A soft sigh escaped his lips as he watched the clock at the front of the room above the chalkboard that the teacher was scribbling on, droning on about the formula to find the length of a triangle side with only an angle measurement. It was the same thing that they had been trying to learn for the past four days and it was no easier for him to understand what the teacher was talking about, no matter how many pictures and words she showed. He felt his eyes drooping as he listened to the teacher go on and on while the other students answered the questions and others whispered and murmured to each other. Finally, the teacher placed the chalk back on the metal rack and looked at the clock, wiping the chalk dust from her hands.
“Alright everyone, looks like we’re out of time, so I’ll hand out your homework and I expect this to be done over the weekend and due Monday” she instructed.
A collective quiet chorus of groans buzzed through the room as the paper packet was passed to the row of students as each one passed them down the column. With perfect timing, once the last packet was delivered, a loud, shrill alarm rang through the room and signaled the end of the class period. The shuffling of bags and papers ceased as the students quickly scampered through the door into the hallway where an amassing swarm of high school students flooded into.
“Have a good weekend!” The teacher called out to the scurrying students as they escaped their trigonometric imprisonment.
Alex Goldfield looked over the math assignment just given to him and sighed as he crumpled up the paper and threw it into his backpack. If it wasn’t for his required credits he would have never signed up for a math class. He was not the best with mathematics and had told his advisors and teachers that it was just not for him, but they didn’t take his concerns seriously and told him to just try harder. He tried their “advice” but eventually he just put in only as much effort was needed to get a passing grade. He was a smart guy and did well in many of his classes, but math was his Achilles’ heel.
He made his way towards his locker to drop off his math book and grab his supplies for the last class of the day. Easier said than done. The hallways were crowded with students making their way towards their classes, congregating in pockets of their friends to talk about their weekend plans, and hall monitors and teachers herding the kids to get moving and not block the hallways. Alex followed the flow of the movement in the halls, occasionally bumping into someone unintentionally, apologizing quietly before moving on.
Alex considered himself to be an average student in pretty much every sense, but every other student would debate that. He was around six feet, six inches in height with short light-brown hair that was messy and curled slightly. His eyes were a grey color and his facial features were slightly rounded. The most surprising thing about him was how well built he was. He was not a very active person, didn’t play sports or go outdoors very often, and did not eat the healthiest diet, it mostly consisted of junk food and fats, but he was rather muscular and buff for someone his age. The body didn’t match the personality as Alex was rather shy, quiet, and introverted. The contrast of looks and personality were rather stark and some of his classmates figured that he must have been blessed by a god or some spirit to have such a body, while some of them held a grudge against him for such physique to be wasted on such a pushover loser.
As he finally arrived at his locker and opened it, the halls began to disperse as the warning bells began going off and alerting students that they had about two minutes before the tardy bell went off. Alex began to quickly gather his things for his last class, shut his locker, and made his way to class. He liked it when the halls were emptier and he risked the tardiness in order to be more comfortable.
He finally made it to his last class of the day, world history, and made his way to his seat. The teacher gave him a little look, but continued on with the lesson. As Alex began taking notes, he felt his phone buzz rapidly in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the notification and saw that it was a news notification.
“BREAKING: UNKNOWN DISASTER LEVELS CLAUSEN; WHOLE CITY REDUCED TO CRATERS AND FLATTENED. CASUALTIES UNKNOWN, EXPECTED TO BE MILLIONS…”
Alex looked at the notification in disbelief. He reread it again several times, but it still said the same thing. The neighboring city to his own now apparently no longer existed. He swiped the alert and waited for the story to load as his heart started pounding heavily. There had been no threats of severe weather and an accident couldn’t have destroyed a city the size of Clausen, it only would have be an inconvenience. Whatever had happened must have been something unworldly. Finally, the story loaded and Alex began reading all he could.
“The city of Clausen has been reported to have been at the center of some unnatural cataclysm as the whole city has been found to be a burning wasteland with everything crushed in gigantic craters that are several kilometers wide and several kilometers longer. Authorities are trying to gather evidence as to what has caused such an apocalyptic event, but have found it hard to do so with everything in the city reduced to practically paper thin sheets.
…
...as authorities have begun their initial search and rescue for survivors, early reports have said that the wreckage is fragile and easily movable, as one volunteer was able to move a flattened truck by their lonesome. Other reports have said that some of the debris is behaving unnaturally, as some fires began to change unusual colors spontaneously and that the air smells of vanilla and floral scents, not of ash and dust, to name only a few. The most bizarre early reports coming out so far are that there doesn’t seem to be any kind of sign of survivors, especially in areas that were actively busy, like Main Street. It was almost as though whatever happened here removed any trace of life
‘Whatever is going on here is unusual and dangerous’ local fire chief Joe Scroze announced. ‘We are asking that family and friends keep away from Clausen until our investigations are complete.”
As Alex continued to read the article, he began to feel something in his chest. There was something in him that felt as though he knew what the cause of this catastrophe was, but he also couldn’t understand how he knew that. This was some incredibly unnatural event, but he somehow knew the cause. But what could it possibly be and how did he know?
Just then, his phone buzzed again and he saw a new notification pop up. It was a text message, but there was no number associated with the message. Confused, he tapped on the alert and it brought him to his messages where the numberless text was awaiting him, with only two words in the body.
