The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Then it was night, and the camera was pointing down at an awkward angle from the front of the Chinese theater, aiming over the forecourt, road, and out to sea. It was crooked as though it had been set on its tripod hastily. In the corner of the frame Amo and Lara talked with a feverish low excitement. The waves lapped against the beach. Off to the left a tiny light hovered in the distance, winding its way closer.

  "No way," Anna breathed.

  The light drew up, becoming an RV she recognized, driven by a man she knew well. Amo and Lara approached as the RV pulled up and stopped. The front door opened and Jake got out. He said something, too far away for the camera to pick up, and Amo spread his arms and said something back, then the side of the RV opened up and a little black girl in a dirty Alice in Wonderland blue dress climbed out.

  Anna gasped.

  Amo ran over to her and hugged her. Lara followed. Everybody hugged and cried, then Cerulean came around the back in his wheelchair and everybody hugged and cried again.

  In her chair on the catamaran Anna was crying too. She hit pause and climbed out of the lounge to the bridge-top in the open sea air. Tears streamed down her face.

  "Bastard," she muttered. "Amo, you bastard."

  She'd never seen this footage before. She hadn't even known it existed, and now the sight of herself so small, bright and proud hurt her deeply. It made her angry even though it made no sense to be angry at Amo, because this was clearly what he truly believed. He took all this mess and tried to make it into a hopeful narrative. He was an idiot who didn't know when to give up.

  She turned and looked back east. He would be there still, waiting for word to come back. He'd tricked her into carrying cairns for the whole world. He was an ass.

  She wiped her face. Back in the lounge she settled to watch. Forty minutes had passed already, with an hour left. She pressed play.

  The remainder was a medley of their group's history. People came and were welcomed. Some were ejected, Julio amongst them. Defenses were erected then forgotten, homes set up, working pipes and sewage systems and electric lines installed, farmland plowed in Chino Hills, solar panels and wind turbines and batteries rigged into each other. There were a few new couples formed, seen through held hands and stolen kisses.

  There were nights where they danced together on the beach, circling like cavemen around a great fire, roasting pork they'd raised in back yards, drinking beer they'd brewed in plastic vats. There were brief interviews with people who'd come on years-long journeys from the interior after seeing one of Amo's cairns. There were forays out to set up new cairns.

  Lara's babies were born, twins. An eight-year-old Anna was there in the corridor outside when Amo brought them out. Other babies followed, not many but enough for great celebrations every time. There were weddings and birthday parties, several for her. She saw herself at ten years old wearing her party hat in the middle of a throng of cheering people. She even looked happy as she blew out the candles on her cake.

  That changed, though. Their little community grew a little more, and Anna shifted. She put away her Alice uniform, and some of the optimism faded from her face. She remembered that time clearly, and the guilt that came with not being a little kid any more. The guilt that said she ought to be something by now, ought to have done something, because hadn't she made a promise, and wasn't it time now to keep it?

  There was a shot of her kite-surfing on the waves, performing moves that were far too dangerous. There was a shot of Ravi cheerfully cleaning her racing yacht, with her nowhere to be seen. They were fleeting moments though, hard to spot, and to anyone else the film was uplifting; a story of hope and survival after the end of the world.

  Finally there was a shot of the T4 virus wriggling in its cell under the electron microscope, before burning out. The film ended on blackness, and a message.

  The T4 unites us all.

  Let us know you're out there.

  We cannot wait to greet you as the family we all are.

  The words remained for a full minute before fading, after which the film ended and reverted back to the title screen with its circle of flags.

  Anna slumped in her seat. Numbly she counted the flags. There were 24. She clicked one randomly, probably it was Thai, and watched through the first few minutes until the first cameraman spoke again. Subtitles in a foreign script popped up.

  She stopped it. She stood and went to the plastic wallet Amo had thrown to her, where she'd left it on the table. How much time had he spent on this? She felt like screaming and laughing. It was manipulation, plain and simple. He was trying to save the world. His hope had always been this big. She opened the wallet, pulled out the satellite phone and tinkered until it hissed with the sound of a live channel.

