Date: 2015-01-20 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Horror; Zombies; Dystopia; Short Stories; Post Apocalyptic; Fiction; Science Fiction; Apocalyptic; Paranormal
Description: In this gripping sequel to THIS IS NOT A TEST, Rhys and Sloane are headed for a safe haven when they get separated along the way. Rhys is determined to reunite with Sloane until he discovers people who might need him more--people who offer him the closest he'll get to everything he's lost, if they can just hold on long enough. Rhys thinks he has what it takes to survive and find the girl he lost, but in a world overrun by the dead, there are no guarantees and the next leg of his journey will test him in unimaginable ways ...
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Please Remain Calm

Courtney Summers

St. Martin’s Griffin
New York

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillan.com/piracy.

To my sister, Megan Gunter, and my agent, Amy Tipton.

I hope the zombie apocalypse is prepared for both of you.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks to Amy Tipton, Sara Goodman and St. Martin’s Press for indulging me every time I say the word “zombies”—and to all my family, friends, critique partners and readers, who do the same.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Begin Reading

Excerpt from All the Rage by Courtney Summers

Also by Courtney Summers

About the Author

Copyright

The little girl limps to our car.

Her right ankle is crushed, her foot bent outward. She drags it across the pavement slowly, coming to a stop at the passenger’s side. Her lips are dry as dust, pale, and cracked. Her milky-white irises surround pinprick pupils and her skin is lost of its color, save for the angry dark veins branching across the thinnest parts of it. A chunk of her honey-blond hair has been ripped away, scalp with it, an ugly black crust in its wake. She brings her hand to the window and bares her teeth and she’s missing three in front. A gap here, another there and there. I imagine baby teeth tucked safely under a pillow, waiting for change.

Sloane told me to stop for this, told me to stop so she could bring her own hand to the girl’s, palm against glass against palm.

The girl snarls at the impossible offering.

“Sloane,” I say.

“Wait,” she whispers.

She edges closer to the window and puts her face as near to it as she can get. The girl does the same, biting at nothing. My fingers curl around the steering wheel. We have to go. But I can’t go, not with the girl pawing at the glass because I don’t want to hear the sound it’ll make, the sticky friction of her dead skin against it when I press on the gas and inch us forward.

I glance at the dirty crowbar resting in the foot-well next to mine and wonder if I’m supposed to add this little girl to a list of people I’m afraid I’ll eventually lose count of. The dead girl clacks her teeth uselessly, straining her neck, oblivious to everything but her own hunger. I look to the woods on my side of the car, but there’s nothing moving in them, not yet.

The little girl screams, how the infected scream. I can hear it through the glass, a thin screech from her rusted-out insides. My stomach twists at the sound. I fucking hate that sound. At first, I think Sloane will get out of the car and finish this like she did her sister, Lily, but she doesn’t. She just stares at the girl like she’s looking for something that I don’t think can be there. Sloane’s clothes are a canvas painted with her sister’s blood. Her arms are scratched all to hell, God knows what from, and I know the parts of her I can’t see are covered in bruises, what Trace left her with before he shot himself in the head.

“We’ve got to go.” I stare at the crowbar between us. You’ve never truly felt the weight of something like that until you’ve destroyed someone with it. “We have to go to Rayford.”

Rayford is supposed to be safe. Survivors there.

It was supposed to be Lily, Sloane, and me in Rayford.

“Sloane,” I say.

She exhales, her lungs working like the lungs of the living are supposed to.

“Okay,” she says.

The girl screams again.

***

I take a twisting back road in Rayford’s general direction, keeping my eyes out for other survivors, but there are none. Just the wheels kicking up dirt in the rearview. Sloane’s dad’s car is one of those hybrid deals. It’ll get us farther on a half-tank of gas than my dad’s old Chevy ever would, but that doesn’t mean it can run on nothing, so my eyes constantly drift from the road to the needle as it makes that slow drop to the E. I don’t know what I’m going to do when it gets there, but the more immediate concern might be my bladder. I shift and an urgent, unpleasant prickling sensation follows. They don’t tell you what to do about that, what happens when it’s the end of the world, the dead come back to life, and you have to piss. Go in pairs, I guess, and hope the one that doesn’t die is you.

Sloane’s slumped against the seat belt like it’s the only thing holding her up. I told her to sleep, told her there’d be a point she’d have to take the wheel, but her eyes have stayed wide open. The car dips into a pothole and a groan escapes my lips. She turns to me, the question in her eyes, but it’s not coming out of her mouth.

“I have to piss,” I mutter.

It takes her a minute and for that minute, my face burns and it all seems too goddamn stupid to be embarrassed about, but it’s what I’m not saying that’s making it uncomfortable. I have to go to the bathroom and I don’t want to die and then come back with my dick out, so …

“Will you cover me?” I ask. She wraps her hand around the crowbar as a response but it’s not enough of one. I take my eyes off the road for a split second and she closes hers and it gets the better of me, just like that. I hit my hand against the wheel before I know what I’m doing and she flinches, but it was both of us running through Cortege. Both of us. She’s not the only one tired or hurting. “Sloane.”

“Yes,” she finally says.

I try not to think about how broken she sounds. No one left alive isn’t. She turns back to the window and I notice then, the handprints on the glass. I concentrate on keeping my eyes on the road, but every so often there’s movement, shadows in the trees. The voice on the radio said to avoid heavily populated areas on the way to Rayford. I thought the back roads would be clear, that there’d be less, if any of them, here.

But why wouldn’t they find themselves here.

“Look how fast they move,” Sloane says softly, like she doesn’t know this, like she hasn’t seen this up close for herself before.

I lick my lips. My mouth is parched as hell and don’t that beat all. When your throat is sandpaper, begging for water, but one sip of it might send your full-up bladder over the edge. I clench my teeth—another pothole—and end up groaning through them.

“Stop,” Sloane says, after I take a left onto a new road. The trees thin, making way for so much space: an out-of-the-way golf course. What was a golf course. The ratty, untended green makes me think of my mother and father, the last time I saw them both. What I did to them with a 6-iron. I push that thought down as far as I can.

“Stop,” Sloane says again because I won’t. There are infected in the distance, on the putting green. They’re oddly still like the sound of our car has captured their attention, but nothing’s inspired them to move—yet.

I don’t want to be the thing that does.

“You can see them coming,” she says. “If you see them, you have time to run.”

And what about her? Would she run?

When we were at the school, we left the safety of the building together to save a man. At least, that’s what I thought we were doing. It was a failed suicide mission for her. When Sloane realized her sister might still be alive, I saw something spark in her but Lily’s gone now, and so is it and I don’t know how to get it back. She thinks too much, is what I think about her. In her head all the time, even when we kissed, when I was touching her in places she’d never been touched before. I can see her stuck inside herself now, stuck back at her house, wrapped around her dead sister’s body. She’s got to know she can’t stay there.

She’s got to know she’s here, with me.

“Lily—”

“Stop,” Sloane whispers and I guess it’s okay because I’m not sure what I would’ve said. I stop the car. It’s wide open out here. Wide open. Those infected on the course, not moving, sniffing the air. I think. I wouldn’t want to be close enough to be able to tell. Sloane and I look at each other and this is all just wasting seconds. The longer we’re stopped, the greater the chance we’ll be seen. I get out of the car and she does the same, our doors creaking out into the world. I turn my back to her and unzip and at first, nothing happens, like I’m wound so tight I can’t even fucking go, but after a second—relief. A successful piss on the side of the road and we didn’t die. What a great time that was. I shake twice and zip up. Sloane’s still going, her side. I keep my eyes fixed on those silhouettes in the distance and all I can think is how could we lose the world to something so still?

But then one of them moves and I remember.

It doesn’t seem right for a dead thing to be so effortless. It turns itself in my direction. Man or woman, I don’t know—that’s how far gone it is.

Whatever it is, it knows we’re here to want.

“Sloane,” I say, as it edges forward, not at full speed yet. Another nearby infected notices, wants whatever is being served up too. “We—we gotta go—” I hear her fumble to pull her pants up and it doesn’t feel fast enough to me. The infected start to run. “Sloane—”

Her door slams shut and it’s too loud. I follow in after her. I turn key, push pedal, and drive. The infected chase us. They chase us until they can’t or maybe they’re still chasing us. Just because I don’t see them anymore doesn’t mean they stopped.

There’s no sign of gas anywhere, not that I’m looking for stations. I rub my eyes. I’m so fucking tired. Sloane’s head lolls uselessly against her window but she never did end up getting herself to sleep. Either way, she’s done and so am I. Stupid, both of us this spent at the same time.

Cary.

We should have waited for him, should’ve seen if he’d make it back to us. He always knew what to do. I squint at the road. I know where we are, kind of. There’s a town ahead, name starts with—shit. It’s there and then gone and I feel like if I’m leading us now, if it’s me, I should know the stupid name of the stupid fucking town, but I can’t …

“What’s the next town? What’s it called?” She doesn’t answer. “We’re going to run out of gas soon. We need to get some. We need to stop and resupply and sleep and—Jesus, Sloane. Just say something, would you? What’s the name of the goddamn town—”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I’ve never been out of Cortege.”

“Never?”

“My dad …” She doesn’t finish.

Her dad. We left him at her house. He’d been mostly consumed by Lily long before we arrived, all his guts dried to the carpet, gluing him there. His teeth were clean, never bit into anything and we just—we walked away. I realize now, how fast that happened, how it felt so unreal but it was real. All of this is real. And her dad is still on the carpet, gnashing his teeth.

“Fairfield,” I say, the name suddenly reappearing from the nowhere it went. “It’s kind of small but it’s nice. It’s, uh … they got a lot of nice houses.” Nice, nice, nice. Look at me. She’s finally truly free of the man who beat the shit out of her on a regular basis and I’m trying to sell her on what’s left. Not for the first time, either. “We’ll find something on its outskirts. Get sleep, get gas in the morning.”

“There’s a gas can in the trunk.”

“Got gas in it?”

She shrugs. The sign for Fairfield comes up, what’s left of the sign for Fairfield, anyway. FAIR is there—but the FIELD is long gone, torn off. The wood of it is all broken and splintered, interrupting the cartoonish landscape someone painted behind the town’s name. There’s a blackened, burnt-out husk of an SUV in the ditch, completely flipped over, like a warning for what’s around the bend in the road. The town itself is just beyond that curve and I don’t know what’s waiting for us. I could guess, but even when you think you know …

I stop the car and stare at the sign and the longer I stare at it, how wrong it is, the more I panic. The kind of panic it’s too hard to work around. The kind that gets you killed. I don’t know how I’ll get myself out from under it until Sloane opens her door and leaves the car, leaves me just like that. I pull the keys out of the ignition and go after her and every single noise I make doing it startles me into the here and now. The door opening, the rattle of my seat belt recoiling, my feet on the road.

“We need to be in the car,” I say. The sun’s getting low in the sky.

“You can’t check the gas can in the trunk, in the car,” she says.

She makes me feel stupid that I didn’t think of it, that I let that reality slip away just as soon as I knew it existed. But I’m tired. I am so tired. Sloane opens the trunk and I find the gas can next to a woolly blanket that smells of oil and I put all my hope into it being heavy with exactly what we need, but it’s empty. Fuck.

I squeeze my eyes shut, and my eyes like being shut and for a second, I’m gone, I’m asleep on my feet. No one calls me back. The faint pull of gravity jolts me awake. I blink hard and push the blanket aside and find an emergency flare and a flashlight. I turn the flashlight on and it works. Good. At the very back of the trunk there’s clear plastic tubing and I relax just a little because at least we can siphon with it.

Sloane’s wandered over to the SUV. She circles it slowly. She reaches her hand out and tentatively touches its frame, like it might still be hot.

“Not going to find gas in there,” I tell her.

“There’s a body.” Her voice is scratchy. She clears her throat and rubs her forehead and I see how tired I feel in how she looks. There’s something so weary in the way she holds herself, slouched like one of those Cortege Elementary School kids I’d see walking home from school, carrying backpacks bigger than they were.

“Let’s just find a place to sleep,” I say.

“If the town is overrun, we’ll have to …”

She trails off. Any other person I’d think the words she’s not saying are keep going. I want them to be the words she’s not saying. I wait for her to come back to me but she doesn’t, so I walk over to her, to where the body is. It’s wedged under the flipped SUV’s roof, burned alive. Head mostly gone. The parts of it that haven’t been ravaged are slowly disappearing back into the earth. There’s an arm reaching across the dirt, a hand, and the few fingers left on it are pointing nowhere. Keep going.

Sloane turns the flare over in her hands, silently mouthing the instructions printed on its side. I make my way into Fairfield at a crawl, trying, impossibly, to tiptoe with a car. I have my window rolled down and so does she, so we can hear—anything. Other survivors maybe, or more likely, something much worse.

