This Is Not a Test (5 page)

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.