The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers

by Michael R. Hicks

  Whistle blew for cleanup. Workers picked up stray tools and delivered them to the portable shed for the night. Jorge padlocked the shed and the crew filed away for dinner. Tristan ate quickly, exchanging a few words with her coworkers, then rose for a walk through the dusk. She wandered toward the fields, which the farmhands had all but completely plowed, then moved past the lumberyard. She knelt for the snips, glanced back toward camp, and headed straight for the river. Within sight of its banks, deep in the smell of the mud and the leafy decay of spring, she took her leather gloves from her pocket and clipped the lowest wire of the fence.

  The sun was all the way down when she replaced the snips beneath the pile of boards. She didn’t dare check whether the fence had been mended the following morning. She didn’t have to; she was counting on security to let her know that.

  They obliged the afternoon of the second day after she’d made her cut, calling for a safety check of all the workers’ bedrooms. She watched as they entered her room. Their feet thumped across the floor. Drawers rustled as the men in black turned them out. She wasn’t worried. There was nothing to find. Security finished up and returned to the barracks. They had given no explanation for the search, but Tristan didn’t need that, either. They’d been looking for whoever had made such a clean cut in the fence.

  Two days to find it. The fence wouldn’t be any problem, then. They’d notice she and Alden were gone long before they noticed the wires had been cut. Even so, on the chance her test run had stirred them into greater vigilance, she intended to wait several days before making her run. Give them time to get complacent again.

  Then Alden came to tell her he was going to war with Spokane.

  “It’s not a war,” he laughed.

  She rolled her lips together. “You just told me Hollister’s taking ten of you to help put down a rebellion. You know another word for rebellion? Civil war.”

  “We’re just like advising the people in Spokane and stuff. Training their troops.”

  “You’ve had two whole weeks of training and you’re qualified to teach people yourself? Pretty accelerated program Hollister’s got you on.”

  “What’s your problem?” Alden glared at her with teenage defiance, his face contorted, frighteningly reptilian. “It’s going to be like training for me, too. Like field work.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. In a few days.”

  She ran her fingers down the scars on the left side of her face. “I don’t want you to go.”

  His glare deepened. “Well, you don’t really get a vote. Those are reserved for people who earn it. Like I’m going to.”

  “Where do you sleep in the barracks?”

  “Why?”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “1F,” Alden said. “It’s not a big deal. That’s where all the recruits stay.”

  Tristan rolled her eyes. “1F? The back corner without any heating, I bet. Nice view of the fence.”

  “There’s heating. Who cares if you can see the fence?”

  She managed not to smile. “I thought you were signed up with Hollister to protect the community. How is getting shot to death in Spokane going to do one damn thing to help Hanford?”

  Alden shook his head, smiling at her obvious stupidity. “I’m not going to get shot.”

  “You can see the future?” she said, abruptly furious with this little know-it-all. “Then why aren’t you running from me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How I’m about to pick you up by the ankles and dash you against that tree.”

  “Did you just threaten one of my officers of the law?” Hollister said, appearing once again at the worst possible moment, as if he’d been lying in wait. He squinted at her through the sharp post-dawn light, mouth half open.

  “I threatened my brother,” Tristan said. “No uniform is going to stop a person from threatening their own family. Anyway, what kind of hypocrite are you? Sending a fourteen-year-old to war?”

  “The state of Hanford is not engaged in any wars.”

  “Really? This Blackwater bullshit you’re trying to pull in Spokane? Just what are they giving you in exchange for your ‘police’?”

  Hollister turned his bloodshot eyes on Alden. “That was classified information, Cadet Carter.”

  Alden scowled at Tristan. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Barracks. Now.”

  The boy spun on his heel and hustled for the security housing. Hollister tapped his nails on his baton, nodding at Tristan. “I feel like we’ve been here before.”

  “Child soldiers?” she said. “That’s a new one to me.”

