Resurrection (Book 3): The Last City

by Totten, Michael J.

  Good to go, Hughes thought.

  As Lucas screamed himself raw into tape over his mouth, Parker sat on the floor near the front door of the warehouse, far away from the offices on the mezzanine level, and plugged his ears with his fingers. That thing tied to the chair was not even Lucas any longer, as if his body had been taken over by a demonic spirit determined to explode his body outward from his lungs and his guts.

  Parker had been there. Oh, had he been there. Most of the time, he remembered it only faintly, like a dream that half fades into the mists upon awakening. Hearing Lucas wailing and thrashing brought it all back, the malevolent rage of a hungry hungry predator chained by its food, by its prey. Parker could not bear to hear it. He couldn’t even bear to share the same cavernous building.

  Breathe, he told himself. If he breathed slowly enough, he could slow down his heart and his mind.

  He couldn’t sit for three days on the floor, though. His back would cry out in agony. So he lay on the concrete and gazed at the high ceiling with his fingers in his ears.

  There were skylights up there, embedded in the roof of the warehouse. Bright shafts of afternoon sun slanted in through those portals. He imagined himself floating up and out into the light. Perhaps that’s what dying would be like.

  Parker felt better on his back, as if he were somehow farther away from Lucas’s trauma. He unplugged his fingers from his ears. Lucas’s heaving and groaning wasn’t actually all that loud, not with his mouth taped. Now that Parker thought about it, he doubted anyone or anything would be able to hear it from outside unless they were standing right below the office windows in back. The sound still disturbed him, but he forced himself to listen to it. He needed exposure therapy. Sound couldn’t actually hurt him. It might not even bother him much if he could habituate himself to it, the way people with tinnitus eventually stopped noticing the ringing in their ears even though it was still there. Surely it was what Betty the therapist back in Wyoming would tell him to do. Besides, he couldn’t keep his fingers in his ears for three solid days.

  He wondered what kind of person Lucas would be when he snapped out of it. Annie had succumbed to temporary amnesia. Parker had suffered panic attacks. Perhaps Lucas wouldn’t fully recover, emerging instead as a full-blown homicidal psychopath that Parker and Hughes would have to put down. Anything was possible.

  If anything was possible, though, Lucas might forge himself into a better man after recovery. That’s what Parker was trying to do, after all. He’d never forget what Hughes had asked him when he resurfaced from his own ordeal. What kind of man do you want to be? Parker was too traumatized then to even consider the question, but he knew the answer now. He wanted to earn the privilege of being one of the last survivors on earth.

  Almost everybody was dead, so why was he, of all people, alive? It was mostly a matter of random chance—he understood that—but at the same time, he couldn’t entirely shake the feeling that the universe had a moral center, that terrible things happened for a reason. At the very least, he could make something good follow tragedy that would not have been possible otherwise.

  He ought to go upstairs and check on Lucas. Face his own demons. Make sure the bandage on the man’s neck hadn’t come loose and that Lucas hadn’t tipped himself over.

  Parker rose from the floor and headed toward the back stairs. He saw that the others were sitting almost in a circle on the floor in the middle of the building with Annie a healthy distance from Roy.

  “You okay?” Hughes said to Parker as he approached.

  “Heading up to check on Lucas.”

  Hughes nodded. Kyle tipped his head back.

  Annie opened her mouth a little. Parker could read her face. She knew this would be hard for him.

  Roy didn’t react, didn’t seem the least bit interested in how his supposed friend was doing, and didn’t betray even a twinge of guilt for putting him there.

  Parker felt flushed when he reached the bottom of the stairs. He could hear Lucas’s groaning and clamoring as clearly now as if they were together in the same room. Lucas was heaving himself forward and backward. Parker could tell without even looking that the chair Lucas was tied to was, somehow, still upright.

