The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  It's all a kind of art. But I don't need to, so I don't.

  I hit the ground floor and glance around at all the discarded supplies lying on the tarpaulin sheet: another twenty cans of industrial-strength paint, both blue and white, the fumes of which I've been faintly high on for weeks, plus ammo, weapons, ropes and harnesses, a few generators, gas barrels, and lots of window-cleaning equipment.

  I don't need them now. Maybe I'll come back for them in years to come, like my own private geocache, but I doubt that. I don't think I'll ever come back to New York again, there are just too many shitty memories.

  Floaters lean over the railings above, reaching down through the gaps and out of the security gate I've locked across the stairway base. They're so easy now. I don't kill them if I can avoid it; it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel.

  I kick through the ammo and pick up a few grenades that'll fit my M320 launcher. I found that in a military bunker inside city hall. If I come across a horde they may be useful as a distraction. Blowing gouts out of the horde itself would only smash up the road and make it impassable for me, but I can shoot out a nearby hilltop or gas station, and they'll go busy themselves with that.

  I check my belt for gear and find a few paint rollers still slotted in there. I was using those for the upper floors, where I last finished up. It was nice to use the graffiti cans in the early days, like following in the footsteps of my heroes, but they were really just a marker. To really ensure my cairn stays visible for the longest time possible I had to paint the exterior, in the same kind of thick industrial paint they use to make traffic markings on the road.

  It's been a hectic month. It took two days just to get the window-cleaner's carriage to work, providing power and figuring out my safety protocol if it cut out. It took the rest of that week to spray on the outline to the Empire State's exterior, with me getting a deep appreciation for how hard any large-scale art must have been for the ancients, like Easter Island. It's been the best part of a month since, coloring it all in.

  I read about cairns in a book on how the social media layer has changed our world. It talked about how the augmented reality of geo-locked apps like the system that made me mayor of Sir Clowdesley built a new kind of cairn; a way of leaving information, supplies and advice behind for those to follow.

  Cairns were used primarily in the Arctic, back when those icy wastes were unexplored and the men who adventured there had to fight for every mile they took, where having a Snickers bar in your back pocket, or laid up and waiting for you in a little stone pile ahead, could mean the difference between life and death.

  Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, all the greatest Arctic and Antarctic explorers used them. They were tiny fingerholds of civilization in the desolate white wastes, the world's first geocaches, crammed with maps, logs, coordinates, food and water, whatever could imaginably be useful; enough to allow those earliest souls to drag themselves out to the poles and back, thus mastering another facet of our world.

  We don't master anything now. The cities and the oceans and the airwaves and even our own bodies and minds are lost to us. We are divided and scattered, if any people yet survive. We badly need cairns again, to help us claw something back.

  So I've built one. I'm going to build a trail of them, like a dragnet belt across the country. If there's anyone left alive in America, in this whole northern continent, I'm going to dredge them up and give them a place to go.

  I bid the echoey stairwell hall a silent farewell. For over a month it's been my workplace and these floaters have been my colleagues. I bow in the center. They applaud with their feet, always desperate to get close enough to touch, to kiss, to caress.

  Farewell and be merry.

  I roll out through the Empire State gift shop, snatching up a token key ring at the dim register, in the shape of the building itself. I'm thinking I'll collect these at every city on the way out West, then make a collage of them; a museum to mankind's greatest achievements in bric-a-brac miniature. Cerulean would get a kick out of that. I'm still providing fulfillment with the best.

  I step into the daylight of the cleared street and blink in the hot sun. Funny how the smell of baking asphalt brings me right back to reality every time, and I think of days long gone by, when becoming mayor of a tiny New York coffee shop was about the limit of fame my poor little mind could take.

  Now I'm the self-proclaimed mayor of all America.

  I stride east along West 34th street, kept company only by the rustling of old newsprint trapped in doorways and gutters. It still impresses me how much paper remains from our old life, carrying headlines two months out of date, reporting on a world long dead. I imagine them blowing west across the country like flyers announcing my coming tour.

