The Last City

by Michael J. Totten

  “Parker,” Hughes said. “You and Roy get that thing out of here. Kyle and I will take care of Lucas.”

  “Stay back, Annie,” Kyle said.

  Lucas heaved his lungs into the tape over his mouth as Hughes grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him across the floor. Parker and Roy hauled the filing cabinet out of the office and onto the mezzanine’s walkway. A desk and a bookshelf were still in there. They’d have to come out too. Lucas could still, theoretically, slam himself into a wall if he tipped himself over again, but he’d only make half as much noise if he did.

  Kyle and Hughes hauled the desk out of the office, and Parker and Roy removed the bookshelf. In a single motion with one arm, Hughes yanked Lucas off the floor and set him upright.

  “He’ll just tip over again,” Annie said.

  “Why don’t we take him off the chair,” Kyle said, “and hog-tie him on the floor? Tie his wrists to his ankles.”

  “We could do that,” Hughes said.

  “He’ll be in more pain,” Parker said. “When he wakes up, I mean.”

  “We need to shut him up,” Roy said.

  “You got us into this,” Hughes said, “so stay out of it.”

  Kyle heard a loud bang from downstairs, something firm slamming hard against metal. “The hell was that?”

  Nobody moved. Nobody said anything. Lucas wailed into the tape.

  Bang. There it was again, at the far end of the warehouse.

  Nobody moved.

  “What is that?” Annie said. Fear in her voice.

  Bang. Louder this time. Lucas screamed and thrashed like he had a parasitic creature inside him struggling to burst out.

  “We need to shut him up now,” Roy said.

  “Shh!” Hughes said.

  Kyle then heard a new sound, somewhere between a grunt and a moan, faint but clearly perceptible. Something was out there. Something that heard them. Something that wanted in.

  Lucas thrashed some more and howled into the tape. The volume wasn’t particularly loud, all things considered. If it were summer, and if crickets were singing outside, the sound might not have carried. Even the low roar of distant nighttime traffic probably would have muffled the noise. But in a world gone quiet, it didn’t take much to alert whoever and whatever was prowling around the perimeter if it was up close and personal, right at the edge of the building.

  Something pounded three consecutives times on the door, more urgently now and making all kinds of noise of its own, the kind that could be heard for a quarter mile in every direction.

  8

  Hughes saw them through the second-floor windows, coming in the moonlight, sometimes as stragglers, other times in pairs or in threes.

  They did not run. They heard the commotion and were drawn toward stimulus as they always were, but they didn’t seem to know what they’d find once they got there. They did not know there were people inside. One of them thought it had heard something in the warehouse, and the rest were drawn by its response. One after another started banging on the walls of the warehouse, raising an even louder ruckus that could be heard from farther and farther away. An enormous mass—a horde—eventually congealed outside the building, the sound of its assault on the walls mushrooming into a horrendous encircling thrum. Hughes couldn’t even hear Lucas over the din anymore.

  “How much ammunition do we have?” Annie shouted. She leaned into Kyle. The two of them apparently were a thing now.

  “Two dozen shotgun shells,” Hughes said, “a few dozen cartridges for the rifles, and a hundred or so rounds for the handguns.”

  Annie seemed to relax. They weren’t okay, though. Not by a long shot.

  “They can’t get in,” Kyle said.

  “No, they can’t,” Hughes said. “But we can’t get out.”

  “They don’t know we’re here,” Parker said. “They haven’t seen us or heard us.”

  “They heard Lucas,” Hughes said and shot a glance toward Roy. The asshole was looking up in wonder at the skylights as if an escalator might magically descend and carry everyone up to a helicopter on the roof.

  “They’re reacting to each other,” Parker said.

  “None of them have screamed,” Annie said.

  “No, they haven’t,” Hughes said. And that meant something. The infected screamed when they saw prey. To alert others, perhaps. Or maybe it was involuntary, triggered by some kind of aggression reflex, the way cats couldn’t resist chasing yarn. Lucas was different. He was screaming because he couldn’t get loose, not because he wanted to eat. That was clear; he bellowed even louder and harder whenever he saw food on legs step into the office.

  “We could distract them somehow,” Roy said, still looking up at the skylights.

  “Without drawing attention to ourselves?” Hughes said. “How?”

  “I don’t know,” Roy said. “Just wonderin’. We could probably get onto the roof. One of us could climb down the exterior ladder, hop into one of the vehicles, and lead them away.”

  The bottom of the ladder outside the building dangled twelve feet up in the air. Anyone who descended would drop down into a melee.

  Hughes shook his head. “Too risky.”

  “Not if someone else on the roof distracted them,” Roy said. “With flashlights or gunfire or something.”

  It wasn’t the worst idea possible, Hughes thought. They’d have to do it under cover of full darkness, of course, after the moon set. By then, though, even more of those things could be surrounding the warehouse.

  Just getting onto the roof wouldn’t be easy. Doable, but tricky. There were metal beams up there, crisscrossing below the ceiling. If they shot out a skylight, someone could inch their way across one of the beams, make their way underneath one of the lights, and pull themselves up. A fall from up there would probably kill a person, however.

