Please Remain Calm (2 page)

“There’s a gas can in the trunk.”

“Got gas in it?”

She shrugs. The sign for Fairfield comes up, what’s left of the sign for Fairfield, anyway.
FAIR
is there—but the
FIELD
is long gone, torn off. The wood of it is all broken and splintered, interrupting the cartoonish landscape someone painted behind the town’s name. There’s a blackened, burnt-out husk of an SUV in the ditch, completely flipped over, like a warning for what’s around the bend in the road. The town itself is just beyond that curve and I don’t know what’s waiting for us. I could guess, but even when you think you know …

I stop the car and stare at the sign and the longer I stare at it, how wrong it is, the more I panic. The kind of panic it’s too hard to work around. The kind that gets you killed. I don’t know how I’ll get myself out from under it until Sloane opens her door and leaves the car, leaves me just like that. I pull the keys out of the ignition and go after her and every single noise I make doing it startles me into the here and now. The door opening, the rattle of my seat belt recoiling, my feet on the road.

“We need to be in the car,” I say. The sun’s getting low in the sky.

“You can’t check the gas can in the trunk, in the car,” she says.

She makes me feel stupid that I didn’t think of it, that I let that reality slip away just as soon as I knew it existed. But I’m tired. I am so tired. Sloane opens the trunk and I find the gas can next to a woolly blanket that smells of oil and I put all my hope into it being heavy with exactly what we need, but it’s empty. Fuck.

I squeeze my eyes shut, and my eyes like being shut and for a second, I’m gone, I’m asleep on my feet. No one calls me back. The faint pull of gravity jolts me awake. I blink hard and push the blanket aside and find an emergency flare and a flashlight. I turn the flashlight on and it works. Good. At the very back of the trunk there’s clear plastic tubing and I relax just a little because at least we can siphon with it.

Sloane’s wandered over to the SUV. She circles it slowly. She reaches her hand out and tentatively touches its frame, like it might still be hot.

“Not going to find gas in there,” I tell her.

“There’s a body.” Her voice is scratchy. She clears her throat and rubs her forehead and I see how tired I feel in how she looks. There’s something so weary in the way she holds herself, slouched like one of those Cortege Elementary School kids I’d see walking home from school, carrying backpacks bigger than they were.

“Let’s just find a place to sleep,” I say.

“If the town is overrun, we’ll have to …”

She trails off. Any other person I’d think the words she’s not saying are
keep going.
I want them to be the words she’s not saying. I wait for her to come back to me but she doesn’t, so I walk over to her, to where the body is. It’s wedged under the flipped SUV’s roof, burned alive. Head mostly gone. The parts of it that haven’t been ravaged are slowly disappearing back into the earth. There’s an arm reaching across the dirt, a hand, and the few fingers left on it are pointing nowhere. Keep going.

Sloane turns the flare over in her hands, silently mouthing the instructions printed on its side. I make my way into Fairfield at a crawl, trying, impossibly, to tiptoe with a car. I have my window rolled down and so does she, so we can hear—anything. Other survivors maybe, or more likely, something much worse.

The town reveals itself to us slowly, first in houses that look like the hearts were ripped right out of them. The destruction isn’t like a natural disaster, not nature reclaiming what we stole, oh no. Symptoms of this disease—whatever it is—are everywhere, making a joke out of the lives we lived and will never live again. Downed telephone poles, smashed mailboxes, broken windows, and overgrown lawns. White picket fences in shambles. More evidence of fire, foundations where houses used to be and one is still hot, sending faint gray curls of smoke into the air. I wonder what happened there, if it was an epic end to someone else’s story.

There are bodies scattershot all over, the truly dead. Either infected that got finished by the living, or the living that that took care of themselves before they got the chance to turn. And blood. Blood is here, everywhere. Doors flung wide open, an invitation to anyone brave enough to cross their thresholds. The first car I see is on its side and I think
maybe
—but the tank is against the road. We move past a house with a desiccated corpse of a dog next to its flattened doghouse. The quiet is eerie, the absence of the living dead. I’m no stranger to this kind of silence and I’m almost ready to believe not seeing the infected is worse than seeing them because at least wherever they are, you know where you shouldn’t be.

