Please Remain Calm (6 page)

“Understood,” I say.

He hands me a hunting knife.

We walk for hours, through the trees, quietly following the river just beyond them—my eyes seeking but never finding Sloane—when my body starts quitting on me. My first real workout in a long time. Brief moments of running from the dead don’t count. All those weeks in the school sitting on my ass and doing nothing are catching up with me. My feet are blistered. My muscles and my joints burn. My head is killing me. Every battered part of me complains and it’s nauseating. I don’t say anything when my gut starts to revolt, I just end up hunched over beside a birch tree, barfing up the food I was so glad to have.

“You damned fool,” Jess says over the sound of my retching, and I hope, dimly, that Sloane made it out of the water in better shape than I did, which is quickly followed by the thought she might not have made it out at all, and I heave again. “Say something if you feel like that.”

I straighten, shaking all over. “You told me we had to be quiet.”

“Fool,” he repeats and Lisa says,
go easy.
“Fine. Break.”

“We need one too anyway,” she says and I decide to like Lisa.

I sit away from my puddle of vomit, and rest my chin in my hands. Jess nudges me a second later, with his canteen. I take it from him and drink. Rub my forehead. I’m sweaty too, and it’s not exactly warm out. I stare down at myself, my shitty post-river clothes and my running shoes that haven’t felt right since I put them on. The only thing that feels sure about me is the knife but I don’t want to get close enough to an infected to test that out. Jess and Lisa, every time I look at them, they make more and less sense. Lisa takes Ainsley a few feet away from us so they can both go to the bathroom. I turn my head. It’s all so close and it can’t be any other way. Jess keeps watch, a rigidness about him that should be about me, but I can’t seem to make it happen.

“Where were you before?” I ask.

“Milhaven,” he says.

Milhaven’s a city. I’m not exactly sure how far it is but I know it’s far, because whenever Milhaven managed to make itself part of any conversation, you could hear its distance in the tone of the person talking about it. Milhaven. Far enough to be a getaway, maybe, if you were desperate for one.

“You been making your way from Milhaven to wherever on foot?”

“We’ve been moving since it started. We had a vehicle for a while and then we didn’t,” he says. “Won’t try for one of those again. Staying on roads is trouble. We went deeper into the woods and we run into a lot less of it now.” Lisa and Ainsley come back. “You about ready?”

“Uh.” I get to my feet slowly. “Yeah …”

“No, he’s not,” Lisa says. “Look at him. He’s exhausted. We need to fill up on water, anyway, and Ainsley’s getting pretty tired.”

“You tired?” Jess asks her. Ainsley stares at her father and, after a long moment of thinking about it, nods. That’s the deciding factor. Not the concussed boy, but the toddler who probably doesn’t even really know what she’s been asked. I don’t know. I don’t know shit about kids. Jess turns to Lisa. “You got an hour. We’re not setting up here for the night. We can get a little farther.”

Lisa nods. “That’s fine.”

I sit back down and I miss my bed. Jess circles us, checking the area, cocking his head, listening. The river’s still audible, a constant reminder that I should be looking for Sloane and not sitting on my ass, and if I wasn’t so weak, I would be. But beyond that, there’s nothing. No sound of infected. When he’s certain enough of our surroundings, Jess turns back to me.

“Look at you out here with all this nothing for it,” he says, sounding halfway amused. “You got no gear. Your shoes are shit for hiking—”

“Watch your mouth,” Lisa says.

“There’s nothing I can do about it now,” I tell him.

“I suppose not.” Jess digs into his pack and hands me a small shovel. “Dig two holes, ’bout sixteen inches wide, a foot deep. Tunnel one through to the other. Understand?”

“Dakota fire pit?”

“Yeah. You done it before?”

“I’ve been camping before.”

“Lisa, you want to round up some firewood? Ainsley, you stay close to me.”

I start working the dirt. The ground is hard, soil difficult to shift. It gets my hands good and messy. The feel of the earth reminds me of my father. The camping trips he took me on. I was so fucking abysmal at it, just being in the wilderness, and he let me know. He loved telling the story about the trip we went on when I was five. I couldn’t stop poking the fire. When he saw me enthralled with a burning stick, he told me to get rid of it and I threw it into the woods, alight.
Almost burned the whole goddamn forest down
. I’d give anything to hear him tell it again. It hits me: that’s going to die with me, that story. My story. My family, everyone in the school, their stories too—I’m the last person who could tell them and if I die, they’re gone.

