The Last City

by Michael J. Totten

  2

  They spent the night in Riverton, Iowa, one of the empty village-like towns they’d already passed through. It was the most logical place they’d eyeballed all day. Bordering the settlement to the north and west was the East Nishnabotna River and the Riverton Wildlife Management Area, a large swath of wetlands that only birds would bother to navigate through. Immediately to the east lay another swampy area. Riverton had natural borders of sorts on three sides with only the southern approach exposed to open farmland.

  So they parked the Suburban on Q Street, a gravel road on the town’s northern fringe next to a compound of storage facilities and grain elevators. It wasn’t pretty, but it was as secluded a spot as they were going to find even with downtown—just a handful of buildings, really—only a few streets away.

  Kyle opened the door on his side and stepped out of the Suburban as twilight was turning to dusk. “I need to walk.”

  “Not by yourself, you don’t,” Hughes said.

  “I’m not going more than a hundred feet,” Kyle said. “I just need to move my legs.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Annie said, which partly delighted him—he still had a thing for her, even if she didn’t reciprocate—but he needed to be alone with his thoughts. He blamed himself for the predicament they were in even though he could logically see that it was no more his fault than anyone else’s.

  “Sure,” Kyle said to Annie, “but give me a couple of minutes to myself first, okay?”

  He gently closed the door without saying anything else or waiting for a response.

  A relatively warm and humid wind was coming in from the south. The air must have been ten degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it had been the last time he stepped outside even though night was falling. Iowa was a foreign country with strange meteorology. Strange to Kyle, anyway. The Pacific Northwest never warmed up at night. In this part of America, devoid of mountains and so far from large bodies of water, the air temperature seemed to be dictated as much by wind direction as by night and day, with frigid fronts from Canada battling it out with tropical fronts from the Gulf of Mexico.

  He should have known about the dams on the river. Well, he did know, actually. He just hadn’t thought about them as obstacles. They weren’t obstacles in the old world, the one he’d spent most of his life in, and he was so accustomed to being able to sail unimpeded on Puget Sound that it hadn’t occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to do the same thing on Midwestern rivers.

  Over and over again for the past several months, he’d made different versions of the same mental mistake. Everyone did. He’d lost track of how many times he absentmindedly flipped on a light switch before remembering that light switches didn’t work anymore. He’d forgotten how many times he thought, for a half second before catching himself, that he should look something up on the Internet. When the Suburban ran low on gas, he still had to remind himself that they’d have to siphon more out of somebody else’s tank rather than pull into a fuel station. So it likewise hadn’t occurred to him until today that American rivers were no longer navigable with no one left alive to operate the dams.

  This was a brutal new fact of geography, brand new to the planet. American rivers had always been navigable, even before there were people to navigate them. The United States had more navigable river miles than any other country on earth, which was one of the reasons it became such an economic powerhouse after the industrial revolution. Kyle remembered his high school geography teacher, Mr. Kampe, telling his class that any group of people in the world with the good fortune of straddling the North American continent would become among the richest on earth after industrialization as long as they were decently governed. Yet today, America’s rivers were clogged arteries.

  Kyle unzipped his coat, walked in a wide circle around the truck, and noticed that his boots didn’t crunch in the snow anymore. The stuff was turning to slush.

  One of the Suburban doors popped open, and Kyle remembered that Annie wanted to join him.

  “Hey, Annie.”

  “It’s Parker.”

  Kyle’s face flashed hot. “Oh,” he said. “Hey.”

  He had to admit, though, that the two of them had gotten along better since leaving Wyoming. Parker seemed, for the first time, almost like a normal person.

  “Warm outside,” Parker said.

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “Weird, huh?”

  Parker said nothing.

  “I was thinking,” Kyle said, “that this town is a good place to scavenge for supplies. We’re stopped here anyway.” Kyle could see Parker’s dark shape against the starry night sky, but he could not read his face. “Pretty sure there’s nobody here. No infected either.” He kicked a bit of slush with his boot.

