This Is Not a Test (3 page)

I turn my face to the doors.

Sloane.

I jolt awake, forget where I am for a second. Everyone is laid out around me, asleep on the dusty blue gym mats we dragged in from the storage room. The last thing we had energy for, the last thing we could do for ourselves before we totally crashed.

I raise my head and listen.

It’s just deep breathing, the noises outside, and nothing else.

I listen hard, but there’s nothing else.

I pull at the collar of my shirt and rest my head against the mat. My clothes feel scratchy and awful against my skin, which is covered in a layer of sweat. I force my eyes shut and drift or maybe it’s sleep and then I think I hear him again—
Sloane
—and I jerk awake again and this time, when I close my eyes I see the living room floor covered in little pieces of red glass.

After a while, I give up on sleep. I check my watch. It’s almost six a.m. I have to pee. My muscles protest as I edge off the mat. The floor is cold and my toes curl in on themselves. I cross the room and step into the hall. It’s an open mouth that forks off in different directions. The tiled floors shine weirdly under the emergency lights lining the ceiling. They wash out the uninterrupted stretch of beige and purple walls and make them almost seem to glow. I feel like a ghost underneath them. The robot beep that happens just before an announcement comes over the loudspeakers drifts through my head. It’s that woman on the phone and on the radio and she wants us all to
listen closely.
I imagine this place crowded with students, all our faces tilted up. Everything about this is wrong. This school was never built to be empty.

Maybe it’s not safe to be out here alone.

Maybe I should go back and wake someone up.

I don’t.

If anything happens, it will just happen to me.

I push through the doors to the girls’ room and head straight for the sinks where I’m sick. The sound of myself retching makes me retch more. The only way I get myself to stop is by forcing myself to straighten before I’m finished. Bile dribbles down my chin. I twist the faucets without thinking.

Water.

Water. Comes. Out.

Does everyone know this? Did they find out before me? I avoided the taps when I was in here before because I didn’t want to end up disappointed if they didn’t work but they work and no one said a word to me about it.
Running water.
I stare at the gushing faucet for too long and then I hold my hands under the stream and splash my face, my neck. Dip my wet hands below my shirt. My body trembles in gratitude but I have no idea who to thank. I turn the faucet off and then I turn it on again just to be sure of what I saw, that I didn’t imagine it.

I
didn’t
imagine it.

The water is real. It moves effortlessly from spout to drain.

I turn it off. I use the toilet. When I come out of the stall, I’m confronted by something else I’ve managed to avoid. My reflection. My skin is tinged green and my brown hair is greasy, strands all clumped together, hanging around my face. There’s a bruise directly below my right eye and I’m not sure how it got there. I trace it with my fingertips. I look better than I did three weeks ago. Funny. The end of the world has done less damage to my face.

I laugh. I lean against the sink and laugh so hard my sides split and I die and it’s good. I press my hands against the mirror. Over my face. The glass feels weird and unreal against my palms. If you break glass into pieces, you can use one of those pieces as a highly effective weapon against another human being. Right through the eye. I saw it. I saw it, I did, I saw it. I stare at my fingernails. They’re ruined, cracked. Rhys and Cary found me sitting in the middle of the road, six streets away from my home, digging my fingernails into the pavement. They thought I was trying to get to my feet, that I wanted to keep going when really I was just waiting to die because I thought I had actually found Lily’s pills and taken them and my brain was inventing this weird dreamscape before it finally shut down for good because how could this be real? How could it be true? The dead don’t just come back to life.

By the time I realized it was real, it was true, it was too late to tell Cary and Rhys I wasn’t like them. That I didn’t want to keep going. They were working so hard to hold on, I knew they wouldn’t understand. So I stayed with them.

Mostly because I didn’t think we’d make it this far.

I reenter the auditorium as quietly as I exited it and lay on my mat. Rhys is on my left, facing away from me. His gray shirt is splattered with dirt and blood. Trace is on my right, on his back, his mouth hanging open. I stare at the skylights overhead until weak rays of sun filter in. A new day. If what I hear beyond them is any indication, it’s the same as the last.

