NOTE: The events here are set 100 years after the original FAYZ. Perdido Beach is bigger and some places changed. Coates is only a school, the kids live in the Coates Academy Village, a village near Coates (obviously). Enjoy!
Prologue
Saturday, 10:32 am
His dad wasn't home.
Neither was his mother.
For the first time since he was born, Richard's parents had left his home to attend a meeting.
His parents were owners of a computers factory, outside stupid, boring, Perdido Beach. There was a tale that kids at the school talked about, something 100 years ago, something about some kids getting trapped in stupid Perdido Beach, in a dome, and acquiring special powers, like in X-Men. They called it the FAYZ and people that joked with them called it the "Event That Never Happened". Obviously, no one believed in the "FAYZ", because there were no eyewitnesses, and those who did got beat up by the older kids.
However, he was just there, lying on the couch, watching TV. He could do anything his father had forbid him to, like for example going with his friends skating on the park, or going to the market to buy chocolate or candies.
He wished he had a sibling. I mean, he had a sister, but she was trapped in the freak school outside Perdido Beach, Coates Academy.
His parents sent her there when he was seven because she was caught stealing a phone. The officers offered his parents two options: Juvie or Coates. They picked Coates. She was nine then.
Coates never had a good reputation amongst kids of Perdido Beach, because Coates had freak, mean kids. Even his teachers didn't like Coates much. In anger moments, some of them slipped comments about how some of them should be trapped in Coates.
Every now and then, the director of Coates came to Perdido's school to give a lecture about why Coates wasn't to be hated.
"Sure they have kids that robbed, hurt, or even killed" He said, "but those cases are not frequent. Only 10% of those kids done something as bad as that. Most of them only grabbed a gun thinking it was a toy and their parents caught them."
But Richard knew better. His sister was allowed to visit her family twice a year, on Christmas Day and on Easter. She didn't hate his parents for their decision, but they couldn't really look in her eyes. Not because of guilt but because she was caught kissing a girl and the Coate's director told his parents, who were highly devoted to the Church.
He didn't really care, because his 13-year old sister was really awesome. She knew lots of jokes and she told stories of Coates. She said that what the Director said was total bullshit. Every week, new kids came. Kids that stole to feed their hungry families. Kids that joined the Z-Mob, as they called it.
He remembered the Box. How could he forget it?
He got up from the couch, went upstairs and entered his parents' bedroom. It was a large room, with a king sized bed, a bathroom, a bar. He opened the closet. There it was. The box.
His dad never told him about that box, but he had caught him opening it. He didn't know what was in there, but he figured it must be something important, because his father looked embaressed and forbid him to ever enter that room again without permission.
He opened the box. There was a wooden stick, about 10 inches long, and a notebook. Weird, he thought.
He grabbed the stick and opened the notebook in the middle.
"Wingardium Leviosa – Makes an object levitate"
He laughed. His dad was crazy – not that he was too surprised. He opened up on a random page. It said recreate horrors.
"Let's see what horrors you've got for me", he said grinning.
He pronounced the words that were written before the description and laughed. Obviously, nothing happened. Then he heard a loud "bang!" and he looked outside the window. He saw the blue sea. Nothing special. Then a grey thing emerged from the sea, far away. He looked at it with horror. That thing looked like a wall. He looked at it with growing horror, as that thing grew with the passing of minutes. After something like 10 minutes, when the grey wall was standing 20 feet above the sea, it was heard another bang. With the passing of minutes, the wall grew even higher, and they heard more bangs. People – kids and adults - were standing on the sidewalk, looking at it, not sure, if they should believe in it. He went down the stairs and went out to the street. He looked for known faces and he saw Edward, a friend of his parents.
"What is that?" he asked him.
"I dunno. Nobody does. But it's not happening just here. Look behind you."
And so he did. Not just behind him, but in every side of Perdido Beach the grey wall was rising, like a barrier. He looked at it, rising, making a curve, and finally joining in a point, too high to calculate how high it was. When all parts of the wall touched, there was a bang, louder than the ones that preceded this one. It was so loud that it knocked him to the ground. When he rose, Edward wasn't there anymore. Neither were any other adult.
The kids were trapped inside a dome.
It was only a matter of time before hunger, thirst, mutations.
He didn´t know what to think, what to believe.
He only knew one thing.
The Event That Never Happened did happen.
And it was happening again.