The Last City

by Michael J. Totten

  Toward Kyle.

  Kyle wasn’t expecting it. Nobody was expecting it. He raised the crowbar to strike, but he did so limply, not quickly or adeptly enough, and the infected tucked its chin into its chest and drove its head into Kyle’s stomach like a human-shaped pile driver. Kyle tumbled onto his back with a raging thing that was once a healthy twenty-something male on top of him. It raised its face toward Kyle’s and lunged with its teeth bared.

  Annie had no time to save him—nobody did—yet she struggled off the floor all the same. Parker was ready with his hammer, and this time he wouldn’t miss, but it would not happen fast enough.

  Kyle raised his arm to defend his face. Not that it would do any good.

  Parker swung the hammer.

  And the infected bit Kyle, clamped its teeth around his wrist just a moment before Parker’s hammer split open the back of its skull.

  “No!” Annie shouted, rising from the floor, unarmed because she’d dropped her own weapon, but energized and enraged now, scrambling toward Kyle as Parker, incredibly, shoved her back to the ground.

  “Stay down!” he shouted.

  There were two more infected right behind the first, coming straight at him.

  Parker swung the hammer and took out the first one.

  Roy appeared from somewhere behind Annie and dispatched the third by running his sword through its arm and its neck.

  Hughes arrived too, barreling past Parker, as Kyle lay on his back clutching his wrist. Annie didn’t know if he was screaming in pain or not. She couldn’t hear anything but a high-pitched whine in her ears.

  Why couldn’t she have been bit on the wrist? Why not Parker? They were both immune and would be fine. She rushed to Kyle’s side, careful of his arm, and stroked his cheek. He winced in pain and turned away.

  The universe was a sonofabitch. Why couldn’t Roy have been bit?

  Kyle’s wound as such wasn’t serious. No major artery had been severed. It looked as if he’d suffer more from bruising than anything else if the virus hadn’t entered his system.

  “Somebody get a bandage,” Annie said.

  “The hell for?” Roy said.

  “Just do it!” Annie shouted.

  She heard someone step into the office, but she didn’t know who, and she didn’t care.

  The ringing in her ears was subsiding. She could almost hear okay now.

  “Kyle,” she said.

  “Annie,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He still wouldn’t look at her.

  She grabbed his chin between her thumb and fingers and turned his face toward hers. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. This shouldn’t have happened.” She kissed him, first on the forehead and then on the mouth.

  Kyle coughed.

  They never did get a chance to cash in that rain check.

  “Does it hurt?” she said.

  He nodded. “But I’ll be okay.”

  No, Kyle, she thought. You will not be okay. None of us will be okay. Not herself, not Parker, not Hughes. Certainly not Roy by the time she finished with him.

  Kyle closed his eyes then. He wasn’t gone yet. She knew that. She doubted he’d even entered the short coma that would set in before the turn. He was simply exhausted.

  “Kyle,” she said and shook him. “Kyle!”

  He slitted his eyes open.

  Annie wanted to say she loved him. She wasn’t sure that was actually true, and it would be far too soon to say so even if it was, but this was the only chance she had left.

  She imagined herself in his place. If she were lying there instead of him, would she want him to hold her hand and tell her he loved her? Of course she would. What else does a human being want to hear on their way out of this world?

  “Kyle,” she said.

  Kyle closed his eyes again.

  “Kyle!”

  She shook him. She slapped him. Shook him again.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Kyle!”

  “Ma’am,” Roy said.

  Annie ignored him.

  “Ma’am,” Roy said again. “Step back and I’ll take care of it.”

  She whirled to face him. “Get the fuck away from us or I’ll beat you to death.”

  Roy’s nodded politely and took a step back.

  “Roy,” Hughes said. “Give them some space.”

  She turned back to Kyle. He didn’t look asleep anymore. She didn’t know how she knew. She just did. He wasn’t gone yet, but he was gone.

  “What do you want to do with him?” Roy finally said.

