The last coherent thought I had before the world split open was about Eli's glasses. They were perpetually smudged, and he was always polishing them on the hem of his shirt, a nervous tic that left circular streaks on the fabric. He was doing it then, in Statistics 301, as Professor Halpin droned on about standard deviation. The afternoon sun slanted through the high windows, turning dust motes into galaxies. It was boring. It was perfect.
The door at the back of the lecture hall opened.
We all heard it, but no one turned. Latecomer. But the person who entered didn't slink into a back row. He stood there. Then two more entered. And four more from the side door by the fire exit.
They wore no masks. Their faces were blank, utilitarian. They carried compact rifles not like soldiers, but like technicians holding tools. The silence was what hijacked my brain. There was no yelling, no grand proclamation. Just a soft, surgical *shush* of movement as they fanned out.
A girl in the third row finally screamed. The sound was severed by a single, flat *crack*. She slumped over her desk. Then the noise began—a cacophony of shouts, scrambling, chairs screeching. But the men at the doors just watched, their eyes scanning. Selecting.
My body moved before my mind engaged. Pure animal circuitry took over. *Down. Under the desk.* I slid from my chair, my knees hitting the cold linoleum. I could hear my own breath, ragged and loud in the sudden tomb-like quiet that followed the initial panic. Whimpers echoed in the room.
Through the forest of chair legs, I saw Eli. He hadn't ducked. He was crouched behind his own desk, his polished glasses now reflecting the emergency exit sign. He met my gaze. In his eyes, I didn't see terror. I saw a furious, calculating clarity. He gave me a sharp, almost imperceptible nod towards the side exit, now blocked by two of the men. He pointed to himself, then to them. A diversion.
"No," I mouthed, the word soundless.
He was already moving. He didn't charge. He stood up, hands raised, a textbook on macroeconomic theory held limply in one hand. "Please," he said, his voice unnervingly calm. "Don't hurt anyone else. What do you want?"
One of the men by the side exit tilted his head. He took two steps forward, his rifle lowering a fraction. It was a trap. I knew it. Eli knew it.
Eli moved. He flung the textbook—a pathetic, spiraling missile—and lunged, not for the man's weapon, but for his legs. The *crack* was different this time. Not flat, but huge, enveloping, final. It wasn't just a sound; it was a physical force that punched the air from the room. Eli's body did not fly back dramatically. It folded, like a marionette with its strings cut, collapsing into the aisle.
Something in my mind broke. Or rather, it streamlined. All fear, all thought, burned away in a white-hot furnace of one desire: **NOT YET.**
A man was turning toward my row. I saw the leg of the student in front of me, a boy named Colin who played intramural soccer. He was sobbing quietly. The attacker's back was to me as he leveled his rifle at Colin.
I did not think. I erupted from under the desk. I didn't tackle him. I scrambled behind him, my arms locking around his torso in a clumsy, desperate bear hug. He grunted, surprised, and tried to swing the rifle's stock backward. I buried my face in his tactical vest, smelling sweat and gun oil. Another *crack*, and a searing line of fire traced across my ribs. Someone else was shooting at me.
The man in my grasp jerked violently and went limp. A lucky shot from where? His dead weight pulled me down. I used his fall, rolling with him, keeping his body between me and the room. The thud of bullets impacting his vest was a deep, sickening drumbeat against my chest. *Thump. Thump. Thump.*
Adrenaline is not a surge. It is a total environmental replacement. The air became electric. Time didn't slow; it fractured into a series of stark, high-resolution images. I saw another attacker, his eyes wide over his rifle sights, aiming at my head. My hand found the pistol in my dead shield's holster. I didn't remember pulling it. The recoil was a sharp upward jerk. The attacker dropped.
I was shot. I felt it this time—a hammer blow to my left shoulder that spun me halfway around. The pain was there, a bright, screaming star in the constellation of my awareness, but it was irrelevant data. A second bullet grazed my thigh. I stumbled, using the first dead man as a crutch, dragging him toward a concrete pillar. A third attacker fired. I hoisted the body, his limbs flopping, and the rounds meant for me tore into him.
I was a machine now, fueled by that singular, shrieking imperative: **LIVE.** I needed a third shield. The second attacker I'd shot was too far. My eyes swept the carnage and landed on Eli.
