The Last Girl

by Joe Hart

  Quiet footsteps to her right.

  A small but bright light flashes on, which partially illuminates the man holding it. His face is stained with smudges of dirt beneath a pair of very thick glasses with black frames. Where Reg was heavily bearded, this man is almost clean-shaven with only a slight stubble covering his cheeks and chin. His mouth is a round O in the lower part of his face.

  They are both hypnotized for a brief second by the sight of one another, held in the stasis of shock. Then the man’s mouth opens wider, and he inhales to release a shout.

  Zoey levels the rifle and yanks the trigger.

  When she dropped it the selector switch on the side must have gotten bumped from the “Semi” setting to “Auto,” for the rifle kicks and chatters in her hands, and tufts of needles fly into the air several feet in front of the man before the bullets walk a line up his left leg and continue on to his stomach and chest. He quakes with the impacts, vibrating in a strange dance, his yell lost in the gunfire. Blood blossoms in the holes of his clothes and mists the air behind him, crimson rain lit by the fire. The rifle continues to rise in her grip until the rounds are no longer hitting him and strafe the trees over his shoulder.

  Zoey stops firing and her ears chime a single tone, but above it are the yells of the men by the fire, their forms spilling from behind the sage ring.

  The man she shot falls to his back and rolls down the decline toward his companions.

  Zoey runs.

  She pelts away from the voices, the lights that begin stabbing the night around her. Tree trunks zip by, her footfalls echoing back like a dozen heartbeats. Something tangles her feet and she nearly falls but keeps going, down a small ravine that washes out below a high ridgeline of staggered rock.

  The sound of an angry insect sings past her head and she ducks instinctively. A second later she hears the gunshot as the ground before her is bathed in the glow of a flashlight.

  “Here! I got him over here!” a voice booms. Another shot splinters the bark of a pine a step to her right. Sap sprays her face and hair and she remotely wonders how she’ll ever clean it off.

  The ground descends, dropping sharply at a bank of trees. The cliff is only a dozen feet tall but too much for her to leap from. Through the dark, the calm expanse of the river winds away in a sharp bend. Booted feet thud on the ground behind her and she turns, crouching, and fires at an indistinct shape coming through the trees.

  The rifle spits flame, and the man is lit in the muzzle blast. He dives to one side, vanishing from sight even as the weapon goes silent.

  Zoey glances down. She’s out of bullets.

  She drops the gun and runs again, keeping even with the cliff to her right, which slowly levels down to the shore of the river. The inky water moves at a steady pace, gurgling as it rounds the bend she stands at. Her eyes flick across its width but the far bank is too distant to swim to even if she knew how.

  Branches crack in the forest, voices yelling to one another.

  Closer.

  Bobbing against the shore thirty yards downstream is a length of driftwood, its bulk bigger than she is around. Zoey runs to it, ankles trying to turn on uneven rocks. When she reaches the log she sees that its end is lodged in the crook of a boulder. She yanks on its length, and it shifts toward her but doesn’t come free.

  “The river! He’s at the river!”

  A light appears on the ridge she came down, and she slides over the top of the log and into the frigid water. A gasp escapes her and her feet slip, submerging her completely for a moment. When she surfaces, the light is sweeping the riverbank below the ridgeline, coming closer. Zoey braces her feet on a slick rock beneath the water and hauls on the log again. This time it unhooks from the angled boulder and comes free. Its weight surprises her but she’s able to move it into the flow of the stream. She slings one arm over it like she’s embracing a friend, and begins to float.

  The light on the ridge has traveled down to the riverbank, and now there is another beside it. They sweep the current and the rocks with precision, pausing here and there before continuing on. The distance between them and her is growing by the second. In less than a minute, they’ll be out of sight.

  Zoey readjusts her hold on the log and kicks gently with her feet. Her body is growing numb from the water, and her teeth threaten to chatter so she clenches her jaw. The voices are fainter, the beams heading the opposite way. She releases a sigh and tries to turn so she can grasp the log with both hands.

