The Last Mile (5 page)

Alice smiled, her growling stomach answering for her.

* * *

“You’re a thrall, right? You got the mark.”

Dan damn well knew he had the mark. It had appeared on his forehead soon after the cow-thing had vomited its rancid milk on him: a scar-tissue design of spirals and intersecting lines that never seemed to be in the same exact configuration whenever he examined it in the mirror. And even when it didn’t burn—and it was blazing like a motherfucking house fire right now—he could always feel it, as if it were a living tattoo whose ink flowed beneath his skin like a slow but constant tide.

The two of them walked alongside the road, the dead-gray ground giving slightly beneath their weight as if it were formed not of soil but rather some spongelike substance. Dan, 9mm in his right hand, hunting knife in his left, walked several paces behind the girl. She was of medium height and didn’t look all that strong, but you didn’t willingly turn your back on anyone in the World After. Not if you wanted to survive a few minutes longer. He’d cut the tape around her ankles, but he’d left her wrists bound. If they ran into more trouble like that deer-thing, she wouldn’t be able to fight, but he couldn’t risk freeing her hands. She’d turn on him to save her own skin or try to make a run for it. With her hands bound, she’d be less likely to attack, and if she tried to take off, she’d be unbalanced and awkward. She’d have to run slow or she’d trip and fall. Either way, she wouldn’t escape him.

Of course, his reasoning assumed that she was sane, and these days, that was a mighty big assumption, one that could easily get you killed. But he didn’t have any choice. His thrall-mark burned like acid, a constant, agonizing reminder of his Master’s impatience. Dan had to deliver the girl and soon, or else… Well, he didn’t know what else, not precisely, but he knew it would be bad. Damned bad, in the truest sense of the adjective.

The World After was chock-a-block full of delicious little ironies like that, he thought.

As they continued walking, Dan swept his gaze back and forth, alert for any sign of a threat. After a bit, the girl looked over her shoulder at him.

“Where are you taking me?”

Dan didn’t want to talk; his tongue still hurt like a bitch from when he’d bit it. He glanced to his left, saw thorn-stalks waving in the breeze. Except, of course, there was no wind. The air was still and stale, like the inside of a closet that hadn’t been aired out for years. At least the goddamned things couldn’t reach them here. They were ten feet from the road, and Dan had never seen a thorn-stalk stretch that far. But then again, that didn’t mean one
couldn’t
reach them, not if it really wanted to. He sighed. Life had never come with any guarantees: that much at least hadn’t changed.

“If you don’t answer me, I’ll sit down and refuse to move,” the girl said without turning to face him this time.

Despite himself, Dan responded. “I’ll just carry you.” His speech sounded a little funny due to his wounded tongue, but his words were understandable enough.

“All the way to wherever it is you’re taking me?” She sounded amused. “Even if you were still eating regular, I bet you wouldn’t be strong enough to carry me that far.”

Dan knew she was baiting him, hoping to stall and learn what she could so she could use it to save herself. Even so, her cavalier attitude was beginning to get on his nerves. “I eat just fine. So does my family.”

“That’s right. You’re a
thrall
.” She emphasized the word as if it were some sort of disgusting insect that should be stepped on immediately and ground into the earth with as much force as possible. “You get food, water, and electricity, don’t you? All for serving your Master.”

“Yes.” Food—canned goods, and even fresh fruits and vegetables—was delivered to his home once a week by another thrall driving a battered pickup truck. Where the food came from, especially the produce, Dan didn’t know and didn’t ask. And as for the utilities, they just worked, presumably because his Master willed it. But he’d gotten so much more than the conveniences of modern life restored. Caroline had returned to her senses after his thrall-mark appeared, and her ghastly self-inflicted wounds healed—to a point. They’d never be able to make love again, but at least his wife was sane. And the return of their conveniences—including regular television, though only one channel that showed randomly selected reruns of old shows—had helped Lindsey come out of her near-catatonia. Life wasn’t back to normal, how could it be? But his family had it a damn site better than most people in the World After, and Dan intended to keep it that way.