  On the upper deck looking out over blue ocean and sky, she spoke her message into the device. Probably they'd hear it straight away, she was that close still.

  "Screw you, Amo. Screw you all the way to China."

  22. TEAPOT TEMPEST

  Speed was all that mattered now.

  For ten days she sailed at full speed and slept only minutes at a time, tethered to the main mast and leaning off the starboard hull with the tiller cable in her hand. Each time she woke as she was slipping toward the water, only caught by the tether she wore around her waist, latched to an eyelet on the hull.

  She'd right herself, check the course, and go back to the battle to keep her eyes open. The world was hot and stuffy and the wind was her lullaby. She only had to close her eyes for a second to start hearing her father's cozy brown voice, the memory of a memory coming back to haunt her.

  "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day," he whispered in the Queen of Heart's imperious tones. "Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

  In those moments she was little Anna again, wrapped up in her tight sheets and looking up at her Daddy's scraggly face, dreaming of all the wonders the world had to offer.

  Each jerk to wakefulness tied the two worlds more closely together. Her time in New Los Angeles began to seem like the dream, and this the reality; she was little Anna again, always following her father.

  The catamaran reached and held on to top speeds of eighteen knots, dragged forward by the spinnaker and blasted by unseasonably good winds. The threat of pitchpoling, capsizing the yacht under the strength of the wind, was ever-present but Anna kept it under control.

  Her father was waiting.

  In ten days and nights she covered sixteen hundred miles. Already she was almost to Hawaii, which was a third of the way to China. Then the storm hit.

  It hit hard and sudden, rising from a brief squall to tempestuous winds, ten-foot waves, and spray that could choke an elephant in less time than it took Anna to fully rouse.

  CRASH

  Thunder racked the sky. A hard cold rain slashed down and Anna shook her head awake, poised off the port outrigger. In seconds she was drenched and shivering so hard she could barely unlatch herself from the hull's safety tether. The metal carabiner was slippery with scaled salt and her fingers were numb and shaky, while the whole yacht was wrenching side to side under the shifting pull of the spinnaker and main sail, both of which were whipping madly in the violent winds.

  Finally she got the carabiner catch open, but as she was about to slip the cable loose, a wave hit just as the spinnaker pulled the fore down, driving the front hulls into the water and jack-knifing the rear up like a violent seesaw.

  Anna was tossed up like shot from a catapult, caught mid-air on the tether which jerked hard at her waist, then dropped down to smack head first off the hollow hull. It rang with a deep bong and she blacked out for an instant, long enough to rouse dangling bodily in the open gap between the hull and the outrigger with her feet trailing in the thrashing water.

  Another wave hit and bucked the yacht again, driving her face hard against the hull with a horrible crunch. The catamaran rocked forward on its tiptoes, near vertical this time, and with her b
ody pressed tight to the hull Anna felt the tension approach full pitchpole. She could barely breathe through her busted nose as the reality snapped hard in her mind. Another good hit timed to a gust in the spinnaker and the yacht would certainly flip, forcing her underwater where she would die tomorrow or die today, as there was no way on Earth to right a flipped twin-hull alone.

  The frame huffed back down with a jolt, dunking her for a moment in the water. She grasped the tether cable but it was too thin and slick to climb and her wet hands pulled on it helplessly. She tried to kick off against the hull and get within reach of the handholds above, but the bucking of the yacht was too strong to get a grip.

  She dangled and smacked back and forth in the gulley between the outrigger and the hull at the whim of the ocean and the winds, knowing that at any second the whole thing would blow over.

  She forced herself to be calm. She stopped scrabbling and racked her mind for an answer. Another wave hit and she ducked her head in between her elbows, thumping against the hull. She couldn't climb out. She couldn't clip out of the tether with her full weight on the carabiner. She snatched for the knife at her yacht-belt but it must have torn loose. The answer came to her last: the only way out was the same way she'd come in.

