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It was an average day in Anubis House. Chaos reigned. Fabian was the first man down. No one knew quite where he had first been exposed. Some suspected it was Adam from Hathor House who he sat with in English. Others blamed the old dusty books in the library. Mara had since informed those others that both wasn’t possible in addition to being ‘really stupid’. Not that it mattered much, the point was he was sick. Really sick. Skin a sickly green, bucket by the bed, straight up hallucination sick.
Jerome had been the next to be infected, it served him right for stealing Fabian’s chips at dinner when his back had been turned. This in turn managed to contaminate both Joy and Alfie in a matter of hours. They had tried to yell at him about it, but their attempt emerged unsuccessful once Trudy revealed to them that they in fact had been screeching at the grandfather clock for fifteen minutes.
In their efforts to be nice, caring, moral people, Willow and Trudy soon caught the unidentified hellish bug not long after. The house was officially on lockdown. No one had seen Victor since. Two days later, only four students remained. They were all holed up in Patricia and Mara’s room, door locked, armed with every disinfectant they had been able to find under the kitchen sink and their apparently mildly superior immune systems. Well, almost all of them.
“Guys, this isn’t funny anymore. Please just let me in!” Eddie pleaded, banging on their door for what was surely the hundredth time that day. He had been bouncing around rooms in recent nights, good enough at noticing the signs to evacuate each one just in time. Though this last room was being a real dick about it, which was hard not to take personally when it contained two of his best friends and his literal girlfriend.
“No!” A muffled voice screamed back from within the confines of the illness’ final frontier. If he had been invited inside, he would know that it was distorted by the walls of The Best Pillow Fort Anubis House Has Ever Seen. It really wasn’t, not by a long shot. But Patricia and Mara, being the sweet, kind people they were known to be, had decided to let KT have this. There was no reason she needed to know about ‘The Great 2007 Strike for The Kitchen Fortress of Blankettude’ that had nearly ended in a record eight expulsions.
Eddie sighed. He really didn’t want to concede defeat. Again. The living room was kind of creepy alone at night and he could feel that he was mere moments away from finally having a conversation with the weird alligator on the coffee table. Plus hiding in the cellar when The Infected came for mealtimes was less than practical. “I told you! I’m not sick!” He tried.
There was a definitive sound of mumbling before a voice called back. “Could you keep it down, weasel? You’re kinda killing the vibe.” Okay, that was definitely Patricia. He failed to see how he was the buzzkill of the house in that exact moment. Slowly, he slid his back down the door until he was sat on the floor. He wasn’t giving up, but it didn’t seem like he was getting what he wanted anytime soon.
Within the house’s very own safe haven, Eddie wasn’t the only mood killer. Locking themselves in had seemed like a good idea after KT had come running into the room to announce that the disease had spread to the second floor. But to be honest, the takeaways they had managed to convince the delivery guys to hoist up to their window via a make shift pulley system were starting to rack up, and sleeping in a pillow fort for five nights consecutively wasn’t quite as fun as it sounded.
“Maybe we should just let him in, if only just to change things up a little?” KT whispered, despite being the one to yell ‘no’ mere moments ago. Patricia scowled.
“No way,” Mara whined, “I am not getting ill. He was sharing a room with Fabian, remember?” She conveniently left out how that was almost a week ago. The truth was, they’d all been considering opening the door. The only reason they hadn’t at this point was basically just on principle.
“Go fish,” Patricia announced, placing a card down, which was confusing because that wasn’t how go fish worked and because they were playing uno. The other two were thinking of a single good way to respond to that when she got a text.
KT peered over, a knowing look on her face. “What’d he say?”
Patricia scoffed. “‘I had a vision that if you let me in I’ll still love you.’ That’s actually pretty funny for him.”
“Yeah, well. I had a vision that you stink!” Mara hollered through the door. Her friends raised their eyebrows. They had definitely been cooped up in there too long. Silently, they both wondered what exactly she thought the whole ‘vision’ thing was about, but mainly they were just happy that she hadn’t questioned it.
“Mara! Sweetheart!” ‘Oh here we go,’ Patricia thought. “I was stupid to think my own best friend and girlfriend would care about me, but you! Me and you, we’re super close! Remember the cellar, the ghost, the amazing advice I give you?”
Yeah, the advice to date Jerome, maybe he should have left that part out. KT looked at Patricia quizzically, apparently looking for some kind of explanation, but she was much too focused on whatever Mara was about to do.
