by Dan Wells
The man by the subway stairs was stretching, his backpack lying gently on the ground beside him. Was he prepping for a strike? She had to go now. Kira scrambled to her feet and bolted toward the storefront, bracing herself for the impact of bullets in her back. Behind her she heard a yelp, like a cry of fear, but she didn’t turn around. At the back of the old pizza place was a thin wooden door, and beyond it an office; Kira dove through and slammed it closed behind her, switching on her light to look for another exit. There was none.
She was trapped.
CHAPTER NINE
Kira swept her arm across the metal desk in the center of the room, clearing away decades-old dust and thick stacks of papers. Last was a thin computer monitor, which she knocked aside on her backswing before flipping the desk on its side, diving behind it for an extra layer of shielding. She crouched low behind the barrier, her rifle tucked into the side of her face, the barrel trained squarely on the door; if the knob so much as twitched, she could put a whole clip into whoever stood beyond it. She waited, barely daring to breathe.
She waited.
A minute went by. Five minutes. Ten minutes. She imagined another gunman on the far side of the door, lying in wait as carefully as she was. Which one of them would break first? There were more of them, and they had the advantage; they had more room to maneuver, and more people to do it with. But she wasn’t going to give up that easily. If they wanted her, they had to come in and get her.
Ten more minutes went by, and Kira shifted her weight painfully from one leg to the other. She blinked sweat from her eyes, feeling them red and raw, but still she refused to move. Another ten minutes. Her throat was parched and painful, her fingers cramped around the handgrip of her gun. Nothing moved. No sound disturbed the night.
Kira’s flashlight flickered, sick and yellow as the batteries started to fail. They’d been weak for a few days, and she hadn’t found any replacements yet. Ten minutes later the light winked out for good, and Kira closed her eyes uselessly against the utter blackness, listening with every ounce of her focus: for the doorknob, for the creak of floorboards or the squeak of shoes, for the click of a gun as it readied to fire. Ten more minutes. Twenty. An hour. Were they really this patient?
Or was there nobody there?
Kira rubbed her eyes, thinking back on the attack. She had assumed there was a trap—it was the most logical explanation—but she hadn’t actually seen anyone. Was it really possible that the man outside, unarmed and alone in a dead city full of monsters, was really the only one? It was extremely unlikely, but yes, it was possible. Was she ready to bet her life on that possibility?
She lowered her gun, whimpering silently at the ache in her stiff shoulders. She moved as quietly as she could to the side of the room, out of the line of fire that would come through the door, and listened again. All was quiet. She reached out with one hand, hugging the wall tightly, and touched the doorknob. Nobody shot her. She took a breath, gripped the knob tightly, and threw it open as fast as she could, yanking her hand back and rolling away from the opening. No gunfire, no shouts, no noise at all but the creak of the door. She stared at the dark black doorway, trying to work up the courage to go through it, and decided to try one more thing; she picked up the monitor she’d knocked off the desk, found a good stance, and heaved it out the door, hoping to draw the fire of anyone lurking on the other side. The monitor clattered to the ground, the screen cracked, and the silence returned.
“Nobody shoot me,” she said, just in case, and slowly came around the corner of the door frame. The pizza place beyond was as empty as ever, and out in the street the sagging metal cars reflected shafts of moonlight. She crept outside, rifle up and ready, checking her corners and watching for an ambush, but she was alone. On the far side of the street stood the subway entrance, and beside it the large man’s cart, motionless and abandoned. A jug lay on the ground nearby, dropped on its side, the water now long spilled out. A few feet away, where he had laid it against the wall of the subway entrance, was the man’s bulging backpack.
Kira walked a full circuit of the intersection, running from car to car for cover, before approaching the backpack. It was enormous, practically as big as she was, and she couldn’t help but think of the shattered craters of the previous two houses she’d seen. Did she really want to open a bomber’s backpack? He could have left it here as a trap specifically to kill her . . . but honestly, he’d had so many easier opportunities to just shoot her if he really wanted her dead. Or were explosives the only weapon he knew? Maybe he really didn’t have a gun at all.
She circled the bag warily, rubbing her face with her palm, trying to make a decision. Was it worth it? The nocturnal monster still haunted her—the one time she’d taken a major risk, she’d nearly died. But her caution was costing her time, and time wasn’t a resource she could afford to spend this freely. The answers she was looking for—what is the Trust? How are the Partials connected to RM? Who am I, and what plan am I a part of? Those were the answers that could save the human race or destroy it. As dangerous as her choices were, she still had to make them. She slung her rifle behind her shoulder and reached for the bag—
—and heard a voice.
Kira scrambled back, ducking behind the wall of the subway entrance. The voice was soft, but it carried well in the midnight silence—a faint muttering from a side street, maybe half a block down and closing. She gripped her rifle, looking for somewhere to run, but she was trapped in the open. Instead she crept slowly to the side, keeping the subway entrance between her and the speaker. As he drew nearer, the muttering got louder and louder until at last she understood the words.
