Chapter 4

Elise was still staring at Nina's hand when Nina reached for the bedroom light, and the moment the room brightened, Elise twisted away so violently that her shoulder struck the wall. She kept rubbing her mouth with the back of her wrist, smearing fresh blood across her chin, while her eyes followed Nina's fingers like there was something crawling beneath the skin.

"Elise, you're scaring the absolute shit out of me, so either tell me what's happening or let me get Mum," Nina said, keeping her voice low because shouting at her best friend suddenly felt like a stupid way to get herself bitten.

"I'm hungry, Nina, and don't start offering me toast because I can smell the blood in your hand and it's making my mouth hurt." Elise swallowed hard, then covered her face as tears slipped between her fingers. "What the hell is wrong with me? I don't want to smell you like that."

Nina's palm still had a thin red scrape from the supermarket, barely worth a plaster, and she held it up to show Elise that there was nothing special about it. "It's a little cut, not a fucking steak, and you've got a fever that's probably making everything smell weird, so stop looking at me as if I'm about to climb into your mouth."

She moved closer, intending to put a hand on Elise's shoulder, but Elise recoiled so hard that her heel slipped on the rug. Her expression twisted, fear wrestling with something ugly and hungry, and then she launched herself at Nina with a force that sent them both crashing into the bedside table.

Nina caught the wall with one hand and shoved Elise away with the other, barely keeping her balance as Elise came at her again, teeth bared and fingers clawing at Nina's shirt. She stumbled into the bathroom, slammed the door, and dragged the little wastebasket beneath the handle while Elise hammered against the other side, crying and begging Nina to open it because she couldn't make herself stop.

"Please don't come closer, Nina, please, because I can hear you moving out there and I keep thinking about your hand, and I swear to God I'm trying to make it stop." Elise's voice broke into a horrible choking sob. "I don't want to hurt you, so don't make me look at you right now."

Nina sat on the cold bathroom floor with both hands clamped over her mouth, listening to her best friend cry until the crying faded into a rough scraping sound. She waited until the house had gone quiet, then opened the door a few inches and found Elise curled beside the bed, her fingernails packed with blood and the inside of her lower lip torn into ragged red strips.

By dawn, Rebecca had stripped the bed and changed Elise's damp clothes, but none of it helped because the fever kept climbing and the grey colour spreading beneath her skin made her look like somebody had been leaving her underground overnight. A cloudy film had begun creeping across her eyes, and when Nina asked her to call Oscar over from the garden, Elise stared at her blankly before asking why Nina was talking about a stranger.

"Oscar, our dog, the disgusting creature who stole your sandwich last week and nearly got kicked out of this family," Nina said, trying to make the words sound ordinary while she pressed a cool cloth against Elise's forehead. "Come on, Lis, you named him after that actor you were obsessed with, so don't tell me you've forgotten the whole embarrassing story."

Elise looked at her for several seconds, then asked whether they had already had this conversation, and her breathing stopped so abruptly that Nina shook her shoulder until she gasped again. Rebecca rushed over with the thermometer, while Daniel stood in the doorway holding his phone and swearing at the emergency line that had played the same recorded message three times without connecting him to a person.

"They keep telling people to remain calm, but they haven't sent a single ambulance down this road, and now there's another message saying not to approach anyone suffering a sudden neurological collapse." Daniel shoved his phone into his pocket, his usual joking manner gone. "Tell me how I'm supposed to remain calm while my daughter looks like she's dying in front of me."

"We're taking her to the hospital, Daniel, because sitting here watching her get worse isn't a treatment plan," Rebecca snapped, already pulling a jacket from the wardrobe. "I work in a clinic, and I am not going to stand around waiting for some recorded voice to tell me what to do with my own child."

Elise heard them discussing restraints and began dragging herself backward across the mattress, her eyes fixed on the belt hanging from Daniel's hand. "Are you planning to tie me down because you think I'm going to attack somebody, Mum? Tell me honestly, because I'd rather hear you say it than watch you pretend you're doing this for my own good."

Rebecca opened her mouth, but the answer did not come quickly enough, and Elise's face crumpled before her mother could even reach for her. Nina sat beside her, ignoring the way Elise flinched when she touched the blanket, while Elise whispered that she had watched the videos and knew what happened after people stopped breathing.

"There's a woman holding her husband's body, and then he wakes up and bites straight through her neck while she's crying over him," Elise said, her voice shaking so badly that she had to stop for air. "There was a little boy crawling after his mother with half his face missing, Nina, and she kept calling him baby even when he was trying to tear her apart."

Nina gripped the blanket until her knuckles hurt, refusing to look at Rebecca because she could already see the fear in her mother's face. Elise asked her to kill her before she changed, and Nina told her they would find a doctor who understood the infection, even though every hospital message and every video they had seen suggested the doctors were already losing.

"You can't promise to save me just because you're scared of what happens if you don't," Elise whispered, staring at Nina with those clouding eyes. "If I become one of those things, I don't want Mum and Dad standing there trying to remember what I used to look like while I chew through them."

Nina promised anyway, then promised that nobody would take Elise away, because she couldn't bear to watch her friend die while she sat there calculating which promises were realistic. When Elise asked to see the street through the window, Nina opened it, and they watched an abandoned delivery van sitting crooked beside a car with its driver's door hanging open.

"I want to remember what everything looked like before people started screaming in the streets, even if it sounds stupid," Elise murmured, leaning her forehead against the cool glass. "And if I change, hide me somewhere they won't find me, because I can't stand the thought of Mum looking at me like I'm something she needs to kill."

That afternoon, Rebecca went into the garden after noticing Oscar lying beside the flowerbed, his body unnaturally still beneath the washing line. She crouched to touch his collar, but the dog's head jerked upward and his jaws snapped around her sleeve, ripping the fabric before she tore herself free with a bloody scratch running across her wrist.

Daniel nearly laughed when she stumbled into the kitchen insisting that Oscar was dead but moving, until the dog hurled himself against the glass garden door hard enough to shake the frame. The family spent the next few minutes dragging furniture against the entrances, filling bottles and cooking pots with water, and collecting knives, a hammer, a torch, and whatever medicine Rebecca could find while Oscar kept smashing his skull against the glass.

Rebecca called the hospital again, and a woman answered through a storm of alarms and distant screaming, telling them the emergency department had been overrun and the dead were moving inside the building. She warned them not to bring anyone infected through the doors, then shouted something about patients locked in rooms before a crash swallowed her voice and somebody began screaming that the doors were opening.

The call cut off while Rebecca was still holding the phone to her ear, and Daniel shoved the dining table against the front door as the garden went strangely quiet behind them. Nina turned toward the hallway when three heavy knocks landed on the front entrance, followed by a wet dragging sound, and a familiar voice outside began begging them to let it in.

"Rebecca, please open this door, because I can see Oscar standing behind you through the glass, and there's something wrong with his face.”