Sick

In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, Parker drives to her family's remote lake house. She tells no one where she's going — that's the point. Her best friend Miri shows up anyway, having tracked Parker's location through her phone. Then Parker's ex-boyfriend DJ arrives, uninvited, having found the address by similar means. The pandemic has made ordinary social friction more loaded. They settle into an uneasy arrangement, the three of them rattling around a large house on a lake while the outside world contracts.

That night, the killing starts. A masked figure moves through the house with methodical, purposeful efficiency — not panicked, not theatrical, clearly prepared. DJ is dead. Parker and Miri run. The house that felt like refuge reveals itself as a contained space with limited exits, every room and stairwell a problem to solve under pressure. The attacker is skilled and relentless. Neither Parker nor Miri has any idea why any of this is happening, which makes it harder to know how to stop it.

There are two killers — a couple working in tandem, not one. When they're unmasked, the motive comes out. Their son died of COVID after contracting it at a party Parker threw early in the pandemic, when the numbers were already climbing and the guidance was clear. They blame her. Not abstractly, not metaphorically — they located her, planned this, and drove here. The disease that made everyone feel like a potential vector has given them a specific person to assign their grief to, and they've committed to acting on it with the same focused energy other people put into masks and contact tracing.

Parker and Miri survive, but only through sustained, brutal fighting that costs them. The killers do not. The lake house is quiet again — in the way places are quiet after terrible things have happened in them.