I wouldn’t care if Rhys wasn’t here but now I have to care. When there’s more distance between us, that’s when I’ll leave, but for now I have to be careful for his sake. I’m not selfish like Lily. I nod in the direction of the front of the school. Rhys swallows and nods back. I make my way forward but he grabs my arm.
“Let me—” his voice cracks. “Let me go first.”
I shake my head but he trudges ahead of me anyway. I follow him, glancing over my shoulder repeatedly. We reach the gate. He ducks and I duck beside him.
We press our faces against the chain link and look around.
The street ahead seems empty, looks almost normal, like the world has yet to wake up, but as our eyes adjust to the dark, things that are wrong slowly begin to assert themselves. The windows in the house across the street are all broken and the front door is wide open. I can see a shape that looks like a body on the lawn. There’s a car wrapped around a telephone pole and I imagine a man or woman slumped over the steering wheel, killed on impact. That must have been a good way to go. But there’s nothing else that we can see.
No dead.
Maybe they’re still at Russo’s.
Rhys tests the gate. Locked.
“We should go over together,” he says.
We stick the toes of our running shoes through the links. The gate rattles under our weight and the baseball bats clang against the metal. Rhys holds his breath. As soon as he clears the top, he jumps. I do the same, landing easily. He grabs my arm again and pulls me behind a pair of decorative hedges at the corner of the front of the school.
“Didn’t see anything. Did you?”
I shake my head. We make our way alongside the building, tiptoeing over flowerbeds until we’re interrupted by the concrete walk close to the main entrance.
We cling to shadows every time we make a noise we shouldn’t and then move on more quickly than before. We finally get to the opposite corner of the school, past the bike rack, and stand just before the parking lot. Rhys stops suddenly.
“What if he’s been bitten?” he asks, and I swear we both have the same thought right after he asks it. Why didn’t anyone think of that before now?
“He didn’t get back up,” I say. “He’s not bitten.”
And then I step into the lot, feeling the bravest and most indestructible I’ve ever felt in my life which is strange, I guess, because I’m readying myself to die. The morning air is so welcome against my skin.
“Sloane,” Rhys says.
I make my way around a car, checking the ignition. No keys. Rhys takes a few more steps and then he stops again and I know he won’t go any farther, that I will have to do this part on my own. I keep walking until I’m standing in the middle of the lot and that’s where I see him.
It’s not Mr. Casper.
I know that right away. I don’t know who he is that he got all the way to the school, begged for help, and ended up facedown on the pavement, but he’s got blood on him and he’s bulky in a way that reminds me of my father.
But it’s not my father, either.
I walk over to the body. This isn’t part of my plan. I was supposed to keep walking forward but for some reason I want to see even though it’s not Mr. Casper and it’s not my father.
This man was someone. He’s dead but he was alive. Maybe I knew him. Maybe I passed him on the street once. Maybe he has a note in his pocket for someone like I do. I crouch down, grab him by the shoulders, and roll him onto his back. His face is swollen, bruised. I do a quick check for bites just in case, but I don’t see any. I don’t see anything that would’ve killed him either. Maybe he survived this long and his heart gave out or something. He’s middle-aged. Wispy hair, balding. Lines edge the corners of his eyes and mouth. I wish dying was as easy as lying down next to him and stealing his death from him.
“Sloane, what are you doing?”
“I’m not coming back with you,” I say.
“What?”
“Go back and tell them it wasn’t Mr. Casper.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m leaving—” I look up at him. I can’t figure out a way to say it. A good enough way to say it. A way that he will understand. “I can’t.”
“You’ll die out here—”
“I know.”
His mouth hangs open but his eyes flicker in a way that tells me he gets it. If he gets it all he has to do is go back inside.
But he doesn’t.
Before he can say or do anything, the man’s eyes open.
Rhys pales. “Shit!”
I drop my bat. It clatters against the ground, startling the man into awareness. He makes a noise, something halfway between a groan and a wail. He sits up, scrambles to his feet, and pushes me back—I fight to keep my balance—and then he’s babbling.
“No, no, no, no—get away from me!”
“It’s okay,” I say stupidly. I turn back to Rhys and he shakes his head. What do we do now. I don’t know what to do now. This wasn’t my plan. “It’s—”
“No!” The man sinks to his knees and then gets up again. “Where’s Nick? Nick?”
