I stagger back, rejoin them. We run into the park. I pretend I don’t see the overturned truck in the sandbox, the bright pink coat of a dead little girl under a swing set. Garbage cans on their sides, garbage everywhere. Cary points to the public bathrooms and we run to them. He pulls the door open and we step inside. It swings shut.

“No lock!” He pants, feeling for it. “There’s no fucking lock!”

The stench hits us then. A sour, biting scent invades my nostrils and makes me gag. Rhys coughs. We turn. Two closed stalls face us.

I push open the one on the right and then I recoil. What was a man is sitting on the toilet slumped over. There is a hole in his head and his body has been ravaged, bite marks, missing chunks of flesh everywhere, revealing muscle and bone. Dried blood cakes the floor.

Harrison starts to heave.

“Harrison,” Cary says. “Harrison don’t you dare—”

He doesn’t. No lock. There’s a small window at the back of the room intact. We could climb out of it. I turn back to the door we pushed through, waiting for an onslaught of dead to filter through, to trap us in this box, but it doesn’t happen.

“What are they doing?” I ask. “Why haven’t they come in yet?”

Cary hands me his baseball bat. He creeps over to the door and opens it up the tiniest bit, enough to see through. I bring my shirt collar over my mouth. The combined smells of the bathroom and the rotting corpse makes my eyes water, makes me want to spend the next thousand years vomiting up my own guts. Cary closes the door and turns back to us.

“They’re at the car. The alarm. More are coming. We have to get out of here before that alarm stops—” He searches the room and sees the same window I did. He climbs onto the sink and peers out. “This side is clear, I think. We go out this window.” He pushes at the frame and nothing happens. “We’re going to have to break it.”

“Then what are we going to do?” Harrison asks.

“Find a place.”

This side of the park slopes down, a hill stopped by a tall wooden fence that separates it from Hutt Street. Hutt Street is the closest thing we have to suburbia. It used to be a field and now it’s being developed into a bunch of houses that look the same. A few are for sale, some are sold, and some are under construction. One of them has to offer temporary shelter.

“Sloane, break the window,” Cary says.