The Last One (31 page)

Bang.

“Open up!” The words come through clearly this time, and I recognize the voice. It’s a showman’s tenor, ringing with bravado.
Randy.
I’m amazed. Aggravating others is his oxygen; how did he make it through Solo?

“I know you’re inside!”
Bang.
“Let us in!”
Bang. Bang.

“Sorry, Randy,” I whisper. I wish there were a peephole, so I could see what he looks like after the last few weeks. I envision him holding a torch, flames lighting his wild hair and glittering off his tacky necklace. He’s probably dressed entirely in squirrel tails by now.

Wait.

He said
us.
I was right; it is a they. Randy isn’t alone.

A second voice outside, quieter and deeper: “That’s not going to work.”

I know this voice too. Emery said we would know when the Solo Challenge was over and I do; it is.
You can do this,
Cooper’s last words to me, unspoken, but I heard, and I thought I
could
do it. But I can’t, and now I can tell him
thank you
and
I’m married.
Because I don’t know
what
he felt—
if
he felt—but I know what ran through me. I should have told him. The instant it happened I should have told him; instead I—but I didn’t
mean
to think it and I was confused, I thought I saw the person I could have been, but no, it’s different—we’re different—because I never
chose
alone, not until I came here, and this is the biggest mistake of my life. I don’t want to be Cooper, I want to be
me,
to be the
us
I left behind—the
us
I chose. And I can, I
will
—because Solo is
over.

I throw myself at the motion-activated doors. I push and tug, then pound on the glass.

Brennan is at my side. “Mae, what are you doing?”

“We’ve got to let them in.” But the doors won’t open. I can’t figure out how to get them open. “Help me,” I say.

“Mae, no, it’s—”

Then from outside, “Hello? Who’s in there?”

Brennan’s head whips toward the doors, and I call, “Cooper, it’s me! I can’t get the doors to open.”

A beat of silence, then, “There’s an emergency exit at the other end.”

“Okay!” I rush along the window displays, searching. I fumble for my lens, but my hand is shaking and I’m running and can’t quite grasp it.

Brennan catches me by the arm. “Mae! Stop!”

“It’s my friends,” I tell him, pulling away.

“What are you
talking
about?”

His disbelief makes me pause. “Well, Cooper’s my friend. Randy…he…but if he’s made it this long and Cooper’s working with him, he’s got to—”

“Wait,” whispers Brennan. He leads me to the emergency exit door, which I suppose he’s been able to see the whole time. I’m so amped I’m fluttering, my breath, my eyelids, I feel like I could take flight. “Hello?” he calls.

“We’re here!” says Randy.

“Who are you?” asks Brennan.

“Friends,” Randy replies.

I reach for the door.

“What are your names?” calls Brennan.

The voice I’ve been identifying as Randy’s says, “I’m Cooper.”

I fall from an unimaginable height.

I’m sinking, shriveling. Fear floods through me, filling me from my toes to my scalp and pulling me under. It’s not the presence of these two strangers that scares me, it’s that I thought I knew them. That my perception could be so far from reality.

Brennan turns to me, his victory clear on his face. For the first time he feels superior to me—and he’s right to.

My fear leaves me, floods out, and I’m empty, washed out and cold.

I can’t do this anymore.

Care. Explain. Pretend.

I walk back to the fire and take a seat.

“Mae!” Brennan’s eyes are bugged with worry. Outside, the men are yelling, or maybe just the one is.

“What?” I say. I stir the lentils. “If they’re coming in, they’ll come in. If not, they won’t. It’s out of our hands.”

Brennan fidgets. “I’ll pack.”

A few minutes later, the men grow quiet. The stew’s bubbling is the loudest sound around, and then the zipping of Brennan’s backpack as he finishes.

We eat. The home fries, the stew, it’s all tasteless. Brennan looks squirrely. He asks again about leaving. I don’t answer. Like the men outside, he soon stops trying. There’s more stew than we can eat. “Breakfast,” I say, putting a lid on the pot and removing it from the dwindling fire. I think of Cooper’s first laugh, like a gift. How special I felt as he walked away, bucket in hand.

“You really think it’s safe to sleep here?” asks Brennan.

