Chapter Text
At the very beginning, no one really believed it. They were nothing but high school boys — abandoned by their teachers, and almost every other adult in the damn camp — left to fend for themselves, in an apocalypse. Seriously? It was ridiculous, they all knew.
Most of the students, all boys aged 13 to 19, broke down that day. The moment that the adults took off after gathering everyone to announce the arrival of a new virus, they knew that they were destined for a sad end together. Thomas would be a liar to say that he was not one of the many who began to sob with disbelief, though he quickly gathered himself with the knowledge that there’d be no point in crying. There had to be some way to live.
Few boys kept their composure, namely Alby, Zart, Newt, Minho, and some dude that Thomas didn’t even know the name of — nicknamed Frypan, as he had always been helping out in the kitchen at the boarding school. There was a camp counselor by the name of Jorge that decided to remain with the boys; the camp itself was his home. He did not care for leaving it in attempt of salvation.
It was because of those five boys, and the one man, that everyone began to calm down. A sense of order was established rather quickly as the young men, despite their differences, found a common goal: survival.
Some boys, perhaps twelve or fifteen, decided to ditch the camp that they’d been dropped at in attempt to make it to their individual homes. The only reason that they weren’t all at school, or at home with their families, was because of their school field trip. It was a smaller school, with only one hundred boys, all academically advanced but personally troubled. They all, for the most part, thrived off of the order, the routine, that they had been given at the school.
The rest of the boys, give or take seventy to eighty in total, were relatively quick to defend the camp after learning more about the new tragedy: a virus that brought the dead to life, at nighttime of all things. It was discovered the night prior — the news was slow to spread throughout the world as no one believed the eye witness accounts of the creatures, which is why it took so long to reach the adults on the field trip.
It took a month for the camp to get a sense of survival. Rationing their food, learning how to farm and tend to the animals that had been left at the camp Glade, being around dead creatures and learning how to put down the dead — it was all reasonably unfamiliar.
Certain posses began to form within the Glade — the Gladers, as Jorge referred to them (the nickname caught on rather quickly,) were divided into different groups based on their personal strengths. Makeshift builders, farmers, watchers of the camps’ borders, those who’d tend to the farm animals; they all had a job.
Keepers, bosses of each job, were found. Zart, Winston, Minho, Newt, Gally were among the boys nicknamed as Keeper. They were the ones to make the plans for the workers — decide who was who, what did what. It was sort of understood that Alby and Newt were the true decisionmakers of the group. Even Jorge, a man far older than the teenagers, hardly questioned their choices.
Thomas himself was named to be a runner, after much decision making on the Keepers’ end. Runners were the boys, the strongest and fastest, the healthiest, who left the Glades’ walls to loot the nearest abandoned farms and markets in the secluded area.
Of all the friendships that had been formed at the boarding school, only few survived throughout the month — people began to learn who their true allies were.
This was no longer high school. It was quickly found that if you were an outcast, you wouldn’t manage well — if you were in a toxic friendship, you and all of your friends wouldn’t make it. The Camp Glade did not do well with drama.
Thomas himself was involved in all sorts of drama, namely with the camp leaders. Not many of the Gladers actually seemed interested in what he had to offer. Gally was convinced that he was somehow a spy sent from the creators of the Grievers (which is what they had taken to calling the dead) and Gally’s group formed a natural disliking against Thomas because of that. Newt took a liking to him whilst Alby remained rather cold, as he was to everyone except for Newt himself. Zart was easy enough to get along with, quiet but agreeable which Thomas liked. Jorge was easy enough but Thomas could never quite figure him out. Minho was — well, Thomas had never been fond of Minho and vice versa, but their shared passion for running and survival was a key component in what had ironically kept them from killing each other thus far.
Despite the passive aggression he received from most of the Gladers, he quickly became friends with a boy named Chuck — who was admittedly one of, if not the, youngest in the camp at only thirteen years old. Hardly a freshmen in school. He was an annoyingly talkative little thing, but Thomas knew he meant well. Thomas took to him rather quickly, swore to himself that he would never let anything happen to the younger man.
And Thomas held true to the promise that he made to Chuck and himself for nearly a year, up until the incident.