He lay where he fell, one arm outstretched. His glasses were gone. His face was peaceful. The men who had shot him were now looking at me, tracking my slow, bloody retreat behind the pillar.
A new logic, cold, perfect, and dream-born, assembled itself in my head. *Resource management.* My current shield was failing, chewed apart by bullets. A fresh resource lay unused. The grief, the horror—those were luxuries for the living. I was in the economy of survival, and sentiment had no currency.
With a guttural sound I didn't recognize as my own, I lunged from behind the pillar, not away, but *toward* Eli. A bullet tore through the meat of my calf. I fell, crawled. Reached him. My hands closed around his torso. He was so light. In the seamless illogic of the moment, the connection between his head and his shoulders simply… ceased to be a concern. It was a ballast. A weight. I gripped it, and the rest of him came with it, a grisly, flailing anchor.
I swung.
The first man raised his arms. The impact was wet, solid. He went down. The second fired. I used Eli's body as a buckler, closing the distance, and swung again. There was a crunch. Silence.
I stood in the sudden quiet, panting. The red was not just in my mind; it coated my hands, my arms, soaked my clothes. It dripped into my eyes. I blinked, and the world was washed in a crimson film. I was a ruin. A walking cathedral of pain and damage. But the engine inside me still turned over. One thought cycled with piston-like regularity: *Find the doctors. Get patched up. Then you can live.*
I began to walk. I left the lecture hall, a bloody footprint with every step. The hallway was empty, fluorescent lights buzzing with a mundane indifference. I passed bulletin boards, flyers for yoga clubs and tutoring services. The absurdity was dizzying. I turned a corner, following a sign with a green "H" and an arrow.
The door was marked "INFIRMARY." I pushed it open.
The light inside was soft, clinical. The smell of antiseptic was so strong it cut through the iron scent of blood. A woman in pale blue scrubs stood at a counter, her back to me, organizing supplies. She turned.
Her name tag said 'ANYA, RN.' She didn't scream. Her eyes, a calm, weathered blue, took me in—the shredded clothes, the dripping red, the likely ghost-white pallor of my face beneath the grime. Her professional mask settled into place, a placid lake over deep, hidden waters.
"Okay," she said, her voice low and steady. "Let's get you on the bed."
I didn't remember lying down. The crisp white paper sheet crinkled beneath me. She worked with efficient, practiced movements. Scissors cut away my shirt. Cold swabs dabbed at the bullet graze on my ribs. The sting was vivid, shocking—the first real, clean sensation I'd felt since the doors opened.
"You're lucky," she murmured, peering at my shoulder. "Through and through. Messy, but clean. The leg is worse." She applied pressure, and white-hot lightning shot up my nerve endings.
The pain unlocked my tongue. Words spilled out of me, a babbling stream. I told her about the lecture, about Eli and his glasses. I told her about using the dead men as shields, about their weight, about the drumbeat of bullets hitting them. I got to the part about Eli, about the swing, the crunch. I framed it as a dark joke. "So I had to get creative with the resources, you know? Waste not, want not." I forced a laugh. It sounded like a cough.
Anya's lips quirked. Not a smile, but an acknowledgment of the absurd. "Resourceful," she said, her tone dry. She picked up a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. "This will clarify your thinking."
She poured it onto the wound in my calf.
The pain was transcendent. It was a white, pure void that swallowed the world. I arched off the bed, a strangled gasp hissing through my teeth.
That's when the howls began.
They weren't human. They were long, ululating cries of profound emptiness, sliding under the door and through the vents. The sound of sanity unraveling at the speed of sound.
Anya's hands paused for a fraction of a second. Then she continued bandaging, her movements tighter, faster.
"I'm okay," I grunted, sweat dripping into my eyes. "I'm okay. I'll… I'll save you. Just let me up."
She looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a crack in her professional veneer. Not fear, but a deep, weary sorrow. She gave a single, slow nod.
I pushed myself upright. The world tilted, then righted itself. My body was a tapestry of agony, but it held. I shuffled to the door, each step a fresh lesson in pain, and pulled it open.
The hallway was dim, the emergency lights now casting long, skeletal shadows. The howls echoed, directionless. A primal understanding clicked into place in my mind, a memory of a skill I'd never learned. It was just there, like breathing. The **Sanity Howl**.
