He steps past us and then he stops and I know we’re meant to follow. We make an unconscious line behind him, a funeral procession. The only thing missing is the coffin but I feel the weight of it. Her body inside. We shuffle up the stairs, our footsteps in eerie unison. We reach the second floor. He hovers on the landing. We hover with him.
The hall is dark.
He takes a deep breath and moves forward.
We are ten feet from Yee’s room when he stops again.
We wait.
Nothing happens.
“If I go in that room,” Trace says, “I won’t come out again.”
Even though he hurt me, even though he thinks I killed her, I don’t want him to go in there because from here, I see her in him. I never saw it when she was alive but now I do. The shape of his face. His eyes. The way he moves. It’s not as delicate, but it’s her.
It makes me feel like she’s not dead.
He brings his hand to his mouth, considers it. I know he could easily stay here forever with her. He turns to us. His eyes fall on me and I shrink away.
“Lucky,” he says. It’s all he says.
We follow him back downstairs, to the library.
The barricade is down. It’s raining again. Cary says that’s a good thing. It will be an uncomfortable thing, but maybe the rain will mask our scent, keep us invisible when we need to be invisible. He hands out our weapons. Rhys and Cary and Harrison take the baseball bats but Trace refuses one. He lifts his shirt, revealing the gun, and then raises his chin, daring us to say something but we don’t. I take the crowbar. I need the weight. I lace my arms through the straps of my book bag. The other thing I’m taking—my note to Lily. I want it with me even though I don’t plan to die before I see her again. Not now.
“We’re going to jump the fence,” Cary says. “We’ll go through the trees until we’re directly across from the alley—” The alley. Where Mr. and Mrs. Casper died. “And we’ll just keep cutting across street after street, every goddamn shortcut until we hit Sloane’s house.”
“What if we need to stop?” Harrison asks.
“Hopefully we’ll have somewhere to do it,” Cary says. He turns to Trace. “Don’t fire the gun unless you have to. From here on out, no talking. No shouting. No panicking.”
All of these things sound sensible.
If we do these things, everything will be okay.
But that’s not how it really works.
He doesn’t ask us if we’re ready. There is no real ready for this. He just looks at each of us and when he isn’t met with resistance, opens the door. My heart seizes. It’s still too early, too dark. Dark enough not to see our own deaths coming and I haven’t once imagined a death that was out of my control since this started. I tighten my grip on the crowbar.
The rain falls. Heavy drops hit the building, the path. The trees beyond the path. Those trees are bare. They’ll offer little to no cover but it’s better than nothing.
I turn back to the school.
Running water. The walls, the ceiling. The barricades. Our fortress.
I turn back to the open door.
My sister.
I’m the first to step through and it feels like I’m stepping into a dream. The path is clear and the trees ahead are clear and Cortege is quiet, quiet enough for me to question whether it ever happened. The boys follow me. I bring my hands to the fence and remember the sound it makes when you go over. I slide my crowbar between the chain link.
We line up against the fence. I squint. There’s nothing in the distance. I think of Baxter. They wait. They wait, but they can’t be invisible. I climb the fence. The metal is slick and cold and the book bag feels awkward against my back, but I’m first to reach the other side. I take their baseball bats and set them quietly on the ground, one by one, and then we make our way through the small thicket of trees, our footsteps crunching against dead leaves from last fall. Still, there is nothing. No sign of them. I look at Cary, Harrison, Rhys, and Trace. They’re uneasy, heads swiveling in all directions, like the silence is noise. I hear them breathing.
I look back at the school again.
Good-bye, Grace.
We reach the middle of the brush. Cary holds out his bat and points to the street, urging us forward. The alley. My hair is wet, my clothes are wet. My palms are sweaty. The Caspers. The poor Caspers, dead. We trudge into the street.
The open, empty street. The sky is lightening.
“Maybe they moved on,” Harrison whispers.
Cary throws him an angry look for speaking.
I point.
The alley is empty but it’s not empty. There are bodies. I see at least three of them spread out along that narrow concrete path. The ones who turned and were put down. Rotting on the pavement. I search the road and my vision opens up to other shapes.
At first glance, they look like lumpy debris, but they’re bodies.
The real dead.
Rhys taps the ground with his bat. We look at him.
“Run for it,” he says.
Run. It would be stupid to go out there slowly hoping not to disturb anything. Rhys holds up three fingers and lowers one at a time as he counts down.
Three … two … one.
I push forward, out of the trees, my book bag scraping against outstretched branches, escaping their feeble attempts to grab at me. My feet hit a puddle off the curb of the road and the splash is deafening. The water soaks my ankles, my jeans. We’re a stampede of the living. The alleyway is so close I can taste it. We hit the middle of the street and—
The bodies seem to get up at the same time.
I stop. Stop. Stop.
“Stop!”
I don’t know who yells it, if it’s me, if it’s one of them. We stand in the middle of the street, backs to each other. My head spins at the sight of all the bodies rising stiffly to their feet. Rotting faces, the dead who have been out here, waiting. Skin slipping off, entire layers of it gone or melting into nothing. Organs on the outside, crusted and dried to clothes, remoistened by the rain. New dead, ones who have been freshly opened and are oozing everywhere. Women and men, girls and boys. People I might’ve known but can’t recognize anymore. There is every shade of blood—black, brown, red, pink. All eyes looking at us through that same milky film that sees us for what we are and what they are not anymore.
Trace raises the gun.
“No,” Cary says. “We need to run—”
“Where the fuck are we going to run?” Rhys asks.
Our voices incense the infected. They charge at us and Cary goes left, forgetting the alley, the shortcut. We follow after him. My side aches at the effort but I can’t quit before I’ve started. I can’t. The dead are fast behind us and I can hear them screaming but it’s not like we scream—it’s a strange, high-pitched, thin screech, like a noise trying to make its way through crushed vocal cords. I want to stop and curl up in the middle of the road and let whatever happens next happen, that’s how scared it makes me.
“The park,” Cary shouts to us. “The park—”
But I see something better.
“Cary, that car—”
It’s across from the park. I veer away from them, run to it. It looks in good shape, a small yellow four-door. A gift from God. Rhys and Cary scream my name. The boys straddle the middle of the road but they never stop moving. I pull on the door handle and the shrill whooping of the alarm explodes into the street, louder than anything.
“Shit—”
I stagger back, rejoin them. We run into the park. I pretend I don’t see the overturned truck in the sandbox, the bright pink coat of a dead little girl under a swing set. Garbage cans on their sides, garbage everywhere. Cary points to the public bathrooms and we run to them. He pulls the door open and we step inside. It swings shut.
“No lock!” He pants, feeling for it. “There’s no fucking lock!”
The stench hits us then. A sour, biting scent invades my nostrils and makes me gag. Rhys coughs. We turn. Two closed stalls face us.
I push open the one on the right and then I recoil. What was a man is sitting on the toilet slumped over. There is a hole in his head and his body has been ravaged, bite marks, missing chunks of flesh everywhere, revealing muscle and bone. Dried blood cakes the floor.