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I seek him out and find him in the gym, opening a pack of cigarettes. He places one between his lips and brings a lighter to it. The flame flickers, illuminating his face briefly, before the smoke drifts lazily around him. He shoves the half-crumpled pack in his pocket. He doesn’t say anything to me, but he knows I’m here. I don’t say anything to him, just watch him inhale like a pro. I close the distance between us. When he exhales, he takes care to turn his head from me and I’m struck by how attractive and easy he makes it look but he always made it look that way.
“I just had this vision of you out front, smoking,” I say.
“That was my thing.” He ashes the cigarette. “What do you want, Sloane?”
I stare out at the bleachers. It used to give me hives, imagining myself on any kind of team, people looking at me. “If Baxter got in here two days ago, that means however he got in here has been open since we got here. None of the infected found their way in.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better?”
“Where did you hide the gun?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Promise I’m not going to shoot myself in the face.”
“Why should I take you at your word? You threw yourself into a bunch of infected. Blowing a bullet through your skull seems way less hardcore so why wouldn’t you go for it? It’s that much easier for you.”
“What do you think you’d do with my body?” I ask, and he twitches, steps away from me. I’ve crossed some invisible line. “Oh, what? It’s okay for you to be so candid with me?” I stare at the ceiling and think about it. “You couldn’t just leave it here to decompose. That would probably be unsafe. Taking it outside would be even more dangerous…”
“It must thrill you that there’s a secret way in here,” Rhys shoots back. “That one day we could wake up and be totally surrounded—”
“The way you look at things is so uncomplicated.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry I’ve pegged you all wrong.” He raises a hand. “I take it back. You’re not thrilled we could wake up one day and be totally surrounded.”
“I’m not thrilled. I’m not anything.”
Rhys drops the cigarette on the floor and grinds it out.
“Wasn’t your dad though, was it.”
“No.”
“You know, if I thought it was mine, like even for a second—even if I knew, rationally, it couldn’t be him—” He stops and shrugs. “Fuck it. Never mind.”
He takes out the pack of cigarettes again, but this time he holds it out. I shake my head. He shrugs but he doesn’t look away, just keeps his eyes on me until I’m so uncomfortable I feel I have to be the first of us to leave to win this moment between us, so I do.
* * *
Baxter sits in the chair at the head of the table and starts nodding off and then Trace and Rhys help him to his own mat so he can sleep for a bit. We move quietly around him. We don’t even talk. He’s already leveled our dynamic and Harrison is the only one who seems happy about it. He should be devastated about this new unknown way into the school but instead, he’s happy. It’s easy to understand why because Harrison is really simple. This is what Harrison thinks: Baxter will remember soon and then he’ll recover and he’ll take care of us.
I watch Baxter sleep. He moans and jerks awake.
“The radio,” he says groggily.
“You’ve heard it?” Trace asks.
“Once. Has it changed? I doubt it has…”
Trace crosses the room and switches the radio on. It’s static for a few minutes and then that woman’s voice comes through, loud and clear.
“—Not a test—”
Baxter holds up a hand and closes his eyes. Trace turns the radio off.
Around di
“So you banded together. Got here all by yourselves,” Baxter says as we settle around him. I hate the way it feels. This is our place but he’s at the head of our table. In the best chair—the one we snagged from LaVallee’s office. “You survived.”
“Not all of us,” Trace says. “Our parents. We lost them.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. How?”
“Excuse me?”
“How did they die?”
Cary is reaching for a bag of chips when Mr. Baxter asks this. His hand freezes over it, totally suspended for the briefest second, and then he grabs it and rips it open. This does not escape Baxter’s notice.
“It was—” Trace starts, and I can tell he’s ready to lay into Cary something fierce, which is the worst thing he could do. I brace myself but he never finishes and when I look, Grace’s hand is on his arm. She’s silenced him.
“We were overwhelmed,” she says. “That’s all.”
“Yes. That happens.” Baxter reaches for some rice cakes and gazes at them, like he can’t believe they’re real. “Did you try to get to the community center?”
“Yeah,” Harrison says. “We almost didn’t make it.”
“We thought it would be safe,” Trace says. “I guess everyone did. It was the first place we headed, right? First one gone. If we had known, we wouldn’t have even tried.”
“We made the same mistake,” Baxter says.
“We?” I ask.
He closes his eyes and then he opens them.
“You know, we could stay here for so long if we wanted to. Even if the water tank goes, there’s bottled. We could stay here as long as it takes for help to come. That’s what we could do. What we should do. Until … help comes.”
“Or the infected figure out the way you got in,” Cary says.
“They won’t.”
“Then you remember where?”
Baxter shakes his head and then he says, “I just know that where we are and what we have is better than what’s out there. We should hold on to it as long as possible.”
Everyone murmurs in agreement, but I can’t. My appetite is gone. I can’t shake the feeling something is very wrong.
I get to my feet. “I’m just going to go to the bathroom…”
“You know what?” Grace stands. “Me too.”
In the bathroom, she hovers while I splash water on my face and my neck. I try to get her to go back to the auditorium but she won’t. She asks if I’m okay.
“I’m fine. Headache. Short-circuiting. I don’t know.”
She doesn’t say anything, which is awkward. It looks like she wants to. I press my head against the mirrors. Cold. I like that.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No. I just don’t want to go back out there yet. Baxter’s freaking me out.”
“When Cary and Rhys walked him in, Trace thought it was our dad.”
“Did you?”
“No. I don’t like this, though, Sloane.” At first, I think she’s talking about Baxter being here, but she’s not. “What if they get in the school? I mean, what if—what if it’s my dad or my mom the next time? What if they come in?”
“Grace, the odds of that happening—”
“Must be as good as the odds of Baxter getting in here after all this time, right?” There’s nothing I can say to that. Tears fill her eyes. “God, when will this stop feeling so bad?”
“I don’t think it does.” I stare at my reflection. “I think it’s just going to be like this.”
She rips a swath of paper towels from the dispenser and wipes at her eyes.
“I just want to be less of a mess. I sneak in here, like, ten times a day to cry.” She laughs weakly. “I wish I was like you. Strong.”
I look away from my reflection. “What?”
“You just handle this. Every time I look at you, you’re just taking it. And then you went outside like it was nothing. And everyone tiptoes around me. No one else made me think about laying off Cary the way you did … no one else made me feel bad for him. It’s like you see things how they need to be and you’re not afraid to call it.”
“You’re giving me way too much credit.”
“I want to be more like that.”
“You have more,” I say. Her forehead crinkles. I can’t believe she thinks I’m strong, that this is strength. “I always wanted to be like you. I still do.”