Someone stirs. Cary. First awake, not counting myself. So strange. I think of him in English class at the back of the room; how he listened with his head in his arms and answered all of Mr. Baxter’s questions in the same unhurried way:
I don’t know,
and how he couldn’t afford to because he was repeating eleventh grade and didn’t he just want out of here like the rest of us? I close my eyes but he tiptoes his way over to me—no, Rhys. He wakes Rhys and they soft-shoe across the room. I hear the slight jangle of the keys he stole from Principal LaVallee’s office and then the sound of the kitchen door gliding open and closed.

I open my eyes. Trace is next to show signs of life. His eyes flicker back and forth beneath his eyelids and he moans, curling his fingers into fists. His whole body tenses until he shouts himself awake, bolting upright before collapsing back on his mat, sweaty and shaking. Grace is next to him in a heartbeat. He grabs her hand, eyes still shut, chest heaving. But he doesn’t—can’t—speak.

“It’s okay,” she whispers. “I’m here.”

The way she says it, the way she’s beside him—I want to be between them. I want to be in the direct path of their togetherness so I can steal some of the feeling for myself. Grace’s eyes drift from Trace to me and I look away, self-conscious. Grace is beautiful. Dirty and covered in blood, she is so beautiful. Prettier than me. But that shouldn’t matter, I guess.

Harrison is last awake. He sits up and rubs his eyes, digging his fists into them. He does this for so long I wonder if he might need someone to tell him to stop until I realize he’s trying to cover up the fact he’s crying. Wasted effort. When he finally lowers his hands and notices the two empty gym mats, he freaks.

“Where are they?” He twists around. “Where did they—”

The kitchen door swings open. Cary and Rhys march into the room, each carrying trays loaded with food. I sit up and watch as they set them in front of our mats and I see bagels and apples and bananas and rice cakes and globs of peanut butter and jam packets on plates surrounded by plastic cutlery. Juice and water. I’m
hungry.
I crawl over to the tray and Grace and Harrison follow suit. The bananas are browning so I reach for an apple instead.

“Eat slowly or you might make yourself sick,” Rhys says.

Cary takes a bagel, tears a piece off and dips it in jam. He pops it in his mouth, closes his eyes and relishes that first bite.

“We’re set up for a while, food-wise,” he says, swallowing.

“How long is a while?” I ask.

“I’m sure help will come before we eat it all.”

I stare at my apple, pressing my fingers against it just to make sure it’s real. It’s solid, cold. I sink my teeth into its waxy skin and it’s sweet enough to make my eyelids flutter. Next to me, Rhys drinks an entire bottle of orange juice in one go, crunching the plastic in his fist when he’s finished.

“Water’s still going,” he says. “So that’s good.”

No one else seems surprised about the water except Harrison, so I guess they all knew about this incredible thing but none of them thought to tell me. And I think I’d be mostly okay with that if I was in anyone’s company but Harrison’s.

“But the power’s off,” Harrison says.

“Water tank on top of the school,” Cary says. “I think we should have enough until this whole thing blows over, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t conserve—like, no obsessive-compulsive hand-washing, that kind of thing…”

Harrison’s eyes bug. “You think it’ll blow over?”

Grace reaches for an apple and holds it out to Trace.

“You should eat,” she says.

“You really think it will blow over?”

“I’m not hungry,” Trace mutters.

“Do you think it will blow over?” Harrison demands, but we’re all watching Trace and Grace now and they know we’re watching them and that makes it worse.

“Please.”

“No.”

“For me.”

“I said no.”

“Trace, you need to—”

“I said I’m not
fucking
hungry!”

I twitch. Trace is so close, he might as well be yelling at me and I hate it when people yell at me. I hate the silence after. This silence, after. I raise the apple to my lips to distract myself from it, but its sickly sweet smell suddenly turns my stomach. I set it down.

“Cary,” Harrison says. “Do you think it’ll—”

“
Yes,
Harrison.”

It’s quiet until Rhys clears his throat.

