Resurrection (Book 3): The Last City

by Totten, Michael J.

  “Ma’am!” Martinez shouted. She could barely hear him over the machine screech. He gestured toward one of the seats. “Strap yourself in!”

  She and Parker sat down. Rather than help her, Martinez tended to Hughes, who wouldn’t be able to belt himself in on his own with only one hand. The seatbelt was complicated. It had four straps instead of just one or two, and Annie had to snap them into a circular fastener designed to rest in the middle of her chest.

  She sat on the left side of the helicopter next to the wide-open door. She was safe now. At last. She considered saying she’d forgotten something, climbing back down, and blowing out one or both of Roy’s kneecaps. Her rescuers would never know. They wouldn’t hear the gunshot over the shrieking whine of the engine.

  But she supposed it was fitting that Roy die by suicide. It fit with his ludicrous philosophy anyway. Even though a painkiller overdose was one of the easiest ways out, it would still take a hell of a lot of nerve to swallow a fatal dose for a person who didn’t actually want to die. Roy’s ever-popular flinch response might stay his hand. He could end up dying of thirst or at least suffering the effects of extreme dehydration before finding his courage.

  As it turned out, Roy’s flinch response manifested itself in a different way. He emerged from the armored car with his hands in the air, his rope restraints somehow removed.

  Annie felt a coldness in the core of her body followed by a flood of adrenaline.

  Martinez saw Roy out of the corner of his eye and did a double take. “Hey!”

  Parker and Hughes were strapped in on the right side of the helicopter and couldn’t see what was happening below.

  Annie reached for her Glock, but she was secured so tightly with four diagonal straps that she couldn’t free it from her jacket pocket.

  “There’s a fourth survivor down there!” Martinez shouted.

  Parker surged forward against his own restraints and shouted at Annie. “Roy’s coming out?”

  Martinez shouted at her as well. “I thought you said there were three of you!”

  Annie nodded. “We can’t take him!”

  Martinez snapped his head back. “Is he bit?”

  “He’s a murderer!” Annie said.

  Martinez went rigid.

  “He’s a serial killer!” Parker yelled.

  Martinez turned his head from side to side. “He’s what?”

  “He’s a serial killer!” Annie shouted. “We have to leave him.”

  Martinez flexed his arm muscles and flared his nostrils.

  Annie unfastened her restraints and stood. “We have to stop him!” she shouted and removed the Glock from her jacket.

  Only now did she realize that Martinez was furious not at Roy but at her. He grabbed her gun with his right hand, straightened his elbow, pushed her forward into her seat, grabbed the butt of her gun with his left, used both hands to snap it into an upside down position, then yanked it away from her. He did all this in a fluid motion that took less than half a second, as if he’d already done it ten thousand times. If her finger had been inside the trigger guard, it would have broken between the first and second knuckles.

  Roy stood barely twenty feet below her with his hands in the air like a supplicant.

  “Leave him!” she screamed.

  “We’re not leaving anybody!” Martinez shouted. She could barely hear him at all and relied on lip-reading as much as her ears to understand what he said.

  “You don’t understand!” Annie shouted.

  She turned to her friends. Parker had unhooked his restraints, but he remained seated. Hughes shook his head from side to side, telling her it was over.

  Martinez forced Annie back into her seat and belted her in. She struggled, but he overpowered her as easily as if she were a child.

  “He’s a serial killer!” she shouted.

  Martinez leaned forward and spoke directly into her ear to make damn sure that she heard him. “Ma’am,” he said. “I don’t know him, and I don’t know you. We’re not leaving anybody.”

  Annie curled her lip and recoiled as Martinez dropped the rope ladder and helped Roy ascend into safety. Martinez helped Roy secure himself in his seat and held both him and Annie at gunpoint as the pilot took the helicopter into the air toward the wall over the screaming heads of the horde.

