The rain had thinned to a mist, soft enough to sound like static against the shattered skylight.
Dan Fort sat in the far corner of the library — a small island of light in a drowned sea of dark. The emergency lamp above him stuttered, the bulb fighting to stay alive. The air smelled of paper rot and rust, and something older, the slow death of silence itself.
He hadn't moved in hours. Stillness was camouflage. Stillness saved calories.
Across the room, the shelves leaned like tired men. A single book had fallen open on the floor — Introduction to Human Behavior. The irony made him snort quietly. He turned another page in his own notebook, the paper whispering beneath his gloves.
Day 2 — Containment breach.
Population before event: ~5,000.
Estimated survivors, Oxford district: <200.
Primary failure: noise / denial.
Secondary: emotion.
He drew a neat circle, then a line through it — zero or infinity, depending on your mood.
The rain shifted again. He heard it in the ceiling, in the pipes, in the subtle tremor of floorboards. The quiet now belonged to something else.
From the librarian's desk, a voice broke through static:
"—anyone still alive… this is Mike Warren… Chemistry labs, east wing… survivors welcome. Repeat—"
Dan lifted his head, slow as if the air were thicker than before.
Mike Warren. The campus president who could make a fire drill sound like a campaign speech. Dan had avoided him the way introverts avoid microphones.
Now that same voice flickered through the dark like a flare.
"Of course it's him," he muttered, half amused, half resigned.
He glanced at his supplies — a few crackers, a flashlight that wheezed more than shone, and a pair of sharpened scissors. The lamp was dying too. He wrote one more line:
Option A: Stay — low risk, slow decay.
Option B: Move — moderate risk, possible gain.
The pen hovered, then circled B.
"Humans are unreliable," he said under his breath, "but so are batteries."
He closed the notebook, listening — drip, wind, the faint sigh of a book sliding from its shelf somewhere deep in the dark.
Packing was ritual: notebook, flashlight, scissors-blade, crumbs of food. Zip. Coat. Shoulders squared.
The corridor smelled of wet dust. Flyers drooped on the walls — Final Exams, Debate Night, Cheer Tryouts — colors bleeding like old wounds. Ghosts of normal. He walked through them without looking up.
Something moved in the Philosophy Wing. He froze beside a marble bust. A student — or what was left of one — shuffled past, hand dragging a red smear along the lockers. Breath mechanical. Head twitching, then still.
Dan counted to thirty, then went on.
He didn't run. Running was wasteful. He didn't fight. Fighting was noise. He flowed through the corridors like a thought that refused to finish.
In the courtyard, three infected scraped weakly at the vending machines. The red glow made their faces look painted. He watched them, murmuring:
"They're starving. Motor decay. No pattern. Just hunger."
The rhythm of their tapping — thud, thud, thud — sounded almost like typing. For a flicker of a second he saw his old desk, a coffee cup, his sister's text:
Don't stay up grading all night, Dan.
He'd promised he wouldn't. He had.
One of the creatures slumped against the glass with a hollow thud, snapping him back.
He moved on.
Up a collapsed scaffold, boots slipping once on wet metal. From the roof, the city stretched silver and ruined. In the distance, a pulse of orange light — the Chemistry Building. A pocket of order.
"Someone's still trying," he whispered.
He crossed the rooftops like a rumor, every leap measured by instinct. Fog rolled in as night deepened, swallowing statues, drowning bicycles half-submerged in puddles.
A scream split the air — sharp, close, human.
Dan didn't turn. "Data point," he said quietly. "Fifty meters south. Irrelevant."
But the echo stayed inside him, circling.
At last he reached the Chemistry Building. He didn't head for the front. Circling, he found the service entrance and crouched by the wall. Through concrete came voices — faint but real.
"…ground the generator here, less heat signature—"
"Yeah, but I need the noise to keep them off the vents—"
Kazuma.
Mike.
Two variables. Opposites. Both improbably alive.
Dan leaned back against the wall, eyes closed for a moment. Through the stone he could almost feel their warmth, their noise.
He opened the notebook again.
Observation:
The loud survive because they outrun fear.
The quiet survive because they study it.
Eventually, both need each other.
He stared at the words, then added a small arrow between them — a bridge, maybe.
"I suppose someone should think for them," he murmured.
He didn't knock. Not yet. He waited, motionless, until the first light of dawn.
A patient shadow beneath a bruised sky — the Rational Ghost listening, calculating — and, for the first time since the world cracked open, feeling the faint, inconvenient pull of belonging.