Unexpectedly, Arastoo woke up in a dark corner near the stairways. He was still in his T-shirt and shorts (though they were a lot less clean now), he was still in the school, he was still alive.
“Ugh…”
As soon as he regained full consciousness, he got up. “My notebook.”
Nowhere to be seen. “Oh, ******** it! ********! ********> Of course, it must have burnt in the fire, like the rest of his room… but then, what had happened to his unconscious, suffocating self?
He scratched his head. He didn’t remember seeing firemen after the fire started. He had breathed a huge amount of black smoke, and his lungs must now share that lovely grainy black shade. And still, he was… alive? No, it was impossible. He couldn’t have been saved only to be abandoned alone here. Plus, it wasn’t so hard to breath anymore, and he was quite sure the poisonous smoke must have left lasting damages.
Wait.
Was he dead and reincarnated? As far as he knew, reincarnated souls weren’t supposed to retain any memory (but again, the afterlife was pretty much the only thing in the world that didn’t open itself to scientific experimentations). He checked his hands, first.
They didn’t look very human. What sort of thing was human-sized, green, had clawed hands, and could talk? Nothing.
“Damn!”
Maybe he wasn’t really reincarnated after all. Then, what option did it leave him? Hell? Purgatory? Purgatory sounds like the most likely choice, since he didn’t remember doing anything so naughty as to deserve going there. Yep, definitely Purgatory. (Wasn’t there a video game or two about lost souls, and abandoned places and Purgatory and religious s**t like that, by the way? Arastoo couldn’t remember; he’d not played many of these before getting bored of the predictability of the monsters behaviour, which also explains why he's not too versed in zombies.) Hell would have been more… hellish and fiery, and he didn’t particularly deserve to be promoted to demonhood.

Conclusion: if he was here, more students were here. He couldn’t have been the only one to die.
Nothing really made sense since he woke up, but he still had hints. He had dreamed about eating people; maybe that was his intended punishment all along. Bacterial meningitis that wasn’t - that never was? – bacterial meningitis. Laney, who he’d kept seeing, as if she held the key. And many more details that can’t be recounted here but were swarming wildly in his mind… along with a hunger that he’d already experimented before.
Some noise. He walked towards the source, in a human-like way like he’d always done prior to the fire, determined to find the explanation and get out of here, whatever it was. Because science was everywhere, and he’d just been proved that life is but an experiment that can be repeated endlessly. (God help us all, because he's going to take advantage on that.)