The Last Girl (22 page)

21

Zoey nudged the small clump of gristle toward the owl that watched her with its luminescent eyes.

“You need to eat,” she said, pushing the morsel another inch closer to the bird’s hooked beak. She had saved the bite of meat beneath her tongue during dinner, daring to spit it out only after Simon said goodnight and locked the door to her room. She’d waited until after midnight before pulling the loosened piece of glass out of its casing to find the bird still in the small alcove where she’d left it that morning.

Its wing hung at an ugly angle away from its body, and its beak opened and closed in small movements as if it were panting. It hadn’t drunk any of the water she’d poured into the divot in the alcove’s floor.

“Just try a bite, okay?” She picked the soft piece of meat up and extended her arm farther out. The owl nipped at her fingers, pinching the tip of one hard in its beak. “Ouch!” Zoey squealed, unable to stop herself. She dropped the chunk and drew her hand back, examining the shallow cut the bird had made. It oozed a line of blood, and a sudden overwhelming fear flooded her. What if the owl was infected with the plague?

She stepped down from the chair and went to the bathroom, running the cut first under steaming hot water, then under cold until the bleeding stopped. She wrapped it carefully in toilet paper before returning to the window. The bird hadn’t touched the meat.

“You don’t look sick,” Zoey said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you besides your wing.” The owl tilted its head at her words as if considering them. “But you’ll starve if you don’t eat something.”

She glanced away from the alcove and its occupant, looking into the night sky.

The darkness above the wall was buffeted by some of the exterior lights, but beyond the pale glow, stars glistened in a billion flickering points.

“How high have you flown?” she said, not breaking her gaze. “Have you tried to reach them?” She looked back at the bird before remembering Simon’s words from earlier that day. “I bet you can fly really fast. Faster than that bird that flew past us today. Zipper. Is that an okay name?” The owl cocked its head the opposite way. “I’ll take that as a yes. Zipper, if you don’t eat or drink anything, your wing won’t heal and you won’t ever fly again. And if you can’t fly, you can’t leave this place. If you’ll just eat and let me help you, I know you’ll get better. I can fix your wing, I’m sure of it.” She licked at the dryness of her lips, studying the sky again. “Otherwise you’ll die here.”

Zoey checked the cut on her finger and tossed the toilet paper into the room. The slice didn’t look infected, but it was really too soon to tell. Maybe she’d wake up with the plague. If she did, she was going to cough all over Rita.

The owl shuffled to one side and made a low, mournful croak. She watched it try to fold the broken wing tighter to its body, but let it flop back to its original position after a moment.

“You can’t give up,” she said in what she hoped was a soothing voice. “The second you give up is when you start to die. You have to fight to make it. You have to want to live. Do you want to live?” The bird blinked. “Then let’s try this again.”

Zoey picked up the meat between her thumb and forefinger and slowly extended it toward Zipper again. In a quick, darting motion, it stabbed its beak forward and snapped back. She nearly yelped with the anticipated pain. She’d pushed the animal too far, been too excited by its presence, too determined to keep it alive, and now it had taken a piece of her finger for payment. She should have left it alone, even if it was going to die. That was the way things were. If you didn’t fight, you died, either in body or in mind.

She brought her fingers back into the better light of the room, ready for the sight of her torn flesh, but they were unscathed save the prior cut.

Zoey blinked and looked back at where the owl rested.

Zipper’s beak worked in quick, pinching motions, the scrap of meat she’d been holding vanishing down his throat with a bob of his head. His eyes flashed and he shuffled forward, dipping down to scoop up some of the water she’d left that morning.

Zoey smiled.

22

With a single motion, she grasps Reg’s beard with the arm he doesn’t have pinned and yanks his head forward to bury her teeth in the soft skin of his face.

Hot blood squirts into her mouth.

A gurgling cry comes from the man’s chest and the reaction is immediate. He shoves away from her, and she feels his flesh tear from her mouth. The gap between them widens enough for her to launch a kick at his groin. The muffled, mewling sound he makes as he tips to one side lets her know she found her mark.

Then she’s on her feet and running, hoisting her pants back above her hips. She flies up the rockfall, not looking back to see if Reg is pursuing her, only moving, running from the feeling of his body on top of hers. Her mind attempts to rip itself from its moorings, to hide away behind a sudden memory of Lee’s fingers sliding over her hand, but she flings it away, bringing herself back to the present.

A branch snaps behind her, close, and her bladder threatens to release itself. She can hear his breathing now, ragged and hoarse. She won’t be able to outrun him.

