The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Shawn, we’re not alone.”

  “Yeah. Mercs everywhere. I’ll shut my damn mouth.”

  Ness glanced to his side. Sebastian waited beside the wall, perfectly still and surprisingly compact. “I mean, I have help.”

  Shawn moved for the door. “Your girlfriend? About time I got a look at her up close. Was starting to think she was another Canadian internet thing.”

  Ness grabbed his brother’s arm, stopping him cold. Shawn frowned down at Ness’ hand. “Shawn—I made contact with a group of aliens. One of them is right outside this door. It’s going to help us get out.”

  “Ness.”

  “I’m not joking. I’m telling you this so you won’t scream or punch it or ruin things with any other typical Shawn business. There’s an alien outside, and it’s my friend.”

  Shawn peered at him for any hint of a put-on. “You know what, I believe you. And I am unsurprised.”

  Ness took a deep breath and stepped back from the door. Shawn followed in his wake, glancing left, then right. Sebastian turned its head to meet his gaze. Shawn hopped straight in the air, eyes bugging as hard as the alien’s, but to his credit, he didn’t scream.

  “Jesus,” he breathed. “Fucking. Christ.”

  “Nope, its name’s Sebastian,” Ness said. “Come on.”

  He led them around the bunker back to his shed. Kristin’s converted apartment building rose past the roof of another warehouse. As Ness halted in the shadow of his former home, light flicked from the wall of the warehouse. A black-dressed security man lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the cold night.

  Slowly, Sebastian leveled its pistol. The man spat, gazed across the dust, and turned back the way he’d come. While Ness considered how best to circle around him to Kristin’s, Sebastian burst forward, feet hardly stirring the dirt, and disappeared after the mercenary. Something grunted in the darkness. Sebastian backed around the corner, dragging the body behind him.

  “Glad that dude’s on our side,” Shawn murmured.

  “It told me why they attacked,” Ness said.

  “Human babes?”

  “I’ll tell you after we’re clear.”

  Sebastian beckoned them forward with a lithe tentacle. They moved in fits and starts to Kristin’s building, pausing often to watch for security men. The front door was unlocked. Ness crept up the metal staircase to the third floor. Harsh bulbs glared down the empty hall. He sidled to Kristin’s door, directed Sebastian to the side, and knocked softly. He waited three seconds, skin itching, and knocked again.

  Her voice was sleepy, annoyed. “Who is it?”

  “Ness.”

  The lock clicked. She cracked the door, grinned at him, and opened it wide. She was dressed in a thigh-length nightgown whose gauzy fabric did little to conceal her nipples. She saw Shawn and closed the door to an inch-wide crack.

  “Hey!”

  “Wait till she sees the other guy,” Shawn said.

  “This is my brother Shawn,” Ness said. “Can we come in?”

  She glared through the crack. “A little notice would have been nice. Hang on.”

  Her footsteps withdrew into the room. Shawn elbowed him in the ribs. “Nice pick.”

  She returned in a t-shirt and sweatpants and introduced herself to Shawn. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be locked up?”

  “Get your shoes on,” Ness said. “We have to run.”

  “Oh yeah? Is the video store about to close?”

  “The plant is about to melt down.”

  She blinked at him, eyes skipping between his. “Glad to see you’ve picked up your Ph.D in nuclear physics.”

  Ness laughed helplessly. “Somehow that’s more believable than the truth. The reactor has been sabotaged by aliens.”

  “And they gave you a heads-up? Did you help one of their grandmothers across the street or something?”

  “I told them Daniel and Roan killed their friends. One of them likes me, I don’t know.” He gestured at her bare feet. “Shoes. Now.”

  She crossed her arms. “Ness, modern nuclear reactors don’t just melt down. There are a billion safeguards.”

  “And how many of them are devoted to stopping terrorists with tentacles?”

  “Ness—”

  He pursed his lips, stepped out the door, and gestured Sebastian inside. Kristin gasped and choked. She fell and scrabbled on the rug, heels kicking, driving herself away.

  “Ness!”

  “Shh!” He ran to her, crouched down, and hugged her. “It’s my friend. It’s going to get us out of here.”

