The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Something is moving out there. There's a rustle that becomes a slapping footfall. I flinch as months of defensive habits kick in. My heart begins to race and a cold sweat breaks on my forehead. I'm still clutching the door, and I want nothing more right now than to put myself back through it and run for the convoy.

  Instead I close it behind me. I step out into the center aisle, 'Main Street' we used to call it, and wait.

  "I'm here," I say, more loudly than I mean to. "It's Amo." I pause while the slapping of footsteps gets louder, then add slackly. "I'm back."

  I catch a glimpse of the figure running, briefly visible as he goes by a slit of reflected light cast through the warehouse shelves, then he's in the dark again. It has to be Hank, tall and skinnier than ever, his footfalls growing louder each second. Others join him, a stampede of bodies running in the Darkness, maybe Blucy, North Korean Bobby, travelling Linda. I stand there waiting for them, with plenty of time to question everything I've seen and think I've learned.

  Are they really friendly? Do they really not want my brains?

  Hank pops into view at the edge of my flashlight's glow, no more than twenty yards off and charging like an emaciated hipster bull. I take an involuntary step back, because he'll be on me in seconds flat. My fists are itching to fight or run or hold a gun, my nerves are firing like an M4 Carbine, and it takes everything I have to take a step forward.

  His eyes glow like halogen lamps, his feet smack the floor, and I manage a hasty, "Easy big guy," before he hits. His body crashes wholly into mine and we go down hard, rolling and thumping, until his face is against my head, and his hands claw at my back and his shoulder punches my chest, and I think that at any minute the first bite will come that will finally make me part of the in-crowd.

  But it doesn't come. We roll and tussle and I manage to push him off me, though he clings close, and he doesn't bite.

  I look at him and he looks at me. We're lying there on the cold floor like he's just done a really good football tackle, and we're about to start laughing. My butt and side hurt where he took me down, but that is all the pain I feel. He didn't attack. More than anything he reminds me of a really over-eager dog. I half expect him to start panting and wagging his tail.

  "Good to see you Hank," I manage. "You're looking well, considering."

  He stares at me. I nod to inspire confidence.

  "I know, yeah, this is weird. Hang in there. Where are the others?"

  A second later one of them hits us, connecting like a ground tackle in the small of my back.

  "Shit!" I cry out, and turn, recognizing the cannonball behind me by her eponymous blue hair.

  "Jesus, Blucy, you could have killed me!"

  She cozies up. Hank cozies up on the other side, like I'm the filling in a human sandwich. The next three or four that come pelting out of the Darkness hit into them and not me directly, so that's better because I don't think broken ribs will bother them the way they would me.

  "It's good to see you guys," I say, as we all lie there in an orgiastic heap. I feel warm and ridiculous though their bodies are cold. "I never thought we'd all be lying like this in the middle of Main Street. But yeah, it's good."

  My wit is lost on them. I pat at them, trying my best not to be condescending. I stop short of saying, 'Good Blucy, there's a good girl.' Instead we just lie silently for a while, breathing together. It's amazing, and despite myself I start to cry. These are the first people I've seen that I actually know since the world ended.

  They look bad.

  "You look good," I say to Hank's wrinkled peanut head. "It's a good look on you."

  Somehow he's managed to get his scarf, an affectation he used to use to 'attract the ladies', since it has little silly kittens on it and was a good talking point, caught in his hair like a turban. I untangle it. He watches me with unblinking eyes.

  "OK, cool."

  After a while of that I get up. They get up with me. They follow me down the aisles, as I head for the place I've really come for. I explain to them a little what my plans are, and what I've been through. I tell Hank the play I used to 'reel' Lara in, color reading her palm. I tell Blucy how my book cover career was going, and about the big 'f' on the Empire State Building.

  She is suitably impressed. I take her hand as we walk. It is a wrinkled bony thing, like a witch's, but it reacts, curling around my fingers like a baby's grip. We walk hand in hand toward the print-on-demand book machines.

