We leave the room together. Instinct tells me to stick to our pack, and I'm not the only one. Ditzy drifts close enough to my side to distract me, and Patrick actually runs into Calico J's back when he hesitates as we come into sight of the first other members of the Anport Rescues. We're midway down the stairs. A small, blonde woman and a brawny man are speaking in lowered tones in the hallway below us.
That conversation goes silent when the stairs creak beneath my feet. Both people look up with expressions that are already wary before they realize who we are. More quiet alarm bells start up in my head. Now we're poised on the stairs in a sort of stare-down, and the two Anport members look ready to punch our lights out, bolt from the house, or both if we take another step. Before we have to find out which, the woman tugs the man's sleeve and beckons him away. I don't realize how tense I've gone until I start moving again.
"They don't like us," whispers Patrick, stating the obvious. "Or each other."
"I wonder if they know about the screening thing," murmurs Calico J.
I say nothing. Neither does Ditzy, and Patrick doesn't reply to Calico J, so an uncomfortable silence falls over us again. I don't see Ember or Oreo anywhere, but I have a guess we'll find them in the office.
"Did anyone see where they went?" I ask for good measure. "Or did they tell us anything?"
All three of my companions shake their heads. I lead the way to the office and knock on the door.
"Come in," says Oreo from inside.
I do. My companions follow more cautiously. Patrick's eyes dart around the room, but Ditzy fixes her gaze on Oreo. The cocky defiance I'm familiar with from her phases back onto her face, and Oreo's scowl in response tells me I'm not imagining it. It's a marked difference from how Ditzy reacted when they first came face to face. That time, I did all the talking.
Ember looks about to start this conversation, but Oreo beats her to the punch, pointing fingers at me and Ditzy.
"You two were beside Vix's body when I found you," he says. "Did you take anything from it? Or from her stuff in general?"
Every muscle in my body seizes. At this very moment, Vix's phone and notebook are both hidden in our room upstairs. I want them to stay that way until we know what's going on.
"No," I say.
"Nothing at all?"
Never have I been so glad that my resting face is expressionless. My sister used to call me a robot whenever we were in social situations together. I pray that my companions will have the presence of mind to hide their own reactions—they all know I'm lying right now. I regret not leaving a guard in our room, even more than I regretted it already. Our stolen finds are only hidden in Patrick's sleeping bag, which is still against the wall beneath the window. Anyone from this group could waltz into our room, search it briefly, and uncover my lie.
"Do I look like a body-robber to you?" I say. My brain catches up with my mouth a moment later, but by then it's too late to take the words back. I commit to them for damage control. "We didn't live this long by making off with the possessions of dead people when we don't know if this... pandemic or whatever you want to call it is contagious."
Oreo and Ember exchange a glance.
"Do you?" I say, seizing the opportunity to turn this back on them.
"Know if it's contagious?" says Oreo in a very obvious misinterpretation of my question. He's already told me they don't know that. It was one of the first things I dragged out of him back in the motel room when we started talking back.
"Rob bodies." I don't even give him the satisfaction of a facial response. "Especially if you don't know if it's contagious."
The atmosphere in the room is suddenly suffocating. Neither Anport leader speaks.
I look Oreo dead in the eye, then Ember. "You didn't mention that last night, Ember. We don't rob bodies. If you do, you might want to stop that."
"We don't," says Oreo. It's an obvious lie. Ember just rubs her temples.
"Sure. Ember, was that what you wanted to talk to us about, or do you have a better question for us?"
The words leaving me right now are so unbelievably cocky, they leave me a little breathless. There's something equal parts terrifying and exhilarating about talking this way. Especially when it so consistently shuts people up and turns the conversation in our favor. Rather than answer, Oreo leans in and whispers something to Ember, who has yet to remove her elbows from the desk or her fingers from her temples. I don't hear it, but Ditzy—perfect, revived, sassy Ditzy—does.
"Isn't he the one who went missing last night?" she says with the most innocent, concerned look imaginable. "You don't find that at least a little suspicious?"
Oreo, true to the reaction Ditzy's working him for, could shoot medieval swords from his eyes if he tried much harder. "Our members are bound by camp rules. He wouldn't have touched the body."
