The Last Girl by Joe Hart

waiting.”
    “Meeka . . .”
    The other woman shrugs, concentrating on a gelatinous pudding. Zoey ponders telling Meeka what she saw in the mechanical room, but Meeka is like one of those small, oblong rocks they sometimes take turns kicking on the promenade; there is no way of telling which way she will bounce.
    “I’m just glad Rita didn’t change. I’d really miss her beautiful smile,” Meeka says without looking up.
    Zoey chuffs laughter through a bite of stew and nearly chokes. A moment later Meeka joins in, and soon Lily is giggling as well, shifting her gaze from one woman to the other.
    “Quiet down,” Thomas says from the other end of the table. So they laugh to themselves in silent gales.

    She is at the doors in the infirmary. The steel doors that she’s never seen open before. They are miles tall, their tops lost in mist like mountains she’s seen pictures of in the NOA texts. Her feet are wet and there is blood on her hands. She looks down, peering curiously, without the feeling of pain. She is wearing a dress of white, the ceremonial gown, yet it is crimson just below her waist, a blooming flower of blood. Her hands are sticky with it, and she hears crying. It is the cry of a baby. Her heart aches with it, and she tries to turn to see where the sound is coming from, but her feet are frozen in place, immovable as if she’s slipped into the concrete and is moored there.
    A low rumbling overtakes the crying child’s voice. It is something inhuman, so deep and alien it must be a machine. But it isn’t. There is a feral quality to it that tells her it is alive, and hungry. Another flood of wetness coats her feet, and she stares down.
    A clear, viscous fluid is leaking from between the doors. It pools upon her bare feet and begins to burn. Zoey tilts her head back to release the scream in her chest, but all sensation is washed away by what she sees.
    The doors are opening, and there is something between them. Jagged things and a lolling red shape beyond them.
    Teeth.
    There are teeth between the doors, and the saliva, the saliva on her feet is burning, burningburningburningburning . .   .
    She comes awake in a flurry of movement, within and without. Her heart thunders, lungs heave, eyelids flicker, arms strain to push her upright. Her teeth are clenched, holding back a scream, and she gazes down at her feet, sure that they’ll be nothing but burnt and bloody stubs of bone, eaten away by the acidic drool of the doors. No, it was a mouth—the doors to the elevator were a mouth. It was going to swallow her whole.
    She knows she’s going to be sick only moments before it happens. She tries to run to the bathroom, but her feet are tingly and asleep. She trips, crawls forward to vomit over the lip of the shower. Her tasteless dinner spews out of her in a choking stream that runs toward the drain. Zoey coughs, tasting bile—and blood. She’s bitten the same place on her tongue as the day before.
    After many prolonged minutes, the clenching in her gut subsides. She turns on the hot water, letting it wash away her partially digested dinner. When it’s swirled away she splashes cold water on her face until the skin there grows numb. She wishes she could wash her mind, scour away the images and the sound, the sound of the baby crying.
    As she hobbles back toward the bed, a noise begins to grow in the hall. She freezes, arm outstretched toward the waiting blankets. Booted feet are coming closer and closer outside. Shadows darken the small gap below the door, and there is the clack of her lock releasing.
    Dellert’s face is the first thing she sees in the gap, followed by two other guards along with the crimson flash of a Redeye’s goggles. Behind them is Simon, his face gray and stony.
    Dellert steps fully into her room, a perversion of a smile on his lips as he looks around before focusing on her.
    “Hello, Zoey. Mind if we come in?”

6
    The words don’t come to her, the ones she wants to say.
    She