Dead Last, Vol. 3

by Quaranta, Marc

  “Jack’s, right. If we make a mistake, we don’t come back,” Haylea said.

  “Of course,” Glen whispered.

  “What babe?” Heather touched his shoulder.

  “That’s it,” he said more excitedly. “That’s it!”

  “What’s it?” Kurt asked.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

  “When we started these Districts, there needed to be an escape plan. In case we were in any trouble, or the government was looking to seize the property, we had contingency plans in place.”

  “Jesus Christ. To bury the whole program?”

  “Yes. Once the funding ran out, this was all built on the backs of a very secluded private sector. We were doing this outside the law. So, if needed, each District planted a bug.”

  “A bug?”

  “Think of each bug as a nuclear weapon on a much smaller scale.”

  “There’s a fucking nuke somewhere here? And you forgot to mention that?”

  “The bug was planted years ago. Yeah, I forgot.”

  “Where is it?” Kurt asked.

  Glen thought for a moment.

  “Fuck, tell me you didn’t forget where it was.”

  “It is in the center of town,” Glen said. “It’s in the apartment above the bar.”

  “Scott’s apartment? That’s ironic.”

  “Wait, what are we saying? We go over there and detonate this nuclear bomb? What about us?”

  “There’s a timer,” Glen said.

  “Can we set the siren off?” I asked Glen.

  “Yeah, absolutely. I can do it from upstairs.”

  “It could work. Those sirens are ridiculously loud. We set the sirens off. Draw the stragglers in and blow this whole fucking town to hell.”

  “Why don’t we just leave?” Heather complained.

  “Shut the fuck up, Heather,” I shouted.

  “Heather, we can’t,” Haylea interrupted. “There are thousands of those things. This is a great opportunity to kill them. This could buy us months of not having to worry about those things. We’ll clean out the whole area.”

  We packed up a few bags of weapons and ammunition to take with us so we’d never be without protection. Glen explained that he could isolate the siren to the horn on the top of his mansion house. It would draw the stragglers to that area and would give us time to get out.

  Kurt and I were going to head to the bar to activate the bomb and the rest of the group was going to head to the house Frank and Reggie had been staying in. Their house was one of the furthest houses away from the center of town so it wouldn’t take us too long to get out.

  We said what we needed to and then we took off in separate directions. Kurt and Haylea said an extra-long goodbye. After seeing how quickly those we loved were dying, they knew, more now than ever before, how fast things could change. By the time we left the house, the siren was deafening.

  Kurt and I were good at getting around unnoticed. We made it to the bar and went upstairs to the apartment. Glen described exactly where the bomb would be. There was a light in the center of the room and directly below that would be a loose floorboard. We lifted the edge and then plucked the board up.

  It was there. Glen also described how we would set it. We just had to make sure to set the timer before activating the bomb or else it would blow instantly and we’d be evaporated into nonexistence.

  “Jack,” Kurt said. I stopped what I was doing and looked at him. “I’m sorry, man.”

  I nodded. He wasn’t apologizing for anything he’d done.

  “If I lost Haylea…man, I’d be miserable. I wouldn’t know what to do. But if I never had the chance to love her in the first place, I’m not sure I’d even want to fight to live.”

  “Well, what if that somebody isn’t around anymore?” I asked. It was somewhat rhetorical, but I was interested in his opinion.

  “Then we fight to survive in memory of those people. I survive every day so that I can be there for Haylea, but I fight for Nick and Dan and everybody else that couldn’t make it. Fight for Emily. She’d want you to live, man. She’d want you to do whatever you needed to survive. And to keep those around you alive, too.”

  “She would, wouldn’t she?” I asked.

  “She was stubborn as hell, man.” Kurt smiled and we both thought about her.

  “She was going to be the better half of me.” I changed the tone of the conversation around again.

  “She still can be. Everything you do, every decision you make. Let her continue to guide you.”

  I may not have always liked his leadership tactics or agreed with what he said, but Kurt did know love. He had somebody he cared about deeply and it was comforting to hear that. But we still had a job to do.

  “We’re all good.” I set the timer for an hour. Gave us plenty of time to get out of there, and gave the siren enough time to draw in as many stragglers as they could.

  “Alright, let’s go.” Kurt headed for the door.

  “Wait, what was that?” I asked. I stopped and listened.

  “What?” he asked. I pointed at the closed bathroom door and both of us made sure our guns were loaded. I waved him over and put my hand on the doorknob. “Ready?”

  1…2…3. I quickly opened the door and we jumped in like the male version of Charlie’s Angels. We were ready to shoot, but the two people inside were cowering in the bathtub.

  “Who the hell are you?” Kurt asked.

  “Please don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” begged the man.

  Deneyse and Adrian introduced themselves. They weren’t a couple. They were friends. Deneyse wasn’t really Adrian’s type seeing that she was a woman. They hid in the apartment after their friends’ house had been destroyed.

  We helped them out of the tub and made sure they weren’t messing with us or carrying a gun. They seemed harmless.

  “Why were you hiding in here?” I asked.

