This is Not a Test

“See that, Chen? We shouldn’t have attempted to assist you.” Trace turns the radio off. “Help isn’t coming for us. We have to go to it.”

“Rayford,” I say.

“Yep,” Trace says.

“That’s almost a hundred miles.”

“Yeah.”

Everyone is still. No one looks like this is good news.

“Sounds like a death sentence to me,” Cary says.

“Find a car,” Grace says. “Drive it out of here.”

“First we have to prepare, then we have to find a car, then we have to assume that car can get us there, then we have to assume absolutely nothing will go wrong from here to there.”

“Your point?” Trace asks. “You’re not saying anything we don’t already know. We were talking about this before you got into the fucking room.”

Cary keeps going, undeterred. “We don’t know how congested the highway is going to be. We don’t know how bad the infection has spread. How many are out there…”

“We could take back roads.”

“Which adds more time to the trip. There’s not going to be any supplies on back roads,” Cary continues. “So what happens when we run out of gas? We just die on some country road or camp out in the woods? Start a colony?”

Trace throws his hands up. “Well, what the fuck else are we supposed to do? We have to go there if we want help. That’s what they said. They are not coming for us—”

“I know that,” Cary says. “I think we should go, I just want to make sure we’ve thought of everything—”

“What is—” Rhys interrupts. “What is ‘medical processing’?”

“It’s probably some kind of procedure to make sure we’re not infected, duh,” Trace answers. “Are you infected? No. There, processed. Welcome to safe haven.”

Rhys doesn’t respond. He turns the radio on and we listen to it again. And then again. Each time we hear it, what little hope it gave us diminishes until Rhys finally turns the radio off for good.

“It feels impossible,” Cary says. “Rayford.”

“It is,” Harrison says. I thought out of all of us, he would be the most excited, the most insistent that we leave, but he’s not. “I think we should stay here.”

“We can’t stay here forever,” Cary says. “We have to leave.”

“But does it have to be today?” Harrison asks. “Tomorrow? This week? What if they’ve reclaimed this town by the time we get there and we never had to take that risk—”

“But it’s not safe here,” I say. “We still haven’t found Baxter’s way in.”

“It’s safer,” Harrison says. “Baxter said we should hold on to this as long as possible. We have food, we have shelter, we have water, we have some first aid, and no one here is infected.”

“That water’s not going to last,” Cary says. “It’s going to run out eventually.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know when—”

“Which could be all the more reason to go—”

“Baxter said they waited now. I don’t want to go out there again. They’re out there and they’re waiting for us—”

“Harrison, we have to do things we don’t want to—”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Harrison explodes and it is so beyond anything we expect from him, we’re stunned into silence. “You’d make us all go out there just so you can throw us under the bus like you did with the Caspers!”

Cary’s jaw drops. His eyes dart from Harrison to Trace and I watch that realization hit him hard, that Harrison is no longer “his” if Harrison ever was.

“Where’s the gun?” Cary asks. He turns to Rhys. “You have it, right?”

“No.” Trace doesn’t even try to keep the glee out of his voice. “He doesn’t.”

“How could you give him the gun?” Cary asks us.

“I didn’t give him the gun,” Rhys says. “He took it—”

“Great, one of these nights, I’ll wake up with a fucking gun against my head—”

“Now that’s a good idea,” Trace comments at the same time Grace says, “He would never! Trace would never.” She turns to him. “You would never do that, Trace. Tell him.”

But Trace waits an agonizing minute before saying, “Not unless I had to.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Cary asks.

“Well, maybe you’ll still turn. Maybe you’re just a late bloomer.”

“I don’t think it works like that,” Rhys says.

Trace shrugs. “A guy can hope, can’t he?”

The Rayford discussion just dies. Everyone is on edge after that except for Trace. He finds it endlessly amusing to incorporate words like bang, shoot, click, and trigger in every sentence that comes out of his mouth until Cary can’t take it anymore and leaves the room.

