There are days you remember forever.

  Your first broken bone.

  The first time you realize that while adults teach you that you shouldn’t cheat and lie, they cheat and lie all the time.

  Your first no-hit run.

  The day police pick you up at school and drive you to the morgue to identify your parents. Your siblings.

  And then there’s the day the world ends.

  Madeleine was in biology class when it started. Room 3A. Third floor.

  Ms. Perry was talking about cell division. Madeleine, as usual, was sketching bunker schematics in her notebook.

  A strand of bleached hair fell across her face. She blew it away with a sharp tch. Usually, she cut it off herself before it got that long, but she hadn’t gotten around to it. The last few days had been strange. Something was in the air.

  Her gray eyes stayed locked on the page, same focus she used for speedrunning boss fights.

  Knowing how to infiltrate a doomsday bunker was way more useful than knowing all the parts of a mitochondrion.

  First, there was just one siren. Then another joined. Then another, like dogs answering each other's howls across the neighborhood. Until they all merged into one massive monster of sound. Madeleine looked up.

  It was a sound that was not only heard with ears, but felt in the bones. And the wailing wouldn't stop. It would just mix with the wailing of evermore sirens, joining in. From firetrucks, police, ambulance.

  Everyone in class paused. Ms. Perry forced a smile onto her face that was meant to say that everything was good, but such a smile isn’t very effective when the rest of your face screams panic.

  “Probably just a drill,” she said, smiling even more awkwardly, and nobody in class thought she’d even believed it herself.

  A drill nobody knew about? A drill that made the ground shake and windows burst?

  She fumbled with stuff on her desk, standing up, sitting down, standing up again, then sitting own again, nervously rearranging pens and pushing stacks of paper in order. What was she doing? Waiting until the sirens stopped miraculously, and her lie about the drill turned reality? That was not how reality worked.

  Then a loud bang. A gunshot? No. The sound was too round, too drawn out. And gunshots usually didn’t make the earth quake.

  Ms. Perry gave a jerk and threw all the papers she had just arranged so neatly sailing to the floor.

  She giggled nervously, not knowing where to look. When Lillian, a notorious liar, and Chef, who was called that way because he loved cooking and always brought food for everyone, ran to the windows to see what was going on, she told them to go back, to their seats.

  She didn’t care whether or not they actually went back. Instead, she pulled out her phone, and so did half of the students in class, feeling it was okay to do it now that the teacher was doing it.

  Then the entire classroom erupted in chimes, screens flashing blood-red warnings. It was a Presidential Alert:

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  “SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

  Someone gasped. Another student pulled up a livestream: smoke, screaming, a ticker at the bottom. “MARTIAL LAW DECLARED”

  Then static.

  Ms. Perry’s lips moved soundlessly, her thumb jamming at her screen as her feeds exploded:

  “Explosions at military bases???”

  “My brother in Europe says it’s chaos”

  “I don’t know what to do, it's everywhere!!!”

  Another explosion rattled the building. One window burst. Immediately after, the PA system crackled:

  “Teachers, initiate Code Black. Proceed to the evacuation assembly areas.”

  Ms. Perry’s hands shook. “Let me… Okay, you stay here, stay seated. Maybe… crawl under the tables. But no panic. I will just check quickly. It's all fine. It's just a drill. I am sure, it probably—”

  Out she was, and she didn’t even bother to close the door behind her.

  This was the last time they’d seen Ms. Perry.

  Whispering voices swell to a hum that filled the classroom. Everyone was talking, throwing in suggestions, guessing what was happening outside, reading aloud from their screens, some playing live streams of people yelling into their phones, until the whole classroom erupted in a dozen different hysterical voices, all screaming from tiny speakers.

  “This isn’t a drill.” A sentiment floating above everyone’s heads and creeping into them from there, slowly enfolding their hearts, ready to squeeze them.

  Madeleine sat there, with closed eyes. But under her closed eyelids, her eyes were trembling. She tried to remember. Tried to recall. This is was what she had been training for.

  This was why she’d memorized the first pages of the book, the bunkers that would matter most in the early hours. The first stage of the apocalypse.

  Heinlein’s Doomsday Villa. Closest to her school.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, hauled her school bag onto her shoulders, and felt the rigid outline of the book inside. One sharp breath. Then she kicked back her chair and stood up.

  “Shut up everyone, shut up, silence your phones and LISTEN!”

  Everyone went quiet. Looking at Madeleine, but even more at each other. Of all people, Madeleine, who never talked to anyone and spent recesses hunched over her handheld console. She did that even when teachers assigned group projects. That antisocial Madeleine.

  "You can talk?" said Mate dryly.

  Madeleine ignored her.

  “We have twenty minutes.”

  No one moved.

  “If you want to survive, follow me.”

  Then she left the classroom.

  Half the class laughed – nervously. The laughter soon turned into something else. Nervous chuckles. Then silence. They all looked at Mate and Scott, neither the smartest nor the coolest, but the ones everyone's eyes automatically found whenever decisions needed making. The ones who knew what to do when no one else did. The ones who would break the silence to when everyone else didn’t know what to say.

  This time, they too, had no idea what to do.

  The fire alarms began to scream. Madeleine walked on. Ignoring it. She didn’t turn to look back. Some would follow. Eleven, that’s how many she needed. Less were okay. But not more.

  Another explosion hit, the tremor shaking the lockers like skeletons in metal coffins. Madeleine didn’t flinch. She kept walking, thinking about coffins. What a luxury. This time, there won’t be any. For nobody.

  She walked past the bulletin board with the weekly announcements – a lot of things were cancelled as if someone had sensed what would happen. Past the posters with the cartoon animals explaining lockdown protocol. Then the ones explaining the importance of iodine pills in case of anything nuclear.

  Down the stairs, two steps at a time.

  Still, no one followed.

  All the way to the main exit, she met more teachers than students. Nobody was paying much attention to her. When shit hit the fan, it was me first, that was a universal law.

  Then she heard footsteps behind her. She turned around.

  It was some of her classmates. Two. Then three. Then more. Five. Six.

  They didn’t speak. Just followed.

  When they left the building, they ignored the wardens, yelling, telling them to turn around and proceed down to the air-raid shelters. Others pointed in the direction of the emergency assembly area. Confusion. That too was just what was to be expected.

  Madeleine walked by, with so much determination, nobody dared to stop here.

  And so did the fourteen classmates that had decided to follow.

  They walked out the school building with solemn determination.

  Those among them that would survive would one day become: the Leftover Legion.

  A group. A menace. Born not from courage.

  Not from friendship.

  Not from hope.

  Born from the kind of blind panic that makes you follow the quiet girl nobody talked to. The quiet girl that never mentioned her family, or the accident that took them from her. The quiet girl that wore the same shirt for three days in a row and didn’t bother to get a haircut, beyond just cutting off excess hair, but with eyes that said. “I’ve already lost everything. Try me.”