Spinoff Chapter: The First Bell

  Origin Story of Gary Lin

  May 6th, 11:24 AM – Boys’ Bathroom, Second Floor

  It was hot for the time of year. The lights in the second-floor boys’ bathroom had been flickering since third period, casting everything in stuttering intervals that made the already dingy tiles look even worse. Gary Lin knelt on those tiles now, one knee pressed into a puddle of something he desperately hoped was just water, his glasses askew on his face, frame bent where Hale’s knuckles had met with his cheekbone.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” Gary managed, tasting copper. His lip was split, he realized distantly. The pain hadn’t fully registered yet. His mind was still cataloging, still processing. Initial impact, right side of face. Glasses structural integrity compromised approximately forty percent. Lip laceration, minor. Ribs, possible bruising, pending assessment.

  “Say?” Hale Mason loomed over him, all six-foot-two of linebacker mass packed into a letterman jacket that somehow still smelled of last Friday’s game. Sweat and grass stains and victory. “I want you to say you’ll do my fucking calc homework, Lin. That’s what I want you to say.”

  Sam Fletcher stood by the door, arms crossed, playing lookout. He was shorter than Hale but wider, with the type of muscle that came from throwing shot put and eating his weight in protein powder. His eyes kept moving to the hallway beyond, nervous. Sam was always nervous when Hale got like this. Violent-happy, that particular gleam in his eye that said he was enjoying this more than he should.

  “I already did your homework,” Gary said, and immediately regretted it when Hale’s boot caught him in the ribs. Not hard enough to break anything. Hale knew the limits, had done this enough times to calibrate, but hard enough to make Gary’s breath stutter out in a humiliating wheeze.

  “Yeah, and I got a freaking C-minus. A C-minus, Gary.” Hale crouched down, getting on Gary’s level, his face close enough that Gary could smell the energy drink on his breath. Monster, probably. The blue kind. “You know what Coach said? He said if I don’t pull my grades up, I’m off the team. Off the team. Because of your shit-ass homework.”

  “Perhaps if you’d actually shown your work instead of copying verbatim—” Gary started, then caught himself. Wrong approach. De-escalate. Calculate exit strategy.

  But Hale was already grabbing the front of Gary’s shirt, hauling him halfway up just to slam him back down against the tile. Gary’s head hit against the floor, not hard enough for a concussion, his mind automatically assessed, but hard enough to make the bathroom spin, the flickering lights suddenly too bright, too fast.

  “Perhaps,” Hale mimicked, his voice pitched high and mocking, “if you weren’t such a fucking nerd, you’d know how to write homework that doesn’t look like a cheat.” He shoved Gary back down and stood up, wiping his hands on his jacket like he’d touched something dirty. “Sam, make sure nobody’s coming.”

  Sam moved his weight, glancing at the closed bathroom door. “Man, maybe we should just—”

  “Make sure nobody’s coming,” Hale repeated, slower this time, and Sam shut his mouth and moved closer, pressing his ear against the old frame.

  Gary stayed on the floor, not because he couldn’t get up, though his ribs were screaming protest at the idea, but because he was calculating. Hale was unpredictable when angry, but Sam was the wild card. Sam did what Hale said, always, but there were limits. Push too far and Sam would step in. Not far enough and Gary would leave here with more than a split lip and bruised ribs.

  Probability of intervention: thirty-two percent. Probability of escalation: sixty-eight percent. Optimal strategy: compliance with minimal resistance. Accept short-term loss for long-term positioning.

  “I’ll redo it,” Gary said, keeping his voice level. No emotion. Emotion was fuel for people like Hale. “The homework. I’ll redo it tonight and make it… more authentic.”

  Hale’s boot came down on Gary’s hand. Not stomping, just pressing, the rubber sole grinding against Gary’s knuckles. “You’ll redo it in the next fifteen minutes, right now, or I swear to God, Lin—”

  That’s when the bell rang.

  Not the regular class bell, the sharp, efficient bring-bring that sent students shuffling between periods. This was different. This bell screamed. It tore through the air like something alive, a metallic shriek that didn’t stop, didn’t pause, just kept wailing and wailing until Gary’s teeth ached from it.

  Hale stumbled back, hands going to his ears. “What the fuck—”

  The lights went out.

  Not flickering this time, but out. Complete darkness for exactly three seconds. Gary counted, his mind unable to stop cataloging even now, before the emergency lighting kicked in. Dim red bulbs in wire cages along the ceiling, casting everything in the color of old blood.

  Sam was at the door now, both hands pressed against it. “Dude, something’s wrong—”

  “No shit something’s wrong,” Hale snapped, but his voice had lost that cruel edge, replaced by something Gary had never heard from him before: uncertainty. Maybe even fear. “What is that? Is that the fire alarm?”

  “That’s not the fire alarm,” Gary said from the floor. He pushed himself up to sitting, ignoring the protest from his ribs, and straightened his glasses as best he could. One lens was cracked now, spiderwebbing out from the corner. Structural integrity twenty percent. Visual acuity compromised. “The fire alarm is a steady tone at approximately three thousand hertz. This is—”

  The screaming started.

