The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  She leaned away. When she took her hands off him, they shook. She thought about the last time she'd touched him, back when she was a little girl in the California ocean, clinging desperately to his head as he strode away down the continental shelf.

  This was really it. She didn't know what to say. She leaned in and kissed his gray forehead. It made her cry.

  "Bye bye, Daddy," she said.

  From her pocket she pulled the little Alice figure, which she'd made over ten years ago. It had been in his backpack throughout his long walk, largely undamaged though a little faded by months in the water. She kissed it too then rested it in the crook of his arm.

  A giant and his daughter.

  * * *

  She sat on the RV roof in the pale midday sunlight, looking at her father's backpack. The items from inside lay spread out in a neat row like soldiers on parade: his wallet, their house keys, a blue crayon with its paper casing stripped away, assorted coins, a dark lump of something in faded plastic packaging that had to be red strings, the book of Alice in Wonderland with the cover washed away, a bottle of water, and a dry seed-case from a walnut tree.

  She touched each item solemnly with her fingertip, as if anointing them. Memories of them drifted up; picking these up from the nightstand in her home, collecting these along the way. She laid her father's phone alongside them, completing the set.

  She'd arrived and fought a Jabberwock. Now this was her treasure. She activated the phone's Hatter app and it flashed with the blue arrow and the yellow dot almost atop each other.

  "Good doggy," she said.

  The sun was sinking already and it was getting cold. High on the Mongolian steppes it was always cold without the sun. She studied her body, counting the blisters and bruises her body-mining and battle with the Jabberwock had raised up. Her arms were spattered with them, probably from tumbling or from bits of shrapnel blown out by the explosion. There was a huge purple oval on her hip and another on her shoulder. Her neck hurt and so did all her muscles, particularly her shoulders.

  There was so much to puzzle through. But the Jabberwock could wait.

  The row of items was here before her now, promising new and deeper understandings.

  She picked up the wallet and opened it. Her hands trembled as she picked through the cards inside. The top bits of them were faded to white where they'd been exposed to water, but the hidden lower halves were as bright as the day they'd been printed; a bank card, a credit card, a travel card, and finally a driving license.

  It had a picture of her father. It wasn't his peanut face or the face from her memories or dreams, but the actual man. He wore a half-smile revealing white teeth. He still had his scraggly beard but his hair was longer than she remembered. His eyes were brown and warm.

  This was her father in his prime. She checked the card's date of issue; it had to be at least a year before she was born. Her vision grew fuzzy and she imagined her father sitting in the photo booth and thinking of the future that lay ahead. Her mother had probably been there too, waiting outside the photo booth, ready to laugh with him at how the picture turned out. A young couple, young and in love, before Anna had even been conceived.

  She wiped her eyes and read her father's name for the first time. She'd never known what it was. She sounded it out to herself quietly; it seemed to fit. It was a good name, a strong name. Their address was printed there too, in a city she bore no memories of.

  She made a cairn as the sun went down. It was simple and unmarked, not for anyone but her. She laid the backpack and its items on the sand before the mound, then piled rocks atop them, like a doll's house version of the zombie cairn. She didn't paint the pile or leave any other sign she'd been there.

  Afterward she slept, and for the first time since she was a little girl there was no tug of guilt pulling at her thoughts as she slipped away, nothing at all. She was free.

  34. CAIRNS

  Dawn came bright and cold, with a biting wind whipping off the desert. Anna unfurled her world map like a spinnaker sail in the refuge of the RV, set a button down on her spot in Mongolia, and surveyed the whole.

  Thousands of miles to the east, back across an ocean and around the other side of the world, lay Los Angeles. Thousands of miles to the west it was much the same.

  She'd come here looking for her father, and some purpose for her life. Perhaps now she'd found both. More than anything, she wanted to go home. To see Amo and Lara. To hold Cerulean's hand, and tell him what he meant to her. And she wanted to see Ravi, too, and tell him some things she hadn't thought of before.

