“What can you possibly want from this?” she asks.
“Everything we lost.”
She doesn’t respond. She’s trembling. I remember kissing her in the school, knew as soon as I did it that she had kissed maybe no one in her life, no matter what she said during that stupid game of I Never and it felt good to figure something out about her on my own. I want to tell her how good and alive she felt, how good and warm and alive she is. I want everything I say to be enough. It was so much easier in the school. All of it, even the worst parts. Maybe because I still felt an old life ghosting me there. I could pretend. Even with Baxter, even with Grace dying, I could always smoke in the gym because that was my thing, before. I got to be that guy, I got to be the guy with his hand up Sloane’s skirt. And there was so much time in the school, time to weigh words, turn them into things like I’m here because they’re not, so I have to make it mean something.
I’m afraid everything I was is gone and all that’s left is everything I’m not.
I wake up hard. Nothing new, welcome to every day. It’s just particularly unwelcome on this one, I guess. I got Sloane back to bed after a while, last night. She’s still out and still breathing. Her pink lips parted slightly, her cheeks flushed, her brown hair fanned across the pillow like a stain. Her shirt just off her shoulder enough to reveal her collarbone. Underneath her shirt—I’ve seen what’s underneath her shirt. When she asked me to check her for bites at the school. And now I’m hard and I’m into it, and I feel like a total asshole. I get out of bed quietly. I leave the bedroom and once I hit the hall, I gag on the stink. I imagine it getting more tolerable the longer we stay here—I mean, it has to, it can’t be so fresh forever—but we’re not staying here that long. We’re leaving today. That’s what I decided. Take whatever we can from the house, siphon whatever’s in the Prius, and get the hell out. Find Rayford, people who can help.
I jerk off, trying to keep my mind blank while I do it.
After I finish, I root through the upstairs—except for the dead room—while Sloane sleeps. From the bathroom, I take salve, Band-Aids, gauze, all the medications there are, even the ones with names I don’t recognize and two inhalers I don’t need because who knows what kind of currency is worth anything now. With that in mind, I grab a handful of jewelry out of the box on top of the bedroom dresser. Maybe someone somewhere wants something pretty and they’ll give me something useful for it.
I find the handgun under Sloane’s side of the bed, hidden in a suitcase under what looks to be a hand-knitted afghan. It’s a semiautomatic and when I pull the slide back just enough to check the chamber, there’s a round in it. I turn it over in my hands carefully, keeping it pointed at the floor. We had a gun before when we left the school, but it got lost along the way. The gunfire draws the infected but really, if they’re out there, anything will draw them and I’d rather face off with this. When I get to my feet, Sloane is awake, looks like she’s been awake. Her eyes are on me, on the gun. I make sure the safety’s on before I tuck it in the back of my jeans.
“It’s mine. You can have the baseball bat,” I tell her. She blinks. “Get up. Let’s see if there’s any food downstairs. Take what we can and get out of here.”
I don’t wait for her to answer. I head to the kitchen and rifle through the cupboards. There’s not much left. I find six cans of tuna in flavored olive oil. Fancy shit. It takes way longer than that to find a can opener and by the time I do, Sloane’s shuffled down. Seeing her makes me want to go because even if she’s here, I don’t know how with me she is.
And I don’t think I can do this on my own.
“We can eat in the car,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says.
“How are you feeling?”
She rubs the back of her neck. “Stupid question.”
“Well, ask me and I’ll tell you I’m fucking great.”
I want to pretend the thing she’s not doing with her mouth is almost smiling, but I doubt it. We get to work overstuffing our bags, mostly with water. Putting as much of it into as many containers as we can. There’s a hunting knife in the laundry room, tucked into a leather sheath. Sloane finds it first and I try to rip it out of her hands but she won’t let me keep it from her. She weaves her belt through the sheath.
“You don’t think I should have it,” she says.
She’s right.
I watch as she takes the knife out a few times, faster and faster with each draw, getting the feel of it and I wonder if she just decided to do it, how quickly she could slice her wrists up. I wonder how quickly it would take her to bleed out if she did.
