Stop!

“Good morning, baby. I have a surprise for you later.” Was the notification message I received from my boyfriend Carl. He was so cute! We spent the week without managing to get some time alone to release the tension. Even the workouts with The Club didn’t have space for us being alone together.

And the craziest part of this was - I didn’t remember how my first week in college went.

Being grumpy in the mornings wasn’t going so well on my body. I don’t know what it was, but I was feeling like I was on a massive hangover from last night. I got up the bed, noticing Ethan had already left the room, and checked my phone again to see it was only 6:20 a.m. that Friday. I changed— well, put some clothes on and collected my backpack to leave the room.

At the classroom, I saw Leon-from-the-cafeteria coming in and silently greeting me, going to the back of the room for a seat. After class ended, he grabbed his things quickly and ran out the door. Maybe he was in a hurry to have lunch, I thought, but decided to join him when I saw he was still walking down the hallway, just a few steps forward. I jogged to get to him, but he started jogging at a faster pace. And just when I managed to get past some people gathered in a small group, blocking my view, I met Carl coming into my direction.

“Oh hey, babe!” I greeted him, trying to look past his body to search for Leon.

“Hey.” He lifted my chin and kissed me briefly. “Let’s get rolling.” We joined hands and started walking the same direction. Leon was still there in the end of the hallway. When he looked behind and saw us together, he started running again through the people.

“Leon, common man. Stop! Leon—” I tried to call him while everybody looked at my face, like I was a freak shouting in the hallway. I dragged Carl with me.

“Babe, what’s happening?” He asked, joining along.

No, I mean. Everybody was frozen looking at my face, literally.

“Aren’t you seeing this?” I asked him, signaling the weird people looking like NPCs.

“What?” He asked back, but I didn’t have time to make my point.

I saw Leon taking a right turn in a hallway that nobody was using. We took the same turn and nobody was there, neither was he. When I went back a couple of steps, nobody was even in the hallway we had just passed by. Everybody was simply Thanos-snapped-his-finger gone.

“Where the hell did everybody go?” I asked nobody.

“I don’t know.” For a second, I forgot Carl was there. Wasn’t he finding all this completely weird?

I paid attention at the left hallway on the intersection that we were on and noticed I couldn't see the end of it. But that was off because the building was a square around the inner open yard. I kept going forward, down the weird hallway, to investigate with Carl just behind me. The windows on my right side let me see outside of the building where the garden was. On my left, the classroom doors and we kept going. Somewhere behind us, the windows stopped facing the garden and it seemed to face a huge lab where I saw Chris punching with his fists against the windows. Not only one of those windows, but he was punching all of them like a bunch of TVs playing the same video. I looked back to the hallway and saw the lights shutting down, one by one, making the hallway turn completely pitch black.

What?! It's the middle of the day, I thought to myself.

I looked back at the hundreds of Chris “outside” and he seemed to scream something, but I couldn't hear it over the glass. I came closer to the window in front of me, until I touched where it was cracking, to try to hear him.

“...up... Michael, wake up!” He was screaming his lungs out but it was all muffled at my side.

“No.” I heard Carl calmly saying.

The glass shattered and I felt water flooding the room. But what room? Everything was a black blur around me. I was drowning, but I couldn't see any liquid at all. I felt shortness of breath as the invisible water was dangerously reaching my neck. Air stopped going into my lungs while I was in a big amount of pain.

Did I tell you I’m afraid of water?