The Last City

by Michael J. Totten

  Their free ride, so to speak, was always going to end when they reached the more densely populated eastern half of the country, and the eastern half of the country effectively began and ended at Omaha. Satellite photos of the country at night revealed the stark difference, with the eastern side lit up like a circuit board and the West consisting mostly of darkness mottled by far-flung islands of light limited almost entirely to the coast. Even supposedly rural states like Iowa were as crowded as Manhattan compared with Idaho, Wyoming, and most of Nebraska. Annie expected from the very beginning that they’d encounter more survivors, more infected, more stalled cars, and more obstacles in general once they reached Omaha—hence the need for a boat.

  The only real surprise was the fact that they hadn’t seen a single sign of life, infected or otherwise, since reaching the continental midpoint.

  There was no marina along the Missouri River in Nebraska City. Just some grain elevators, a chemical plant, an electrical station, and a storage facility. Central Avenue, the traditional main street, ran at a ninety-degree angle away from the river instead of alongside it. The people who built this town seemed to have had no real interest in the Missouri, thinking of it strictly as the state line between Nebraska and Iowa rather than as a place for recreation and transport.

  Just south of downtown, such as it was, a bridge headed over the river into Iowa. There were no cars on it.

  Kyle scrutinized the map. “I think we should cross.”

  “Into Iowa?” Hughes said. “Why?”

  “Couple of reasons,” Kyle said. “We might have to cross at some point, and for all we know, this is the only clear bridge.”

  Parker groaned.

  “And the route looks better. Highway 29 in Iowa follows the river south in a more or less straight line. No road traces the river here on the Nebraska side.”

  “Let me see that,” Hughes said.

  Kyle passed the map to Hughes in the driver’s seat.

  Hughes slowed down as he scanned it but didn’t stop. “Mmm,” he said. “Goes as far as Kansas City. And if we don’t find a boat by the time we get there, we’ll have to cross the state and look for one on the Mississippi River.”

  Annie stared at her hands. Parker turned his head and looked out the passenger window. Hughes seemed to take their silence as an assent and made a left onto the bridge and over the state line.

  A sign greeted them on the other side: The People of Iowa Welcome You. Fields of Opportunities.

  But there were no people, of course, in Iowa anymore. And at first, the beginning of Iowa looked exactly the same as the end of Nebraska. Wide and flat, corn and wheat fields gone fallow and covered with snow, trees devoid of their leaves, the winter landscape as stark as a black and white photograph. Annie saw a rise of hills off to the left, though, perhaps a half mile away, that looked like the foothills of a modest mountain range.

  The highway was clear, but Hughes kept the speed to a respectable forty miles an hour.

  Annie chewed her thumbnail and replayed that final scene in Wyoming in her mind, when they had come upon the mayor of Lander in the small town of Belt.

  “What would you all have done if I had killed Steele?”

  “What do you mean?” Hughes said.

  “Back there in Wyoming,” Annie said. “If I shot him. Or bashed in his head with a crowbar. What would you have done?”

  At first, nobody said anything.

  Then Hughes shrugged. “Probably nothing.”

  Annie had thought not. It’s what she would have said if she were one of the others.

  A person could commit a homicide right there on the street in the middle of the day in front of witnesses, and nobody would do anything. That was the world she lived in. Murder was allowable now. Frowned on, perhaps, but allowable.

  “Something up ahead,” Parker said. “Blocking the road.”

  The road was straight and flat to the horizon, so Annie could just barely see it, but there it was in the far distance, a dark horizontal barrier stretching across the asphalt and into the adjacent fields. It looked like it might be a train.

  Hughes slowed from forty to thirty miles an hour, then to twenty as they got closer.

  It was a wall, not a train. Built with sheets of corrugated metal most likely attached to some kind of fencing. At first, Annie figured it was built to keep the infected out, but no. Someone had written a message on it in white paint, which became legible as the Suburban got closer: Not welcome in Hamburg. Foreigners will be shot.