“Never leave the backpack, never leave the backpack.” It was the same phrase, over and over: “Never leave the backpack.” She peeked out and saw the large man from before, trudging up the street with his same waddling gait. “Never leave the backpack.” His hands twitched, and his eyes darted back and forth across the street. “Never leave the backpack.”
Kira wasn’t sure what it was; something about the way he walked, or spoke, or rubbed his hands together—probably a combination of all that and more—that made her decide. She’d wasted enough time. She had to act. She slung her rifle back over her shoulder, spread her hands wide to show that they were empty, and stepped out from her hiding place, between him and the backpack.
“Hello.”
The man jerked to a stop, his eyes wide with horror, and he turned and bolted back the way he had come. Kira stepped forward to follow, not certain if she should, when suddenly he stopped, bending low at the waist as if wounded, and shook his head violently. “Never leave the backpack,” he said, turning toward her, “never leave the backpack.” He saw her again and ran a few more steps away, as if it were an involuntary reaction, but then he stopped again, turning and eyeing the backpack with a pained, terrified expression. “Never leave the backpack.”
“It’s all right,” said Kira, wondering what was happening. This wasn’t at all what she’d expected. “I’m not going to hurt you.” She tried to look as harmless as possible.
“I need the backpack,” he said, his voice practically dripping with desperation. “I’m not supposed to ever leave the backpack, I always take it with me, it’s everything I have.”
“Are these your supplies?” she asked, stepping to the side. The move gave the man a better view of the backpack, and he surged forward five more steps, his hand reaching out as if to snatch it away from her from fifty feet away. “I’m not here to steal from you,” she said slowly. “I just want to talk. How many others are there?”
“That’s the only one,” he pleaded. “I need it, I can’t lose it, it’s everything I have—”
“Not the backpack,” she said, “other people: How many other people are with you in the safe house?”
“Please give me the backpack,” he said again, creeping forward. He stepped into the light, and she could see tears in his eyes. His voice was hoarse and desperate. “I need it, I need it,
I need the backpack. Please give it back to me.”
“Is it medicine? Do you need help?”
“Please give it back,” he muttered, over and over. “Never leave the backpack.” Kira considered for a moment, then stepped to the side, moving twenty feet away to the other side of the water cart—far enough that he could come up and grab the backpack while still staying well outside her reach. He rushed forward and collapsed on it, clutching it and crying, and Kira looked again for an ambush—for snipers in the windows, or men coming up behind him in the street. He seemed to be completely alone. What’s going on here? Could this be the bomber who’d been so hard to track, who’d set traps so cunning that even Partials didn’t find them until it was too late?
He didn’t seem eager to talk about anything but the backpack, though, so she focused on that.
“What’s in it?”
He answered without looking up. “Everything.”
“Your food? Your weapons?”
“No weapons,” he said firmly, shaking his head, “no weapons. I’m a noncombatant, you can’t shoot me, I don’t have any weapons.”
Kira took a small step forward. “Food, then?”
“Are you hungry?” He seemed to perk up at this, his head rising.
Kira thought carefully, then nodded. “A little.” She paused, then gestured toward her own pack. “I have some beans if you want some, and a can of pineapple I found in a drugstore.”
“I have lots of pineapple,” he said, climbing slowly to his feet. He brushed off his hands and hefted the backpack up onto his shoulders. “I like fruit cocktail best: It has pineapples and peaches and pears and cherries. Come back to my house and I’ll show you.”
“Your house,” she said, thinking back to the craters. She was more sure now than ever that this man was no Partial; if anything, he seemed like a giant child. “Who else is back there?”
“Nobody,” he said, “nobody at all. I’m a noncombatant, you can’t shoot me. We’ll eat fruit cocktail in my house.”
Kira thought about it a moment longer, then nodded. If this was a trap, it was the weirdest one she’d ever encountered. She put out her hand to shake. “My name is Kira Walker.”
“My name is Afa Demoux.” He placed the fallen water jug on the cart, gathered his pump, and began towing it all back to the safe house. “You’re a Partial, and I’m the last human being on Earth.”
Afa’s safe house turned out to be an old TV station, old enough to contain some equipment from before the days of computerized entertainment. Kira had done salvage runs on a handful of local news stations back on Long Island, and their systems had been arcane but small: cameras, cables, and little bits of computer equipment feeding everything into the cloud. This building had that as well—every TV station probably did, she thought, given the old world’s obsession with the internet—but it had older devices as well: broad banks of manual mixing equipment, a room of mysterious broadcasting machines designed to send everything into the sky, to be picked up by remote antennas instead of beamed directly through satellite links. This was why the building still had its enormous antenna, and that was why Afa lived here. She knew this because he told her, over and over, for nearly an hour.
“The cloud went down,” he said again, “but radios don’t need the cloud—it’s a point-to-point communication system. All you need is a radio, an antenna, and enough electricity to run it. I can broadcast to anyone, and they can broadcast to me, and we don’t need a network or a cloud or anything. With an antenna this big I can broadcast all over the world.”
