The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I'm not sad, I'm not happy. If anything there's just regret, for what might have been. If I'd said this. If he'd done that. What matters is the ocean are now free, and safe from his predation. He says they walk west into the water, and that's OK by me. Let the ocean join the ocean in freedom, and there swim for as long as they like.

  33. ANGEL

  I look up at Lara's face in the clouds, hovering over me like the shadow of the alien mother ship.

  "Hi," I whisper weakly. I reach up and pat at her face, like creamy coffee. So beautiful. It's a good last thing to see, as the blood drains out of my ravaged legs.

  "Jesus, Amo, what happened?" she asks.

  I smile, high on dying, blessed with this final angelic vision. I try to frame an answer but my lips don't work well.

  "Waiting for you," I whisper. "LA. Ragnarok."

  Her sweet, limpid eyes cloud with confusion. I'll explain later, I want to say. Upstairs. In the sky. We'll all climb up the tower together.

  Then she's moving me. She's doing something with my legs, and the pain is so bad I start to laugh. It's another twinge in my legs!

  "Look at your legs, Amo, what the hell happened?"

  Her face shifts, like ripples on the surface of a lake after a stone's been thrown. I try to say something more but I can't really make a sound. It is good to see Lara after so long, even like this. I take a dry breath, then another.

  "There was an indicator," I manage to whisper. She leans in close to hear. "It hit my shoulder."

  She frowns, the movement of her brows barely visible, then does more to my legs. I am dragged and shifted and turned. So this is what passing over to the other side feels like?

  "Amo, I'm going to have to move you," she sayd. "I need to do something about this mess. There's so much blood, I can't even find all the wounds."

  "They bit Don," I croak. "He's right there. We need to help him."

  "Don's dead," Lara says, without even looking. I can just about see the bloody skeleton on the asphalt, all that's left of him now. "I think he's a bit past helping."

  She reaches in her pack and produces a bottle of water. She unscrews the cap and holds it to my lips, and I drink.

  I suck it in and it fills me like a river. I look up and she's gone again.

  I laugh, feebly. Of course. The clouds are fickle. I try to sing a song, a tune in my head but I don't even know the name. The ocean bumble nearby, filling the space she'd taken. I read the label on the water bottle absently.

  Fresh Spring Water Direct from the Alps!

  It sounds delicious, so cool and clean. I close my eyes for a time, and when I come back she's come back too. That's good.

  "This is going to hurt," she says. There's some kind of low trolley beside her, a long shiny metal thing with a cream-cake coating of white sheets atop it, low to the ground, grumbling on wheels.

  A stretcher? I look past it and see the blurry white flank of an ambulance, with a striking red cross on the side. What? Something of logic creeps in past the dying daze in my mind, and I look again at Lara.

  "Lara?" I whisper.

  She nods grimly, then does something to my legs which just about kills me, and just as I realize that Lara is really here, Lara has come out of nothing and is really, actually here, a black wave of pain reaches up like a dark ocean and gobbles me down.

  INTERLUDE

  Getting him on the stretcher was the first of the hardest things Lara had ever done. He was so damn heavy, even lifting his torso half on to the edge exhausted her. Getting his hips on nearly busted out her back. She tipped his legs as gently as she could after, though she was afraid of touching them too much.

  He cried out then went unconscious. That was a blessing, but not if he died. Already fresh trickles of blood were seeping from the deep and crusted wounds in the backs of his legs. They looked like spray from a shotgun blast; similar to patterns she'd etched into the dead to date.

  Had she come all this distance, killed her own parents, hidden, fled, fought, and raced across the country following his trail of cairns just to lose him now?

  "Hang in there, Amo," she said, then belted him in and lifted the stretcher to waist-height. The spring inside helped, and she rumbled him over to the waiting ambulance in seconds.

  She'd found it after fifteen minutes of mad driving in circles, hunting beyond the Strip for a hospital. The first ambulance she tried wouldn't even start, but the second did. The doors opened and pulling out the stretcher was easy, as the legs kicked down to the ground.

