The Last City

by Michael J. Totten

  Parker had gotten over it. At least he seemed to, so perhaps Annie would be fine in the end, but he worried sometimes that she was going to snap and do something stupid or dangerous or both—something with irrevocable consequences for her personally and for everyone still alive—before they reached the end of the road.

  Hughes and Annie agreed about one thing, at least. Roy could not be allowed to go free when they reached the city. Hughes just had to make sure that Roy didn’t know what the others knew about him until it was too late to bail on the mission or to sabotage it. If Roy even suspected that the others knew his secret, God only knew what he’d do.

  At least the drive was interesting. The highway plunging southward from Kentucky into Tennessee looked nothing like the Midwest. The landscape was hillier, more densely forested, and lined with little cliffs along the side of the highway, as if the roadbed had been blasted out of rock to smooth out the grade. The forest seemed almost impenetrable. Those woods had been hiding secrets for hundreds of years and no doubt concealed pockets of rugged survivors who had no need or inclination to erect man-made barriers to keep others away. Hunkering down in the hollows between the hills would be enough. No one with a lick of sense would go traipsing around in there without knowing exactly who and what lay at the end of the paths. Hughes knew there had to be paths, old ones, long hidden from outsiders.

  They eventually crossed the Tennessee River between Old Washington and Decatur, bypassed the small town of Athens, and entered the forbidding Nantahala National Forest near the border with Georgia and North Carolina. Prairie and farmland country were long behind them now. Appalachia was another world entirely, and Hughes was relieved to have a guide here, even if that guide was Roy. Annie vaguely knew the area, sure, but she had never lived there, hadn’t visited in years, and had no idea, really, what to expect after everything had violently changed forever.

  Past the small village of Austral, the woods looked positively gothic with a jungle-like tangle of trees draped with moss, slashed by vines, and almost but not quite concealing imposing wood-framed houses rotting from years of neglect. Many of them looked haunted.

  “Jesus,” Parker said.

  “He’s taking us to his lair,” Annie said.

  A joke, surely, but Hughes thought the real joke was that Annie was only half joking. Just moments later, Roy pulled into a driveway that led to a weathered and peeling Victorian mansion with a collapsed porch, a decrepit balcony on the second floor that nobody would dare set foot on, a crumbling chimney topped with an iron lightning rod, and—most incongruously—windows that sparkled as if they’d just been cleaned yesterday.

  “What did I tell you?” Annie said.

  Roy parked in the driveway.

  “Seriously?” Parker said. “We’re staying here? And we’re just going to leave the vehicles out front?”

  Hughes didn’t like it either. He wasn’t going inside that house. No way. He kept the engine running and rolled down the window as Roy climbed out of the RV. The air smelled faintly of mold. “What are we doing here, Roy?”

  “What’s it look like?” Roy said.

  “You want to sleep in there?” Hughes said, resting his arm on the top of the truck door.

  “There’s beds inside,” Roy said.

  “What on earth would make you pick this place?” Parker said.

  “There’s nobody anywhere near here, my friends,” Roy said.

  Hughes killed the engine, left the keys in the ignition, opened the door, and stepped out. “I don’t like it. None of us likes it. And we need to get something straight here.”

  He took a step toward Roy. Roy did not move.

  “I’m not your friend.”

  Roy’s facial expression did not change.

  “None of us here are your friends,” Hughes said.

  Roy looked at his feet for a moment, then made eye contact with Hughes again. “I’m real sorry about Kyle. I told you that before, and I’ll say it again as many times as I need to.”

  “This isn’t about Kyle,” Annie said from the Suburban’s backseat.

  Hughes winced.

  Roy looked at Annie with slitted eyes, icy and cold and reptilian. Annie stared back, righteous and angry and hot.

  Goddammit, Annie.

  Roy glanced at Parker and finally at Hughes again.

  “She doesn’t trust you,” Hughes said, because he had to say something. “None of us trusts you.”

  Roy squinted at Hughes. Annie was fucking up in the worst possible way.

