It was quiet now, Quill thought, her cheek pressed to the cool, dirty flagstones. She hadn’t heard the sound of another human being in five days. No more retching or coughing. No more crying. No gagging or screaming, or that dull sound of bodies being piled in the empty cell beside hers. Just... quiet. Occasionally she heard a mouse scurry, and sometimes a horse would snort outside, riderless. The sound startled her every time. But mostly she just heard her own raspy breath.
Quill lay sprawled across the floor of her cell, the cool stones her only comfort. Everything ached. Her head throbbed and her mouth was too dry to swallow. She hadn’t had water in three days and knew none was coming. She’d die here. Maybe in a few hours.
A week ago, when the realization that most of the city was really dead had struck, she’d begun pleading with the one man who remained at his post. Even he’d been sick, but some misplaced sense of duty had motivated him to keep walking that hall where she’d been the only living thing to guard.
“Let me out,” she’d begged. “Please. Everyone is dying. Just give me a chance to live.”
He’d only shook his head, and she could remember how he’d slid to the floor, too exhausted to stand anymore. His eyes, bloodshot, had stared through her. “Why should you live?” he’d asked. “You’re a murderer. Your execution is next week.”
God, was that today? Quill tried to count the days on her fingers. She’d kept careful track of time, watching through the little barred window set high up in the wall each time the sun set. She’d repeated the number of days she’d been imprisoned to herself, again and again, because that was the only way to keep track. She had nothing to write with. Nothing shared her little cell besides a bucket to relieve herself, stinking in the corner, and a flea-ridden blanket to throw over her shoulders at night when it got close to freezing.
Thirty days. She’d been here thirty days, and that meant today was the day of her execution. There was no one to swing the ax though. The irony amused her; the only survivor in the whole damn city, maybe in the whole damn world, was someone with a death sentence. And she was locked in, so she’d die too.
She’d tried everything to get out of that cell, both before her last guard died and after. Now she was weak from hunger, delirious from dehydration, and she could do nothing but stare out of her cell into the hall and wait for her last breath to come.
She was only nineteen, but looked ten years older now. Her cheeks and eyes sunk into her skull, filmed by pallid, waxy skin. Her hair was dirty and knotted and dull, a rat’s nest fanned out around her. She’d once been.... Well, not beautiful. She’d never been a beauty. But she’d been clean and well dressed, and she’d been so full of youthful vitality that people had sometimes mistaken her for pretty. Now she resembled a corpse. Like everyone else in the capital, she would be robbed of a dignified death. She would have rather died on the executioner’s block, where she could go kicking and screaming. She’d planned to curse everyone who’d come to see her die. She’d planned to spit in the face of the priest who came to read her last rites. She’d wanted to go out with a fight, not collapsed on the floor, so thirsty she could barely move.
“Help,” she tried to call, but her throat and mouth were too dry to make much sound. Her voice was nothing but a weak whisper. Damn it, she thought. Damn it all.
Though Quill was certain everyone was dead, she refused to give up until she met the same fate. She dragged herself to the iron bars one last time, pulling herself along the stone floor with her fingernails, pain pulsating through her head, limbs throbbing. And she pounded weakly on the door, making the metal clang against its frame.
The sound of the last survivor.
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