Last Woman Read online

  I stood and started blowing out the lanterns. I’d leave one on, that wasn’t a fire hazard.

  A few articles remained unread; I saved them for another time. I managed to find a package of something called ‘pain away’ in the employee first aid cabinet. I washed those down and finished off my bottle of water to thwart any post drinking headache. My previous headache had finally subsided, I didn’t need another.

  If anything, that whiskey would help me sleep. My body was tired and achy, my mind and heart heavy.

  Not wanting to think of anything else, I closed my eyes and prayed for a dreamless sleep.

  12. The Dream

  It was the same one. It always was. At first it was every night, then just every time I dreamt.

  The phone call. The knock. The scream. My scream.

  That day was forever embedded in my mind.

  “Nearly done,” I said to my husband on the phone. I had been working all Saturday morning on marketing reports. That was my job. I collected the research from the study groups and compiled it.

  “We won’t be much longer. Unless you want us to stay out,” he said.

  “No. Come home.”

  “Daddy, can we stop and get pizza?” I heard my six year old daughter ask from the back seat.

  It made me laugh.

  “Well, Faye, you heard Sammy. She wants to stop.”

  “Rich …”

  “We won’t be long, enjoy your break.”

  “How’s Mark doing?”

  “Oh, he’s a champ. If his driver’s test was today he’d pass with flying colors. He’s excellent.”

  “Hey Mom!” Mark called from the background.

  “Drive.” Rich told him. “And remember. Two seconds after the light changes.”

  “Yep. Got it.”

  I laughed. “Well, get back to being driving instructor. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Sounds good. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.” I pulled the phone from my ear but not before I heard an eerie, ‘oh my God’ come from Rich.

  The line went dead.

  It didn’t sit well with me. Immediately, I tried to call him back. It went directly to voice mail.

  How long and how many times did I call, text, both Rich’s phone and Mark’s. It wasn’t more than an hour and a half, because the knock came at the door.

  One police officer. “Mrs. Wills?”

  My family had been killed. My entire family. In one single instance, even after my son hesitated to go when the light turned green, a truck going fifty miles an hour, running a red light rammed right into my family’s car.

  The impact sent the car sailing down a busy street. I wasn’t the only one who lost that afternoon. Like a billiard ball, after it rolled and ricocheted into other cars.

  For the first few days, after the shock, I struggled with the fact of what my family endured. I was crushed over thinking that my poor daughter in the back seat was screaming out for help. The only comfort came from the coroner who said they all died on impact.

  He said they didn’t suffer. But his report wasn’t enough. I actually sought him out.

  “Swear to me.”

  “Mrs. Wills, this is highly unusual.”

  “Swear to me please. Swear to me on anything that’s important. Please, swear to me they didn’t suffer.”

  He gripped my hand, looked me in the eyes. “On my own child, I swear to you.”

  It took everything I had not to kill myself in the days following the funeral. Aside from being cowardly, I wanted to see it through. I wanted to see justice delivered to the man who not only took my family, but destroyed the lives of four other families in the process.

  I sat through every day, every hour of that trial. Eight counts of vehicular homicide while under the influence. He had no defense and begged to be put away. I listened as he said he had no will, he was drunk and that the day it happened he had buried his own three year old son who had passed away from leukemia.

  When the families stood up and asked the judge to deliver a life sentence, I saw a man who was remorseful. Putting him away wasn’t bringing back my family. He wasn’t a man who was tossing his actions aside, he would definitely live and carry what he did for the rest of his life. That was punishment enough. I told the judge that.

  It didn’t matter. When the judge handed the sentence of twenty-five years, I left the courtroom went home, threw away my car keys and started drinking. I didn’t stop. Not until that day I dropped unconscious in that bar only to wake up to a nightmare world.

  Thing was, even before the flu, I was living in a nightmare world.

  The dreams would never stop; it would ease, but never go away.

  I was pretty sure I screamed when I sprang awake, I always did. Wake in a sweat, heart beating, and then cry.

  Not this morning. I didn’t cry. For the first time since it happened, I realized why it happened. They were spared the madness that I now had to experience. I already grieved them; I still was and would be for a long time.

  They were all I had in the world, and their loss was bigger to me, than what I faced now.

  My losses were tallied long before the world keeled over.

  All that was left for me to do was to get out of the city and try to make my way to my house. What I would do after that remained to be seen.

  The Wilkes’ watch read a little after eight am. It was time to gather my things and get moving.

  My first focus was accomplished, I found out what happened to the world. Focus two was the hotel and the answer to what happened to people. Now I just wanted to get to my final focus and that was simply to get home.

  13. Squeaky Wheel

  I did several things before leaving that hotel. I cleaned up, wore comfortable clothing and transferred items from that damn bulky duffle bag to a large suitcase with wheels. That suitcase was packed. I grabbed anything and everything I thought I may use in my journey home. I figured it would be easier than that duffle bag to tote. I carried a small sack over my shoulder with my day’s rations. How long I’d be out or how far I made it remained on my health. Which felt remarkably better. I didn’t feel as weak and those shoes were going to work.