  Ahead of her, a light flashes on a dozen yards away.

  She doesn’t think, only acts.

  Slipping below the water, she grasps the underside of the log, finding a knobby handhold of an old branch. She forces herself beneath its mass, closing her eyes to the blinding cold. The water roars around her and she wonders if she’ll even feel the bullets when the man fires or if she’s already too cold.

  The air in her lungs begins to smolder.

  Then burn.

  How far? How far has she floated? Far enough?

  She starts to shake against the log’s length, shuddering with the need for air. Finally she can stand it no longer and rolls to the far side of the log, coming up only enough to peer over its top but still not daring to breathe.

  The light is fading behind the nearest corner, its beam cutting the dark in quick slashes. He’s running in the opposite direction.

  Zoey sucks in a huge lungful of air, drinking it, gasping with ecstasy. The river picks up speed as she manages to get both arms over the log, then a leg. She hauls herself mostly free of the water, straddling the driftwood like the people she’s seen in the textbook riding animals called horses. The log rocks, threatening to spill her back into the river each time she moves, but she keeps her balance.

  She shivers, the air, so wonderful to breathe moments ago, now an enemy as it invades her soaked clothing, running icy hands across her numb skin.

  A shout echoes from far behind, but she doesn’t bother looking back. They’ve probably found Reg. Good.

  She stays on the log as the river bends three more times. With each corner the current seems to gain speed, and somewhere ahead the sound of water rushing over rock filters to her.

  With arms that have been dipped in lead, she paddles to the left side of the river, the log scraping bottom after an eternity. Zoey tumbles from it into thigh-high water, managing to keep her head above the surface. She slogs to land, legs faltering twice before they fail her completely, dropping her onto all fours.

  Overhead a pale slit of moon emerges from behind a cloud bank, its light enough to make out a tall stand of dry grass lining the bank ten yards away. She crawls to it, hands abrading on rocks, until the shush of the grass surrounds her. Even though it is dry and brittle, it feels like the softest thing she’s ever touched.

  Shaking, she flounders to the center of the dead growth that would come up to her waist if she were standing, and rolls to her back. Feebly she pulls armfuls of grass close, down over her like a braided, rustling blanket.

  The last thing she sees is the cold wink of the moon disappearing once again behind a veil of clouds.

  23

  An alarm is going off.

  Its incessant call repeating over and over. The shrillness of it drags her from a mired sleep so thick it feels like she’s deep underwater.

  The alarm. Something’s happened. Someone’s finally broken out of the compound. Or someone’s broken in. The thought excites her, but she still can’t get her eyes to open. She’s warm now, even her ears flare with heat, and the sun is shining through her window onto her bed. Simon hasn’t come to bring her to breakfast. She must be sick, but she doesn’t feel it.

  There’s something wrong with the alarm. It’s not as loud as it should be, and the end of it turns up in a sort of sweet tone she’s never heard before.

  Zoey cracks her eyes open.

  A bright yellow bird with black-and-white wings sits on a tree branch above her. It leans forward, and with a little bobbing motio
n, sings its song again.

  She watches it, letting reality seep back in. The night before, her escape down the river, how cold the water was. She tries to sit up, but it takes three efforts before she manages it. The sun shines down on the river and shatters there into a million fractures of gold. There is no wind, and the brown grass around her is still.

  She climbs to her feet, wincing at the new injuries from her latest flight. Above them all the gash in her stomach is the worst. It’s as if someone poured salt into the wound while she slept. She starts to peel back the still-damp hem of her shirt, but stops, afraid of what she’ll see.

  The yellow bird continues to sing and she watches it for a time, swaying a little on her feet as a bout of dizziness comes and goes. It tips forward and back on its branch, balancing on such thin legs and feet, she’s amazed it can stand at all. It calls again, and somewhere in the trees beside the river a quiet answer returns. The bird cocks its head and flits away, leaving the branch it rested on swaying.

