Please Remain Calm (3 page)

“Oh,” Sloane says. “Maybe …”

She heads back to the car and rummages around the front seat. She returns with two things: an AAA membership card and a plastic employee badge. I stare at the badge, at the grainy photo on it. Her father, a burly-looking guy. This is the man who put his fists to her. I wonder if I would be afraid of him if I passed him on the street. He’s the head of a human resources department. What a joke.

“You don’t look like him,” I tell her.

She opens her mouth—but her jaw just hangs there like the words left her quicker than she had them. I hand the badge back to her. The membership card should be good enough. I turn to the house and slide it in the crack between the door and door frame, hoping for a spring bolt because if it’s not a spring bolt, we’re as fucked as we were when we started. I push in, meeting a little resistance and then start bending the card. Please work. Please,
please
work …

“I know I don’t,” Sloane says at my back.

While I try to get the door open all the sounds I took for granted before the world ended fill my head. Bugs humming. The wind rustling the leaves of nearby trees. Water? I think I hear rushing water not so far away and I remember the Danforth River cuts right through this area. Should be just beyond the trees past the house, if I can hear it from here. And then the sound of the lock … giving. Thank God. I open the door and hit something heavy on the other side.

“I need you,” I say.

She helps me push on the barricaded door and I realize how weak we’ve become after a month in that school, eating, sleeping, and waiting. The furniture blocking the door scratches against the floor inside and then it finally gives, just enough for us to squeeze through.

“Okay,” I say. We retrieve our things from the car, the backpacks we’ve carried with us. They’re filled with what little food and clothes and water we took from Sloane’s house before we left. We grab the flare, flashlight, and the baseball bat. We slide them in through the door’s narrow opening and follow after, holding our breath so we can inch through.

The darkness hits us a second after the smell.

Something’s dead in here.

Sloane coughs and I turn the flashlight on, lighting the room we’ve found ourselves in. It’s a kitchen divided by a hall that opens up to a living room where there’s a couch and a recliner and God, I want them both. I run the flashlight over the makeshift barricade that was holding the door in place. A hefty old refrigerator. I turn back to the house.

“Hello?” I call.

Any infected would come running for that.

We wait.

Nothing.

But something’s rotting in this place. Maybe an animal? Optimistic. Sloane follows me to the kitchen sink. I twist one of the faucets and we jump when a stream of water pours out. I listen to the weird wet rattle of it touching down.

“A well, maybe?” I have no idea. I move to turn it off but Sloane stops me, stares at it for a minute like … she doesn’t explain. I let her have it for as long as I can stand it. The sound of it is unsettling. Too wrong because it’s too good.

“We’ve got to make sure it’s safe,” I say. “Figure out what stinks.”

We go through the downstairs quietly, the flashlight’s lonely beam guiding us. I freak myself out when it makes shadows, my mind turning them into monsters. There’s not much to this part of the house. The kitchen, the living room, a pantry, a laundry room with a very tiny bathroom attached. Tomorrow we’ll be hungry but for now the aim is
sleep.
It’s the only thing on my mind. What that couch would feel like, my body sprawled across it … I press forward. There’s a back door barricaded by an old armoire full of useless junk to weight it down and just before that door, a set of stairs. The smell’s definitely coming from upstairs.

“Hello?” I call again, just to be sure.

Nothing.

I take the first step.

The stairs creak all the way up, every single one. When I reach the landing, Sloane bumps into me and I’m so tense, I almost raise the bat to her and I’m glad I don’t do that. We stand in the hallway, side by side. There are four doors up here and they’re all closed.

“You stay behind me,” I tell her.

Now is not about gathering courage, it’s about staying one step ahead of my fear. I push the first door open fast, let it swing wide into nothingness. The flashlight reveals an empty bathroom with a door leading into the next room down. Sloane keeps behind me, close, but she’s so quiet I can’t even hear her breathing. I stare at the door and then I press my ear against it. Silence. I push it open slowly.

