The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Warm sea winds washed over her. The sun was already up and hidden behind its mask of white cloud, and the mound was there. The city was still and the mounds were everywhere, and that was that.

  "Lint and cobbles," Anna muttered. Perhaps there'd been another dream of her father in the night, alone on his rocky island.

  She looked and thought that this was what the crazy woman had warned her of; this moment when madness beckoned.

  "Everything we ever did, turned to naught," Anna said.

  It was a true thing. It was the T4, and it meant her father would be somewhere like this, buried in a meaningless mound.

  For so long she'd believed she'd find him, somehow heal him, and bring him home to be a father again. Now she accepted that that would never happen. Even to see him would be a kind of surrender. Perhaps it would take more than she had to give. Perhaps it would break her mind too.

  The sting of the rifle's recoil still echoed in her palms, from killing the woman. She held up her hand and looked at the middle finger she'd set herself. Crooked now, and forever. Everything was a cost.

  The satellite phone hissed by her side. She barely remembered picking it up and turning it on. She clicked the button to transmit, and the static fuzz dropped away. She thought about what she'd like to say, came up with nothing, and let the button go.

  Amo was back there, perhaps, on the other end. She thought back to his expression, when he caught her and Ravi vandalizing the ruins of LA, and maybe now she understood why. There had been millions of windows to smash, millions of walls to deface, but not a single one they could spare. It wasn't fair to leave that kind of despair for others to find.

  In this world you had to build.

  * * *

  She heaved the first of her munitions crates out of the front hulls and set it on the bridge. She would do this her way. No one said building meant you couldn't also destroy. You just had to do it right.

  She pulled the yacht up a few hundred yards from the bridge, dropped anchor, and lifted the rocket-launcher to her shoulder. This would make an impact.

  She took aim and fired. The rocket steamed out on a trail of smoke, flew low under the bridge and arced gracefully into the water, where it sank without exploding. She reloaded, raised the trajectory and fired again, this time hitting the side of the bridge with a massive 'crump'. Flames burst out like a wind-whipped spinnaker, then dissipated within a smothering ball of smoke.

  Shrapnel peppered the water. A tiny piece of something pinged off one of the hulls.

  Sea winds soon cleared the black smoke, revealing a mangled mess of bridge railings and chewed-up asphalt. Good enough.

  On the beach she transferred tools and equipment from the catamaran onto a flatbed cart; red and white paint cans, heavy-gauge cables and a brush. She pulled the load along the shady path to the bridge, whistling a song from another time.

  "Always look on the bright side of life."

  It was from the Life of Brian; a film Cerulean had insisted she watch. Brian sang it while he was getting crucified. Now it cheered her on.

  She walked along the bridge to the gap she'd blown open, and there she set to work. She chose a dusty black Lexus and painted it red and white. She attached cables from the chassis to the bridge supports, then painstakingly rolled the car toward the edge, using a large metal strut for leverage.

  At last she shoved the Lexus through the hole and off the bridge. The cables snapped taut with a musical CLANG.

  The cables held. She leaned out over the edge, to where the red Lexus swayed on its cables a hundred yards below. The arrows she'd painted on it were starkly clear, pointing up.

  Almost done.

  She painted the floor around a nearby BMW white and stocked it up with Amo's USBs, and a message from her. Go to New LA, she said. Go to Amo.

  Back on the yacht she sailed into the bay. Looking back, there was her swaying Lexus beside the mound of bodies, red all over with white arrows pointing upward. It was a silent answer to a silent question. Defiance is still possible, it said. Despair can be a choice.

  Hopefully it would hang there for years like a lighthouse.

  "Farewell, Japan," she said.

  A fair wind blew her out of the bay and soaring back to sea. Her father and her fate were waiting.

  WEST

  30. MONGOLIA

  She circled Japan in a few days. At times the wind pushed her close enough to the coast to see gray mounds. Every one steeled her resolve. She sailed and she slept and soon enough she was crossing the open gulf of the East China Sea.

