The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "Sit down!" I shout at them. "Just take a goddamned seat!"

  The chair bounces off the mom's shoulder and she falls back, collapsing on her daughter. I throw another chair and another, shouting inane one-liners like, "Have a break, take a load off!" until all eight chairs are resting on them or either side of them.

  A brainwave strikes and I shove the table sideways over them, pressing hard against the chairs and locking them skewed against the thick mahogany dresser against the wall, with the mom and daughter tangled up in them.

  I stop and pant. I drop and look under the table. For now they're tangled in each other's limbs and the chairs, reaching out toward me still, but any second they'll break free.

  I run to the living room, snatch up the coffee table and carry it back. I slide it under the table and press it up against the chairs as well. I drag the green sofa over too, pressing it flush against the head of the table and bracing in the chairs. I get the TV and press it in tightly above the coffee table. I throw cushions from the sofa to cover them up.

  I stop and pant some more in the middle of the now-empty living room. I just made a zombie fort. The furry remnants of the cat stain the carpet by my feet. My dumbbell bar is there and I pick it up. The fort makes creaking sounds, but I don't think they can get free. Maybe they never will.

  I creep past them to the back door. It's made of glass, and there's no key apparent. I cover my eyes and hit the glass with the bar. It bounces off and sends a jarring reverberation up my arm, so I hit it harder with a stabbing motion like I've seen on TV. It smashes. I open my eyes and pound, crack, and kick the rest of the glass through.

  I step outside.

  Now I'm outside.

  I look into the kitchen, where the father with the broken collarbones is pressing up against the back door. His face leaves bloody smears on the glass. I can see his snapped right collarbone jutting up underneath his robe. I turn to the side and throw up again, hot and acrid. Goddamn.

  Then I go to the moped. It's a beauty, sitting there on the brushed concrete, bright and limpid as a lily pad. Beside it there's a tiny work shed, a low bank of withered tomato plants, and a big plastic trunk spilling over with kids' toys. I go to the yard gate, slide open the bolts, and duck my head out into the backstreet beyond.

  Empty. That is a delicious sight. The alley runs left and right in cracked asphalt, at one end meeting Willis and at the other turning onto 143rd.

  I duck my head back in and close the gate as quietly as I can. Probably it's only a matter of time before they find me. I dart back to the moped and pat down its front, finding the ignition keyhole right at the top of the front wheel's upright axle, set within an elegant walnut bevel.

  Of course there is no key. I don't have a clue how to hot-wire it.

  At the kitchen window I press my face up close and look inside for the key. I scan the walls for little hooks, the sideboards for little dishes. The father's face thumps against the glass in front of me, obscuring my view. What an ass.

  I slide over and keep looking, until soon enough I spot the most likely candidate; a papier-mâché soap dish in the middle of the breakfast bar, within which a tangle of keys and chains lie.

  The idea comes easily.

  I tip up the yard toy box and carry it back into the living room. With one hand I hold up the box, and with the other I open the door to the corridor beyond. Little Jemima/Janiqua is standing there looking up at me.

  I put the box on her head like I'm cheating at a carney game; dropping hoops over spikes in the back of a cruddy stall, then press down. Her legs give out beneath my weight and she crumples to the floor. I set the box on top of her and weight it down with the TV stand. She thumps but she's trapped.

  I open the front door and look out. Hello, horde. They are crammed in to the right, still staring up at the roof of my building where they last spotted me. I look only long enough to see there's a bit of clear road between me and them, in front of the library, and maybe that's enough.

  I jog back inside, open the kitchen door, then run back. The dad lumbers awkwardly after me, his arms swaying like pendulums. I dash out the front door and he follows, out into the street in full view of the horde, where I wait for him to catch up.

  Crazy. The horde notices me and members start to peel off at a sprint. Seconds remain before they hit me, and the father's still barely clear of the door. I run at him then dart to the side, vaulting over the low green fence and cutting in behind him for the door.

  I make it with seconds to spare and slam the door shut. They hammer against it and I run on, I've probably got moments only, so finding the key is essential. In the kitchen I snatch up the papier-mâché tray and splay the keys out onto the breakfast bar.