  “Why are y’all doing this?” Roy said.

  Hughes wasn’t entirely sure what Roy meant by this.

  “You like the world the way it is,” Annie said. “Don’t you.” It wasn’t really a question.

  Roy said nothing.

  “It suits you just fine,” Annie said. “It suits you perfectly.”

  Parker opened the passenger door and got out. “Why don’t we all take a step back here?”

  Nobody said anything for a couple of moments.

  “Roy wouldn’t be here if he liked the world how it is,” Parker said. “Isn’t that right?”

  Roy eyeballed Parker. Hughes stared hard at Annie and shook his head almost imperceptibly, telling her, Don’t.

  “He wants what you and I have,” Annie said to Parker. Immunity. “And what Lucas had before he got killed. That’s not the same thing.”

  Nice save, Hughes thought.

  “You got me dead to rights, ma’am,” Roy said. “I never denied it.” He paused, as if weighing what to say next. “I don’t expect y’all to think much of me after what happened. But we got a job to do, and we’ll finish tomorrow. Least I will. And I’m doing what I can in the meantime. Lucas and I’ve stayed in this house. There’s beds in there and water in the sink. Even the toilets flush. Nobody around here for miles. Nobody in these woods and nobody on the roads.”

  “We’re sleeping in the truck,” Hughes said.

  “Suit yourself,” Roy said and shrugged. “You want to make our final plan tonight or in the morning?”

  Hughes exhaled. Roy had moved on. Disaster averted.

  “What’s to plan?” Annie said, her voice still edged with contempt.

  “Atlanta ain’t empty,” Roy said. “It’s overrun. We can’t just drive up to the gate.”

  “I sure as hell hope you don’t expect us to walk,” Parker said.

  “Course not,” Roy said. “Question is how we make our way through the suburbs. You want to shoot our way through? Get bigger trucks? Sneak in at night?”

  “Maybe we should,” Parker said.

  “Should what?” Roy said.

  “Sneak in at night,” Parker said.

  Hughes nodded. “We’ve got night vision. We can drive in the dark with the headlights off.”

  Roy nodded. “Okay then.”

  Hughes exchanged glances with Parker, then returned his attention to Roy. “Okay then? We’re going to need a lot more than that.”

  “Sir,” Roy said, apparently chastised at his earlier use of the word friend, “I don’t know what else to tell you. I haven’t been to the center of Atlanta in two and a half years. I can tell you, though, that the suburbs were swarming with infected less than two weeks ago.”

  Hughes glanced at his friends. Parker swallowed hard. Annie stared at a point in space and nodded to herself, as if she saw something no one else could. But Hughes knew what she was thinking. They truly didn’t need Roy anymore. Once they reached Alpharetta, the northernmost suburb, they’d all be running blind. Annie could take the sonofabitch out the moment they got there.

  Hughes wouldn’t let her. Even vicious and murderous psychopaths were on the side of the angels against the infected.

  “Let’s go inside,” Roy said.

  Hughes glanced at the house again. It must have been abandoned twenty years earlier and looked like it had been beaten up not only by weather but also by a moderate earthquake. “Not happening.”

  “It ain’t haunted,�
�� Roy said. “There’s no body parts in the fridge.”

  Hughes exchanged glances with Annie, still ensconced in the Suburban’s back seat and refusing to come out. She leaned forward and opened her eyes wide, imploring Hughes to deal with this somehow.

  He checked his watch. The sun would be down in less than an hour.

  “How far’s Alpharetta?”

  “Three hours,” Roy said.

  “What’s stopping us from going tonight?”

  Annie opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again. Parker looked around, as if wondering where Kyle was. Roy dropped his chin and shrugged.

  “Why don’t we just go?” Hughes said. “If we’re driving through it in the dark anyway, what’s the point of staying here for twenty-four hours?”

  “We’re going through the suburbs in the dark,” Parker said. “You sure you want to drive to the suburbs in the dark?”

  “Why not?” Hughes said.