  This is my plan. Listen closely children, because I'm going to drop some art. It's called-

  Zombies of America

  And I'm uniquely placed to make it. First though I need power, and light, and paper and ink, and to understand the book machines, and to make the art and the words, but all that will come. This is a fulfillment center after all, where all your dreams come true.

  30. FULFILLMENT

  The layout comes back to me quickly, and I prowl the aisles of the Darkness following the invisible diviner in my head. I find the generators in no time, a whole section devoted to them, and my group follows on behind, touching my arms and back when they can. I pick up the first generator, a C-540 model, at least 80 pounds, and think 'Damn that is heavy'. I offer it to Hank.

  "You want to help?"

  Did he shake his head? I can't tell. He doesn't take it though. It's too heavy to carry. I go find a flatbed trolley and collect five generators. I drop them at the book machines then take the trolley out to the convoy and gather a drum of gas from the battle-tank.

  The staff of the center look strange in the outdoor light, trickling along behind me like a line of baby ducks. I suppose this is the first time they've been outside in nearly four months. Their skin is still a light gray, but their clothes are oddly bright, like new. They wait patiently while I roll the gas drum out and get it on the trolley, then they walk alongside me like little kids gone shopping with their mom, holding on to the drum's sides.

  I patrol the Darkness looking for gear. I get cables and transformers and lamps and socket extenders. I get paper and card and glue and ink and toner, mustn't forget toner, and everything else I think I might need. I start the first generator burning beside the book machines and plug in the lamps.

  Let there be light. It warms the place right up, and the generator's thrum gives the Darkness a pulse. I pull up the old sofa Blucy installed back here, take a comfortable seat with my peeps lying down around me, and dig into the book machine operating manual.

  Hours later, I'm ready to try a sample run. I have everything in the right position, probably; ink in the trays, paper in the loading bay, glue topped up, toner roll inserted, and power running into the machine through a triple-decker transformer tangle of cables and plug combinations.

  The machine operates off pdf files, and there are several in the RAM already, one of them being Blucy's latest masterwork, 'Werewolves in the Pliocene'. The cover is shockingly bad, not one of mine.

  I press print. The machine starts to kick and flash like it's bottling a storm, rocking itself back and forth. Ah, the book machines. I settle back on the sofa like we used to, almost a year ago now. It's so strange to have Blucy right here beside me, in withered body if not in spirit. Hank too, and some other new ones I don't know. It makes me sad that they're probably dead, but happy that they're here still, to keep me company for this.

  "Sit down," I tell them. I pat the seat by my side. None of them sit. They either stand nearby or lie on the floor watching me, while I watch the machine.

  After five minutes the bucking and fizzing stops, and out spits a book onto the conveyor belt. I pick it up and study it. It is fine work. It is digital bits, words and numbers and a little bit of art which until now were floating in electromagnetic storage cells in a steadily decaying hard drive; now converted to a real, tangible thing.

  Excellent.

  I shut the machine down. I flick off the lamps and power, then cart another generator with me back to the outer offices, to the canteen, where there's a window and a des
k, and a fridge I can maybe get to work. It's hot as hell, so I open all the doors and set them with stops. I even open up one of the loading bay doors in the warehouse, by jumping the circuit from one of my generators.

  Light floods in, and a delicious cool breeze blows by, clearing out the dry and stale air. I smell grass seeds and undergrowth, and they are sublime. Now I just need a corn dog and some Bud to watch the big game.

  Back in my new office I feed coins pilfered into the vending machine until it spits out 7UP cans, which I then put in the little fridge, plugged in to the generator. It tastes great going down cold. Sophia had the right idea with her little luxuries.

  The heat clears out and the breeze keeps on coming. The staff wander around their transformed world, seeing portions of the Darkness in light for the first time. At times they come to stand by me while I get to work.

