Rayne only broke from his trance when the screaming began.
At first, it was distant—isolated shrieks piercing the silence like cracks in glass. But the cracks multiplied. The voices swelled in number and flavor: terror, pain, and fury twisted together.
He didn't move. He didn't call out. He couldn't. Fear had gripped his spine like a vice, anchoring him to the darkness of the closet. He simply trembled and prayed—a hollow ritual to an absent god.
Deep down, even as his lips whispered fragments of salvation, he wondered if anything holy had ever listened to him at all.
A sudden burst of movement broke the silence—five students, panicked and pale, hurled themselves into the physics classroom. They shut the door as quietly as chaos allowed and scattered beneath desks, hiding from whatever hunted outside.
It wasn't enough.
Ten minutes of dread passed like centuries. Then came the knock.
It was soft. Almost shy. A cruel mockery of gentleness.
Rayne held his breath as he silenced his phone and clenched his eyes shut. He became a shadow in the dark, a wish to disappear.
Then the creaking started.
The door did not break—it was peeled away, like flesh from bone, and flung with ease and contempt. One of the students screamed. That alone was enough to invite doom.
It crawled in, slowly—deliberately. Not because it needed to, but because it reveled in the pause.
Rayne could see it through the closet's slits.
It was large. Far too large to be natural, its body contorted and crouched like a titan forced into a coffin. Skin stretched tight across jutting bones, dry and gray. Its mouth dripped with anticipation, its eyes glowing with something worse than hunger—longing.
It moved with a predator's elegance, stalking its prey as a demon among men. The next moment a student was ripped apart like paper, thrown in halves across the classroom.
Soon there was silence again.
Rayne remained.
The thing didn't leave. Not yet. It gathered the remains with a kind of reverence, removing their clothes and arranging the pieces. Then it began to eat—not in some monstrous unhinged grotesquerie, but like a man at lunch. Calm and devoted.
It chewed bones like brittle twigs. Ecstasy gleamed in its sunken eyes. And between bites, it murmured.
"…urry…m…eye'm…sau…ry…"
Rayne strained, the words almost indistinct. But the cadence—the tragedy in its tone—was unmistakable.
"I'm sorry."
He blinked, his stomach cold with revulsion and confusion.
It was crying.
The thing that devoured his classmates both wept and grinned as it fed.
And in that moment of cruel clarity, Rayne understood. The stories were true. It was a wendigo—once human, now damned. A soul corrupted not by hunger alone, but by some ancient, inviolable law. A spirit bound to devour, yet cursed to remember what it had been.
After it fed, it left—searching for more it could never satisfy.
Rayne should have felt only horror. But instead... relief. A filthy, shameful relief that clawed at his chest like guilt incarnate. And worse still, pity. For the monster. For himself. For everything.
He turned to his phone again, fingers numb.
No response from his mother.
He thought of Navia. Mark. Lila. Nate. Samuel.
His classmates. His teachers. Would he ever see them again? Did it even matter?
There were no answers. Only the screams.
So he waited. In silence. In dread. In that tiny closet that now felt like a grave.
And he would have kept waiting, had the earth not shaken furiously.
The tremor flung him out like a rag doll. His ears rang as a sound wave crushed through the school, shattering windows and silence alike.
He crawled to the broken window, dazed.
In the far-off horizon—a mushroom cloud. Towering. Monstrous. Magnificent, almost, in its scale.
Then another tremor.
Another wave.
His ears bled.
He stumbled into the hallways, which had become catacombs—painted with blood, but devoid of bodies. Only scraps of cloth remained, clinging to the silence like ghosts.
He found others at the front doors. Survivors. A meager twenty. Of them, only three he was familiar with: Mrs. Fayad. The girl he had bumped into. Samuel.
No one spoke. They simply stared toward the horizon.
Jets circled the cloud like vultures circling a decaying corpse.
But there was no corpse.
From the heart of the ruin, a roar erupted—a sound older than language, that shattered thought and will. Several dropped where they stood. It belonged to something ancient and furious. Something divine.
Then it emerged.
Black-scaled. Winged. Enormous. With eyes like burning eclipses. Its neck alone seemed to stretched across skylines. Its wings unfurled, and the sky seemed to darken.
No... it did darken. Light fled from the very presence of the monster.
The jets turned to escape.
It did not let them.
The air thickened, crushing Rayne's chest. Then came light—not golden-red of flames, but a terrible, absolute white.
The dragon breathed, and the world vanished.
The jets evaporated. The already burning remains of the city of Atlanta dissolved into nothingness. Where its breath passed, reality was denied.
The light passed.
And the sky returned only for it to grow even darker as the beast turned to the distant horizon.
It wasn't done.
Its infernal mouth opened once again as it gathered its boiling white breath that somehow managed to darken the sky around it.
As if it aimed to devour all the light of the world.
Rayne could only watch as everything crumbled beneath the white annihilation.
Ash. Silence. Death.
Navia—gone. Mark—gone. His mother—gone. All gone, whether before or now. It made no difference.
As the light approached, Rayne smiled. There was nothing else to do.
In the face of a ruined world and a certain death, he chose his final prayer as a once devout Catholic:
He cursed God and died.