  At the intersection with 5th Avenue, surrounded by huge video screens suspended on the buildings, all blank now, I stop by my JCB construction vehicle. It is bright yellow and ocean-proofed with welded grille plating around the cab.

  Beside it I climb onto the roof of a Subaru SUV, one link in a perimeter chain of parked cars I created a month ago in advance of this endeavor. Back then I just wanted a clear stretch of road to walk along without needing to shoot out straggler floaters all the time.

  Now it's my own rat-run maze across the city. I've cleared about a mile of streets in total, from Sir Clowdesley to here, the culmination of so many plans. After filling up Yankee Stadium it was easy, just driving and parking, like moving blocks around in Deepcraft. It was advanced valet work. I herded away any floaters trapped inside, killing only a few recalcitrant loiterers.

  Now they bumble up against the flanks of the car-walls, unable to figure out how to climb over, at most gathering two or three deep. There aren't enough of them anymore, and I've given them no clear space to mass. Rather they line my route and wave to me as I come and wave to me as I go between here and my base in Sir Clowdesley. I've grown to quite like it, like my own daily ticker tape parade.

  In all there are probably tens of thousands of them still, but they're spread all over. There must be millions in Manhattan, but most of them will be in apartment blocks, locked into cells that were once their homes. For that I can only be thankful that the switch happened around midnight, with the streets devoid of the daily crush of tourists and workers.

  From the dust-marked roof of the Subaru I look over the heads of the nearest floaters toward one of the wandering herds, up on 5th Avenue somewhere near Bryant Park. Some of them do this too, wandering like the ghosts in a game of Pac-Man. I suppose whatever adaptive behavior has evolved into their brainstems, it rewards a hunting approach of both nesters and roaming hunters.

  At first I watched these developing packs carefully, but they rarely massed at a barricade. The most I've had to contend with in a month is the odd one or two somehow finding their way onto my parade route, like lost sheep.

  None of them have died yet. I look down at their sun-bleached gray faces and ice-white eyes, and they look back up at me like groupies to a rock star, as ever. A few feet closer and I'd be torn apart, but standing here all they can do is strain, like blind Venus fly traps. Their hair is coming out now and they're very thin, many of them are sporting old wounds that don't heal; bites and broken bones. They're draped in ragged clothes crusty with old blood and bleached pale by the sun, but still, they're looking remarkably well. Not one of them can have eaten in months.

  I wonder, as I often do, if they will eventually die, or if this is some kind of holding pattern they're capable of maintaining forever, perhaps metabolizing carbon directly from the air like plants. For all I know they could be cannibalizing each other at night, or eating moss, or anything. I know I eat far less now too. We're linked in that, at least; perhaps having a brain in the spine is a more efficient way to run things.

  I climb down from the wall and get into the JCB cab, firing up the engine. I make a pointed effort to not look up at my work on the Empire State Building. I have a spot all picked out for that.

  The JCB rumbles o
ver the asphalt on its caterpillar tracks, and I lean my hand against the lever taking us south toward Madison Park. This has been my daily commute for a month now. As the streets amble by, accompanied by the grind of my vehicle's heavy metal treads, I go over my checklist another time. There are two vehicles in the convoy pulled by this earth-mover, one a battle-tank filled with weapons, water and supplies plus my living space, and one a delivery truck full of gas and all the painting supplies and other stuff I'll need to stock up my cairns.

  I'm not worried. I've cleared my route out of the city already, a few days work pushing cars to either side on 34th street and through the Lincoln Tunnel. It was like grinding out experience points in World of Warcraft, a game I used to play when I was a kid; little reward but a sense of hard work done. I'm certain there are plenty of supplies out there across the country, enough to feed me for a thousand years, but it's better to be prepared.

  I haven't spoken to another living soul since Cerulean died. It's just been me and Io and the ocean.