  The RV needed only a little fresh oil and some tuning to its brakes. Not one wheel had blown out yet, and she had the gear to manage when it did. She had more than enough fuel to get to the next major city.

  She laughed. She'd never researched any of this, but that was what made it an adventure.

  "I'm going through the looking glass," she said into the hissing satellite phone, atop the RV. The wind snapped at her clothes and hair so loud she could barely hear herself. If they were answering she'd never hear it. "The long way round, leaving cairns all the way. Tell Cerulean I miss him, Amo. I even miss you. Tell Ravi I miss him as well. I'm coming home, and I'm bringing the world with me."

  The road had no name that she could see, but the sand lying in shallow drifts over the surface was no worse than before. The GPS unit blinked happily on the dashboard, directing her toward Paris, France.

  She peeled out.

  * * *

  It took her four weeks to reach the coast, driving nine-hour days. She was out of Mongolia on the Murun-Bulgan highway and into Russia as summer came to its end. On the M52 she bore north and west, up through the wooded fir valleys of Biysk and past blocky communist-era statues and French-colonial municipal buildings. There were tatty old lemon-yellow Ladas everywhere, long coffin-like cars alongside great gray heaps of the dead.

  On the road northwest to Novosibirsk she raced through overripe fields that were surely once farmland for sunflowers, rapeseed and wheat, but now were studded with new growth walnut and Mongolian lime trees, strangled in places by thick Japanese knotweed. Geese honked overhead and vermilion foxes watched from the rushes of lakes that stretched on into ice.

  The number of gray mounds ebbed until there were none. The Jabberwocks hadn't reached this far. She wasn't sorry to see them go. In their place the Altai mountains rose up, wearing a brittle cap of snow. She kept the map open in the passenger seat beside her, weighted down with the hissing satellite phone, her two constant companions.

  The chill in the air deepened. She stopped at a store in a low valley and took three of the fluffiest coats they had. She left payment in the form of USBs lying neatly like orange pips on the counter. Later on she stopped at a Yangtze fulfillment center, laughing her way down the dark hallways where all the signs were written in stark Russian script, stocking up for her cairns.

  Through the Siberian pine-coated hills she rolled, to Novosibirsk where she cruised past the lilac-colored train station to the tallest building, Gorskiy City Hotel. There she unloaded, and climbed, and made her first cairn on the Eurasian continent. Rappelling down from ther twenty-fifth floor, she painted a simple STOP sign, with an arrow.

  In the lobby she left her stash of supplies, along with a handful of Amo's SEED, Ragnarok IV.

  From Novosibirsk it was a day's hop to Omsk along narrow road-channels carved through dense ancient woods, beyond which she dropped cairns all along the way to Moscow, where she painted a huge square in Red Square red. In the midst of it she put a single white Ferrari, towed over with the RV, and filled it with goodies. It stood out beautifully against the red.

  She drove on down into Europe. The chilly Russian valleys gradually gave way to the thick old growth pine and birch forests covering Belarus. Winding through long shadowy roads overcast with tangled ancient trees, she thought of Alice stumbling around lost in a forest. Occasional sudden bursts of motion interrupted her silent passage; a stag emerging fr
om the undergrowth, a hawk erupting from the shrubs with a caw. Towns blipped up and blipped out in much the same way, each heralded by grimy old Stalinist statues, many of which had been half torn down or fenced with rusting metal walls. All were coated in ivy, with saplings growing up around them.

  She left her symbol in Minsk, painted on the columns of the grand old KGB headquarters. Poland was next, with medieval castles on hills and gray concrete cities. Time whipped by in a blur of driving, painting cairns and dreaming of the days ahead. She was impatient and ready to be home. It had been months already. She looked out for people along the road and any signs of habitation, but saw none.

  After Poland there was Germany, where she left cairns in Potsdam and Hanover, in Dortmund and Cologne. In Belgium she stopped for an afternoon in Liege and ate fine, crumbly chocolate. In France she breezed through vineyards and fields ripe with pumpkins, stopping off in Amiens to sample the wine, before speeding on to the coast.

