The Last Girl: A gripping psychological thriller with a killer twist Page 15

  A few small papers are pinned to the wall next to the chart. According to the heading, these are babies born in 2018, and the names suggested for them. I have a feeling a lot of answers are on this piece of paper, but I can’t even figure out what this is all about. Aren’t the babies’ parents supposed to choose the names?

  The paper says there are around ten babies born each week. Some of the babies’ chosen names are circled in red.

  Something else is circled in red. A calendar. I have a feeling I should understand something right away, but can’t. The calendar has certain months circled: January, April, May, June, or August.

  What the hell does this mean? What happens in these months? Why are they important?

  The sound of nearing footsteps tick-tocks in the back of my head, but I am too consumed, and confused, by the chart I’m staring at.

  The footsteps are getting louder. Someone is at the door.

  I rip the chart down. I will fold it up and tuck it in my back pocket. But just as I am about to do that, I notice a scribble at the bottom of the report:

  Babies survival rate: 50%

  Abortion rate: 50%

  Mother’s survival rate: N/A

  Note: Awaiting permission to send to the Furnace.

  65

  The door flings open. Quickly, I fold the chart and tuck it in my pocket then straighten up. The woman at the door, probably a senior nurse, glares at me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I don’t know what to say. My mind is still distracted by the baby names on the chart. I still hold the magnetic card in my hand.

  The nurse comes forward and scans me from top to bottom. Her eyes linger on the card. “Are you new here? Never seen you before.”

  “Just arrived a few days ago.” I nod, faking the naive newbie-girl look. “Don’t know how to use the card.”

  “Yeah?” she says. “Who’s your handler?”

  Handler? “Dr. Alan Suffolk,” I say, risking everything.

  “Of course.” She rolls her eyes. “His nurses are the most naive, always.” She snatches the card from my hand and inserts it into the slot. She waits for the green hologram and then types in the passcode.

  I don’t get a chance to read it. She’s bigger and taller than me and blocks the view. I wonder if she’ll ask me if I know the passcode, but she doesn’t bother. She pushes me into the white room ahead. “We have too many babies to deliver today, so we need all the nurses available.”

  “I am glad to help,” I mumble, and step inside.

  Deliberately, I slow down until I hear the door close behind me. I don’t want to seem lost.

  I am in another deserted hall. Everything is white in here. The walls. The equipment and the desks. Only the chairs and a bed on my right are metallic. The drone I heard earlier dominates the room. It sounds like a generator.

  Farther in, human sounds begin to rise. Rooms on the left and right. I hear another baby’s cry.

  Furious, I push through one of the double doors and stand still. What stops me is a complicated image of the things I have feared since I arrived. My mind tries to reject what I see, but there is no escaping. It’s all in front of my eyes.

  Ahead of me, behind a window, I see doctors operating on a woman. Some of them are holding strange metallic instruments in their hands. A doctor hands a baby to the nurse on the left. The nurse holds the crying baby and gently hushes it. The doctor says something to the other nurses, and they pull a blanket over the mother on the table from head to toe. I can see she is wearing a wristband.

  Frozen in my place, swallowing and sweating, I don’t know what to do. One of the doctors seems to be the one everyone looks up to. Then I realize the nurses and doctors are congratulating him.

  On the mother’s death, or the baby’s birth?

  He shakes hands with a few then takes off his head covering and pulls down his surgical mask. That’s when I suppress a shriek. The doctor is Major Red.

  “Bastards!” I totally lose my patience. I have no more time for puzzles and games. Whatever is happening here, it’s not right. I run to the nearest door leading to the operating room and storm inside. One of the nurses tries to hold me back. I punch her in the face.

  By the bed, I pull the blanket back and stare at the poor woman. Dead. She has a brutal cut in her midsection and clots of blood are seeping out.

  “What the fuck did you do to her?” I turn and slash at another doctor. I pick up another sharp instrument and slash at Major Red.

  66

  Soldiers storm into the room, flashing their firearms. No one worries about contamination in here.

  A soldier pushes his gun against my back and I fall to my knees. My magic weapon of justice falls on the floor. Its metallic sound fades into oblivion, and so does my hope. I realize how alone I am on this island. So many people around me, and not one of them deserves to live. I miss Ashlyn.

  “That was so reckless of you, Miss June,” Major Red says, my knife having slashed diagonally across his face. It’s strange how my instrument went over the same old scar I’d seen earlier. He waits until the soldiers truly get hold of me, then kneels down. “Why do you keep doing these things?”

  I spit on his face. I don’t want to listen to his manipulative excuses, to him trying to convince me of my insanity. I am so beyond that. I know I am not insane.

  Major Red wipes my spit away, his face reddening slightly. He doesn’t look as angry as I’d expect him to be. I stare at his ugly face and then…

  Then…

  The back of his hand. This can’t be true. How didn’t I notice this before? There, on each knuckle, I see a tattoo. The same small red tattoo. A swastika.

  My mouth hangs open for a few moments. All kinds of questions spin in my head.

  He smirks, as if enjoying that I noticed. Then he stands up. “Take her back to her room.”

