THE LAST MAN: Part Thirty-four

There a blistering gun battle near the Reclamation Center. It sounds like thousands of bits of glass being crushed. Dull hollow explosions punctuate the fighting, joined in awful chorus of the murdering airships on the coast. I pause in the doorway of my building and can see that parts of the city have gone unnaturally dark.

Further on I pass a naked man in a doorway. He is curled gently, an arm across his belly. His feet are bloody and there is a bullet wound through his forehead. A trickled of blood runs across his forehead and across one temple. But for that the lonesome figure appears asleep. On the next block I find a man and woman cowering and disoriented. They huddle against the wall, their faces emptied of any emotion, with only a jacket from a fallen trooper to keep them warm. At the end of the street the front of a Section Twenty-one transport has been shredded by a bomb. Flames pour from the rear compartment, consuming the troops inside, still sitting in their seats.

The scene before the Reclamation Center is far ghastlier. Bodies are piled at the wide, arched entrance. A crimson river floods into the street. Great concrete pillars to either side are chewed and pitted by shrapnel and bullets. A transport lies overturned. The bodies of Low City rebels and Corporation troops are scattered everywhere, many in deadly embrace. The continuing battle thunders from within the building.

Near the entrance I find one of the rebels still alive. I recognize her from the sewers. Kneeling I gently lift her head. Her eyes, distant and confused, find mine.

“Why did you come here?” she coughs. There is blood on her lips. More trickles across her cheek, running wet and wrm over my fingers.

“Why did you?” I ask.

She coughs heavily, bringing a wave of terrible pain that wracks her broken body. She squeezes the back of my arm tightly, and then relaxes as the pain, or the worst of it, passes.

“There was no choice,” she says, her voice fading steadily. I sweep back the hair from her tortured and perspired brow.

“Yes,” I say, simply.

She coughs again, more violent and more exhaustive this time. There is sudden alarm in her young face. Not a realization she is dying. There is no doubt about that. The bullets had all but cut her in half, enough that her legs have fallen unnaturally to one side. No, the alarm, I believe, is more a precise understanding of just how little time remains her.

“You have to go, get away from here,” she says. “There isn’t much time.”

As if to underscore the urgency in her voice the earth shudders powerfully. Across the city a giant tower collapses into a cloud of dust and smoke and flame.

She looks to the roar following a moment later. I know already this is the fate about to befall the Reclamation Center. Now that knowledge grows to an urgency. It thunders away in my chest.

Her expression transforms to something puzzling and curious. And for a moment we are an island apart from the battle. It is not something dark or reflective of the cruelty done her body. Nor is it filtered through some ultimate betrayal of personal dreams or aspirations. It is apart from those things, as if the body and its desires are inconsequential. It comes to her like a recognition, like an idea just occurring to her. She reaches up and touches my cheek.

“You’ve come for…” she says. “What’s the word? I can’t think of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Help me to say it.”

“Love?”

“Yes,” she says at hardly a whisper as her body goes limp. She almost smiles, and seems lifted by the word; by a single ancient word. The light fades from her eyes. She gives a final sigh and manages the word one last time. “Love.”


THE LAST MAN
Part Thirty-four

The battle in the Reclamation Center builds to a deafening crescendo. Fate screams in my ear, warning me that death hunts me every moment. It’s shrill fingers would drag me away to cower someplace. Intellect is of limited value. It favors all too often the weaker elements of my heart. What is death? Why should I care, rushing headlong through smoke, climbing over bodies, pressing through fleeing Associates? I am a man with purpose, and in that purpose death is only a minor consideration. The fear that accompanies the threat of death is merely a hindrance.

The great hall is a confusion of images and moments. Near the furnaces the main force of Low City rebels is cornered and under siege in a frantic and desperate hand to hand struggle. Associates, rebels and soldiers alike throw themselves into the flames, animated and dejected fully by the all consuming violence around them. There are masses of bodies, the terrified and hopeless, clustered together so tightly one might believe they are fused. Others pass as a blur as they rush headlong from the fighting. Smoke fills the tragic hall. Bullets chop the air. Cries and moans arise each time one finds a victim.

I realize it is almost impossible to find Desiree here, even if she remains alive. The nearer the furnaces the fewer living souls I find, and my hopelessness rises in direct proportion. There is a terrible grinding and cracking sound as one of the furnaces slips open, its flames curling towards the ceiling hundreds of feet in the air. It boils out to set alight dozens of fighters still locked in combat, like some great amber flood. The battle continues unabated, those at the front unaware comrades and enemies behind have been consumed, and those being consumed unwilling to abandon the fight before the very moment of death.

Even here, some distance away, the heat drives me back. I shield myself with an arm and turn away, tripping and sprawling across the blood-drenched floor among a confusion of limbs. Behind me the furnace dissolves in a roiling ball of flame, swallowing the fighting there. It continues elsewhere, smaller battles, but every bit as bitter and unrelenting everywhere in the hall.

There is a woman beside me, dead from a terrific head wound. The hair covers her face completely. My blood runs cold at the prospect that it could be Desiree. I reach out to brush the hair from her face. My fingers tremble, hovering near her face. Just then hands grab my tunic and turn me over. My instinct is to fight, but I hesitate.

“Desiree!” I exclaim.

She is nude and covered with blood. It drips from her fingers and covers one hip. Desiree’s hair is singed on one side. The side of her body is burned red, and beginning to blister on her shoulder and arm. I can only surmise that she was close to Reclamation when the fighting broke out. I pull her to the wall and help to cover her with a fallen trooper’s jacket. She is trembling terribly and seems disoriented and dulled. No doubt the lingering affects of the drug administered before being thrown into the furnaces.

“You’re hurt?” I shout above the din. Even then I can hardly be heard. She stares at me blankly, and shrugs.

The rebels are nearly finished. More troops pour into the hall until the rebels, those who are still alive, are hopelessly outnumbered. Still they fight on, even taunting and encouraging the Corporation troops. In the confusion Desiree and I slip from the hall into the street.