The street gets thick with cars after that and if ours were any wider, we’d be fucked, we’d be walking through this. I wonder if we should stop and try siphoning from some of them, just in case, but the sun’s nearly gone now, and we wouldn’t see anything coming.
“Look,” Sloane says and she points to another sign on the next corner with that same word painted on it. SHELTER. Another arrow. Right. “It could just be bodies by now.”
“Rayford might be too,” I say. “And then it’d just be us.”
She doesn’t say anything. I turn the corner and there’s another sign on another telephone pole but this one says SHELTER AHEAD and I press hard on the gas and then Sloane says, “Rhys—” and it’s not my name, it’s a warning.
By the time I realize it, it’s too late.
The entire town must be here.
Here. A war was lost here, its victors still here, gazing at what’s left of the battlefield. Their backs are to us and church, church is in my head. I remember standing for the hymns and all those people in front of me, backs to me, and I couldn’t see their faces but I knew.
I knew they were opening their mouths.
I turn to stone. I want to preserve us as long as possible. Do not move, do not make a sound. Let them keep their backs to us, let us quietly drift away somehow. But that’s impossible because we’ve already announced our arrival.
And they have opened their mouths.
They swarm the car before I can do anything and all I see is what’s left of gray skin and black veins and every shade of red.
Sloane goes for the crowbar and I think the window when the hands start coming through it, fingers clawing at my chest, digging into my shirt, digging into me. I yell and they dig deeper, determined to keep me screaming so they can be sure I’m still a living thing.
I push back at the hands on me, into the unnatural softness of decaying skin. I yell, and they screech back. Over that ugly-thin sound, I hear Sloane’s startled cry. I turn to her and she’s got the crowbar in one of them. There’s too much give and it goes right through the thing’s face and when it falls back, the crowbar goes with it.
I remember the rest of my body.
I press my foot down on the gas but there’s no clean escape when we have to push through so many dead. The loud awful thuds of them meeting the car overwhelms us. Sloane’s side mirror goes. One of them gets ahold of a windshield wiper. Piece by piece, the only thing between us and them is disappearing.
“Come on,” I tell the car. “Come on.”
It moves forward against all odds and when we’re finally free of the bodies enough to pick up speed, the infected follow, follow, follow because death doesn’t stop, it never stops. The car squeals around the corner, and I reach out and touch Sloane, grabbing at her shoulder and I’m saying, “Okay?” Like that time my dad and I got in a car accident. The car flipped and rolled and when it was done rolling, his arm stretched protectively across my chest and he just kept asking over and over, Okay? And he didn’t stop until I told him the truth, no, not okay, maybe but still here.
“Are you bitten? Sloane, are you bitten?”
She pushes my hand away and I glance down at myself, do my best to take stock while I keep driving. The front of me is stained, all stained with them. I want to rip off my shirt. I hold an arm out, then the other, and I see nothing. No bites. Touch my neck, every place they could have sunk their teeth that I wouldn’t have noticed because of the adrenaline coursing through me. Once I’m sure I’m fine, I fight the instinct that wants to go back and crush them all with my bare hands because why couldn’t I, how could I not when they’re dead.
“I lost the crowbar,” Sloane whispers.
“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re still here. It’s okay.”
Slowly, our breathing evens out, our pulses settle. I keep checking the mirror. We woke up the town, I think. The dead are coming out of their hiding places, moving down streets, seeking out us intruders. They scrabble after the car.
This is their world now. We don’t get to be in it for free.
We reach the other end of Fairfield and the town sign this side of it is still in one piece. Thank you for visiting! Come again! Fuck this place. I glance at it in the rearview and there’s the mural, a still lake and the sun setting into it. But across the sun’s golden, wavy rays, splashed in black paint, is the word OVERRUN.
“There,” Sloane says. “Look—”
“What?” My voice cracks.
We haven’t spoken in a while.
“The house,” she says. “There’s a car …”
I peer into the darkness. My eyelids are so heavy, tank so close to empty. I see what she’s pointing at, a house in the distance. I see a car there too. People? Would people be there? And if not people, the dead? Can we risk it? Can we not?
I’ve got a million questions and I want to bash them all out of my head.
“I’ll drive up,” I say. “If there’s anything there, I’ll draw it out with the car. If there’s too many, we’ll just turn around and … keep going.”
I turn off the main road and drive up the dirt lane to the house. There’s a yellow Prius parked there, the front of it a little crumpled in, and it’s so strange to me, to see it just left like that because it still looks like it might run. Our car’s headlights cast a cold glow over the house, which is some kind of visual contradiction. It looks modern and outdated at the same time. Someone’s fixer-upper. New white siding but the front porch needs work. The windows on the first floor are boarded up. All of them.
Someone’s been hiding out here.
I’m not so stupid to get hopeful again, not after what happened with Fairfield. I circle the place a few times, grind the wheels into the ground, let them make noise into the night. When that draws nothing, I lean lightly on the horn and then I idle.
Still nothing. Living or dead.
“If there were survivors, they could’ve left for Rayford,” I say.
