The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  It also cemented his disfigurement.

  He roused to heat, thirst and pain. His entire left side was alight. In the cracked rear-view mirror he saw speckles of blood tarnishing his left cheek like furious zits.

  Cynthia's buckshot.

  He tried to open the door but his left arm was agony. He unbuttoned and peeled back his bloodied shirt, creeping the denim across the swollen bowl of his shoulder.

  It was excruciating. He probed the inflamed skin and the pain knocked him out. There were two bullet holes at least, entry wounds but no exits he could detect. His bones might be smashed to powder inside the skin, with the bullets lodged in amidst them.

  The Mustang's engine was dead, so he fought his way out and stood swaying in the mid-day heat. The sun crushed him like a bug. His left arm swung at his side, painful with every grudging step he took.

  In the trunk he dredged up his go-kit hidden beneath the floor of the trunk, ever-ready to bug out; it contained guns, painkillers, medical supplies, maps, a GPS, more guns, a range of knives, water, rations, and a backpack to hold it all; everything he'd prepared for.

  He hung a sling round his neck with great care, swallowed painkillers and antibiotics, tipped alcohol over his shrapnel-stung face and the two holes in his shoulder, fixed sticking bandages over the entry wounds, drained two bottles of water, then slung what he could manage of the pack over his right shoulder and started north.

  West back to New LA.

  It took three days and three nights, hiking in a daze. Simple thoughts drove him on. Revenge was high on the list, starting with Masako.

  She had come to him.

  He'd been happy with Indira, or at least a civilized semblance of happy. She did as she was told, she served him well enough in the bedroom, and she denied him nothing thanks to her hunger for his approval. She'd wanted him to be special, her reason to go on living, so it was easy to take advantage of her, but in truth she'd been pathetic, barely a real person. Screwing her for so long was hardly better than screwing a zombie, she was so grateful.

  Masako had always been more real, something he'd lusted after for years. And she'd come to him. That was important to remember. He couldn't be held accountable for what had followed next. That she changed her mind in the midst of things; how was he to be expected to stop once he'd started? He'd barely even realized what was happening, a few no's from her, a bit of scratching, and then it all fell apart?

  Indira never minded a few no's. There were things a man needed, after all. Things a woman had to learn to accept. And she'd come to him. What had she thought she was going to get?

  Still they'd come for reprisals, wrapped in their fake righteousness, ruining everything. Ruining his life. How was it his fault that Masako had changed her mind? It was her fault. It was their fault. Killing Indira had never been part of his plan, it just happened. Better she go that way than get to stand in judgment of him, though now it seemed clear he should have shot that black bastard Cerulean twice instead. Then Amo, then a bullet for the old crone Cynthia, and he could have saved one for Indira at the end, if he'd really felt it.

  Counting each of those bullets kept him going through the pain, one for every step forward.

  He reached Las Vegas and found a hospital, but it was too late to do anything about his whole left side. Fits of paralysis and pain washed over him like waves. It was too hard to sleep, so he didn't sleep. He tried to dig into his skin for the bullets but couldn't keep conscious no matter how many anesthetics he injected himself with. Digging in his own back hurt all up and down his spine.

  Instead he sewed up the holes as best he could. He made a cast and wore it. His face scabbed and began to heal. Once he was almost spotted by a New LA patrol, and the encounter left him gasping, barely conscious, almost caught.

  He had to be smarter than that. Revenge would have to wait until he had recovered.

  He boosted a car and drove east.

  At first he had no clear destination, only to find a lair and hole up until he was stronger. New LA would be there for him when he was ready. He backtracked along Amo's line of cairns, at each stop contemplating tearing them apart.

  He didn't, though. He couldn't say why.

  In New York the true extent of his future became clear to him. Standing alone in the golden lobby and looking up at the name board, he saw his reflection in the glossy elevator doors. He favored his right side so much now that his whole left shoulder was deformed, like a hunchback.