  “I could’ve watched you all day,” Zoey says. Her voice sounds like she swallowed gravel and feels like it as well. She listens for a bit longer, the bird’s intermingling song getting farther and farther away until it is quiet again. At least she can’t hear the men—that’s something. Though that doesn’t mean they aren’t nearby.

  He’s at the river!

  She sneers at the memory of the men’s shouts. Of course they thought she was male. How could a woman kill two of them and escape? Though it’s probably not a bad thing to let them think they’re chasing a man. The alternative would be worse. For a man, they might look for several days before giving up.

  But for a young woman?

  What had Reg said right before he tried to force himself upon her? I’m gonna be a rich man, you don’t know the price you’re gonna bring for me.

  She casts off the panic that tries to descend on her and begins to walk along the river but stops, flexing her fingers. She’s forgotten something. Zoey turns back to the place where she laid overnight, but there is nothing but the crushed shape of her form there in the grass. Something, something isn’t right. She realizes what it is after another minute of thinking. The rifle. It’s gone, and her hands feel strange not holding it. She turns away from her makeshift bed and moves on.

  The rushing water she heard the night before appears in the form of a tumble of rocks cutting into the current a half mile downstream. They shine with moisture and gush foam as the river tumbles past them, faster and faster until it drops twenty feet in a waterfall to a swirling pool below. Zoey watches the place where she would’ve been dashed to pieces for a time, swaying drunkenly. Then she keeps walking for another hour before she has to sit and rest.

  The woods have thinned out to nearly nothing on either side of the river and the lack of cover makes her feel vulnerable. She leans against a toppled boulder that has broken into a spray of rock either with the impact of its fall or the onslaught of time. She picks through the pieces, seeing if they fit together, tossing them back down when they don’t. The wind pushes against her face and for the first time since waking she realizes she’s very warm. Too warm. She strips off the long-sleeved shirt, realizing she has a fever, there’s no denying it anymore. She recalls the only other time she came down with one; when she was ten and had caught a cold that traveled deep into her sinuses before compacting inside her right ear. It had only lasted a day after an injection from one of the doctors, but for that brief period the world had taken on a hazy quality and her head had tried to drift away from her body.

  That same sensation grips her now, but its intensity is threefold. Unconsciously she places a hand over the wound on her stomach and holds it, as if mere pressure can draw away the sickness it’s spewing into her bloodstream. She supposes she should feel grateful for the infection. Without it she might have frozen to death the night before. Appreciate the small things.

  She coughs out a laugh. That’s what Lee would have told her. Lee. How she wishes he was beside her now. She can almost feel his arms around her, holding her. Why didn’t she let him do that more before? She swipes at her eyes and notices how taut the skin of her face feels, how warm. But her hands are warm as well, as warm as Lee’s always are.

  Zoey forces herself to her feet and is about to continue on when she stops. A faded spot of blue protrudes from between two rocks several feet away. When she moves closer she sees it’s some type of clear container, its cap the blue she spotted. She picks up the bottle and looks through its scratched and clouded side. There is nothing within it and when she twists off the top only a slightly stale smell escapes. She rinses it in the river several times before filling it. The icy bottle is such a contrast to her burning skin it forces a shiver from her as she continues parallel to the river.

  It is past midday when she stops again. The trees are completely gone save for distant patches miles from the river, across the humped plains that have taken over as scenery. Everything is brown with only suggestions of green here and there. Zoey drinks from the bottle, letting the cool water slip down her throat in little sips. Her stomach is hollow but doesn’t ache anymore. She wonders if that’s good or bad. The thought of potatoes slathered in butter rises in the back of her mind, and she shoves it away. There’s no time for fanciful ideas now, it’s a dangerous distraction. She needs food, shelter, better clothes, and most of all a shot like the one she received all those years ago to take away the sickness. She’ll have to find a house and hope there will be something to help her inside, and she can’t delay any longer. The sun is already in its descent and the day will be gone before she knows it.