  He ascended the stairs, pausing again outside the door. He made fists with his hands and cracked his knuckles with his thumbs, told himself that anxiety was just a feeling, that it would pass, that a welling up of panic wasn’t medically dangerous, that he could settle down later, perhaps in his sleep, and talk about it afterward with Annie because she, of all people, would at least understand.

  Parker opened the door and saw not Lucas but himself strapped to that chair, the fury of a hundred suns exploding behind pitiless eyes.

  Parker joined the group in the center of the warehouse. They sat mostly in a circle on the floor with Annie opposite Roy and outside the circumference, as if she’d rather be somewhere else but didn’t want to be by herself. Parker took a spot on the floor next to her and wondered why no one had busted out the camping chairs yet.

  “How’s Lucas?” Annie said.

  Parker knew what she meant. Annie was not asking about Lucas’s well-being. Lucas had no well-being. She wanted to know how Parker was doing after getting a look at him.

  He answered by opening his eyes wide.

  Kyle craned his head back and looked at the ceiling. The sun was lower on the horizon now and no longer slanting in through the skylights. “I’m really liking Arkansas so far.”

  Roy chuckled. Parker was surprised the man had a sense a humor.

  “Wish I could show you folks Fayetteville,” Roy said. He paused. “Best warehouses around.”

  “You know,” Parker said to Roy, “he’s going to be royally pissed at you when he recovers.”

  “More pissed than he is now?” Roy said and laughed at his own joke.

  “Seriously, man,” Parker said. “What are you going to tell him?”

  Roy shrugged. “I don’t have to tell him anything.”

  “He knows you let him get bit,” Parker said.

  “He doesn’t know anything,” Roy said. “Not right now he doesn’t. And he might not even remember our names when he comes out of it. If he comes out of it. Isn’t that what y’all said happened to Annie?”

  “My memories came back,” Annie said, “after a couple of days.”

  “Lucas didn’t see it happen,” Roy said. “He won’t know if none of you tell him.”

  Parker doubted that, but he supposed it could be true. Hughes had seen what happened, but Parker hadn’t. Kyle or Annie hadn’t seen it either, so Lucas also might not have. “We should tell him.”

  “The hell for?” Roy said.

  “Because it’s the right thing to do, asshole,” Kyle said.

  “You people,” Roy said. “The right thing to do.”

  Kyle gave Roy some side-eye.

  Parker liked Kyle now, especially with these jackasses around for comparison. Kyle has been a punk when Parker first met him, but he was more of a man now and less of a child. Kyle was, at his core, a decent person and always had been. Parker hadn’t seen that at first because it hadn’t yet occurred to him that it mattered.

  “Roy?” Parker said.

  “Yes, sir,” Roy said.

  “What do you plan to do when all this is over?”

  “All what?” Roy said.

  “When the doctors find a cure,” Parker said.

  Roy shrugged. “Hope they’ll cure me.”

  “Then what?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Don’t know,” Roy said.

  “What did you do for a living before all this?” Parker said.

  “That’s a peculiar question.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because you’re the first person to ask it.”

  “How many people have you met since this happened?”

  Roy rolled his shoulders. “Dozens maybe.”

  “And nobody asked you?”


  Roy jutted his chin slightly and shook his head.

  “We’re stuck in this place for days,” Parker said. “Might as well be friendly, don’t you think?”

  Roy didn’t respond.

  “I built cabinets for a living,” Parker said. “Hughes here was a bail bondsman. Annie was a college student. Kyle did something with computers.”

  Roy said nothing at first, clearly uninterested, but he played along in the end. “I installed home security systems.”

  Parker wondered if that meant Roy had known, or had access to, the passcodes his customers used to disarm their security systems.

  “What did Lucas do?” Hughes said.

  “Hell if I know,” Roy said. “Didn’t know him back then. Never asked him.”

  “You guys have been wandering around the countryside together for how long?” Parker said. “And you haven’t asked him?”

  “The person I was is dead,” Roy said. “The person Lucas was is dead. The people y’all used to be are dead too.”

