Beneath Rosewood

Rosewood High School sat like a brick laid flat on the small town of Rosewood, Oregon—sturdy, red, and unsuspicious. There were lockers with chipped paint, mystery meat Thursdays in the cafeteria, and that constant faint smell of bleach and sweat lingering in the gymnasium. It was the most normal school anyone had ever known.

But normal is often camouflage.

It started with a cough.

Not from a student, but from Mr. Reilly, the AP Bio teacher. He was always punctual, stern, and unshakably boring. One day, right in the middle of his lesson about mitochondria, he froze mid-sentence and let out a long, wet cough that echoed against the whiteboard.

“‘The mitochondria is the—’ krrkkhk!—the powerhouse of the… organ…”

His voice cracked, trembled, and for a moment, his eyes glazed over—like a TV screen switching channels. Then, as quickly as it came, the moment passed. Mr. Reilly blinked, smiled a little too wide, and finished, “cell. Yes. Powerhouse of the cell. As we were saying.”

Ellie Dade noticed it first. She sat in the back, hidden behind her curtain of red curls and a paperback copy of Dune slid beneath her desk. She was a watcher. A collector of oddities.

After class, she whispered to her best friend Ryan Chu in the hallway.

“He glitched, Ryan. Like, TV-static-glitched. He coughed and then just… rebooted.”

Ryan rolled his eyes, brushing jet-black bangs out of his face. “Maybe he just had a coughing fit. Or short-circuited from too much mitochondria.”

“No. His smile. It was off. Too many teeth.”

Ryan blinked. “You counted his teeth?”

“I noticed.”

It didn’t end there.

Mrs. Howard, the theater teacher, stopped blinking entirely one day during tech rehearsal. Mr. Malloy, the janitor, was spotted lugging barrels labeled BIOHAZARD into the basement after hours. The track team’s coach, Ms. Cortez, suddenly couldn’t remember her own sister’s name, despite bragging about her for years.

“Ellie, you’re spiraling,” Ryan warned one afternoon. They were sitting at their usual cafeteria table, eating fries and watching the social strata of Rosewood High unfold before them.

“I’m telling you,” Ellie muttered, eyes scanning the faculty table. “Something is wrong. People don’t just forget who they are. Or stop blinking. Or—look, you weren’t there for the teeth.”

“Then let’s investigate,” said a voice from beside them.

It was Nora Brandt—resident conspiracy theorist, part-time goth, full-time hacker. She leaned over their table, dark lipstick slightly smudged, a thumb drive clutched between her black-nailed fingers.

“You’ve been watching them, Dade,” she said. “So have I.”

Ellie straightened. “You’ve seen it too?”

Nora smirked. “I’ve recorded it. But not just that—I’ve tracked strange activity in the school’s security system. Cameras in the basement go dark every night at 9:03 PM sharp. Every. Single. Night.”

“Why 9:03?” Ryan asked.

Nora’s voice lowered. “Because that’s when they go down there.”

The Descent

That night, the three of them hid in the school’s maintenance closet until the building emptied. Ellie kept checking her phone for the time. At 8:59 PM, Nora produced a set of keys she’d “borrowed” from the AV club’s faculty advisor and led them through the east hallway to a locked door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“You realize we’re breaking, like, eight laws,” Ryan whispered.

“If we survive, I’ll confess to each one,” Ellie replied.

They crept down a narrow staircase, lit only by the flicker of a malfunctioning overhead bulb. The air grew colder, damper, and the smell—sweet and metallic, like rusted honey—hit them like a wall.

The basement wasn’t concrete and cobwebs like they’d expected.

It was alive.

The walls pulsed faintly, covered in a strange amber resin that glowed gold in the low light. Strange tendrils snaked along the floor and disappeared into the ceiling above. And at the center of the room sat rows—rows—of egg-shaped pods, each the size of a person, filled with the same amber goo. Inside each one floated a humanoid shape, curled like a fetus, skin pale and translucent.

“Holy—” Ryan started, but Ellie clamped a hand over his mouth.

Footsteps.

Above.

The sound of the stairwell door opening. Heavy, synchronized footsteps descending.

The trio ducked behind a massive generator-like machine, breathing in unison, hearts pounding.

The figures that entered the basement were not teachers. Not really. They wore the faces of Mr. Reilly, Ms. Cortez, Mrs. Howard, and several others—but their skin rippled slightly, like liquid latex struggling to hold its shape. Their eyes shimmered faintly blue.

