The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  She shut it down. It was all too hopeful. If she had heart enough, she'd dump all his USBs into the ocean.

  * * *

  Oahu Island dawned off her bow early the morning after. It was the perfect place for a cairn, Amo would think, but she'd left her first cairn already, perhaps the only one she ever would; a stinking grave ship on the ocean, with a rotting corpse wedged inside.

  Soon enough the stench would be gone. The salt air would wither the woman's skin and bones, storms would wash away her tomato plants and punch holes in her hulls, and the ship would sink. On the ocean floor she'd come rest amongst the gray people of the ocean, as they strode through the ocean along the sand, so deep down and dark where nothing could survive.

  There she would remain, preserved forever.

  That was Anna's legacy, her cairn. It was the truth, and the truth was all she could leave behind.

  Honolulu went by. Anna faced the setting sun. This way lay her father, with nothing but water ahead for another seven thousand miles. After that lay Japan, China and finally Mongolia, and the only answer she'd ever sought.

  27. MOUNT

  She thought the first mound of bodies was a crag jutting up through the water, and sailed on by.

  Five weeks had passed and she was weary. Every day was the same, an unending litany of tasks, and always the sea was there, haunting and mocking her.

  "Anna, where's your father?" it asked her. "Anna, where's your mother?"

  In time the sense of numbness had been swallowed by boredom. Every day and every night were the same, again and again, a ceaseless race with the sun which she never could win. She'd gotten so sick of the monotony that she'd even turned Amo's satellite phone on, but all it did was fizz, catching no signals.

  The catamaran sailed on. She was too tired to think. She felt blind to the line dividing sea from sky anyway. Weren't they the same? What was the difference if it was all blue? Sometimes she'd find herself lying off the edge of an outrigger, daydreaming that she was sailing on a bed on an ocean of gray bodies.

  There were no more milestones left to look out for. Since the tiny island of Midway, barren but for a few concrete foundations and weedy runways, there had been nothing.

  She set her anchor at night but still drifted off course. One morning she woke in the midst of a vast garbage patch, becalmed. Not a breath of wind troubled the sails, not even when she took out the spare spinnaker. It wouldn't inflate a bit.

  Trash lay on all sides for as far as she could see, congesting the flat seas with a plastic stew of footballs, kayaks, frisbees, lunchboxes, toilets, Lego blocks and plastic bags.

  For three days she endured the drone of the docking engines as they propelled the yacht forward at the miserly pace of half a knot. It was nothing, but to run the propellers harder would risk them clogging with chopped plastic, and she had limited spares.

  She could swim faster than this. The floating garbage patch stretched for miles. Leaning over the yacht's edge she sometimes poked at items in the jumble, digging for a sight of the clear water beneath, but there was only more trash. This was the tip of the iceberg. She felt like a tiny ant on the back of a trash vanilla pudding, cutting a trail that quickly sealed over behind her.

  No wonder the apocalypse came to these people, she thought. The world was half dead already.

  She made her peace with the satellite phone, leaving it tuned in and on all the time, a low hiss in the lounge. She made no reports to it, and nothing came through in return, but still it helped.

  For something to do, she opened all the water jugs and gathered the USBs in one super pack, ready for the day she decided to throw them overboard. She dug through her cache of weapons and made a few hours amusement taking potshots at the trash. Raking the water with assault rifle fire helped with the frustration. The rocket launcher made bright eruptions of plastic.

  She crossed off days on the lounge wall like a prisoner. She thought about the woman in her yacht, and her little boy, and all the other lost survivors who might be out there still, taking their own slow paths to extinction.

  Then she saw a second mound.

  She was still some three hundred miles off the coast of Japan, and there wasn't supposed to be any land here at all. She steered over and it soon became clear this was not a rock or a half-sunken ship or the torn foundation of an oil-rig, but something else entirely.

  It was a pile of solidified ocean bodies.

