Silence followed my words. No one wanted to admit I was right, and I knew they all knew it.
A soft groan broke through the stillness. My head snapped toward the sound.
One of the sleeping students was stirring, shifting slightly on the floor. A low, guttural noise escaped his lips, and my blood ran cold.
'No…has he'
The moment he turned his head, I thought.
*Bam*
He had fallen over the lecturer's table, face flat, onto the ceramic tiles... and then the hurling sound hit as he woke up screaming in pain with his head dripping blood.
"Ouch."
"Pssshhhh…uhhhh…sorry."
"Sorry."
"Sorry."
We turned and looked at him with pity; he had fallen off from where he slept, that being the lecturer's table atop the podium.
'But why did he sleep there?'
'I guess it was spacious, but was it really that comfy?'
No one knew exactly why he slept there, nor did we realise he was a roller—someone who moves around in their sleep. But if he had been aware of the potential consequences, why did he continue to sleep in that spot? 'Why did he sleep there?'
I looked at him, his face a mixture of disbelief and confusion as he traced the blood flowing from his forehead. He seemed surprised, dazed, and bewildered, his mouth agape in shock.
Fast forward… At about midday, we were already starving and thirsty. Our food and water were gone. The old man's water bottle, the only one left, wasn't even worth drinking—it was filled with so much backwash that the mere thought of it was nauseating. Everyone had woken up by now, and we sat together, trying to figure out a way to escape.
Our group was down to nine—four males and five females, all from different faculties. Three were already dead.
We had begun brainstorming ways to leave the hall without running into zombies, but every idea seemed impossible. We were on the sixth floor of the campus's main building, a 21-story brutalist structure with an additional ground-floor annexe. Looking out the windows, we saw few viable escape routes, and worse, the campus was still crawling with zombies.
"What if we... no, that wouldn't work."
"What about this—we use a rope," said the same guy who had fallen earlier.
Everyone turned to look at him like he had lost his mind.
"Are you okay, or did the fall affect you?" one of the girls asked dryly.
She had short hair that was in a mess from sleep and striking blue eyes that had been darkened; her expression was a mix of disbelief and exhaustion as hunger and stress was clearly present.
She pinched her fingers together and stared him down.
"Firstly, we are on the sixth floor. Let that sink in," she spoke surprisingly calmly.
"Second, we aren't in any of the faculty halls, so where do you expect to find a rope?"
"And even if we did find a rope, how exactly would we use it from this height without dying?"
"Uh?"
She fired off her questions in rapid succession, her frustration spilling over with her voice speaking in pitch.
The guy looked sheepish, rubbing the back of his head in realisation.
"I mean, maybe we could find some sheets or something."
"No," she cut him off, shaking her head. "Just… no."
Silence followed. The weight of our situation was suffocating. We were trapped and we were running out of time before we would have any strength to do anything.
"What about this?" We turned our ears to the next suggestion, looking at the brown-skinned girl who spoke up.
"We could try to lure them in and use that moment to quickly arrange... then we could escape." We stared at her in dismay at the idea she brought up.
"We could try this but we would need to plan it well," Aaro said as he stood up; he was the boy who I had talked to last night.
"We would need to arrange the chairs in an order to draw in and block the zombies long enough for us to move fast," he continued while he walked to the adjacent door of the hall.
The lecture hall was a mid-sized academic space, constructed under the New World Building Standards (NWBS)—a post-collapse architectural initiative designed to optimize efficiency, modularity, and safety. These standards dictated that educational institutions be built with multi-functional, disaster-resistant structures, ensuring adaptability for both daily learning and potential emergency scenarios.
At the heart of the hall was a large central platform, positioned precisely in the middle of the hall's length, serving as the lecturer's stage. It was slightly elevated, allowing clear visibility for students seated on either side. Flanking the platform were two structural compartments, originally intended for equipment storage, but also reinforced for emergency lockdowns, featuring hidden panels that could be sealed in the event of a crisis.
The seating was arranged in a tiered amphitheater-style layout, with ten ascending rows of platforms that faced each other across the open space. This layout fostered discussion-based learning but also gave the room a compact, enclosed feel, amplifying the sense of entrapment under the current circumstances. Each level was separated by narrow walkways, with adjustable hydraulic railings—a feature added to assist mobility-impaired students and to allow reconfiguration of the space when needed.
There were three primary entrances—two wide, double-door openings on either side of the hall for student access, and a separate, narrower door at the rear, designated for lecturers. The lecturer's entrance was reinforced with biometric locks, a security measure implemented after past incidents of campus violence, but now ironically making it useless as an escape route in the face of the current crisis.
One of the most striking features of the hall was its massive window design. Covering approximately five-sixths (⅚) of the walls, the three-panelled, side-opening windows were constructed with double-glazed, reinforced glass—rugged enough to withstand heavy impacts but designed to allow some quarterly see-through visibility. This particular feature was part of the NWBS initiative to maximize natural light and reduce reliance on artificial power sources, yet now, it provided an unsettling view of the chaos unfolding outside.
Unlike traditional static lecture halls, this space featured revisitable standard equipment, meaning that desks, lockers, and other furniture were not fixed in place. The hall was integrated with an inner rail system, allowing furnishings to be lifted, repositioned, or fully deconstructed into compact parts. This modular setup, once intended for flexible learning environments, was now the key to potential survival, offering a means to create barricades, obstacles, or pathways for escape.
Looking up as he stood down from the highest platform level, he flicked his finger to and fro in a contemplative manner, in a way resembling someone at the thought.
"What if we take the remaining furniture and seats and use them as a barricade to obstruct the zombies from there?"