  Not the bell anymore. People. Voices in the hallway beyond the bathroom door, high and terrified. The kind of screaming that didn’t stop for breath, something primal.

  Footsteps thundered past. Running, dozens of them. The whole hallway sounded like it was stampeding.

  “Holy shit,” Sam breathed. His hands were still on the door, fingers spread wide against the wood. “Holy shit, what’s happening?”

  “Open it,” Hale said.

  “What?”

  “Open the fucking door, Sam. See what’s going on.”

  Sam turned to look at him, eyes wide in the red emergency lighting. “Are you serious?”

  “Does it look like I’m joking?” Hale had straightened up, trying to reclaim his usual dominance, but Gary could see the way his hands were shaking, even if just slightly. “It’s probably just some prank. Seniors doing something stupid. Open the door.”

  For a moment, Gary thought Sam might refuse. His hand was on the lock, but he wasn’t moving, wasn’t turning it. He stood there, frozen, while the screaming got louder and closer and more desperate.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  Then something hit the door from the outside.

  An impact. Heavy and wet-sounding, followed by a dragging sound, like something being pulled across the wood. Sam jumped back, stumbling into the sink behind him. The faucet turned on from the impact, water running at full blast, and nobody moved to turn it off.

  “Fuck this,” Hale said, and he moved forward, shouldering Sam aside. His hand went to the lock. “I’m not staying in here like some scared little—”

  The lock clicked. Hale pulled the door open.

  Sam Fletcher died in that very instant.

  Gary would remember it in pieces, later, when his mind finally processed what his eyes had seen in that first impossible moment. The way the thing moved, fast, joints bending wrong, multiple limbs where there should have been two. The way Sam’s scream cut off mid-breath, just stopped, like someone had hit pause. The way his body came apart.

  No. Not apart. Dissolved.

  Sam’s flesh turned to red mist, his bones crumbled to powder, and then even that powder was gone, just a fine crimson dust hanging in the air where he’d been standing. The whole process took maybe two seconds. Two seconds for Sam Fletcher to stop being a person and start being a stain on the bathroom floor.

  The creature, Gary’s mind refused to call it anything else, stepped through the doorway.

  It had been human once, maybe. Gary could see the remnants in its structure, the suggestion of arms and legs and a torso. But everything was wrong. The limbs were too long, the joints bent at angles that made Gary’s geometry-trained mind scream. Its head, if that’s what the top part was, had many eyes, or not enough, or maybe no eyes at all, just dark hollows that somehow still saw.

  And it was looking at Hale.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hale whispered. He backed up, one step, then another, his usual swagger completely gone. His letter jacket caught on the paper towel dispenser and tore, fabric ripping, and he didn’t even notice. “Jesus Christ, what—”

  The creature moved forward, flowing across the space between the door and Hale like water.

  Hale turned and ran.

  There were only three stalls in the second-floor boys’ bathroom. Hale made it to the middle one, slamming the door behind him. Gary heard the lock click, heard Hale’s ragged breathing from inside, and him mumbling something that might have been a prayer or might have been just senseless repetition: “no no no no no—”

  The creature’s attention moved. Those maybe-eyes turned away from the stall, sweeping across the bathroom, and landed on Gary.

  Gary Lin had always prided himself on his ability to think clearly under pressure. Pop quizzes, math competitions. He thrived when other students panicked. His mind was built for crisis management, for seeing patterns in chaos, or finding optimal solutions when everyone else saw only problems.

  But right now, staring at something that shouldn’t exist, Gary’s mind went completely blank.

  Then his body moved without his mind’s permission.

  He was on his feet and running, his bruised ribs screaming, his cracked glasses threatening to fall off. The creature made a sound behind him, something between a hiss and a laugh and metal scraping, and Gary didn’t look back, didn’t let himself look back.

  The door. He had to get to the door. Sam’s red dust was still settling in the doorway, and Gary ran toward it, felt it coat his skin like ash, and then he was through, out into the hallway, and he grabbed the door handle and pulled.

  The door slammed shut with a bang.

  Gary leaned against it, his weight pressed to the wood, hands flat against the surface. His glasses slipped down his nose and he pushed them up with a shaking hand, leaving a smear of Sam’s dust across the lens.

  The hallway was chaos.

  Students ran in every direction, some screaming, some silent, all terrified. Lockers stood open, contents spilled across the floor. The emergency lighting painted everything in that awful red, turned familiar hallways into something from a nightmare.

  Somewhere close, there was a sound like thunder, or like a building coming down. Glass shattered. Someone screamed and then stopped, abruptly.

  Gary’s back was still pressed to the bathroom door when he heard it: scratching from inside. Slow, consistent. The creature working at the wood of the middle stall.

  Hale’s voice, muffled: “Help! Someone help me! It’s still in here! It’s still in here!”