It’s a master bedroom and it’s empty and so bizarrely, cleanly kept. The windows aren’t barricaded, too far up to be breached. There’s a bed with comfortable-looking pillows and a rumpled duvet. Sloane runs her hand over it while I stare at the family portrait above one of the dressers. A woman, a man, and a boy and they all look alike. Red hair, pale skin.

“Two more,” I say. Sloane stops touching the comforter and follows me back into the hall. I choose the door across from the bedroom and decide I’ll open it on the silent count of three but I do it on two instead. It’s an office. A computer collects dust on a desk that’s collecting dust that’s covered in a few more family photos collecting dust. I streak a line through the dust on the desk with the tip of my finger.

One room left.

The end of the hall.

Sloane and I stand at the doorway, kept back by the smell. I pull my collar up over my nose. There’s no question this is where the death is. I glance at Sloane, but she’s not looking at me. Her eyes are on the ground, not scared, not anything.

I grip the door’s cold handle and open it.

It turns out to be the rotting body of the father on his son’s bed, his wrists cut straight up and down. The blood of him is dried and black across the sheets and floor. Bled out. There’s no other family with him and I guess that must be his reason why.

I turn away, can’t meet Sloane’s eyes when I do.

I close the door.

We take turns in the bathroom, Sloane and I. We clean ourselves. We change clothes. We push the fridge back in front of the door downstairs, making sure it’s firmly in place. At first, we think we’ll sleep on the couch, as far away from the smell as we can get, but it turns out we’re willing to suffer close to the rot just for that familiar, comforting sensation of bed. We go into the bedroom and I take the family portrait down before we pull the covers back and claim the mattress. Sloane keeps close to her edge and I keep close to mine.

Get your mother, Rhys. This place isn’t safe—

My only boy.

I don’t want to hurt you.

I could’ve been drowning the way I choke awake. Suffocating on the silence. I hack it out of my lungs, clear my throat. I know I didn’t sleep myself into a different night, so this must be the same one. Got settled into it long enough for every muscle in my body to start working against me, though. My legs, my arms, my back, all screaming. I push my head into my pillow and try to block it out enough to get back to sleep but then I feel the space beside me.

Times like these, you go so far out of your way to assure yourself you’re not alone. You memorize the person you’re with: the way they breathe, the way they move, the warmth of their body. All these things, you reach for every second of the day and when they’re gone, you don’t even have to open your eyes to know it.

She’s gone.

I sit up, fumbling for the flashlight, turn it on, washing the room out in its weak glow and she’s not there. I throw the covers off me and get out of bed, shivering as my bare feet meet the cold floor. I make my way over to the bathroom door.

“Sloane?”

Nothing. I open the door and she’s not there. I slip out of the bedroom and it’s sickeningly quiet against that sickening smell. Moonlight slivers through the curtained window at the end of the hall, turning everything blue. I know where she is. I wish I didn’t. I find her in that room with the body. She’s sitting on the floor and she’s staring at it. She doesn’t move when I step in. I watch her for a long minute, watch her until I see the slow, subtle rise of her shoulders. It tells me she’s breathing. I approach her slowly until I can just make out her face in the dark. She’s staring at the man, his long-open, emptied wrists. Her eyes are wide, unseeing—so unseeing that at first, I think I imagined her breathing.

“Sloane,” I say.

She doesn’t answer. She keeps her eyes on the body. She’s pale and blank. I crouch down in front of her, blocking her view and she doesn’t even notice the interruption. It’s like she can see through me, to him. I reach for her hand and that’s when I notice the razor blade in it.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I found it,” she says.

I grab her wrists, both of them. Veins intact. The blade falls to the floor in the process. I shine the light on it, see its rusty edge. Old blood. But his, not hers.

She nods at the man.

“What do you think of that?”

“Coward,” I say.

“Trace too?”

“Even him,” I say and I think about him, putting that gun under his chin and pulling the trigger. I wasn’t in the room when it happened, but I saw what was left. “It’s selfish. It’s a sin.”

“Oh. Well, that changes everything,” she says and I stare at the body while I try to think of something to say that makes the difference.

“Why did you make me stop?” I ask.

“What?”

“For the infected girl, on the way out of Cortege.”