  Hughes blew out his breath. “We’ll bury him. Outside and with dignity. We can’t leave him in here.”

  “I mean,” Roy said, “what do you want to do before you bury him?”

  Annie noticed his words. Before you bury him. Not before we bury him.

  Hughes wanted to rip Roy’s intestines out with his hands and spool them onto the floor. He’d made it all the way to Arkansas from Seattle with Kyle—eighty percent of the way to Atlanta—and now Kyle was effectively dead because Roy wanted proof that Annie was really immune.

  Why the fuck did Roy think they were going to Atlanta if Annie wasn’t really immune?

  Liars never believed anyone else. They lied like they breathed and thought everyone else did it too.

  Good God. Hughes could only imagine what Roy must have been thinking when he let Lucas get bit. At this point, though, what difference did it make? Hughes couldn’t trust Roy to tell the truth. Nor could he trust Roy to have anyone’s back in a fight.

  He still had Lucas’s cracked cell phone in his pocket. He doubted he’d find much of anything useful or even interesting on it, but he made a note to himself to scroll through it at some point before Lucas recovered.

  First, though: Kyle. The poor kid was going to return within minutes as one of those things.

  Parker and Annie knew what Hughes would do next. They’d seen it before. Roy was the only one with a question mark hanging over his head. So, Annie kissed Kyle one last time and got out of the way, moving to the steps and putting her head in her hands, not seeming to care that she was staining the bottom of her pants with even more blood.

  Parker stepped into the office.

  Roy hovered nearby as Hughes gently used his fingers to close Kyle’s mouth and plug his nose. Kyle didn’t struggle. He was far too deeply unconscious. Try that with even a passed-out drunk, and the victim would snap to attention and fight. But a man whose brain was undergoing the brutal transformation wrought by that virus was in no condition to resist. He just suffocated. Hughes held Kyle’s airways shut for five long minutes. To ensure that his work was done, he felt Kyle’s neck for a pulse that wasn’t there.

  Hughes knew all along that it could come to this, that he’d have to snuff out one of his companions. Ever since they left the Pacific Northwest, though, this could only happen to Kyle or to himself since neither Parker nor Annie could turn. At this point, Hughes was just grateful that he’d never have to do this to Annie.

  The world went quiet again. Hughes heard nothing but his own heartbeat and a faint post-violence hum in the atmosphere. That meant something. On some level, he knew that the silence was important, but he was so physically and emotionally depleted that he wasn’t sure what it meant, couldn’t understand what his subconscious was trying to tell him.

  Why did it matter that the warehouse was quiet again? Of course it was quiet. The infected were dead, and no more seemed to be coming. Some dim part of his mind found that astonishing, but the hush itself meant something else.

  Then it hit him, ton-of-bricks style. Lucas was silent. After all that gunfire and shouting, after all that hell, Lucas did not make a sound. He couldn’t possibly be asleep.

  “Parker,” Hughes said. “Can you go check on Lucas?” He looked at Roy as he said that. Roy looked at his feet.

  Hughes could have checked on Lucas himself, but he didn’t want Roy out of his sight.

  Parker ducked into the office.

  Annie turned he
r head toward the skylights, as if the heavens might offer her something if she only wished hard enough. Hughes knew she would grieve for a long time.

  Parker returned from the office. “Guys,” he said. “Lucas died.”

  They buried Kyle and Lucas in the trees behind the warehouse. Hughes would have made Roy dig the graves if they had a shovel, but they didn’t, so they used crowbars. It took them four hours.

  Nobody said anything over Lucas’s grave, but they all said a few words over Kyle’s. Hughes went first. “Rest easy, my friend.”

  “I’m sorry for everything,” Parker said.

  “This will be righted,” Annie said. “That is a promise.”

  “Sorry for your loss,” Roy said, not to Kyle, of course, but to the others, as if he hadn’t even heard what Annie had said.

  Parker wanted a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked for years, hadn’t even thought about smoking for years, but he wanted a cigarette and considered scrounging around in a convenience store for some cartons. It would only take him five minutes once he found the right place.

