The birth had been horrendous. It lasted days, with her screaming wordlessly on the bloody, stinking bed like an animal. He'd prepared, he'd read everything he could on midwifery and the right kind of drugs and how to ease the baby out, but in the end he could do little more than stand by and encourage her on, though she wouldn't hold his hand and she wouldn't look him in the eye.
On and on it went, but still the child didn't come. He'd read about twists in the umbilical cord that could choke it, about the baby facing the wrong way and blood flow being cut off, about Caesarean births and premature births and birth abnormalities, and he thought about them ceaselessly as she wailed and bled. In the end he made the hard decision, that there was only one way to save either of them now.
Myra was pale and barely breathing when he approached her with the scalpel, glinting silver in the morning light. She didn't speak, only let out intermittent cries. Her blood was everywhere; so much leaking from inside her that she surely couldn't last much longer. It was a mercy, he told himself, as he bent to her stomach and made the first cut.
He didn't do it well. He didn't do it right, and in all the mess he dropped the blade. There was her pale tan stomach, and here was a ribbon of slit muscle, and here were plump organs bathed in dark blood, and here slit the amniotic sack, and…
Of course the child was already dead. Stillborn, too long in the birthing and already turning gray. With the last of her strength Myra finally looked at him, and cursed him with some Portuguese word he didn't know, and attempted to spit in his face, though the saliva only dribbled down her chin.
So she died, in ignominy and despair, and it was his fault.
That was a hard time, probably harder even than losing Jenny and Lucy. At least with them there'd been good memories to cling to once they were gone. With Myra though all his pleasant memories of early frolics and wild sex had been replaced by the ungainly, grunting emptiness of the last eleven months.
All for this, for a baby, and now here lay the baby before him, nestled like an acorn in its seed casing, never to breathe, never to go forth, never to multiply.
It broke him for a time, and he wandered the forests and drank. He left her body there, not daring to face the accusation in her eyes. It soon became clear to him that what he'd done to her was not only a crime, but the greatest crime of all. Even his readings of Lars Mecklarin had taught him as much.
He'd wasted her. She was an instrument of life, the only route for the human race to survive, and he'd used her up just to balm his own suffering. Even a dog treated that way would rebel, but this had been a woman. When he hadn't been abusing her physically he'd abused her mentally too, spending all those hours weeping into her hair and begging for her understanding and forgiveness. He'd drained and sucked the life out of her, and was it any surprise her own body had killed the child inside it?
He had poisoned the well with his own endless need.
Realizing that, and his guilt, was the moment he began to truly grow up. Standing now before all these people, preparing to change their world forever, he took pride in the man he had become.
Better. Wiser. Stronger.
In their eyes there was terror, just like Myra before he crushed her into the snow, and that was good for the beginning. He'd seen it many times now, and learned how to channel it into something far more productive. Everything he'd built so far had come on the back of that revelation.
The Law had to be unbreakable. They had to accept that from the outset, and understand that no force on Earth could change it. The Law was simply an objective reality, hard to look at but no less true for being ignored. But these people had ignored it for far too long.
Because of that, they were going to die. It was simple and certain. From fifty-seven people they had produced only five children in twelve years. In a generation their numbers would halve, in two they'd be cut to a quarter, and there'd be no hope of having the genetic diversity to bring the race back. Those that remained would inbreed, sicken and die.
The best cure came before the patient even got sick. What seemed mad, too cruel, too demanding was really just a necessity, and he, Matthew Drake, just held up a mirror so they could see the truth.
He'd refined his tactics in the ten years since Myra. For her he'd offered no choices, nothing better for her to hope for or worse for her to fear. He'd offered only cruelty around the clock, and her silence had been her only means of revolt. He'd offered no hope of relent, and Lars Mecklarin himself confirmed that that was a hopeless path. For cogs in a machine it could work. For dumb animals plowing a field it could work. But not for people.
