Disclaimer: I don't own the Gone characters or settings in this, only the oc's.

Warning: Minor(?) blood and violence in this chapter.

Chapter 1

When the adults disappeared, Danielle 'Dani' Sparks and Simon Hertz were on a school trip to the Stefano Rey National Park for a camping expedition with their eighth grade class. Of course, no one knew that all of the adults disappeared. At first, several of them believed that their adult chaperones were playing a joke on them, albeit a creepy one. They were, after all, telling scary stories around a campfire in a clichéd manner. But when the night came and went without any sort of a sign from the adults, that's when the students got worried.

So they all huddled in the clearing, scared witless. A few attempted to raise spirits by telling jokes, but the punch lines often fell flat. A roar of an angry beast, probably a bear, echoed in the distance, causing a flock of birds to flutter out of the trees. Hours passed, and the children became restless. Short attention spans didn't really help when it came to 'apocalyptic' settings.

"I'll go out and check for any adults," Simon offered quietly. He was one of the few who didn't seem as bothered by this situation. He adjusted his glasses and shook his hair slightly by impulse when he received numerous stares from the others. They clearly thought he was crazy to go alone. The most glaring gaze came from Dani, a girl he didn't really know well but recognized due to her overuse of tanning spray and makeup.

Dani thought Simon, the class's 'quiet one', was being foolish. Self-consciously, she checked herself in her pocket mirror for any blemishes in her copper-toned skin. Her lipstick was wearing down, and she cursed herself for not being able to keep up the 'ganguro' look. Doing her makeup was her way of showing fear. Yet unlike most of the others, she didn't really mind that the adults were gone. No one would be there to scold her for her 'unbecoming' looks and such. Of course, there were others in her class who did the same…

"I'll go with you," Dani added swiftly. She got to her feet, straightening her blue-and-white-striped crop top and dusted off her tan cargo pants. Adjusting her orange newsboy cap, she placed a hand on her hip. Now it was Simon's turn to stare at her confusedly. He shrugged his shoulders. Picking up his backpack filled with the extra change of clothes and snacks, Simon led Dani out of the thicket and into the dense wood. The campfire and their classmates behind them slowly disappeared into the distance as the two followed the dirt path back to the Park's main building.

Dani spread her arms out and began to hum a tune from an anime series to lighten the mood, but it only served to grate on Simon's nerves. He notices her checking her makeup again and lost his patience.

"Why the hell are you so obsessed with tanning and that disgusting powder?" he questioned her.

"Baka!" she insulted him in Japanese, "this is an alternative form of expression called 'ganguro' in Japan and began in Tokyo. It is not 'disgusting'. It is an art."

"So you are a Jap, then."

"I am not! I'm Chinese. I just happen to be an anime otaku!"

"A what?"

"A—oh forget it, you dummy!"

"Hmph! Whatever."

They continued walking in silence all the way to the Research Center. Except for the eerie silence surrounding the building, nothing seemed too out of place. Here and there, vehicles vibrated in neutral in the parking lot, as if their owners had got out and left. Without a word, Dani and Simon neared the wide glass doors of the wood-paneled building. Their hands rested on the two separate door handles tentatively.

"Think we should go in?" asked Simon.

"I dunno," Dani replied with a smirk. "You're the one who wanted to come here. You decide."

Simon huffed in annoyance. He pulled open the door, not knowing what to expect. If he was waiting for a horde of zombies to ambush them, he was highly mistaken. Taking a deep breath, he entered with Dani glancing nervously around behind him.

"Scared, are you?" Simon sneered.

"Of course I am!" Dani cried grimly. Honestly, she wondered if this Simon guy had any feelings at all. "The adults went and disappeared, and you're acting like you don't even care! Honestly, what's wrong with you?"

Simon blinked at her, obviously not expecting that outburst. "'What's wrong with me'?" he spluttered. "All you ever do is do your makeup and complain! Why did you even follow me?"

"Dunno," answered Dani, shrugging her shoulders nonchalantly. Simon nearly fell to the ground at the complete change in personality. "Anyways, what should we be looking for?"

Thinking for a moment, Simon replied, "Food, water, the basics. We should try the phones, too."

"Wakatta!" Dani replied, giving a mock salute. Simon rolled his eyes at the word he didn't understand. Maybe otaku meant 'idiot'. He watched as Dani strutted to the stairway leading to a lower part of the building. "I'll start down here!"

