The Last City Box Set

by Logan Keys

  “Are you sure?” His voice cracks with hope.

  “Very. I…” our eyes tussle then lock. I toy with my hair then pull my hand down to my side. “It’s late,” I say seeing the sun fight for its place in the sky. “I have to go.” Shade doesn’t want me to leave, but I can’t stay. “I have a thing,” I try lamely, and before he can argue, or before my confused feelings can annoy me further, I sprint away at top speed.

  While Shade might be fast, he doesn’t have time to see which way I go, and I change direction enough to make sure he doesn’t follow me.

  Because I need to get away from a looming suspicion that those butterflies had not been his emotions after all. That they might have been mine.

  And because I need to be alone for this tonight.

  Quick as lightning I wind up where I must, and Joelle doesn’t chide me, but I sense her impatience radiating inside of my head.

  We meet where we had planned.

  At Tommy’s graveside.

  “Do you believe in God, Dallas?”

  “You can see that I do.”

  “And he made us? Even like this?”

  I want to reach for her hand. Is she beyond that? Joelle had once been a child who needed such things. I see into her memories, she’s bouncing on the bed, and Tommy’s telling her to quit.

  I want to reach out and hug her, hold her, do what you would for a child, but there is another Joelle that eclipses those memories, and I see her rushing through a forest, running with a pack of wolves, hunting with them. Bedding down alone in a cave; always alone.

  Girl to wildling to queen.

  So much in such a short period.

  No. I think I won’t reach for her hand, because she needs to control her façade as well as I do.

  Joelle is not a child anymore.

  And I am not a lovesick girl.

  She is waiting for my answer.

  I say, “God made us. Then science made us like this.”

  “And then man killed Tommy.”

  I sigh. It’s true, but... Tommy killed Tommy. He was too good for this world to begin with. “If you want to sacrifice yourself for goodness, the world will let you.”

  Joelle nods. “I’d like to say a prayer, but I don’t know where to start.”

  “The Lord’s Prayer?”

  “I don’t know it.”

  I clear my throat. It’s been a while.

  But the words won’t come. I can’t remember them but another comes. Tommy’s mother had a pillow in her room she’d stitched. Whenever I was hurt really badly, I’d move my fingers across the words. I wouldn’t ever forget them. Not ever.

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

  Joelle pushes away errant tears but her face is stiff with a fierceness. “For thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

  “Amen,” we both say.

  “Let’s just be silent and stay a while longer,” she says in the smallest voice, and her careful use of the words make my throat close.

  I nod.

  Joelle moves and reaches for my hand.

  We both hold on for dear life, and stare at the recently disturbed earth.

  Before dawn, Joelle drops to her knees, still holding my hand. But it’s become sweaty.

  We are both uncomfortable with the building light.

  Joelle pulls from my grip and then digs the now claw-like fingers into the earth.

  And that’s when I see it.

  I touch her shoulder. “Joelle,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  She sniffs and rubs her eyes and follows where my hand points. A stone, across and to the right. It says, “Joelle.”

  She rushes over.

  She touches the stone and then brushes away dirt on her name. “Why?”

  “They must have thought…”

  “I was dead?”

  Her eyes fill with tears and she looks away, lip trembling. “He died thinking I died. I guessed he had to have.”

  I nod. What can I say?

  She storms over to Tommy’s grave and sinks to her knees again, hands finding their holes from before and she lifts giant clumps, a sob escaping her throat in gasps. “He… wouldn’t… want…” Hiccups between words interrupt them, sobs, and deep breaths too. “This… we… need… to get him out of here… move him.”

  I try to stop her. But it’s a weak attempt. I merely hug her shoulders while she digs. I know she is right. Joelle’s absolutely right. Tommy wouldn’t want to be here. He’d want to be…

  I sit back and shake my head. The sun’s making it hard to think. “The farm,” I say and she nods. “He’d want to be at the farm.”

  She keeps going, but I tell her, “Joelle, stop. Come on. We have to go.”

  The sun is rising on us both… and we are not part of that life anymore.

  Joelle finally gives up. Her shoulders slump, her chest shudders with what is left of her tears.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For being my friend. I… don’t have any of those left, now.”

  I almost say how she’s found her mother again… but…

  “She is not a friend,” Joelle says.

  We make our way to our rooms.

  Before she leaves me at mine, her face turns quizzical. “Do you think that somewhere in Anthem there are children… you know… of the leaders there, wondering how they got where they are? Wondering if they will be exactly like what they hate most?”

  “I imagine.”

  Her eyes grow cold. “I feel sorry for them.”

  And Joelle leaves.

  Chapter Twenty

  Dallas

  In my own dreams, I’m sweating over the stove, and the room’s too hot. I throw open the window and let the air inside. My red hair catches the breeze, and my dress dances around my knees. My apron, I untie and pull off. The roast won’t be ready for a long while.

