The Last One(63)

We’ve reached the bus. My skin prickles. The bus’s yellow front bleeds into the building’s gray, but I think there’s room to pass behind. There has to be.

“Mae, let’s go around,” says Brennan.

“I am going around.”

“Around the block, Mae.”

I know that’s what he meant. I walk toward the back of the bus.

“Mae, please—don’t you see them?”

He’s talking about the props spilling from the bus’s rear emergency exit. I see five or six, and there are probably more inside. I smell them too, like the others but with charcoal.

I look at Brennan. He’s shaking, overdoing it. My high school friends were more convincing.

“Just get it over with,” I say. I cram my hand into my pocket, rub my glasses lens, and walk.

Brennan follows in silence. These props are swollen and bursting, blackened with rot. A pile of newspapers and trash has coalesced like a snowdrift along the bus’s rear tire. I step on a paper bag and something mushes beneath my boot. I feel a fleshy pop and something thin, long and hard against my arch.

It’s nothing. Don’t look.

“Mae, I can’t do it.”

I’m past the bus. I don’t want to turn around.

“Mae, I can’t.” His voice has heightened in pitch. I force myself to turn back. I look directly at Brennan, tunneling my vision. He’s a brown and red blur, recognizable as human, but barely. “Mae, please.”

He’s just another obstacle, another Challenge. A recording device creating drama.

“Cut it out,” I say.

“But I—” he interrupts himself with a sob. I can’t see his face, but I’ve seen him cry so many times already. I know how his mouth twists, how his nose leaks. I don’t need to see it again to know what it looks like.

Leave him.

I can’t.

You don’t want to.

They won’t let me. They want him with me. He needs to be with me.

“You can do it, Brennan,” I say. I force softness into my tone and use his name because names seem to calm him. He calls me Mae with nearly every breath, so much so that I’m almost beginning to feel as though it’s my real name. Real. There it is again. When the unreal outweighs the real, which is true? I don’t want to know. “They can’t hurt you. Just come quick and we’ll get out of here.”

He nods. I imagine that he’s biting his lip, as he tends to do.

“We’re only a few days away,” I say. “We’ll be there in no time.”

I see his arm move toward his face, and then he’s getting bigger, clearer, approaching. The black and white stripes of the pack hugging his shoulders. A moment later he’s at my side and I can see that yes, he’s crying. He’s also pinching his nostrils shut with his thumb and forefinger.

“Let’s go,” I say.

Within minutes, we clear the worst of the destruction. We’ve returned to simple desolation. All that work, all that money, and all we had to do was walk by a bus. Not that it was easy, but their wastefulness irks me.

“Mae?” asks Brennan. “Why don’t we take the highway?”

His question rests atop my lingering unease. It’s like he’s trying to get me to break the rules.

“No driving,” I say.

“Oh.” A beat of silence, then, “What about to walk on? It’s gotta be quicker than this.” Is this a Clue? Have they closed down the highways too? That’s big. Too big. I don’t believe him. “There’s a sign for it right there,” he says. “It’s close.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I can’t answer; I don’t know the answer.

“Mae, why not?”

I keep walking.

“Mae?”

The name burns through me.

“Mae?”

I can feel his fingers crawling through the air, approaching my arm.

“What did I say about touching me?” My voice shudders with all that I’m keeping inside.

He draws back, sputtering an apology. For a moment it seems that he’s let his question pass. Then he says, “So, the highway?”

“No, Brennan.” My frustration is building, turning to anger. “We’re not taking the highway.”

“Why not, Mae?”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Why?”

“And stop saying, ‘why.’?”

Agitation speeds my steps. Why is he challenging me like this? Why doesn’t he have any regard for the rules of the game?

Why?

You know why.

I grasp my glasses lens, tight. My thumb’s callus catches as I rub. I remember all Brennan has said about quarantine and illness. I remember the flyer, a house filled with blue, so much blue, as blue as the summer sky and just as clear. I remember the teddy bear, watching me.

If I allow myself to doubt, I’ll be lost. I can’t doubt. I don’t. It all makes sense. Metal and fur, a drone far above. He’s a cog like everything else. Like me. His rules are just different.

I’m walking carelessly, faster than I should be. My foot catches on nothing; I stumble. Brennan reaches out to steady me, but I pull away.

“Mae,” he says.