The body on the floor.
I aim the light back on it and in the time it took me to do it, he is up, on his knees, his palms pressed against the floor.
He stares at me. The expression on his face is odd. The fresh clothes I last saw him in are tattered. He is filthy. He left here clean and came back filthy. Came back alive.
“Mr. Baxter,” I whisper. “Mr. Baxter, what are you—”
“I told you I wasn’t infected,” he says. “I told you.”
He reaches for me.
I run.
I know it’s stupid dangerous to turn my back on him, that I shouldn’t leave him in the hall but I have no other choice. I burst into the auditorium and I’m shouting, Baxter’s here—he’s here! And no one asks me if I’m imagining it this time. Trace gets the gun from wherever he’s been hiding it and there are more flashlights, spastic beams of light dancing all over the room. I tell them what Baxter said to me before I fled. I told you I wasn’t infected. I told you.
We storm down the hall, around the corner to the place where I found him, and I expect him to be gone but he’s still there—like I first saw him.
Flat on his back. Crumpled.
We stop.
“Mr. Baxter?” Cary calls.
We wait for him to move, respond. He doesn’t.
Cary steps forward but Trace cuts in front of him, the gun out. He holds it over Baxter’s prone, still form. Cary goes to the basement door and peers inside.
“Why did he come back?” Harrison asks. “Why?”
“He’s not infected,” I say. “He can prove it. He wants shelter.”
Grace kneels beside him. Baxter’s eyes are half-open, glazed. He blinks and moves his lips but no words come out. She leans forward.
“Mr. Baxter? Can you hear me?”
“We can leave him here.” Trace lowers the gun. I step in front of him and crouch behind Grace. Trace circles Baxter until he’s behind us both. “We’re going. He can have the school.”
“Holy shit,” Cary says softly. “Did you see this?”
He runs his flashlight over the floor, revealing the dirty gray tile. It’s streaked with blood. He follows the trail all the way back to Baxter and I can’t figure out what part of him it’s coming from, what part of him is open. Baxter closes his eyes.
He stops breathing.
“Oh, God,” Grace whispers. She brings her fingers to Baxter’s neck to feel for his pulse. She looks up at us. “He’s cold.”
“Grace,” Rhys says. “Get away from him—get away from him now—”
I pictured this differently in my head. Pictured the turning slow. Baxter starts breathing again. Relief flashes across Grace’s face until she notices the difference. The terrible familiarity of the sound creeps up on her. The mechanical breaths of the dead.
Baxter’s body jerks once.
He opens his eyes.
His irises are white.
“Grace, get back!”
Baxter grabs Grace and in one swift motion, their positions are reversed. She’s on the floor, on her back, and he’s on top of her and someone is screaming, everyone is screaming—
“Get him off her—get him off her now!”
Grace pushes at his shoulders, tries as hard as she can to get Baxter’s mouth away from every part of her flesh and then Harrison shouts, “Trace, the gun!”
But I don’t think there’s time, there is no time. Baxter grabs her wrist and pulls it to his lips and I do the only thing I can think of to do—I grab Baxter and I pull him off her and then there’s a shot, this incredible bang and it’s so in my ears I feel it in my teeth. Baxter rolls sideways and I go with him, but he is not dead. It wasn’t a good enough shot. Baxter starts to twitch my way and I’m frozen but if this is it, it’s okay because I saved Grace. I saved her.
“Sloane, move!” I don’t know who shouts it. Cary, Rhys, Trace. There’s another shot, another shock, and then, Baxter is motionless on the ground. Trace’s aim was true this time.
Blood pools onto the floor from Baxter’s head.
“Shit!” Trace is shaking. “You said he said he wasn’t—you said he wasn’t infected!” He says this to me like this is my fault. Like I brought Baxter back into this school. He stares at the gun for a minute. “I killed him,” he says stupidly. He laughs. “Holy shit, I killed—I—fuck! That was close—Grace—” He turns to her. “Grace?”
We all turn to her.
She’s still on the floor, dazed.
Trace hurries to her. “You didn’t get bitten, did you? Did you—”
“No…” She tries to get to her feet but it’s like invisible hands keep her pinned to the ground. Her eyes widen in faint surprise. “Oh…”
Trace sets the gun down and a dull whine fills my head, my heart breaks in half. His hands hover over her like he’s afraid to touch her and Cary shines the light on her slowly and I see red, her stomach is red.
“Oh Grace,” I say. “Grace—”
“I’m okay,” she assures us, and she tries to get up again but she can’t and her eyes settle into a kind of understanding that makes me want to run so far away.
“No,” Trace says. “I didn’t—I didn’t—” He pulls her upright into his arms and she cries out and he moans like her pain is his. She buries her face in his chest. “Talk to me.” He shakes her a little. “Grace, talk to me. Please.”
This didn’t happen. This is not happening.
“I don’t want to die,” she says.
I step back. Rhys wraps his fingers around mine, stopping me.
I can’t feel it.
“Okay, don’t talk if you’re going to say things like that.” Trace squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m sorry—I am so, so sorry, Grace—”
“Don’t be mad,” she whispers. “Please don’t be mad at me.”
“I could never be mad at you,” he says, and she starts to cry because it’s all she can do, the last thing she’ll ever do. “Grace, come on.”
“Please don’t be mad.” Her voice is getting smaller and smaller. “I don’t want to do this to you…”
“Then don’t—come on, don’t do this to me—you don’t have to do this to me…”
But she does. Grace dies in the hall, in her brother’s arms, in our school in this stupid, unforgiving world where there are no phones or ambulances or hospitals or doctors. She closes her eyes and she tries so hard to stay, but in the end she lets us go.
Trace asks to be left alone with her body.
We wait for him in the auditorium. No one speaks. We try, but our voices sound funny when we do, our words awkward and stiff as they fall from our tongues, like we are just learning to talk. It is hard to hear anything over the ringing in my ears, the beating of my heart, the air entering and leaving my own lungs.
Harrison is curled up on his mat, crying.
I want to hurt him until he stops.
Seconds pass, minutes pass, hours pass. The sun rises. When Trace finally comes in, we are all so much older. His eyes are red and swollen and his face is drained of color. There is blood on him—Grace’s blood stains his shirt, his pants.
Even knowing this, I look for her. I look past him for her. She’s not there. Half of me understands this but half of me refuses to believe it and that half of me is waiting for her so we can talk about this. We can’t talk about her being dead without her being here.
Trace looks at us and no one says anything.
There is nothing any of us can say.
Seeing him makes Harrison cry harder. He covers his mouth and sobs. Grace kissed that mouth when she was alive. Cary’s mouth. It hits me again: Grace is dead. Just like that, there is no Grace. We live in a world without Grace.
“Where is she?” Rhys finally asks.
“I took her to Ms. Yee’s room,” he says. “She’s there.”
My eyes drift to Grace’s mat. Where she should be. Some of her things are still scattered around. The clothes she wore yesterday. Rhys asks if we can see her and Trace tells us no. He crosses the room to Grace’s mat. He picks up her sweater and buries his face in it. He starts to cry and the material can’t muffle the sound. We sit there and watch him uselessly until he raises his head.