  The streets ramble by. I pull up to Madison Square and take the JCB over the curb and down the walkway of the Park, toward the Admiral David Farragut monument in the middle.

  My convoy is waiting beside him, already linked up and bristling with weapons. I climb to the battle-tank's roof, actually a yellow school bus I fitted with M240 machine guns pointing out the windows, plus a Bluetooth relay hub to operate my big speakers. I settle myself on a bright orange beanbag I liberated from a Tommy Hilfiger window display. The sun is starting to set over the city and country, leading the way to the west.

  I pop a beer and lie back with snacks at my side. I hardly need to eat or drink anything these days, just like the zombies, but these things still taste good. At last I look up at the Empire State building's south face, and see my art.

  f

  LMA

  This is my work, a gigantic white 'f' on a blue field, blazoned across each face of New York's most iconic tower, covering the windows and the outer walls. It is ten stories high and nearly as wide as the building itself; a symbol for our modern times more potent than a cross or flag or sickle moon.

  We are all one, it says. We are all friends under Zuckerburg. I chuckle, because while it's ridiculous it is also patently real. No one will see that symbol and be scared, because no one thinks evil cannibal-survivors have that kind of sense of humor.

  It's given me a purpose, and perhaps, if there's anyone else alive out there, it will give them a purpose too. It's my lighthouse to guide the others safely in, to the lobby of the Empire State building where they'll find my social media supply cairn; a mayor giving out free coffee, transposed to the real world.

  I hung a billboard inside, where anyone can post their name and date of arrival on, with my new LMA tag and date at the top. I wrote my map and directions of where I will go across the floor; a plan of the entire journey and every step that I will take, with coordinates of all the cairns I plan to leave behind along the way, so they can follow. I left a big tray full of USBs with every point of the map marked out inside too. There's no shortage of laptops now, so I left plenty of them to read the USBs by, laid out like display units in an Apple store. I left GPS units too, and solar panel chargers, and in the basement below are a dozen RVs with enough gas and supplies stacked in their backs to take anyone clear across the country.

  Of course there's coffee too. Down one wall there are ten Nespresso machines, in case there's a crowd, each stacked with its own brightly colored pile of refill pods, packaged in neat little boxes like shotgun shells.

  If there's anyone left alive they will see this trail I've left for them. Perhaps they'll follow, and find me, and then I won't be alone anymore and neither will they.

  I sip my beer, a craft brew I rescued straight off its microbrewery production line in Yonkers, and admire the giant 'f'. My work looks crisp and neat hanging in the sky above this abandoned city, visible for miles, the graffiti tag to eclipse all other tags. I can relax; the first step is done.

  It feels especially meaningful seen from this viewing point beside the Admiral David Farragut. I read about him in an encyclopedia in a book store; a lot less convenient than Wikipedia, but just as useful. Like Clowdesley he was a naval officer, the first full admiral in the US fleet. He distinguished himself in the civil war amongst numerous other naval campaigns, though he was most famous for his quote: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"

  I have adopted that catchphrase now, in light of modern events, and adapted it. It's the sweltering summer of 2019 and no one uses torpedoes anymore.

  Damn the zombies, full speed to the West!

  I wrote it on the floor of the Empire State Building foyer in the same thick paint I used for the 'f'. I wrote it here at this ancient hero's feet and signed it with my new tag in full, Last Mayor of America, LMA for short. These words will last for decades, maybe centuries, long after I'm gone. All these marks I'm leaving will be a symbol for others until the Empire State Building comes crumbling down and New York is left as rubble and dust for the ocean to frolic in.

  That makes me feel better, and helps still the gnawing loneliness that bites at me every night. I lie back and wait for dark, listening to the comforting sound of the ocean lapping against the barricade. Tomorrow my odyssey begins. It might take a week, it might take a year, but at the end I'll settle down to watch the pre-release reel of Ragnarok III in LA's Chinese theater, beside the Wall of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, and wait for the others to come, because I can't truly be the last in all of America, in all of the world, left alive.

