THE LAST MAN: Part Twenty-nine

In short order everyone is on the move. I am not bound, rather by oversight or otherwise. Not that it matters. The woman who guards me holds a captured Section Twenty-one rifle at the ready. She is young, with attractive Asian features, but the seriousness of her expression and the confidence with which she carries the weapon leaves little doubt about her determination.

I am better now. I know the sewers better than before, not much better but well enough to have an idea the direction we are moving. The Low City rebel leader now commands a force of more than a hundred strung single file through the sewers. The water and filth has deepened, rising nearly to our knees at times. It runs cold and swift, the chaotic currents underneath those black waters making our progress all the more treacherous. I cannot move my thoughts from the ruins, and the belief that, at the end of all this, I will never reach them. Indeed, in this place, I feel farther away from the world, let alone the ruins. That realization is worth than death.

At every junction I weigh my chances at escape. The guard ahead of me is more concerned of a surprise attack or an ambush by Section Twenty-one than for me. Behind me the guard helps a comrade with a heavy bundle of supplies. They have fallen back quite a distance. In the darkness they are barely visible at all. I could slip away down one of the many intersecting passages, but they are even smaller and narrower. I am outclassed, untested and out of place here. They would recapture or kill me before I managed to get very far. Still my mind races, palms tingle and my heart swells for even the slightest opportunity.

I can smell the Reclamation Center now. I can tasting the burning of bodies and feel the thundering calamity of the furnaces reverberating through the walls and into my soul. Time is running away from me with every step, running away from me like a pugnacious child. The reluctant clock hand drags me through each excruciating moment despite my failing will. I am fighting it at every step, and come grudgingly to the understanding that I am the final agent of the hope I seek.

At a junction I spot a portal to the city above. Gray light falls in a heavy shaft, illuminating a circular patch of churning brown water. There is something more, the blue glow of a Sentinel. It is high and out of sight, but there is no mistaking that light. I recall John Brown, the dog carcass and the rats, and realize this might prove my last opportunity.


Footing is hardly a certainty. There are hidden straps and obstacles with nearly every sloshing step. I can only guess at my chances for reaching the portal, but I know full well my chances if I fail an attempt. In an instant I am splashing, slipping and clawing towards that pale shaft of daylight.

I can hear others behind me, giving chase. Bethune’s fighters, move easier through the muck and refuse. Foolish to chance a look backwards, but the flash of a knife blade drives me forward. I know now that I will die here, my body left to rot and be consumed in this sewer. I am not sad for that realization. I have chosen this path, however, and I am determined to see it through to the end.

I reach the light first, standing tall and straight. The guards stop short, backing away from the light and Sentinel, as if I am standing at the center of a flame. I turn to face them, my arms outstretched in some mechanical gesture that I am unarmed. They could kill me yet. By their expressions and the way they hold their weapons that it still undecided. But they know. They know it is too late, and killing me now would be little more than an act of revenge. Sentinel has already read my thoughts fully. The Corporation knows everything now. It knows of the attack on the Reclamation Center, and it knows Bethune’s true identity.

THE LAST MAN:Part Twenty-eight

“I cannot allow you to leave,” she says, turning back to the last of her journals and notes.

“What am I to you? You’ve already seen how I protected you and the others from Sentinel and Section Twenty-one.”

“I have,” she nods, weighing the last of her things in her hands. “For that I will protect you as long as I am able, but at this moment allowing you to leave is a risk I cannot accept.”

“If you fear I will return to the city…I will take my chances with the refugees on the coast.”

“I am sorry.” She tosses the last of her things into the fire. She motions to the guards. “Bring him, we are going to the Reclamation Center.”

“You’re going to liberate the Reclamation center?” I asked, alarmed.

“Liberation?” she replies, with not a small amount of mockery. “There is no liberation. I will strike them at the heart of their hypocrisy. It will be historic, dear friend, and you shall be there to watch firsthand.”

