Текст книги "This is Not a Test"

Автор книги: Courtney Summers

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Trace stares at us through the window.

His eyes are hollow and his jaw is set. Cary unlocks the door to the nurse’s room and pulls it open. I stay behind Rhys and Harrison. If I’m afraid of anything right now, it’s Trace. I don’t want him to lose it on me again. When I woke up this morning, everything hurt a little more and I have to be able to run. He makes no move toward me. There’s no anger on his face but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

He steps past us and then he stops and I know we’re meant to follow. We make an unconscious line behind him, a funeral procession. The only thing missing is the coffin but I feel the weight of it. Her body inside. We shuffle up the stairs, our footsteps in eerie unison. We reach the second floor. He hovers on the landing. We hover with him.

The hall is dark.

He takes a deep breath and moves forward.

We are ten feet from Yee’s room when he stops again.

We wait.

Nothing happens.

“If I go in that room,” Trace says, “I won’t come out again.”

Even though he hurt me, even though he thinks I killed her, I don’t want him to go in there because from here, I see her in him. I never saw it when she was alive but now I do. The shape of his face. His eyes. The way he moves. It’s not as delicate, but it’s her.

It makes me feel like she’s not dead.

He brings his hand to his mouth, considers it. I know he could easily stay here forever with her. He turns to us. His eyes fall on me and I shrink away.

“Lucky,” he says. It’s all he says.

We follow him back downstairs, to the library.

The barricade is down. It’s raining again. Cary says that’s a good thing. It will be an uncomfortable thing, but maybe the rain will mask our scent, keep us invisible when we need to be invisible. He hands out our weapons. Rhys and Cary and Harrison take the baseball bats but Trace refuses one. He lifts his shirt, revealing the gun, and then raises his chin, daring us to say something but we don’t. I take the crowbar. I need the weight. I lace my arms through the straps of my book bag. The other thing I’m taking—my note to Lily. I want it with me even though I don’t plan to die before I see her again. Not now.

“We’re going to jump the fence,” Cary says. “We’ll go through the trees until we’re directly across from the alley—” The alley. Where Mr. and Mrs. Casper died. “And we’ll just keep cutting across street after street, every goddamn shortcut until we hit Sloane’s house.”

“What if we need to stop?” Harrison asks.

“Hopefully we’ll have somewhere to do it,” Cary says. He turns to Trace. “Don’t fire the gun unless you have to. From here on out, no talking. No shouting. No panicking.”

All of these things sound sensible.

If we do these things, everything will be okay.

But that’s not how it really works.

He doesn’t ask us if we’re ready. There is no real ready for this. He just looks at each of us and when he isn’t met with resistance, opens the door. My heart seizes. It’s still too early, too dark. Dark enough not to see our own deaths coming and I haven’t once imagined a death that was out of my control since this started. I tighten my grip on the crowbar.

The rain falls. Heavy drops hit the building, the path. The trees beyond the path. Those trees are bare. They’ll offer little to no cover but it’s better than nothing.

I turn back to the school.

Running water. The walls, the ceiling. The barricades. Our fortress.

I turn back to the open door.

My sister.

I’m the first to step through and it feels like I’m stepping into a dream. The path is clear and the trees ahead are clear and Cortege is quiet, quiet enough for me to question whether it ever happened. The boys follow me. I bring my hands to the fence and remember the sound it makes when you go over. I slide my crowbar between the chain link.

We line up against the fence. I squint. There’s nothing in the distance. I think of Baxter. They wait. They wait, but they can’t be invisible. I climb the fence. The metal is slick and cold and the book bag feels awkward against my back, but I’m first to reach the other side. I take their baseball bats and set them quietly on the ground, one by one, and then we make our way through the small thicket of trees, our footsteps crunching against dead leaves from last fall. Still, there is nothing. No sign of them. I look at Cary, Harrison, Rhys, and Trace. They’re uneasy, heads swiveling in all directions, like the silence is noise. I hear them breathing.

I look back at the school again.

Good-bye, Grace.

We reach the middle of the brush. Cary holds out his bat and points to the street, urging us forward. The alley. My hair is wet, my clothes are wet. My palms are sweaty. The Caspers. The poor Caspers, dead. We trudge into the street.

The open, empty street. The sky is lightening.

“Maybe they moved on,” Harrison whispers.

Cary throws him an angry look for speaking.

I point.

The alley is empty but it’s not empty. There are bodies. I see at least three of them spread out along that narrow concrete path. The ones who turned and were put down. Rotting on the pavement. I search the road and my vision opens up to other shapes.

At first glance, they look like lumpy debris, but they’re bodies.

The real dead.

Rhys taps the ground with his bat. We look at him.

“Run for it,” he says.

Run. It would be stupid to go out there slowly hoping not to disturb anything. Rhys holds up three fingers and lowers one at a time as he counts down.

Three … two … one.

I push forward, out of the trees, my book bag scraping against outstretched branches, escaping their feeble attempts to grab at me. My feet hit a puddle off the curb of the road and the splash is deafening. The water soaks my ankles, my jeans. We’re a stampede of the living. The alleyway is so close I can taste it. We hit the middle of the street and—

The bodies seem to get up at the same time.

