Jolie would be the last.
Her body had grown cold, yet Matt still held her. Her then warm, but now cold blood had stained and seeped through his shirt, but he didn’t care.
Her eyes were still open. He thought about closing them, but he just couldn’t move himself to do it. They were still beautiful eyes, even if there was no life to them. His child was going to have those eyes, he was sure of it, or at least he hoped. His eyes had been the ones of his father, and he liked them about as much as he liked every other part of Nigel. Nigel had been a bad parent. Matt was supposed to have been better.
But now he’d never know.
A plow truck drove by the rest stop, not seeing anything. Matt could feel the driver inside, feel his anger and annoyance at the cold, could hear him through the radio, talking about how much he wanted to go home and see his kids before it got too late. Matt wished he would.
Life was so short. One moment you planned on doing one thing, and then before you knew it, all of your plans, no matter how detailed and fool-proof, would go right up and under, and then your life would be placed in a new direction, usually in opposition to the direction before.
He could feel the NaUs inside of him.
Kent’s felt funny, different from the rest. It was like someone had shoved speakers into his ears and turned on every single radio station in the county. How the hell Kent stayed sane, if one could even call his last couple of days as sane, was a miracle to Matt. His arms and legs had bright pink veins in them, and they felt weaker than they had been before.
He’d already had one seizure, thanks to Jolie’s NaU. He felt more powerful than he thought he would. Jolie seemed to have been holding back, since Matt was pretty sure he could level a mountain with her power if he wanted to.
But he couldn’t bring her back.
A few snowflakes landed on her open eyes, not melting. He looked away.
He couldn’t stay there. He’d have to get up eventually. This snowstorm would end, and then there would be a tomorrow, assuming that he would even live until the following day. He knew where Walter and Becca had run off to, had listened to their breathing through the radio of Walter’s truck before the man smashed it. He felt where they went and knew where to find them.
He didn’t get up.
He reached down and looked at Jolie again. She would have been a good mom. That was a cliché thing to say, but Matt believed it to be true. Jolie would have been a good mom, and they could have had something. Not anymore. Because of him.
Sure it had been Robbie who initially doomed her, who had given her NaU, the nanites parasite that drained all life from her and would eventually end with her being dead. Then Becca doomed her along with their child when she didn’t give up, when she didn’t just hand over the NaU like she should have, and Matt was sure, deep down, she wanted to. And then Matt killed her.
The NaU had reflected off of Becca’s shields and shot right into Jolie’s chest. No party was at fault there, and Matt couldn’t feel any anger in his chest for his sister. All he felt was emptiness.
He reached up and closed Jolie’s eyes. He used his hand, not his NaU, to do it. Her skin was cold to the touch.
He set her body down in the snow and left it there. He might have been able to pull open the ground for Peter, but not for Jolie. Besides, who would want to be buried in a rest stop of all places?
What were her parents going to think? As Matt looked around at all of the bodies, that was all he could think of. Kent’s mother would be relieved. Danni’s parents would be upset, but not as upset as they might have been if they ever learned the full extent of Danni and Peter’s relationship. Peter was buried under the ground in the cornfield, and Matt thought that was right. The boy wasn’t from Greendale, but he seemed to like the place good and well enough. Always wanting to help—well, now his body would be helping to provide nutrients to the corn once that field became usable. Maybe in a hundred years or so, through erosion and weather, Peter’s body would spring up to the surface, but Matt wasn’t concerned about a hundred years from now.
It was amazing what death, or rather impending death, could do to one’s outlook on life. All of that other stuff, the important stuff, the kind of stuff that people worry about in between their nine to five shifts, no longer applied to Matt. He wondered if this was how his mother felt, back when cancer started to take her for a loop, but before she lost her brain function.
Matt took off into the air. Below him, Jolie’s body was already almost completely covered.
So many snowflakes, so little time. There was a world out there to see, and he could see it. Screw Becca and her NaUs—hell, he might already feel himself getting sick, but that didn’t mean that he’d be completely useless. There was so much he could do with the time he had left that it didn’t make any difference.
Jolie.
His friends, all gone. He was the last one.
It was never supposed to be him. That night at the fair, no one would have suspected that he’d outlive all of his friends. But he did. He did.
Tears ran out of his eyes and
