Last Man Standing Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Taylor, Keith

  The sound of my name snaps me to attention, and as Warren grabs Lewis under the arms and drags him slowly towards the door I rush forward. As I pass the blood drenched curtain I see something I was never expecting. A woman. Alive. Her face is streaked with tears and her eyes are wide with fear, but otherwise she seems unharmed.

  “Are you OK?” I ask, carefully stepping past Laurence and reaching down to take her hand.

  She nods, hesitates, then reaches up to me. As she moves the rope between her wrists slips away, falling from her at its ragged, broken end. In the wall behind her I see a small bullet hole beside a steel loop, through which the other severed end of the rope is attached.

  “Umm, Vee?” I lower my voice, as if speaking too loud might make it more real, “I think we need to get out of here right now. Look.” I point to the broken end of the rope. Inch by inch it climbs the side of the bed.

  Vee takes a second to understand what it means. “Oh, for the love of... OK, looks like we’ll have to make this short and sweet.” She looks up at me. “Is there anything you’d like to say to this fucker?”

  I lift the girl to her feet, push her in the direction of the door then nod at Vee. “Yeah,” I say, lowering myself into a squat just far enough from Laurence that I know he can’t reach me. “Look at me,” I say, waiting for him to turn his head. “Remember me?”

  Laurence clasps his hand tightly over the wound in his neck, and when he opens his mouth I see blood on his lips. He gasps before speaking through gritted teeth. “Yeah. You’re the pussy from the parking lot.”

  I shake my head angrily. “No! Do you remember me from before? From New York?” I don’t know why it matters so much to me, but I can feel my rage bubble to the surface at the blank look on his face.

  “Kid, I got no fucking idea who you are.” He gasps, a line of blood dribbling down his cheek.

  I can’t believe it. I know I look pretty much the same as I did a month ago. The world has become unrecognizable but I haven’t. There’s no way he doesn’t remember me. “New York, you evil fuck. You tried to kill me.” I can hear my voice rising, and my finger twitches up to the trigger of my gun. “You shot my girlfriend. You remember Kate? You shot her in the chest and left her to die in the middle of the fucking street!”

  Vee casts a wary eye to the rope. “Tom, time to go. Wrap it up.”

  I ignore her, locking eyes with Laurence as he looks at me with what appears to me genuine ignorance. Eventually he smiles and looks away, as if I’m not worthy of his attention. “Kid, I shot a lot of girls.” He lets out a chuckle, spraying the carpet with specks of blood. “What makes you think yours was special?”

  “Tom...” I hear the warning tone in Vee’s voice as she looks around at the room.

  This isn’t quite the cathartic release I was looking for, but fuck it. It’ll do the job. I lean in close to Laurence, wait until he locks eyes with me once more, and I squeeze off two shots, one in each thigh. He grimaces with pain and bares his teeth.

  “You’ll remember these girls,” I whisper into his ear and point at the beds. “Vee, let’s go.”

  I keep my gun trained on him as Vee stands, and we back out quickly. With each step the rope running around the room gains more slack as ten infected women tug it loose, and as we reach the door the woman closest to the severed end finally works herself free. She rolls from the bed, her hands still bound, and quickly pulls herself to her feet as she notices Laurence on the floor.

  “Please,” Laurence manages to call out, an edge of fear suddenly in his voice. “Don’t leave me with them!”

  There’s nothing more to say. Vee backs out of the room and I follow, closing the door on Laurence just as the first infected woman reaches him. She falls to her knees above him, her teeth bared.

  The thin door does nothing to block out the screams.

  ΅

  :::11:::

  Two Days Earlier

  “WHY DIDN'T YOU eat the cop, Joe?”

  Joe snarls in response. He isn’t much of a conversationalist.

  “Seriously, Joe, I’m really wondering. Why the fuck didn’t you take a bite out of him when he was fresh? He can’t have been dead more than a couple of hours. Shit, he was probably still warm and tasty. What are you, a picky eater?”

  Another snarl. Joe does like to drone on.