The true path to controlling people lay not in the stick but the carrot, in offering hope for the future. To never offer that to Myra showed how weak, how truly unprepared he'd been.
The mind is a cage,
Mecklarin wrote in his book Life on Mars.
but even a cage has a door.
He'd built eleven cages so far, since Myra, and they'd all held, because they all had doors. He had the scars to prove it.
The first had been Lydia.
He'd found her on the outskirts of Brussels, nearly two years after the apocalypse. In those days after Myra died, he'd driven endlessly, working his circuit of Europe with a mobile concert trailer behind him, pumping out hundreds of decibels of sound across the still world, crawling along at five miles an hour. Sometimes he played music, warming classics like Marvin Gaye, Lou Reed, Aretha Franklin, and other times he played a recording of his own voice, promising safety and hope. All day he'd drive, drawing the dead out of their holes to follow him in long lines. At times he shot them. At times he just let them stretch along behind to the horizon, until they lost interest and drifted away.
At night he let off fireworks. He carried barrels of them and shot them into the sky for hours around a roaring fire, before falling asleep in the cab of his long-haul truck.
One morning he wasn't alone. He woke to his own music thundering out, and knew what it had to mean. Still he'd gone out bleary, fumbling for a gun, miming someone who believed the dead had somehow set it off by accident.
She'd been out there waiting for him, and she'd pointed her gun at his head.
"You're a big one," was the first thing she'd said.
Her name was Lydia Jones, an exchange student from the US, trapped in France when the apocalypse hit. It was winter again, and she held the gun to him while he set up a fire. It was hard not to cry while he worked, to feel that this was finally his chance at redemption.
It unnerved her.
"What are you crying for?" she'd demanded, jabbing the gun at him. She was younger, pale and thick-bodied. She wore her hair short like some kind of dyke, dressed in jeans, boots and a checked red shirt, nothing like Myra's wispy gypsy clothes, nothing like Myra's curving sexual frame.
It was like the Law wanted to make it easy for him, to remove any temptation of sexual attraction, and for that he was grateful.
"It's been so long," he said. "Since I saw anyone. That's all."
"Well stop it. I could just roll out any minute. Don't forget that."
He nodded and smiled at her. She was a wonder just because she was alive. Not his type at all, but a wonder still. Lydia Jones from Arkansas, only twenty-three.
He served her tea and a platter of caramel cookies. They talked across the fire, mostly about the old days; nostalgia for TV shows, about their families and jobs, highlights from the journeys they'd made, and he made himself amenable. Trust perhaps would be slow to come, he knew that, but still at some point he'd have to introduce the cage. Everything was a gamble now. There was a line to be walked, between her hating him enough and her coming to accept the vision he offered.
It grew dark and they separated. That night and every night after she retreated into the woods alone, like a fish drawing out the line, where she slept far out of his vision.
"Follow me and I'm gone," she said. "If I don't kill you first. You'll never see me again."
He didn
't follow her. He let her come to him.
After a week they could laugh. Guardedly, carefully. They had a cooking roster, and even simple games they would play together, luxuriating in the company and the sound of each other's voices. Sitting around a fire over dinner one night he raised the question of the future, and she stared into the flames.
"I suppose we all die. I don't see anyone coming to save us."
"That's too desperate," he said. "There must be another way."
She snorted. "What? You and me, are we going to restart civilization?"
He'd shrugged.
"Dream on," she said, wagging her gun at him, never far from reach and often in her hand. "We're not even the same species."
After nine days they agreed to travel forward together. He bided his time. It took time for her to grow lax, but it was only natural. It was human nature. So on the sixteenth night he sprung the trap. It was a momentary lapse on her part, leaving her gun on a log behind her while she went to the pot on the fire for more Frank and Beans. It was the first mistake she'd made, and he used it.
He charged.
The moment he was up she saw it, and reacted with impressive speed, kicking the pot so it swung up and struck him on the hip as he came on, spilling boiling beans across his belly and thighs.
