Fragments (12 page)

She circled the bag warily, rubbing her face with her palm, trying to make a decision.
Was it worth it? The nocturnal monster still haunted her—the one time she’d taken
a major risk, she’d nearly died. But her caution was costing her time, and time wasn’t
a resource she could afford to spend this freely. The answers she was looking for—what
is the Trust? How are the Partials connected to RM? Who am I, and what plan am I a
part of? Those were the answers that could save the human race or destroy it. As dangerous
as her choices were, she still had to make them. She slung her rifle behind her shoulder
and reached for the bag—

—and heard a voice.

Kira scrambled back, ducking behind the wall of the subway entrance. The voice was
soft, but it carried well in the midnight silence—a faint muttering from a side street,
maybe half a block down and closing. She gripped her rifle, looking for somewhere
to run, but she was trapped in the open. Instead she crept slowly to the side, keeping
the subway entrance between her and the speaker. As he drew nearer, the muttering
got louder and louder until at last she understood the words.

“Never leave the backpack, never leave the backpack.” It was the same phrase, over
and over: “Never leave the backpack.” She peeked out and saw the large man from before,
trudging up the street with his same waddling gait. “Never leave the backpack.” His
hands twitched, and his eyes darted back and forth across the street. “Never leave
the backpack.”

Kira wasn’t sure what it was; something about the way he walked, or spoke, or rubbed
his hands together—probably a combination of all that and more—that made her decide.
She’d wasted enough time. She had to act. She slung her rifle back over her shoulder,
spread her hands wide to show that they were empty, and stepped out from her hiding
place, between him and the backpack.

“Hello.”

The man jerked to a stop, his eyes wide with horror, and he turned and bolted back
the way he had come. Kira stepped forward to follow, not certain if she should, when
suddenly he stopped, bending low at the waist as if wounded, and shook his head violently.
“Never leave the backpack,” he said, turning toward her, “never leave the backpack.”
He saw her again and ran a few more steps away, as if it were an involuntary reaction,
but then he stopped again, turning and eyeing the backpack with a pained, terrified
expression. “Never leave the backpack.”

“It’s all right,” said Kira, wondering what was happening. This wasn’t at all what
she’d expected. “I’m not going to hurt you.” She tried to look as harmless as possible.

“I need the backpack,” he said, his voice practically dripping with desperation. “I’m
not supposed to ever leave the backpack, I always take it with me, it’s everything
I have.”

“Are these your supplies?” she asked, stepping to the side. The move gave the man
a better view of the backpack, and he surged forward five more steps, his hand reaching
out as if to snatch it away from her from fifty feet away. “I’m not here to steal
from you,” she said slowly. “I just want to talk. How many others are there?”

“That’s the only one,” he pleaded. “I need it, I can’t lose it, it’s everything I
have—”

“Not the backpack,” she said, “other people: How many other people are with you in
the safe house?”

“Please give me the backpack,” he said again, creeping forward. He stepped into the
light, and she could see tears in his eyes. His voice was hoarse and desperate. “I
need it, I need it, I need the backpack. Please give it back to me.”

“Is it medicine? Do you need help?”

“Please give it back,” he muttered, over and over. “Never leave the backpack.” Kira
considered for a moment, then stepped to the side, moving twenty feet away to the
other side of the water cart—far enough that he could come up and grab the backpack
while still staying well outside her reach. He rushed forward and collapsed on it,
clutching it and crying, and Kira looked again for an ambush—for snipers in the windows,
or men coming up behind him in the street. He seemed to be completely alone.
What’s going on here? Could this be the bomber who’d been so hard to track, who’d
set traps so cunning that even Partials didn’t find them until it was too late?

He didn’t seem eager to talk about anything but the backpack, though, so she focused
on that.

“What’s in it?”

He answered without looking up. “Everything.”

“Your food? Your weapons?”

“No weapons,” he said firmly, shaking his head, “no weapons. I’m a noncombatant, you
can’t shoot me, I don’t have any weapons.”

Kira took a small step forward. “Food, then?”

