I used to have plans for after we got away from the Anport murder house, but I've gone through them like discarded tissues over the last two days, and I've yet to buy a new tissue box.

"We need somewhere to go that isn't Chesnet," I say, because location is about the easiest target when we're sitting together on a hill, without our gear, in the middle of Nowhere, Cape Morgan.

Calico J's brow furrows. "If we're immune to this, though..."

"I have a bad feeling about Chesnet."

I half expect him to push back against that vague response, but I think the events of the last day have shaken him. He shoots a glance at me, then tugs the fabric of the sweater he's wearing. "Aren't you cold?"

I still don't have a shirt on. Now that I'm paying attention, goosebumps rise to attention along my arms, all the way up to my shoulders. Calico J pulls off his sweater and tosses it to me. It's a little damp, but warmer than nothing. 

"I don't trust Chesnet, either," says Patrick in a small voice.

"I trust you both," says Calico J. "Here's the other thing, then... if we're immune, shouldn't we at least try to find out why? We might be the key to a cure or something."

"None of us is a scientist," I say.

"Is this a scientific phenomena, though?" says Ditzy. "I mean, really. It's a red goop that materialized from the water, puts people to sleep when you say their names, wakes them up again like zombies if you say their names again, kills people whose names it doesn't get, and attacks survivors voluntarily. I blame aliens."

"Fair point."

"About the aliens?" says Calico J, giving me an incredulous look.

"Well, it's not a disease," says Ditzy.

"If I had to guess," I say, "I'd say it's some kind of entity. It came from the water. The ocean in particular. Let's be honest here, we don't know five percent of what's down there, and most of it will try to kill you."

"Unless you're us," says Ditzy cheerfully.

"Well, yeah. Then there's that."

"It's not just about names," says Calico J. "We've confirmed that, at least. Names were the first stage, but anyone it couldn't put to sleep, it's just straight-up killing now."

"It keeps telling us to run."

"Stalker," says Ditzy under her breath.

At the back of my Redding-sense, a disturbance starts up on the far side of the hill. From the way Patrick lifts his head, he detects it, too. It's not the same as the wave, at least. Much smaller. It's too far away to tell anything else.

"We need something we have in common," says Calico J.

Ditzy snorts. "Stubbornness?"

"Ditz, please."

"Age."

"Location."

"Didn't location try to kill us?"

"I'm just spitballing here. If you have anything better, add it to the list."

Ditzy starts to say something else, then stops. A very odd look creeps across her face. She starts giggling.

Calico J eyes her. "What?"

"Gay."

He puts his fingers to his temples and rests his head on them.

"Am I wrong, though?" says Ditzy, with glee etched into every part of her expression. "Tell me I'm wrong."

"Ace," says Patrick without lifting his head.

"Counts."

"I am not even going to pursue this," says Calico J. "Also, my ex went down on Red Thursday. So did the guy making eyes at me across the front row in the first week of class. Try again."

"We've ruled out everything else." Ditzy looks disgusted. "We've all been drinking the water. I know people in my parents' social circle who only drank bottled water, and they still went down. Only one of us swims, but that also means one of us swims, and even the two people who can currently control this stuff don't align on that. Meg was a competitive swimmer, and Patrick almost drowned, for God's sake. If that's not—"

"Wait," I say.

She falls silent. That silence spreads to consume the space between us, and I see Calico J's eyes widen as he realizes, too.

"I've almost drowned before, too," I say slowly. "And J, didn't you say your riptide incident landed you in the hospital?"

He nods wordlessly. Both our eyes turn to Ditzy. My heart dips. She's crossed her arms—hugging herself—and looked away. Her expression is pinched, like she's in pain, about to cry, or both. That look shifts back and forth with another: the emotionless neutrality she's maintained for the entire time I've known her, and that still comes out when she speaks about her family.

"Ditz?" says Calico J, a lot more gently than I'm good at.

"My mother," she says shortly. "I was being stubborn with swimming lessons, and she didn't like that I wasn't listening to her. She snapped and threw me in the pool." After a long, stunned silence, she finishes, "I was five."

The silence this time is heavy as a gravity blanket and stifling as too many people in a too-small tent. I think we've found our answer. All four of us have almost drowned before. We've come face to face with the water that carries this entity, whatever it is, and we've survived.

"It's like a vaccine, maybe," I say. That's a pretty poor representation of the ideas moving through my head at light speed now, but it's what comes out of my mouth, and I can't take it back now. "Like we've already beaten it off once, so it can't take us again. Even if it knows our names."

"Meg," says Calico J, "have I ever told you you're a genius?"

I gape at him. It's probably a pretty good rendition of a human carp, but my mind-blank on how I'm supposed to respond to the compliment is cut short as a hand-wave catches my attention. It's Patrick. He points down the hill's other side with a look of panic on his face, and Calico J and Ditzy both notice. Something crackles in the forest.

It's footsteps. My hand flies for my hockey stick, but it's not at my side. I snatch my knife instead. The steps are too slow to be a living, conscious human, unless said human thinks they're being a lot more stealthy than they actually are. Which means it's almost certainly a Sleeper.