Grace sits in a corner alone, wringing her hands. All of this drama. All these little dramas. It’s exhausting. She looks exhausted. I go to her and sit beside her. She glances at me and glances away and I feel bad for how I laid into her yesterday. I shouldn’t have.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I would never say anything to Trace.”

“I know but Cary might,” she says. “If Trace keeps pushing it.” She forces a weak smile at me but her eyes are full of worry. “And then Cary probably would wake up with the gun against his head. It would kill Trace if he found out.”

“Cary won’t tell,” I say.

I don’t know if that’s true but she relaxes a little, lets herself believe it.

“It’s not going to happen again with him,” she says. “It was spur of the moment. I just—wanted to touch someone, you know? Be close to someone. He was there. Do you get that?” I do but I don’t say so. “Look at Trace and Harrison.” She nods at them. They’re on the couches. Trace is leaned back, his hand resting between his legs. Harrison mirrors his pose. In some extremely fucked-up way, they look like they belong. “Guess what Trace said to me.”

“What?”

“He said all Harrison needs is a little guidance.” She sighs. “I guess that’s how pathetic we both are now.”

“It’s not pathetic.” I swallow. “When everything happened … like the day it happened, I was thinking about you. I thought about you a lot after Lily left.”

“Nothing bad, I hope.”

“Never,” I say. “I was thinking about that sleepover because I really liked your family. You guys were the perfect family to me.”

She laughs. “We were far from perfect. Trust me.”

“I needed to believe you were,” I say. “It was a good memory. I needed it after Lily left.” And then, something else she needs to know: “I’m not strong, Grace.”

She stares at me for a long moment and then puts her arms around me.

The thing no one tells you about surviving, about the mere act of holding out, is how many hours are nothing because nothing happens. They also don’t tell you about how you can share your deepest secrets with someone, kiss them, and the next hour it’s like there’s nothing between you because not everything can mean something all the time or you’d be crushed under the weight of it. They don’t tell you how you will float through days. You autopilot, here but not really here, sleepwalking, and then every so often you are awake.

The next moment that matters turns out to be this one:

“Do you need anything?”

I’m sitting on the cot in the nurse’s room. Rhys stands in the doorway. I don’t understand what he’s asking until I realize I’m surrounded by first aid. Peroxide, salve, and fresh bandages to tend to my forehead with. I bring my hand to it. It’s crusting over.

“I want to leave it like this,” I say.

“That’s not going to help it heal.”

I gather the supplies and go into the bathroom. I take care of the wound. When I come out, Rhys is still there. He’s stepped into the room and his hand is on the back of the chair he sat in that night, waiting for me to wake up just so he could demand answers from me. He looks me up and down and I flush, remembering what I’m wearing today. A drama department dress. It’s blue, straddling that strange line between casual and formal and I felt weird putting it on but earlier I decided to give my other clothes a quick wash in the showers and now they’re drying out in the locker room.

“I keep thinking about what you told me,” Rhys says. “About your father. I thought … you got away from him. You should look at it like that. Now you’re free.”

“It’s not about him,” I say.

“You’re so fucking tragic, Sloane.” He pauses. “I don’t think I’ll go to Rayford.”

This surprises me. “Why?”

“I don’t like the sound of it. Medical processing.”

“You’re not infected.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know how infection works. Maybe it’s changing all the time.”

“You know more about it than us,” I say. “You knew Baxter wasn’t infected. Cary. You were right about the cold.” He doesn’t respond. “How do you know they get cold?”

“What did your father do to you?” he asks. “You tell me about that and I’ll tell you what I know about the cold. It shouldn’t be hard, right? If it’s not about him.”

Is this what it’s like to get close to other people—you do something insane together and then you have to share everything even if you don’t really want to? But I weigh it. I want to know. I want to know what he knows about the cold. I want to know what it’s like. I’ve been close to it and I don’t know what it’s really like.