“I thought …” She trails off. “I don’t know.”

I exhale and then I settle down beside her, the side of my leg touching hers. “Look, Sloane, I get it. I do. It’s like being … it’s like standing between glass, the grief. And behind you is everything like it was and ahead of you is—”

“Nothing,” she finishes. “There’s nothing left.”

“
We’re
left,” I say. “That’s something. And you must believe it because every time you’ve had a choice, you kept going.” I stare at the man, wishing I could close his wrists, stitch them shut. “But maybe you don’t realize you’re doing it because you’ve spent so long telling yourself you can’t.”

I rub my face, missing the bed. After a while, she speaks.

“What can you possibly want from this?” she asks.

“Everything we lost.”

She doesn’t respond. She’s trembling. I remember kissing her in the school, knew as soon as I did it that she had kissed maybe no one in her life, no matter what she said during that stupid game of I Never and it felt good to figure something out about her on my own. I want to tell her how good and alive she felt, how good and warm and alive she is. I want everything I say to be enough. It was so much easier in the school. All of it, even the worst parts. Maybe because I still felt an old life ghosting me there. I could pretend. Even with Baxter, even with Grace dying, I could always smoke in the gym because that was my thing, before. I got to be that guy, I got to be the guy with his hand up Sloane’s skirt. And there was so much
time
in the school
,
time to weigh words, turn them into things like
I’m here because they’re not, so I have to make it mean something.

I’m afraid everything I was is gone and all that’s left is everything I’m not.

I wake up hard. Nothing new, welcome to every day. It’s just particularly unwelcome on this one, I guess. I got Sloane back to bed after a while, last night. She’s still out and still breathing. Her pink lips parted slightly, her cheeks flushed, her brown hair fanned across the pillow like a stain. Her shirt just off her shoulder enough to reveal her collarbone. Underneath her shirt—I’ve seen what’s underneath her shirt. When she asked me to check her for bites at the school. And now I’m hard and I’m into it, and I feel like a total asshole. I get out of bed quietly. I leave the bedroom and once I hit the hall, I gag on the stink. I imagine it getting more tolerable the longer we stay here—I mean, it has to, it can’t be so fresh forever—but we’re not staying here that long. We’re leaving today. That’s what I decided. Take whatever we can from the house, siphon whatever’s in the Prius, and get the hell out. Find Rayford, people who can help.

I jerk off, trying to keep my mind blank while I do it.

After I finish, I root through the upstairs—except for the dead room—while Sloane sleeps. From the bathroom, I take salve, Band-Aids, gauze, all the medications there are, even the ones with names I don’t recognize and two inhalers I don’t need because who knows what kind of currency is worth anything now. With that in mind, I grab a handful of jewelry out of the box on top of the bedroom dresser. Maybe someone somewhere wants something pretty and they’ll give me something useful for it.

I find the handgun under Sloane’s side of the bed, hidden in a suitcase under what looks to be a hand-knitted afghan. It’s a semiautomatic and when I pull the slide back just enough to check the chamber, there’s a round in it. I turn it over in my hands carefully, keeping it pointed at the floor. We had a gun before when we left the school, but it got lost along the way. The gunfire draws the infected but really, if they’re out there, anything will draw them and I’d rather face off with this. When I get to my feet, Sloane is awake, looks like she’s been awake. Her eyes are on me, on the gun. I make sure the safety’s on before I tuck it in the back of my jeans.

“It’s mine. You can have the baseball bat,” I tell her. She blinks. “Get up. Let’s see if there’s any food downstairs. Take what we can and get out of here.”

I don’t wait for her to answer. I head to the kitchen and rifle through the cupboards. There’s not much left. I find six cans of tuna in flavored olive oil. Fancy shit. It takes way longer than that to find a can opener and by the time I do, Sloane’s shuffled down. Seeing her makes me want to go because even if she’s here, I don’t know how with me she is.

And I don’t think I can do this on my own.

“We can eat in the car,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says.

“How are you feeling?”

She rubs the back of her neck. “Stupid question.”

“Well, ask me and I’ll tell you I’m fucking great.”