The Last One (38 page)

This is the first question he’s asked us, but he’s already taken several notes in his leather-bound ledger. Race and sex, I assume. General impressions. Brennan’s bouncy energy, my scowl.

“Brennan Michaels,” says Brennan. He’s sitting straight in his chair, too straight. His right leg operates an invisible sewing machine.

“Immune or recovered?” asks the man.

“What?”

“Were you immune to the plague or did you catch it and recover?”

“Oh. Immune.”

The old man makes a note. “Any skills we should know about? Tasks you’d be especially fit for?”

“I, uh…”

“He’s thirteen,” I interject.

The bearded man turns to me with lifted brows. I don’t like him. “What about you, what are your skills?”

“I don’t die,” I say, “even when everyone else does.”

The brows lower. “We’ve got three hundred and fourteen souls here who can say the same. Any actual skills?”

I dislike him a little less.

“She can build fires!” blurts Brennan. “And shelters out of branches and stuff. And she’s really good at—”

I shoot him a stilling glance. We didn’t see much of the farm, walking in with our escort, but it’s huge and populated with multiple structures. There were running tractors, noise. Life here is beyond debris huts. “I’m not a doctor or an engineer,” I say. “I can’t track a deer and I don’t know how to build a roof, but I’ll do whatever needs to be done. Teach me, or I’ll figure it out on my own. Either way it’ll get done.”

The man jots a few more notes. “Well, you don’t sound lazy,” he says. “As long as you’re willing to contribute, we can use you. And what are you, immune or recovered?”

“Recovered, I think.”

“What’s your name?”

“Mae,” I say. Perhaps I should have hesitated, or given the other, but Mae’s the version of me who made it this far.

“Mae what?”

This time I do hesitate, and then I give the only answer that feels true. “Woods.”

In the Dark
—Trying to find my wife

…

[+] submitted 1 day ago by 501_Miles

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[-] LongLiveCaptainTightPants 1 day ago

A friend of a friend of mine met the banker guy from the show in a camp outside Fresno. He was evacuated along with a few of the others. Says he thought it was all scripted at first, took him a bit to realize there was a real emergency. I’ll reach out, see if I can get contact info.

[-] 501_Miles
1 day ago

Thank you. This is the first lead I’ve had—thank you.

[-] LongLiveCaptainTightPants
4 hours ago

Got it. PM to follow.

[-] Trina_ABC 1 hour ago

501_Miles—I’m with an ABC affiliate outside of San Francisco. We heard about your search for your wife and would love to speak with you. If you’re willing to share your story, please PM me. Maybe I can help.

…

26.

“This place is pretty nice, huh, Mae?” asks Brennan. He’s sitting on his cot across from mine, tying his shoelaces. We’re in a barn that’s been converted to a dorm and houses two dozen people. This corner is ours. It was kind of them, to give us a corner.

“Could be worse,” I reply. I’m getting better at putting in my contacts left-handed, but it’s still difficult, especially without a mirror.

“About Vermont…” says Brennan.

“We’re better off here.”

He looks up, hopeful. “You think we should stay?”

I take my hand away from my eye and blink rapidly. It stings for a second, then the lens settles. “Yes, I think we should stay.” Because his future is more important than my past.

We’ve been here four days. It’s difficult, being surrounded by people after so long alone, or nearly so. But there’s less drama than I expected. Everyone has a role, and seems to fill it with minimal complaint. “Most of us had it rough, getting here,” the doctor told me when I went to see her about my hand. “We know how bad it could get, if we let it. So we don’t.”

Another bit of lore: There was an attempted rape, early on. They let the assailed choose the punishment and she chose instead to forgive. Something about there being enough grief in this world without adding to it. It’s unclear who exactly this woman was—no one ever gives her a name when telling the story—but if this is truly a new world, someone’s bound to dedicate a statue to her before too long. Or a church. Soon her memory and eventually her myth will be begged forgiveness for sins beyond count or measure.

There’s no one left to forgive me.

I asked the doctor about my period; she said nearly every woman here has missed one. It’s the physical stress, like I thought. She had me stand on one of those tall, creaky scales, the type that measures height too. One hundred four pounds; almost thirty below the weight I think of as mine. She said my body should be getting back to normal soon, now that I’m safe. She actually used those words: “normal,” “safe.” I think that’s what made me tell her about the coyote. She stared. Turns out I know more about rabies than she does. If I’m still standing a month from now, I’m in the clear.

I haven’t told Brennan. I figure it’s best not to mention rabies until and unless I develop an irrational fear of water. He’s befriended a few kids around his age, but slingshots back to me every meal, every morning, every “town hall,” and every evening. I’m grateful.

“Mae,” says Brennan as I move on to my right eye. “When we were at your house—”

A different world, a different life, a different me. “I told you, Brennan, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But it’s different now.”

“No,” I say, firmly. I blink my second lens into place.

“But, Mae…”

He looks guilty, maybe a little scared. I wonder if he stole something. Scavenged, in the parlance of our new reality.

“If it’s something you need forgiveness for, you have it,” I say. He still looks supremely uncomfortable. I need to give him something. “Tell me what was in the motel room instead.” Because that’s something I still haven’t been able to reconcile, and I need to so I can forget it.

“Oh.” His sneakers are tied. He rubs the toes of his right foot into the hay-lined dirt floor, drawing an oval. “It was stupid. The room was filled with electronics. TVs and laptops, Xboxes, stuff like that.”

“No bodies?”

“No.” A second oval, a slightly rotated twin of the first, making a very slim
X.
“But things were dusty like no one had been there in a while.”

“So whoever put it there is probably dead,” I say.

“Probably,” he agrees. A third oval. His foot is a slow Spirograph.

