This Is Not a Test (19 page)

“That’s almost a hundred miles.”

“Yeah.”

Everyone is still. No one looks like this is good news.

“Sounds like a death sentence to me,” Cary says.

“Find a car,” Grace says. “Drive it out of here.”

“First we have to prepare, then we have to find a car, then we have to assume that car can get us there, then we have to assume absolutely nothing will go wrong from here to there.”

“Your point?” Trace asks. “You’re not saying anything we don’t already know. We were talking about this before you got into the fucking room.”

Cary keeps going, undeterred. “We don’t know how congested the highway is going to be. We don’t know how bad the infection has spread. How many are out there…”

“We could take back roads.”

“Which adds more time to the trip. There’s not going to be any supplies on back roads,” Cary continues. “So what happens when we run out of gas? We just die on some country road or camp out in the woods? Start a colony?”

Trace throws his hands up. “Well, what the fuck else are we supposed to do? We have to go there if we want help. That’s what they said. They are not coming for us—”

“I
know
that,” Cary says. “I think we should go, I just want to make sure we’ve thought of everything—”

“What is—” Rhys interrupts. “What is ‘medical processing’?”

“It’s probably some kind of procedure to make sure we’re not infected, duh,” Trace answers. “Are you infected? No. There, processed. Welcome to safe haven.”

Rhys doesn’t respond. He turns the radio on and we listen to it again. And then again. Each time we hear it, what little hope it gave us diminishes until Rhys finally turns the radio off for good.

“It feels impossible,” Cary says. “Rayford.”

“It is,” Harrison says. I thought out of all of us, he would be the most excited, the most insistent that we leave, but he’s not. “I think we should stay here.”

“We can’t stay here forever,” Cary says. “We have to leave.”

“But does it have to be today?” Harrison asks. “Tomorrow? This week? What if they’ve reclaimed this town by the time we get there and we never had to take that risk—”

“But it’s not safe here,” I say. “We still haven’t found Baxter’s way in.”

“It’s saf
er,
” Harrison says. “Baxter said we should hold on to this as long as possible. We have food, we have shelter, we have water, we have some first aid, and no one here is infected.”

“That water’s not going to last,” Cary says. “It’s going to run out eventually.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know
when
—”

“Which could be all the more reason to go—”

“Baxter said they waited now. I don’t want to go out there again. They’re out there and they’re waiting for us—”

“Harrison, we have to do things we don’t want to—”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Harrison explodes and it is so beyond anything we expect from him, we’re stunned into silence. “You’d make us all go out there just so you can throw us under the bus like you did with the Caspers!”

Cary’s jaw drops. His eyes dart from Harrison to Trace and I watch that realization hit him hard, that Harrison is no longer “his” if Harrison ever was.

“Where’s the gun?” Cary asks. He turns to Rhys. “You have it, right?”

“No.” Trace doesn’t even try to keep the glee out of his voice. “He doesn’t.”

“How could you give
him
the gun?” Cary asks us.

“I didn’t
give
him the gun,” Rhys says. “He took it—”

“Great, one of these nights, I’ll wake up with a fucking gun against my head—”

“Now that’s a good idea,” Trace comments at the same time Grace says, “He would
never
! Trace would never.” She turns to him. “You would never do that, Trace. Tell him.”

But Trace waits an agonizing minute before saying, “Not unless I had to.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Cary asks.

“Well, maybe you’ll still turn. Maybe you’re just a late bloomer.”

“I don’t think it works like that,” Rhys says.

Trace shrugs. “A guy can hope, can’t he?”

The Rayford discussion just dies. Everyone is on edge after that except for Trace. He finds it endlessly amusing to incorporate words like
bang, shoot, click
, and
trigger
in every sentence that comes out of his mouth until Cary can’t take it anymore and leaves the room.

Grace sits in a corner alone, wringing her hands. All of this drama. All these little dramas. It’s exhausting. She looks exhausted. I go to her and sit beside her. She glances at me and glances away and I feel bad for how I laid into her yesterday. I shouldn’t have.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I would never say anything to Trace.”