“And what does your Master want now? Me?”

Dan didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The girl was dirty, her white blouse dingy and splotched with all manner of stains, many of them blood, he guessed. She was an adult, but only just. Not that much older than Lindsey, really. Biologically speaking, he was old enough to be her father, if he’d gotten married young and started a family right away. The thought of what his Master would do to her…

No, don’t go there,
he warned himself.
Look what happened last time. You got to stay cold, stay hard. For your family.

They didn’t have that far to go. Less than a mile now. He could do this, had done it plenty of times before. He’d only failed once, and he wouldn’t fail again. He couldn’t.

“Tell me something,” the girl said. “Why is your Master all the way the hell out in butt-fuck Egypt? I mean if he—or it, or whatever—wants you to make like Domino’s and deliver, wouldn’t he have picked someone who lived closer?”

A good question, and one that Dan had pondered on more than one occasion. The best answer he could come up with: because it amused his Master to make his thrall travel.

“Shut the fuck up and keep walking” was the answer he gave the girl instead.

* * *

Good going, kiddo. Piss him off any more and he’ll put a couple bullets in your back.

Probably not, she decided. His Master obviously wanted her alive. Still, that didn’t mean the thrall couldn’t get rough with her if she mouthed off too much. But she just couldn’t help herself. She’d always been one to talk before she thought, and she’d only gotten worse since the Arrival. More than just the physical world changed that day: the people had too.

We’re all a little crazy now,
she thought. She glanced over her shoulder at the thrall.
Some of us more than others.

She faced forward again and marveled at how different the highway looked. This was the first time she’d been so far out of town since the Arrival, and I-75 looked nothing like she remembered. The asphalt on both sides of the highway was cracked and broken; that much was the same as in town. But the large weeds sprouting up from the fissures—thorn-stalks, she’d heard them called—were different. The streets in town might be broken and difficult to travel on, but they remained passable. But she’d seen what the thorn-stalks could do. By the time she and her captor had made it to the side of the road, they’d reduced the deer monster to an empty bag of pebbly gray hide. Even its bones had been liquefied and absorbed. It seemed the Masters had no objections to humans moving about freely in town, as long as they didn’t stray past the city limits.

It’s like we’re pets in a cage,
she thought. No, more like animals in a holding pen, waiting our turn to be led to the slaughterhouse.

The mental image sent ice water surging through her veins, and she wondered again what her captor and his Master had in mind for her. Whatever it was, she knew it wouldn’t be as merciful as a quick death.

Live in the moment,
she reminded herself. That was the only way to maintain even a margin of sanity in the World After. She thrust aside all thoughts of where she was being taken and what would happen to her there and refocused her attention on her surroundings. She’d grown used to the absence of grass and trees in town, but out here, with no buildings to break the sameness of the smooth gray ground, it seemed as if she was walking across the alien landscape of another world. She supposed that, in way, she was. Between the hazy yellow sky above and the gray barrenness surrounding her, Alice felt both isolated and exposed, and she suffered a touch of vertigo, as if her body was having difficulty telling the difference between up and down. She walked with extra care, concentrating on each step, placing her feet precisely to maintain her balance.

Though many people thought of the Midwest as having flat plains stretching from one horizon to the other, southwest Ohio showed the mark of the glaciers that had made their torturously slow procession across the state thousands of years ago, and the Arrival hadn’t changed that. The highway rose and fell, twisted and turned, melded to the hilly terrain it wound through, as if it were always a part of the land, just as it had before the Arrival. There were other things that had survived intact, though not many, and Alice saw one now off in the distance: a billboard on their side of the highway advertising a twenty-four-hour Starbucks.

She couldn’t help it; she started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” her captor demanded, his voice tense, as if he feared she were losing it.

She momentarily forgot her hands were bound and tried to point at the sign. When she couldn’t, she said, “The billboard. You want to stop off for a cup of coffee? My treat.”