“They wait, now.” Sloane’s words curdle my guts. They echo in my head in Mr. Baxter’s voice.
If they can’t find life, they seem to wait for it … it’s quieter, but it’s not safer.
But the infected didn’t kill Baxter. We did. I wonder if that’s why everything’s gone so wrong since then, all we’ve lost. My dad always said we’re at the mercy of something greater than ourselves and whatever humanity we don’t show to others, we pay for. We’re paying for.

Sloane’s hand goes to my arm.

“What?”

She’s staring ahead, at a dirty wooden sign nailed to a still-intact telephone pole. The black lettering swallows everything else until it’s the only thing I see.

My stomach lurches, doesn’t know how to hold the hope that’s suddenly settled there.

Shelter.

“You think it’s for real?” I ask.

Or maybe it’s just a long-broken promise. But I guess there’s only one way to find out. She lets go of my arm and I round the corner, following the arrow. We pass three buildings, businesses. A used bookstore. Paperback carnage. Books ripped apart, spines broken, pages everywhere. Stories so far past their usefulness. After the bookstore is a butcher shop. The bones of some dead animal, long stripped of its meat, hang in the broken window, dry and sun-bleached. I see bloodstains on white tiles. After that, a Laundromat. Dented metal machines, broken glass, and a mess of … I don’t know what on the floor. It makes my stomach turn again, whatever it is—or isn’t—anymore.

The street gets thick with cars after that and if ours were any wider, we’d be fucked, we’d be walking through this. I wonder if we should stop and try siphoning from some of them, just in case, but the sun’s nearly gone now, and we wouldn’t see anything coming.

“Look,” Sloane says and she points to another sign on the next corner with that same word painted on it.
SHELTER.
Another arrow. Right. “It could just be bodies by now.”

“Rayford might be too,” I say. “And then it’d just be us.”

She doesn’t say anything. I turn the corner and there’s another sign on another telephone pole but this one says
SHELTER AHEAD
and I press hard on the gas and then Sloane says, “Rhys—” and it’s not my name, it’s a warning.

By the time I realize it, it’s too late.

The entire town must be here.

Here. A war was lost here, its victors still here, gazing at what’s left of the battlefield. Their backs are to us and church, church is in my head. I remember standing for the hymns and all those people in front of me, backs to me, and I couldn’t see their faces but I knew.

I knew they were opening their mouths.

I turn to stone. I want to preserve us as long as possible. Do not move, do not make a sound. Let them keep their backs to us, let us quietly drift away somehow. But that’s impossible because we’ve already announced our arrival.

And they have opened their mouths.

They swarm the car before I can do anything and all I see is what’s left of gray skin and black veins and every shade of red.

Sloane goes for the crowbar and I think
the window
when the hands start coming through it, fingers clawing at my chest, digging into my shirt, digging into me. I yell and they dig deeper, determined to keep me screaming so they can be sure I’m still a living thing.

I push back at the hands on me, into the unnatural softness of decaying skin. I yell, and they screech back. Over that ugly-thin sound, I hear Sloane’s startled cry. I turn to her and she’s got the crowbar in one of them. There’s too much give and it goes right through the thing’s face and when it falls back, the crowbar goes with it.

I remember the rest of my body.

I press my foot down on the gas but there’s no clean escape when we have to push through so many dead. The loud awful
thuds
of them meeting the car overwhelms us. Sloane’s side mirror goes. One of them gets ahold of a windshield wiper. Piece by piece, the only thing between us and them is disappearing.

“Come on,” I tell the car. “
Come on.
”

It moves forward against all odds and when we’re finally free of the bodies enough to pick up speed, the infected follow, follow, follow because death doesn’t stop, it never stops. The car squeals around the corner, and I reach out and touch Sloane, grabbing at her shoulder and I’m saying, “Okay?” Like that time my dad and I got in a car accident. The car flipped and rolled and when it was done rolling, his arm stretched protectively across my chest and he just kept asking over and over,
Okay?
And he didn’t stop until I told him the truth, no, not okay, maybe but
still here.