  “You want to go now?” Parker said.

  “Sure,” Kyle said. “Why not? We could go together.” Kyle wasn’t sure he should have said that.

  “Let’s go in the morning,” Parker said. “First light.”

  Kyle felt a twinge of relief. “Okay. Sure. In the morning.”

  First light took an eternity to arrive. Kyle kept waking up and fidgeting in his sleep until finally, at long last, a cold blue light tinted the sky. He eased himself out of the truck and closed the door without quite latching it so the others could sleep.

  The snow was mostly gone, the morning air only a few degrees cooler than inside the truck. Iowa in midwinter felt temperate and humid now with tropical air on its way in from Texas.

  Parker stirred and shook the sleep from his head. Kyle waved a silent good morning. Parker nodded and emerged from the truck a little clumsily to greet Kyle. “Want to head out now?” he said in a low voice.

  “Want to wake up first?” Kyle said.

  “I’m awake,” Parker said. “Been in and out for the past couple of hours. If it weren’t for the snow, I’d have slept on the grass.”

  Kyle understood. Human bodies were designed to sleep horizontally, not in car seats.

  “Get your stuff,” Kyle said and titled his head sideways toward the truck.

  Parker opened the front passenger door and retrieved his Glock, a claw hammer, and a crowbar. Kyle had his own handgun tucked into his pants. Parker handed Kyle the crowbar.

  Kyle popped open the back of the Suburban and lifted the hatch quietly.

  “It’s okay,” Annie said. “We’re awake.”

  Kyle shrugged. He still needed to be quiet in case they had neighbors they had not seen or heard yet. Anything was possible. That was the whole point of going out scavenging early, when anyone still alive in Riverton was most likely still sleeping.

  Kyle and Parker donned empty backpacks and set out. Aside from food, they weren’t looking for anything in particular. They simply made a point of scavenging when the opportunity arose, when it seemed safe enough, and Riverton, Iowa, seemed as safe a place as they were likely to find for a while.

  “We could use one of those giant atlas books,” Kyle said as he and Parker walked. “You know, the kind that has fifty pages of maps just for one state.”

  “Should look for those at a gas station,” Parker said.

  “Sure,” Kyle said. “I’m just saying. If you see one, you know, grab it.”

  They followed Q Street to Apple Avenue, both of them gravel. After another two blocks, they came to K Street, the highway through town, with countryside to the right and houses to the left. They turned left. Downtown, so to speak, was just a few blocks ahead.

  There wasn’t much to the place. Just brown grass, bony trees, and off-white houses that hadn’t been painted in years. There was nothing green or apparently even alive in any direction. Kyle had never seen such a colorless place.

  Parker stopped in the middle of the road. Kyle held up.

  “Shh,” Parker said. “Hear anything?”

  Kyle listened hard. And heard absolutely nothing at all.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Kyle whispered. The town looked, sounded, and felt like it had been empty for years. He didn’t get th
e creeping feeling that they were being watched.

  “Me either,” Parker said, in a normal tone of voice this time.

  They walked until they came upon the Duck Pond Café on the right, a sad diner that had started its life as a mobile home. The sign out front had a drawing of a burger and a box of fries on it, each with a pair of eyeballs as if the two food items were cartoon characters. A red Chevy pickup in the lot provided the only vibrant color in any direction.

  Kyle gestured toward the café with his crowbar. Parker nodded and headed toward it.

  “I’m worried about Annie,” Kyle said.

  Parker said nothing.

  “She seems different now,” Kyle said.

  “She is,” Parker said.

  “What do you think’s going on?”

  Parker raised his eyebrows and looked away. Kyle could only imagine what the two of them had been through. As far as he knew, they were the only human beings on earth who had recovered from the infection.

  Parker seemed to be in better shape now—a bit more agreeable and a lot less anxious—but Annie was worse. She seemed depressed, even despondent, after what happened to her in Wyoming.