  He tried to press it down but the broken bones had set in position. It didn't hurt too much, after two slow weeks on the road, and at least he could use his left arm a little. This was just who he was now; a cripple of sorts, like Cerulean.

  For a time he even considered letting go of revenge and starting his own commune. In Boston maybe, or Washington. He could move into the White House. Of course then he'd be competing with Amo for recruits, so he'd have to make his own cairns and develop his own story, earning a cult-like following of his own.

  He tried sketching a few comics, but couldn't come up with a narrative to fit his life that would inspire others, plus he wasn't much of an artist. Stick figures in MS Paint weren't going to cut it. The story was all just misery anyway, from the apocalypse to now, five years of playing second fiddle, being beaten, talked down to and disrespected.

  So he changed the story.

  He turned his spur of the moment murder of Indira, for which he'd felt some residual guilt, into a point of pride. She'd betrayed him for years, really, by being so weak. If she'd truly respected him, she would have stood up for herself more. He changed the rape of Masako into her outright lies about a sexual encounter she'd loved better than any in her life to date. That enraged Cerulean so much that he had to get revenge.

  Julio was the innocent victim of Masako's betrayal. Masako and Indira had been working together. It had all been a plot to bring a good man down.

  He toured New York, revisiting the scene of Amo's genocide in Times Square for inspiration. There was little of their bodies left, anywhere. Dried up husks of skin like threadbare leather on the asphalt. Teeth and bones scattered like remnants from a dragon's feast.

  He laughed, when he found the plaque Amo had left outside his favorite coffee shop, Sir Clowdesley.

  RIP

  Here I committed a genocide of some thousand of the ocean (zombies).

  It was pathetic, really, an infant's attempt to atone for a most heinous crime. It disgusted him. This was their hero, Amo the mass murderer? He himself, Julio, had killed only a handful of the dead by comparison. He was not the monster, Amo was. Amo had crushed him for years.

  He shaped this long mistreatment into the new narrative in his mind. He'd tolerated it beyond all human patience. They'd beaten him and abused him and never truly valued his contributions.

  His was the story of a victim. That was what made it so hard to write into a compelling narrative. He'd always believed he was the hero when he was just the slave. Did he really want revenge? Was he right to count every bullet with every step, dreaming of the day he'd grind them all into the dust?

  Yes.

  Now an answer came to him. Amo had taken him there; to the gun tower in Maine, beneath which there had to be a bunker. It was just another instance of Amo crushing him down, and perhaps the people in the bunker would see that.

  Those people had already rejected Cerulean, because they'd seen what he was. They would see what Julio was too, and judge him to be better. With their strength at his back, New LA would fall.

  * * *

  The tower stood in a sloping field paved with dry gray carcasses, as solid and still as a stadium floodlight. When he saw it, driving out of the snow-laden spruce forest with the view of the white-headed mountains cut clean against a brisk winter sky ahead, he almost swerved off the road. It was up and the guns were pointing outward, like stunted silver branches.

  But it wasn't firing.

  He parked and climbed out.

  Crusty bodies paved
the sloping hillside like a vast scab, spread solidly in a five-hundred yard radius. The dead. Here and there tufts of tall grass grew through them, but mostly they were an unbroken layer of leathery gray skin overlaid with a light dusting of white snow.

  The gun tower stood in its square concrete block in the center. The last time he'd come, he'd tried to destroy it. Amo had stopped him then, too; just another indignity added to the list.

  There were a few zombies standing beside it even now, brittle and thin-boned things, beating their wiry fists against the stone. He hadn't seen live zombies for some time.

  He took out binoculars and surveyed the guns. They showed signs of rust. He'd seen them in operation five years earlier; the mechanism that raised them up and let them down, but that seemed to have failed now. Perhaps it was rusted solid, or the power was out. He scoured the ranks of the fallen ocean, but few of them seemed to be freshly dead. All of them wore snow like a mantle.