Simon didn't reply but searched for the light controls. Finding them, he flipped them on, but none of them lit up. Shrugging, Simon moves to the center of the room where a physical map of the area. Tracing a finger across the raised surface, he noted that there was a town about fifteen miles away. If they walked quickly, it would probably take around four hours to reach 'Perdido Beach'. A town would mean people, hopefully, and the safety that came in numbers. He hoped.

Leaving the map section, Simon wandered around until he came to the cafeteria he and the others had eaten lunch at just the day before. He headed to where the kitchens might be. Each step he took echoed in the tiled room as Simon opened every cabinet, drawer, and refrigerator. All he found were a few packages of buns and sandwich meat, and some sodas and bottles of water – not enough to satisfy a bunch of teenagers. Still, Simon tossed his finds into a couple of plastic grocery bags lying around.

"Hey, Dani!" he shouted. "Find anything yet?" No answer. Shouldering is backpack and hanging the new bags from the crook of his arm, Simon left the dim room to meet up with Dani. Wandering past the walls lined with observation windows, he stopped at the foot of the stairs. He stared down into the basement. Abruptly, he realized the lights had turned on downstairs. "How is that possible?"

"Hey, Simon!" Dani's voice calls from below. "Get down here!"

Curious about how the lights turned on without any power, Simon hurried down the stairs to ask Dani. He found her near a back corner behind sedimentary displays where a couple phone booths were. It was an older version, a corded one, and Dani held the receiver up to her ear. Even from a few feet away, Simon could hear the dull dial tone. Dani had an uncharacteristically distressed expression. When she spotted Simon, however, a mask of annoyance took its spot.

"No answer, huh?" he asked.

"What do you think, baka?" she retorted.

"Speak English!"

"I tried calling my parents, the police, even the school. But no one picked up." She handed the boy the phone. "Here, you try."

Simon tentatively pressed the numbers of his home phone. Did he really want to know? What if they didn't pick up? What would that mean then? The machine rang for what seemed like an eternity. Even then, it didn't send him to voicemail. Simon hung up the phone looking grim. Just because they didn't pick up, didn't mean something was automatically wrong, right? It was the middle of the day; surely, his parents would be at work. But something else struck him as strange.

"No answer, huh?" Dani spoke up.

"How did you even get the phone to work?"

"Eh? What'dya mean?"

"I tried to flip the lights on upstairs," Simon told her, beginning to get annoyed at her supposed naivety, "but none of them did. Is there some sort of generator down here? How did you get the lights to turn on?"

Dani shrugged, her shiny pink lips curled into a smirk. "I dunno," she replied. She gestures to the bags in Simon's hands. "I'm guessin' you found something useful, hm?"

"Yeah," he confirmed. "There's a town, Perdido Beach, about fifteen miles 'way. I'm thinking, if we started out at one later today, we could get there by ev'ning. There'll probably be others there. We should get back quickly and inform the others."

"So you really are the serious one," Dani remarked.

"Did you even hear what I just said?"

"Of course I did, baka!"

Sighing, Simon readjusted his glasses with two fingers. "Then let's get back."

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Within minutes, the duo are back on the trail leading out to the copse the students were camping out at. Once again, Dani hummed a tune, while Simon peered off into the distance, thinking. He wondered how this happened. Surely, at least their own parents would answer. The teachers, no matter how much they seemed to dislike the students, wouldn't go this far for a practical joke. Simon sighed for the umpteenth time. There was too much information that he didn't know yet, and there was nothing he could do but continue forward.

Dani, on the other hand, was containing her discomfort more inconspicuously. Sure, the situation worried her some, but she figured that everything would return to normal in the end. She'd been left alone on various occasions, so the quietness of the area didn't faze her. The only regret she had at the moment was that she hadn't brought enough manga to read. She abruptly stared at her hands. That power from earlier seemed to still linger in her palms. She thought she saw a green spark run down the lines in her hands, but it disappeared so quickly that she figured it was her imagination playing tricks.

Ten minutes later, they were closing in on the campsite when shrieks filled the air. In a flash, Dani took off. Despite her looks, she actually was capable of running fast. Simon called after her. He cursed under his breath when she didn't listen. He took off after her, dropping the bags, until he found her frozen at the edge of the clearing. The stench of iron and must filled his lungs, and he covered his mouth with his hand to prevent himself from gagging.