“Doors are secure. What else do we need to do today?”

“Well.” Cary. “I was thinking—”

“Wait.” Trace.

“What?”

“If Rhys asked
us
what
we
need to do today, then why are
you
answering?”

Cary stares at Trace.

“Forget it. Never mind.”

Harrison’s eyes dart between them. “I want to know what Cary was going to say.”

“I do too,” Rhys says.

“I don’t think Trace wants to hear it.”

“No, I just wanted to know why
you
get to be
our
voice. You just jumped right in there and spoke for all of us. So what are you, like—leader, now?”

“Holy shit.” Cary raises his hands. “Nobody said anything about leading—”

“I mean, I’m not going to stand in your way or anything, since we know what happens to people who you seem to think are disposable—”

“
Christ,
Trace,” Rhys says.

“Oh, sorry, Moreno. I forgot you were president of the Cary Chen Fan Club since he got
most
of us here and everything.”

The whole time Trace is talking, my eyes are on Cary. I don’t have to look at Trace to know the vein in his forehead is pulsing, that he’s talking through his teeth. Cary’s face is deceptively calm but his eyes are all sadness. Maybe guilt.

“Say what you want to say, Trace,” he says.

“Okay, fine. There was no way in
hell
that alley went from empty to swarmed in ten seconds. You said it was clear—”

“They move fast—it
was
clear—”

“You said it was clear and you
knew
it wasn’t and you let them walk
right into it
—”

“It was clear!”

I flinch again. Cary gets to his feet and Trace does the same. I have this vision of Trace killing Cary, straddling him on the auditorium floor, bashing his head against it until Cary’s brains are everywhere. Cary sees it too. He walks away like that’s the end of it, but then he doubles back, red-faced, and points at Trace. His fingers are in the shape of a gun.

“I would have never,
never
—”

“But you did. You
know
you did—”

“Trace, what could Cary have
possibly
gained by doing that?” Rhys asks.

Trace turns on him. “I
know
what I saw—”

“Did anyone else see it? Hey, Sloane, did you see it? Did you see Cary tell the Caspers to walk into a swarmed alley? What did you see?” I shake my head, trying to keep myself from being pulled into this but he won’t stop. “Come on, tell us what you saw, Sloane—” The more he says it the more I feel myself start to cave—
I’ll tell Rhys what I saw, no, I’ll say what Trace wants to hear
—when two things happen: Grace screams,
“Stop!”
At the same time a loud
bang
sounds against the doors, startling us all, sending us scrambling back.

We stare at the doors for the longest time after that but nothing else happens.

Harrison whispers, “Oh no,” over and over even though nothing else happens.

“Look,” Cary finally says, and he sounds tired, like it’s the end of a long day and not the start of new one. “We should check the barricades. Maybe add more to them and make sure nothing’s moved. That’s all I was going to say before.”

“I am
not
helping you,” Trace says.

He storms across the room, his footsteps loud against the floor, somehow louder than everything that’s going on outside. He steps into the hall like he has somewhere to go but there’s nowhere to go.

I think of reality TV shows.

Contestants on an island, whatever. This feels like it could be bad reality television. I imagine an audience, comfortable at home, some other world watching this right now, judging me for everything I’ve done and will do. This is television. We’re actors pretending to be people and when this is all over, one of us will be a million dollars richer. I just forgot.

I look around and try to spot the hidden cameras.

Nothing.

We’ve split up to check the barricades. Cary takes the front doors, Rhys takes the back. Harrison is looking after the exit in the library and Grace volunteers for the gym. That leaves me with the auditorium (“Just check for weaknesses,” Rhys told me), staring at all the tables and desks. I don’t touch them. The doors will stay shut or they won’t.

I’m not alone long. Trace comes back.

“What did you see?” he asks.

He heads straight for the stage, for the tray of leftover food. He picks through it before settling on what Grace first offered him—an apple. He tears into it and I watch the ecstasy of that first bite on his face, taste it with my lips as his mouth makes its way around the fruit.

When he’s finished, he sets the core back on the tray.