The Last of Us
by Jeffrey Conolly
We almost seem like a parade:
Carter in front, waving a shotgun about like it’s some sort of repellent, me in back and the kid between us. The kid had never seen the surface before, and I can see the deep wonder in his eyes as he stares at the skeletons of an age long past.
The boy sees something and sprints up ahead. Carter reaches to grab him but snatches only air. I try to see what the boy is looking at, what he’s running to, but the wind blows and suddenly dust envelopes my senses.
“Nathan,” Carter screams, “Come back.”
I move forward into the dust. As it clears I see the boy climbing on the back of a large stone tiger. His hair, now thick with the city’s fine debris, looks gray, like that of my own. His smile as he scales the tiger is contagious, but I can tell that Carter wants to beat it out of him.
Carter is not enjoying the surface.
The mousy man looks to me to see if I’ll scold the boy. When I do nothing but smile he sighs, drops his gun to his side and begins to clean the debris off his glasses.
He slips his glasses back on. “So this is the place?”
“Yep, Comerica Park. At least that’s what it used to be.”
The kid slides of his mount and returns to us. We’re looking at the stadium, only I’m the only one that saw it back when it was a stadium, back when you could buy a hot dog and a Coke and watch Cabrera knock one solid and hope to God it came your way, so only I see the hell that this world has become. Only I see this nightmarish before and after. The stadium is eviscerated. In spots we can see right through it, end to end, as the structure of what was once a great testament to sport now seems like haphazard scaffolding. The breeze picks up again, blocking our view with dirt and ash, and I hear the awkward sound of grinding metal as what’s left of the stadium actually gives way to the breeze.
“Is he here? Is he really here?” The boy jumps at me.
“Of course.”
Carter disapproves my lie with a glance.
In truth, I hope that Nick has made it. Out on the surface, you can never be too sure.
We enter the ruins, I nearly stumbling over what was once a second stone tiger. Now only the paw remains, clinging to this forgotten world like the rest of us.
“Were you here when the bombs went off?” The boy’s voice is high pitched with excitement.
“Not here, but close to here. In a place called Dearborn.”
The kid works this over in his head. He’s never been outside the basement of the high school. I’ve told him the story, night after night, bedtime after bedtime; it’s his favorite. As old as I’m getting, I’m sure he can tell it better than me, but I can see in his eyes he wants to hear it again.
“I was just a little runt, like you, and me and my family were watching TV. They were talking about one that had dropped on New York, then L.A., and then I was standing at the window. Waiting. I guess I was excited. Then there was this huge light and cloud, and I was thinking I was going crazy, because there was no sound to come with it, but then it came…”
We pass one of Nick’s signs etched in chalk on a pillar. I feel some of my worst fears relived. “So then my mother ripped me up in her arms and…”
Carter stuck a finger to his lips and put his shotgun at full attention.
Scavengers. Cannibals. I don’t even see the first one till I hear the shot gun blast. I see its decrepit teeth as it wails in pain, clutching the new wound on its chest. A shot to its face stops the wailing.
I pull the kid back to me, and we watch Carter, the master, at work. This is why we brought him. With his shotgun he conducts a symphony. Two down to his left, two slain to his right, reload. One seizes his leg, biting down and tearing the flesh of his calf. With one bullet, its life has ended. Carter limps forward, falling two more, another shot in the head to be sure. Reload. He gives the last one the option to flee. It considers, then charges at Carter, mouth open wide. Carter inserts the shotgun and pulls the trigger. The creature meets its maker, then the cement.
The wind blows again. When the ash clears, he is still standing there. Our Clint Eastwood. He is mourning, just like all of us.
Their bodies, now dead on the ground, look human again, as if the dust in the wind washed the monster away. We should search their bodies, but we move on. The boy is fighting tears and losing. The eager child I brought with me died with the cannibals.
We walk on to the agreed meeting place, rounding the arc of this once great temple of the gods. As I walk, searching for the right section number, I can’t help but remember myself as the boy’s age, running hand in hand with my father, clutching the tickets with the other hand, doing the same thing I’m doing now.
I feel hope draining from me with every step. He’s not going to be there. When he left a year ago we all called him crazy for trying this, absolutely nuts. There is no way he made it. There was no reason for the boy to have to see all of this.
And then I saw them. Children. Running and playing, all circling one individual. He stood in the center of them all, wearing a mangy old costume of red and white, and a fake beard made out of a bed sheet.
“Santa!” The boy yelled, and ran down to greet him. I could recognize Nick in the suit, the man that left our commune a year before on Christmas day, but to all the kids, he was the genuine article.
The parents were few. We stood and watched our children’s face light up in a way that we thought before was never possible. Nick starts giving them all the things he had been scavenging over the last year: trucks and dolls, planes and princesses, mangled teddy bears and even stacks of books. Each kid got several things, and a sack to carry it in.
When it was done each kid starts showing off their new treasures, my own showing me a stack of baseball cards “Can you show me which ones use to play here?”
Nick comes over and smiles. I smile back.
“Here.” He hands me a package.
“You didn’t have to.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I open it. It was a picture of the three of us, put into an old broken frame. Me, Nick, and the thing we once shared. My wife and his sister.
I began to cry.
“Merry Christmas, Ben.”
“Merry Christmas, Nick.”
We hug, and I feel how ratty his suit really is.
“I gotta go, I’ve got three other stops. See you here next year?”
I nod, and watch him walk off, slinging his bag over his shoulder whistling jingle bells, leaving a handful of happy kids behind. He is our hope, our Santa Claus.
Even for the last of us.
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Jeffrey Conolly has been published in Macabre Cadaver and Flashes in the Dark and is soon to appear in Alien Skin Magazine. He is also the editor of the online horror magazine “The Daily Tourniquet.” To keep track of all things Jeffrey, visit his website at www.jeffreyconolly.com
