The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I scanned the pole down to the concrete block. Around it there were about fifty zombie bodies standing and smacking at the concrete like a drum. Beneath their feet were perhaps a thousand dead zombies, laid out like a hellish carpet that left barely any sign of the grass below. Most of them still wore clothes, as they hadn't shriveled enough to slough them off, so in truth it looked like a massacre.

  It looked like Times Square, where I'd killed thousands. I gagged and this time swallowed back acid reflux. Julio didn't comment.

  The sound of the fifty or so beating at the block was a steady, low drum line.

  "There has to be people underneath it," I said. "Enough to pull all these over and keep them coming."

  "And they knew it would happen," Julio continued, gesturing at the surrounding land. "Look at the location, it's a perfect line of sight for miles. The whole area's a killing ground."

  I worked the logistics of this new reality round in my head: autocannons, lines of sight, anti-jamming mechanisms. "They must have thought the zombies could dig down to them. If enough of them massed, maybe it would be possible. Why else have the guns here?"

  "Why else?" Julio agreed.

  We lay there longer, watching through binoculars, perhaps an unspoken agreement that we wanted to see the big guns fire. It didn't take too long; only a few hours as more stumbling bodies filtered out of the forests to beat at the block, some traipsing up past me along the road.

  At last the guns barked, and the suddenness of it made me flinch.

  RATATATATATATATATAT

  The sound washed over us like an avalanche, and out on the field hot metal found dry flesh and tore it apart.

  Zombies fell. It made me sick to my stomach to watch, as bodies who were once mothers and husbands, children and wives fell like mown grass, their corpses piling up like a thicker layer of snow over the ones who'd come before. It was a nightmare, though it only went on for a few minutes before the fire rate slowed, then fell silent. Maine was still again.

  "They're watching us," Julio said.

  The guns had shifted angle to point directly at us. The reflected light off a lens was there again.

  "We should back up," I said.

  Julio grunted assent, but neither of us moved, perhaps transfixed by the notion that through that lens and down that periscope pipe, someone down below was looking back.

  Three thousand people. It was crazy. Was it Mecklarin himself? The mad fancy of holding one of his audiobooks up, like I might get it signed, ran through my mind. Before I could do it though the guns folded in on themselves into grooves in the pole, fast and smooth, then the pole itself dropped rapidly back into the concrete box.

  Abruptly, it was gone. The box remained. A few zombies were already picking their way across the fields of slaughter.

  "Shit," I whispered.

  "Shit indeed," Julio agreed. "They've seen us now. We have to kill these bastards before they kill us."

  God I wish I'd listened to him.

  * * *

  It takes a lot to admit Julio was right.

  Sitting in my hot, pathetic closet while my people back in the Theater wait for me to come lead them to safety, I face the reality that for ten years, I've been wrong. I was wrong about him and I was wrong about Cerulean's gun turret, and it has led us to here. It stings like something I can't understand. It fills me with doubt that I can't overcome.

  What if the trail of cairns was the wrong idea? What if sending Anna off was wrong? What if the next choices I make will be wrong too, and lead to the deaths of my wife, my children, my friends at the hand of a vomiting demon? The terror of it paralyzes me. I should go down there and tell them I'm not the man they thought I was. I don't know what to do, because whatever faith I had was based on judgments that were wrong.

  But it's not only these. It makes me sick to really, truly face it. Masako too, and Indira, and Cerulean, lay all these at my door. Trust, goddammit. I shouldn't have trusted anyone. I should have killed Julio the first time I saw him, but I didn't because I was weak. I've always been weak, and shit, people just do things. People just do things and you can't plan for that or trust that they won't.

  11:00, I'm due to give a PowerPoint in an hour, but maybe I'll just hole up here until the deadline passes. Maybe they truly are better off without me. I just don't know.

  INTERLUDE 3

  Salle stepped out of the summery hall into a long, bright red corridor with posters and paintings hanging on the walls. People were moving in it, talking purposefully in pairs, going in and out of doors with blinks of their security passes against readers. It seemed more like a corridor in a tech company than an underground bunker they were all sealed in for a decade. It felt utterly banal and bizarre at the same time.

  Salle walked amongst them, trying her card on doors as she went, but all the readers dinged red. A hundred yards on was her elevator, which she rode two decks down to the third floor. The corridor here was green and yellow and seemed to twist to the left. Strung along the walls were amateurish paintings, perhaps done by her fellow inhabitants.

  She felt as giddy as a freshman on the first day of term. Her room was 345C, and with excitement she touched her card to the reader, it dinged green, and the door opened. Inside her room was painted a shocking violet with a turquoise bedspread. It was a good size, with a private toilet off to the side, a fridge, a desk and a forty-inch TV currently displaying a wintry lake scene.

  Ten years lay ahead like a most grand adventure.

  The first day she passed in dizzy exploration, on a scavenger hunt to explore the realm allotted to her. She passed through a Marine-themed zone, a farming bay where soy plants were budding in layered racks of soil trays under bright grow lights, an open store room laid out like a Kroger's, accommodation corridors with brick-fronts to make them look like tenement buildings, a bar, a gym, and even a swamp, just as Mecklarin promised. It was like a really great college campus had mated with a theme park, art gallery and national park.

  At the tail end of the third floor main corridor she found the forest, where huge fir trees grew to forty feet tall under ultraviolet lamps in a space half a football field in size. A guy in coveralls talked to her.

  "They scrub the air," he said, smiling apologetically. "The lungs of the Habitat, really. Sorry, I can see you're new." He nodded at the manual in her hands, and extended his hand. "I'm Terry, bio-engineer."

