The Last City Read online

  Roy nodded, then furtively turned toward the road in the direction the trucks had gone.

  “What the fuck, man?” Hughes said.

  “Don’t ask me,” Roy said, eyes wide.

  Hughes stepped out of the vehicle. Parker stayed right where he was.

  “What did you do, Roy?” Hughes said and stormed forward.

  Roy took a step back and held his palms up in the air. “Hey, man. No idea.” He shook his head.

  Hughes stopped two feet from Roy, close enough to punch him or worse.

  “You’ve been through here before,” Hughes said. That was clear.

  “Yesterday,” Roy said. “And a month back. We didn’t see or hear anybody.” He widened his eyes again, as if seeing and hearing nobody in this part of the country was hard for even him to believe. “It was like no one had been here for years. That’s why we came back this way.”

  “So those ladies just randomly shot at us?” Hughes said.

  “The fuck should I know?” Roy said.

  “They shot at your RV,” Hughes said.

  “They shot at your truck,” Roy said.

  Hughes stared hard at Roy. Stared holes through him. He thought about blasting the sonofabitch to pieces right there in the parking lot with the pump-action Persuader. It wouldn’t do any good. Wouldn’t get Annie to Atlanta any faster. Would fuck up their mission more than just about anything else he could do short of killing Annie herself.

  “Must have seen us from a distance,” Roy said. “Lucas and I drove through here yesterday, then again today. Nobody around here is friendly.”

  Perhaps, Hughes thought. America’s heartland wasn’t as hospitable as it used to be. That was for goddammed sure. But women shooting at strangers just for existing? Really? Hughes doubted that’s what had happened. He didn’t believe Roy for a minute, but they had to get back on the road. They could dump the bastard on the outskirts of Atlanta, which they should be able reach in a couple of days.

  “Alright,” Hughes said and squinted. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  “Okay then,” Roy said, sounding more relieved than he should.

  Annie didn’t believe Roy and didn’t waste half a second before saying so once they got back on the road.

  “I don’t believe him either,” Hughes said.

  “You think it was some kind of revenge hit?” Parker said.

  “Undoubtedly,” Annie said.

  “What for?” Parker said.

  “You really have to ask?” Annie said.

  “You think Lucas and Roy raped those women?” Parker said.

  Of course they did. “Why shoot at them otherwise?”

  “Lucas and Roy could have stolen something,” Parker said. “Looted the wrong house or bunker.”

  “They’re rapists,” Annie said.

  “You can’t possibly know that,” Parker said.

  “I know it,” Annie said.

  “I’m sorry,” Parker said, “but you don’t. They’re creepy for sure, but if they’re rapists, why are those women still even alive?”

  “Most rapists aren’t murderers,” Annie said.

  “Maybe they’re neither,” Parker said.

  “Parker has a point,” Hughes said.

  Annie felt herself get red in the face.

  “I don’t trust them any more than you do, Annie,” Hughes said, “but we don’t know what’s going on. None of this would hold up in court.”

  Annie crossed her arms over her chest. “There aren’t courts anymore.”

  “You know what I mean,” Hughes said.

  “No, actually I don’t,” Annie said.

  Hughes huffed. “Look. They’re creepy. I get it. I agree. And I don’t trust them for shit. But we don’t have to.”

  “We don’t have to?” Annie said.

  “I trust that they know where they’re going, more or less, and that’s enough,” Hughes said. “We will never sleep in a room with them. We will never give them our weapons. We will never take all our eyes off them, not for five seconds.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Annie said.

  “Okay, Annie,” Hughes said. “What do you want to do then? Ditch ‘em? Shoot ‘em? Steal their RV and leave them for dead?”

  Annie said nothing.

  “Can I take that as a no?” Hughes said.

  Annie had nothing to say.

  “They try anything,” Hughes said, “and they’re dead. Both of them. That’s a promise.”

  Annie nodded, but she still wouldn’t say anything.

