UCLA Dorms, April 2023

The dorms weren’t dead.

They were… changing.

What once reeked of sweat, cheap perfume, and burnt ramen now stank of blood, rot, and something fouler — something like bile and ash mixed with the copper tang of old coins. The air felt thick, like it had weight, pressing down on skin, on lungs. Every door hung half open like a loose jaw. Light flickered weakly, making shadows crawl.

Gussa shoved open the emergency stairwell door.

It slammed against the wall with a hollow bang.

The smell hit him like a fist.

Rot. Piss. Mold. And deeper, older things — wet earth, spoiled meat, blood spilled too long ago. The air shimmered, humid with decay. Something dark streaked the walls. Handprints, maybe. Smears of things once human.

From above — a sharp, slamming noise.

Then faint, rapid footsteps.

Then a scream, shrill and wet, cut short mid-breath.

The whole building seemed to hold its breath.

And then it came.

A figure lurched into the stairwell, stumbling from the second-floor laundry room.

Once a student.

Now a horror.

The left side of its face was peeled back, the skin hanging in gory strips, one eye dangling by a slick thread of nerve. The jaw hung open at a crooked angle, teeth cracked, gums mottled black. From the chest, something writhed beneath the skin — as if a fist-sized thing crawled just under the surface, distorting the flesh.

Its eyes — the one still in its socket — were empty.

No soul. No thought.

Just the wet hunger of the dead.

It dragged one foot, leaving a viscous, blackish trail, thicker than blood, more like oil mixed with pulp.

Gussa didn’t think.

Something old, buried in his bones, moved him.

He grabbed a snapped mop handle from a half-open janitor’s closet and plunged it straight into the thing’s skull.

There was a wet pop.

A sudden tremor through its limbs.

A spray of chunky, yellow-gray fluid.

It collapsed. The thick, sludgy blood pooled under it, the stench rising in a visible shimmer.

He stared down at the thing.

Chest heaving.

Hands shaking.

“I remember how to kill,” he muttered, wiping gore off his face with a shaking hand. “Guess that’s muscle memory.”

The walls pulsed in the flickering light.

A fly crawled from the corpse’s open mouth.

He took the stairs two at a time.

Not daring to look up.

Not daring to look down.

Room 3B.

The door hung open on a half-broken hinge, the room beyond leaking flickering lamplight and thick cigarette smoke. Inside, the normalcy felt… wrong.

Natalya stirred first — curled up in a beanbag, an empty wine bottle limp in her fingers. Her eyes opened like a doll's, glassy and wide.

“Gussa…?” she whispered.

Something cracked in him.

“Yeah,” he said, voice tight.

Even the sound of his own name felt foreign now.

“You look… different.”

“I’ll explain later.”

The room was a disaster.

Bodies strewn around in careless piles of exhaustion and drunkenness.

Michelle sprawled across two chairs, her shirt stained with old ketchup. She groaned.

“Why the hell are you so loud? If this is about that protein crap you drink, I swear to God. I’ll literally choke you.”

.Zion, all 6’5” of him, a bag of sour gummies stuck to his arm snored like a dying vacuum sprawled on the futon. He stirred, scratching his stomach. “Bro, why are there sirens outside? Is there like... a party?”

Taylor, sitting hunched over, perked up like a rat hearing a trap spring.

“Food?” he croaked. “Someone’s got food. I smell it.”

Gussa slammed the door behind him.

“Everyone shut the hell up,” he snapped. “I need you all to listen, and I need you sober now.”

The edge in his voice cut through the fog in their heads.

The room froze.

“The campus is overrun. The dead… are getting up. And they aren’t human anymore. I just killed a guy I think I had astronomy with. His face was half-missing. Something… moving in his chest.”

Zion blinked blearily.

“Like… zombies?”

Michelle scoffed.

“Gussa, you high?”

“I died today.”

Silence.

The memory slammed back — his skull splitting open, blood in his eyes, the cold embrace of asphalt. The shadowed figure in the dark, burning eyes watching as his body failed. The agony. And then… awakening. In this new, old skin. The wrongness of it. Muscles too lean. Hair too long. Eyes that didn’t belong to him.

He shivered.

“Shot in the head. Woke up. The city’s gone to hell.”

Natalya rose to her feet, pale, trembling.

“I believe you.”

Taylor scoffed.

“Of course you do.”

“Shut up, Taylor,” Michelle growled, grabbing a pistol from the desk.

“Alright, what’s the plan, Rambo?”

He pointed toward the window.

Flames writhed in the distance. Smoke blackened the sky. Sirens wailed like dying animals.

“We head east. Michelle — your dad. The bunkers, the survivalist crap.”

Michelle’s face split in a grim grin.

“Jesus. He’s been waiting for this since Y2K.”

Zion cracked his knuckles.

“We get to smash heads?”

“You might.”

“I’m in.”

Taylor reluctantly stood.

“Fine. But front seat, or I swear to God—”

“You’re riding on the roof.”

They moved fast.

Grabbing what they could — crowbars, knives, old baseball bats, a rusted machete, Michelle’s pistol. Sweat beaded on their foreheads. The walls vibrated with distant thuds and scraping.

Then…

“Y’all hearing that?” Michelle hissed. 

Wet, rapid footsteps.

Slapping sounds coming up the stairwell.

A stench — burnt meat and sewage.

Something approaching.

Fast.

A knock. No — a pounding.

The next door burst open.

Smoke spilled out — thick, greenish, chemical-smelling.

Two figures stumbled in.

Martina Belavani — her face streaked with gore, hair matted, kitchen knife clutched tight. Her hoodie was smeared with streaks of black blood and something yellow-white, like fat.

Behind her, Milo Akuri. His face pale, one cheek split open, a long black smear down his neck. His hands were slick with thick, tar-like filth. His eyes were wide, panicked.

“They're in the vents!” Martina gasped. “Close the goddamn door!”

Milo stumbled forward, his voice a rasp.

“Seal it. Now!”

Taylor gawked.

“Who the f—”

“Neighbors from a couple rooms over,” Natalya hissed.

Gussa lunged for the door as Zion shoved a bookshelf against it.

A wet thud hit the other side.

Then another.

And then a long, dragging scrape.

Above them, a vent rattled.

Something gurgled inside — a sound like wet paper tearing.

A slick, gray-pink hand slipped out — the fingers elongated, claws blackened and dripping with mucus. The flesh bubbled, pulsing as it wriggled from the grate.

“Move!” Gussa shouted.

Zion smashed upward with the bat.

The vent sprayed gore.

A severed limb dropped, twitching, leaking some stinking, greenish fluid.

Everything went still.

The room reeked of blood and bile.

Gussa tightened his grip on a crowbar.

“We move together.

We move fast.

And if any of us get bit —”

He left it hanging.

Everyone understood.

Hell had arrived.

And it wasn’t done.