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Harrison and Grace are dead.
The couch depresses. Someone sitting beside me. I can’t bring myself to open my eyes again. I keep them closed. The body in the bathroom. Mr. Baxter. Lily.
When I open my eyes, I feel time has passed. Rhys is on the opposite end of the couch, his face pressed into one of its pillows. I dig into my book bag and pull out one of the water bottles. I polish off half of it before I even think about conserving. I shove it back into my bag and look around. Cary is at the kitchen table. The baseball bat rests in front of him. He rolls it back and forth slowly. I make my way over.
“What’s it like outside?” I keep my voice low.
He shrugs. “They know we’re around. They’re on both sides of the street now. I can’t get to any of the cars. We’ll have to leave.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“Run. Hope for the best. I should tell Rhys to get it together.” He pauses. “And Trace. He’s upstairs. He won’t come down.”
“I’ll get him,” I say.
“Be careful.”
I linger there for a minute and instead of going straight for Trace, I sit down beside Cary and he moves away from me. I reach for his arm and he pulls it back. He doesn’t want anything I’m offering.
I leave the table and walk down the hall, climb the stairs. I search the halls for Trace. I find him in a bedroom. Someone’s bedroom. A dress hangs over a desk chair. A slew of family photos are pasted onto the wall and all seem to center around one young, blond girl. This must be her room.
Trace sits on the edge of her bed, looking out the window. The gun is in his hand. He runs his thumb along it. He turns to me and fear squeezes my heart until his expression softens, becomes something very sad, and then I’m not afraid anymore. It would kill her to see him like this. If she can see him like this now, it’s killing her.
“I’m sorry,” he tells me.
I sit down on the bed. He returns to the view of the street below. I follow his gaze and I see the infected walking slowly back and forth.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. He nods. “Good.”
He puts the gun under his chin and pulls the trigger.
Blood is in the air. It’s in my mouth.
I stumble away from Trace and then Rhys and Cary are at the door asking me what’s going on and then they see it and understand it immediately. Trace is dead. We’ve lost Grace, Harrison, and Trace. There are only three of us now. Only three.
Rhys grabs my arm and tries to haul me to my feet. “We have to go—” He pulls me away from Trace’s body but I dig my heels in because Grace wouldn’t want me to leave him like this. “Sloane, we have to leave—”
“But—Trace—”
“No, we have to go now!”
I glimpse the view out the window. The infected are scrambling, trying to source the sound of the shot. I can hear a familiar thudding echoing through the house. Splintering wood. We rush downstairs and I am trying to explain how Trace died, he killed himself, even though they know. I run into the living room, grab my crowbar. I try to get my book bag, fumble to put it on but Rhys and Cary are screaming that there’s no time, no time. The fridge teeters forward and back, the dead trying to push it out of the way. They know we’re in here.
“We’re close,” Cary says as we follow him down the hall, “so just run!”
He pushes the door open. I know this, we’ve done this before, those first few days. The streets bustling with hungry dead, us against them, no time to think up a better plan than just run and hope and pray. I take the lead and I make them sprint for a house across the road—it’s Mrs. Crispell’s house. The backyard is fenced.
“We have to get past the fence—”
I’m hyperaware of the uneven footfalls behind us, the animal growls. We’ve lost the numbers game. We are going to die. Still, we press on, we reach the fence. The boys fight their way over it. I’m last to go, half over the side when one of the dead grabs my sneakers. It bites into the sole of my shoe. I scream and kick at it blindly until I co
I force myself to my feet, staggering dizzily for a second before my head clears. The fence rattles behind me. I look back. A group of infected shake at it, try hard to push it down. They are so hungry, so desperate for us that they can’t make their bodies understand they need to climb.
I run. This street, Gunter Street, is less crowded. I see cars but there’s no time to stop. I pass by a house, searching for Rhys and Cary when I spot them crawling under the back deck of Mrs. Schmidt’s house. I crawl in after them. We get lucky. We’re not seen. We keep pressed to the ground and stare at the street ahead, the last street before mine.
There are dead everywhere, milling around.
We’ll never make it.
“Maybe they’ll clear,” Rhys says weakly. “If we wait.”
So we wait.
We are under that deck for hours, none of us talking. I have all these things I want to say about Trace bubbling up my throat but I know it’s not the time.
It’s just that he’s gone.
He was here and then he was gone.
Like that.
More time slips away as we wait for the dead to find something better to do. They don’t. They’re waiting for us and they could wait forever. They have forever.
We don’t have forever. I’m numb and my body aches. I feel like my mind is dying. We’re going to die out here in the dirt, waiting. Rhys moves close to me. Somehow, he’s not cold. I huddle next to him. We can’t stay here all night. If we stay here all night, we’ll stay here the next night and the night after that.
“That’s the Seals’ yard.” I point to the house across from us. “All we have to do is go through that house and then mine is right there, across the street.”
“Easier said than done,” Cary says.
“We have to do something,” Rhys says.
Cary thinks about it and then he says, “We split up. I’ll go right, you and Rhys go straight through. If we all head in the same direction, they’ll close in and it’s game over.”
“We meet at Sloane’s house,” Rhys says.
“Right.” Cary pauses and then stares at me. “So look after yourselves.”
I know then. I am more sure of it than I am of Lily being at home, waiting for me. I know he is going to go right and if he makes it, he’ll keep going. I want to change this, but all I do is reach over and squeeze his hand.
He squeezes back.
He elbows his way out from under the deck and then he starts shouting, telling them to come get him. The dead pursue him immediately, don’t see Rhys and me wriggling out from under the deck. We don’t actually see if Cary makes it—but he made it, he had to make it, I know he did.
And that’s how we say good-bye.
Rhys and I stumble through the Seals’ backyard. We catch the notice of four infected as we clamber up the steps to the back door. It’s open and we throw ourselves through it. I slam it shut and lock it. The dead throw the full weight of themselves against it. It’s not going to hold.
Rhys leans against the wall, catching his breath. I don’t want him to catch his breath, there’s no time. I am so close to her, I can feel it. I grab his hand. It sounds so ridiculous, so delusional, but I know we’re safe in here. I know the path is clear for us from here on out. I know I will get where I need to go and I’ll see her. I drag him to the front door, stare out the window.
My house. The yard is clear. And the picture window—
“The windows are boarded,” I whisper excitedly. “The windows are boarded—” Another thought crosses my mind. “But the doors probably are too—”