“What of the innocents?”

“There are no innocents. This is war! There is no one to redeem. All are beyond redemption.”

“You would slaughter so many?”

She comes forward. Her back is to the fire, so that her features are all but obscured in shadow or lost in the glare. She is not enraged or hostile or threatening. Her mood is much different, rather like a teacher in the channels; wishing to impress upon me a crucial point. She takes hold of my arm to stress her position.

“Lucky soul,” she says. “What luxury you have to believe in the inviolability of human life. Yours is a perspective of the common man, in which life is large and death is a monolith. Your lives stand for nothing but struggle and pain and that is all you can see. At the end of that is only death, an ignominious death. You are relieved of the burden of history. You are relieved of the burden of being judged by future generations. Death is nothing to me in the face of that legacy. That is the burden I bear.”

THE LAST MAN: Part Twenty-seven

The flames jump, crackling and roaring to a blaze that reach skyward, where the scorched concrete ceiling bends them back, like the liquid petals of a flower. I shield myself from the scorching heat, yet cannot take my eyes from the pages curling and blackening in the flame. Like the archives, and the volumes rotting there, here is a history lost. It seems a terrible crime, for how can a man rightly comprehend his fate without memory of his past?

Around us is a wild scene. It is the frenetic preparations for a final great battle to be joined against the Corporation. Many of the warriors brandish captured section Twenty-one weapons. They appear fierce in wolf skins and pieces of body armor. That wall of odd bricks is almost gone. A dozen or so children wait to shuttle the final loads somewhere deep beneath the city. Aids rush in and out begging orders and instructions. Bethune is well prepared, dispatching them to their urgent duties without hesitation and without the slightest indecision.

“We’re prepared,” she says with a weighted sigh.

“You’ll strike the Corporation?”

“It has always been A strategy. Would I choose such a terrible outcome? Of course not, but often in war the time and place of battle is chosen by the enemy. It is necessary to strike them before they strike us.”

“All of your people are fleeing along the coast,” emotion rises in my voice.

“Far too dangerous to remain,” she says.”I have my fighters.”

“The Corporation will butcher them out in the open!”

“Do you believe I would send them to be martyred lightly? The Corporation already makes it clear they mean to exterminate us. Better to die for a cause than for nothing.”

“The Corporation has no official policy about the Low City.”

“By their actions and their lieutenants their policy it only too clear,” she turns away.

“This is the wrong path,” I say, taking her arm and turning her back to me. She pulls away, glaring angrily at my unforgivable breach. Several guards rush forward, drawing blades. Bethune waves them away.

“In desperate times the wrong path is all too often the only path.”

I can see that it is pointless to argue. She is decided. The events have run away from any one person's ability to stop them. They have gained a character of their own, like the fire, ready to consume all the stands before it; innocent or guilty. I might strike Bethune down (and be slain by her guards) but the moment has even fled and outgrown her significance.

“I am sorry for you,” I say, “but more sorry for the innocent on both sides who will suffer most."

Her acts, I assert, are criminal, and not at all worthy of Mary McLeod Bethune’s association. True enough, this memory proves a malleable substance, fully at the beckoning and blunder of the owner. I had learned to alter mine, concealing true identities from the Corporation of those I felt were just. All that was now changed, and so Bethune’s identity was returned to its rightful place in history and in my memory. If Sentinel sought I would make no effort to protect her at all. I turned and started to leave. The guards block my path. I turn, finding the rebel leader’s immoveable gaze.

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.

THE LAST MAN: Part Twenty-five

“We’re leaving the city, fleeing up the coast,” says Alice Walker, as I warm myself at the fire. Her husband is tending to the wound on my neck. It is deep enough that he must stitch it closed. A curative tea numbs the pain enough as John Brown pinches the wound closed and works the needle through the torn flesh.