As they approached the pods, one of them spoke—not in words, but in a series of clicks and guttural sounds that vibrated through the air like music underwater.

Another replied with a low hum. The pods began to pulse.

The shapes inside began to change.

One unfurled slightly—its face smoothing, forming cheekbones, hair, even freckles.

It was Ellie.

Ryan gasped aloud.

All heads turned.

“RUN!” Ellie screamed.

The Escape

They barreled up the stairs, footsteps thundering behind them. The aliens were fast—inhumanly fast—moving like mercury across the floor. But Nora slammed the security door shut and twisted a knob on her hacked key. A loud clunk echoed.

“That’ll hold them—maybe—go, GO!”

They sprinted out the back of the school and didn’t stop running until they reached Ryan’s garage, where Nora had her makeshift surveillance setup.

She plugged in the thumb drive.

The footage was grainy, but there it was: the pods, the aliens, the shapeshifting.

And inside the pods—dozens of students now. Duplicates in amber.

“That’s why they’re acting weird,” Ryan murmured. “They’re not just copying the teachers. They’re replacing them.”

“Not yet,” Ellie said. “They’re still in the pod stage for us. But that means we’re next.”

The Resistance

Over the next few days, they operated in shadows.

They recruited quietly: Milo—Ellie’s lab partner with a knack for building drones; Jess—Nora’s cousin who worked late-night shifts at the power plant and could sneak equipment out under the radar; and Samara—a sophomore whose mom was the town’s mayor and who had access to city records.

They called themselves The Root—short for Root Access, because according to Nora, if they couldn’t beat the aliens with strength, they’d beat them with code, surveillance, and a whole lot of creative sabotage.

They mapped teacher patterns, found which ones had been replaced. They discovered that the aliens were calling themselves the Ethereans, and that they fed on human memory and emotion—downloading lives through the amber resin.

“They don’t just wear our skins,” Nora explained one night, her voice hoarse from lack of sleep. “They become us. Like downloading a soul.”

The scariest part?

No one else noticed. Not the principal. Not the district.

Ellie had a theory.

“They’ve replaced more than just the faculty.”

The Breaking Point

Then came Homecoming.

The Ethereans had planned it.

All students would be gathered in the gym. Music. Lights. Distraction.

And beneath their feet? The pods. The conversion. The replacements.

“They’re going to gas us,” Jess said, pointing to a leaked blueprint of the HVAC system. “Sleep agent through the vents. Knock us out. Transfer us down through the basement. Replace us.”

“No one will ever know,” Ellie whispered.

Ryan stood, jaw clenched. “Then we burn the whole thing down.”

The Fire

They didn’t go to Homecoming in tuxes or dresses.

They went in black hoodies and boots, loaded with makeshift EMPs, homemade firebombs, and flash drives full of backup footage uploaded to fifteen separate servers.

The night of the dance, while “Midnight City” blasted over the speakers and disco lights painted the gym, the Root made their move.

Nora and Milo shut down the cameras. Jess disabled the HVAC release. Samara locked the exits and rerouted the fire alarm. Ellie and Ryan descended into the basement one final time.

They were met by Mr. Reilly—or the thing wearing him.

“You are delaying evolution,” it said, voice hollow.

Ellie held up a lighter. “We prefer revolution.”

She dropped it into the pool of amber.

The fire caught fast. Too fast. The resin was alive, flammable. Screams—inhuman, high-pitched, otherworldly—filled the chamber as the Ethereans tried to morph, shift, escape.

But they burned.

One by one.

The pods cracked and oozed, the duplicates inside melting into formless sludge. The walls peeled and crumbled.

Ellie and Ryan ran, flames licking their heels.

The Aftermath

The fire was blamed on faulty wiring. The school was closed for “renovations.” Several faculty members mysteriously resigned.

But the pods were gone.

And so were the shapeshifters.

The Root met one final time on the roof of the school, watching the sunrise.

“We won,” Ryan said.

Ellie shook her head. “We survived. That’s not the same thing.”

Nora lit a cigarette and stared at the smoke curling upward. “They came from somewhere. And they were preparing for something bigger.”

Ellie looked out over Rosewood, where houses were just beginning to light up for the day.

“If they were in the teachers,” she said quietly, “who’s to say they’re not in the town council? The cops? The mayor’s office?”

Ryan’s blood ran cold.

“So what now?”

Ellie smiled, tired but fierce.

“Now we watch. We wait. We protect. Because whatever’s beneath the surface…” She looked down at her old school. “...hasn’t finished rising.”

The End?????????????