“I know but Cary might,” she says. “If Trace keeps pushing it.” She forces a weak smile at me but her eyes are full of worry. “And then Cary probably
would
wake up with the gun against his head. It would kill Trace if he found out.”

“Cary won’t tell,” I say.

I don’t know if that’s true but she relaxes a little, lets herself believe it.

“It’s not going to happen again with him,” she says. “It was spur of the moment. I just—wanted to touch someone, you know? Be close to someone. He was there. Do you get that?” I do but I don’t say so. “Look at Trace and Harrison.” She nods at them. They’re on the couches. Trace is leaned back, his hand resting between his legs. Harrison mirrors his pose. In some extremely fucked-up way, they look like they belong. “Guess what Trace said to me.”

“What?”

“He said all Harrison needs is a little
guidance.
” She sighs. “I guess that’s how pathetic we both are now.”

“It’s not pathetic.” I swallow. “When everything happened … like the day it happened, I was thinking about you. I thought about you a lot after Lily left.”

“Nothing bad, I hope.”

“Never,” I say. “I was thinking about that sleepover because I really liked your family. You guys were the perfect family to me.”

She laughs. “We were far from perfect. Trust me.”

“I needed to believe you were,” I say. “It was a good memory. I needed it after Lily left.” And then, something else she needs to know: “I’m not strong, Grace.”

She stares at me for a long moment and then puts her arms around me.

The thing no one tells you about surviving, about the mere act of holding out, is how many hours are nothing because nothing happens. They also don’t tell you about how you can share your deepest secrets with someone, kiss them, and the next hour it’s like there’s nothing between you because not everything can mean something all the time or you’d be crushed under the weight of it. They don’t tell you how you will float through days. You autopilot, here but not really here, sleepwalking, and then every so often you are awake.

The next moment that matters turns out to be this one:

“Do you need anything?”

I’m sitting on the cot in the nurse’s room. Rhys stands in the doorway. I don’t understand what he’s asking until I realize I’m surrounded by first aid. Peroxide, salve, and fresh bandages to tend to my forehead with. I bring my hand to it. It’s crusting over.

“I want to leave it like this,” I say.

“That’s not going to help it heal.”

I gather the supplies and go into the bathroom. I take care of the wound. When I come out, Rhys is still there. He’s stepped into the room and his hand is on the back of the chair he sat in that night, waiting for me to wake up just so he could demand answers from me. He looks me up and down and I flush, remembering what I’m wearing today. A drama department dress. It’s blue, straddling that strange line between casual and formal and I felt weird putting it on but earlier I decided to give my other clothes a quick wash in the showers and now they’re drying out in the locker room.

“I keep thinking about what you told me,” Rhys says. “About your father. I thought … you got away from him. You should look at it like that. Now you’re free.”

“It’s not about him,” I say.

“You’re so fucking tragic, Sloane.” He pauses. “I don’t think I’ll go to Rayford.”

This surprises me. “Why?”

“I don’t like the sound of it. Medical processing.”

“You’re not infected.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know how infection works. Maybe it’s changing all the time.”

“You know more about it than us,” I say. “You knew Baxter wasn’t infected. Cary. You were right about the cold.” He doesn’t respond. “How do you know they get cold?”

“What did your father do to you?” he asks. “You tell me about that and I’ll tell you what I know about the cold. It shouldn’t be hard, right? If it’s not about him.”

Is this what it’s like to get close to other people—you do something insane together and then you have to share everything even if you don’t really want to? But I weigh it. I want to know. I want to know what he knows about the cold. I want to know what it’s like. I’ve been close to it and I don’t know what it’s really like.

So I count to a hundred and then I open my mouth and a history of bruises comes out.