  She begins to rise from the rock she’s sitting on and freezes.

  The day.

  Today.

  Today is her birthday. She is twenty-one.

  It is past midday. If she were still in the ARC she would be wearing the white gown now, be listening to the Director’s speech. She would be walking past all the watching eyes, seeing them for the last time before being taken to the elevator, and then to the lab with the beds and machines. They would put her to sleep and violate her and, and . . .

  Zoey nearly faints but catches herself at the last second, biting down hard on her lower lip. The world comes back into the hazed focus of the fever and she braces her hand on a nearby stone. After several calming breaths she raises her head, letting the sun shine down on her ratted hair.

  She isn’t in the ARC anymore. She won’t be going to the upper level again. Ever.

  She starts walking then. Away from the river, across the dry and crusted ground, and she doesn’t look back.

  She smells smoke in the late afternoon as the sun is slanting shadows hard against the ground. There is an acrid taste in the air, its stinging bite sour in the back of her throat. The horizon to the west is a strange orange, the air above it pale and shimmering. Beyond it are bizarre shadows far in the distance, their rising outlines something that must be a trick of the light, some type of illusion born of the afternoon sun and perhaps her own wavering vision.

  Zoey stands on the highest rise she’s seen so far, the land sprawling out below her in waves of tan speckled with darker scrub. A bird glides far above in spirals that never end. It’s been there for the last few hours, hovering, watching. There is a hump rising up from the landscape perhaps a mile from where she stands that might be a structure, though it looks crooked and odd. It is her only option. She needs to rest, somewhere out of the sun and wind. Needs to eat. The instability of her limbs is increasing along with her temperature. What happens when she can’t walk anymore? When she runs out of water? When she collapses from fever?

  She supposes she will die.

  But she will die free.

  She is about to set out again toward it when a sound slowly begins to rise through the air.

  It’s a low humming and at first she thinks it is the helicopter returning, but soon she realizes it’s too even, too uniform for the chop of the rotors. It climbs in volume, and Zoey lowers hersel
f closer to the ground.

  A line of vehicles appears from behind a grade to the west. They emerge from the land like a herd of trundling beasts, a fog of blue smoke trailing behind them. One, two, three, four of them, and now she sees they are following a faint depression she initially mistook as a natural wash in the land. The road they drive on is covered in silt that kicks up into the air with their passage. A man pokes from the top of the first vehicle as well as the last, their indistinct shapes holding black silhouettes of rifles.

  Zoey drops lower and hugs the ground, only the top of her head visible above the rise. She curses herself for being so stupid. Why is she walking on the highest point where she’s visible to anyone passing by? She isn’t thinking straight. She watches the convoy pass and then slow before stopping at a low hill. Another vehicle emerges then from the opposite direction, its shape almost identical to the others. It coasts to a stop, nose to nose with the lead vehicle.

  Doors open, and figures get out.

  Four of them, all armed, vaguely familiar.

  They are the men from the night before. She stares at them as the passenger in the convoy’s first vehicle climbs out and approaches the group of four. They speak for a long time, their gesticulations becoming more and more emphatic. The flash of something near the tail end of the convoy catches her attention.

  A man is standing on the roadside holding something to his eyes. Again the flash.

  Zoey slides down completely out of sight. Binoculars. He was scanning the area. Did he see her?

  She inches backward, sliding down until she’s sure she can stand without being seen. She hurries away, hunched low despite the pain that radiates from her stomach. The land dips and rises before falling away to a narrow, rocky valley. On its far side, the house she spotted before comes into view. Its strange shape is due to the fact that most of the roof has caved in and one wall is entirely gone. Rotted boards protrude from the wreck like broken teeth into a weed-choked yard.