"I need to leave," says a strangled voice behind me. It's Calico J.

"Go," I say without turning around. "Ditzy and I can investigate."

Something in me has calmed. It always does, in crisis situations. My heart still punches me in the chest, but my head is clear, and I can breathe more easily. I glance over my shoulder as Calico J makes his escape, and meet Ditzy's eye. She's staring at the body with eyes wide, and it's hard to tell in the dark, but I think she's paler than usual.

"Unless you need to go, too," I say.

I can manage alone, even if I don't want to. Something protective in me rises whenever someone else in my vicinity can't complete a task that I have the mental resources for.

Ditzy, though, shakes her head. "I can stay," she says, and her voice squeaks like a teenage boy's. I see her go red even in the flat light of my headlamp and the reflection of her flashlight's beam off the wall. She clears her throat and repeats, "I can stay," in a much steadier tone.

I've only once seen Ditzy scared. That I can remember, anyway, unless she's just good at hiding it. She's the person in our group who's taken down more Sleepers than the rest of us combined, and she's even said her mother was the first of those. Not that they had the best relationship before Red Thursday. I don't know anyone who does who calls their own mother by her first name.

But that doesn't matter, really. Ditzy has killed Sleepers, if the catatonic state they fall back into when lethally injured counts as death. At least one of them was no longer breathing. Each time, Ditzy simply turned away and went back to her business without so much as a waver. No shake in her voice. She didn't even go pale. Whatever this is, it's spooked her.

I nod and turn back to the body. Either way, it means I'm going to be the one responsible for investigating, unless Ditzy regains her usual composure in time to help. I'm not sure touching a Redding-dead person is a good idea when we don't know if it spreads, but I've hauled around enough Sleepers that I'm willing to take a risk for the sake of information. We know nothing about the next stages of this apocalypse. If it really is progressing, information could be the difference between life and death.

I hook my hands under the woman's arms and pull her away from the wall to check for Redding. The smallest thread of it smears the floor as the body moves. It slithers back into a crack almost immediately. Preserved. It's as good as confirmation.

The woman isn't heavy, and it's no struggle to lay her out on a bare patch of floor. I bite my lip. Blood and visible injuries don't phase me—they never have—but there's still something sickening about the patches of Redding that coat her skin. Maybe it's their passing similarity to bruises, and the implications that would ensue if they were. The woman wears sleeves of them. Her hands are dark red and blotchy, and red creeps up her neck and across her face, adding an extra layer of gruesome to its twisted expression. Even the lines where her shirt hikes up above her waistband and her rucked-up pants expose her ankles show the same red.

If those were bruises, her death would expose the depths of human brutality. But aside from the self-inflicted scratches, there's no sign of other injuries. Like the Redding itself killed her instead of putting her to sleep. Her phone lends credence to that theory: thirty-six new messages, but not a single call.

Her phone was out the window anyway. I drop to a crouch beside the body and rummage through the woman's pockets. I find her room key almost immediately.

"Do motels like this only issue one key per room?" I ask.

Ditzy doesn't reply. I glance over my shoulder. She's watching me with an expression I'm more used to from Patrick or even Calico J: a kind of helpless waiting for me to draw conclusions or tell her what to do.

"Do you know?" I repeat.

She shrugs. It looks like it's meant to be nonchalant, but it comes out tense and kind of awkward. "I've never stayed in a motel."

I suppose that makes sense, if her parents are millionaires. I sigh and turn back to the body. In my experience, most cheap motels only provide one key to each room, which means the woman was alone when she died. Nobody locked her in and abandoned her. This is a perfect repeat of the university cafeteria.

My pocket buzzes. I whip out the woman's phone again, but the buzz was just its battery dying. Holding it, though, reminds me of the last text on the screen.

Vix, if it got you, I swear I'll...

"It" is not generally a person. It sounds like the person on the other end of the text knew this might happen, and knew the Redding was to blame. Or maybe I'm extrapolating too far for how little we know of the situation. What we need is to go through the rest of their communication. For that, we need to get into the phone. Until then, scouting the rest of the room will have to do.

I check the woman's pockets again, running an inventory of what she's got in them. It's nothing special. I roll her over and am greeted by a knife on the back of her belt. I relieve her of that, then grimace. No part of me likes probing the butt pockets of dead people. But this is survival, so I do it anyway. I come up with a slip of paper for my efforts. Unfolding it reveals a phone number that I don't know and wouldn't expect to. I hold it up to Ditzy with a questioning look. She reads it twice and frowns. "That's not a local area code."

