A Game of Firsts (The Forest of Hands and Teeth) (2 page)

Only a week ago life had been so normal. I’d stood in the dressing room staring at my body, worried about whether the bra made my boobs look big enough to attract a guy’s attention. I’d fingered the lacy edges, wondering if they would chafe and itch.

Those had been my only worries then. And now this.

I screamed and ran, forgetting everything: to close the door behind me, to grab the keys from the lock, to pick up the flashlight. Terror made everything hazy. I tore across the driveway toward the garage and Danny must have heard me because he looked down from the entrance to the attic, his face a perfect O of surprise.

He flipped the stairs down from the ceiling and I lunged up them. When he pushed past me, I was screaming for him to come back. He’d remembered, though. While I panicked, he knew what to do. He dashed to the keypad by the garage door and mashed the button, even standing there while the door rumbled down to make sure it closed and nothing got in the way of the sensor to send it bounding back up.

Just as the grinding gear of the opener shuddered silent, we heard the pounding. The woman had followed me out of the house, and now she was at the garage moaning for us, trying to scratch her way in.

Danny stood there, his shoulders shaking, and I wanted to climb down the ladder to him, I really did, but I couldn’t force my fingers to unclench from the railing.

He was crying. We both were. We’d thought there was a chance, but now they’d found us and suddenly the possibility of surviving seemed that much farther away.

“
S
HE WAS MY FIRST
dead body,” I say, legs tucked against my chest and chin on my knees. I’m rocking slowly, not caring about the oppressive heat or the rain that trickles in through the hole in the roof. The woman’s been banging at the garage door all afternoon, and I can’t stand the sound anymore. I keep trying to get Danny to talk, but he just paces around the tiny space, his hands in continuous motion.

We’d seen them on TV, but that was different. They were anonymous then.

“Mrs. Neimeyer.” I’ve been trying to say her name all day, forcing myself to remember that she’s not an “it.” She lived two doors down. She had an annoyingly loud laugh, and on holidays she’d sit out on the back patio with her husband and a cooler of beer and she’d laugh and laugh and laugh and we’d roll our eyes and say, “There she goes again.”

Danny stops his pacing, shoving his fingers through his hair and wincing. We’re both sweaty and greasy. “I never realized she had such a nice body.”

He seems horrified by what he’s just said and the expression on his face is so priceless that I can’t help but giggle.

He lets a smile ripple along his lips as his cheeks blaze red. “It’s true.”

I nod. “And I almost bought that same bra last week.” I toss a pillow at him and he dodges out of the way, muttering, “TMI, Jules.”

T
HE FIRST FEW TIMES
we heard the choppers overhead we fought our way through the hole in the roof to try to wave them down. Even though we’d draped a white sheet across the roof to indicate there were survivors inside, we never saw any indication the pilots noticed us or cared. Eventually we gave up and let them drone past, the beat of their rotors causing the entire garage to vibrate softly. More neighbors joined Mrs. Neimeyer beating at the doors and walls. The moaning became as constant as the buzz of cicadas and nothing we did could keep the sound of it from grating on us. It was a hot summer, the sun burning bright in the morning and giving way to vicious storms in the afternoon. One of them knocked out the cable for good and we’d had nothing to distract us except for what we could call up on our phones.

Even those were useless. No matter how many times we tried to reach our parents or 911 or even friends from school we got nothing—just voice mail after voice mail after voice mail. A few times we talked about getting in the car and taking our chances out on the roads but then we’re remember the images from the news: highways choked with empty cars, all of them crawling with the risen dead.

“We’re safer here,” Danny said and I swallowed the words, for how long?

On the seventh day, the power blew, and a few hours later Danny looked over at me. “I’m out of juice.” He held up his phone. “Where are the keys to the truck so I can charge it up?”

That’s when I remembered the day in the kitchen. Dropping the flashlight, leaving the door open, forgetting the key ring still lodged in the lock.