  I go to the sliding glass door and open it. A squeal fills the air as two children chase one another in a circle. One has hair the color of a faun, not quite red, and the other is like a halo of fire. They dance in the dusk. A warm and familiar voice is saying, “Hey beautiful,” from behind me, but I don’t turn around. I never do.

  It’s him. I know it’s him, but even in my dream I don’t try to look.

  Instead, I stare at the barn, at the pond, and the crops newly planted. Though this is dirty work, I’ve had my hair done, my toes are painted hot pink, and I’m planning on wearing my new bikini to the pond for a night dip.

  My wish is that he’ll stare at the pale skin that shows, leagues of it, the thing is barely there. Got it from the mall on sale, and it’s sexier than lingerie, and the pond at night is dreamier than a romantic evening out.

  He loves that pond.

  And I love him.

  The water’s always been like magic to us both, soothing away the day. It’s gonna help us make another baby.

  Then like I know it will, the dream fades to black and white. The dancing children are the first to leave. They fade and disappear. Dark clouds build above, and it eats the gloam until there is nothing left but darkness.

  And that voice, now it’s saying, “Don’t turn around. Don’t.”

  And fear ebbs throughout me. I keep my eyes pointed outside. I know what he’s saying.

  He’s a zombie. I turn and go into the kitchen, never looking toward the living room where he waits. At the edge of my vision, he’s swaying, lumbering back and forth.

  I come back with a knife, but I can never face him. Not like this.

  With each step toward the glass door to our backyard, everything changes. The house starts to slowly age, cobwebs, and moss bloom, and my outfit changes too. My hair that was floating around my head, lifts on its own and pulls tightly into a ponytail, and the leather eats away at the dress I’d been wearing until I’m me again. This me.

  Dallas.

 
Not Daisy.

  I go into the yard, and I brush past the rusted swing, and I walk toward the tall wheat that wilts away until there’s nothing left but clay dirt.

  I cut a path through the now dead leaves, and I keep going and… going.

  When I finally gain the strength, the courage to turn around, there will be nothing left, only a jungle of vines that have destroyed our house. My pond will be filled with algae, un-swimmable, a veritable swamp.

  My dream turns into reality and I’m not even asleep anymore. I’m standing in the room. It’s day time, and I’m back in L.A.

  “Where were you this time?” Joelle asks.

  I startle. The rest of me shakes fully awake. She’s seen me sleep walk before, luckily just around the dark areas. Even asleep I’m careful of the sun.

  Joelle said she’d walked too, or had, before.

  “Nowhere,” I say trying not to flinch at the emptiness of my voice. “Just my own head,” I say.

  She’d guessed it from the first. My abilities. That I’d had what Pike had had. The power to go to people’s dreams. She doesn’t have that, but she can talk to us either way.

  I travel into the dreams of the sleeping. Vampires, humans, whatever. My travels are further each time. I’d gone into Joelle’s dreams that first time. She’d been sitting on her bed next to Tommy, spilling out her heart to him. Joelle’d seen me and had raged at me to get out of her head. But, later, she’d apologized that her dream self was still immature.

  I get it.

  Because my dream self gets her hair and toes done. And she buys bikinis. But our real selves are grittier.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Dallas

  “How’s those strings?” Shade asks with a shrug at my glare. “You guys are like a hive. The little queen bee sending you here and there. Tightly knit group of blood suckers, eh?”

  “Jealous?”

  He stiffens. “A little”

  I laugh at his honesty.

  Shade even smells lonely again, desperate. Like he’d worried I wouldn’t show, but I have, and it’s ebbing away a little at a time. I must be his only friend. He sweats the fear of disappearing into the fade, of being nothing one day, and he doesn’t want to be invisible any more than any other human. But is he human?

  Maybe not.

  I know I’m not. Not anymore.

  “This is your last chance,” he says. “To turn back.”

  “Why? Cause you think they’ll hurt me?”

  Shade shakes his shadow head. “I won’t let that happen.”

  “Good guy, huh? Chivalry and stuff.”

  My heart, dead as it is, pangs.

  I realize Shade likes me. Not just the attraction thing, but he seems to think I’m cool or something. It takes a lot of cues for me to read that type of thing on a man. But he does. He likes me more than just. I don’t have time for like. For love. I don’t have time to do anything but what Joelle’s asked me to and then I think and think on the deep thoughts, and dream and dream the terrible dreams, memories that prick my heart, and I manage to live with myself, barely, but we all die little by little every day, and I’m just trying at night like everyone else to come back from the dead.

  I stop Shade before he sneaks me in. “We are about to go into an adult version of Lord of the Flies, right?”

  He laughs. “Yeah.”

  Still can’t see his face. I’m getting used to it now, though.

  “I can handle myself,” I say. “But steer me to the leader before they attack, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dallas

  Bradford’s exactly how I’d picture the male version of Adrian to be. She’s bitter and sour, and he’s all puffed up and cocky, traipsing back and forth near his own throne like a rooster.

  Another throne? What century am I in? And why would the forces go along with this? I bet I’m about to find out.