  Part II

  Something Else is Going On

  5

  Traveling south through Missouri was almost straightforward. They zigged and zagged roughly parallel to the Mississippi River without ever actually driving alongside or even seeing it, bypassing the small and medium-sized cities that formed a necklace of pearls along the riverbank: Burlington and Keokuk in Iowa, then Hannibal, St. Louis, and Cape Girardeau in Missouri.

  Hughes sulked at the wheel with his eyes and his mind on Lucas and Roy in their RV at all times. Cold air whistled through the bullet holes and flapped the plastic sheeting they’d taped over the busted window.

  As promised, they made it to the Ozark highlands and Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest, a blend of leafless oaks and southern conifers across gentle rolling mountains too far south and far too smooth to have ever seen the underside of a glacier. Even now, with the winter sun low in the sky, the air felt warmer and damper than Iowa’s, almost like Seattle’s in April. Southern Missouri seemed the kind of place where a person could live outside for much of the year without too much trouble, which also meant encounters with the infected were more likely.

  Roy pulled into an empty campground at the edge of the forest a few miles shy of the city of Poplar Bluffs, a place Hughes had never heard of, but judging by all the road signs he’d seen, must have been the most important place in the area. Hughes saw no reason for the campground to exist. It was not alongside a lake or a river but in a partial clearing in a random part of the forest.

  They had their pick of sites. Roy chose one that was exactly like every other, with a green picnic table and a firepit under a canopy of evergreen branches.

  Hughes parked the Suburban at the next campsite over and killed the engine. Everybody scrambled out and stretched. The air smelled of hardwood and pine and felt almost, but not quite, warm enough to sleep outside on the ground.

  “Y’all holding up okay?” Roy said as he and Lucas stepped out of the RV.

  “Fine,” Hughes said without making eye contact. He twisted at the waist, first to the left and then to the right, to ease the tension in his lower back.

  “Warmer here,” Parker said.

  “Gonna be even warmer tomorrow,” Roy said, “when we get to Arkansas.”

  “Where are we, exactly?” Kyle said.

  “Missouri,” Roy said.

  “I mean,” Kyle said, “is this the Midwest or the South?” A bird flitted from one tree to another above Hughes’s head.

  “Both,” Roy said. “Neither. This is the Ozarks.”

  Hughes thought the Ozarks looked more like large hills than mountains.

  “Greater Appalachia,” Roy said. He pronounced Appalachia so that that last two syllables sounded like atcha rather than aitcha. “More hillbillies than hayseeds.”

  At least there used to be, Hughes thought, not that it mattered. Whatever regional cultures had once existed were gone and would stay gone, even if the human race someday recovered. Any reemerging pockets of civilization would be defined far more by surviving a near-extinction event than whatever came before.

  “Why don’t you folks come on over and drink some beers?” Roy said. “We got lawn chairs.”

  “I’ll pass,” Annie said and gazed off into the trees.

  “Come on now,” Roy said. “Lucas, go fetch the lawn chairs.”

  Roy sat on a small boulder the size of a tree stump next to the fire pit.

  Lucas went
back inside the RV.

  “You stayed here before?” Hughes said to Roy.

  “Coupla times,” Roy said.

  “Any trouble?” Hughes said.

  “Wouldn’t be back if there was trouble,” Roy said.

  Hughes wasn’t sure he believed that. Not after Iowa.

  Lucas returned with two fold-out camping chairs.

  Roy waved his arm in a summoning motion. “Come on and have a beer. Won’t be full dark for another hour.”

  Hughes supposed that was true. They were farther south now than they had been at any point on their journey, and the sun would set later.

  He didn’t want to have a beer with these people but couldn’t think of a polite reason not to. They’d be traveling together for at least another couple of days, and those couple of days wouldn’t be any easier if Hughes and the others were standoffish. So he shrugged.

  Annie shot him a look.

  Lucas fetched a six-pack of longnecks and two more chairs from the RV and placed them in a semicircle around the firepit.

  Roy stayed put on his boulder, but Lucas took one of the chairs. Hughes took a chair next to him. First Parker joined them, then Kyle, and finally Annie. She sat stiffly with her ankle over her knee and her hands in her lap.

