Текст книги "This is Not a Test"

Автор книги: Courtney Summers

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FOUR DAYS LATER

“Grace! GRACE! Dad’s alive! He’s outside! He’s ALIVE!”

Trace bursts into the auditorium screaming these words at the top of his lungs and then we’re awake like we were never asleep.

Mr. Casper. Alive.

Trace is breathless and crying as he leads us to the second floor. The flashlight jerks in his hands as he tries to explain. “I couldn’t sleep—I was wandering around and I heard him, he was calling for help—I went to the window and I saw—”

Mr. Casper. He’s alive, in the parking lot, calling for help.

Rhys is going are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? Maybe you were sleepwalking. Trace is so beside himself he doesn’t even tell Rhys to fuck off.

We sprint down the halls and up the stairs so fast my lungs feel like they’re going to explode. My heart is numb. I don’t believe this. I can’t believe in this.

Mr. Casper is alive.

“I told you, Grace, I told you—they knew we were here—I knew one of them would try to get to us—I fucking knew it!”

I’m at the window first. Trace hands the flashlight to Harrison and pushes himself against me, forces me into the glass. We look past the edge of the auditorium roof, trying to see, searching—Mr. Casper, alive—but the lot is empty. Dawn edges up the horizon, but it’s not doing it fast enough. It’s not light enough to see anyone or anything.

“Where?” Rhys asks. “I don’t see him—”

“He was…” Trace nudges us away. “He—”

“How could you even see—”

“Shut up—”

“Listen,” Cary hisses. “Just listen.”

I press the side of my head against the glass and listen with everything I have. I hear car alarms in the distance. Grace takes a sharp breath in.

Trace spins around. “What—”

She points and I follow her outstretched finger to the crumpled shape of a man facedown on the pavement. I don’t know how we missed it at first, until I realize we missed it because we were looking for signs of life.

“No—no,” Trace says. “No—that’s not—he was alive—”

I squint. It could be anyone from here. I don’t know how Trace could have made out his father’s face in this lack of light. I’m too afraid to ask him in front of Grace.

“If he’s dead, infected can’t be far off,” Cary says. “Was he shouting?”

“He’s not dead! He was standing—he was up! He’s just hurt or something—he just—Dad! We have to go out—we have to bring him back in—we have to help—”

“Trace—”

I tune them out. The parking lot is empty. I look for others—the shambling, broken bodies of people we used to know surrounding the school again—but there’s nothing.

“Dad! DAD!”

Cary pulls Trace away from the window but Trace is made of the kind of energy people with hope have. He frees himself and shoves Cary against a row of lockers.

“Don’t fucking touch me—”

“You don’t even know it’s him—”

I hear it first and then I see it: Trace drives his fist into Cary’s face. It’s a dull sound, but I know it’s a sharp hurt. I know what it feels like. Cary’s knees buckle but he doesn’t fall. He rights himself and stands there, stunned, while blood trickles from his nostrils. He brings his hand to his face and stares at his stained fingertips and I see his anger building in a way I’m not sure anyone else can. It’s from his heart, in his veins. I almost want to tell everyone to back away but I watch, transfixed, instead.

“You’re useless—” Trace spits at him. “You fucking murderer!”

Cary tackles Trace and they’re a sloppy mess of fists and legs and Grace is screaming get off him, get off my brother!

Rhys is the one who separates them. He has to hold Trace down in the end by climbing on top of him and pushing his knee into Trace’s back.

I turn back to the window, the man outside.

Trace gasps under Rhys. “We’re wasting time—”

“He’s not moving, Trace—”

“Are you sure it’s him?” I ask.

“Who else would it be? I have to go out there—I have to get him—”

“No!” Grace says. “You are not going out there. You can’t—” And Trace says, Grace, it’s Dad, I know it is, I saw him, we have to get him because he believes this. He’s fevered with it. It’s his father out there because it can be no one else.

And she’s saying, “No, you can’t. You can’t leave me—”

She repeats this over his insistence he has to go outside and the more she says it, it’s like the more she believes he will leave her until she’s crying so hard she’s hyperventilating. Trace tries to reach for her, but he can’t unless Rhys gets off him. When Rhys does, Trace holds Grace and she sobs all over his shirt. He holds her and stares at me, at the window beyond me, trying to soothe her and figure this out at the same time. Then his eyes spark. He turns to Cary.

“You go out there and get him.”

Cary stares. “What?”

“It’s your fault he’s out there. Go out there and bring him back in.”

“Go out there yourself—”

“I’m not leaving Grace,” Trace says. “This is your fault, so you do it.”

“I am not dying for you,” Cary says through his teeth. “And fuck you for asking me—that guy out there? Whoever he is? He’s dead.”

