Classroom X

day zero point five: shock

"Who the heck are you?"

The entire class turned in unison to look at Siward, consternation leeching the colour out of their faces. Siward expertly ignored the attention he was garnering from all around him, his lips curled defiantly, his own gaze expressing nothing but a willful demand to be answered.

The soldier's eyes latched onto Siward instantly, assessing, judging. He gave Siward a lethal smile. "You can call me Major Strauss."

"And Major Strauss believes one of us is made of plastic?" Siward wasn't even trying to sound civil.

The Major's lips twisted unpleasantly. James couldn't even fathom how Siward would have the guts to talk so rudely to a man who could very well shoot him. Wait, maybe that wasn't it. Maybe Siward's courage stemmed from the knowledge that by law, the Major couldn't shoot him. James had long since known that Siward liked pissing off authorities and relishing in their inability to get back at him, because he knew they had lines they couldn't cross.  And Siward exploited this handicap to his heart's content.

If he thought about it, in the end, Siward's thought processes weren't too complicated to unravel. He survived on crass audacity and animal cunning, and believed that the whole world served no other purpose than to exist as his playground.

"Not quite," said Major Strauss smoothly. He didn't immediately elaborate, and James had the sneaking suspicion that the Major was enjoying keeping them on tenterhooks. Major Strauss pushed the register book on the teacher's desk further back and sat down on its edge. He crossed his ankles casually and studied each student before him. "I assume there's no one here who hasn't heard about the Simea terrorist attack."

The class went even quieter, if that was even possible.

There was no one who hadn't heard of the attack. It was one of the greatest tragedies of the century, and one of the most bizarre acts of terrorism that had happened in recent history. James remembered the news feeds from fifteen months ago reporting the bloody scene at Simea. The entire town square was strewn with body parts—torn off limbs and decapitated heads—as though a bomb had gone off in the middle of an unassuming crowd. But the strangest thing was, only humans took the damage that day; a regular explosion should have brought down at least a few buildings, or split the road with cracks, but the only evidence the building structures bore of the attack was the blood and shredded flesh staining the walls red.

There was a video that circulated through Wagnex, a social media site rated eighteen plus, revealing a capture from one of the victim's cellphones. The video started with an invisible narrator video logging street fashion, the camera swinging back and forth across a crowded town square, most shops around boasting a fairly good day of business. The attack happened silently. There had been no kind of warning, nothing that gave away there was anything strange about the square that morning. One moment, everything in the video showed a peaceful, normal day, but the next frame looked like a jigsaw puzzle breaking up—the humans in the video were sliced to pieces, as though by a thousand invisible swords that struck at once. Blood fanned the air, no one even had time to process what had happened. Then the camera hit the dark asphalt and glitched.

But just before the camera stopped recording entirely, a lone scream cut through the dark. It sounded like a young boy crying out from unbearable pain.

People had hypothesised about the means the killer used for the massacre. Popular opinion was that it was a bioweapon, taking into account how the attack only affected living things. Some argued about the possible existence of a highly corrosive chemical that ate through flesh at the speed of sound. Some spread rumours about death rays and alien invasions; others wrote essays on quantum lasers as though it were an actual thing. In the end, it just showed that nobody had a clue.