  * * *

  She stood at the hull edge with the sail furled and anchor down, staring at the mound. It was a humpish jut of people, motionless and heaped up about five feet through the water like a gray mound of jelly, maybe fifteen feet around. She'd never seen anything like it, except perhaps in Amo's comic book.

  The bodies were sinewy and withered; gray skin shriveled down against the bone, with screwed-up peanut faces she couldn't make out. Their eyes were tightly closed with no hint of white light spilling from within. They were skeletons, basically, held to each other in a weird kind of lattice, rife with hollow gaps like the atomic structure of a complex carbohydrate.

  On the whole, they looked like really boring gray coral. Bits of hair remained in places, scraps of clothing long-faded of color. All of them were facing inward to the center of the heap, with their arms and legs spread out and interwoven with others. She imagined a fanciful party game, where all the people piled onto each other in a heap, then were frozen solid.

  Leaning over the outrigger edge, she strained to touch one of them.

  "Holy shit," she whispered, when she did. Its skin was as solid and unyielding as marble. She leaned closer and laid her palm on the sharply ribbed back of an emaciated figure, still wearing the shreds of a jacket and belt. She ran her fingers along the indentations where its skin had sunken into the valleys between ribs, but there was no give at all, no spongy or leathery sensation. She leaned further and shoved.

  It was rock hard.

  Without thinking too much about it, she anchored the yacht and slipped into the water. Touching the bodies felt strange at first, holding to them like she would a dock, but their solidity quickly removed any sense of unease. They were truly dead now.

  Her feet found purchase underwater, a smooth shelf of shoulders and backs. She ducked her head and looked beneath the surface; the water was cloudy but she could see far enough to confirm the obvious.

  The mound continued downward in a tight stack, made up of hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies. It continued past the point where the water grew too murky to see; an irregular slope of arms, legs, backs and heads descending into darkness.

  Above water she ran quick calculations that rapidly sprawled into the tens or even hundreds of thousands. The Pacific averaged at about two and a half miles deep, and if this mound was really anchored at the bottom, the number could be astronomical. Her mind spun. Even if the mound went down as a perfectly straight pole for two and a half miles, with say twenty bodies to every five feet, then that made…

  Around forty thousand.

  Her jaw lolled open. Forty thousand bodies if it was only a pole straight down, and she already knew it wasn't; it was a mounded heap. She looked at the skeletal gray arm she was holding like it was a handrail. Were there millions right here?

  On the yacht she collected her scuba gear. Two suits hung in the starboard rear hull, behind the water jug blocks. She laid one out with tanks, tubes, breathing apparatus, mask and flippers, tested the air pressure and flow, checked the mask and suit for cracks, then put it on.

  Off the outrigger rail she pulled the mask down and tipped over the edge.

  The water closed around her and down she went. In a second she hit the pyramid's slope and took hold of it to pull herself deeper, using rocky limbs like rungs in a swimming pool. The water quickly grew dark and she hit her shoulder-mounted lamps, which lit up the ocean with countless floating motes like stars in the sky.

  She went down: thirty feet, fifty feet, where the slope of the mound steepened until she was descending a
lmost vertically. She'd never been much deeper than fifty feet but now she blew right past that limit, beginning to feel the pressure of the water on her skin. A warning light blipped in her mask as she hit seventy.

  Then she saw movement. She stopped descending as a bright flash of color slunk back into the hollow, root-like structure of intertwined bodies. Her pulse hammered against her ribs and she crept the next few feet with all her nerves tingling.

  More flickers of color darted inside the tower. She peered in through a gap between diagonal thigh pillars, aligning her shoulder lamps to cast light through the woven bodies. It wasn't hollow inside; there were more bodies within like a second layer to the onion, and in the gap between the layers new life had sprung up.

  She laughed into her respirator as a school of orange clownfish scurried away from her lights and took refuge in a bright pink ribbon of coral. More coral and anemone were everywhere in bright shades of blue, yellow and red, climbing inside the body tower like ivy. More bright fish darted in and out to eye her, inspecting this strange black monster briefly before fleeing home.