Cary storms down the hall. It must be awful to find out your life is worth nothing to someone else. I want to tell Cary he’s not worthless. Harrison probably needs him. Rhys stares at Trace, disgusted, but Trace doesn’t care. He closes his eyes and leans his cheek against Grace’s head. He has no other options.

“Grace, I have to do it.”

“No. No.”

He breathes in and tightens his grip on her.

“It’s him. I know it is.”

I get that feeling again. That ache to have what Trace and Grace have, along with the sharp reminder that I don’t. The parking lot is still empty save for the man on the ground. Trace’s words echo in my head we have to bring him back in and I don’t know why they do until it hits me and I finally understand them for what they really are: an out.

“I’ll do it,” I hear myself saying. “I’ll go.”

I stop at my locker for my letter to Lily and tuck it carefully in my pocket. I have this insane fantasy where my sister comes across my body on the ground or walking around and she finds the note on me and reads the note and it kills her.

When I get to the library, Cary is actually helping Trace with the door, which is unreal to me. Blood is crusted under Cary’s nose. Trace is shaky, vibrating with the possibility of his father being out there, dead or alive. I watch him closely, looking for some indication he knows it can’t really be Mr. Casper. There are none. His heart will hold on to it until he knows for sure.

Grace and Harrison sit on one of the tables together. Harrison keeps the flashlight trained on the boys and says he’s afraid of the door being open for the brief second it will take me to walk out of it but no one comforts him. Grace is zoned out, like she can’t really understand how this happened or why but I can tell she wants me to go out there. I know she does.

“You don’t have to do this,” Rhys says.

“Shut up.” Trace grunts as he pushes a desk aside. “She wants to.”

I nod. “I want to.”

Rhys sighs, resigned, and then he says something terrible.

“I’ll go with you.” No. No. No. I open my mouth to protest but he cuts me off. “I mean, let’s just say if by some miracle the guy out there isn’t dead—”

“My father is not dead,” Trace says loudly.

Rhys ignores him. “That means you have to get him back inside and there’s no way you’re going to be able to do it alone. It’s a two-person job. Unless you want to die.”

Ha ha. My stomach turns. This went from good to bad, just like that, but I can’t let it stop me. I work quickly to rationalize it. It’s better this way. It makes it easier. Instead of leaving Trace and Grace high and dry, Rhys can go back and tell them if it’s Mr. Casper or not. If it’s Mr. Casper, Rhys can get him back into the school. And me—when I go, I won’t have that on my conscience. That would be good. It’s a good thing that Rhys is coming with me. It’s good.

“Fine,” I say. “Okay.”

Trace and Cary move the last shelf aside, leaving the door naked before us. Rhys bends down and tightens his shoelaces. I do the same.

“Why are you doing this?” He doesn’t ask me quietly enough.

“I was wondering too,” Grace says. “Is it because of…”

She stops but I know what she’s going to say. Is it because of what I said to you? I don’t know how to tell her I’m sorry I hurt her but it’s nothing to do with her. I don’t think I can. I knot my shoelaces twice and get to my feet. She waits on my answer.

“I like your family.” It’s the only thing I can think of to say.

Her face softens. I wonder if she’s thinking of the sleepover. Something inside me just wants to see her remember it like Trace wants it to be his father outside because—I don’t know.

I guess it’s the last thing I have.

“Okay,” Cary says.

Trace gives me a hug and I lose myself in the sensation. It’s so dizzyingly nice, like someone wants me and I almost think it would be worth hanging around for if it was an all-the-time thing. He lets me go, gives Rhys a curt nod, and then hands us each a baseball bat. I hold mine limply at my side. Rhys clutches his so hard his knuckles turn white.

“Stay by the door,” he tells Cary. “Don’t move and open it when you hear us.”

“I’m not moving,” Cary says. “Good luck.”

Rhys looks at me. His eyes ask if I’m ready. I nod. I’m more ready than there are words for. Cary pushes the door open. It’s still dark. A cool April breeze drifts in and curls around us, making me realize how stale the air is in here. I take a gulp of it and hold it in my lungs.

Rhys and I step outside.

The door closes quietly and firmly behind us.

The fence is in front of us. We back into each other automatically, checking both sides. Nothing. There’s nothing. I feel Rhys breathing against me, scared out of his mind.

“Do you really think it’s Mr. Casper?” he whispers.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I don’t want to die today, Sloane.”

We stare down the path that leads to the athletic field. It’s a blind spot, totally wide open. We don’t know what’s out there. The path to the front of the school is gated, slightly closer to the parking lot but it’s still a walk around the building. And if the gate is locked, we’ll have to climb it. We won’t be soundless doing it.

I wouldn’t care if Rhys wasn’t here but now I have to care. When there’s more distance between us, that’s when I’ll leave, but for now I have to be careful for his sake. I’m not selfish like Lily. I nod in the direction of the front of the school. Rhys swallows and nods back. I make my way forward but he grabs my arm.

