The Last Door

Forty infected were coming up the ridge road behind us, and not one of them looked at Daniel. They passed within arm's reach of him while he typed the code into the keypad beside the bunker door, and they stepped around my sister as though she were a fence post. Every one of them kept its eyes on me, and I was the only person on that hillside who did not understand why. I stood on the concrete lip of Aldercrest Shelter with a tire iron in one hand and nothing left in the rest of me. Nine days earlier, I had been a night-shift nurse planning a wedding. Now my hair was matted with dirt, my scrubs had split at the knee, and my lungs burned from two miles of climbing. Because I had gone back for Elise twice when she fell behind on the road. The worst moment had come that morning on the overpass. An infected man had lunged for Elise, and I had swung the tire iron before I had time to be afraid. And when I looked up the whole column below us, it had turned like a school of fish. They had walked past Daniel and past Elise, and they had come straight toward me. I told myself that I must be imagining it because the alternative was too strange to hold in my mind, and I had spent the whole climb trying not to look behind me. Daniel had promised me this place since the second night of the collapse. He was a structural engineer, his firm had poured the foundation, and he was the only person I knew who had the access code. I had believed him completely, the same way I believed everything he told me. In nine days I had given him my coat, my share of the water, and the last of my antibiotics for a cut on his hand, because loving someone had always meant giving them whatever they needed. I had never once asked what he was giving me in return. The steel door groaned and rolled sideways on a track as wide as a train rail, and warm air spilt out smelling of carpet and machine oil. I almost cried at how ordinary it smelled because I had not breathed anything ordinary in nine days. My knees weakened with relief since I had slept in stairwells and eaten whatever scraps the others could spare, and I had begun to believe that safety only existed in the past. Elise went through first, with Daniel's hand on her back. I stayed on the threshold with the last pack because someone had to watch the road, and because I was always the one who stayed. That morning , I pressed my final crackers into Elise's palm and told her that I had already eaten, and she had believed me because she always did. When I turned around, the crowd had reached the top of the ridge. At the front walked a woman in a grey hospital cardigan, and I recognized the cardigan before I recognized her face. Mrs. Abernathy had been my patient in bed twelve, a retired schoolteacher who made me promise each night to feed her cat, and she had been dead for four days. She walked at a steady pace with her hands hanging open at her sides, and she looked at me with such tenderness that my skin crawled. "Mara," she said. The word came out of her like a recording played backwards, but it was my name. My stomach dropped because the dead are not supposed to remember anyone's name. "Mara, come on!" Daniel shouted from inside the bunker. I turned and took one step across the track, and the door stopped moving. It did not jam or stutter. It stopped the way a held breath stops, as if something inside had made a decision. I looked up and saw Elise standing at a red hand lever set into the wall, her palm pressed flat against it and tears running down her face. Her hand was trembling, but she did not take it away. "Elise," I said. "It's me." "I know," my sister said, and she pulled the lever. I had raised her from the age of fourteen, after our parents died, and I had skipped meals and worked double shifts and signed every form with my own tired hand. For a moment I could not think of anything that mattered more than the fact that she had said I know, and that she had said it gently, as though she were sorry for both of us at once. The door slammed shut with a hammer blow of pneumatics that shook the concrete under my boots. I threw my shoulder into the closing gap and caught a sliver of light and air. Daniel was standing twelve feet back with his hands open at his sides, and he did not shout or reach for me or move at all. His mouth formed two words that I have replayed a thousand times since, and I am nearly certain that they were "I'm sorry." The gap closed on my fingers, and I tore them free and left skin on the steel. I hit the door with both fists and screamed their names until my sister's stopped sounding like a name. The metal was cold and perfectly smooth, and it did not even ring, and from the other side, I heard nothing at all, not even footsteps, which told me that they had already walked away. I could hear slow footsteps on the gravel behind me, and they stopped one by one until the hillside went completely quiet. The crowd had halted ten feet away. Hundreds of them stood in a silent half circle on the concrete, looking at me the way you look at a person you have walked a very long way to reach. They had passed my fiancé and my sister without a glance, and I finally understood that they had not come to this hillside for the bunker. They had come for me, and I had no idea what I had done to deserve it. I pressed my back against the steel and looked for a way out, but the ridge dropped away on one side, and the crowd filled the road on the other. The air smelled of wet earth and something sweetish and rotten that coated my throat every time I gasped, and my arm shook so badly from exhaustion that I could barely lift the tire iron. Then, a man's voice tore through the silence. "Mara!" A paramedic in a torn jacket was fighting up the ridge road through the back of the crowd with a fire axe, and he was cutting a straight path toward me. I had never seen him in my life, and he was killing people to reach me, and he was shouting my name as though it were the only word he had left. He did not make it. Mrs. Abernathy reached me first and laid both hands on my cheeks as gently as a mother checking for a fever, and the others closed in behind her. I slid down the door, and my last clear thought was that I had spent my whole life saving people and that this was the last thing I would ever lean on. I thought of Elise at fourteen, asleep on the sofa in her school uniform, and I wondered how I had saved everyone except myself. But the steel was no longer cold. A low, steady vibration came through my spine and ribs, like a machine waking up, and beneath it, I heard a sound that no door should make. It was slow and patient and mechanical, and it sounded exactly like a clock being wound. Then the dark closed over me, and a warm hand settled between my shoulder blades. "Hey," a voice said, close and gentle. "Mar, you're shaking. Did you have a bad dream?" I opened my eyes to a strip of morning sun on a blue wall and the smell of lavender detergent. The man who had stood twelve feet back with his hands open was rubbing my back and asking whether I had had a bad dream. He had no idea that I had already died at his door. I could still feel cold steel against my cheek, and I could not make my lungs fill because I had stopped breathing the moment I understood where I was.