The Last City

by Michael J. Totten

  “Wow,” Annie said.

  Parker tapped the brake and slowed a bit. “What?” He scanned the road ahead of him, but he didn’t see anything other than asphalt and trees.

  “I took the night vision off,” Annie said, “and the lights are gone.”

  Parker could still see it.

  “The light’s really dim,” Annie said. “City’s darker than it looks. Only we can see it from here.”

  Parker nodded. Of course. They had only just now noticed the lights, and they were using night vision. The radiance was barely perceptible, so dim that he wondered if they’d see it at all, even with night vision, if there weren’t clouds in the sky to reflect it back down toward earth. The city center was still far away. Atlanta’s suburbs sprawled an incredible distance. And besides, the skyscrapers were probably dark at night. While fragments of the city might still be holding on, life couldn’t be normal there. Downtown wouldn’t be bustling with office workers and traffic. Wouldn’t make any sense to light everything up even if the buildings were packed to the top floors with refugees. People needed darkness to sleep, and blazing towers of light would attract infected from everywhere.

  An exit ramp appeared on the right leading to a cluster of gas stations and chain restaurants.

  “Anybody seeing anything?” Parker said. “Any movement, anywhere at all?”

  “Nothing,” Hughes said.

  “No people,” Annie said, “no infected, no cars, no nothing.”

  “Roy said the army’s inside Atlanta,” Annie said. “Maybe they’ve come out and cleared the area.”

  Parker shook his head. “No bodies. It all looks undisturbed.” The buildings weren’t even boarded up. “Nothing much happened here.” Nothing but a mass exodus. He wondered how many infected could actually be in this city if so many people had left.

  If Roy hadn’t warned them that the suburbs were overrun, Parker might have thought Atlanta was a much safer place than it actually was. All along he’d assumed the eastern United States might have fared better than the West Coast since people out here had more time to prepare for what was coming, and in some ways, that seemed to be true. The outskirts of Seattle and Portland looked nothing like this. Even cities as far east as Omaha looked nothing like this.

  Of course, they weren’t actually in Atlanta yet or even its suburbs.

  “How much farther?” Parker said.

  “Ten minutes,” Annie said. “We’ll be in Alpharetta in ten minutes.”

  She was wrong. They got there in less than five.

  But it wasn’t what they expected. The four-lane highway mushroomed into an eight-lane freeway, and it was still devoid of people, infected, and cars—an astonishing fact of apocalyptic geography. Wherever the people of the eastern seaboard had run off to once they knew what was coming, they had all the time they had needed to get there.

  And yet, according to Roy, Atlanta’s suburbs had been overrun not even two weeks ago.

  “Something’s wrong,” Hughes said. “This is too easy.”

  Or Roy is full of shit, Parker thought. They were still cruising along at a comfortable thirty miles an hour, but Parker didn’t like it either. Unless Roy was lying, they couldn’t possibly glide all the way into the city like this.

  “Get Roy on the radio,” Parker said.

  The radio squawked. “Talk to us, Roy,” Hughes said. “What’s going on?”

  “We get off soon,” Roy said. “Roadblocks coming up.”

  Roadblocks? Parker thought. The hell for?

  “Army cut the main highways,” Roy said.

  “Why?” Hughes said. “Over.”

  “No idea,” Roy said. “Seemed they had something in mind but retreated behind the walls before they could finish. No point uncutting the roads.”

  Parker kept his eyes on Roy’s RV, about two hundred feet in front of him.

  “Czech hedgehogs ahead,” Roy said into the radio. “This is where we get off.”

  “Czech hedgehogs?” Annie said.

  “Anti-tank obstacles,” Hughes said. “Like huge iron jacks.”

  “They expecting a Canadian ground invasion down here?” Parker said.

  “Czech hedgehogs stop cars and trucks even better than tanks,” Hughes said.

  “Why bother?” Parker said.

  “God knows,” Hughes said.

  “Maybe they hoped they could wall off the suburbs as well as the city,” Annie said. “But they ran out of time.”