  It felt almost like coming home. The salty winds of the Atlantic blowing in over the little marina at Le Havre were a welcome sensation. She was almost there.

  35. SLEEPER CELL

  The Atlantic was easy. She found a buoyant catamaran in the harbor, spent two days fitting it and stocking it with gear, then she was away.

  Long sunny days passed by as the wind ushered her west. She lay on the new bridge and looked up at the sky and thought about the apocalypse. The ocean had died for her. Ten years ago billions had crossed the world to sacrifice themselves on giant mounds atop red Jabberwock monsters.

  What were they? She was ready to try and figure out.

  She had no further samples to study, no electron microscope or slides of the T4, but that didn't stop her. She had notepads and pens, and using them began to construct a picture of how the world had ended.

  A year before the apocalypse the world was infected with the T4 virus. In most people it made no visible changes; it simply bedded down to lurk like a viral sleeper cell. In others, the one in ten million like her and Amo and the others in New LA, it struck differently. They entered a coma that turned them briefly into floaters.

  This was some kind of inoculation. They recovered, though their recovery was abysmal, which caused the hurt.

  "Our entire cellular make-up was shifted," she said into the hissing satellite phone one afternoon, reading over her scribbled notes and stacked diagrams of cellular division. "We were like butterflies in a pupal state, unable to process the real world while our senses adapted."

  She tapped the paper with her pen, thinking.

  "At the same time, the sleeper cell spread throughout the population. Probably it was airborne. It made subtle changes in its hosts, readying them like empty vessels for the change to come. Then Amo and Lara sent the signal, one they could never have expected, the virus activated, and the world turned gray."

  She circled the sketch of a T4 she had drawn. For months it had haunted her thoughts and dreams; this three-legged thing was inside them all, controlling them from within. Now she began to think of it differently, no longer as a parasitical tripod but as a lighthouse on a great wall, looking out over an endless ocean.

  Perhaps it had saved them all.

  "What if the ocean were an immune reaction to the true infection," she told the phone, "like white blood cells. They threw themselves on the Jabberwocks. I don't know what it was, but I couldn't fight it. It had some kind of mind control. I got the sense it wanted to use me like another pupal sac, to make more."

  She paused and chewed the pen.

  "So the ocean saved us. They sacrificed themselves to stop it."

  She sat at the edge of the bridge and gazed out to sea. It was a lot to swallow still, and so much of it was conjecture. But it was a good story to tell.

  "Without the ocean we would have been overrun," she told the phone. "We owe our lives to them."

  She rubbed her eyes. A few months ago she'd been angry, and desperate to leave New LA behind. Now she wanted nothing more than to go home.

  * * *

  New York was much as she remembered it. She signed the blackboard in the Empire State's lobby for a second time, then helped herself to one of Amo's RVs in the parking lot below.

  Before she left New York she drove north to Yankee Stadium. They'd talked many times about returning here and setting the tens of thousands of floaters inside free, but they'd never done it. There were always other things that were more urgent.

  Standing now before the stadium's tall glass façade, blockaded by large Greyhound coaches Amo had used as gates, she cried a little. Through the glass she could see the ocean inside, emaciated, wilted and patting on the smeared glass futilely. They'd locked them away and denied them their true purpose, for nothing.

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  She jumpstarted the Greyhound and rolled it clear of the entrance. That was all it took, and at once a trickle of gray bodies tottered out. Anna smiled as they came over and encircled her. They touched her hair and her arms and her belly as though there was nothing at all to forgive.

  "It's good to see you," she said, as they gathered around her. "I'm sorry you had to wait so long."

  They circled her in a swarm, spreading out across the street as hundreds and thousands poured free. She climbed back into her RV, and with the windows down she drove west at a snail's pace, reaching out to touch the hands that strained up toward her.

