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The croent quiet It hat they’d all wanted to know for the last year and a half

"Well … what exactly do you know?" Gates said

"The , and they orking on fixing it and we haven’t heard anything since," Belinda said froh what Belinda had just said, his red eye blinking much more than the other

"Shit, I don’t knohere to start," Gates said "Uh …"

The rooive them Gates seemed surprised by just how captivated they all were Amob

"Let’s see," Gates went on "The infection hit us about three weeks after you Most of us went to St Patrick’s Academy down in Denton"

"The private school?" Will said

"Yeah," Gates said, brightening a bit when he saw that it was Will asking "We’d heard there was a quarantined school in Pale Ridge and all these people had died, but Denton is fiftyto worry about" His eyes unfocused as he got lost in the memory "The day it hit us, it was school spirit day All our parents were there We were all out on the lacrosse field One second it was fine, the next, parents were vo blood all around me My mom--"

Gates cleared his throat and stopped talking He looked out at the crowd of McKinley kids again

"I’ new to you Must have been the same here," he said "But when the soldiers came for us, they didn’t try to quarantine us, or capture us They started shooting Two hundred and thirty-two of us eventually made it out of there alive We hid anywhere we could, and we stayed on thethe whole state, and they were having a hard ti into each other and shit It was nuts The virus was spreading so fast The ers were trying to get their kids out of the state before they caught the virus It got real er with a bald head, they’d kill you And it wasn’t just the soldiers either Everybody had guns Fuckin’ grandet sick Her sto to leave Colorado, scared they were going to die So the way she’d convinced herself not to think about whether her parents had died She thought s took hold of her again

"We ate e could steal or e could hunt," Gates continued "We hid wherever we could In the mountains, in the sewers Empty barns But ere never safe They h to phase out There’s only forty-two of our original group now"

"Are our families out there?" a sunken-chested Nerd boy said

Gates looked at hi?"

The Nerd boy continued to stare at Gates, like he hadn’t answered him yet

"No, they’re not," Gates said

The Nerd turned and walked back into the crowd