  A chemical addiction, though, was the last thing he needed. He wouldn’t be able to feed that habit indefinitely. There were plenty of unsmoked cigarettes left in the world, sure, but they were all going rancid, and he doubted that more would ever be produced, even if the whole world one day recovered. Smoking was over forever. Doctors in Atlanta might extract a miracle cure from Annie’s veins, but the odds that the cigarette or vaping industry would revive in his lifetime were zero. So he gnawed on his fingertips and let darkness overtake him.

  Annie felt shock and disbelief at the same time, like she might be able to scramble reality and run it again, perhaps with a different and better outcome, if only she could find a rewind button.

  Kyle was gone, but he couldn’t be. He’d been perfectly fine a couple of hours ago.

  She had only known him for a few months, but it felt like years, and she couldn’t imagine going forward without him. Once she and her companions had set out for Atlanta, win or lose, succeed or fail, she’d never imagined her future without any of them. If they saved the world, they’d do it together. If they failed, they’d fail together, dying at once in a calamity or finding a niche somewhere to live out whatever remained of their lives.

  Annie still had Parker and Hughes. They were friends—no, they were family—but they weren’t potential life partners as Kyle had been.

  Her mind was erecting guardrails against reality to protect herself. The enormity of what had happened was too much to process at once. She was not in denial, though. No. Psychological guardrails couldn’t keep the truth out entirely. Rather, she found herself in a surreal kind of limbo state, where Kyle was somehow alive and dead at the same time, where the future she had imagined for herself was still a real possibility despite what had just happened, as if one part of her mind knew that Kyle was gone while the other continued as it had before.

  The guardrails fell, though, one at a time. The first went down when Hughes gently suffocated Kyle. The second slipped when Annie helped carry Kyle out of the warehouse. The third tumbled when she helped Parker dig Kyle’s grave, a fourth when they lowered the body, and a fifth when they covered him up.

  “We’re leaving,” Hughes said. There wasn’t much daylight left, and the area was almost certainly cleared of every infected for miles, but none of them could tolerate another night near that warehouse.

  So she and her friends got back in their Suburban as Roy returned to his RV alone. Annie was shocked to realize that she had the entire back seat to herself now. Somehow, and for no rational reason, she hadn’t expected that. She’d gotten into the back seat and shared it with Kyle so many times.

  Another guardrail down.

  Hughes drove the Suburban behind Roy’s RV out of the lot and back onto the road heading farther south into Arkansas.

  Annie had no idea where they were going and didn’t care. Into Tennessee, presumably, since it was only a couple of miles away, but she just wanted to curl up in the back seat and sleep. She couldn’t do it, though, in case she accidentally sprawled onto Kyle’s side. Instead, she leaned her head against the glass and willed herself to slip away from the wretched world for as long as she could. Just being awake at all was excruciating.

  She had only two friends left now, and it raised a terrible question. What would she do if she also lost Parker and Hughes?

  She wouldn’t go on. Not to Atlanta. She was going there for Kyle, Parker, and Hughes now and not for anyone else. She couldn’t lie to herself about that any longer. Soldiers who returned home from war famously said they no longer cared what they were fighting for once the bullets started flying. They fought for the men next to them. That’s what she was doing. Gutting it out for the men next to her.

  A vaccine couldn’t bring back the world. Civilization was an abstraction, a collective thing in the head that had been flipped off like a breaker switch on a wall.

  Parker marveled at the fact that he’d once wished Kyle was dead.

  He’d seen Kyle as a stupid kid in a young man’s body who was going to get them all killed, but Kyle could, and did, learn how to survive as a valued companion after the disintegration of practically everything. From here on out, Parker would have to be very fucking careful about what he wished for. And he shouldn’t ever think he knew the future based on a single moment in time. The future was not like the present, only more so. Life rarely went in straight lines for long. It turned corners.

