The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers

by Michael R. Hicks

  The masked alien left. As she waited for the one that cleaned her to arrive, she practiced one of Alden’s exercises, tensing every one of her muscles as she breathed out, then relaxing them all as she breathed in. It was a chi exercise, meant to build awareness and strength of breath, but it was also designed to teach pinpoint muscular control. By the time the second alien arrived, she had worked the feeling back into most of her body. By the time it returned her to the orange, she had the strength to keep the lid from slurping closed.

  She braced the fleshy top open with both palms, waiting until the clatter of the alien’s feet receded and the door whooshed closed. Then she slid one of her hands into the gap of green light. The lid kneaded her hand like a blind mouth, fighting to reseal itself. She wedged her other hand beside her first. Inch by inch, she forced them past the damp mouth into the lighter air beyond. She stood on her tip-toes until her arms were through to the elbow, then clamped herself to the side, dug her toes into the porous surface of the wall, and squirmed. Forcing her head through the gap was the worst: the damp, slick sponge tongued her brow, her nose, her mouth, brackish and cold. Her shoulders popped free. She wriggled her torso out into the green-lit room. Gravity expelled the rest of her from the box with a flatulent sigh. She fell.

  She tucked her right arm above her head, letting it meet the ground, and rolled like Alden had taught her, distributing the impact along her body. The room was silent. She approached the door and it whispered open.

  The hallway was empty. She didn’t know the way out, but she guessed the labs would be closer to the center of the facility than the holding pens would be. She headed the opposite way from the lab, her bare feet gripping the slick floor. The hallway was too high to be human. She jogged past several closed doors. Like the others, they were knobless, but she’d never seen one open unless it was approached directly. Her heart raced. She was shoeless and nearly naked, but she could deal with that once she got outside. She glanced around for a weapon—a club, anything—but the hallway was barren.

  The corridor terminated in another door. She glanced back down the silent hall and stepped forward.

  Beyond the doorway, a wide window showed a cloudless night. Tristan held her breath. A few seating-slings and pedestals stood around the room. A desk of sorts. It might have been a lobby, but Tristan saw no sign of aliens. She stepped inside. The door whisked closed behind her.

  She glanced around for exit signs, then almost laughed out loud. Her mirth dried up as she scanned the walls. There were no signs of any doors at all. Were they somehow hidden? She ran up to the exterior wall, tracing it with her fingers. It was smooth and cold and damp.

  A light bloomed in the window. At first she thought it was a jet, but it was awfully low. A motorcycle? An alien car? She shrank behind one of the pedestals and waited for it to pass. The light expanded, brightening. A school of gray fish floated past the window.

  She stumbled forward. The fish darted away from her movement, tails stirring bubbles in the water. She slumped to the ground, palms squealing on the window. There was no way out. She would die here. Wherever Alden was, he would too.

  They found her a few minutes later. She gave no resistance as they dragged her back to the orange.

  17

  “It’s not like that, Shawn,” Ness said. “They invaded us. Tried to wipe us out. It’s not like we have some global army to fight back with.”

  Shawn snorted. “Yeah, but that doesn’t make us terrorists.”

  “Call it what you will,” Roan said. “It’s smart fighting.”

  Daniel tipped back his chin, combing his fingers through his beard. “It is, isn’t it? Are we reasonably convinced these men aren’t spies or seditionists?”

  Larsen stuck out his lower lip. “Reasonably.”

  “Then let me ask you this,” Daniel said, swinging to face them. “We have a society of sorts in this place. Certainly not enough for a state. More along the lines of a tribe. As we struggle to resurrect the necessities of life, to say nothing of the luxuries, we find ourselves with more work than we have hands. May I ask your plans for the future?”

  “Well,” Shawn said, “I imagine I’ll be killing some aliens.”

  “And you, Ness?”

  “I’d like to try to help get the internet back.”

  “That’s the most pathetic thing I ever heard,” Shawn said. “We got real goddamn aliens pouring out of the sky and you want to hop online and pretend to be an elf chick.”

