Richard DuBois - Last Resort

With swift jabs of the knife, he advances towards me. I hop back, staying beyond the reach of his blade. Behind him, the two women scoop up the food Owen dropped.

“Help!” I cry. “They’re stealing our food!”

Owen slashes at me; I duck away.

“Not your food, man,” he snarls, crouched low to spring in any direction to prevent my escape. “Dis is our island. Everyting on it belongs to us.”

I grab a pan and swat the knife aside. He lunges again, the sharp point aimed straight for my heart.

“My God, somebody stop them!” Pamela stands in the doorway, while Bill leans heavily against the doorframe.

Owen’s lip curls into a menacing sneer. Panting with effort, he slashes at my face. I tumble backwards, narrowly avoiding the knife. Pamela hurls plates at Owen with considerable accuracy; it gives me enough time to dash to the far end of the center island and out of Owen’s reach.

“Owen, come!” The island women call, nodding in the direction of what I assume is a back way out of the kitchen. Shouts of alarm from the other guests grow louder as they rush towards the scene.

Torn between his desire to gut me like a fish and the need to escape with his loot, Owen hesitates, but yields to the calls of his companions and follows them away. Jonas, Robby, and some other guests barge into the room.

My words rush out. “It was Owen. Owen and two of the women who work here. They stole our food. I tried to stop them; they got away.”

Bill groans and collapses to the floor.

“We’ve got to go after them,” Conner paces the kitchen, crunching the shattered plates beneath his heels. “Who’s with me?”

“Owen has a knife,” I warn.

Jonas lifts the torch the women dropped in their haste to leave, surveys the damage, and shakes his head. “Don’t bother. They’re long gone by now.”

“Fucking great,” Conner huffs with his hands on his hips. “Do we have anything left?”

Holding the torch aloft, Jonas looks in the pantry. “They didn’t wipe us out—”

“Only because they were interrupted,” Amy interjects with loud exasperation.

“They certainly knew what to look for—bottled water, boxes of dried cereal, bags of rice,” Jonas continues.

“My husband,” Pamela pleads. “My husband needs a doctor.”

Bill lays flat on his back, his head cradled in Pamela’s lap. I kneel beside him, hold his wrist, and look at my watch. “He’s got a faint pulse. I don’t understand what’s wrong with him. Bill, can you hear me?” A weak flutter of his eyes assures me he is conscious. “Bill, listen to me. Have you eaten anything that could be affecting you?”

“No,” he rasps. “This might be the problem,” he opens his shirt to reveal a thin scar on his chest. “I have a pace maker.”

The realization of what this means makes my eyes grow wide with alarm. “The pace maker stopped working when the E.M.P. blast hit us,” I rise to my feet. “Bill, you’re in danger of heart failure. We’ve got to bring a doctor here.”

“There is no way to summon a doctor. You would be better off bringing him to the town,” Jonas advises.

“How? There’s no car,” Pamela says.

“We have flat carts—big enough for a man to lie on. It is the best we can do,” Jonas offers.

Pamela looks uncertain, desperate to save her husband but clearly daunted by the task of pushing him over the hilly, winding road all the way to Rio Galera.

I place one of Bill’s arms over my shoulders. “Don’t worry, Pamela. I’ll help you.”

Visible relief washes over Pamela.

Gwen steps forth from the crowd. “I’ll come, too.”

What? Why does she want to come? I shake my head. “It’s too dangerous.”

She stands firm. “It doesn’t matter. We can get Bill to a doctor faster if three people do it versus only two.”

I am about to argue, but Conner slams the door to the pantry. “What are you going to do about this, Jonas?”

Caught off guard, Jonas tries to stammer out a response. Conner presses on. “How’d they get in, anyway? Maybe you let them in.”

“That’s absurd,” Jonas protests.

“One thing is certain, those fuckers will be back to steal the rest,” Conner bypasses Jonas and addresses the crowd. “If the rest of the world really was blown to hell then these supplies are the last we’ll get. When they run out, we’re screwed. From here on out we’re responsible for our own security. Who’s with me?”

Numerous heads in the crowd nod in vigorous agreement. Jonas stands off to the side, obsolete and forgotten.

“Phillip, we’ve got to hurry,” Pamela re-focuses my attention.

Jonas takes us to a flat cart over which we lay blankets to provide Bill with some cushion. Gwen dashes off to the kitchen. She returns and hands me a steak knife. “Here, it’s better than nothing. Tuck it in your belt.”

Pamela leads the way holding a torch. Gwen and I push Bill over the narrow bridge that spans the lagoon. Mentally, I retrace the road from the airstrip in Rio Galera to the resort. We have a long journey ahead of us.

More than once, we come to a fork in the road and struggle to determine which way is correct. Night is an impenetrable shroud upon the land; landmarks are impossible to see. Pamela and Gwen look to me for guidance, to decide which road will lead us to town. I half remember and half guess, pointing the way we should precede and praying I am right.

“Even if we find the doctor, do you think they’ll be able to help Bill?” Gwen whispers.

I check to make sure Pamela cannot hear us over the rattling wheels of the cart. She walks several feet ahead to light our path. Bill is alive but unconscious.

“I don’t know,” I sigh. “There’s a good chance he is beyond saving, at least here on this island. What he probably needs is a new pace maker, and that’s not going to happen. Either way, we’ve got to try.”

We push on for several minutes, struggling on the steep hills and pitted asphalt.

The road levels off. I turn to Gwen. “Why are you helping us?”

“This may shock you to know, Phillip, but I care about Bill, too,” she replies in a tone that makes me look stupid for asking. “Besides, it’s good for me to do something; it’s better than sitting in the resort, slowly losing my mind,” she continues, her expression calm and self-possessed. “I can’t stop thinking about what happened to my parents, to our home and everyone I knew… I’m not like you. I haven’t completely given up hope that our parents and all the other people we care about are still alive—even if it’s only a shred of hope. In that way we are very different, Phillip. You do the sensible thing. When it is pointless to hope for something that is not going to happen you accept it… you move on. I’m the fool who keeps believing, keeps thinking that suddenly things can change.”

It is clear she refers to more than just the whereabouts of our families. For Gwen to be so transposed and self-aware is odd. It is unlike her. I want to tell her how much I admire her perseverance, long after other people would have surrendered. I want to tell her that she is not wrong or foolish for clinging to her dreams, but I do not get the chance.

“What is that glow in the sky?” Pamela calls our attention to a pulsing, orange light that fills the horizon.

It takes a few seconds for me to realize what I am looking at.

“Fire,” I say. “Rio Galera is burning.”

The ominous glow acts as a beacon, guiding us onward. The closer we get to our destination the brighter the glow. It illuminates the hillsides, turning the land an unsettling red. The smell of charred wood fills the air.