“They were totally outnumbered,” Trace says.
“I know.”
So was I, for a minute. Hands, faces, open mouths, milky white eyes. All that disease free-flowing under their skin, trying to force its way into mine. I hold my arms out, look at the skin that’s exposed, that was exposed, and wonder how much of them is still on me. I rub my hands over my arms, slowly at first, and then fast, faster. I itch. A word I forgot existed enters my head: shower. I can smell myself. I smell all of the dirt, the sweat, going to the bathroom when there was no place to go, the blood I got on me that’s dried now—
Trace stares. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I pull at my shirt. The cotton plaid is stained red and brown. Rhys’s voice is in my head, from yesterday, taunting me: Still here still here still here still here.
“God, look at us,” I say. “It’s all over us—”
The locker rooms are on the other side of the school.
I have to pass Rhys at the back doors to get to them. He’s adding a storage cupboard from Mrs. Lafferty’s room to a mountain of other furniture and he doesn’t notice me slip by. I find a spare set of clothes in my locker. I hold them to my face and inhale, hoping for the scent of something familiar and comforting—like how I used to just stand in Lily’s room after she left and breathe her in—but they only smell like school.
I take my suicide note out of my pocket and set it carefully on the top shelf, fighting the urge to shove it in my mouth so I’ll feel less empty. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, move through the hours like someone who wants to still be breathing when I had so firmly made up my mind to stop. I’m not supposed to be here and the world has ended and it’s too stupid and sad for words and it’s changed time; a second is a minute, a minute is an hour, an hour is a day, a day is a month, a month is a year, and a year—
I can’t be here that long.
When I step into the locker rooms, I hear myself move twice, like I’m made of echoes. The light is better in here. The sun spills in from the transoms and makes everything seem peaceful. I walk over to them and get on my tiptoes but I can’t see anything except sky and then I start thinking about people in space, astronauts, and if they’re just stuck up there forever trying to reach everyone here on earth, getting no answer and not knowing why and I think that would be horrible, but good—the not knowing. I wouldn’t want to know. I stay like that for a long time when the door opens. Grace steps inside and I hear a bell somewhere, I swear. Post-PE, time to shower. But it’s not those days anymore, so the second thing my mind reaches for is something’s wrong.
“Trace told me about your idea.” She’s hugging a bundle of clothes to her chest. “I told everyone else. Cary said ten minutes tops with the water.”
Grace is all good words. Nice, generous, great listener. The kind of student government president the student body votes in for all the right reasons. She unfolds the clothes in her arms and holds up a dress. I recognize it from the school’s production of West Side Story.
“The drama department provides.” She eyes my clothes jealously. “I didn’t have anything of my own.”
For a second, neither of us says anything. Grace and me, I don’t know what we are. Almost friends? But then we stopped talking and looking at each other in the halls. It had to happen, I guess, but I always wondered why she was the one who started it when it should have been me. I always secretly wanted to ask her why.
We head to the showers. I don’t change out of my clothes until I’m in a stall behind a cheap plastic curtain and then I peel them off slow. Shirt, jeans. I let them stay under my feet. They need to be clean too. I look down at myself. Patches of bruises, scrapes, scratches. I turn the water on. The showerhead sputters once, twice, and then sprays water all over me.
It’s freezing.
“Shit!” Grace shrieks from the stall beside mine. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”
I twist the hot water knob desperately. Nothing happens. No hot water. None. It seems obvious now but Jesus. I run my hands over my body quickly, trying to get as much of the dirt and grime and blood off as possible in the least amount of time. I take measured breaths in and out and pretend the water’s warm. Soak my hair. This is awful.
As soon as I feel clean, I turn the water off and lean against the wall, dripping and shivering. I don’t think that was ten minutes. Grace is still under the water, so I sprint out naked, grab my clothes, and pull them on. They cling to my damp body. I sit on the bench and wait for her. She takes a while, longer than she should, and when she finally does come out, she’s naked. Of course she’s naked but she’s so—confident. She was like that at our sleepover too. At the end of the night, she changed in front of me and I remember wondering what it would be like to have a body like hers. I wonder it now. She’s fleshy and beautiful and I’m so much the opposite of that. I don’t have a body that’s nice to hold. She slips the dress over her head and runs her fingers through her wet hair. She looks especially vintage now, perfect and untouched.
