Harrison starts to heave.
“Harrison,” Cary says. “Harrison don’t you dare—”
He doesn’t. No lock. There’s a small window at the back of the room intact. We could climb out of it. I turn back to the door we pushed through, waiting for an onslaught of dead to filter through, to trap us in this box, but it doesn’t happen.
“What are they doing?” I ask. “Why haven’t they come in yet?”
Cary hands me his baseball bat. He creeps over to the door and opens it up the tiniest bit, enough to see through. I bring my shirt collar over my mouth. The combined smells of the bathroom and the rotting corpse makes my eyes water, makes me want to spend the next thousand years vomiting up my own guts. Cary closes the door and turns back to us.
“They’re at the car. The alarm. More are coming. We have to get out of here before that alarm stops—” He searches the room and sees the same window I did. He climbs onto the sink and peers out. “This side is clear, I think. We go out this window.” He pushes at the frame and nothing happens. “We’re going to have to break it.”
“Then what are we going to do?” Harrison asks.
“Find a place.”
This side of the park slopes down, a hill stopped by a tall wooden fence that separates it from Hutt Street. Hutt Street is the closest thing we have to suburbia. It used to be a field and now it’s being developed into a bunch of houses that look the same. A few are for sale, some are sold, and some are under construction. One of them has to offer temporary shelter.
“Sloane, break the window,” Cary says.
It takes two tries to break the window with the crowbar. The first time it recoils and only cracks the glass. Second time’s the charm. It shatters. I try to clear away as much of the broken pane as I can but Cary tells me to stop, stop it we have to go. Except the window is too small to fit through with our book bags on. We toss them out ahead of us and then we squeeze through slowly. I go first, after the last book bag. The glass cuts into my arms and I think of that woman twisting her way through our picture window. The picture window. How can it be safe at home if the picture window is broken?
Rain spatters against my face. I land on the ground. There are no dead here, but I don’t know what’s beyond that fence. Harrison is next out the window and then Cary. As soon as he’s clear, an ominous rumble sounds overhead. The sky opens up and drenches us.
We have to crawl down the hill so we won’t be seen. We drag ourselves across muddy, dead-spring grass. It’s a full-on storm and the only thing I’m grateful for is the smell of earth this close to my face. I dig my hands into the grit. I like how it feels.
Even amid all this, I like the way it feels.
I don’t know how long it’s been since we left the school. It’s light out now. It can’t be that long but maybe it has been. Time has a way of shifting funnily in situations like these. There is not enough of it or there is too much of it and it’s always one when you need the other.
We finally get to the edge of the fence and press our backs against it. We can’t stay here long. Sooner or later, the dead will drift from the car—the alarm has stopped—and stumble their way down here. And the fence—it’s not the kind you can jump.
I press my face against it, like I could hear through the wood, through the rain. I can’t hear anything. I don’t know what’s on the other side. I hate to gamble like this.
We crawl along. Trace is in the back. Cary is in the front. I’m behind Cary, Rhys is behind me, Harrison is behind Rhys. Lily will freak when she sees me like this, covered in mud, alive. I wonder if she’ll cry, if she’ll believe I’m there, if she’ll press her hands against my face to prove it. I bet even then she still won’t believe it.
Cary stops and I’m so caught up in thoughts of my sister, I run into him. We’ve reached the end of the fence. He holds his hand up. Wait. And then he crawls forward, forward, peers around cautiously. After a minute, he moves even farther around for a better look and then he jerks back, pressing himself against the fence.
“There’s a group coming up the other side,” he says. “They’re going to make their way around in a minute. We have to move or they’ll see us. We’ll get to one of those houses and lay low until the rain lets up. Ready?”
We get to our feet and curve around the fence. The sight at the opposite end of it is sickening. A group of infected converging, turning their heads searchingly. The ones who reach the fence first paw against the wood. They seem to know we’re around but not where. Cary gestures us forward and we are quiet but we are not invisible and I wish we were invisible. The houses across the street are invitations. Their doors are open, open mouths.
We need to run.
We just need to run for it.
We don’t. We tiptoe across that road, the rain silencing our footsteps. We go to the first house we see and hurry up the steps.
The door is locked.
Cary looks around and then jumps over the side of the porch and we follow him between two houses. I know what he’s thinking. Maybe there’s a back door, maybe there’s a back door. Maybe it’s open. Harrison sticks close to Cary. I’m next to Rhys. Trace hangs back.
We’ve almost cleared the house when the rain turns into glass. I feel it in my hair and against my face. Broken window. An infected has jumped from a window of the house beside us. It lands neatly between us and a scream rises in my throat but dies on my lips. Rhys pulls me back and we stumble into Trace. It’s a man. A dead man. Not long dead, I don’t think. His skin is gray, tinged purple, and his eyes see everything and nothing. There are gashes on his hand. His neck is wide open. He rasps air at us, momentarily confused to be surrounded by so many living. He turns slowly, his steps stilted.
He faces Cary.
Chooses Cary.
Cary charges into the dead man and they both go flying into the ground. I raise my crowbar over my head to bring it down on the man before the first bite can happen when I realize it’s not Cary. It’s Harrison.
Harrison jumped in front of Cary.
I slam the crowbar into the man’s shoulder. It doesn’t stop him. The man grips Harrison’s shoulders, pulls him down, and bites into the first piece of flesh his mouth can find—Harrison’s cheek. I could fool myself into thinking it’s a kiss, but then the skin separates from Harrison’s face and it’s just red, a river of red dragging down his face, hanging flesh, and the dead man pulls at it with his teeth, annoyed it’s still attached to the person it belongs to.
Harrison screams and I’m terrible because the first thing I think is he’s going to draw attention, not that he’s doomed, that he’s going to die one way or the other. Rhys raises his bat. Blood spatters, brains everywhere. Like that, it’s over. I look behind us. Nothing else has come.
Yet.
Rhys kicks the dead man off Harrison and Harrison lays on the ground making fish-out-of-water noises, twitching, shocked. We surround him. His mouth moves, open, closed, open, aggravating his wound, making the bleeding worse. He’s trying to say something but nothing is coming out. Cary bows his head as close as he can get it to Harrison’s mouth. Harrison’s eyes go wild and then he finally finds his voice.
“There,” he says.
Cary looks up at us. His face is wet. I don’t know if it’s just the rain.
“Get in the house,” he tells us.
“But—”
“Get in the house!”
We crawl in through the broken window, leaving Harrison and Cary outside. I fall onto a cold kitchen floor and crawl across it, past an island, before getting to my feet. The house has an open layout, a kitchen that bleeds into a living room that opens down a hall. Stairs. I don’t see any dead but I see bloodstains everywhere. The TV screen-down on the floor. An overturned table with missing legs. Ripped couch.
I clutch the crowbar and step forward cautiously as Rhys and Trace fall in behind me. Rhys runs to the front door to make sure it’s locked. Trace makes his way upstairs. I make my way to the other side of the house, into what looks like an office. Empty. The windows are all shuttered. I meet Rhys in the hall. Trace pads halfway down the stairs.