I’m hyperaware of the uneven footfalls behind us, the animal growls. We’ve lost the numbers game. We are going to die. Still, we press on, we reach the fence. The boys fight their way over it. I’m last to go, half over the side when one of the dead grabs my sneakers. It bites into the sole of my shoe. I scream and kick at it blindly until I connect with something soft and mushy and it finally lets go. I hit the ground, land on my side, the wind is knocked out of me. For a second the world wavers and I think I’ll black out. If I do that, I’ll die. Rhys and Cary are way ahead, they’re running ahead. They won’t stop for me, won’t help me up. They can’t. I have to do this on my own. Lily …

I force myself to my feet, staggering dizzily for a second before my head clears. The fence rattles behind me. I look back. A group of infected shake at it, try hard to push it down. They are so hungry, so desperate for us that they can’t make their bodies understand they need to climb.

I run. This street, Gunter Street, is less crowded. I see cars but there’s no time to stop. I pass by a house, searching for Rhys and Cary when I spot them crawling under the back deck of Mrs. Schmidt’s house. I crawl in after them. We get lucky. We’re not seen. We keep pressed to the ground and stare at the street ahead, the last street before mine.

There are dead everywhere, milling around.

We’ll never make it.

“Maybe they’ll clear,” Rhys says weakly. “If we wait.”

So we wait.

We are under that deck for hours, none of us talking. I have all these things I want to say about Trace bubbling up my throat but I know it’s not the time.

It’s just that he’s gone.

He was here and then he was gone.

Like that.

More time slips away as we wait for the dead to find something better to do. They don’t. They’re waiting for us and they could wait forever. They have forever.

We don’t have forever. I’m numb and my body aches. I feel like my mind is dying. We’re going to die out here in the dirt, waiting. Rhys moves close to me. Somehow, he’s not cold. I huddle next to him. We can’t stay here all night. If we stay here all night, we’ll stay here the next night and the night after that.

“That’s the Seals’ yard.” I point to the house across from us. “All we have to do is go through that house and then mine is right there, across the street.”

“Easier said than done,” Cary says.