The Last City by Michael J. Totten

Author:Michael J. Totten [Totten, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belmont Estate Books

14

They drove in silence the rest of the day, which suited Hughes fine. He did not want to talk, especially not to Annie. They’d just fight, about Roy, about Atlanta, about everything. He worried about her despondency, about losing her faith in a mission that had been her idea in the first place, about her waking up screaming from a goddamn nap in the middle of the day and refusing even to speak about it, and about her . . . bloodthirstiness toward Roy. Hughes wondered if the same demons that had tortured Parker after he recovered from the virus were having their way with Annie now too, if on some level the postinfected could never fully be cured. That would explain why she was losing her faith in Atlanta.

Parker had gotten over it. At least he seemed to, so perhaps Annie would be fine in the end, but he worried sometimes that she was going to snap and do something stupid or dangerous or both—something with irrevocable consequences for her personally and for everyone still alive—before they reached the end of the road.

Hughes and Annie agreed about one thing, at least. Roy could not be allowed to go free when they reached the city. Hughes just had to make sure that Roy didn’t know what the others knew about him until it was too late to bail on the mission or to sabotage it. If Roy even suspected that the others knew his secret, God only knew what he’d do.

At least the drive was interesting. The highway plunging southward from Kentucky into Tennessee looked nothing like the Midwest. The landscape was hillier, more densely forested, and lined with little cliffs along the side of the highway, as if the roadbed had been blasted out of rock to smooth out the grade. The forest seemed almost impenetrable. Those woods had been hiding secrets for hundreds of years and no doubt concealed pockets of rugged survivors who had no need or inclination to erect man-made barriers to keep others away. Hunkering down in the hollows between the hills would be enough. No one with a lick of sense would go traipsing around in there without knowing exactly who and what lay at the end of the paths. Hughes knew there had to be paths, old ones, long hidden from outsiders.

They eventually crossed the Tennessee River between Old Washington and Decatur, bypassed the small town of Athens, and entered the forbidding Nantahala National Forest near the border with Georgia and North Carolina. Prairie and farmland country were long behind them now. Appalachia was another world entirely, and Hughes was relieved to have a guide here, even if that guide was Roy. Annie vaguely knew the area, sure, but she had never lived there, hadn’t visited in years, and had no idea, really, what to expect after everything had violently changed forever.

Past the small village of Austral, the woods looked positively gothic with a jungle-like tangle of trees draped with moss, slashed by

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