“Let me—” his voice cracks. “Let me go first.”

I shake my head but he trudges ahead of me anyway. I follow him, glancing over my shoulder repeatedly. We reach the gate. He ducks and I duck beside him.

We press our faces against the chain link and look around.

The street ahead seems empty, looks almost normal, like the world has yet to wake up, but as our eyes adjust to the dark, things that are wrong slowly begin to assert themselves. The windows in the house across the street are all broken and the front door is wide open. I can see a shape that looks like a body on the lawn. There’s a car wrapped around a telephone pole and I imagine a man or woman slumped over the steering wheel, killed on impact. That must have been a good way to go. But there’s nothing else that we can see.

No dead.

Maybe they’re still at Russo’s.

Rhys tests the gate. Locked.

“We should go over together,” he says.

We stick the toes of our running shoes through the links. The gate rattles under our weight and the baseball bats clang against the metal. Rhys holds his breath. As soon as he clears the top, he jumps. I do the same, landing easily. He grabs my arm again and pulls me behind a pair of decorative hedges at the corner of the front of the school.

“Didn’t see anything. Did you?”

I shake my head. We make our way alongside the building, tiptoeing over flowerbeds until we’re interrupted by the concrete walk close to the main entrance.

We cling to shadows every time we make a noise we shouldn’t and then move on more quickly than before. We finally get to the opposite corner of the school, past the bike rack, and stand just before the parking lot. Rhys stops suddenly.

“What if he’s been bitten?” he asks, and I swear we both have the same thought right after he asks it. Why didn’t anyone think of that before now?

“He didn’t get back up,” I say. “He’s not bitten.”

And then I step into the lot, feeling the bravest and most indestructible I’ve ever felt in my life which is strange, I guess, because I’m readying myself to die. The morning air is so welcome against my skin.

“Sloane,” Rhys says.

I make my way around a car, checking the ignition. No keys. Rhys takes a few more steps and then he stops again and I know he won’t go any farther, that I will have to do this part on my own. I keep walking until I’m standing in the middle of the lot and that’s where I see him.

It’s not Mr. Casper.

I know that right away. I don’t know who he is that he got all the way to the school, begged for help, and ended up facedown on the pavement, but he’s got blood on him and he’s bulky in a way that reminds me of my father.

But it’s not my father, either.

I walk over to the body. This isn’t part of my plan. I was supposed to keep walking forward but for some reason I want to see even though it’s not Mr. Casper and it’s not my father.

This man was someone. He’s dead but he was alive. Maybe I knew him. Maybe I passed him on the street once. Maybe he has a note in his pocket for someone like I do. I crouch down, grab him by the shoulders, and roll him onto his back. His face is swollen, bruised. I do a quick check for bites just in case, but I don’t see any. I don’t see anything that would’ve killed him either. Maybe he survived this long and his heart gave out or something. He’s middle-aged. Wispy hair, balding. Lines edge the corners of his eyes and mouth. I wish dying was as easy as lying down next to him and stealing his death from him.

“Sloane, what are you doing?”

“I’m not coming back with you,” I say.

“What?”

“Go back and tell them it wasn’t Mr. Casper.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m leaving—” I look up at him. I can’t figure out a way to say it. A good enough way to say it. A way that he will understand. “I can’t.”

“You’ll die out here—”

“I know.”

His mouth hangs open but his eyes flicker in a way that tells me he gets it. If he gets it all he has to do is go back inside.

But he doesn’t.

Before he can say or do anything, the man’s eyes open.

Rhys pales. “Shit!”

I drop my bat. It clatters against the ground, startling the man into awareness. He makes a noise, something halfway between a groan and a wail. He sits up, scrambles to his feet, and pushes me back—I fight to keep my balance—and then he’s babbling.

“No, no, no, no—get away from me!”

“It’s okay,” I say stupidly. I turn back to Rhys and he shakes his head. What do we do now. I don’t know what to do now. This wasn’t my plan. “It’s—”

“No!” The man sinks to his knees and then gets up again. “Where’s Nick? Nick?”

I step after him. “Just—”

“Get away from me!”

“It’s okay,” I repeat. I walk over to him and before I can do anything, he charges at me, shoves me back hard. I land on my elbows and wince. I get to my feet slowly, feeling blood trickle down my arms, and look to Rhys, who is totally paralyzed by this turn of events.

“We can help,” I say. “We have shelter—”

“Stay away. Where’s Nick? Nick? Nick!”

The man wanders away from me, farther down the parking lot, and his voice gets louder and louder and louder as he calls for Nick, whoever Nick is. I turn to Rhys.

“Go back, Rhys. Go back inside—”

And then—breathing.

But it’s not breathing like the way I breathe or the way Rhys breathes. It’s something that is a sick imitation of life.

