The Last City

by Michael J. Totten

  Annie understood now why Roy believed the universe was committing suicide. He’d been to Atlanta. He’d heard this before. The sound itself could have driven him mad. For the first time, she wondered if he might have been a normal, functioning person before he came here and heard this, when he still installed home security systems for a living. Was that even possible?

  Annie, too, had heard the same sound before—in her own mind back in Washington state, when she spent three days as a hungry hungry predator, as if a force backed by the whole weight of the universe compelled her to destroy and devour every human being she could find.

  “What do we do?” Parker said.

  The horde must have been a mile thick on the ground. Annie and her friends could not make it through. Surely, Parker must know that. He had to be asking where else they should go or if there was even a point going anywhere.

  Nobody said anything for a while.

  Hughes finally broke the silence. “We need—” he said and coughed. “We need to know what we’re dealing with.”

  Annie turned around in her seat and stared at Hughes in the back. She could see his face in the light.

  “What we’re dealing with,” she said, “is the biggest horde in the world.”

  She imagined a drone’s-eye view of the landscape ahead. A mile-wide swath of infected and, beyond that, a thirty-foot wall. On the other side of the wall, weak and terrified humans, hunkering down, half starving and more than half panicked, waiting for the inevitable end.

  Roy had been right all along. Everyone left alive in Atlanta had been kidding themselves. The people who had fled on boats to the Caribbean had been kidding themselves. Annie, too, had been kidding herself when she’d fantasized about fleeing to Canada. This was the flinch response, the instinctive regret of a suicide halfway to the sidewalk from the top of a building. It wasn’t rational. It was biology.

  And yet. And yet. Roy had agreed to lead her and her friends to Atlanta, knowing in advance what they’d find once they got there.

  She shook her head back and forth as if something were stuck in her hair. Think, Annie. Get it together.

  “Are there any hills around?” Parker said.

  “None that are high enough where we could see much,” Annie said. “This isn’t Seattle.”

  “Not hills,” Hughes said. “But skyscrapers. We can drive back to Buckhead. Climb the stairs to the top of one of those towers and see what we’re dealing with from the roof.”

  Annie didn’t like it. “We’d be walking up into a deathtrap.” There’d be no way out if a bunch of those things surrounded the building. “You want to get cornered again like we did in the warehouse?”

  Hughes blew out his breath.

  “We can’t drive through whatever’s ahead,” Annie said.

  “Sure as hell can’t walk through it,” Hughes said. “But we might be able to drive around it.”

  “They’re surrounding downtown,” Annie said.

  “You don’t know that,” Hughes said.

  “They’re drawn by the light,” Annie said.

  Parker needed to turn the Suburban around. If the horde surged their way, they’d be swallowed by a tsunami of teeth.

  “We need to get out of here,” Annie said.

  “We at least need to know where the edge of the horde is,” Hughes said.

  “What difference does it make?” Parker said. “We’re going to have to go through it whether it’s a mile deep or two hundred feet deep.”

  “It’s not two hundred feet deep,” Annie said. “The wall is on the south side of the North Druid Hills. That’s two miles away.”

  “Are we sure that’s where it is?” Parker said.

  “That’s what Roy said,” Annie said. “And there’s no one else we can ask.”

  She wasn’t going to ask Roy about it again. No point. She never wanted to ask him again about anything, but she pressed the call button on the radio anyway.

  “Any ideas, Roy?” she said. “Over.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, no,” Roy said.

  Of course not. There were no options. They didn’t have a helicopter or plane, and no one knew how to fly anyway. They couldn’t float down a river. There weren’t any nearby. They couldn’t sneak in under the cover of darkness. There was enough light in the sky now that Annie could read a magazine without a flashlight or night vision. They couldn’t call ahead and ask for a rescue or even get close enough to the walls to signal for help. They might be able to get someone on the handheld radios, but not from this far away from the wall. They might try using a flashlight to send a message in Morse Code from the top of one of the towers, but again, those towers were deathtraps. They might be able to find a flare gun and shoot it into the sky, but the odds that anyone inside the walls would come outside and save them were miniscule. Why would they?

  “We need a bigger truck,” Hughes said.

  “We need a tank,” Parker said.

  They weren’t getting a tank, but Annie remembered something. “A few miles back,” she said, “when it was still dark, when we drove around a pack in the street, we went through a parking lot at a bank.”

  “I remember,” Parker said.

  “There was an armored car in the lot!” Hughes said.

  “Yes,” Annie said. “There was.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment. Annie refused to get excited, but she had to admit there was a tiny chance that it might work. They might get stuck in the horde, but the infected couldn’t break in. That was the whole point of armored cars. No one, and nothing, could get inside. Survival was possible.

  “Can we find that bank again?” Parker said.

  “I know where it is,” Annie said.

  “We need keys,” Parker said.

  No, they didn’t, Annie thought. They had the next best thing.

  “Remember that diner in Iowa?” Annie said. “Where we met Roy?”

  Nobody said anything. Of course they remembered.

  “Lucas gave me his set of lockpicks.”