“Open me”
Alex began to feel his heart race. What was going on? First he gets reports that the neighboring city was seemingly reduced to nothing but a flattened wasteland and now he is getting numberless messages? He took a deep breath and relaxed. The text was probably just some kind of spam telling him that some king in a far away country was sharing his wealth. He didn’t buy it and simply selected the message and deleted it. Taking another breath, he tried to focus on the lesson, when he noticed something strange. He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, but after blinking them and giving them a good rubbing, he was astounded by what he saw.
All of his classmates and the teacher were moving in a looping behavior.
The teacher was walking from one side of the board to the other and back before doing the exact same motion over and over again. All around him the students would seemingly write down some notes before the words disappeared and they wrote them down again. The clock also was in this loop as the second hand seemed to strike twelve before resetting at the ten and then moving again. Alex looked at his hands and gave them a couple squeezes and smacked himself to see if he was dreaming, but his burning cheek and non-looping behavior told him that he was not affected by the strange occurrences. Just then, his phone buzzed again with another text message, again from the numberless sender. With his hands shaking slightly, he opened his inbox and looked at the message.
“OPEN ME”
He felt incredibly compelled to do so. These wacky occurrences had set his curiosity into overdrive and he needed answers. Something in his head again began to tell him that he knew what the cause of all of this was and that it was incredibly familiar to him. It was something personal to him. It was a feeling as though it was something that had been removed from his mind, but only a bit was left. He felt himself entering almost a trance and felt his thumb began to move towards the message to open it. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt it calling to him, beckoning to him like the ancient sirens of mythology. Their songs attracted the sailors of the seas to them with their alluring and beautiful songs...right before they killed them.
Alex snapped out of his trance just in time to stop his finger from opening the message and quickly deleted it again. He noticed that he was breathing rather hard and was sweating slightly. This was getting out of hand and he needed to get out of this room and it’s continuously looping inhabitants.
Bolting out of his chair and sprinting out of the room, he began to run down the hallway with no particular destination in mind, when he again noticed something strange. The school was practically dead silent. For a school that held well over a couple thousand students, that was practically impossible. Alex began looking around and noticed that any student or faculty he saw was not acting normal. Some were looping in place, others were seemingly stuttering and looked glitchy, almost as though they were a bug in a video game, and some were not moving at all. Alex again begin to feel himself freak out. None of this was possible, this was not real.
Then his phone began to buzz again.
He was dreading what he was about to do, but at this point, it seemed as though he had no choice. He looked at his phone and saw the same alert in his inbox. Only this time, the sender seemingly had grown impatient and the message they sent sent a cold shiver down his spine.
“Alex, I swear, if you don’t open this, you will regret it. Open the text, dammit!”
Not only did the sender seemingly know his name, but the message itself seemed to break his phone, as the words began to spread across the screen and take up every inch of it, ensuring nothing else but the message was on the screen. His whole body trembling now, he slowly tapped on the screen and opened the message. When he did, he was greeted with a completely white screen with only a pulsing type line in the upper lefthand corner. Alex tried to write something, but the keyboard didn’t appear and his phone was unresponsive. Then, something did show up on the screen.
“Fiiiinally. I ask you a couple times to open up and you discard my message? Do you know how rude that is?”
The words appeared one letter at a time in rapid succession, as though his phone was typing out the message itself, like his phone was talking to him. Suddenly, the whole message deleted itself and the screen went blank again before more words began to show up.
“Hahaha, phones can’t talk to you, silly. Everyone knows that. Seems as though you need some fresh air, Alex. Why don’t you come outside? I’ll be there shortly anyway to pick you up! It’s been awhile since I’ve seen my little brother, after all <3 “
Alex stared flabbergasted at his phone. He must have been going crazy. This was too much to try and handle. How did they know what he was thinking? That he was indoors? And...he had an older sibling? He brought his hands up to his head and began to rub them through his hair to try and calm down as well as taking a couple deep breaths. After a couple moments, he figured that whoever was messing with him like this probably had some kind of agenda and he figured he might as well go along with the ride. And if things got out of hand, he didn’t take those self-defence classes for nothing after all.
He began making the trek to the main entrance to the school but not before realizing that he was seemingly going in circles. He rubbed his head in confusion as he was certain that he was heading the right way, but every corner he took lead him to somewhere completely different in the school. After what seemed like hours of frustratingly hapless walking and backtracking, his phone went off again, the same sender. Alex opened it to the blank white screen again before the words began to spell out.
“Hee hee, sorry little bro, but I couldn’t help but have a little fun at your expense. Your reaction to getting lost was priceless, hahaha!! Here, I’ll help you out, though I thought you’d know your way through your own school ;)”
Alex was now really getting upset. This was getting ridiculous and he was about to find someway to wake himself up from this dream before he got in trouble for sleeping in class. However, as he rounded the next corner, which he was sure he had already done hundreds of times, he found himself at the main entrance and the doors leading outside. He paused in confusion and looked back only to discover that he was in the main foyer of the school and not in a random hallway that he had been going through. Filled with frustration and still annoyed that his dream was not ending, he sighed and decided to humor his brain and walked outside.