  24

  The perimeter around Atlanta’s intact urban core stretched in an oblong shape for roughly two miles, from the Centers for Disease Control and Emory University on the northeastern edge to the skyscrapering city center to the southwest. The wall itself was clearly defined, not only because the structure was plainly visible but because it was surrounded on all sides by a sea of infected larger than the safe zone itself. From the air, Annie could see the burning skyscraper in Buckhead now, too, besieged by a secondary horde peeled off from the main one.

  Martinez kept his service pistol trained on Annie and Roy, though Annie knew he wasn’t going to shoot anybody after taking so much trouble to rescue them.

  She thought they’d head directly to the CDC, which would have been a five-minute walk from their starting point without a wall in the way, but the pilot turned right and nosed toward the city center instead. Hundreds of people milled about down below, all of them on foot.

  The pilot landed just shy of downtown on a helipad marked by a giant white cross at a complex called the Atlanta Medical Center that appeared to have been built in the 1980s.

  A dozen civilians approached as the pilot shut off the engine. They were clean, well dressed, and flanked on each side by pairs of uniformed soldiers carrying rifles. Two men, apparently doctors, wore lab coats. At the head of this phalanx was a bespectacled black woman who appeared to be in her forties wearing a dark blue blazer. She carried herself like she was the boss of something, either the medical complex or possibly even the city.

  Martinez holstered his pistol and gestured with his head for everyone to get out.

  Annie unhooked herself and disembarked ahead of Roy without making eye contact with him. She needed to make damn sure she spoke to whoever was in charge here before Roy could get in a word.

  The bespectacled black woman looked concerned, even anxious. She stood closer to the helicopter than anyone else. Annie knew she would be the first to say something.

  Annie approached with Parker and Hughes next to her and Roy trailing behind.

  “Welcome to Atlanta,” the woman said. “I’m Governor Chrissie Jordan. I apologize for taking so long to come out and get you.”

  The governor! Atlanta was Georgia’s capital, but it somehow hadn’t occurred to Annie until now that anyone there would outrank the mayor.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Hughes said. “We’re all grateful.”

  The doctors noticed Hughes’s bleeding and bandaged amputated arm. “Let’s get you checked out,” one of them said.

  “I’m okay,” Hughes said.

  The doctors gave Hughes some space.

  Annie felt dizzy, her head still filled with the roar of the helicopter even though its engine was silent. She could swear she could still hear the horde even though she could not.

  “I’m told you say you’re immune,” the governor said.

  Annie nodded. “I’m Annie Starling,” she said. “This”—she gestured toward Parker—“is Jonathan Parker. We’re both immune. Our friend Hughes here is not. And this man”—she pointed at Roy—“is a serial killer.”

  The governor snapped her head back. “He’s . . .” She exchanged worried glances with her aides, with her soldiers, and with the helicopter pilot.

  “I can prove it,” Annie said. She produced Lucas’s cell phone from her pocket. “He took a video of himself slitting a woman’s throat on this phone.”

  One of the soldiers looked to the governor. She nodded. The soldier approached, and Annie handed the phone to him.

  “There’s no passcode,” Annie said. “And the battery is almost half charged. Just open the camera app and you’ll see it.”

 
The governor was clearly aghast and seemed unable to figure out what to make of these ragged, stinking, injured, and blood-spattered people standing before her. She looked like a woman prepared for a business meeting who had opened the conference door and found a pack of wolves inside instead of her colleagues. “You’ve been traveling with this man?” she said.

  “We didn’t know when we first met him,” Parker said.

  The soldier who’d retrieved Lucas’s phone waved it toward the governor. She shook her head, then addressed Hughes. “This is true? You’ve seen it?”

  “I’m afraid so, ma’am,” Hughes said.

  “You traveled with him anyway?” the governor said. “You came all the way here him anyway?”

  “We needed his help,” Hughes said.

  The governor shook her head, like she couldn’t quite comprehend what she was hearing. Annie understood. She’d felt the same way herself every time Hughes had said the same thing to her. But she understood now that Hughes was right.