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those assholes who demands gluten free shit in restaurants, Joe. Come on, buddy, fess up. You sure look just like one of those pricks.”

  Kaylee looks up through the bars of the cell and shoots a hateful glare at the man leaning against them. “You wouldn’t want to eat me, Joe. I’m packed full of gluten. Stuffed to the gills with delicious gluten. I’m not organic, either. One bite of me and you’ll shit yourself inside out, you nasty little prick.” She laughs out loud as a snatch of Fight Club comes back to her, and she begins to yell. “You don’t know where I’ve been, Joe! You don’t know where I’ve been!”

  Her voice echoes claustrophobically off the wall just a couple of yards away, and she squeezes her eyes closed as the first hint of another approaching panic attack sets her teeth on edge. The last one almost made her swing open the door and try to run. She pinches her eyes tight until colored spots appear in her vision, and doesn’t open them again until her breathing starts to settle down.

  Joe isn’t the guy’s real name. She doesn’t know his real name, but she needed to call him something once she’d started recycling all the curse words she knew after the third day. ‘Pestilent asshole’ just wasn’t cutting it any more, and after a few days on her own she felt like she needed a buddy. Joe sounded like a nice, friendly name. It sounded like the name of a guy who wouldn’t try to eat her. Good old Joe.

  Kaylee stands from the narrow bed and silently paces back and forth for a few minutes. It’s not quite enough to calm her completely, but the movement helps just enough to keep her from losing it. If it wasn’t for the tiny little window set high in the wall she would have gone crazy days ago. That little beam of sunlight passing across the floor for a few hours each day is just enough to remind her that the world continues to exist outside. The earth continues to orbit the sun.

  Today, though, the approaching sunlight is more than just a distant ray of hope. After nine days trapped in this ten by eight cell with no food and nothing to drink but the water in the toilet bowl, the moment those rays hit the wall will be the moment Kaylee will finally escape this stinking, rotting hellhole. Today she’ll breathe fresh air for the first time since the moment the cops locked the cell door. Hell, it might be for the last time. She has no clue what’s going on beyond the walls of the jail, but if she dies today she’ll at least die with the sun on her back.

  “You have no idea what’s coming, Joe,” she mumbles, flashing a hint of a smile through her dry, cracked lips. “Your snarling days are over, buddy.”

  Joe snarls again. Always with the snarling. He just stands there, mouth open, drooling, snapping and snarling at her as if he thinks today might be the day he can magically squeeze through the bars. It’s almost as if he isn’t even listening to her.

  Kaylee slumps back to the bed and looks beyond Joe to the desk down the hallway. She tries not to look at the cop still resting in his chair with the revolver on the floor by his side, but it’s tricky for two reasons. For one thing it’s his fault she got stuck here in the first place. It’s hard to tell by the way his head tilted to the right after he shot himself, but she recognizes him as the booking officer who locked her up that first night.

  Jesus, that night. What a disaster.

  She’d been out at a party billed as End of the Worldapalooza, some concert a bunch of frat guys decided to throw when word of the evacuation came down. She’d planned to stay home and pack a few things, but one of her idiot friends was desperate to lose her V card before society went to shit. She insisted she needed to have sex before the water was cut off, because she couldn’t bear to go to the refugee camp without being able to shower herself
off after fucking. She’d convinced Kaylee to come along and – like always – Kaylee had told herself that she was capable of having ‘just one drink’ at a party. Hey, there’s a first time for everything, right?

  The cops pulled her over around 5AM the following morning. She had no idea where her friend had gone and no memory of the last few hours, but what she did have was a blood alcohol content of 0.15, a half empty bottle of Patron on the passenger seat and, in the pocket of her jeans, a baggy of something she absolutely couldn’t pretend was baking soda. They threw her in the drunk tank to sleep it off, and the guy out in the hallway missing the back of his skull was the cop who booked her in.

  When she woke up around lunchtime she figured she’d slept through the evacuation. There was no way of knowing exactly what happened, but she guessed that it was the booking officer’s job to clear out the cells before getting the hell out of Dodge, and for whatever reason he’d decided to eat his gun instead. Before he went, though, he’d been kind enough to put the key in the door so she could get out. She guessed he figured she’d wake up, see him, find the key and take care of herself. Fucker probably thought he was being kind.

