“What if we need to stop?” Harrison asks.
“Hopefully we’ll have somewhere to do it,” Cary says. He turns to Trace. “Don’t fire the gun unless you have to. From here on out, no talking. No shouting. No panicking.”
All of these things sound sensible.
If we do these things, everything will be okay.
But that’s not how it really works.
He doesn’t ask us if we’re ready. There is no real ready for this. He just looks at each of us and when he isn’t met with resistance, opens the door. My heart seizes. It’s still too early, too dark. Dark enough not to see our own deaths coming and I haven’t once imagined a death that was out of my control since this started. I tighten my grip on the crowbar.
The rain falls. Heavy drops hit the building, the path. The trees beyond the path. Those trees are bare. They’ll offer little to no cover but it’s better than nothing.
I turn back to the school.
Running water. The walls, the ceiling. The barricades. Our fortress.
I turn back to the open door.
My sister.
I’m the first to step through and it feels like I’m stepping into a dream. The path is clear and the trees ahead are clear and Cortege is quiet, quiet enough for me to question whether it ever happened. The boys follow me. I bring my hands to the fence and remember the sound it makes when you go over. I slide my crowbar between the chain link.
We line up against the fence. I squint. There’s nothing in the distance. I think of Baxter. They wait. They wait, but they can’t be invisible. I climb the fence. The metal is slick and cold and the book bag feels awkward against my back, but I’m first to reach the other side. I take their baseball bats and set them quietly on the ground, one by one, and then we make our way through the small thicket of trees, our footsteps crunching against dead leaves from last fall. Still, there is nothing. No sign of them. I look at Cary, Harrison, Rhys, and Trace. They’re uneasy, heads swiveling in all directions, like the silence is noise. I hear them breathing.
I look back at the school again.
Good-bye, Grace.
We reach the middle of the brush. Cary holds out his bat and points to the street, urging us forward. The alley. My hair is wet, my clothes are wet. My palms are sweaty. The Caspers. The poor Caspers, dead. We trudge into the street.
The open, empty street. The sky is lightening.
“Maybe they moved on,” Harrison whispers.
Cary throws him an angry look for speaking.
I point.
The alley is empty but it’s not empty. There are bodies. I see at least three of them spread out along that narrow concrete path. The ones who turned and were put down. Rotting on the pavement. I search the road and my vision opens up to other shapes.
At first glance, they look like lumpy debris, but they’re bodies.
The real dead.
Rhys taps the ground with his bat. We look at him.
“Run for it,” he says.
Run. It would be stupid to go out there slowly hoping not to disturb anything. Rhys holds up three fingers and lowers one at a time as he counts down.
Three … two … one.
I push forward, out of the trees, my book bag scraping against outstretched branches, escaping their feeble attempts to grab at me. My feet hit a puddle off the curb of the road and the splash is deafening. The water soaks my ankles, my jeans. We’re a stampede of the living. The alleyway is so close I can taste it. We hit the middle of the street and—
The bodies seem to get up at the same time.
I stop. Stop. Stop.
“Stop!”
I don’t know who yells it, if it’s me, if it’s one of them. We stand in the middle of the street, backs to each other. My head spins at the sight of all the bodies rising stiffly to their feet. Rotting faces, the dead who have been out here, waiting. Skin slipping off, entire layers of it gone or melting into nothing. Organs on the outside, crusted and dried to clothes, remoistened by the rain. New dead, ones who have been freshly opened and are oozing everywhere. Women and men, girls and boys. People I might’ve known but can’t recognize anymore. There is every shade of blood—black, brown, red, pink. All eyes looking at us through that same milky film that sees us for what we are and what they are not anymore.
Trace raises the gun.
“No,” Cary says. “We need to run—”
“Where the fuck are we going to run?” Rhys asks.
Our voices incense the infected. They charge at us and Cary goes left, forgetting the alley, the shortcut. We follow after him. My side aches at the effort but I can’t quit before I’ve started. I can’t. The dead are fast behind us and I can hear them screaming but it’s not like we scream—it’s a strange, high-pitched, thin screech, like a noise trying to make its way through crushed vocal cords. I want to stop and curl up in the middle of the road and let whatever happens next happen, that’s how scared it makes me.
“The park,” Cary shouts to us. “The park—”
But I see something better.
