Chapter 93: The Last True Thing
The man was talking to the air over and over, while she hung eight inches off the floor with a grip she couldn’t see wrapped tight around her throat.
He had turned his back on a room full of her dead and walked to the long control panel and started muttering to it like there was somebody on the other side answering him.
He asked the empty console a question, waited a beat, and nodded at nothing.
Then he said "how long" to no one, and tilted his head at the reply only he could hear.
And that’s when she understood, he wasn’t alone.
This was a coordinated strike, not just one crazed supernatural man.
Her ears were still a single high tone with no top and no bottom to it.
While under that tone, her heart kept sinking deeper and deeper into despair.
But still her hands kept patting down her own thighs, her own chest, hunting a sidearm or a knife or something that hadn’t peeled itself off her.
But there was nothing to find.
She made herself stop hunting.
She made herself count instead, hoping and praying desperately that one of them survived, that the man accidentally failed to kill one of them, because if that were true, they might get her the opportunity to escape that ghostly death grip on her throat.
Rourke was on his back with one hole in him and his eyes still open at the ceiling he’d told them to hold the corners under.
Ashby folded over a console with the top of his head gone.
Honce by the doorway with his neck turned past where necks turn, Del somewhere out in the dark she’d never see him come out of, Brandt on the floor among his own technicians with the panel still glowing above his ruined head, four minutes from saving the entire south of the country and now four minutes from nothing at all.
The grip shifted, and her whole body seized against it before her brain caught up, because the pressure came off her throat all at once and reset lower, wrapping her ribs instead, and the first breath went into her so fast and so deep that it hurt worse than the choking had.
She hadn’t decided to gasp. Her body just did it, dragging in stale reactor air like it was the last of anything, and some cold professional corner of her filed the reason for the change even while the rest of her wanted to weep with the relief of it.
"Fort Harlan," the man said, still not turning around, conversational, the way you’d say it to somebody you’d been introduced to at a bad party. "How many of you are there? Back at the wire."
And there it was, the thing that finally broke her open. Curiosity. Or maybe interrogation.
Interrogation of a terrorist, about one of the largest, most fortified survivor camps in the country.
And Mara felt the bottom go out of everything she had left.
But she was Mara Voss.
And Mara Voss had talked an eighteen-year-old into lowering a rifle he was two pounds of trigger away from firing, and Mara Voss had carried a stranger’s kid out of a burning town on her back, and if there was one single thing left in this building that she was better at than dying, it was this.
So she found her voice, and she made it steady, and she went to work.
"A lot of us," she said, and it came out even, because she made it come out even. "We got walls that hold. Doctors... not field guys. Power, water, food that’ll last. A whole medical wing."
She let that sit for exactly one breath the way you let an offer sit.
"Whatever you’re doing all this for," she said, and her eyes went to that small calico shape on his shoulder without meaning to, then past it, hunting the shape of the thing he was protecting because a man does not do this for nothing, "... we’ve got room for it. Look, listen to me... I’ll ask no questions... come with us, bring whoever you want to as well. I’ll tell the command it was the Infected. You won’t be charged. We can use your abilities. With what you can do, there are so many lives we can save. We can make Harlan the greatest bastion of humanity!"
The man’s shoulders moved, something almost like a laugh, and he still didn’t turn around.
"That’s a good offer," he said, and he actually sounded like he meant it. "That’s a really good offer, honestly."
"Then take it," Mara quickly said. "Look, no matter your beliefs, your religion, or vows, no matter what you’ve thought since birth... the world has ended. There’s no religion now, no borders or factions... It’s just us now, us humans. And our humanity."
"True. And I am not a terrorist."
Seven words, and no heat in it, and he said something else to the air after it, low, a number maybe, and waited on the answer only he could hear.
The tone in her ears was thinning out.
She could hear the pump in the floor now, patient, the same pump she’d walked in here to kill, and she pushed everything she had into the only argument bigger than her own life.
"Then act like it, listen to me, because you’re not just killing me," she said, faster now, letting the mission carry it the way it had carried her down every dark corridor in this place. "That plant sits on the Halden river. That river runs south. Four counties, maybe five, all the way to the coast... Every camp we’ve found drinks out of it. Every field anybody’s going to try to plant come spring grows out of it. You melt this thing down, and you don’t kill just Halden... Halden’s already gone, you poison the whole south of what’s left, for longer than either of us will be alive."
