The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

On the instant I'm on high-alert. I never prepped for this. With the crowd of the ocean in back, I'll have a hard time backing up. I can't go through.

  Shit. Is it a trap?

  I scan the road and the sides, but see nobody. They could be in the forest to the left, watching me even now through a telescopic sight. God knows why, but they could be. I'm a sitting duck.

  And 'SORRY' for what? For what they're about to do?

  I have to move that truck before the ocean engulf me. I tap the music to a halt and there is only uncanny silence, but for the rumble of the JCB's engine. I turn that off too, then grab a shotgun and climb out of the cab, still in my pants with the hot sun tanging at my skin. Shit, the ocean in back are already lurching my way. I run out onto the grass median to get a better look at the truck's cab. The door hangs open.

  "Hey," I call, but there's no answer.

  Shit shit shit. My heart is hammering now. For a second I'm torn; run back and fully gear up, by which time the JCB will be over-run, or try and move the truck, maybe draw the throng away so I can come back at my own pace?

  It's a gamble either way. I decide and run.

  The truck's cab is empty. The red leather driver's seat has faded in the sun where the door has been left open; must've been a week at least. I take two steps up the metal ladder rungs and reach for the ignition, but the keys aren't there. They're not on the seat, on the floor. I lean further in and flip the glovebox, but it's empty.

  Shit!

  Something touches my back, and I screech. I kick off without looking, my foot bounces off a bark-rough chest, and then I'm scrabbling into the cab with a handful of floaters at my back, thwacking

  "Shit, goddammit!" I curse at them. I point the shotgun their way and shoot, and a couple go down, but it's not enough. More are coming, and I can only think that this is stupid, a really stupid way to die. I look around the cab but there are no other weapons, and no extra shotgun shells. I have one left in the double barrel and no choice at all.

  I open the passenger-side door and look out. The coast is clear. My mind flashes back to the good old days, when I ran Janiqua and her mom around the sofa, and I figure that maybe I can pull the same trick here, using the trailer. I think it and lock the program in place, then lean back toward the driver's side and yank down on the air horn.

  HOOOOOOOOOONK.

  Yep, that works. My head rings with it. Shit. I pull it again and again, and steadily the ocean line up in front, trying to slap their way in. I check the other door again. Thank God, still none of them coming that way. I drop down to the hot tarmac and dash silently down the trailer's flank, peeking every now and then to see the ocean's wasted gray legs toddling along on the other side. As I go around the back of the semi, squeezing between the back corner and the highway fender, some guy jumps on me.

  I yell, and toss a wild elbow into his head. He rocks to the side. Once he must've been a buff young guy, wearing a Harvard sweater so faded I can barely make out the lettering. There are a few others nearby, looking up at something, but I haven't got time to check that out because he's lunging now.

  I blow out his throat and head with the shotgun. He makes a cracking sound, like I've felled a tree, and powder spumes out of him. It's not mist anymore, its dust like a seedpod bursting.

  There's too many in the way now, blocking me from my JCB. Shiiiiit. I'm surrounded, and the ones clustered here are coming, but the back doors of the trailer are open behind me. I catch a glimpse of something hanging down from the trailer's roof, then I'm scrabbling backward. I have to let go of the shotgun to get a grip, and it clatters to the floor.

  Hands paw off my back and I lurch up, ringing my elbow hard off unforgiving metal. Thank God I'm naked, or they'd have yanked me down by my clothes. I roll into the trailer and scuffle backward desperately, away from the hands as they reach up, away from the only way out, and away from the thing hanging in the open trailer's doors.

  Shit.

  It's a body.

  23. SOPHIA

  It's not a good sight.

  It's a girl, hanging. For a moment I think she's about to open her eyes and talk, but she's too pale for that, and her feet are not even touching the floor, and she doesn't have any eyes at all.

  I feel myself begin to come apart. Electrical cable has been worked around the metal light fixture of the storage cab's interior, dangling tautly down to bite into her throat. Her head is at a sharp angle, bloated and rotting, with the eyes already pecked away and long trails of bloody tears down her cheeks.