Ditzy plays dumb. "Camp rules? Was it camp rules for that woman—Vix, you said?—to run away and make you come looking for her? That seems like a strange rule to have."
Oreo is becoming a strawberry oreo at the speed of chameleon. I piece together the fragments of the conversation to determine what they're talking about. The Anport member who went missing last night is Psy, the same guy who investigated the motel room while Oreo talked to us by the car outside. Ditzy's pinning the blame for any of Vix's missing possessions on him.
I can roll with that.
"Look," I say. If I can get a 'good cop, bad cop' vibe going with Ditzy, I can paint myself as the reasonable one and potentially get more answers. I draw both hands down my face to play it up. "We've been over this? We're not out to fuck you over. We gain literally nothing from making enemies when it's the apocalypse and... dare I say it, we're surviving better than you guys. What are you missing, and do you think she had it on her? I can tell you if I saw it in her stuff."
Oreo opens his mouth with a face that means obstinacy, but Ember's done with this conversation. "Sorry," she says, to us. Oreo sulks back in his chair to let her talk. "I'll get to the point. Vix had a phone, and she didn't have it on her when Psy searched that room. We really need it back. Did you guys happen to find a phone anywhere on the motel premises? It's important."
We've committed to the lie now. "We didn't," I say, and at least try to sound regretful. "Sorry."
"Why?" says Calico J. He sounds curious, and I shift to make more space for him to talk to the leaders. I want to know why, too. The answer could range from Vix's last texts with Seven, to who warned her to run, to the unknown numbers she contacted, including the one we found on a slip of paper in her pocket.
Ember, though, isn't as easily cracked as Oreo. She shakes her head. "Doesn't matter, then. Internal camp stuff."
I don't think it's just internal camp stuff. If I say anything, though, I'll blow my cover, so I remain silent and watch the way Oreo's eyes doge about the room as Ember and Calico J talk about something to do with Psy being missing. By the time I tune back in, Calico J has volunteered himself to help with any kind of watch or search. And I'm absolutely not letting him go alone on that, so I prepare to intervene and end up never needing to.
"We think it would be best if you stayed out of our camp activities," says Ember, talking over whatever Oreo opened his mouth to say himself. "If you guys need food, though, I can point you towards the nearest town and foraging spots."
That ends up being a consensus among us, so we return to our room and determine that Patrick and I will head into town while Ditzy and Calico J stay back and guard our stuff. I gather bags, knives, and can openers, our new standard gear for screening food before we take it home. Patrick checks his sleeping bag and gives me a thumbs up. Nobody snooped and found the notebook and phone, then.
"Take it with us," I say in an undertone, sidling over to him. "And if you find a quiet place, check the texts from Oreo. You can catch me up on anything suspicious if I'm busy."
He nods and slips the phone into a hidden pocket in one of the backpacks. I get Ditzy's keys and watch the car's gas gauge worriedly as we follow the Anport van with its own foragers into town. Pulling over at a gas station gives us the privacy we're looking for. Patrick opens the phone while I wrangle the only gas pump in the station that runs on solar power, hoping the fuel hasn't gone bad in the almost two months since the world shut down. The last thing we need right now is a malfunctioning car.
I'm successful, anyway, and reconvene with Patrick in the station's convenience store over a bag of stale chips. He found a lot less in Oreo's texts than I was hoping. Most are orders that sound exactly like things I'd expect to hear from Oreo. Of that majority, the bulk are grouped into two separate days. Each documents what seems to be a missing-member search: one for someone named Mars, and the other for Ada, the internet-provider employee who Ember said they'd lost before she and Oreo finished their map of Cape Morgan. Both exchanges are largely sterile. Whatever anyone knew about the disappearances doesn't come through, and past the very initial contact between Vix and Oreo, Seven never comes up. The final thirty-six texts, meanwhile, are Oreo and probably Ember attempting to contact Vix in the day and a half before we found her. She never replied.
Foraging takes half the day. Most of what we find is contaminated, but we uncover an unexpected answer to one of the Redding's mysteries in the third supermarket we search. The Sleeper of a former employee lies sprawled in the frozen-foods aisle, which reeks badly enough that Patrick and I both pull our shirts over our mouths and noses when we search that end of the store. I don't think there's anything special about the Sleeper until Patrick frowns at the Redding-tentacle that connects it, like all Sleepers, to the rest of the Redding's network.
