Resurrection (Book 3): The Last City

by Totten, Michael J.

  Hughes huffed, as if he didn’t like sitting helplessly in the back seat with no sense of control or even a map. He had a job to do too, though, so he radioed Roy and relayed Annie’s directions.

  Parker followed the RV onto Dogwood Road, exiting the suburban sprawlscape and plunging them into a forest on what looked like a rural two-lane highway.

  “The hell are we?” Hughes said.

  “We’re still going the right way,” Annie said. “Heading south from Alpharetta to Sandy Springs. This isn’t unusual. Atlanta is huge, but it’s a city in a forest like Seattle and Portland.”

  There weren’t even any houses on the side of the road here, nor were they any infected. If Annie didn’t know better, she’d think they were in the wilds of Kentucky again.

  “Good job, Annie,” Parker said.

  “Take it slow, Roy,” Hughes said into the radio.

  So Annie was navigating now, and she was doing a heck of a job of it. They truly didn’t need Roy anymore. She could whack him right there in the suburbs and never look back, never regret it. He had entirely outlived his usefulness. They could find a nice quiet place, radio for him to stop for a moment, and plug him right in the face.

  “Darker here,” Parker said.

  And it was. Most of the trees were leafless this time of year, but they still made long, dark shadows on the road that blocked much of the light from above.

  Parker took the Suburban across the Chattahoochee River on Johnson Ferry Road, turned right onto Riverside Drive, and emerged in a lightly wooded area where long driveways winded up to mansions on hills. The streets were quiet and clear.

  Annie checked her map. “I think we’re coming up on the Perimeter.”

  “What’s that?” Parker said. “Freeway,” Annie said. “I-285.” A ring road, and the midpoint between downtown and the countryside.

  They went straight through a traffic circle, across an overpass wrapped with a hurricane fence above the dark and silent Perimeter road, and into more trees. Halfway there now.

  Annie bit her knuckle. “Roy said there were infected all over the suburbs.”

  “We’ve seen ‘em,” Parker said.

  “Not really,” Annie said. “We saw more of them the night we left Lander than we’ve seen here.”

  “Don’t get cocky,” Hughes said. “Hordes move around.”

  “I’m not getting cocky,” Annie said. “I’m not convinced Roy was actually here. We’ve hardly even seen any damage.”

  “Most people left,” Parker said.

  “Exactly,” Annie said. “So how many infected could there be?”

  “Six million people lived here,” Hughes said. “Less than ten thousand lived in Lander. And you said it yourself. We saw more there than we’ve seen here. So, whatever is here, we haven’t seen yet.”

  Annie consulted the map again and checked the street signs to ensure she knew where they were.

  “Bunch of malls off to the right,” she said. “Don’t go that way. Head east.”

  “Which way’s east?” Parker said. The suburban roads weren’t laid out on anything resembling a grid.

  “Make a left on Powers Ferry Road,” Annie said. “There’s a golf course. Plenty of open space. Coming up in a minute or so.”

  Hughes radioed the directions to Roy.

  Annie stewed. No point following the sonofabitch, especially now that she was leading him from behind. But she marveled at her surroundings. They were in a bonafide forest with stately old homes set back from the road. And this was after crossing the Perimeter to the inner half of the metro area. Whoever had lived here lived well. The area was effectively rural yet barely a half hour’s drive from downtown. The best of both city and country. And there were no infected here, even after the end of the world.

  “Stay on this road,” Annie said. “Up ahead we’ll take Old Ivy to Roxboro, which will take us right to North Druid Hills.”

  North Druid Hills. That’s where they’d find the wall.

  “How far is that from here?” Hughes said.

  “Three of four miles maybe,” Annie said.

  “Brace yourselves,” Hughes said. “We’re getting close to the city center.”

  “Don’t worry,” Annie said. “We’re skirting it.”

