The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I sidestep at the last moment and he goes by, then I step up close so he can't charge me again. I pat him on the burly shoulder. "There we go."

  He puts his wrinkly hand on my shoulder too. No problem. We conga that way back to the stairs.

  The roof of Wells Fargo is wavy glass, so I can't go down in a window-cleaner's basket. Instead I hook into the rappel points and hack my generator to power the in-coil system. It all works fine, and after working on the Empire State for so long I have no problem with heights.

  From the slippery glass top I look out over the Colorado countryside. There are skyscrapers and suburbs then an endless flat plain of scrubby brown and green fields. This is Middle America, the plains, and it goes on forever. This new cairn will be visible for miles, so I better make it a good one.

  I rappel down the building's side and work fast, running myself left to right along the windows like a dot-matrix printer, slapping the paint in place with deft familiarity. I don't work from sketches painted in the interior this time, because I'm not too worried about accuracy. A splash that looks jagged up close will look like a razor-straight line from a mile away. Distance forgives a lot.

  I get high on the sway of it, spending the first day on the east-facing side swaying around between floors 48 and 40, covering most of the building's façade in yellow. That night I hunker down in the dizzy heights of a top floor executive suite, where I watch Ragnarok I on the 100-inch TV. In it our mythological superheroes are climbing all over buildings in Shanghai, fighting off aliens.

  I'm not a huge fan but it is good fun. It feels good to watch a movie and not twinge at all. The noise and light fills the room for a little while, and I can forget where I've been and what I've done.

  In three days I finish all four sides of the building. In the ground floor lobby I set up a cairn, with my books and my route, then I drive away. On the outskirts of Denver I look back along I-76 at my handiwork.

  It's a giant yellow Pac-Man. I tried to do it like a stop-motion animation, though who will notice that I don't know. Starting at the east his mouth is mostly open, then clockwise he clamps it closer to shut, until at the north it's just a slim wedge of pie.

  His eye is a black dot the size of a jacuzzi. It looks good. It's a bit of fun.

  I rumble on.

  * * *

  I tell jokes to Io and she tells them back to me. I try to think of puns about zombies. Most of them revolve around the similarity of 'brains' to other words, like drains, grains, flames. I theorize aloud about why zombies have always been so interested in brains, and figure out it's probably because they haven't got any of their own.

  A hankering takes me for coconut ice cream.

  We pull off the highway and into a Wal-Mart in the scrubby forests near Grand Junction, where the ice cream is rotten sludge in tubs, though I expected that. I've come instead for the astronaut ice cream. I find it in dehydrated wafer-form, sealed in brick-like silver packages. There's no coconut but there are vanilla, strawberry, and Rocky Road. I grab a handful and on the way out pick up some cans of bolognese and a box of green tea.

  It's a feast that night on the border between Colorado and Utah, camped out in my battle-tank with the bitter tang of the green tea's tannins in the air. Nostalgia overcomes me, and while chewing down bolognese I fire up the Darkness in Deepcraft, slipping my goggles over my eyes.

  Cerulean is there waiting for me. I turn on my diviner and go with him down the aisles, toddling along through the bicycles and the exercise equipment, circling around past the book machines and down narrow passages filled with boxes of Barbie dolls. Hank passes me but he's mute now, with his Internet feeds cut off. The real Hank is out there somewhere, wandering with his Darkness herd. The real Cerulean is out there too.

  In the morning I drive into Utah, replenishing my gas barrels at a Shell station because there's a tanker sitting on the forecourt, and that's a lot easier to siphon than the underground tanks. I get a pack of Big Red and some lukewarm grape soda and snack my way into the desert.

  The land turns brown and burned red, in this our long approach through Mormon country to Las Vegas. To either side great sandstone buttes rise like the Mittens in Monument Valley. It is a gorgeous, wasted land, as pure as driven sand, dotted with hardy green cacti and mountainous termite mounds. Scrappy shoots of dune grass crop up everywhere, and sand has begun to reclaim the road.

