Текст книги "This is Not a Test"

Автор книги: Courtney Summers

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Trace wakes everyone up.

He’s running circles around the room, his sneakers slapping against the floor. It’s a sound that gets steadily more annoying the longer my eyes are open because of it.

Rhys groans and says what we’re all thinking.

“Jesus. I’m trying to fucking sleep here, Trace.”

“Before all this shit happened,” Trace says, breathless as he laps us, “I’d wake up by six and do five miles. I’m not stopping for you, Moreno.”

“The school has a gym,” Cary points out.

“Blow me, you stupid fuck.”

“You kiss your mother with that—”

It comes out of Cary’s mouth automatically. One of those stupid throw-away lines you just say that you’ve probably said before except this is not a stupid throw-away line anymore.

Trace stops running.

I can’t deal with them fighting so I close my eyes and go back to sleep. The next time I wake up, no one has moved except Trace isn’t running anymore. He sits next to Grace on her mat while she fiddles with her phone.

“My battery’s dead,” she says.

“Doesn’t make a difference,” Trace says. “I checked the landlines in here. They’re out. There’s no more emergency message on them. Lasted nine days, though, so I guess that’s something.”

I close my eyes and go back to sleep. The next time I wake up, it’s breakfast. Rice cakes smothered in jam, canned peaches. I stay awake this time but I’m not sure why.

“Zombies,” Harrison says.

“Shut the fuck up,” Trace tells him.

Rhys laughs. It’s a sharp, unpleasant sound at first and then he really starts to laugh. He covers his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking, while we stare at him.

“Sorry.” He wipes at his eyes. “Just—sorry.”

“Do you think it’s the government?” Harrison asks, picking at his mat. “And that it’s just local? Like … they did this to us?”

“I think they’d have bombed the shit out of us by now if that was the case,” Cary says.

“So then it’s global,” Trace decides. “And if it’s global, I doubt anyone’s coming for us.”

This sets Harrison off. “What? But—”

“The message on the radio is still going,” Cary says. “They’ll come. This is what I think: Cortege is a small town, right? So it might take them a while to get to us. You think it’s crazy here, just imagine how it is in, like, the city or something. We’d have no chance.”

“Was anyone here sick?” Rhys asks. “That flu?” No one says anything. Rhys glances at me. “You were out for a while, weren’t you? The last couple of weeks before this started. Were you sick?”

“I’m not infected,” I say. “Do I look infected to you?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Rhys says quickly, but I don’t know what else he could have meant. “I’m just trying to figure it out.”

“I don’t think it’s the flu,” Cary says. “I think that was just weird timing.”

“Maybe it’s terrorists,” Harrison says.

The boys go back and forth for a while, trying to figure out how and why this started, like they have the brainpower to piece it together and if they do, it will change the fact it happened and that we’re here. Grace stares up at the skylight and says, “Maybe it’s God.”

“Don’t be so cliché,” Trace tells her.

But everyone stops talking about it after that.

*   *   *

“It was almost better when we were out there.” Rhys sighs.

“Don’t even joke about that,” Harrison says.

We’re still in the auditorium, lounging. There was lunch and there was napping, long stretches of silence and a bit of arguing. It’s barely past three. I understand what Rhys means. Waiting around to be saved is like waiting to die and I have done more of both than anyone else in this room. There’s a whole lot of nothing before there’s something and running was something.

Everyone clings to the idea of safety and because the auditorium seems safest, no one likes to venture too far from it without someone else in tow. Everyone except me, that is. I say I’m going to the bathroom but instead I wander the school and I pretend I’m walking Cortege when everything was normal, when it looked nice. Four years ago, all this money went into its beautification. Trees were planted along the main street, lights were strung on them, flowerbeds were put in every blank space and we got new street signs, the works.

Now it’s gone.

I wonder how much time I have before anyone looks for me. I’m far enough away from the auditorium that I don’t hear any voices and I’m far enough away from the entrance that the noises outside seem muted, or maybe they’re as loud as they ever are and I’m already used to them. I move past empty offices and classrooms. It’s an eerie route that takes me by no one. I reach the stairs to the second floor and pause, suddenly aware my life lacks structure now, that I never have to answer to anybody and I never have to suffer for it. As soon as the thought is in my head, there’s another one and it’s sharper, clearer, much more painful:

It doesn’t change anything.

And then a cheap, musky scent is in the air—a ghost, I know it’s a ghost—and my chest aches. I try to remember how to breathe around the loneliness, this being alone, but I can’t. I don’t know how. I have to climb the stairs to get away from it but there’s no getting away from it. I reach the landing and walk the hall, turn the corner. Sun lights this side of the building, save for a large blot of darkness—one of the big windows we covered with poster boards. I walk over and stand in its shade. Press my hand against it.