Before him, the campsite had become a warzone. Bodies, no, corpses lay strewn across the grass like trash in the park, all of them stained crimson with blood. Appendages lay torn off and bent in odd angles, none of which could ever have been considered normal. Upon further examination, Simon saw that their classmates' faces shone with tears and were frozen in a look of pure anguish. He heard a thump! next to him and saw Dani had fallen to her knees, looking horrified. Simon wasn't faring much better.

"What the hell?" he whispered. Then his voice got louder. "What the hell? What the HELL? WHAT IN THE FREAKING HELL HAPPENED HERE?" Dani sure didn't have an answer for it. Every single one of their classmates was dead. Gone. A thought occurred to him. What were they supposed to do now?

Simon suddenly heard a rustle coming from the trees. Slowly, he said to Dani, "Hey, Dani, let's get outta here." That rustling noise became louder. "Dani?" Still no answer. The lurking creature came closer. "DANI!"

RRRWAAARRRR!

At the very moment that Simon shouted, a gigantic shadow leapt over him and into the clearing. Neither he nor Dani had any idea what it was, but regrouped tensely. Whatever the creature was, it was covered head to toe in brown fur matted with wet blood, still fresh. The two figured that this must've been the monster that mauled their classmates. Beady red eyes regarded them with the desire for fresh human flesh. A deathly aura seemed to surround it. Definitely not normal.

"What…is that thing?" whispered Dani. Simon didn't answer. He focused more on an escape plan at the moment. There was no way they could outrun the monster, nor could they fight it without some sort of a weapon. While he was thinking, the monster attacked. It sprung from the ground at him, sending dirt flying.

Simon heard Dani scream, breaking him out of his thoughts, only to be met with grimy fangs bared and breathing a terrible stench down on him as he lay flat on the ground. The creature loomed over him, front claws digging into Simon's abdomen. A drop of saliva dripped down on him as the monster snarled. Simon squeezed his eyes shut tightly.

And then, abruptly, the weight on his chest disappeared. Gripping a hand to his chest, Simon unsteadily got to his feet, vision blurry. A few feet away, he saw Dani cornered against a tree by the dark creature. However, a determined expression remained on her face. Dani placed her hands before her, one of the other, fingers like claws, and aimed at the monster. Right as it swung a meaty paw at her, green sparks zigzagged from her palms and straight into the monster's stomach. Roaring, it backed up, and, stumbling over its own two feet, crashed into the trees behind it. The force was so great that a fissure immediately ran up the side of the tree. It must have been scared witless from that showing, as the monster fled into the trees, smashing into the foliage along the way.

Simon stared at Dani, who just wiped her brow of sweat. The green lightning was gone, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. She could kill him in an instant if she wanted. Or was it just a trick of the light? Simon wondered about that. Nothing made any sense anymore.

"What's with that stupid-looking face, baka?" Dani asked as if nothing was wrong. Simon lost his cool exterior at that.

"What the fricken' hell was that?" he screamed. "You just shot frickin' laser beams from your hands! What the hell just happened?"

"Stop cussing!" Dani complained, blocking her ears with her hands. The same hands that had just shot lightning at a monster. She places her arms behind her head. "And anyway, it's not like I wanted these powers. They just kinda…showed up. And before you ask, I've only known since this morning, when we were at that building."

Then it clicked. "So you're the one who turned on the 'lectricity," Simon concluded. "But…lightning and electricity are on different levels. How're you able to manipulate those factors…?"

"You're pretty calm for seein' someone take on a monster."

"I've…never mind."

"Hm? What's that, baka?"

"Let's just say, I'm used to weird things happenin'," Simon said mysteriously.

"But you know," Dani continued seriously before changing her tone to excitement, "it's just like we're in a shounen manga! This is so cool!" She turned serious once again. Looking at the bodies, she shuddered. "But…what should we do about the others? I don't wanna just leave 'em here…"

Simon wondered about that too. Honestly, burying their classmates would only mean spending time and energy that could be used to find help. Yet, it didn't seem right to just leave them like that.

