The Last Marine

The next few days fell into a routine, a strange new version of domestic life in the middle of the apocalypse. The apartment building became their fortress. Quinn, with his infantryman’s focus on physical security, and Hex, with his technician’s mind for systems and traps, worked together to improve their defenses.

They dragged more furniture into the lobby, reinforcing the main barricade until it was a nearly impenetrable wall of metal and wood. Quinn taught Hex how to create chokepoints in the stairwells, using heavy vending machines and office desks to create narrow passages where they could face a threat one at a time. Hex, in turn, rigged up a series of crude but effective warning systems—tripwires made from fishing line connected to tin cans on the lower floors. Their military training, one from the ground and one from the air, sometimes clashed in methodology, but their shared goal of survival made them an effective team.

One afternoon, Hex walked Quinn through his communications setup. The desk was a chaotic nest of wires, circuit boards, and scavenged electronics.

"I’ve boosted the antenna’s range using parts from three different satellite dishes I pulled from the roof," Hex explained, his fingers flying across a keyboard. "I can listen to almost any frequency. Military, civilian, emergency services, you name it."

He turned a dial, and the room filled with a hiss of static. "This is the national guard channel. For the first day, it was chaos. Orders, counter-orders, whole units reporting they were being overrun." He switched the frequency. A garbled scream, cut short by static, filled the air for a second before Hex silenced it.

"That was the last thing I heard on the police band two days ago," he said, his face grim. "Now, it’s all like this." He swept the dial across a dozen more frequencies. They were all the same. Dead air. Hissing static. The ghost of a scream. "There’s no command structure left to reach, Quinn. We’re on our own. For real."

The finality of it was a heavy weight. Quinn had held onto a sliver of hope that somewhere, some part of the government, of the military, had survived and was organizing. Hex’s wall of static was the definitive answer.

In the small pockets of downtime, a fragile sense of normalcy began to emerge. Lily, slowly coming out of her shell of silent shock, started to interact with Hex. At first, she would just watch him from a distance as he tinkered with his electronics. Then, one day, she timidly approached him as he was trying to repair a small, handheld radio.

"Is that a treasure?" she asked, her voice small.

Hex looked up, surprised. His initial gruffness softened as he looked at her. "Yeah, I guess it is," he said. "If I can get it to work, we might be able to hear other people." He showed her the inside of the radio, pointing out the different colored wires. "See this? It’s like a puzzle."

From then on, Lily would often sit quietly near his desk, drawing or watching him work. Hex, for his part, never seemed to mind. Quinn would watch them, and for the first time in a long time, he felt a flicker of something other than grief or rage. He saw the gruff technician absently hand Lily a piece of jerky from his own rations, or stop his work to admire a drawing she had made. The soldier who had called her a liability was now, in his own quiet way, one of her protectors.

Their supplies were dwindling. The scavenged cans and crackers were almost gone. Hex had a small generator in the building’s maintenance room, but they had no fuel for it.