I shrug. I lie on my towel-lined chair. The cloths beneath me bunch uncomfortably. I get up and sweep them all to the floor. I lie down again. Our fire is little more than embers.

“Mae?”

I squeeze my eyelids shut. I’m so tired.

“In the morning, let’s find a car. Let’s drive the rest of the way.”

“No,” I say.

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“Oh,” says Brennan.

“Go to sleep,” I tell him.

I open my eyes. The fire’s embers are a faint orange blur.

Ad tenebras dedi.
I could say it. I should. I shift in my chair, so that I’m facing the ceiling, the camera somewhere up there, watching me. If I were to say the words, would the electricity flicker on? Would the front doors slide open? Would Emery stride in and pat me on the back, tell me I made a noble effort, but now it’s time to hand over the ratty blue bandana I have tied around my Nalgene and go home? Would a car be waiting outside?

Or would nothing happen at all?

The thought pinches. I cannot give up. I cannot fail. As exhausted and frustrated as I am, I must keep going. I’ve given myself no other choice.

I turn back to the dying fire. I stare at it until my eyelids droop. Mice scuttle down one of the aisles. Their gentle patter helps me fall to sleep.

A hand on my shoulder wakes me, I don’t know when. Later. It’s still dark. I can’t see any sign of the fire.

“Mae.” A whisper in my ear. “I think they’re inside.”

“Who?” I ask.

“I heard something in the back. Listen.”

At first I hear nothing, just Brennan’s breath by my ear. And then I hear the sound of a door creaking open. Right on time.

Resigned, I say, “Get our bags.”

We head to the front of the store, then skirt the checkout lanes until we reach the mouth of the produce section. We creep from one stand to another, making our way to the back. Brennan exhales too loudly behind me.

From around the corner I hear, “Where are they?” Not-Randy’s voice. And then the other, louder, “Hello?” From the nearness of the voices, I guess that the men are standing just outside the swinging doors. We’re only about twenty feet to their left, our backs to shelves of salad dressing. This is the home stretch, I tell myself. The home stretch of a game that’s lasted far too long.

I hear their footsteps and a rustling sound. The footsteps come our way. I put my arm out to keep Brennan from moving. With my forearm against his chest, I feel his nervous breath.

The two men walk by, moving slowly toward the outer wall of the store. For a few seconds nothing but air separates us, then a rack of bagged walnuts and pecans comes between. Soon, the men are over where I found the potatoes. From their soft footsteps, I can hear that they’re moving toward the front of the store, probably planning an aisle-by-aisle search. I gesture for Brennan to follow me and inch around the corner toward the swinging doors.

Crunch.
Right under my foot. Whatever I stepped on, it’s loud. Brennan and I both freeze. The footsteps across the store halt, and then suddenly they’re pounding toward us.

Fear and flight, instincts stronger than reason. I shout, “Go!” and shove Brennan through the doors. We run to the office where we entered and I slam the door behind us. Shaking, fumbling, I can’t find the lock. Brennan shoves the desk toward the window.

A sudden force against the door pushes me away. Adrenaline courses through me and I push back, slamming the door into its frame. Then Brennan is there, helping.

“The lock!” I say.

He finds it and snaps it closed. “Will it hold?” he asks. We’re both braced against the pounding door.

“I don’t know.” I look at the window. I don’t think it’s possible for us to climb out before they’d break in.

The banging against the door stops. Neither Brennan nor I move.

“We just want to talk,” says Not-Randy.

“Yeah, right!” Brennan shouts back.

“Stop,” I tell him.

Looking out the window, I can see that the sky is lightening. Dawn is close. I don’t know why they’re here, except that they’re meant to be overcome. I don’t think they’ll hurt us, but they could steal our supplies, or tie us up, or lock us in the walk-in cooler. They could delay us in hundreds of different ways, and I won’t stand for any of them.

“Look,” I call out. “We don’t have anything you want. This place is full of food. Just leave us alone.”

“There’s food everywhere,” says Not-Randy.

“Then what do you want?” asks Brennan.

“Like I said, to talk. Me and my brother, we’ve been alone since the shit hit the fan. We live down the road.”

“What do we do?” Brennan whispers to me.

All I can think to do is to keep the man on the other side of the door talking and get out of here. I look around the gray, blurred room.

