Noah thought back to the odd hyper feeling he’d momentarily observed back in the vat room when he’d opened the container and gotten a faceful of pressurized dust. “I think I already experienced a little of that,” he said slowly.
“Through which method?” Leah asked suspiciously. “Eating people, or dust?”
“Dust. When I opened one of the vats.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t gotten it the other way,” Clarissa commented.
“Hey, I’ve been showing commendable self-restraint,” Noah protested. “There were like twenty uninfected patients upstairs in those rooms, you know.”
“Great job, Noah. We’re all proud of you,” Leah muttered. “What I want to know is how the doctors managed to figure any of this stuff out. Exactly how much ‘consumption of flesh’ is required, and who’s being eaten? None of the patients upstairs had that half-starved look you get after you’ve regenerated from an injury.”
“Oh man, I was injured,” Brian realized, gazing around with a horrified expression. “Do I look like Noah now?”
Elias sighed. “The building is literally made of mirrors. Did you not check your reflection? We’re all in the same boat.”
“Guys,” Leah ground out. “Listen. I think there are more patients somewhere. All of these notes had to come from somewhere.”
“We get it,” Brian said. “They’re probably somewhere in this hallway, right? We’ll find them and get them cured, just like all the others. We’ve come too far to just leave infected people laying around.”
“The sunk cost fallacy, except with human life,” May murmured.
“We should’ve brought the vacuum with us,” Leah said. “We’ll have to make yet another trip upstairs to get it.”
“Er, we might need to find another vacuum. The bag ripped, remember?”
“We’re spending an awful lot of time running around not blowing up vats,” Clarissa observed. “The more time we spend here, the higher the chance we’ll be discovered.”
“We already were discovered, and I think that went pretty well,” Elias said.
“Yeah, and she was an ignorant idiot who had no idea how to handle us. Who’s to say the next guard we stumble across won’t be more informed, and better equipped? The sickness makes us all terribly vulnerable. If they so much as turn off the lights, we’re screwed.”
“Keep one of your flashlights on,” Noah suggested. “So we won’t be in total darkness if that happens.”
Clarissa paused. "I should've thought of that." She took out a penlight, turned it on, and clipped it to one of her coat pockets so that it shone towards the floor by her feet. “Okay. We need to get moving.”
“I know, I know,” Brian said, pulling the pendant off his neck. “But I might have an idea of how to get that freezer over there open. You think there’s enough dust in this thing to activate super zombie mode?”
Noah snorted. “You actually want to do that?” Even knowing the potential benefits, releasing so much dust into his lungs did not appeal to him in the slightest, and a deep-seated revulsion rose up in him at the mere idea. His lip unconsciously curled.
“Yeah, it’ll suck,” Brian said. “But there’s gotta be something important locked up in that wannabe vault. If this pendant can grant me the strength to open the door, I’m willing to put up with a little discomfort to make it happen.”
“How noble,” Clarissa said, looking between them in visible confusion.
Noticing her expression, Leah said, “I don’t know either. More dust shenanigans, I’m guessing.”
“I have the dust too,” she said. “Shouldn’t I feel the same as them?”
Elias glanced at her. “It must remain in a sort of dormant state until you get injured. It doesn’t seem to really start messing with your head until that point.”
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“Yeah. You’re not a real zombie yet, poser,” Noah shot out, grinning at Clarissa.
“Shh, I’m getting superpowers,” Brian interrupted gleefully. He pressed the pendant to his lips and compressed the opening mechanism on each side. He looked somewhat silly, trying to fit his mouth around the rectangular piece of metal, but to his credit, hardly any dust escaped around the corners of his lips.
“What if I wanted to try?” Leah complained. “Your saliva is going to be all over it.”
Brian gave her a dirty look, but didn’t bother attempting to respond around the pendant.
“Can you feel anything happening?” Noah asked after a few moments had passed.
Brian waggled his eyebrows.
“I don’t know what that means.”