  Smeared blood and crushed cornflake crumbs mingle on the countertop. I pick through the contents rapidly; house keys, a bottle top, car keys, a little sculpture in colored clay, then keys on a lime green fob the same color as the moped. It has to be the one, so I snatch it up, try the kitchen door and thank Buddha it opens. The thumping gets louder behind me and I sail through into the yard, closing the door behind me.

  I straddle the moped and waddle it to the yard gate. I fumble to get the key into the handsome slot. I bumble to open the yard-gate, backing up the moped to let it swing inward. I turn the ignition key, and just as a resounding crack comes from the front of the house, the engine revs into life.

  It is the most beautiful sound I've ever heard. I squeeze the handle for gas hard and the moped takes out from under me like a rocket, jetting off and throwing itself forward into the alley and me flat onto my back.

  "Ugh," I say, as the wind smacks out of me. Sprinkly stars spark across my eyes, black beckons, and I dimly make out a flood of gray people running into the kitchen to hammer up against the door.

  The glass fractures like ice cracking. Dizzily I watch them, beating at the glass kitchen door just yards away.

  They look so sad. Their faces and eyes are just dead. I feel like crying, that so many of them have become like this and there's nothing I can do but run.

  "I'm sorry," I whisper, because I can't help them, and I'm going to leave the little girl in her box, maybe forever. The mom and daughter could stay in that fort until they rot and become trickles of mess on the carpet like their poor dead cat. The father might wander limp-armed around his own home with all his family lost forever, because of me.

  Then a shard of glass skitters out of the door and hits the ground next to my face, and I get moving again. The glass door cracks outward and the flood pour through, drawing bloody stripes down their faces on the jagged glass.

  I jerk to my feet and leap through the gate, slamming it behind me. The moped is thank God still revving on its side, and I pull it up, get on tentatively, and squeeze the handle just hard enough to sneak a squirt of gas into its firing chambers.

  It picks up. I stay on. Together we spurt off in an amateurish zigzag down the alley, followed by a crash and a tidal flow of people seconds later.

  Jesus shitting Christ.

  8. RIDE

  I burst out onto Willis like a bat out of hell, a good half-block ahead of my infected comet trail. Turning south I zip past the right turn onto 143rd in a blink, briefly glimpsing the mob still flowing away from my apartment, then I'm gone and flying down the silent road, pushing sixty in a thirty zone.

  I whizz through the intersection where the Chevy exploded; it's just a black and burned-out skeleton now. The dark slug-trail of the guy I tore in half is still there but he's gone and so am I.

  Wind whips in my hair, and I weave in and out of standing traffic. Yesterday this much stimulation would have killed me. I blink dust out of my eyes and focus on the road, already past 140th and closing fast on the Harlem River. There are a few gray people straggling through the intersections limply, a big guy in a brown jogging suit and a young girl wearing bright red spectacles with her hair up in a 70's bob. I swerve to pass them by. They pick up running after me, falling into my wake like
jet skiers behind a speedboat.

  I blast through intersection after intersection with no red lights to stop me, 139th, 138th past the gourmet deli where a food truck has knocked over a fire hydrant and there's a wide pond of brackish water. 137th, 136th, the streets pass by like postcards. Jutting out from the gas station on the corner of 135th a white semi-trailer truck lies halted across most of the road and I veer around it, only to drive almost directly into an old gray-faced lady. I bank hard and nearly throw myself from the moped, pulling to a stop on the hard shoulder.

  I pause to catch my breath. Maybe a minute ago I was in the house and now I'm here. A tall building rises to the side and a flash of movement inside catches my eye. There, perhaps on the fifth floor, someone's banging against the glass. I study the building's façade and pick out more of them, trapped like prisoners in hundreds of stacked cells, looking out at me and hammering on the glass.