  “She’s—” Kyle said, but Parker shushed him and placed his finger on his lips before pushing open the café’s front door. It wasn’t locked. Anyone, or anything, could be in there.

  Inside, the place looked like a typical diner with a blue and white checkerboard floor, plastic chairs that almost matched the blue squares, round silver tables, and a chipped Formica counter with a soda fountain and a coffee warmer and pot next to the cash register. It smelled like dust and nothing else.

  Parker gestured with his head toward the kitchen and pantry in back.

  Kyle heard a door slam, not inside but outside, and not far away. Perhaps from the house down the street they’d just walked past. He and Parker looked at each other. Someone had seen them walk down the street and head into that diner, and whoever it was was coming.

  Kyle swapped the crowbar into his left hand and drew his handgun with his right.

  “Behind the counter,” Parker said in a low voice.

  Kyle and Parker stepped behind the counter. The diner still felt empty, undisturbed, and a layer of dust coated the Formica countertop, but they hadn’t searched the kitchen area yet, and knowing that at least one person was out there on the street made Kyle feel like his back was exposed. There could be a hundred people out there converging all at once on the diner with only one of them dumb enough to draw attention to himself by slamming a door.

  He and Parker crouched low. Kyle couldn’t see a damn thing from down near the floor, but he knew better than to raise his head, so he peered around the side of the counter instead. He couldn’t see the street from that angle, only the tops of the nearest trees.

  “I don’t think anyone can see inside,” Parker said, “with the glare on the windows.”

  Probably true, Kyle thought, so he and Parker stood. The street looked the same as it had before: forlorn and empty with nobody out there.

  “They know we’re in here, though,” Parker said. “They saw us walk in.”

  Kyle heard something else now, something farther away, a large vehicle, like a truck or a bus of some kind. “You hear that?”

  Parker nodded.

  “It’s not Annie and Hughes,” Kyle said. Whatever it was sounded larger than the Suburban, and it was coming from the east—the opposite direction from where they’d camped for the night.

  Kyle’s mind turned to flight, but he didn’t dare run. He had no idea how many people were out there, no idea who or what he’d be facing, no idea which way to go. His eyes darted from the coffee pot and the cash register to the tables and chairs. Everything looked vaguely dangerous now.

  The rumbling from the distant vehicle stopped, and Riverton fell into silence again.

  Reinforcements showing up on the outskirts? Called in by radio?

  “Stay down,” Parker said and made a downward motion with his hand. “I’ll keep watch. No sense both of us risking getting shot in the head.”

  Kyle crouched again and held his breath. He still didn’t hear anything.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Parker said. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and raised his gun toward the glass.

  “What?” Kyle said.

  “Get up,” Parker said.

  Kyle stood up and saw it. One of those things. An infected man with a bald head, a gray overcoat, stained pants, and muddy boots staggering down the street past the diner.

  “It doesn’t know we’re in here,” Kyle said.

  Parker exhaled loudly and kept his gun trained on the infected. He wasn’t going to shoot through the glass. He’d probably miss at this distance with a handgun anyway, and besides, shooting a single oblivious infected would be a waste of ammunition and a reckless summons to everyone and everything in the area. There was still a truck or bus up the street, after all.

  “Did that thing just randomly come out of the house after we passed?” Kyle said.

  “Must have heard us but didn’t see us,” Parker said. “At least it didn’t see us come in here.”

  Kyle gripped his crowbar. Whoever was in the vehicle he’d heard didn’t seem to be around. Could have just been someone passing through. At the very least, it wasn’t anyone’s backup.

  “Let’s go out and take care of it,” Kyle said.

  “Wait up,” Parker said. “There could be more.”

  “Doubt it,” Kyle said.

  “Just wait,” Parker said. “We don’t know who’s up the road either.”