She didn’t look back to check the expression on his face, in case her laughter had made him jumpy. She didn’t want to get a bullet between her shoulder blades for making a stupid joke.

“I’d forgotten that sign was even there,” he said. “I guess I’m always too busy watching the road when I pass this way.”

“Watching for things like that deer, you mean.”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.

She gazed up at the sky. “Do you think they’re still up there? The eyes?” The yellow haze that choked the sky began to coalesce almost immediately after the Arrival, and it hadn’t broken since. No sun, moon, or stars anymore, yet somehow there was light enough to see by, as if the yellow mist gave off its own kind of illumination.

“Oh yes. They’re still there. Sometimes I think they always were, and we just couldn’t see them. Not until they wanted us to.”

The thought that those eyes—eyes that she was sure belonged to the Masters—had been watching them all this time, maybe watching
forever
, disturbed her more than anything she’d experienced since that day in the parking lot outside the Pasta Pavilion. Until now she’d had her memories of the World Before to comfort her, but her captor’s words forced her to consider the possibility that there
never
had been a world without the Masters. Never had been a world that was safe, free, and most of all, sane.

The notion filled her with such despair that she didn’t want to resist her captor, didn’t want to escape. Maybe it would be better to let him sacrifice her, or whatever the fuck it was he did. At least then it would all be over, and she’d be free of this nightmare her world had become. She probably deserved whatever was going to happen to her, no matter how awful it might be. Considering the things she’d done since the Arrival…

Alice jumped as the silence of the gray wasteland was broken by the sound of an engine rumbling to life. The rumble grew to a roar, and a motorcycle came speeding out from behind the Starbucks billboard.

Her abductor stepped in front of her, gun in one hand, knife in the other.

“Stay behind me,” he warned.

Alice would’ve taken off running if there’d been anywhere to go. Instead, she remained where she was. Who knows? Maybe the motorcycle rider would turn out to be a knight of the road and save her.

Yeah, right.

As the biker approached he kept to the shoulder where the thorn-stalks didn’t grow. The plants quivered as he passed, and a few made token grabs in his direction, but none came close to touching him. He throttled back and slowed as he drew near. The biker wore no helmet and Alice clearly saw the thrall-mark on his forehead, similar to her captor’s.

The biker’s head was shaved, and he sported a black goatee. He wore only a tan leather vest, and almost all of the skin displayed was covered with tattoos. He was a stout man, with thick arms, a broad chest, and a layer of belly fat that somehow made him look tougher than if he had six-pack abs. He gripped the handlebars tight, knuckles pronounced, the skin covering them red and scarred. Alice guessed those knuckles had seen a lot of hard use over the years. She didn’t recognize the type of bike he was riding—she’d never been into motorcycles, never even ridden one—but it wasn’t the sort of bike that the Born to be Mild crowd rode. The kind that was big, awkward, and slow, pieces made out of colorful plastic as if it were a child’s toy that had been zapped by a growth ray. Mr. Goatee’s bike was the real deal: lean and mean, all metal and built for speed. The wooden stock of a shotgun rose over his right shoulder, and Alice guessed he carried the weapon in some kind of holster, though she didn’t see any straps under his vest. Maybe the holster was part of the vest. Was that possible?

Very observant,
she congratulated herself.
Now what about the fact that he doesn’t have any legs?

Alice had left that little detail for last because she hadn’t wanted to deal with it. But it was true: the biker had no legs. At first she thought he was a double amputee who’d somehow rigged the bike’s controls so he could do everything he needed with his hands. But if that was true, then how could he stay seated on the bike without slipping off? The answer turned out to be quite simple. He didn’t have to worry about falling off the bike because he was part of it. His waist had somehow been merged with the bike’s leather seat, making him some sort of mechanical centaur.

The biker rolled to a stop and the kickstand deployed by itself, keeping the motorcycle from toppling over. Mr. Goatee let go of the handlebars and crossed his arms over his chest, covering the spot where Alice’s captor trained his gun.

“You don’t see too many folks walking out here these days,” Mr. Goatee said.