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Tires squealing against the pavement.
People ru
Screaming.
This must be a dream. I must not be awake. Or I’m awake and someone ruined our tidy, quiet street while we were sleeping. Broken glass. Doors flung wide open. Cars parked and ru
Everyone is panicking.
People rush by. They don’t even look at me. A loud crack makes me jump but I can’t source the sound. Another scream. A group of people run down the road, so frenzied their movements are jerky and uncontrolled. I watch one of them fall, a man. The others surround him, they’re so desperate to pull him to his feet they overwhelm him and I can’t tell where he stops and they begin.
A car careens past and takes out our mailbox but it keeps going. I take a few dumb steps down the walk and spot a woman staggering awkwardly across our lawn. Is this the girl that needed help? She is covered in red, half hunched over, her arms reaching for someone I can’t see. I don’t know who she is, but I call out to her; I want to know if the blood on my father is hers. She somehow hears me over all the other noises and turns her head in my direction at the same time my father grabs me and yanks me back inside, throwing me into the foyer. I hit the wall as he slams the door shut—in the woman’s face. I glimpse a crimson-stained mouth just before the sound of her body colliding against the wood fills the house. My father takes me by the arm and drags me down the hall. He walks so fast, I can’t keep up. I trip and land on my knees. He whirls around. I cover my face with my hands instinctively but he hoists me to my feet and drags me toward the door to the rec room—
An awful sound explodes from the living room.
Our picture window breaking into a thousand pieces.
He lets me go and doubles back. “Get in the rec room, Sloane, and don’t move!”
Get in the rec room. Move. Don’t move. Move. I crawl after him, crawl until I see the living room carpet glittering in the sunlight. Glass is everywhere. I watch the woman who was on our lawn writhe through our window, oblivious to the leftover shards and blades of it digging into her legs and hands. She streaks blood on the white sill and as soon as she’s through, steadies herself on our pale yellow couch. She leaves a red handprint in her wake. She doesn’t even look like she knows where she is. She pauses, rolls her shoulders and inhales. The air rattles through her lungs and makes me breathless. Her head jerks left to right, left to right, left to right before stopping abruptly. She looks at us, takes us in.
She lunges.
It’s easy for my father to overpower her. Because she’s nothing, she’s small, he pins her by the neck with one hand and, with the other, gropes around for something to defend himself with. She gnashes her teeth and claws at his arms so hard she breaks skin, makes him bleed, and the blood makes her wild. She twists her head toward it. My father finds a large piece of broken glass and raises it above him.
He thrusts it into her chest.
And then he does it again.
Again.
The woman doesn’t realize she’s supposed to be dying. It’s like she’s becoming more alive, stronger each time the glass is forced into her. She fights to free herself against my father’s waning grip and he stabs blindly until finally, desperately, he drives the glass into her left eye and the woman stops moving.
She’s stopped moving.
He stares at her body and sits there, drenched in someone else’s life, and he looks so calm, like he knew this was coming, like the way this morning started it was only ever going to end up like this. The room starts to spin.
“Sloane,” he says.
I find my way to my feet and back into the hall, knocking into the end table where we keep the phone. It clatters to the floor. The sound of the dial tone steadies me, rights the earth.
“Sloane—”
I push through the front door again and I keep moving until I reach the sidewalk. I’m just in time to see two cars meet in the middle of my street but not in time to get between them. The raw crunch of metal sends me reeling back and puts everything on pause for one brief, critical moment where I edge around the wreckage and try to focus on one thing that makes sense. This: Mr. Jenkins is spread-eagle on his lawn, in his housecoat. He’s twitching. Mrs. Jenkins is kneeling over him. She rips his shirt wide open. Heart attack, I think. Mr. Jenkins has a bad heart. She’s giving him CPR.
Except that’s not what it is at all.
Mrs. Jenkins’s determined fingers have torn past the material of Mr. Jenkins’s shirt.
And now they are tearing into his chest.
PART ONE
SEVEN DAYS LATER
“Get the door! Get the tables against the fucking door, Trace—move!”
In a perfect world, I’m spi
You can lose everything in seconds.
“Harrison, Grace, take the front! Rhys, I need you in the halls with me—”
I slip past the curtain. I smell death. It’s all over me but it’s not me, not yet. I am not dead yet. I run my hands over my body, feeling for something that doesn’t belong. We were one street away and they came in at all sides with their arms out, their hands reaching for me with the kind of sharp-teethed hunger that makes a person—them. Cary pulled me away before I could have it, but I thought—I thought I felt something, maybe—
“Sloane? Where’s Sloane?”
I can’t reach far enough behind my back.
“Rhys, the halls—”
“Where is she?”
“We have to get in the halls now!”
“Sloane? Sloane!”
I look up. Boxy forms loom overhead, weird and ominous. Stage lights. And I don’t know why but I dig my cell phone out of my pocket and I dial Lily. If this is it, I want her to know. I want her to hear it. Except her number doesn’t work anymore, hasn’t worked since she left, and I don’t know how I forgot that. I can’t believe I forgot that. Instead of Lily, that woman’s voice is in my ear: Listen closely. She sounds familiar, like someone’s mother. Not my mother. I was young when she died. Lily was older. Car accident …
“Sloane!” Rhys pushes the curtain back and spots me. I drop the phone. It clatters to the floor. “What the hell are you doing? We’ve got to move—” He takes in the look on my face and his turns to ash. “Are you bit? Did you get bitten?”
“I don’t know—” I unbutton my shirt and pull it off and I know he sees all of me before I can turn away, but I don’t care. I have to know. “I can’t see anything—I can’t feel it—”
Rhys runs his hands over my back, searching for telltale marks. He murmurs prayers under his breath while I hold mine.
“It’s okay—you’re good—you’re fine—you’re alive—”
The noises in the auditorium get louder with the frantic scrambling of people who actually want to live, but I’m still.