  Hughes took a longneck from the six-pack, twisted the cap off with his fingers, and passed the remaining beers to Parker.

  “You still think the universe is committing suicide?” Kyle said.

  Roy nodded. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “How does Annie fit into that theory?” Kyle said.

  “Not sure I follow,” Roy said.

  “She’s immune,” Kyle said. “So is Parker. Lucas now too. Three out of six of us are immune. That doesn’t change anything for you?”

  Lucas rubbed the back of his neck.

  Roy narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know that she’s really immune.”

  “I showed you the scar on my back,” Annie said.

  “Anyone could have bit you,” Roy said. “I didn’t see it happen. I didn’t see you recover.”

  Hughes wondered if Roy was accusing Annie of lying or if nothing was real in the world unless Roy had seen it himself. If a tree fell in the woods and Roy wasn’t there to hear it, did it make a sound?

  “So, what are we doing then?” Kyle said.

  “I’m taking you to Atlanta,” Roy said. “Case I’m wrong.”

  “You think this is some kind of big show?” Hughes said.

  “The hell do I know?” Roy said.

  “Why would we lie?” Hughes said.

  Roy shrugged.

  “Why else would we be driving from Seattle to Atlanta?” Hughes said. “You think that makes any kind of sense otherwise? We’d be living in tents on the roof of a Walmart two thousand miles from here if she wasn’t immune.”

  Roy sized up Hughes as if the two men had never seen each other before. He and Lucas had been prowling all over the country, and they weren’t entirely honest about why. It made sense then that he didn’t entirely believe Annie’s story. It was a classic case of projection. Pickpockets kept their cell phones and wallets close, and liars didn’t trust other people.

  “Not saying I don’t believe you,” Roy said. “Figure there’s a halfway decent chance you’re telling the truth.”

  “Terrific,” Kyle said.

  Nobody said anything for a couple of moments. Then Roy leaned forward on his boulder. “You ever try to kill yourself?”

  “No,” Kyle said.

  “Any of you?” Roy said.

  Headshakes all around.

  “Neither have I,” Roy said and sat up straight again. “You ever wonder what a man who throws himself off a building thinks when he’s halfway down? Probably not so far, so good. Know what I’m saying?”

  Nobody answered.

  Hughes swallowed hard. His wife had been morbidly depressed for years and had killed herself after the outbreak. Sometimes he understood. The end of all things was finally too much for her, even though they had a child together. Most of the time, though, he could not understand. For years she’d made no effort whatsoever to fight the disease that poisoned her mind. She surrendered to it completely, as if she’d forgotten that she’d ever been happy and therefore could be again, as if cognitive therapy worked for other people but, for some reason that she never even tried to explain, would not work for her. She was lost in a dark maze, and she gave up trying to find the way out. Hughes had tried to lead her out plenty of times, but she would not take his hand.

  “You want to die, Roy?” Hughes said.

  “Not today,” Roy said. “But I’ve seen enough to know I don’t want to spend an eternity here.”

  “Why are you taking us to Atlanta then?” Kyle said.

  “Flinch response,” Roy said.

  “Flinch response?” Parker said.

  “That oh shit feeling a jumper gets when he’s halfway to the ground from the top of his skyscraper.”

  They made it as far as Jonesboro. A smallish city in northeastern Arkansas and home to Arkansas State University. Twenty miles southwest of the Missouri Bootheel. Incorporated in 1859, humid subtropical climate, population just shy of eighty thousand before the global shitstorm wiped almost everyone out.

  Plan was to keep going east into Tennessee, less than an hour away. If they hadn’t needed gas, they wouldn’t have stopped. And if they hadn’t stopped, more of them would have survived.

  6

  Despite their vast differences in culture, history, and politics, northern Arkansas looked exactly the same as southern Iowa—wide and flat, open fields studded with farmhouses, deciduous trees shorn of leaves for the season, and a foreboding sky threatening a grainy landscape with rain. If it weren’t for a sign saying Welcome to Arkansas, Hughes would have had no idea they’d put Missouri behind them and officially entered what was once considered the South.

