Chapter 6 Collapse of the Peaceful Campus

Evelyn’s POV

At noon the light in the room turned green. It came through the gap in the curtains as one flat blade of color and lay across the floorboards, and I was up before my eyes had finished opening. Through the blind the whole sky had gone the color of a bottle held up to a lamp, the sun still there behind it but wrong, small and green, and the shadows on the rug had already pulled out long and thin like it was five in the afternoon. I looked at my watch. Twelve exactly.

For three seconds the campus went dead. Not quiet — dead, the way a room sounds after somebody pulls the plug, and in that gap I could hear Hannah breathing through her mouth in her sleep, a bird still working the willow by the west entrance, and Grace's empty bunk across the room where she had dropped her spare charger and forgotten it.

Then every window in every building opened at once and let the screaming in.

Hannah sat up with her hair squashed flat on one side and asked if there was some parade. Zoe bolted for the window, yelling for us to come see the sky, and I caught the back of her hoodie and pulled. She hit the desk with her hip and swore at me.

"Shut the curtain. Stay away from the window," I said, and my hands were already working without me: pack off the chair and onto my shoulder, strap tight, the boning knife loose in the sheath at my hip, boots laced since dawn. Ten years of habit doesn't check the calendar.

Zoe pulled the curtain open a crack, and we spotted Dale Whitaker. He was in my stats class, still dressed in his white interview shirt and black slacks. One hand pressed against a willow trunk, his shoulders heaved sharply even from the third floor. A dark sweat stain bloomed between his shoulder blades. Two girls walked over and paused; one leaned in, touched his arm, and spoke to him.

He lifted his head. His face was empty, blank like a photograph. Then his jaw split open, skin peeling into wet flaps. Something pale, grape‑colored burst out, coiling around her wrist, then her head. The glass did nothing to muffle the sound.

I knew him. He had turned in the other life too, and I never did find out at which minute.

Zoe backed into a chair and knocked it over. Hannah had both hands on the window frame and her knuckles had gone the color of the paint. I gave it two seconds, which was all I could spare, and then I stopped looking at him . How many were still running on the quad. Which stairwell the crowd hadn't reached yet. Which stretch of the path had already gone quiet, because quiet means everybody over there is done.

Car alarms blared by the fountain, then one after another across the Fifteenth Avenue lot, like falling dominoes. On the path, a couple bickered. The boy pulled free, stumbled back, let out a twisted sound and fled. The girl stood frozen, then touched her face. Her cheek tore away like damp paper under her fingers, revealing green flesh that oozed down her hand and onto her shoe. She stared at her fingers, then at the boy, already far away. She screamed, and the cry cut short seconds later — whatever was coming had reached her.

I did the arithmetic in my head the way I'd done it a thousand times. In the other life nobody had a word for the green crystals that came down with the light, so we called them Demon Seeds and kept calling them that long after we knew better. Three in ten of the people they hit directly would burn through the fever and come out on the far side, changed and alive. The rest ended up like the man twenty feet from the willow, who twitched in the grass and then pushed himself up on arms that bent the wrong way.

I did not duck the one drifting toward me. I tilted my chin up, let the crystal settle in my palm, and let it split my skin and burrow inside. This was a choice, not bad luck. Burn unfurled down my veins, and I quietly logged the start of the sensation to cross‑reference against my notes from the last run.

"Grace is still out there," Zoe shouted, and went for the door. She said the name twice. I caught her around the waist and put her down on the bed hard enough to make the frame jump, and she fought me for a second before she quit.

The hallway had stopped being a hallway. Feet went past at a run. Somebody hit the far wall with an open palm, nails dragged on cinder block, a girl called a name and got no answer and called it again. Then a short flat sound, like a book dropped on concrete, and after that a dragging that took its time.

I threw the deadbolt and turned the desk on its side and walked it into the door until the edge jammed down on the knob. I ran the pack straps through the desk legs and around the bed frame and pulled them until the buckles creaked, pulled the curtains shut and left one slit about a thumb wide. Zoe's phone was face-up on the rug and I kicked it under the bed. "Don't let it ring," I said. "Not once."

Hannah had folded herself into the corner between the wardrobe and the wall with her knees up. "You're not scared?" she asked.

"I'm scared enough that my hands are shaking." I held them out where she could see, and they were. "But being scared doesn't move that thing out of the hallway. It just makes you slow." I crouched down so I was at their level instead of standing over them, and I said it once and didn't soften it. "Everything you see from here on is real. The faster you get used to that, the longer you live."

A minute later, banging started. A girl’s raw, breaking voice begged from outside, saying something was on the stairs. Hannah surged toward the desk. I pressed her shoulder down and shook my head, holding her gaze. She stared at me, then settled back. The banging lasted forty seconds. Then it changed.

Hannah put both hands over her mouth and cried without making any noise. Zoe folded forward until her forehead hit her knees. I sat down with my back against the door, hand on the knife, eyes on the gap where the door met the frame, and thought about how I had stopped one of them with a hand on the shoulder for no more than a breath, and hadn't stopped the other one at all. That thought did no good where it was, so I put it down and went back to watching.

The noise in the hall thinned out and moved away and finally went somewhere else. I got up and took one more look through the slit. Two of the north fire doors were standing open with nobody using them, and past the fountain a red pickup had come to rest sideways with its driver's door hanging open, which meant somebody had gotten out and hadn't gotten back in. The light was still that flat gray-green, and the shadows were stretched out like late afternoon, and my watch said ten past twelve.

I made two packs of instant noodles with the water left in the thermos and let them sit, and the steam fogged the plastic lids and smelled like a normal evening. Then I peeled an apple in one long strip and cut it into pieces, and the cold of it made my fingers feel like mine again. Zoe lifted her head, her eyes swollen nearly shut.

"You can still eat?" she asked.

I already had a mouthful. I chewed it, swallowed it, and said, "Eat. We can't carry it all, and you won't get anything like this again for a while." I pushed the apple pieces toward Hannah. She picked one up, her hand shook the whole way to her mouth, and she bit down and cried and chewed at the same time. Zoe took a piece too, and then a second one. The three of us sat behind the desk with our backs to the door and ate.

When I finished, the room was quiet enough that I could hear us chewing. I slid the knife back into the sheath and went to the window and put one eye to the gap. The green was draining out of the sky at the edges, going the color of dishwater.

"Before it gets dark," I said, "we leave this building."