I tell him about how my father made a room small just by being in it. How he wasn’t the kind of man who hurt you and cried after, apologized after, made promises to stop that he’d never keep after. He was a machine. I tell Rhys about how my father would check us over obsessively to make sure no bruises showed, stood me and Lily beside each other in our underwear sometimes so he could take inventory of every mark. How quickly he realized hurting Lily was hurting me, how many times she stood between us … how the first time he got me so badly I saw stars, I had to crawl up to my room alone, the worst it had ever been and she wasn’t there and then I am telling him about how she never told me she felt trapped, that I wish she’d just told me but maybe telling me wouldn’t have made it better. Maybe the only way our story can end is varying degrees of sad. And that I miss her, that I need her, and this kind of missing, this kind of need, the kind of emptiness it leaves behind is worse than waking up one day and finding the whole world has collapsed in on itself, that I was over long before it was.

I tell him about how Grace and Trace kill me sometimes, for having each other, and that’s what surviving is, I think. Having something. And I think of how clever Rhys is, how he asked me one thing to get me to tell him everything else. Or maybe I knew what he was doing and I wanted to say it out loud because …

Maybe I needed to say it out loud.

He keeps his eyes off me until I tell him, “I wouldn’t have let you die out there. I know you think I would have, but I wouldn’t have.”

“But you went out there to die.”

“I wouldn’t have let
you
die. When I saw them coming for you, I ran to you, to save you,” I say. “I wouldn’t have left you like that. Not like she did to me.” I swallow hard. “She always said I’d die without her and she left anyway.”

“But you didn’t die,” he says.

“I did,” I say. “I’m just waiting for the rest of me to catch up.”

It’s silent. I wait for him to take his turn, but he doesn’t. He moves close to me, close enough to bring his hand to my face. He hesitates. At first, I think he’ll tell me he’s sorry or he understands but these are useless sentiments and he knows they’d be wasted on me. Instead, his thumb traces my mouth, lingering on my lower lip. He presses the skin of it wonderingly. His touch is so gentle that my body’s first inclination is to shy from it because it doesn’t understand. He leans in. We’re an inch apart and his breath is on my face. My heart is beating so loud I’m afraid he can hear it but my voice is even when I ask him what he thinks he’s doing. It stops him where he is and I am so aware of how much space there is in the narrow gap between our lips.

“So it’s okay for you,” he says.

“If you told me not to, I wouldn’t have.”

His eyes search mine. “So tell me not to and I won’t.”

I try to find the words but they’re not there.

I kiss him hard instead. We’re closer than I realize and he stumbles a little but he recovers and then we’re all over each other, so frantic that just as I register his hands in one place—in my hair—they’re somewhere else. Rhys pulls me against him and I can’t breathe, I don’t want to breathe. He hisses and pulls back, brings his hand to his mouth.

“You bit me,” he murmurs.

“Sorry.”

He presses his fingers against his lip, checking for blood. There’s none.

“It’s okay. Let’s just go slower with this,” he says.

So we do, much slower. Too slow, I think. I don’t know how I’ll do this. He kisses me softly, carefully, asking permission each time. He draws me out until I’m in the same nice moment with him and we move to the cot and I want to tell him I’ve never done this before, that he has been my first everything so far, when his hand slips between my legs and touches me in a way I have never been touched by anyone else before. My breath catches in my throat. I tense in all the wrong places, but that doesn’t mean I want him to stop. I just don’t know how to let this happen. He kisses my neck and I think about how we almost died out there, we almost died out there together but we didn’t and now his hand is between my legs.

I watch Rhys watch me. He watches the way my body responds to him. I lean my head back and close my eyes and every thought I’ve had in this place dissolves until all that’s left feels electric and light. His mouth finds its way back to my mouth, to my neck. I tangle my hands in his hair and he likes that. Somehow, I know he does just like I know I like how he is touching me even though it makes me nervous, even though it makes me want to turn myself inside out.

Because it’s the opposite of everything. It’s …

He presses his forehead against my shoulder. Our breathing is uneven.

“Christ—”

A voice behind us. I know it’s Trace. I don’t have to look to know it’s Trace. Rhys doesn’t let it deter him. He kisses me once more and it’s tender and sweet. He moves his hand out from under my dress and its absence is immediate.

He kisses me again and then he gets off the cot but I stay still.

“Is this for real?” Trace asks.