The Last Door

The last of the crackers went to Elise.

I broke the sleeve in half out of habit, remembered there was nothing left to divide it from, and pressed the whole thing into her palm. She was crouched against the guardrail of the overpass with her knees pulled up, nine days of grime on a face that used to take forty minutes to do every morning.

"You have to eat something too, Mara."

"I ate." I hadn't since Tuesday. I wasn't sure which Tuesday.

Daniel stood a few steps up the ramp, holding the binoculars he'd taken from a sporting goods store before the whole block went dark. He didn't turn around. He hadn't turned around much since the second night. "Ridge road is clear," he said. "Two miles. Aldercrest is right behind it."

"You keep saying that name like it's a promise."

"It is one." He finally looked at me, and his face did what it always did, softened at the edges, made me feel like the only person in a very large room. Eleven months of that face across a dinner table. A ring in my pocket I'd stopped wearing on day three because it caught on things. "My firm poured the foundation. I've got the code. Nobody else knows it's there, Mara. Nobody."

I believed him. That is the part I would like to scrape out of myself, if I could. I believed him the way I'd believed everything for twenty-six years, completely and without checking.

Below us, the city made a sound I'd stopped being able to describe. It wasn't screaming anymore. Screaming needs breath and people had run out of it. It was a low, wet shuffling, thousands of feet on broken glass, and under it something that sounded almost like humming.

Elise lifted her head. "They're closer."

They were. A column of them was coming up the off-ramp from the river district, and I had been a nurse long enough to know the stages by their gait. The fevered ones stumbled. The turned ones walked. These walked, all of them, in a line so straight it looked drawn with a ruler.

At the front was a woman in a gray hospital cardigan.

I knew the cardigan before I knew the face. Mrs. Abernathy, bed 12, a retired schoolteacher who had made me promise every night to check that her cat was fed. Her cat had been dead for eleven days. She had been dead for at least four.

She walked past Daniel. Within arm's reach, close enough to brush his sleeve. He flinched and she didn't even turn her head. She walked past Elise, who curled into the guardrail with her hands over her mouth, and Mrs. Abernathy stepped around her like a fence post. Her eyes were fixed on me.

"Mara," she said.

It came out of her like a recording played backwards, but it was my name.

I should have run. Instead I stood there with a tire iron in one hand and my last good thought in the other, which was: why me?

Then the man behind her lunged for Elise, and I stopped thinking and swung.

I don't remember the next minute in order. I remember the sound the iron made. I remember Elise's scream going up an octave. I remember Daniel hauling her to her feet by the arm, saying "Go, go, go," and the three of us tearing up the ridge road with the entire column turning behind us like a school of fish changing direction.

Turning toward me. Not them. Me.

We ran until my lungs felt like torn paper. The road climbed through dead pines and abandoned cars, and my sister's hand slipped out of mine twice, and twice I went back. Both times I told myself it was because she was younger, because I'd raised her from fourteen, because our mother would have wanted it. The truth was simpler. Going back for people was just what I did. It was the only thing I knew how to be.

Aldercrest was not a building. It was a hillside with a door in it.

Gray steel, taller than a bus, set into a poured concrete lip. A keypad glowed green beside it, impossibly alive in a dead world. Daniel hit the code with fingers I noticed were shaking, and something deep in the mountain groaned, and the door began to roll sideways on a track as wide as a train rail.

Warm air came out. Clean air. It smelled like carpet and machine oil, like a place where someone had planned for you.

Elise went through first. Daniel went after her, one hand on the small of her back, and I stayed on the threshold with my pack because someone had to look behind us.

The ridge road was full.

I counted forty, and then I stopped counting. They were coming up through the pines at a steady, patient walk, hundreds of paces back. Mrs. Abernathy was still in front. They didn't hurry. They didn't need to. They knew exactly where I was going.

"Mara." Daniel's voice, from inside. "Come on."

I turned and took one step across the track.

The door stopped.

Not a stutter, not a jam. It stopped the way a held breath stops. I looked up and Elise was standing at a red lever set into the wall, a hand-crank override, painted the color of an exit sign. Her palm was flat against it. Her face was wet.

"Elise."

She wouldn't look at me. She looked at the floor between us, at the line of steel where the door would meet the wall, as if the line was the only thing in the world she could stand to see.

"Elise, it's me. It's me."

"I know," my sister said.

She pulled the lever down.

The door started to move. Not the slow glide it had opened with. It slammed, a hammer-fall of pneumatics and servos, and I threw my shoulder into the gap and caught a sliver of light and sound and air. Daniel was standing twelve feet back with his hands open at his sides.

That is what I think about. Not Elise. Daniel, with his hands open, like a man who has just set something down. He didn't shout. He didn't reach for the lever or for me. His mouth moved, and I have gone over it a thousand times, and I think it was: I'm sorry.

Not "stop." Not "wait." Sorry.

The gap closed on my fingers and I pulled them free, leaving skin on the steel.

I hit the door with both fists. I screamed their names. I screamed my sister's name until it stopped sounding like a name. The metal was cold and perfectly smooth and it did not even ring. Behind me the humming had become a chorus, and the shuffling had become a rhythm, and I turned around with my back flat against the only thing in the world that was supposed to save me.

They stopped ten feet away.

Mrs. Abernathy was in front, her cardigan buttoned wrong. They all stopped, hundreds of them, in a half circle on the concrete, and they looked at me with a terrible stillness, the way you look at a person you have walked a very long way to reach.

Then something happened I did not expect. Someone was shouting.

"MARA!"

A man was fighting up the ridge road through the back of the crowd. He had a fire axe and a torn paramedic's jacket and blood to the elbows, and he was swinging with a ferocity that would have made me afraid of him on any other day. He was cutting a path straight toward me. He was shouting my name like it was the only word he had left.

I didn't know him. I remember thinking that clearly. I didn't know him at all, and he was killing people to get to me.

He didn't make it.

The first of them reached me before he was halfway. Mrs. Abernathy put both hands on my face, very gently, almost tenderly, and the rest followed. I slid down the door and felt it against my spine, steel and cold and sealed, and I thought: this is the last thing I will ever lean on.

But it wasn't cold anymore.

The door was humming. Through my back, through my ribs, through the dying edges of me, a low steady vibration like a machine waking up. And underneath it, a sound that I had never heard come from a door in my life. Slow and mechanical and patient.

It sounded like a clock being wound.