  Ness scowled. “To communicate, dumbass. To figure out where the enemy is going and what they’re doing. What’s the alternative, irradiating the whole planet and hoping they blunder into the hot spots? Sweet idea. If we can’t have Earth, no one can!”

  “This is moving past the point,” Larsen said.

  Daniel patted the air. “Agreed. We have a foundation to lay before we begin to hope of active resistance. Do you two have any special talents? Skills?”

  “I’m an electrician,” Shawn said.

  Ness rolled his eyes. “And you were so good at it you lost your house.”

  “I’m certified.”

  Daniel’s gray brows rose. “We could certainly use one of those. Right here at the site, in fact. How about your brother?”

  “He was too lazy to ever do a damn thing,” Shawn said. Ness opened his mouth to protest, but Shawn drowned him out. “But he’s smart. Plenty smart. A problem-solver. You put a knot in front of him, he’ll pick it loose before you know it.”

  Ness was too stunned to speak. Shawn winked.

  “I’m sure we’ll have a use for that, too,” Daniel said. “Larsen?”

  Larsen finally smiled. “I can think of something right now.”

  * * *

  Ness stared at the hoe in his hands. The sun beat down from the sky, whaling his neck and his face, its rays as heavy as a wet canvas.

  “What’re you waiting for?” Larsen gestured at the hoe. “Never seen a screwdriver before?”

  Tidy green rows stretched out before him. Ness was close enough to smell the river. “Sure. Just not one this large.”

  “There are weeds in the rows. Apply as necessary.”

  The large man stepped away. Ness almost let him go, too afraid to speak up, but he could imagine Shawn shaking his head. “I have a question.”

  Larsen turned. “Then question.”

  “This is farming.”

  “Not a question.”

  Ness’ blood ran hotter. “I was hoping to help reconnect your internet. Start talking to people.”

  Larsen nodded. The flat sheets of his freckled cheeks looked designed to absorb the sunlight. “Do you have a degree?”

  “No.”

  “Work experience?”

  “I’ve spent my whole life online. With a little bit of time—”

  Larsen nodded at the housing at the far end of the farm. “Do you know how many people we have at this settlement?”

  “If I did, wouldn’t that be highly suspicious?”

  “237. And counting. Do you know how many of those people need to eat every day?”

  Ness sighed through his nose. “That depends on whether you like them.”

  Larsen gazed blankly, as if his lips and lids were too heavy to move. “Most of the men and women who knew how to manage the nuclear reaction going on across the river have died. The few who are left don’t have time to pull weeds. You want power? Weed the garden.”

  As the man watched, Ness turned to the endless rows of green sprouting from the brown furrows. Sweat trickled down his neck. He bent and hacked at the cheatgrass and dandelions hiding between the crops. He looked up a minute later. Larsen was gone.

  Ness worked hard for five minutes. Dust clods burst, gray clouds sifting on his shoes. The rhythm of his chops grew sparse. He needed to conserve his strength in the heat. Anyway, they had a whole city to scavenge from. A couple hundred people could survive for years on all that had been left behind. It would be more productive for him to be going door to d
oor, sacking up bags of linguini and cans of tomato paste.

  And if there were really 237 survivors here, few of them appeared compelled to join him in this oh-so-crucial business. A handful of others hunched over the rows, hoeing and spraying pesticides from big green jugs. The remainder must have been back in the longhouses at the far end of the farm. Enjoying the air conditioning. Ness stopped to drink from his water bottle. There was no shade for hundreds of feet in any direction.

  After a while, he set to work again, slashing the grass and dragging it away from the crops. He didn’t know if the uprooted weeds needed to be segregated in this fashion, but dragging a fallen one away was less work than whacking a new one out of the ground. Anyway, no one was watching.

