The Last Town

Just floor and walls and David Pilcher sitting in a corner, his head hung as if he’d fallen asleep sitting up. The lights burned down through the window and lit the left side of the man’s face.

He hadn’t been allowed to keep any personal effects, including a razor, and white stubble was beginning to overspread his jaw.

You did this, Ethan thought. You ruined so many lives. My life. My marriage.

If he’d had a keycard to this cell, Ethan would’ve rushed inside and beat the man to death.

Everyone—townies and mountain people—came down for the burials.

The cemetery was too full to accommodate all the bodies so an open field on the southern border of the graveyard was annexed.

Ethan helped Kate with Harold.

The sky was gray.

No one spoke.

Tiny flakes of snow swirled through the crowd.

There was just the constant sound of shovels stabbing into the cold, hard ground.

As the digging finished, people crumpled down in the snow-frosted grass beside loved ones, or what was left of them, the dead wrapped tightly in once-white sheets. The digging had given them something to do, but as they sat motionless and cold beside lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, friends, and children, muffled sobs began to rise up from the crowd.

Ethan walked out into the middle of the field.

From where he stood, it was a crushing collection of sights and sounds: all those little mounds of dirt, the dead waiting to be lowered into their final resting places, the grieving of those who had lost everything, the mountain people standing behind the townies looking solemnly on, and the column of smoke at the north end of town coughing spirals of sweet-smelling black into the sky as six hundred abby corpses smoldered into nothing.

Except for David Pilcher, the man responsible for all this pain, every human being left on earth was in this field.

Even Adam Hassler, standing on the outskirts with Theresa and Ben.

Ethan was struck with a single, terrifying thought: I’m losing my wife.

He made a slow turn, studying all the faces. The grief was overpowering. A living thing.

“I don’t know what to say. Words can’t make any of this feel better. We lost three-quarters of our people, and it’s going to be hard for a long, long time. Let’s do what we can to help one another, because it’s just us out here alone in the world.”

As everyone began to lift the bodies gently down into their graves, Ethan headed back across the field, through the falling snow toward Kate.

He helped her lower Harold into his grave.

Then they took up their shovels, and, along with everyone else, began to fill in the dirt.

THERESA

She walked with Hassler through the forest south of town, snowflakes drifting down between the pines. Adam had shaved his beard and cut his hair, but the smooth skin only underscored the gaunt, drawn quality of his face. He looked emaciated. Like a refugee of a starving world. She couldn’t get past how surreal it felt to be physically close to him again. Before she’d given him up for dead, she’d made it a habit of imagining their reunion. None of those fantasies had been anything like the real thing.

“Are you sleeping all right?” Theresa asked.

“It’s funny. You don’t know how many nights out in the wild I dreamed of sleeping in a bed again. All the pillows, the covers, the warmth, the safety. Being able to reach out in the dark to a bedside table and wrap my hand around a cool glass of water. But since I’ve been back, I’ve barely slept. Guess I got used to sleeping in a bivy sack, tied into a tree thirty feet off the ground. How about you?”

“It’s difficult,” she said.

“Nightmares?”

“I keep dreaming that things went another way. That those abbies got into the jail cell.”

“How’s Ben?”

“He’s okay. I can tell he’s trying to wrap his head around what happened. A lot of his classmates didn’t make it.”

“He saw things no kid should ever have to see.”

“He’s twelve now. Can you believe it?”

“He looks so much like you, Theresa. I’ve wanted to see more of him, to just talk to him, but it didn’t feel right. Not yet.”

“That’s probably best,” she said.

“Where’s Ethan?”

“He was going to stay with Kate for a while after the burial.”

“Some things never change, huh?”

“She lost her husband. She doesn’t really have anyone else.” Theresa sighed. “I told Ethan.”

“Told him . . .”

“About us.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t just go on keeping it from him.”

“How’d he take it?”

“You know Ethan. How do you think?”

“But he understands what the situation was, right? That you and I were trapped here. That we thought he was dead.”

“I explained everything.”

“So does he not believe you?”

“I don’t know if it’s that so much as he’s just trying to come to terms with the idea that, well, you know.”

“That I was f**king his wife.”

Theresa stopped.

So quiet in the woods.

“It was good, right?” Hassler asked. “When it was just you, me, and Ben. I made you happy, didn’t I?”

“Very.”

“You have no idea what I’d do for you, Theresa.”

She looked up into his eyes.

He stared at her with such love.

An energy in the air, Theresa could sense that this moment carried more heft than she realized. Her heart had once been wide open to this man, and if she let him keep looking at her like this, like she was the only thing that existed in his world—

He moved in.

Kissed her.

At first, she drew back.

Then she let him.

Then she kissed back.

He walked her slowly back against a pine tree, and as he pressed into her she ran her fingers through his hair.

As he kissed her neck, she tilted her head back and looked up into snowflakes that fell and melted on her face, and then he was unzipping her jacket, his fingers making quick work of the buttons on her shirt underneath, and she found herself reaching for his.

She stopped.

“What?” he asked, breathless. “What’s wrong?”