Only it doesn't connect. A different one does. The man has two, and while one joins up with an artery of Redding along the wall like I would expect, the other heads off under the shelves, further into the store. Patrick and I follow it to its end in the canned-goods aisle. Here, it branches up the shelves like some grotesque spiderweb, each tendril stopping at a can. I lift my hockey stick with a silent question for Patrick. He shrugs. I reach out warily and knock one of those cans off the shelf.
The Redding disconnects immediately. The can hits the floor with a clang, and we leap back as a spray of red-tinted bean juice explodes from a hole corroded in its metal side. Patrick's breath hisses. He snatches my arm as I go to prod the can again, and points to the side. The nearest Redding artery has grown a new tentacle. As we watch, it reaches for the can again, while that can's Redding-contaminated contents coalesce into a tendril of their own and reach out to reconnect. They merge back together in all of a minute.
"So that's how it feeds the Sleepers," I say, disgusted. I'm glad we got rid of our contaminated cans, then, before the Redding that awakened in them ate a hole in each and joined with the stuff outside. Patrick just nods.
We return to the Anport murder house to find that Ditzy and Calico J have spent the whole day shut in our room, playing cards, napping, and otherwise keeping entertained. They're close to climbing the walls. Leaving hasn't been an option: the whole camp is intensely weird about our presence, and today was apparently no exception. We end up finding a quiet corner of the property to cook our lunch and dinner outside, then retreat to our room again with our food.
I lie in bed late that night. Silence highlights the patter of rain on the roof once more, once again not saying anything. I sigh and roll over with my back to the warmth from Ditzy's sleeping bag. Footsteps creak on the house's front porch, headed towards the door. My waning mental presence hopes there isn't a Sleeper outside.
Something about that thought hits wrong.
My eyes snap open again. Downstairs, the squeal of the house's front door indicates that someone has stepped inside. It's probably just Ember back from patrol, but that's not the realization that sets a different kind of electricity burning over my skin. I finally know what's been nagging at me ever since we arrived.
When we first spoke, Ember said this group had a Sleeper incident here recently, and that it was how this house got its name. But Sleepers don't walk as far as this house is from any other habitation. We're an hour out from the town, on a massive, empty property. Ember said this house was empty when they found it, and that nobody here knows each other's real names. Even if someone said their own, they couldn't wake themselves up again after.
None of that adds up to a Sleeper incident. Not unless the Anport Rescues were hit by Sleeper-like behavior from the inside.
Oreo asked about red patches like the ones we found on Vix. He asked if anyone in our group had acted like they were "infected."
The footsteps downstairs pause for a long moment. Then they begin to move up the hallway towards the stairs.
I leap out of bed and shake Ditzy. She rolls over with a groan.
"Get up," I hiss. "I think there's a Sleeper downstairs."
Something rustles sharply across the room. I spin around to find Patrick bolt upright, watching me with eyes that gleam with fear in the faintest not-darkness of early predawn.
"Wake J," I say. Patrick shakes him while I grab my hockey stick and fumble for Ditzy's flail for too long before realizing she took it to bed with her. It clinks in the darkness as she slings it over her shoulder and scooches to the edge of the bed.
"Meg?" says Calico J from across the room. "What's going on?"
"Sleeper. Everyone shut up for a second."
They all turn into statues of themselves. The creak of a stair crawls through the darkness at the heart of the house. Several seconds later, it's followed by another. Then Calico J gasps. "Guys? The rain."
I drag my brain off the creaking stairs and switch focus in time to realize what he's talking about.
Tap. Taptap. Tap.
I know that sound.
Tap. Tap. Taptap.
It's happening again. It's happening, and this time I'm not imagining it, if everyone else can hear it, too. I wasn't going crazy.
Taptap. Tap.
I can't tell if anyone else in the house is aware of the threat yet. I've lost the ability to hear or process anything that isn't the rain as the pattern ends, pauses for three long seconds, then begins again.
Tap. Taptap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. Taptap.
Taptap. Tap.
Another stair creaks.
The Sleeper is halfway up them now.
And the rain is telling us to run.
Like this chapter if you think Meg made the right choice by lying about the phone.
Comment what you'd do in this Sleeper-Rain situation!