"I say we burn it," he replied softly. Dani stared at him questioningly. "It'll be like a cremation, I think. Besides, we…we don't have the time to bury them, and leaving them exposed…I don't want to imagine what wild animals would do…Think you could set a fire with that lightning of yours?"

Dani nodded in confirmation. "I think this's the most I've heard you talked this entire year, baka," she told him. She grinned grimly. "But yeah, I think I can do that. This…this will take some time. Help me move them closer to each other."

Together, Simon and Dani pushed, rolled, and carried the various appendages and bodies to the center of the clearing. It was needless to say they gagged and retched at both the sight of the mauled teens and rotten stench that hung heavily in the air. Simon said nothing when he noticed tears running down Dani's face. He had no idea how to comfort anyone, let alone a girl. After several long minutes, all of the former students and their 'pieces' had been piled neatly in the center of the thicket of trees.

Sighing, Dani walked over to one of the bodies before taking aim and sending a bright flash of green at it. The clothing sparked, and a flame soon appeared. It caught on the rest, setting it ablaze. The two watches as the flaming pile sent up a cloud of smoke and the waft of meat cooking. They nearly retched when they realized the stench of the flesh burning smelled similar to that of a steak. Dani placed her palms together, whispering words that Simon couldn't make out. The last phrase he caught:

"Rest in peace, everyone."

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

They waited for hours as the fire eventually burned itself out before heading off. As they left, Simon grabbed the plastic bags, relieved that the food didn't look like it'd rotted. Silence once again overtook their surroundings, save for a few songs of birds and bugs. Simon liked the quiet – it gave him time to think. But to be honest, he couldn't think or plan or anything. His mind had gone blank after the cremation.

Dani glanced at Simon. The megane boy had reverted to the quiet one that he'd been in school. She pondered over what he'd said earlier. Let's just say, I'm used to weird things happenin'. Did that mean he had powers like her? And how exactly did she get those powers in the first place? She grinned. What if she really was in a manga? That would be so awesome in her book. She shook her head furiously. No, it wouldn't be any fun if everyone died. Clenching her fist tightly in determination, she decided on a goal: She would just have to make sure that no one died.

Eye twitching, Simon couldn't believe the number of emotions Dani's face could shift to in such a short amount of time. He realized then that he knew nothing of the girl. Seeing the flames of resolve burning in her eyes, however, he kept quiet.

"So where are we headed, baka?" Dani suddenly asked. The nickname she'd given Simon piqued his irritation. As did the makeup she was currently applying to her face.

"Quit callin' me that, will ya?" he growled. "What does that even mean, anyway? We're goin' to Perdido Beach. I told ya earlier, didn't I?

"Yeah, yeah," Dani replied.

They fell silent, listening to their own footsteps crunch the leaves and twigs under them. An hour passed, and Simon Dani reached the highway that would lead them straight to their destination. The whole expanse of dirt and sand of the horizon sizzled in the late afternoon light, and the asphalt path seemed to stretch on forever into the distance. It was clear that they wouldn't make it to the town by dark.

"Let's take a break, baka-chan," Dani said. She smirked at the new nickname she gave to Simon. He rolled his eyes. It didn't sound any less insulting than before.

"Fine," he replied shortly. Reaching into one of the plastic bags, he handed Dani the packages of bread and meat. She gratefully took it from him and made two sandwiches.

"You might as well eat as much as you'd like, Dani," Simon told her as she took a bite. "I'm not sure how much longer those'll last." Cue a spit take. Dani spewed the have eaten bite off to the side.

"What'dya mean by that?" she exclaimed. She glared at the sandwich. "You aren't saying it's already moldy, are you?" Simon snatched the bags from her before she could hurl it away. Then he began to make his own sandwiches.

"Think whatever you'd like," he told her. "But you never know when your next meal will be. For all we know, this could be our last meal."

"Can you be any more depressing?"

"Maybe." Simon smiled slyly. Then he scolded himself for being so close to this strange girl. He mentally slapped himself on the head for being so open. How he wished he could be emotionally detached from others like before. But this one, this girl, had somehow pulled him in, gotten him to talk more. He had to admit, though, he kind of liked her company.

"Baka!"

Then again, maybe not.

A/N: Thank you for reading this first chapter. If there were any discrepancies regarding the characters, scenes, or grammar, please tell me in the reviews. Advice is also appreciated.