The town reveals itself to us slowly, first in houses that look like the hearts were ripped right out of them. The destruction isn’t like a natural disaster, not nature reclaiming what we stole, oh no. Symptoms of this disease—whatever it is—are everywhere, making a joke out of the lives we lived and will never live again. Downed telephone poles, smashed mailboxes, broken windows, and overgrown lawns. White picket fences in shambles. More evidence of fire, foundations where houses used to be and one is still hot, sending faint gray curls of smoke into the air. I wonder what happened there, if it was an epic end to someone else’s story.

There are bodies scattershot all over, the truly dead. Either infected that got finished by the living, or the living that that took care of themselves before they got the chance to turn. And blood. Blood is here, everywhere. Doors flung wide open, an invitation to anyone brave enough to cross their thresholds. The first car I see is on its side and I think maybe—but the tank is against the road. We move past a house with a desiccated corpse of a dog next to its flattened doghouse. The quiet is eerie, the absence of the living dead. I’m no stranger to this kind of silence and I’m almost ready to believe not seeing the infected is worse than seeing them because at least wherever they are, you know where you shouldn’t be.

“They wait, now.” Sloane’s words curdle my guts. They echo in my head in Mr. Baxter’s voice. If they can’t find life, they seem to wait for it … it’s quieter, but it’s not safer. But the infected didn’t kill Baxter. We did. I wonder if that’s why everything’s gone so wrong since then, all we’ve lost. My dad always said we’re at the mercy of something greater than ourselves and whatever humanity we don’t show to others, we pay for. We’re paying for.

Sloane’s hand goes to my arm.

“What?”

She’s staring ahead, at a dirty wooden sign nailed to a still-intact telephone pole. The black lettering swallows everything else until it’s the only thing I see.

SHELTER →

My stomach lurches, doesn’t know how to hold the hope that’s suddenly settled there.

Shelter.

“You think it’s for real?” I ask.

Or maybe it’s just a long-broken promise. But I guess there’s only one way to find out. She lets go of my arm and I round the corner, following the arrow. We pass three buildings, businesses. A used bookstore. Paperback carnage. Books ripped apart, spines broken, pages everywhere. Stories so far past their usefulness. After the bookstore is a butcher shop. The bones of some dead animal, long stripped of its meat, hang in the broken window, dry and sun-bleached. I see bloodstains on white tiles. After that, a Laundromat. Dented metal machines, broken glass, and a mess of … I don’t know what on the floor. It makes my stomach turn again, whatever it is—or isn’t—anymore.

The street gets thick with cars after that and if ours were any wider, we’d be fucked, we’d be walking through this. I wonder if we should stop and try siphoning from some of them, just in case, but the sun’s nearly gone now, and we wouldn’t see anything coming.

“Look,” Sloane says and she points to another sign on the next corner with that same word painted on it. SHELTER. Another arrow. Right. “It could just be bodies by now.”

“Rayford might be too,” I say. “And then it’d just be us.”

She doesn’t say anything. I turn the corner and there’s another sign on another telephone pole but this one says SHELTER AHEAD and I press hard on the gas and then Sloane says, “Rhys—” and it’s not my name, it’s a warning.

By the time I realize it, it’s too late.

The entire town must be here.

Here. A war was lost here, its victors still here, gazing at what’s left of the battlefield. Their backs are to us and church, church is in my head. I remember standing for the hymns and all those people in front of me, backs to me, and I couldn’t see their faces but I knew.

I knew they were opening their mouths.

I turn to stone. I want to preserve us as long as possible. Do not move, do not make a sound. Let them keep their backs to us, let us quietly drift away somehow. But that’s impossible because we’ve already announced our arrival.

And they have opened their mouths.

They swarm the car before I can do anything and all I see is what’s left of gray skin and black veins and every shade of red.

Sloane goes for the crowbar and I think the window when the hands start coming through it, fingers clawing at my chest, digging into my shirt, digging into me. I yell and they dig deeper, determined to keep me screaming so they can be sure I’m still a living thing.

I push back at the hands on me, into the unnatural softness of decaying skin. I yell, and they screech back. Over that ugly-thin sound, I hear Sloane’s startled cry. I turn to her and she’s got the crowbar in one of them. There’s too much give and it goes right through the thing’s face and when it falls back, the crowbar goes with it.

I remember the rest of my body.

I press my foot down on the gas but there’s no clean escape when we have to push through so many dead. The loud awful thuds of them meeting the car overwhelms us. Sloane’s side mirror goes. One of them gets ahold of a windshield wiper. Piece by piece, the only thing between us and them is disappearing.

“Come on,” I tell the car. “Come on.”

It moves forward against all odds and when we’re finally free of the bodies enough to pick up speed, the infected follow, follow, follow because death doesn’t stop, it never stops. The car squeals around the corner, and I reach out and touch Sloane, grabbing at her shoulder and I’m saying, “Okay?” Like that time my dad and I got in a car accident. The car flipped and rolled and when it was done rolling, his arm stretched protectively across my chest and he just kept asking over and over, Okay? And he didn’t stop until I told him the truth, no, not okay, maybe but still here.

“Are you bitten? Sloane, are you bitten?”

She pushes my hand away and I glance down at myself, do my best to take stock while I keep driving. The front of me is stained, all stained with them. I want to rip off my shirt. I hold an arm out, then the other, and I see nothing. No bites. Touch my neck, every place they could have sunk their teeth that I wouldn’t have noticed because of the adrenaline coursing through me. Once I’m sure I’m fine, I fight the instinct that wants to go back and crush them all with my bare hands because why couldn’t I, how could I not when they’re dead.

“I lost the crowbar,” Sloane whispers.

“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re still here. It’s okay.”

Slowly, our breathing evens out, our pulses settle. I keep checking the mirror. We woke up the town, I think. The dead are coming out of their hiding places, moving down streets, seeking out us intruders. They scrabble after the car.

This is their world now. We don’t get to be in it for free.

We reach the other end of Fairfield and the town sign this side of it is still in one piece. Thank you for visiting! Come again! Fuck this place. I glance at it in the rearview and there’s the mural, a still lake and the sun setting into it. But across the sun’s golden, wavy rays, splashed in black paint, is the word OVERRUN.

“There,” Sloane says. “Look—”

“What?” My voice cracks.

We haven’t spoken in a while.

“The house,” she says. “There’s a car …”

I peer into the darkness. My eyelids are so heavy, tank so close to empty. I see what she’s pointing at, a house in the distance. I see a car there too. People? Would people be there? And if not people, the dead? Can we risk it? Can we not?

I’ve got a million questions and I want to bash them all out of my head.

“I’ll drive up,” I say. “If there’s anything there, I’ll draw it out with the car. If there’s too many, we’ll just turn around and … keep going.”

I turn off the main road and drive up the dirt lane to the house. There’s a yellow Prius parked there, the front of it a little crumpled in, and it’s so strange to me, to see it just left like that because it still looks like it might run. Our car’s headlights cast a cold glow over the house, which is some kind of visual contradiction. It looks modern and outdated at the same time. Someone’s fixer-upper. New white siding but the front porch needs work. The windows on the first floor are boarded up. All of them.

Someone’s been hiding out here.

I’m not so stupid to get hopeful again, not after what happened with Fairfield. I circle the place a few times, grind the wheels into the ground, let them make noise into the night. When that draws nothing, I lean lightly on the horn and then I idle.

Still nothing. Living or dead.

“If there were survivors, they could’ve left for Rayford,” I say.

Sloane gets out of the car and by the time I reach her, she’s halfway up the walk to the porch. I grab her by the arm and yank her back, hissing her name. I don’t know what the fuck she thinks she’s doing. She stares at me, her face so white it casts its own light, I swear, and she sways a little. She’s got that glazed look of the deeply tired and I let her go because I understand it. My bones understand it. It’s the kind of tired where the thing you need is rest and the most you can hope for is sleep. But I’ll take it, shutting off for a while, even if it means I wake up bone-weary again tomorrow. I glance at the house.

“Wait here.”

I go back to the car and grab the aluminum baseball bat I took from the school. I hold it tightly and step onto the porch. It groans under my feet, like it’s long forgotten the weight of human steps. I stand at the front door and grimace at the bloody scratches across it. Fingernail marks. Lots of them. The infected were here, even if they’re not anymore. I knock, feeling absurd. No one comes. Nothing bad, nothing good. I jiggle the handle. Locked.

Damn.

I move to the window next to it. I pull at one of the boards. Really nailed in. This is when a crowbar would be good, but we don’t have one anymore. I turn to Sloane.

“Do you have a credit card or something?” I ask because who wouldn’t have a credit card handy during the zombie fucking apocalypse.

She shakes her head and I rest mine against one of the wooden boards keeping us from climbing in through the window. I think of my wallet, still at home on my nightstand and my parents—still at home too. After a while, I gather the will to face her.

“Cary showed me how to break in, if the lock’s right. I just need something thin like a credit card I can slip in between the door and the frame, so I can get it unlocked.”

“Oh,” Sloane says. “Maybe …”

She heads back to the car and rummages around the front seat. She returns with two things: an AAA membership card and a plastic employee badge. I stare at the badge, at the grainy photo on it. Her father, a burly-looking guy. This is the man who put his fists to her. I wonder if I would be afraid of him if I passed him on the street. He’s the head of a human resources department. What a joke.

“You don’t look like him,” I tell her.

She opens her mouth—but her jaw just hangs there like the words left her quicker than she had them. I hand the badge back to her. The membership card should be good enough. I turn to the house and slide it in the crack between the door and door frame, hoping for a spring bolt because if it’s not a spring bolt, we’re as fucked as we were when we started. I push in, meeting a little resistance and then start bending the card. Please work. Please, please work …

“I know I don’t,” Sloane says at my back.

While I try to get the door open all the sounds I took for granted before the world ended fill my head. Bugs humming. The wind rustling the leaves of nearby trees. Water? I think I hear rushing water not so far away and I remember the Danforth River cuts right through this area. Should be just beyond the trees past the house, if I can hear it from here. And then the sound of the lock … giving. Thank God. I open the door and hit something heavy on the other side.

“I need you,” I say.

She helps me push on the barricaded door and I realize how weak we’ve become after a month in that school, eating, sleeping, and waiting. The furniture blocking the door scratches against the floor inside and then it finally gives, just enough for us to squeeze through.

“Okay,” I say. We retrieve our things from the car, the backpacks we’ve carried with us. They’re filled with what little food and clothes and water we took from Sloane’s house before we left. We grab the flare, flashlight, and the baseball bat. We slide them in through the door’s narrow opening and follow after, holding our breath so we can inch through.

The darkness hits us a second after the smell.

Something’s dead in here.

Sloane coughs and I turn the flashlight on, lighting the room we’ve found ourselves in. It’s a kitchen divided by a hall that opens up to a living room where there’s a couch and a recliner and God, I want them both. I run the flashlight over the makeshift barricade that was holding the door in place. A hefty old refrigerator. I turn back to the house.

“Hello?” I call.

Any infected would come running for that.

We wait.

Nothing.

But something’s rotting in this place. Maybe an animal? Optimistic. Sloane follows me to the kitchen sink. I twist one of the faucets and we jump when a stream of water pours out. I listen to the weird wet rattle of it touching down.

“A well, maybe?” I have no idea. I move to turn it off but Sloane stops me, stares at it for a minute like … she doesn’t explain. I let her have it for as long as I can stand it. The sound of it is unsettling. Too wrong because it’s too good.

“We’ve got to make sure it’s safe,” I say. “Figure out what stinks.”

We go through the downstairs quietly, the flashlight’s lonely beam guiding us. I freak myself out when it makes shadows, my mind turning them into monsters. There’s not much to this part of the house. The kitchen, the living room, a pantry, a laundry room with a very tiny bathroom attached. Tomorrow we’ll be hungry but for now the aim is sleep. It’s the only thing on my mind. What that couch would feel like, my body sprawled across it … I press forward. There’s a back door barricaded by an old armoire full of useless junk to weight it down and just before that door, a set of stairs. The smell’s definitely coming from upstairs.

“Hello?” I call again, just to be sure.

Nothing.

I take the first step.

The stairs creak all the way up, every single one. When I reach the landing, Sloane bumps into me and I’m so tense, I almost raise the bat to her and I’m glad I don’t do that. We stand in the hallway, side by side. There are four doors up here and they’re all closed.

“You stay behind me,” I tell her.

Now is not about gathering courage, it’s about staying one step ahead of my fear. I push the first door open fast, let it swing wide into nothingness. The flashlight reveals an empty bathroom with a door leading into the next room down. Sloane keeps behind me, close, but she’s so quiet I can’t even hear her breathing. I stare at the door and then I press my ear against it. Silence. I push it open slowly.

It’s a master bedroom and it’s empty and so bizarrely, cleanly kept. The windows aren’t barricaded, too far up to be breached. There’s a bed with comfortable-looking pillows and a rumpled duvet. Sloane runs her hand over it while I stare at the family portrait above one of the dressers. A woman, a man, and a boy and they all look alike. Red hair, pale skin.

