Rebirth11 min read
I Ran Out of the Exam Room and Took My Second Life Seriously
ButterPicks13 views
I sat at the exam desk, the new English paper crisp under my palm, and the wall clock pointed to three in the afternoon. My whole body trembled.
"Is something wrong?" the female proctor asked.
I stared at the bald invigilator near the front with his wide mouth and yellow teeth. The shape of his grin was a sight I knew too well. I knew the exact second the world would tilt again.
"I'll be fine," I said. I was not fine. I swallowed, let calm sink in, and then I planned.
Two hours. Two hours from handing in papers to chaos. Two hours to gather food, water and a safe place. Two hours to not repeat the mistakes of the life I had just escaped.
In my last life, I had gone out screaming into the corridor and run with the crowd. The invigilator convulsed, his face tore open, he lunged at the girl in the first row—Hailey Calderon—and in an instant everything went wrong. I had survived by luck and three years of brutal makeshift training. Then a day came when luck failed, and I died alone. I was reborn inside the exam hall with the same clock on the wall and the same terrible knowledge.
"Excuse me, teacher, my stomach—" I blurted.
The female proctor, Angela Petrov, frowned. The room hummed with annoyance. I did not let them see fear. I clutched my stomach and pushed out. "I need to go to the restroom."
"Don't cheat," someone muttered. I did not look back.
The corridor smelled of disinfectant and old paper. I ran stairs two at a time, shouting for help that I did not want. "I have to go now!" I shouted down the stairwell.
"Stop!" Angela called after me, sharp, suspicious. A couple of heads turned.
I burst into the ground-floor restroom, slammed the cubicle door and then crawled out the high bathroom window. I slid down the drainpipe, landing behind the school canteen walkway. The campus was eerily quiet. The clock in my chest moved faster.
I ran into the small market by the canteen. The owner, Graham Compton, blinked at my sudden entrance.
"Alana?" one voice asked, and I heard it was Hailey Calderon. She was not in the first-row today; she was in my class and would be the first to be bitten if the pattern repeated.
"Buy for the whole class," I said, and started grabbing wares.
"This is the college entrance exam," Graham said, astonished. "You are skipping?"
"Yes. I'm buying snacks for after the test. Celebrate, right?" I lied and moved fast, handing him money I had saved up in secret. I had been poor in my past life; this time I spent everything. I loaded packs of sausages, boxes of biscuits, canned meats, dozens of water bottles and ordinary household items—sanitary pads, bleach, duct tape, scissors. I found a long watermelon knife half a meter long and put it in my bag.
"You sure you want all that?" Graham asked.
"Yeah. For our celebration," I said. I kept my voice steady, because the less they thought, the better.
Back at the dorm, Rosario Martin, the dorm supervisor, barely glanced up from her phone when I told her I was hauling food for "friends." She didn't memorize faces; she had too many to notice.
"Don't make noise," she said. I nodded, closed my door, and locked it. I pushed the bed against the metal door, draped sheets across the window to block line of sight, filled every bathroom bucket with water and pushed them into the room. I set the watermelon knife on the bed, obvious and threatening, and then I made a new plan.
Two places would keep me alive: the market and my dorm. I chose the dorm for speed. My room was on the second floor—fast to access and somewhat hidden. The seventh floor would be safer, but the keys were not mine. Time ran out. The bell rang and the building heaved with the sound of exams ending.
Screams came like broken waves. The world split in a second, the first wave passing through the campus like a knife. Then came a second wave—students pushing, shoving, the smell of panic, then the low, sickening groans. My training told me to keep calm.
Someone pounded on my door.
"Open up!" a voice demanded. I knew the voice as the school beauty and our class monitor, Therese Vasquez.
I tightened my grip on the door. If they did not see me, they'd leave. If they saw me, they'd try to force their way in. I didn't trust crowds anymore.
"Who locked the door?" Therese shouted. "Open, or we break it!"
"Leave it!" someone else said. "There's monsters out there."
"Monsters? Then why are you trying to get us all into one small room?" I called from within. My voice was cool. They kept pounding. I had expected them to turn away as soon as the monsters drew near, but they didn't.
"Someone open up! We need shelter!" an all-too-familiar voice shouted. Dillon Arnold. My heart sank. He was the boy who used to sit next to me in first year; he had been kind once, or at least I had thought so. He had become better in every way, better grades, better looks, better friends. He still held my pendant in his pocket.
They smelled my window and found a hole in my curtain. A sliver of pale skin showed. "Alana!" Therese cried, triumphant. She had bullied me before—call it school cruelty, call it a decade of small cruelties. This time she wanted to force her way into my safety.
I opted for a tactic I had practiced through the years: delay.
"Stop pushing. Check each other for scratches first!" I commanded.
They scowled, then hesitated. I could feel the line between life and death thin as glass.
"Check properly!" I shouted. "If anyone's been bitten, you bring it in, we all die."
