The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers

by Michael R. Hicks

  She drove back to the campus, parked, napped inside an office beneath a blanket and all her clothes. After nightfall, she pocketed her knife and her gun and shouldered a purse heavy with ammo and water and Lay’s chips. She walked north, paralleling the road from a distance of a hundred yards. Plenty of space to hide in the sage should headlights shine down the road. A low thrum penetrated the night. Two giant pillars of steam climbed into the sky, highlighted by the glow of the half-moon.

  Tristan stopped three hundred feet from the fence. A gate barred the road. Gatehouse beside it. Movement in its dark windows. Electric lights washed the grounds far inside the compound. A man strolled through the circle of light around the main building and disappeared back into the shadows. Bare-bones patrols—it was ten minutes before she saw another soldier—but the fact they ran patrols at all, out here in the middle of nowhere, belied an organization and a paranoia that would not make her task any easier.

  Twenty-odd buildings were scattered around the tall, white-capped building near the compound’s center. Alden could be in any of them.

  Lights gleamed across the river. She struck east, hit a bridge. For ten minutes, she crouched in the sage and watched it through her binoculars. No sign of guards. No lights, either. She headed across, slinking along the high rails at its sides. On the other end, the road hooked toward a cluster of low, rectangular buildings surrounded by a high wire fence. Forty-foot towers projected above it all, spindly watch-stations of wood and aluminum spaced along the fence. Each sported a spotlight, like something out of an old prison movie. She stooped across the cold and dusty field. A dog barked, waited, barked again. She rose and it bounded forward, angling toward the fence. Tristan froze. It was a Shepherd mix, tall, solid. It barked until she turned away and hustled across the field.

  She found a hill nearly a mile east of the fences and set up a short ways from its crest. Should have brought an emergency blanket. She napped fitfully, woken by the cold. She walked around to stir her blood, then curled up again. At dawn, she woke for good, positioning herself below a generous clump of sage, where she propped herself on her elbows and fitted the binoculars to her face.

  Dozens of people emerged from the long simple housing blocks. They milled in the cold yellow morning and sat at the benches arranged under off-blue tarps. They were too far away to make out more than heights and builds. Several might have been Alden or possibly just slender women. Men with guns and dogs hung around the fringes. The ground between her and the fences held nothing but sage and weeds and dust.

  She rationed her water, making it to nightfall with no worse than an angry stomach. She didn’t see a way to get any closer without getting captured. She walked back to the campus, put together a bag with food and water and shoes and a gun and two sticks and two knives, returned to the hill east of the farm, and buried the bag at the base of a sage.

  Unarmed, she walked to the farmland gates.

  A man shouted from one of the towers. She stopped and waited. Two men in black caps ran from the gate with rifles drawn. They gave her a quick pat-down and led her to a shed with a concrete floor and a couple of folding chairs.

  She explained with minimal elaboration. Four days ago, her car had broken down outside of town. She’d walked in and tried to find another, but couldn’t track down a working battery. No, she hadn’t thought to find a generator and charge one that way. As she tried car after car, she noticed the clouds rising from the north. At first she’d thought it was the smoke of a brushfire, but from her house in the hills, their nighttime lights gleamed like sweet promises. Finding her neighborhood low on water, she attempted to move to a house by the river, but had wound up run off by a pack of half-starved dogs. After that, she’d walked straight here.

  “Here at Hanford, we got a system,” the guard-captain said, a man in his late thirties with shaggy brown hair and glassy red eyes. He’d introduced himself as Hollister. “You want to live here, you got to earn it.”

  “I expected no less,” Tristan said.

  “Hard work. We got a farm. That’s where most residents go. But you could wind up assigned to anything. You good with cars? They’ll take you to the garage. Can you sew? Well, there you go.” Hollister smiled at himself, glassy eyes crinkling. “Most people, they wind up on the farm.”

  “We’ve all got to eat.”

  “And I need you to know just what you’re getting into. We expect a three-year commitment. Signed. We’re investing in our residents the same way you’re investing in our community. Can’t feed you for nine months to see you run off right before harvest.”

