Please Remain Calm Read Online Free PDF

Mary.
Ave Maria. Dios te salve, Maria.
I haven’t prayed since the school. When I got there, I spoke to God, I asked Him for mercy and protection but when things kept getting worse and worse in spite of it, I stopped. Thought I’d make myself one less begging voice.
    In church, in Cortege, they prayed in English. I lost my Spanish as I got older, living in a town that didn’t want to make room for my language. But in church, just the four of us, my family, we prayed in Spanish. When I was really young, I’d get so confused I’d end up reciting the prayers in both languages, switching out every other line, but as I got older, I’d focus on my father’s baritone and everyone else disappeared. The voice in my head now is mine, and it’s always been a pale imitation …
    Llena eres de gracia
—one of the stairs creaks under my feet and I stop.
El Señor es contigo.
Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres.
Y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre:
Jesús
… I hear them outside, shuffling across the porch. Nails clawing curiously against the door. Our way out.
Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores
…
    I make it to the hall and then tiptoe through it, then across the kitchen. Maybe I could see through the cracks of the barricaded window and figure out how many we have on this side of the house before we decide what to do about it … I reach a window, lean forward, and peer out.
    A ravaged face with white eyes peers in.
    I jerk away at the same time it screams. Fuck.
Fuck.
The shuffling on the porch turns to frenzied scrabbling. The clawing at the door intensifies and then turns to thudding, the sound of one of them throwing the full weight of its body against the wood—and then more. I watch the fridge rattle. The windowpane starts to break and the boards across it seem to bend and the screaming gets louder and the only prayer in my head now is
we have to go. We have to go. We have to go.
    “Sloane,” I yell, because there’s no point in trying to be quiet anymore. I grab my backpack off the floor and put it on. She’s already running down the stairs saying, “They’re going to the front of the house—”
    Thud.
    “I know—we gotta go through the back—”
    Thud.
    Thud.
    Thud.
    And then Sloane’s at the back door, throwing things out of the armoire while the force against the front door gets louder. We don’t have much time. I’ve seen them turn doors to shreds, nothing. The family here before us must have been so good at surviving, not to have brought this down on themselves but us, we just fuck up. We don’t know how to do anything else.
    I help Sloane as she pulls the emptied armoire aside while the dead gain more ground behind us. We get it out of the way and I’m about to open the door when she yells, “
Wait!
” And runs back into the hall, going for her backpack. Instead of lacing it through her arms, she digs into it, time we can’t afford to waste. I scream her name,
Sloane, Sloane, Sloane,
until she pulls the flare out and forgets the rest.
    One of the boards across the window comes loose at the same time the fridge in front of the front door screeches forward and I see an arm snake through that narrow space. The hand belonging to it has been bitten at some point or other, maybe the bite that turned it, and I see bone. Being so open and raw doesn’t stop its reaching. Sloane gets to her feet, clutching the flare, and when she’s next to me, I finally open the door. Our eyes take a moment to adjust to the light but it doesn’t take the remaining infected this side of the house any time to adjust to the sight of us.
    There are still too many.
    “Just
go
!”
    Sloane tries to lead us to the car but I grab her arm and drag her away with me, finding time to hope in the frenzy that she just broke from the big picture, forgot that the front of the house is surrounded. That she wasn’t going to offer herself, like she tried to once before, back at the school. We stumble crazily