Please Remain Calm by Courtney Summers Read Free Book Online Page B

reminder that I should be looking for Sloane and not sitting on my ass, and if I wasn’t so weak, I would be. But beyond that, there’s nothing. No sound of infected. When he’s certain enough of our surroundings, Jess turns back to me.
    “Look at you out here with all this nothing for it,” he says, sounding halfway amused. “You got no gear. Your shoes are shit for hiking—”
    “Watch your mouth,” Lisa says.
    “There’s nothing I can do about it now,” I tell him.
    “I suppose not.” Jess digs into his pack and hands me a small shovel. “Dig two holes, ’bout sixteen inches wide, a foot deep. Tunnel one through to the other. Understand?”
    “Dakota fire pit?”
    “Yeah. You done it before?”
    “I’ve been camping before.”
    “Lisa, you want to round up some firewood? Ainsley, you stay close to me.”
    I start working the dirt. The ground is hard, soil difficult to shift. It gets my hands good and messy. The feel of the earth reminds me of my father. The camping trips he took me on. I was so fucking abysmal at it, just being in the wilderness, and he let me know. He loved telling the story about the trip we went on when I was five. I couldn’t stop poking the fire. When he saw me enthralled with a burning stick, he told me to get rid of it and I threw it into the woods, alight.
Almost burned the whole goddamn forest down
. I’d give anything to hear him tell it again. It hits me: that’s going to die with me, that story. My story. My family, everyone in the school, their stories too—I’m the last person who could tell them and if I die, they’re gone.
    “Good work,” Jess murmurs when I finish. I wipe my hands on my jeans and it doesn’t do much to clean them and the running water in the house in Fairfield feels like too much of a memory now. “Lisa, start the fire. Rhys and I will collect some water.”
    “Come back,” Lisa says simply.
    “I always do.”
    We take a bag of water bottles and I follow him through the woods. With him ahead of me, I pay less attention to what’s around us, which is stupid but if he notices, he doesn’t say anything. Eventually, we reach the bank, follow it to the edge of the water, where he stops abruptly. I freeze. He looks at me and then he jerks his head, directing my attention across the river. I squint. Other side of it is a field. A group of infected are running through it.
    The water’s between us and the current would take them if they saw us and tried to cross, but I keep still. I just watch, with Jess, the gracefully determined way they move. Their steps seem so heavy, but they’re so impossibly fast. They veer left, all of them, so sharp that—
    “Are they chasing something?” I ask.
    I step forward, trying to get a better look, but Jess holds his arm out, keeps me back. “It’s an animal, most likely.”
    “How do you know?”
    “If it wasn’t, we’d hear the screams.”
    My stomach turns. “So what do we do?”
    “They’re on the right side of the river,” he says. “But we shouldn’t stay here long. We’ll get the water, we’ll get some food in us, and then we’ll move out.”
    We wait until they’re no longer in sight before we gather the water up and by the time we get it back to the camp, Lisa has a small pot hanging over the pit. The smoke and flame are only just visible from their holes. Jess pours the first bit of water we gathered into the pot and once it’s boiled, he tells Lisa to get the MREs and he goes through the process of preparing them. He opens them up, tossing the dried food our way. A stick of jerky for me, a packet of M&M’s for Ainsley, crackers for Lisa. Ainsley melts the candy in her hands and it gets all over her face. Lisa cleans it up with some of the towelettes from the MRE packs. Jess uses the clean water to activate the flameless ration pouches, for the meals themselves. They’ve got a whole rhythm here that I can only sit back and watch. By the time we’ve got chicken stew in front of