This Is Not a Test (22 page)

“I told you I wasn’t infected,” he says. “I told you.”

He reaches for me.

I run.

I know it’s stupid dangerous to turn my back on him, that I shouldn’t leave him in the hall but I have no other choice. I burst into the auditorium and I’m shouting,
Baxter’s here—he’s here
! And no one asks me if I’m imagining it this time. Trace gets the gun from wherever he’s been hiding it and there are more flashlights, spastic beams of light dancing all over the room. I tell them what Baxter said to me before I fled.
I told you I wasn’t infected. I told you.

We storm down the hall, around the corner to the place where I found him, and I expect him to be gone but he’s still there—like I first saw him.

Flat on his back. Crumpled.

We stop.

“Mr. Baxter?” Cary calls.

We wait for him to move, respond. He doesn’t.

Cary steps forward but Trace cuts in front of him, the gun out. He holds it over Baxter’s prone, still form. Cary goes to the basement door and peers inside.

“Why did he come back?” Harrison asks. “Why?”

“He’s not infected,” I say. “He can prove it. He wants shelter.”

Grace kneels beside him. Baxter’s eyes are half-open, glazed. He blinks and moves his lips but no words come out. She leans forward.

“Mr. Baxter? Can you hear me?”

“We can leave him here.” Trace lowers the gun. I step in front of him and crouch behind Grace. Trace circles Baxter until he’s behind us both. “We’re going. He can have the school.”

“Holy shit,” Cary says softly. “Did you see this?”

He runs his flashlight over the floor, revealing the dirty gray tile. It’s streaked with blood. He follows the trail all the way back to Baxter and I can’t figure out what part of him it’s coming from, what part of him is open. Baxter closes his eyes.

He stops breathing.

“Oh, God,” Grace whispers. She brings her fingers to Baxter’s neck to feel for his pulse. She looks up at us. “He’s cold.”

“Grace,” Rhys says. “Get away from him—get away from him now—”

I pictured this differently in my head. Pictured the turning slow. Baxter starts breathing again. Relief flashes across Grace’s face until she notices the difference. The terrible familiarity of the sound creeps up on her. The mechanical breaths of the dead.

Baxter’s body jerks once.

He opens his eyes.

His irises are white.

“Grace,
get back
!”

Baxter grabs Grace and in one swift motion, their positions are reversed. She’s on the floor, on her back, and he’s on top of her and someone is screaming, everyone is screaming—

“Get him off her—get him off her
now
!”

Grace pushes at his shoulders, tries as hard as she can to get Baxter’s mouth away from every part of her flesh and then Harrison shouts, “Trace,
the gun
!”

But I don’t think there’s time, there is no time. Baxter grabs her wrist and pulls it to his lips and I do the only thing I can think of to do—I grab Baxter and I pull him off her and then there’s a shot, this incredible
bang
and it’s so in my ears I feel it in my teeth. Baxter rolls sideways and I go with him, but he is not dead. It wasn’t a good enough shot. Baxter starts to twitch my way and I’m frozen but if this is it, it’s okay because I saved Grace. I saved her.

“Sloane,
move
!” I don’t know who shouts it. Cary, Rhys, Trace. There’s another shot, another shock, and then, Baxter is motionless on the ground. Trace’s aim was true this time.

Blood pools onto the floor from Baxter’s head.

“Shit!”
Trace is shaking. “You said he said he wasn’t—you said he wasn’t infected!” He says this to me like this is my fault. Like I brought Baxter back into this school. He stares at the gun for a minute. “I killed him,” he says stupidly. He laughs. “Holy shit, I killed—I—
fuck
! That was close—Grace—” He turns to her. “Grace?”

We all turn to her.

She’s still on the floor, dazed.

Trace hurries to her. “You didn’t get bitten, did you? Did you—”

“No…” She tries to get to her feet but it’s like invisible hands keep her pinned to the ground. Her eyes widen in faint surprise. “Oh…”

Trace sets the gun down and a dull whine fills my head, my heart breaks in half. His hands hover over her like he’s afraid to touch her and Cary shines the light on her slowly and I see red, her stomach is red.

“Oh Grace,” I say. “Grace—”

“I’m okay,” she assures us, and she tries to get up again but she can’t and her eyes settle into a kind of understanding that makes me want to run so far away.