My body became still, my lungs squeezing out any air I’d ever breathed.

I didn’t have to say it. Danny knew from my expression. He reached over to the phone in my hand and slid the power switch to off. “We’ll check it at noon and midnight. For a few minutes, just to look for news and see if Mom and Dad called.”

Numbly, I nodded. Outside the zombies still came, stumbling into the cul-de-sac as if drawn by our sign: Alive Inside. Might as well have been an advertisement for a 24/7 diner. Not that the zombies could read.

“
I
CHEATED ON MY
math final last year,” Danny admits.

I’m stunned into silence. My brother’s always been the one with better grades and it never occurred to me he’d come by them any way other than honestly. “Why?”

He’s sitting under the hole in the roof, letting a fine mist of rain dance on his shoulders. “I wasn’t spending enough time studying.” He stares at his hands. “I was worrying about the SATs and where to apply for college and…” he trails off.

“No one ever figured it out?” I realize it’s a stupid question. I’d have known if they had. Mom and Dad would have been absolutely livid. “Was that the first time?”

When he looks up at me rain slides down his face, and for a moment I mistake it for tears. He shakes his head. “Everyone thinks of me as the smart one and if I’m not that, then what am I?”

His admission makes my lungs feel too small. How could I not have realized how he felt?

I try to figure out how to respond but my brother’s first to break the silence, shifting the conversation away to shallower topics. “Being holed up here in the garage makes you wish we’d been allowed to go on that senior cruise after all, right?”

T
HE POUNDING DOWNSTAIRS WAS
more insistent than the usual fare and it jolted us both. “Come on, man,” someone shouted from outside. “Let me in!”

Danny scrambled out of the hole in the roof before I had a chance to tell him maybe it was a bad idea, because what if they were dangerous? The news had reported bandits were searching for safe places to shack up and we had a big white sheet on display for anyone who was looking.

Just as I started to go after him he jumped back into the attic and ran for the trap door, pushing open the stairs and sliding down them. I grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?” I hissed.

“It’s Raf.” He sounded excited.

“So?” I raised my eyebrows.

His forehead crinkled, confused. “He’s outside. He’s in trouble. We gotta get him through the window before the dead break down the fence to reach him.”

“Danny…”

“We gotta help him.”

I hated the way his words made me feel: selfish and ashamed. But I didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t have a lot of supplies, and no one knew how long this would all last. It didn’t matter in the end though, because Danny slid the window open and in Raf came.

He stood panting, hands fisted on his knees, and then he grabbed my brother, holding him tight and sobbing, telling him again and again, “Thank you. Thank you.”

D
ANNY WAKES UP ONE
night with the idea that he’ll figure out how to hot-wire the truck by looking it up online. I watch as the battery icon draws down on the cell phone, eventually turning red. The glow of the screen makes his face appear green—dead like the neighbors pounding away downstairs.

Eventually it cuts out and we’re back to darkness.

“Did you figure it out?”

I hear his head move, the rustle of the skin along the back of his neck against the collar of his shirt, but I don’t know if he’s nodding or not.

W
E RAN OUT OF
food during the fourth week and water became pretty scarce soon after. I was fairly proud we’d been able to ration that long, and we’d have been able to go even longer if it hadn’t been for Raf.

Every time I saw the way my brother’s cheeks sunk farther into his face I wanted to scream at them both: tell them how stupid it was to let Raf in. How we’d have had another three weeks otherwise. Raf must have figured how angry I was because he knew to keep clear of me, especially when the heat climbed in the middle of the day.

And then one night I woke up to the sound of a car engine idling. Danny threw down the trap door, keeping the stairs from falling open. A weak light drifted up from below and it took a lot of energy to drag myself across the floor and look down into the garage.

Raf sat in the truck, the dome light on. The engine rumbled and roared as his foot tapped on the gas pedal and we could hear the radio blaring: static. It hissed from the speakers as Raf cycled through the channels, searching for anything.

