DEGREES OF DEATH

10. The Psychopath’s Coup

 

The pulsing black veins under the torn grey hoodie seemed to suck all the remaining oxygen out of Room 2-B.

Daniel froze for only a second before his executioner's instinct took over. With his left hand, he raised the teak chair leg, its sharp end aimed directly at Satria's face.

"Back up. Everyone, back up against the whiteboard! Now!" Daniel's voice boomed, shattering the panic that was about to erupt.

Xavier, Alex, Chania, and Bianca reflexively stumbled back, away from the stranger. Kimberly was already cowering in the corner.

Satria flinched. His pale face turned ashen. He quickly pulled his hoodie sleeve down, trying to cover the festering scratch marks with his trembling right hand.

"No… this… this is just a normal wound!" Satria stammered, his voice a high, desperate shriek. "I swear! I was running, and my arm got scraped on a rusty nail on the fence! It's just a regular tetanus infection! I'm still human!"

"Take off your jacket. Now," Daniel commanded flatly. His eyes were like ice, devoid of any shred of mercy. The tip of the club in his left hand didn't waver.

Satria took a step back until his back hit the barricade. A small, discordant laugh escaped his trembling lips. "What's wrong with you people? You're so paranoid! I… I just need some water and rest."

"Daniel, wait," Alex tried to intervene from behind. His naive nature resurfaced at the sight of someone begging and crying. "Maybe he's right, Niel. Don't be the judge and jury, we can clean the wound with—"

"Shut up, Lex!" Daniel roared without turning, cutting his friend's sentence short. "Look at his eyes, Lex! Look at his eyes!"

Everyone looked at Satria’s face. And that's when the true horror slapped them.

Satria’s eyes, once a dark brown, were slowly beginning to cloud over. His pupils were dilating unnaturally, swallowing the color of his irises until only a familiar, milky white remained. The blood vessels around his eyes and temples bulged, turning the same deep black as the veins in his arm.

The infection wasn't instant. It had a delay, waiting for the host's immune system to completely collapse before taking over the brain. And now, that time bomb had just detonated inside their safe zone.

"I'm… hungry," Satria mumbled, his voice suddenly changing to a deep, hoarse rasp, as if his vocal cords had been soaked in acid.

Instantly, a mixture of red blood and thick, black slime spewed from Satria’s nose and mouth. He choked on his own blood, his body stiffening violently.

CRAAAACK!

The sound of his spine snapping backward echoed through the classroom. Satria’s posture changed drastically, hunching over like a feral beast. He looked up, and the frightened face of the architecture student was gone completely. All that was left was a starving predator.

Satria roared and lunged at the person closest to him. At Daniel.

Daniel couldn't use both hands, his right arm still bound tightly across his chest. He knew he couldn't win a physical struggle against a mutant with only his left.

As Satria leaped with his mouth gaping wide, Daniel didn't dodge backward. He dropped to one knee, swept his foot under a nearby iron student chair, and kicked it forward, sending it sliding directly into Satria’s path.

CRASH!

Satria’s knees slammed into the chair, making him stumble and fall into a row of student desks.

"Vier! Get that long bench!" Daniel yelled, charging forward.

Xavier, who had been panicking, somehow found his courage again. He dropped his bat and grabbed a long wooden bench meant for three people.

Satria was just starting to crawl back up, growling wildly, his milky white eyes locked on Daniel's neck.

"Push, Vier! Pin him!" Daniel commanded.

Daniel used his left shoulder and arm, along with Xavier, to lift the long wooden bench like a giant shield and slam it into Satria’s chest.

THUD!

Satria was driven back by the weight of the bench and the force of two people. Daniel and Xavier kept pushing with the last of their strength, fueled by pure adrenaline. They cornered the creature, pushing it further and further back, toward the large glass window on the side of the classroom that overlooked the courtyard below.

"GRRRRAAAA!" Satria clawed at the surface of the wooden bench, his broken fingernails leaving streaks of black blood. His snapping jaws repeatedly tried to reach Xavier’s face, spattering saliva on his cheek.

"Shit! Your breath stinks, you bastard!" Xavier shrieked in disgust, pressing the bench with all his might, the veins in his neck bulging. "Niel, he's too strong!"

Daniel’s left arm began to tremble with exhaustion, while his right shoulder screamed with a pain that nearly made him pass out from the vibrations of the struggle. He glanced at the window behind Satria.

"On three… we push him through the glass!" Daniel snarled. "One… two… THREE!"

With one final, animalistic heave, Daniel and Xavier slammed the bench into Satria’s body at full speed.

SMASH!!!

Satria’s body crashed through the thick glass of the second-story window. Shards of glass flew through the air. Losing his footing, Satria was pushed through the shattered window frame, falling through the air with the wooden bench.

"AAARRRGGHH!" The monster’s roar was cut short.

THUMP!

The sound of flesh hitting asphalt echoed from below. Daniel and Xavier immediately backed away, gasping for breath. Daniel collapsed, his back sliding down the wall next to the broken window, his breathing like a locomotive.

Xavier dared to peek down through the shattered window.

Below, Satria’s body lay in a heap with a broken neck. But the sound of his fall and the shattering glass had become a dinner bell for the horde of mutants patrolling in the drizzle.

Within ten seconds, a dozen Listener-phase mutants sprinted from various directions and pounced on Satria’s not-quite-dead body. They tore, ripped, and feasted on the flesh of their own kind.

Xavier swallowed hard and quickly pulled his head back inside. His face was ashen. "His friends downstairs took care of him."

