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world.
    I leapt from my bed, surprisingly quick and agile, as if gravity had less hold on me. I braced myself in the doorway while the building continued to shimmy, the forty year-old joists creaking in protest.
    The inside wall of my room cracked from floor to ceiling. Screams echoed from the surrounding dorms. I tried to calm my breathing, to reassure myself that it wasn’t real. I was here.
    My name is Alex Moore. I’m twenty-one. I go to Pacific University. I play forward on the soccer team. I just got accepted to Stanford. Oh yeah…my ex-boyfriend killed me two nights ago.

    A buzz ran along the hall, electrical outlets exploding in its wake, filling the air with a smell of ozone and dusty plaster.
    “It’s just an earthquake,” I said to myself, “they happen all the time.” I was thankful for the feeling of my tense muscles, my feet underneath me, clothes clinging to my sweat-slicked skin. I’m here . The darkness that wanted to swallow me up wasn’t real. I was too overjoyed that my soul and body were still connected to be scared of a little natural disaster.
    The earthquake stopped.
    I released my death-grip on the doorframe and sank to the floor, grateful for the dirty, flattened carpet under my fingers. I lay there, not breathing for a long moment of eerie stillness. I counted to a hundred very slowly, and still didn’t need to breathe.
    Not all a dream, then.
    The fire alarm blared through the calm, and the sprinklers came on. A pounding of feet hit the hallways, along with the murmur of a whole dormitory of people stirred from sleep into hysterics in a matter of minutes.
    “Alex! Theresa! Come on!” Someone banged on my outer door.
    I got up slowly, relishing the spray of water raining down, each cool drop a tingle of awareness on my now heated skin.
    Outside, the corridor was a chaos of people shoving and stumbling in a pack of drenched bodies as alarms blared and emergency lights flashed. To me, they seemed to be moving in slow motion. Every detail was stretched out. Watching them felt like observing an ant farm — an invisible plate of glass and a world of understanding between us. They were so oblivious. Like I had been forty-eight hours ago.
    Nothing could have made it clearer that I was different now. I felt it in every cell of my body. For one thing, I felt strong. Fit. I could probably do an Ironman without batting an eyelash. But I could also taste their fear in the air — a jolt of saltiness, like touching your tongue to a battery. I could smell each of them, from the pungent hungover stoners to the sweet innocent freshmen. I took them all in at once, but my brain catalogued every unique signature. A new part of my mind had opened up to discern and process this information. It was such an incredible high, I’ll admit I temporarily lost myself in the power trip.
    When fire truck sirens joined the fray outside, I made my way down the stairs and through the front door. The bulk of the students had gathered across the street on the lawn in front of the health building. I turned the opposite way, slipping into a narrow alley between our hall and the next.
    The murmur of the crowd filtered out of my hearing, and the alarm bells finally stopped. I walked down the alley feeling as though I was made of silk and shadow, invisible and walking on air — a part of the night. Moonlight caressed my skin in a soft, milky beam. It was the most incredible feeling I’d ever had in my life. I smiled at that thought — not my life, my death .
    I was an Undead. It had to be true — and it felt incredible! Like I had finally, truly awakened. Even the mice scurrying along the side of the brick building held a new wonder for me. I had no trouble seeing the fine details of the alley through the dark. I knew I didn’t have to breathe to live, but every lungful of air brought a cacophony of new information about the world around me. My appearance hadn’t changed, that I could tell, but I was more tuned-in to