  The smell is strong. She smells like the dead, before they became the dry and crusty things they are now.

  "No," I say. Beneath and beyond her, the ocean are filling up, but I don't really notice that now. I envision myself getting up and grabbing hold of her legs, trying to lift her up to take off the pressure while crying out frantically, 'Somebody cut her loose, somebody call an ambulance!'

  I don't do it. She's dead. I slide a few feet back on my butt, lost in fear and horror.

  This is what she's sorry for? For jack-knifing her truck? For trapping me? For killing herself?

  The fight goes out of me, and tears come to my eyes.

  She survived. I can say that without a doubt. Like me, she rode out the apocalypse. She didn't join the ocean. Then she did this to herself. She broke her own neck to make it permanent, probably jumped off the trailer's roof.

  "Wait," I say feebly. "Wait a second."

  She doesn't answer. Her dead eye sockets, eyeless now and squirming with fat white maggots, stare back at me.

  I am too late. I can't look at her. I can't look at the ocean as they gather and reach up their gray, skinny arms to her as she slowly, steadily revolves in the breeze.

  Counter-clockwise. Clockwise. The power cable creaks. I turn my face away.

  * * *

  The trailer's inner gloom is not what I expected.

  It is plainly her home. With the ocean lapping closer behind, I scan for weapons. She's got a sofa at the back, a generator of her own with a few gasoline tanks nearby and an ad hoc chimney to carry the fumes through the roof. There are lots of wires and fat blocky transformers plugged into cable extenders, leading to a music system, a huge flat screen TV, a bed, a fridge. I pad inside and open the fridge door. Bottles of clotting milk stare back at me in the dark. I wonder if she actually milked a cow, or this is reconstituted stuff from powder.

  There are about twenty bright red boxes of a sugary kid's cereal stacked by the wall. It's little details like this that sting. On the rug there are reefer papers. I suppose she'd been lighting up a few spliffs. Why not? I find a stash of her tobacco and dry fine-grain weed in a pouch by the coffee table.

  There are no weapons. No ammo. I barely even find a sharp kitchen knife.

  Shit.

  I sit on her sofa and look back at the world outside. I guess she sat here a few times, thinking about what was to come. The thought makes me guilty. The guilt makes me laugh. It's that good old craziness again. I thought I had it licked; buried under purpse and work, but no. A few good strokes down the back with a floater's hand, and I'm right back in the thick of my genocide madness.

  This is all so stupid. A dozen thoughts ricochet through my head, of what I'll do differently if I'm ever in this situation again. Don't leave the JCB. Always carry more weapons. Clear the horde in back before I ever step out the door.

  Fine. None of that helps me now. My heart is yammering away, and that's doing me no good. The ocean don't seem able to climb in. Maybe they're distracted by her, anyway, dangling there.

  I have some time to think. In that time, her weed starts to look mighty good.

  I haven't rolled a fat one since college, but I do it anyway, navigating by muscle memory. I light it up and smoke it down. It tastes like shit, but it helps with the stress. I start to giggle, but this is a good honest weed giggle, not straight up madness.

  I go through her stuff.

  Sophia, her name is. I find it on student ID in a purse.
She was a pretty blonde girl, maybe twenty-three. There's also some change, odd pennies and dimes. It feels sour to hold them in my hands. What did she think she was going to spend these on? Alive this would have been a funny thing I could have teased her about, and maybe she'd make the point that they might still work in a vending machine, or perhaps they remind her of the past, and our best presidents.

  Like this they feel like unfinished stories, so thin and vulnerable, her whimsy remaining as a pathetic reminder of her failure.

  I find some whiskey and drink it to help the high buzz on. I look out at the ocean.

  Sorry, she wrote on the side of the semi. That's what gets me now. It makes me think about stringing up my own cable and joining her.

  What the hell am I doing this for?