  “I’m still me,” Annie said, sounding more defensive than she should.

  “Bless your heart, ma’am,” Roy said, “but I doubt that.”

  Annie got a little red in the face. Parker saw anger there and something else too.

  “Doesn’t matter who Lucas was,” Roy said. “Only matters who he is.”

  Parker shook his head.

  “These people,” Kyle said, “are the best friends I’ve ever had.” He looked Parker right in the eye when he said that. Parker nodded, slowly and deliberately, and saw out of the corner of his eye that Annie watched it happen.

  “We’ve all lost people,” Kyle said. “Hughes lost his wife and child. Annie lost her sister. Parker never heard from his ex-wife again. She’s a missing person now, basically. She left him before all this, and he did everything he could to get her back.”

  Parker’s throat ached as he listened to this. His friends didn’t know why Holly had left him. He never told them and never would. Holly left him because he hit her. He only hit her once, and he’d hated himself for it since. A single act that lasted less than a second permanently changed who he was. Roy’s nonsense be damned, not even the end of the world could change that searing fact about Parker.

  “I wouldn’t be here,” Hughes said, “if I hadn’t lost my wife and my child.”

  “That’s how y’all define yourselves now?” Roy said. “By what you’ve lost?”

  Hughes threw his hands in the air. “I don’t get you, man. I truly don’t. My wife and child made me who I am. I’d bet my life that you weren’t ever married. I’d bet my life that you never loved anyone.”

  Roy stared at a point in space at the back of the warehouse.

  Night fell. Kyle went upstairs to check on Lucas. He took the tiny LED flashlight on Parker’s keychain, the one that emitted the faint blue glow. It barely illuminated his feet. No chance that anyone or anything would see it from outside even if they were squinting up at the windows.

  Kyle was worried because Lucas had gone quiet. The man was probably just down for the night—the infected had to sleep too—but there was always a chance that something had happened. Lucas could have had a rage-induced heart attack or a stroke. Maybe he bled out from the wound in his neck or got some kind of infection aside from the obvious one.

  Kyle didn’t care about Lucas per se. He didn’t even like the guy, couldn’t help but see him through Annie’s eyes at least some of the time, but Lucas and Roy were helping Kyle and his friends get to Atlanta, something they did not have to do, something that could save the lives of many thousands of people. Lucas himself was one of the few remaining survivors and had value for that reason alone. If Kyle expected Lucas to have his back, he was duty-bound to reciprocate.

  The metal stairs shuddered under the weight of a person, so Kyle took them slow. He didn’t want to wake the poor bastard and felt relief that the infected, despite everything, still needed to sleep.

  He reached the top of the stairs, stepped into the office, and aimed his faint light toward the chair. Lucas’s head slumped sideways, and his chest rose and fell. He was still upright. The bandage, though, was thick with dried blood. At some point, Lucas’s screaming and thrashing must have reopened the wound, but it seemed to have sealed again. Tomorrow, Kyle thought, they should wash his neck and dress him with a fresh bandage.

  He had a low opinion of Lucas, but he’d had an even lower opinion of Parker when they’d first met, and Parker was well along the path of redemption. Parker seemed to be an even better person because he’d been infected. A certain amount of suffering was good for us, Kyle thought. It was a crucible that burned away the impurities and left only the things that matter most—family, friends, and the sheer wonder of being alive. It helped us see the suffering in others and feel something for them. Parker would never be the same after everything he’d been through, and Lucas was now being tormented in the same inferno that had burned away the darkness in Parker.

  Kyle thought back to when he met Annie. It felt like ten years ago even though it was only a couple of months ago. How different he was now. He hadn’t changed so much so quickly in the whole of his life. He wondered, then, if Roy had a point. Was the person Kyle used to be dead?

