London woke up wrong that morning.
The sky couldn't decide whether to rain or brood, and the city sounded like someone had turned down the volume on the world. Even the usual clamor of buses and delivery trucks felt offshore, muffled by an invisible hand.
Mike Warren leaned against the railing outside the mathematics building, coffee steam fogging the air above his cup. His notebook was a messy topography of equations, doodles, and one-liners scored through with a black pen. Headphones hung loose around his neck; a peppy indie track whispered from them like a nervous animal in his chest. He had a grin on his face, the sort of grin people wore when they'd just read Memes on their phone.
"Statistics say caffeine kills creativity," he said to himself, letting the cup warm his fingers. "Guess I'll die creative, then." He took a sip.
Across the courtyard, Kazuma Aoki adjusted his satchel strap with the small, precise movements of someone who had rehearsed the exact placement of every item on his person. He walked like a person who measured the world in problems and solutions, eyes flicking from exit to entrance, cataloguing obstacles the way others catalog photos. His hair defied London humidity; his movements were economical and deliberate, Almost like robo.t
Near the library steps, Dan Fort sat slouched against a column, hood up, earbuds in — a silhouette of indifference. His laptop glowed on his knees. The essay on the screen hadn't progressed for a while; his fingers rested on the keys as if waiting for the world to present a worthy problem. Dan's philosophy, if he had one, was simple: conserve motion so the brain could move. Now his mind moved, quietly, like a mouse in the walls.
The first thing anyone noticed wasn't a sound. It was a metallic tang in the air that made your teeth itch — the kind of smell that clung to the back of the throat. Blood, maybe. Burning wiring. Whatever it was, it tasted wrong.
By noon the campus felt off. Lecture halls were half-empty. Professors posted terse messages and canceled classes. The university's social accounts blinked with silence. Still, students clustered in the quad, laughing and scrolling, pretending normality was a jacket they could shrug back on.
Mike noticed the pigeons first. A flock exploded into the sky as if a hand had swept through them. Then a security guard ran across the field, moving faster than any campus guard had a right to. Then came the screams.
They came in fragments: a girl in the cafeteria collapsing mid-sentence, another student hurrying to help and then recoiling with blood on her hands. The collapsed girl convulsed, then with a grotesque, animal logic bit the other's people wrist. The sound that came from her wasn't quite human; it dragged the room's air into a different shape.
Panic spread faster than any rational explanation.
Kazuma watched from the engineering block window, expression unchanged. His mind did not supply panic , it supplied options: best exits, choke points, routes to transport. He did not shout. He did not run. He slung his bag over one shoulder and said, without theatricality, "Containment will fail."
By the time the sun began to slide behind the clock tower, the university was a corridor of shouts and overturned chairs.
Mike bolted down a stairwell and slammed the door, palms stinging as glass vibrated under three fists. He shoved a broom through the handles and leaned his back against it, chest heaving. The grin was gone. Humor, his shield, had been blunted.
"This… this isn't funny anymore," he muttered, then, in a reflex that had nothing to do with the situation and everything to do with who he was, added, "...maybe a little."
A second voice answered — quiet, steady. Mike peered down the stairwell and saw a student holding a metal pipe like a practiced tool. Kazuma's face was calm, his eyes cold as glass.
"If you make noise, they'll hear," Kazuma said.
Mike swallowed. "Mate, if I can hear me, they can hear me."
Kazuma didn't smile. "Move quietly. Follow me if you want to live."
Mike blinked. "You really just said that?"
Kazuma's back did not betray humor. "It worked," he said.
They were hardly alone. In the hallway below, Dan sat on a bench, still absorbed by his laptop, earbuds in as if the chaos were merely a background condition worth recording.
Kazuma's patience thinned. "What are you doing?"
Dan looked up, expression unreadable. "Documenting the end," he said. "Might be useful."
Mike gaped. "Are you insane? We have to get out!"
Dan closed the laptop with the same slow care he applied to everything. "I'll go," he said. "But not running. Running wastes energy."
Kazuma's mouth tightened. "You'll die slowly, then."
Dan stood and stretched as if he'd been woken from the mildest nap. "That's still slowly," he agreed. "I'll take it."
The three of them moved through corridors strewn with evidence of sudden departure — backpacks, a shoe, a coffee cup rolling like a small moon. The sound outside had changed: it was lower now, a wet dragging intermixed with broken human noises. Occasionally the lights above flickered, and the distant skyline pulsed with the orange teeth of fires.