Sloane gets out of the car and by the time I reach her, she’s halfway up the walk to the porch. I grab her by the arm and yank her back, hissing her name. I don’t know what the fuck she thinks she’s doing. She stares at me, her face so white it casts its own light, I swear, and she sways a little. She’s got that glazed look of the deeply tired and I let her go because I understand it. My bones understand it. It’s the kind of tired where the thing you need is rest and the most you can hope for is sleep. But I’ll take it, shutting off for a while, even if it means I wake up bone-weary again tomorrow. I glance at the house.
“Wait here.”
I go back to the car and grab the aluminum baseball bat I took from the school. I hold it tightly and step onto the porch. It groans under my feet, like it’s long forgotten the weight of human steps. I stand at the front door and grimace at the bloody scratches across it. Fingernail marks. Lots of them. The infected were here, even if they’re not anymore. I knock, feeling absurd. No one comes. Nothing bad, nothing good. I jiggle the handle. Locked.
Damn.
I move to the window next to it. I pull at one of the boards. Really nailed in. This is when a crowbar would be good, but we don’t have one anymore. I turn to Sloane.
“Do you have a credit card or something?” I ask because who wouldn’t have a credit card handy during the zombie fucking apocalypse.
She shakes her head and I rest mine against one of the wooden boards keeping us from climbing in through the window. I think of my wallet, still at home on my nightstand and my parents—still at home too. After a while, I gather the will to face her.
“Cary showed me how to break in, if the lock’s right. I just need something thin like a credit card I can slip in between the door and the frame, so I can get it unlocked.”
“Oh,” Sloane says. “Maybe …”
She heads back to the car and rummages around the front seat. She returns with two things: an AAA membership card and a plastic employee badge. I stare at the badge, at the grainy photo on it. Her father
, a burly-looking guy. This is the man who put his fists to her. I wonder if I would be afraid of him if I passed him on the street. He’s the head of a human resources department. What a joke.
“You don’t look like him,” I tell her.
She opens her mouth—but her jaw just hangs there like the words left her quicker than she had them. I hand the badge back to her. The membership card should be good enough. I turn to the house and slide it in the crack between the door and door frame, hoping for a spring bolt because if it’s not a spring bolt, we’re as fucked as we were when we started. I push in, meeting a little resistance and then start bending the card. Please work. Please, please work …
“I know I don’t,” Sloane says at my back.
While I try to get the door open all the sounds I took for granted before the world ended fill my head. Bugs humming. The wind rustling the leaves of nearby trees. Water? I think I hear rushing water not so far away and I remember the Danforth River cuts right through this area. Should be just beyond the trees past the house, if I can hear it from here. And then the sound of the lock … giving. Thank God. I open the door and hit something heavy on the other side.
“I need you,” I say.
She helps me push on the barricaded door and I realize how weak we’ve become after a month in that school, eating, sleeping, and waiting. The furniture blocking the door scratches against the floor inside and then it finally gives, just enough for us to squeeze through.
“Okay,” I say. We retrieve our things from the car, the backpacks we’ve carried with us. They’re filled with what little food and clothes and water we took from Sloane’s house before we left. We grab the flare, flashlight, and the baseball bat. We slide them in through the door’s narrow opening and follow after, holding our breath so we can inch through.
The darkness hits us a second after the smell.
Something’s dead in here.
Sloane coughs and I turn the flashlight on, lighting the room we’ve found ourselves in. It’s a kitchen divided by a hall that opens up to a living room where there’s a couch and a recliner and God, I want them both. I run the flashlight over the makeshift barricade that was holding the door in place. A hefty old refrigerator. I turn back to the house.
“Hello?” I call.
Any infected would come running for that.
We wait.
Nothing.
But something’s rotting in this place. Maybe an animal? Optimistic. Sloane follows me to the kitchen sink. I twist one of the faucets and we jump when a stream of water pours out. I listen to the weird wet rattle of it touching down.
“A well, maybe?” I have no idea. I move to turn it off but Sloane stops me, stares at it for a minute like … she doesn’t explain. I let her have it for as long as I can stand it. The sound of it is unsettling. Too wrong because it’s too good.
“We’ve got to make sure it’s safe,” I say. “Figure out what stinks.”
We go through the downstairs quietly, the flashlight’s lonely beam guiding us. I freak myself out when it makes shadows, my mind turning them into monsters. There’s not much to this part of the house. The kitchen, the living room, a pantry, a laundry room with a very tiny bathroom attached. Tomorrow we’ll be hungry but for now the aim is sleep. It’s the only thing on my mind. What that couch would feel like, my body sprawled across it … I press forward. There’s a back door barricaded by an old armoire full of useless junk to weight it down and just before that door, a set of stairs. The smell’s definitely coming from upstairs.
“Hello?” I call again, just to be sure.
Nothing.
I take the first step.
The stairs creak all the way up, every single one. When I reach the landing, Sloane bumps into me and I’m so tense, I almost raise the bat to her and I’m glad I don’t do that. We stand in the hallway, side by side. There are four doors up here and they’re all closed.
“You stay behind me,” I tell her.