  “What happens after three years?”

  “Reassessment.”

  “What if I try to leave before then?”

  Hollister stared her down. “Don’t.”

  She shifted in her chair, attempted to look thoughtful. “In exchange, I get food and water? A place to sleep?”

  The man nodded once. “Showers, too. Clothes machines. ‘Lectric lights. Aren’t many places in the country can say that anymore.”

  “Where do I sign?”

  He favored her with a lopsided grin and produced a clipboard. “Right about here.”

  The document was more or less exactly what he’d just explained. Short. Unlawyerly. She signed as Billie Winslowe.

  “Billie,” he read. “I like that. Tough girl, Billie?”

  She mustered a small smile. “These days, who isn’t?”

  Hollister showed her to a room in one of the longhouses. Six beds. Two empty, the other four soon to be occupied by the women currently brushing their teeth and removing makeup, jockeying for space at the two mirrors in front of two metal basins.

  “I thought you said you had water,” Tristan said.

  “We do,” he said. “But only so much that’s halfway clean. Got to preserve it. You’ll get enough to keep yourself pretty.”

  She smiled, trying to soften the edge she felt rising in her gut. He left her with the bag of clothes she’d brought with her. The women introduced themselves; she promptly forgot their names. She didn’t intend to need to know them.

  She stayed up half the night worrying whether she’d done the right thing. She should have spied longer, made certain Colin hadn’t lied about Alden before surrendering herself to contractual slavery. But skulking in the shrubs, it could have taken days, weeks to pinpoint her brother, assuming he wasn’t working indoors at the plant across the river, where she might never see him, depending on how strictly the lords confined their servants. In the meantime, she’d have no way to tell how he was treated, whether he was being beaten—or worse; her mind approached the possibility with morbid semi-glee, then retreated in angry horror—by the guards in charge of their human cattle. If anything were to happen to him while she dawdled in the wastelands, she could never forgive herself.

  Not that she’d have the chance to seek that forgiveness. She’d be killed by guards after killing whoever had hurt her brother.

  For better or worse, she was inside the fence. Whether or not Alden was here, she needed to think of a way to get out, not rake the muck of regret. The fences buzzed, electric; she’d need to dig out, like she had in the alien prison, or find some insulated snips. Did the fence border the river, too? Or could she and Alden wade into the water and float to safety? Could she use pesticides to poison the dogs? They roamed free at night; she’d need some method to neutralize them, even if that were simply devising a way to escape during the day.

  In the end, it simply didn’t matter. Whatever it took—cultivating a conspiracy, fucking a guard, leading a revolution—she would get it done.

  She woke before dawn, stomach growling. While her roommates snored, she practiced her kung fu, stepping lightly, soles a whisper on the unfinished hardwood. At first light, an old man opened the door and grunted a wake-up call without glancing at the women inside.

  Tristan filed out to the breakfast tables and lined up for a bowl of steaming oatmeal dusted with white sugar and for a cup of Kool-Aid from
concentrate. She sat at the far corner of the tables, paying more attention to the others than the blandness of her food.

  A teen boy wandered into the morning, blinking against the hard daylight with sleep-angry eyes. His blond hair jutted at all angles. Chemicals bloomed from Tristan’s middle, surging her with tingling lightness. She stood.

  He glanced her way. Just as she’d imagined a thousand times—in the orange and fleshy jail, in the house of the kindly couple in Williams, in the locked room with Yvette in the fiefdom of Lord Dashing—Alden did a double-take.

  “Tristan?”

  He moved toward her, casually at first, perhaps not allowing himself to believe it, then broke into a sprint that nearly bowled her over. She crushed him to her chest. His half-fed bones dug into her hip and shoulder. He smelled like old sweat, but also something much older: the same scent of skin and specific Alden-ness she’d smelled every time she went into his bedroom at the house in Redding.

  To her surprise, she was still able to cry.