  The RV suddenly loomed larger ahead. For a brief moment, it appeared to be moving in reverse toward the Suburban. Parker slammed on the brakes. Annie lurched forward and strained against her seatbelt. The RV was not moving backwards. It had come to a sudden stop in the road. With its tail and brake lights off, Parker hadn’t realized what had happened until he’d damn near driven up Roy’s ass.

  Annie squinted into her night vision and saw nothing beyond the RV except the road and more trees. A church with a magnificent steeple rose above a steep hill to the left. To the right, a driveway led into the woods.

  The sky above blazed with so much light that downtown could be on fire.

  “What’s going on, Roy?” Hughes said into the radio.

  Roy’s voice crackled through static. “Pack of ‘em ahead.”

  “How many?” Hughes said.

  “Back up, Parker,” Annie said.

  “Wait,” Hughes said.

  “Twenty or thirty of ‘em,” Roy said.

  “They see you?” Hughes said.

  “They hear us,” Roy said. “They hear our engines. But I don’t think they can see us back here in the trees.”

  Annie switched to naked-eye vision again so that she could see what the infected would see. She saw almost nothing at all, even with her right eye adjusted to the darkness already. The light reflecting off the clouds above had little effect on the ground. She did see a pale light at ground level straight ahead past the trees, though. She checked the map and saw that they were near a major intersection and presumably some kind of business district. Nothing major like a mall, but an end to the woods they’d been driving through.

  “What else do you see, Roy?” Hughes said into the radio.

  “Parking lot,” Roy said. “The infected are coming out of a parking lot and onto the road. And there’s an electrical station behind a fence off to the right.”

  Annie couldn’t see any of it.

  “There’s a big intersection on the other side of this pack,” Roy said.

  “And?” Hughes said.

  “Looks like it’s clear,” Roy said.

  “What do you think?” Hughes said, not to Roy but to Annie and Parker.

  “We could run ‘em over,” Parker said.

  “Are you kidding?” Annie said.

  “Not even a little bit,” Parker said. “Figure we’ll have to do that at some point before we get to the wall.”

  “Why don’t we back up?” Annie said.

  “They’ll just follow us,” Parker said.

  “Roy,” Hughes said into the radio. “How far away are they?”

  “Hundred feet, maybe,” Roy said. “They’ve stopped now.”

  “Back up,” Annie said.

  She realized with a jolt that nobody was keeping an eye out behind them.

  “Hughes,” she said, “Check behind us.” It was the first time in her life she’d ever told Hughes to do anything.

  “Clear,” Hughes said.

  Parker backed up the Suburban. He took it slow, slower even than walking speed. Driving forward with one eye and no side vision was hard enough. Driving in reverse for even a couple of feet was as much a leap of faith as anything else.

  “You’re good,” Hughes said. “Just hold the wheel straight.”

  Parker sped up a bit and Roy followed him backwards in his RV.

  They only made it a short distance when Annie noticed that Roy wasn’t following anymore. He couldn’t see out the back. He’d hardly see anything in his mirrors with night vision.

  “Roy,” Hughes said. “You okay?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, the RV surged forward, slowly at first and then faster. Much faster.

  My God, Annie thought. He’s going
to ram them.

  Parker was still driving backwards, craning his head over his shoulder to look out the rear window.

  “Stop!” Annie shouted.

  Parker brought the Suburban to a halt. “The hell is he doing?” he said after turning his attention back to what was in front of him.

  Annie heard what sounded like sacks of potatoes hurled at the side of a car, followed by screams of shock, pain, and alarm.

  “Running them over,” Annie said.

  Parker sat up at full attention and leaned forward at the wheel.

  Annie could see the infected now, first as flickers of movement on each side of the RV, then more clearly as those that weren’t hit chased the vehicle in the dark.

  Parker stepped on the gas.

  “Wait,” Annie said. “Hold back a second.” There could be hundreds more up there for all anyone knew, and they’d be drawn by the screams of those that had just been run down.

  Parker hit the brakes.

  Annie didn’t hear any more screaming. She thought she heard some moans of pain up ahead, but she couldn’t be sure.

  “Kill the engine,” Annie said.