  Kristin tried to speak and choked on her own spit. She pounded her chest, voice strained. “We have to stop it.”

  “I said it’s here to help.”

  “The meltdown. I know how to shut down the reactor. Sort of. It could still overheat, but—”

  Ness snorted. “Why?”

  “Why would you want to stop a nuclear leak that could kill hundreds of people? I don’t know, because we’re not Satan?”

  “You didn’t say shit about a meltdown,” Shawn said.

  “Because it’s totally out of my hands,” Ness said. “And we’ve only got like forty minutes before it’s too late.”

  “Well, that’s more than enough time to drop the rods and shut it down,” Kristin said.

  “I don’t care about any of these people!” Ness said. “They shot my friend in the head! Right in front of me. They’re keeping hundreds of slaves. Goddamn slaves. The government died and these people went straight to selling each other as property. The future looks bad enough as it is. We don’t need them around to make it worse.”

  “I have friends here,” Kristin said. “A meltdown will leave this whole area unlivable for thousands of years. It could kill anyone who wanders through town. We have to stop it.”

  Sebastian’s tentacle wriggled over its pad. Kristin and Shawn flinched back; Kristin rolled her eyes, Shawn chuckled. It held out the pad: “WHY TALK MUST LEAVE”

  “What!” Shawn said. “You taught the lobster English?”

  “It learned on its own,” Ness said. “Some gestures, too. Freaky, right?”

  “Make it flip me off.”

  Ness got out his pad, wrote, “Hold on.”

  Sebastian rolled its claws in a tight circle. “RADIATION KILLS HUMANS”

  “Thanks for the intergalactic wisdom,” Ness muttered. He turned to Kristin. “Unless you’d like to test its claim, we need to leave. We can have this argument ten miles from now.”

  “Leave away,” she said. “I’m going to go stop our personal Chernobyl.”

  “Need a hand?” Shawn said.

  Ness’ mouth fell open. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Shawn shot him an annoyed look. “I ain’t some monster, Ness. I don’t have tentacles and big stupid googly-eyes. I’m not gonna let all these people die.”

  “But this place is horrible!”

  “Seems to me that’s because of Daniel and that bra-wearing pit bull who does his bidding. Mercs won’t care who’s paying their checks. We take the two of them out, we run this place however we please.” Shawn held out his hand. “Run away or come with, Ness. But if you’re leaving, give me your gun.”

  32

  Alden hung on and didn’t let go. “Where have you been?”

  Tristan laughed, squeezing him tighter. “Where have I been? What about you?”

  “I thought you were dead.” He pulled back, turning away to wipe his tears, as if she hadn’t already seen them. “Did they take you, too?”

  “Spent months in a slimy orange box. Practiced my kung fu the whole time.”

  “Me too!” he laughed. “What if we were right next to each other? We could have just punched our way through!”

  Tristan smiled. “God knows I tried. Anyway, we were at separate facilities. No kids at mine.”

  Alden glanced at the other corner of the dining area, where a man in a black uniform and a shouldered rifle watched them dully. “How did you fi
nd me?”

  “I just kept searching.”

  He frowned at the dust, then glanced at her face. “Is that how that happened?”

  Her smile tightened. “You should see the other guy.”

  “No way,” Alden laughed. “Bet you killed him. He’d be all rotten and wormy.”

  “I just sent him to his room without pizza. What about you? Have you been okay?”

  His smile emptied; she hoped hers had been less visibly hollow. “Yeah. Fine. Bored.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Like a month.”

  “Has anyone hurt you?”

  Alden’s smile recovered some of its enthusiasm. “Why? Would you beat their ass?”

  “And whatever else that ass is attached to.”

  “They’ve been fine,” he said quickly. “Just strict.”

  He was still so young. Too young to lie well: he looked away, grinning nervously, some part of his childhood still resisting the idea of telling his parents anything but the truth. She supposed he’d get the chance to learn with her. A large part of her still couldn’t believe that he was here, that she could reach out and run her fingers through his hair, could lean in and smell his skin. In terms of absolute time, they’d only been apart what, nine months?—the length of a school year, a pregnancy—but in terms of relative experience, it felt like a lifetime. She didn’t fight her grin.

