The Last Mayor Box Set 2

by Michael John Grist

  It's not enough and I don't know how it ever will be.

  "He needs more," Drake whispers in my ear, caressing my head. So strange, I cracked his skull open and he strokes mine, but it feels good, like a twinge, like the only thing I need to do right now is recover. Those old days were always so clear, back when getting better from the coma was my only goal. Every day I bent all my efforts to it, pushing forward until I couldn't go another inch, until the twinges took hold and crushed me under their stifling weight. It was awful, but at least it was simple.

  Arnst falls asleep at the wheel after breaking my world, and there's no more punishment for him. He tortures and he enslaves, he's a party to murder and rape, and what does he pay? The first flickers of a new rage bubble to the surface.

  "Yes," coos Drake, "you're right, it isn't fair," but I don't need him now because I'm seeing it for myself.

  I take Arnst by the scruff of his shirt and pull him off the seat. His huge body thumps onto the floor and shakes the RV. He only groans. I see Feargal and Keeshom watching me with alarm, Lydia and Hatya peering fearfully round the door of their bedroom, and bark an order.

  "Get his legs." Feargal shudders, then moves. He's whipped now, an obedient dog. Keeshom takes longer, but he follows.

  I take Arnst by the arms, and together we manhandle his massive bulk out of the RV. I don't do it gently, letting him crack off the frame, bumping his back off the stairs, until we get him out on the dusty road. I stand at his head and look back into the dying embers of the setting sun.

  The RV is a streaky silver box on a dark river of road, this barren stretch of I-44 an hour or so east of St. Louis. Four lanes of asphalt flanked by dark green oak and pine forest, surfaced with dark clay dust, and me.

  They're standing there now, wondering what to do. Arnst lies unconscious and they're all wondering.

  Things harden inside.

  I've always been soft, and I know it. Maine nearly broke me. I could never have done the things that Drake did, and that's why I'll always lose. It's not enough that we got lucky, that Lara's vision somehow bailed us out. I need to change what I am.

  A partial quote haunts back to me, heard I don't know where or when, but fitting for this moment. 'Every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be repaid by another drawn with the sword.' It sounds Biblical, or maybe something Lincoln said about slavery.

  Either way it's perfect, though I don't have a sword. Maybe if Don was here. I almost laugh.

  "That's it," Drake whispers, "yes," and I do start to feel it. If I strain hard, if I listen with all my being, I begin to understand. With my enemy at my feet, my people before me cowering and afraid, I do start to feel it.

  A wild and fearsome joy.

  The pleasure of crushing down. I catch tears in my eyes and turn them to bile. I take this weakness and burn out its eyes, until finally it sees that being Amo will not work. Offering love and hope will not mean a thing if we cannot first survive, which leaves only one way left to go.

  My hands move to my belt.

  "No!" calls one of them. Hatya, the quiet one. My gaze finds her and she shrinks. I look into her eyes as I undo the buckle and slide the smooth, sheer leather band from its loops. She knows this, I think. She's felt this before.

  "You can't be serious, Amo," says Keeshom, staring at me in disgust. Now he sees it too, now he believes that maybe it was me who sent Lara off into that cornfield at Chino Hills. Maybe I'd hit her, maybe I'd put her in the fit from the start. Maybe everything they've said about me for so long is true. Mass murderer. Liar. Manipulator.

  I grin.

  "Step up," I tell him. The setting sun turns the sky to ash and blood all around, so it feels like we're back in the shadow of the great white eye, washed by the rain of cinders, fogged by that hellish, stifling heat. "Step up and see."

  He gawks, and turns to Feargal, but finds no help there. Feargal hangs his head. He was beaten by Drake and now he's beaten by me, and good.

  "Good," soothes Drake at my back, giving me strength. "Very good."

  I stare at each of them, willing any one to step up and stop me, and with every second passing the anticipation grows, the wild joy thickens, and I'm right here in the thick of it. I should have done this a long time ago, to Witzgenstein and Julio, to Don and the Maine bunker. Hope is nothing next to strength. The lash is all that matters.

  I raise my arm over Arnst's still body, holding the lash, and they gasp. Hatya burrows her face in her hands but I can't allow that.

  "Open your eyes," I tell her, but she won't. "Open them!"

  She doesn't.

  I look at Lydia. I look at Keeshom. I settle on Feargal.

  "There'll be a chance down the line," I tell him, aping his own excuses. "You'll work change from the inside out, later. But for now, I need you to open her eyes."

  He looks at me with pleading, and I meet him with my wild grin. Screw his pleading. Screw it right to the sticking place, and let's have at it, boys, let's get it done. "Now."

  He buckles. He moves behind Hatya and pulls her hands away from her face. He forces her eyes open with his fingers. He doesn't say a word but she shrieks, and there I am, triumphant before them with the belt raised. The real man. The great man, and it feels…

  Drake presses himself to my skull like a purring cat. "This is nothing," he murmurs, just like he did in Screen 2. "There's far, far worse to come."