  He worked halfheartedly for an hour, then quarterheartedly for a couple hours after that. By the end, he was hardly advancing at all, bashing listlessly at long-uprooted weeds until they were reduced to an oozing green mulch. His clothes were soaked with sweat. It wasn’t that he was exhausted. Not physically, anyway; his time in the mountains had trained his muscles to accept hours of low-level manual labor in exchange for little more than occasional breaks and plenty of water. It was a mental thing. A fundamental lack of motivation he remained unable to do anything about. Experimenting with meat-smoking? That was interesting. That was something he’d happily dedicate hours to. Whole days. Working the fields of strangers he’d just met that morning? That was another story. A much duller one.

  Why couldn’t he be like everyone else? Working away for hour on hour without complaint? It was like they could block those hours out. Forget about them like last week’s garbage. He just got depressed. His depression, his lack of motivation, that just made it worse, eroding his ability to keep going like icicles melting in the sun, destroyed not only by the sunlight, but by their own meltwater as it slipped to the ground.

  A man in a baseball hat hollered the workers in from the field for dinner. Men and women sat at dozens of picnic tables under a canvas roof with open sides. They were fed plates of spaghetti with a spoonful of grated cheese and a single strip of bacon apiece, which Ness watched the others crumble over their pasta. It was the first bacon he’d tasted in months and the meat was so salty and the fat so sweet that it hurt him to have to swallow.

  “Hey.”

  Ness glanced up and met inquisitive eyes. The kid was a couple years younger than him and wore a mustache that looked like it needed to be erased. He spoke with a soft Spanish accent. Ness shrank into his chair. Had the kid been watching him in the fields? Seen him slow down, working the same spot over and over to kill time until the day was done?

  “What do they look like?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Ness said.

  “Man, you know. The aliens.”

  Ness looked down at his plate, the sparse parmesan clumped around his remaining noodles. “Like you’ll never eat crab legs again.”

  The kid snorted. “Never knew why anyone ate those to begin with. Big, nasty water-spiders. My name’s Nick. You just got here today, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I been here a while. Hard to say, really.”

  Ness frowned. “Do you have amnesia?”

  “No, man.” Nick twirled a finger at the fields. “Like, how long I been at this farm? A few months. This life? Since always.”

  “You were a..?”

  “My parents moved here when I was just a little kid. We followed the harvest. When strawberries were ripe, we picked strawberries. When cherries were ripe, we picked cherries. Apples, apples. This place right here, it’s like my life’s no different at all.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Who likes picking fruit?” Nick laughed. “So you ever like fight one of them?”

  “Dude, they’re like seven feet tall,” Ness said. “They got all these little pincers. I heard them blow up a truck once. That was right before we decided to run.”

  “That’s crazy.” Nick tore off a piece of bread that hadn’t been soft in days. “Well, better here than out there with them, I guess.”

  They slept six to a room, multiple rooms to a house, each room accessible from the outside only, motel-like. Each person had a bed and an end table and a dresser. The lights switched off at nine o’clock that night. The sun had barely set. Ness unpacked in the darkness. They’d let him keep Volt. He went outside and called softly, not wanting to wake the others, but she was too far off in the fields to hear.

  In the morning, Nick followed him into the fields to give him some pointers on how to speed up his work. Ness hadn’t asked—Nick just wanted to help, and, in the way of all experts, to demonstrate his expertise—but despite Nick’s intentions, Ness couldn’t help resenting it. Having someone with him meant he had to work hard.

  He was too embarrassed to take his shirt off like the other men. His hands blistered. He went to the barn where they stored the workers’ gear and got a pair of yellow leather gloves, signing them out from the older woman whose entire duties consisted of sitting at a card table and making sure no one stole tools and equipment. Truly irreplaceable gear, that. Why, to get a new pair of leather gloves, you’d have to drive ten whole minutes to the city to the south.

  He hated the work. It was as simple as that. He didn’t see why he had to weed corn and harvest cabbage when it had been his idea to dirty-bomb the aliens. And he was producing far more food than he could eat. There were scores of workers here at this farm. Scores more left every morning in trucks bound for more farms down the road, dust devils spinning from their wheels. Just how much food did their little tribe need?