  Perhaps, Parker thought. Either way, the easy driving on the eight-lane was over.

  The RV’s brake lights came on, and Roy indicated a turn onto Exit Ramp 9 toward Hayes Bridge Road into Alpharetta. Parker followed him onto the offramp, made left turns where signs pointed to Alpharetta and DeVry University, and—just like that—they were properly in the suburbs, with a wide thoroughfare fronted by a low-rise Marriott Hotel and a series of office parks.

  Infected milled about in the road, not a horde or even a pack but stray individuals, two of them standing there in the street, one sitting cross-legged on a patch of grass where a sidewalk would be in an older part of the city, and three or four others, spaced far apart in the parking lot in front of the Marriott, apparently asleep on the pavement.

  Parker and Roy each slowed their vehicles to ten miles an hour. The first infected was bang in the center of the road, standing there motionless but turning toward the RV and the Suburban with its head cocked sideways as if it didn’t know what to make of the sound coming toward it.

  Roy drove around it.

  Parker slowed the Suburban to less than walking speed as he neared.

  “Don’t stop,” Annie said.

  Parker could clearly see now that the infected was a middle-aged woman. Everything was rendered with green pixels, but he knew she was black. She had distinctly African-American features and looked strangely undangerous bathed in night-vision green, more curious and perplexed than hostile, her eyes trying and failing to pinpoint the Suburban’s exact location.

  “She can’t see us,” Parker said. “Not even a little bit.”

  Neither Annie nor Hughes replied, as if they were just as transfixed as he was. The infected woman was recognizably human. She had parents. Children, perhaps. A home once, and a job. A life down here in suburban Atlanta. Maybe she commuted every day into the city to an office in one of the towers. Whatever she’d done and whomever she’d loved before the virus struck her down, she couldn’t remember.

  “You ever seen one of them like this?” Parker said.

  “How could we?” Annie said.

  Not even behind glass in some kind of a zoo would the infected look like this, Parker thought. Only with night vision could they be observed in a nonaggressive state so up close and personal. The infected woman groped toward the Suburban in the darkness like an eyeless creature.

  Parker turned the wheel and drove past her. He did not want to hit her, did not want her making any kind of contact at all with the truck. No telling what she’d do. She probably wasn’t intelligent enough anymore in her diseased condition to realize she was so close to her prey or to even realize she was facing a vehicle, but he didn’t want to take a chance and give her an excuse to scream, to cry out, to alert the others that she’d found something. The others wouldn’t be able to find Parker or his friends either if she did scream, but he didn’t want whatever was around all riled up. Easier, and safer, to keep them docile so he could drive around them as easily as if they were orange cones in his path.

  He and Roy took things painfully, agonizingly slow. It wasn’t any kind of a problem. Not at first, anyway. They only had to swerve around an infected every once in a while. Those that moved, moved slowly. Those that stood around did little more than turn their heads at the approaching sound with a dim bovine wonder. Some that were lying on the ground stirred and sat up, but some of them didn’t. None of them charged. None of them screamed.

  “Imagine trying this during the day,” Annie said.

  Parker s
huddered. Trying this during the day would be a drastically different experience. That was for damn sure. The infected would scream, cohere into mobs, packs—even hordes—and they’d charge. Parker wouldn’t be able to poke along at ten miles an hour, and he wouldn’t be able to dodge them. He’d have to run them down and pray not to get stuck.

  The lights on the horizon glowed brighter now.

  “Annie,” Parker said. “Can you see the city lights without night vision now?”

  “Yeah,” Annie said after a moment. “We’re getting closer. And hey. There’s more off to the east.”

  Parker couldn’t see anything at all to the east without turning his head. He had no peripheral vision. None of them did. He sneaked a quick head swivel, though, and saw what Annie was talking about: another dome of light on the eastern horizon.

  “I see it too,” Hughes said. “What’s over there?”

  “Nothing,” Annie said. “Farmland.”

  “Can’t be nothing,” Hughes said.