The classroom fell into a heavy silence. The ragged breathing of each survivor was audible in the cramped space. The cold, rainy air now poured in through the gaping hole in the window, bringing a bone-deep chill.

Chania walked slowly to the window, staring at the streaks of black blood left on the frame. She was silent, her mind seemingly working hard to process what had just happened.

"An old bite or scratch," Chania murmured, breaking the silence. She turned to Daniel with a vacant expression. "That means… the time it takes is different, Niel. Some turn in seconds, like Becca. Others wait for their immune system to collapse over hours, like Satria."

Daniel let out a rough breath. His gaze was ice-cold, sweeping over his terrified group members. He limped to the center of the room.

"Listen to me. All of you," Daniel said with an absolute tone that allowed for no argument. "Starting right now, the laws in this group have changed. Anyone who gets injured, no matter how small the scratch, has to report it! No secrets. One lie to save yourself means you're killing everyone else in this room."

Alex, who had defended Satria just moments ago, now bowed his head, unable to meet Daniel’s eyes. Guilt crushed him. If Daniel hadn't been so firm, he might be the one getting his intestines chewed on right now.

"Anyone hurt?" Daniel asked sharply. "Report it now. If I find out you're hiding something later, I'll throw you out that window myself."

Everyone shook their heads in unison.

Daniel finally let out a breath, walked to the corner, and sat down in a student chair. The pain in his right shoulder felt like it was setting his entire nervous system on fire. He closed his eyes, letting his body rest for a full minute.

Chania approached him silently. She held out a bottle of water and a single white pill. "I found some high-dosage painkillers in the first-aid kit. Take it, Niel. You look like a ghost."

Daniel opened his eyes, looked at the pill, then at Chania. "Thanks," he muttered. He swallowed the pill greedily, letting the cool water wash down his throat.

"So… what do we do now?" Alex asked from the corner, his voice hoarse and pessimistic. "The window's broken. Sooner or later, our sound or scent will be picked up by the hundreds of them out there. We can't stay in this classroom forever."

Daniel leaned back, staring up at the cloudy sky through the broken window. "We're getting out of this campus. Today. We'll find a car or walk as far away from the horde as we can."

"No! You're insane, Niel!" Kimberly suddenly cut in. She stood up, her face streaked with tears, her body trembling. The trauma of hiding alone all day yesterday still had a grip on her. "We should just wait here until someone rescues us! The army will come, Niel! They're everywhere out there. In here, we have walls, we have a locked door!"

Daniel turned his head slowly to look at Kimberly. His expression wasn't angry, just completely empty. It was the look of someone who had grasped the bitter reality of this world faster than anyone else.

"These walls won't feed us, Kim," Daniel answered, his flat voice stabbing straight to the heart. His eyes shifted to the barricaded door. "And that door… that door is just buying us time until they realize we're in here. No one is coming to save us."

Silence. Daniel’s argument was too logical, too cruel for Kimberly to refute. She started sobbing quietly again.

But before anyone could respond to Daniel, a sharp sound from the back of the room shattered the quiet.

SMASH!!!

The glass of the back window, the one that faced the outer roof ledge of the faculty building, suddenly exploded inward. Shards of glass sprayed into the classroom like shrapnel.

Everyone stumbled back, Xavier reflexively raising his bat.

Before they could react, a round, wet, sticky, and bloody object was thrown in from outside. It rolled across the tile floor with a wet splat, leaving a thick, red trail, before finally coming to a stop at the tip of Daniel's boot.

Chania and Kimberly shrieked in unison. Bianca covered her mouth, stifling a gag.

The object was the severed head of a zombie. Half of its face was mangled, but its lower jaw was still twitching, trying to bite the air. The severed tendons of its neck were still dripping fresh blood onto the floor.

Everyone froze. Cold air rushed in from outside.

A man then climbed casually through the window he had just destroyed. His expensive sneakers crunched on the broken glass without hesitation. His clothes were dirty and splattered with dried blood. The corner of his lip was split and bruised, but his eyes held a look of absolute madness.

In his right hand, he held an iron crowbar, its hooked end bent and dripping with fresh blood.

It was Vincent Damian. A final-year law student, a sociopath whose dark reputation was an open secret on campus. The man rumored to have driven a junior student to suicide just for his own psychological satisfaction.

A crooked, purely innocent yet deadly smile spread across Vincent’s face. He swept his gaze over the terrified faces in the room, then his eyes landed on the pile of bread and bottled water on the floor.

"Nice little party," Vincent said dismissively, his voice far too relaxed for the middle of an apocalypse. He swung the bloody crowbar, resting it arrogantly on his shoulder. "It’s a shame you forgot to invite me."

Xavier and Alex took a step back. Vincent’s reputation was far more terrifying than that of a campus bully; this guy was the definition of an escaped lunatic. His presence in the room suddenly made the zombie threat outside seem trivial.

But Daniel didn't move.

The Warlord didn't back down. Instead, he took a calm step forward, placing his body directly between his group and Vincent. He ignored the pain in his shoulder. His left hand gripped the teak club so tightly he was ready to kill. His expression became the blank, predatory stare of a hunter.

"Find another room, Vin. This one's full," Daniel said flatly, with no trace of fear in his voice.

Vincent snorted. He spat a mixture of saliva and blood onto the classroom floor, then looked at Daniel with a dangerous glint in his eye. His smile widened.

"I'm not asking for your permission, Daniel," Vincent whispered, slowly raising his crowbar. "I'm taking over this room. And from now on, your food, your room, and all of your lives belong to me."