Terror By Night

Chapter 18

Three Months Later

I zigzag my way through the narrow, crowded walkways. What we're calling structures, and I use the term lightly, is essentially anything not nailed down and slapped together with duct tape and hope. Cardboard makes for excellent doors until it rains too hard, then a replacement hastily found in the garbage. People fill the narrow spaces, which isn't hard to do when there's limited room to start with and nowhere to go.

The campus started out as a temporary shelter for the young brought from the school districts around the neighboring counties of Tallahassee. After a while, it was more than just that. Some came from southern parts of Georgia as well. We were all shipped here to the retrofitted stadium, part of the property of FSU, when the Terror arrived. That's what everyone's taken to calling 'them.' The Terror. Due to the fact every night, they slink out of whatever hole they've been hiding in, to terrorize neighborhoods, towns, and cities. You name it, the Terror's been there or going to be. The reason I decided upon for the name: they seem to be straight out of Psalm 91- the terror by night.

Our set-up here was meant to be temporary. They (the leadership) were so optimistic in thinking they could handle the aliens in a short time, and we'd all go back to business as usual. They'd been overly confident in themselves and underestimated the enemy.

True, the Terror hungered for the youth. Scientists discovered there was something in our genetic make-up that made them crave us, something about our heightened hormones. It was like a drug to them. They actively sought the younger humans to feed from. But the thing the adults hadn't understood was the Terror didn't need us. They wanted us. They could still get what they needed from adults. The way I made it make sense was this way: we were the coffee and the grown-ups were the water. Children didn't seem to be any kind of draw.

So, while the government was busy trying to keep us alive, the adults themselves were dying off. The creatures only came out in the night, so at first people didn't realize the danger to themselves. They caught on eventually, but the Terror had wreaked havoc on much of the status quo. Thousands of people dying, or missing, began to affect the running of the government, of public systems such as power and water plants, and even public transportation. As soon as the sun went down, the world turned off. People won't work the nightshift when it could possibly mean their life. The pay isn't worth it.

I don't blame them. But it did create a new way of living for the rest of us. That day when our bus pulled up to the gates of the university, I'd been so distracted by the newness and, let's be honest, Xavier, to pay attention to the details. I hadn't realized the extent of how different my life was about to become. The National Guard had erected check points at every entrance. We passed through multiple layers of security which included an enormous chain link fence topped with barbed wire encircling the entire campus. Turns out it's also electrified. The University had been turned into a militarized compound. From what I later learned, this was the same scenario in other college and university campuses across the country. Some states only had one or two, while places like Texas had six. It depended entirely on the population of the surrounding areas. If I'd lived in Montana, I'd had been shipped to Idaho or Wyoming. I can't imagine the living conditions there. It was bad enough at our location when Florida had two other compounds in our state. One in the central part of the state in Tampa. They combined the University of South Florida and the University of Tampa into one large sprawling city compound. That facility received the majority of the state's teenage residents, from what I information I've gathered. Ours is the second largest. The southern compound is at the University of Miami. They were the smallest of the three.

There was no feasible way hundreds of thousands, possible a million, teenagers were all going to be comfortably housed on campuses meant for tens of thousands. Living conditions became creative. Kids kept getting shipped in, space got tighter and spilled over into every nook and cranny until we're occupying every spare inch. The students who were already housed here took in as many as they could fit. Every dormitory is at four or five times their intended capacity. Soon, though, that was still not enough. We couldn't expand outward because of the perimeter security. Instead, we expanded inward. Every available free space has now been taken over. The beautiful green lawns disappeared to become living quarters. Baseball and soccer fields are filled with tents and shelters. Streets became narrower and narrower as more industrious persons created their own lean-to's. There remains very few direct paths to anywhere across campus.