor's voice entirely.
The air was heavy with thick gray smoke and a sharp, sulfurous stench that burned the back of his throat. The whole campus looked like a war zone—except there were no soldiers, no artillery, no enemy army. Just raw, mindless destruction.
But as Rix ran, a cold thought settled in his gut.
Is this really just a natural disaster?
Could thousands of meteors falling at the exact same time, concentrated directly over population centers, really be a coincidence? It felt calculated. Manufactured.
If it isn't natural... who the hell could even do something like this?
The thought trailed off as he rounded the corner into the main parking lot and skidded to a halt.
The lot was a graveyard of twisted metal. Cars had been flattened into pancaked slabs of steel beneath chunks of fallen debris. Rix sprinted toward the bicycle rack, his stomach dropping when he saw the structure crushed flat.
"Where is it..." he muttered, scanning the ground frantically.
A few yards away, tossed near a shattered planter, he spotted it. The shockwave of a nearby impact must have thrown the bike clear of the rack.
He ran over and hauled the frame upright. The body was surprisingly intact—just a few scrapes and a slightly bent handlebar. But when he looked down at the rear wheel, he cursed.
The chain had snapped off the chainring and was wedged tightly between the frame and the gear teeth.
"Shit!"
He dropped to his knees, his grease-stained fingers tearing at the metal links to pry the chain back into alignment.
A sharp, wet tear sounded from the darkness behind him.
Rix froze.
He turned his head slowly.
Ten yards away, beneath the collapsed overhang of the faculty lounge, a body was pinned under a slab of concrete. A body that shouldn't have been moving.
Its neck jerked to the side with a sickening snap. Then, with unnatural, hitching motions, its arms bent back at impossible angles, dragging the crushed lower half of its torso out from beneath the stone.
It forced itself upright, swaying like a ragdoll. Thick, yellow foam bubbled from its lips, spilling down its chin as it let out a wet, rattling wheeze.
"Akkk... harggk... koorrhh..."
A second sound scraped against the asphalt to his left.
Rix whipped his head around.
Another corpse was pulling itself off the hood of a crushed sedan. Its limbs twitched violently as it shuffled forward, deep, dark fissures split wide across its forehead.
Rix stayed pinned to the ground, his heart slamming against his ribs so hard it rattled his teeth.
"Wh... what... the fuck... Zombies?"
His hands went completely numb. The scenes he had only ever seen on screens were playing out on the concrete right in front of him.
All around the parking lot, figures were twitching. One by one, the dead were standing up.
Fuck, fuck, what do I do? Run now? Fix the chain?
There were at least ten of them within thirty yards, their milky, vacant eyes slowly turning toward him, closing the distance from every angle.
"Fuck!"
He slammed his hands back onto the bike chain. He had to fix it. Running on foot through the city in this state was a death sentence. The closest one was fifty meters away—he had a few seconds.
40 meters.
Sweat poured down his face, stinging his eyes.
30 meters.
His fingers were trembling so badly he couldn't align the teeth with the chain links. A five-second fix was turning into an eternity.
"Come on... get on there... come on!"
20 meters.
He could hear the scraping of their shoes on the gravel now. The wet, rhythmic choking sounds from their throats grew louder.
10 meters.
Rix stood up, every nerve in his body screaming at him to abandon the bike. His gut told him that if one of those things so much as broke his skin, he was done. And his gut was never wrong.
5 meters.
He swung his leg over the seat, his foot slamming onto the pedal.
2 meters.
He threw his weight forward, stomping down.
1 meter.
0.5 meters.
A cold, stiff grip clamped onto the fabric of his hoodie, jerking him backward.
Rix spun his head around. He was staring directly into the gray, sunken face of a dead student. The thing unhinged its jaw, a black tongue vibrating behind ruined teeth.
"Kaghhhh!"
"Get the fuck off me!" Rix screamed, driving his heel straight into the center of the corpse's face.
The impact cracked against the bone. The zombie didn't fly back, but the weight of the kick forced it to stagger, its fingers tearing free from his hoodie.
Rix didn't wait for it to recover. He threw all his weight into the pedals, the chain catching with a loud clack as the bike surged forward.
He wove through the moving corpses, his tires spraying gravel behind him as he accelerated toward the broken iron gates of the main entrance.
Behind him, the dead shuffled out into the street in a slow, ragged wave. Rix didn't look back. He hit the main road, head down, pedaling hard toward home—not even knowing if there was still a home left to reach.