The next morning, I was jolted awake by the unmistakable sound of gunfire. It wasn't just a single shot—it was a rapid series of cracks, echoing through the still air like a fking war zone had erupted outside.
"Shit!" I shot upright in my bed, my heart pounding. "Did you guys hear that?!"
Kenji, who had been sprawled out on the floor with his blanket tangled around him, bolted up, his eyes wide. "Dude... was that—?"
"Gunshots," Raul finished, already halfway to the window. He threw open the blinds, and we all scrambled to join him, crowding around the glass, our eyes scanning the campus. In the distance, we could see soldiers lining the barricades, rifles aimed at something we couldn't make out from this far away. They were firing, no doubt about it—one after another, like they were trying to hold something back.
"WTF are they shooting at?" Malcolm asked, leaning in closer, his voice tight with worry.
"Can't see from here," I muttered, squinting against the morning light. "But whatever it is, they're not fucking around."
Kenji fumbled for his phone. "I'm checking online. There's gotta be something about this by now. Maybe people are posting updates or videos."
We all grabbed our phones, and I pulled up X, refreshing the feed over and over again. But the screen just spun, that little loading icon mocking me.
"No service?" Ethan said, staring at his screen in disbelief. "What the hell?"
"Same here," I muttered, trying again. Nothing. No bars, no Wi-Fi.
"Fk, the internet's down." Malcolm cursed under his breath.
"You've gotta be kidding me. They're shutting everything off? What, are they trying to keep us in the dark on purpose?" Raul's face darkened as he sat back down at his desk, tapping at his laptop, but there was nothing. The Wi-Fi was dead.
"Looks like it's not just our phones. The whole network's down." Kenji let out a nervous laugh, running a hand through his hair. "Okay, now it's feeling like a full-on apocalypse. First gunshots, now no internet. Next, we'll be bartering for cans of soup."
I didn't laugh. None of us did. The tension in the room was thick enough to choke on. If the internet was down, that meant communication was gone too. No social media, no news, no nothing. We were cut off.
"WTF are we supposed to do now?" Ethan asked, his voice shaking slightly. "We can't get updates, can't see what's happening outside... We're flying blind."
I started pacing, the weight of the situation pressing down on me. "This is bad. Really fking bad. If the internet's down, they're trying to control the flow of information. They don't want people knowing what's really going on."
Kenji was still frantically trying to get his phone to work, but it was no use. "Yeah, well, I'd like to know what's going on right outside our fking window. Why are they shooting? What the hell is coming?"
Before anyone could respond, the lights flickered, and then, just like that, they went out. The hum of the mini-fridge stopped, the ceiling fan slowed to a halt, and we were left in complete silence.
"The power too?" Malcolm whispered, staring up at the dead lightbulb. "Fk. This isn't just a shutdown. This is... they're shutting everything down. "
Kenji let out a groan, tossing his phone onto the bed. "So what now? We're cut off, no power, no internet, and we've got soldiers shooting at who knows what out there. Are we seriously just supposed to sit here and wait?"
"I don't fking know," I muttered, running a hand through my hair. "But staying here is starting to feel like a worse idea by the minute."
Raul, always the calm one, tried to keep us grounded. "We don't have a lot of options right now. We need to stay put until we figure out what's happening. If we go outside, we're walking into the unknown."
"Yeah, but sitting here like this? It's like we're waiting for the end to come knocking," Malcolm shot back, his voice sharp. Ethan let out a shaky breath, leaning against the wall. "What if it's already inside? The campus, I mean. What if... what if the virus is spreading in here, and we don't even know it?"
That thought hit me like a punch to the gut. The idea that the danger wasn't just out there, beyond the barricades, but could be right here, inside the very building we were hiding in. The possibility made my stomach twist.
Kenji glanced toward the door, his face pale. "I don't like this. I don't like being stuck in here, cut off from everything. We're sitting ducks."I couldn't shake the feeling that he was right. We'd been talking about how we'd survive a zombie apocalypse for years, and now that we were in the thick of it—if that's what this was—we had no fking clue what to do.
"We should keep checking the windows," Raul said, his voice steady. "Watch the soldiers, see if we can figure out what they're shooting at. We need to know what's coming, even if we can't stop it."
Malcolm sighed, rubbing his temples. "Yeah, because that's all we can do right now—watch and wait."
I stood by the window, staring out at the campus. The gunfire had stopped for the moment, but the tension outside hadn't eased. The soldiers were still out there, still on edge, still braced for something to come. And whatever it was, we weren't ready for it.
Q: What would you do in this situation?