The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Her feet chilled in the cool sea-spray from below, and she laid back and looked up the rise of the main mast. Above it hung the blue sky and the hot yellow holepunch of the sun. Sweat rolled down her face and wicked away under the full blast of the wind. Waves crashed under the twin hulls and scaled her skin with a thin film of salt.

  She'd give herself this moment. New LA was already long gone behind her; a gray sprawl that had steadily rolled beneath the curvature of the Earth. Now it was only her, and she let her arms flop to either side, resting awkwardly on the solar panels fitted to the bridge's fore. The black glass was warm to the touch, already charging up all her toys and utensils underfoot.

  She'd waited for this moment for so long. Now this would be her world for the next several months. Her mission lay ahead like a red line bisecting the world.

  She elbowed the left solar panel and the vibration bonged through the hull. With a crew of seven this catamaran could complete a round-the-world race in a month or two. With a crew of one it could cross the Pacific in about the same.

  She closed her eyes and ran through her route. In a month she'd be at Japan. She'd circle below it and pull up through the South China Sea, hitting the industrial coastal town of Tianjin just southeast of Beijing. From there she'd choose a road, find a vehicle and drive. After three hundred miles she'd hit Inner Mongolia, then cross the border to Mongolia. Another five hundred miles after that, passing Ulaan Baatar on her right, she'd reach the point the Hatter's RF chip had last linked in to her father's phone, before the signal went down.

  47.601879, 101.212063

  The numbers circled in her head like gulls.

  She opened her eyes. In all directions there was nothing but water. She could still feel the heat of Ravi against her skin. Amo standing at the dock echoed brightly in her thoughts. She was exhausted and worn-out and excited.

  She was coming for her father.

  She was also hungover, with a nasty headache reminiscent of the hurt.

  She locked the autopilot and padded over the bridge. The foamcore structure flexed comfortably under her feet, squeaking when she dropped down to the shallow balcony at the tail that led inside. Inside the lounge she drained a liter of water. It made her belly roll and slalom like there was a rambunctious baby in there.

  "Steady on, child," she said absently, patting her stomach. She went to drink more but had already drunk both the hand-bottles she'd prepared.

  The hulls held water in the rear cabins, seventy gallons each in big clear jugs. She remembered Amo had said he'd left something in one of them.

  "Ok, Amo," she muttered, and started to the left.

  Down two steep steps she dropped into the starboard hull, paneled in molded cream plastic. It was narrow and hot like a greenhouse, with every inch of extra space in use. Shelves inset into the bulkhead were filled with provisions: pot noodles, freeze-dried mash, sun-dried raisins and nuts, canned beans, meats and fruits. It was everything the body needed.

  She headed back toward the rear cabin, trailing her fingers along the wall. It was still hot from lying in the marina, though soon the wind and surf-spray would cool it down. She entered the rear cabin, slightly wider than the corridor and large enough to accommodate a rack-bed, though she'd stripped the furnishings months back. Now it was filled floor to ceiling with two-gallon water jugs, stacked in neat rectangular cardboard boxes like a bricked-in wall.

  "Where is it, then?" she asked.

  She studied the roof and the walls but there was nothing apparent. Perhaps it was sealed in behind the ranks of water jugs. That might be something Amo would do, like treasure buried in Deepcraft, forcing her to dig through to reach it. She couldn't help herself from smiling.

  She lifted the nearest cardboard box from the top of the pile and peeled the tape from the joins, opened the flaps and reached in for the plastic handle. The jug came out smoothly, then clanked in mid-air.

  Anna looked down. The jug seemed normal, but normal jugs didn't clank. She lifted it up and peered through the plastic. There was a bundle floating inside, wrapped up in bubble-wrap with a white strip of laminated paper around the outside. There were words written on it, and Anna turned the jug to follow them round.

  Good luck with the zombies.

  She laughed. Everyone knew what that meant. The first cairn of the new world had been left as a message from Lara to Amo, aimed not at the zombie apocalypse but at the comic he'd been working on at the time, which was about zombies.