I didn't decide to use it. I just opened my mouth and let it out.
It wasn't loud. It was *present*. A low, resonant frequency that vibrated in the teeth and the bones, a sound that felt like cool water on a fevered brain. It poured down the corridor, and the answering howls stuttered, then ceased.
From the gloom at the far end, two streaks of black fire materialized. They were not hot; they radiated a deep, sucking cold. They raced toward me, silent and predatory. As my Howl washed over them, they shuddered, coiling in on themselves. The flames guttered, darkened, and solidified.
Two men stumbled into the pool of light. They were dressed in civilian clothes—jeans, t-shirts. One clutched his head, the other stared at his hands as if seeing them for the first time. They looked at me, eyes wide with a confusion that bordered on terror.
"We were… chasing the noise," the first one, a lean man with a shaved head, rasped. "The anger. It was so loud. It was all there was."
"I'm Leo," the second said abruptly, his voice trembling. "He's Marcus. We were… in the library. I think. They came in…"
Before he could finish, the air changed. From every doorway, every air vent, silent blue embers began to drift into the hall like ethereal snow. They were beautiful and chilling, a constellation of despair. My Howl, still echoing, seemed to bounce off the walls, returning to me amplified, layered. A **Resonance**.
The blue embers flickered where the resonant wave touched them. Their cold blue light softened, warmed to a gentle azure, and dimmed. Where each ember died, a person stood. They wore identical thick blue padded jackets, their faces pale but clear-eyed. They looked at me, then at each other, a silent communication passing between them. As one, their gazes returned to me. Not with fear, or anger, but with a desperate, hungry hope.
A man in the front, his jacket zipped to his chin, spoke. "Leader."
The word was simple. Absolute.
Leo and Marcus stared, their own confusion mirrored and magnified. "We remember now," Marcus whispered, horror dawning. "We weren't in the library. We were in the lecture hall. We… we died. I felt the bullet go through my neck."
The reality of his words should have shattered me. Instead, my survival-engine brain assimilated them as new data. *Condition: potentially deceased. Imperative: unchanged. LIVE.*
From a side corridor, a new light bloomed. A sickly, phosphorescent green. It didn't drift; it *spread*, like mold through a petri dish. Within it walked a man. He was not fire. He was solid, real. He wore a pristine white lab coat over a sweater and slacks. He held a tablet in one hand. He saw us—saw *me*—and a professional, appreciative smile touched his lips.
"Fascinating," he said, his voice a cultured baritone. He stopped a polite distance away, ignoring the Blue Jackets as if they were furniture. His eyes were on me, Leo, and Marcus. "A spontaneous Anchor, manifesting a Restorative Emotive Frequency. And two Latent Rages, fully stabilized. Extraordinary."
"Who are you?" I demanded, my voice rough.
"Dr. Alistair Finch. I'm with a research collective. We study unique post-mortem phenomena. What you're experiencing is a Class-3 Spectral-Narrative Interference Phenomenon, or S.N.I.P." He said it like it was as common as the flu. "You three are displaying remarkable coherence. Wasting that coherence on… wandering… seems suboptimal. I have a proposition. Volunteer for my study. We provide purpose, structure. And payment."
"Payment?" Leo echoed, dumbfounded.
"Of course. This is work. You're not savages." Dr. Finch's smile was benign. "Think of it as contract acting. We're always in need of subjects who can interact with the environment. Your unique 'Howl,'" he said, nodding to me, "makes you particularly valuable."
Anya had appeared in the infirmary doorway, watching silently, her face unreadable.
Purpose. It was a lifeline thrown into the surreal ocean I was drowning in. I looked at Leo and Marcus, saw the same lost need in their eyes. I nodded. "What do we do?"
"First, a baseline," Finch said cheerfully. He produced an object from his lab coat pocket—a vintage Kodak instant camera, boxy and yellow. "A simple perception test. Gather together, please. You too, my dear," he added to Anya.
We huddled awkwardly—me, Anya, Leo, Marcus, with Dr. Finch in the center. He handed me the camera. It was cold. "There are two buttons. Press the top one first."
The button was labeled **ENABLED SHOT**. I pointed the camera, framed us all in the viewfinder. Our expressions were a study in shock, confusion, and residual terror. I pressed the button.