I look around the barn. There are a handful of others milling about, preparing for the day. I’ve heard maybe a dozen different explanations for the plague since arriving, but the majority opinion seems to be it had something to do with fracking. Either the process released a prehistoric pathogen, or it was the dispersal method for a man-made toxin. One of the more outspoken proponents of the unearthed-pathogen theory is an old Indian woman who’s currently standing by the barn door. She waves at us, smiling, then takes the hand of the little white girl—four, five years old—who I’ve never seen more than ten feet from her side. The idea of fracking being behind this doesn’t make any sense, and I think the woman knows it. She just needs something to believe; they all do.

“Maybe whoever put that stuff in the motel is here,” I say to Brennan.

“Mae!”

The look in his eyes hurts. “They could be, Brennan. Or men like those two at the grocery store could show up any day.” Maybe Cliff and Harry
would
be here, if not for me. Maybe they too would have roles to fill. “This is a good place,” I say, “but just because someone made it this far doesn’t mean they’re a good person. So don’t get complacent.” He squirms. “Brennan, promise me.” Because I can’t do it, I can’t lose him too.

“I promise, Mae.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I’ve got to go, I’m on breakfast duty.”

“You’re lucky,” says Brennan. “I’m chopping wood all morning.”

His voice is so forlorn I can’t help a little smile, impressed by his resilience, for chopping wood to feel like a burden. “That’s better than scrambling eggs for three hundred strangers,” I tell him. “I’ll be right out there with you as soon as my hand’s better.”

“Mae, how long do you think we’ll be here?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Could be another day, could be forever.”

In the Dark
—Trying to find my wife

…

[+] submitted 5 days ago by 501_Miles

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[-]LongLiveCaptainTightPants
3 days ago

Was Elliot any help?

[-] 501_Miles
34 minutes ago

He said she didn’t get out when he did. That some of them were left behind. She was left behind. That’s all he knows.

[-] Velcro_Is_the_Worst
29 minutes ago

You know how many bodies there are rotting east of the Mississippi right now? Millions. Your wife is one of them. Dead as a doornail. Accept it and move on.

[-] LongLiveCaptainTightPants
28 minutes ago

Don’t listen to him, Miles. People survived. There’s been radio contact with pockets of survivors and there’s talk of sending in recovery teams as soon as it’s safe. As soon as they can.

[-] 501_Miles
Just now

I know. Thank you. If anyone could have made it, it’s my Sam.

…

27.

Faces swarm the camera. Calmer than expected, cleaner than expected, thinner than they used to be. Most are smiling and many are crying as their breath blurs the air. One by one they accept pamphlets and bottles of water from men and women wearing orange vests. Backs of heads nod and bob as frost crunches beneath boots and shoes and the occasional pair of slippers. As strong a community as was being built here, nearly all want to be saved.

Three thousand miles away a man watches the scene on an old flatscreen. He’s lucky, he shares the room with only two others—fellow East Coasters, though he didn’t know them before. The man has a four-month-long beard that used to be more black than gray. His chin is tucked into his palm and he gnaws on a thumbnail as he searches the faraway faces. An alert to which he will not reply blinks on his iPhone, which lies on the cot beside him. Service was restored locally two months ago, but there weren’t any messages, not from her. Her mother left one from the landline back in August; she didn’t sound well and no one’s answered his attempts to call back. This is the third camp he’s watched the rescue teams enter. None have been easy, but this is the hardest yet. It’s the largest known cluster, over three hundred people. His best chance.

A news anchor appears in the frame, microphone in hand. She’s sleek and polished, her symmetrical face augmented with HD-friendly makeup. She’s not the one who’s been helping the man search; she knows nothing about him. Looking at her pert grin, one would never know that a mysterious miasmic infection whose origins authorities are only now beginning to trace recently reduced her nation’s population by a third and the world’s by nearly half. A caption at the bottom of the screen reads:
EASTERN U.S. REFUGEES RESCUED
.

The caption is a lie. The man searching the screen for his wife’s face—he’s the refugee. He became one the second he boarded a bus to quarantine instead of taking the last train home. His roommates are refugees, as are the thousands of others like them: the displaced waiting to go home. The people in the camp are not refugees. They are survivors. Each has a story about reaching this thriving community in the hills of Massachusetts. The short Arab man who just accepted a bottle of water was a taxi driver in Washington, D.C. He got sick; so did his wife and children. He was the only one to recover, waking in his apartment dehydrated and surrounded by his deceased family. His will to live was stronger than his sorrow, barely. The elderly Indian woman in the right corner of the screen lost her daughter and grandson days before saving the life of the little white girl who now rides her shoulders; she scooped the girl from her car seat as water rushed in through the window of the Mini Cooper her delirious father had just crashed into a river. The black child in the red sweatshirt held his mother’s head as she faded to nothing on a church pew. Alone, started walking south, only to turn east on meeting a stubborn stranger his loneliness wouldn’t allow him to leave. The stubborn stranger’s story is the strangest of all, riddled with deceit external and internal. Even the man who legally owns the property these many people have begun to think of as home has a story, though he did not have to travel to arrive. His is a story of opening doors, of deciding to give after losing so much.

In time, many of these stories will be celebrated, but for now the losses are still being counted. For now the mere survival of these people is news enough. All the anchor wants to know is “How do you feel?”

“Overwhelmed!”

“Exhausted!”

“Blessed!”

Nothing of substance, nothing unexpected. Just tears and platitudes. The man watching hears nothing. A chocolate Lab trots through the shot and his heart pinches. He doesn’t know what happened to the greyhound he adopted a week before the world he knew imploded. The dog was supposed to be a surprise for his wife. Speckled and sweet, just like she wanted, and she would have loved the name: Freshly Ground Pepper. He let the dog sleep in their bed, even the night she got into the trash and vomited a foamy pile on the first step of their evening walk.