“Two more,” I say. Sloane stops touching the comforter and follows me back into the hall. I choose the door across from the bedroom and decide I’ll open it on the silent count of three but I do it on two instead. It’s an office. A computer collects dust on a desk that’s collecting dust that’s covered in a few more family photos collecting dust. I streak a line through the dust on the desk with the tip of my finger.

One room left.

The end of the hall.

Sloane and I stand at the doorway, kept back by the smell. I pull my collar up over my nose. There’s no question this is where the death is. I glance at Sloane, but she’s not looking at me. Her eyes are on the ground, not scared, not anything.

I grip the door’s cold handle and open it.

It turns out to be the rotting body of the father on his son’s bed, his wrists cut straight up and down. The blood of him is dried and black across the sheets and floor. Bled out. There’s no other family with him and I guess that must be his reason why.

I turn away, can’t meet Sloane’s eyes when I do.

I close the door.

We take turns in the bathroom, Sloane and I. We clean ourselves. We change clothes. We push the fridge back in front of the door downstairs, making sure it’s firmly in place. At first, we think we’ll sleep on the couch, as far away from the smell as we can get, but it turns out we’re willing to suffer close to the rot just for that familiar, comforting sensation of bed. We go into the bedroom and I take the family portrait down before we pull the covers back and claim the mattress. Sloane keeps close to her edge and I keep close to mine.

Get your mother, Rhys. This place isn’t safe—

My only boy.

I don’t want to hurt you.

I could’ve been drowning the way I choke awake. Suffocating on the silence. I hack it out of my lungs, clear my throat. I know I didn’t sleep myself into a different night, so this must be the same one. Got settled into it long enough for every muscle in my body to start working against me, though. My legs, my arms, my back, all screaming. I push my head into my pillow and try to block it out enough to get back to sleep but then I feel the space beside me.

Times like these, you go so far out of your way to assure yourself you’re not alone. You memorize the person you’re with: the way they breathe, the way they move, the warmth of their body. All these things, you reach for every second of the day and when they’re gone, you don’t even have to open your eyes to know it.

She’s gone.

I sit up, fumbling for the flashlight, turn it on, washing the room out in its weak glow and she’s not there. I throw the covers off me and get out of bed, shivering as my bare feet meet the cold floor. I make my way over to the bathroom door.

“Sloane?”

Nothing. I open the door and she’s not there. I slip out of the bedroom and it’s sickeningly quiet against that sickening smell. Moonlight slivers through the curtained window at the end of the hall, turning everything blue. I know where she is. I wish I didn’t. I find her in that room with the body. She’s sitting on the floor and she’s staring at it. She doesn’t move when I step in. I watch her for a long minute, watch her until I see the slow, subtle rise of her shoulders. It tells me she’s breathing. I approach her slowly until I can just make out her face in the dark. She’s staring at the man, his long-open, emptied wrists. Her eyes are wide, unseeing—so unseeing that at first, I think I imagined her breathing.

“Sloane,” I say.

She doesn’t answer. She keeps her eyes on the body. She’s pale and blank. I crouch down in front of her, blocking her view and she doesn’t even notice the interruption. It’s like she can see through me, to him. I reach for her hand and that’s when I notice the razor blade in it.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I found it,” she says.

I grab her wrists, both of them. Veins intact. The blade falls to the floor in the process. I shine the light on it, see its rusty edge. Old blood. But his, not hers.

She nods at the man.

“What do you think of that?”

“Coward,” I say.

“Trace too?”

“Even him,” I say and I think about him, putting that gun under his chin and pulling the trigger. I wasn’t in the room when it happened, but I saw what was left. “It’s selfish. It’s a sin.”

“Oh. Well, that changes everything,” she says and I stare at the body while I try to think of something to say that makes the difference.

“Why did you make me stop?” I ask.

“What?”

“For the infected girl, on the way out of Cortege.”

“I thought …” She trails off. “I don’t know.”

I exhale and then I settle down beside her, the side of my leg touching hers. “Look, Sloane, I get it. I do. It’s like being … it’s like standing between glass, the grief. And behind you is everything like it was and ahead of you is—”

“Nothing,” she finishes. “There’s nothing left.”

“We’re left,” I say. “That’s something. And you must believe it because every time you’ve had a choice, you kept going.” I stare at the man, wishing I could close his wrists, stitch them shut. “But maybe you don’t realize you’re doing it because you’ve spent so long telling yourself you can’t.”

I rub my face, missing the bed. After a while, she speaks.

“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 shift 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.

“Sloane.” My voice is too weak. I try again. “Sloane—”

“Shut up.”

I start coughing. It sends the pain in my skull up to ten. My vision blurs. When I can see again, a man is standing over me. He’s got a gun pointed at my face.

“I won’t hurt you unless you give me a reason to.”

“I won’t,” I rasp.

He lowers the gun. “You awake now? For real?”

“Think so.”

“Good.”

He’s a white guy. Thick all around. Not exactly big, but beefy in the kind of way I’d be no match for on a good day, let alone this one. He has brown hair, not short and not long, and a wiry brown beard, mottled with gray. His face is full of lines.

“I’m not sure what you remember. I pulled you out of the river this morning. You’ve been in and out but I don’t think most of it stuck. You don’t look so messed up now, though.”

“Where am I?”

“My campsite,” he says. I try to sit up and everything starts spinning again. The man puts a hand on my shoulder and forces me back. “Don’t think you’re ready for that.”

“Where’s Sloane?”

“You’ve been saying that name. Not yours?”

“No. She’s—she’s a girl. She’s with me.”

“Didn’t find a girl with you.”

I don’t know this guy from Adam, but I know he’s not lying. My throat tightens. Didn’t find a girl with me. Didn’t find her with me and what does that mean.

“You didn’t find a girl?”

“No.”

It means she’s probably dead, Rhys.

One way or another.

I press my hand over my eyes and dig my fingertips into the bruised and swollen one just to feel something other than—she can’t be dead. She can’t be.

“You sure—” I fight that pull backward, that feeling of everything I should have done differently. “You sure there wasn’t a girl somewhere?”

“Not that I saw.”

A tear slides down the side of my face and I wipe it away, but there’s another quick to follow, and another after that, because all I can see is Sloane, the girl in the school, the girl in the school who trusted me. A door closes inside me.

She can’t be dead. That part can’t be over.

I try to breathe through it but I can’t. I curl on my side, gasping, because there’s nothing else my body knows how to do and the man says, “Easy,” and then “easy, dammit.” His hands are at my shoulders. He keeps them there until my lungs are working right.

“River tore you up.” His voice skirts the edges of my loss. “Scrambled your egg, cut you up some, and bruised you even more than that. That said, could’ve been a lot worse, that current, this time of year. Where’d you come from?”

“Fairfield,” I say. It’s harder for me to skirt those same edges. I squeeze my eye shut and I see her and I open it again. I swallow. “Fairfield …”

“Fairfield’s overrun. That whole area is crawling with ’em.”

“I know. That’s how I ended up in the river.”

“Well, you’re a lucky son of a bitch then. You’re pretty far from where you started.”

“You really didn’t find a girl?”

“Only found you.”

“And what’s—what’s going to happen to me?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “We’re heading out tomorrow. Didn’t feel right leaving you alive and defenseless, though. These woods are safer than Fairfield, but that’s not saying much.”

“But—”

A crackling sound interrupts us, something moving in the woods. The man brings his finger to his mouth and then draws his gun, his eyes on the trees.

I stare at the stars, no moon in sight. My mother, my father, Grace, Harrison, Trace, Cary. Sloane. But not me. Not me. And what am I. Lucky son of a bitch. I hurt, every single cut and bruise singing its song on my skin. I try not to start crying again, don’t want to be weak, even though there’s no one I care about left alive to see it if I am.

The man finally decides it’s safe enough.

He says, “Just a minute,” and goes into the tent and when he comes back out he’s got a package in his hand. “Get yourself sittin’. I got an MRE here. I’ll get it going for you.”

It takes a lot to get myself upright. I could use help, but I’m too proud to ask for it. I get it in the end, though, when I almost pitch forward and eat the flames of the campfire.

The man props me up against a tree. I stare at the fire until he hands me a plastic pouch and spoon. It’s so warm. I dip the spoon in the open top and watch something white and creamy ooze off.

“Pork sausage and gravy,” he says.

“Thank you.”

My hand shakes when I bring it to my mouth. It tastes—good. Warm and rich and maybe better than it actually is because in the school we didn’t have this kind of luxury. Only had stale, packaged food that wasn’t aspiring to be … something. The man stays standing while I eat, watching the dark. The sausage bites are meaty, satisfying, and it reminds me of things that are good. I want Sloane here. I want her to be reminded of it too.

“Don’t get yourself too worked up to finish that,” he says because it must be all over my face. “Where were you headed?”

“Rayford.”

“Why would you want to go there?”

“Voice on the radio said to.”

“What makes you think Rayford is still standing?”

My heart stops. “It’s not?”

“Nothing is.” He shrugs. “Why should it be any different?”

“It’s the government,” I say and he snorts. “We needed somewhere to go. We were in a school … holed up in a high school. It got bad. We didn’t know what else to do.”

“You and the girl?”

“My group—”

“Group?” His voice is sharp. “You’re with a group? They looking for you?”

“No. We lost them and then it was just me and … me and her.” I stare at my hands. My hands, holding food. I make myself say her name. “Sloane.”

“How many people you lost?” he asks after a second.

God. Numbers heavy in my mind will be even heavier off my tongue. I don’t know what’s worse, holding their names, or turning them into a body count.

“Seven.”

He whistles, impressed.

“Is this your place?” I ask. “You stay out here?”

“It’s a stop along the way.”

“Where you headed?”

“Nowhere you’ve earned,” he says, like we got to the part where I asked him to take me with him and my face heats up because I might’ve been working my way to it. “This isn’t a time for strangers. I’m sure you know that.”

“My name is Rhys Moreno,” I say. “I’m seventeen. I lost my mom and dad.”

He doesn’t offer me anything for it.

“Wake up.”

The cut of his voice has my body upright before I even really know what’s going on. The fire is out and smoldering. The sun is slowly climbing its way up the white sky. It’s a testament to how exhausted I was that I didn’t hear him moving around, didn’t hear him put the fire out. If he hadn’t been here, I could’ve been killed, slept through my own devouring. I rub my eyes, forgetting about the busted one. That fucking hurts. I suck a breath in through my teeth. My clothes feel scratchy and gross, like they dried to my skin. I’m sure they did.

“What?” I ask.

“Can you stand?”

I untangle myself from the bag, and that takes some doing. I loosen the cords, unzip the zipper, wriggle out, and get my feet under me. By the time I’m upright, I’m sweaty and my head is pounding. I lean against the nearest tree for support, but at least I’m standing. The man eyes me. In the light, his face looks worse. Dirtier and weatherworn.

“That was pathetic,” he says.

“Well, I guess that’s my problem.”

“I guess it is.”

I take in the patch of land he’s carved out for himself. The drowned fire and the tent, which is on the small side and a shade of green that matches our surroundings. There’s someone in that tent. Listening for infected, your senses get a little sharper. Never sharp enough, though. I’m about to ask who it is, when he asks me what I’m thinking about.

I’m thinking I don’t ask for a lot. It wouldn’t have been that hard for Sloane to end up on the same muddy patch of bank I did. For us both to be here right now.

But I’m thinking that even if she didn’t—she doesn’t have to be dead.

“I gotta look for the girl I lost,” I say.

He raises his eyebrow. “Think she made it?”

“I don’t know but I have to try to find her,” I say. I reach into my waistband and realize—shit. “Was there a gun on me? Did you take it? I had a gun …”

“No gun on you.”

“Fuck.” I bury my face in my hands and after I’ve absorbed this latest loss, I cast around until I find a … stick. I pick it up. It’s got a little heft to it. Maybe. I feel the man’s eyes on me and I must look too pathetic for the man to even say so this time. “Which—which way’s where I came from?”

He looks me up and down. “You’re serious.”

“She’s the last thing I got left.”

He studies me a long time, his arms crossed. Finally, he shakes his head like I’m an idiot. “You follow the river south, she might be that way. In a few days—and that’s if you run into no trouble—you’ll get to Riverside. You know the way to Rayford from there?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“We’re headed that way. We’re not going to Rayford, but we’ll be sharing the same path for a bit.” He pauses. “Nobody’d make it through Fairfield in one piece on luck alone. We were talking while you were out. You can travel with us until you hit Riverside and then we’ll separate. The closer we get to that town the more infected there’s gonna be. Safety in numbers.”

But he’s not offering out of the goodness of his heart. I think he wants a body if he needs one. That’s okay, because I think I want one too.

“Who’s we?” I ask.

He sizes me up again, or maybe he never stopped. Runs his tongue over his teeth and then he says, “Lisa.” There’s movement inside the tent. After a moment, a woman steps out and she’s got long brown hair past her shoulders that makes me think Sloane, even though it couldn’t possibly be her. My heart gets right in my throat. This woman is in her thirties, younger than the man. She’s fair-skinned with brown eyes. She’s wearing khaki pants and a black vest over a long-sleeve shirt.

She’s got a kid in her arms.