  He just hadn’t counted on Joe being there when Kaylee finally woke up to the worst morning of her life: a wicked tequila hangover, the end of the world and an infected bastard gnashing at the bars of her cell.

  That was nine days ago.

  This, though, isn’t the main reason she doesn’t like looking at the cop. Over the last nine days of hell she’s pretty much forgiven the cowardly bastard for not making sure she got out safe, and the sight of the key in the door has been a great comfort. He screwed up, but at least he meant well. No, the main reason she doesn’t like looking in that particular direction is simple.

  The cop brought a snack with him the day he decided to kill himself.

  On the desk beside him sits a Snickers bar and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and for nine days they’ve been all she’s dreamed about. She’s woken up every morning licking imaginary Dorito dust from her lips. She’s spent hours fantasizing about that first bite of the Snickers. She’s dreamed about the chocolate, slightly melted in the warm room, coating her tongue, and the delicious resistance of the peanuts and nougat between her teeth. After nine days it’s almost become a fucking sexual thing, just as much about the tactile pleasure of the food as the flavor, and she suspects that if she makes it through this alive she’ll spend the rest of her days dealing with some extremely complicated feelings whenever she visits a 7-Eleven.

  As she sits and stares at the candy she realizes the sun is beginning to rise. It’ll be a while before the sunlight hits the wall, but out the window the little patch of sky has already shifted from black to dark blue. Just a little longer and she’ll get to eat. Finally the gnawing pain in her belly will be soothed, and she’ll be free to head to the nearest store and grab everything she’s been craving for the last nine days. Spray cheese. Pastrami. Marshmallow fluff. Oh Jesus, a whole jar of pickled onions.

  “It’s almost time, Joe,” she says, pulling out the skinny pillow from behind her and tugging off the pillowcase. “You’re gonna be dead soon.” She finds the corners of the case where she’s already torn through the cotton by rubbing it against the sharp edge of the bed frame, and she feels a little rush of satisfaction as she tears the case lengthwise to make a yard long strip of fabric. Another half hour of patient sawing at the corner of the bed leaves her with four lengths of cotton, each of them a yard long and about a hand’s width, and she patiently sets about knotting them together until she has a long, thin rope that can take a decent amount of tension. Finally she ties a thick knot at one end. It’s not as heavy as she’d imagined, but it should do the job.

  The idea had only come to her the previous night, and now she’s kicking herself for waiting so long. For all this time she’d pinned her hopes on rescue, and she’d told herself time and again that there was nothing in the bare, spartan cell that could help her fight off Joe when she finally left. The bed and toilet were both secured firmly to the ground, and the bed itself had no sheets or blanket. Literally the only thing in the room she could pick up was the pillow, and it had taken her all this time to figure out how to use it as a weapon.

  Out the window the sky looks a little lighter. The sun isn’t quite up, but she’s done waiting. It’s light enough beyond the cell to see Joe clearly, and she doesn’t need more than that.

  She wants to eat that damned Snickers.

  “It’s time now, Joe,” she says, noticing her voice is suddenly weak and wavering with the nerves. In her chest she can feel her heart flutter, but her path is set. If she doesn’t eat now she won’t have enough energy to try to get out later. It’s make or break time. “Come on, buddy. You wanna eat me, right?” She walks over to the wall on the opposite side of the room to the cell door and Joe slowly follows, snapping at her through the bars, excited by her movement. His arms reach through the bars a little too close for comfort and Kaylee takes a quick step back, a sudden chill shivering down her spine. If he grabs her hair it’ll be game over.

  After a few deep breaths she steps forward again, carefully lowering herself out of reach of Joe’s grasping hands. He swings wildly down to her but he doesn’t seem to remember how to crouch. He just leans against the bars and reaches to around waist level, allowing Kaylee to slide in close to the bars and push the knotted end of the rope through.