But it didn't stop him. He came on still, striding through the fire, and she sent one meaty right hook that caught him wildly in the throat, but it didn't put him down. Instead he fell on her, and beneath his much greater weight she was crushed. She cried out and kicked, she dug her fingers into his cheeks and pried for his eyes, reminding of Myra so long ago, crushed to the snow.
But he was a different man now. He defended himself enough to keep his eyes intact, though he couldn't stop her nails raking deep weals into his cheeks and throat. Her fists around his back dug into his kidneys and her knees gouged away at his thighs, trying to jab into his groin. But he didn't relent. He lay atop her and waited for exhaustion to come, defending himself where he could, until finally she stopped and began to sob.
He lifted her then, arms trapped at her sides, and her thrashing started with renewed, desperate vigor. Her feet hammered at his legs, her head lashed back and beat on his cheeks. He carried her toward his trailer, toward the enclosed section at the back where the concert techs and roadies had once worked on speaker cables and amplification, which he'd since made into a narrow but workable living space.
She'd never seen the door before; neatly recessed into the pattern on the trailer's side. She'd never seen him go in and out. When she saw it now she began to scream.
"No! Let me go! Matthew, let me go!"
He carried her in, flicked on the halogen light, and then set her down awkwardly in the corner. There was a bed and a toilet, a sink and a shower hooked up to water tanks he'd installed on the roof. There was a desk and a TV, and posters from movies on the walls, a cooking range and even a little refrigerator humming quietly.
Her eyes bugged wide as he stepped back, and she saw all this. She saw the door behind him close; sheer metal like the walls, reinforced with a touchpad lock. She watched as he keyed in a code and the locks bolted electronically. She stared as he turned back to face her, and she mumbled, "No."
He knew what she expected, what she feared, but that had to be quashed fast. There were different kinds of fears, and if his plan was to have any chance of success, she had to have no fear of that.
He dropped to his knees by the door. He opened a nearby counter drawer and took out a sharp kitchen knife, which pulled a gasp from her, but swiftly he slid it across the floor to her. For a long moment she stared before snatching it up.
"You said we were all going to die," he said, as softly as he could, though he too was quivering with the blows she'd landed and his own kind of fear; that this would fail, that there was no real way to make this system work, no matter what Lars Mecklarin suggested in his book. There were so many ways it could fail.
"You said we were different species," he went on. "So let's stop lying, Lydia. Stop pretending there's any point to us being alive. Kill me, if you want. Kill yourself too. But I've had enough of aimless roaming. We are not leaving this room until we decide, one way or the other."
She stared at him, at the knife, at the door code-panel, then rolled to her knees.
"I knew you were a psycho. I knew it. What the hell do you want?"
He slumped lower, making himself no threat, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She had the knife. He had nothing, only the door code in his head.
"I want hope," he said. "It's the First Law in the Bible. Go forth and multiply."
It was the first time he'd said the words out loud. Even with Myra he'd kept it to himself, fearing ridicule. Now he got it.
She laughed, loud and angry. "Go forth and multiply? Are you goddamn kidding me?"
"It's the only way," he said. "I'm sorry for this. Truly, I am. And if you want to kill me, I won't stop you. I swear. But at least let's be honest. Let's not be selfish any more, Lydia. Out there, we are the walking dead. And we just keep on, roaming the world like we'll ever find something that can save us, but we won't. I lost my daughter and my wife, I was a good man, but I won't find them out there, because they're gone. They died for nothing, and we're going to die out there too, achieving nothing. Building nothing."
He paused, feeling the dramatic effect build. "But what we do here could save us. You and I. Because we are the same species, Lydia. We are compatible, when pleasure isn't a part of it. It's not love, it's simple biology. All that we need, we have right here."
She stared at him, the last of her fear curdling to rage.
"You want us to screw? I told you, I'm gay! You goddamn idiot. I'm gay!"
