The Last Girl (23 page)

23

An alarm is going off.

Its incessant call repeating over and over. The shrillness of it drags her from a mired sleep so thick it feels like she’s deep underwater.

The alarm. Something’s happened. Someone’s finally broken out of the compound. Or someone’s broken in. The thought excites her, but she still can’t get her eyes to open. She’s warm now, even her ears flare with heat, and the sun is shining through her window onto her bed. Simon hasn’t come to bring her to breakfast. She must be sick, but she doesn’t feel it.

There’s something wrong with the alarm. It’s not as loud as it should be, and the end of it turns up in a sort of sweet tone she’s never heard before.

Zoey cracks her eyes open.

A bright yellow bird with black-and-white wings sits on a tree branch above her. It leans forward, and with a little bobbing motion, sings its song again.

She watches it, letting reality seep back in. The night before, her escape down the river, how cold the water was. She tries to sit up, but it takes three efforts before she manages it. The sun shines down on the river and shatters there into a million fractures of gold. There is no wind, and the brown grass around her is still.

She climbs to her feet, wincing at the new injuries from her latest flight. Above them all the gash in her stomach is the worst. It’s as if someone poured salt into the wound while she slept. She starts to peel back the still-damp hem of her shirt, but stops, afraid of what she’ll see.

The yellow bird continues to sing and she watches it for a time, swaying a little on her feet as a bout of dizziness comes and goes. It tips forward and back on its branch, balancing on such thin legs and feet, she’s amazed it can stand at all. It calls again, and somewhere in the trees beside the river a quiet answer returns. The bird cocks its head and flits away, leaving the branch it rested on swaying.

“I could’ve watched you all day,” Zoey says. Her voice sounds like she swallowed gravel and feels like it as well. She listens for a bit longer, the bird’s intermingling song getting farther and farther away until it is quiet again. At least she can’t hear the men—that’s something. Though that doesn’t mean they aren’t nearby.

He’s at the river!

She sneers at the memory of the men’s shouts. Of course they thought she was male. How could a woman kill two of them and escape? Though it’s probably not a bad thing to let them think they’re chasing a man. The alternative would be worse. For a man, they might look for several days before giving up.

But for a young woman?

What had Reg said right before he tried to force himself upon her?
I’m gonna be a rich man, you don’t know the price you’re gonna bring for me.

She casts off the panic that tries to descend on her and begins to walk along the river but stops, flexing her fingers. She’s forgotten something. Zoey turns back to the place where she laid overnight, but there is nothing but the crushed shape of her form there in the grass. Something, something isn’t right. She realizes what it is after another minute of thinking. The rifle. It’s gone, and her hands feel strange not holding it. She turns away from her makeshift bed and moves on.

The rushing water she heard the night before appears in the form of a tumble of rocks cutting into the current a half mile downstream. They shine with moisture and gush foam as the river tumbles past them, faster and faster until it drops twenty feet in a waterfall to a swirling pool below. Zoey watches the place where she would’ve been dashed to pieces for a time, swaying drunkenly. Then she keeps walking for another hour before she has to sit and rest.

The woods have thinned out to nearly nothing on either side of the river and the lack of cover makes her feel vulnerable. She leans against a toppled boulder that has broken into a spray of rock either with the impact of its fall or the onslaught of time. She picks through the pieces, seeing if they fit together, tossing them back down when they don’t. The wind pushes against her face and for the first time since waking she realizes she’s very warm. Too warm. She strips off the long-sleeved shirt, realizing she has a fever, there’s no denying it anymore. She recalls the only other time she came down with one; when she was ten and had caught a cold that traveled deep into her sinuses before compacting inside her right ear. It had only lasted a day after an injection from one of the doctors, but for that brief period the world had taken on a hazy quality and her head had tried to drift away from her body.

That same sensation grips her now, but its intensity is threefold. Unconsciously she places a hand over the wound on her stomach and holds it, as if mere pressure can draw away the sickness it’s spewing into her bloodstream. She supposes she should feel grateful for the infection. Without it she might have frozen to death the night before. Appreciate the small things.

She coughs out a laugh. That’s what Lee would have told her. Lee. How she wishes he was beside her now. She can almost feel his arms around her, holding her. Why didn’t she let him do that more before? She swipes at her eyes and notices how taut the skin of her face feels, how warm. But her hands are warm as well, as warm as Lee’s always are.

Zoey forces herself to her feet and is about to continue on when she stops. A faded spot of blue protrudes from between two rocks several feet away. When she moves closer she sees it’s some type of clear container, its cap the blue she spotted. She picks up the bottle and looks through its scratched and clouded side. There is nothing within it and when she twists off the top only a slightly stale smell escapes. She rinses it in the river several times before filling it. The icy bottle is such a contrast to her burning skin it forces a shiver from her as she continues parallel to the river.

