The next several rooms consisted of unoccupied labs, furnished with tables, stools, and whiteboards. It took quite a bit of time to thoroughly search through the many cabinets and drawers in each room, which contained all manner of science paraphernalia, though their efforts were eventually rewarded.

  In the fourth room Elias happened across a collection of metal containers shaped like wine bottles. Each vessel sported a knob where the cork would be on a regular bottle, which when sufficiently loosened would begin to release dust. They opened each of these containers and relocated the dust into the pendant.

  One of the bottles, however, was hooked up to a delicate array of narrow glass tubes. Dust had flooded from it to fill the entire contraption.

  They were stumped on how to deal with this until Clarissa stepped forward, raised her hatchet, and swung it clear through the delicate apparatus. An awful screeching sound of shattering glass filled the room and dust flew everywhere. Brian used the pendant to clean the air, and they left the broken pieces of glass scattered across the desk and floor.

  They continued on, generally ransacking each room for any sign of the dust and gradually making their way closer to the vat room, until they came across something different. They found a room that was not vacant.

  The first thing Noah noticed about the space were the lights; they were dimmed well past half power, casting the room in shadow. It was not so dark that he was unable to see, however, and his attention soon fastened onto the twin glass cubicles located on the far side of the room. Within each compartment was an examination table, and laying on each table was a person. One of the people had a hood around their head, while the other’s head was free, though they seemed to be sleeping. Both individuals were manacled in place, and the cubicles were locked by a sliding bolt from the outside. The entire enclosed space around the hooded person was shrouded in dust.

  “What’s happening here?” Brian asked quietly, gazing around with a frown. His voice had returned to normal and the dark lines under his skin had disappeared, but he was the worse for wear. He had become increasingly gaunt as the extraordinary effects of the dust wore off, and his current state was truly macabre. He must’ve been mind-numbingly hungry, but he bore it without complaint.

  They crossed the room to the enclosures, their established routine of combing through every nook and cranny momentarily forgotten.

  As they grew closer it became apparent that though both individuals had the distinctive malnourished appearance of an infected person who had healed from a wound, only one of them was currently infected, and was in fact in a far worse state than the other. The person wearing the hood was so dreadfully emaciated that she was hardly more than a skeleton. Her exposed arms were covered with bite wounds.

  Clarissa barely spared the hooded woman a glance before she pressed her nose against the glass of the uninfected man’s enclosure. “Hey, that’s the guy who owns the Corner Market. David, right? What the hell is he doing here?”

  Noah was struck by a sensation akin to being punched in the gut as his gaze locked onto the man’s face. Is that really him? Like most Oakridge students, he had seen David’s mammoth form bustling around his store countless times, his presence as much a part of the building as its yellowed windows and cracked floor tiles. The man in front of him, however, could have been the store owner’s older, feebler brother. He had lost most of his prodigious muscle and looked to have aged ten years in the past two days.

  “Insight must have been curing Oakridge staff in addition to all of us students, even if I haven’t seen any of ‘em around,” Brian mused thoughtfully. “Maybe they were tested and treated the night before we arrived? Anyway, the Corner Market is so close to campus that I guess somebody went over to test the people there, too. I don’t know how else David could have ended up here.”

  “Some dumb infected kid must’ve gone to the store and spread the dust to him,” Elias said.

  Brian glanced furtively at Noah, who gave a glum shrug. Yeah, he had pretty much known from the beginning that had infected David. The man’s current situation was entirely his fault, but if he were being honest, he found he was actually somewhat relieved that the guy had been brought to Insight. It meant he wasn’t in danger of spreading the dust to his unsuspecting patrons, or picking up an injury somehow and suddenly eating one of them. Sure, something strange was obviously going on in this room, but he was cured now, and had been for quite some time. That’s what mattered.

  “That doesn’t explain what he’s doing locked up in a glass cage,” Leah said. “And why him in particular? If Insight cured all the staff and faculty at Insight, they could’ve stuck any one of them in here if they needed some kind of test subject.”

  “Maybe they thought it’d be easier to get away with trapping a random store owner rather than a professor or someone backed up by a whole institution,” Elias suggested. “Or maybe it was completely random and they don’t care.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” May said to Leah, gesturing to the door.

  Noah stepped closer. “We should do that.”

  Leah glanced back and forth, clearly unwilling. “I’m okay. He’s probably fine.”

  Noah squinted at the infected woman in the other enclosure, momentarily distracted. “Hey, this person is infected, but someone clearly tried their best to eat her anyway. What kind of idiot tries to eat another infected person?”

