The Last City Read online

  The Last City

  A Zombie Novel

  Michael Totten

  Contents

  Books by Michael J. Totten

  I. The Universe is Committing Suicide

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  II. Something Else is Going On

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  III. The Last City

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  IV. End of the Road

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Fifteen Months Later

  Mailing List

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2019 by Michael J. Totten

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in

  any form or by any means without the prior written permission of

  Michael J. Totten.

  First American edition published in 2019 by Belmont Estate Books

  Cover design by Kathleen Lynch

  Edited by Sara Kelly

  Totten, Michael J.

  The Last City

  Books by Michael J. Totten

  Resurrection

  Into the Wasteland

  The Last City

  Taken

  The Road to Fatima Gate

  In the Wake of the Surge

  Where the West Ends

  Tower of the Sun

  Dispatches

  Part I

  The Universe is Committing Suicide

  1

  Annie thought she’d never see skyscrapers again. Yet there they were, a handful of modest ones in the center of Omaha, Nebraska, rising from the prairie as if announcing to visitors coming in from the wasteland that human beings still lived in this part of the country.

  At least human beings used to. Annie saw no signs of them now. Just stopped cars, frozen in time and ice, heading away from downtown across all lanes of traffic, the blanketing snow printed only with deer tracks. Wintry trees reached toward the skies like the claws of dead insects. Here and there on the side of the road were soft snow-covered mounds that Annie assumed were dead bodies—or whatever was left of the bodies after the hordes of infected had their terrible way with them.

  She was in the back seat of the Chevy Suburban with Hughes at the wheel, Kyle beside her in back, and Parker up front in the passenger seat. They were heading south on a four-lane bisected with a median strip toward the derelict urban core. The road itself was jammed up with cars, so Hughes had to drive on the grassy strip next to the pavement.

  That strip was a barely passable obstacle course of ditched vehicles, lamp posts, telephone poles, leafless deciduous trees, and abandoned suitcases. Progress was slow. The Suburban’s tires emitted a muffled sound as they made fresh tracks in the snow.

  Kyle squinted at the map he’d grabbed at a vacant gas station. “Missouri River’s just a few hundred feet to the left. Looks like there’s a riverfront park up ahead. Miller’s Landing.”

  If all went well, they wouldn’t have to drive very much farther. Plan was to find a marina, unmoor a sailboat, make their way down the Missouri River to the Mississippi River, then float past the states of Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana to the Gulf of Mexico. From there they could sail east until they reached the Florida Gulf Coast, then hotwire a car and drive north to Atlanta. If the Centers for Disease Control was still up and running, the doctors there might be able to study Annie’s natural immunity and develop a cure.

  The Missouri River was just far enough away to the east that they couldn’t see it, nor could they drive to it when they found the exit to Miller’s Landing. The four-lane was too clogged with cars. It could only be crossed on foot. They’d have to get out and walk.

  Hughes killed the engine, and a hush that sounded eternal settled over the world. Everyone just sat there for a moment, taking it in.

  Annie didn’t know how many people used to live in the Omaha area. By the looks of the place, probably not much more than a million. Omaha wasn’t any kind of major metropolis. Just a medium-sized Midwestern city with a clutch of midrise towers in the center of low-density sprawl, but after no-rise Wyoming and the barrenness that made up the rest of Nebraska, Omaha, to Annie’s eyes, could have been Chicago.

  But it was as dead as Seattle and Portland, where the plague started—in North America anyway—after spreading by plane from the Russian Arctic and Moscow. Annie had hoped that distant cities thousands of miles away might have barricaded themselves in a kind of reverse quarantine once they knew what coming from the Pacific Northwest, but there she was, almost two thousand miles away and halfway across the continent, and Omaha hadn’t fared any better.

  She’d grown up and spent most of her life in South Carolina, and she’d still have no idea how sparsely populated the western half of the United States was if she hadn’t just driven through it. Much of it resembled the surface of the moon, and even most of Nebraska was staggeringly blank, devoid of topography, its desolate expanses almost entirely treeless. Driving across it in winter felt like spending two days on a snow-covered ocean.

  And yet the virus that turned once-decent people into predators had spread from Seattle across that vastness to Omaha as if it hadn’t encountered so much as a speed bump.

  “What are we doing?” Annie said.

  “Looking for a boat,” Kyle said.

  “No, I mean what are we doing?” Annie said.

  “Not this again,” Hughes said.

  “Look at this place,” Annie said.

  “I see it,” Hughes said, averting his eyes from the bleakness surrounding them.

  “You really think Atlanta looks any different?”

  “It might, Annie,” Parker said.

  She doubted it. “Okay. Let’s say, by some miracle, Atlanta is perfectly fine.”

  “Doesn’t need to be perfectly fine,” Hughes said.