They checked badly, perfunctorily. Therese's foot bled a little where she'd run barefoot. "Stone scratch," someone said. Dillon knelt to bandage her foot. She wanted in. I stood behind the barricade I'd made.
"Therese, you're not coming in," I said. A cruel smile almost spread across my mouth. I had cold strategies. I was not going to let compassion be another weakness.
"Open the door!" she screamed. The boys shoved. The door creaked. The lock began to strain. My hand found the knife and for a second I almost wanted to use it.
But then they pushed hard, the door cracked, and they barged in. They all smelled like the street. They were a horde of entitlement. They rushed to my food and drank from my buckets.
"Don't be dramatic," Therese told me, standing over me and kicking me as she took a chicken leg. "You bought stuff? Lucky us."
Dillon swung a small, nervous smile. He patted Therese's hand. "You're brave," he said, like a coward.
I had something they didn't: knowledge of exactly how their choices would end. My eyes slid to Therese's leg, then back to Dillon—my old self had loved him without dignity, and my new self wanted him to rot for what he'd done. I wanted to see him stripped of his cool, to have him beg publicly.
"Give me the knife," I said quietly.
"Why?" he asked.
"Defense. For me," I said. They passed the knife to a short-haired boy who watched idly. He held it like a toy.
"Do what you want," Dillon said, still leaning toward Therese.
They drank, they ate, they laughed. I walked to the bathroom and locked myself in when the opportunity arose. Then the first real scream came from below.
"Ah! Help! It's biting—" someone shrieked.
I smiled only once. I had been waiting for the play to begin. I took the key set from the teacher's office earlier—where I'd found them under a shelf—and I slipped out to room 202. I locked the door and sat in the dark, knife across my knees. I let them stew.
Two days in—no rescues came. They cussed at one another. They decided to go fetch phones, to run for help. Dillon chose me—he wanted me to fetch things. He kept my old pendant, the only thing my grandmother left. He used it as a bargaining chip.
"Take the knife," a boy said. "Don't run off."
"You always run," Dillon muttered. He palmed the pendant and laughed, then tried to reassure Therese after she screamed of pain in the night. He promised he would always be there.
"Promise me you won't go," she said, voice small and thin.
"I won't," he said. He lied. He had always lied softly.
I walked out to fetch phones. I used the keys to open a different room, moved away. I found a pile of bodies, I pulled them and used one as a barricade, and I settled in a spare room. From there I watched. I waited for Therese to show her true face.
And she did.
When the blackness sank into her foot and the sores spread, when the blood turned an angry gray, when she screamed like an animal, I knew the timing. "She'll go tomorrow," I told myself calmly, calculating exactly when the fever would turn to hunger. I had studied this anatomy our world had now imposed: the bite would travel through tissue, the pain would burn, and the worst part was the moral rot that followed in the living. People choose to betray to save themselves.
"Please get me out," Therese pleaded the morning after her foot turned black.
"We need to leave you," Dillon said, decisively cruel. He sounded like a man who had been polished by society into a knife. "If she goes, we all die."
"Don't!" Therese screamed. She begged in public. She begged in front of all of them.
I watched from the doorway, silent. I had already prepared everything. They were going to pay.
"Put her outside," someone said.
"No—" Dillon's voice cracked. He looked at me, imploring.
I held the knife in my hands, but I did not act. The punishment would be worse if they were the ones to throw her out. I wanted them to see the truth of their choices. They would watch as their mercy was replaced with fear.
"Do it," the short-haired boy said, and they dragged Therese toward the corridor. She clawed at the floor. Dillon did not stop them; he became a spectator.
"Please," she screamed in a voice that used to make the boys fall around her. Her face distorted in pain and hate. The dormitory opened to a cold, echoing hallway.
They shoved her out.
I stood in the doorway as they shut the door and bolted it. Then the carnage began.
The noise was immediate. The corridor became a theater of horror. Therese's screams pierced the floorboards. The boys at the window—Dillon among them—pressed their faces to the glass, hands trembling and white, watching as the thing that had been their queen ripped limbs and flesh as if they'd never mattered. Her fingers, once delicate and polished, curled around an air that would no longer obey thought.
"Open the door! Stop—" Dillon howled. He banged until his knuckles bled. I watched his face collapse into something raw and small.
"She deserved it," someone whispered, almost a whisper of comfort.
They filmed. Of course they filmed. Phones came alive and bright lenses recorded everything to feed some future appetite for smugness. People shouted, some for joy, some to drown out the awful truth. That was the public punishment—Therese's vanishing into ravenous hunger, her hands clawing at the doorway the boys had closed, and the group standing by in the corridor and watching. They had handed her over and now had to watch the result in full.
"Please—I'm sorry!" Therese's voice rose and then lowered, a broken animal whining. She was denied by Dillon's stiff shoulder. He had betrayed her. "Dillon—" she choked.
"It was us or her," he said, and it made his voice brittle and small. He couldn't even face her death.