  “She probably wasn’t infected at the time,” Elias sighed. “See her wounds? They look old, like they’ve had some time to heal. She must’ve gotten halfway through the process of healing them before running out of energy.”

  Noah glanced back at the store owner, separated from the infected woman by a sheet of glass. He wasn’t injured at all. In fact, if one could ignore his stick-thin limbs and sunken face, he was more or less in perfect condition.

  “There’s a vacuum here,” Clarissa’s voice came from behind him. Noah spun around to see her picking up a portable hand-held vacuum from a table pushed against the wall. “It’s empty,” she added, peering into the transparent dust compartment. She turned it on, testing its battery, and it whirred for a moment before she shut it back off.

  “Excellent, we can use it to cure this lady, and then get out of here,” Leah said. “You want to do it or should I?”

  “You’re not even a little curious to know why they’re locked up?” Brian prodded, turning to his sister.

  “Nah.”

  Brian went to the glass door of David’s cubicle and slid the latch open. “Well, I think we should take a closer look,” he said, just a touch too eagerly.

  Leah’s eyes widened. “Don’t you dare,” she snapped, leaning over to snatch him away from the door. “Do we need to cure you first?”

  “No,” Brian muttered quickly. “I really was just curious. I figured the infected woman probably wouldn’t feel much like talking, based on the looks of her.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Leah shot the skeletal woman a look, then turned grudgingly back to her brother. “I suppose I can spare a minute to see if he knows what the hell is going on in here. But not while you’re anywhere close. Clarissa, keep an eye on him.”

  “Oh, I can do that.” She grinned.

  Noah couldn’t help but edge forward as Leah opened the door. She paused and leveled a glare at him. “Get back, all of you,” she growled.

  Noah glanced around and realized May and Elias had casually drawn up beside him, equally interested to ‘speak’ to David. Sure, the guy was a staple of Oakridge campus life, universally known- even loved- by approximately every single student, but Noah was hungry. They all were.

  “I just wanted-”

  “I know exactly what you want. You are not eating this guy,” Leah said firmly. “I’m going to wake him up now, and I don’t want to hear so much as a word out of you. Stay behind the glass. In fact, if you want to be useful, take the vacuum and cure the other person.” She pushed the syringe gun back into his hands before he could refuse.

  Noah stared evenly at her. Nearly his entire conscious mind valued his own hunger over Leah’s request. Yet somehow, that tiny sliver of himself that still cared was digging in its feet, putting up a fierce struggle to make its voice known. In the end, though he hardly understood why, he simply stood and watched as she entered the glass cage alone.

  May and Elias tried to walk forward past him, but he grabbed their forearms and held them back. If he didn’t get to go in, neither did they.

  “I don’t mind curing the skeleton,” Brian offered, taking the vacuum in hand. “Can I borrow the syringe gun, Noah? I’ll have to pull her hood up to get the vacuum into her mouth, so it’d probably be safest just to-”

  “Of course,” Noah agreed. He handed it to his friend. “Again, not sure how many doses are left in there, so be careful.”

  Brian grabbed the weapon and shook it experimentally by his ear, then shrugged with a goofy expression. “I’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m in danger of getting eaten.”

  “Don’t make any assumptions,” Clarissa said. “We don’t know what Insight did to these people.”

  “Okay, good point,” Brian said, sobering. He unlatched the enclosure and let himself inside, leaving the glass door open behind him. Dust wafted out through the gap.

  “Are you, ah, are you awake?” Brian asked quietly, clearly hoping the answer was no. He received no response, but he brought the syringe gun to the person’s shackled arm anyway and slid the needle through the skin. The poor woman barely had enough flesh on her bones for Brian to be able to pierce her arm at all, and what little she did have was marred by half-healed bite wounds.

  Noah reflected that proper medical practice probably should’ve had them replacing the needle between each person they punctured, but there wasn’t much they could do about it at this point. Hopefully nobody would die to any unfortunate infections.

  Brian tore the hood off and raised the vacuum, only to freeze as the thick haze of dust trapped beneath cleared away.

  “Penelope?” he asked.

  Noah’s head swiveled, recognizing the name. The person laying on the examination table looked a far cry from the girl he had met earlier, though the facial structure was about the same.

  Brian noticed his reaction. “You know her, too?”

  “Not really, I just ran into her yesterday in the halls,” Noah replied, joining his friend in the cramped glass enclosure. “I thought she got out, but clearly she wasn’t so lucky. How do you know her?”

  “We’re in the same writing seminar. I really only know her name, to be honest.”

