The Last Mile by Tim Waggoner Read Free Book Online Page A

maintain even a margin of sanity in the World After. She thrust aside all thoughts of where she was being taken and what would happen to her there and refocused her attention on her surroundings. She’d grown used to the absence of grass and trees in town, but out here, with no buildings to break the sameness of the smooth gray ground, it seemed as if she was walking across the alien landscape of another world. She supposed that, in way, she was. Between the hazy yellow sky above and the gray barrenness surrounding her, Alice felt both isolated and exposed, and she suffered a touch of vertigo, as if her body was having difficulty telling the difference between up and down. She walked with extra care, concentrating on each step, placing her feet precisely to maintain her balance.
    Though many people thought of the Midwest as having flat plains stretching from one horizon to the other, southwest Ohio showed the mark of the glaciers that had made their torturously slow procession across the state thousands of years ago, and the Arrival hadn’t changed that. The highway rose and fell, twisted and turned, melded to the hilly terrain it wound through, as if it were always a part of the land, just as it had before the Arrival. There were other things that had survived intact, though not many, and Alice saw one now off in the distance: a billboard on their side of the highway advertising a twenty-four-hour Starbucks.
    She couldn’t help it; she started laughing.
    “What’s so funny?” her captor demanded, his voice tense, as if he feared she were losing it.
    She momentarily forgot her hands were bound and tried to point at the sign. When she couldn’t, she said, “The billboard. You want to stop off for a cup of coffee? My treat.”
    She didn’t look back to check the expression on his face, in case her laughter had made him jumpy. She didn’t want to get a bullet between her shoulder blades for making a stupid joke.
    “I’d forgotten that sign was even there,” he said. “I guess I’m always too busy watching the road when I pass this way.”
    “Watching for things like that deer, you mean.”
    He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.
    She gazed up at the sky. “Do you think they’re still up there? The eyes?” The yellow haze that choked the sky began to coalesce almost immediately after the Arrival, and it hadn’t broken since. No sun, moon, or stars anymore, yet somehow there was light enough to see by, as if the yellow mist gave off its own kind of illumination.
    “Oh yes. They’re still there. Sometimes I think they always were, and we just couldn’t see them. Not until they wanted us to.”
    The thought that those eyes—eyes that she was sure belonged to the Masters—had been watching them all this time, maybe watching forever , disturbed her more than anything she’d experienced since that day in the parking lot outside the Pasta Pavilion. Until now she’d had her memories of the World Before to comfort her, but her captor’s words forced her to consider the possibility that there never had been a world without the Masters. Never had been a world that was safe, free, and most of all, sane.
    The notion filled her with such despair that she didn’t want to resist her captor, didn’t want to escape. Maybe it would be better to let him sacrifice her, or whatever the fuck it was he did. At least then it would all be over, and she’d be free of this nightmare her world had become. She probably deserved whatever was going to happen to her, no matter how awful it might be. Considering the things she’d done since the Arrival…
    Alice jumped as the silence of the gray wasteland was broken by the sound of an engine rumbling to life. The rumble grew to a roar, and a motorcycle came speeding out from behind the Starbucks billboard.
    Her abductor stepped in front of her, gun in one hand, knife in the other.
    “Stay behind me,” he warned.
    Alice would’ve taken off running if there’d been anywhere to