“No,” Trace says. “I didn’t—I didn’t—” He pulls her upright into his arms and she cries out and he moans like her pain is his. She buries her face in his chest. “Talk to me.” He shakes her a little. “Grace, talk to me. Please.”

This didn’t happen. This is not happening.

“I don’t want to die,” she says.

I step back. Rhys wraps his fingers around mine, stopping me.

I can’t feel it.

“Okay, don’t talk if you’re going to say things like that.” Trace squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m sorry—I am so, so sorry, Grace—”

“Don’t be mad,” she whispers. “Please don’t be mad at me.”

“I could never be mad at you,” he says, and she starts to cry because it’s all she can do, the last thing she’ll ever do. “Grace, come on.”

“Please don’t be mad.” Her voice is getting smaller and smaller. “I don’t want to do this to you…”

“Then don’t—come on, don’t do this to me—you don’t have to do this to me…”

But she does. Grace dies in the hall, in her brother’s arms, in our school in this stupid, unforgiving world where there are no phones or ambulances or hospitals or doctors. She closes her eyes and she tries so hard to stay, but in the end she lets us go.

Trace asks to be left alone with her body.

We wait for him in the auditorium. No one speaks. We try, but our voices sound funny when we do, our words awkward and stiff as they fall from our tongues, like we are just learning to talk. It is hard to hear anything over the ringing in my ears, the beating of my heart, the air entering and leaving my own lungs.

Harrison is curled up on his mat, crying.

I want to hurt him until he stops.

Seconds pass, minutes pass, hours pass. The sun rises. When Trace finally comes in, we are all so much older. His eyes are red and swollen and his face is drained of color. There is blood on him—Grace’s blood stains his shirt, his pants.

Even knowing this, I look for her. I look past him for her. She’s not there. Half of me understands this but half of me refuses to believe it and that half of me is waiting for her so we can talk about this. We can’t talk about her being dead without her being here.

Trace looks at us and no one says anything.

There is nothing any of us can say.

Seeing him makes Harrison cry harder. He covers his mouth and sobs. Grace kissed that mouth when she was alive. Cary’s mouth. It hits me again: Grace is dead. Just like that, there is no Grace. We live in a world without Grace.

“Where is she?” Rhys finally asks.

“I took her to Ms. Yee’s room,” he says. “She’s there.”

My eyes drift to Grace’s mat. Where she should be. Some of her things are still scattered around. The clothes she wore yesterday. Rhys asks if we can see her and Trace tells us no. He crosses the room to Grace’s mat. He picks up her sweater and buries his face in it. He starts to cry and the material can’t muffle the sound. We sit there and watch him uselessly until he raises his head.

“This is real, isn’t it? That happened.” And then he calls her name. “Grace? I—”

There is no answer.

He stares blankly at nothing and then he grabs her blanket, her pillow, and walks out of the auditorium. The air is too heavy to breathe. I can’t breathe. I get to my feet and I leave and I walk down the hall, my hand against the wall to steady myself because the world is moving, it’s moving under my feet until I finally have to stop and just sit on the floor. I don’t know how long I’m there before Rhys is beside me, helping me stand.

We walk back to the auditorium together.

There is a window in the basement we never barricaded.

This window is at the back of the school, facing the athletic field. It’s close to the ground and semi-concealed by boxwood. That’s how Baxter got in. It would be a forgivable oversight except as soon as Cary tells us about it, we all see it in our heads and it is the most painful kind of realization. The next stupid thing: shelves were placed in front of that window, a barricade. Baxter put them there the first time and then fought them down the second but don’t worry, Cary tells us, nothing else found its way in after Baxter came, after Grace died.

We checked that basement and we looked at those shelves.

“It wasn’t obvious,” Rhys says, like that should make it okay that we looked at those shelves and never considered the possibility of a window behind them. It actually makes it worse. We all knew Baxter was lying about forgetting, he wanted to use it as leverage so why wouldn’t he hide it from us? Why wouldn’t we look for something hidden?

“Where is he?” Rhys asks. “Where did you put his body?”

“He’s in the basement.” Cary stares at his hands and then he shakes his head. “I can’t believe he came back just to do that.”