  Perhaps in an alternate universe they’d made it to Atlanta without Roy. But in yet another alternate universe, they were dead on a roadside in Iowa. In another they were dead on a roadside in Missouri. In this universe, they’d made it to Atlanta at least in part because Roy had helped them. If the doctors could make a vaccine from her blood, Roy would have saved far more people than he had killed.

  “He didn’t know that we knew,” Annie said, “until we got to the wall.”

  The governor narrowed her eyes at Annie, then scrutinized Roy. Annie could imagine the gears turning in the woman’s head.

  “Is it really that bad out there?” the governor finally said.

  “Worse,” Hughes said. “Worse than you can imagine if you haven’t been out there.”

  The governor turned now to Parker. “You two are really immune?”

  Parker nodded. “It’s the reason we came here.”

  Roy looked like he’d rather be just about anywhere else in the world. He had to have known this would happen the moment he presented himself to be rescued. He’d be imprisoned and probably executed. But at least he was alive and safe at the moment.

  Annie accepted that she’d be effectively imprisoned as well. Roughly two square miles of central Atlanta had managed to hold back the tide with a broom. It was still America in there, but it was a prison. At best it was a tiny, skyscrapering island. And now that its leaders knew the truth, they’d no doubt put Annie in a prison-within-a-prison just as the rulers of Lander, Wyoming, had. They’d be crazy not to. They had to realize, just as her friends did, that she was the most precious person alive. That’s why they’d sent helicopters. And it’s why they would not let her go.

  Annie wouldn’t resist. She wouldn’t even complain. They were only going to do what she would do if she were in their place.

  The governor produced a cell phone from her pocket, opened it up with a passcode, tapped the screen a couple of times, and placed it next to her ear. She held up a finger and took a few steps away from the others for a moment of privacy.

  Annie couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “What’s she doing?” she said to no one in particular.

  “Calling someone?” one of the soldiers said and shrugged.

  “Her phone works?” Parker said.

  “You mean we could have—” Annie said.

  “Cell towers are down,” the soldier said, shaking his head. “She’s making a call over the hospital’s Wi-Fi.”

  Annie felt herself go slack-jawed, but she realized, at the same time, that she should not have been surprised. The United States military had built the proto-Internet to ensure that basic communications could survive a nuclear war.

  One of the doctors addressed Annie. “Ma’am,” he said. “Would you be willing to let us take a look at you?” The latest in a string of surprises. Would she be willing? They were giving her a choice? Was there an alternate universe where a twisted version of herself would say no?

  “Of course,” she said. “If you think it might help.”

  The two doctors looked at each other and nodded. “We do.”

  “You’ve been working on a vaccine?” she said.

  “We have,” the second doctor said.

  “Any progress?”

  “A bit,” the first doctor said. “But not enough.”

  “You think I might help?”

  The first doctor nodded. “It’s the reason we flew out and got you.”

  The governor returned, her phone still in her hand but down at her side now. “We can put the three of you up in a two-bedroom apartment downtown,” she said to Annie.

  In an apartment. Not chained to a bed in the CDC. In an apartment!

  But of course. This wasn’t Wyoming. Annie wasn’t going anywhere. This wasn’t a pit stop, and she’d come here on purpose. Where else could she even go?

  “And you,” the governor said to Roy, “will be going somewhere else.”

  A police car with its lights flashing pulled into the heliport’s parking lot. Two officers emerged from the vehicle and approached, surprisingly at ease under the circumstances.

  Roy took a step back. Parker seized his arms from behind and held him in place.

  Annie looked at Roy from head to toe as if for the first time. He shouldn’t have been there. He was supposed to be dead. Poisoned with Oxy, shot through the head and the balls, or blowtorched and cut into cubes. She wished the infected could have ripped him apart right in front of her. It was the least he deserved. She should have murdered him in the car when she had the chance.

  “That him?” one of the officers, eyes on Roy, said to the governor.