  “Well, let’s say the CDC is perfectly fine,” Annie said. “Doctors put my blood under a microscope and voilà. They find a cure. Then what?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “They going to show up here in Omaha in a government helicopter?” Annie said. “Hop out with a case full of vials and say, great news, everybody, come and get yourself vaccinated?”

  A light wind whispered through the wreckage, the city otherwise silent as a cemetery.

  “They going to vaccinate the deer and the rabbits?” Annie said.

  Hughes opened the driver’s side door and stepped out. Cold air washed into the truck. “Out,” he said.

  Annie shivered.

  “Out,” Hughes said again.

  Annie, Parker, and Kyle got out and closed their doors. Hughes pressed the key fob in his hand and thunked the four doors into the lock position even though there was nobody left to steal anything.

  Nobody spoke as they made their way across the four-lane between stopped cars to a short road through open parkland that, according to Kyle’s map, led to Miller’s Landing on the edge of the Missouri River. No cars blocked their path any longer. No point fleeing downtown only to stop along the riverside less than a mile out.

  They soon came to two covered picnic areas next to a frozen artificial lake. Beyond it, Annie saw the Missouri. It hadn’t iced over and was smaller and narrower than she had expected. She’d imagined the Missouri as a grand river like the Columbia or th
e Mississippi, but it was just a few hundred feet wide at the most. There were no boats.

  “Maybe there’s a marina downtown,” Kyle said.

  “Maybe,” Hughes said, sounding doubtful to Annie’s ears.

  Annie shivered and hugged herself. Before seeing the river, she’d pictured marinas on the waterfront, the kind she was used to in Seattle, but the Missouri was a middling river at best, and Omaha wasn’t a coastal city.

  “Going to be dark soon,” Parker said.

  Colder too, Annie thought, though the January sun had precious little warming power anyway.

  They headed back to the Suburban, silent and mopey, and continued the slow drive along on the grassy strip next to the crammed four-lane, barely making two hundred feet of progress before the strip that made progress possible ended abruptly at an overpass ferrying cars above an enormous railyard below. The overpass was too jammed to drive on, and the railyard was blocked by a train that stretched for at least a half mile in each direction. Proceeding on foot wouldn’t be any kind of a problem, but continuing in the Suburban was impossible.

  “Wonderful,” Kyle said.

  They’d have to backtrack, and they’d have to backtrack for miles. They were not going to find a marina in Omaha. Certainly not today. They’d have to spend an entire day picking their way through the suburbs, and no other route would take them anywhere near the banks of the Missouri. Better to just back up, skirt the city entirely in a wide orbit, and pick up the river’s edge farther south in the countryside.

  Kyle checked his watch. “We should go back and camp at that park.”

  Hughes and Parker nodded. Annie said nothing.

  They sulked on the way back to the park—Parker, Hughes, and Kyle because they weren’t going to spend the night in beds on a boat, but Annie for another reason entirely. She’d spent the past two days hating herself since their escape from Lander, Wyoming. The others didn’t know it because she hadn’t said anything, but she’d lost confidence in herself.

  When she and her friends had encountered that warlord of a mayor, Joseph Steele, on the road in the small town of Belt, she had wanted to kill him. Wanted to kill him for taking her prisoner, kill him for milking her blood like she was a farm animal, kill him for throwing Parker into the county lockup for no good reason at all, kill him for ruling over the only intact town she’d seen anywhere in the ruins of America, and for bringing the whole thing crashing down on everyone’s heads. She wanted to kill him, out there on the road with none of his men around to protect him, but her friends wouldn’t let her.

  Something stopped normal people from pulling the trigger when pointing a gun in somebody’s face, but nothing would have stopped Annie if she’d been alone.

  What was wrong with her? When the world had circled the drain, it took her civilized morality with it. That’s what was wrong with her. And not just her, either. She doubted Lander’s mayor was a monster before the infected showed up and threatened his town. She doubted the pre-apocalypse Parker would have attempted to murder Kyle on the San Juan Islands. And she was certain that the pre-apocalypse version of herself wouldn’t have wanted to kill anyone for any reason.

  Annie was not the same person she used to be. And if that was true of her, it was true of everybody.

  Parker hated “camping” in the Suburban. It wasn’t at all like proper camping in a tent during the summer where he could recline next to a crackling fire until his eyelids grew heavy at midnight, then zip up and retire horizontally in a sleeping bag. No. Camping in the Suburban during winter meant sitting there in the cold and the dark for six hours before finally feeling exhausted enough to sleep half-assedly upright. It was only slightly less awful than trying to sleep on a plane.

  He wished they’d found a sailboat. Sailboats had beds. Sailboats didn’t have fireplaces, but then, neither did the Suburban. And no one thought it wise to build a fire in the ruins of a city and attract a band of barbaric survivors—or, worse, a pack of those things—that could see the glow for miles around. So he just sat there in his seat in the dark with his own thoughts in a half daze, willing himself to get tired, with two cups of dehydrated and reconstituted chicken tetrazzini in his belly.