I wish I could break this window. Step through it. But I can’t break this window. I can’t even find some less dramatic way to die inside of this school, like hanging myself or slitting my wrists, because what would they do with my body? It might put everyone else at risk. I won’t let myself do that.

I’m not selfish like Lily.

I hate her. I hate her so much my heart tries to crawl out of my throat but it gets stuck there and beats crazily in the too narrow space. I bring my hands to my neck and try to massage it back down. I press so hard against the skin, my eyes sting, and then I’m hurrying back down the stairs, back to the first floor. I think of Trace running laps, something he can control.

I push through the bulky gym doors and as soon as they’re shut behind me, I run. The bleachers stretch out on either side of the room. Light pours in overhead. The gym used to feel so alive, always bustling, and now it’s nothing. The barricade against the exit is monstrous and every time I catch it out of the corner of my eye, my insides jump and it makes me run a little faster until I’m circling the gym at a pace I know I can’t maintain, a pace that is killing me. I ran as fast out there, but it was different out there. My body wants more rest, more food.

My body wants to stop.

Thud. I end up on my knees. I’m dripping with sweat and my stomach is churning and the sound I heard was not the sound of myself falling and landing but—thud.

I turn my head to the exit.

Thud.

Thud.

Tears stream down Harrison’s cheeks.

Thud.

He covers his ears.

Trace and Grace hold hands.

I hold mine together in front of my face, the edges of my thumbs against my lips like I’m praying and I am praying. I wasn’t raised to believe in God, but sometimes when I ask for things to happen, they happen. This is what I want to happen: I want the doors to burst open.

“They know we’re in here,” Rhys says. It’s true, they do. They know. This isn’t the frenzied sounds of bodies stumbling and tripping against the door amid all the other chaos, an accident that goes away. This is consistent. It has purpose. Intent.

They know we’re in here.

“Ours wasn’t the most subtle entrance ever,” Trace says.

Rhys turns to Grace. “Did you hear this when you checked the barricade yesterday?”

“No. I mean—” She stops and bites her lip. “I don’t know? It was really noisy.”

“I didn’t hear them in here when I put the barricade up,” Cary says. “So if we didn’t hear them then and Grace didn’t hear them yesterday…” He trails off. “It means they’ve figured out we’re in here since we got in here.”

“But how do they know?” Rhys asks.

“Why don’t you go out there and ask them?”

“Go to hell, Trace.”

“What if it’s help?” Harrison asks in a small voice.

No one says anything because we all know it’s not help. If it was anyone we wanted inside, they’d use their voice. They’d tell us to open the door. Cary’s hand covers his mouth as he thinks. We watch him think. After a while, he starts walking, gesturing us out of the gym. We follow him down the halls until he gets to the very back of the school, to the doors Rhys secured. We stand there and stare at them. Wait.

Thud.

Harrison moans and I wonder what it’s like to be him, to feel each bad development like it’s the first bad development, that it’s still worth resisting enough to cry over.

“Don’t start,” Cary tells him. “We’re not done…”

He leads us to the front of the school.

Thud.

The sound of more bodies forcing themselves against the doors, trying to get to us.

We go to home base, the auditorium.

It’s started there, too.

Thud.

We finish in the library. We stand there for twenty minutes, none of us speaking, but nothing happens. Here, nothing is outside the door.

“I wonder if they just have to know that we could be in here,” Cary says.

Trace snorts. “Bullshit. They saw us break in.”

“But why didn’t we hear them trying to get in before now? Remember that house on Rushmore? We were quiet as hell and they stormed the place.”

I remember the house on Rushmore Avenue. It wasn’t fortified, not like this, but we were quiet and got inside without being noticed and we stayed quiet. It was only minutes before we were discovered and then we were running again, climbing out a bedroom window while the door holding them back turned to nothing before our eyes. I remember the way it sounded, the wood splintering as easily as a twig …

“So you think they want in here because they can be in here? Because the school is here and they are too? That makes no sense, Einstein,” Trace says to Cary. “Try again.”

“We’re practically surrounded,” Cary snaps. “If there are no other survivors around this area, what else have they got to do? They’re at every fucking door because they’re looking for food. If anything makes sense to them, it’s that buildings like these are just fucking food containers.”

“They’re not at this door, though,” Grace says.

“Why would they be at this door?” Cary asks. “It’s practically invisible.”