  I pass through various National Forests, fed on water stopped up behind Bryce canyon to the north, and am enveloped in verdant Douglas fir and Bristlecone pine. I spot squirrels and turkey in the branches and the undergrowth, startled as I rumble by. I drink water from a fresh tributary stream, so cold and fresh. I get on my knees and smell the sweet resin of the pine needle carpet.

  I drop cairns in Richmond and Beaver, in Cedar City and St. George. Of course I'm saving something special for Vegas itself. It's got to be grand for a place like that. I ask myself, what would Banksy do with all the world as his canvas? What would JR do? How do you fight back against 'the man', when there is no 'man' left to fight?

  I'm not them, though, and I'm not fighting their battles. I'm me, Amo, and I'll do what I have in my head.

  After Zion National Park I hang a left off the main track, and drive a few hours east for the first time since backtracking to the Darkness. I've always wanted to see 'The Wave', a part of Coyote Buttes that has gorgeous sandstone escarpments, like the eye of Jupiter made flesh on planet Earth.

  The terrain gets redder and harsher around me, Arapaho land, and I get misty-eyed and awed with it. Of course I've seen the Grand Canyon before, but there's something more intimate about this. Soon I pass through the parking lot and by the visitor's center. There I get out, load a pack with a gas burner and gear, then head up the ranger trail.

  It's already straining toward dusk as I ascend into the wave. It is a perfect half-pipe of red and cream sandstone, like freshly scooped raspberry ripple, so smooth and perfect I want to bite it. That all this was formed by water and wind just blows my mind. It feels as alien as Mars, and I am the last man alive to see it.

  The sandstone is slippery and a fine rain of sand shivers off at my touch. There are stairs cut into the rock and a rail bolted in, and I climb to a viewing platform atop a twisty crag. Atop it I set up my burner and toast marshmallows. They crackle and catch blacken, melting the lovely inner layer to sugary goodness. I sandwich them with chocolate and Graham crackers, watch the white distend and bulge through cracks in the black outer skin, and take that first luscious bite.

  Oh my Lord above, that is sweet.

  It's good.

  I look up at the sky. Of course it's the same sky it always was. Shooting stars flash like claws raked across the dome of heaven.

  "They're not really stars," my dad told me and Aaron once, after a night-time hike. "They're just little bites of interstellar dust, or the screws and nuts that come off falling satellites, burning up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere."

  This awed us even more. That there was a layer of sky up there so hot that it burned, that interstellar dust was reaching out to our little planet across the gulf of space, then falling down upon us all like a fine rain, like fairy dust.

  * * *

  In the morning I head out wordlessly. It's time to finish this thing. I roll the convoy back to I-15, bound for Las Vegas and the coast. It's the final leg now, and I'm excited about what I'll find.

  Will anybody be there already? Will I find a copy of Ragnarok III tucked away in a producer's office, ready for distribution nationwide? Will it be all that I hoped, or am I going to end up swinging like dear Sophia within a week?

  Whatever. I'm not worried. I feel good regardless of the outcome. I'll have done what I set out to do, and if it just leads to me dying there alone, then that's fine too.

  I pull through the desert corner of Arizona and then into Nevada at the fastest clip yet, down largely empty roads. Soon Las Vegas dawns like an abandoned theme park from the wastes, and I blow down the Str
ip hard, roaring between outsized casino-hotels with my music pounding, bound for the UFO hotel, a massive silver saucer sticking edge-into the ground, surrounded by faux-rubble, like it crashed there.

  They only finished building it a few months before the ocean came on; one of the largest casinos yet, surrounded by giant green alien sculptures. I saw it on the news, distantly, back when I could barely handle TV. It's where my next-to-last major cairn will go.

  Everything is still and silent but for me, and sand blows down the streets in cute twisty zephyrs. I see the UFO dawn like a dark sun over the faux-city.

  Before that though, I see a man in the road.

  Two floaters trail behind him, on leashes tied about their necks. For a second I think I must be dreaming. I blink but that doesn't change the reality. He's there. He's real, and he turns and waves as I roll near.

  I pull the JCB to a stop and race out to meet him.

  32. DON

  I run over and he runs to me with his pet floaters tethered behind, and we stop an awkward distance apart, sizing each other up.

