THE LAST MAN: Part Thirty-three

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.”