“That’s great,” said Kira, “but who do you talk to? Who’s out there?” There had to be more survivors than just Long Island—she’d always hoped but never dared to believe.
Afa shook his head—broad and brown-skinned, with a bushy black beard salted liberally with gray. Kira guessed that he was Polynesian, but she didn’t know the individual islands well enough to guess which one. “There’s nobody out there,” he said. “I’m the last human on Earth.”
He did live alone; that much, at least, was true. He had converted the TV station into a twisting warren of stored equipment: generators, portable radios, stockpiles of food and explosives, and pile after pile of papers. He had stacks of files and folders, bundles of news clippings held together by twine, boxes of yellowed printouts next to more boxes of scraps and receipts and notarized documents. Thick binders overflowed with photos, some of them glossy, some of them printed on weathered office paper; other photos bulged from boxes or spilled out of rooms, entire offices filled floor to ceiling with records and filing cabinets and always, everywhere, more photos than she’d ever imagined. Those few walls not covered with cabinets and bookshelves and tall stacks of boxes were papered over with maps: maps of New York State and others, maps of the United States, maps of the NADI alliance, maps of China and Brazil and the entire world. Covering the maps was a dense nest of pushpins and strings and crooked metal flags. They made Kira dizzy just looking at them, and all the time, on every surface, even crunching and rustling underfoot, were the papers and papers and papers that defined and bounded Afa’s life.
Kira pressed him again, setting down her can of fruit cocktail. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m the last human on Earth.”
“There are humans on Long Island,” she said. “What about them?”
“Partials,” he said quickly, waving his hand to dismiss the idea. “All Partials. It’s all here, all in the files.” He gestured around grandly, as if the mounds of unordered papers were plain evidence of universal truth. Kira nodded, irrationally grateful for this fleck of insanity—when he had first called her a Partial it had scared her, truly disturbed her. He’d been the first human ever to say the words out loud to her, and the accusation—the knowledge that someone might actually know, might actually say it—had shaken her to the core. Knowing that Afa was merely delusional, thinking everyone in the world was a Partial, made it easier to bear.
Kira pressed again, hoping that more specific questions might draw out a more specific answer. “You used to work for ParaGen.”
He stopped, his eyes locked on hers, his body tense, then returned to his eating with forced nonchalance. He didn’t answer.
“Your name was on a door at the ParaGen office,” she said. “That’s where you got some of this equipment.” She gestured around at the rows of computers and monitors. “What are they for?”
Afa didn’t answer, and Kira paused again to watch him. There was something wrong with his mind, she was certain—something about the way he moved, the way he talked, even the way he sat. He didn’t think as quickly, or at least not in the same ways, as anyone Kira had met before. How had he survived on his own like this? He was cautious, certainly, but only about certain things; his home was miraculously well defended, filled with ingenious traps and security measures to keep himself hidden and his equipment safe, but on the other hand, he’d gone outside unarmed. The best explanation, Kira told herself, is that there’s somebody else with him. Based on what I’ve seen, there’s no way he’s capable of defending himself this well, and certainly no way he could set up all this equipment. He’s like a child. Maybe whoever’s really running this safe house uses him as an assistant? But as much as Kira had tried, she hadn’t been able to see or hear anyone else in the building. Whoever it was was hiding too well.
Talking about ParaGen just makes him clam up, she told herself, so I need to try a different tactic. She saw him eyeing her half-eaten can of fruit and held it out to him. “Do you want the rest?”
He grabbed it quickly. “It has cherries in it.”
“Yes, it does. Do you like cherries?”
“Of course I like cherries. I’m human.”
Kira almost laughed, but managed to stop herself. She knew plenty of humans who hated cherries. Sharing the fruit seemed to undo the nervousness she’d caused by mentioning ParaGen, so she probed him about a new topic. “It’s very brave of you to go out at night,” she sai
d. “A few nights ago I got attacked by something huge; I barely got away with my life.”
“It used to be a bear,” said Afa, his mouth full of fruit cocktail. “You need to wait till it catches something.”
“What happens when it catches something?”
“It eats it.”
Kira shook her head. “Well, yeah, but I mean why do you need to wait for that to happen? What does that mean?”
“If it’s eating something, it’s not hungry,” he said, staring blankly at the floor. “Wait until it eats, and then go outside to get water while it’s busy. That way it won’t eat you. But always remember to take the backpack,” he said, pointing in front of him with his spoon. “You can’t ever leave the backpack.”
Kira marveled at the simplicity of his plan, but even so, his answer sparked a dozen new questions: How did he know when the monster had eaten? What did he mean that it “used to be” a bear? What was so important about the backpack, and who had told him all these strategies in the first place? She decided to pursue the latter question, as it seemed like the best opportunity to broach the topic again.
“Who told you not to leave the backpack?”
“Nobody told me,” he said. “I’m a human. Nobody’s in charge of me, ’cause I’m the only one left.”