  She passed by rocky Jeju Island fifty miles off the coast of South Korea and bore northwest, passing two days later around the Shandong peninsula into Bohai Bay. China dawned off her port side with cities and green forests and intermittent mounds just like Japan. Anna didn't care; she'd stopped trying to keep track of the numbers. It wasn't going to stop her now.

  Tianjin docks looked much like the dockyards of LA. Tall horse-like yellow cranes stood on discolored concrete quays, ready to unload container ships that would never come. A huge tanker lilted drunkenly on its side, rusting a bloody red. Beyond them lay another city skyline.

  She pulled in to the concrete dock, and set foot on another continent for the first time in her life. The air smelled like hot asphalt, like the air in any city anywhere.

  "I'm in China," she told the hissing satellite phone.

  Nobody came to greet her.

  She unloaded the yacht with brisk economy. It didn't take too long to find a suitable vehicle; an RV in a covered sales lot a few blocks over. She serviced and stocked it with tires, gas, water and oil, charged up a battery with a hand crank, then drove back to the dock. As it grew dark she loaded her gear, then started to drive.

  By morning she was into the countryside, slipping the nightmarish reach Tianjing's suburbs. The road weaved through wild rice paddies, fruit orchards where ripe kumquats and dark blood oranges grew side by side, and fields of tall waving grain, toward the endless blight of Beijing.

  Beijing was neverending, like New York and Los Angeles and Tokyo all rolled into one. She turned the RV's music up to get her through, 50 Cent and Jack Johnson alternately. Mounds were everywhere, with no sign of recent life.

  She raced north in a blur, sleeping little just like on the yacht, through the little towns of Changping and Badaling, past segments of the Great Wall. Huge blocks of orange-gray stone rested one atop each other, topped by the in-out crenellations of battlements and punctuated every mile or so by watch towers.

  She sped on through Zhangjiakou to Ulanqab in a long afternoon of buildings and fields, then angling off toward Mongolia. The land changed rapidly from the lush green of crops, trees and grass to the orange dust and barren yellow rock of the Inner Mongolia steppes. It got colder and the road ascended sharply, zigzagging up switch-backed roads over bald foothills.

  One hundred miles from the border with Mongolia a chime rang out behind her.

  She was slumped in the driver's seat with her head resting on the window and a red lace hanging from her mouth like bloody drool, listening to the rampaging lyrics of Eminem, so she didn't really hear it.

  The beeping sound came again, rising in a brief furlough in the music. She switched Eminem off and slowed down, listening more carefully, until it came again.

  BEEP BEEP

  She pulled over and killed the engine. Her heart began to race. She climbed out of the driver's seat and glared back down the middle of the RV, as if defying whatever was beeping to do it again.

  BEEP BEEP

  It lit up to boot. For a long moment she couldn't move, too overcome by the weight of this message finally finding its way to her. She'd dreamed of it for so long.

  BEEP BEEP

  She lurched down the RV and swept her father's phone off its charger on the rear table. The screen had activated itself with a notification which was already fading, but meant everything.

  Hatter signal reacquired.

  She opened
the phone and clicked through to the app, still a fog of gray where the map should be, but now there wasn't only the blue arrow for her at the bottom, there was also a yellow dot at the top, pulsing like a breath drawing in and drawing out.

  Her father.

  Her hands shook and she felt like she might burst with excitement. After ten years of waiting she was almost there.

  * * *

  Mongolia flew by in a blur of sulfurous canyons, jagged battlement hills and constant rising steppes, broken by an increasing number of tall gray mounds. Once one of them almost blocked the road, but she managed to just squeeze by, scraping the paint off the RV's sides.

  She drove deep into the night with the moon hidden behind clouds, so she couldn't make out the road beyond her RV's headlights, taking sharp hairpin turns at sixty, propelled onward by the beep of the phone. Only after grazing off her third railing barring the edge of a steep cliff did she slow down and stop.