  The infected staggered toward a dingy square house on a corner lot with a child’s bike on its side in the yard. It wasn’t heading there in any kind of a hurry.

  “We could just let it pass,” Parker said.

  “It could swing back around,” Kyle said. “Cause trouble for us later.”

  “Could also cause trouble for whoever is up the road.”

  “Do we want that?”

  Parker shrugged, shook his head, crept toward the front door, and pushed it open as slowly and quietly as he could.

  The infected did not hear the door. It had no idea Kyle and Parker were there. The thing was a good 150 feet ahead, though, and would hear them coming.

  Parker seemed to have the same thought, but he didn’t care. “Fuck it,” he whispered. “Go loud.”

  Kyle nodded, and they both took off running.

  Hughes was digging around in the back of the truck for breakfast bars when he heard the scream. An infected. No question about it. Somewhere in the center of Riverton.

  Annie was busy boiling water water on a camp stove for tea. She blew out the flame and stood up, wide-eyed.

  Hughes slammed the Suburban’s back door and fished the keys out of his pocket.

  He heard the scream again, followed by a faint smack. Then nothing.

  “We’d better go,” he said.

  Annie nodded. “In the truck or on foot?”

  “Truck,” Hughes said. He got behind the wheel and turned the ignition key as Annie zipped up the camp stove in her backpack and climbed into the passenger seat. Tires crunched over gravel as he pulled away from their camp site amid the grain silos and storage facilities.

  He rounded a C-curve, made a hard left onto the paved road that went through the middle of town, and saw two things directly ahead: Kyle and Parker standing over a body and an RV approaching at a leisurely pace with its hazard lights on.

  Kyle and Parker stood there waving at the RV. They were not running, nor were they pointing guns at the vehicle. Hughes had missed something. A friendly announcement of some kind signaling a lack of hostility.

  Hughes pulled alongside Kyle and Parker and stopped. “Stay in the truck,” he said to Annie and climbed out with his shotgun. He didn’t point it at anybody, but he had no idea who the fuck was in that RV, and he wasn’t going out there unarmed.

  The RV came to a stop. At least two men we
re inside, a driver and passenger. The driver turned off the engine and stepped out with nothing in his hands. He was partly balding and appeared to be around fifty. He smiled and waved. Too friendly. Either that or oblivious to the danger of randomly encountering four strangers, but the man would not still be alive if he were oblivious to that danger. A younger man with darker skin waved hello and remained in the vehicle.

  “Howdy,” the driver said and shook hands with Kyle and Parker. “Name’s Roy.”

  Kyle and Parker introduced themselves.

  Hughes just said hi.

  “You all know each other?” the man who called himself Roy said.

  “We do,” Hughes said.

  “Looks like things went a little catawampus here,” Roy said and looked at the body of the infected on the road, the back of its skull bashed in, a pool of blood spreading around its head.

  “No trouble,” Parker said. Drops of blood dripped from the hammer in his hand.

  Hughes glanced at the RV’s license plate. South Carolina. Which told Hughes that this Roy character might not be familiar with Iowa either.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” Roy said.

  “What’s that?” Hughes said.

  “These stragglers,” Roy said, gesturing toward the dead infected in the road. “Not part of a herd or a horde. And this far north too, out in the cold.”

  “You drove here from the South?” Hughes said.

  “Sure did,” Roy said.

  “Long way,” Hughes said.

  “Not as far away as where you’re from,” Roy said, with his eyes on the Suburban’s plates. “All the way from Washington?”

  “Seattle,” Parker said.

  Roy glanced behind him at the RV and made a summoning motion. “Come on out, Lucas. These folks are friendly.”

  The man Roy called Lucas stepped out. He was younger, perhaps around thirty, and seemed vaguely Hispanic, though “Lucas” didn’t sound to Hughes like a Hispanic name. Both of these men stood there in the road like meeting four complete strangers over the body of a brained infected in the middle of an Iowa village was no big thing.