It is past midday when she stops again. The trees are completely gone save for distant patches miles from the river, across the humped plains that have taken over as scenery. Everything is brown with only suggestions of green here and there. Zoey drinks from the bottle, letting the cool water slip down her throat in little sips. Her stomach is hollow but doesn’t ache anymore. She wonders if that’s good or bad. The thought of potatoes slathered in butter rises in the back of her mind, and she shoves it away. There’s no time for fanciful ideas now, it’s a dangerous distraction. She needs food, shelter, better clothes, and most of all a shot like the one she received all those years ago to take away the sickness. She’ll have to find a house and hope there will be something to help her inside, and she can’t delay any longer. The sun is already in its descent and the day will be gone before she knows it.

She begins to rise from the rock she’s sitting on and freezes.

The day.

Today.

Today is her birthday. She is twenty-one.

It is past midday. If she were still in the ARC she would be wearing the white gown now, be listening to the Director’s speech. She would be walking past all the watching eyes, seeing them for the last time before being taken to the elevator, and then to the lab with the beds and machines. They would put her to sleep and violate her and, and . . .

Zoey nearly faints but catches herself at the last second, biting down hard on her lower lip. The world comes back into the hazed focus of the fever and she braces her hand on a nearby stone. After several calming breaths she raises her head, letting the sun shine down on her ratted hair.

She isn’t in the ARC anymore. She won’t be going to the upper level again. Ever.

She starts walking then. Away from the river, across the dry and crusted ground, and she doesn’t look back.

She smells smoke in the late afternoon as the sun is slanting shadows hard against the ground. There is an acrid taste in the air, its stinging bite sour in the back of her throat. The horizon to the west is a strange orange, the air above it pale and shimmering. Beyond it are bizarre shadows far in the distance, their rising outlines something that must be a trick of the light, some type of illusion born of the afternoon sun and perhaps her own wavering vision.

Zoey stands on the highest rise she’s seen so far, the land sprawling out below her in waves of tan speckled with darker scrub. A bird glides far above in spirals that never end. It’s been there for the last few hours, hovering, watching. There is a hump rising up from the landscape perhaps a mile from where she stands that might be a structure, though it looks crooked and odd. It is her only option. She needs to rest, somewhere out of the sun and wind. Needs to eat. The instability of her limbs is increasing along with her temperature. What happens when she can’t walk anymore? When she runs out of water? When she collapses from fever?

She supposes she will die.

But she will die free.

She is about to set out again toward it when a sound slowly begins to rise through the air.

It’s a low humming and at first she thinks it is the helicopter returning, but soon she realizes it’s too even, too uniform for the chop of the rotors. It climbs in volume, and Zoey lowers herself closer to the ground.

A line of vehicles appears from behind a grade to the west. They emerge from the land like a herd of trundling beasts, a fog of blue smoke trailing behind them. One, two, three, four of them, and now she sees they are following a faint depression she initially mistook as a natural wash in the land. The road they drive on is covered in silt that kicks up into the air with their passage. A man pokes from the top of the first vehicle as well as the last, their indistinct shapes holding black silhouettes of rifles.

Zoey drops lower and hugs the ground, only the top of her head visible above the rise. She curses herself for being so stupid. Why is she walking on the highest point where she’s visible to anyone passing by? She isn’t thinking straight. She watches the convoy pass and then slow before stopping at a low hill. Another vehicle emerges then from the opposite direction, its shape almost identical to the others. It coasts to a stop, nose to nose with the lead vehicle.

Doors open, and figures get out.

Four of them, all armed, vaguely familiar.

They are the men from the night before. She stares at them as the passenger in the convoy’s first vehicle climbs out and approaches the group of four. They speak for a long time, their gesticulations becoming more and more emphatic. The flash of something near the tail end of the convoy catches her attention.

A man is standing on the roadside holding something to his eyes. Again the flash.

Zoey slides down completely out of sight. Binoculars. He was scanning the area. Did he see her?

She inches backward, sliding down until she’s sure she can stand without being seen. She hurries away, hunched low despite the pain that radiates from her stomach. The land dips and rises before falling away to a narrow, rocky valley. On its far side, the house she spotted before comes into view. Its strange shape is due to the fact that most of the roof has caved in and one wall is entirely gone. Rotted boards protrude from the wreck like broken teeth into a weed-choked yard.

In the distance, engines rev and slowly fade away until there is only the sound of the plains and the smell of smoke.

The house is even worse than it appeared from a distance. She approaches it at a slow limp, throwing looks back in the direction of the road every few steps. She’s visible here, but the convoy has moved on. Each step is becoming a laborious event. The ground doesn’t feel solid, instead her feet seem to sink into it and stick each time she tries to move.

The house stinks of mold and the musk of an animal. She pulls herself inside through the gaping hole left by the collapsed wall. She is in a wide room held up by interspersed wooden beams traveling from floor to ceiling. A chair, its cushions black and bloated with moisture, sits across the room. All manner of nature coats the floor and walls—dried moss along the baseboards, dark mold crawling across the ceiling, old nests of unknown creatures.

The stairway to the second floor is collapsed, and the door leading off the large kitchen won’t budge no matter how hard she pushes against it. She slides down to sit on the floor, the exertion overwhelming.