  Noah glanced over to see if Leah happened to recognize the girl as well, but she had managed to awaken David and was busy interrogating the confused man.

  “Penelope!” Brian shouted in the girl’s face, apparently deciding she should be awake as well.

  “She’s not going to be in her right mind, and in any case, you’ve just blinded her,” Noah reminded his friend. “I’m not sure why you’d want her to wake her.”

  Brian slumped. “Oh, yeah.” He powered up the vacuum, but rather than move it to Penelope’s lips, he just stood there motionlessly for a few seconds before turning it back off.

  “What? What is it?” May asked, stepping into the cage.

  Brian swallowed uncomfortably. “Is she even alive?”

  Noah stared down at the girl. She looked downright cadaverous. In normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have been a question of whether any life lingered in her body.

  “She’s gotta be,” May said finally. “This space is full of dust. She’s still breathing, or at least she was recently.”

  “That’s right,” Brian said, relieved. “She’s probably fine.”

  “She might not be once we cure her, though,” May said. “Depending on how debilitating the supposed post-treatment weakness is.”

  Brian threw his hands up despite the fact that he was currently holding both a vacuum cleaner and a needled weapon. “Well, what do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know. She might be okay,” May said hesitantly.

  “She’ll probably just need a nice big meal or two. The kind regular people have,” Noah said, though he frowned worriedly even as he spoke.

  Brian stared unhappily at them for several long moments, then reluctantly brought the small vacuum to life. “Let’s hope so. She seemed like a decent person.”

  He pressed the nozzle into Penelope’s mouth. The vacuum’s storage canister was transparent, allowing them to watch as dust rushed into the small space and swirled around, gradually tinting it darker and darker until it was an even shade of jet-black. She remained unconscious through the entire process.

  Eventually he shut it off and pulled the nozzle free. He wasted no time fishing the pendant out from his shirt collar and then detaching the vacuum’s dust compartment to allow its contents to be swallowed up into the necklace. The dust in the glass cage was drawn in as well, and when they rejoined Elias and Clarissa back outside in the wider room, so too were the few enterprising wisps that had escaped out the door.

  Noah re-locked the door, figuring it wouldn’t matter to Penelope due to her being locked to the table she lay upon. They were leaving the hood on the ground, so she would at least be able to view her surroundings as soon as the blinding agent wore off.

  Brian paused outside the enclosure. “Good luck,” he whispered. He returned the syringe gun to Noah and shoved the vacuum into his backpack, defying several laws of physics to make it fit.

  They wandered to the second enclosure.

  “Almost done there, Leah?” Brian asked. “We’re all finished administering the treatment, if you need any help.”

  Both Leah and the wretched form of David turned to peer at them through the pane of glass. “I’ll be out soon. You stay right there.”

  True to her word, she exited the enclosure less than a minute later. “The things Insight put these people through,” she muttered.

  “He told you what happened?” Noah asked.

  “Oh, he sure did, or at least what he could remember of it. Apparently the military closed off Oakridge Street yesterday afternoon before checking if anyone in the stores were infected. Out of the entire street, he believes he is the only one to have been carrying the dust. His symptoms had not yet progressed to the point that he was coughing the stuff out, so he’d had no idea that he was ill at all until the results of the test said otherwise. They brought him straight here in an Insight vehicle alongside several Oakridge professors from campus who had also tested positive for the dust. Upon arrival, however, he was separated from the group and brought directly to this room. The doctors didn’t even pretend to try to cure him. They just locked him down to that table. They then… damaged… him extensively, until he was out of his own mind with hunger, and they left him like that for several hours. Then they brought in a girl. He says her name was Penelope. She was uninfected.

  “The doctors separated them before he could completely consume the girl. She’s in that enclosure now,” Leah said, pointing to Penelope without recognition. “They then took all the dust from him and gave it to her.”

  “What? What’s the point?” Clarissa demanded.

  “I can hazard a guess,” Elias said. “It seems that they wanted to know if two infected people could heal each other infinitely. The answer, clearly, is no.”

  “That poor man. He’s going to need therapy,” Brian said matter-of-factly, gazing through the glass at him. The usually cheerful store owner was laying flat on the table, eyes staring hollowly up at the ceiling. There were tears running down each side of his face, pooling in the crinkles of the plastic cushion beneath his head, though his expression remained empty.

  Clarissa stared at the four students standing before her, their cheeks sunken and their limbs reduced to insubstantial twigs, blood freckling their faces and drenching their clothing. “Yeah, I suspect you all will.”