“No!” May yelled, rushing to his side. “Why would you do this?”

Travis glared hatefully at her. “You’ve taken everything from me. I see no reason to suffer needlessly through a life without my only sources of joy.

“Besides, I know how this looks! You think there’s any future for me where I’m not locked up for killing my kid?”

May gazed at him sadly. “There isn’t anymore.”

We didn’t take everything from him, Noah thought grimly. He still had his life. He chose to take that from himself. Not that it made what they’d done any better.

Leah and Brian drew up beside May, but there was nothing any of them could do. Travis clutched the knife shakily against himself as if one of them would try to pull it out, despite none of them making a move to do so. There was no coming back from a pierced heart, not with the terribly slow regeneration of an uninfected person. His muscles slowly relaxed as blood loss drained his strength, and his head drooped to his chest.

He went from listless to dead within the minute. Just like that, Sophie’s family was gone. All that remained were three cooling bodies laying beside one another. None of them had died with a tranquil expression, though even if they had, the sheer quantity of blood surrounding them would have tipped off any uninformed viewer that they had not gone out peacefully.

Noah gazed bleakly at the scene. He had never been exposed to anything close to this level of violence in his uninfected life, and the scene now spread out before him felt sharper, more real than anything he’d ever faced before. He was glad the sight of the bodies no longer filled him with hunger. He knew instinctively that it was because they were no longer alive, not a result of a change in his symptoms, but he took solace in the moment of self-composure regardless. He was not proud of what the sickness was turning him into, but if this were the closest he could get to normalcy, he would enjoy it while he could. I just have to stay away from anyone who doesn’t have the sickness, he thought gloomily. Then I can live life like normal. Well, mostly normal.

For a moment he imagined what it would be like if everyone at Oakridge got infected, and a kind of community formed where they could all exist without worrying about eating each other. I probably shouldn’t hope for that outcome, as nice as it sounds. Any new students would have to be okay with willingly infecting themselves; it would need to be a requirement of enrollment. He laughed at the thought. A zombie campus. The amount of signage warning away normal people would be crazy.

“What the heck do we do now?” Brian asked quietly.

“Definitely not stay here,” Leah said.

“Let’s talk in the kitchen until we know where we want to go,” May suggested.

They did as she suggested, keen to get out of the sitting room. Leah snagged a chair from the sitting room so that there were enough seats for them all around the table.

“We’re not thinking about going back to campus, right?” Noah wanted to confirm.

The siblings exchanged a glance and shook their heads.

“We should warn people about how the Wager interacts with the sickness,” May said. “I’m not saying we should personally go back to campus to tell everyone, but we should make sure the information gets out there. There could be more people like Sophie who think they’ve found an effective cure.”

“I doubt there’s anyone else on campus with the Wager,” Noah mused. “And to be honest, we should’ve seen it coming. It’s not like we didn’t know what would happen if someone got injured.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“I didn’t connect the dots that the Wager kills people by destroying their internal organs,” Leah said. “My brain kinda skipped right to the instant death result.”

“Yeah, unfortunately it wasn’t so instant. I wonder how close it came to actually killing Sophie before the healing kicked in.”

“I think we’re getting off track,” Brian interrupted. “We can’t stay here. We are not stealing Sophie’s house after killing her family.”

“We could go see you dad,” Leah said to Noah.

He slowly turned to her with a murderous look and she held her hands up. “That was a joke. No need to eat me.”

Noah rolled his eyes.

“We know how family get-togethers end up,” Brian said. “Nearby relatives are off the table.”

“In more than one sense,” Leah muttered.

“Maybe we should’ve just stayed on campus,” May said. Before anyone could argue, she tried to explain, “More than just preventing this whole disaster with Sophie, I think we might really have been able to help Insight find out more about what’s wrong with us. I get that they have a bad track record with their patients, but would that really be an issue for us? We wouldn’t feel anything they did, and they would be very highly motivated to avoid injuring us. Going to them is our best shot at ending up with a real cure.”

“You make a good point,” Leah conceded. “But part of the original reason we left was because the visit to Insight wasn’t presented to us as our choice. Dr. Jansen should have asked if we were interested in an appointment. If she had only made all the same arguments you just did, we probably would have agreed. Going about it in the way she did only served to scare us all away.”

“We can still go back,” May said. “They don’t have to know we ever left.”

“Except that Sophie will have mysteriously disappeared. Some concerned neighbor will eventually find her and her parents here, and who knows what sort of conclusions will be made from there,” Brian said.

“Speaking of which, we should call the police once we leave the house. I would feel horrible if we just left the family rotting here indefinitely,” Noah said.

Leah looked a little uncertain at the idea of involving law enforcement, but Brian and May nodded, and she didn’t argue. “Fine. So I’m guessing since nobody has thrown out any ideas yet that don’t involve turning ourselves over to Insight, we have no clue where to spend the night?”

May scowled. “We should just keep it in mind as an option.”

“If we need to we could literally just lay down somewhere in the woods,” Noah suggested. “Nobody would find us there.”

“But we’d be so vulnerable,” Brian protested. “If we’re sleeping, we won’t know that we’re being eaten alive by wolves or whatever until it’s too late. We would never know what happened, we’d just be gone.”

“We could go back to the mausoleum,” Noah said half-heartedly, the mention of wolves reminding him of the place. “We never told anyone where we got the dust. Nobody would look for us there of all places.”

“Do you really want to walk all the way there?” Brian wasn’t keen on this suggestion either. “We’d have to find the path again, and that ancient zombie is still in there. Unless it somehow got out and is now roaming town.”

“Well, the zombie was inert for most of the time we were there,” Noah said, mostly just to argue. “It was pretty much a regular dead body until we touched its pendant, and I’m like ninety-nine percent sure it returned to normal after we covered the coffin back up. Plus, we’re zombies too, now. It won’t eat us. Probably.”

“I think going to the mausoleum is a good idea,” Leah said, surprising everyone. When they looked doubtfully at her, she explained, “We should get that pendant. It’s definitely involved with everything that’s happened so far; if anything can help us find a cure, that necklace can. We’d have to be stupid not to go after such an obvious potential windfall.”

Brian groaned. “Well, I don’t want to be infected forever. Maybe it’s worth the risk. If going back to that freaky place will help us find a way to get back to normal, then I say screw it. Let’s go.” He stood up and pushed in his chair.

Noah stood up as well. “I’m good with that. I don’t want to hang around here any longer.”

“Fine, but we still need to figure out what we’re doing in the morning,” May reminded them. “As safe as it might be, I don’t want to be staying in a mausoleum for the next several days.”

With no further reason to stick around, they got up from the table and made their way to the front door. Noah glanced briefly at the bodies and shuddered. His friends kept their gazes averted from the sight altogether as they picked up their various bags and clothes where they had been thrown aside in the sitting room.

When they had all their things, they opened the door and exited the household.