There was no response, though the blood vessels in Brian’s body grew darker and more prominent as the seconds ticked by. A slight shaking became noticeable throughout his entire form.
He finally pulled the pendant away from his mouth and folded it closed before too much of the dark particles could leak out into the air. “It means shut up and let me finish,” he said in a strangely blurry voice, as if his voice was coming through a fan. The few dark wisps of escaped dust were dragged after him as he swept across the room towards the locked freezer.
Noah noticed his friend’s gait was strangely stuttery, like an old hand-cranked film playing out before his eyes. Each step consisted of a thousand small jerky movements. Noah could hardly imagine how much dust was permeating Brian’s body, but it couldn’t possibly be conducive to his health.
Brian reached the freezer and reached forward for the handle, grabbed it, and pulled it open like it had never been locked to begin with. A loud snap echoed through the room.
“Twenty-five to thirty percent increase in strength?” Leah muttered. “Something tells me they were being a tad conservative with that estimate.”
Or they weren’t using so much dust in their experiments, Noah thought.
“I did it,” Brian said in that same odd voice, turning back to them.
“Yes, we can see that,” Clarissa said drily.
“I think I might just explode now,” Brian said, looking down at his vibrating hands.
“Can you suck the dust back out with the pendant?” Elias wondered. “Like you would with a vacuum?”
Brian looked at the necklace doubtfully. “This thing doesn’t really start suctioning until it’s actually in the presence of dust. It won’t just draw it out from my lungs like that.”
“The note said that this strengthened state doesn’t last long,” May recalled. “I’m not sure what else you can do besides wait it out.”
“Yeah. It’s fine, it doesn’t exactly hurt,” Brian muttered. “C’mon, take a look at what they were keeping in here.”
They all gathered around the freezer as a mist drifted out from within and danced around their feet. At first glance, the box seemed completely empty. There were no items on any of its wire racks, with the exception of the bottommost shelf. There they found four familiar stoppered vials. Leah stepped forward to take them out.
“Is that…?” Noah trailed off.
Leah nodded. “Our blood samples. Has our names right on them.”
“When did they get your blood?” Clarissa demanded. “And why would they lock it up?”
Noah shot a questioning look at his friends who had been by his side from the beginning. Leah and May nodded shortly, and Brian seemed ambivalent. Alright then.
“We were some of the earliest people to get infected,” Noah bluntly informed Clarissa and Elias. “The first four, actually.”
“You were what?” Clarissa spluttered. “How?”
Noah leaned back against a nearby freezer. “It started with that pendant Brian’s carrying, which we found in a mausoleum nearby campus. We opened it up, the dust came out, and we got sick. And then things escalated before we realized what was wrong.”
“Why didn’t you vacuum it out? How did the whole school end up with it?” Elias asked, his brows furrowing as he tried to wrap his head around the fact that he was standing in a room with the four people responsible for the current crisis.
“We had no idea what was happening,” Noah grumbled. “We didn’t know if a cure even existed at the time. And we did get ourselves quarantined, but it was too late. I’m sincerely sorry for everything that’s happened as a result.”
Clarissa briefly shut her eyes. “Okay. So how did they end up with your blood?”
“We provided the samples back on campus,” Brian said. His voice had nearly returned to normal, though dark lines still traced beneath his skin, and he trembled with excess energy. “Who knows if they even got any use out of them. I just don’t understand why they would be locked up.”
They looked back to the four vials clutched in Leah’s hands.
“I don’t know,” Leah said finally. “I’m not leaving these behind, though.”
“I can carry them,” Clarissa offered.
Leah passed them over and the girl pocketed them.
“Alright, we opened the freezer, let’s go,” Elias said. “Hopefully we can move a little quicker through the rest of the rooms.”
Clarissa began gathering up all of the papers on the table and shoving them into her coat. When she was finished, they left the room. The hall was empty, which the majority of them were disappointed to see.
They moved as one to the next door, which turned green, allowing them inside.