  ROAD TRIP

  22. SORRY

  The Lincoln Tunnel is empty of the ocean, and the road out of New York is a peaceful affair, bar the rumbling of the JCB's treads thrown back at me by the dark tunnel walls. I flip the hinged window out and enjoy watching the dot of light up ahead getting closer, like a distant vision of the world at the end of an impossibly long birth canal.

  It has been a nightmare. I have done things I never thought possible. I have been so evil I had to kill myself, and I've been so good I'm still on a high.

  I burst up into the light. A toll bay tells me to stop but I go straight through. Some rules, like road tolls and parking violations, just exist to be broken. The metal barrier rail bends backward then snaps off its hinge, clattering to the side. The JCB is so wide it strikes sparks off either side of the gate.

  We rumble on. There are more cars here, where the tunnel bleeds into Weehawken and up to the 495. I circle the on-ramp loop, keeping an eye on my convoy, but they're well tethered and none as wide as the JCB.

  I put on my music, signaled remotely from my phone via Bluetooth, and the first song from my painting mix kicks, Katy Perry's Roar from 2014. Fitting. I stop the JCB on a corner of the looping highway, and climb up to stand on top of the cab. From here the view back across the Hudson River to New York is truly panoramic; the fabulous glittering city as seen in so many movies. From here the corruption at street level is invisible, and the buildings glisten like crystal shards.

  There's my 'f', right in the middle.

  The lines are crisp and sharp. It feels like I'm wearing my Deepcraft goggles and seeing an overlay placed atop reality. In reality Facebook was never a place or a real thing, it was never something you could reach out and touch, but now it is. The digital spaces that once connected us now have to be real.

  I take pictures; they'll go in future cairns. Then I get back in the cab and rumble out, heading west.

  * * *

  The city recedes behind me, and the convoy maxes out at about twenty miles per hour. It feels good to be moving. A warm summer wind blows stickily through the open window, and I strip off my shirt to enjoy it. Out the window I see urban gray resolve into bright green foliage, old forests that would have stood back when the Native Americans hunted the land.

  I smell cedar and applewood on the air, mixing with fresh grass pollen and the comfortable tang of hot blacktop. There are weeds beginning to shoot up in the
cracks at the highway's verge, amongst the off-cast strips of tire rubber and desiccated chip packets. Moss grows on a low surface coating of windblown dust.

  I rumble on. Forest gives way to farms interspersed between little towns, bound northwest on I-80. This road will carry me clear across the country, through Pennsylvania and Ohio, Indiana and Illinois into Iowa, close to my parents' house. I think I'll stop in, though I'm not sure what I'll do if I find them there.

  Maybe I'll open the door and let them wander free. They shouldn't be cooped up, like the girl I left in the box. They should be able to feel the sun and go naturally to the earth when their time comes.

  I rumble through little settlements swallowed up in woods, and my music draws the ocean out like a tide. There's probably a few hundred in back now, creaking along on their leathery legs, drawn like moths to a flame.

  The music's not for them, though. I'm hoping it'll draw in the living, whether they're cannibals or Satanists or just decent people. The battle-tank is well equipped for any eventuality, but I don't think it'll come to that. Resources are not scarce, so there's little reason to fight.

  I roll on. Hours go by and I hum my way into them. The road twists contentedly, unfolding the vistas and trees of New Jersey until I exit through a clutch of red maples in Worthington State Forest, where a sign tells me:

  You are now entering Pennsylvania.

  A minute further on, there's a semi-truck with a long white trailer sprawled diagonally across the road, punched through the median strip to block most of the four lanes. Across its side there's a message graffitied in thick red letters, and my heart begins to pound.

  SORRY

  I stop the JCB and read the letters again. They are slightly faded, dim as though they've been there for a few weeks and drizzled by rain, but they can't be something from before. They must be fresh.

  This jack-knifed trailer is not an accident. Somebody did this on purpose.