The camera whirred. A square of white paper slid out. We watched as colors bled into existence: the blue of Anya's scrubs, the grey of the walls, our pale faces. There we were, a grim group portrait. Dr. Finch beamed in the center, a proud father.
"Now the other button," he instructed, his voice gentle. "For contrast."
The second button read **DISABLED SHOT**. I pressed it.
This time, there was no whir. A silent, cold flash, like a stroke of lightning sealed in glass. The photo paper emerged faster. It felt different to the touch—slick, slightly damp.
The image developed not in a slow bloom, but in a sudden, horrifying reveal.
Dr. Finch stood in the center, smiling the same, gentle smile. But we were not with him.
Where we had been standing were four faint, translucent smudges, like breath on a window. And next to each smudge was a small, typed notation.
Next to the smudge where I stood: **SUBJECT: Kaito. Physical Termination: Campus Incident, Lecture Hall B. Cause: Exsanguination from GSW to femoral artery. Time of Death: 14:07.**
Leo's label cited a severed carotid. Marcus's, a traumatic brain injury. Anya's simply said: **SUBJECT: Anya Riel. Physical Termination: Campus Incident, Infirmary. Cause: Fatal GSW during containment.**
I looked from the photo to Anya. Her calm was gone. Her hand was pressed to her stomach, where her scrubs were now, impossibly, blooming with a dark, wet red stain that hadn't been there a moment before. She looked at me, and the weary sorrow in her eyes had finally crystallized into knowing.
"We thank you for your participation," Dr. Finch said, his voice still kind, as if commenting on the weather. "The role of the 'Unaware Spirit' is the most challenging of all. Your commitment to the narrative was superb." He gave a slight, appreciative nod. "Your payment."
Another man, in an impeccably tailored suit, appeared from the same corridor as the green fire. He carried a small metal lockbox. With silent efficiency, he placed stacks of crisp, strange paper currency into our numb, unresisting hands.
The bills were a uniform grey. The numerals were clear: **$700**. Then another stack: **$1000**. **$1,700 total**. The paper felt wrong—too smooth, too heavy, like pressed ash. It smelled of ozone and old stone.
"Welcome," Dr. Finch said, spreading his hands, "to the curated afterlife. Your previous performance has concluded. Your next assignment begins shortly."
The man in the suit produced a small, leather-bound folder and handed it to me. I opened it with numb fingers. Inside was a single sheet of the same grey paper.
**CONTRACT FOR SERVICES (POST-TERMINAL)**
**Role:** Spectral Anchor / Field Lead
**Assignment:** Pacification & Narrative Stabilization, Quarter 7.
**Duration:** Until Recall or Dissolution.
**Remuneration:** Per standard S.N.I.P. schedule.
I stared at the words. The numbers. The currency in my hand. The photos. The cold, undeniable truth of it all crashed down with the weight of a planet.
This was not a dream. It was not a hospital.
It was a **production**. A managed, curated, bureaucratic afterlife. We weren't survivors. We were the cast, forever trapped on a set built from the stubborn timber of our own denial, paid in the ghost-ash currency of the dead to perform the only role left to us: pretending, desperately, that we were anything but what the disabled shot had revealed.
Faint, new howls echoed in the distance. Different this time. Not black, not blue. A hungry, gleaming gold.
Dr. Finch's smile didn't waver. He checked his tablet. "Ah. Right on schedule. Your first call, team. A Class-4 Obsessional Manifestation. A challenging debut. Let's see what that Howl can really do."
He turned and walked back into the spreading green fire, expecting us to follow.
I looked at the ash-money in my hand. I looked at the true-photo, with its clinical labels of our ends. I looked at Leo, Marcus, and Anya—her wound now visible, a part of her story she could no longer ignore.
The engine inside me, the one that screamed **LIVE**, finally seized. In the silence it left behind, a new, colder mechanism clicked into place. It had one function, one directive, written in the currency of ghosts and the ink of a stolen death.
It whispered: **PERFORM.**
I tucked the grey money into my bloodstained pocket. I met the eyes of my team—my fellow actors in this endless, terrible play. Without a word, we turned and followed Dr. Finch into the waiting, colored fire.