  He didn’t think so. He wouldn’t be who he was today if he hadn’t once been somebody else. In his distant future—and he could believe again that he had a distant future ahead of him—he’d no doubt change again, but he’d change from where he was now, the various versions of Kyle strung together in time like links in a chain. Whoever and whatever Lucas once was, he would not be the same after recovery. Whether he’d be a better person or a worse person was anyone’s guess. Not even Roy could know the answer to that. It hadn’t even occurred to Roy to ask the question.

  Kyle crept silently down the stairs and found Annie waiting for him below.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, yourself,” he said.

  He saw her smile in the faint blue glow from his light.

  “Come on,” she said and held out her hand to him.

  Warmth spread in his chest as he took her hand. She led him toward the dead-bolted door in the back, far away from the others.

  What was she doing? He didn’t dare get his hopes up, but . . . was she doing what he thought she was doing?

  She spun around when they reached the far wall and kissed him full on the mouth.

  It took him a moment to respond, but he got there after a moment and leaned into the kiss, placing his hands on her waist as she rested hers on the back of his neck. She probed his mouth with her tongue and pressed her body into his.

  She pulled back for a moment, took a breath, and said, “I’ve wanted to do this for days.”

  I’ve wanted to do this for months, he thought.

  Then Lucas woke up. At first, he just grunted, and Kyle paused and turned his ear toward the office upstairs.

  “Forget him,” Annie said and kissed him again, harder this time.

  Lucas went quiet again, and Kyle all but forgot about him.

  He luxuriated in Annie and thought, I am the luckiest person alive.

  “How far do you want to take this?” Kyle whispered.

  Annie let him go for a moment and lifted her shirt over her head. That answered the question. For the briefest of instants, he considered saying they should make sure the others went to sleep first, but Kyle wasn’t about to pull the plug on this moment. Not a chance.

  Lucas screamed into the duct tape and rattled the office chair. The worst sort of distraction possible, but also the best. The others wouldn’t hear him and Annie.

  He reached behind her back to unhook her bra strap. He couldn’t figure out how. He was never any good at this and doubted he ever would be.

  “I got it,” Annie said and laughed. She reached behind herself, unlatched the strap with a single motion, and let her bra fall to the floor.

  Kyle cupped her cool right breast in his left hand. He wished he could look her
in the eye when he did it, but the warehouse couldn’t be darker.

  Then Lucas screamed again, louder this time, and managed to topple his chair to the floor. The sound of metal and plastic and human weight crashing onto concrete echoed throughout the warehouse.

  Kyle willed himself to ignore it. The others would handle it if the situation had to be handled.

  He dropped to his knees and kissed Annie’s breasts. She cooed and grinded her hips. He felt himself go hard and ignored the chatter from the others inside the warehouse.

  A new ruckus now from the office: in addition to Lucas’s screaming, blessedly muted by the tape over his mouth, something was banging repeatedly against metal.

  “Kyle!” Hughes’s voice. “Annie!”

  Goddammit.

  Somebody shushed Hughes. Probably Parker.

  More banging and shaking. Lucas was down for sure and slamming himself into a filing cabinet.

  “Kyle!” Hughes said again, quieter this time.

  Why was Hughes calling his name? Couldn’t he go up there himself?

  Then he remembered. He had the LED light, the only one they could use in that warehouse at night without drawing attention from outside through the windows twenty feet up.

  Kyle reluctantly pulled away from Annie. “Can I get a rain check?”

  Annie answered him with a quick kiss, then squatted and fussed with her bra and her shirt.

  “Kyle!” Hughes said, angrily but still quietly.

  “Coming,” Kyle said. He used the blue glow to find his way back to the others.

  Lucas banged his chair into the cabinet some more.

  “What are you and Annie doing?” Hughes, his face faintly cobalt. “Never mind. We need to get up there.”

  Kyle led the way, and the others followed, including Annie—bra and shirt in place again—up the stairs and into the office.

  Lucas had indeed tipped himself over and was slamming himself hard against one of the metal cabinets.