It’s how they give themselves away.

That house on Rushmore Avenue. We heard them first before they broke in. This awful choked, ragged sound that told us to leave as fast as we could. We have trained ourselves to run from it, to fear it.

I look around but I can’t source it. I want to know where it’s coming from so I can move toward it. It echoes around us, brings Rhys back to himself.

“Forget him—forget about him—we have to go back.” Rhys walks backward as he says it, heading toward the gate. “Sloane, we have to go back now—”

“I’m not going with you,” I say.

“Nick? Nick…”

I have to get this man to shut up. I have to get this man to shut up for a minute so Rhys can get back. I hurry over to him, my brain slowly registering other things as I do, like his shirt is half open. There are holes in the legs of his pants. There are red splotches all over him. He’s twitching and he whirls around when I’m within reach. He raises his fist. I flash to my father, stop in my tracks.

“Don’t you come closer—don’t—”

I call back to Rhys, my eyes on the man. “Get inside while you can. I’m staying—”

“I’m not going back without you.”

I turn to him.

This is the moment everything goes wrong.

At least five infected are running for Rhys, coming in from all directions, stragglers alerted to us by the man’s shouting. They materialize from seemingly nowhere, some kind of hibernation. I yell for Rhys to get back into the school but he’s a deer in the headlights.

I don’t want to die today, Sloane.

I run to him.

“Rhys, go!”

I make it to him first, I get in front of him and the weight of at least three infected are on me, pushing at me as they fight for my body. I lose my footing and lurch forward. One of the dead—a girl—grabs my arm and pulls me to her and Rhys finally wakes up. He grabs my other arm and pulls me to him but as hard as he pulls, the dead girl pulls harder while the other four scramble around her for a piece. They all want at me. I’m the prize, I think stupidly—and then my shoulder pops out of its socket. I scream. Rhys grabs his bat and smashes it against the dead girl’s wrists, smashes it into the others, whatever he can do to get me free and I’m thinking about how it’ll never work, how this is it, when the dead girl’s grip loosens. Rhys grabs my arm, the wrong arm, and the world comes into the cruelest kind of focus, makes me realize something. We can’t go back. They’ll follow us to the door. And then it’s not just Rhys, it’s everyone, I’ll risk everyone and I’m not Lily, I would never do what she did to me—

“We have to lead them away,” I say. “We have to—”

But they’ll follow you no matter where you go. My brain puts the puzzle together before I even know what the pieces are and I run into the parking lot, Rhys close behind me, all the dead following fast. My chest aches, my lungs can’t hold air. My feet hit the ground so hard I feel it in my bones. We round the parking lot and the man is still there. When he sees us, all of us, his eyes widen. I close the distance easily and—I push him.

The man grabs on to me. We fall and he lands a second after I do and it’s a second I have on him. I use my good arm to scramble to my feet. The man reaches for me. I kick him in the—face. I hear myself kick him in the face. His teeth. Rhys is ahead of me now. I run after him because I don’t want to be near what is about to happen, what I made happen.

“Help me—help me—”

I look back. I can’t help myself.

They’re feeding. Four of them. But one—that girl—hasn’t lost sight of us yet. She pursues us, her hair flying around her head. She’s not wearing a shirt and all of her exposed skin is gray. The veins beneath it are dark, angry lines that want to break free, be outside of her. Her lips twitch, revealing vicious teeth.

“Come on!” Rhys shouts. “COME ON!”

We finally reach the athletic field. It’s wide open but there are no other infected, none that I can see. I can hear the girl behind me, though, and she’s close, she’s fast, faster.

She dives for me and we both crash to the ground. The side of my forehead connects with the pavement. I swear I hear it crack and then I’m underwater and everything is strange and removed and I’m strange and removed from it. I turn myself over, slowly, painfully, and stare into milky white irises, all the capillaries around them busted and red. I lose focus. I see one of her, two of her, three of her. Calm settles over me. She licks her lips. I close my eyes.

This is it. Finally.

A splintering sound reaches my ears and then again, again and again. Something splitting open. At first I think it’s me, that when you die, you splinter into a million pieces, but then I feel wet—wet against me, but slick and wrong. And then a dead wet weight on top of me.

Rhys hooks his arms under my arms and pulls me out from under the girl and I blink and she comes into focus; her head is completely decimated, bits of blood and brain all over me, and then I’m on my feet but I don’t feel like I’m on my feet. Rhys drags me by the hand and I trip after him. Everything is turning gray. He urges me on.

“Come on, you can do this—”

It’s quiet around us now but he moves like we’re still being chased. My legs are rubber and I fall. I can’t breathe. He pulls me up again, wraps his arm around my waist and we both stagger to the library door. He pounds his fists against it and I slump to my knees.

“Open the door—open the fucking door!”