The desk chair. In movies, they always jam chairs under doorknobs and that holds up the bad guy long enough for the hero to get away. I hold up a finger to Brennan, asking for silence, and for him to wait.

“Where are you from?” asks Not-Randy. “Are you local?”

As quietly as I can, I step away from the door. The desk chair is on its side, a few feet away. Holding my breath, I pick it up. It scrapes the floor, but Not-Randy is still talking and his voice masks the sound. “How many of you are there?” he asks. “Are you family, like us?” I bring the chair back to the door and ease its back under the knob. I have no idea if it’ll hold. “Were you sick? My brother was, but he got better. Me, I never got it, whatever it was. They tried to evacuate us with the others, but we wouldn’t have it. This is our place, you know? You must know, you’re still here too. Ain’t many of us that are.” I nod toward the window, and Brennan moves away from the door. I motion for him to go first, and he climbs onto the metal desk. Not-Randy’s still talking. “Used to be there was this band down the road, these three nutjobs. I knew one of them, and he kept trying to get us to join them. But we didn’t. They were real crazy—always talking about trespassers. This group, and my brother and me, I think we were the only ones left in the whole county.” Brennan’s standing now, with his hands on the window frame. He pulls himself up and pushes through, feetfirst. I watch him disappear. “They’re gone now, dead or moved on, I don’t know,” says Not-Randy. “Since then, we—”

Banging, bashing, the sounds of a struggle outside the window. Brennan’s muffled voice, calling, “Mae!”

Then a deeper voice, a shout, “Cliff!”

Motherfucker,
I think. That’s why Not-Randy wouldn’t shut up, so his partner could sneak around outside.

The door behind me crashes open, the useless chair skidding toward the wall. Not-Randy steps inside. He’s a hulking, bearded white man. I’m caught between him and the desk; the man outside struggles loudly to hold Brennan.

“There’s only one in here!” yells Not-Randy—Cliff. He steps toward me. He’s close now, taller than me by about a foot. I can see his face: pudgy and unremarkable. His beard is blondish red.

It goes quiet outside.

“Harry?” calls Cliff.

“I’m okay,” his partner returns. “It was just a kid.”

It’s Brennan who’s been silenced.

Cliff reaches out and touches my arm. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We can take care of you now.”

His arrogance, the laziness of whoever wrote his script. It makes me furious. But what can I do? This guy’s twice my size and blocking my path to the door, and his so-called brother is right outside the window.

I say what the script demands. “I don’t need taking care of.”

“It’s okay,” says Cliff. Now his hand is on my shoulder. Hitting a man this size in the arm won’t accomplish anything except to piss him off, and I know the rules. I can’t hit him anywhere that counts. “We have someplace safe,” he adds. His breath stinks as bad as a prop.

Fuck the rules.

I send a hook straight to the man’s jaw. All my strength is behind the strike, years of cardio kickboxing classes. I twist my core with the movement, lift my heel from the floor, smash my knuckles into his face. My fist erupts as the man stumbles away, reeling.

I don’t give him a chance to strike back. I run past him, out the door and into the hall, through the swinging doors, and down the nearest aisle. I trip, sprawling forward, scramble to my feet, hear Cliff cursing, pursuing. The swinging doors crash shut behind him.

I sprint toward the emergency exit. I can hear the man behind me, but I’m going to make it. I slam against the exit bar with my shoulder and push through. I’m free, I’m out, I—

The second man stands before me, smiling in dawn’s light. He’s white, smaller than Cliff, bigger than me. And he’s holding a machete.

He lunges toward me, machete at his side. I dodge backward, falling again and landing propped on my side by my pack, then Cliff is there, yanking me to my feet; my head snaps hard enough to tweak my optic nerves.

Furious energy engulfs me. I fight. I kick, I claw. I bite. I mean to kill this man. I can hear shrieking, and I understand distantly that it’s my voice, then Cliff steps away, recoiling. I can taste blood, mine, his, I don’t know, a coppery drizzle in my mouth. My right hand is throbbing and I can’t unclench my fist.

Cliff is hunched over, his nose bleeding. I don’t need to see to know there is hate in his eyes. Not-Cooper is watching, swinging his machete idly at his side.

“Fuck you, Harry,” says Cliff to him. “What are you just standing there for?”