  In exchange for this labor, Ness and the others got an hour of electric light before bedtime, which he spent reading books from the makeshift library in the lodge’s common room. He supposed they had running water, too, although there was never enough hot water to go around. Anyway, the showers were communal. Mortifying. He’d almost worn his underwear into the grimy, tiled bathhouse, but he decided that would be even more embarrassing than the other men seeing his genitals. Instead, he showered sparingly, late at night or very early in the morning. He asked Nick about going into town—they had Sundays off—but gasoline was reserved for farm business and emergencies.

  An old man with weather-beaten brows woke them every morning. Breakfast began at six o’clock. They were expected in the fields by eight. They worked unsupervised until noon, then were given a two-hour break for lunch and personal business, after which they returned to the rows until evening. Now and then a pair of men with guns drove down the dirt roads enclosing the fields, cigarettes rolled into the sleeves of their flannel shirts, but they were mostly watching the wastelands, the gray dirt and the yellow grass. Nick ate most meals with Ness. They complained about the weather, exchanged stories of their lives before the plague.

  The fourth day in the fields, Ness worked quickly until he reached the very end of the furrows. The others were back toward the middle, bent over their hoes. He dropped down to the irrigation canal and followed the sluggish water back to the river, where he skipped stones and poked at bugs until dinner.

  On Sunday, a pickup thrummed over the bridge to the south and turned for the farm. Ness sat in the shade at the picnic tables. The truck pulled into the gravel drive, dust breathing from its tires. A half dozen people hopped out. Shawn saw Ness and grinned.

  “How’s it going, baby brother?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay? Taken any farmer’s daughters up to the hayloft? Hey, you guys got any beer?”

  “There’s water in the coolers,” Ness said. “Sometimes we get Kool-Aid.”

  “Ritzy,” Shawn said. “You get nap-time, too? Where are the graham crackers?”

  “Overseen by a surly old woman with a ledger and trust issues.”

  “Well, it sounds like you guys are doing great out here,” Shawn said. “Daniel and Larsen are shipping all kinds of stuff up north.”

  “They are?”

  “Sure. Colony up in Spokane.”
<
br />   “They’re trading?”

  Shawn nodded, sipping his grape Kool-Aid. “Gasoline. Hogs and chickens—haul ‘em here live, butcher them in one of the old labs. Some clothes, they got a real tailor up there or some shit.”

  Ness stared at the blisters on his palms and fingers. He’d popped a few of them and the skin had whitened and died. “What about the bombs?”

  “Hell if I know. I’m just a grunt. A wire-monkey. They got me stringing stuff up for miles.”

  “If they’re not going to fight back, maybe we should go find our own place.”

  “I dunno, man. I’m getting addicted to showers.” Shawn crumpled his cup and tossed it at a trash can. “You bored? Why don’t you come into town with me and find some Playboys?”

  Ness blinked. “They let you go into town?”

  “What, they got you cooped up here all day? No wonder you’re going stir-crazy.”

  They made plans for the next Sunday. Nick showed Ness how to soak his blisters to cool the pain, how to wrap them in bandages small enough so he could still wear his gloves. He worked the fields at his own pace, jabbing idly at the never-ending grass and weeds hiding close to the roots of the corn and the wheat. For a few days, the temperature dropped to the 80s before climbing back to low triple digits. Volt came back for a couple of nights, chewing his earlobes in the morning, then went back out to the wasteland. Across the river, the steam of the plant clouded the sky.

  “Hey.” Nick plunked down across from him at the picnic table. A few bits of tomato dotted their plain spaghetti.

  “Hey,” Ness said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Not much.”

  “Yeah.” Nick twirled his pasta. “Hey, it’s like not really my business. But some of the guys have been talking.”

  “People do that.”

  “Well, you might want to put in more effort, is all.”

  “More effort?” Ness said.

  “Yeah, you know.” Nick chewed, eyes on his plate. “Out in the fields.”

  “Or what?” Ness said. “They’ll beat me with a sack of doorknobs?”