  31

  The words meant nothing to Ness. They may as well have been written in whatever alphabet the aliens used for themselves. It was as if he had taken a word like “soft” and repeated it—soft, soft, soft—until it no longer represented softness, but only itself, a tautological negation. He stared at the black pad, trying to understand.

  “Meltdown?” he wrote. “At the nuclear plant?”

  “YES MELT DOWN”

  “You mean it’s going to blow up?”

  The alien wagged its head side to side. “NO MELT DOWN RADIATION LETHAL”

  “How do you know?”

  Its tentacle danced above its pad. “BECAUSE WE DID IT”

  “What???” Ness scrawled. “Why?”

  “KILL DANIEL ROAN”

  “And everyone else!”

  The pad flashed. “KILL DANIEL ROAN”

  “You can’t do that.”

  It gazed at him. Its milky eyelids wiped its baseball-sized eyes. Its two thickest tentacles climbed over its rubbery back and wavered against the backdrop of branches.

  “ALREADY DID”

  Ness fumbled his pen. “Right now?”

  “NO TONIGHT MELT DOWN”

  He reached behind himself, as if seeking a wall for support. Very clearly, he saw that this was his fault. Not the killing of the creature’s gutbrothers—that had been an act of war, nothing more or less, and after the aliens’ attempt at genocide, he and Shawn could hardly be blamed for killing two of the enemy who’d landed in their back yard.

  But blaming Daniel and Roan—he had done that. He had invited the aliens to strike back, hoping to divert them from discovering he was the killer and lead them to destroy his captors in one fell swoop. It had seemed so elegant. So brilliant. But he’d been trusting aliens to act like humans. Aliens who’d already shown no compunction about killing nearly seven billion humans. For all he knew, they intended to keep fighting despite the loss of their mothership, executing an ongoing guerrilla war for final control of the Earth. In that light, taking out two of their personal enemies alongside several hundred impersonal ones, and at the same time wiping out one of humanity’s few functional power stations—well, that was a solution every bit as elegant as his own scheme.

  Not for the first time, he wished he’d never been born.

  It was absurd how much could hinge on a single decision. Terrifying. Every one of Ness’ instincts screamed out for him to run, to hide away while Hanford died under a raging storm of radiation, to put it behind him and move on. He could drive off right now. No one would know his part in this except the aliens, and no human would ever ask them. A crime was only a crime when it was known.

  But he couldn’t leave Shawn—and Kristin—to die.

  “You have to stop it,” he wrote. He didn’t know if it could feel guilt, but it had told him about the meltdown for a reason. It had to be vulnerable somehow.

  The alien’s tentacle wriggled above its black pad. “NO”

  “My brother’s there and I can’t get him out. You’re going to kill my gutbrother.”

  “DON’T USE WORD”

  “He’s my gutbrother!” Ness wrote. “I will always go back for him! And you are going to kill him!”

  Its claws rolled in fast and tiny circles. “NO NO NO”

  “He’s the reason I survived your plague.” Ness looked up from his pad and met the thing’s dead-puppet stare. “Now stop the attack.”

  “CAN’T”

  “Then help me get him out!”

  The alien went still. Slowly as a toppling boulder, it turned its face to the sky. Ness didn’t bother to try to read its face, or even to guess its thoughts. That could only mislead him. Whatever logic it was arranging in its swollen brain, it wouldn’t follow any human pattern.

  It moved its tentacle with clear reluctance. The pad lit up. “I HELP”

  Ness blinked against sudden tears. “What do we do?”

  “I COME TONIGHT”

  “There’s a girl, too.” Ness paused his pen over his pad. Did these creatures even date? Marry? Mate? “She is also like a gutbrother.”

  “WE WILL ALL LEAVE TOGETHER”

  Ness’ smile overwhelmed his face. “Thank you.” It only stared. “What’s your name?”

  It rotated one of its claws side to side. “NO WORD”

  “I just thought there might be something you’d like me to call you.”

  It clacked its claws, then tapped its tentacle through an intricate succession of motions. “SEBASTIAN”

  “Sebastian?”

  “YES CALL SEBASTIAN”

  “Like from The Little—” Ness stopped and scribbled that out. He didn’t want to know. “Where will you come? To my room?”