  “Hang on,” Hughes said.

  “Just do it,” Annie said. “We’ll be able to hear better. And they won’t hear us.”

  Parker nodded and killed the engine. It would only take a second to turn it back on again.

  Annie listened hard. She clearly heard moaning now. Roy hadn’t killed everything he’d just hit. She could see the wounded infected now too, lying on the ground, clutching their bruised and bleeding abdomens and limbs.

  Roy had cruised on ahead, clear into the intersection, and she could barely make out his RV at this distance. She could, however, hear slapping, shouting, and grunting. The survivors surrounded his vehicle. There was just enough light now that they’d be able to see it. Then more sounds: a revving engine, a loud and hard smack, and more screams of pain. Roy was being mobbed.

  “We need to move,” Hughes said.

  “Let them finish him off,” Annie said.

  “Not yet,” Hughes said.

  “It will save us the trouble later,” Annie said. “And what good is he now? He doesn’t know where we’re going any better than you do.”

  “We help him,” Hughes said, “he helps us.”

  “When has he helped us?” Annie said.

  “He got us this far,” Parker said. “And he just cleared a path forward.”

  Let his last act be a sacrifice for good then, Annie thought. The perfect ending for a terrible man whose mother should have had an abortion.

  Parker started up the Suburban and drove toward Roy.

  “Goddammit,” Annie said.

  Seconds later, they left the trees behind and entered a huge six-lane intersection, with Roy’s RV caught in the middle of it, surrounded by infected, midrise towers looming ahead in the distance.

  “Shit,” Parker said. “We’re downtown. Annie!”

  “This isn’t downtown,” Annie said. “This is Buckhead.”

  “Buckhead?” Parker said.

  “Northern Atlanta,” Annie said. “Downtown is still miles away.”

  Two dozen infected swarmed the RV. They seemed more curious than hostile, not quite sure who or what was inside. Roy hit the gas and lurched forward toward a lamp post, then slammed into reverse and did the same thing backward.

  “Why doesn’t he just turn and drive straight?” Annie said.

  “He can’t see,” Parker said.

  “So, what are we doing?” Annie said.

  Hughes got on the radio. “Roy, we’re right behind you.”

  “Can’t see shit,” Roy said.

  “I know,” Hughes said. “There’s a lamp post in front of you. Don’t hit it. Turn the wheel thirty degrees to the right, then drive straight.”

  “I can’t see shit!” Roy shouted.

  “I know,” Hughes said. “Just . . . Parker, lay on the horn.”

  “Are you crazy?” Annie said.

  “Roy took out half of ‘em already,” Hughes said, “and there aren’t any more.”

  Annie swept the scene with her night vision. Hughes was right. The roads were clear in every direction.

  Parker leaned on the horn, the sound beyond blaring, effectively a siren and louder than anything shy of a gunshot.

  It got the infected’s attention. That was for damn sure. They stopped struggling to get inside Roy’s RV and turned their full attention to the Suburban instead.

  “I don’t think they see us,” Parker said.

  Annie didn’t think so either. They moved toward the sound, though. And they weren’t far away, barely fifty feet at the most.

  Roy, now free, turned his RV to the right and exited the intersection.

  “Go,” Annie said.

  Parker let up off the horn and followed Roy away from the melee.

  “We need to turn left on Old Ivy Road,” Annie said. “It’s coming up right away.”

  “Roy,” Hughes said into the radio. “Make the next left.”

  Roy made the left and Parker followed.

  “You see?” Hughes said.

  “See what?” Annie said.

  “We still need him,” Hughes said.

  “More like he needs us, actually,” Annie said.

  “We needed two vehicles to get through that,” Parker said.

  Annie huffed but said nothing.

  16

  Atlanta looked a lot more urban all of a sudden, with midrise apartment buildings lining the side of the road and high-rise towers puncturing the sky in the near distance. If Annie hadn’t told him otherwise, Parker would have sworn they were arriving downtown. Buckhead alone was larger than most American cities, yet it was a single neighborhood of Atlanta that he’d never even heard of before.