“You should worry about yourself,” she tells me.
Fury turns my insides out fast enough for me to call her a bitch before I can think if that’s something I really want to do. It stumbles out of my mouth pathetically, but I can’t deny it wasn’t satisfying, that some of the tension I’ve been carrying since we left Cortege doesn’t go away. It crosses my mind too late if her dad ever called her that.
I can’t look at her once I’ve thought it.
I step into the kitchen, feeling her eyes on me as I go. I keep my back to her until she heads upstairs and then I start searching places I’ve already searched and I don’t know if any of this is what we should be doing or if it only feels like it’s what we should be doing.
I let it go on for a while, my uselessness and the space she put between us, and then I wander to the stairs, expecting to find her in the corner of that room, waiting for me to drag her to the car but when I reach the bottom of them, she’s halfway down and she doesn’t look right.
She says, “Rhys,” and it feels like the only time she makes herself say my name now is when something’s wrong.
When we were in the school, they surrounded us.
We couldn’t account for it, how they sought us out, seemed to know we were there when we hadn’t given ourselves away. The most we could figure was they remembered places meant people. They didn’t have to know we were there to know that once we were there, that we could be there again, whether they’d ever seen us there before with their own dead eyes. Sloane and I crouch by the window at the end of the hall on the second floor.
We’re surrounded.
It’s a sick feeling, that you’ve done everything wrong. That you should have kept going, even when you were too tired to see. Should’ve siphoned from the Prius, should have put the gas in our car and kept going. Would’ve been in Rayford by now, maybe. So easy, really. But we didn’t. So how the fuck we get through this next part, I don’t know.
There’s got to be at least … fifteen of them that I can see from here, this side of the house. Could be more on the other side. Fifteen. That’s bad. All it takes is one and they run. I’ve fought off groups before and making it out in one piece was pure dumb luck. That’s it. These days it feels like alive is an accidental state of being.
One of them, a man in a ratty, shredded suit, stares up at the house. He (it?) reminds me of a dog that’s gone still in the middle of a hunt. Listening. The others almost seem to take their cue from him. They are still and listening too.
“I saw them,” Sloane says. She moves away from the window, careful not to be seen, and sits on the floor and wraps her arms around her legs. “When you came to get me.”
I ease down beside her. My heart is pounding so hard I think it’s going to explode and my stomach hurts and my hands are shaking. I clasp them together so they stop and I try not to let the rest of it show on my face.
“We could wait them out,” I say.
“I think one saw me.”
This is bad.
“The suit?”
“Yeah.”
This is really fucking bad. Christ. Fuck getting this far and it’s not close enough. They’ll wait. They’ll outlast us. But that’s only if they don’t bust their way in here first.
I don’t know what to do.
“I’m going to check the front,” I say.
She stays where
she is while I crawl away from the window and move halfway down the stairs on my ass until it’s safe to stand and as soon as I do, the Ave Maria’s in my head. Hail Mary. Ave Maria. Dios te salve, Maria. I haven’t prayed since the school. When I got there, I spoke to God, I asked Him for mercy and protection but when things kept getting worse and worse in spite of it, I stopped. Thought I’d make myself one less begging voice.
In church, in Cortege, they prayed in English. I lost my Spanish as I got older, living in a town that didn’t want to make room for my language. But in church, just the four of us, my family, we prayed in Spanish. When I was really young, I’d get so confused I’d end up reciting the prayers in both languages, switching out every other line, but as I got older, I’d focus on my father’s baritone and everyone else disappeared. The voice in my head now is mine, and it’s always been a pale imitation …
Llena eres de gracia—one of the stairs creaks under my feet and I stop. El Señor es contigo. Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres. Y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre: Jesús … I hear them outside, shuffling across the porch. Nails clawing curiously against the door. Our way out. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores …
I make it to the hall and then tiptoe through it, then across the kitchen. Maybe I could see through the cracks of the barricaded window and figure out how many we have on this side of the house before we decide what to do about it … I reach a window, lean forward, and peer out.