  From what I saw, the main streets of town were free of traffic, except for the sidewalks lined with bodies that occasionally tumbled to the road. But in the back of my mind, I had it figured that the main roads out of town were going to be jammed or blocked. The fleeting thought to grab a car, left me.

  I had to walk. It wasn’t going to be as hard, at least that's what I believed. I wore better shoes and didn’t carry that heavy duffle bag. Pulling something on wheels would be a lot easier. However it was much more annoying.

  One of those wheels squeaked.

  The concrete jungle of the city was a cavern for echoing. Each step I took, the wheel squealed and bounced back at me, over and over.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said out loud. “The entire city and I get the defective suitcase. Unreal.”

  I grew irritated with each step, I suppose there were other things that could have annoyed me, and perhaps the noisy suitcase was just a distraction to keep my mind off things.

  It was better when I got onto the expressway that went around the city. The noise of the squeaky wheel was still there and loud, but it carried out in the wind and didn’t echo back at me. My plan was to follow the expressway until the end of the city and go south. At some point they had to stop blocking the roads and bridges, or so I thought. Cars were crammed on sections of roads, then there would be a long stretch of nothing.

  Nothing except that damn squeaky wheel. I think I stopped every twenty feet to get a break from it.

  The expressway was also named River Trail Road because it ran alongside the river. Not really, portions rose high above other roadways, giving me a good view of all that went down.

  I wondered how a flu so feral, how something so swift, left enough well people around long enough to loot and cause damage.

  Stores were b
roken into, glass busted, the bullet strewn victims were easy to spot as opposed to the ones that died of the flu. With something that wiped out everyone, I would imagine I’d be too sick to want to steal.

  Then it dawned on me, the city was shut down a week before I woke up. Those last few days of chaos and fear. My God how people must have panicked knowing it was over. How scared they had to be. It wouldn’t take long for thousands of people to destroy a city. People fighting because that was all they had left to fight for was a morsel of food and their last dying breath. Maybe they held out hope that they’d be spared. Or maybe they were spared and shot while looting or even shot because they weren’t sick.

  That thought struck me. What if that was the case with me? What if someone sick and bitter knew I wasn’t going to get the flu and said, ‘the hell with her, why does that drunk deserve to live?’ and they tagged me as dead?

  How many people may have been that tiny speck of hope, but were extinguished by another?

  I would never know.

  I could only guess in my mind. That passed the time as I walked slowly, tugging along my squeaky case, darting in and out of cars, and when there weren’t cars, avoiding the mass amount of dead birds that spewed about everywhere.

  Taking in the sites of destroyed properties and bridges to nowhere.

  There was something awesome about the sight of the main bridges. It wasn’t the bridges themselves that were destroyed as it was the ramps to the bridges that had some sort of explosives used on them. The biggest bridge was breathtaking. The ramps leading up to it folded like a house of cards.

  It was a good enough place as any to stop. I actually had done really well and made it to the edge of the city. Some water, a cigarette, maybe a cracker. It was warm on the roadway, the sun beating down and a constant light breeze brought in and blew out waves of stench.

  I pushed down the handle to my squeaky suitcase and sat down.

  Had the world been normal, had there even been birds, I probably either wouldn’t have noticed or heard them. But like my squeaky wheel, the sound carried to me. In fact it scared the hell out of me and I jolted.

  It sounded like a big hollow rubber ball smacking against a concrete wall. But it didn’t just make one bouncing sound, it echoed loudly.

  Something dropped? Was it my imagination?

  Slowly I stood. It was quiet. Just as I was about to dismiss it and started to sit again, I heard the same bouncing sound. This time I jumped to my feet. Determining where it came from was hard because of the echo in the empty city.

  I was also above the town. Where? Where did it come from?

  The binoculars were in my rations bag which sat next to the suitcase. I bent down for it, and another sound occurred. This portrayed frantic. Metal against metal. In my mind I immediately envisioned gang members, wearing bandanas, carrying weapons. Men turned beasts in an apocalyptic world, no law and order. Ravage. Pillage.

  Listening to the metal against metal, my fear increased. They were coming for me. Taunting me, running a pipe against a fence, because that’s what it sounded like. The same pipe they probably would use to bash my skull after they robbed me.

  I wasn’t sticking around. I was in the open. How foolish. How stupid I was to believe I was alone. If I lived, someone else did and that didn’t mean they were nice.

  Gathering my rations bag, I tossed that over my shoulder, popped up the handle to my suitcase and immediately started to bolt.

  The pipe against the fence stopped. My god, they spotted me. The faster I ran, the louder and higher pitched the suitcase squealed. I was a moving target, easy to hear. So with that in mind, heart pounding, barely able to breathe, I dropped the suitcase.

  The moment I did, the moment I started to run, I heard something else. Something I didn’t expect.

  A voice. A male voice, deep, raspy and not young, screamed out, cracking as he did.

  “Hey! I hear you! Hey! Is someone there! Anyone! Help!”

