Chapter 3: Rhythm and Reckoning

The first thing I noticed was the beat.

It was ridiculous — a stupid, catchy chorus that had been trending for weeks — pulsing in my ears like a metronome. I’d grabbed my phone out of habit when we bolted across the courtyard and jammed the earbuds in without thinking. “Neon Night” by Kira Vale was blasting, and somehow the poppy synth drops made everything feel cinematic. I laughed at myself for a second. Then a hand grabbed the back of my jacket and yanked me down.

Below the lip of the rooftop, they were coming. Close now. Voices that used to be names, now scraping at the chain-link like they could tear the metal with their teeth. Up close they smelled wrong — like wet paper and old iron — but the song kept my head clear. It set the tempo.

“Lexi, what do we do?” Maddy’s whisper hitched into a sob. Her face was pale where the rooftop lights hit it, hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. She looked like she wanted to run, or cry, or both.

“We get to the stairwell,” I said, voice low. “I can get us down the maintenance shafts. Faster. Fewer bodies.” My hands were steady. That steadiness wasn’t luck — it was practice, a hundred replayed endings filed away in my head like blueprints. Ten days, I reminded myself. Ten days to break the script.

A figure shoved itself up onto the roof, one of the janitorial crew from the cafeteria — his uniform torn, his eyes gone glassy. He lurched like he had a marionette inside him pulling the strings. Another followed. And then the first tried to climb the ladder.

Maddy froze. Her fingers dug into my sleeve. “Lexi—”

“Move,” I said, and my tone let her know I wasn’t asking.

I hopped down, landing light and controlled. The first one turned, like something in its head recognized movement, and lunged. Reflex took over. The song hit the chorus and in the same heartbeat I swung.

The bat in my hands was an old aluminum thing I'd grabbed from the gym closet earlier — nothing fancy, perfectly weighted. It tasted right in my palms. I didn’t think. I felt the rhythm instead: one-two, one-two, the beat lining up with the arc of my swing. The first head met bat with a dull thud that didn’t splash or spray or anything cinematic. It just stopped. The body slumped, limp as a puppet whose strings were cut.

Maddy’s gasp was loud enough to cut the music. Her eyes were huge. “How—?”

I kept moving.

The roof was small and flat; there was nowhere to run if I got stuck. So I made space. I stepped, pivoted, and let the momentum of the bat carry me, smacking at collars and skulls in clean, efficient hits. The song dropped into its bridge and somehow my movements matched it: a bat swing on the downbeat, a jab on the off. Each strike had a purpose — disable, separate, create distance. Not flailing, not panicking. Professional. Like a choreographed fight scene where I wrote the choreography.

A cluster of them surged up the ladder, their hands scrabbling for the edge. I planted my feet, swung wide, and the barrel of the bat clipped two of them at once. They folded, tangled, and slid back down the ladder. The bat hummed in my hands, reverberation running up my arms. It felt alive. It felt right.

Maddy watched, slack-jawed, her mouth forming words she couldn’t spit out. “Lexi… why are you so—”

“Because I can’t afford to be anything else,” I said, pulling her behind me. “Because you’re here and I’m not losing you again.”

Her eyes filled in a way that broke something in my chest that I didn’t know had been holding together. I hit the nearest one in the shoulder so it dropped to its knees. No gore, no poetic death throes — just blunt stoppers, one after another. We moved like a small, ugly dance, two survivors improvising steps: me the lead, Maddy following, her trust a physical thing in the squeeze of her hand.

Downstairs, the school sounded like it was being rewritten in real time: alarms long-since dead, distant screams that might have been human at some point, the slap and patter of feet that no longer belonged to people. But I had options. Calculations. I traced paths with my eyes — stairwell A had clear sightlines but led to the main exit swarming with bodies; stairwell C had a maintenance door that opened into a service alley where we could disappear into backyards and then to the canal. The canal had boats. Boats meant mobility. Mobility meant choices.

“Canal,” I said. “We go canal.”

Maddy’s hand tightened. She nodded like she knew better than to argue. We scrambled down the maintenance ladder — slow, careful, the way you lower something precious — and hit the hall just as another group rounded the corner. I swung one-handed this time, the bat cutting arcs that made three of them collapse to the floor in a heap. No theatrics. Just efficient removal of the threat.

We weren’t silent when we moved. We didn’t have to be. The chaos bought us cover; screaming served as camouflage. People were thinking about survival in short, sharp bursts, not strategy. That was my advantage. I thought in lines and angles and time: how long until reinforcements arrived, where the noise would funnel them, which doors would still open.

We reached the service exit and spilled into dusk that smelled of gasoline and fried food. The sky wasn’t on fire yet, but orange-laced clouds rolled low like a bruise. The streets were starting to clump with motion — small packs, mouth-breathing clusters that turned heads in unison. A car stalled in the middle of the road; someone abandoned it with the keys still in the ignition. It was ugly and messy and early.

Maddy stumbled, nearly falling, and I caught her. She looked at me like someone who had just seen a different mask drop from my face. “You fought like… like you knew what you were doing.”

“I did,” I said, and the truth tasted like metal. “I remember how it ends. I remember how it starts. I’m not letting it start on my watch.”

She pressed her forehead to mine, a quick, desperate human thing. “Promise me you won’t—”

“—I can’t promise I won’t get scared,” I cut in. “But I promise I’ll do everything smarter this time.” I smiled, because that was the only thing that made my insides stop going cold. “And also, Kira Vale makes an amazing soundtrack for murder.”

Maddy laughed, a short hiccup that was half terror and half relief. It sounded like music to me.

We moved toward the canal with the city behind us beginning to rearrange itself into something else. My bat tapped along my shoulder in time with the fading chorus in my earbuds. Ten days weren’t gone. Not by a long shot. But the countdown felt different now — less like a sentence and more like a timer I could borrow time from.

We slipped into the alley and into the wet, neon-tinged night, and for the first time since I’d woken up back in Mrs. Carver’s class, I felt like my nightmare had handed me a script — and I was going to rewrite the ending.

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