  17

  Hughes took a deep breath as Parker turned the Suburban around and headed north again toward Buckhead. His body felt like an overinflated tire that had just sprung an air leak; only now did he realize how tired he’d been. He and his friends weren’t going to be okay, exactly, inside an armored bank car, but they couldn’t easily be killed inside one either.

  What about Roy? He wasn’t going to follow in his RV anymore. He’d have to ride with everyone else. Annie was going to hate it, and she would be right. It was going to be a problem.

  Hughes wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on the guy, because he was going to drive. Break time was over. His eyes weren’t fatigued any longer, and he didn’t even crave sleep. Most of all, he missed being in front where he felt in control of the vehicle and the mission.

  “You sure this is going to work?” Parker said.

  Hughes chuckled. “Which part?”

  “The lockpicks,” Parker said.

  “They’ll work,” Hughes said. “We have door picks and auto picks. I checked.” He only vaguely knew how to use them, but he understood the theory well enough. There would be a learning curve. It would take a while, but he’d work it out.

  “What do we do when we get stuck?” Annie said.

  “Easy,” Hughes said. “Don’t get stuck.”

  “We can’t drive through a hundred thousand infected,” Annie said. “The tires’ll spin in blood, brains, and ground-up limbs before we can run over even a hundred of them. You want to get out and push?”

  Oh, she of little faith. “That’s not going to happen.”

  Annie snorted. “I’m not going to sit there and wait to die of hunger and thirst while diseased maniacs scream at us through the windows. I’ll blow my brains out.”

  “You will do no such thing,” Hughes said.

  “We have plenty of suicide pills in the first-aid box,” Annie said.

  Hughes flinched. She sounded like Roy. “We’re not going to
get stuck.”

  “You know something the rest of us don’t?” Parker said.

  It wasn’t that complicated. If Hughes had learned anything about the infected, it was this: they only attacked if they saw you or heard you. “We can paint the windows,” he said, “so they can’t see us, and we’ll drive one mile an hour. They’ll move out of our way. They won’t even know we’re inside.”

  “You want to drive blind?” Annie said.

  “We can leave an unpainted slit so we can see out,” Hughes said.

  “Not bad,” Parker said and nodded.

  But they could do even better. “We can also pull them away from the walls,” Hughes said.

  “Pull a million infected away from the walls,” Annie said.

  “There aren’t a million of them,” Hughes said.

  “Close enough,” Annie said. “What, get them all to chase us to Tennessee, then turn around and come back?”

  “We don’t want them to chase us,” Hughes said.

  Annie laughed.

  “We want them to chase something else,” Hughes said.

  “Sic them on Roy,” Annie said.

  This time Parker laughed.

  “Not Roy,” Hughes said. “Buckhead.”

  “Buckhead?” Parker said.

  “The neighborhood with the skyscrapers.” Hughes said. “We drove through it fifteen minutes ago.”

  “You and your skyscrapers,” Annie said.

  “We could set them on fire,” Hughes said.

  Nobody said anything. Hughes smiled in the dark and leaned back in his seat.

  He knew what his friends were thinking. They were considering what could go wrong, and the answer was: plenty. They could get attacked while sloshing gas cans around. They could get trapped inside one of the buildings. The fire could spread and burn down the city.

  “Brilliant,” Parker said.

  “Hardly,” Annie said. “Remember Seattle?”

  How could Hughes forget? Seattle was his hometown. When they’d sailed past it on the Puget Sound on their way to the San Juan Islands, they saw that the entire city had been incinerated to blackened foundations. It might as well have been nuked. Hughes had assumed a rare Northwestern lightning storm had started a blaze, but now he wondered if someone had set a fire on purpose while fighting or distracting a horde.

  He didn’t want to do the same to Atlanta, but Atlanta wasn’t Seattle. Downtown Seattle hadn’t walled itself off. It had no functioning urban core. Atlanta did. There had to be at least one fire station up and running somewhere downtown. The wall builders would have made sure of it. They might not be able to prevent flames from leaping over the wall, but they should be able to douse any that did.

  Besides, a fire in Buckhead would probably stay in Buckhead as long as it didn’t burn during a windstorm, especially if Hughes and his friends only lit one building on fire, whichever was the tallest and most easily seen from downtown. The horde would almost certainly be drawn to the flames during the day when a tower of billowing smoke wouldn’t compete with the nighttime glow from downtown.

  “We could end up setting the entire state of Georgia on fire,” Annie said.

  “Impossible,” Hughes said. “Forests caught fire here for millions of years before firefighters even existed.”

  “Okay,” Annie said. “But cities have always had firefighters. Until Seattle.”

  “It’s a risk,” Hughes said. “But would that be any more dangerous than what’s out here right now? What would you rather be dealing with if you were inside the walls? A fire that will burn itself out in a couple of days or a million infected?”

  “We could wait for the infected to starve to death,” Parker said. “Things that can’t continue forever, won’t.”

  “Things that can’t continue forever,” Hughes said, “can continue for a lot longer than you think they can. And we’re racing against a clock here. Those things will eventually starve to death, yes, but so will everyone in the CDC. They can’t go outside the walls to get food. Not while they’re surrounded. For all we know, they’re down to their last rations already. We might be doing them a favor by setting the city on fire.”