It’s a girl, maybe four. The girl’s hair is a mess of brown curls, fat little body in an outfit that mirrors her mother’s. Her head rests in the crook of Lisa’s neck and she stares at me with the palest blue eyes. I have never seen a more desperate symbol of hope since the world ended and I’ve never felt the world more desperate to make a mockery of it.

The only thing I’ve got inside me for this is horror.

They have a kid.

These poor fucking saps.

“This is my wife, Lisa, and our daughter, Ainsley.”

Lisa sets Ainsley on the ground, but Ainsley clings close to Lisa’s leg. Her eyes widen as she takes in my face. I remember how beat up I am and it probably gives me all the makings of a monster to someone as small as her. Part of me hopes I’m the only monster she’s met so far.

“Hi, Rhys,” Lisa says.

“Hi,” I say and then, to Ainsley. “Hi, there.”

Ainsley presses her head into Lisa’s thigh.

“I’m Jess,” the man says.

Jess.

They dismantle their campsite, fit it in two bags. Ridiculously efficient. Jess throws me an energy bar and calls it breakfast and tells me I better keep up. I’m more than ready to go. Lisa gets Ainsley ready, tying impossibly tiny shoelaces on impossibly tiny shoes on impossibly tiny feet. The kid is quiet in a way no kid should ever be quiet. She’s already learned.

“How long you been out here?” Jess asks, hefting his pack onto his shoulders. “There any place she might go back to, if she survived?”

“A few days,” I say. “And I don’t think so. We were just running.”

“You’ve only been out in this for a few days?”

“I told you. We were in a school like from a week after it started.”

“So you found shelter,” he says. “You have food there? Water?”

“Yeah.”

“And you left. Why the hell would you do that?”

“Just stupid, I guess,” I mutter, feeling it. “What, you been camping this whole time?”

He laughs a little. “Sure.”

“And how’s that better than leaving a school?”

“We’re headed somewhere safe,” he says, looking a little too proud. Or maybe I’m just jealous. “But unlike you, we’re not going to leave when we get there.”

“We should go,” Lisa says abruptly. “We’ve been here long enough.”

“Right,” Jess says. “I just want to make a few things clear to our add-on here.” I bite back the urge to ask him if he’s sure he’s not the one joining me. “I lead. Once we get moving, we’re quiet. Don’t speak unless you have to. You see infected, don’t make a fucking sound. This isn’t a Romero movie. We don’t fight unless we have to. We don’t engage. They’re too fast. We find a different way around. The only time you get close is when you’ve got no choice.”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

“Give him something,” Lisa says.

Jess looks at her. “We just met him and you want to arm him?”

“Give him something you can shoot out of his hands then.” She rolls her eyes. “You don’t want that to be the difference out here, do you?”

He has to think about that, thinks about it too long. Makes me impatient. I say, “I just want to find Sloane. That’s all. I’m not going to make trouble for you.”

“That remains to be seen.” He goes into his pack. “You put any of my family in danger and the dead will be the least of your worries. Understood?”

“Understood,” I say.

He hands me a hunting knife.

We walk for hours, through the trees, quietly following the river just beyond them—my eyes seeking but never finding Sloane—when my body starts quitting on me. My first real workout in a long time. Brief moments of running from the dead don’t count. All those weeks in the school sitting on my ass and doing nothing are catching up with me. My feet are blistered. My muscles and my joints burn. My head is killing me. Every battered part of me complains and it’s nauseating. I don’t say anything when my gut starts to revolt, I just end up hunched over beside a birch tree, barfing up the food I was so glad to have.

“You damned fool,” Jess says over the sound of my retching, and I hope, dimly, that Sloane made it out of the water in better shape than I did, which is quickly followed by the thought she might not have made it out at all, and I heave again. “Say something if you feel like that.”

I straighten, shaking all over. “You told me we had to be quiet.”

“Fool,” he repeats and Lisa says, go easy. “Fine. Break.”

“We need one too anyway,” she says and I decide to like Lisa.

I sit away from my puddle of vomit, and rest my chin in my hands. Jess nudges me a second later, with his canteen. I take it from him and drink. Rub my forehead. I’m sweaty too, and it’s not exactly warm out. I stare down at myself, my shitty post-river clothes and my running shoes that haven’t felt right since I put them on. The only thing that feels sure about me is the knife but I don’t want to get close enough to an infected to test that out. Jess and Lisa, every time I look at them, they make more and less sense. Lisa takes Ainsley a few feet away from us so they can both go to the bathroom. I turn my head. It’s all so close and it can’t be any other way. Jess keeps watch, a rigidness about him that should be about me, but I can’t seem to make it happen.

“Where were you before?” I ask.

“Milhaven,” he says.

Milhaven’s a city. I’m not exactly sure how far it is but I know it’s far, because whenever Milhaven managed to make itself part of any conversation, you could hear its distance in the tone of the person talking about it. Milhaven. Far enough to be a getaway, maybe, if you were desperate for one.

“You been making your way from Milhaven to wherever on foot?”

“We’ve been moving since it started. We had a vehicle for a while and then we didn’t,” he says. “Won’t try for one of those again. Staying on roads is trouble. We went deeper into the woods and we run into a lot less of it now.” Lisa and Ainsley come back. “You about ready?”

“Uh.” I get to my feet slowly. “Yeah …”

“No, he’s not,” Lisa says. “Look at him. He’s exhausted. We need to fill up on water, anyway, and Ainsley’s getting pretty tired.”

“You tired?” Jess asks her. Ainsley stares at her father and, after a long moment of thinking about it, nods. That’s the deciding factor. Not the concussed boy, but the toddler who probably doesn’t even really know what she’s been asked. I don’t know. I don’t know shit about kids. Jess turns to Lisa. “You got an hour. We’re not setting up here for the night. We can get a little farther.”

Lisa nods. “That’s fine.”

I sit back down and I miss my bed. Jess circles us, checking the area, cocking his head, listening. The river’s still audible, a constant reminder that I should be looking for Sloane and not sitting on my ass, and if I wasn’t so weak, I would be. But beyond that, there’s nothing. No sound of infected. When he’s certain enough of our surroundings, Jess turns back to me.

“Look at you out here with all this nothing for it,” he says, sounding halfway amused. “You got no gear. Your shoes are shit for hiking—”

“Watch your mouth,” Lisa says.

“There’s nothing I can do about it now,” I tell him.

“I suppose not.” Jess digs into his pack and hands me a small shovel. “Dig two holes, ’bout sixteen inches wide, a foot deep. Tunnel one through to the other. Understand?”

“Dakota fire pit?”

“Yeah. You done it before?”

“I’ve been camping before.”

“Lisa, you want to round up some firewood? Ainsley, you stay close to me.”

I start working the dirt. The ground is hard, soil difficult to shift. It gets my hands good and messy. The feel of the earth reminds me of my father. The camping trips he took me on. I was so fucking abysmal at it, just being in the wilderness, and he let me know. He loved telling the story about the trip we went on when I was five. I couldn’t stop poking the fire. When he saw me enthralled with a burning stick, he told me to get rid of it and I threw it into the woods, alight. Almost burned the whole goddamn forest down. I’d give anything to hear him tell it again. It hits me: that’s going to die with me, that story. My story. My family, everyone in the school, their stories too—I’m the last person who could tell them and if I die, they’re gone.

“Good work,” Jess murmurs when I finish. I wipe my hands on my jeans and it doesn’t do much to clean them and the running water in the house in Fairfield feels like too much of a memory now. “Lisa, start the fire. Rhys and I will collect some water.”

“Come back,” Lisa says simply.

“I always do.”

We take a bag of water bottles and I follow him through the woods. With him ahead of me, I pay less attention to what’s around us, which is stupid but if he notices, he doesn’t say anything. Eventually, we reach the bank, follow it to the edge of the water, where he stops abruptly. I freeze. He looks at me and then he jerks his head, directing my attention across the river. I squint. Other side of it is a field. A group of infected are running through it.

The water’s between us and the current would take them if they saw us and tried to cross, but I keep still. I just watch, with Jess, the gracefully determined way they move. Their steps seem so heavy, but they’re so impossibly fast. They veer left, all of them, so sharp that—

“Are they chasing something?” I ask.

I step forward, trying to get a better look, but Jess holds his arm out, keeps me back. “It’s an animal, most likely.”

“How do you know?”

“If it wasn’t, we’d hear the screams.”

My stomach turns. “So what do we do?”

“They’re on the right side of the river,” he says. “But we shouldn’t stay here long. We’ll get the water, we’ll get some food in us, and then we’ll move out.”

We wait until they’re no longer in sight before we gather the water up and by the time we get it back to the camp, Lisa has a small pot hanging over the pit. The smoke and flame are only just visible from their holes. Jess pours the first bit of water we gathered into the pot and once it’s boiled, he tells Lisa to get the MREs and he goes through the process of preparing them. He opens them up, tossing the dried food our way. A stick of jerky for me, a packet of M&M’s for Ainsley, crackers for Lisa. Ainsley melts the candy in her hands and it gets all over her face. Lisa cleans it up with some of the towelettes from the MRE packs. Jess uses the clean water to activate the flameless ration pouches, for the meals themselves. They’ve got a whole rhythm here that I can only sit back and watch. By the time we’ve got chicken stew in front of us, I’m trying to get a handle on these people I’ve managed to find myself with.

“Were you in the army or something?” I ask.

Jess exchanges a glance with Lisa. “No.”

“You said you’ve been on the road since this started.” I gesture to the packs, the food. Everything. “That mean you been on the road like this since it started?”

“Yep.”

I look from him to her. “You … didn’t know this was going to happen, did you?”

“Not this exactly,” he says.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Watch your mouth,” Lisa tells me.

“We’re Preppers,”Jess says. “You know what they are?”

I know what Preppers are. I’ve seen those crazies on Discovery a few times. People getting ready for any kind of apocalypse like total ass—oh. Jess watches these thoughts cross my face, leans back looking all smug about it.

“You think the people laughing at us then are laughing at us now?”

“How long you been ready?” I ask.

“Working on this since the towers fell,” Jess replies. “My father died that day.”

“You were waiting for another terrorist attack?”

“What makes you think this isn’t one?” he asks. He spoons some stew into his mouth, swallows, and shrugs. “I was waiting for SHTF. Could be a terrorist attack or civil war, government going crazy, the economic collapse, a pandemic. Everything but zombies.”

“Wait,” I say, as it dawns on me. “So that means you’re headed to a bug-out location, doesn’t it? You got a place?”

Jess stares at the fire pit, nods.

“How do you know it’s still standing?”

“No one’s going to find it,” is all he says. “Made sure of it.”

I go back to my meal, trying to think how Sloane and I could win these people over. Because I’ll find her along the way—I will, and we’ll need a place. And if I don’t … I’ll still need one. It could be their place. And it’d be better than the school because at school, we didn’t have survivalists, we were just a bunch of kids who wanted to survive. I want these people. I want their walls.

“She’s quiet,” I say.

Lisa looks at me. She’s sitting on the ground with Ainsley in her lap. Ainsley digs through Lisa’s bag because I guess that’s what passes for kid entertainment around here. We walked until we started losing light faster than we were gaining ground and then Jess picked a spot for us to set up. I helped Lisa put the trip wires up around us. Before we hear that sick sound of the dead, we’ll hear bells chiming.

Jess pitched the tent, but I won’t be staying in it. They have a mat, a sleeping bag, and a bivy sack for me. Jess and Lisa will take turns on watch, but for now Lisa’s letting Ainsley wind down and then she’ll put her to bed with her father. Ainsley’s been distracting, but not for the reason most kids are. She doesn’t screech, doesn’t whine, doesn’t make any verbal demands for attention. She doesn’t talk. When she walks, she must have her hand held. If she’s not walking, she’s carried and whenever she’s carried, she twists her parent’s hair around her fingers and stares into the distance, her eyes intently scanning her surroundings.

“She’s my quiet girl,” Lisa says. She kisses the top of Ainsley’s head. “So how are you feeling?”

“I think I’ll be of more use to you tomorrow.”

She smiles politely. Doesn’t argue, doesn’t agree. After a second, Ainsley produces a small book. I glimpse its brightly colored cover in the dim light, but not its title. She holds it to herself like a kid would a prized stuffed animal.

“It was in the car,” Lisa says. “When we lost the car, we didn’t even know she managed to grab it to take with her …”

Ainsley holds the book out to me, surprising Lisa and me both. She wants me to read to her. I shake my head stupidly because I don’t know what else to do.

“Oh,” Lisa says softly.

She gently takes the book from Ainsley’s hands, then encloses her daughter in a hug, ducking her face against Ainsley’s curls so I can’t see it. If this was supposed to be story time, it never happens. Lisa stays frozen in that position for a long time, before finally taking Ainsley to the tent. When she returns, she doesn’t look at me. We sit in silence until Jess wakes up to take watch. He plants himself in the middle of the camp and stares into the darkness.

“How’s your head?” he asks.

“Down to a dull roar,” I admit.

