Chaos
Chapter 2
*Day one.*
"Run! Everyone head to the East gate!" The soldier was already breathing hard by the time he got the words out, and it didn't matter — nobody needed telling twice. The whole city had gone up in panic, people grabbing onto anyone who'd let them, no idea how any of it had started, just the animal certainty that they had to move.
Cars piled into each other at every intersection. People threw themselves off rooftops rather than wait for what was climbing up after them. It had come without warning — by the time anyone official said a word about it, the damage was already done. Didn't matter if you were old or young, fast or slow. Death didn't care. Every corner had someone screaming for their life, getting torn apart mid-sentence.
The smell of blood was everywhere. This was humanity's worst hour, and somewhere underneath all that noise, a voice nobody was listening to kept calling out — *somebody help, I'm stuck, please, somebody* — and got nothing back. Everyone was too busy staying alive to spare a second for anyone else. Morals didn't survive contact with a stampede.
He was pinned under a slab of concrete that had come off a collapsed bridge — lucky, honestly, to still be breathing at all. He watched people run past him and a thought crept in that he tried to shove back down: *I'm actually gonna die here, aren't I.*
That's when the smell hit him. Gasoline, and it was already spreading his way from a wrecked car nearby. He started squirming, twisting, anything to get clear before it reached him. It wasn't enough. Sparking cables caught the fuel and it went up. For half a second he just stopped fighting — let whatever was going to happen, happen. Then, cursing under his breath about how expensive it was just to keep living, he kept moving anyway. Whatever instinct kicked back in worked — he got loose just enough that when the explosion threw him with the rest of the debris, he came out the other side without anything broken.
"Well. That wasn't so bad." Kaito said it to nobody, swaying on his feet, head bleeding, barely upright.
---
On the other side of the block, two girls broke into a local restaurant. One of them had taken a hit to the shoulder earlier and could barely see straight anymore. By the time her friend dug up a first aid kit, it didn't matter — Kelly was already gone, lying in a pool of her own blood.
"Kelly. Kelly, are you alright?" No response, no matter how many times she tapped her head. The scream that came out of her next was the kind that carried, and it's what pulled Kaito toward the restaurant in the first place, still trying to find his own footing.
"This can't be happening. We were supposed to be on spring break." She curled up against the wall, knees to her chest, staring at her friend's body and just repeating it — *this can't be happening* — like saying it enough times might undo it.
"Somebody had too much to drink," Kaito said, looking down at the corpse. It came out flat, half a joke that landed nowhere. The girl just stared at him — not offended exactly, more like she couldn't process one more thing right now, including who he even was or why he'd followed the sound of her screaming.
He wasn't thinking straight either. Found a first aid kit sitting on a table and started patching his own head up in front of a cracked mirror, ignoring the throbbing. She kept watching him do it.
"You know it's rude to stare," he said. She didn't stop.
"All my friends are dead." She said it plainly, like she was reading it off something. It caught him off guard — that wasn't a sentence you dropped into a room casually.
"...Sorry to hear that. Tough world we live in." Her eyes didn't have anything behind them when he said it. Like whatever part of her that would've reacted had already checked out.
The silence afterward sat wrong. She kept staring, right into him, until he finally broke it.
"I know I'm ugly, but you don't have to make it that obvious." Nothing. Not even a flicker.
Then two gunshots cracked from somewhere behind the building, followed by a groan that didn't belong to anything human. They went to check — bad idea, in hindsight — and found the source waiting for them: rotting, upright, and fast enough to latch onto the girl before either of them could react. She screamed, thrashing, trying to shove it off, and Kaito was already moving.
He caved its skull in with whatever was closest and didn't stop once it was down — kept going until there wasn't a face left to speak of, just wet mess smeared across the floor. The smell alone was enough to send the girl to her knees, retching. Kaito just stood there, soaked in it, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and headed for the restroom like that was a normal thing to need after.
He'd barely gotten his pants off when he heard it — a lot of footsteps, closing in fast.
A voice, flat and certain, cut through the door.
"Walk out. Hands on your head."
