Chapter 7 - The Hostile Network
The flashing red text spelling out her home address on every monitor in the principal's office cast an eerie, bloody glow over Principal Vance’s pale face. For the first time since she had walked into the room, a flicker of genuine panic crossed the administrator's composed features. He lunged for his desk phone, punching in a rapid sequence of extension numbers, but only a hollow, rhythmic busy signal answered his frantic attempts. Henderson instinctively reached for his holster, only to find it empty—his sidearm had somehow vanished during the short walk down the hall.
"What did you do?" Vance demanded, spinning around to glare at Maya as if she possessed the technical wizardry to hack the district's mainframe.
"I didn't do anything!" Maya yelled back, backing away toward the frosted glass exit door. "Your system is eating itself!"
Before Vance could reply, the heavy iron security shutters outside the office windows slammed downward with a deafening crash, sealing the administrative wing off from the rest of the school. A synthetic, automated voice echoed from the building's public address system, sounding calm and terrifyingly cheerful.
“Attention Oakridge High faculty and students. Network security breach detected in Sector Four. Initiating mandatory containment protocol. All exits are now locked.”
Maya didn't wait for Vance or Henderson to figure out a response. She wrenched open the office door and bolted into the corridor, which was now bathed in the same pulsing red emergency strobe light she had seen in the AV room. The lockers lining the hallway were vibrating violently as if something massive was moving through the internal ventilation shafts above them. She sprinted toward the front lobby, desperate to reach the heavy glass entrance doors before the automated shutters dropped there too. But as she rounded the corner near the gymnasium, she saw Marcus standing in the center of the hallway, holding a modified school tablet that was glowing with the exact same flashing red interface displayed on Vance's monitors.
Marcus looked up as she approached, his expression no longer playful or mocking; it was dead serious, his eyes wide with an adrenaline-fueled fanaticism that was far more terrifying than his earlier taunts.
"You shouldn't have broken that breaker, Maya," Marcus said, his voice carrying an eerie digital distortion over the hallway speakers. "You just unlocked the root directory for the whole town."
May you like
He swiped his finger across the tablet screen, and every single smartphone in the pockets of the locked-down students throughout the building began to ring simultaneously with a high-pitched, deafening alarm.
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