  “You sure that way’s east?” Parker said. He heard Annie rustle the map while he kept his eyes on the road ahead of him.

  “Positive,” Annie said. “Athens is that way, but it’s far.”

  “Shit,” Hughes said. “There’s stars in the sky that direction.”

  Uh oh, Parker thought. The weather was clearing. He was pretty sure now what the glow was. Clouds had covered the sky for days, but they were shifting.

  “The moon’s coming up,” Annie said. “Isn’t it.”

  “We need to stop,” Parker said. “Get Roy on the radio. The infected are going to see us.”

  Hughes radioed Roy and told him the bad news. Without peripheral vision, the guy might have no idea the moon was about to rise in the east if nobody told him.

  They were on a major suburban traffic artery now, with three lanes in each direction divided by a curbed grassy median. Strip malls, gas stations, and chain restaurants filled the void between the countryside and the city.

  “Pulling over,” Roy said into the radio and took his RV off the main drag into a parking lot. Parker followed and stopped in front of a franchise he’d never heard of before called Captain D’s Seafood Kitchen. Not until he got out of the truck and met Roy in the lot did he notice that Captain D’s was all boarded up, the first time he’d seen such a place on a streetscape that otherwise looked intact. Atlanta’s mass exodus had been a hell of a lot more orderly than Seattle’s.

  “Plenty of clouds still overhead,” Roy said, looking up.

  “Shh,” Parker said. He didn’t see or hear anyone else, infected or otherwise, but they’d already made plenty of noise just pulling in and parking. He constantly had to remind himself, though, that while he could see, any of those things in the area couldn’t. Night vision was unnatural. He had to trust it. The deeper parts of his brain, the subconscious and primitive threat-detection regions, automatically assumed that if he could see, everyone and everything else should be able to also.

  Hughes and Annie got out of the Suburban and huddled on each side of Parker, the four of them all gadgeted up and looking like a cyborg gathering in apocalyptic suburbia.

  Parker scrutinized the eastern horizon. He could see stars in that direction but only low in the sky, no higher than a visible inch or two above the strip mall across the street. The moon was going to rise any second, but most of the sky was still cloud-covered.

  “I think we’ll be okay,” he said.

  “Mmm,” Hughes said.

  Parker licked his index finger and held it still in the air for a moment. He felt nothing. The atmosphere couldn’t be calmer. “There’s no wind,” he said. “The clouds aren’t moving.”

  “No wind down here,” Hughes said and looked straight up, “doesn’t mean there’s no wind up there.”

  “Clouds don’t look like they’re moving,” Roy said.

  “No, they don’t,” Annie said.

  “We should wait until tomorrow,” Hughes said. “I hate to piss on everybody’s parade, but somebody has to.”

  “You want to hole up in this fish shack?” Parker said and gestured with his head toward Captain D’s. “We wait until tomorrow, the sky could clear up for a week. We can always retreat if we have to.”

  “That’s a hell of a risk,” Hughes said.

  “We wouldn’t have come here at all if we weren’t willing to risk it,” Annie said.

  “Doesn’t mean we should be stupid,” Hughes said.

  “We aren’t being stupid,” Parker said. “We’ll keep an eye on the clouds. If the sky starts opening up any more than it already has, we’ll have plenty of time to bug out before the moon’s overhead and lighting everything up.”

  Nobody argued, but nobody agreed with him either.

  “Okay?” Parker said.

  Still, nobody said anything.

  “We didn’t come this far only to get this far,” Parker said.

  Hughes looked at the sky one more time. The clouds had not moved at all, and they didn’t look like they were going to. “Fine,” he said.

  “Agreed,” Annie said. “Let’s go.”

  Nobody bothered asking Roy his opinion, nor did he volunteer one.

  Annie didn’t worry about the moonlight. Parker was right—they’d have all the time they needed to backtrack out of the suburbs or even the city if they had to, as long as they didn’t wait until the sky cleared entirely and the moon was right overhead.