  “Okay,” Annie said. “So, we torch a skyscraper. Then what?”

  “I don’t know,” Hughes said.

  “You don’t know?” Annie said.

  “Depends on what happens next,” Hughes said. “Does anyone or anything see us? Do we end up attracted a horde from the countryside instead of downtown? Does a helicopter swoop in with fire retardant?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “We navigate the path as it unfolds,” Hughes said.

  Full darkness descended again as they returned to the north and away from the well-lit downtown.

  “Where am I going, Annie?” Parker said.

  Annie leaned forward in the passenger seat so she could see Roy’s RV in the side mirror. He drove without headlights, but she saw his rig perfectly with her night vision. “Keep going straight for a while.”

  She didn’t need to look at the map for the return trip to the bank. There were only a handful of turns, the next still a few miles ahead.

  “We need to take care of Roy,” she said.

  “Later,” Hughes said.

  “He’s not coming with us.”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “Not since we decided to switch vehicles, we haven’t. You can’t expect him to follow in his RV.”

  Hughes said nothing.

  “I’m not riding with him,” Annie said.

  Hughes still said nothing. Annie knew what he wanted to say. Roy was an extra set of eyes and hands. He was a capable fighter. He hadn’t hurt anyone since Iowa. But Hughes didn’t say any of those things. He had to know she was right, that this was the end of the line.

  “We have to deal with him at some point,” she said.

  “We don’t, actually,” Parker said. “We can turn him in after we get through the gate.”

  After we get through the gate? Annie marveled at Parker’s optimism. She couldn’t decide if she should laugh at him or scoff.

  “He won’t see it coming,” Parker said. “He has no idea that we know the truth about him.”

  “I’m not riding with him,” she said.

  “You—” Hughes said and turned around in his seat so he could look at her.

  “Annie,” Parker said. “We need to be careful.”

  “I am being careful,” she said.

  “You’re being emotional,” Parker said.

  Right. She was being “emotional”—a rich observation coming from a man who’d reacted and behaved more emotionally in the time she had known him than anyone she’d ever met.

  “I’ve been dealing with a lot of shit,” Parker said. “You know. You’ve been with me through all of it.”

  At least the man was self-aware.

  “I—,” Parker said. He couldn’t continue, but he didn’t have to.

  The next and final turn was coming up.

  “Make a right,” Annie said.

  Parker turned right. They were getting close to the bank now.

  “I . . . ,” Parker said, “reacted impulsively. Back on those islands. And I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you.”

  “I’m not you!” Annie said. “You attacked Kyle for no goddamn reason. Roy is a serial killer. He can’t be allowed to run wild.”

  “He’s not running wild!” Parker said. “He’s under our control whether he knows it or not. And we need to deal with him coldly and rationally, not because he deserves it but because it is necessary. Until then, he’s useful. He doesn’t know we have Lucas’s cell phone.”

  Annie took a deep breath. Parker was far too complacent, and he wasn’t even close to convincing her. Any number of things could go wrong, including things no one had thought of.

  “We’re here,” Parker said.

  The bank was straight ahead on the left, the armored car still in the lot. Parker cranked the wheel, pulled
off the main road, and came to a stop a few parking spots down.

  Annie turned around in her seat. Roy was still coming up the main road.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Hughes said.

  She wasn’t going to do anything stupid. She was going to do what was necessary, as Parker had put it. Her friends would be mad at her, but once it was done, it would be done, and they wouldn’t hold it against her for long. They’d know she was right, in the end.

  She held the Glock in her right hand near her feet.

  Hughes turned around in his seat and stared at her through his night vision monocle. He looked like a robot. “Give me your gun.”

  Annie lay the Glock at her feet and raised both hands in the air.

  “I don’t have it,” she said.

  “Give it to me!” Hughes said.

  “You can see that I don’t have it.”

  Hughes opened the front passenger door and got out in a flourish without checking his surroundings or to even trying to be quiet. Then he opened her own door and at once saw the gun at her feet. She leaned back and let him snatch it. He grabbed her crowbar as well for good measure as Roy pulled into the lot and parked his RV two spaces down.

  Parker stepped out of the Suburban wielding a hammer. Hughes took a step back and made room for Annie to exit the vehicle. He had a crowbar in each hand, and he stuffed Annie’s Glock in his jacket pocket. Roy climbed out of his RV with his sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  “I need a weapon,” Annie whispered to Hughes.

  “Hold on,” Hughes said, eyes on Roy.

  “Seriously,” Annie said, a little too loudly.

  Hughes made a downward motion with the flat of his hand.

  “Give me one of those crowbars,” she whispered, more quietly this time.

  Hughes eyeballed the rear of the Suburban. The lockpicks were buried somewhere back there in a box.

  “I won’t do anything,” Annie whispered and glanced at Roy. He was standing there with his feet apart and wielding his blade like he couldn’t wait to start chopping heads. “None of us can be out here unarmed.”