“I’m not going back without you.”

I turn to him.

This is the moment everything goes wrong.

At least five infected are running for Rhys, coming in from all directions, stragglers alerted to us by the man’s shouting. They materialize from seemingly nowhere, some kind of hibernation. I yell for Rhys to get back into the school but he’s a deer in the headlights.

I don’t want to die today, Sloane.

I run to him.

“Rhys, go!”

I make it to him first, I get in front of him and the weight of at least three infected are on me, pushing at me as they fight for my body. I lose my footing and lurch forward. One of the dead—a girl—grabs my arm and pulls me to her and Rhys finally wakes up. He grabs my other arm and pulls me to him but as hard as he pulls, the dead girl pulls harder while the other four scramble around her for a piece. They all want at me. I’m the prize, I think stupidly—and then my shoulder pops out of its socket. I scream. Rhys grabs his bat and smashes it against the dead girl’s wrists, smashes it into the others, whatever he can do to get me free and I’m thinking about how it’ll never work, how this is it, when the dead girl’s grip loosens. Rhys grabs my arm, the wrong arm, and the world comes into the cruelest kind of focus, makes me realize something. We can’t go back. They’ll follow us to the door. And then it’s not just Rhys, it’s everyone, I’ll risk everyone and I’m not Lily, I would never do what she did to me—

“We have to lead them away,” I say. “We have to—”

But they’ll follow you no matter where you go. My brain puts the puzzle together before I even know what the pieces are and I run into the parking lot, Rhys close behind me, all the dead following fast. My chest aches, my lungs can’t hold air. My feet hit the ground so hard I feel it in my bones. We round the parking lot and the man is still there. When he sees us, all of us, his eyes widen. I close the distance easily and—I push him.

The man grabs on to me. We fall and he lands a second after I do and it’s a second I have on him. I use my good arm to scramble to my feet. The man reaches for me. I kick him in the—face. I hear myself kick him in the face. His teeth. Rhys is ahead of me now. I run after him because I don’t want to be near what is about to happen, what I made happen.

“Help me—help me—”

I look back. I can’t help myself.

They’re feeding. Four of them. But one—that girl—hasn’t lost sight of us yet. She pursues us, her hair flying around her head. She’s not wearing a shirt and all of her exposed skin is gray. The veins beneath it are dark, angry lines that want to break free, be outside of her. Her lips twitch, revealing vicious teeth.