"What the hell is going on?" Mai asks in a harsh whisper as the others look at us expectantly.

  I tilt my head to look at my friends, my eyes red and moist from unshed tears. "Intense training montage turned into a funeral, but I don't think they liked it very much." I managed to get out, my voice hoarse from continuous vomiting.

  "Jacob!" Ella hissed in annoyance, and the moaning from outside got closer, but I couldn't see what was happening with the curtains closed.

  I frowned in annoyance, trying to decide if being a smartass was worth it, but I decided against it. For now. "I exhausted myself trying to figure out my ability. Wanted to say goodbye to my parents. The event started and turned them into undead, so I put them down, but I think I broke my wrist. I believe the fight drew the rest of the neighbours' corpses." I say, listing off the events of the last hour and a half.

  Ella and Sam scowl as Mai snorts, "You suck at keeping watch." She whispers.

  My frown deepens, but I try not to snap at them and take a deep breath. "I will be more careful next time." Meanwhile, Noah had produced a wrist brace from fuck knows where along with some painkillers. I give a quick thank you and begin wrapping up my wrist and popping pills. I look expectantly at Ella, not exactly trusting my mouth, but she just gives me a look mixed between exasperation and confusion.

  Before I could ask for help healing my wrist, I heard Ava's soft voice cut through the silence. "Ah, guys, they are still out there," came her hushed, fearful voice as she peeked through the curtain. Her words caused a ripple of fear to flow through the group, who stared at the curtain for a few moments as if expecting the feral dead to break through the glass and eat them all alive.

  A few tense moments pass with silence only broken by the occasional moaning of the undead in the streets. Luckily, they didn't appear to sense us with the house's walls, and our hushed conversation carried on, where I managed to ask Ella to help heal my wrist and aching body.

  This apparently meant that she could feel the inner workings of my body and some of the pain that came with it. While I didn't like the fact that she was essentially learning everything about my body as if I were naked, it did have the unexpected benefit of proving that I wasn't bitten by the moving corpses, something that admittedly slipped my mind.

  Sadly, Ella wasn't able to magically fix my broken bones, several burst blood vessels, an inflamed digestive tract and damaged nerves all in one go, so she begrudgingly sat next to me and pumped me full of a strange warm energy whenever she could.

  From there, the conversation eventually gravitated to the rather undead cannibalistic elephant in the room, or more accurately, how to keep it out of said room.

  Sam scowls. "Why are you so insistent on killing everything and hiding from everyone?" Sam asks in a hushed voice before continuing on. "These are people, not characters in a film. Not everything is evil and out to get you, Jacob. You were the one out there making noise. If we leave them alone, maybe they will leave, and we won't have to go around trying to kill everything."

  I abruptly stop my curious glances at my slowly healing wrist and turn to glare hatefully at Sam. 'Calm, Jacob, calm. It's been a stressful few days for everyone.'

  "Jacob didn't know the event would happen, Sam," Noah whispers from the side. I cast him a thankful look and turned back to Sam, but I decided my hateful words would be counterproductive in convincing people I wasn't a murder-happy idiot, even if it would feel great to unleash the bubbling hate into the world.

  "There might be a cure in the events or store thing it mentioned," Ella adds on, agreeing with Sam and against my stance of putting the dead out of their misery and making the streets safer.

  I look at Ella and try to bring the hurricane of thoughts into a reasonable argument: "If there is a cure for eternal torment granted by a crazed God who was gifted the world on the condition that the generations before us fucked it up beyond repair and thus needed to be punished." I take a deep breath and try to calm the torrent of emotions raging within me "Then I will have to take that moral burden and hope they can forgive me for putting them down."

  I then glare at Sam, "I am not a doctor, and I definitely don't understand Godly magic, but those corpses did not have a pulse for at least 12 hours, then got up and tried to kill me. There was a message from a literal God saying "that they would drag the living into their eternal torment to share their fate". The same God, mind you, that set everyone's nerve endings aflame just because he could, I can't see him bluffing. And if you think I was out there brutalising my recently deceased parents' corpses because I think I'm in a fucking film, then you are surely mistaken." I hiss at him, trying to remain calm.

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  Silence filled the room as Sam and I stared at each other before he broke eye contact and stared at the floor, deep in thought. "I don't want to go around fighting either, but I think dealing with them is the best course of action," Noah said in a low, unsure voice.

  Sam POV

  "Dealing with them would only be putting us in harm's way to kill people who could be cured. They might just be sick, we don't know how any of this works." I say, trying to make sure they don't do anything rash that they will regret.

  I watch Jacobs' usually calm face morph into a visage of increasing annoyance, and while I understand where he is coming from, I just can't go around killing people. Jeremy said the wheels would come soon, and maybe they would change the people back, and I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if I ended up killing them. Just because he has lost hope doesn't mean he needs to drag the rest of us down with him; we should raise him up.

  Looking around the room, I see everyone's torn expressions before looking back to Jacob, who now seems to have calmed down. His bored expression masks his thoughts.

