He doesn’t ask us if we’re ready. There is no real ready for this. He just looks at each of us and when he isn’t met with resistance, opens the door. My heart seizes. It’s still too early, too dark. Dark enough not to see our own deaths coming and I haven’t once imagined a death that was out of my control since this started. I tighten my grip on the crowbar.

The rain falls. Heavy drops hit the building, the path. The trees beyond the path. Those trees are bare. They’ll offer little to no cover but it’s better than nothing.

I turn back to the school.

Running water. The walls, the ceiling. The barricades. Our fortress.

I turn back to the open door.

My sister.

I’m the first to step through and it feels like I’m stepping into a dream. The path is clear and the trees ahead are clear and Cortege is quiet, quiet enough for me to question whether it ever happened. The boys follow me. I bring my hands to the fence and remember the sound it makes when you go over. I slide my crowbar between the chain link.

We line up against the fence. I squint. There’s nothing in the distance. I think of Baxter. They wait. They wait, but they can’t be invisible. I climb the fence. The metal is slick and cold and the book bag feels awkward against my back, but I’m first to reach the other side. I take their baseball bats and set them quietly on the ground, one by one, and then we make our way through the small thicket of trees, our footsteps crunching against dead leaves from last fall. Still, there is nothing. No sign of them. I look at Cary, Harrison, Rhys, and Trace. They’re uneasy, heads swiveling in all directions, like the silence is noise. I hear them breathing.

I look back at the school again.

Good-bye, Grace.

We reach the middle of the brush. Cary holds out his bat and points to the street, urging us forward. The alley. My hair is wet, my clothes are wet. My palms are sweaty. The Caspers. The poor Caspers, dead. We trudge into the street.

The open, empty street. The sky is lightening.

“Maybe they moved on,” Harrison whispers.

Cary throws him an angry look for speaking.

I point.

The alley is empty but it’s not empty. There are bodies. I see at least three of them spread out along that narrow concrete path. The ones who turned and were put down. Rotting on the pavement. I search the road and my vision opens up to other shapes.

At first glance, they look like lumpy debris, but they’re bodies.

The real dead.

Rhys taps the ground with his bat. We look at him.

“Run for it,” he says.