It was he who rallied my rescue. He was rummaging in the Archives when I burst in, chased by Section Twenty-one. I don’t thank him, as there is nothing to celebrate or be thankful in the deaths of others. It was only what had to be done. Now it remains to be seen what the Corporation will do. The exodus of the Low City has little to do with that particular act. The family, all of the clans are already or nearly prepared to leave.

Some have already begun to move. They are not the first. Hundreds have piled up on the beach, bottlenecked as these apparent refugees make their way along the narrow, debris strewn shore. They are deathly silent in that endeavor, the few words spoken to comfort children.

“Strange through all this,” I say soberly, “I count you as a dear friend.”

The tension of the moment was fully evident in John Brown’s face. His wife looked over at the remark, as she prepared for the journey. Unlike John, she could find no cause to smile. She hauled a heavy satchel onto her shoulders.

“Nothing some Associate knows for friends.”

“I know enough to feel indebted to you and your family, and to worry over your journey.”

“No worries,” he says. “Body’s needs to do what they needs to do, and these bodies needs to go.”

“Where will you go?”

Alice walker helped her mother to stand. She is pale and terribly weak. Though I do not notice, John confides she had a stroke the night before and has been thoroughly disoriented and confused. Fear she will not survive the journey but do not say so. Alice heaves bundle onto her back and shakes her head, straining under the weight of her burden. “We are eternal refugees, the forever pawns of war. We would we go when there is no place for us?”

“Do your time in this world good to come along,” John brown offers.

The offer was a tempting one, to remain among these good people. I could well imagine a place among them. I could well imagine a life in which color or difference or handicap was less point for disagreement as an opportunity for perspective. But I felt pulled to those ruins far out to see, though that fate was far less certain.

“You will forgive me?” I said, taking his hands in mine, clasping them tightly.

“Your ruins?” He replied.

“I must know.”

I watch them leave and take their place among hundreds pressing towards the shore. Many more remain, no doubt waiting until the others had moved on. I hardly knew them. I hardly knew anything of their lives and suffering. Their culture and way of life is so fundamentally different then mine. There can be no doubt my caring for these people. Our lives and fates were intertwined, and that was not a deliberate happenstance, at least not for any of us. No man is ever lone, except in his own heart. We were all tumbled madly in the whirlwind of life and fate, thrown together as random assemblages, tasked by burdens and pleasures with making the best of things as they come. As I turned away and started for the sewers I already missed them terribly.

THE LAST MAN: Part Twenty-four

It is a frigid evening, requiring a jacket and gloves. My warm breaths rise ghostly-white before the wind along the narrow boulevard tears them to pieces. I pause on the street and linger at the glow of the atrium atop the building high above the street. The street is dark and deserted, but for the dull bluish glow of a Sentinel on the corner. The Reclamation Center churns onward, spewing hideous clouds of black smoke. A brisk southern wind whips the smoke earthward in dark tendrils, like death’s insatiable fingers ravenous for more souls.

There is a vehicle at the corner. It is dark, but I can make out 2 figures inside. It is an unnatural thing, and I am certain they have come for me. Whether they will arrest me, or simply observe to be sure I reach court in the morning is impossible to say. What is certain is that they are there to ensure the court’s sentence is carried out.

My thoughts threaten to run away on their own, as the fever of encroaching and unstoppable fate takes hold. I look again to the Sentinel on the corner. Fearing my own thoughts will betray me I remove my gloves and stuff them in a pocket. The icy cold wind biting at my fingers succeeds in diverting my thoughts.

I turn away from the dark vehicle and start up the empty street. The doors to the vehicle open and close quickly. There are footsteps behind me, not close, but near enough. At the corner I pause, my heart seized with fear, the blood in my veins colder than that howling wind. A Sentinal is above me. Raising my hands I let the cold stab deep into the flesh. Half a block away another car pulls to a stop. Four Section Twenty-one troopers step into the street. One of them is the commander who oversaw my beating days before. His words return to me, and I am sure he relishes this opportunity to indulge his sadism. The moment is decided for me. I have only too choices. One is submission. I choose the other.