He tells me to go to sleep. I feel this need to prove myself by keeping my eyes open. It doesn’t feel gracious, to close my eyes, but in the end, I can’t stay awake.

***

Get your mother, Rhys. This place isn’t safe—

My only boy.

I don’t want to hurt you.

What can you want from this?

The way Sloane’s voice works its way into my head, I’d swear her mouth was right next to my ear. I open my eyes and expect her to be there and she’s not. I expect to be in the school and I’m not. I want to be at home and I never am.

The sky isn’t quite the dark it should be, so morning must be on its way. Jess is on the ground, watching me. I exhale. I feel better. Well. Relatively. The ground’s hard under the sleeping bag, does no favors for a body that’s taken on more than its fair share of abuse in the last couple days, but I felt worse then, so I must be better now.

“I was about to wake you up,” he says. “You were dreaming. Making noise.” He clears his throat. “Called out for your parents.”

“Oh,” I say. Cary told me I did that in the school sometimes, the dead of night. He was the only one who heard. Or if anyone else did, they didn’t say anything. He’d just nudge me in the ribs and tell me to shut the fuck up because he was trying to sleep, man like it was no big deal. It never felt like one when he did that, anyway.

“How’d your parents die?” Jess asks.

I stare at the ground, my lips pressed together, while his eyes stay on me. What he’s asking—he has to know what he’s asking me.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says. “But you don’t make much of a case for yourself, if you don’t. Unless you’re the reason they’re dead.”

“What kind of case do you think I’m trying to make?”

“Don’t act stupid.”

“I, uh …” My mouth is dry. “The first night. The house got overrun. Our house. One bit my dad and we locked—we … we holed up in their room, waiting for the police. He got cold. He turned. We didn’t know what was happening. He bit my mom.”

“You finish them?”

The last person I talked about this with was Sloane and I was sorry I did. It opened everything up. After, I kept seeing their deaths. I saw my hands and their deaths. A horror movie doesn’t look good in real life. People turn into nothing and the way they do is so messy and wet and red. It will make you so sick. You’ll discover you weren’t strong, that however hard you brought the weight down wasn’t enough. You’ll look at your father’s wrecked face and his mouth will still be moving, hungry. You’ll think nothing could be worse than that, so when your mother shows the first signs of turning, you won’t wait for it to happen. And then you’ll find you were wrong. There is something worse. The last thing the monster with your dad’s face sees is a hero—at least that’s what you’ll tell yourself. But your mom, she’ll just look at you. Her only boy. She’ll cry with every blow until she doesn’t anymore.

“I had to.”

“So your parents are dead and your girl’s gone,” he says after a while and I laugh in spite of myself. He looks at me like I’m crazy. “What’s funny about that?”

“It sounds like the most pathetic country song ever,” I say and then even he chuckles.

“You’re right. Sorry.” He gets up, stretching his legs. “Lisa says Ainsley wanted you to read to her earlier. She doesn’t even let us read to her.”

I don’t know what to make of that.

A sudden, distant noise in the woods turns Jess’s head in that direction. We’re still, not even breathing, waiting for it. Something. But there’s nothing, not this time.

“Hi, Ainsley,” I say, when she comes out of the tent with Lisa.

Because I am making a case for myself.

The kid startles at her name, or my saying it. She stares at her mother in wonder, like she needs confirmation she really heard it. This is what I know: Ainsley’s not just quiet. There’s something wrong with her. But I’m not stupid enough to ask after it. We eat a dry breakfast and pack up camp and move. It feels good to keep moving, to be looking for Sloane. It also feels bad to keep moving. The first time we stop for a short break, I find blood staining the heels of my socks, especially the left. Seems useless to bitch about it, so when Jess asks if we’re ready to head out, I say yes.

Keep going, keep looking.

My gait become increasingly uneven the less weight I’m able to put on my left foot and when Jess stops, I think it’s because he notices. But it’s not. He makes a gesture at Lisa and her eyes widen. She pulls Ainsley away, tiptoeing back. I’m about to open my mouth and ask but Jess raises his finger to his lips and then I hear it.

Once you know the sounds of teeth tearing into human flesh, the wet, sloppy noise of skin and organs rolling around an infected’s mouth, of fingers with the kind of hunger driving them enough to make it possible to rip a belly open and pull all its insides out, you don’t forget it. Jess looks at us and raises two fingers. He kneels down slowly and waves me forward. I make my way over and the little I stir the ground under my feet is too loud, too much. But the sounds never stop. I duck down beside Jess and he points. I see them, in the middle of a clearing. Two infected, feasting on a body. They’re older. Adults. A man and woman.

“Shit,” I breathe because I don’t know who they’re eating. Jess throws me a sharp look for talking, but I think a train could blow through here and the dead wouldn’t move for it because they won’t want to leave the table before everything is cleared from their plates.

I watch one yank out … God, intestines. The slick, red strand hangs sloppily from its hand, dragging in the dirt momentarily, and then moves to its mouth and I don’t think the dead feel anything that’s human, but I can only describe what I’m seeing in a human way. The dead man looks satisfied as he brings the guts to his closed lips, painting them red like it’s lipstick because he’s too excited to remember he needs to open up first. That doesn’t last long. Soon he’s chewing on them, gulping them down, and when he’s done, he’ll still be hungry.

Don’t let it be Sloane.

“I gotta see if it’s her,” I whisper.

It can’t be her.

Jess reaches into his waistband for his gun.

I look behind me, to see what Lisa’s doing. Her eyes are fixed on the dead. Ainsley stands beside her, but she’s not looking at any of it. She’s staring at something to her left. My gaze follow hers and I see what she’s seeing.

An old man.

His head is tilted, staring at Ainsley and Lisa with increasing understanding of what they have to offer. His shirt is covered in blood. His eyes are white. He opens his mouth and screams.

“Shit,” I say and I scramble to them, forgetting my bloody, torn-up heels. I reach Ainsley at the same time he does, barreling into her as he barrels into me. My body covers hers, keeps her safe, but just because I didn’t want to see a four-year-old get eaten today doesn’t mean I wanted to die for her, either. And then two things happen at once: Lisa starts screaming, pulls Ainsley out from under me, and the old man goes after the only thing left.

Everything fades out. All I can hear is my heart, nothing else, not even the rattling breaths and snarls of the man on top of me. He has that same frenzied response to meat the others did, doesn’t know which part of me he wants first, when there’s so much to choose from. He tears at my clothes, his fingernails digging into me and I push against him with one hand, reaching across the ground for the knife with the other, but I only feel dirt and nothing else. Fuck, fuck. I reach for his face and just miss his mouth. Grab him by both sides of the head and try to push him back and he’s so fucking strong for an old fucking dead person. I jam my thumbs in his eyes and I push as hard as I can, but nothing about that is as easy as it looks in the movies. His eyes start to give, start to fill under my fingernails, but it doesn’t hurt him, and if it doesn’t hurt him he’s not going to stop. I bring my legs up, using them to put more space between us and let one hand off his face, reaching out on my opposite side. My fingers curl around a—rock.

It takes everything to heave it against his face. I swear I hear his jawbone crack. He goes sideways and it’s all I need to scramble back from him. He recovers too goddamn fast and grabs my foot, pulling it toward him, and then I can hear everything. The snarling, the screeching, the screaming, my own voice yelling itself hoarse, and the loud bang of a gun gone off and I’m hoping it’s in this direction but it’s not. I kick out as hard as I can and my shoe comes off, but that’s what I need to be free. I trip myself to my feet and finally find the knife, glinting against dead leaves. I drive it into the old man’s head and he finally falls like he’s supposed to, and he stays down like he’s supposed to. I stumble back and everything else has gone to hell. Ainsley is cowering behind a tree, and those dead that were feasting before, they’ve been called away from the cold plate for a warm meal. Jess is keeping the woman back as best he can while trying to aim his gun. But the man has overwhelmed Lisa. She’s screaming for help and before I can get to her, the gun goes off, the woman crumples to the ground, the man rips out Lisa’s throat with his teeth, and then she crumples too.

Jess dispatches the man with his gun, another loud crack sent through the woods.

“Ainsley, stay where Rhys can see you, but face away from me,” Jess says in a voice that sounds much calmer than his shattered face looks. Ainsley understands. She turns around like she’s done this before. I edge closer to her, curling my socked toes into the cold ground.

Jess moves to his wife, who is on her back, twitching, drowning in her own blood. She brings her hand to her throat, clutches it as if she could stop it and I think that’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, her heart still beating hope enough to try to save herself, even like this.

“Goddammit,” Jess says weakly, trying pointlessly to pull her hand from her neck, like there’s something he can do. He knows that’s not what he has to do. He stares at her helplessly and everything that comes out of his mouth next is something he’s going to regret for not being meaningful enough later. “Goddammit, Lisa, what the fuck … why …”

He starts to cry, his whole body shaking. Lisa’s eyes are wild and she’s making the kind of sounds I’ll never forget, her voice trying to work its way around the part of her throat that’s been ripped out. Her lips are flecked with her own blood. She’s not going to make it much longer than this and then she’s going to turn. She moves her hand from her throat and all the blood she seemed to be holding back floods out. She grasps Jess’s shirt, twisting it in her fingers, and suddenly, I’m not here anymore, I’m back, a month ago, I’m in a bedroom. I don’t want to hurt you. My only boy. Jess moans, bringing me back to this here, this now. My face is wet.

“LisaLisaLisaLisaLisa,” he says, his voice stuffy with tears and snot. “Lisa. Look at me. I love you.”

He shoots her in the head.

***

I get my shoe back on. I keep my distance from Jess. There’s no time for a burial, but the leaving is so goddamn hard without one. I remember standing in my parents’ room before I finally climbed out the window because the dead were at their door and the door was giving way. Even with the mess of blood, their broken faces, I wanted to keep close to them because once you go, you can never go back. Jess kisses Lisa’s coat-covered face and calls Ainsley over. I stay where I am and watch him explain to her what has happened. I can’t make out the words, but his voice is low and soothing, and whatever he says is terrible and simple enough to understand because Ainsley throws herself into her father’s arms and stays there. He gets to his feet, holding her, and makes his way over to me. His eyes are watery.

“I’m really—”

“We have to get as far from this area as we can and find somewhere we can settle in for the night,” he says. “I need you to carry Lisa’s gear.”

“Okay.”

“Check that body, make sure it’s not anybody you know.”

“Right.”

I make my way slowly over to the body the first two infected were eating, the one I worried was Sloane’s. When I get there, my heart is racing, doesn’t think it can take one more tragedy but one more tragedy’s always on the way.

It’s a girl. But it’s not Sloane. It reminds me of Sloane. It’s like when we found her father. The girl’s middle is so eaten out, the upper and lower parts of her body are no longer really attached. I’m so relieved but I try not to show it. I don’t want to make Jess feel bad that I still might have something when he just lost so much. That’s the worst kind of envy. I felt it when Sloane thought Lily was still alive. I didn’t want her to have it because I wanted it so badly for myself.

“Is it her?” Jess asks behind me.

Before I can answer, the girl opens her eyes. I yelp and jump back. This cycle is endless. Her hands stretch out, begging after me. I would stab her in the head if I could trust there was no chance she could pull me toward her. But leaving her like this feels wrong. Before, I got stuck on whether or not they had souls and I don’t think they do. I think that part of her is free. I have to think that part of her is free. But it doesn’t change the fact she was someone, once.

“Leave it,” Jess says. “Let’s go.”

So we leave her reaching and screaming and we walk for hours. Lisa’s pack is heavy but I can’t complain because Jess carries his and he carries Ainsley, rarely setting her down and when he does, it’s not for long. I know it’s not easy on him, the physical weight. He winces and rubs his arms in those rare instances she’s out of them. Ainsley just clings to her father like he’s exactly what he is: the last thing she’s got left.

When night closes in on us, Jess says, “Here,” and we set up. It’s awful. I see the places Lisa filled so effortlessly and they just drive home the fact that Jess is no longer one-half of a well-oiled machine. I prepare the trip wires, but I fuck it up and Jess has to fix them for me. I help him pitch the tent and the things Lisa just knew how to do, he realizes I don’t and it takes twice as long as it did a day ago. I dig the fire pit while he gets water. He takes Ainsley with him and having no one at my back is terrifying. My brain invents noises, imagines eyes on me in the darkness. When Jess returns, we prepare some MREs but he can’t entice Ainsley to eat and I’m not so hungry myself. Jess eats, though, all of it.

“Can’t afford not to,” he says, when he notices me watching him scarf the last of it down. He gets to his feet, dusting off his jeans, and puts Ainsley into the tent. When he comes out, he goes straight into his pack and pulls out a flask. He holds it out to me—the smell of the liquor inside is sharp—but I shake my head. He takes a long pull off it.

“You saved my daughter today.”

“It was nothing.”

“Think that little of yourself?”

“No, I mean …” I trail off. “There are some things I just don’t want to live to see.”

“Yeah.” He nods thoughtfully and just as quickly, his face dissolves. He buries his head in his hands and I don’t know where to look. After a minute he says, “Just go.”

