“Sure.”

We stare at each other.

“… Alone?”

“Oh. Yeah, sure. Of course.”

Before I leave, I want to ask her if she remembers the sleepover in sophomore year. I want to tell her that I was thinking of her when the world ended but I don’t.

Later, the emergency lights seem to stop working one by one. Cary says it’s a miracle they lasted as long as they did. When Harrison asks him what this means for us, Cary says it’ll be harder to move around at night, but that we have enough natural light in the day. We find a few flashlights in the custodian’s office to guide us through the darkness and no one points out the obvious—that sooner or later they will run out of battery power too.

Trace wakes everyone up.

He’s running circles around the room, his sneakers slapping against the floor. It’s a sound that gets steadily more annoying the longer my eyes are open because of it.

Rhys groans and says what we’re all thinking.

“Jesus. I’m trying to fucking sleep here, Trace.”

“Before all this shit happened,” Trace says, breathless as he laps us, “I’d wake up by six and do five miles. I’m not stopping for you, Moreno.”

“The school has a gym,” Cary points out.

“Blow me, you stupid fuck.”

“You kiss your mother with that—”

It comes out of Cary’s mouth automatically. One of those stupid throw-away lines you just say that you’ve probably said before except this is not a stupid throw-away line anymore.

Trace stops running.

I can’t deal with them fighting so I close my eyes and go back to sleep. The next time I wake up, no one has moved except Trace isn’t running anymore. He sits next to Grace on her mat while she fiddles with her phone.

“My battery’s dead,” she says.

“Doesn’t make a difference,” Trace says. “I checked the landlines in here. They’re out. There’s no more emergency message on them. Lasted nine days, though, so I guess that’s something.”

I close my eyes and go back to sleep. The next time I wake up, it’s breakfast. Rice cakes smothered in jam, canned peaches. I stay awake this time but I’m not sure why.

“Zombies,” Harrison says.

“Shut the fuck up,” Trace tells him.

Rhys laughs. It’s a sharp, unpleasant sound at first and then he really starts to laugh. He covers his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking, while we stare at him.

“Sorry.” He wipes at his eyes. “Just—sorry.”

“Do you think it’s the government?” Harrison asks, picking at his mat. “And that it’s just local? Like … they did this to us?”

“I think they’d have bombed the shit out of us by now if that was the case,” Cary says.

“So then it’s global,” Trace decides. “And if it’s global, I doubt anyone’s coming for us.”

This sets Harrison off. “What? But—”

“The message on the radio is still going,” Cary says. “They’ll come. This is what I think: Cortege is a small town, right? So it might take them a while to get to us. You think it’s crazy here, just imagine how it is in, like, the city or something. We’d have no chance.”