Soon there will be no more showers, none. Nothing.

I sit on the bench in the dark, naked. I run my hands over my body, feeling out my bruises without being able to see them, and I think about what Rhys said, how we’re not made of anything. I wonder if my father felt the same way about me, Lily. Maybe once he realized it the first time, he wanted to realize it over and over because it made him feel like he was made of something. I get dressed slowly and make my way back.

The halls are pitch dark. I let the flashlight guide me but I go the long way around, taking corners, pausing at exits, studying the barricades we put up.

I keep walking, letting the light trail over the floor.

My heart stops.

I jerk my hand up, washing the ceiling with light. I think I must have been imagining what I just saw, like I’ve imagined my father’s cologne and I have imagined his voice. I did not just see—what I thought I saw. I squeeze my eyes shut and count back from ten, until I’ve calmed down and then I direct the ray of light from the ceiling, over the wall. It spills into the open basement door.

The open basement door.

My hand shakes. If I don’t move, if I don’t move the light, if I keep the light off it, it will go away. I open my mouth to shout for help but if I shout for help, I might wake it.

The body on the floor.

I aim the light back on it and in the time it took me to do it, he is up, on his knees, his palms pressed against the floor.

He stares at me. The expression on his face is odd. The fresh clothes I last saw him in are tattered. He is filthy. He left here clean and came back filthy. Came back alive.

“Mr. Baxter,” I whisper. “Mr. Baxter, what are you—”

“I told you I wasn’t infected,” he says. “I told you.”

He reaches for me.

I run.

I know it’s stupid dangerous to turn my back on him, that I shouldn’t leave him in the hall but I have no other choice. I burst into the auditorium and I’m shouting, Baxter’s here—he’s here! And no one asks me if I’m imagining it this time. Trace gets the gun from wherever he’s been hiding it and there are more flashlights, spastic beams of light dancing all over the room. I tell them what Baxter said to me before I fled. I told you I wasn’t infected. I told you.

We storm down the hall, around the corner to the place where I found him, and I expect him to be gone but he’s still there—like I first saw him.

Flat on his back. Crumpled.

We stop.

“Mr. Baxter?” Cary calls.

We wait for him to move, respond. He doesn’t.