“Yeah!” She replied enthusiastically. But this was Mara, and they weren’t talking about school work or oddly elaborate revenge plots, so Patricia braced herself for the blow. “Hey! Remember when I cast you as the lead in a play I wrote and worked really hard on and you literally didn’t show up?”
All three present Sibuna members’ shoulders slumped. They may have been saving the world, those of who weren’t possessed at least, but god did they look like assholes last term. Eddie wasn’t entirely sure how to respond.
Since charming his way in didn’t appear to be working, he decided to resort to a different tactic. “Patriciaaaa!”
She grabbed a pillow from beside her, before laying back and covering her face with it. “I literally cannot take this for one more second,” she groaned, muted slightly by the fact she was actively smothering herself.
“You’re the one who’s dating him,” Mara retorted, as she attempted to play solitaire with the deck of uno cards. She hoped they’d leave her own questionable relationship history out of it.
“That was barely my choice,” she replied, and KT frowned, not understanding what that even meant. “You two idiots are the ones who decided to befriend him.”
The other two girls thought about defending themselves, but decided it wasn’t worth the breath. Although, it did beg the question if anyone was really friends with Eddie of their own accord.
He had made the extremely well thought out decision that his best bet now was just annoyance, and so he began to bang his fists against the door. Again. Repeatedly.
Pretty soon the other two girls joined Patricia in laying on the floor, KT with her head on her stomach and Mara with her legs across hers. They were all thinking the same thing and they knew it, but none of them wanted to be the one to suggest it. Honestly now they just wanted to see the look on his face when he realised it was just as boring in their room as outside it. Finally, KT made a decision.
“Eddie, when’s Mara’s birthday?” She yelled. The other two lifted their heads slightly, glancing at her quizzically.
“October 6th, why?” He called back, his tone suspicious. At least the banging had stopped.
“What’s my favourite ice cream flavour?” She asked. Patricia had no idea where this was going and was contemplating just going to sleep. It wasn’t like time really mattered to any of them anymore anyway.
“Phish food. Though one time I asked you if you knew who Phish were, and you said ‘the little chocolate chunks’.”
“How many times has Patricia almost been expelled?” Mara asked the last question, and KT raised her eyebrows.
She could hear Eddie chuckle from the other side of the door. “Five. But she only knows about four, because you guys cornered my dad on the way to telling her and threatened to set the school on fire.” Patricia opened her eyes and met Mara’s, who only laughed.
And with that, KT got up and unlocked the door.
“Oh my God!” He yelled, swinging open the door and launching himself directly into the pillow fort and consequently on top of all three of them.
“No, we’re gonna get cooties!” KT laughed as Mara and Patricia attempted to roll him off of the top of their human pile. He had wiped out their tower of soda cans, Mara’s failed attempt at unotaire and one of the fort’s walls, but none of them really minded. They had managed to spin him so that he was laid in-between Patricia and Mara, his head on his girlfriend’s arm. KT was attempting to crawl away, when the three of them pulled her back sending her tumbling across them.
“I love you all,” Eddie started, garnering odd looks, “but you smell really bad.” That was a declaration of war if they’d ever heard one. Pillows were not of short supply in their current surroundings, and so they all began to scream, smacking each other in the face.
“What on earth is going on here?” A voice sounded from the doorway. All four of them froze where they were, in a tangled mess of limbs and blankets. Trudy had been the one to speak, although she was surrounded by every other student in the house around the door none of them had heard open.
Unsure of what to say, none of them said anything. Alfie took a picture on his phone, which he unsubtly sent to the house group chat, making everyone’s phones ding.
“I’ve just come to tell you everyone is feeling much better, so you’ve got school again tomorrow morning.”
Eddie stared back at the girls with murder in his eyes.
“Woah Trudy, there’s a zombie behind you,” Patricia shouted, making Mara flinch and hit her with a pillow.
“I see it too!” KT yelled, diving to hide behind her. They were definitely overacting, but in all honesty the last few days had made them so deluded that it was barely a far cry from the truth.
“I guess we can’t go to school tomorrow after all,” Eddie added, playfully collapsing back into Mara’s waiting arms.
Trudy took one look at the state of the room, and them, and sighed.
“Perhaps you lot better take one more day locked in here, since it seems you may be coming down with it too.”
All four of them shared a look with each other, before charging out of the room as quick as they possibly could.