Now is not about gathering courage, it’s about staying one step ahead of my fear. I push the first door open fast, let it swing wide into nothingness. The flashlight reveals an empty bathroom with a door leading into the next room down. Sloane keeps behind me, close, but she’s so quiet I can’t even hear her breathing. I stare at the door and then I press my ear against it. Silence. I push it open slowly.
It’s a master bedroom and it’s empty and so bizarrely, cleanly kept. The windows aren’t barricaded, too far up to be breached. There’s a bed with comfortable-looking pillows and a rumpled duvet. Sloane runs her hand over it while I stare at the family portrait above one of the dressers. A woman, a man, and a boy and they all look alike. Red hair, pale skin.
“Two more,” I say. Sloane stops touching the comforter and follows me back into the hall. I choose the door across from the bedroom and decide I’ll open it on the silent count of three but I do it on two instead. It’s an office. A computer collects dust on a desk that’s collecting dust that’s covered in a few more family photos collecting dust. I streak a line through the dust on the desk with the tip of my finger.
One room left.
The end of the hall.
Sloane and I stand at the doorway, kept back by the smell. I pull my collar up over my nose. There’s no question this is where the death is. I glance at Sloane, but she’s not looking at me. Her eyes are on the ground, not scared, not anything.
I grip the door’s cold handle and open it.
It turns out to be the rotting body of the father on his son’s bed, his wrists cut straight up and down. The blood of him is dried and black across the sheets and floor. Bled out. There’s no other family with him and I guess that must be his reason why.
I turn away, can’t meet Sloane’s eyes when I do.
I close the door.
We take turns in the bathroom, Sloane and I. We clean ourselves. We change clothes. We push the fridge back in front of the door downstairs, making sure it’s firmly in place. At first, we think we’ll sleep on the couch, as far away from the smell as we can get, but it turns out we’re willing to suffer close to the rot just for that familiar, comforting sensation of bed. We go into the bedroom and I take the family portrait down before we pull the covers back and claim the mattress. Sloane keeps close to her edge and I keep close to mine.
Get your mother, Rhys. This place isn’t safe—
My only boy.
I don’t want to hurt you.
I could’ve been drowning the way I choke awake. Suffocating on the silence. I hack it out of my lungs, clear my throat. I know I didn’t sleep myself into a different night, so this must be the same one. Got settled into it long enough for every muscle in my body to start working against me, though. My legs, my arms, my back, all screaming. I push my head into my pillow and try to block it out enough to get back to sleep but then I feel the space beside me.
Times like these, you go so far out of your way to assure yourself you’re not alone. You memorize the person you’re with: the way they breathe, the way they move, the warmth of their body. All these things, you reach for every second of the day and when they’re gone, you don’t even have to open your eyes to know it.
She’s gone.
I sit up, fumbling for the flashlight, turn it on, washing the room out in its weak glow and she’s not there. I throw the covers off me and get out of bed, shivering as my bare feet meet the cold floor. I make my way over to the bathroom door.
“Sloane?”
Nothing. I open the door and she’s not there. I slip out of the bedroom and it’s sickeningly quiet against that sickening smell. Moonlight slivers through the curtained window at the end of the hall, turning everything blue. I know where she is. I wish I didn’t. I find her in that room with the body. She’s sitting on the floor and she’s staring at it. She doesn’t move when I step in. I watch her for a long minute, watch her until I see the slow, subtle rise of her shoulders. It tells me she’s breathing. I approach her slowly until I can just make out her face in th
e dark. She’s staring at the man, his long-open, emptied wrists. Her eyes are wide, unseeing—so unseeing that at first, I think I imagined her breathing.
“Sloane,” I say.
She doesn’t answer. She keeps her eyes on the body. She’s pale and blank. I crouch down in front of her, blocking her view and she doesn’t even notice the interruption. It’s like she can see through me, to him. I reach for her hand and that’s when I notice the razor blade in it.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I found it,” she says.
I grab her wrists, both of them. Veins intact. The blade falls to the floor in the process. I shine the light on it, see its rusty edge. Old blood. But his, not hers.
She nods at the man.
“What do you think of that?”
“Coward,” I say.
“Trace too?”
“Even him,” I say and I think about him, putting that gun under his chin and pulling the trigger. I wasn’t in the room when it happened, but I saw what was left. “It’s selfish. It’s a sin.”
“Oh. Well, that changes everything,” she says and I stare at the body while I try to think of something to say that makes the difference.
“Why did you make me stop?” I ask.
“What?”
“For the infected girl, on the way out of Cortege.”
“I thought …” She trails off. “I don’t know.”
I exhale and then I settle down beside her, the side of my leg touching hers. “Look, Sloane, I get it. I do. It’s like being … it’s like standing between glass, the grief. And behind you is everything like it was and ahead of you is—”
“Nothing,” she finishes. “There’s nothing left.”
“We’re left,” I say. “That’s something. And you must believe it because every time you’ve had a choice, you kept going.” I stare at the man, wishing I could close his wrists, stitch them shut. “But maybe you don’t realize you’re doing it because you’ve spent so long telling yourself you can’t.”
I rub my face, missing the bed. After a while, she speaks.