THE LAST MAN: Part Twenty-six

“They must not fall in the hands of the Corporation,” Bethune tells me, dumping well-used journals, maps and paper into a roaring fire.

It was with some effort I managed to find her again. I was recognized by a fighter who accompanied Bethune and I to the Reclamation Center. She stepped from the shadows shrouded in dog hide. The black eyes and yellowed upper canines hanging down over her brow, and making her seem all the more threatening. She was a small, young woman with deep dark eyes, highly adapted and attuned to life and war in the sewers. Her tangled blond hair was bundled beneath a hood. A large red-brown birthmark covered one side of her angular face, extending down beneath her cloak. A crudely forged scimitar was at her waist. In her hand she carried a Section Twenty-one pistol. She held it awkwardly, as though she might fling it at an adversary rather than shoot it at one.

“Please go back,” her tone was pained, almost pleading. “Go back to the others. Go with them and leave the city for good.”


“What’s happening?”

“It is too terrible,” she replied. “I think we will all die.”

“And you?”

“I am with the cause, and to the end,” she said before relenting and leading me back to Bethune.

As we made our way through the sewers the thunder and roar of the Reclamation Center seemed to grow to a din, like a great monster no longer fulfilled at being fed by its patrons and keepers of the Corporation. It seemed as if the whole monstrous plant might tear from its moorings to devour the city. The walls shook as I never remembered. Maybe it was me and my skewed perspective and visceral disdain for that place, or perhaps the world was rising to a cataclysm. Either way time was slipping away, something which now felt entirely out of my control. History is a raging river, and I was being swept helplessly and inexorably towards an inevitable conclusion.