Chapter 3

By the time Nina and Elise got home, the supermarket had become the biggest argument on every news channel, with shaky phone videos showing people screaming between overturned shopping trolleys and a man in a blood-soaked shirt being dragged across the entrance while he snapped his teeth at anyone stupid enough to come near him. The footage kept disappearing, reappearing under different accounts, and disappearing again, which only encouraged people to upload worse versions with captions claiming the dead were eating shoppers.

Daniel stood in the living room with the remote in one hand and the grocery receipt in the other, looking like he was considering suing the entire country.

“Do you girls understand how much money you spent on absolutely nothing, because I can see three bottles of water, half a packet of gloves, and a receipt long enough to wrap around my neck?”

Elise kicked off her shoes and collapsed onto the sofa, clutching her stomach as if she had been personally wounded by his financial concerns. “Dad, a lunatic tried to chew through a security guard in front of an entire supermarket, and you’re examining the receipt like we went on a luxury holiday without inviting you.”

“I am examining it because somebody has to think about tomorrow while you two are busy collecting traumatic experiences,” Daniel snapped, although his eyes kept darting toward the television whenever the footage changed.

Rebecca had already put the supplies they managed to buy into a separate bag for the clinic, but she stopped sorting the gloves when the news showed a paramedic trying to restrain a patient whose arms were twisted behind his back. The patient jerked so violently that both men fell against a wall, and the recording ended with somebody screaming for a sedative.

“Turn that rubbish off before you make yourself sick,” Daniel muttered, but Rebecca kept watching until the presenter returned.

Elise, apparently determined to prove that fear had not stolen her personality, launched into a dramatic reenactment of the supermarket attack, exaggerating the man’s height until Nina accused her of inventing a whole new species of giant. Elise threw a cushion at her, missed completely, and knocked a glass off the coffee table, which sent Daniel into another lecture about how nobody in his house respected furniture.

For a few minutes, the familiar noise almost worked; Nina laughed when Elise attempted to imitate Martin’s furious shouting, and Rebecca told them both to stop behaving like children before the neighbours started wondering whether the family had lost its collective mind.

Then Elise stopped laughing halfway through a sentence.

She rubbed her forehead, looked toward the kitchen, and wrinkled her nose as if somebody had opened a bin full of rotten meat.

“Did somebody leave raw chicken out somewhere, because this kitchen smells absolutely disgusting and I’m going to throw up if that smell gets any stronger?”

Rebecca looked up from the clinic supplies, sniffed the air, and frowned. “I cleaned the kitchen before you girls came home, and there is no meat sitting out anywhere, so stop trying to frighten me with nonsense when I have enough things to worry about already.”

“I’m not trying to frighten anybody, Mum, I’m telling you the house smells like wet soil mixed with rotten meat and something metallic, and it’s making my head feel like somebody is squeezing it between two bricks.”

Nina watched Elise press the heel of her hand against her forehead, her earlier excitement draining away as she rubbed her left wrist through the sleeve of her pyjamas. The same wrist she had complained about in the car, although Nina could not remember her mentioning it before they left the supermarket.

Rebecca crossed the room and touched Elise’s cheek, then checked her temperature with the thermometer she kept in the kitchen drawer. The reading was only slightly elevated, not enough to explain the way Elise’s face had gone pale or the way she kept flexing her fingers as if something beneath her skin was pulling them into a fist.

“Have you hurt your wrist, sweetheart, because you keep rubbing it and you’re looking rather unwell for somebody who spent the entire journey home making jokes?”

Elise stared at her own arm, turning it beneath the light before tugging her sleeve lower. “I don’t remember hurting it, and if I did, it was probably when everybody decided to trample one another like a herd of frightened cows.”

Nina thought of Martin gripping her wrist, the warmth of his blood smearing across her hand, and the frantic way he had begged them not to leave him. She had washed herself until her skin hurt, but the memory still made her stomach twist, and now Elise was standing in the kitchen complaining about a smell nobody else could detect.

“Did you touch Martin or that man who attacked him, because you were right beside me when everything went crazy and I couldn’t see what you were doing every second?”

Elise gave her an irritated look. “I was trying to keep my teeth inside my mouth and my head attached to my body, Nina, so unless you saw me licking the security guard, I’m pretty sure I managed to avoid touching either of those lunatics.”