  “We’ve never driven anywhere in the dark,” Annie said. “Not even once.”

  That wasn’t true, actually. They’d fled Lander, Wyoming, at night. But Hughes took her point.

  “We didn’t do that out West,” Hughes said, “because our headlights could be seen for miles in the empty countryside.”

  “Plenty of open countryside before we get to Atlanta,” Roy said. “It ain’t all woods from here.”

  “But we have the night vision,” Hughes said.

  “We’ve always had night vision,” Parker said.

  “We’d have used up the batteries if we drove all night every night,” Hughes said. “Doesn’t matter now, though. We only have to do it once. And the batteries last fifty hours,” Hughes said. “We’ll be fine.”

  “What about moonlight?” Parker said.

  “It’s a half moon,” Hughes said. “It won’t be up all night.”

  “Is it waxing or waning?” Annie said.

  Nobody said anything. Nobody knew.

  “Is is rising earlier each night or later?” Annie said.

  Shit. Nobody knew.

  Hughes looked at the sky. Still as cloudy as before, an uninterrupted gray slab and heavy as an iron lid over the atmosphere. “I think we’ll be okay.” And if not, he thought, we’ll deal with it.

  Nobody spoke. They just looked at each other for a couple of moments. Parker swallowed hard. Annie tilted her head a little bit sideways. Roy put his hands in his pockets.

  “If the moon comes out from behind the clouds,” Hughes said, “we’ll hunker down or withdraw and try again tomorrow night. And we have enough battery power to go three nights in a row without a recharge.”

  Still, nobody spoke.

  Annie’s face turned ashen. She pressed her elbows into her sides as if trying to make herself smaller. Until now, she’d seemed almost fearless. Hughes knew she wasn’t afraid of the drive. He wasn’t even sure she worried about the infected out in the suburbs. She was afraid of the city itself and what they might find there, whether the CDC was really still up and running and what the doctors might do to her once she told them the truth. Hughes had promised her that he wouldn’t let them mistreat her as the authorities in Wyoming had, but she knew as well as he did that he wouldn’t be able to stop them.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Hughes said. He locked eyes with Annie and turned so that Roy could not see his face. “Let’s finally rid the world of this scourge.” Then he pointed at Roy with his eyes.

  Annie nodded. She understood. Parker nodded too. They were on the same secret page, right out in the open. The sooner they got to Atlanta, the sooner they could get rid of Roy.

  “Or we could spend the next twenty-four hours in this haunted house,” Hughes said.

  “Severed heads in the fridge for dinner,” Roy said.

  “Alright,” Parker said. “City’s walled off, right?”

  “Correct,” Roy said.

  “And they aren’t letting anyone in,” Parker said.

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” Roy said. “Not that I’ve tried.”

  Of course Roy hadn’t tried. Harder to get away with murdering people for sport inside a walled enclave.

  “We just going to drive up to the wall and yell at whoever’s inside to let us in anyway?” Parker said.

  “We need to pull up at a gate,” Roy said. “There’s three of ‘em. The White Gate, the Red Gate, and the Black Gate.”

  “They painted them?” Annie said.

  “Those are just names,” Roy said.

  “Why have gates if they don’t let anyone in?” Hughes said.

  “So they can come out,” Roy said.

  “Who’s ‘they?’”

  “The army,” Roy said.

  “The army’s in there?” Hughes said.

  “Army built the wall,” Roy said, “just like around Washington, DC. Same kind of walls they once built in Baghdad.”

  “How many civilians are in there?” Hughes said.

  “No idea,” Roy said.

  “So, we drive up to one of the gates,” Annie said, “and tell them we’re immune. They’ll either open the gate or come out to get us.”

  “What if they don’t?” Parker said.

  “They will,” Annie said.

  “They might not,” Parker said.

  “What would you do?” Annie said. “You’re the army commander who walled off the Centers for Disease Control, and you don’t open the gate to people coming in from the wasteland who say they’re immune? How does that make any sense?”

