The Last Door

he crackers w

ressed the whole thing into her palm. She was crouched against the guardrail of the overpass with h

eat somethi

nce Tuesday. I wasn'

tore before the whole block went dark. He didn't turn around. He hadn't turned around much sinc

that name like

rson 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 thr

f myself, if I could. I believed him the way I'd believed eve

ymore. Screaming needs breath and people had run out of it. It was a low, wet shuffling, t

her head. "Th

en a nurse long enough to know the stages by their gait. The fevered ones stumbled. The turn

a woman in a gray

schoolteacher who had made me promise every night to check that her cat was fe

didn't even turn her head. She walked past Elise, who curled into the guardrail with her hands o

," sh

a recording played backw

ith a tire iron in one hand and my last go

unged for Elise, and I st

g up an octave. I remember Daniel hauling her to her feet by the arm, saying "Go, go, go," and the three of u

ward me. N

ine 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

uilding. It was a hill

ssibly alive in a dead world. Daniel hit the code with fingers I noticed were shaking, and something

d like carpet and machine oil, like a p

nd on the small of her back, and I stayed on the thresh

e road w

s at a steady, patient walk, hundreds of paces back. Mrs. Abernathy was still in f

s voice, from i

ook one step a

oor s

d Elise was standing at a red lever set into the wall, a hand-crank override, pa

li

t the line of steel where the door would meet the wall, as if

it's me.

" my sis

ed the l

of pneumatics and servos, and I threw my shoulder into the gap and caught a sliver of lig

just set something down. He didn't shout. He didn't reach for the lever or for me. Hi

" Not "wai

rs and I pulled them free,

he metal was cold and perfectly smooth and it did not even ring. Behind me the humming had become a chorus, and the shufflin

ped ten f

ds of them, in a half circle on the concrete, and they looked at me with a terribl

ed I did not expect.

AR

ket and blood to the elbows, and he was swinging with a ferocity that would have made me afraid of him on any ot

that clearly. I didn't know him at all,

n't ma

very gently, almost tenderly, and the rest followed. I slid down the door and felt it against

sn't cold

me, a low steady vibration like a machine waking up. And underneath it, a sound t

ike a clock