  “She hurt one of nurses badly and locked her inside a cabinet,” a soldier says. “She should be sent to—”

  “I said to her room.” Major Red glares at him. “Make sure she doesn’t leave this time. I’ll deal with her later.”

  My numb feet drag behind me on the floor as the soldiers pull me. I wriggle and swear and spit on them, but they’re like robots, nonreactive to my insults. On the way back, I glance at the pregnant women in the open rooms again. They are terrified. Most of them look away as if they have never seen me before.

  “What’s stopping you from opposing them?” I ask them. No one says a word.

  Then, when I am close to the corridor that leads to my room, I see it. The horror of it all. Another large room behind thick glass. This one isn’t an operating room. Nor a patient’s. It’s a room full of newborn babies. The soldiers’ hands I once resisted are now my solace. I grip them hard, so I won’t fall to my knees. My eyes are still on the babies. The infants whose mothers probably all died on operating tables like where Major Red stood. Mothers who eventually ended up in the Furnace.

  “Is my daughter in here?” I drool the words, nearly incoherent. “Who is Manfred Toot?”

  The soldiers don’t answer me. No one will answer me on this island. One of them sticks me with a syringe in my neck. I’m wondering if it’s the one I stole from the nurse. The world begins to shutter all around me.

  The babies are still crying. A large sign on the wall spells it all out for me. It reads in bold, neon-lit letters: Welcome to the Crib.

  67

  Mercy Medical Center, New York

  Floyd read to his wife but had noticed no changes so far. Every few pages, he raised his head from the book and looked at her. Nothing. He reasoned that he was an impatient man. Improvement wouldn’t happen so fast. He just wished August would wake up and take him in her arms and save him from this brutal world.

  The things he’d seen in his life were enough proof.

  A few recent missions with the FBI came to mind. One of them stuck out more than most. The discovery of a neo-Nazi organization planning to plant their m
embers in American government.

  How was that possible? Nazis surviving this long? What kind of hate against humanity drove such an organization?

  Floyd shook the memories away. Right now, even while he was reading to August, he hoped the last passengers of flight 1001 had survived. At least one. Just one. So they weren’t just loading corpses into a chopper and taking them home to wailing families. Please, God, if you’re really there, make their efforts count.

  It wasn’t long before he realized that he couldn’t really stomach the book he was reading to August. He’d have preferred informative non-fiction, but August hated those.

  He stood up and shoved the book back in the bag. Not that he had given up on hope for his wife’s recovery. He just figured that if he was going to tolerate a fiction book, he better read her favorite. That book he’d seen on her nightstand so many times. That book she’d gushed about and begged him to read.

  If only he could remember its title now.

  He felt guilty, not paying attention to the books she loved. It was a common human fault, not listening to loved ones. A song he used to listen to in his youth came to mind: “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)” by an eighties rock band called Cinderella.

  Book after book, cover after cover, he tried to remember that favorite book of hers. He recalled her telling him that this book had changed her life. Something he never understood. How could a book change a life? Only experiences, blood and sweat, and repeated heartache changed a person’s life. Or so he believed.

  He wondered if there was a book that could change his mind, not his life, about books. One paperback fell on the floor, and he knelt to pick it up. He wiped away a faint trace of dust and realized he remembered this one. Floyd picked it up, wondering if this was some kind of a divine intervention.

  It wasn’t entirely fictional, he remembered. The real story was of a skydiver whose parachute didn’t open. She’d crashed straight on the ground. Only the endless spikes of adrenalin caused by hundreds of red ants stinging her kept her alive.

  Floyd stared at the book for a while. It was barely a believable story, but the FBI had confirmed some details back when August asked him about it. The real woman had ended up in a coma for a long time, but she woke up eventually.

  Was this really a divine sign, to find the book August loved the most? What did she love about a woman in a coma before she went into one herself?

  “The woman in this book woke up.” He stole a glance back at August.

  Fighting the tears, he sat on the sofa opposite her, chains of hopelessness wrapped around his heart. “Wake up, August,” he said. A whisper, really. “If you can hear me, I beg you to wake up. I’m lost without you, babe.”

  Of course, she didn’t. Nor did she blink or wiggle a toe.

  He checked his cell phone and wondered why Dixon hadn’t called yet. He put the cell away and sat down to read August’s favorite book.

  He began by reading the title out loud:

  The Last Girl.

  68

  Everyone around me is trying to sell me all kinds of lies. Nurses try to explain things to me. That none of what I saw is what I think I saw.

  They wipe away my sweat and change me back into the hospital gown. I can’t resist. They already sedated me again.

  “Dr. Suffolk didn’t just say you need to be locked up,” one of them tells me. “He said you needed better medical care, the kind you can get in Ward Four.”

  “You shouldn’t have spat on Major Red,” another says. “He is a good man.”

  “Get out!” I say with a numb tongue, but my anger must be showing in my eyes, because I see the nurses step away, as if I am a disease. “Major Red is a liar. So are all of you. Isn’t this island supposed to be a military base? I believed there were no women on the island, let alone pregnant women. What do you want with the babies? What the hell is going on in here?”