  “YES HAVE MAP”

  “There are guards.”

  “YES GUARDS DIE”

  “What should I do?”

  “GO BACK WAIT FOR SEBASTIAN” It lurched toward the river. After several leaf-skewering steps, it turned and held up the pad. “TONIGHT BYE”

  Ness drove back to the plant. He sought permission to see Shawn, but Roan was out, and the guard refused to make the decision on his own. Ness supposed it didn’t matter. What would Shawn do with a few extra hours when Ness didn’t even know how to tell him to prepare?

  He wandered the dusty grounds, watching the steam rise from the clusters of round vents. The rumble of the reactor felt no different than normal. Had the aliens already begun their work? Would Daniel know? Would the old physicist have any hope of stopping it? Sebastian made it sound inevitable. What would Daniel and Roan do if Ness came to them right now? At the very least, he would have to reveal he’d been in contact with the aliens. His imagination played the sequence of events as deterministically as a movie. Once he explained, they would lock him up. The reactor would melt down, killing him in his cell, or they would somehow avert it. Then Roan would come to his cell, shoot him, find Shawn, and shoot him, too. They would not brook a second betrayal. They’d made him take notes on the entire ethanol process. It would be simple enough to divert Brandon to the task. To promote someone from the farm. It didn’t take a nuclear scientist to mash up corn and boil it a couple times.

  That was why he didn’t go to Kristin. She would just try to stop it. Questions would arise; fingers would point. Roan was too canny to miss all the time he’d spent outside the fence. The alien artifacts he still had in his lab. She would follow the links back to him.

  Anyway, he didn’t want to stop it. These people deserved to die. Daniel as the despot, Roan as his enforcer, the scientists and engineers and techs as his enablers and willing minions. The workers at the farm would be collateral damage. They’d had their chance to stand up after he’d given his speech. They’d sat back down as soon as Daniel bothered to cross the river. Because of them, Nick was dead.

  Ness sat silent in his room and waited for the alien to deliver him.

  He woke to the sound of something scrabbling at his lock. He leapt up, looking around f
or a weapon. The best he could do was his pen. He clenched it like a dagger. The door swung open. Moonlight lined Sebastian’s many limbs. A guard struggled at the alien’s feet. Its tentacle coiled around his throat like an eyeless anaconda. The man’s face was purple; he made small sputtering sounds. Sebastian lifted one of its pointed legs and stabbed down through the man’s open mouth.

  Ness went for his notepad. He’d fallen asleep in his shoes. “Is it happening?”

  “YES”

  “How long do we have?”

  “HOUR”

  “Until it starts? Or finishes?”

  “FINISHES”

  Enough time to get several miles away even if they couldn’t find a car or bikes beyond the fence. Ness grabbed the machine gun from the dead guard. The grounds were silent except the omnipresent grumble of the reactor. His heart raced, but he found it oddly comforting to have Sebastian beside him. The alien gazed down at him expectantly. Ness gestured it forward. He jogged to the shadow of the next building, a high, dark warehouse, and paused to stare across the empty space between them and the next patch of cover, a concrete bunker he suspected was used to store spent nuclear fuel. Shawn was housed just beyond it in another cluster of storage sheds. He still hadn’t seen any more guards; either Sebastian had killed them all, or they were elsewhere on the sprawling grounds.

  He circled around the light ringing the bunker, then angled straight for the sheds, Sebastian skittering beside him. Ness drew up beside Shawn’s door, gestured at the padlock. Sebastian raised a blunt black pistol to the lock and crowded around it. Blue light flared, bright enough for Ness to write by.

  The padlock thumped to the dust. Ness held up his pad to the creature. “Stay out here. I need to explain.”

  Sebastian wagged his bulbous head. Ness swung open the door, painting the cramped space with moonlight. Shawn waited just inside, half-crouched in the darkness, fists held out from his body.

  “Ness!” Shawn straightened, grinning in disbelief. “We out of here? Where’d you get the gun, Rambo?”