  “They’ll let us in,” Hughes said. “The CDC has no reason to still exist otherwise.”

  “I’ll lead in the RV,” Roy said. “Keep your radio on.”

  “You know your way?” Hughes said.

  “A bit,” Roy said.

  “Annie?” Parker said. “Do you know your way around Atlanta?”

  “In the city,” Annie said, “but not in the suburbs.”

  “Main roads are blocked,” Roy said, “once we get past the outskirts. We’ll have to find our way through on the surface streets.”

  “We’ll need a detailed map,” Parker said. “From a gas station or something. Unless you already have one.”

  Roy shook his head.

  “Where are we going, exactly?” Annie said.

  “CDC,” Roy said, like she was stupid for asking.

  “I mean,” Annie said, “where are the gates?”

  “Just follow me,” Roy said.

  “You don’t know,” Annie said.

  “I know where one of ‘em is,” Roy said.

  “So tell us,” Annie said.

  Hughes opened his mouth to tell her to drop it, then shut it again. She was right. They needed to know. “In case something happens to you,” he said to Roy. “We’re driving separately, after all.”

  “North Druid Hills,” Roy said. “The Black Gate is at North Druid Hills.”

  “You know where that is?” Hughes said to Annie.

  “It’s just north of the CDC and Emory University,” Roy said.

  “Okay,” Hughes said and nodded, satisfied. Annie never did answer his question about whether or not she knew that part of the city, but it wouldn’t matter once they found a map.

  Night was coming. The weak winter sun was below the trees now. “We could leave midafternoon tomorrow instead of right now,” Hughes said. “Sleep in tomorrow and arrive just before nightfall. That would be the smart play. But I’m itching to go and will be awake for several more hours anyway.”

  “I don’t like this place,” Annie said and shuddered.

  Roy rolled his eyes.

  “We could get attacked here,” Parker said.

  “More likely to get attacked on the way down,” Roy said.

  “Not if we drive in the dark with the lights off,” Hughes said.

  “Should we eat first?” Parker said.

  “We should eat when we can,” Hughes said, “because we have no idea when we’ll be able to do it again.”

  “I ate in the
RV,” Roy said, “so I’m good to go.”

  “You aren’t the only person here,” Annie said.

  “We can eat in the truck,” Parker said.

  “Fine with me,” Hughes said.

  “Okay then,” Roy said, as if Annie’s opinion counted for nothing. “In the long run, we’re all dead, and so is everyone else, but what the hell. Let’s save the world.”

  Daggers flashed in Annie’s eyes. “You aren’t saving the world.”

  “Annie—” Parker said.

  “You’re only saving yourself,” Annie said. “None of us have forgotten what you said in that diner.”

  The universe is committing suicide.

  “You’re no better than me,” Roy said.

  “We’re all better than you,” Annie said.

  “Annie—” Hughes said.

  “Because you’re saving the world and I’m saving myself,” Roy said.

  “That’s about the long and the short of it,” Annie said.

  “Alright,” Parker said.

  “I’m just more honest about it than you,” Roy said.

  “Let’s go,” Hughes said.

  “How’s that?” Annie said.

  “I do what’s good for me,” Roy said, “and you do what’s good for you.”

  “Bullshit,” Annie said. “What’s good for me is heading so far north into Canada that what’s left of the world will leave me alone. That’s what I want to do. This is a sacrifice.”

  “It ain’t a sacrifice,” Roy said. “It makes you feel good. Like a virtuous person. That’s why you’re doing it. And you want the old world back because you were comfortable in it. I’ll believe in your altruism when you show me a jackalope.”

  “We’re going,” Hughes said, got behind the wheel, and shut the door.

  Roy pulled his keys out of his pocket and headed toward his own vehicle. “I’m doing this for me,” he said, “and so are y’all.”

  Parker opened the back of the Suburban.

  “Don’t worry,” Annie said and nodded. “You’ll get what’s coming to you.”

  Hughes sucked down his anger and started the engine.