  Can they see me? Seconds later the glass on one of the high-up windows goes out, falling like a spray of twinkling light, followed by a body. I catch flashes of a dark naked male, then he hits the cement with a disgusting wet thump. A second later he gets up, ruptured and bloody and with his neck twisted at a hideous angle. He starts shuffling toward me

  More glass smashes. Bodies rain down from above like cats and dogs. The old lady hobbles closer. I rev the moped and race on, up onto the overpass by 134th. Pulaski Park whizzes by, empty basketball courts baking in the morning sun, and I thump onto the bridge with the Harlem River spread out to either side and the smoking cityscape of uptown New York ahead. There are no people milling here now, they're all at my house.

  I veer around a tipped delivery truck and a few abandoned cars. Halfway over, with a fresh salty breeze blowing down the river, I come upon the wreckage of the plane fuselage, lying across most of the road. The oval tube of the plane's body is blackened by fire.

  A child bursts out from behind a car and I yank the handlebars left. For a moment I think I'll go off the bridge where the railings have been scoured away, but I get the moped under control and race on, leaving the child running behind.

  Scattered around the fuselage lies all manner of charred wreckage: narrow food trolleys spitting up plastic ready-meal trays, in-flight magazines like a drift of glossy snow, broken bodies, some of them crawling. There's a bank of seats tipped upside down, and gray hands wave out from underneath like legs on a millipede. For a surreal second I imagine the bank picking itself up and coming hurtling after me, running on hundreds of undead arms.

  I angle for a slim gap between the fuselage and the edge of the bridge. I'm not getting off and creeping through on foot now; there's too many of them behind me. I duck low on the moped, rev the engine, and cut through the gap like Evel Knievel through a ring of fire.

  Whoo!

  The road is clear beyond. There are a few floaters out there, gray people separated from the ocean of infected, but I'm getting good at the moped now and evade them easily. I take it down off the bridge and onto 1st Avenue, into Manhattan proper. This is probably the stupidest thing I've ever done, driving into one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world, but whatever, I ride on. I flash briefly on Rick Grimes riding his horse into Atlanta and laugh.

  I'm on an iron steed. A lime-green moped. When they make the movie of my life it will look ridiculous.

  I squeeze the accelerator and race south. The streets are nearly deserted here, but for a preponderance of stationary eighteen-wheelers. I figure the infection must have hit some time deep in the middle of the night for them to be so many of them, with so few commuters and so many people trapped in their houses still, wearing pajamas.

  I speed under the green copper bridges on 125th and 124th, past a night bus, a cop car, the wreckage of a downed helicopter lying in a bonfire-like heap of shattered glass and twisted metal pilings, torn from the face of a nearby skyscraper.

  Thomas Jefferson Park whizzes by on my left, the Metropolitan Hospital on 99th on my right, where people wearing white gowns wander in the parking lots. They all pick up my trail and follow along. Around 94th street I hit the canyon walls of skyscrapers that will flank both sides of the street all the way down to Coney Island, boxing me in.

  There are more of them on the streets now, rising up like floodwaters; businessmen and women heading home late or coming into work early, revelers in lurid makeup and skin-tight tops enjoying a walk of shame that could last until their bodies rot into the ground, a fat guy in a sumo diaper, his great gray haunches quivering.

  I go around a long stretch limo on 92nd, quietly ticking in the rising morning heat. Down 87th street I glimpse a horde wandering down a beautiful, tree-lined avenue. Everything is so surreal. A KFC near 90th has its doors wedged open by the husk of a dead dog, its entrails splayed across the sidewalk in a dark inkblot of blood.

  Through the 80s and into the 70s I go, through the 70s to the 60s until on 65th street outside a gorgeous little sandstone church I spy the pale tide of a herd ahead, and pull sharply right. I speed three streets over to Lexington Avenue, clear of the swarm; God knows what they were gathering for. Another survivor?

  Down Lexington I put the pedal down, hitting eighty through a school zone, past Bloomingdales with its flags out on a long clear stretch to the sea. I've never seen New York so empty except in movies. The odd floater stumbles along like a latecomer to the party over on 1st, and I whizz by. The streets are narrower here, three lanes wide and claustrophobic. My knuckles ache from clutching the handlebars so tightly.