Without thought I am running across the street, chased by the commander and his men. They are trained and bred for this, and I am nothing against anyone of them, let alone half a dozen. There is but one chance, and that is to reach the archive building. I can hear them close behind, but to look back now would prove fatal. A slip, a misstep or a stumble and I am lost. Rounding a corner the archive building is just ahead. I can see the inky blackness of the entrance. A downhill slope gives me a moment’s advantage with my longer stride.

They know. They know by now I have no intention of surrendering. I have no intention of going quietly to Reclamation. They know that by now and will kill me here on the street. That much I know.

They are slower through the narrow passages beneath the archive building. They are unsure in the darkness, and nearly trip and fall over one another, but they are closer now than before. Rounding a corner one of them grabs my collar, but trips and falls, taking down several around him.

Throwing myself hard against the door, I spill forward into the rancid water and muck, barely managing to keep my feet. The humidity and rot of the archives hits me like a wall. I am still fighting to get my footing when the troopers burst through the door behind me. They have me, I feel sure, my mind and body swimming in amber, but the racket sets the archives alive. Clouds and swarms of flying, slithering and creeping things slow my pursuers, long enough for me to reach the top of the first pile.

The storm swirls around me as well, blinding me, causing me to stumble and fall just as a hail of bullets cuts the air overhead. A ricochet cuts my neck, and warm blood spills down my body. It knocks me sideways where I flail and tumble into the hole at the back of the archive. For a moment I feel suspended in air before landing with a bone-jarring thud.

It the darkness I have only a vague impression what direction I am going. That darkness is all but absolute, and made all the more disorienting as my arms and legs grudgingly accept my shouts to reach the dull pale light ahead, which I pray is the beach and the rescuing numbers of the Low City. Troopers are dropping through the hole behind me one at a time. I crawl and reach feebly for the light ahead, unable to find my feet.

In an instant the first trooper is upon me and I am thrown hard against the wall. Undeterred, for the moment, I lunge for the light before the sharp end of a heavy boot finds my chest, ripping the air from my lungs and folding me in a heap against the wall. Before I can even moan gloved hands grab my throat. Their murderous pressure is calculated by my unseen assassin. When at last he hisses through gritted teeth the voice of the Commander is unmistakable.

“Think we wouldn’t meet again?” he spits. “You’ve become the purpose of my existence. Now I’ll correct a genetic mistake and rub you out of the Universe.” He shouted up the others. “Quick, a light down here so I can enjoy the fear in his eyes as I squeeze the life from him!”

Several lanterns come on, but the vision is hardly what any of us expected. There, at both ends of the passage is a wall of faces, like beautiful demons lusting for some long deserved justice. The Commander’s hold on my neck softens, but did not release me, as if he holds me hostage, or might chose out of spite that I precede him into death. Still, I might have rejoiced at being rescued, but the faces of the troopers, their expressions at the end of all hope, is sobering. They are the faces of men who understand that death is at hand, and that resistance only succeeds in prolonging the pain and humiliation of that lamentable end.

The Commander, for all his hate and hubris, is not so quick to concede, even as I can see the rising desperation in his eyes. The fear he relished to find in my eyes now filled his own as his men are consumed and dispatched by those dark demons with little more than pathetic gasps or muffled cries.

With that he releases me and stands straight. Climbing to my feet I find his eyes. What I find there sweeps me into the abject lonesomeness of his position. Yet, his eyes remain burgeoning with defiance and pride. His body is resigned perhaps to fate, though it is plain to see that his spirit will not so easily concede.

“Think that I would beg or be driven mad by this feeble assertion against the Corporation?” he laughs darkly. “I am a soldier, and for my enemy I have nothing but contempt. So I am killed. That’s a soldier’s lot.”

“To what end?” It seems unsympathetic arguing this with a doomed man.

“I fight for an ideal.”

“And what of the Low City?”