  And now was not the time to ruin their reunion with talk of what happened to him during that separate lifetime. That could come later. When they were gone. When they were safe. Anyway, if something had happened to him here, she couldn’t afford to let her anger compromise their escape.

  They sat together and ate. Her breakfast had gone cold in the chilly morning. Too soon, one of the armed men rose from their own table of Lucky Charms and coffee and called the residents out to work. Tristan was directed to a column of several dozen people assigned to a pile of lumber at the edge of a fallow field. Apparently housing was running low on this side of the river; while others cut pieces, she was assigned to sand the rough edges. The sandpaper rubbed her fingertips raw and red. They were granted two short breaks, including lunch, then wrapped up with the sun inches from the western hills, its pink light interrupted by the steam rising from the power plant.

  The day had not given her much to work with. After dinner, Hollister, the red-eyed captain who’d processed her arrival, pulled her from the mingling crowd.

  He nodded at Alden. “You know that boy?”

  “Why?”

  “This morning, he called you Tristan. Before you’d said a word to him.”

  She raised her brows. “Is that a crime here?”

  “Of course not. But signing a false name to your work contract is.”

  She nearly asked him why it mattered; there were no more drivers licenses, no Social Security numbers, no databases of debt and credit and citizenship. In this era, you were whoever you said you were.

  “I used to babysit him,” she said instead. “In my hometown. I hadn’t seen him since I left for college.”

  “I see.” A shrewd light pierced the fog of whatever drugs he was on. “And if I asked him, he’d say the same thing?”

  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw him. Everyone else I know died in the Panhandler or the collapse. I thought everyone on Earth was a stranger. Then I come here and the first thing I see is the little blond kid who used to hide fruit snacks in the toilet tank.”

  “And he called you Tristan because?”

  “That’s my first name,” she said. “I started using my middle name in college. Do you need to change it for the forms?”

  Hollister rubbed his puffy eyes, frowning at Alden, who sat at another table giggling with a girl a year old than himself.

  “Better,” he said. “Roan runs this ship just like her asshole: tight and squeaky-clean.”

  “Person like that probably wouldn’t be happy to hear you speaking that way.”

  The man shot her a fierce look, fog clearing from his eyes. “Are you threatening me?”

  Tristan pushed out her lower lip. “That depends on whether you think she’d be mad.”

  “Papers. Come on.”

  She followed him to an office adjacent to the bare concrete room where they’d received her application for citizenship. He found her papers in a green file cabinet and went over them point by point, filling in many of the places he’d left blank the first time around: place of birth, parents’ names, education. By the time they finished, lights-out had been called; the man accompanied her back to her room, where she brushed her teeth in the dark.

  Dumb of her to not work this out with Alden the second she saw him. She couldn’t let them know they were brother and sister. It would be far too easy to leverage that information against her. She resolved to clear this with him first thing in the morning.

  She never got the chance.

  Alden wasn’t at breakfast. Tristan ate her meal—grits, homemade; three women were still grinding corn for the latecomers—then found the dark-haired girl her brother had spoken to the day before.

  “Seen Alden today?”

  “Not since yesterday.” The girl combed her fingers through her hair, glancing at Tristan’s face, her shoes. “You’re his..?”

  “Babysitter.”

  The girl’s lips tightened. “Isn’t he like fourteen?”

  “From when he was younger,” Tristan laughed. The girl was worried about unknowingly talking with—and being attracted to—a loser. “He knows kung fu.”

  “I know, right?”

  Tristan got up and wandered around the longhouses. She still hadn’t seen him by the time they were called to work. As she helped sort and stack lumber, an icy nausea curled in her stomach. Most likely, Alden had been reassigned to another task—forty people toiled back at the housing, carrying away the dirt a backhoe excavated from a growing hole at the end of the buildings; even more worked in the fields far upriver, hacking away the weeds that had begun to poke from the soil, preparing to seed the earliest crops—but she couldn’t shake the feeling something had happened to him. Something precipitated by her arrival.