  She pressed one hand against the hull, held one overhead toward the outrigger beam, and waited. The ocean rolled and the wind bucked and she waited, feeling for the perfect confluence between the two; a wind strong enough to sink the front, a wave at the right angle and strength to make the catamaran jackknife again.

  When it came she was ready. The yacht kicked like a donkey, flipping near vertical again and hurling her up through the gap. Her upraised hand just barely kept the outrigger from braining her, the tether spun her in a tight arc while the yacht reared up on its front, and she slammed down.

  Her hip cracked, her belly folded across the hull like a trussed damsel across a horse's saddle, and she began to slip back into the gap, but on the way down she grabbed on to the outrigger rail. The yacht teetered then fell again as the spinnaker skimmed the water and some of the wind spilled out of it. The rear smacked the waves, water sprayed into Anna's mouth and eyes, and she rolled coughing and retching to her knees on the hull walkway.

  This time she got the carabiner on the first go, pushing the metal jaw back and feeding the cable through. She almost tumbled backward into the boiling water as another wave hit, but grasped hold of the upper outrigger beam in time. She noticed that one of the fingers on her right hand was twisted backward and bleeding, then she was moving.

  In time with the wind and the waves she strode across the gap to the bridge, where she dropped into the spinnaker reel well. She punched a bolted-on emergency compartment open, pulled the knife out of it, and cut the spinnaker lower cable just as a fresh wind sprang up.

  The yacht nose-dived slightly then kicked up as the lower half of the spinnaker shot free, lifting the bulbous sail high and crazily spilling wind. It climbed sharply, lifting the whole front of the yacht up now and threatening to pitchpole backward. Cables at its sides and top still tied it to the catamaran, so she sliced those too.

  The next thing she knew she was in the water bodily. It felt strangely warm, enveloping her on all sides like cozy warm sheets. She opened her eyes and saw multicolored fabric flowing around her. Hands pressed to her back and raised her up. She spun in the sheets and saw figures rising from below, gray bodies that pressed and lifted.

  The ocean.

  They raised her higher but the spinnaker hung overhead like a heavy tent ceiling, impenetrable. She scratched at it but there was way through.

  "Go back!" she tried to shout, but no sound came and bubbles burst from her mouth. Freezing seawater ran down her throat.

  This time the calm came by itself. She could already feel the deep urge to breathe gathering at the base of her throat, the onset of hypoxia. She needed to breathe. She looked down again at the gray-limbed bodies, expecting glowing white eyes and expressionless faces driving her stupidly to her death, but that wasn't what she saw.

  They were dolphins.

  They had blunt noses and heads, bright and lively eyes, and they were trying to save her. She wrapped her arm around one and it nestled close to her chest. She got her other arm around it and it dived. In seconds her ears popped and it went dark and cold as they descended rapidly. Nearby was the flurry of other muscular gray bodies in the water. Her face touched the creature's smooth side, lost in this moment of grace.

  Then it turned and they were kicking upward, toward the ocean surface as seen from beneath. The play of pale storm-light off the toothy waves was beautiful, like the impressionist paintings Cerulean had always tried to interest her in, all choppy stucco lines of raised color spreading and intersecting. It was a second sky and she was lost beneath it, a seed in its belly waiting to be born.

  More dolphins swam to either side. She almost lost her grip but one of them pushed her from behind. They rose up the side of the sinking spinnaker together. It was a giant rainbow jellyfish hovering in the water. They drove her up through the surface and…

  Noise and chaos returned. She gasped and struck out, thumping her elbow on the metal bridge ladder-rail. She was between the front hulls and the dolphins were gone. She grabbed hold of the ladder and took shelter as another wave struck, then pulled herself up.

  Her right hand didn't work so well but it was enough. On top again she ran along the hull then leaped across the gap to the mast well. Her knife was gone again, so she slotted out the winder from its hatch and cranked the sail down. At once the thrust went out of the yacht and the sail began to thump with a deep pulse as the wind caught then spilled, caught then spilled.