  She said sorry, though she'd seen no one in months, known no one for all that time. She killed herself with the ocean at her feet, looking out over them and the glorious view, hanging there with her feet kicking and…

  I lapse deeper into guilt. I shouldbe trying to escape, get back to my convoy, but some part of me doesn't care about that now. The bigger part. That part wants to feel this way; that I didn't do enough, that I should have been out here a month ago, two months ago, instead of playing my silly games with the Stadium and the Empire State. Maybe if I'd found her then we could have helped each other, even saved each other, but I didn't do that. I didn't lift a finger to save Cerulean either.

  I haven't done a damn thing that matters.

  I languish in the guilt. I smoke another doobie in her sweltering, stuffy tin can of a home. I sit on her sofa, where she must have sat a thousand times chewing vaguely on food packed by hands long-taken by the ocean, and look at the TV. She's got great choice in DVDs, a lot of Bill Murray. Groundhog Day is one of my all-time favorites.

  Outside it gets dark. The ocean are packed in now, like in my old apartment, mostly just breathing. I guess that's peaceful. I imagine myself running out along their heads, bouncing off withered shoulders until eventually, ultimately, they drag me down.

  I find her journal, and read it by the light of my phone. It is a litany of hope dashed. She went to her parents but they were dead. She went to her boyfriend but he was dead. He attacked her and she had to kill him with a frying pan and a skewer through the throat. She went to town and everyone was dead. She tried to press on. She even brought her medical books; she was studying to become a doctor, and tried to make some headway with the ocean. She dissected a fully dead one, studying its brain and brain stem as best she could.

  The brain stems were engorged, she writes, thicker than normal, and pressed sharply against the windpipe, which caused their characteristic breathing sound. It's fascinating. The brain itself is alien, the normal structures altered with thick new nerve fibers running through the normal folds of gray.

  I sit back and think.

  'Transmitter?' she has written next to her diagrams of this new structure. To me it looks like a circuit board of flesh. Her notes ramble on in bizarre theories, about the purpose of this new structure. She too was aware of how quickly the infection spread, faster than any disease we've ever seen before.

  'Receiver?' it says on another diagram. If I'm reading her ideas correctly, it seems she's suggesting the brain has been completely repurposed as a two-way signal box. Signals go out, signals come in. It could explain some things, I suppose; how they work so closely together, how they know I'm there even when I'm silent and invisible. How the infection started nearly instantaneously.

  It makes me think that maybe Cerulean was wrong. Maybe it wasn't Lara and I that caused it. I think back; the twinge on our date was already coming away before we got back to the apartment. Maybe there was some external signal happening, picked up by the receivers in our brains, though it affected them and me in different ways.

  So it wasn't me?

  I don't suppose it matters. My brains. Their brains. We're all screwed up.

  I wonder if there are any unaltered survivors still, up in the Arctic perhaps, living on isolated islands where the signal never reached. They must be really confused about now. Anyone they send to find out what happened will probably never come back, as the signal changes their brain and transforms them, too.

  I read on. Her journals get darker. She had glimpses of hope, though it doesn't seem she really believed them. She was headed for Lewington, the next big city over, where she thought maybe they would have an electron microscope. She was hoping to study the spinal tissue in more detail, perhaps with some hope that the condition could be reversed, despite the massive changes to the brain. She outfitted the semi-truck for survival, just like my convoy.

  But she couldn't kid herself enough. She didn't even make it very far. The looming road defeated her and the loneliness tore her up. All these brains around her were lost, along with personalities and everything that ever made them human. She wasn't going to be able to help them, and watching Bill Murray on the TV screen alone in a nightmarish world of the dead just wasn't enough for her.

  Sorry,

  she writes in her final journal entry, addressed to other survivors she couldn't know even existed.

  I wish I could do this. I feel like I'm letting you down. But I can't do it anymore.

  She left everything neat. She parked the semi across the road not to trap me, but because she couldn't bear to go completely un-noticed, even in death. She craved to be seen to the last, to be witnessed, to be held and remembered.