Ditzy beside me has her flail at the ready. She says something in an undertone that I miss entirely; the steps in the forest have confiscated my attention, and it takes an effort to drag it back.

"Sorry?" I say.

"Do you think it's coming for us?"

"I don't think so." The steps are moving parallel to the ridge, not up it—the same direction as the Redding-anomaly. I think it is the Redding-anomaly.

"Is it not chasing someone, then?"

That also takes a moment to register. The implications land shortly after. There's only one set of footsteps. This Sleeper isn't chasing anyone. I've never seen what the Sleepers do if they catch the people who woke them, but I've also never seen a Sleeper wandering around like this. Given that fact alone, they probably rejoin the Redding network that sustains them.

Well. They should. This one hasn't.

"I'm going to go investigate," I say. If the Sleeper is chasing anyone out here, that person can't be a part of the Anport Rescues—unless the group changed their minds on us being demons and decided to launch a manhunt. If there isn't someone, meanwhile, this is new Sleeper behavior.

"Can I come?" says Ditzy.

"Keep quiet."

"What do we do if it attacks us?"

"Same as usual. I'd rather not get into its line of sight, though. If we can watch from a distance and see what it's up to, that would be ideal. If it's an Anport member, though..."

Ditzy cocks her head with a smile that turns unsettling if you look at it too hard. She jingles her flail hopefully.

"We talk with them first." I side-eye her obvious disappointment. "You wouldn't actually kill a living human, would you?"

The blithe way she shrugs tells me I probably don't want to know.

"J, are you okay to stay here?" I say.

He nods. I beckon to Ditzy and slip into the light-footed walk I use when I'm trying to sneak up on a deer or get close enough to my sister to scare the living daylights out of her. Ditzy follows with the grace of a ballerina. Together we thread a path between the trees, down the hill at an angle that will let us intercept the Sleeper and get a good look at it as it goes by. The buzz of the Redding intensifies as we draw closer to ground level. Or river level, I guess. Soon, I can feel it in the soil all around us.

"Ew," whispers Ditzy, midway over a rotten log.

I look back. She's holding a piece of bark that came off in her hand. My heart jumps into my throat at the familiar red tint on the exposed log beneath. Threads of Redding like fungal mycelia crawl across the wood. It must have followed the dampness there.

"Put it back."

Ditzy gingerly returns the bark, with a goodnight pat for good measure. Now I keep my attention laser-focused on every detail of the forest around me. This part of the Redding's behavior, at least, is starting to make sense. It's in the water, but that's not the full story. It is the water. Maybe it all came from the ocean originally, or maybe it emerged spontaneously all over the world; earth's water cycle is so interconnected, I suspect we'll never know the answer. But that means rivers and rain aren't the only places we can find this stuff. It's in the soil. It's in the groundwater—it came up through the murder house's basement, and that house was not connected to a municipal water system. It was in the cans of contaminated food we had to ditch at our last safe house, dormant until it came time to grow.

Red Thursday, then, was just a trigger. The moment when whatever entity this is made its move. It makes me wonder if it was in everyone's bodies, too, waiting to respond the moment their names were called.

How names come into this, I still don't understand. Names and Morse code. But I'm sure it's all connected somehow.

My Redding-sense, more than anything, warns me when to stop. I sink to a crouch behind a screen of bushes. Ditzy does the same. We're ahead of the footsteps. They approach us slowly, zombie-like in their staggered, leisurely pace. No Sleepers are graceful, but they do retain some measure of their muscle memory, and I'd be willing to bet this human never walked through the forest when they were awake. Their footsteps catch on roots and branches, and pause for a very long moment before a slithering sound indicates their passage over a log. I part the bush's branches with a hand and peer through.

It's a Sleeper. Tall and lanky, with a ragged mop of hair that mats on one side like it took a shower and then slept on it. The all-over red of its skin makes me shudder. It's impossible to tell what then original skin tone was until the Sleeper gets close enough to show white around the ankles, then its face. Ditzy and I bite back gasps.

It's Psy.

Psychasthenia, former member of the Anport Rescues, recently turned but already red all over. The matted hair on the side of his head isn't from being slept on. It's blood. The whole side of his skull is dented in a way no human skull should ever be. At least not on a person who's up and walking. His eyes stare dead ahead as he continues to fumble his way through the forest. They also just stare dead. I can't tell if he's dead. The blow I heard Ember deal him would have killed a normal human, but everything is wrong with Sleepers, and this is no exception. I'm faintly aware of Ditzy's hand gripping the back of the sweater I'm wearing. Like it takes her that not to scream.

I'm not sure why I'm still okay. But I am. And I soon discover I have less gag reflex than Ditzy as Psy comes into view with one eye withered in its socket, and the other fully gone. Blood crusts the empty socket. He's dead. Truly, properly dead, gone the same way as Vix and the boy Oreo killed and every former survivor in the Chesnet university cafeteria.

And he's still walking. 

Like this chapter if you're ready for a not-quite-zombie apocalypse  😉

Comment what you think about this group's immunity!