  She wound faster, regardless of the blood dropping on her hands from her broken face or the blood welling up from her broken finger.

  The sail came down and she worked the jib next, until finally the yacht's riotous race through the storm halted and she dropped anchor.

  Afterward, she rolled down into the lounge, nauseous and faint. It was wet and suds of ocean foam slipped from side to side on the floor as waves hit. She could barely think for breathing. A blackness was drawing down, and she barely got safely wedged between the sofa and the bolted-down table, head to the hard wood, before it plummeted over her like an eclipse.

  23. TEA PARTY

  There were guests in party suits sitting around a long wooden tea table stacked heavily with various kettles, pots, teacups, silver dining sets and cake trays, situated in a clearing in the middle of a wood. All the guests wore faces she knew: one was Cerulean, one was Amo, Ravi was there too as were Lara and Jake and others, all of them holding cups of steaming tea.

  Anna stood at the edge watching.

  "Well you must drink tea my dear," called Lara cheerfully, as though continuing a conversation. Her head was too big for her shoulders, and a strange heart shape was painted across the middle of her lips. She was holding out a teapot in the shape of Anna's father's head. "Everybody must have tea."

  "Tea for everybody!" squeaked a little purple seahorse that bobbed in a cup that had already been poured. "And everybody for tea."

  "Now who's for tea?" Lara asked.

  Ravi held out his cup toward the head-pot. Lara frowned and snatched the cup off him. "From the left now dear," she advised sternly, "never the right, you ought know that by now."

  Ravi looked down at his lap ashamedly. Lara tipped the gray teapot-head and a thin stream of brownish-gray liquid poured from its nose, steaming gently up to the cup's very brim. She handed the cup back to Ravi.

  "Now don't spill a drop," she cautioned, "it's all very sclerotic, don't you know."

  Anna noticed the head had no handle, Lara was simply holding it by the back of its scraggly gray hair. It began to look more like a severed head being used for tea than a teapot shaped like a head.

  "That's my father's head," she said.

  "Tea for you, what's that?" Lara shouted in reply. "Well where's your cup then child? There ca
n't be tea without a cup, or cup without a tea, don't you know?"

  Anna looked at the table before her; there were cups everywhere, but none for her. She pushed her chair back and stepped away from the table. She didn't even remember sitting down.

  "I'm in no mood for tea," she said. "Not from a head."

  "Tsk tsk," Lara responded, "lint and cobbles child, how else do you expect to receive your tea if not in a cup? Some complex arrangement of tubes and lead piping, perhaps?"

  "I don't want tea!"

  Lara's face drew back, her heart-painted mouth opening in surprise. "No tea? Don't you want to see the Jabberwock?"

  "The Jabberwock doesn't even exist. It's a myth."

  Lara's big face fell. The teapot-head sagged in her hand, spilling brain-tea over the crockery-clad table. She looked at Amo who sat across from her. "Doesn't exist? Amo, have you ever?"

  "I've never," Amo replied smoothly.

  "If there was no Jabberwock then why ought we be gathered like this, drinking ten T4 teas or five tea for twos?" She made a quick count, nodded sharply, then rounded back on Anna. "Of course there is a Jabberwock, little lady, and of course there are ten, or two. Do you not think all of this adds up to something?"

  "I'm not a little lady," Anna said, growing angry, "I'm a woman and that's my father's head. Put it down."

  Lara grinned. "This old thing? I must have brewed a thousand good teas in this head. Of course the best tea is right in here." She tapped Amo's head. "Drink up, my dear."

  Amo lifted his tea and drained it in one. When he lowered the cup he was transformed, with eyes turned glowing white and a face that was wholly gray.

  Anna took a step back. A moment ago Amo had been Amo and now he was a floater.

  "Don't be afraid," said Lara, "it comes for us all in the end. Drink your tea, Ravi dear."