“Are you hungry?” He seemed to perk up at this, his head rising.

Kira thought carefully, then nodded. “A little.” She paused, then gestured toward
her own pack. “I have some beans if you want some, and a can of pineapple I found
in a drugstore.”

“I have lots of pineapple,” he said, climbing slowly to his feet. He brushed off his
hands and hefted the backpack up onto his shoulders. “I like fruit cocktail best:
It has pineapples and peaches and pears and cherries. Come back to my house and I’ll
show you.”

“Your house,” she said, thinking back to the craters. She was more sure now than ever
that this man was no Partial; if anything, he seemed like a giant child. “Who else
is back there?”

“Nobody,” he said, “nobody at all. I’m a noncombatant, you can’t shoot me. We’ll eat
fruit cocktail in my house.”

Kira thought about it a moment longer, then nodded. If this was a trap, it was the
weirdest one she’d ever encountered. She put out her hand to shake. “My name is Kira
Walker.”

“My name is Afa Demoux.” He placed the fallen water jug on the cart, gathered his
pump, and began towing it all back to the safe house. “You’re a Partial, and I’m the
last human being on Earth.”

Afa’s safe house turned out to be an old TV station, old enough to contain some equipment
from before the days of computerized entertainment. Kira had done salvage runs on
a handful of local news stations back on Long Island, and their systems had been arcane
but small: cameras, cables, and little bits of computer equipment feeding everything
into the cloud. This building had that as well—every TV station probably did, she
thought, given the old world’s obsession with the internet—but it had older devices
as well: broad banks of manual mixing equipment, a room of mysterious broadcasting
machines designed to send everything into the sky, to be picked up by remote antennas
instead of beamed directly through satellite links. This was why the building still
had its enormous antenna, and that was why Afa lived here. She knew this because he
told her, over and over, for nearly an hour.

“The cloud went down,” he said again, “but radios don’t need the cloud—it’s a point-to-point
communication system. All you need is a radio, an antenna, and enough electricity
to run it. I can broadcast to anyone, and they can broadcast to me, and we don’t need
a network or a cloud or anything. With an antenna this big I can broadcast all over
the world.”

“That’s great,” said Kira, “but who do you talk to? Who’s out there?” There had to
be more survivors than just Long Island—she’d always hoped but never dared to believe.

Afa shook his head—broad and brown-skinned, with a bushy black beard salted liberally
with gray. Kira guessed that he was Polynesian, but she didn’t know the individual
islands well enough to guess which one. “There’s nobody out there,” he said. “I’m
the last human on Earth.”

He did live alone; that much, at least, was true. He had converted the TV station
into a twisting warren of stored equipment: generators, portable radios, stockpiles
of food and explosives, and pile after pile of papers. He had stacks of files and
folders, bundles of news clippings held together by twine, boxes of yellowed printouts
next to more boxes of scraps and receipts and notarized documents. Thick binders overflowed
with photos, some of them glossy, some of them printed on weathered office paper;
other photos bulged from boxes or spilled out of rooms, entire offices filled floor
to ceiling with records and filing cabinets and always, everywhere, more photos than
she’d ever imagined. Those few walls not covered with cabinets and bookshelves and
tall stacks of boxes were papered over with maps: maps of New York State and others,
maps of the United States, maps of the NADI alliance, maps of China and Brazil and
the entire world. Covering the maps was a dense nest of pushpins and strings and crooked
metal flags. They made Kira dizzy just looking at them, and all the time, on every
surface, even crunching and rustling underfoot, were the papers and papers and papers
that defined and bounded Afa’s life.

Kira pressed him again, setting down her can of fruit cocktail. “What are you doing
here?”

“I’m the last human on Earth.”

“There are humans on Long Island,” she said. “What about them?”

“Partials,” he said quickly, waving his hand to dismiss the idea. “All Partials. It’s
all here, all in the files.” He gestured around grandly, as if the mounds of unordered
papers were plain evidence of universal truth. Kira nodded, irrationally grateful
for this fleck of insanity—when he had first called her a Partial it had scared her,
truly disturbed her. He’d been the first human ever to say the words out loud to her,
and the accusation—the knowledge that someone might actually know, might actually
say it—had shaken her to the core. Knowing that Afa was merely delusional, thinking
everyone in the world was a Partial, made it easier to bear.