  If there was coral then that meant…

  She angled her lamps back down and pulled herself five feet deeper, reaching the dusty sea floor. It was awash with a carpet of drifting life. Countless tiny eyes and hermit crab legs and fish no bigger than her thumbnail ducked back into their crevices as she swept her lamps across them.

  She was barely eighty foot deep and this couldn't be the ocean floor. She swam a short distance, careful to mark her bearings as she went, and soon found the land tapered down sharply.

  This had to be a seamount, a mountain rising underwater, probably the remnant of an old volcano. Here at this peak the ocean had built a tower out of bodies; a mountain on a mountain.

  At the base of the tower she tried to peer deeper through the scaffold of limbs, but all she could see was the second skin of bodies within.

  A bizarre notion came to her, that perhaps there would be a door somewhere. She would knock and a witch would open up.

  "Excuse me, I'm looking for my father?" she'd ask.

  The witch would stuff her in an oven and make her into seafood muffins.

  She flippered around the tower. It was not as massive as she'd first suspected, perhaps a hundred feet in circumference, but there were no doors, arches or windows. Once she tried knocking on a broad stretch of withered back, but nobody answered.

  It was simply a heap of solid dead bodies, like a sculpture. She flashed back to Amo's first comic rendering of zombies in New York: a tower stretching up to the sky, reaching for images of loved ones in the sky. Was this the same? It was the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where there was nothing that could possibly hold any meaning for the lost souls of fallen America.

  There were only fish.

  * * *

  On the surface she climbed to the top of the mound. It seemed more disrespectful somehow than pulling on their limbs underwater, but it also seemed important.

  At the top there was a single bald head, shiny and hard. She knocked on it too. She considered setting a single USB key atop it, but knew it would wash away with the first strong wave. She tried to prize open its eyes, but even the eyelids were set like stone. She rustled through the jeans pockets on a floater nearby, but they were ragged and empty.

  What now?

  On the yacht she took photos, feeling some responsibility to document this, even if she ultimately only threw the USBs away. She took out her father's phone and studied the Hatter app. There was no yellow flash marking his position, but then his last coordinates were still a thousand miles away.

  Was her father heaped in a tower too?

  She took out the satellite phone and tuned it to hiss. There was no shame in contacting them for this.

  "They're in a tower," she said into it. "Thousands of them, just like Amo drew in his comic. In the ocean. They've gone solid. I don't know why, but I'm going to find out."

  She set the phone back down. She tossed all the scuba stuff on the floor of the lounge, then raised the sails and the spare spinnaker. Fresh energy poured through her.

  The race was on again, and she wasn't going to delay a second longer.

  28. JAPAN

  The coast of Japan materialized on the horizon two days later. The catamaran raced high in the water, cutting through the waves at a record nineteen knots with the spinnaker bulbous at the fore. Anna leaned far off the outrigger edge, pulling the yacht into balance with the weight of her body.

  The coast was green and gray and brown beneath a hazy, hot white sky. As she drew near a thick humidity swelled out to envelop her, raising a sweat that didn't blow away in the breeze. The air smelled so rich with dust and sap it made her dizzy. She whipped the spinnaker line like it was the reins on a horse.

  Soon enough she saw.

  The coastline was littered with mounds. They stood up off the horizon like ridges on a spine, each a sharp rise of gray reaching up. She'd mistaken them for buildings at first, but they were bigger and wider than that, and the true scale of them didn't become clear until she neared land.

  They were massive. There were dozens of them up and down the coast, like little mountains. It meant millions of people. She'd had no intention of stopping in Tokyo, but she couldn't ignore this.

  In three hours she was soaring down the great open mouth of Tokyo Bay, past long expanses of overgrown green and yellow fields fading into dirty gray factories and docking yards that stretched for miles, all spiked with enormous heaps of the dead.