  Hughes stopped the truck and leaned forward at the wheel a couple of hundred feet out.

  “Foreigners?” Kyle said.

  Not outsiders, Annie thought. Foreigners. She knew, though, that whoever painted that sign wasn’t referring to Mexicans or Canadians. They were warning people from the next town over.

  “What the hell’s Hamburg?” Parker said.

  Kyle squinted at the map. “Small town in Iowa,” he said, “just on this side of the Missouri border.”

  “Turning around,” Hughes said and made a U-turn in the median strip.

  Annie had been wondering why she hadn’t seen any cars anywhere, not a single one even on the side of the road, but now she understood. Nobody who knew the area would go anywhere near Hamburg.

  “Get back on Route 2,” Kyle said, looking at the map. “Where the bridge into Nebraska is. Just turn right when we get there instead of left.”

  The turn was only five minutes away. No big deal. Annie noted, though, that it was the second detour they’d made in less than twenty-four hours.

  Hughes made a right onto Route 2, and minutes later they arrived in Iowa’s hill country. The state looked strikingly different now from Nebraska. Annie had always assumed the Midwest was as flat as a board, but it wasn’t, at least not in this part of Iowa. The ground rose up in steep rippling waves high enough that it would take thirty minutes or more to hike to the top. They could drive to the top, she thought, and survey the surrounding plains from a high point with binoculars, but she doubted they’d see much in the emptiness. Aside from the wall around Hamburg, she’d seen no evidence that anyone was still alive in any direction. And now that she thought about it, she’d seen no evidence that anyone in Hamburg was still alive either. They could have built that wall months earlier and all died in the meantime, their fortress now a graveyard picked clean by crows.

  “Kyle,” Hughes said. “Where do we turn south again?”

  Kyle studied his map.

  “Keep going through Riverton up ahead,” Kyle said, “then hang a right on 59. That’ll take us well past Hamburg and into Missouri. If you want to be cautious, keep going a little farther and turn right on Hackleberry Avenue instead.”

  “Hackleberry Avenue?” Hughes said. “Is that in a town?”

  “Not really,” Kyle said. “But there are towns everywhere. Every town in the state is within walking distance of the next one. We’re not in Wyoming anymore.”

  Hughes continued through tiny and empty Riverton, barely a thousand feet from one end to the other. The place was just a village, really, with hardly even much of a Main Street. Annie noticed, after reaching the other side, a sign indicating that the route they were on was called 250th Street. The state of Iowa seemed to be laid out on a grid like a blown-up version of a modern American city, minus the city.

  Not ten minutes later, the road plunged into a small river. A bridge had collapsed—or had been destroyed. Hughes pumped the brakes, and the Suburban slid on the snow and ice to a stop.

  “Should we get out and check?” Parker said.

  “For what?” Hughes said. “Someone blew the bridge. We’ll just go around.”

  Annie felt heavy in the chest.

  “There’s another road,” Kyle said. “Just a half mile south of here crossing the same river.”

  “Over a bridge?” Hughes said.

  “Well, yeah,” Kyle said. “It’s just a creek, actually. Middle Takio Creek.”

  If this bridge really
had been blown on purpose, Annie thought—and it certainly hadn’t fallen down in an earthquake—there could be only one reason for it. Whoever lived on the other side wanted to keep cars out. It wouldn’t stop anything else. Anyone not in a wheelchair could cross the creek on foot without too much trouble. The infected certainly could and would if they saw prey on the other side.

  Hughes turned the Suburban around, backtracked, made a left on C Avenue, then another left on 260th Street. It was a rural road, though, not any kind of street in an urban sense. Annie wondered where 1st Street was.

  Almost immediately after turning left on 260th, they came across another collapsed bridge.

  Hughes braked to a stop and killed the engine.

  “What are we doing?” Kyle said.

  “I have no idea,” Hughes said.