I step after him. “Just—”
“Get away from me!”
“It’s okay,” I repeat. I walk over to him and before I can do anything, he charges at me, shoves me back hard. I land on my elbows and wince. I get to my feet slowly, feeling blood trickle down my arms, and look to Rhys, who is totally paralyzed by this turn of events.
“We can help,” I say. “We have shelter—”
“Stay away. Where’s Nick? Nick? Nick!”
The man wanders away from me, farther down the parking lot, and his voice gets louder and louder and louder as he calls for Nick, whoever Nick is. I turn to Rhys.
“Go back, Rhys. Go back inside—”
And then—breathing.
But it’s not breathing like the way I breathe or the way Rhys breathes. It’s something that is a sick imitation of life.
It’s how they give themselves away.
That house on Rushmore Avenue. We heard them first before they broke in. This awful choked, ragged sound that told us to leave as fast as we could. We have trained ourselves to run from it, to fear it.
I look around but I can’t source it. I want to know where it’s coming from so I can move toward it. It echoes around us, brings Rhys back to himself.
“Forget him—forget about him—we have to go back.” Rhys walks backward as he says it, heading toward the gate. “Sloane, we have to go back now—”
“I’m not going with you,” I say.
“Nick? Nick…”
I have to get this man to shut up. I have to get this man to shut up for a minute so Rhys can get back. I hurry over to him, my brain slowly registering other things as I do, like his shirt is half open. There are holes in the legs of his pants. There are red splotches all over him. He’s twitching and he whirls around when I’m within reach. He raises his fist. I flash to my father, stop in my tracks.
“Don’t you come closer—don’t—”
I call back to Rhys, my eyes on the man. “Get inside while you can. I’m staying—”
“I’m not going back without you.”
I turn to him.
This is the moment everything goes wrong.
At least five infected are running for Rhys, coming in from all directions, stragglers alerted to us by the man’s shouting. They materialize from seemingly nowhere, some kind of hibernation. I yell for Rhys to get back into the school but he’s a deer in the headlights.
I don’t want to die today, Sloane.
I run to him.
“Rhys, go!”
I make it to him first, I get in front of him and the weight of at least three infected are on me, pushing at me as they fight for my body. I lose my footing and lurch forward. One of the dead—a girl—grabs my arm and pulls me to her and Rhys finally wakes up. He grabs my other arm and pulls me to him but as hard as he pulls, the dead girl pulls harder while the other four scramble around her for a piece. They all want at me. I’m the prize, I think stupidly—and then my shoulder pops out of its socket. I scream. Rhys grabs his bat and smashes it against the dead girl’s wrists, smashes it into the others, whatever he can do to get me free and I’m thinking about how it’ll never work, how this is it, when the dead girl’s grip loosens. Rhys grabs my arm, the wrong arm, and the world comes into the cruelest kind of focus, makes me realize something. We can’t go back. They’ll follow us to the door. And then it’s not just Rhys, it’s everyone, I’ll risk everyone and I’m not Lily, I would never do what she did to me—
“We have to lead them away,” I say. “We have to—”
But they’ll follow you no matter where you go. My brain puts the puzzle together before I even know what the pieces are and I run into the parking lot, Rhys close behind me, all the dead following fast. My chest aches, my lungs can’t hold air. My feet hit the ground so hard I feel it in my bones. We round the parking lot and the man is still there. When he sees us, all of us, his eyes widen. I close the distance easily and—I push him.
The man grabs on to me. We fall and he lands a second after I do and it’s a second I have on him. I use my good arm to scramble to my feet. The man reaches for me. I kick him in the—face. I hear myself kick him in the face. His teeth. Rhys is ahead of me now. I run after him because I don’t want to be near what is about to happen, what I made happen.
“Help me—help me—”
I look back. I can’t help myself.
They’re feeding. Four of them. But one—that girl—hasn’t lost sight of us yet. She pursues us, her hair flying around her head. She’s not wearing a shirt and all of her exposed skin is gray. The veins beneath it are dark, angry lines that want to break free, be outside of her. Her lips twitch, revealing vicious teeth.