Ficorpio
Chapter 1
When the Apocalypse Survival Game descended, my roommates and I barely managed to survive ten days.
Then the door gave way, and our shared dorm room became a playground for zombies.
None of us made it out. We died horribly.
And when everything finally fell silent, I was reborn.
Reborn before the game had even begun.
The moment I opened my eyes again, I threw my arms around my roommates and burst into tears.
They looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
Staring at the three idiots who had once been like sons to me, I told them everything I remembered about the Apocalypse Survival Game.
Brotherhood came before everything. I didn’t need to explain myself twice. They accepted the absurdity of it surprisingly well. In fact, they were practically eager to get started.
Marcus was still fantasizing about tearing through the apocalypse like some action hero when I poured cold water over him.
“Forget about dominating anything,” I said. “Barely scraping by is more like it.”
When the end of the world came, the first priority was building an emergency stockpile.
Julian and I formed one team. Marcus and Noah made up the other. We split up to raid wholesale stores and every major shopping center we could reach.
To keep our frantic buying spree from drawing attention, we told people we were opening a small business.
We stocked up on every basic necessity we could think of, then kept going.
By the time we were done, supplies filled more than half the dorm room. Exhausted, the four of us collapsed onto the floor.
“Ethan,” Noah asked, frowning, “do you think this is enough?”
“It should be. Let’s worry about surviving the first month before anything else.”
Julian adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his nose and spoke quietly.
“Warning posts about the game have been online for a while, but most people think they’re a prank. There probably aren’t many who truly believe them.”
I shook my head. We’d spread the word. Whether anyone believed it was up to them.
It was 11:30.
In thirty minutes, midnight would arrive.
The four of us sat around the small square table and waited for the game to descend.
The countdown began.
Three…
Two…
One…
The Apocalypse Survival Game had arrived.
Marcus was the first to lose patience. He pressed his ear to the door, listening for any movement in the hall. When he heard nothing, he kicked the leg of my chair in irritation.
“Ethan, are you screwing with us? What game? Did you wake up half-asleep this morning and mistake a dream for reality?”
Before Marcus could say anything else, an electronic voice rang through the room.
“Apocalypse Survival Game: University Edition has begun. Students, please enjoy the game to the fullest.”
I tightened my core to keep from toppling over, then spread my hands.
“A mechanical voice trying to sound cheerful is somehow even creepier.”
Chapter 2
Marcus gave an embarrassed laugh, his anger vanishing. He sat back down obediently.
The mechanical voice continued.
“Any student who has not entered a residence hall by noon will be subject to System Erasure.
“Erasure commencing. Erasure complete.
“The first survival stage will last thirty days. If all original occupants remain alive in a shared dorm room for the first ten days, the entire room will receive an additional reward.
“We wish all students a wonderful month ahead.”
My roommates and I went pale.
A wonderful month?
How could that thing say it like that?
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Someone pounded on the door.
Noah swallowed hard before calling out, “Who’s out there?”
“Open the door! The person inside is a fake. I’m the real Julian Hart!”
The voice outside belonged to Julian Hart.
Except Julian was already standing in our dorm room.
Noah Carter and Marcus Reed felt every hair on their bodies stand on end. They shot to their feet so fast their chairs scraped across the floor.
“Th-that’s Julian Hart outside… Then who’s sitting in our dorm room?”
Julian, seated inside the room, looked up at them as if they were idiots.
“What are you two freaking out about? If I were some unknown species, do you think you’d still be alive?”
He pointed toward the door.
“That thing outside wants you to open it. Don’t lose your heads!”
I stared at the Julian Hart sitting in front of me, unable to tell whether he was real or fake. The situation was becoming a serious problem.
In my previous life, Julian hadn’t returned to the dorm that night. Because the game detected that our room was missing one of its registered occupants, it erased him. No one had pounded on our door from outside, either.
The Julian outside kept talking nonstop, bringing up memories we all shared.
He knew them in convincing detail. Almost too convincingly.
After hesitating for a moment, Marcus found a relatively safe spot and sat down on the floor. Then he began questioning the two Julians inside and outside the room.
He asked things like when Julian had last gone crazy over love, and how many bottles Noah had drunk after his third breakup.
The answers from both Julians were nearly identical. When Marcus asked how many bottles Noah had finished, the Julian outside even added a few details.
Since we still couldn’t tell which one was real, I stepped forward.
Marcus spoke up.
“Julian Hart, how tall are you?”
Two completely different answers came from opposite sides of the door.
“Six feet.”
“Five-eleven.”
Men might grow older, but they never stop lying about their height.
The answer was obvious.
The dorm room door opened.
The real Julian Hart stepped inside, and the Dormitory Impostor vanished into thin air.
Chapter 3
The monster could only tell the truth to prove its identity. People, on the other hand, weren’t nearly so reliable—especially when they had a fixation with their height.
Marcus Reed draped an arm over Julian’s shoulders and grinned.
“How the hell did you end up outside?”
It was only after hearing Julian’s explanation that we learned what had happened. The instant the clock struck twelve, he had been switched into the Residence Hall.
If he hadn’t made it back to the dorm room in time, he would have been transformed into a zombie.
“The rules say anyone who hasn’t entered the Residence Hall before midnight will be erased,” I said calmly. “It seems the game can’t simply slaughter innocent people outright. It can only eliminate them through these replacements.”
In our previous life, we’d lost one person on the very first day. On the tenth day, we’d just received the supply drop when we died. We hadn’t seen a single extra reward—not even a scrap.
“What a load of crap!” Marcus cursed. “They said there would be additional rewards, but clearly they just don’t want to hand anything out. Cheap bastards.”
The other three roommates joined in, muttering curses at the game.
Before long, the zombies’ howls grew much louder. Perhaps other students had been switched outside as well and failed to reach their dorms before the deadline, transforming directly into zombies.
There was only one thing we could do: hold the room and keep the zombies out.
Five days had already passed. Thanks to the Emergency Stockpile we’d prepared, the four of us were still living fairly comfortably. But the students in other rooms—those who hadn’t believed the Apocalypse Survival Game was real or hadn’t had time to gather supplies—had already run out of food.
It wasn’t long before someone came knocking.
Unlike every apocalypse story I’d heard before, the water never shut off after the Apocalypse Survival Game began.
In theory, if you had water but no food, you could survive for seven days.
But seven days wasn’t nearly enough. The first phase of the game lasted an entire month.
We’d been careful when we moved our Emergency Stockpile into the shared dorm room during those first few days, but someone had still noticed.
Before long, our first uninvited guest arrived.
“Ethan, you’ve still got a lot of food in there, don’t you?”
Caleb Brooks from the next class spoke from the other side of the door. His voice was weak, kept deliberately low so he wouldn’t draw the zombies’ attention.
When I didn’t answer, Caleb grew more frantic.
“We’re in the same department. Can’t you spare one loaf of bread? Just one. I’m starving. I swear, I’m about to die.”