“What?” I’m afraid of what that means.

“Get in the tent, I don’t want … I’ll keep watch.” He shakes his head. “Get in the tent or get the fuck out of here. Your choice.”

I go into the tent. There’s a small solar lantern hanging from the top of it. Ainsley is sitting up in her sleeping bag. She has that book in her hands. She’s chewing on one corner of it. I take up space on the opposite side of the tent and listen to the sound of Jess unscrewing the flask’s cap again. I peel off my socks and stare at my shredded heels. Doesn’t look good but I don’t really feel it. I wonder how Sloane’s doing. I imagine her, out of the river, surviving. Her face. Cutting her way through the darkness, to me. I imagine it over and over again to take the place of everything else I’ve seen today.

After a while, Ainsley crawls up beside me and when I look, she’s holding the picture book out. I can make out the title now. Molly’s Picnic. I look at Ainsley. Every part of how she’s holding herself is petulant. She wants this story. It’s a weird as hell feeling, her wanting me to read to her, but after today, how can I deny her? I take the book and open it. On the first page, there’s an inscription.

To Ainsley, love Andrew

Andrew. I wonder what he’s doing now. I flip past the title page and it’s all bright colors and cartoon faces. It’s a story about a little girl named Molly who is getting ready for a picnic. Ainsley and I follow her from page to page as she decides what’s going to go into her picnic basket for a perfect day in the park, where all the other little children are playing, just waiting for her to join them. It’s not a fairy tale, but I start it with once upon a time anyway.

I wake up to a soft whump against my chest. I bolt upright, terrified out of my mind, and a shirt and jeans tumble into my lap. Jess stands in the tent opening, bleary-eyed and puffy-faced—definitely hungover—but relatively awake.

“Those will probably fit.”

I rub my eyes, only aggravating the left one a little and I realize I can see out of it. I turn my head. Ainsley’s not there, so she must be with Jess. I pull on the shirt and jeans. They’re a little loose, but they’re better than the stale, bloodstained clothes I’ve been wearing. They aren’t Jess’s, though, wouldn’t even begin to fit him and I can’t shake the feeling if I knew whose they were, I wouldn’t want to wear them.

I’m taking my time, getting ready to face him, when I hear the tinkling of the bells and then I can’t get outside fast enough. It’s only Jess taking down the trip wires. I’m an idiot. He nods to where Ainsley’s sitting on a blanket, getting cold cereal all down her front. There’s some jerky laid out for me, and next to it, a small selection of first-aid stuff.

“Noticed you limping yesterday,” he says. “Take care of it and I’ll get the tent down.”

I wonder where he’s put Lisa. Not her body—I know where that is. But where he’s put his wife, where he’s tucked her away so he can find the will to do something as simple as feed Ainsley breakfast or take a tent down. I wonder if all hearts are made with the same pockets for fear and pain and sadness. They must not be, or if they are, maybe we all don’t know how to use them. Because otherwise so many of our stories would have ended differently.

Soon, everything’s ready to go. The walking’s easier now that I’ve looked after my heels, go figure. Jess holds Ainsley’s hand, uses the other to carry his gun. He keeps tapping the trigger and then, after a couple of miles, glances at me and says, “I’ve got a map. When we stop, I’m going to show you where I’m headed.”

“Okay,” I say.

“It’s a cabin. It was over a decade in the making. Dead ain’t going to get through it. Reinforced doors and windows. There’s a safe room and a storage room with—well, we got close to five years’ worth of canned and dehydrated and freeze-dried food there, not accounting for any spoilage that might’ve happened since we last did inventory. Medical supplies. It was built to be self-sustaining too. We’ve been working our way to it for the last four weeks. It’s closer to us than you know.”

My stomach turns. “Where will you be?”

“Hopefully there with you.”

“What about Rayford?”

“Rayford is bullshit,” he says. “Every safe haven I’ve seen from Milhaven to here has fallen. I’m giving you the goddamn golden ticket, Rhys. Don’t be too stupid to take it.”

“What’s the catch?”

“If something happens to me, you make sure Ainsley gets there too.”

Jesus. I think I miss Lisa more than all of them now. I stare at the back of Ainsley’s head, her curls, and try to imagine being responsible for her. Just her and me, out here, trying to get through the woods to the cabin and then after that, what? I’ve been with these people for less than five days and I’m looking at possible guardianship of a four-year-old and everything inside me is telling me to drop my pack and run. Everything. But then I see Jess’s face, and it’s so desperate and broken, I can’t. This guy pulled me out of the river. Saved my life.

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I say.

He cracks a small smile. “Well, it wasn’t going to before you said that.” And then the smile disappears. “If you have to, you’ll do it. You saved her once and she trusts you. I can tell. You’ll do it.”

“Yeah,” I say. Christ. “I’ll do it.”

But every step forward is me thinking how I can take every step back. We walk until the trees start to thin and that makes me uneasy. I can see the river to the left of us and to the right, the ground rises and seems to flatten out.

“That a road?” I ask.

“Yeah. Old road. Not maintained,” Jess says. “But that doesn’t mean no one’s been using it or died on it. Riverside’s close enough and that’s why we’re seeing more infected now. That’s why we got to be careful.”

Another mile, and another. Sweat breaks out all over my body. I shrug the pack farther up my aching shoulders. Ainsley starts lagging and Jess doesn’t seem to notice, but I’m afraid to ask for a break because there’s an energy coming off him that I understand and I don’t want to get in the way of. He’s found some kind of inner balance to keep him moving forward. I bet all his thoughts are lined up neat, one right after the other—get his kid to safety, get there alive—and any interruption could ruin him. If that happens, I won’t know how to pick up the pieces.

And then Jess says, “Fuck,” and Lisa’s not there to tell him to watch his mouth.

We stop. There’s an RV crumpled against two trees. The front is smashed, must’ve hit them hard. There’s only a crack in the windshield, though. There are blood streaks on the side of its tan exterior, like someone was hurt and dragged themselves away. The blood stops at the entry door, which hangs open and still, before starting up again. I glimpse a bit of the interior from here.

“Check it out.” Jess draws his gun. “See if there’s anything worth scavenging. If it’s empty, we could spend the night here.”

We circle the RV slowly and it and the surrounding area seem safe, for now. No signs of trouble. We’re just about to explore the inside when Ainsley frantically tugs on her father’s hand. She’s got to go to the bathroom. He nods at her.

“Take a look inside,” he tells me.

I face the entry, which is too narrow for me to get through with the pack. I set it down on the ground and get my knife out but I don’t think we’ll find anything. Any infected would’ve made themselves known by now. I take the steps in and a gunshot explodes in my ears. The smell of it in the air, the warmth at my neck, tells me it was close, that it’s not Jess, it’s someone inside. The bullet tears through the driver’s seat just next to me. I cover my face with my hands.

“Don’t shoot! I’m not infected!”

“Rhys?”

My heart stops. The voice is so familiar and right that I can’t believe it. I’m afraid to believe it, I’ve wanted it so bad.

I lower my hands.

“Rhys,” she says again.

I don’t understand.

The people I want don’t come back. But past the smell of gunpowder is the smell of sweat and blood, another person. The blinds are drawn and the light in here is so weak, but I would know her silhouette anywhere. I memorized it.

She’s here and every moment without her was a lie.

“Rhys?” Jess shouts. “Rhys?”

“It’s okay! I’m okay—it’s okay.”

I stumble over everything that got strewn on the floor when the RV crashed. I trip over cups and forks and clothes and magazines, a vase and its scattered dried-out, disintegrating flowers. She’s at the back of the RV, in the bedroom. She’s on the floor at the foot of the bed, propped up against it. Her face is pale, the bags under her eyes as dark and purple as bruises, or maybe they are bruises. There’s a gash on her forehead, the blood of it fresh and all over and I have to force the next question through my teeth, asking it so quietly no one else will hear.

“Are you bitten?”

She blinks, several times, like she can’t believe any of this, either, and then she shakes her head. Her lips are cracked and bloody.

“No,” she says faintly.

“What happened to you?”

The blood from her forehead stains the side of her face, trails down her neck. It’s soaked into the collar of her shirt. Her legs are sprawled out awkwardly in front of her and the knees of her pants are torn up, and her skin there is crusted with blood. One arm is curled against her stomach and that hand holds the gun she fired at me. Her other arm hangs at her side and—Jesus, it’s dislocated. I recognize that weird separation happening under the skin because it’s the same shoulder she dislocated at the school. She’s dirty, scratched up, and has a few cuts. Jess storms into the RV, I hear him behind me. I bring my hands to her face and it feels good to touch her. Her pupils are blown. One bigger than the other. That’s a concussion. She’s panting, a little, in pain.

“I looked for you,” she manages.

“Me too.” I press my fingers into her skin because I can’t hug her because she’s hurt but all I want to do is put my arms around her. “I looked for you too. God, how’d you get here? Did you see any infected? What happened?”

She frowns, swallows, and it’s all probably too much to throw at her at once. “There weren’t infected at first … but then there were.” Her eyes drift up to Jess, but she doesn’t ask. She turns back to me, losing focus. “I found a hunting—there was a hunting tree stand, it was old, but I got up there and I tried to wait them out, but—”

Her eyes drift shut. I bring my hand to her shoulder and squeeze. It takes her a long minute to open them, like now that she’s around people she can finally turn off. “Hey. Stay with me. But what? What happened after the tree stand?”

“It was rotting and I fell,” she says. “And then I just ran.”

I take the gun out of her hand and tuck it into the back of my jeans and turn to Jess. Ainsley hides behind him. He stares down at the two of us in wonder.

“Sloane,” he says, before I can tell him.

***

“We’re going to have to set that shoulder,” Jess tells her after I’ve hastily introduced them and he’s looked her over. “That’s going to be goddamn unpleasant.” He turns to me. “I can’t give her anything for the pain until we know how bad the concussion is.”

“It’s okay,” she murmurs, meeting my eyes and I just stand there, running my hands through my hair and smiling like an idiot, which feels like asking for it, but I can’t stop. I watch Jess pinch the top of her hand. As soon as he lets go of her skin, it jumps back into place.

“You’re not dehydrated,” he says. “What’ve you been drinking?”

“River water.”

“Well. Not the best thing you could’ve done. Miracle you’re not sick. If you do get sick, I’ve got something I can give you. Can you stand?”

“Yeah.”

She struggles to her feet one-handed and I get stupid and try to help her, but I end up grabbing the wrong parts of her to do it. She yelps and her knees buckle, but between me and Jess, we get her upright. We navigate her through the narrow space, passing a wide-eyed Ainsley, who sits on her knees on the pullout sofa.

Outside, Sloane lays on the ground. Jess digs some of his clothes out of his pack and bundles them up, tucking them into Sloane’s armpit. Cary did it a different way, when we had to do this at the school. Jess sits on the ground next to her, grabs her arm with both hands, and puts his foot against the clothes. He starts to pull her arm toward him. The pain of it startles Sloane, makes her half-rise, her body desperate to get away from this, so they have to reposition and start again. The second time, she clenches her teeth and moans. Sweat dots her forehead and tears leak out of her eyes and then her shoulder pops back into place.

Jess pats her face and says, “Good girl …”

He ends up making a sling for her out of a belt, of all things. He hangs it around her neck, makes a figure eight, and puts her wrist through the bottom loop. By then, she’s exhausted, her eyes not tracking anything, but staying stubbornly open.

“Okay, let’s get you up,” Jess says. “You can make use of that bed in there …”

“But—Rayford. We have to—Rhys?”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “We’re okay.”

We get her up. Her face goes a scary shade of white and her eyes roll back. Jess seems to anticipate it, gets her in his arms. Carries her with the ease I imagine he must’ve carried me from the river. I follow him in. He maneuvers his way back and eases Sloane down on the bed. She stirs a little, but curls into the mattress. No one refuses that kind of comfort, not in these kinds of times. There’s a privacy curtain, and he pulls it closed, ushering me out even though what I want to do is be with her, next to her. I want to put my hands on her face again. I want to be sure she’s really there.

Jess sits down on the couch and pulls Ainsley toward him. He looks at me and says, softly, “You lucky son of a bitch.”

Later, I find Jess outside, staring into the woods. It’s chilly. I cross my arms.

“She’s going to be down a couple days,” he tells me. “If she can get moving sooner, then we’ll do that, but for now, she needs rest and food.”

“Yeah, she does,” I say.

“I set the trips. I think we should all stay inside, though, while we’re here. Lay low.” He looks like he’s tracking something in the dark. I squint, but I don’t see anything.

“What is it?”

After a long moment, he turns to me.

“Nothing.”

I look at him and I know how denied he must feel of his own happy ending and I don’t think he hates me all the way for mine, but he must a little.

“Stop staring,” he says.

I flush. “Sorry.”

“So you got a gun now. If she lets you have it.”

“You want the knife back?”

“Keep it. Why don’t you go on in, check on Ainsley? I’ll be there in a little bit.” Then he lies, or at least I think he does. “I just want to be sure it’s safe.”

