The Last One(80)

“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.