Pajari is dead.
Fury fills him. He stands, stares down at her.
“We saved you. This is your fault!”
He kicks her body, once, twice, almost a third time before he realizes what he’s doing.
Vanev falls to his knees.
Like Bureau, he starts to cry.
They did the right thing—they helped Pajari. Doing so cost them all that there is. They helped her; she died anyway.
And because of her, he, too, will die.
He can’t hear Marija’s weapon. He can’t hear anything but the roar of the fire. Is Marija still alive? Is Bureau?
If so, they won’t be for long.
All around the small crater, the dying jungle rages with flame.
He coughs, harder than ever before.
It’s getting hard to breathe.
Smoke crawls down the crater’s slope, an intangible beast oozing toward him.
Vanev can’t stop coughing.
He tries to block out the burning pain in his hands and face.
He will not see fourteen.
He will not even see tomorrow.
He feels dizzy. The ground spins beneath him.
He falls to his back, staring up at the night sky, at the stars, wondering if Em and the others made it.
O. Vanev closes his eyes.
In his last moments, the world fades away, and a tiny shred of his past rises up from the darkness, a past that was never his.
Oscar. That’s what the O stood for.
His name was Oscar.
Author’s Note: This story is part of the Generations Trilogy, also by Scott Sigler. The series includes the novels Alive, Alight, and Alone. “The Last Child” takes place during a pivotal moment in Alone.
SO SHARP, SO BRIGHT, SO FINAL
SEANAN MCGUIRE
Seanan McGuire has released more than forty traditionally published works under both her own name and the pseudonym “Mira Grant” since the publication of her first book in 2009. She has won the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Alex, and Pegasus Awards, which is a very nice thing to be able to say. Seanan lives in the Pacific Northwest with her collection of cats, comics, and creepy dolls. If you need her, look to the nearest cornfield. She is always there. Waiting for your call.
They don’t like bright light, and it’s bright today, so bright that it’s giving me the nagging edge of a headache. That’s a good thing. Means until they hit the final stages, the middle of the day is as close to safe as it gets. We slept during the day for the first couple of months, like we had to shift our own internal clocks to match the monsters if we wanted to stay alive. I got over that pretty quick. If I’m going to die, I’d almost rather do it fast, with all the lights off, and never see it coming. They don’t like water, either. When it rains—and it’s been raining more and more as we move toward the wispy edge of winter—the streets are empty, and I can run down the sidewalk and see them watching sullenly from their hidey-holes, nothing but eyes in the dark, angry and yearning to lash out. They hate us. How they hate us, for the crime of being alive and uninfected.
They’d change both those things in a second if we let them. If we get careless. There was this song I heard once. A funny song, on one of my little brother’s nerd radio shows. It was about the old Looney Tunes characters, about that coyote who always wanted to catch the roadrunner. He talked about all the times he’d lost, all the times he’d failed, and then he said—sang, I guess—“Remember that I have to win only once.”
I remember.
I remember a lot of things I don’t want to remember.
I remember my little brother—Danny, Danny, it’s so hard to even think his name anymore, after everything that happened, after everything fell apart—sitting at the dinner table, talking too fast around a mouthful of mashed potatoes, trying to make us care about some stupid article he saw online. Bats in Arizona, he’d said. Rabid bats, and rabid coyotes, and rabid dogs turning on their owners.
“Whatever, Cujo,” I said, and rolled my eyes, and Dad laughed, and I felt this hot pride in my chest, because I’d made our father happy and Danny hadn’t, and sometimes that was what mattered. We weren’t brother and sister—we were combatants in the same gladiatorial ring, both fighting for the prize of parental approval.
That night, I won and Danny lost, and I’d give anything to take it back, anything at all. Even my life. If I could just rewind the clock long enough to relive that one evening, to savor my food and smile at my brother and be his friend and his supporter, not his adversary, I’d take the consequences willingly.
But I can’t. The world is broken, the world is wrong, and still we don’t have time travel, or magic, or any of the other things the books used to say would come and save us. We just have the sunlight, and the rain, and the slow decay of everything that matters.
We just have the end.
I’m hungry.
It was easier before the power grid went down. Back then, I could flip a switch and play God, let there be light, let there be safe passage through the aisles of canned vegetables and shelf-stable legumes. I ate so many beans during the first few weeks that I was terrified I’d fart so loudly it would lead them right to me. Death by flatulence. Not a great thing to put on my headstone—not that I was ever going to get one. Graveyards are a thing of the past, of course. They’re smart, the ones who used to be us, and they like to leave corpses in the places we’re likely to go, propping them up against walls and stretching them across doorways.
Corpses carry all kinds of disease. Not just the big one. Lots of nasty things enjoy making a meal of human flesh, and if you breathe in too deeply around the dead, you’re likely to join the legions of the lost in no time at all.
So first the stores filled up with dead bodies, and then the lights went out, and now every Target is a potential killing field, every Safeway is an abattoir, because there’s no flashlight bright enough to keep them away forever.
I’m so hungry. I’m hungry, and I’m thirsty, and my head is killing me.
Someone has already done the hard work of smashing the store windows; glass glitters in the sun, tipped here and there with streaks of blood. I don’t know if it’s ours or theirs, which means I have to treat it all as an infection risk. The light stretches into the store, bright and buttery and inviting.
I can’t see any food there, but that doesn’t have to mean anything; maybe the shelves at the front have been picked bare, or maybe they pulled the food back, out of the light, to save it for themselves. They don’t usually spend their days sleeping on linoleum, and why should they? They still have houses. They still have beds, and shelter, and walls to keep out the weather, the sun and rain. We accidentally created the perfect dens for our own destruction, and now those of us who are still us scavenge around the edges, trying not to be seen.
It’s probably safe. It’s probably safe. There’s almost no chance someone is hiding in there, waiting to strike. Unless it’s a hungry dog. They don’t have homes anymore, and they’re all infected, and they hide wherever the sun doesn’t reach, at least until the final stages, when the anger and confusion and disorientation is finally enough to drive them out into the light.
I pull a rock out of my pocket, weighing it carefully in my hand before I fling it through the opening. It clatters on broken glass, rolling across the linoleum with soft thumping sounds until it comes to a rest against the base of a shelf. There are no other sounds. I start to step forward, and stop as a hand grabs my elbow.