  I stopped running.

  14. Hello

  It took only a moment after the voice stopped calling for me to believe I had completely lost my mind. I read the magazine; I knew the numbers, while I hardly was delusional to believe everyone that survived would be nice. Really? A gang?

  Shaking my head at my own silly delusion brought on by silence, I walked back to my suitcase. I was certain the noises, the voices were similar to a mirage of water in the desert.

  But … what if?

  As crazy as it seemed, I took a deep breath and just simply called out. “Hello!”

  My voice bounced back at me.

  Quiet.

  “Hey!”

  Immediately I knew that wasn’t my voice. One would think, that, I mean, I woke up to an extinction level event, it was the third day after waking, and it was the first human contact I had, I should be ecstatic.

  I wasn’t. I was actually kind of scared.

  Unable to pinpoint where the voice came from, I started rotating my body clockwise, looking. Wherever he called from, it reverberated. But how far was he? In the silent, dead city, sound traveled.

  For a second, I thought about leaving. Again, chalking it up to my imagination.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  “Why are you hiding?” I asked.

  “What!”

  “I said …” I inspired a huge breath. “Why are you hiding?”

  “I’m stuck!”

  “Is this a trap?” I yelled.

  “Lady, please!”

  “Fine! Where are you?”

  A pause.

  “Jail.”

  Jail? Was he kidding? I questioned, then I slowly looked to my right. I stood on the roadway directly in front of the county jail property. The red brick, multi building complex was close, yet far, because I was on an overpass.

  To get to the jail I had to back track. It wasn’t going to be an easy trek. If he indeed was in the jail, and stuck, then it was inhumane of me to keep walking and not, at least, try to help him.

  15. Locked In

  Before I made it from the rise of the overpass to street level, if indeed this man was in the jail, I asked, once more where I could find him. Knowing full well, I probably wouldn’t hear him once I was on the street.

  His voice cracked horribly from yelling. Stating something like Building One, Two ‘B’. I had no clue what that meant.

  The county jail was located in the vicinity of the city’s judicial building. I had never been there not even for a traffic ticket, so I was going in blind.

  When I left the overpass, I glanced at my Wilkes’ watch and it was shortly before noon. When I finally lugged my belongings and myself to the city building, it was pushing one o’clock. Not that I was moving that slow, I just didn’t know where I was going.

  I suppose he thought I left him. That wheel squeaked loudly again, especially as I entered the more confined space of the city.

  Finally I found where I was headed and it was evident, that towards the end, it was a complete madhouse.

  Police cars were burned, bodies were everywhere, military posts once again set up and abandoned. I wondered how the man calling me was stuck when apparently the front doors were busted open, numerous bodies of men wearing bright orange jumpsuits sprinkled across the pavement.

  I brought in my suitcase, but left it just inside the entrance of the building labeled number one. I pulled out the hefty flashlight. While there were some small windows, very little light made its way in. The building I sought was clearly numbered and located on the river facing portion of the property.

  In a sense I was proud of myself for being brave, I never really was. I didn’t do haunted houses or go to see scary movies unless I was with a group of people. Yet, I made it into the buildings and followed signs.

  Doors were open everywhere and the stench of dead filled the air. A map on the wall just outside of the room marked ‘visitor waiting room’ told me that this 'Two B' was on the second floor.

  I searched for a st
airwell and found it. It was even darker than the building. Pitch black. Even though I was thankful for my flashlight, I still was cautious, flashing back to movies and, staying close to the wall and hoping some sick, flu stricken man didn’t grab onto my ankles and ask me to come have chicken with him.

  Second floor.

  Again, another unlocked door.

  The stairs led to a hall, which in turn led to a huge open control room.

  One body of a guard was there. He sat at the control board, blank monitors surrounded his slumped over body. Yet, only the third person in authority I saw holding their post.

  Outside of the control room I could see where the hall was marked. I stopped at Two A, and aimed the beam of my light through the small glass window on the metal door.

  I called out. “Hello!”

  “I hear you!” he replied.

  I moved to Two B. The door as the same. Closed, I could see through the window some light, but not much. I walked to the door and pulled. It was locked, of course.

  I lifted my flashlight and leaned to the window to peek in.

  Suddenly my beam caught his eyes, the light reflected from them, quickly making them appear a glowing green and I jumped back with a scream.

  “Thank God.” His voice was muffled, more so than what I heard calling when I was on the street.

  I inched to the door.

  I couldn’t see much of him, only that he was hunched over to look through the window at me.

  “I am so happy to see you!” He said with excitement. “I am so glad to see you. I heard you.”

  I couldn’t see much of his face, not at all. I was scared, after all this man was in jail.

  “Are you a murderer?” I asked.

  “What? No. I ...”

  “A rapist?”

  “No.”

  “Child molester?”

  “Lady. No. I’m the second floor.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Lower the floor, the lower the risk.”

  I realize it was stupid, I was face to face sort of with another survivor, but I was hesitant. Was I going to help this man only to be slaughtered?