“Good work,” Jess murmurs when I finish. I wipe my hands on my jeans and it doesn’t do much to clean them and the running water in the house in Fairfield feels like too much of a memory now. “Lisa, start the fire. Rhys and I will collect some water.”

“Come back,” Lisa says simply.

“I always do.”

We take a bag of water bottles and I follow him through the woods. With him ahead of me, I pay less attention to what’s around us, which is stupid but if he notices, he doesn’t say anything. Eventually, we reach the bank, follow it to the edge of the water, where he stops abruptly. I freeze. He looks at me and then he jerks his head, directing my attention across the river. I squint. Other side of it is a field. A group of infected are running through it.

The water’s between us and the current would take them if they saw us and tried to cross, but I keep still. I just watch, with Jess, the gracefully determined way they move. Their steps seem so heavy, but they’re so impossibly fast. They veer left, all of them, so sharp that—

“Are they chasing something?” I ask.

I step forward, trying to get a better look, but Jess holds his arm out, keeps me back. “It’s an animal, most likely.”

“How do you know?”

“If it wasn’t, we’d hear the screams.”

My stomach turns. “So what do we do?”

“They’re on the right side of the river,” he says. “But we shouldn’t stay here long. We’ll get the water, we’ll get some food in us, and then we’ll move out.”

We wait until they’re no longer in sight before we gather the water up and by the time we get it back to the camp, Lisa has a small pot hanging over the pit. The smoke and flame are only just visible from their holes. Jess pours the first bit of water we gathered into the pot and once it’s boiled, he tells Lisa to get the MREs and he goes through the process of preparing them. He opens them up, tossing the dried food our way. A stick of jerky for me, a packet of M&M’s for Ainsley, crackers for Lisa. Ainsley melts the candy in her hands and it gets all over her face. Lisa cleans it up with some of the towelettes from the MRE packs. Jess uses the clean water to activate the flameless ration pouches, for the meals themselves. They’ve got a whole rhythm here that I can only sit back and watch. By the time we’ve got chicken stew in front of us, I’m trying to get a handle on these people I’ve managed to find myself with.

“Were you in the army or something?” I ask.

Jess exchanges a glance with Lisa. “No.”

“You said you’ve been on the road since this started.” I gesture to the packs, the food. Everything. “That mean you been on the road like
this
since it started?”

“Yep.”

I look from him to her. “You … didn’t know this was going to happen, did you?”

“Not
this
exactly,” he says.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Watch your mouth,” Lisa tells me.

“We’re Preppers,”Jess says. “You know what they are?”

I know what Preppers are. I’ve seen those crazies on Discovery a few times. People getting ready for any kind of apocalypse like total ass—oh. Jess watches these thoughts cross my face, leans back looking all smug about it.

“You think the people laughing at us then are laughing at us now?”

“How long you been ready?” I ask.

“Working on this since the towers fell,” Jess replies. “My father died that day.”

“You were waiting for another terrorist attack?”

“What makes you think this isn’t one?” he asks. He spoons some stew into his mouth, swallows, and shrugs. “I was waiting for SHTF. Could be a terrorist attack or civil war, government going crazy, the economic collapse, a pandemic. Everything but zombies.”

“Wait,” I say, as it dawns on me. “So that means you’re headed to a bug-out location, doesn’t it? You got a place?”

Jess stares at the fire pit, nods.

“How do you know it’s still standing?”

“No one’s going to find it,” is all he says. “Made sure of it.”

I go back to my meal, trying to think how Sloane and I could win these people over. Because I’ll find her along the way—I will, and we’ll need a place. And if I don’t … I’ll still need one. It could be their place. And it’d be better than the school because at school, we didn’t have survivalists, we were just a bunch of kids who wanted to survive. I want these people. I want their walls.

“She’s quiet,” I say.

Lisa looks at me. She’s sitting on the ground with Ainsley in her lap. Ainsley digs through Lisa’s bag because I guess that’s what passes for kid entertainment around here. We walked until we started losing light faster than we were gaining ground and then Jess picked a spot for us to set up. I helped Lisa put the trip wires up around us. Before we hear that sick sound of the dead, we’ll hear bells chiming.