“Okay.” I hesitate. “Hey, I don’t think I said it—thanks for pulling me out of the river.”

He doesn’t look at me.

“Guess it had to happen.”

I go back inside. Ainsley is still curled up on the couch, but she’s occupied with a coloring book and a pack of crayons we found under the driver’s seat. She was happy about it, but it was one of those sick little discoveries for the rest of us. There were kids here, wherever they are now. Ainsley looks at me. She doesn’t say anything, and it’s so wrong, the absence of questions, of wanting her mother out loud. I tap the page of the coloring book, of the Disney princess’s hair she’s decided to turn blue.

“That’s cool,” I tell her.

On the counter next to the sink, there’s a photo. An eight-by-six in a cheap plastic frame of some house. A home. A nice little bungalow. The sky above it is overcast and moody, some kind of storm on the way. There’s nothing ominous about it, but it’s awful in its nostalgia. I don’t know the place, but I know the time. Before.

After a while, Jess comes in and gets the food ready and I have to wake Sloane for that because she’s got to be starving. She’s half-gone and I have to feed her and I’m glad she’s kind of out of it because I don’t think she could stand it otherwise.

“Lily,” she says once and it bites into me and I don’t know where she thinks she is.

“She’s not here,” I tell her.

“I know that,” she says. “I have to tell you something.”

“You can tell me later, okay?”

I remind her that she’s hungry. She can’t finish it all, but tomorrow will be better, I think. After that, she stays awake long enough to help me clean the blood off her and bandage her forehead and when I’m done, she curls back on her side and falls asleep instantly. When I come out, Jess is sitting at the dinette, finishing up his dinner. There’s an empty MRE bag beside him. Ainsley’s. I look around and she’s tuckered out on the sofa, just as out as Sloane is.

“How’s Ainsley doing?”

“She’ll be fine,” he says. Another lie. He nods. “Sit there.”

I sit next to him. In the space between us, there’s an old People magazine. Nearly a year old now. There’s a headline about whether or not social media is the new death of celebrity. That’s weird to think about. That first week in the school, I had this Internet itch I couldn’t scratch. I just wanted to see the end of the world unfold online, check if I had any e-mail about it. I never thought I’d get used to being without, but now I can barely convince myself there was a time the need I had for it was real. I look away from the actor smiling out at us on the glossy cover page to Ainsley again.

“Why doesn’t she talk?”

Jess is silent so long, it forces me to look at him.

He pushes aside his food. “It was hard going for us the first few days.”

“It was for us too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Took us a week to get across our town. We lost people.”

“I had a son about your age, from my first marriage. Andrew.”

Andrew.

To Ainsley, love Andrew.

“He didn’t make it,” Jess says.

I want out of these clothes.

“Did he read to her?” I ask slowly.

“Yeah.”

I bring my hand to my face and try not to let it get to me but it does. The weight of everything Ainsley has lost is on me and for one moment, I feel it more deeply than my own losses. Everything that’s been taken away from her. Everything she’s never going to have. There’s nothing she’s going to grow up to be. There’s nothing I can grow up to be, either, but at least once, I got a taste of my own possibility. What does Ainsley have? That stupid book I read to her?

“She must see something in you. Ainsley. Because she just—she really went inside herself after we lost him. I didn’t know a four-year-old could do that. That night she tried to give you the book, Lisa lost it. Told me we should keep you around because who knows, maybe she’d start talking again.” His voice cracks. “She’s got the sweetest voice.”

“I’ll bet.” I rub the back of my neck.

“I’m glad we found you,” he says after a long minute. “You and Sloane. It eases my mind.”

“Jess,” I say. “About Lisa—”

“When we get there, I’ll …” He trails off. “But right now, I’m not going to think about it. So that’s the last time you’re going to say her name to me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Look, we’re close, once we get past Riverside. And we’re only on its edges.” He reaches beside him and pulls out a map. “I’m going to show you where the cabin is. You need to know how to get there.”

“Right.”

He lays it all out for me, traces the path with his finger and when he does it like that, it looks like nothing. Like all we’d have to do is take a few steps and we’d be there. If everything goes right, Jess says we’d arrive in about a day. We go over it and over it and over it again, until I’ve got it memorized, until I can say it all back to him and when I do, it sounds like a prayer. It sounds like something I can believe in.

I slip behind the curtain, into the bedroom.

Sloane is sleeping. I sit down on the edge of the bed and listen to her breathing and then I match my breath to hers because if she’s still here, so am I. I stay like that until the sound of Jess’s snoring fills the RV and then I carefully crawl up the bed and lay down next to her.

“Sloane,” I say.

My voice, her name.

People aren’t supposed to be able to fathom eternity. It’s an amount of time beyond all human comprehension. But ever since everything ended, I think I’m getting closer to understanding it. These little tastes of it in the way hell stretches around us, making pain endless and moments like this one rare and fleeting.

Making moments like this one everything.

I fall asleep and the next time I open my eyes, it’s still dark but she’s awake and she’s watching me and I think she has been for a while. I reach out and she moves closer to me. She says, “I thought it was a dream.”

“It’s not.”

She exhales and closes her eyes. After a while, mine start drifting shut and the last thought I think I’ll have is about how nice it is waking up and falling back asleep and having the person you want to have beside you, beside you, but then she speaks again, pulls me out of it.

“I was alone,” she says. “I was so scared.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner.”

“It’s okay.” She pauses. “The whole time I was out there, I kept thinking about her.”

“Who?”

“Lily. I kept thinking about how strange it was.”

I take her hand, running my thumb along the top of it.

“She was supposed to be the strong one,” she says.

“Sloane.”

“But I’ve gotten so much farther than her.”

We stare at each other. After a long moment, she asks me to tell her what’s happened since I came out of the river, so I tell her everything. I tell her about Jess and Lisa, saving me, about Lisa and how she died. I tell her about Ainsley and the book. I tell her about the place Jess has for us the way he told it to me, that it’s far enough away to still be standing, and he says it’s safe, that it’s so safe.

“Then let’s go there,” she says.

By dinner the next day, Sloane is up and moving around. She’s put in breakfast and lunch. She’s still pale, a little stiff, but she’s better. Jess asks her if she’s up for a hike.

“Yes,” she says, without hesitating.

“Anyone else look like you do right now, and I’d tell them they were lying,” Jess says. “But I believe you. You know why?”

“Why?” she asks.

“Because you made it here on a lot less,” he says and he has no idea how on the mark he is. The compliment brings a little bit of color back to Sloane’s face. An actual blush.

“What were you thinking?” I ask him.

“I think we move out early tomorrow, before dawn. That should give us the cover we need and we’ll be able to see any infected, if they’re out there.”

“Okay,” I say. “That sounds like a plan.”

“Water should be boiled by now,” he says. “We’ll eat, call it an early night.”

He leaves the RV to get it. Sloane watches him go and then she sits on the couch next to Ainsley, who hasn’t taken her eyes off Sloane since they were introduced. Her curiosity seems to overwhelm her, sitting this close to Sloane, and she reaches out and gently grabs a tiny fistful of Sloane’s hair. Sloane gives me a questioning look, but she says, softly to Ainsley, “I like your hair too.”

And then I realize—Sloane has the same color hair as Lisa.

Ainsley lets the strands fall back against Sloane’s shoulder and then climbs off the couch, finds her Molly book and holds it out to me. I take it and sit down and Ainsley sandwiches herself between me and Sloane. Ainsley keeps a little closer to me and I wonder if she looks at me in the dead boy’s clothes and gets confused. She’s young, but she’s old enough to know the difference, isn’t she? Old enough to look at Sloane and miss her mother.

I go through the story and when I reach the last page, I close the book. Ainsley opens it as soon as I do, wants to hear it one more time. I read it again.

Jess comes in when it’s happening and the whole thing takes him off guard, first time he’s seen it. His face crumples, but he leans against the counter, closing his eyes, and listens to me tell it too. I imagine all of us in that cabin a year from now, what that would look like. Carving out our own place, making something out of nothing. It feels as right as it doesn’t and I think maybe I was wrong. We can’t have exactly everything we lost. But maybe we can come close.

The bells sound while we’re asleep.

It wakes me up. At first, I think it’s wind chimes. It makes me remember lazy summer breezes in Cortege, hearing my abuela’s wind chimes rattling together, hanging in her front porch. I loved that sound. And then I realize. The trip wires.

“Oh no,” I say.

Sloane and I hurry out of the bedroom. Jess is already on his feet, already has Ainsley awake and on her feet too. He says, “Could be just an animal.”

The bells sound again.

I have my gun. Jess has his. Sloane has the hunting knife. I swallow and look to the front of the RV, the windshield. All I can make out are the shadows of the trees it’s run up against.

The bells sound again.

“That’s all sides,” I say.

Jess turns to the covered window in front of the dinette.

“I’ll look,” he says quietly. “Get an idea of what we’re up against. No one so much as breathe when I do.”

I nod and then I hear a strange whining, squeaking sound from the side of the RV. A hand, dragging itself alongside the vehicle’s body. Shit. I glance at Sloane and try not to think about how this kind of thing went for us in Fairfield. Jess opens the blind, just a tiny little crack, and looks out of it for what seems like a longer time than he should. Each second passes with the beat of my heart, and each time my heart beats, I think it’s going to give.

Finally, he carefully moves away from the window, letting the blind recoil back into place. He stands there quietly, thinking. We wait for him to tell us what to do.

“We have to go,” he says.

“How many are there?” I ask.

“Enough. The way they’re circling the RV, I don’t know which ones I’ve already seen and which ones I haven’t. We have to go before we’re too surrounded to leave. We won’t be able to take everything with us, but we should be okay for a day or so, then we’ll be at the cabin.”

“How are we going to do this?”

My brain is misfiring, too scared to think up a plan of action. The door to the RV rattles, dead hands experimenting with it. It’s locked, but the possibility of something being beyond it doesn’t escape the infected because then the door starts to shake.

They want in.

“Shit. Okay,” Jess says. “Rhys, you take Ainsley out through the driver’s side door, Sloane and I will go out the passenger’s side. We need to be everywhere, so they won’t know which way to go first. Get to that old road that’s beyond us. We run like hell until we get to Derringer Bridge. If we get separated, that’s where we’ll meet. You know where that is, Rhys? You remember what I told you?”

“Yeah,” I say. I picture it on the map Jess showed me. It’s a few miles. It’s okay. I can find it. I know I can. “Yeah, I remember.”

We get ready as quickly and as noiselessly as possible, shrugging on our coats. Jess dresses Ainsley and picks her up in his arms and then holds her tight, burying his face in her neck. He says, “I love you, baby.” She presses the side of her head against his. “You love me? You want to say it for me?” He pulls back and looks at her. Ainsley brings her hand to his beard, but she doesn’t talk. Won’t talk. His mouth trembles. He kisses her face. “I love you so much.”

Sloane catches my eye and she quickly turns away from me and I get this weird feeling in my chest, that I should tell her—not that I love her. Because I don’t. But that I could, maybe, if we survived long enough.

“You stay with Rhys,” Jess tells Ainsley. “You stay close to him.”

She nods.

“Okay,” Jess says. I tuck my gun back into my waistband because now I have to go out armed with a kid. He passes Ainsley to me. “You think you can hold her and run, the first stretch? I don’t want her on the ground for this part.”

“I can do it.”

“Thank you,” he says. “Get to the front there. I just want to give Sloane a rundown on where we’re headed, because she doesn’t know …”

He pulls Sloane aside and starts laying it out for her. I move forward with Ainsley in my arms, trying not to think about how they’re already straining under her weight, light as she is. She keeps her arms around my neck, tight. I can hear her breathing in my ear. It’s a better sound than what’s outside and the sounds outside are getting louder. The dead push harder on the door, must be more than one of them now.

“We have to go,” I say.

“Okay,” Jess says and Sloane moves past him, comes up to the front near Ainsley and me. I have to adjust the seat so I can get by the steering wheel. “Okay, now,” Jess says somewhere behind me. “On my count …” I stare at the door handle. This close to the window I can hear the snarling, the teeth gnashing, outside. “One …” The door shakes more. “Two …” Ainsley’s hot breath on my face, her sweaty arms around me. “Three.”

Go.

Something’s wrong, we get it wrong right away. I push out the driver’s side door, nearly falling flat on my face, on Ainsley. Sloane stumbles out after me. She got the wrong door.

“Sloane, you got the wrong—”

She pushes at my back, urging me forward. “Go, go—”

And then I hear Jess explode out of the other side of the RV. Not from the passenger’s side, but from the entry door and I don’t understand, I don’t understand how we’ve all gotten this so wrong when we laid it down so easily minutes ago.

Jess starts to yell.

“Come on! Come and get me! Come on!”

No.

The dead scream. Ainsley’s grip becomes a choke hold and I try to move around the front of the RV, to get to Jess, to keep him from doing this stupid thing, but Sloane grabs me and pulls me back. I feel her hand snake around me for the gun.