  “That’s him,” the governor said.

  “Sir,” the officer said. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”

  They cuffed him and walked him to the squad car. One officer got behind the wheel. The other trundled Roy into the back, using a hand to ensure Roy did not hit his head.

  Fifteen Months Later

  Morning sun warmed Annie’s face and hands as she plucked the season’s first peaches and placed them into the crate. The air in the orchard was warm and humid and smelled of earth and ripening fruit. The peaches looked delicious, but she wouldn’t break her fast for at least another hour. She sipped instead from a water bottle and could still faintly taste the baking soda and mint she’d used to brush her teeth.

  Blade worked beside her. She didn’t know his real name. He just went by Blade, and he didn’t talk much. He wasn’t surly, exactly. Just silent most of the time and taciturn at his liveliest. Annie had the feeling he suspected that no one else in the commune wanted to hear anything he might have to say and that he was doing everybody a favor by keeping whatever it was to himself.

  “You on security tonight?” Blade said.

  “I am,” Annie said.

  She enjoyed security detail. She had an eight-hour shift three nights a week, from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. And she had the morning shift for farm work, from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., seven days a week, which meant she had to sleep from 3:30 in the afternoon to 10:00 or 11:00 at night. It only took her a week to get used to that schedule. All she had to do was place an eye mask over her face to prevent afternoon sunlight from keeping her awake during the day, and night didn’t feel much like night since she wore military-grade night-vision goggles throughout her shift. They were much better than the cheap consumer-grade monocles she and her friends had used on their way into Atlanta.

  Annie didn’t know what Blade thought of his security shifts, but he was good at the job. He also worked graveyard, and his team had so far captured three gangs of bandits while Annie’s team had only caught two. She caught the first stealing fruit from the orchard and the second attempting a break-in at the barn. Use of force was authorized in self-defense, and she was more than ready if it ever came to that. There was no jail on
the compound, so captured criminals were chained to a maple tree in the expansive front yard of the main house until the Fulton County Sheriff’s department could come out and get them. Prisoners typically waited there for two days and were provided fresh well water, two square meals, and a bucket.

  The Fulton County Sheriff’s Department had jurisdiction out there, but the commune was farther out in Rockdale County. Fulton, with its county seat in Atlanta, was the only one left in the state of Georgia with a functioning law enforcement department. No one thought the Rockdale County seat in Conyers would be repopulated for at least another generation.

  Dealing with the infected who wandered on to the property was less complicated than dealing with bandits. Every security squad shot to kill. The numbers of infected were small enough now that noise wasn’t much of an issue. Most of the infected seemed to have starved to death, and the army had mopped up the horde outside the city walls a long time ago. Annie supposed there’d be some nonzero number of infected out in the wasteland for at least a couple of years, but they were increasingly rare and decreasingly dangerous. Because the vaccine worked perfectly. Annie had spent three days as one of those things after she’d been bit, but a vaccinated person wouldn’t experience any symptoms at all.

  Her peach crate was almost half full. She was getting faster at this, though worrying about smashing the peaches on the bottom of the crate still slowed her down a bit. A third of the crop would be consumed on the compound, another third delivered to Atlanta, and a final third canned on site. Half the canned peaches would be traded for food from other agricultural communes in Rockdale, and the other half would be sent to the city. Georgians were still functioning on a barter economy. No one knew when they’d start using currency again or even if they’d use US dollars again.

  Kyle would enjoy this life, Annie thought. He wouldn’t have wanted to remain in Atlanta any more than she did, though his reasons would be drastically different from hers. He’d wanted a simple life in the countryside since the day she met him. She could accept that he was gone now, but her life was much lonelier than it would have been had he survived. The men on the commune made it abundantly clear to her, each in their own way, that she could have any of the bachelors she wanted, but she couldn’t connect with them. Most hailed from urban Atlanta, and none had spent even a day in the wasteland. She felt a hundred years older than all of them.