  I rig my workspace with a top of the line iMac, stylus and graphical pad, hooked up through Photoshop. They watch and listen with interest as the machine boots up. I feel like a conductor with them as the orchestra, so I tap the pad with the stylus like I'm signaling for attention, and start music playing through my phone. I open a new pane, the right size for the maximum pdf the machines take, and put my pen to the tablet.

  I begin.

  * * *

  It takes five days. I take breaks but they are light, because I'm that focused. I love it, throwing myself into the work again with renewed vigor. Every panel I complete feels like a new kind of victory, more than the big 'f' in New York, more than I can really describe.

  I tell my story. I tell it from my coma all the way to now, about brave Cerulean and Lara, about my massacres and attempts at atonement, about Sophia on the way and my empty family home, all with as much honesty as I can. I put myself into the comic book art; lying down in the road to die and waking up alive.

  It is a hell of a story. I draw over a hundred panels, full color, high resolution. I outline and colorize, I add in text and narration. I try to resist the urge to give myself cooler reaction lines, and only partway succeed. I am the mayor, after all.

  Of course I sleep, and eat and drink soda, and take breaks when my back or my wrist hurt. Somewhere along the way, on one of my walks to and from the convoy or around the silent, peaceful center, my audience leaves. They don't say goodbye, they just melt away into the world, gone wherever the others have gone, with their quota of Amo-time filled.

  I salute them, standing at the door, as they traipse off into the woods. We're all moving on.

  I sleep on the roof of the battle-tank, except when it rains and I sleep inside surrounded by my cairn supplies, listening to the steady thump of raindrops on the metal roof. I dream of Lara bounding through fields to meet me, like Hank, though she's properly alive. I wake feeling good, that I'm doing something worthwhile and maybe even saving lives.

  After five days all the work is done, with my hand aching and blistered from working with the stylus, but not an art-allergic twinge in sight. I format the pages into a single pdf, I trim the edges and manage the bleed on the front and back covers. The front is an image of me borne aloft by the zombie ocean, one living man amongst a sea of thousands of the dead.

  I run it through the machines, all of them hammering and clattering at once, like a barnyard of oinking pigs. I run it and run it, printing copy after copy. When the machines jam I unjam them. When they need paper or ink I feed them. When the generators start to fade I fill them to their gurgling lips.

  I stand on the top of the center in the middle of the print run, so high up I can't even hear the machines thumping, and look out at the sky. It's silent and unblemished. The air smells ripe and dusty, like a storm is coming. This is a full-throated Iowa summer. It's so silent, and as the sun goes down it gets beautiful; the sky lights up in burned sienna and ochre shades, like firing clay.

  I can hear the sound of jackdaws in the forest. The traffic on nearby I-80, my road, is absent. There are no co-workers below, bustling in and out of the office, gossiping while smoking at the loading bays. There are no semis coming to unload goods or pick up goods for delivery.

  It's just me, mayor of everything I survey in this empty and barren land, but it doesn't feel barren. There's life growing everywhere I look; green overtaking the parking lot, trees rustling in the wind, the birds, the drone of bees going by, the buzz of cicadas in the bushes living out their short lifespans.

  I'm not alone, and this truly is a beautiful land.

  I cart the stacks of my comics, let's call them graphic novels, to the battle-tank. There are several thousand, filling six plastic cartons. I throw out my weaponry to make room, leaving it in a bonfire-like pile in the middle of the parking lot. There it can rust away to nothing, and that's OK by me.

  I get back into the cab, and look one final time at the Yangtze center. It's empty now, but I imagine Cerulean's digital ghost rolling through its halls, though he never once went there in life. It was his favorite place, still, and where for a time we both belonged.

  I rev the JCB and pull away.

  In a few hours I reach the spot on the road where the revelation first happened. Flanked on both sides by corn, it is a nondescript locale but for the geo-tag I placed in my phone.

  There I build my second cairn out of Blucy's bug and Hank's Cadillac, dragged along at the back of the convoy. I array them either side of the road and draw a thick checkered bar between them in white and black on the road, like the start and finish line of a race. I tag it LMA and draw arrows pointing to the two vehicles.