Zoey catches a glimpse of a barren pine to her right a dozen paces ahead. Its branches are different from the other trees, and it takes her a split second to realize it’s dead. Its limbs snake out in a thousand directions, and even in the faint light she can see their pointed ends scratching the sky.

She changes course for the dead tree, leaping over a knee-high rock. She trips as she reaches the tree’s base and skids to a stop with its crumbling bark crushing into her shoulder. Reg’s footfalls are right behind her, and she barely has time to climb to her feet and face him.

He is ten steps away, coming full bore, an outline of fury against the backdrop of forested night.

Zoey reaches up over her head.

Stretches high.

Grasps the lowest, wickedly pointed branch and pulls it down.

The branch shudders in her hands and she lets go, cringing against the impact she knows will come.

But it doesn’t.

She opens her eyes and stares at what she’s done.

Reg jitters at the end of the razored branch, and it takes a heartbeat for her to recognize its tip protruding from the back of his neck. Reg chokes and splutters something as he makes feeble grabs for the branch impaling him. His fingers slide in a bony rasp down its length to where it disappears under his chin. His legs shudder before they fold, and he drops to his knees.

Zoey moves out from under the dead tree’s cover, taking care to keep far out of the man’s reach. She stares, transfixed as Reg’s shirt and jacket darken with the unending current that pumps from his ruined throat.

He turns his head to look in her direction, to follow her movement, but instead slumps to the side, the branch snapping off to follow him to the ground, where he lies utterly still.

The sounds of the night come rushing back in. Zoey blinks, the silence that had gathered in the seconds before Reg impaled himself on the tree branch washing away.

No
,
she tells herself.
He didn’t do it, you did. You’ve done it again, killed again.
But even the guilt-fueled voice can’t drown out the lingering feeling of his hands on her, trying to tear her clothing away. The urge to spit on his corpse comes and goes as she steps past it.

Zoey moves through the trees, climbing carefully back down the rocky embankment and retraces the path of her flight. Soon the woods begin to jitter with firelight again, and she makes out the stump she hid behind earlier.

The fire still wavers in bright, lapping tongues. The men’s voices are there, but lower now, almost conspiratorial. She drops to her hands and knees, fingers hovering across the ground, searching for the hard composite of the rifle stock. It has to be here. She remembers it falling away when Reg struck her. It was only feet from the right side of the stump. Couldn’t have gone far.

She crawls a little farther down the slope, a sense of unease multiplying within her. Where is it? Where, where, where? She rotates to her left, and her hand brushes something hard. Her heart leaps. No, just the end of a rock. She fumbles past it, and something snags her thumb. A strap, the rifle sling. Zoey nearly moans with relief as she drags the weapon to her, its weight so comforting she nearly hugs it. She starts to rise to her feet as a sound makes the hair on the back of her neck stiffen.

Quiet footsteps to her right.

A small but bright light flashes on, which partially illuminates the man holding it. His face is stained with smudges of dirt beneath a pair of very thick glasses with black frames. Where Reg was heavily bearded, this man is almost clean-shaven with only a slight stubble covering his cheeks and chin. His mouth is a round O in the lower part of his face.

They are both hypnotized for a brief second by the sight of one another, held in the stasis of shock. Then the man’s mouth opens wider, and he inhales to release a shout.

Zoey levels the rifle and yanks the trigger.

When she dropped it the selector switch on the side must have gotten bumped from the “Semi” setting to “Auto,” for the rifle kicks and chatters in her hands, and tufts of needles fly into the air several feet in front of the man before the bullets walk a line up his left leg and continue on to his stomach and chest. He quakes with the impacts, vibrating in a strange dance, his yell lost in the gunfire. Blood blossoms in the holes of his clothes and mists the air behind him, crimson rain lit by the fire. The rifle continues to rise in her grip until the rounds are no longer hitting him and strafe the trees over his shoulder.

Zoey stops firing and her ears chime a single tone, but above it are the yells of the men by the fire, their forms spilling from behind the sage ring.

The man she shot falls to his back and rolls down the decline toward his companions.

Zoey runs.

She pelts away from the voices, the lights that begin stabbing the night around her. Tree trunks zip by, her footfalls echoing back like a dozen heartbeats. Something tangles her feet and she nearly falls but keeps going, down a small ravine that washes out below a high ridgeline of staggered rock.

The sound of an angry insect sings past her head and she ducks instinctively. A second later she hears the gunshot as the ground before her is bathed in the glow of a flashlight.