  Now she pushed the feet end of the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, onto the sliding rails, and it accepted them. The front legs bent back flush and Amo slid inward like a smoothly oiled drawer.

  She followed him in, cursing, crouching in the tight space. She'd done basic first aid for Sir Clowdesley, but that hadn't covered shotgun blasts. First she had to see what she was dealing with.

  She raided the many little shelves in the ambulance's back, coming up with rolls of bandaging, surgical tape and a pair of needle-nose scissors. With great care she slit his bloody and tattered jeans down both sides, then peeled them away. Coming free from the bloody scabs, they tore and started fresh flows.

  She could wash them later. She tossed the ruined pants out of the back and started wrapping the bleeding crevices with thick bandage rolls, softly at first then tighter as dark red continued to show through. She worked on the left leg then the right, lifting them and slipping the roll underneath, taping it with cotton and gauze, doing it again until his lower half looked a mummy, stained with blotches of red.

  She applied pressure. For a moment he woke and barked out something, then passed out again.

  "What now?" she muttered, looking at her handiwork.

  She tore through the cupboards again. There was a mini-fridge with bags of dark red blood in, but those would have perished months back, and she had no idea what his blood type was. She kept looking until in one cupboard she found a rack of yellow-ish clear bags, complete with long tubes. Drip bags?

  She grabbed one and pulled it near. It was written with all kinds of chemicals, but it had to be right, didn't it? They wouldn't keep weird, extremely specific stuff in ambulances would they? She checked it against the other bags there, three in total. They were all the same.

  It had to be the good stuff. She hung one from the hook on a swing-out hanger, then started hunting for a needle. She'd never injected a person before. Of course she'd seen it on TV, and had her own blood taken at health checks. It looked simple enough. She rustled through more drawers until she came up with a needle that looked like a fit.

  She attached it to the drip end with a twist and click. Fluid began to drip through. She caught some and licked it, yeah, it tasted salty and sweet, probably that was all right? She twisted the little plastic tappet to halt the flow then took hold of his right forearm. It was splashed with road-dust and blood. With an alcohol-swab she wiped it clean, then wiped her hands too, and the needle.

  She searched for something to bring up his veins, and settled on his belt. It slid free from his legless jeans and she wrapped it tightly around his bicep, patted the underside of his forearm, and waited. Veins popped up. Taking her heart in her mouth, she fed the needle into his skin. It seemed good, so she opened the tappet, then a bulge started to form.

  Nope. She pulled it out and picked a different spot, trying again. Again it bulged. Third time, near the crook of his elbow, she got it. No bulge formed. The drip fed down. He was getting fluids and basic nutrition.

  She taped the line in place, belted him again into position, then climbed out, closed the back doors and got into the driving seat.

  Where the hell was the hospital again?

  * * *

  She stood over him, lying on the stretcher by the window of a clean and white first floor hospital room. Getting him out of the ambulance and into a room had been horrible with blood and stress. One thing she was grateful for was that he'd remained unconscious throughout. Flipp
ing him onto his belly had been easy though. Keeping the drip going, setting up a fan and a light with a generator in the corner, all that was easy.

  Far harder was contemplating his legs. She just didn't know. Was it better to leave him as he was, bandaged neatly, or should she dig the shrapnel bits out and try to sew him up, or sew him up with them inside, or what? He'd lost so much blood, could he stand to lose more?

  She stood by and watched two more drip bags go into him, dithering. She raided supply rooms for the tools she thought she might need: a gallon of swabbing alcohol and a fat pipette to drop it into place, antibacterial soap to scrub up with, surgical gloves, scalpels, towels, bandaging, surgical thread and curved needles, clean blue scrubs and a face mask, a helmet with a large magnifying visor, a surgical light hung over the bed, pounds of cotton wool-type blotting stuff, gauze, a shiny kidney bowl for slugs she extracted, a range of tweezer-like utensils for extracting, powerful and pungent disinfectant in serious brown jars, bottles of antibiotics in pill and liquid form, and a dozen more drip bags with tubes and needles to match.

  She laid them all out on silver trays on clean white strips of gauze and tried to decide.