Kira pressed again, hoping that more specific questions might draw out a more specific
answer. “You used to work for ParaGen.”

He stopped, his eyes locked on hers, his body tense, then returned to his eating with
forced nonchalance. He didn’t answer.

“Your name was on a door at the ParaGen office,” she said. “That’s where you got some
of this equipment.” She gestured around at the rows of computers and monitors. “What
are they for?”

Afa didn’t answer, and Kira paused again to watch him. There was something wrong with
his mind, she was certain—something about the way he moved, the way he talked, even
the way he sat. He didn’t think as quickly, or at least not in the same ways, as anyone
Kira had met before. How had he survived on his own like this? He was cautious, certainly,
but only about certain things; his home was miraculously well defended, filled with
ingenious traps and security measures to keep himself hidden and his equipment safe,
but on the other hand, he’d gone outside unarmed.
The best explanation,
Kira told herself,
is that there’s somebody else with him. Based on what I’ve seen, there’s no way he’s
capable of defending himself this well, and certainly no way he could set up all this
equipment. He’s like a child. Maybe whoever’s really running this safe house uses
him as an assistant?
But as much as Kira had tried, she hadn’t been able to see or hear anyone else in
the building. Whoever it was was hiding too well.

Talking about ParaGen just makes him clam up,
she told herself,
so I need to try a different tactic
. She saw him eyeing her half-eaten can of fruit and held it out to him. “Do you want
the rest?”

He grabbed it quickly. “It has cherries in it.”

“Yes, it does. Do you like cherries?”

“Of course I like cherries. I’m human.”

Kira almost laughed, but managed to stop herself. She knew plenty of humans who hated
cherries. Sharing the fruit seemed to undo the nervousness she’d caused by mentioning
ParaGen, so she probed him about a new topic. “It’s very brave of you to go out at
night,” she said. “A few nights ago I got attacked by something huge; I barely got
away with my life.”

“It used to be a bear,” said Afa, his mouth full of fruit cocktail. “You need to wait
till it catches something.”

“What happens when it catches something?”

“It eats it.”

Kira shook her head. “Well, yeah, but I mean why do you need to wait for that to happen?
What does that mean?”

“If it’s eating something, it’s not hungry,” he said, staring blankly at the floor.
“Wait until it eats, and then go outside to get water while it’s busy. That way it
won’t eat you. But always remember to take the backpack,” he said, pointing in front
of him with his spoon. “You can’t ever leave the backpack.”

Kira marveled at the simplicity of his plan, but even so, his answer sparked a dozen
new questions: How did he know when the monster had eaten? What did he mean that it
“used to be” a bear? What was so important about the backpack, and who had told him
all these strategies in the first place? She decided to pursue the latter question,
as it seemed like the best opportunity to broach the topic again.

“Who told you not to leave the backpack?”

“Nobody told me,” he said. “I’m a human. Nobody’s in charge of me, ’cause I’m the
only one left.”

“Obviously nobody’s in charge of you,” said Kira, frustrated by the circular conversation,
“but what about your friend? The one who warned you not to lose the backpack?”

“No friends,” said Afa, shaking his head in a strange, loose sort of way that shook
his entire torso as well. “No friends. I’m the last one.”

“Were there others before? Other people with you, here in the safe house?”

“Just you.” His voice changed when he said it, and Kira was struck by the thought
that he might very well have been completely alone—that she might be the first person
he’d spoken to in years. Whoever had saved him and taught him to survive, whoever
had set up this and the other radio stations—whoever had rigged them with explosives—was
probably long dead, lost to Partials or wild animals or illness or accident, leaving
this fifty-year-old child all alone in the ruins.
That’s why he says he’s the last one,
she thought.
He watched the last ones die.

Kira spoke softly, her voice tender. “Do you miss them?”