  Work ceased. She returned to eat, mechanically chewing the cornbread and the spaghetti with red sauce poured straight from labelless jars. The sun left. She slept.

  It was the same thing the next day and the day after. The nausea ate her from the inside, hollowing her, rasping her nerves from the bone. Her calm resolve eroded, replaced by twin imps of panic and rage. Had Hollister taken him? Relocated him? Imprisoned him as some perverse punishment after ferreting out Tristan’s lies? The security chief had given no sign he disbelieved her babysitting story—in fact, he’d said nothing to her at all—but it could not be coincidence. And if she went to ask, she could only expose herself, confirming his suspicions.

  And then—what? Would she be imprisoned? Exiled? Executed? For all their talk of work contracts, this place was not a carefree commune. Armed guards watched their every moment. An electric fence penned them in. Every hour of their day was scheduled: lights on, breakfast, work, lunch, work, dinner, lights out. She doubted a challenge to that control would be dismissed with a simple slap on the wrist.

  So she hollowed, devoured by a doubt and indecision she hadn’t felt since the Panhandler had taken their parents. She knew she would act soon, whether or not it was wise.

  On the fourth day of Alden’s disappearance, with Tristan still working on lumber, a man shouted in pain. He cursed, flung down his handsaw, and booted his sawhorse into the dust.

  “That’s it,” he said. He walked in a circle, sucking on his bloody finger. “I’m done. That’s it.”

  An older man came to him, speaking too softly for Tristan to hear over the death metal blaring from the security officer’s pickup. The wounded man shoved his friend away.

  “I’m done, okay? I’m going at this stuff like some dumb lumberjack? If they ran an extension cord out here, I could rip a Skilsaw through this stuff in thre
e hours. Without cutting my fucking finger open, either. They don’t want me to work? Fine. I’m done.”

  The officer clicked off his music. In the abrupt silence, Tristan could hear the murmur of the river through the trees. A radio hissed static from the cab of the truck.

  Most of the others returned to their tasks. The older man argued in low tones with his angry friend, who stomped on his overturned sawhorse until it cracked to pieces, then sat on the rubble and nursed his bleeding finger. Another truck rolled down the dirt ruts to their makeshift lumberyard, its high tires birthing dust devils behind it. It swung to a stop, high frame rocking, clouding them in fine dry dust. Hollister jumped from the cab. The passenger door opened and Alden hopped down to the ground, blond hair hidden under the black cap of a security guard.

  Alden trailing behind him, Hollister walked to the seated man. “What’s up?”

  “I’m done.” The man shook his head at the stacks of unstained wood. “Not until you get me some proper tools.”

  “You’ve got what you’ve got.”

  “A big old pile of bullshit? You try it. You pull that saw through boards all day, then tell me it makes any goddamn sense not to run a cord out here.” He flung his arm at the pillars of steam rising across the river. “I mean, what’s all that about? That thing could power half of Seattle. They afraid a single saw’s gonna brown us out?”

  Hollister rubbed his thumb and forefinger in the corners of his eyes. “Stand up. Pick up your saw. Work.”

  “Get me a Skilsaw and you’ll have to drag me to bed.”

  Hollister grimaced, as if he were struggling with a bout of gas, and turned to Alden. “Just like I shown you. You ready?”

  Alden stared at the seated man. “How will I know when it’s good?”

  “I’ll say when. Don’t hold back. That’s how you wind up hurt.”

  Work had stopped across the yard. Gulls cawed from the river. Alden reached for a flat black baton dangling from his belt. The seated man smirked. Alden swung the baton down on his head.

  Frozen by his disbelief, the man didn’t flinch until the last moment. The baton caught him on the side of his head. He toppled off the lumber, catching himself on one hand, barring the other above his head. Alden’s first swing hadn’t been all that strong—his forearm had been too tense, his elbow hesitant and stiff—and the surprise, if anything, was what had knocked the man over. But the first blow unstuck something in Alden. His eyes flashed. His second strike carried the same loose power he put into his snapping punches. The stick cracked into the man’s wrist. He yanked back his hand and yelped. Alden followed him in, aiming another blow at the man’s head; the man twisted, catching it on the shoulder instead.