  Not much is obvious with these specials, they have their own covert way of hiding their traits, but I can sense that Bradford isn’t all human. A beast of a man, both in terms of inside and who he is.

  But I only get a glimpse of him when we move to his part of the city. He leaves before I approach, and so Shade and I decide to do a little recon instead.

  Bradford is running the show, his little gang snapping fingers close behind like Westside Story.

  We follow him through the barracks. He’s got it out for one of his, someone’s messed up.

  They pull out a soldier who’s obviously been roughed up and I feel Shade shuffle on his feet uneasily.

  “Is this the norm?” I say as they haul the poor guy away for some small infraction.

  He nods.

  I motion for us to leave. It’s all I need to see. I’ve got a beat on him for my dream walking.

  In our shadows, we head back. I don’t want a confrontation with this many of his men around, and I have another way of getting at the creep.

  When we step outside of the gate, he asks in confusion, “That’s it?”

  I shrug. “For now.”

  “And then you go to sleep and attack him?”

  “It doesn’t quite work like that.”

  “Why don’t you tell me how it works then?”

  Shade moves to sit on a barrel. We’d left the guarded area, who were not being very vigilant as we’d swept right past them, twice. But, now we’re near the “line” and a hastily put up a fence in an empty spot, alone.

  I bounce a hand on the chain-link, testing it, before I finally sit on another barrel, across from Shade.

  “I’m not really sure how it works,” I begin. “When it happened to me I was paralyzed by fear, he was meaning to scare me. I haven’t done that to anyone.”

  “Yet…”

  “Yet. I just slipped in and out on accident. Seeing your leader---”

  “He’s not my leader.”

  I frown. “Then why guard his walls?”

  “I’m not exactly following Bradford, as much as helping the men not be turned into statues by a crazy lady.”

  “Touché. But he’s not exactly sane himself.”

  “Touché.”

  I’d seen those zealots’s eyes before. Bradford is definitely keeping the world spinning the direction it has been since I’ve known it. Off into violence, chaos, and hate.

  “Anyway,” I say. “I’ve only done it a couple of times. Joelle thinks I should be able to see him, and visit him, and maybe we can use it for some good.”

  “Good for you or good for Adrian?”

  “I’m not really sure, Shade.” I let the exhaustion tinge my voice. “I have no dog in this fight.”

  He starts to laugh. I do too, but out of a confused tiredness.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You just have no idea how funny that comment is.”

  “How so?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I look at the space where Shade had been, but now it’s empty. Only the echo of his voice once more, “You’ll see.”

  And then I am alone.

  I shake my head. I’ve not seen him in the daylight, and no wonder I’m getting tired. The sun, it’s coming

  I have to jet back to my sleeping cubby hole, pronto.

  But first, I need to eat. And this is a good time for that.

  It’s a risk this close to dawn, but once I get near the moat, I find out I’m not the only one cutting it close.

  I hear her inside my head before I see her through the trees, a streak of black hair. I’d had to use a small boat to get across the moat, but Joelle’s wet like she’d swam.

  She’s moving so fast, she’ll be dry soon.

  I find that instead of hunting deer, I’m stalking my fearless teen-aged leader. She’s the one who spots and brings down the animal with grace, and the neck breaks without the poor thing ever feeling fear.

  She’d nearly been feral before, and it makes her a keen huntress.

  Joelle is done in minutes, and she retreats to the
shadows. I take my turn and let the rising sun find me just enough to burn.

  We don’t have time to cross the moat, so we both search out a place in the soft earth to lay.

  It’s not pretty, and I hate to admit that now the feeling of being buried alive very much suits me. It’s not like I need to breathe. It doesn’t bother me like it should.

  Instead, fertile soil replenishes me, and the heartbeat of the earth at the core lulls me to sleep.

  But this “night” I do not enter Bradford’s dreams as I’d wanted. I enter Shade’s.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Liza

  “What if I told you I wasn’t dead? That I was trapped here? Same as you.”

  I close my eyes so tightly that it hurts. It doesn’t really hurt, but it is painful inside of my mind and I realize that perhaps the mind could be injured or killed inside of Cory’s false realities, that I could be hurt or killed.

  Tommy’s voice is as pure as snow that’s untouched in the early morning. I’ve been on the island every single day for what feels like a million days and now I’m here again. La La Land.

  I’m in L.A., and that means the soft voice speaking to me is a nightmare and not a dream. Because if there is anything harder than seeing Jeremy again, it’s seeing Tommy.

  I’m not sure why that is. Maybe because Tommy’s death was fresh. Jeremy’s turning into a guard feels a lifetime ago. If I open my eyes, I will see him again and I’ve been brave…. I’ve been strong… as strong as I can be, but I’m not brave enough for this.

  “Make him go away!” I scream. “Cory!”

  “Hey, hey,” Tommy says and when he touches my arm, I hiss and open my eyes, glaring at the apparition.

  I’m ready to be angry, but soft brown eyes melt me where I stand. “Tommy,” I whisper, and everything else falls away.