  He headed over, brushing easily past the zombies. Up close the concrete block was smooth and featureless, bar the dents and scratches that teeth and scratching fingers had wrought. In one place a section of two-inch rebar was showing, as though the concrete had pulled back its lips in a sneer to reveal bone. He fingered the metal.

  Whoever was below had gone to a lot of effort to protect themselves.

  It wouldn't be enough.

  He climbed to the top of the block and touched the gun pole. The metal was a reflective silver, unblemished but for his hunchback image. Just then the block underfoot rumbled. The metal tower began to rush downward at his side, his reflection shifting imperceptibly, and it took a moment before he realized it was retracting back into the concrete.

  He threw himself off the block a second before the four gun towers cracked into the concrete, so hard they would have crushed him. He fell and hit the blanket of bodies on his deformed left shoulder, crunching something inside. He yelled out, blinking towards unconsciousness, but came back in time to see the gun tower slowly rising up again, like a daisy shooting up to the sky.

  He laughed. That was hilarious.

  Somebody was inside, still. They didn't have bullets, so they'd tried to swat him like a fly.

  * * *

  It took him a month, but he found them.

  He blew the concrete block to shards with drill-implanted explosives sourced from a nearby granite quarry; three twenty-pound bags of ANFO, Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil, normally used for mountaintop removal. They flowed down the holes he drilled in the block as a stream of tiny pink beads, like candy. He ignited them with a stick of old-fashioned dynamite, and they blew in a bubble of dirt and rock that shook the earth and knocked him off his feet half a mile away.

  The big tower flew through the air and hit the ground flat. That felt like progress. Amo had never let him take the lead here. It felt good to defy him.

  Where the block had been was now a large crater, and in the middle of that crater, like a plughole leading down to the drains, was the lower half of the chute the pole had run in and out of, as wide around as a hot tub. Within its blasted, ragged lip lay a set of powerful engine-driven wheels that ran and stopped fitfully as he watched.

  "It's gone, you idiots," he told the hole. "Your fly swatter's down."

  He dropped a camera on a wire down the chute, but it was just a chute with no doors leading anywhere, and soon enough it filled up with zombies dropped down from above. They hit the bottom then started hammering at the western inner face of the chute, like miners tapping a seam of gold.

  "Gotcha," Julio said.

  He sprayed a marker line across the field cutting to the west, then came back with a JCB. The first trench he dug was a yard deep, and he found nothing. He cut three more, until it was wide enough for the JCB to fit in, then dug another yard down and hit smooth cement.

  He cleared it in two weeks, like an archaeologist steadily brushing clay from the surface of a find. It was an unbroken rectangular structure leading away from the gun chute, approximately a hundred yards long and ten wide.

  He tapped on the cement with his crowbar.

  "Hey," he shouted, "you in there. Open up."

  They didn't answer. Of course they didn't. This was their bunker.

  He set back to drilling holes and pouring pink ANFO beads in. Before he could blow the first though, the world around him erupted. There was a cacophonous explosion that crammed the air hard into his ears and showered him with a thick wave of jagged winter dirt.

  He rolled down the curve of the dome until he was wedged hard against the edge of the pit he'd dug; dirt rolling down over him and the next explosion came.

  The earth throbbed and his body was entombed. He laughed into the cold clay, assuming the only possibility was true.

  They were bombing themselves, to get at him.

  He lay there for hours, until long after the last strike. It had been four or five blasts total he thought, though he couldn't be sure because at least one of the impacts had knocked him unconscious, cracking ribs and putting a painful crick into his jaw.

  When he finally crawled out, burrowing through the loosely packed soil slow as a worm, he saw a dusk landscape pocked with great blast craters. His makeshift home; a premium silver RV with the coal fire left burning at all hours, was now just a few ruptured shreds of torn silver, like an exploded soda can. His JCB was splayed yellow metal. His heaped bags of ANFO explosives had been replaced by a hole bigger than any of the others.

  He laughed, looking up at the sky. Drones? Missiles from a second bunker somewhere? It didn't matter.