  They’d made it all the way through the suburbs unscathed—not at all what Parker had expected. None of them had expected it. Roy had said the suburbs were overrun, yet here they were, deep now into the city. The infected hadn’t died off or been killed off. The sidewalks and streets weren’t littered with bodies. They were strangely empty.

  Had Roy even been there a few weeks earlier, like he’d said, or was he lying?

  Parker wondered if Annie was right about Roy. He was not adding value. Not anymore. Sure, he’d helped clear a pack of infected out of an intersection, and they’d helped him in return, so in theory it made sense to tag team. But it made a lot less sense when Parker played the tape back in his mind and imagined what he would have done if Roy hadn’t been there, if the Suburban had been the only vehicle on the road when the infected appeared. Parker would have had options. For one thing, they had a hundred pounds of ammunition in the back of the Suburban. They could shoot their way through just about anything. More easily, though, Parker could have turned around and taken a different road. There were hundreds of different routes to get from A to B in a place the size of Atlanta.

  Roy’s intel was bad, and he was tactically useless. He wasn’t even a guide anymore, with no real idea how to get where they were going. Annie was directing them now, leading from behind with a map. Roy should be following in his RV, not out front and taking Annie’s directions over the radio. Then again, Parker reasoned, with Roy out front he was effectively their human shield. Anything that came at them head-on would slam into him first.

  That still left the problem of what to do with him.

  After diagonally traversing the continent, from the Pacific Northwest to the southern Atlantic seaboard, clearing the last gap should have been easy. Annie, squinting at the map, calculated the distance from Buckhead to North Druid Hills along Roxboro Road at only four miles, five miles tops. They could have made it in less than fifteen minutes poking along at a measly twenty miles an hour, but nothing prepared them for what they encountered.

  The sky grew brighter as they neared downtown, and after crossing Interstate 85, the clouds overhead buzzed with reflected electricity. Annie removed her night vision and saw
everything—a shopping mall on the left, a low-rise bank branch on the right, six empty lanes dead ahead—with near perfect clarity, as if the landscape blazed under full moonlight. She could almost make out colors.

  By the time they reached the upscale Druid Forest neighborhood, Annie could make out colors, and could do so perfectly: gray asphalt, tan winter grass, prickly Georgia evergreens towering above beige-yellow homes.

  Annie heard the horde long before she could see it. The sound was faint at first. She thought the engine might be emitting some kind of screech or hiss, but it grew louder after a quarter mile and even louder than that after a half, finally congealing into a low and unmistakable roar.

  Now she understood why the suburbs and even the city so far had appeared to be empty, why she’d hardly seen any infected, why the vast cityscape had been abandoned even by them. They were drawn to the light in downtown Atlanta. They might wander around more or less aimlessly during the day, but at night they hurtled toward the bright urban core like insects to candles and lamps. There could be tens or even hundreds of thousands ahead.

  No way could they drive through it.

  “Stop the truck,” she said and sank low in her seat, trying to make herself smaller.

  Parker clenched his fingers around the steering wheel and slowed the Suburban to jogging speed. Roy, still out ahead, slowed his RV.

  “Stop!” Annie said.

  Parker floored the brake pedal. Annie lurched forward against her seatbelt.

  “Hughes,” she said. “Hand me that radio. Please.” Dammit, she had to talk to Roy.

  Hughes passed the radio forward, and Annie pressed the talk button. “I’m sure you can hear that,” she said. “Over.”

  Roy’s voice came back to her, crackling through static. “Even the dead hear it.” He stopped his RV, a block or so in front of the Suburban.

  “Where’s the wall?” she said.

  “Told you,” he said. “North Druid Hills.”

  “Where is it, exactly?”

  “Just south of there,” Roy said. “Midway between North Druid Hills and Emory University.”

  Annie looked again at the map. “That’s two miles away!” she shouted.

  She killed the radio and dropped it on the floor at her feet.