“Here! I got him over here!” a voice booms. Another shot splinters the bark of a pine a step to her right. Sap sprays her face and hair and she remotely wonders how she’ll ever clean it off.

The ground descends, dropping sharply at a bank of trees. The cliff is only a dozen feet tall but too much for her to leap from. Through the dark, the calm expanse of the river winds away in a sharp bend. Booted feet thud on the ground behind her and she turns, crouching, and fires at an indistinct shape coming through the trees.

The rifle spits flame, and the man is lit in the muzzle blast. He dives to one side, vanishing from sight even as the weapon goes silent.

Zoey glances down. She’s out of bullets.

She drops the gun and runs again, keeping even with the cliff to her right, which slowly levels down to the shore of the river. The inky water moves at a steady pace, gurgling as it rounds the bend she stands at. Her eyes flick across its width but the far bank is too distant to swim to even if she knew how.

Branches crack in the forest, voices yelling to one another.

Closer.

Bobbing against the shore thirty yards downstream is a length of driftwood, its bulk bigger than she is around. Zoey runs to it, ankles trying to turn on uneven rocks. When she reaches the log she sees that its end is lodged in the crook of a boulder. She yanks on its length, and it shifts toward her but doesn’t come free.

“The river! He’s at the river!”

A light appears on the ridge she came down, and she slides over the top of the log and into the frigid water. A gasp escapes her and her feet slip, submerging her completely for a moment. When she surfaces, the light is sweeping the riverbank below the ridgeline, coming closer. Zoey braces her feet on a slick rock beneath the water and hauls on the log again. This time it unhooks from the angled boulder and comes free. Its weight surprises her but she’s able to move it into the flow of the stream.
She slings one arm over it like she’s embracing a friend, and begins to float.

The light on the ridge has traveled down to the riverbank, and now there
is another beside it. They sweep the current and the rocks with precision, pausing here and there before continuing on. The distance between them and her is growing by the second. In less than a minute, they’ll be out of sight.

Zoey readjusts her hold on the log and kicks gently with her feet. Her body is growing numb from the water, and her teeth threaten to chatter so she clenches her jaw. The voices are fainter, the beams heading the opposite way. She releases a sigh and tries to turn so she can grasp the log with both hands.

Ahead of her, a light flashes on a dozen yards away.

She doesn’t think, only acts.

Slipping below the water, she grasps the underside of the log, finding a knobby handhold of an old branch. She forces herself beneath its mass, closing her eyes to the blinding cold. The water roars around her and she wonders if she’ll even feel the bullets when the man fires or if she’s already too cold.

The air in her lungs begins to smolder.

Then burn.

How far? How far has she floated? Far enough?

She starts to shake against the log’s length, shuddering with the need for air. Finally she can stand it no longer and rolls to the far side of the log, coming up only enough to peer over its top but still not daring to breathe.

The light is fading behind the nearest corner, its beam cutting the dark in quick slashes. He’s running in the opposite direction.

Zoey sucks in a huge lungful of air, drinking it, gasping with ecstasy. The river picks up speed as she manages to get both arms over the log, then a leg. She hauls herself mostly free of the water, straddling the driftwood like the people she’s seen in the textbook riding animals called horses. The log rocks, threatening to spill her back into the river each time she moves, but she keeps her balance.

She shivers, the air, so wonderful to breathe moments ago, now an enemy as it invades her soaked clothing, running icy hands across her numb skin.

A shout echoes from far behind, but she doesn’t bother looking back. They’ve probably found Reg. Good.

She stays on the log as the river bends three more times. With each corner the current seems to gain speed, and somewhere ahead the sound of water rushing over rock filters to her.

With arms that have been dipped in lead, she paddles to the left side of the river, the log scraping bottom after an eternity. Zoey tumbles from it into thigh-high water, managing to keep her head above the surface. She slogs to land, legs faltering twice before they fail her completely, dropping her onto all fours.

Overhead a pale slit of moon emerges from behind a cloud bank, its light enough to make out a tall stand of dry grass lining the bank ten yards away. She crawls to it, hands abrading on rocks, until the shush of the grass surrounds her. Even though it is dry and brittle, it feels like the softest thing she’s ever touched.

Shaking, she flounders to the center of the dead growth that would come up to her waist if she were standing, and rolls to her back. Feebly she pulls armfuls of grass close, down over her like a braided, rustling blanket.

The last thing she sees is the cold wink of the moon disappearing once again behind a veil of clouds.