I stop. Stop. Stop.

“Stop!”

I don’t know who yells it, if it’s me, if it’s one of them. We stand in the middle of the street, backs to each other. My head spins at the sight of all the bodies rising stiffly to their feet. Rotting faces, the dead who have been out here, waiting. Skin slipping off, entire layers of it gone or melting into nothing. Organs on the outside, crusted and dried to clothes, remoistened by the rain. New dead, ones who have been freshly opened and are oozing everywhere. Women and men, girls and boys. People I might’ve known but can’t recognize anymore. There is every shade of blood—black, brown, red, pink. All eyes looking at us through that same milky film that sees us for what we are and what they are not anymore.

Trace raises the gun.

“No,” Cary says. “We need to run—”

“Where the fuck are we going to run?” Rhys asks.

Our voices incense the infected. They charge at us and Cary goes left, forgetting the alley, the shortcut. We follow after him. My side aches at the effort but I can’t quit before I’ve started. I can’t. The dead are fast behind us and I can hear them screaming but it’s not like we scream—it’s a strange, high-pitched, thin screech, like a noise trying to make its way through crushed vocal cords. I want to stop and curl up in the middle of the road and let whatever happens next happen, that’s how scared it makes me.

“The park,” Cary shouts to us. “The park—”

But I see something better.

“Cary, that car—”

It’s across from the park. I veer away from them, run to it. It looks in good shape, a small yellow four-door. A gift from God. Rhys and Cary scream my name. The boys straddle the middle of the road but they never stop moving. I pull on the door handle and the shrill whooping of the alarm explodes into the street, louder than anything.

“Shit—”

I stagger back, rejoin them. We run into the park. I pretend I don’t see the overturned truck in the sandbox, the bright pink coat of a dead little girl under a swing set. Garbage cans on their sides, garbage everywhere. Cary points to the public bathrooms and we run to them. He pulls the door open and we step inside. It swings shut.

“No lock!” He pants, feeling for it. “There’s no fucking lock!”

The stench hits us then. A sour, biting scent invades my nostrils and makes me gag. Rhys coughs. We turn. Two closed stalls face us.

I push open the one on the right and then I recoil. What was a man is sitting on the toilet slumped over. There is a hole in his head and his body has been ravaged, bite marks, missing chunks of flesh everywhere, revealing muscle and bone. Dried blood cakes the floor.

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.

“Is it clear?” Rhys asks him.

Trace nods and goes back upstairs and I realize he hasn’t said a word since we left. I move to follow him—I don’t know why—but Rhys grabs my arm and holds me back.

A clattering noise sounds from the kitchen. We go to it and find Cary on the floor, on his hands and knees. The baseball bat rolls in front of him. He has two book bags.

No Harrison.

“Don’t say anything,” he says.

He stays like that for a long moment, trying to gather the will to get to his feet. It isn’t until Rhys makes his way to the window that Cary manages to stand.

“Don’t look out there,” Cary says. “I’ll cover it.”

My stomach turns. I watch Cary struggle to move the fridge in front of the window. Rhys and I offer to help but Cary refuses to let us. I wonder what he’s thinking, if he’s thinking of how it was supposed to be Harrison when we were first outside. How Harrison was so worried about doing nothing with his life but in the end, he gave it to Cary. Harrison, dead. I’m filled with pity for him but I can’t say I’m entirely sad. I move to the wrecked couch and shrug off my book bag. I sit down. I’m immediately aware of how cold and wet I am, how sore. I close my eyes and listen to the rain.

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 connect with something soft and mushy and it finally lets go. I hit the ground, land on my side, the wind is knocked out of me. For a second the world wavers and I think I’ll black out. If I do that, I’ll die. Rhys and Cary are way ahead, they’re running ahead. They won’t stop for me, won’t help me up. They can’t. I have to do this on my own. Lily …

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—”

The back door starts to give. They’re going to get past it. I fling the front door open and grab Rhys’s hand again, forcing him forward. We trip down the steps and race to my yard. I push on the front door but it won’t open. I step back and notice the second floor windows are clear. I bet she left them clear for me. Rhys follows me around the side of the house. The maple tree outside my window. My grip tightens on the crowbar.

“We have to climb it.”

Our desperate scramble up is nothing like in the movies. The bark is gritty and painful against our hands and the rain has made it slick. There’s no learning curve. Lily is the one who climbed trees, not me, and I think that’s the only reason I make it. Because I know she did it.

Somehow, we get to the weak branch that leads directly to my window. By that time, the infected are below us. The branch strains under our weight and starts to give as I break the glass with the crowbar. I launch myself through the window. Rhys falls in after me. I crawl across the floor and use my bed to get myself to my feet—my bed—and I’m dizzy with how untouched my room is. The end of the world didn’t happen here.

Or maybe it did. Maybe I’m dead. I turn to Rhys.

“We made it, right? We’re here—Rhys, are we here? Rhys—” I crouch next to him and put my hands against his face while he gasps for breath. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

“We’re still here,” he manages.