  In the bug I put graphic novels, some two hundred of them. It's ambitious, but I've always been that way. I set up a nice bit of custom shelving inside, so they're handsomely arrayed. There's even a sign that says:

  The ocean (zombies) won't hurt you. Pass it on please.

  In the Cadillac I leave a digital cache: dozens of laptops, batteries, and USBs all with the same stuff I put in the Empire State, but with my video of the friendly floaters foremost in the filing system. It's a short highlight reel showing me walking in their midst in this very spot, lying beside them, laughing with them, moving freely and unhurt while surrounded by an ocean of the dead.

  "Don't you want an entourage like this?" I've titled it. I've drawn a picture of a floater modeled on the famous Banksy image of a guy throwing a bunch of flowers, and used that as the cover image. I even draw that onto the hood of the car itself. The floater isn't throwing flowers though, he's throwing a nice pink brain.

  You have to laugh.

  I stand back and look at my work. It's the starting point of a new journey, one that I believe will catapult me and any who follow to the West, and what we might find there. The destination takes on mystical power in my mind. It's a brave new world with such dreams in it.

  I get in my convoy and I rumble over the start line. It's only as I'm falling back into the monotony of the drive, watching the yellow fields slough by on either side, that I realize something vast and unavoidable.

  Cerulean must be alive.

  It hits me like a gut punch. He had the coma like me. He remained uninfected like me. His mother was hammering at the basement door to get down, but I don't think she wanted to kill him, not if she was anything like these others. She would have knelt at his side until she was ready to go on, leaving him there in his basement to wake up from his methadone dose.

  Oh my God. Cerulean is alive.

  The epiphany dizzies me and I have to pull to a stop. If Cerulean is alive then perhaps Lara is too. The ocean will lap against them both, but it will not kill them. I feel that for certain.

  God damn.

  WEST

  31. UTAH, ARIZONA, NEVADA

  I press on, feeling time biting at my heels, like blazing this trail is the most important thing I'll ever do. Day chases night and I chase after them both, always following the sun and the moon over my head and off to the west, always west.

  At night I dream of Cerulean and Lara, out there somewhere, perhaps together and united
by the New York cairn, rolling and walking hand in hand with the ocean. Gray bodies lurch around them like emperor penguins in the Arctic, too damn docile to fight back, because they've never seen humans before and don't know that they should fear us.

  I drive and I sleep and time burns away behind me in dropped cairns. I place them in all the bigger towns, getting the process down to a fine art. In Nebraska I hit up Omaha and North Platte; in Colorado I drop them in Brighton and Frisco. I leave my books and my digital footprint, I add large blackboards sourced from nearby coffee shops for a guestbook.

  I drive on through the endless waves of corn, alternating at times with the leafy green of soy. On stretches there are hay bales lining the road that have been there for months, steadily mulching down. The high sweet smell of their fermentation carries in the air, along with the cloying scent of sugar-beet plantations in the distance. Water towers mark my progress, and by the names written across their bulbous flanks I chart a path from tiny town to tiny town.

  I walk with the ocean and I ride with them. We're all heading west. When I sleep I sleep amongst them and we breathe together. Come the morning they are always gone, and I follow.

  In Denver I ricochet through streets clogged with emergency vehicles and milling floaters. I guess that out here they had longer to react to the infection as it spread. People had time to call for help.

  It didn't help. I don't see a single living soul, or any sign that anyone survived.

  I bulldoze my path gently.

  I smash my way into the Wells Fargo Center, fifty floors tall, and rig a pulley in the stairwell to haul my painting gear up: drums of thick yellow street paint, rollers, rope, generators, gas, food. Hiking fifty floors is an insane workout.

  I wander through bank offices around the fortieth floor. The view is epic, of course. Nothing here has changed since the world flipped on its axis, bar the people and the power. At one point a worn-looking security guard comes pelting for me.