  I stand beside her dead body, thinking that I will remember her for as long as I live, because I know exactly how she feels. I feel I have let her down too. I want to tell her that, tell her I'm sorry too, but I can't. I have come too late, and there is nothing I can do.

  But maybe I won't have to carry that memory for too long. I don't know how much longer I want to survive.

  I fire up her generator and I watch her movies. It riles the ocean up, but the trailer's too high for them to climb in, and they don't seem to have the strength to stack themselves anymore.

  I watch 'Groundhog Day'. The part where Bill Murray kills himself again and again hits home hard. I can't stop crying when he finally makes a meaningful connection with Andi McDowell. He's earned it, by this point. For everything he's done and all the changes he's made, he's earned it.

  I lie in her bed in the darkness after, listening to the lapping wheeze of the ocean, and think about the comas. She'd survived them too. She'd come so far, and built this semi-life with ingenuity and luxuries I never considered, so resourceful, but at this final stage she fell. Her dream wasn't strong enough, the propellant in her jetpack not potent enough, and she just couldn't push through the emptiness in those empty skulls.

  It is somber and sobering. I go to sleep and dream of Cerulean's phone call, and the seconds after when the line went dead, when I knew I'd never talk to him again.

  Robert. Sophia. Lara. I've left them behind like they were nothing, always moving on. I have no meaningful connections left, and any moves toward that have been kidding myself. Signs left behind mean nothing if there's no one there to see them. The world is empty, it's lonely, and it's going to stay that way for the rest of my life.

  24. IO

  I wake with a revelation that I don't like.

  I know how to get out. It's stupidly simple. I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier. Now I stand at the tailgate and look back over the ocean, thinking about if I want to do it.

  What for, I wonder? More SORRIES splashed across America? Is that what I'm leaving, is that what people are going to feel when they see my messages? My LMA tag will look ridiculous to them. They'll rifle through my stuff like I went through hers, and it'll just make them want to kill themselves more.

  Shit.

  I could just jump. Dive, like Cerulean, and let their arms gather me in. It would be easy. I wouldn't be alone. I think about that for a while.

  Then I take out my phone. Still plenty of battery left. I double-click.

  "Io," I say, "play t
he Beatles."

  "Playing the Beatles," comes her reply. The signal goes out by Bluetooth, and out comes the roar of the speakers from the top of the battle-tank, fittingly the first line of 'Help!'

  The ocean start to turn. They tune into the sound. They amble away.

  Oddly that makes me sad.

  I stand there and listen while the Beatles save my life, thinking that dammit, I do need somebody. I need somebody right now.

  "Good job, Io," I whisper.

  "My pleasure, Amo."

  After that, it's easy, and I am blank. They prefer the music to me.

  I fetch a pair of bolt-cutters from the battle-tank, accessed easily now through the roof hatch, and cut Sophia's cable. A few floaters watch as I lift her over my shoulder, but they don't come running.

  In the forest, I dig her grave. The dirt here is loose, bar the tangles of slim roots, but the shovel blade cuts through them brightly. It doesn't take long. I leave a marker of two sticks fastened into a cross with twine. It's not much.

  With chains, I use the JCB to drag the trailer back, until it's no longer blocking the road. The ocean slap the convoy up and down, and a few go under the wheels, but it's pretty hard to care.

  I pull away. I leave Sophia behind. I've never felt lower in my life.

  The road passes by in a daze, and miles go by. I play my music half-heartedly through forests and over hills, through little towns and past a million strip-malls, running by flag-pole signs for various fast food burger joints, pancake huts, ice cream stands, all of which would have once spun and flashed to catch my attention.

  They look so foolish. They don't mean a damn thing.

  I stop to fill the JCB's tank from my barrels. Floaters run toward me but I have time. I eat a cold hotdog on the battle-tank roof. I could cook it but why bother. It's bland and slippery. I bring up my phone and scroll through past messages; to and from Cerulean, my mom, my other older friends. The record goes back years, all my mail. I eke myself forward with these pathetic memories.