  “Why’d you turn the truck off?” Kyle said.

  Hughes huffed. “Let me see that map.”

  Kyle passed the map forward.

  Hughes yanked it out of Kyle’s hands and scrutinized it. “We’re too far east,” he said. “We don’t need to be all the way over here. We should just go back to 59 and head down into Missouri from there.”

  “I was just trying to get us a safe distance from Hamburg,” Kyle said.

  Annie had a sour taste her mouth. “To hell with all this.”

  “To hell with what?” Hughes snapped.

  “Everything,” Annie said.

  “Not now, Annie,” Hughes said.

  Her companions couldn’t see it. What if they were to wade across that creek and find an encampment of suspicious survivors, hunkered down in barns or whatever, and announce that they were from the government and had a vaccine? What would happen?

  They’d most likely be shot. That’s what would happen.

  They’d certainly be shot if they banged on the gates of the walled city of Hamburg.

  Whatever remained of American civilization in its former heartland had atomized. Everybody was paranoid, and everybody was dangerous, including Annie herself and her friends. She’d reach for her gun the moment she saw anyone upright on two legs, and she’d want to shoot them if they so much as twitched wrong.

  Hughes turned the ignition back on, made a U-turn, drove back a couple of miles, and made a left on Route 59, threading the needle between Hamburg and whoever had blown the bridges.

  The way ahead was clear. Annie saw nothing but frozen fields and derelict farmhouses surrounded by clusters of shade trees. The fields were vast, stretching almost from the asphalt to the horizon, and Annie was astonished at the staggering amount of food that must have been produced here. She wondered what the landscape would look like after a couple of years without anyone tending crops. The shade trees, presumably, would reproduce. After a couple of decades, Iowa would be blanketed again in forest and prairie.

  The border between Iowa and Missouri appeared at the top of a small rise, with a sign that read: Missouri Welcomes You. Next to it was a State Line Discount Tobacco store in what used to be a small house, advertising cartons of Marlboros and Old Golds for less. Just past the border loomed a half dozen high-tech windmills as silent and unmoving as everything else.

  Annie scratched another state off her mental list: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and now Iowa. So long, Iowa. Nice seeing you, but we’ll never be back.

  Kyle peered at the map. “Turn right on 136 toward Rock Port,” he said.

  “I got it, I got it,” Hughes said, as if he’d memorized the map and didn’t need or want any more bumbling directions from Kyle.

  Annie leaned toward Kyle and peered at the map. Kyle pointed at Rock Port and traced his finger down along the Missouri River toward Kansas City a few hundred miles to the south. She doubted they had any real chance of finding a marina and a usable sailboat before reaching the next large city.

  “Goddammit,” Hughes said.

  Annie looked up from the road and out the front windshield. The first thing she noticed was a large line of trees roughly a half mile away, which in this part of the country seemed to indicate a town was ahead. Then she saw people. Several of them. Moving out of the trees and onto the road. They were far away and small at this distance, but she could tell they weren’t infected. They formed a line with deliberation and purpose.

  Hughes slowed the truck to a crawl.

  “What do we do?” Parker said.

  “We need to talk to them,” Hughes said. “Ask for directions.”

  The people in the road had rifles. Annie could see them now. One man stepped ahead of the others, his rifle pointing at the sky.

  Hughes pumped the brakes and slid on the snow to a stop.

  The man in front fired a warning shot into the sky.

  Hughes powered down the driver’s side window and placed both of his open palms outside the truck, as if to say he wasn’t armed. But of course he was armed. The Suburban was full of weapons—hunting rifles, handguns, a pump-action shotgun, crowbars, and hammers. Nobody left alive in this world was unarmed anymore, and the Missouri militia up ahead knew it.

  The man in the road fired another warning shot into the sky, then pointed his weapon at the Suburban.

  “Shit,” Parker said.

  Hughes waved his left arm outside the window in a wide quarter circle, indicating message received in long-distance sign language. He backed up a few dozen feet, made a U-turn, and drove slowly away, north again toward the state line.