  Around 56th street I catch my first glimpse of the Chrysler building's crenellated top, jutting confidently above the other buildings. It watches over me all the way down to 42nd street, until on 40th I hit another horde and swing left to 2nd Avenue, then juice it the rest of the way down to 23rd and past the Subway station stairs. There I swing right, racing along my old commute route, and halt the moped bang in front of Sir Clowdesley.

  Bullseye.

  Clowdesley looks like it always does; all weathered brown wood and spiral copper designs, with a perplexity of Hard Rock-like literary merchandise pasted to the windows and decoupaged to the walls.

  I jump off my green steed and stride up to tug on the stout wooden door, only to find it's locked. I tug harder as if that'll make a difference, but it doesn't.

  I press my face to one of the windows to look inside, but there's no sign of Lara. Maybe I got here first. I pull my dumbbell bar out of my pack and smash through one of the windows. I can only hope it's high enough that they can't climb through. I scrape the frame clear and drag myself in.

  I've reached Sir Clowdesley!

  I sit at one of the wooden window seats in my favorite old haunt, which I am doubtless now mayor of for life, and catch my breath, thinking about all the terrible, horrific, disgusting things I just saw and did.

  It's enough to make a person go mad.

  POST-APOCALYPSE

  9. SIR CLOWDESLEY

  It is surreal to be here.

  I look into the shadowy interior, up the stairs to the cozy 'library' area flanked by old books, where I used to sit and dream about zombies, and marvel at how nothing has changed. The air still smells of fine-roasted Jamaican beans. If I close my eyes I can hear the clatter of the baristas whacking milk froth off their steamer sieves.

  I was here only yesterday. Now there's no one left to govern at all.

  And Lara isn't here.

  I look at my watch, drifting on a tide of post-shock, post-stress and horror-exhaustion. Nearly three. This time yesterday I was calling Lara for the first time. That's hard to believe. So much has changed already. I feel light-headed, drifting on a hot cloud of the last twenty-four hours.

  It took all the courage I could muster to call her, then, holding my fragile mind in my hands and risking it with every word. It wasn't a baby step. It was an almighty leap.

  "Hello?" she'd answered, only three rings in. "Is that the zombie mayor?" I could hear the smile in her voice. "Have you got your art re
ady to show me?"

  Zombie mayor was not a good nickname, but I was in no shape to protest. "I have it," I managed. "I have a booking at the French place too, Rien, at 7."

  "Great. I can meet you outside, I checked it out. The cat looks fun."

  "Yeah, I think so. I'll see you then."

  "See you, Amo."

  She hung up. I slumped back.

  My heart was hammering, there was sweat on my temples, and my head was starting to twinge hard. Crap, I thought, I'm going to die right here.

  I flopped off the chair to the floor, with my eyes throbbing sharply. I draped my video screen goggles on and plugged in my earphones, and logged in to the Darkness, where Cerulean was waiting.

  My avatar popped up by his side in the Darkness. Long, tall shelves stretched away on either side like train track rails, packed with all kinds of products, fading away into the dark.

  Cerulean turned to face me. His character was a giant blue parrot with a little pirate on its shoulder, which was his idea of a joke.

  "This is bullshit," he said.

  I almost ignored him, sending up a privacy signal that I was too overwhelmed to talk, but just having him there was already helping.

  "Hello, Cerulean," I typed back, with my words popping up as little comical speech bubbles above my head. "What is?"

  "This." He pointed at one of the shelves, on which a rack of colorful videogame-style mushrooms were glitching through the shelf base. "I spent hours crafting these, and now this. What kind of damn mushrooms are these?"

  I chuckled. Cerulean used to get very upset about the smallest things. It wasn't funny really, more a part of his condition, but still I had to laugh, and that helped the twinge loosen a little.

  "It's just bits," I typed.

  "Shit bits," he returned, "shitty little bits."

  "Shiny bits," I counseled. "Sweet and tasty."

  He gave me a look that would be exasperated, if giant blue parrots had that much expressive range, but instead looked mostly cute. I made my avatar smile. It was important we both stayed within our normal emotional range, even if we weren't feeling it, because, well, we'd both die if we didn't.