July 20, 2015

I was cleaning out my locker as the academic year was ending soon. When I finished taking out the stack of books in the front, I finally found those that had been missing since the beginning of the year. They must have fell behind one day and I never bothered looking before getting new copies. I was about to close the door when I realized I nearly left behind my grades and other documents on the bottom.

We had set plans to watch a movie outdoors but when I got to the venue, I didn’t expect it to be as packed as it was. “Go this way, the moonlight is better”, an employee directed me to the right through a brick doorway. The light seemed to emanate from glowing embers rather than the moon.

I spotted some friends talking in a small circle and I cursed myself for not coming earlier for it appeared that I had missed a large part of the conversation. Someone was explaining that he had left our former school because an increasing amount of outsiders started hanging out around the schoolyard and their mother was concerned. It didn’t help that the day they made the decision was on a typhoon day.

“Hey, make sure we get back to the hotel safely today” an acquaintance beside me knocked on my shoulder. They seemed to have been drinking so I asked them where they lived and they told me they were staying at the hotel above the train station.

All of a sudden, paper planes were being thrown down from the roofs above us as we sat in the middle of the street. Each paper plane had various messages written on the wings, most of them in Chinese. Some were cut and crafted with scissors but for the most part they were only folded. Among the hundreds of planes that the audience was now fumbling to catch, some of them were in a series. One was a set of 5 with the following written: “We are headed towards:” “North” “East” “South” “West” in Chinese with bubbly characters.

The superhero movie that we were watching had just begun. The threat this time was that a generator that was run by a virus-powered fuel, “Convira”, was being targeted. Apparently it becomes deadly only when the fuel stops running and stagnates, allowing it to fester. The generator had blown up and I commented to the person sitting next to me on how the movie moved so slowly that I had forgotten it had already begun.

I was now one of the characters in the film, walking with the crew through a densely forested area before entering the lab. We had already walked too far from the safety area before I realized that I should have stayed back. After I had already asked if I should turn back, my exit was sealed off from a zombie-like being. We were surrounded so we rushed into a glass shelter before we were swarmed by the hellish-looking spawn.

It wasn’t until further inspection that I realized we were being chased by girls in costumes. Their blood-stained clothes and faces were accompanied by masks which made it appear as if their eyes sockets were empty.