  “When we couldn’t get to our friends, we thought the bar would be as good of a place as any to hide, but it was a mess down there and those zombie things came after us.”

  “They were in the bar?” I asked. Kurt and I looked surprised by that. There weren’t any in there now, though. They were heading to the sirens.

  “Yeah. Just a few of them, but we thought climbing stairs would be tough for them.”

  “Smart call,” I said. “You might want to come with us.”

  “Why? We don’t even know who you are,” Adrian said.

  “See that thing in the ground? That’s a really big bomb. So, we need to go.”

  “Okay. We’ll go with you,” Deneyse said. She smiled at me, which was almost too friendly, but now wasn’t the time to tell her I was emotionally unavailable.

  The four of us slowly moved down the stairs. I went first and Kurt went last. We kept the two of them tight between us so that we could add two more to our group back at the house.

  They were right, the bar was a mess. I hadn’t noticed on the way up because we were focused on getting to the bomb, but it was disgusting. Blood and flesh covered the floor and walls. There wasn’t a living soul in the group.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Fuck!” I heard Kurt scream. Then he fired off two shots.

  I turned around and pulled Adrian and Deneyse out of the way. I readied myself to shoot something, but Kurt had already killed it.

  He slowly turned to me and his eyes were thin. He was clenching his jaw and stared into my eyes.

  “What?” I asked him. “Kurt, what is it?”

  Kurt turned back around and I almost fell to the ground. I looked away and every thought I ever had in my life rushed through my brain. I saw my own childhood, I saw high school and college, I saw myself begging my doctor for drugs, and having sex with random trashy women. I saw Emily and Haylea. I saw a future that would never be in a world that would never exist.

  And then all of those thoughts just vanished and I saw nothing. I saw blank. Grey. There was this cl
earing, but usually, a clearing was peaceful and a sign of good things to come. This clearing was bad. It was an emptiness. It was an end. Kurt had a bite mark above his hip.

  And we stared at each other as everything had just crashed and burned to an end.

  47

  Kurt Elkins

  J ack and I got back to the house without any issues. We were able to add two more able bodies to our group in the process, too. However, we were about to lose one.

  I wasn’t going to live through the night.

  “How do you want to do this?” Jack asked me as we stood outside on the porch.

  There were stragglers around, but they ignored us. They walked down the street following the sound of the siren. We wouldn’t have had to rush if it wasn’t for the deadly virus killing my body or the bomb that was set to blow us to hell.

  “Just gonna go inside.”

  Jack made a fist and bopped me on the shoulder. I looked back at Adrian and Deneyse and they looked heartbroken. As if they had known me for their whole life. I guess being around anybody who knows they’re about to die is depressing. Doesn’t matter if you don’t know them.

  Jack opened the door and walked inside first. I followed behind him and the rest of the gang was sitting in the kitchen. They jumped up with excitement when they saw us.

  “How’d it go?” Ryan asked.

  “The bomb is set. We have about fifty minutes.” Jack walked by the group and then they saw me. There was blood on my side and a giant bite hole in the shirt. It didn’t take them more than a second to see what had happened.

  Haylea was the last to see. Or she could have just been the last one to process it. Everything she had known or learned or experienced in her life up to that this one awful, single moment no longer mattered. It all disappeared and I could see the color of her skin fade to a pale white. Her mouth dropped, tears instantly fell, and she crumbled to the floor.

  I walked up to her slowly.

  “No! No! No! No!” she shouted. She kept shouting it repeatedly even as I pulled her in so tightly. I tried to hug her harder than I ever had in my life, but she was fighting it. She wanted to hit me and be mad at me for letting it happen. Then her arms just dropped to her side.

  “No…” She was trying to talk, but her crying was stopping her. She could barely breathe. She couldn’t regain her composure.

  And I could do nothing. I could say nothing. I could only sit there next to her and hold her until she either accepted what was happening or until I died.

  There were two cars in the garage that Frank had never used. The indispensable amount of resources, equipment, food that District 7-1 still amazed me. The next few minutes, the group packed up as much as they could in the trunks. They grabbed food, packed the weapons, some extra clothes, and a couple of magazines and games. Had to find a way to pass the time while surviving.

  Haylea and I sat in one of the first-floor bedrooms while they were packing.

  “I’m sorry, Haylea,” I said to her.

  “You don’t have to apologize.” Her voice was raspy as if she’d been screaming for hours. Her eyes were red. Her heart was heavy.

  “I shouldn’t have gone. I should have been more careful.”

  “Oh, stop. You don’t have to apologize. From the first day, you’ve been going out on these little trips. You were the only one who offered every single time. Without you, a lot of people would have died.”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  “Hell, you’re fearless, Kurt. If it wasn’t for that fearless mentality to always run out into the unknown, you never would have even made it to me after the outbreak.”

  “We’re never going to be able to get married. Or have kids,” I said. “I just…I wanted that so badly. I wanted that so badly for you.”

  “I don’t know how well raising a child in this world would have gone.”

  “I don’t know if that would have stopped you from wanting to try,” I said. I held her hand and played with her fingers.

  “I’ve had names picked out since your proposal. The first one.”

