"Pardon?"

"You have someone in your house who is infected with a highly contagious disease – the zombie plague."

Oh my god – do they have any idea how ridiculous they sound?!

"Zombie plague?" Poor Alicia, being confronted by a bunch of suckers who actually believed Natalia's outlandish story about Seth having "the zombie plague".

"What should we do?" I ask Doyle in a whisper as we sit on the staircase, listening to the conversation that is taking place in the living room below.

"We could tell them the truth," he suggests, "Not that they'd believe it."

"But they believed Natalia's made-up story."

"Which means that they won't believe something as simple as the truth."

We lapse into silence and listen as Alicia asks the people to leave. One of them says quite loudly that if she's sending them away, it clearly means that she has something to hide. A chorus of "exactlies" and "rights" runs through the group, and then Alicia says that she has every right to ask someone to leave if she doesn't want them disturbing her, and that she has nothing to hide. Then she says that it is true Seth is sick, but it's only a cold.

She shouldn't have said that. Someone shouts, "So you admit he's ill?!" She desperately tries to wrangle the situation, but it escalates all too quickly, and in half a second, someone is barging toward the stairs. Doyle and I hurry up into the hallway and into Seth's room, where we lock the door and wait.

He ate breakfast this morning, but was unable to keep it down. It's more than a cold he's got, but the townspeople don't have to know that. We brought him something from Food City not long ago – just some potatoes – and he hasn't thrown that up yet. He's asleep now, but wakes with a start when the people from downstairs begin to bang on the door.

"Open this door!" Someone screams angrily.

They continue to pound until I hear what sounds like an air horn out in the hallway. The noise stops immediately, and then I hear a door open with enormous force and Izzy's yelling, "What'd you that for?!" I hear a thud, a grunt, and then Rogan says, "The jackasses woke me up."

There's a pause, and then Izzy says, "Why are all of these jackasses here, anyway?"

"We've come to exterminate –"

And that's when Izzy breaks into a full-fledged Dalek impersonation, rendering everyone else silent until she's said "exterminate" robotically about twenty times.

"Are you quite finished?" Someone asks.

"Sure," Izzy says blandly. "So why are you jackasses here?"

An angry voice answers loudly, "The boy in there has the zombie plague!"

Seth looks at Doyle and I with confusion. "What the hell's the 'zombie plague'?"

Doyle shakes his head. "Long story. We'll tell you later."

"It actually doesn't even exist," I say, which probably confuses him even more.

Izzy's voice drifts through the door. "What the holy shit is the 'zombie plague'?"

There is silence. A few people clear their throats. Eventually, someone admits that they don't really know, exactly.

"Well, if you don't know what it is, just leave, because it's probably not that important," Izzy tells them irritably. "And I'm pretty sure that a 'zombie plague' doesn't even exist, okay, idiots?"

Footsteps head down the hallway and descend the stairs. I watch out the window that looks down over the street until I see the group walking away from the house.

"Okay, I think it's all clear now," I tell Doyle, who unlocks the door.

"So," Seth says, struggling into a half-sitting position, "Will you please explain to me what this 'zombie plague' is and why those people think I have it?"

The door opens and in comes Izzy, with Rogan behind her, his scarf pulled down off his face, revealing his bleeding nose.

"Well," Doyle sits down on the end of Seth's bed, "To make a long story short, Natalia started a rumor."

"I never did like her," Izzy says, "That sounds like something a stuck-up bitch like her would do."

"What happened to your nose?" I ask Rogan.

He nods toward Izzy. I kind of already knew she'd done it, but I still had to ask.

"Izzy, why must you?" I say as she sprawls out on Doyle's bed.

She shrugs. "He's bastard son of a bitch...he deserves it. Right, bastard?"

Rogan just leaves.

+++++

The people show up at the house for the next couple of days. Mostly they just stand outside and heckle anyone who comes out the door or flip the bird at the faces peering out the window. Except for Natalia. They seem to pity her. She probably made it out like she was the victim, and not Seth.

Alicia is completely stressed. She knows that the people got the idea from Natalia, but Natalia said when she said the 'zombie plague', she was just joking, but apparently these people took her seriously. Liar, liar, pants on fire, with the longest nose in all the Shire. (Yeah, I know we're not in the Shire, but it had to rhyme, okay?)

"We might should tell Ellie," Alicia says one morning, "If she doesn't already know."

"If she has heard about it, she probably didn't think anything of it," Natalia says.

We can only hope. If Ellie thinks Seth is a threat to the lives of her people, she'll throw him out in a minute. Which means she'll throw me and Doyle out with him. Because if Seth is going, we are, too.

Food City has been awful the last two days. People give of dirty looks and say insults loud enough for us to hear because they think we're letting our highly contagious, infected-with-the-zombie-plague-friend stay in their town.

But we'll be fine. Seth will get better, and everyone will realize how stupid they were being.

Maybe.

+++++

"Hopefully they'll still serve us," Izzy says as we near Food City that evening.

"Hopefully they won't throw us out," I add as Doyle opens the door.

We go stand in the first line, for soup. That's their main course for today. We get the now-usual dirty looks and some whispers trickle through the line, but overall it's quite calm.

We get our soup – I get splattered in the face by some of the juice, which I'm pretty sure was purposefully done – and we get a table in the corner.

Rogan joins us, to Izzy's displeasure, and she satisfies herself with kicking him in the shin under the table. He glares at her for a second before breaking his large roll in half and giving the larger half to Pirate, who sits on the bench beside him.

"I hope that they didn't poison our food or anything," Izzy says a little while later, causing the rest of us to stare at our half-consumed food nervously. "But I'm sure they couldn't do it, since everyone else has to eat this food, too."

We resume eating. And if they did poison it, at least we'll die happy.

After finishing his soup, Doyle stands up. "Don't take my bowl to the dirty dish station, I'm gonna get a refill when I get back from the bathroom."

"Okay," I say, and Izzy gives a thumbs up because her mouth is too full of food to say anything.

I watch him walk to the far side of the large room and into the short, narrow hall that leads to the bathrooms.

I hear Izzy slurping the contents of her bowl, and turn back to mine. The minutes pass, and I absently keep glancing at the entrance to the hallway, waiting for Doyle to reappear. I've finished my soup, and he still hasn't come back. He probably had to do #2 or something. Ew! Why did I think about that? While I'm eating! Well, technically, I've finished by now, but still. I'm so weird. I shouldn't think about other people pooping, it's weird. Okay stop.

A deep growl rises in Pirate's throat. It grows into a full-fledged snarl, and he leaps off of the bench and sprints toward the hall to the bathrooms. Rogan follows him. They disappear out of sight, and when Pirate's first angry bark reaches my ears, I hurry toward it.