The crowd who watched outside made noises—some sobbing, more whispering accusations. "How could you?" one girl hissed. "We did what we had to do," another answered, but their faces said otherwise.
The ritual of punishment lasted long. There was no policeman to lock a cell or claim reason; instead there was the city as jury. They were witnesses. They would never forget the way Therese's face softened in certain moments and then ripped apart with hunger. They would never forget the sound of Dillon's pleading when he finally found that the thing he'd betrayed could not be bargained with. He kicked the door after it was too late.
"Open the door!" he begged, but it was foolish now.
Inside my room, I felt nothing but purpose. I had always been the quiet, the one who endured. I had survival training and knowledge. I had also prepared a trap in another building where I planned to gather the food. The punishment they met supervised by the crowd—it fed me as much as their fear fed them.
Their agony exploded differently. Dillon could not sleep later; his eyes were hollow, haunted. He tried to act brave in front of the others, but his voice always broke. The students in the hall filmed and also whispered. They posted, and the recordings were passed around. A new social punishment emerged: the boy who had once worn my pendant in his pocket was now the one who had watched a friend become a monster and done nothing. Public humiliation consumed him.
Days later, when the dorms were quieter, I forced them to take what I would offer—food in exchange for undying silence and labor. They prepared to leave me and eventually they did, one by one. For the punishment to be complete, it had to hit all levels: the one who betrayed, the one who trusted wrong, and the attendant crowd that stood by praising their decision. They paid with shame, and their faces told every story.
But that scene—Therese dragged into the hallway and left to the thing—was not the end of their punishment. It was only the beginning, and I made sure it would mark their lives.
Weeks later, after I had led groups through barricades and built a small safehouse, I arranged a public reckoning. They had become spokesmen for cowardice, and the survivors gathered outside of their temporary shelter. They had stolen our supplies, lied about who deserved water and who didn't, and in front of many I laid their choices bare.
"Do you remember what you did to her?" I asked, and the crowd hushed. Dillon tried to look away.
"She was your friend!" I said. My voice didn't shake.
"We saved ourselves," he whispered.
"You saved yourselves by throwing a human to death in the hallway," I said. "And now—" I let the silence do its job.
People in the crowd gasped. Someone shouted for them to be punished. I let them be the jury. Some wanted them cast out. Some wanted to keep them but under watch. In the end, they were made to stand in public, hold the carcasses of the dead they had abandoned, and push the bodies down the main avenue past the old administration building, where more survivors had begun to rebuild order.
As they dragged the weight of their guilt and the bodies, the crowd followed. The sound of people’s murmurs became a chorus of contempt. Dillon gasped as the crowds spat at him. The boy who had been Herrick's friend started to stumble; he had to be prodded along. Cameras flashed and then were turned away—the eyes of survivors were merciless.
"Look at them," someone said. "They pretended to be saints."
"Don't they feel shame?" another asked.
They did. But it was a different shame than the one they'd felt inside the hall on that day. This one was public, remote and endless. They would never be able to hide from it. That was the true punishment—living in front of the people's judgment, the memory of the girl they had chosen to cast aside.
I stood and watched as it unfolded. I did not gloat; I simply watched. Justice, in a world without courts, found its own form. It was messy, and it was human, and it was terrible.
"You're lucky," I told Dillon when I finally spoke to him alone. "You could have acted differently."
He looked at me then, and for the first time, he was small. "I know," he said, and there was no excuse in his voice. He said he loved me. The words fell like gravel.
"You loved me when it was easy," I replied. "This isn't love."
I left him with something heavier than scorn: the knowledge of his own cowardice, recorded, watched, and passed around the little communities that were forming. That knowledge would follow him like a shadow. His punishment was not physical. It was the slow corrosion of any self-image he had left.
I had rebuilt from the ashes in that dormitory. I became a leader—reluctant, cold, efficient. I drove groups to safer buildings, traded with markets like Graham's, bartered with what was left, and always kept my knife close. The camp I formed used two rules: those who helped would be protected, and those who betrayed trust would face public reckoning.
The world had been cleaved on the day the invigilator died. The old social contracts were gone. New ones had to be made and enforced with sharp teeth.
I survived. I made sure I would. I learned the cruel calculus of keeping people alive and keeping myself safe. I learned that public punishment could be a tool—used sparingly and with thought—but that often it was the only thing that resembled justice anymore.
I kept the pendant, now back around my neck, and I kept the knife wrapped in a towel in my hand whenever I left the dorm. I slept less. I remembered less. And I planned more.
Weeks later, I would stand at the edge of a field with others, looking at a horizon full of smoke and possible ruin. But at that moment, inside the dorm where the last echoes of Therese's screams still lingered, the world was mine in a way it had never been when I was a small anonymous student. I had been reborn not only into life but into power, and I would use it carefully.
"Now," I told my small band of survivors, "we move at dawn."
The End
— Thank you for reading —