“Are you bitten? Sloane, are you bitten?”

She pushes my hand away and I glance down at myself, do my best to take stock while I keep driving. The front of me is stained, all stained with them. I want to rip off my shirt. I hold an arm out, then the other, and I see nothing. No bites. Touch my neck, every place they could have sunk their teeth that I wouldn’t have noticed because of the adrenaline coursing through me. Once I’m sure I’m fine, I fight the instinct that wants to go back and crush them all with my bare hands because why couldn’t I, how could I not when they’re
dead
.

“I lost the crowbar,” Sloane whispers.

“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re still here. It’s okay.”

Slowly, our breathing evens out, our pulses settle. I keep checking the mirror. We woke up the town, I think. The dead are coming out of their hiding places, moving down streets, seeking out us intruders. They scrabble after the car.

This is their world now. We don’t get to be in it for free.

We reach the other end of Fairfield and the town sign this side of it is still in one piece.
Thank you for visiting! Come again!
Fuck this place. I glance at it in the rearview and there’s the mural, a still lake and the sun setting into it. But across the sun’s golden, wavy rays, splashed in black paint, is the word
OVERRUN.

“There,” Sloane says. “Look—”

“What?” My voice cracks.

We haven’t spoken in a while.

“The house,” she says. “There’s a car …”

I peer into the darkness. My eyelids are so heavy, tank so close to empty. I see what she’s pointing at, a house in the distance. I see a car there too. People? Would people be there? And if not people, the dead? Can we risk it? Can we not?

I’ve got a million questions and I want to bash them all out of my head.

“I’ll drive up,” I say. “If there’s anything there, I’ll draw it out with the car. If there’s too many, we’ll just turn around and … keep going.”

I turn off the main road and drive up the dirt lane to the house. There’s a yellow Prius parked there, the front of it a little crumpled in, and it’s so strange to me, to see it just left like that because it still looks like it might run. Our car’s headlights cast a cold glow over the house, which is some kind of visual contradiction. It looks modern and outdated at the same time. Someone’s fixer-upper. New white siding but the front porch needs work. The windows on the first floor are boarded up. All of them.

Someone’s been hiding out here.

I’m not so stupid to get hopeful again, not after what happened with Fairfield. I circle the place a few times, grind the wheels into the ground, let them make noise into the night. When that draws nothing, I lean lightly on the horn and then I idle.

Still nothing. Living or dead.

“If there were survivors, they could’ve left for Rayford,” I say.

Sloane gets out of the car and by the time I reach her, she’s halfway up the walk to the porch. I grab her by the arm and yank her back, hissing her name. I don’t know what the fuck she thinks she’s doing. She stares at me, her face so white it casts its own light, I swear, and she sways a little. She’s got that glazed look of the deeply tired and I let her go because I understand it. My bones understand it. It’s the kind of tired where the thing you need is rest and the most you can hope for is sleep. But I’ll take it, shutting off for a while, even if it means I wake up bone-weary again tomorrow. I glance at the house.

“Wait here.”

I go back to the car and grab the aluminum baseball bat I took from the school. I hold it tightly and step onto the porch. It groans under my feet, like it’s long forgotten the weight of human steps. I stand at the front door and grimace at the bloody scratches across it. Fingernail marks. Lots of them. The infected
were
here, even if they’re not anymore. I knock, feeling absurd. No one comes. Nothing bad, nothing good. I jiggle the handle. Locked.

Damn.

I move to the window next to it. I pull at one of the boards. Really nailed in. This is when a crowbar would be good, but we don’t have one anymore. I turn to Sloane.

“Do you have a credit card or something?” I ask because who wouldn’t have a credit card handy during the zombie fucking apocalypse.

She shakes her head and I rest mine against one of the wooden boards keeping us from climbing in through the window. I think of my wallet, still at home on my nightstand and my parents—still at home too. After a while, I gather the will to face her.

“Cary showed me how to break in, if the lock’s right. I just need something thin like a credit card I can slip in between the door and the frame, so I can get it unlocked.”