A ravaged face with white eyes peers in.
I jerk away at the same time it screams. Fuck. Fuck. The shuffling on the porch turns to frenzied scrabbling. The clawing at the door intensifies and then turns to thudding, the sound of one of them throwing the full weight of its body against the wood—and then more. I watch the fridge rattle. The windowpane starts to break and the boards across it seem to bend and the screaming gets louder and the only prayer in my head now is we have to go. We have to go. We have to go.
“Sloane,” I yell, because there’s no point in trying to be quiet anymore. I grab my backpack off the floor and put it on. She’s already running down the stairs saying, “They’re going to the front of the house—”
Thud.
“I know—we gotta go through the back—”
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
And then Sloane’s at the back door, throwing things out of the armoire while the force against the front door gets louder. We don’t have much time. I’ve seen them turn doors to shreds, nothing. The family here before us must have been so good at surviving, not to have brought this down on themselves but us, we just fuck up. We don’t know how to do anything else.
I help Sloane as she pulls the emptied armoire aside while the dead gain more ground behind us. We get it out of the way and I’m about to open the door when she yells, “Wait!” And runs back into the hall, going for her backpack. Instead of lacing it through her arms, she digs into it, time we can’t afford to waste. I scream her name, Sloane, Sloane, Sloane, until she pulls the flare out and forgets the rest.
One of the boards across the window comes loose at the same time the fridge in front of the front door screeches forward and I see an arm snake through that narrow space. The hand belonging to it has been bitten at some point or other, maybe the bite that turned it, and I see bone. Being so open and raw doesn’t stop its reaching. Sloane gets to her feet, clutching the flare, and when she’s next to me, I finally open the door. Our eyes take a moment to adjust to the light but it doesn’t take the remaining infected this side of the house any time to adjust to the sight of us.
There are still too many.
“Just go!”
Sloane tries to lead us to the car but I grab her arm and drag her away with me, finding time to hope in the frenzy that she just broke from the big picture, forgot that the front of the house is surrounded. That she wasn’t going to offer herself, like she tried to once before, back at the school. We stumble crazily through the backyard, headed for the woods ahead of us. I feel like we could lose them in the trees, like that would be enough to stop them. The infected give chase and I won’t look back, can’t. Hearing them is enough, a cacophony of breathless shrieking that all means one thing: mine, mine, mine.
One scream is louder than the others.
We just get into the trees when I feel the full weight of it slam into me. I go sprawling across the ground, my face eating pine needles and dirt. I try to scramble to my knees before my body registers any of the pain but the infected grabs my backpack and pulls me toward it and then I’m splayed belly-up, just waiting to be torn into.
The suit.
He falls onto me and I put my hands up instinctively, hoping they don’t meet teeth. They don’t. They push into shoulders, sink into shoulders, or maybe his shoulders are sinking into my hands, moist and slick and strange and soft, and I’m grunting, trying to force him off me but all I’ve got the strength and grip to do is keep his face inches from mine. His teeth clack together. The smell of him. God, the smell. So putrid and wrong. Bile inches up my throat. And wouldn’t that just be great, vomiting now, choking on it, dying on my back with one of them on top of me and where’s Sloane, where is Sloane? Milk-white eyes, milk-white eyes, and more of them coming. I hear more of them coming.
And then a bright burst of yellow flame and smoke: the furious hiss of the flare burning in Sloane’s hand. She throws it away from us, throws it far into the woods. The suit breathes on me and I bring it up, all that nothing in my stomach, and I do choke, vomit burning my throat, and my grip is slackening and I—
I don’t want to die.
A knife goes into his head.
Sloane. She tries to get the knife out and it won’t come out. She heaves the body off me and I roll onto my side, spitting out the puke and then she’s the one pulling me forward and we stumble through the woods. I glance back. The flare bought us some time. They circle it, not quite understanding what it is but soon enough, they’ll understand what it’s not.