“The Corporation represents modernity; a progression. As for your chosen friends, the New Man has always eradicated the regressives.” His eyes search mine. I long to find an inkling, the slightest desire for mercy. “So I am dead, but one day these terrorists will go too far. And you, you have chosen your side as well. That will be your fate.”

I turn away, pressing through the demon faces in the passage. Pausing I look back at the Commander. He stands alone, his head bowed. I turn away as the crowd moves in upon him. I have no interest in seeing the man die.

THE LAST MAN:Part Twenty-three

He offers his hand, staring at it as I allow it to hang in space between us. I could let it be, wondering whether he will retract it with a measure of disappointment or with disdain. I could ignore it and teach him a lesson. But what lesson? Do I teach him that he represents power and that offering his hand in friendship reflects his power and undermines my own? Do I teach him there is no bridge between what he represents and what I stand for? But what of us as men?

I take his hand. His grasp is sincere and firm. The pressure, the connection fills me. So simple, yet there it is. I study the connection and revel in it. It is an interpretation, a matter of the heart whether I have taken his hand or accepted it.

“…a revolutionary is always willing to be audacious,” I begin, finding Huey Newton’s words, “to take great risks-to dare to struggle, dare to win.”

“You’ve dared.”

“I continue to dare.”

“Even in the face of certain defeat?” he asks.

“I am one man,” I reply. “A man alone is always defeated. Then again, a man alone has nothing to lose but his dignity, and I will defend that to the last.”

He smiles, almost sadly. “You were marked from the start.”

I ponder the words a few moments and nod slowly. “How much longer do I have?”

His head snaps sharply. I avoid his eyes. The man from the corporation leans closer.

“You have some plan. You will try to escape, won't you?”

I shake my head. “I've come too far to divulge my intentions so easily.”

He laughs out loud. “But you have! You've revealed everything!”

“Think what you want.” He knows, and it infuriates me. I look away.

“Section 21 will come for you tomorrow morning. They will take you straight to court. There will be a pronouncement of guilt and then sentencing.”

“What sentence?” I ask calmly, though I fear my heart may burst at any moment.

“The only one that can be pronounced.”

My head and heart sink. What is at the end of all hope? When precisely is that realization? Certainly it is not a repose for the dead. It must be the when nothing more can be done, or with the besieging of sanity. Perhaps I am an island, and hopelessness is the ocean. The ocean swells now over my shores. But if the ocean is hopelessness, then the breath in my lungs, the swelling of my heart is a boat, and a small chance for escape.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he says with a deep sadness. It is something I have not seen in him before. “It should be comforting to know your fate so fully. Mine is not so easy.”

“No?”

“I’m dying,” he says, quite by surprise. “Cancer.”
“Cancer?” I repeat quietly. He laughs, more to himself.

“A genetic disorder. Isn’t that funny?”

“So what of your line?”

“Oh, I have been cloned. He’s a bright young boy, with a future I can only dream of.”

I stand and look down upon him. His eyes are soft blue pools that threaten to burst and rush over his tightening cheeks. It makes me terribly sad. Not for me but for him. This time my hand extends first. He takes and holds it tightly. He lays the other hand over them. His eyes are there for the longest time.

“Then I suppose this is goodbye,” I say.

“Is it a curse or a blessing that we believe our lives must account for something?” he says. “All this was created not by one for one, but by many for many. When the cell asserts itself against the body we call that cancer and cut it away.”

“And do you believe yourself a cancer?” I ask.

“Is that a flaw?’

“It may well be a burden.”

“Isn’t that the same?”

I let his hand fall, and embrace his eyes with mine. With that I smile triumphantly.

“Only for you,” I say. “And only for the Corporation.”

He nods thoughtfully and stands.

“Come,” he says, “I’ll see you home. Not so eager to say goodbye just yet.”

“You’ll forgive me,” I tell him, brushing my finger tips along his sleeve, “but I am.”