  "Jesus," he says. His eyes are wide and watery. His face is thin and he's tall, he's got almost a foot on me. Across his thick chest he wears bandoliers of bullets just like I used to. There's a sword in a sheath at his waist and a handgun, and a shotgun in a sleeve down his back like Ash in the Evil Dead. "I thought everyone was dead."

  I laugh. "Me too. Damn, it is good to see another living person."

  He holds out his hand. I spread my arms. We pull into a braced, manly hug. He stinks of old sweat and the sour saltpeter tang of expended gunpowder, but then I probably do too.

  We pull away and we laugh in the awkward gap between us.

  "Don," he says, holding out his hand again. He has a Southern drawl. We're both grinning like idiots. "I'm from Texas, I've been roaming all the highways for months, looking."

  I take his hand and give it a firm pump. "Amo, from Iowa, though I've just come from New York."

  He raises his eyebrows. "New York, in that rig? It must've taken a month."

  I shrug. "Yeah. I was looking out too, for others."

  His eyes narrow eagerly. "Did you find any? Are there others?"

  I consider telling him about Lara and Cerulean, but despite the natural ebullience of meeting a survivor, I hold back. I don't know this guy at all. "No. Well, yes, but she was dead. A girl. She committed suicide before I reached her."

  This casts a pall over our jubilant meeting. He runs a hand through his thick blonde hair. He looks to come from Scandinavian stock.

  "And you?"

  He shakes his head. "You're the first, man. Damn, it is good to see someone."

  I nod. It is.

  "And you said your name was ammo? Like, bullets?"

  I hold in a laugh. Shall I tell this huge man that my name actually means love, and my parents were hippies? Maybe later.

  "Sure," I say.

  "That's cool. I guess I should've come up with something better than Don." He laughs sheepishly. Then he draws his sword. It looks like a medieval replica, maybe from a fantasy movie or something, with an ornate pommel and what look like runes carved into the shaft.

  "Sword, maybe? It could be a good name. Here, you want to have a go?"

  He swivels the blade smoothly, doubtless a practiced motion, and holds it out to me.

  "I got the idea from that zombie TV show, you know, that black girl?" He jerks his thumb to the two floaters milling aimlessly where he left them, their leashes trailing. "Them too."

  I notice they're both female. They're dressed as cheerleaders, in bright miniskirts and tight sweater tops that haven't faded with exposure to the sun. I think-

  "Here," he says, pressing the sword closer. "The balance is perfect. Most of these things are made of zinc, and the tang, that's the bit of the blade that goes down into the handle here, is nothing more than a thin pin, so when you hit something, snap, the whole thing comes apart." He hawks and spits to the side. "This baby is real though, cold-rolled steel sharp as a straight-razor."

  I take the sword by the handle. There are spots of dried blood on the blade, but the balance is fantastic. I give it a few experimental swishes.

  "It does feel good," I say. "Where did you get it?"

  His grin widens with pride. "I found it in some rich asshole's pad in LA. He had a whole wall full of them, like he was some kind of crusader knight."

  "You've been to LA?"

  "Sure. I go back and forth, you know, patrolling the desert. Scouting."

  I swing the sword a few more times, then hold it out to him pommel first. For an instant I feel vulnerable, with the handle toward him and the blade toward me. All he'd have to do is push and I'd be impaled.

  The moment passes though and he takes the sword.

  "Just hot shit," he says abruptly, while sheathing it again. "Just color me damn surprised to meet you. Ammo, what a name, and what a rig."

  "And you walk?" I ask. "You just, kind of roam?"

  He laughs. "Yeah, sometimes. Me and the girls."

  We look at his floaters. They toe the ground and strain at the edge of their taut leashes, tethered to a nearby car.

  "So, you know they don't want to kill us, right," I say.

  "Sure, of course. I woke up when the plague hit and some nurse was leaning over me all attentively, you know? I was in a hospital, then. For a minute I thought she wanted to screw me, but then I figured it out. TV down, lights down, the white eyes?" He points to his eyes to help me get the point. "I figured it. I gave her what she wanted, anyway."