  “Oh please. He won’t see the first hint of trouble until he’s finished his training.” Hollister worked his jaw. “Training you’re compromising with insidious doubt. You know what doubt does to a soldier?”

  “Restores his sanity?”

  “Ruins him. Gets him killed. Threatens his brothers in the field.”

  “What’s apt to get him killed is the fact he’s fourteen!”

  “You’re done.” The man cut his palms through the air. “You are no longer to have any contact with Alden Carter. Any efforts to defy this decision—if I so much as see you look at him—and you will be whipped.”

  She had to turn away to stop herself from striking him. “You can’t do that.”

  “Says who? I run security on this side of the river. This isn’t a joke. This isn’t an idle threat I’ll forget tomorrow. Talk to him again, and I will tie you to a post and whip you.”

  To stop herself from whipping the blade of her hand into his windpipe, she resolved to leave in two days. Not that she had much choice; Alden would be bound for Spokane within a week. But she had her gear together already. Her plan. The last piece of the puzzle had been discovering where Alden slept. The barracks was structured like a roadside motel—the front door led to a “lobby” and, she presumed, the upstairs where the security team gathered to strategize and drink Miller, but the bunk rooms themselves were accessed through outside doors, with no interior passages connecting them to each other. The front door was locked, but for whatever reason of philosophy (never leave your weapons behind), hubris (no one who’s not a security officer would dare step into their rooms), or just poor planning (oops), the bunkroom doors didn’t even have locks.

  “Understood,” Tristan said.

  Hollister’s focus swam through the red-rimmed murk of his eyes. “You’re taking this awful gentle.”

  “What else am I supposed to do?”

  “The Tristan I know? Throw a fit. Or a fist.”

  “How can you move forward when you’re always stopping to fight?”

  “Smart girl.” He watched her go.

  She got her gloves and went to the yard with the others. Amid the rasp of saws, the low jokes of the men, and the caws of gulls picking at the scraps around the picnic tables, she worked with patient diligence, cutting her marks and loading them up on the wagon for the men to haul off to the dig for the new longhouse. Her feeling of peace ran so deep Hollister could have walked up, slapped her in the face, and forced Alden to eat dirt at gunpoint, and she still would have borne it with a smile.

  Because it would all be over soon. In less than two days, they would be gone from here, somewhere on the roads through Oregon or Northern California. That was her provisional plan: head south, stock up for a couple of weeks, and find somewhere permanent before the end of the spring. Somewhere they could grow a garden. Have fresh water and a means of fuel to boil it clean. Find a streamside cabin in the woods beyond Redding. Somewhere past a ridge so the Empty Skulls wouldn’t see the smoke of their fires. If they could find a cabin—and between wealthy skiers, grizzled survivalists, and cartel pot operations, there were more than a few even in the remotest mountains of the Shasta Cascades—all they’d have to do was store enough wood to keep them warm through the winter. There was still more than enough food in the homes of the dead to see them through while they grew their
garden and learned where to fish and how to hunt.

  It felt good to have a plan again. A future, however fragile. It meant she had hope, too, for the first time in a long time. No matter how hard the work ahead, no matter how much chopping and planting and cleaning it took to set up their home, after everything that had happened in the last year, it would feel like the sleep at the end of a long journey.

  By dinner, her numinous optimism had been sucked away like rainfall on the dust. By bed, her doubts had sprung back to life like poison spores. Yet again, she’d let her anger get the best of her. Banned, under threat of actual whipping, from speaking to Alden. What if circumstances changed her plan and she needed his help after all? What if he didn’t even want to come? Was she so sure he’d leap out the door as soon as she showed up? He seemed happy here. Accepted. He was even looking forward to this idiocy in Spokane.

  That idea drew the darkest blood. What if Alden were genuinely happy here? She wasn’t his mother. Taking him away from here to be with her would be, in its way, just another form of imprisonment. For his own good, yeah. His safety. But she had been safest in the kingdom of Lord Dashing: locked in a room, knights warned to keep their hands to themselves, fed and housed and protected from all the wrongs lurking beyond the high stone fence. Safest, yes. Happiest? Not close.