  "You'll regret that," he said.

  * * *

  He came back with a drone of his own.

  It was a high-spec quad copter, a thousand dollars fresh from its shelf in a nearby Yangtze fulfillment center, good for remote control from a mile away and able to ferry loads of up to ten pounds.

  He loaded it with a ten-pound bag of ANFO beads, flew it to the bombsite and brought it down on the bunker's midpoint.

  BOOM.

  The drone was gone, the explosives were gone, and a lovely gout of shrapnel and dirt flew up into the air. He waited, but no bombing run began from above.

  He loaded up the second drone and tried again. He did it all day and into night, until the forest somewhere to his right erupted in fire; a second bombing run. Whole trees flung up into the moonlight then thumped to the earth, like giants tossing javelins.

  He waited it out. He couldn't see if the missiles were arcing in from land or were falling down from a drone orbiting too far above to see, but he didn't care. The people below him were fenced in; they didn't have access to the resources that he did. He had all of America, while they had only the stores they'd built up before the apocalypse hit.

  This time he would win.

  * * *

  The next day revealed an obliterated landscape. The forest south of the bunker remained in only small stands, while the rest was scooped out in great craters of dirt and rock. Trees lay like pick-up sticks, splintered, their yellow innards gleaming sappily with frost.

  A light dusting of snow coated the uneven landscape like icing sugar. The cement bunker in the midst of all that devastation reminded him of his brutalized body, like the bullets buried in his shoulder. Today, he felt sure, he would get inside.

  He sent a drone over, activated the camera, and aimed it into the hole he'd blasted. The bottom was dark. He steered it down. A gust of wind from below caught it and it bashed a rotor noisily off the inner walls and fell. It crashed against a surface at an upside-down diagonal; the video feed fizzed with distortion, then the image settled.

  It wasn't the bottom of the hole. It was the chamber below.

  INTERLUDE 2

  He unpacked a rope ladder, tied it securely to two prongs of twisted rebar, then climbed down. Cold air rose up around him, smelling faintly of mold and ammonia. Cement dust swirled around him, getting into his nose and making his eyes run.

  When his feet hit the floor, he drew a gun an
d a flashlight.

  "Hello," he called, peering into the darkness. The corridor was big, easily four times his height and maybe ten feet wide. It had the air of a tomb, untouched for generations. He rubbed his eyes and blinked into the darkness.

  "Hello!"

  Nobody answered.

  He turned, toeing his ruined drone and chips of cement out of the way, and ran the flashlight along the ceiling, where the sheer walls curved up into a smooth arch. There was something strange there that took him a moment to put his finger on.

  No lights.

  The realization sent a shudder through him. Why would there be no lights in a bunker? Plus it was freezing in here, colder than above in the open air. Didn't they need heating too? It felt like an icy breeze was blowing straight over his skin, despite his thick winter parka, but strangely the dust wasn't moving; there wasn't a breath of wind he could see, but still there was that chill.

  He ran the flashlight further around. As well as no lights, there were no switches, no outlets, no pipes or cables, nothing you would expect of a habitable bunker. He shuddered again, his legs shaking now, and shone the light down the corridor both ways, but it couldn't penetrate the depths. He chose a direction and started along it, taking careful steps with his gun held up, though his knuckles burned with the invisible wind.

  Ten paces he went, fifteen, then the beam of light caught a glint of metal.

  His finger twitched and the gun barked a rough blast. The bullet sparked off something, ricocheted four or five times in a mad tympanic fury off the walls, then fell silent but for hammering echoes.

  He stepped forward and ran the light over the space ahead. There was something but he couln't make it out. The cold was overwhelming now, a harsh wind that seemed to clamp around his head and interfere with his thinking.

  He walked closer, and with every step the cold grew fiercer. Holding up the gun became too difficult so he let it dangle uselessly by his side, then fall to the floor. His lips throbbed in the cold. His breath steamed. The flashlight wavered and he had to lean into the invisible wind.