  She enjoyed riding in the front seat for a change and felt slightly peeved that neither Parker nor Hughes had been gentlemanly enough to offer it to her before. She understood why: they were both large men who required more leg room, but still. The back seat of the Suburban wasn’t exactly cramped.

  A fire station appeared on the left side, and on the other side of the road, incongruously out in the sprawl, was a classical two-story nineteenth century building that nobody had ever demolished. It had pillars in front of the main entrance and a spindle-lined balcony on the second floor.

  Bright green light washed over the roof and the cityscape to the west. The moon was up now.

  “Here we go,” Hughes said.

  Annie hunched over in the passenger seat so she could check the sky to the east through the driver-side window. The cloud cover held. The moon would be obscured again after rising a few more degrees.

  She removed the night vision from her eye to check her surroundings naturally. She could see a little bit better unaided now than before, but not much, just the vague shape of things against a gray background—and only the tops of things, really—where they created silhouettes against the sky. No actual details were visible. The road was but a strip of heavy gray unspooling in front of her, and she couldn’t tell where the asphalt ended and the sidewalk began. She and her friends were still more or less safe, at least for the moment, and they’d probably stay that way as long as the sky didn’t light up more than it already had.

  Then she saw it. An infected, dead ahead in the road, shambling toward the Suburban. And she wasn’t using her night vision. She saw it with her naked eye.

  Roy swerved around it without any trouble.

  Annie put the night vision back on as the Suburban approached. The infected was a young man, perhaps a teenager, with a horrific gash on the side of his face. As Parker drove around it to the left, Annie turned her head to keep her eyes locked on to its face. The infected likewise turned its head to keep its eyes locked on her as the Suburban passed, its mouth agape as if something as large as a dinosaur were lumbering by in the dark.

  “It saw us,” Annie said.

  “It saw the truck,” Parker said, “but it didn’t see us.”

  She supposed Parker was right. To an unaided infected eye in the night, vehicles would be dark blobs moving across an inscrutable landscape. A healthy person would recognize them, of course, and not just by the sounds they made. Annie could see well enough now without her night vision to discern cars and trucks from, say, boulders and bushes. She wouldn’t be able to see in
side any vehicles, though, at least not well enough to see faces behind glass. The infected, therefore, wouldn’t know their prey was on the other side of the windshield. Not in this gloom.

  She saw more of them ahead, eight or nine milling about in the road in a disorganized pack. The low moonlight provided enough illumination to activate them but not yet enough that they could navigate without stumbling aimlessly.

  Parker and Roy slowed the vehicles. The infected ahead were too spread out to drive around. They were a safe enough distance away, almost a full city block, but they were shambling ahead.

  “They see us,” Annie said and scanned the area with her night vision. On her right was a bank with a parking lagoon around it, empty except for an armored car, and beyond that, a grocery store with a whole lake of parking.

  “Pull into that bank lot,” Annie said.

  “On it,” Parker said.

  Hughes radioed Roy and told him.

  Roy made the turn first, then Parker. Easy enough. They cruised from the parking lot at the bank, passed the armored car, headed into the grocery store’s lot, then reconnected to the main road. The pack of infected followed but were left behind at once.

  Annie removed the night vision again and surveyed the cityscape with her bare eyes. She could see a little bit better than she could even a couple of minutes ago. The moon was higher in the sky now and illuminating the surface, including the sides of the buildings. It would ascend above the cloud cover soon enough, but they had another problem to worry about: the city lights were closer, and brighter, and made worse by cloud cover. The light was coming from below, bouncing off the ceiling above, and radiating down into the suburbs. The clouds were going help obscure the moonlight but amplify the city lights.

  “Brighter now,” Parker said. “Get us on a different road.”

  Annie consulted the map. “Head west on Dogwood Road toward Morgan Falls Overlook Park.”

  “Why that way?” Hughes said.

  “Looks quieter,” Annie said. “Spread out. More residential.”

  Hughes huffed, as if he didn’t like sitting helplessly in the back seat with no sense of control or even a map. He had a job to do too, though, so he radioed Roy and relayed Annie’s directions.