"You're a woman," he said calmly. "I don't find you attractive physically and I'm sure you're not interested in me, but this is not about that. This is about having a child, about breathing some damn life back into the world out there, because it's too empty now. Don't you agree with that? Don't you stand out in the forest alone at night, and just goddamn weep for all that we've lost?"
He stared at her, trying to help her see with the force of his gaze. "I do. It hits me again every day. So I need you, and you need me." He looked around then, at the small prison cell. "Could I have done this differently? I wish I could, but if I'd told you any other way, would you have listened? No. You'd be gone in an instant, just like you said. So I'm saying it here. I want you to make the choice for us both. Does the human race die with us, in this shitty box? Or does it go on?"
She stared at him. His words probably sounded mad, but there was truth in there too. Enough truth for him, hopefully enough for her.
She pushed herself to her feet. She was still exhausted, but she had strength enough to stand.
"Do you really think I'll say yes to this mad bullshit? I'd rather die." She pointed the knife at his face. "You don't get to offer me that choice."
Then she darted in, and she plunged the knife down, and he didn't move. It slid right down into the gap between his shoulder and collarbone, like a hand into a glove. She gave a surprised little gasp, he grunted, then out came the blood. He took a breath and toppled sideways.
"I-" he mumbled, then he was lying on the floor, his head pressed against one of the cabinets. He'd installed all these himself, teaching himself to weld, dreaming of the day they'd get their use. Now, for however long it took her to eat all the food he'd laid in stock, they'd be used.
His vision was getting dark already, with the blade probably pressing against his heart or his lungs, but he could see enough to watch her jerk back. She looked horrified. She looked at the bloody knife in her hand and dropped it.
"Don't … let me … die," he managed in a croak, before the darkness closed in.
It was touch and go for a time. He almost died. He lost a lot of blood. But in the end, he didn't die.
She stopped the flow of the blood, and put crude stiches into him. She bandaged him well and made him comfortable wi
th a pillow and blanket there on the floor, so when he woke a day or so later it was into a different atmosphere.
She tended him. There was food and she fed him. Days later, it was hard to tell with only a bulletproof window in the roof for natural light, she sat him up and they spoke.
"Now seriously," she said, neither angry or amused, just flat and serious. "What's the code?"
He looked back. "You haven't chosen yet, then. You have to, Lydia. I can't let you go out there just to die alone."
She tried a time longer, perhaps thinking he'd soften, thinking he'd grow warm and relent, but he didn't, and in the end she went ballistic. She smashed up the room. She beat him with her fists, and he didn't fight back. She took a go at torture, slicing his body with the knife in different places, breaking one of his fingers, burning him with hot metal glowing from the stove. At the peak she held a glowing red fork an inch away from his eye and demanded the code on pain of being blinded.
"You need to choose," was all he said back. "We die or we don't. I don't need my eyes for either."
She almost did it. He could feel the heat of the fork singing his eyelashes. But then she relented. She went to her corner and quietly started to cry.
Days followed where she barely responded. She didn't eat. It seemed like she'd made her choice. He never went too near her, but now he cared for her. Not like he did for Myra, not forcing her to eat, but offering food and drink. She didn't eat it. She grew weak and thin.
He'd been in this place before, back on the Summer Dawn, outside the door where his family lay dead. He'd been there after Myra died, roaming the forests and waiting to die. There was only one way to keep her alive now. After all, every cage had a door.
So he let her out.
It was a brilliant sunny day, and she was so weak she could only exit with his help. The road outside was warm, the green trees blowing in a gentle wind. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Your children will know this," he said to her. "Our children. You'll share it with them, and isn't that worth something? Once you're pregnant, you can lock me in there if you want." He pointed to the prison trailer. "You can change the code and leave me to die. You'll be free, you could even try to give yourself an abortion. But why would you? I will love our children, Lydia. I'll try to make them happy. There is nothing I want more in the world than to make these forests ring with their laughter."
The Last Mayor Box Set 2 Page 73