The driver side window was rolled down and he held his arm out casually. Danny sat with his eyes closed so he didn’t see it, but I did: the blood pebbling up from the bites on Raf’s arm, dripping from his wrist, collecting in a sticky puddle below.

I slid down the ladder toward him and knew from his eyes it had been a suicide mission from the beginning. Piled in the corner were a few bottles of water and packets of beef jerky pilfered from the neighbor’s. He told us later he knew all three of us weren’t going to make it—someone had to go out and get supplies and grab the keys so he figured it might as well have been him. “It was rude of me to crash your party without bringing anything in the first place,” he tried to joke.

I
N THIS NEW WORLD
there’s the first time you die, and then there’s the second. No one knows what happens between the two. Some of the people talking on the news liked to say there’s still hope attached to the soul—a belief that there can be something lodged so deep and hard in the mind that there’s a glimmer of who we used to be aching to be seen.

I don’t really get that, though. I don’t know why anyone would want to believe there’s something left. Because what does that make all those people shambling around, teeth snapping at the air, with all that need shimmering from their bodies like heat from the asphalt in a Georgia summer?

It’s easier to think it all disappears: who we were, who we wanted to be, all those infinite possibilities just searing from the blood as the heat of disease takes over.

But maybe that’s what I have to believe, because Raf’s the one who gets infected first. I watch the way the blood wells in the perfect divots from that woman’s teeth and then I watch his eyes go wide and terrified.

“Promise me you’ll do it.” His grip is so hard around my arm that I feel the capillaries bursting.

I realize later that the bruise’ll last longer than Raf.

E
VERY MORNING WE DRAINED
a little more of the truck’s battery, flicking on the radio and waiting for news. Sometimes we’d get word of quarantines being shut down, military movements organizing against the hordes. But there would never be anything telling us what to do to keep surviving. Neither of our phones ever rang and the messages we left for our parents and friends kept piling deeper and deeper.

Danny spent most of his time on the roof. Staring at what, I didn’t know.

Raf’s body lay in the yard off the side of the garage. The mere sight of it made me gag, forcing me back inside, but Danny kept himself out there, staring.

He’d been the one to kill Raf, in the end, after he’d turned. Danny hadn’t been able to bear doing it before then, even though he’d stood over him with a saw blade clutched in his fingers for hours. For a brief moment I’d been able to look into Raf’s eyes right after he came back and there was nothing there.

Not the boy I’d once wanted to kiss, not the boy who was always over for dinner helping himself to seconds, or the one who’d once pulled Danny out of the passenger seat after a car wreck on the way to school.

My brother cried as he forced the saw into his friend’s neck, pushing his weight against it to sever the spinal column like they’d instructed on TV. Afterward he knelt on the roof, screaming. It was the first time either of us had ever killed something that had once been alive. I couldn’t see how it would ever be the last. Not in this new world.

“
T
HEY WERE ALL MY
friends,” Danny whispers.

I open my eyes to find him rolled on his side, facing me. The attic is stuffy, the air rancid and filled with moaning and scratching from below.

“Who were?” I ask.

“Everyone in your stories. They were all my friends. Germaine. Leroy. Micah.”

I lift one shoulder. “So?”

He rolls onto his back. The sun crams through the hole in the roof, turning our attic into a sauna. In a few hours the tree will start to shade the eastern slope and we’ll crawl outside and look for rescue, but for now we’re trapped.

“You knew them better than I did,” he finally mutters.

Because of the sense of pain in his voice I want to protest, but I don’t. “Who was your first?” I ask instead and in answer he rolls away.

I let the silence fill the space between us until it grows so wide it could swallow the world. There’s a question neither one of us has had the courage to ask no matter how many times we discuss what to do next.

“Are we going to make it?”

“I don’t know.”

It’s the most honest answer either one of us has.

• ♦ •

ALSO BY CARRIE RYAN

The Map to Everywhere

The Forest of Hands and Teeth