She heard the words come out of her, and she believed every one, and she had no way of knowing she was speaking another woman’s argument almost line for line, into the back of the one man on earth who’d already heard it once and buried it.
"My brother’s back at Harlan, just a kid at the wire who loves running the dawn radio watch," she said, and it slipped out sideways, not a plea; she would not beg, just a fact that got loose because it was the truest thing she owned. "He’s twelve... he’s-"
"Everything I kill," The man suddenly spoke, back still facing her, "...It turns into credits, a currency so to speak... And I can use that currency to buy things from an otherworldly being... a cosmic entity."
"W-what?"
"Come on," The man chuckled, "It is really so hard to believe? I literally have you floating in the air."
"You-!" Mara’s teeth immediately clenched, her mind instantly churning out the why he was doing this, "You’re doing this for fucking loot?!"
"I’m doing this for a cure."
Mara was immediately stunned to silence, while the man continued to work the panel as though he hadn’t just said there was a cure for this nightmare.
"Th-Then come with me! You must come with me!" Mara’s heart instantly went into a frenzy; even her arms and legs began thrashing. "We can give you everything you need! Jets, tanks, assault helicopters, a fucking army! Anything you want! You don’t need to do this! Give me a week! Just a week! And you will have enough for those credits to get that cure! I swear I promise!"
The man turned around and quietly looked at her, his blue eyes flashing dangerously close to hope before dimming back to that same serene coldness.
And in that quiet, her eyes finally found the rifle slung across his chest, and stayed there.
It was a rifle just like hers.
The same long lean shape she’d carried through three towns and a burning field, sixteen inches of it, a suppressor on the front, and just above the magazine well, cut into by hand, by somebody who had taken their time doing it, were two names.
She couldn’t read them from here. But she understood what it meant.
Seemingly sensing her gaze, the man looked down at his own rifle and chuckled.
"She’s bitten," he said softly, gazing dimly into her eyes.
And that was the thing that finished her, worse than the corpses, worse than anything, because a monster does not carve names, a monster does not keep a small warm animal riding safe against his neck, a monster does not sound genuinely sorry to turn down your fort, and this man had done all three and had still folded her entire team onto this floor without one single thing moving in his face while he did it.
He wasn’t a monster.
He was a man, and he had a person he loved this much.
That was worse than any monster she could have imagined, and somewhere in the ruin of understanding it, Mara stopped negotiating.
Because she got it, finally, all at once and all the way down.
She was never a threat, nor was this a discussion or an interrogation. He wasn’t telling her this because she asked. He was simply reminding himself why he was doing this, using her to justify himself.
The trap they’d built, the funnel, the eight guns, Rourke dragging them all up off their knees by sheer will, every hour of every drill she’d ever run, all of it had been about as relevant to this man as the weather he’d already sorted her into, and there was no offer in her mouth and no county on that map that was ever going to outweigh whatever those two carved names meant to him.
Behind his bloodshot eyes, medical tape running across one cheek and up through his eyebrow, behind all of it wasn’t rage or hunger or even satisfaction, just a calm, tired certainty that she had never once been a problem, and his way was the only way.
The calico on his shoulder watched her with round, unhurried eyes.
While Mara Voss looked at the man who had never been in any danger, in a room full of people who’d died blind and deaf believing they might win, and she let go of the last of it, the deals and the mission and the small stupid hope that talking had ever been going to work, and she felt something older than fear rise up to take its place.
"Hope it was worth it," she said, and her voice didn’t shake now, because there was nothing left in it to shake. "You damn terrorist!"
She said it knowing he wouldn’t stop.
She said it knowing he wouldn’t spare her.
She said it because it was true, and because it was the last true thing she was ever going to get to say, and because a boy at a wire she would not see again deserved for her to go out with her head held high and defiant instead of begging.
The man looked at her for a moment before-
"Yes, it is... every bit of it."
-Crack-!
And Mara Voss came off the invisible grip all at once, her thrashing arms and legs dangling loosely before hitting the floor with a dull thud never to move again.