“Don’t talk to Grace like that,” Trace says.

“I wasn’t talking to her like anything—”

“Stop,” Rhys tells them.

I contemplate the door. The exit in the library opens up into a narrow path that leads around the front of the school and to the athletic field out back. A chain-link fence lines the path, separating the school’s property from a dense but small cluster of trees that lead to the road. The front of the path is gated, but the back, leading to the field, is wide open.

“So that’s our way out,” I say. “If we have to leave.”

“That’s the door,” Cary agrees. “Unless they end up finding it too. In which case, we’d have to fight our way out of here.”

Rhys nods. “So we should be ready, one way or the other.”

How we are ready:

Two bags packed with the essentials: water, food, clothes, and medical stuff we raided from the nurse’s office. Cary and Rhys volunteer to carry them. Trace demands we get a bag each, but changes his mind when he remembers how the dead outside can and will reach for anything they can hold on to. We get aluminum baseball bats from the gym. Our weapons.

The supplies rest on the table next to the door and then we start fine-tuning our plan, as if plans make a difference when you’re being chased from one moment to the next. We had a lot of plans before we got here and I’m not sure we saw any of them through.

The plan: if the doors are breached, Cary is counting on the noise of our barricades falling to give us the lead time to get in here and get this barricade out of our way. And then we escape into the night. Or the day. Whichever.

Harrison whimpers at the idea of leaving, even though it’s purely hypothetical at this point, and we have to promise him repeatedly that we won’t leave him behind even though Trace threatens to. When Cary tries to figure out where we’ll go after we leave, Trace decides Cary’s acting too much like a leader and they get in a fight and we never figure it out. We have this teamwork thing down. And then Cary declares the library off limits.

“We’ll check it once a night to see if there’s any activity,” he says. “But we should keep this part of the school as quiet as possible. I don’t know if they can hear us out there, but I really don’t want to risk it. I want to stay here until we absolutely have to leave.”

Which is just another way of saying more waiting.

On the way back to the auditorium, Rhys touches my arm, stopping me. I jerk away, which surprises him but neither of us says anything. Cary turns at the sound of two less people moving with him. Rhys waves like, just a second. The others trudge back to the auditorium.

“So, what do you think?” Rhys asks.

I think he’s clean. His brown hair isn’t spiked with its own grime. His bangs are sharp against his forehead, some strands longer than others, like he cut his hair himself and he did it in the dark. His face is smooth. The boys have been sharing a razor they found in Coach Hainsworth’s office. Rhys Moreno. He used to hang across the street with the other senior smokers until the first bell. Sometimes surrounded by girls, sometimes not.

“What do I think about what?”

“The plan.”

I don’t tell him there isn’t one as far as I’m concerned. As soon as we leave here, I separate from them. Maybe I’ll even do something sacrificial so they have time to get away and then I can die a hero or whatever but I’ve realized something since I got here. I cared too much about how I was going to go before—Lily’s pills, the ones I couldn’t find—when it doesn’t really matter how I go, just that I do.

“I mean,” he continues. “I don’t know. You barely talk.”

“Maybe I’ve got nothing to say.”

“Not with those eyes.”

The way he looks at me right now—I don’t think he means it like a come-on or anything. His gaze is intent, searching my face so obviously, it makes me uncomfortable.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Everyone else here is riding extremes. You’re distant but you always look like you’re thinking. You keep wandering off alone, which is actually kind of stupid … so I just wanted to know what’s going on.”

“Nothing.”

He hesitates. “Where’s your family, Sloane?”

“Dead like yours?”

I have no idea if Rhys’s family is dead or not until I see how the question cuts him. He winces, but maybe he shouldn’t have asked if he didn’t want me to rip his chest wide open. He brings his hand to it, palm against it, like he’s trying to keep his heart inside. It’s like I took something away from him but I don’t know what. There’s nothing left to take.

“I’ve never said my family was dead,” he says. “What gives you the right?”

He turns and makes his way down the hall before I can answer. I have no choice but to follow him and for some reason, that makes me angry.

“I’ve always been quiet,” I say at his back. “It’s not like you knew me before.”

He stops and turns. “You’re Sloane Price. Your locker is on the diagonal from mine. You and your sister were attached at the hip when she went here, like it was you two and no one else, and I always thought that was weird but I also thought it was kind of sweet. And what you just said to me about my family was really cold.”

“So where are they, then? If they’re not dead?”

He gives me the dirtiest look and stalks off.

I want to ask him if he’s glad we made it but by then he’s already gone.