They found refuge in the engineering lab and turned the room into a temporary fortress. Cabinets were shoved against doors. A soldering table became a barricade. For a while they were simply three people who had chosen proximity over solitude.
Mike sat on a desk, legs swinging. Anxiety and adrenaline bobbed in him like a trapped animal. "So — what's the plan, genius?" he asked, half-joke, half-demand. "You look like the type who eats plans for breakfast."
Kazuma unfurled a blueprint of the national rail lines across a lab table, the paper trembling slightly in Mike's nervous hands. He traced routes with his fingertip, not needing to speak to make his intentions clear.
"We can't stay," Kazuma said. "The city is compromised. Trains are self-contained, fast, and defensible. If we reach the East Line depot and take a train, we can move — together."
Mike laughed, but it sounded small. "You want to steal a train?"
"No." Kazuma's voice was flat. "I want to command one."
Dan folded his arms and cocked his head. "From London to Tokyo," he said, deadpan. "There's a bit of water in the way."
Kazuma looked at him as if the ocean were a solvable equation. "Engineering has solutions," he said. "We'll figure out the rest when we have a vehicle that moves on rails."
Mike sank back, exhaling, a laugh that had no joy in it. "Oh, this is mad. Completely mad."
Dan watched the dark window where the city smoldered, the reflection making his eyes small and hard. He said, almost to himself, "Mad is surviving when everyone else goes sane."
There was a brittle humorless edge to his voice that made Mike stop laughing.
Something slammed against the barricaded door.
The laughter dissolved into an immediate silence, the kind that buzzes in the ears. Then the moaning threaded through the lab — low, wet, and wrong. It was imitative of a human sound but stripped of its meaning, like a phrase spoken in an alien language.
They listened to the sound as if it were a new species. For a few seconds the world's old rules still seemed valid: doors could be closed, people could hide, and the universe would continue to obey those small, pedestrian laws.
Then something thudded against the door again, and the silence that followed felt heavier than any piercing scream. It was the kind of silence that held breath in its hands and did not return it.
The alarms began to fade long before anyone thought to turn them off.
Somewhere in the east dorms, a fire alarm kept bleating through the corridors, but the rest of the campus was already sinking into silence. The kind of silence that only exists after too much noise—after the running, after the screaming, after people stopped believing help was coming.
Kazuma stood at the end of the library's upper hall, watching the courtyard below. From that high window, he could see smoke rising from the science wing. Something had exploded—again.
Mike kicked a chair over, pacing near the study tables. "So… we're sure this isn't some chemical leak, right? Because if it is, I'm suing whoever mixed zombie juice with cafeteria soup."
Dan didn't look up from where he was bandaging his hand. "You'd have to survive to file a lawsuit."
"That's dark," Mike muttered.
"It's realistic," Dan replied evenly.
Kazuma turned from the window. "We can't stay here forever. Once the emergency power fails, this place becomes a trap."
Mike leaned against a desk, eyebrows raised. "You got a better idea, Professor Doomsday?"
"Supplies," Kazuma said. "We gather what we can. Food, water, medical kits. Then we relocate."
"Relocate where? The apocalypse doesn't exactly come with travel brochures."
Kazuma spread a map of the city on the desk. It was creased and coffee-stained, probably from before the world decided to end. "The train yard. If we can secure a rail vehicle, it gives us mobility and distance from population centers."
Dan nodded slightly, approving the logic. "Trains don't need roads. That could work."
Mike blinked. "You're serious. You want to ride out the apocalypse like it's a field trip."
Kazuma didn't respond. He was already marking routes in pencil.
Dan stood and peered toward the windows. "Noise attracts them. If we move, it has to be quiet."
"Quiet?" Mike asked, gesturing around. "The campus is literally on fire."
"Then we wait," Kazuma said. "Until it burns down enough that no one cares."
Mike gave a short, incredulous laugh. "You really know how to make a guy feel optimistic."
Dan closed the door softly. "We'll hold here tonight. Library's got one entrance we can barricade."
"And if the infected get in?" Mike asked.
Dan met his eyes. "Then we stop being students."
The three of them went to work—pushing bookshelves, breaking tables for nails, blocking windows with chairs and filing cabinets.
Hours passed.
The only light came from Mike's flashlight bouncing across cracked spines of old books. Somewhere outside, a woman screamed, the sound dragging too long to be human. Mike froze mid-motion, then forced a laugh that didn't reach his eyes. "Someone failed the art project."
Kazuma said nothing. Dan simply tightened the barricade.
By the time the last scream died down, the three of them sat in the dim glow of flickering emergency lights waiting and pretending not to think about how empty the world had become.