A Game of Firsts (The Forest of Hands and Teeth) Read online

  “No one ever figured it out?” I realize it’s a stupid question. I’d have known if they had. Mom and Dad would have been absolutely livid. “Was that the first time?”

  When he looks up at me rain slides down his face, and for a moment I mistake it for tears. He shakes his head. “Everyone thinks of me as the smart one and if I’m not that, then what am I?”

  His admission makes my lungs feel too small. How could I not have realized how he felt?

  I try to figure out how to respond but my brother’s first to break the silence, shifting the conversation away to shallower topics. “Being holed up here in the garage makes you wish we’d been allowed to go on that senior cruise after all, right?”

  THE POUNDING DOWNSTAIRS WAS more insistent than the usual fare and it jolted us both. “Come on, man,” someone shouted from outside. “Let me in!”

  Danny scrambled out of the hole in the roof before I had a chance to tell him maybe it was a bad idea, because what if they were dangerous? The news had reported bandits were searching for safe places to shack up and we had a big white sheet on display for anyone who was looking.

  Just as I started to go after him he jumped back into the attic and ran for the trap door, pushing open the stairs and sliding down them. I grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “It’s Raf.” He sounded excited.

  “So?” I raised my eyebrows.

  His forehead crinkled, confused. “He’s outside. He’s in trouble. We gotta get him through the window before the dead break down the fence to reach him.”

  “Danny…”

  “We gotta help him.”

  I hated the way his words made me feel: selfish and ashamed. But I didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t have a lot of supplies, and no one knew how long this would all last. It didn’t matter in the end though, because Danny slid the window open and in Raf came.

  He stood panting, hands fisted on his knees, and then he grabbed my brother, holding him tight and sobbing, telling him again and again, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  DANNY WAKES UP ONE night with the idea that he’ll figure out how to hot-wire the truck by looking it up online. I watch as the battery icon draws down on the cell phone, eventually turning red. The glow of the screen makes his face appear green—dead like the neighbors pounding away downstairs.

  Eventually it cuts out and we’re back to darkness.

  “Did you figure it out?”

  I hear his head move, the rustle of the skin along the back of his neck against the collar of his shirt, but I don’t know if he’s nodding or not.

  WE RAN OUT OF food during the fourth week and water became pretty scarce soon after. I was fairly proud we’d been able to ration that long, and we’d have been able to go even longer if it hadn’t been for Raf.

  Every time I saw the way my brother’s cheeks sunk farther into his face I wanted to scream at them both: tell them how stupid it was to let Raf in. How we’d have had another three weeks otherwise. Raf must have figured how angry I was because he knew to keep clear of me, especially when the heat climbed in the middle of the day.

  And then one night I woke up to the sound of a car engine idling. Danny threw down the trap door, keeping the stairs from falling open. A weak light drifted up from below and it took a lot of energy to drag myself across the floor and look down into the garage.

  Raf sat in the truck, the dome light on. The engine rumbled and roared as his foot tapped on the gas pedal and we could hear the radio blaring: static. It hissed from the speakers as Raf cycled through the channels, searching for anything.

  The driver side window was rolled down and he held his arm out casually. Danny sat with his eyes closed so he didn’t see it, but I did: the blood pebbling up from the bites on Raf’s arm, dripping from his wrist, collecting in a sticky puddle below.

  I slid down the ladder toward him and knew from his eyes it had been a suicide mission from the beginning. Piled in the corner were a few bottles of water and packets of beef jerky pilfered from the neighbor’s. He told us later he knew all three of us weren’t going to make it—someone had to go out and get supplies and grab the keys so he figured it might as well have been him. “It was rude of me to crash your party without bringing anything in the first place,” he tried to joke.

  IN THIS NEW WORLD there’s the first time you die, and then there’s the second. No one knows what happens between the two. Some of the people talking on the news liked to say there’s still hope attached to the soul—a belief that there can be something lodged so deep and hard in the mind that there’s a glimmer of who we used to be aching to be seen.