  “We could climb up there and shoot them,” Annie said.

  Hughes shook his head. “There are at least a hundred out there already. We have more than a hundred rounds, but we’ll miss a lot with the handguns. Thinning them is the best we could do. And the noise would be catastrophic. Might as well shine a bat signal onto the clouds and tell every shambling psychopath for ten miles around where we are.”

  He did not like what he saw outside the windows. Didn’t like it at all. Dozens more were converging on the warehouse from every direction. No way could they shoot all of them. And only a suicidal person would drop from the bottom of the exterior ladder even in total darkness. Hughes wished they had an air force.

  Thank heaven the windows were far above the ground, ringing the warehouse at mezzanine level where the second floor would be if there were a second floor. The upside was that the infected outside couldn’t break through the windows. The downside was that the elevated windows gave Hughes a terrible angle. He couldn’t see straight down outside, couldn’t count the number of infected out there. He could only guess by roughly how many he’d seen on approach and by the sounds they made. That inevitably led to an undercount. There could be another hundred down there that he hadn’t seen.

  “What if we get onto the roof,” Annie said, “drop the ladder from above, then crack their heads one at a time as they climb up?”

  “No dice,” Hughes said. “More of them are showing up here every minute. I don’t know if we can take them out faster than new ones arrive. And the last thing we want is to have them above us. If we can get onto the roof from the inside, they can get inside from the roof.”

  “So you don’t want to shoot them,” Parker said, “and you don’t want to lead them away. You have a better idea?”

  “I do,” Hughes said.

  It was simple, really. The infected behaved like alien beings, but they were still human organisms. They had the same survival needs that everyone else had. It was a simple fact of biology. They’d die if those needs were not met.

  “We wait,” Hughes said.

  “Wait?” Annie said. “We can’t just passively sit here.”

  �
�We can,” Hughes said. “And we will.”

  “You want to just hope they get distracted and go somewhere else?” Parker said.

  “It could happen,” Hughes said. “It could happen five minutes from now. None of them have actually seen us. They don’t know we’re in here. One of them heard Lucas banging around and slamming his fist on the wall. Others showed up and started doing the same thing. So what? They’re stupid, right? Just about anything could pull them away. A lightning storm on the horizon, a car driving down the road, even a rabbit hopping around.”

  “And if not?” Parker said.

  “They’ll die,” Hughes said.

  Annie narrowed her eyes and nodded. She saw it. Then Parker did too, followed by Kyle.

  Roy didn’t get it. Didn’t seem to, anyway.

  “We can survive in here longer than they can out there,” Hughes said, “because we have water and food and they don’t.”

  They hunkered down for a long siege, long enough that Lucas might recover before it ended. They could keep him alive by pouring water down his throat if they had to. The infected outside, though, if they didn’t wander off to find something to drink, would weaken and collapse over time. Hughes and his friends wouldn’t even have to wait for them to die. They’d just have to wait for the infected to keel over and groan on the ground, and then he could step over them on the way to the Suburban.

  Hughes saw a potential flaw in the plan, though. If the infected could find a nearby water source, this business could last a whole lot longer. Hughes doubted it, though. The infected would get distracted and drift away. Planning and strategy were beyond them.

  The damn things were more likely to move first thing in the morning, when the sun came up. Night produced little stimulus. Even with a half moon in the sky, they couldn’t see much without streetlights, headlights, or porch lights. Any number of things could draw their attention in daylight, though, so long as Hughes and his companions kept quiet and out of sight.

  Hughes stood on the mezzanine and watched through the windows as more of them came, drawn by the noise of the others mindlessly assaulting the walls. The darkness inside concealed him, but he could see well enough outside in the moonlight. What he wouldn’t give right now for some incendiary devices. The warehouse wouldn’t burn. It was made of prefab metal. The infected would burn, though. He just needed a way to set them ablaze.

  Annie and Kyle joined Hughes at the railing at the top of the staircase. Parker and Roy were still somewhere below.

  “What if your plan doesn’t work?” Annie said. “What if they never stop coming?”

  Hughes had already thought of that. He tried his best to play out every conceivable scenario in his mind so that nothing that happened later would truly surprise him.

  “Our best bet,” he said, “would be to run outside with guns blazing and shoot our way through. Lead them away from the building, then come back and jump into the vehicles. We probably wouldn’t make it. But some of us might.”

  Kyle nodded.

  Annie shuddered.

  The booming against the walls slacked off by one in the morning. A few infected were still slapping and kicking the building, but they sounded half-hearted and tired now. Some shuffled around and moaned outside the door, but the horde as a whole seemed to be retiring for “bed.”

  Annie couldn’t stay awake any longer despite her fried nerves. None of them could. She and Kyle prepared a comfortable space for themselves of five carpets piled atop each other. They did not, however, find a private spot away from their companions. She wanted to cash in that rain check as much as he did, but the feeling of impending doom hadn’t done her libido any favors.

  Besides, she wanted the others—well, Roy, anyway—to see her and Kyle sleeping together. If Kyle publicly “claimed” her, Roy would be less likely to mess with her. No guarantees, of course, but another boundary was in place now.