“We sent him outside to die,” Rhys says. “Why can’t you?”

“Someone should check on him,” Harrison says. “Trace, I mean.”

“You do it,” Cary tells him. “You’re closer to him than we are.”

Harrison’s eyes widen. “I don’t want to—I don’t want to see her—”

“You wouldn’t.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Yeah, well, he can’t stay in that room forever. We have to go to Rayford.”

“Jesus,” Rhys says. “He just lost his sister, Cary. Give him a couple of days.”

“You think he’ll still go with us?” I ask.

Cary shrugs.

“I’ll check on him,” I say.

I leave the room without looking back. Each step forward is a slow and hateful thing. I am going upstairs to see Trace, who is sitting with Grace’s body. I bite my lip and tears come. I think the worst part is knowing it hasn’t really sunk in yet. This is just the surface of it, like when Lily left. First there was the shock, this total implosion, and then numbness and every so often it would hit me in waves, just to remind me it was still there. Each wave was worse than the last. A full-body ache, this heaviness, seeing the world in gray.

I’m standing outside of Yee’s classroom when I hear Grace’s voice.

She’s talking to Trace.

Relief surges through my veins, makes me weak. I
knew
it was a mistake, some unreality. I knew she was alive. I
knew
it. I push the door open and it slams into the wall. Trace sits on Yee’s desk and my eyes pass over him in search of Grace but they don’t see her how they expect to see her. They come to rest in the middle of the room, where all the desks are pushed together to display—her. She’s covered with a sheet, but her voice—

I still hear her.

I turn to Trace. He’s holding the camcorder.

My heart crashes.

“We made a video,” he tells me because he doesn’t know I know. “In case…” He pushes a button and Grace’s voice stops and the room gets colder as soon as it does. “The battery will run out soon and then I’ll never hear her again.”

The air tastes funny. Strange. Everything is different now. The school is so alien. You’d think this place only ever belonged to us, that it was always ours and it is something so much less with one less of us in it.

“Can I see her?”

“You don’t want to see her.” He holds up the camcorder. “You can see her here. Alive.”

I walk over to him, never unaware of the other presence in the room. I don’t know how he stands it. I sit next to him, lean in close, and stare at the tiny LCD screen. It’s paused on the two of them.

The quality isn’t that great. It’s fuzzy. Trace didn’t adjust the settings for recording at night and the only thing illuminating them is the flashlight and it makes Grace look unreal on top of unreal. I have this urge to find my way into the video, to tell her what’s coming.
Grace, did you ever imagine that you’d die.
He turns it off and looks at me. His eyes are empty.

“Do you need anything?” I ask. “I can get you … anything.”

“No,” he says. “You can’t.”

It gets quiet again. And then—

“Do you think if we brought one of those things in … if we brought one of those things in and they bit her … she’d…” His voice cracks. “Do you think she’d come back?”

“No,” I say, my stomach turning. “No. She wouldn’t. It’s too late…”

“Were you going to stay with us?” he asks. “She told me she asked you. Were you going to?” My mouth goes dry. “Don’t lie to me. Just tell me if you were.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“She really wanted you to come. I wasn’t so sure but she liked you.”

“I know.”

“She said you didn’t know if you’d go because of Rhys.”

“It wasn’t because of Rhys.”

“But she really liked you.” It’s almost an accusation. I don’t say anything. He rubs his eyes. “If I step out for a second—will you stay with her? I hate when she’s alone…”

I nod. Even so, it takes him a long time to leave. His entire being resists it. I can see the fight happening in him. He finally steps out. Leaves me alone with her. I know he’ll be quick so I know I have to be too, which means there is no time to prepare. I hurry to the center of the room, the desks, her body.

I grip the edge of the sheet and pull it back.

This is what true death looks like. She’s not infected, so she will not turn. She’s so gone from us no bite will bring her back. I bring my hand close to her face, but I can’t bring myself to touch her. Everyone says death looks like sleeping, that it looks like that kind of peaceful, but this is nothing like that. The stillness. Her lips, her mouth, her hair. Everything is wrong. I can’t accept that she’s here in this room, in front of me, but she’s not here. She’s here but she’s not. I think of the dead outside, bodies. Bodies—but not
people.