  Kyle had fully matured, but Parker was still a work in progress—an irony since Parker was twice Kyle’s age. Kyle’s problem had been developmental; Parker’s was chronic. He’d spent his entire life as a pain in everyone’s ass, the sort of thing that, after the apocalypse, could get somebody killed. Others might kill you if you couldn’t get along and they saw you as a threat. Parker’s own friends damn near killed him when they experimented and infected him on purpose. They never would have done that if he’d been a better human being.

  The kind of person who saw God’s hand in everything might nod and smile. Annie wouldn’t even be on the road to Atlanta if she, Kyle, and Hughes hadn’t conducted their mad scientist experiment on Parker. And if she wasn’t on the road to Atlanta, she could not save the world. None of this would be happening if Parker had not done something terrible to deserve it. Seen that way, Parker’s near-fatal flaw could bring salvation to all in the end.

  Parker could imagine that, but he dared not believe it. He wasn’t a Jesus figure. He’d been forced to shape up or die, so he shaped up.

  What was Roy doing? That’s what Parker wanted to know. Was he improving himself in some way? Becoming smarter, more capable, more decent, more . . . anything? Parker doubted it but forced himself to hold off. His experience getting Kyle wrong all but demanded it.

  A sign on the side of the road startled him. Welcome to Missouri. “What the hell?” he said. He’d sensed they’d been heading north but dismissed it. He always knew which way was north, as if he had a scrap of metal in his head that pinged the magnetic pole.

  His larynx spasmed when, for the briefest of moments, he thought about asking Kyle to check the map. He turned around in his own seat and saw Annie with her head against the window and her eyes closed.

  “Why are we heading north?” he said.

  “A little piece of Missouri juts down into Arkansas,” Hughes said. “That’s where we are.”

  Parker huffed. He should give Roy a break, though. Knowing the way was Roy’s job. It was his only job. If they had to head north around some obstacle to cross the Mississippi River, then fine. Even so, he turned around in his seat again and fished Kyle’s map out of the back.

  He saw it now, there on the page. They were avoiding Memphis. Plenty of bridges spanned the Mississippi into Tennessee in and around Memphis, but Memphis surely had no shortage of problems better avoided. The only other bridge Parker could see over the river was up in Missouri between Caruthersville and Dyersburg.

  Thei
r route made sense, then, for a while anyway, but when Roy took them over the Mississippi River into Dyersville, he turned left and headed north again toward Kentucky. They were still going the wrong way on the map.

  Annie stirred in the back. “Where are we?”

  “Heading into Kentucky,” Parker said.

  “We’re going north?” she said.

  “We are,” Hughes said.

  “Where’s the map?” she said.

  “I have it up here,” Parker said and passed it back to Annie.

  “We’re going around something,” Hughes said.

  “Going around what?” Annie said.

  “No idea,” Hughes said.

  “We’re just trusting him?” she said.

  Nobody replied.

  The light in the sky faded as they continued in silence. They finally reached a campground at the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, a misnomer of park on a long and narrow peninsula between a lake and a river.

  Roy pulled into a campsite, and Hughes took another two slots away, which Parker took as a not-subtle suggestion that they weren’t going to sit around a fire pit drinking beer and shooting the shit before bed anymore.

  Hughes got out of the Suburban and headed toward the RV. He walked angrily and with purpose. Parker stayed put, too exhausted to move. His body would have demanded sleep at gunpoint if it could. Annie seemed to feel the same way even though she’d already napped in the truck.

  Roy met Hughes in the neutral zone, in the empty campsite between them.

  “Why didn’t we just cross into Kentucky from Missouri,” Hughes said, “and skip that shitshow in Arkansas?”

  “Can’t,” Roy said.

  “Why not?” Hughes said.

  “That border ain’t friendly,” Roy said.

  “Which side is a problem?” Hughes said.

  “Both,” Roy said.

  “Both how?” Hughes said.

  “Bad as Arkansas was,” Roy said, “the border is worse. Yes, we lost two people, but I still saved your asses. You don’t want to follow me? Adios, motherfuckers.”