It was the wind that woke him.
No shouting. No alarms. Only wind — carrying something brittle, something wrong, as if the air itself had cracked.
Dan Fort lay under the slanted roof of the campus garden shelter, coat draped over his face, notebook open on his chest. The rain's rhythm was hypnotic — drops hitting the edge of the metal overhang in precise intervals. A mechanical lullaby.
The last sentence he'd written stared up at him in tight, deliberate handwriting:
"Human fear accelerates by imitation, rather than by reason."
He read it a second time, then closed the notebook with a quiet, firm snap.
The air smelled of wet grass and iron, as though rain had washed blood through the soil.
Everything across the quad seemed… paused. Not empty. Held breath, still.
Dan pushed his coat back and sat up. His hair was damp, clinging to his forehead. He should have left hours earlier — he'd skipped his morning lecture, meandered down to the garden, dozed off. Now the sky was a heavy bruise, clouds pressing low, wind tugging at the trees like it wanted the leaves to run.
Something in the silence was wrong. Too clean. Too total.
No footsteps. No bicycles. No background hum of the living world.
Only the occasional echo—a faint siren, a scream swallowed by rain, a crash that didn't sound like an accident.
Dan stood, stretching lazily, rolling his shoulders. "That's… new," he muttered. He looked over towards the cafeteria; its glass doors were shattered, the shards scattered like teeth.
Inside, silhouettes jerked and stumbled between overturned tables.
He squinted, his head tilted.
"Well," he said softly, "there goes lunch."
Two students burst from the wreckage—one bleeding heavily, the other sprinting blind with terror. Behind them, something followed. Staggering. Twitching. Too fast where it shouldn't be.
The bleeding one fell, and the other did not look back.
Dan's expression barely changed.
"Fight or flight," he muttered to himself. "And sometimes, abandon."
He turned and slipped his notebook into his coat.
No panic. Just direction.He started toward the library, not running. Running was noise, and noise was attention. He moved in measured strides, hugging walls, cutting through courtyards like a ghost who'd already accepted his own absence.
The university around him seemed distorted, like a photograph left too long in the sun. Familiar shapes warped by fear.
A bicycle lay twisted on the path.
A phone buzzed incessantly beside a puddle, its screen cracked and glowing.
Every small detail felt louder than it should.
Ahead, by the philosophy building, a small crowd was pounding on a locked door. There is a sound to desperation — sharp, uneven, too human.
One girl, in a red jacket, screamed for help. The others didn't help her. They just... ran.
Dan's eyes followed their retreat for a heartbeat, then shifted.
Behind her, from the corridor came movement.
Slack and broken figure, jaws opening far too wide; the noise it made — like breath trying to imitate a scream.
Dan dodged behind a pillar before he saw the rest. He didn't need to. He'd already learned enough.
Observation achieved. Hypothesis forming.
He slipped down a narrow path, his steps light, keeping to the shadows. The library wasn't too far away—a fortress of logic, of order. He liked that. Stone and silence didn't panic.
Halfway across the courtyard, footsteps came behind him: running, stumbling, desperate.
He crouched beside a statue, body still.
A man ran past — face ghost-pale, shirt dark with blood down one arm. He didn't even see Dan.
The next instant there came another sound: a dragging step, a wet rasp.
Dan's pulse didn't budge. He waited. Counted. Listened.
When both sounds faded, he exhaled and spoke quietly to the rain.
"Observation: response is triggered by motion more than sound. Hypothesis: vision dominant. Hearing secondary."
He adjusted his coat, hands deep in pockets, and continued toward the Bodleian.
The old library loomed against the storm, a cathedral to reason surrounded by irrationality. Heavy oak doors were locked.
Dan frowned faintly. "Of course they are."
He scanned the facade, spotted a drainpipe leading to a cracked window. A short climb. Manageable.
He wrapped his hand around the pipe and began to climb—slow, easy, each movement soundless and sure. His shoes slipped once on wet stone; he caught himself without ever losing cadence.
Inside, the library was half-dark. The air thick with the scent of paper and leather and electricity gone cold. Emergency lights painted the aisles in dull gold. A chair lay overturned near the help desk.He moved through the stacks quietly, his fingers trailing light touches along the shelves. Books were comforting — predictable, indexed chaos. He wished people worked that way.
Somewhere below, something shuffled — distant but deliberate.
Dan turned off his phone screen and listened. The sound moved away.
He chose a corner near the psychology section, beneath a high window looking out over the rain-soaked courtyard. The world looked like a painting of panic from there: flickers of light, moving shadows, the orange pulse of a fire near the hospital district.
He sat down, cross-legged, back to the shelf. He flipped open his notebook.
System failure starts not with collapse, but with silence.
Panic is viral.
Mike Warren would make this a comedy. I'd make it efficient.
He almost smiled at the final sentence.Mike. The chaos magnet. The loudest in any room. He'd once declared himself "temporary student president" just to see if anyone would stop him. No one had. They'd loved him for it.
Dan exhaled softly, his eyes closing.
"People like that," he muttered, "they either die first… or save the rest." He leaned his head back against the shelf, the cool wood against his skull. Outside, the sirens wove into the rain like a melody running out of notes. A heavy, muffled thump echoed through the floorboards. A door, perhaps. Perhaps not. Dan didn't move. His eyelids drooped, his voice dropping to a whisper that wasn't intended for anybody, perhaps not even himself. "If I don't have to do it, I won't. If I must… I'll make it efficient." Rain whispered against the glass. The air thickened. And as chaos clawed through the city, Dan Fort — theorist, observer, quiet constant in a world unraveling — did what he always did when logic ran out. He closed his notebook. Folded his arms. And went to sleep.