  Soon a huge blue bridge hung before her, arcing easily half a mile across the bay. On the left it fed into the city proper, amongst dozens of tall skyscrapers. The majority of them were banal glass or gray constructions, though the odd unusual one rose up from their midst, like nails waiting to be hammered down, punctuated everywhere by the lumpy mounds.

  On the right the bridge descended in an elegant curve to a low shock of malls fronted by a shallow beach, with amongst them the largest mound yet, half-spilled into the water like a heap of forgotten salt.

  It towered higher than the bridge. Anna couldn't take her eyes off it as the wind cut out of her spinnaker sail and she drifted in closer. She dropped anchor just shy of the sand and went over the rail and into the water.

  She strode up the beach and to the mound, willing the wobble and sway in her legs away.

  "Oh, God," she murmured.

  It was all bodies. Standing here like this, with the whole of it in sight at once, it was undeniably plain that tens of thousands of people had died to make it.

  She dropped to her knees while the land and sky swirled around her. Here was a body, and another body, and another still, this one with dark frizzy hair, this one wearing a fraying backpack, this one sporting the upper part of a smart black shoe around its ankle like a bracelet. This was what the woman had seen, and what the boy had seen, and the reason for the loss of them both.

  Tears threatened to overcome her.

  She stumbled around the mound, taking in its dizzying scale. She drew closer and peered through the limbs, as she'd done before on the water. The bodies were a little plumper here, not as withered as those at sea, so the gaps between them were smaller, but still she could make out a second skin beneath the outer layer, and maybe another layer inside that.

  "Hey," she said softly, "hey, I'm here."

  They didn't respond. She touched a shoulder cautiously, but it felt just the same; as hard and smooth as alabaster. There was no scent of rot or decay, only the heat and the dust.

  "I'm here!" she said, then turned to shout it across the bay. "I'm right here."

  From the yacht she gathered a pair of binoculars. The bodies held her weight easily as she climbed, though it was strange at times to take an outstretched hand for a handhold. At the top she sat on a man's back, flat like an altar, and looked out above the bridge to the full extent of the city. It went on endlessly. She'd always thought of New LA as an endless, characterless sprawl, but this sprawl w
as the Pac-Man that would gobble her city up. It went on so far she couldn't see the edge, and where much of LA was single floor warehouses and duplexes, this was all high-rise.

  Gray mounds grew like ant hills, in their hundreds.

  She studied the skyline with her binoculars, looking for any sign of human activity: a giant 'f' perhaps, a Michael Jordan, a smiley face. There were holes bitten out of buildings, and trees growing on top of skyscraper roofs, crashed cars and roads filled with moss and a whole section of town sunk beneath a murky swamp, but there was no sign of human habitation. No paintings in the windows, no mattresses laid out in the shape of an SOS in the streets, no arrows pointing to cairns, no smoke rising, nothing. There were just endless ranks of buildings and mounds like gravestones in a vast cemetery.

  She put the binoculars down as the tears got the better of her. Millions dead and nothing to show for it. The ocean had done this and left nothing but their corpses behind, like the body casts of worms in the sand. The message they delivered was utterly clear, and it broke her across its back.

  Total and utter defeat.

  It was the meaningless end of the human race. It was what her father had come so many thousands of miles to do. This was the shape of the T4 that was inside them all, the parasite at the heart of all their hopes and dreams, making of them a complete folly.

  It was too much. She stumbled and rolled and staggered back down the mountain.

  Mounds ringed the bay. They seemed to swell up over her like waves, threatening to crush her like a little girl in the water. She ran back to the yacht and crawled into her bed again. The people were THUMPING outside and her father was beating at the door and there was nothing she could do but get under the covers and hide.

  29. BRIDGE

  She woke to silence and weak morning light. Her head ached and the sheets were stifling around her. She was still wearing her clothes from the day before.

  She kicked out of the sheets, drained a liter bottle of water, and climbed to the bridge.