  “I don’t think I want to know what they are,” I said. I didn’t need to hear the names of the children I was never going to have now. “Maybe you’ll still be able to name some one day.”

  “Kurt,” she said upset.

  “I’m sorry. You know, Jack and I were debating whether it was easier to love and lose than to never love.”

  “What did you decide?”

  “I told him it was easier to never love, but it was so much more important to have loved.”

  I took both of her hands and held them tight against my chest.

  “You need to keep going, Haylea. You cannot go to a dark place, a place of hate. I love you and you love me and no matter what, nobody or no thing can take that away from us. That is our truth. That was our path. That was my reason for fighting every single day. You need to keep moving forward. You need to stay strong, you and Jack, for everybody else out there.”

  “Everybody out there isn’t too large of an everybody anymore,” she said.

  “But it will be. I know we’ve lost a lot, but there are more people that may need our help. Look at Deneyse and Adrian. There’s more out there. And you and Jack and Frank need to keep pushing forward. Ryan. All of you. Haylea, you can survive.”

  “I just—” she started.

  “It is worth it. Trust me. It is worth it. Keep fighting. I love you so much and you are going to do this. You are going to do this for me.”

  I kissed her on the forehead and then on the cheek over and over again.

  “I love you.” I stared into her eyes.

  “I love you,” she said holding back tears long enough to have this last moment of peace with me. “I love you.”

  It wasn’t easy, for either one of us, but Jack helped Haylea to the car, the garage door opened, and both cars pulled away from the house.

  I walked around Frank’s house with a strange feeling. I understood that my life was about to end, but there was this small strange feeling of having zero worries. People can say they don’t worry or don’t have anxiety or stress, but the truth is there is no way to truly have no worry. There is always a tomorrow.

  I didn’t have one. I truly had nothing weighing me down. I stood in the house with this feeling of cleaner vision, fuller breaths, more relaxed muscles, and no pain.

  I put a gun in my mouth and was ready to end it all. I wasn’t going to turn into one of those damn things and I wasn’t going to wait for that bomb to go off. I didn’t know how big the explosion would be and I didn’t want there to be any chance of me living through that only to turn.

  The end was coming. I knew that. It was inevitable, but still, I couldn’t pull the trigger. I sat there and tried to pull the trigger, but my fingers were tight.

  The noise of a straggler bumping into the glass sliding door startled me and pulled the gun out of my mouth. I was ready to shoot the straggler, but he simply bounced off the door and continued walking over toward the siren.

  “You okay?” said a voice.

  It was Jack. He was standing in the kitchen above me. I would have been so pissed earlier in our relationship to have him standing over me, but now it felt like a protector watching my last moments.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I just came back to make sure everything was okay.”

  “Haylea…”

  “She’s in the other car. They’re gone. Meeting me down the road. It was her idea. We don’t want you to become…”

  “I can’t do it, Jack. As easy as it should be knowing what the other option is…I can’t do it.”

  “You know I actually thought about killing you myself,” Jack said. “Isn’t that sick?”

  “We didn’t like each other. You sucked, man.”

  “Yeah, but no matter how bad it got, were you ever going to kill me?”

  “Well, no.” I laughed. “I always figured you were capable of that, though, and yeah, I was ready to
do what I needed to…in defense.”

  “Right. In defense.” He laughed. “You’re a great man, Kurt. Thank you for everything you did for us. We had completely different styles, but I can tell you that everybody in those cars is going to be fine. They’re going to stay alive and keep fighting.”

  “They’re going to stay that way because of you,” he said. “I learned so much from you. So, with a little bit of me and a little bit of you, those people have a great second in command.”

  “Second in command?”

  “Come on, you know after this nobody is going to mess with Haylea. She’s going to be the best person to lead this group.”

  “Take care of her, Jack. Please.”

  “I will. I’ll do whatever I have to do. She’s going to be okay. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

  Jack leaned forward and kissed me on the top of the head. He stood up and took a step back. It was then that I noticed he picked up the gun that I had set down. Our eyes connected and I was okay with it. I couldn’t do it.

  He raised his arm and the gun stared at me in a more intimate way than most people ever had.

  I saw Haylea sitting at her WTIX desk getting ready for a morning news show. She was curling her hair. She always told me that she needed to curl her hair at least once a week so that the audience didn’t get bored with her hair. The audience got bored with her hair? That’s the kind of thing she thought about. It always cracked me up.

  I used to walk around the newsroom and find any reason to stop by her desk. I’d bring her a drink or a candy bar. I used to buy those Hostess Snowballs to her. The vending machine was always stocked with them because nobody liked them. She didn’t even like them. I just loved putting them on her desk. It eventually became a little note. Whenever she came back to her desk and saw one, she knew I was thinking about her.

  Sometimes I would just sit in a chair and watch her. We wouldn’t speak. I’d make funny faces at her or kick her gently under the desk. I just wanted to hear her giggle. I didn’t want a belly laugh, just a giggle. This soft, simple sound that brought joy to my mornings.

  So, I’d just stare at her.

  “What are you doing, Kurt?” she said to me.