  So much for scratching another state off the list. Annie thought she’d never see Iowa again, but she was heading back within minutes.

  “Now what?” Parker said.

  “We’re boxed in on three sides,” Hughes said. “Those assholes to the south, the blown bridges to the east, that Great Wall of Hamburg to the west. All we can do is drive north.”

  “Into Iowa,” Kyle said.

  “The wrong direction,” Parker said.

  “Either that, or go back to Nebraska,” Hughes said.

  “No!” Annie said. “We can’t go back there.” Not for any particular reason except that she didn’t want to subtract yet another state from her list. Nobody argued. Returning to Iowa after five minutes was a setback, but driving all the way back to Nebraska would feel like a defeat.

  Now that Annie was actually in the Midwest, looking around and taking it in, she realized something about the place that wasn’t obvious on a map. This part of the country had few natural barriers. The western United States had mountains, canyons, inhospitable deserts, and incredible distances between cities. The Midwest had none of those things. Hence the perceived need to blow bridges and build walls: to create, with human effort, a weaker version of what nature provided elsewhere.

  Getting any real distance from other people wasn’t possible. Annie and her companions couldn’t get more than a couple of miles from the nearest small town, nor could they get much more than a thousand feet from the nearest house. The landscape repeated itself with numbing regularity: large field, small house, large field, small house, large field, small town, large field, big city, all the way to the Appalachian Mountains.

  “How much daylight do we have left?” Annie said.

  “Two hours,” Kyle said.

  “We’re not finding a boat today,” she said.

  Hughes sighed. “No, we’re not.” He sounded as frustrated as Annie felt. She realized she was grinding her back molars and forced her jaw to relax.

  “We can loop around in a big arc,” Kyle said. “Drive north to 35, then take the 71 south into Missouri.”

  “That won’t put us anywhere near the river until we follow the road to St. Joseph,” Hughes said, “which is practically Kansas City, which’ll be even bigger and more fucked up than Omaha.”

  “Why don’t we just drive across Iowa to the Mississippi River?” Parker said.

  Hughes slouched at the wheel. “Yeah, right.”

  “It’s a bigger river,” Parker said. “More boats.”

  “There might be a marina in Kansas City,” Kyl
e said.

  That’s what we thought about Omaha, Annie thought.

  Kyle traced his finger on the map along the Mississippi River, all the way on the other side of the state. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “What now?” Hughes said.

  “We are so stupid,” Kyle said.

  “What?” Hughes said.

  Kyle folded the map into quarters, shoved it onto the floor beneath his feet, and looked out the window.

  “What?” Hughes said.

  Kyle groaned, defeated. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t matter?” Annie said.

  Kyle shook his head. “We can’t sail to the Gulf of Mexico from here even if we do find a boat.”

  Annie sank into her seat. There was only one thing Kyle could have seen on the map that would block their path to the Gulf of Mexico on a boat. “The river is dammed,” she said.

  “Of course it is,” Kyle said. “I don’t know why none of us thought of it.”

  Hughes slowed the Suburban, pulled over to the side of the road, and stopped.

  Of course they hadn’t thought of it. They’d sailed from Olympia, Washington, to Orcas Island without any trouble. Puget Sound was a vast ocean inlet, not a river. No point damming it. And besides, before everything went sideways, anyone could have sailed down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico because a guy at the dam would open the locks and let boats through. But there’d be no guy at the locks anymore and no way past the dam.

  “We’re fucked, my friends,” Hughes said. “We’re going to have to drive.”

  “We can drive to the Gulf of Mexico,” Parker said. “Sail to Georgia from New Orleans.”

  “No point,” Kyle said.

  “Why not?” Parker said.

  “Because, believe it or not,” Kyle said, “we’re already closer to Atlanta than we are to New Orleans.”

  So we drive, Annie thought. We drive through a maze.