The tapping stopped. But we didn't move.
Alex's breathing was slow and shallow, like he was trying not to exist too loudly. I clutched the knife again, hands still slick with rainwater and blood I didn't want to think about.
The silence pressed down, thick and tense. The kind that made your ears ring.
Eventually, whatever was out there moved on — or waited. Either way, it was gone. For now.
I leaned my head back against the wall and exhaled, trying to unclench every muscle in my body. My arms were shaking. Not from the cold this time, but from adrenaline fading too fast.
Next to me, Alex was staring at the ceiling like he was asking it for answers.
I broke the quiet first.
"So…" I said softly, "why were you still on campus this late?"
He blinked, like the question hadn't even occurred to him yet. He turned his head toward me, then offered a tired half-smile.
"I was in the library," he said. "Studying. I lost track of time."
I raised an eyebrow. "Studying? At this hour? Who does that?"
He shrugged. "Desperate third-year with a caffeine addiction and a fear of failure."
I snorted. It was a small sound, but in the dark, it felt weirdly loud.
"Fair," I said. "What were you studying?"
"Political theory. Boring stuff," he muttered. "I was trying to finish a paper. I looked up, and boom — library's half empty, it's pouring, and my phone's blowing up with emergency alerts."
He gave a dry laugh. "I thought maybe it was a fire drill or something."
I shook my head. "I thought the same thing. I turned on the news and the president was like, 'Everything's under control,' which is the universal sign that absolutely nothing is under control."
He smiled again — real, this time.
It felt weird, talking like this. Like we were friends catching up after class. But there was blood on my jeans. Mud on our shoes. Screams echoing outside.
Still, I liked hearing his voice. It made me feel a little less alone.
"Why were you still out?" he asked, eyes on me.
I hesitated. "Same as you, kind of. I was studying in the library and lost track of time. I was supposed to meet my friends, but I ended up running back to the dorms, changed, and finally checked my phone. That's when I saw her."
"Aly."
I nodded. My throat tightened, but I swallowed it down.
"She was supposed to be alive."
Alex didn't say anything.
We sat there for a while. Just listening to the rain and whatever horrors waited behind that door.
Then I looked at him.
"Thanks," I said. "For not running away when you saw me."
He looked confused. "What do you mean?"
"I had blood all over me. A knife in my hand. You didn't know who I was. You could've bolted."
Alex leaned his head back and let out a breath.
"I figured," he said, "if you were the kind of person to cry while stabbing a monster, you probably weren't one."
I blinked. That… actually hit kind of hard.
"Plus," he added with a small grin, "you're scary as hell with a knife. I didn't think I could outrun you."
I rolled my eyes. "You couldn't."
We both smiled — tired, bruised, and unsure what tomorrow would look like. But in that small moment, we weren't strangers anymore.
We were survivors.
And we had each other.
But then —
BANG.
The door shook violently.
Once.
Twice.
Something slammed into it with bone-crushing force. Again — harder.
Alex shot up, every muscle tensing. I tightened my grip on the knife. The dried blood on the handle felt sticky against my palm.
SCRAAAPE.
Something dragged across the wood — slow, rough, wrong.
Alex stared at the door, his brow furrowing. "That's… weird."
"What?"
He took a step closer, listening. "That sound. It's not human."
A slow, dragging sound scraped against the wood — wrong. Not like anything I'd ever heard before.
Alex's eyes darkened. "That's… not right."
I looked at him, confused.
He swallowed hard. "If these things were just people turned into zombies, they'd still have normal bodies — hands, feet, arms. The sounds they make would be… human. Clumsy, sure, but human."
He shook his head, voice low and tight. "But this?
Maybe there's worse things out there than the dead. Things that don't just want to feed, but want to destroy."
He said it quietly, like admitting it out loud made it more real. "Too heavy. Too deliberate. People don't move like that."
BANG.
The door shook violently.
A third hit — harder — and the wood cracked.
A deep fissure split through it, and in the blink of an eye, a chunk of the door blew inward, splinters flying like shrapnel.
We both froze.
Because in that instant — that terrible, suffocating instant — something moved behind the new hole in the door.
An eye.
Not human. Not anything that should exist.
It stared straight at us, unblinking.
Black sclera. Red iris. No pupil. No soul.
It twitched. Too fast. Too smooth. Like it didn't blink because it didn't need to. Like it had seen us the whole time — waiting for us to notice it.
My stomach turned to ice.
The edges of the hole steamed — like the wood around it was rotting under its breath.
Alex took a step back, voice flat with dread. "That's… that's not a person."
I couldn't speak.
It leaned closer — or maybe it was just the illusion of motion, of something ancient and hungry pressing against thin wood.
The scraping started again, louder now, as claws — long, crooked, too many — dragged along the broken edges of the door.
Alex grabbed my arm. "Move."
Another slam.
The chair under the handle skidded forward with a metallic scream.
He looked me in the eye — his were wide, but focused. "That's not a zombie."
He swallowed. "That's something else."
I couldn't think. Couldn't breathe.
He yanked me toward the second door. "We go. Now."
I nodded, dazed, clutching the knife so hard I thought the handle might break in my hand.
The wall trembled. The eye was still there — watching. Smiling with it, somehow.
The chair wedged under the handle jerked forward with a violent squeal.
Alex turned to me, voice sharp now.
"It's going to break through. We need to move."
"Where?" I asked, low and breathless.
"Smaller room. Storage closet. Anywhere with a solid lock." He scanned the room. "We can't get trapped here."
Another crash. Louder. Closer. Closer than it should be.
His eyes snapped to the far side of the room — the second door. Our only other way out.
Alex was looking around when his gaze dropped to the other door.
The wall shuddered as something struck again. Heavy.
It knew.
It knew.
A sickening thud rattled the frame. The whole room seemed to shudder. Like it was already watching us through it.
Alex's hand went to the second door's handle — the only other way out.
"We need to move. Now. Before that thing breaks through."
I swallowed a scream that wanted to tear out of my throat and nodded.
I grabbed my backpack. "Ready?"
"No," he said, "but it doesn't matter."
I looked at him. For a second, despite the panic crawling in my chest, there was something steady in his eyes.
"I'm glad I wasn't alone," I said quietly.
He didn't hesitate.
"Me too."
Then we slipped out the second door, into a hallway flickering with broken light — leaving behind the splintering wood, the eye, and the thing that was no longer knocking.
As we shut the door behind us, we heard one final whisper of wood tearing —
and a low, garbled clicking from the other side.
Not a groan.
Not a growl.
A clicking noise — low, wet, deliberate.
Something learning.
Something remembering.
Not dead.
Not alive.
Just waiting.
And the question neither of us could say out loud:
If that wasn't human…
What the hell was it?