  “She’s lost it,” a third nurse says.

  “You think?” a fourth comments with a nasty chuckle. “This woman has been a nut case since she arrived.”

  I spit out more words from my brain, not sure they’re reaching my tongue. “Goddammit. What did you bitches inject me with?”

  One of them whispers in my ear, “We aren’t bad people. On the contrary. I think it’s you who is bad. Anyway, Dr. Suffolk will see you again soon.”

  69

  I spend the next hour or so awake. Whatever they’ve given me, it semi-paralyzes me. I can’t even move my eyes, as if I am in a coma. I’m staring at the bland color of the ceiling, trapped in my head. It’s an awful feeling to be imprisoned in your own mind.

  The worst thing about it is how much calmer and collected I begin to feel. I don’t want that. What is it that I’ve been injected with? My left arm hurts like hell from under the bandages.

  Time feels like killing myself with a slow and dull knife. How long has it been? It doesn’t matter. The sedative is wearing off. Soon I’ll be free again.

  While I wait, I begin to count sheep.

  Then I decide that counting sheep is for people with memories.

  I resolve to do it my way. Instead of counting anything, I keep repeating:

  Kill Manfred Toot.

  Kill Manfred Toot.

  Kill Manfred Toot.

  Until the unbearable blare in my head returns and cracks my skull in toot—I mean in two.

  70

  I stand by the bed, drinking all the water I can. Needing energy, I follow up by gorging on all the food the nurses brought in on the tray. I need my strength. I have a plan.

  It’s a dangerous plan, but it’s not like I didn’t already do it with Ashlyn in Ward Four earlier. I will climb out the window and walk on the ledge outside. Victorian buildings have big ledges. I guess I am lucky. I will have to slide myself outside the half open window somehow, since the other part doesn’t open.

  Before I get to the window, I scan the floor, foolishly hoping for another oil message. There isn’t one. I wonder if this means whoever sent them before has no access to the Crib.

  In just a few minutes, I am out on the ledge. How? Suddenly I could easily open the locked part. I wonder if whoever sends me the notes did that, trying to help. I plaster my hands to the wall, not looking down. I move only as far as the ledge goes, briefly sneaking glances to feel my way. My gown is soaking wet. I begin to shiver. It’s nothing. Practice makes perfect.

  The cold in my back chills me, tempting me to slip and fall. Step after step, I am waiting for my hand to grip a window frame. From where I stand, it’s hard to tell how far away the nearest window is.

  What if there are no windows to other women’s rooms? I have two choices: either believe in the existence of a window and keep going or slip and break my neck on the ground below. That would be a shame: an amnesiac dying thinking she is someone else. In that case, I wonder what happens to me in the afterlife, if there is any. Will they count the sins of the person I am now, or the one I was then?

  The edge of the window almost cuts at my hand. I almost slip again, unable to grip the window’s wet frame.

  I hold on. The window is slightly open, which makes no sense in this weather. I don’t question such illogical things anymore.

  Recklessly, without scanning the room from outside, I take a leap of faith and jump inside.

  71

  The room’s door is locked, so I don’t have to worry about someone spotting me from the corridor. It’s another copy of my room. The woman on the bed in the middle is pregnant. I saw her when I stepped out in the corridor earlier. I remember her. The cocoa-colored woman. The first one who hushed me and told me to advance.

  She freaks out when she sees me again.

  “Silence,” I say. “I will not hurt you.”

  “You have to leave,” she whispers. “I want my baby to live.”

  “Listen.” I pull her hand up and read the name on the wristband. “Adriana—”

  “I will not listen. You have to leave.” Her accent i
s South American, or so I believe. No time to chat about her nationality.

  “You will listen to me,” I whisper with ferocious intensity. “I will not leave before you tell me what is going on in here.”

  “No. My baby doesn’t deserve to die. I know I will, but I want it to see the world.”

  “Of course your baby has to live.” I nod. “But why do you have to die?”

  “It’s the law of the Crib. All the women here know it. Stop asking questions and leave.”

  “Only if you tell me everything. Who brought you here? How long have you been here? Why are you giving in to death?”

  Adriana stares at me, breathing heavily. “You’re crazy.”

  “Try another one. Been told that too many times.”

  “I will say nothing. You had your chance. Me and the other pregnant women showed you to the operating room.”

  “So?”

  “You should understand everything by now.”

  “Understand what? I saw Major Red delivering a baby, and the mother was dead on the operating table.” I try to remember what else I saw. “And I found this chart, sorted by years, with names of babies on it.” I flatten it out and show it to her.

  “I know what this is.” She looks away again.

  “You do?”

  She refuses to speak, loathing my existence in a strange way I can’t comprehend.

  “What is this? A calendar? Why are these months circled? January, April, May, J—”

  “June and August.” She looks into my eyes.

  “June and August?” I tilt my head. “How do you know that?”

  “You know.”

  “I know what? Why should I know? Major Red said today is the fifteenth of June. He said he didn’t believe my name is June.” I can’t catch my breath, recalling the events. “Then I wake up with this wristband on my hand. It says my name is June West.”