  Amo was a little kid at heart.

  She hurried into the light of the lounge, where she set the jug down and hacked off the top with a rigging knife like it was a tough-skinned Humpty-Dumpty. She fished out the package and tore it open, spreading the message neatly at her feet and splaying the contents across the wooden floor.

  About thirty metallic USB memory sticks clattered out like dice.

  Anna laughed again. She'd built cairns by Amo's side, so she recognized the USB model. He'd picked them up in a tech store in Tennessee, about five thousand in total, solid state and guaranteed to hold their magnetic charge for decades to come.

  "You crafty bastard, Amo," she murmured. Wasn't it just like him to sneak one of his cairns aboard her yacht? She plucked one of the USBs up and studied it; a slim key of plain silver stamped with the indentation:

  1TB

  That was ample storage space. She turned it and on the other side was a tiny word written in black marker pen, in Amo's comic book capitals:

  SEED

  They were all the same, glinting where they trespassed in beams of light cast through the yacht's outrigger cables. For a moment she had the impossible image of them taking root in the boards, then springing up in miniature little Amos, who would stalk up and down the hull looking stern while being boyishly silly.

  Impossible things before breakfast.

  She got to her feet and went to the captain's desk, where her navigation laptop was waiting. She booted it and plugged one of the USB keys in. The contents popped up in the SEED drive, showing only three files:

  Ragnarok IV

  Zombies of America

  Deepcraft Encyclopedia

  Anna laughed. Ragnarok IV was ridiculous. Ragnarok III was the last movie Hollywood ever made, so what was Ragnarok IV?

  She double-clicked and it opened across the screen; a black backdrop with icons of flags arrayed in a circle. Near the top was the red and gold of China, then the complex yin-yang of South Korea, the red sun of Japan, along with others Anna didn't recognize. Beneath each of them were words she couldn't read, presumably written in the matching language. Somewhere at the bottom was the US flag, with

  ENGLISH

  beneath it. A language menu page.

  "Interesting," Anna murmured, and clicked the Stars and Stripes. The circle of flags faded but the black background held, while music began drifting up from the laptop's speakers tinnily, something classical and haunting over the dark. Then the film started.

  Anna gripped the edge of the table.

  It was footage shot from a shaky camera looking down from a rooftop on a broad night street, where a flood of white-eyed bodies was running. Screams rang out faintly. With a sick feeling Anna recognized it as Hollywood Boulevard. There had to be hundreds of people down there, stumbling and charging through halos of light cast by streetlamps.

  "Do you see this shit?" the cameraman shouted from behind the lens. "What the hell's going on?"

  A second later he fell off the roof. The camera caught the motion badly, but the angle shifted abruptly, the view spun and circled, then there was a thump, the world rolled and a crack spidered up through the lens, though the image continued on its side.

  The right half of the screen was filled up with sidewalk, the left half with the body of the cameraman, a shadowy bulk blocking the street. His face was young, pale and bloodied. Moments passed, then he twitched. His eyes opened and they shone bright white.

  He got to his feet and joined the running throng.

&
nbsp; Nobody bit him, as zombie lore stated. He didn't have to die to turn. He just turned, as the signal pumped out on the wind.

  The flow of bodies continued down the street. More fell from nearby roofs and thumped down in the view of the camera, then moments later got up. Others punched their way through bar windows and emerged trailing glass and blood. In cars gray people butted and punched against windshields and side windows. The flow of people went by and by, fed by countless tributary streams sucking up from the city.

  "Jesus," Anna whispered.

  It was found footage from the real world, taken on the night the world ended. She'd seen movies that started the same way, with medleys of destruction, but never this. This was the real thing.

  Footage from more US cities followed. Each of the clips lasted thirty seconds or less, depicting the fresh and urgent flow of bodies down night streets before each camera dropped to the ground as its operator was infected. One of them might have been Chicago; Anna recognized the skyline from a cairn-placing trip she'd taken years ago with Jake and Lara. Another was a shot encompassing orange desert, she guessed Nevada from the red stone escarpments, another was amidst a great redwood forest somewhere in California.