  It would be no good to pitchpole again, not having come this far.

  She woke to a spluttery hissing. Freezing in the cold tin of the RV she didn't recognize the sound for a long moment, then bolted up to the front.

  The satellite phone was trying to speak.

  She clamped the transfer button down. "Cerulean!" she shouted into it.

  A silent second passed then there was a muffled response, words broken by thousands of miles of static and space, but she recognized the intonation.

  It was Cerulean.

  Happiness swelled up and she kicked the RV door open, climbed the ladder to the roof and held the phone up to the pale pre-dawn sky. It fizzled and hissed, but she thought she caught a single word.

  "Anna!"

  "Cerulean," she called back into it. "Can you hear me? I'm in Mongolia, Cerulean! I'm really here, I've almost found my father!"

  The phone whispered and hushed with words that overlaid and rolled like tides. She basked in it, reaching out to both of her fathers at once. It didn't matter that she couldn't hear him clearly or that he couldn't hear her. They had just communicated over half the world.

  Soon the fizzing faded out, leaving her laughing and awed.

  She drove on.

  * * *

  There were valleys filled with floater bodies. In places they had gathered beneath elaborate shrines perched on winding crag-tops, as if seeking priests to officiate at their own mass rite for the dead.

  Her blue arrow drew closer to the flashing yellow. In a day she left the valleys behind and entered an endless landscape of flat orange dust. The temperature rose in the sun, and she tore down the straight, empty road with Amo's favorites, the Beatles, jangling out through the open windows.

  Tiny settlements of a few tin shacks punctuated the empty steppes. A great herd of camels flooded the road and she honked her way through them. They didn't part easily, and for a time she was becalmed in their midst, shouting at them to move from the RV roof.

  They stank of unwashed hair, piss and dust.

  "You filthy bastards!" Anna catcalled them. "Take a bath. You're no better than plastic."

  They catcalled back with honking brays and spat at her car. It was glorious.

  The mounds grew in frequency, and dwarfed the ones in Tokyo. In two days she hit Ulaan Baatar and swept on by. At the edge was a huge statue of Genghis Khan, sitting on horseback facing east over the city.

  In the middle of a desert plain, two days later with sand and dust in her hair and eyes, she stood before a mound a hundred feet high in the middle of a constellation of dozens, with the Hatter app beeping constantly, and knew she'd finally arrived.

  Her father was right here.

  The blue arrow and yellow dot overlapped. She clicked off the beeping numbly. This was it. This mound, somewhere, contained her father.

  A few tears leaked down her cheeks. She'd expended so many already, it felt like she hardly had any left. The sky was blue and the mounds were gray and this was the shape of things.

  "Hi, Daddy," she said to the mound.

  She circled it, hoping to spot him on the outside. She remembered the yellow lightning bolt on his pajamas, but probably that would have faded by now, if the whole thing hadn't torn off underwater.

  She picked out some bodies wearing torn and weathered backpacks on the mound's exterior, spotted with sand and sun tarnish. She studied them, but couldn't tell if they were her father by their wrinkled faces or their withered skin.

  She opened up their packs. There had been a tiny figure of Alice in her father's pack, she remembered, alongside his copy of Alice in Wonderland, his wallet, his house keys, a clutch of red laces and maybe a Coke. She remembered the contents so clearly still.

  But few of the bags had anything left inside. None of them had anything she recognized.

  She circled slowly around the mound, kicking through drifts of sand. Perhaps these people had been through the Pacific like her father. They might have walked across the bottom, or swam, thousands of miles just to come here and build this pointless cairn, for no reason at all.

  It wouldn't stop her.

  "You're in there, aren't you?" she asked the mound. "You're waiting for me, I know it. You've been waiting for years."

  Her father.

  The mound was a mound. Grim determination shifted to excitement, and her skin tingled. She'd promised, she'd come this far, and now she was so close.

  She began unloading the RV.