Nina wanted to ask again, but Rebecca’s phone began ringing, and the name on the screen made her hurry into the hallway before answering. Her colleague worked at the hospital where Martin had been taken, and Rebecca’s expression changed almost immediately as she listened to the frantic voice coming through the speaker.

“What do you mean the patient attacked a nurse after he was pronounced dead, because that is not something you can casually tell me while I’m standing in my kitchen trying to work out whether my daughter needs a doctor?”

The woman on the other end spoke so quickly that Nina could barely follow her explanation. Several patients had arrived with fever, bleeding, and confusion, and one had become violently aggressive whenever staff approached him; another had stopped breathing, been declared dead, and then attacked a nurse who leaned over to examine him.

Rebecca gripped the edge of the hallway table while her colleague described security officers trying to restrain the patient, whose body kept twisting despite the injuries he had sustained. Somebody shouted in the background, followed by the crash of something heavy hitting the floor.

“Tell me whether this thing spreads through the air, through blood, or through whatever else you people are dealing with, because I have two girls at home and I need something more useful than an instruction to remain calm!”

A voice screamed for the doors to be shut, the woman on the phone started saying something Rebecca could not understand, and the call ended with a sharp crackle that left Rebecca staring at her screen.

She called back twice, but nobody answered.

Daniel had heard enough to grab his keys, insisting that they take Elise to the hospital before her mild fever turned into something they could not handle. Rebecca rounded on him, asking whether he had been listening to a single word she said, because the hospital was apparently full of patients attacking the people trying to treat them.

Their argument grew louder until Elise slammed her palm against the counter, startling everyone into silence.

“Would you both stop discussing my possible death like I’m a bloody piece of furniture, because I’m standing right here with a headache and a sore arm, and neither of you has even asked whether I want to go anywhere?”

Rebecca’s face crumpled before she could hide it, and Elise immediately looked away, suddenly ashamed of the cruelty in her own voice. Nina stepped beside her friend and told Daniel that dragging Elise into an overcrowded hospital might be the worst possible decision, even though she could feel her own unease growing with every minute.

Later, when the house had settled into an uneasy quiet, Nina sat beside Elise on her bed while videos played on her phone, each one more disturbing than the last. In one clip, a man with blood covering his shirt continued biting at a paramedic after several people had pinned him to the ground; in another, a woman lay motionless on a hospital trolley until her eyes opened and she lunged at the person standing beside her.

Elise stopped the video and rubbed her wrist again, pressing so hard that her fingernails left pale marks in her skin.

“Do you think those people are still alive when they start acting like that, or are we watching dead bodies move around and bite people because the entire world has gone completely insane?”

Nina tried to tell her that the videos could be edited, that people did stupid things for attention, and that nobody had proved what was happening, but Elise watched her with an expression that made every excuse sound pathetic before it had even left her mouth.

They agreed not to tell Daniel and Rebecca about the videos, partly because they did not want another argument and partly because neither of them wanted to hear their own fears spoken aloud by somebody older. Nina stayed beside Elise until her eyes finally closed, then returned across the hall to her bedroom and searched for the symptoms Rebecca’s colleague had described.

The results were a disgusting mess of rumours, deleted posts, blurry hospital footage, and people arguing that the whole thing was a government experiment, but one video showed a man declared dead inside an ambulance suddenly grabbing the driver by the throat. Nina watched it twice before the account vanished, taking the video with it.

She was about to search for a copy when a faint scratching sound came from Elise’s room, followed by a soft thump against the wall.

Nina crossed the hallway and pushed the door open, expecting to find Elise awake and complaining about the noise outside, but her friend was sitting upright in the darkness with her shoulders hunched and her hands gripping the bedsheets so tightly that her knuckles had turned white.

The light from Nina’s phone fell across Elise’s face, revealing damp hair stuck to her forehead and a thin line of blood running from one nostril to her upper lip. She did not look at Nina’s face or ask why she had come inside; her eyes were fixed on Nina’s exposed hand, tracking the faint red mark beside her fingernail.

“Elise, what are you staring at, and why are you sitting in the dark with blood running down your face when you were supposed to be sleeping?”

Elise swallowed, pressed both hands over her mouth, and began to tremble so violently that the mattress creaked beneath her.

“Nina, please don’t come any closer, because I can hear something moving inside you, and I can hear your blood moving through your fingers.”