  She shut these thoughts out. She would take him from this place. And once she taught him how to think well, that’s when he could start to make his decisions for himself.

  At breakfast, she didn’t glance Alden’s way. At work, she stuck to her cuts. At dinner, she took the duct tape and tarp back to her room, dawdling along the way to give her roommates time to clear out, and hid the items under her mattress. Alden was still in camp the following breakfast. When work finished at sunset, she took a hammer and the tin snips behind the shed, tucked them into her waistband, and went back to her room, where she scrubbed her hands and face until the last of her roommates left for dinner.

  The room was silent. She pressed her ear to the walls of both adjoining rooms and heard nothing besides the empty tone of her own ears. This was, perhaps, the biggest gamble in her plan. She had a cover story in case one of the woman who bunked in her room returned early—she had slipped while trying to hammer a loose nail into the sill—but even if they bought the lie, her plan could be spoiled.

  She pulled back the thick brown curtains on the eastern window. Fleeting sunlight showed a field of sparse weeds between her and the fence. The window was framed into eighteen-inch quarters. She tore at the duct tape, laying it in strips across the lower left quadrant of the window, first forming a square, then filling in the glass with a many-pointed aster. Last, she plastered the top of the square of tape to the upper edge of the sill.

  Tristan wrapped a sock around the hammer’s head, grinned foolishly, and bashed the taped-over center of the window.

  It fell apart neither as cleanly as she’d hoped nor as disastrously as she feared. The noise was a muffled crack; a few shards fell outward, hitting the yellow grass beneath the window. The bulk of the glass hung from the tape holding the window to the upper frame. She donned her gloves, pulled over a chair, climbed up, and removed the broken window from its frame. She brought it to her bed, splinters tinkling on the floor, and hid the mess underneath the bed frame. She hurriedly covered it in her dirty laundry and backtracked to sweep up the fallen pieces with her gloved hands. Heart racing, she cut out a square of the clear tarp and taped it into place in the empty window. She pulled back the drapes.

  The sun’s edge had already fallen below the hills. In a few minutes, it would be night. So long as the wind didn’t pick up and ripple the tarp—and even then, it would have to blow out of the east instead of its usual southwestern source—the window should go unnoticed until morning.

  She went outside, hastily buried the pieces that had fallen into the grass, brought her gloves inside and washed up, and went to the tables for a late dinner. Workers murmured, chuckled. She was glad she hadn’t made any friends. No one had bothered to note her absence.

  Tristan knew she should eat, but her nerves drowned out her hunger. She swallowed what she could and retired to her room for what would be the longest night of her life.

  She brushed her teeth and washed up, gaze flicking across the room whenever one of the women went too near the east window. Settled into bed, she feared falling asleep, but she couldn’t exactly do jumping jacks while waiting for her roommates to drift off. She lay on her side with her knuckles digging into her ribs and remembered all she could of Alden. The first day he’d come home from kung fu, flushed and sweaty and smelly, throwing punches at their mother’s stomach. His first day of middle school a week before Tristan left for Berkeley where he refused to tie his shoes because he said no kids tied their shoes anymore. The day their dad had driven them to get the puppy—a baby black lab with the fattest cannonball belly you’d ever seen—and it had licked Alden’s baby face and he’d cried and tried to squirm away.

  After remembering for an hour, she discovered she recalled his birth, too. His beginning. Pink. Squalling. She’d hated the hospital; it smelled like her dead grandparents. There was nothing to do. And the baby, Alden, was such an awful whiner.

  In the cold of the longhouse on the farm, stretched in deliberate discomfort beneath a worn-out down blanket, smelling her roommates’ skin and the cut lumber of walls that were younger than the virus that had destroyed it all, Tristan laughed and covered her mouth. She’d wanted to run away so badly after her brother was born. She had gone so far as to make herself a baggie of baby carrots and another of ranch dressing (spilling as much on the floor as in the Ziploc) and two boxes of an electric orange drink masquerading as juice and headed for the woods above the subdivision. A survivalist from the start.

