Run. It would be stupid to go out there slowly hoping not to disturb anything. Rhys holds up three fingers and lowers one at a time as he counts down.

Three … two … one.

I push forward, out of the trees, my book bag scraping against outstretched branches, escaping their feeble attempts to grab at me. My feet hit a puddle off the curb of the road and the splash is deafening. The water soaks my ankles, my jeans. We’re a stampede of the living. The alleyway is so close I can taste it. We hit the middle of the street and—

The bodies seem to get up at the same time.

I stop. Stop. Stop.

“Stop!”

I don’t know who yells it, if it’s me, if it’s one of them. We stand in the middle of the street, backs to each other. My head spins at the sight of all the bodies rising stiffly to their feet. Rotting faces, the dead who have been out here, waiting. Skin slipping off, entire layers of it gone or melting into nothing. Organs on the outside, crusted and dried to clothes, remoistened by the rain. New dead, ones who have been freshly opened and are oozing everywhere. Women and men, girls and boys. People I might’ve known but can’t recognize anymore. There is every shade of blood—black, brown, red, pink. All eyes looking at us through that same milky film that sees us for what we are and what they are not anymore.

Trace raises the gun.

“No,” Cary says. “We need to run—”

“Where the fuck are we going to run?” Rhys asks.

Our voices incense the infected. They charge at us and Cary goes left, forgetting the alley, the shortcut. We follow after him. My side aches at the effort but I can’t quit before I’ve started. I can’t. The dead are fast behind us and I can hear them screaming but it’s not like we scream—it’s a strange, high-pitched, thin screech, like a noise trying to make its way through crushed vocal cords. I want to stop and curl up in the middle of the road and let whatever happens next happen, that’s how scared it makes me.

“The park,” Cary shouts to us. “The park—”

But I see something better.

“Cary, that car—”

It’s across from the park. I veer away from them, run to it. It looks in good shape, a small yellow four-door. A gift from God. Rhys and Cary scream my name. The boys straddle the middle of the road but they never stop moving. I pull on the door handle and the shrill whooping of the alarm explodes into the street, louder than anything.

“Shit—”