"Where's it from?"

"South Hackaby, I think? Somewhere around there."

That's several states away. It could be anything, then. Family members, friends, a boss, a telemarketer who's not a bot. I pocket it for safekeeping and maybe a later try.

Part of the woman's back is exposed now, her shirt pulled up from my turning her over. I take the moment to poke a patch of Redding. It feels like a dead person, and I clench my fist like that will remove the memory of the sensation. It passes. Something about this particular apocalypse has desensitized me to the carnage all around, and it's honestly a little terrifying. Or maybe that's just my brain blocking out things I'll feel eventually. I don't know. I just know that the next thing I do is pinch the edge of the woman's shirt and pull it up to see the patterns of the Redding across a broader patch of skin. It gathers like bruises, but it's all linked into a network, faded and blurry. It's too evenly distributed to be random.

The Redding itself killed her. The Redding doesn't kill people. It puts them to Sleep, and you can still wake them, like zombies. This was supposed to be a zombie apocalypse: a cruel twist on a game of Red Rover, where names are everything, and not revealing your name means you're safe. Not just safe until the Redding gets fed up, and kills you.

I clench my hands as I get to my feet again. The woman's stuff is still here, strewn about the room, bedbug bags sealed and water bottle rolled into another corner. I don't care if it's the apocalypse. I hate going through dead people's things. This is normally a time where I'd rely on Ditzy to initiate a search, but she continues to hang back as I walk to the bed and flick back the covers to check for bedbugs. None show. And it looks like I'll be doing this alone, so I drop the woman's pack on the bed and unzip it.

The first thing I notice is that she seems to have packed in a hurry. The bag is lumpy along the sides, and half the pockets aren't even used. Opening it reveals clothing shoved in without rolling, folding, or any kind of order. It's possible the bag and knife were salvage finds, and she's not actually as adept a camper as her gear would have me believe. But probing further reveals that even her toothbrush and other toiletries were simply shoved in with the rest, and I'm pretty sure those are things most people will separate if they had time to pack.

I guess that also aligns with the texts—not any particular content in them, but their sheer quantity. If I was the kind of person who liked betting on anything, I'd bet money that she left in a hurry and left someone behind: the person with the nickname Oreo, who's responsible for at least one text of the spam that's hit her phone between its travel out the motel window and us finding it in the grass.

The woman's pack has nothing of any real value. Not even any food beyond a handful of granola bars, which I pocket. Everything else—clothing, toiletries, a Romance novel—are things we can just help ourselves to whenever we enter a town. It's one of the perks of being among the few people left awake. There are enough resources in the world to last us years, provided the Redding doesn't get them first.

I'm about to move on to other luggage when an offhand readjustment reveals that the pack is still a little heavier than I would have expected from its size and fabric thickness. I lay it down and slide a hand into it again. Most travel packs like this have a secret or even unintended pocket laid flat against their stiffened back panel; I use mine all the time to stash anything from spare cash to my passport when I'm traveling across the border. A quick feel here reveals exactly that. Tucked beneath the nylon of the pocket is a thin, rectangular shape, a little too heavy and a little too stiff to be part of the pack. I slip a hand into the pocket and pull it out.

It's a notebook. A personal journal, by the looks of it as I flip it open. The first entry dates back to a month or so before Red Thursday. I flip through the pages, noting only dates and the tidy, experienced handwriting of the woman. I can only assume it's hers. People don't tend to hoard other people's journals, and the handwriting is the same as the phone number from her pocket. Not confirmation, but it's the best I can do with context clues.

The woman—if this is indeed her journal—didn't write every day, but at least she made an effort. She stuck with it at least three or four times a week until a conspicuous gap marks the terror of Red Thursday. The journal entries pick up again shortly after. I see her select a nickname—Vix—bolded and underlined among text-walls penned in the scrawling hand of fear. I'll have to read these properly later. For now, I'm more interested in whatever the woman wrote last.

The journal entries grow erratic after Red Thursday. Some span pages. Others are no more than a line or two. I'm almost at the end of the book when they run out. I backtrack to find the final entry. From the last line of text, it's at least a dozen pages until I find its dated heading. I know two things immediately. The first is that this is going to be a valuable resource for us. The second is that Vix's story will only get more chilling from here. 

Like this chapter if you'd only read that notebook in daylight!

Comment who you think Vix might be (or be associated with)