  "What do you think?" she'd asked the few of the ocean gathered nearby, like an audience. They looked like doctors. They held to her elbows. She didn't have time to be afraid that they might eat her, like they'd plainly eaten the body on the Strip.

  Using portable battery-powered machines she took his pulse and his blood pressure. They both seemed low, but then she took her own and saw they were low too. She strung up a third drip bag, injected a syringe full of liquid antibiotics into it, and watched it flow into him.

  It began to grow dark outside, but the desert heat was unremitting. He showed no signs of waking up. At last she made the decision, and rolled up her sleeves, drew her mask into place, and cut the bottom part of her makeshift bandaging away from his left leg.

  It was a torn and meaty mess. There were scour marks where buckshot had grazed through the sides, long furrows where they'd burrowed in, and dark red wounds where they'd gone deep. It looked like a muddy battlefield, crusted with trenches and bomb-divots sprinkled with fragments of denim. She didn't know where to begin.

  Sweat dripped down her nose and caught in the surgical mask. It was hot under the lights and the fan did little to relieve the dry heat. She stripped off her shirt and bent to work, wearing just a sports bra and her scrubs.

  She began with something easy, cleansing a shallow furrow around his ankle. If she did it piece-meal, allowing the existing sealed scabs to hold, then perhaps he'd keep most of his blood in him. She began to think of his body as a precious bag, one she had to keep intact so the liquid inside wouldn't leak.

  Cleansing the interior of the shallow line, like a seed-line plowed into a field, turned her stomach. She'd never done anything like this before. It was a very far cry from practicing law, or making coffee. She kept working, but there didn't seem to be enough skin left to seal it over again. Scraping away the crust of blood gently with alcohol and a cloth, she saw the raw pink and red of inflamed skin and muscle beneath. Was it infected already? She couldn't tell. Fresh blood began to seep up like water bubbling through porous cloth. She splashed alcohol and disinfectant liberally, which mixed with the blood and ran pink down the sides of his leg, darkening the white stretcher sheets.

  There didn't seem to be any bits of shrapnel in this gouge. She swallowed back her gorge and took up one of the threaded needles. It couldn't have been further from the needlework she'd done as a kid, but surely the principle was the same. Grabbing the edge of the skin was hard, and piercing it with the needle was tougher than she expected.

  She pushed it through with a little pop. The thread ran through his skin like a shoelace through an eyelet, stopping at the crude knot. She scooped into the other edge of the wound, blotting furiously now with gauze to clear her view, and pulled the thread taut. The wound zippered closed, but in doing so cracked the scabs on other wounds on his leg, which began to leak blood through their caked platelets.

  "Shit," she cursed. She hadn't thought of that.

  It became an awful, bloody race. She needled the rest of that gouge in one long thread, then tightened it up like a corset before tying it off. Half a dozen other wounds, each deeper and more severe, were bleeding now too. She leaned back and saw that his face was white.

  "What the hell," she muttered. It was too hard. She was going to spend all night on this, and lose him still. But what else could she do? She already felt exhausted from driving through the night, hoping to finally catch him up. Then when she'd rolled up and seen this?

  She was emotionally drained. She'd been alone for so long. But this had to be done.

  "Stop pussyfooting around," she whispered to herself. She bent back to his leg, cut a little more bandaging away, and dived into one of the biggest, darkest wounds, trying a new theory. If she could seal those up first, then perhaps there'd be less blood leaking out when she pulled the smaller ones tight.

  It was a deep hole dug into his calf. There was only a shallow crust of blood over the top, and when she broke through it began to well up profusely. She felt sick. She dug into the hole with one of her pliers. She rooted around, grateful the only sound was his smooth breathing, until she hit something hard. Bone or metal? No way to know. She dug deeper until she got a grip then pulled. It shifted, but caught on something. To pull harder would do more damage, potentially tearing ligament or a muscle.