  Gary stepped away from the door.

  He took one step back, then another, his eyes locked on the wood like he could see through it, like he could watch the creature circling Hale’s stall. The scratching got louder. Hale’s screaming got more desperate.

  Gary took another step back.

  Probability of survival if I open that door: zero percent. Probability of survival if I run: unknown. Optimal strategy—

  Someone slammed into him from behind.

  Gary went sprawling, and managed to catch himself against the opposite wall before he hit the ground. He spun, ready to run, ready for another one of those things—

  “Watch it, you dork,” someone said, but there was no heat in it. His eyes were wide, searching the hallway, taking in the chaos. “Sweet Jesus, what the hell is happening?”

  It was Kyle Sawyer.

  Kyle, with his backwards cap and his varsity jacket and his aluminum baseball bat held like he actually knew how to use it. Kyle, whose face was white under his tan.

  “I don’t know,” Gary said. His voice came out surprisingly steady. The shock was wearing off, he realized. His mind was starting to catalog again, to process. Three minutes since initial incident. Estimated casualty rate: unknown. Escape routes: unclear. Immediate threat: behind bathroom door, currently occupied.

  “You don’t know?” Kyle turned those wild eyes on Gary, and for a moment he looked like he might swing the bat. “There are fucking monsters eating people and you don’t know?”

  “I know there’s one,” Gary said, staring at the bathroom door. Behind it, Hale’s screaming had stopped. “I know that it killed Sam Fletcher in approximately two seconds. I know that the emergency lighting suggests total power failure. And I know that standing here arguing about it isn’t going to help our probability of survival.”

  Kyle stared at him. Then, slowly, he lowered the bat. “Sam’s dead?”

  “Sam’s dust.”

  “Jesus.” Kyle ran a hand over his face, smearing something across his cheek. Was that blood? “Jesus Christ. I was just—I was in the gym when the bell—I heard screaming and I grabbed—” He looked down at the bat like he’d forgotten he was holding it. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  From inside the bathroom, silence. Complete silence. Even the sink had stopped running, Gary realized. Or maybe he just couldn’t hear it anymore over the chaos in the hallway.

  Kyle took a breath, tried to summon his swagger. “Okay. Okay, I gotta—I gotta take a piss. You stay here and keep watch.” He leaned in close, voice low and ugly. “And don’t even think about bolting. You run and I’ll put you down before that thing gets the chance. I’ll knock those dork teeth in.”

  He stepped toward the bathroom door.

  Gary watched him reach for the handle. Watched Kyle’s fingers extend, his hand move in slow motion toward the knob, and him about to open that door and let out whatever was waiting inside.

  Probability that Kyle Sawyer survives opening that door: zero percent.

  Probability that the creature exits and continues attacking: one hundred percent.

  Probability that I am next target: ninety-seven percent.

  Optimal strategy: allow Kyle to open door, use his death as distraction, run.

  Kyle’s fingers touched the handle.

  “Wait,” Gary said.

  Kyle paused, hand still on the knob. “What?”

  “Don’t.” Gary stepped forward, not letting himself think about what he was doing, just moving. “Don’t open that door.”

  “Dude, I really gotta—”

  “There’s something in there.”

  Kyle’s hand froze. He looked at Gary, then at the door, then back at Gary. “What kind of something?”

  “The kind that turned Sam Fletcher into red dust in two seconds.” Gary’s hand reached out and grabbed Kyle’s wrist, pulling his hand away from the door. “The kind that’s been completely silent for the last thirty seconds, which means it’s either dead—unlikely—or waiting. And if you open that door, we’re both dead. So don’t.”

  They stood there, Gary’s hand wrapped around Kyle Sawyer’s wrist, both of them staring at that closed bathroom door. The screaming in the hallway was getting more distant. People were either escaping or dying, and either way they were moving away from this spot.

  “So what do we do?” Kyle asked quietly.

  Gary let go of his wrist and stepped back, his mind already racing through possibilities. Safe locations. Resource availability. Alliance benefits versus liabilities. Kyle Sawyer: athletic advantage, leadership qualities, known by student population. Disadvantages: impulsive, intellectually limited, likely to argue.

  But alive. And armed. And looking at me like I might have answers.

  “We survive,” Gary said. He pushed his cracked glasses up his nose and looked at Kyle Sawyer. Kyle, who had never spoken to him before except to mock or threaten, who represented everything about the social hierarchy that had made Gary’s life miserable.

  Kyle, who might be useful.

  “First, we find somewhere safe,” Gary continued, his voice getting steadier as his mind found its footing again, started planning, started calculating. “We gather information. We figure out the rules. And then we use those rules to our advantage.”

  “Rules?” Kyle looked at him like he was insane. “Dude, there are monsters—”

  “Everything has rules,” Gary said. “The question is whether we learn them fast enough.”

  From inside the bathroom, something scratched at the door.

  Gary and Kyle looked at each other.

  Then they ran.