  He had never been to Arkansas, nor anywhere else in that part of the country, and he wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that it appeared—so far anyway—indistinguishable from up north. He hadn’t expected banjos to start playing all of a sudden, but he somehow expected . . . something . . . though he couldn’t rationally think of what that might be.

  Hughes followed Roy’s RV by a comfortable two hundred feet. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and they’d already been on the road for four hours. Farmhouses gave way to homes set back among bare broadleaf trees without much land behind them, suggesting that Hughes and his crew were leaving agricultural country and heading into a small city or town. After passing a trailer park, Roy indicated a turn to the left with his signal.

  Hughes slowed the Suburban and flipped his own signal on out of habit. There was no one behind him. There probably wouldn’t be another vehicle behind him ever again, but he still used his turn signal.

  Roy made a left into a dirt lot surrounded by ragged chain-link fencing and littered with transportation detritus from various collapsed industries—a cement truck, two rusted backhoes, and a half dozen semi truck cabs without trailers attached. Immediately south of the truck yard was a medium-sized warehouse of some kind, also ringed by chain-link fencing, with a paved lot around it.

  “Kyle,” Hughes said. “Where are we?”

  “Just north of Jonesboro,” Kyle said from the back seat, hovering over his map.

  “North of Jonesboro, middle of nowhere, what’s the difference?” Parker said as Hughes pulled the Suburban into the lot. “The hell are we doing here anyway?”

  “Roy probably needs gas again,” Hughes said and glanced at the dashboard. The Suburban still had half a tank. He didn’t know how big the RV’s tank was. Had to be huge, easily three times the capacity of a regular car’s, but most RVs got less than eight miles to the gallon going downhill on a freeway.

  Hughes killed the engine and climbed out with his pump-action Persuader in one hand and a crowbar in the other. The others stepped too, each with a pistol and a hand weapon—a hammer for Parker, crowbars
for Kyle and Annie.

  Roy got out of his RV with a hunting rifle. Hughes thought it might be a Tikka T3 Lite, but he couldn’t be sure. Lucas appeared with a far more formidable weapon that Hughes recognized instantly—a Bushmaster M4 Type Carbine. Not the civilian model either. This one was military grade, a true weapon of war, illegal in all fifty states, with three-round burst and automatic fire capability. It took .233 NATO rounds and came with a six-position stock and a flash suppressor out of the box.

  Hughes hoped he’d never get into a fight with Lucas while the man had that thing anywhere near him. Lucas leered at Annie and chuckled to himself at the look of disgust on her face. Scrapping with him at some point did not seem a remote possibility.

  “Out of gas already?” Hughes said to Roy.

  “Quarter tank,” Roy said. “Don’t want to go any farther with less than half. Shit’s about to get interesting.”

  Hughes flicked his shotgun’s safety into the fire position. Parker retrieved the siphon hose from the back of the Suburban. Lucas ran his own hose from one of the semi truck cabs into the RV as Parker sucked gas out of another into the Suburban.

  Hughes noticed that neither Roy nor Lucas carried hand weapons. “Don’t you guys have crowbars or something else quiet?”

  “Roy has a sword,” Lucas said. Then he shrugged. “Won’t be here long.”

  “More bandits in these parts than infected,” Roy said.

  “Get your sword,” Hughes said. “And a hammer or a knife or whatever else you’ve got.”

  “We’ve made more than enough noise already,” Roy said, “just pulling in here and parking.”

  “Not half as much as we’ll make if Lucas fires that Bushmaster,” Hughes said.

  Roy and Lucas ignored him. Hughes made a face. Lucas saw it but didn’t react.

  While Parker and Lucas siphoned fuel, the others stood guard at the four points of a circle, with Hughes facing the road, Annie facing the warehouse next door, Roy watching the trees to the north, and Kyle keeping watch toward a denser thicket of trees beyond the fence line. Hughes did not like that fence. It offered only the illusion of protection. He saw three ripped or cut gaps that anything smaller than a giraffe could barge right on through.