  "We are so going to die," He snorts before pulling out a strange looking lump of red metal that causes him to flinch upon contact.

  "We aren't going to die," I argue back, starting to get fed up with his attitude again. "We are in here, and they are out there. They can't get to us, Jacob. We are safe." I try to reason with him as he starts fiddling with the metallic substance with a pained expression.

  He just lets out a long sigh. "If we talk normally, they will break through the glass in under a minute, and we will be forced to fight regardless. If we stay in here and are quiet, they might not come in, but we can't go out. We become reactive instead of proactive, and when those wheels start to spin again, we will be utterly fucked." He says in a calm voice, like he isn't talking about us all dying.

  "We could lead them away somewhere", I say, looking around for support.

  "We would have to navigate streets filled with undead to lead them away," says Noah as he peeks out the window. "And we would just make a ticking time bomb until they are evolved enough to break out of wherever we put them," he mutters.

  We continue to argue back and forth for the better part of an hour. Jacob was adamant that they would try to kill us, no matter how much I wanted to convince him. Mia reasoned that he was trying to understand what happened with his parents, but that only seemed to piss him off again.

  Eventually, Jacob was healed enough to use both hands again to finish making an odd-looking ring and knife from the weird red metal. Then promptly decided to remove the dead from outside the house, but to leave one alive so Ella could check it for signs of life as a peace offering to our ongoing argument.

  It wasn't ideal, and I couldn't condone murder, but I also couldn't deny that they posed a threat to us at the moment. After a futile attempt to talk him out of it, I watched both Noah and Jacob leave through the back door and jump over the fence, returning the way they came.

  Despite checking the window repeatedly, we didn't see them for a long, agonising couple of minutes. By the tenth minute, my stomach was tying itself into knots, dread curling in deeper with every second they didn't show. But that worry quickly turned to guilt in an instant, as a dense metal ball smashed into someone's head, spraying their brains across the driveway a few houses down.

  I looked up to see Noah throwing more balls into the gathering crowd that sensed his presence. The crowd started to screech and contort in unnatural angles as they approached the brick house to claw and bite at its walls and fragile glass. I was worried they would break in until suddenly, a javelin started spearing out into the group from the wall directly under Noah's window.

  It quickly turned into a brutal and efficient way of killing the infected as more and more of their bodies piled up under the window until the only one that was left was the downed neighbour Jacob had encased in metal when the event first started. I spent a few moments mournfully staring at the piles of dead before pulling myself together and heading out to the downed infected that appeared to be deaf and blind from the mental casing surrounding their head.

  It lay there covered in brain matter and drying blood, trying its hardest to stand but couldn't control its flailing limbs long enough to find purchase. Soft snarls started to escape its mental prison as more of us crowded around the trapped man. It began frantically scratching and flailing around on the floor, trying to grab hold of us.

  I take a step back and gulp as I turn to Ella. "Can you heal it?" I ask hopefully. She looked at me with fear in her eyes before sending a glance at Jacob. Seemingly understanding her request without any verbal confirmation, he grabs one of its outstretched arms and uses his whole body weight to force it to the floor and onto the ground, encasing it in tarmac as Noah steps onto its chest, forcing it to lie flat on the ground.

  I cringe as they further harm the body, but decide not to voice my concerns. Ella, on the other hand, takes the chance to kneel next to the body as Noah continues to pin its body to the floor with his steel-capped boot. Muffled roars and snarls escape through the impromptu metal gag as Ella does her best to inspect and heal it with her powers. We all stand in silence as she tries to heal Jacob's neighbour. I had high hopes at first until Ella suddenly jumped away from the body, clutching her head in horror before violently adding vomit to the vile mix of grey matter and blood splattered across the sidewalk.

  "Oh god, oh god oh fuck…" She manages to get out before vomiting again. Ava hugs her shaking form as the rest of us watch in trepidation. "What's wrong? Can you heal them?" I asked her, hoping to get an answer before more infected appeared.

  She looks up at me in fear. "The body has no health or life that I can touch, it's being… puppeteered by some kind of worm, thousands of them eating and pulling the body around. Their the black stuff under their nails and teeth, I don't know what would happen if one of them manages to grab us." She stammers out just before a sickening wet crunch sounds off behind me. My head snapped in its direction to see Jacob pulling a chisel out of the body's skull and wiping the blood on its clothes in a calm, almost bored manner, like he was hanging out the washing.

  I just stood there staring at the corpse and Ella, unsure of what to do or feel. 'Could there be no way to bring back the dead? My Dad…'

  "And now?" Jacob asks in what sounds almost like relief. Ella flinches at the question but slowly reaches out her hand in determination to touch the cooling body. "They are still there, but they aren't moving much anymore. They're dying? I can't tell there are too many of them, and they are too small." She quickly pulls her hand away and frantically wipes it on her pants like it would clean them from the parasitic worms.

  "What do we do now?" Ava's question fills the silence as we all process our new reality. Her true question is left unsaid, but it weighs on us all the same: 'If puppeted corpses aren't even seen as an event, then what the hell are the wheels going to bring?'