“Cary, that car—”
It’s across from the park. I veer away from them, run to it. It looks in good shape, a small yellow four-door. A gift from God. Rhys and Cary scream my name. The boys straddle the middle of the road but they never stop moving. I pull on the door handle and the shrill whooping of the alarm explodes into the street, louder than anything.
“Shit—”
I stagger back, rejoin them. We run into the park. I pretend I don’t see the overturned truck in the sandbox, the bright pink coat of a dead little girl under a swing set. Garbage cans on their sides, garbage everywhere. Cary points to the public bathrooms and we run to them. He pulls the door open and we step inside. It swings shut.
“No lock!” He pants, feeling for it. “There’s no fucking lock!”
The stench hits us then. A sour, biting scent invades my nostrils and makes me gag. Rhys coughs. We turn. Two closed stalls face us.
I push open the one on the right and then I recoil. What was a man is sitting on the toilet slumped over. There is a hole in his head and his body has been ravaged, bite marks, missing chunks of flesh everywhere, revealing muscle and bone. Dried blood cakes the floor.
Harrison starts to heave.
“Harrison,” Cary says. “Harrison don’t you dare—”
He doesn’t. No lock. There’s a small window at the back of the room intact. We could climb out of it. I turn back to the door we pushed through, waiting for an onslaught of dead to filter through, to trap us in this box, but it doesn’t happen.
“What are they doing?” I ask. “Why haven’t they come in yet?”
Cary hands me his baseball bat. He creeps over to the door and opens it up the tiniest bit, enough to see through. I bring my shirt collar over my mouth. The combined smells of the bathroom and the rotting corpse makes my eyes water, makes me want to spend the next thousand years vomiting up my own guts. Cary closes the door and turns back to us.
“They’re at the car. The alarm. More are coming. We have to get out of here before that alarm stops—” He searches the room and sees the same window I did. He climbs onto the sink and peers out. “This side is clear, I think. We go out this window.” He pushes at the frame and nothing happens. “We’re going to have to break it.”
“Then what are we going to do?” Harrison asks.
“Find a place.”
This side of the park slopes down, a hill stopped by a tall wooden fence that separates it from Hutt Street. Hutt Street is the closest thing we have to suburbia. It used to be a field and now it’s being developed into a bunch of houses that look the same. A few are for sale, some are sold, and some are under construction. One of them has to offer temporary shelter.
“Sloane, break the window,” Cary says.
It takes two tries to break the window with the crowbar. The first time it recoils and only cracks the glass. Second time’s the charm. It shatters. I try to clear away as much of the broken pane as I can but Cary tells me to stop, stop it we have to go. Except the window is too small to fit through with our book bags on. We toss them out ahead of us and then we squeeze through slowly. I go first, after the last book bag. The glass cuts into my arms and I think of that woman twisting her way through our picture window. The picture window. How can it be safe at home if the picture window is broken?
Rain spatters against my face. I land on the ground. There are no dead here, but I don’t know what’s beyond that fence. Harrison is next out the window and then Cary. As soon as he’s clear, an ominous rumble sounds overhead. The sky opens up and drenches us.
We have to crawl down the hill so we won’t be seen. We drag ourselves across muddy, dead-spring grass. It’s a full-on storm and the only thing I’m grateful for is the smell of earth this close to my face. I dig my hands into the grit. I like how it feels.
Even amid all this, I like the way it feels.
I don’t know how long it’s been since we left the school. It’s light out now. It can’t be that long but maybe it has been. Time has a way of shifting funnily in situations like these. There is not enough of it or there is too much of it and it’s always one when you need the other.
We finally get to the edge of the fence and press our backs against it. We can’t stay here long. Sooner or later, the dead will drift from the car—the alarm has stopped—and stumble their way down here. And the fence—it’s not the kind you can jump.
I press my face against it, like I could hear through the wood, through the rain. I can’t hear anything. I don’t know what’s on the other side. I hate to gamble like this.
We crawl along. Trace is in the back. Cary is in the front. I’m behind Cary, Rhys is behind me, Harrison is behind Rhys. Lily will freak when she sees me like this, covered in mud, alive. I wonder if she’ll cry, if she’ll believe I’m there, if she’ll press her hands against my face to prove it. I bet even then she still won’t believe it.
Cary stops and I’m so caught up in thoughts of my sister, I run into him. We’ve reached the end of the fence. He holds his hand up. Wait. And then he crawls forward, forward, peers around cautiously. After a minute, he moves even farther around for a better look and then he jerks back, pressing himself against the fence.