  He's right. I have to be ready.

  It feels amazing.

  * * *

  I drive through the night.

  Nobody talks. The women comfort each other at the back while Keeshom tends to a feverish Arnst. Feargal vomited once, now he sits in the dark with a rifle in his hands, rocking back and forth while the stale stink wafts all around.

  I don't know what I've done.

  Drake sits in the passenger seat beside me, just like Cerulean once did. His head is broken open and oozing.

  "Victory's not for everyone," he says.

  I ignore him.

  "Only the strong. You've heard that expression. It's not a Brit thing, is it?"

  "I think it's in Rocky," I say softly.

  Drake laughs, and reaches out a fist for me to bump. I don't bump it, but he doesn't seem upset.

  Missouri passes by in the dark. All these states start to look the same, once you turn out the lights. Endless darkness reaching out to nothing; a dark continent.

  I don't remember what happened.

  "Ah, mate," Drake says, reading the uncertainty in me. He lolls forward attentively, and an eggshell sliver of bone rocks in the bowl of his skull like a dashboard bobblehead. "Lighten up. Enough with the self-analysis, already. You take everything so seriously. It'll come back to you. You either did, or you didn't beat a defenseless, helpless guy half to death. You may have made a bunch of weak-willed men and women watch. So what?"

  He laughs. I can't help but snort a little too. It does sound bad.

  "If you did, he'll heal. And he did worse to you. We both did worse to you, and look what I got?" He points at his wrecked head. "I got the short end of the stick on that, right?"

  I laugh more freely. He leans back in his seat and sighs. "And if you didn't, no problem. He's just tired. There's a long road ahead."

  I mouth the words along with him. A long road. When I next look over, he's not there anymore, but someone else is. Someone I know well. A young black man with short dark hair, just looking at me.

  Cerulean.

  I don't have anything to say to him, and it seems he has nothing to say to me, either. He just wants to look, and that's fine. Looking is free, just like I looked at Arnst while he watched the road, though it does get uncomfortable. A shudder passes over me, and that sense of something wrong creeps up again, like in the dream. There's even a faint tang of souring meat in the air.

  "I don't know, Robert," I say finally. "I don't know what I did. What should I have done?"

  He just stares.

  "It's not like whipping is a new punishm
ent," I go on. "It used to be common. They put people in stocks, they hung them, they quartered them like Guy Fawkes, and what else could I do? We've tried banishment, but they always come back. I can't imprison people, not before and certainly not now. I could've killed him, but that's a crime too, when I need him. This is wartime."

  He just stares. It makes me feel like laughing. There's something very light and airy in my head, like I'm the one with no skull top instead of Drake, like there's nothing but air above me.

  "Come on," I say. "Lighten up."

  "Don't lie to yourself, Amo," he says, at last favoring me with words. "He's no threat, and that wasn't punishment. That was something else."

  I shrug. "All right. There's things I have to do, and he's my training. So what?"

  "So don't enjoy it," he says.

  I do laugh at that, a raucous bark that makes Keeshom jerk violently in his sleep. "Not enjoy it? Jesus, Robert, when did you become such a bleeding heart? You're the one who thrashed Julio, and you're telling me you didn't enjoy that? I saw the look in your eyes afterward. You were wild."

  Robert keeps on watching me. I laugh some more.

  "Robert," I say, wheedling like Drake, "old buddy. Come on."

  "Not like this, Amo," he says, and I notice that he's speaking without moving his lips, which is a good trick.

  I smile. "I don't know any other way."

  "You're just afraid," he says. "Of the end. Of what's coming."

  The sour smell grows stronger, stinging my eyes. I try to blink it away, but there are flashes of the fulfillment center in the darkness behind my eyelids.

  "What are you doing?" I ask, but Robert just watches. I try to keep my eyes open, but like Arnst before me I'm fighting a losing battle with the Darkness closing in, and-

  I'm back lying in my sealed cardboard box on the conveyor belt, rumbling along with white spores drifting in the air and maggots worming at my elbows, tumbling toward Distribution. My only connection to the outside is Cerulean's voice, but I can't read it from here, can't see his speech bubbles so I don't know what he's saying.

  "I won't be there at the end," I shout into the cardboard, spilling all my plans. "I'll be dead by then, long dead, so what does it matter?"

  The box rustles as it passes through the portcullis of hanging plastic flaps, then there's a cold that cuts through the cardboard and into my bones. The white spores flash and grow before my eyes like bacteria reproducing in a drop of water, then the box rocks and tilts.

  I cry out as it drops off the end of the belt, but there's no one to catch me, and I fall. I scream and tumble, and down below I know something terrible waits, something worse than all the rest, and all I want in the world is to not see it, to not see that end and to just die before it comes, but-

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  Copyright © 2017 by Michael John Grist

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  Cover art by Damonza.

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