*   *   *

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

It hasn’t stopped. It drives Cary and Rhys into the halls, or maybe they’re checking the other doors, I don’t know. Harrison has pieces of wet toilet paper jammed in his ears and he took a bunch of Benadryl we found in the nurse’s office, so he’s out. We also found blankets and pillows in there so now our mats look like sorry imitations of beds and they feel like them too. I lay on mine and watch the door. I pick a scab clean off my elbow. A blot of blood appears.

I swear the thudding picks up.

Thudthudthudthud.

I pull the blanket up to my chin and I close my eyes. Rhys and Trace settle in on either side of me. Rhys says prayers under his breath and it’s the sound I fall asleep to.

Sloane.

I open my eyes and it’s minutes later. No, hours. I can’t think around the sharp edge of my father’s voice in my ears.

A shadow floats across the room and I panic—he got in, no he didn’t, he couldn’t have—when I realize it’s Grace and Trace, sneaking out of the auditorium. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to force my dad out of my head but once he’s there, he’s there.

I decide to follow them.

I leave the auditorium quietly, listening for their voices as I step into the hall. I circle the first floor twice because the building is confusing in the dark, but I don’t find them. I move on to the second floor, pausing outside of classroom doors, listening.

A beam of light down the hall catches my eye. The AV room. I hide behind a row of lockers and watch Trace pick through Principal LaVallee’s keys while Grace holds the flashlight over his hands.

“Does Cary know you took those?” she asks.

“They’re not his keys.” Pause. “No.”

He finds the right key and opens the door. They hesitate on the threshold. When we were out there stepping into any room, through any doorway, it was like having fear injected right in your heart. It was dangerous. After a long moment, they go in. I move as close to the door as I can and I hear them shuffling around for a while, silent, and then—

“Ready?” Trace.

“They won’t be able to see our faces.”

“They might. We’ll say our names.”

Silence.

“I don’t want to do this.”

“Grace, come on. They knew we were coming to the school.”

“But—”

“And I didn’t see them die and you didn’t see them die, so what if they’re trying to get to us? What if we have to leave or what if—what if we die before they get here? If we die before they get here, they’ll find this. And if we don’t die we can watch it and laugh about it later.”

I peer around the door. They’re sitting on Ms. Yee’s desk, facing a digital camcorder mounted on a tripod in front of them. Grace holds the flashlight under their faces. It makes them look awful. The open LCD screen is glowing, flickering as they move. I sit on the floor and listen. I have no right to this moment but I’m going to take it anyway.

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Whatever’s in your heart.”

“Trace, come on.”

“Do it for me.”

“I don’t like you talking like we’re going to die. You think I’d let anything happen to you? You really think I’d let you die?” It’s quiet for a moment and then the sound of Grace’s muffled crying drifts into the hall and I risk another look. Trace is holding her now but even so, she’s still the one comforting him. “I would never let anything happen to you.”

The worst kind of emptiness fills me. Imagine loving someone that much, but imagine them loving you back. I thought I knew what that was like but I didn’t. I never did. She lets him go and wipes her eyes. Trace moves from the desk to the camcorder and hits the record button. I stop watching but I stay against the wall and listen.

“My name is Trace Casper and this is my sister, Grace. We’re seventeen…”

Seventeen and live in Cortege, have lived here all their lives, and attend Cortege High. They’re twins. Birth date: March eleventh … I fade out until it gets more personal.

“Our parents are Troy and Leanne Casper and if they’re still alive, this is for them.” Trace clears his throat. “Grace, say something before the battery dies…”

“We tried to get to you,” she says, and then Trace chimes in, yes, yes, we tried to get to you, and suddenly they’re both talking over each other. It all comes pouring out.

They talk about how we got to the school and how Trace hates Cary and how the dead are outside the doors and it’s the same thudding over and over and how it makes hours feel like days and if the barricades are breached, we have an escape plan but no one knows where we’re going next but as soon as they do, they’ll put it on the tape so the Caspers know too.

There is this awful moment as they try to describe their state of mind. How do you say that physically, you’re okay, when everything is not. They’re determined to make it clear that they’re scared and sad and lonely and missing their parents while trying to pretend they aren’t suffering for it when it’s so obvious they are. The closing message is all I love yous and just before Trace turns the camcorder off, Grace blurts out, “We’re sorry we left you,” and then she starts to cry again and I think it isn’t enough to survive for the sake of surviving. There has to be more to it than just that. Trace and Grace have each other. This is what they’re here for. Why they’re still here. Surviving should mean something like it means something to them. And if it doesn’t—

If it doesn’t.