  Joe suddenly steps to the side, focusing his attention on the makeshift rope instead of her, and Kaylee makes her move before his awkward shuffle catches up to her. Reaching through the bars she tosses the knotted end to the side, passing the rope behind Joe’s legs, and quickly drags it back through the bars before he can step out of the way. She grabs both ends and pulls the rope tight around his knees, dragging his legs against the bars before she quickly ties the ends in a tight knot.

  Joe begins to howl as Kaylee shuffle back and lifts herself from the ground. His face contorts into a confused grimace when he finds himself unable to move his legs, and he wobbles from side to side for a moment before suddenly falling backwards, bent at the knees, and cracks his head on the tile floor.

  Kaylee’s hands are shaking as she hurries to the door and takes hold of the key, and at the sound of the door creaking open she barely notices the tears cutting lines through the grime on her face, nor the gulping sobs escaping her throat. She crosses the hallway in a daze, ignoring the dead cop to reach over and grab the Snickers and chips, and in moments she’s torn open the brown wrapper and crammed the chocolate bar whole into her mouth.

  It’s the best thing she’s ever tasted. The best experience she’s ever had. Her taste buds are almost overwhelmed, and as she blissfully chews the nougat and soft, melted chocolate her hands tremble with the joy of that feeling she missed so much. It’s something she never really thought about, and something she swears to herself she’ll never take for granted again, this joy of eating. It’s... it’s incredible.

  The pack of Doritos follows closely after the chocolate, along with – bliss! – a stale jelly donut that was sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts box obscured by a stack of files. The sugar rush hits her right away, and for a brief moment she feels invincible, followed immediately by a violent bout of vomiting on the booking officer’s desk. She braces herself on the edge and waits for the nausea to pass, ashamed of herself for wolfing down the food all at once.

  A snarl from Joe shakes her back from her glassy eyed stupor, and she suddenly realizes she’s now exposed for the first time in nine days. There are no bars to hide behind now, and she can’t afford to drift off. She needs food – real food – and somewhere safe to rest up as she evaluates the situation. She grabs the revolver from the floor and pushes out the... what do you call it, the wheel? She doesn’t know guns, but she knows what she’s looking at well enough to realize that the bullet that went through the cop’s head was the last one in there. Still, she thinks, the butt might make for a pretty good cudgel until she can find a be
tter weapon. She knows she doesn’t really have the strength to fight, but it feels good to hold the gun even if it’s useless.

  Joe’s whining over by the cell door sends needles driving into her brain. She’s been listening to it for what feels like forever, but before now it was coming from the other side of the bars. It drove her crazy but she knew he was harmless. Now they’re both on the same side of the door, though, the snarling and gnashing takes on a much more threatening tone.

  Kaylee looks down at the gun. Surely it wouldn’t take too much force to bludgeon Joe to death, right? He’s immobilized and he doesn’t seem to have much coordination now he’s on the floor with one arm awkwardly pinned beneath him. Just a few blows to the head with the heavy steel butt should be enough to put him out of his misery...

  ... but she can’t bring herself to do it. He’s real now. She gave him a damned name. It’d almost be like... Jesus, she can’t imagine she’s thinking like this... It’d almost be like killing a friend. She sighs.

  “You got off light, Joe,” she mutters quietly. “You’re just lucky I’m cool.”

  She turns her back on him and walks slowly down the hallway, remembering her drunken route into the station days earlier. When she comes to a door with a security card reader she panics for a moment, but sighs with relief to find it swings open now the power’s out. Beyond the door she finds the front desk, and beyond that the automatic sliding doors leading out into the street. These are clamped firmly closed – probably the only reason her cell wasn’t swarming with infected – but they judder slowly open when she uses the last of her energy reserves to pry them apart.

  The world outside is... normal. The streets are empty, of course, but there’s nothing that would suggest that the nation has collapsed and zombies rule the earth. It could almost be just another quiet Sunday morning in Harrisburg, after the late night drunks have stumbled home but before the weekend shoppers begin to fill the streets. It’s eerie, and the still air does little to help the mood.