Please Remain Calm Read Online Free PDF Page B

through the backyard, headed for the woods ahead of us. I feel like we could lose them in the trees, like that would be enough to stop them. The infected give chase and I won’t look back, can’t. Hearing them is enough, a cacophony of breathless shrieking that all means one thing:
mine, mine, mine.
    One scream is louder than the others.
    We just get into the trees when I feel the full weight of it slam into me. I go sprawling across the ground, my face eating pine needles and dirt. I try to scramble to my knees before my body registers any of the pain but the infected grabs my backpack and pulls me toward it and then I’m splayed belly-up, just waiting to be torn into.
    The suit.
    He falls onto me and I put my hands up instinctively, hoping they don’t meet teeth. They don’t. They push into shoulders, sink into shoulders, or maybe his shoulders are sinking into my hands, moist and slick and strange and soft, and I’m grunting, trying to force him off me but all I’ve got the strength and grip to do is keep his face inches from mine. His teeth clack together. The smell of him. God, the smell. So putrid and wrong. Bile inches up my throat. And wouldn’t that just be great, vomiting now, choking on it, dying on my back with one of them on top of me and
where’s Sloane, where is Sloane?
Milk-white eyes, milk-white eyes, and more of them coming. I hear more of them coming.
    And then a bright burst of yellow flame and smoke: the furious hiss of the flare burning in Sloane’s hand. She throws it away from us, throws it far into the woods. The suit breathes on me and I bring it up, all that nothing in my stomach, and I do choke, vomit burning my throat, and my grip is slackening and I—
    I don’t want to die.
    A knife goes into his head.
    Sloane. She tries to get the knife out and it won’t come out. She heaves the body off me and I roll onto my side, spitting out the puke and then she’s the one pulling me forward and we stumble through the woods. I glance back. The flare bought us some time. They circle it, not quite understanding what it is but soon enough, they’ll understand what it’s not.
    “
Rhys,
” Sloane says, and she sees it the same time I do: those shadows moving in the trees. They’re everywhere. They gather behind us, around us, some coming from the front. I drop my backpack. I don’t want to be grabbed again. Somehow I hear Sloane gasping for breath, just slightly behind me and the only way we’re going to survive this is if we run forever and never stop. We’re not going to survive this.
    One of them, an old naked woman with an exploded stomach and gray breasts dangling halfway into her own open gut space lurches out of nowhere and reaches for Sloane. Sloane dodges, knocking into me and I almost fall again but I right myself in time. I slide between two trees, my arms scraping against bark and hear the infuriated shriek of an infected that must’ve been a lot closer than I realized. It loses me, perplexed, before it realizes it needs to go around. I stumble again, desperate for some kind of end to this, a happy end to this.
Please.
I hear something ahead, familiar. What I heard last night, but louder now.
    The Danforth River.
    We give the last of ourselves to reaching the edge of this part of the world. We stop, our lungs desperate for air, but we can’t afford a single breath of it. We stare at the water below and it’s angry, as angry as what’s behind us. White foam, churning, and beneath that, rocks. This river isn’t kind and it’s a long way down. What happens if we jump?
    I know what happens if we don’t.
    Sloane looks at me.
    I grab her arm and we throw ourselves over and I try to hold onto her, but as soon as we break the water, she’s gone. The impact sends my teeth together, sends the wind out of me, forcing my mouth open. The current is stronger than I am and it holds me under, turns me around and around, until I don’t know which way is up. My abdomen connects with