  One was New York, with the camera pointing up past the Empire State Building as a helicopter spun out of control in the sky. The sound of its guttering blades subsumed the steady tramping of the ocean as they walked. The craft wobbled then veered sharply into a building, shearing its blades before crashing to the street in flames. The flood was crushed beneath it. The camera operator swore then dropped the camera.

  Tinny voices rose up above the sounds of chaos, along with swelling, desperate music. There were scraps of frantic news reports on what was happening, voices filled with disbelief and fear. A pressed and smart anchorman sitting at a neat news desk talked urgently about the spread of madness they were seeing, then became a floater on air. He stopped speaking mid-sentence, stood, and his eyes began to glow white like an old TV screen warming up. There were screams in the studio followed by silence, and the tramp of footsteps. The camera continued to record as the feeds on the monitors behind the desk died out.

  Soon the voices and reports faded, as did the music. They were replaced by the steady thump of the ocean's footfalls, and the great rasping suck of their synchronized breathing. The screen returned to the original camera, lying on its side and watching the flood walk sideways from the bottom of the frame to the top. They went on and on, pumping like blood through the intersections of a city, headed only one way.

  West.

  Anna's mouth was dry. She stared at the little screen as it faded into black, and silence. She hadn't expected that. She'd never seen the moment the world turned before. She'd only heard about it and seen it in comics but there'd never been footage. Presumably Amo had harvested it for a reason. Maybe he'd thought the people of New LA couldn't handle it.

  Maybe he was right. It filled her with emotions she couldn't understand. The sheer number of people lost hit her in ways she'd never considered. This was loss on a scale she couldn't comprehend. Her memories of the flood were so faint and distant, tied up with the loss of only one man, her father. Now the mass death of humanity was right in front of her. This really happened, and the numbers were hard to ignore.

  Millions and billions had died.

  She looked at the timestamp along the bottom. Only fifteen minutes of the movie had elapsed and there was an hour and a half left.

  Gradually the music rose up again. The key changed steadily from the haunting melody to something a little more hopeful. A trumpet serenaded in the distance. Anna leaned in closer, ramped up the volume and full-screened the image. The music got louder, reached a peak, and then color splashed across the black.

  Somebody was laughing. The camera was turning and jolting with flashes of gray bodies and old clothes, until it slipped free and for a second pointed up at the blue sky, then down and across at a road filled with gray bodies, surrounded by golden and green fields of corn.

  Anna gasped. She'd seen this before, a long time ago: footage from the moment Amo realized the ocean wouldn't hurt him. There were thousands of floaters spread around him, all facing toward him. They didn't look angry or sad, they weren't lost or found, they were simply there and looking right back.

  Then the camera tipped and angled, so she was looking straight into Amo's face. He was younger and thinner and there was a wild joy dancing in his eyes. He laughed and he talked at the camera in a confused garble, so fast that she could barely make it out, but the words didn't seem important. The moment was what mattered.

  This was the morning after Amo had let the ocean take him, and been forgiven. She'd watched it when she was a little girl but hadn't understood. Now tears rolled down her cheeks.

  For five minutes Amo circled amongst the ocean and they moved with him, like a drop of oil flowing over water. It was beautiful and full of hope.

  The image faded and was replaced. Now Amo stood by a large warehouse which had to be his Yangtze fulfillment center. The camera must have been on a tripod, and Amo was pushing a crate of something on a wheeled pallet. He brought it over to the camera, grinning madly, and held up a first edition of his comic for the camera to see.

  Zombies of America

  The same wild exuberance was in his eyes. He was bright and fresh and ready for anything. His eyes were as happy as she'd ever seen, like he was glimpsing something bigger and brighter beyond the camera, perhaps even all the way out to Anna herself, sitting on her yacht at sea ten years later. She shuddered. At this point he hadn't even known there was anyone else alive, but he'd believed. He didn't know about Lara or Cerulean or anything, but he'd had faith.