“Trace thinks maybe they’re still alive,” she says casually, like she’s talking about the weather, clothes, I don’t know. I’d almost believe it meant as little to her as any of those things if her face didn’t dissolve directly after she said it. She brings her arm to her eyes and cries.
I don’t know what to do.
“I can get him if you want,” I offer awkwardly.
“No. God, I don’t want him to see me like this.” She lowers her arm and takes short breaths in and out. “I think they’re dead. I think they’re dead. I have to say it. They’re dead. But I don’t want Trace to know I think that. I want him to hope.”
I bet Lily’s safe wherever she is. I bet she found a soldier who took her away to some camp, some survivor camp, and she’s in some bunker right now, eating rations. Flirting.
I bet this is all a relief to her.
“You’re a good sister,” I tell Grace, but I feel very far away when I do.
“Thanks.” She wipes at her face. “Uhm, could you just … give me a minute?”
“Sure.”
We stare at each other.
“… Alone?”
“Oh. Yeah, sure. Of course.”
Before I leave, I want to ask her if she remembers the sleepover in sophomore year. I want to tell her that I was thinking of her when the world ended but I don’t.
Later, the emergency lights seem to stop working one by one. Cary says it’s a miracle they lasted as long as they did. When Harrison asks him what this means for us, Cary says it’ll be harder to move around at night, but that we have enough natural light in the day. We find a few flashlights in the custodian’s office to guide us through the darkness and no one points out the obvious—that sooner or later they will run out of battery power too.
Trace wakes everyone up.
He’s running circles around the room, his sneakers slapping against the floor. It’s a sound that gets steadily more annoying the longer my eyes are open because of it.
Rhys groans and says what we’re all thinking.
“Jesus. I’m trying to fucking sleep here, Trace.”
“Before all this shit happened,” Trace says, breathless as he laps us, “I’d wake up by six and do five miles. I’m not stopping for you, Moreno.”
“The school has a gym,” Cary points out.
“Blow me, you stupid fuck.”
“You kiss your mother with that—”
It comes out of Cary’s mouth automatically. One of those stupid throw-away lines you just say that you’ve probably said before except this is not a stupid throw-away line anymore.
Trace stops running.
I can’t deal with them fighting so I close my eyes and go back to sleep. The next time I wake up, no one has moved except Trace isn’t running anymore. He sits next to Grace on her mat while she fiddles with her phone.
“My battery’s dead,” she says.
“Doesn’t make a difference,” Trace says. “I checked the landlines in here. They’re out. There’s no more emergency message on them. Lasted nine days, though, so I guess that’s something.”
I close my eyes and go back to sleep. The next time I wake up, it’s breakfast. Rice cakes smothered in jam, canned peaches. I stay awake this time but I’m not sure why.
“Zombies,” Harrison says.
“Shut the fuck up,” Trace tells him.
Rhys laughs. It’s a sharp, unpleasant sound at first and then he really starts to laugh. He covers his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking, while we stare at him.
“Sorry.” He wipes at his eyes. “Just—sorry.”
“Do you think it’s the government?” Harrison asks, picking at his mat. “And that it’s just local? Like … they did this to us?”
“I think they’d have bombed the shit out of us by now if that was the case,” Cary says.
“So then it’s global,” Trace decides. “And if it’s global, I doubt anyone’s coming for us.”
This sets Harrison off. “What? But—”
“The message on the radio is still going,” Cary says. “They’ll come. This is what I think: Cortege is a small town, right? So it might take them a while to get to us. You think it’s crazy here, just imagine how it is in, like, the city or something. We’d have no chance.”
“Was anyone here sick?” Rhys asks. “That flu?” No one says anything. Rhys glances at me. “You were out for a while, weren’t you? The last couple of weeks before this started. Were you sick?”
“I’m not infected,” I say. “Do I look infected to you?”
“I didn’t mean that,” Rhys says quickly, but I don’t know what else he could have meant. “I’m just trying to figure it out.”