  Neither Parker nor Hughes said anything about or even seemed to notice her openly bedding with Kyle. They must have expected it. If Kyle and Parker hadn’t gotten into that blood feud with each other, it would have happened a long time ago.

  “I want to sleep for a week,” she said and lay her head on Kyle’s chest.

  “I want to sleep for a month,” Kyle said and wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

  She heard his heart beating and felt the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

  “Can I still cash that rain check?” Kyle said.

  “Mmm,” Annie said and answered his question by running her hand down to his stomach area. “Maybe tomorrow if those things leave us alone.”

  Human beings could sleep through just about anything with enough time to get used to whatever they needed to sleep through. The first clap in a thunderstorm may startle a person awake, but they could probably sleep through the fiftieth without too much trouble. Residents of Manhattan didn’t even hear the traffic when they went to bed, back when there was still traffic. Even civilians in war zones managed to drift off if exploding bombs weren’t too close.

  Likewise, Hughes, Annie, Kyle, Parker, and Roy slept almost peacefully even with a horde right outside. The threat-detection parts of their brains settled down after learning that the sounds, while angst-inducing and dreadful, didn’t portend imminent danger.

  A sudden new sound, however, such as breaking glass or a gunshot, could wake anyone who wasn’t deaf or in a coma. That’s exactly what happened at dawn when three things occurred almost at once. The busted door leading into the warehouse jerked open a couple of inches, the pile of rolled carpets barricading it slid across the floor, and Hughes bolted upright before he even knew what was happening.

  Everybody was up—Annie and Kyle on their makeshift bed, Parker on the concrete next to Hughes, and Roy off to the side by himself. Hughes shook himself awake, blinked a couple of times, and figured out what had just happened. A surging mass of infected outside had shoved so hard against the door that they managed to budge it. And they were still shoving.

  Hughes placed his index finger over his lips—nobody make a sound—but it was too late. One of the infected got a glimpse through the now-ajar door into the warehouse. It saw Hughes and the others, stirring from sleep, and it screamed. Moments later, two more of them screamed, and a chain reaction of shrieking and howling spread outward from the door like a concussion wave.

  The infected had found the building’s weak point, and now they knew prey was inside.

  Kyle and Roy had amassed a four-foot-high stack of carpets in front of that door. It must have weighed as much as a car, but it still wasn’t enough. They’d have to double it, stack carpets eight feet high, all the way to the top of the door.

  Parker leapt to the top of the pile and leaned hard against the door while the others scrambled to lay on more weight. The carpets were large and awkward to move, but they didn’t weigh all that much when they were laid inert on top of each other. If a vehicle or some kind of heavy machinery could have been parked against that door, everything would have been fine.

  After ten minutes, the door finally seemed secure with what must have been two tons of weight—more than enough, about as much as a truck. The door had been shoved three inches ajar, though, and it remained stuck in that position. The infected couldn’t squeeze in, but they could see in, and the howling derangement outside was louder than ever.

  “They’re not getting in,” Hughes said.

  “They aren’t going away either,” Annie said, “now that they know we’re in here. Either they die or we die.”

  Roy retrieved his sword from his bedding area. “Out of my way,” he said and pushed past Annie.

  He jabbed the point of his blade between the door and the jamb and ran his steel through the faces of the infected peering inside. He stabbed and impaled almost expertly, as if he’d been practicing every day, until he couldn’t reach any more live ones over the pile of corpses.

  He turned and faced the others, blood dripping from his sword, his face set with g
rim determination as if he might run his weapon through his companions before finally thinking better of it. He shook his head violently from side to side as if to clear the gruesome chore he’d just carried out from his mind.

  “Thanks, I guess,” Kyle said.

  “Won’t help,” Parker said.

  “Didn’t make it worse,” Kyle said.

  “So now what?” Annie said.

  “Same as before,” Hughes said. “We wait.”

  “We going to wait here for a week?” Annie said.

  “As long as it takes,” Hughes said.

  They sat in Roy’s camping chairs in a sort-of circle, with Annie standing and hovering over Kyle. She could not just sit there and do nothing. Not for a week. Not with a mob outside hurling itself at the walls.

  She forced herself to stop wringing her hands. “How long does it take to die of dehydration?”

  “Couple of days,” Parker said. “Almost happened to us at the prison in Lander. After maybe two days, though, they’ll be so fatigued they’ll hardly be able to move.”

  Annie relaxed a little. If the infected collapsed from exhaustion after two days, she and her companions might be able to stroll right on past them to their vehicles. But more could show up in the meantime. There were hundreds out there already.

  “Where are they getting their water from, anyway?” Kyle said.

  “There’s creeks and rivers and lakes and ponds all over the place,” Roy said. “There’s a creek two hundred feet from here, just behind the trees in back of the warehouse.”

  Annie tensed.

  “Wonderful,” Kyle said.

  The infected could take a break and wander on over there any time, lap up some water, and come right on back. If it occurred to them. If they knew the creek was there. If they’d seen it, crossed it, and remembered it.

  “We can’t just sit here,” Annie said.

  “I’m all ears,” Hughes said.

  “What if we disguised ourselves?” Roy said.