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

back of his neck against the collar of his shirt, but I don’t know if he’s nodding or not.
    W E 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.
    I N 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.
    E VERY 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