  31. JABBERWOCK

  Anna looked at her chosen spot, much like every other spot, and considered. The hammer weighed heavily in her hand.

  "It's not smashing people," she muttered to herself, "don't think of it as smashing people. They're more like snails."

  Before her a single hand stuck out from the mass with the fingers spread, like it was beckoning her in. An invitation was definitely the way to think of it, not defiling the dead. This was why she had come, after all. Destruction didn't have to be destructive.

  She brought the hammer down.

  It hit the hand and the hand cracked away at the wrist, falling to hit the dirt with a thump. Anna's arm tingled with the impact, and she leaned in to study the fracture line.

  It was perfectly clean, like it had been cut with a laser, and showed a neat, stony cross-section of dried skin, stringy tendon, gray muscle and bone. She ran her fingers over the surface; it was dry and smooth, not gross at all.

  "They're solid all the way through," she said to the hissing satellite phone, resting on an outcrop of knee. "And smooth, like a perfect slice on flint. I'm going to dig to the middle."

  The phone hissed.

  She brought the hammer down again.

  After three hours she'd worked up a thorough sweat and made a visible hollow in the mound. At first she'd intended to make a neat and narrow tunnel burrowing straight through to the center, but actually it proved far easier to topple bodies away whole than cut through them.

  All she had to do was smash away fingers and feet that were hooked around their fellows, then lever the heavy bodies down. It grew easier the wider she went, taking apart the outer skin of the lattice before moving to the next layer in. Their bodies became a sizable pile behind her, so she used the RV and a length of looped cable to drag them away, making a new mound elsewhere.

  Her shoulders ached, but really this was just like sailing without a break; a question of will. There was no way she would sleep until it was done.

  Through the night she dug. At times the hammer couldn't crack a particularly tightly clenched fist, and she brought out her crowbar, pickaxe, electric drill or blowtorch. With them she sawed, pried, drilled and burned her way into the heart of the mound like a worm in an apple, coring a cavernous tunnel that led eerily through solid bodies, narrowing like a cone the deeper she went. Overhead and to either side their bodies held fast like carved angelic figures in a cathedral, reaching down.

  Sometime in the early morning, half-dozing in a kneeling position with the flashlight guttering by her side, she glimpsed a flash of color ahead.
At first her sleepy brain thought it was a fish darting back into the coral, but a few moments later she realized that wasn't possible, because she wasn't at sea anymore.

  She rubbed her eyes awake and trained a flashlight through the porous wall of limbs and trunks ahead. She'd come about fifteen feet already, turning out well over a hundred bodies. She was probably almost at the center, where the hint of color was.

  "Holy shit," she muttered.

  There was something red, bright red right in the middle of the mound, standing upright like a totem pole. She pressed her face close to somebody's solid armpit to peek through the gap, while trying to angle the light through another gap to illuminate whatever lay beyond.

  It looked like a leg. Like a massive, enormous red leg, connected to a massive, enormous figure.

  She hadn't expected that. She pulled back and rested on her haunches to puzzle it over. What the hell was this? A different kind of floater? Was one of these at the core of every mound she'd seen so far, like the pips in an apple?

  She kept digging.

  By noon, with hot dry winds swirling dust into the mound's inner sanctum, she had cleared through to the naked red giant at the center.

  It was a naked red giant.

  It was so massive that its head and shoulders disappeared into the roof of bodies above, easily three times her height. The white stone floaters right next to it clung on like bandaging on a mummy, and had been incredibly difficult to crack, drill, and prize clear, packed in tighter than anywhere else.

  Now it stood before her, largely excavated. Between its legs, where some kind of genitalia should have been, was a blank space. Its thighs were as thick as Colorado redwood trees and its chest was as big as the air conditioner they used to cool the giant IMAX theater. Its arms lay straight down at its side, giving it the appearance of a toy soldier standing on guard. Its forearms looked a little like shrunken wings, with a webbing of razor-sharp cartilage sticking out and running down from the elbows to the little fingers.