  I don’t really get that, though. I don’t know why anyone would want to believe there’s something left. Because what does that make all those people shambling around, teeth snapping at the air, with all that need shimmering from their bodies like heat from the asphalt in a Georgia summer?

  It’s easier to think it all disappears: who we were, who we wanted to be, all those infinite possibilities just searing from the blood as the heat of disease takes over.

  But maybe that’s what I have to believe, because Raf’s the one who gets infected first. I watch the way the blood wells in the perfect divots from that woman’s teeth and then I watch his eyes go wide and terrified.

  “Promise me you’ll do it.” His grip is so hard around my arm that I feel the capillaries bursting.

  I realize later that the bruise’ll last longer than Raf.

  EVERY MORNING WE DRAINED a little more of the truck’s battery, flicking on the radio and waiting for news. Sometimes we’d get word of quarantines being shut down, military movements organizing against the hordes. But there would never be anything telling us what to do to keep surviving. Neither of our phones ever rang and the messages we left for our parents and friends kept piling deeper and deeper.

  Danny spent most of his time on the roof. Staring at what, I didn’t know.

  Raf’s body lay in the yard off the side of the garage. The mere sight of it made me gag, forcing me back inside, but Danny kept himself out there, staring.

  He’d been the one to kill Raf, in the end, after he’d turned. Danny hadn’t been able to bear doing it before then, even though he’d stood over him with a saw blade clutched in his fingers for hours. For a brief moment I’d been able to look into Raf’s eyes right after he came back and there was nothing there.

  Not the boy I’d once wanted to kiss, not the boy who was always over for dinner helping himself to seconds, or the one who’d once pulled Danny out of the passenger seat after a car wreck on the way to school.

  My brother cried as he forced the saw into his friend’s neck, pushing his weight against it to sever the spinal column like they’d instructed on TV. Afterward he knelt on the roof, screaming. It was the first time either of us had ever killed something that had once been alive. I couldn’t see how it would ever be the last. Not in this new world.

  “THEY WERE ALL MY friends,” Danny whispers.

  I open my eyes to find him rolled on his side, facing me. The attic is stuffy, the air rancid and filled with moaning and scratching from below.

  “Who were?” I ask.

  “Everyone in your stories. They were all my friends. Germaine. Leroy. Micah.”

  I lift one shoulder. “So?”

  He rolls onto his back. The sun crams through the hole in the roof, turning our attic into a sauna. In a few hours the tree will start to shade the eastern slope and we’ll crawl outside and look for rescue, but for now we’re trapped.

  “You knew them better than I did,” he finally mutters.

  Because of the sense of pain in his voice I want to protest, but I don’t. “Who was your first?” I ask instead and in answer he rolls away.

  I let the silence fill the space between us until it grows so wide it could swallow the world. There’s a question neither one of us has had the courage to ask no matter how many times we discuss what to do next.

  “Are we going to
make it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It’s the most honest answer either one of us has.

  • ♦ •

  ALSO BY CARRIE RYAN

  The Map to Everywhere

  The Forest of Hands and Teeth

  The Dead-Tossed Waves

  The Dark and Hollow Places

  The Dead and Empty World: A Collection of Forest of Hands and Teeth Stories

  Infinity Ring Book 2: Divide and Conquer

  EDITED BY CARRIE RYAN

  Foretold: 14 Tales of Prophecy and Prediction

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Carrie Ryan is the New York Times bestselling author of the Forest of Hands and Teeth series and Infinity Ring: Divide and Conquer as well as the editor of Foretold: 14 Tales of Prophecy and Prediction. Currently, she’s working on The Map to Everywhere, a four book middle grade series co-written with her husband, John Parke Davis, the first book of which will be out from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in November 2014. Her next young adult novel, a romantic thriller, will be released by Penguin Random House in 2015. A former litigator, Carrie now lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband, two cats, and dog. They are not at all prepared for the zombie apocalypse. You can visit Carrie online at www.CarrieRyan.com.

  Table of Contents

  A Game of Firsts

  Also by Carrie Ryan

  About the Author