Lounging coolly on the sidewalk was an enormous white cat with a yellow collar. It hadn’t been there when they first walked up to the house.

Upon noticing it, everyone’s heads swiveled to stare at Noah in panic, but he didn’t make a move towards the animal.

“What? I’m not that desperate,” he said. “It’d take a lot for me to go back to non-human food.”

“I wish you meant that in the normal sense,” Brian muttered. “When did you get so weird?”

“Hey, we all have the same sickness,” Noah said, crouching down to pet the cat. It started purring immediately. “No need to be mean about it.”

“Let’s get moving,” May said, watching Noah nervously.

He straightened. “You guys have no trust.”

“And I think we’re well justified in that. Let’s go.”

They kept walking, leaving the cat behind. It meowed pitifully at their retreating backs but thankfully didn’t try to follow.

“That stupid animal might have saved Sophie’s family if it weren’t prancing around outside,” Leah said.

“Ducky’s a smart kitty,” Noah defended the cat, feeling protective. “It knew it’d be dinner if it went inside, and Sophie might well have still been hungry afterwards. Not sure what’ll happen to it now that its family is gone, but I’m sure it’ll figure things out. Cats are resourceful, you know?”

“Sure,” Brian said. “You gonna call the police now?”

“I’m going to wait until we’re a block or two away.”

They turned left off of the driveway and set off with May leading the way. Noah wouldn’t have known which way to go, but she seemed confident enough that he didn’t question her choice in direction. Brian and Leah already had the flashlights out; the sparsely placed street lamps left large swathes of the road in shadow.

“You realize there’s a decent chance somebody will figure out our involvement,” Leah warned. “It’s not that I don’t think you should make the call, but you need to be aware that we could find ourselves in some serious trouble.”

“I’m aware,” Noah assured her. “But as much as Travis obviously blamed us, we’re not personally responsible for any of the deaths in that house. Although we could have prevented… well, everything, probably, I have some confidence that we won’t be convicted of murder if they work out that we were there. We were just a couple of poor bystanders.”

“Insight could get us in trouble if they tell the authorities about our sickness,” Leah worried. “All it would take is somebody over there catching wind of the awful thing that happened nearby and sticking their noses into the situation. Their scientists could probably take one look at the scene and know exactly what went down. It wouldn’t exactly take a master of forensics to figure out that Sophie was eating Cassandra. They could make the argument that we put the family in danger just by our presence; the possibility that we could also get wounded, and they’d be right.”

“We could say we didn’t know about the danger,” Brian said uncertainly. “Though I’m not sure anyone would believe that.”

“Look,” Noah said. “I know that it might not be the most cautious or logical decision to call the police to a scene we were involved in, but I’m not calling them out of a commitment to our fine legal system. I’m doing it because I’d feel like absolute garbage if I left a family to rot in their own home.”

“No, I feel the same way,” Leah agreed. “Which is why I’m not going to try to stop you. Get out your phone and call them now. We’re far enough from the house. We don’t want to wait until we’re at the mausoleum; they can probably track the call.”

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

“Alright.” Noah got his phone out and hesitated nervously. “I’ve never actually called the cops before,” he admitted.

“I can do it,” Leah offered easily.

“No, it’s fine.” He steeled himself and dialed.

Soon a man’s voice answered. “What’s your emergency?”

Noah was suddenly kicking himself for not planning out what to say. What should he do, just straight up say a whole family had died? “Uh, something really bad has happened. The address is…” he trailed off and looked around in alarm.

“80 Birchwood Lane,” Leah sighed, rubbing her temples.

“You hear that?” Noah asked the phone.

“80 Birchwood Lane, yes. Can you share any more details about the reason for your call?”

“Three people have died.” Noah decided to just spit it out. There was no reason to be furtive about it. “Two of them died to stab wounds and one was… um, eaten alive.”

“Are you in a safe place currently?”

“Yeah. The guy who stabbed the first person turned the knife on himself afterwards. We’re not at the house anymore.”

“That’s enough,” Leah mouthed at him.

“Um. Have a good day,” Noah said, interrupting whatever the guy was trying to say next, and hung up. Worried that he would try to call him back, he immediately shut off his phone and put it away.

“You could have ended the conversation better,” Brian grumbled.

Noah punched him without looking over, failing to notice that the shot missed him by a foot. “I didn’t say anything I shouldn’t have, did I?”

Leah shrugged. “We should be fine. They’ll go to the house and see what happened. I say we’ve done our job.”

“I kind of wanted to just give the guy the address and hang up,” Noah confessed. “I guess this is better, though.”

Brian chuckled. “Good thing you didn’t. That would’ve been suspicious as heck.”

They turned onto another road and Noah was glad to recognize the stone brick wall lining each side of the road.

“Hey, we’re practically there already!” Brian said in surprise. “Going to the mausoleum might not have been such a bad decision after all.”

“Were you ranking the options based on how far you’d have to walk to each one?” Noah asked accusingly.

“Of course.”

They began to hear the sound of sirens distantly behind them, though no vehicles drove down the road they were currently on.

“Good. They’ll find them,” Leah said. “I might actually be able to sleep tonight.”

“I know what you mean,” Noah said. “This is the spot, right?”

They had arrived at the sign marking the entrance to the trail.

Brian pointed at where it said Hours: Dawn to Dusk and smirked. “Aw, guys, we have to pick another destination, the trail’s closed.”

Leah walked past him onto the trail, not slowing in the slightest. “We’re zombies; we’re supposed to wander around in the dead of night. This is totally acceptable and expected behavior.”

“‘Zombie’ feels derogatory somehow,” Brian mused.

“Oh, do we need proper non-offensive terminology now? What would you prefer?”

“I’m fine if people want to think of us as zombies,” Noah commented. “Otherwise we’re just plain cannibals. At least this way we have an excuse for how we’re acting.”

“How you’re acting,” Leah corrected. “We haven’t eaten anyone.”

“Don’t you have to be an actual corpse to be a zombie?” Brian wondered aloud. “If you forget about our lungs and heart not working at the moment, we’re not dead. Nobody would be able to tell anything’s wrong with us until we try to eat them.”

“Yeah, Sophie’s parents sure made that clear,” Leah muttered.

“Functioning lungs and heart are a pretty strong indicator of life,” Noah said. “There’s a reason Dr. Jansen got so freaked out.”

“We’re special,” Leah said cheerfully. “Special zombies.”

“But not for much longer,” Brian hoped. “We’ll get this pendant and it’ll reveal the secret to un-zombifying ourselves. Then we can go back to campus and cure everyone else, and everything will go back to normal.”

Brian’s flashlight suddenly turned off, prompting the friends to all look at him.

“Uh, I didn’t turn it off,” he said, just as surprised as the rest of them. “It must have died.” He clicked the button several times and shook the device, but it remained dark.

“It’s okay, we have another one,” May said.

“I would have liked to have a backup,” Brian muttered. “Nothing to be done about it now, I guess.”

They continued into the darkness of the woods.