  Stewing in his own thoughts didn’t bother him as much as it had on the road from Seattle to Lander, when he’d convinced himself that he could snap at any moment and sink his teeth into somebody’s neck. Annie had recovered from her bout with the infection a whole lot better than he had. Even so, he was surer now that the virus was gone from his body and mind, that it hadn’t actually turned him into a psychopath. Betty the therapist, whom he’d met shortly before her death in Lander’s prison, had more or less cured him by convincing him that he was merely suffering from a whopping case of anxiety, some kind of post-traumatic stress response after spending three days strapped to a chair while the virus turned his mind into a buzz saw.

  So, sure, he felt better, but he wasn’t ready to use the word recovered quite yet. He still felt on edge, like he might plunge into a panic state again just by thinking about it. Better to have something to do and something else to think about.

  “I need to go find a tree,” he said and opened the passenger door, grateful that his bladder would rescue him from his own jagged thoughts for a couple of moments. “Back in a minute.”

  He stepped into the cold and the dark and produced a small LED flashlight from his pocket.

  They’d parked a hundred or so feet from the river. He had half a mind to walk down there and pee in it. He knew he shouldn’t, but he wasn’t sure why now that he thought about it. Fish peed in the river. Deer most likely did too. So why shouldn’t he? He headed toward a line of skeletal trees and did his business there instead.

  Someone else stepped out of the Suburban and closed the door as he zipped up.

  “Hey.” Annie’s voice.

  “Don’t pee in the river,” Parker said.

  She laughed. “Wasn’t planning on it. I just wanted to talk. And I had to get out of that truck.”

  “I hear you,” he said and stretched his neck by craning his head to each side.

  She didn’t bother with a flashlight. Didn’t really need it with the ambient starlight reflecting off snow. He flicked off his own LED light. He could see her well enough, though he could not read her face.

  “Let’s walk,” Annie said. “Maybe down to the river so we don’t keep the others up.”

  “Sure,” Parker said, though the others weren’t sleeping yet anyway. The sun had been down for hours, but he doubted it was even 9:00 p.m. yet.

  Their boots scrunched in the snow as they made their way to the riverbank.

  “Are you and Kyle okay?” Annie said.

  Parker knew what she meant. He and Kyle hadn’t exactly gotten along famously since they met in Washington state. At first, they had just bitched and sniped at each other, but later they went at it like two rats in a sack until Parker finally snapped and tried to kick Kyle over a cliff. That’s when Annie told the others her secret—and when Annie, Kyle, and Hughes made the momentous decision to tie Parker to that chair, inject him with Annie’s blood, then infect him on purpose to see if her immunity could be transferred. It was either that or execute him for attempted murder.

  “Kyle and I are okay now,” Parker said.

  Kyle was the absolute last person on God’s earth that Parker had expected to save him in Wyoming. Kyle had risked his life and damn near gotten himself killed, and he did it alone.

  “I’m tired of fighting all the time,” Parker said. “Tired of being mad all the time. Tired of everything all the time.”

  “Interesting,” Annie said.

  “Why’s that?” Parker said.

  “Because recently you were scared all the time.”

  “I haven’t had any more panic attacks.”

  “You haven’t. I’d know.”

  Parker chuckled. Indeed she would. There was no such thing as a silent, secret panic attack. Not for him, anyway.

  “I�
��m learning to trust myself,” he said. “It’s not easy, but I’m working on it. I don’t want to say this in front of Kyle and Hughes, but I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Annie said.

  “I’m trying to be better, Annie,” he said. “The world isn’t making it easy, but I promised myself that I would, and now I’m promising you.”

  He couldn’t read Annie’s face in the dark.

  Annie felt groggy from oversleeping as they set out again in silence at first light the next day, back the way they had come along the grassy strip next to the four-lane, away from the center of Omaha toward the outskirts to the north, dodging and weaving past abandoned cars, the ruined urban environment as familiar now as it was dismal.

  They made a wide counterclockwise circle around the Omaha metro area, with stalled traffic finally thinning near the small town of Blair, and they eventually ended up in Nebraska City—just a small town, really—also along the Missouri River, roughly fifty miles south of their starting point. The journey took them four hours, and they had five hours of daylight left at the most.

  “Half the day and hardly any progress at all,” Kyle said.

  “We always knew this was going to be the hard part,” Hughes said.

  Having grown up on the East Coast, Annie understood that more instinctively than the others. Hughes, Parker, and Kyle had spent their entire lives in the western United States, with its mind-boggling distances between places. The hinterlands east of Seattle were so vast that Minneapolis was the next big city over, almost two-thirds of the way across the country.