  She pulled out and went at it on a different angle. She clamped it again, and this time it came free with a sucking breath. She held it up, feeling dizzy. It was a bead of metal as big as a nail head. She dropped it with a clank into the kidney bowl, had another root in the well to check it was alone, then sewed up the hole. It took only a few stitches to pout it closed, sealing off the blood flow.

  Already his calf was looking better. Still there were a dozen gouges to deal with on that leg alone, and she didn't like to think about the other, but some order was beginning to come to the chaos.

  She got on.

  By dawn of the next day, it was done. Both his legs were a forest of blue thread, drawing strange patterns across his disinfectant-tangy skin, painted a dark brown. The sheets were a mess of pale blood and dark clots. The air stank of iron and iodine. The kidney bowl was heavy with the weight of lead she'd pulled out of him, like extracted teeth.

  She bandaged him up in a daze, seeing colors and shapes in the air. A dead man tugged at her sleeve. She rolled Amo carefully onto his side, stabilizing him with pillows. She refreshed his drip. His breathing was shallow and his face was drawn and pale.

  There was nothing more she could do. She fed the generator to keep the fan going, then fell blood-smeared and sweaty onto a sofa, and fell asleep at once. If he survived or not was up to him now.

  34. WHOLE NEW WORLD

  There's an ache in my whole body. I'm lying on my side. I recognize a hospital room. Hot light streams in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, overlooking low suburbs and orange desert. There's a red sofa by the window and lying upon it is Lara. She looks shattered, asleep, rumpled in a thin white sheet.

  My mouth is dry, my eyes hurt. I try to roll onto my back but I can't, there's some kind of frame holding me in position. I crane my neck to look at it, but even that much movement starts something screaming in my legs.

  A gray figure with a cratered gray face shuffles into view. A janitor, maybe?

  "Hey," I say. My voice sounds like rustling sand.

  He says nothing. A few others shuffle with him, two doctors, a nurse, and some girl in dungarees. It's weird but I can't complain.

  "Thanks for coming."

  They say nothing. I remember Don, and wonder if these ones may turn too.

  "Not feeling hungry, are you?" I rasp. My throat hurts. My forearm hurts. I look down and see a drip line feeding in to my wrist. The bag it connects to is half-empty, hanging over my head.

  So Lara saved me? Lara's al
ive?

  I guess so. I feel dizzy still.

  "Hey, Lara," I try to shout. Am I laughing, it's hard to tell. I sound more like Muttley in Wacky Races, a canine barking laugh. She turns in her sleep. She must've had a hard time, saving me. I should let her rest.

  I got shot with a shotgun. I should let me rest. I close my eyes and sweet, nourishing sleep finds me again in seconds.

  * * *

  Lara watched him for three days and three nights, as he lay in a coma-like torpor in the hospital's eastern wing, by a window overlooking a therapeutic Las Vegas garden.

  "Only old people and junkies," she murmured to herself, standing at the window. She'd had the thought many times, based on the types of dead people she'd released from their wardroom 'cells'. It was a wonderful kind of emancipation.

  'Floaters', Amo called them. 'The ocean'. Maybe that was better than 'the dead'. It implied there might be hope for them yet.

  None of this felt real to her. Ever since she'd come out of hiding in her parent's home, hunkered down for months waiting for the authorities to come, the world had felt unreal, especially after she'd seen Amo's first cairn in New York.

  The Empire State. It had started her on a pilgrimage that only grew faster as she realized how much she was gaining on him. The dates grew closer together. She sailed through Denver laughing aloud at his cocky ridiculousness. Pac-Man? There was something bright and beautiful and defiant about it. LMA.

  Now she was here, and he was in his bed, maybe in a coma.

  She went around the hospital opening doors.

  There were dozens of the dead, or 'floaters', trapped in their rooms; old people whose hearts had flaked out while riding a roll in the casino, young guys and girls with caved-in noses from too much heroin, all now part of the ocean. They thumped sluggishly against their windows and doors.

  One by one she let them out, and let them follow her. In their rooms she studied their charts while they crowded around her. This one was Anne Gideon, suffering from gout. She looked like she was well over that now. Here was Toby McTavish, broken leg in three places. It didn't show.