“Rhys,” Sloane says, and she sees it the same time I do: those shadows moving in the trees. They’re everywhere. They gather behind us, around us, some coming from the front. I drop my backpack. I don’t want to be grabbed again. Somehow I hear Sloane gasping for breath, just slightly behind me and the only way we’re going to survive this is if we run forever and never stop. We’re not going to survive this.
One of them, an old naked woman with an exploded stomach and gray breasts dangling halfway into her own open gut space lurches out of nowhere and reaches for Sloane. Sloane dodges, knocking into me and I almost fall again but I right myself in time. I slide between two trees, my arms scraping against bark and hear the infuriated shriek of an infected that must’ve been a lot closer than I realized. It loses me, perplexed, before it realizes it needs to go around. I stumble again, desperate for some kind of end to this, a happy end to this. Please. I hear something ahead, familiar. What I heard last night, but louder now.
The Danforth River.
We give the last of ourselves to reaching the edge of this part of the world. We stop, our lungs desperate for air, but we can’t afford a single breath of it. We stare at the water below and it’s angry, as angry as what’s behind us. White foam, churning, and beneath that, rocks. This river isn’t kind and it’s a long way down. What happens if we jump?
I know what happens if we don’t.
Sloane looks at me.
I grab her arm and we throw ourselves over and I try to hold onto her, but as soon as we break the water, she’s gone. The impact sends my teeth together, sends the wind out of me, forcing my mouth open. The current is stronger than I am and it holds me under, turns me around and around, until I don’t know which way is up. My abdomen connects with something hard, sharp, and then I’m pushed beyond it and the water is in my nose, it’s in my mouth, my lungs, everywhere, and my father—is praying. I can hear him praying for me.
Ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte …
I shif
t against the cold, wet ground.
All the pieces I’ve broken into scream.
Something moves above me and around me, light shifting behind my eyelids and I have no fight left, but I jerk my arms out and manage to get my hands over my face. I hope it doesn’t hurt worse than this, being ripped apart, but I know it will. I don’t want to die in someone else’s mouth, but who did. And then there are hands on me, a man’s voice in my ear, firm and rough.
The infected don’t speak.
“Easy.”
I moan.
“Easy, son.”
It’s been so long since I was anyone’s son.
***
Vomiting my guts out. Hands hold me up, calloused fingers on my skin.
I can’t open my left eye and when I try to crack my right eye open, light assaults my head and the agony goes straight to my stomach. I gag, but this time, nothing comes up.
I want the pain to stop.
***
A canteen pressed to my lips, water, but I’m through with water.
I turn my head, don’t have the energy to speak.
“You gotta drink that. You’ll be a lot worse off if you don’t.”
***
“You know your name? Sloane?”
***
Hours slip.
My body aches. My head feels like it’s split open. If I try, I can hold myself separate from these things enough to make sure I’m not cold. That’s the most important. I’m not cold, so I’m not bitten. Then the rest of it hits me.
Fairfield. The suit.
Sloane and the river.
A man.
I’m on the ground. There’s a … I’m encased. In a bag. Not really a sleeping bag. It crinkles when I move. Nothing soft beneath it. I smell—I smell a fire, burning wood. I feel the warmth of it, close. I open my eyes. Eye. The left refuses to open and it should scare me but it doesn’t, not more than not knowing where I am and who I’m with.
The sky above me is dark and I see flames flickering from the corner of my good eye. I move a little, slowly, legs and hands. I touch my face and my left eye. It’s swollen to shit. I turn my head and there it is, the fire. The light sears itself into me, hurts the longer I stare at it. Beyond it, I make out a tent. I swallow. My throat is sore, it feels like I’ve been eating gravel. I try to raise my head but the world spins like last summer after that fucking racist prick asshole Joe Arthur couldn’t believe I never had tequila in my life and got the guys to hold me down while he poured half a bottle of it down my throat. I flop back onto the ground—bad idea, my body lets me know it—and I close my eyes, trying desperately to find some kind of anchor amid the pain.
Please Remain Calm Page 3