Jess pitched the tent, but I won’t be staying in it. They have a mat, a sleeping bag, and a bivy sack for me. Jess and Lisa will take turns on watch, but for now Lisa’s letting Ainsley wind down and then she’ll put her to bed with her father. Ainsley’s been distracting, but not for the reason most kids are. She doesn’t screech, doesn’t whine, doesn’t make any verbal demands for attention. She doesn’t
talk.
When she walks, she must have her hand held. If she’s not walking, she’s carried and whenever she’s carried, she twists her parent’s hair around her fingers and stares into the distance, her eyes intently scanning her surroundings.

“She’s my quiet girl,” Lisa says. She kisses the top of Ainsley’s head. “So how are you feeling?”

“I think I’ll be of more use to you tomorrow.”

She smiles politely. Doesn’t argue, doesn’t agree. After a second, Ainsley produces a small book. I glimpse its brightly colored cover in the dim light, but not its title. She holds it to herself like a kid would a prized stuffed animal.

“It was in the car,” Lisa says. “When we lost the car, we didn’t even know she managed to grab it to take with her …”

Ainsley holds the book out to me, surprising Lisa and me both. She wants me to read to her. I shake my head stupidly because I don’t know what else to do.

“Oh,” Lisa says softly.

She gently takes the book from Ainsley’s hands, then encloses her daughter in a hug, ducking her face against Ainsley’s curls so I can’t see it. If this was supposed to be story time, it never happens. Lisa stays frozen in that position for a long time, before finally taking Ainsley to the tent. When she returns, she doesn’t look at me. We sit in silence until Jess wakes up to take watch. He plants himself in the middle of the camp and stares into the darkness.

“How’s your head?” he asks.

“Down to a dull roar,” I admit.

He tells me to go to sleep. I feel this need to prove myself by keeping my eyes open. It doesn’t feel gracious, to close my eyes, but in the end, I can’t stay awake.

***

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

My only boy.

I don’t want to hurt you.

What can you want from this?

The way Sloane’s voice works its way into my head, I’d swear her mouth was right next to my ear. I open my eyes and expect her to be there and she’s not. I expect to be in the school and I’m not. I want to be at home and I never am.

The sky isn’t quite the dark it should be, so morning must be on its way. Jess is on the ground, watching me. I exhale. I feel better. Well. Relatively. The ground’s hard under the sleeping bag, does no favors for a body that’s taken on more than its fair share of abuse in the last couple days, but I felt worse then, so I must be better now.

“I was about to wake you up,” he says. “You were dreaming. Making noise.” He clears his throat. “Called out for your parents.”

“Oh,” I say. Cary told me I did that in the school sometimes, the dead of night. He was the only one who heard. Or if anyone else did, they didn’t say anything. He’d just nudge me in the ribs and tell me to
shut the fuck up
because he was
trying to sleep, man
like it was no big deal. It never felt like one when he did that, anyway.

“How’d your parents die?” Jess asks.

I stare at the ground, my lips pressed together, while his eyes stay on me. What he’s asking—he has to know what he’s asking me.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says. “But you don’t make much of a case for yourself, if you don’t. Unless you’re the reason they’re dead.”

“What kind of case do you think I’m trying to make?”

“Don’t act stupid.”

“I, uh …” My mouth is dry. “The first night. The house got overrun. Our house. One bit my dad and we locked—we … we holed up in their room, waiting for the police. He got cold. He turned. We didn’t know what was happening. He bit my mom.”

“You finish them?”

The last person I talked about this with was Sloane and I was sorry I did. It opened everything up. After, I kept seeing their deaths. I saw my hands and their deaths. A horror movie doesn’t look good in real life. People turn into nothing and the way they do is so messy and wet and red. It will make you so sick. You’ll discover you weren’t strong, that however hard you brought the weight down wasn’t enough. You’ll look at your father’s wrecked face and his mouth will still be moving, hungry. You’ll think nothing could be worse than that, so when your mother shows the first signs of turning, you won’t wait for it to happen. And then you’ll find you were wrong. There is something worse. The last thing the monster with your dad’s face sees is a hero—at least that’s what you’ll tell yourself. But your mom, she’ll just look at you. Her only boy. She’ll cry with every blow until she doesn’t anymore.