  All these people were her family. To them she owed everything.

  "Thank you," she said, holding hands and touching their heads. "Thank you for all you've done."

  She led them west, just like she'd always done.

  "Charging up," she said softly, as she drove. Perhaps this was an essential stage in their life cycle. Perhaps they sampled what a living human felt like, then went off to fight its opposite. Maybe it even stirred old memories in their dry heads, allowing them to remember who and what they'd been.

  She smiled and cried a little at that. It would be nice to think that her father had known what he was doing at the last, that it wasn't just a T4 virus forcing him into it

  She drove on.

  Through the day and into the night they followed her, just like old times. Together they left the city behind and crawled like a long caterpillar through the fields and forests of New Jersey, headed for Pennsylvania. As dawn broke and the road swerved gently to the right, they split away and tumbled down the embankment, heading due west through the weeds and fields.

  Anna stood at the roadside and said goodbye to them as they passed. They were going to their deaths, but it was all right. She'd seen where they were going and what they were going to do, and it wasn't that scary. It was a kind of beautiful.

  "Best of luck," she said to them. "Safe journey. I know you'll do fine."

  By evening her voice was a croak. At some point she curled up on the grass verge and napped, but when she woke in the night they were flowing by. She got up and went back to thanking them, until finally they were all gone.

  The sound of them rustling through the evening dark faded like a distant freight train, honking its call through the lonely night beyond her bedroom window. She was just a little girl again, leading her friends into the water, telling them not to be scared because nothing out there was going to hurt them now.

  "I might see you again," she called after them. "Some day."

  * * *

  For two days she drove. Little towns and big states passed her by, following the route Amo had taken ten years back. She passed by Sophia's cairn and way-marker and added fresh USB seeds.

  In Chicago she turned right, and for a time drove northwest. A chill cut in but she dressed in her Siberian furs and pressed on. Snow soon lined the ground around her, as she went past Milwaukee and Madison, through Wisconsin Dells and Mauston, to Minneapolis.

  There the circuit was complete.

  She pulled up to her old house in the suburb of Minnetonka. It looked like a nice area, if you didn't count the weeds everywhere and the cracks i
n the asphalt, or the ivy creeping up the walls and the dry knotweed strangling cars beneath a mass of brown.

  There were tall brownstone houses with short front yards overgrown with trees and hedges. The cool air smelled like elderberries and winter. She looked down at the address written on a piece of paper, copied from her father's driving license. Almost there. Her hand shook as she let the RV roll slowly down the street. Flashes of memory came back to her, of where she'd run after him, where she'd fought her way through the ocean's flow.

  It all looked smaller.

  She stopped at number forty-seven, her heart beating hard. She killed the engine and climbed out, took out the house keys and held the unfamiliar metal so tightly her fingers hurt, but she didn't need them. The door still hung open. Still she held onto them, like a magic totem in her hand.

  She walked in.

  The hallway was carpeted with rushes of crinkling brown leaves. In the lazy autumn light she studied photographs on the walls. Here was her father. Here was a picture of her as a baby. Here was her mother. She was a pretty lady with dark hair. Here was a picture of all three of them together, posing over a big blue cake with a picture of Alice on the side.

  There were many others pictures. In all of them they looked happy. There was no hint of the misery to come. Anna peered closely at her mother, trying to understand who she was behind those smiling eyes.

  It didn't really matter. They were both dead now.

  In the kitchen she found an empty bowl of cereal on the counter, and laughed. Up the stairs, her old room was full of light. The bed lay in the middle, so small. She'd spent a year in it, just a little girl with her father by her side. She imagined him standing outside the room, spending long moments preparing himself to enter, putting on his smile and pushing through another day.

  He had done so much for her, both in life and in death.

  Around the room her pictures were still tacked to the walls, their colors still bright; images of birdmen and birdwomen, rainbow warriors and horses with slug legs, monsters and heroes and Alice too, weaving her way amongst them with grace and wit and childlike ease.