  Pines so high they must tear holes in the sky. Squirrels yelling from the boughs. The smell of sunlight on fallen leaves. At the time, she would have sworn she’d climbed within a stone’s throw of the very peak of the mountain. In truth, she couldn’t have made it more than a half mile from the end of the manicured lawns before eating her snacks and turning back. Her dad was still at work. Her mom hadn’t even noticed she was gone.

  It was time.

  She rose, dressing in the darkness. She put on her jacket and carried her shoes. Leaving the blinds in place, she peeled the tape from the sill as gently as she could and lifted the tarp. She flung her shoes into the weeds and dropped her pack into the grass. Her shoulders barely cleared the frame. She wriggled partway out the window like a half-dead snake. There was no room to sit on the sill, to right herself and drop down to her feet. Tristan prayed for no broken wrists and let herself fall face first toward the ground.

  She caught herself and half-rolled, half-flopped to her back. Her wrist twinged, but the pain faded as she laced up her shoes. Bugs chirped from the halfhearted grass of spring. She went straight for the fence, put on her leather gloves, got out the snips, and cut a six-foot strip from each of the lowest two wires. She crawled through on her belly.

  On the other side, she sat up in the cold night and grinned. The stars burned like angry souls. She crawled on hands and knees for several hundred yards, then crouched behind a clump of sage and turned to watch the enclosure.

  Across the river, faint blue light flashed behind the buildings. The color was unnatural, wrong. Her instincts told her to go back. She should have listened. She swore silently and continued on. It took her the better part of an hour to find the sage where she’d buried her gun and her gear; she only found it by walking in ever-wider circles until she literally stumbled over the mound.

  She was halfway back to the camp when the alarm screamed into the night.

  Tristan froze. The croon of an air raid siren soared and ebbed. Not from the barracks—it was too distant, too night-muffled. From the plant. She dropped to hands and knees and crawled through the weeds. Men jabbered from over by the barracks. A dog barked. Tristan wriggled under the fence and jogged back to her housi
ng, meaning to pull herself back in through the window and try again tomorrow.

  “What was that sound?” one of the women said inside the still-dark room. “Are we about to be bombed?”

  Tristan gritted her teeth. Of course the alarm had woken them. The circuit breaker for the lights was cut off every night, but her absence would be exposed the second they lit a candle or clicked on a flashlight. Or simply realized she wasn’t joining their anxious conversation about the siren.

  The alarm died mid-whoop. The women inside the longhouse went silent, listening. All Tristan could do now was crawl back to the wasteland and hope everyone returned to bed. It was still deep in the night. There was little chance security would spot the gap in the fence. She could return once the guards went back to sleep.

  “Turn around,” a man said from her side. “Slow.”

  He was dressed in the black of security. A rifle glinted in his hands. He edged closer. “Drop the pack and put your hands on your head. You twitch, you speak, I shoot.”

  The pistol was zippered in her pack. No way to get to it before he pulled the trigger. She slid the pack from her shoulders and raised her hands. He circled behind her, yanked down her hands, and knotted them tight with a zip tie. He grabbed her backpack and prodded her toward the barracks.

  “Move.”

  She walked. Her legs felt numb. Her thoughts went thick. She should have tried to grab his gun when he’d gone for the plastic cuffs, but she’d been so wrapped up in her interrupted plans her brain hadn’t been ready to shift gears. Headlights flared in front of the barracks, illuminating the turreted U-Haul they belonged to. Security milled around the vehicle. A man pulled the lever locking its gate in place and the slatted metal cranked up into the truck roof. Cannibalized car seats lined its walls. A rack of guns stood at the far end.

  The guard marched her straight to Hollister. “Look what I got. Found her outside her bunk.”