  He grins. I smile back. What did he just say?

  "So, Ammo. You say you're going to LA?"

  I nod, then wish I could take it back. I'm not ready to tell him about the others yet, about my cairns and my plan. I ad-lib. "Yeah, I have family there." I cast around for a part of LA I know. "Down near Muscle Beach. You know it?"

  He laughs. "It's full of posers still! I guess they were having a full-moon party or something; there's a stage set up, the band's gear's all up there, and all these idiots wandering around with only their bikinis and shit on like there's no better place to be than the beach."

  I nod, absorbing this. I look back at his cheerleader zombies on their leashes. It's clear they're straining to head west, to go wherever the rest of them go.

  "So what's with them?" I point. "It's not like the TV show, you don't need them to fend off the others."

  He shrugs. "Company. I like to have them around."

  "Where did you get them? They must've come out of some midnight show in a casino, perhaps, with clothes still bright like that?"

  His eyes narrow slightly. "Yeah maybe. I found them wandering in the desert nearby, and they came up with all the hugging that they do. Maybe they're sisters, I'm not sure, you can't really tell with the raisin faces. I figured I'd keep them. There's nothing where they want to go but other drifters, you know?"

  I process this for a second. I put it to one side, that their clothes would not be so bright if they'd truly been wandering in the Nevada sun for three months, because it leaves a pretty distasteful taste in my mouth. Did he dress them like that?

  I focus on the most interesting thing.

  "You're saying you've followed them, the floaters? You know where they go?"

  He laughs. "Sure I have. I guess you wouldn't have though, would you, not when you're making for your family?" His brow wrinkles. "But let me ask, why the convoy Ammo, pulled by that thing? You could've made it across the country in a few days if you took, like, a Lamborghini or something."

  He's catching me in a lie. "Supplies," I blurt. "I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know they weren't dangerous until a week ago."

  He stares at me. "Seriously? So you've been fighting the zombie apocalypse, like, all this time?" He gives a low whistle. "That sucks. I feel that. Of course they're not dangerous, not in that way at least. And you've not got any yourself, chained up inside? It's really all ammo in there?"

  He looks
concerned. I try to puzzle out the reason.

  "Why would I have them chained up inside?"

  He laughs again. "I don't know, man. Who can say what people do? Can I take a look inside, anyway?

  "What?"

  He points. "Inside the school bus, see what kind of gear you're packing. Call it professional curiosity, one survivor to another. I showed you my blade, show me yours. Plus, I have some whiskey in my pack, we can toast."

  I let my answer wait a second too long, maybe. I recover quickly, but still.

  "Sure, yeah. I have tea."

  He laughs. "Tea! Ain't that peachy. Yes, let's have some tea. After you."

  "OK."

  I lead us toward the battle-tank. He catches up and slaps me on the back. The sour stink of him is actually overpowering. "Don't be nervous," he says. "We're all good. I've been waiting for this moment for so long."

  I laugh. "Who's nervous? I've been hogging my M320 launcher since the start, I don't want to go sharing it around now."

  "You have an M320? Damn, I knew you didn't play about, Ammo. Walking around with no weapon on you, music blaring like you were the ice cream man come to town or something, I knew either you'd gone soft or you had to be packing some major heat. You sure there's no one in there right now, drawing a bead on me?"

  "What? No, there's no one in there."

  "Good."

  We reach the bus door, reinforced with cut strips of sheet metal. I open a square cover in the tank's side, like the flap on a gas tank, and pull the lever. The door cranks noisily open.

  "Love it," Don says. "After you, boss."

  I climb in. It's the same as it always is, though my crates of comics are lying right there. For some reason I feel I ought to hide them away. This starts to feel like a mistake. There's hardly even any ammo or weapons in here at all, and I forgot I tossed the bulky M320 and all the grenades away weeks ago.

  "What the hell is all this?" Don asks, climbing in behind me. His head almost strokes the roof of the tank. In the confined space, the disparity between the size of us becomes far more apparent. He's huge, and his animal stench comes at me in waves like an assault. "Where are the guns? And what are these, comics?"