  He set the comic down and picked up the camera, then walked it over to show a pile of weapons sitting in the middle of the Yangtze parking lot. He set it down with a clunk and moved to squat beside the pile, in shot.

  "I don't need these any more," he said. "Neither do you. What we need is each other, now more than ever. Come find me at the Chinese theater in LA and I'll welcome you like my own lost family. Please."

  He got up again and left the frame. "Here's my ride," he said, and turned the camera to his convoy, the bright yellow JCB that Anna remembered, and the armored school bus and the RV with speakers on the back. "It looks scary but the only heat I'm packing now is decibels." A moment later the speakers began to vibrate and a stomping Kanye West track blared into the air. The camera swung up back to his face.

  "Let's roll out!" he cheered. The image went to black.

  Anna rubbed her eyes. She couldn't believe any of this. It was so brazen.

  More shots of floaters on the road followed, panning by. Amo had to be filming out of the window as his convoy rolled across America. There were cities and deserts, forests and rivers, each clip a few seconds long. In some of them Amo spoke from behind, in some he sang, in others the camera watched from a tripod as he erected one of his cairns with two vehicles either side of a highway.

  Next came a fast-motion capture of him painting the giant Pac-Man in Denver. He must have set the camera recording on a neighboring roof, then dashed back, climbed the building, and rappelled down to paint it. The efforts he'd gone to made her laugh out loud. It was comic, but it was also powerful.

  Look at what one person can do, it said. Steadily the Pac-Man took shape. It was amazing, really. He'd filmed it from start to finish, with the clouds racing by overhead and the sun going down and coming up again.

  It was the Pac-Man, or yellow pie, that had drawn her in. Because of this she'd met Cerulean and the others, because of this she'd come out of Wonderland and gone Through the Looking Glass.

  Next up was a shot of Lara. The camera lingered on her back, standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling window through which the outlandish Strip hotels of Las Vegas were just discernible. It had to be the hospital where she'd saved Amo's life.

  After a moment she turned and laughed. "Are you filming me now?" Her voice was delighted.


  "No," Amo said.

  "Well, you should be," she said, and tossed her curly hair. "I look magnificent."

  He laughed and she came over. "But I'm not the star of this narcissistic endeavor," she said. "You are."

  She grappled for the camera and pointed it at Amo. He lay on a rumpled hospital bed looking sweaty, pale and weak.

  "Shoot me from this angle," he said, turning his chin to the side, "I look much better."

  Lara laughed and the camera jiggled.

  "Or this angle, it's good too." He turned his chin the other way.

  "That's just your whole face," Lara said, laughing still.

  "Well shoot it then, woman!"

  She laughed and dropped the camera to the covers, then leaned in to kiss him. Their lips met just at the edge of frame.

  The screen went black, then opened again on the coast. There was the Pacific Ocean, and Lara and Amo were whooping at it, taking turns to point the camera at each other with the ocean behind them. Next they sped along in a series of fast cuts taking in the highlights of Los Angeles; floaters walking into the water off Muscle Beach, floaters trawling along through traffic-strewn streets, floaters walking along stars on the Walk of Fame, until they arrived at the Chinese theater.

  There they interviewed each other briefly about how good it felt to have finally arrived. Amo limped a little but he looked stronger.

  "This is everything I ever dreamed of," Lara said. "I've wanted to see this movie all my life. Ragnarok III, thank you so much for bringing me here Amo."

  Amo laughed. "Early reviewers said it really delves into the motivations of the superheroes."

  A clip of the movie followed, which made Anna laugh too. There were no copyright infringement lawsuits now. Two of the brightly-costumed heroes tumbled through the air, punching each other into skyscraper walls, while alien-looking slug things hit into the White House. A geyser of light shot up into the sky and Washington exploded.