“Jess!” I scream. “Jess, you asshole!”

“He wanted it,” she says urgently. “Rhys, he wanted it this way. There are too many. He wanted us to take Ainsley. We have to get out of here. I’m going to cover you, come on—”

No, no, no, no. She pulls me away, drags me through the trees. I hear a gunshot, so loud and close, I feel it in my mouth. The ugly sound of the dead surrounds us, more of them than I can ever remember hearing at one time. They’re screeching, directing each other to their prey.

To Jess.

And it’s not long before I’m hearing him being torn open, and I’d give anything not to hear him. I’d give anything to cover Ainsley’s ears from his screams. His screams. The woods are crawling with so many of them, more than was at the house in Fairfield, all in varying stages of decay. Some of them are blind to us, want to reach the dying man and make their claim, but the eyes that see us, see only us. The gun goes off several more times. I watch bodies fall as they take bullets to the head or the knees. But soon the chamber’s dry and all we can do is run.

Ainsley’s heavier in my arms now and my legs are turning to nothing and it’s that moment when I’m aware I’m losing steam that the infected realize it too. They become even more determined and better at the chase. One tackles me and I drop Ainsley, hear the awful thud of her small body hitting the ground. I lay there for a long moment, wondering if this is the one that is mine. I stare up at the sky, at the stars dotting the darkness, until the view is interrupted for the rotting visage of a man who reminds me of my father.

I don’t want to hurt you.

He opens his mouth.

“Rhys!”

I turn my head. Sloane has Ainsley in her arms, somehow. The man above me leans forward, his teeth sharp and ready, but there are more behind him and they try to pull him away from me so they can have me to themselves. They yank him back and I roll to the side at the same time they collapse forward, grasping at the space where I was.

We get clear of the dead.

We find the road and then we find the bridge. Jess told me the infected should be less of a problem after that, if any, because it’s farther away from Riverside. After the bridge, we move deeper into the wilderness, through trees. I wait for the ground to get steeper as it rises, because after a long hike up, we should be high enough to see it, the cabin. From there, it’s back down again and another six or seven miles through a dense stretch of woods.

The air is dry against my skin and my mouth is parched, barely enough spit to wet it. But that turns out to be the biggest of my problems because Jess was right. We don’t run into any dead. I push down the fury building inside me that it couldn’t have been easy for that one last night. That we couldn’t have just walked out of the RV and been on our way. When the ground starts to elevate, Ainsley starts faltering. We take turns carrying her. I know it hurts Sloane’s injured arm, but she doesn’t complain. Ainsley stares at me over Sloane’s shoulder, her face pale and drawn. The night took so much out of her and the death of her father is in her eyes and it’s so wrong to see all of this on the face of someone so young.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“What?” Sloane asks.

“He could’ve sacrificed either of us instead.”

She pauses. “Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to live with that, if he had.”

I’m mad at him, so much. Sloane whispered the story to me, about Jess telling her what it was like outside the RV, that we were too surrounded, that he was going to do this so his daughter had a chance. He was smart, I guess, to tell it to Sloane because I wouldn’t have let him. I don’t blame Sloane for not stopping him, but I’m so fucking mad at him. Just because we’re supposed to be here for Ainsley, doesn’t mean he’s not supposed to be here for us.

“We’re getting close,” Sloane says breathlessly, after a while.

“You hear that, Ainsley?” I force myself to sound cheerful. “We’re getting close to the cabin. It’s going to be okay. When we get there, we’ll clean ourselves up and we’ll get some food and we’ll have—I’ll read you the—”

I didn’t bring the book.

It’s still in that fucking RV.

“I’m sorry, Ainsley,” I say. She closes her eyes. I try to remember the first lines about Molly waking up and getting ready to start her day. Maybe I could write it myself, make it close to how it was. But all its words escape me now, got left behind.

Eventually, I see light between the trees, the sky. Sloane notices it too and picks up her pace. We make it up the last of the hill and break through the clearing and the view is everything I want it to be, a promise. There’s not many of those made these days. Sloane sets Ainsley down and we stare across the woods below us, the ones we’ll be walking through, and beyond them, I see the cabin. The cabin. This small, but cozy-looking shape in the distance. Shelter. Safety. Home. We can make a home out of that, I think. I turn to Ainsley, and she’s sat herself down, her tiny palms pressed against the ground.

“I’m cold,” she says.

She’s got the sweetest voice.

No.

I move to her, kneel in front of her, seeing for the first time how limp and pale she is, see that what I was telling myself was just her father’s death wearing on her was so much worse than that, that there are things in this world, now, that are worse than that. I bring my hands to her baby face and draw back just as quickly because she’s cold and I know that cold.

“No,” I say.

No.

My eyes search until they find the small bloodstain on the cuff of her pants. I roll it up and find a very small bite mark on her ankle. More of her pants got it than her leg did, but it’s not like if you get a little bitten, you get to make it out okay.

“No,” I whisper. “I can’t …”

I look up at Sloane and she looks down at me with the sorriest eyes. A tear slides down her face. I turn back to Ainsley and her head begins to twitch, jerky little nods. The sight makes my stomach hurt. I gently ease her back on the ground and I don’t recognize her anymore. She looks smaller than she already is, like she’s not wearing her body right.

“I can’t,” I say.

“I’ll do it,” Sloane says.

Ainsley’s mouth opens and closes but she doesn’t make sound. It’s starting now, it’s starting, but it can’t be starting because she just got her voice back and we were going to be in the cabin, Ainsley, me, and Sloane. All of us. And it was going to be good, even without Jess, even without my parents, even without Lily. Not everything we lost, but good, because it would be so close. So close. We were so close.

But we’ll never be close enough.

What am I supposed to do, knowing that?

“Rhys.”

I look up from the body.

Sloane holds out her hand for mine.

“Let’s keep going,” she says.

There are lights in the windows.

Keep reading for an excerpt from All the Rage
by Courtney Summers,
coming in April 2015 from St. Martin’s Griffin

ALL THE RAGE copyright © 2015 by Courtney Summers

NOW

The boy is beautiful.

She wants him to look at her.

Look at me, look at me, look at me.

Look at her. She’s young, she’s vital, she’s a star in the sky. She’s agonized over this night, agonized over every second of getting ready, like the perfect combination of clothes and makeup will unlock the secrets of the universe. Sometimes it feels like that much is at stake.

She has never been hungrier in her life.

You look perfect, her best friend, Penny, says, stepping back from the mirror, and that’s all she needs to hear to feel worthy of the six-letter name she’s tattooed on her heart. Penny would know about perfect. Penny’s got the kind of face and body that stops traffic, turns heads, leaves people open-mouthed, in awe. The kind of pretty that makes you prettier just by being close to it and she’s always close to it, because they’re close. Secret-keeping close.

Thank you, she says. She’s never had a best friend before, let alone been one. It’s a strange feeling, to have a place. Like there was an empty spot beside another (perfect) girl, just waiting for her. She pulls at her skirt, adjusts the thin straps of her top. It feels like too much and not enough at the same time.

Do you really think he’ll like it?

Yeah. Now don’t do anything stupid.

Is this stupid? It’s so much later now and beautiful, beautiful, she’s saying to the boy because she can’t seem to shut up. She has had one, no, two, no, three-four shots and this is what happens when that much drinking happens. She says things like, you are so beautiful. I just really wanted to tell you that.

The boy is beautiful.

Thank you, he says.

She reaches clumsily across the table and threads her fingers through his hair, enjoying the feel of his dark curls. Penny sees this happen somehow, sees through the wall of an entirely different room where she’s been wrapped around her boyfriend because suddenly, she’s there, saying, don’t let her drink anymore.

I won’t, the boy promises.

It makes her feel warm, being looked after, out for. She tries to articulate this with her numb tongue, but all that comes out: is this stupid? Am I stupid?

You’re one drink away, Penny says, and laughs at the stricken expression this news inspires. Penny hugs her, tells her not to worry about it, whispers in her ear before disappearing back behind her wall, but he’s looking at you.

Look at her.

Drink.

Six-seven-eight-nine shots later and she’s thinking oh no because she is going to puke. He walks her through his house, guides her away from the party.

You want to get some air? You want to lie down?

No, she wants her best friend because she worries she is so many drinks past stupid now and she doesn’t know what to do about that.

It’s okay. I’ll get her. But first you should lie down.

There’s a truck, a classic pick-up pride and joy. There’s the truck’s bed, and the cold shock of it against her back makes her shiver. The stars above move or maybe it’s the earth, that slow and sure turning of the earth. No. It’s the sky and it’s speaking to her.

Close your eyes.

He waits. He waits because he’s a nice boy. A blessed boy. His father is the sheriff and his mother sits at the top of a national auto supply chain and they are both so proud.

He waits until he can’t wait anymore.

She thinks he’s beautiful. That’s enough.

The hard ridges of the truck bed never warm under her body but her body is warm. He feels everything under her shirt before he takes it off.

Look at me, look at me, hey, look at me.

He wants her to look at him.

Her eyes open slowly. His tongue parts her lips. She’s never felt so sick. He explores the terrain of her body while he pretends to negotiate the terms.

You want this, you’ve always wanted this and we’re not going that far, I promise.

Really? His hands are everywhere and he’s a vicious weight on top of her that she can’t breathe against so she cries instead, and how do you get a girl to stop crying?

You cover her mouth.

But that was a long time ago, and that girl …

I’m in the dirt. I’m on my hands and my knees and I’m crawling in it, what I came from. I don’t remember standing, don’t remember ever being a thing that could stand. Just this dirt, this road. I opened my mouth to it, tasted it. It’s under my fingernails. A night passed from the ground. Now it’s early morning and I’m thirsty.

A dry wind moves through the trees off the road beside me, stirring their leaves. I dredge up spit to wet my swollen lips and lick my bloodstained teeth. It’s hot out, the kind of heat that creeps up on you and makes mirages on the road. The kind that shrivels the elderly and carries them into the waiting, open arms of death.

I roll onto my back. My skirt rides up my legs. I pull at my shirt and find it open, feel my bra unclasped. I fumble buttons through holes, covering myself even though it is so. Hot. I can’t. I touch my fingertips to my throat. Breathe.

My bones ache, have aged somehow in the last twenty-four hours. I press my palms against the grit and the bitter hurt of it startles me into semiawareness. They’re scraped, raw and pink, what happens when you crawl.

A distant rumbling reaches my ears. A car. It passes and then slows, backs up, comes to a halt beside me. Its door opens and slams shut. I close my eyes and listen to the soft crunch of soft soles on rough gravel.

Birds are singing.

The footsteps stop but the birds are still singing, singing about a girl who wakes up on a dirt road and doesn’t know what happened to her the night before, and the person standing over her, a shadow across her body that blocks out the sun. Maybe it’s someone nice. Or maybe someone come to finish whatever it is that’s been started. About a girl.

Don’t look at her.

TWO
WEEKS
BEFORE

Before I tore the labels off, one was called Paradise and the other, Hit and Run. It doesn’t matter which is which. They’re both blood red.

Proper application of nail polish is a process. You can’t paint it on like it’s nothing and expect it to last. First, prep. I start with a four-way buffer. It gets rid of the ridges and gives the polish a smooth surface to adhere to. Next, I use a nail dehydrator and cleanser because it’s best to work with a nail plate that’s dry and clean. Once it’s evaporated, a thin layer of base coat goes on. The base coat protects the nails and prevents staining.

I like the first coat of polish to be thin enough to dry by the time I’ve finished the last nail on the same hand. I keep my touch steady and light. I never drag the brush, I never go back into the bottle more than once per nail if I can help it. Over time and with practice, I’ve learned how to tell if what’s on the brush will be enough.

Some people are lazy. They think if you’re using a highly pigmented polish, a second coat is unnecessary, but that’s not true. The second coat asserts the color and arms you against the everyday use of your hands, all the ways you can cause damage without thinking. When the second coat is dry, I take a Q-tip dipped in nail polish remover to clean up any polish that might have bled onto my skin. The final step is the top coat. The top coat is what seals in the color and protects the manicure.

The application of lipstick has similar demands. A smooth canvas is always best and dead skin must be removed. Sometimes that takes as little as a damp washcloth, but other times I scrub a toothbrush across my mouth just to be sure. When that’s done, I add the tiniest amount of balm, so my lips don’t dry out. It also gives the color something to hold onto.

I run the fine fibers of my lip brush across the slanted top of my lipstick until they’re coated and work the brush from the center of my lips out. After the first layer, I blot on a tissue and add another layer, carefully following the outline of my small mouth, smudging the color out so it looks a little fuller. Like with the nail polish, layering always helps it to last.

And then I’m ready.

Also by Courtney Summers

Cracked Up to Be

Some Girls Are

Fall for Anything

This Is Not a Test

About the Author

Courtney Summers lives and writes in Canada. Visit her online at www.courtneysummers.ca.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

PLEASE REMAIN CALM. Copyright © 2015 by Courtney Summers. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Lisa Pompilio
eISBN: 978-1-4668-7590-6

First Edition: January 2015
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com