  "Salle," she said, shaking his hand, "psychologist."

  "Ah, Mecklarin's wizards? I heard one of your crew got sick."

  "I'm the replacement."

  He smiled. "Well, you need any help, just let me know. Looks like we're on a rotation together for the first year or so."

  She smiled back. "Thanks, Terry."

  He went back to tending freshly planted saplings in the black dirt.

  She stopped at the bar for a drink. The walls were festooned with memorabilia, like a TGI Fridays. It was bizarre and terrific. They had chocolate milkshakes and it was delicious.

  At the end of her tour Salle sat at her desk, looked in the mirror and couldn't stop herself smiling. That morning she'd been in the outside world, going about her business, and now she was here, part of a dream to change the world.

  She couldn't wait to get started.

  * * *

  Life in the Habitat never let up. Work began and she was already behind, constantly racing to catch up; memorizing the staff psych files, meeting with all 400 in her sector of the third floor, making additions and alterations to their files as best she could then feeding that back into Mecklarin's algorithms, taking on his feedback and slowly getting inducted into the research schedule under the floor's lead psychologist, respected Berkeley professor Richard Albright.

  In her off hours, staggering around the Habitat with a head foggy and full with 400 people's childhood trauma, sexual preference and practices, genetic disposition and political affiliations, she dived into her sector's social life. Events came and went constantly; huge parties to celeb
rate each passing week, sports events, art exhibitions, craft beer tastings. Mini cliques formed then reshuffled under her guiding hand.

  She had sex a lot at first. Everyone was free and excited to be part of such an important step forward for the human race, like hippies at the start of a new commune. She forgot about her old life and her boyfriend.

  Months passed. She rarely saw Mecklarin, though he was always there in the distance, striding around and glad-handing people, cheerful and in charge, passing in and out of zones that had not yet opened to her. He was a great man at the head of the trenches, a visionary leading them forward.

  The research she did when not partying sucked her in; some of it intensely complex, trying to root into problems that had challenged both psychologists and philosophers for generations, like what is love, what is happiness and how can it be maximized, what are all the regulatory functions of emotion. Everything fed into some part of Mecklarin's algorithms, themselves a search for some core, elegant truth underpinning all of human programming.

  And they were getting closer. Every day their refinements improved Mecklarin's algorithms, making their predictions more and more reliable. The progress they made in unlocking the brain outstripped any work done in the past fifty years.

  Months passed, then years, and with the passing of time her zone of exploration opened up. She gained access to floor 1 where they had an actual circus, to floor 3 where they had an Arctic zone complete with ice and penguins. She was promoted to head psychologist for all three of those floors, overseeing twelve hundred people. Soon she was meeting with Mecklarin on a weekly basis, then daily, until they started seeing each other at night too, and he whispered his dreams for the project in her ear, pressed close together in the narrow confines of her single bed.

  "Let's go to your room," she'd say, but he only smiled.

  "You don't have access to that area yet."

  Everything was perfect. The research was plowing ahead, the innovations and discoveries they'd set out to find were pouring in every day, not only in the realm of psychology but also in botany, engineering, even theoretical physics. The experiment was working, Lars Mecklarin was her lover, and they were on their way to Mars.

  Then the revolution began.

  * * *

  Four years in, it started with rumors.

  No one knew where they began, but they were insidious and creeping, always lurking behind Salle's eyelids in the dark after the colorful rooms and busy lives and fully-packed event schedule were eclipsed by the dark, and she lay alone in the too-long night, waiting for a dawn that might never come.

  All the rumors were different, but they all contained the same central thread: the people of MARS3000 were alone. They'd been buried alive under the mountains of Maine like three thousand corpses, and no one was ever coming for them. There'd been a nuclear apocalypse and the air up above was radioactive, so they'd never be returning. They were actually in the hold of a colony ship, smuggled aboard while they slept and packed off to Mars without their knowledge. Zombies had struck and killed every soul above ground, leaving nothing behind but empty buildings.

  The rumors started as a kind of joke, gallows humor whispered in bars as pick-up lines, repeated with increasing urgency as bodies pressed against each other hungrily in the dark. Was three thousand enough? Could any number ever be enough? They grew and spread like a cancer, an infection that at first fascinated Mecklarin, as it played into none of his predictions, but soon came to plague him as productivity plummeted.

  Everything changed one long, slow morning over Irish coffee.

  "I have no idea," he said to Salle, sitting in her room looking out of the TV window onto a view of blue sky and clouds. He looked hung-over, with dark bags under his eyes and a weary gray cast to his usually ruddy, glowing skin. Many people were behaving erratically now, breaking from long-held patterns that led them to sleep in too long, party a little too hard and argue a little too much, losing the healthy balance that had held them all in check for so long. "I'm not sure I can control it, and if I can't control it…" He let his voice ebb out.

  Salle had seen the infection in herself as well. It was everywhere, haunting everyone. The thought that nobody was left outside was a crushing notion, even if it was only a joke. But was it a joke? The more times she heard the story, the deeper that crack of doubt grew in her mind, and the only way to test it was to hear word from outside, or to go outside, or to have someone from the outside come in.

  But none of those things were possible. Every one of the three thousand in the Habitat had signed a contract committing themselves to ten years. To exit now would not only mark every one of them as failures, but also deal a crushing blow to the human race at large that said it just couldn't be done. Self-contained colonies on Mars were an impossible pipedream, without each mini society descending into stress-induced mania, which led to areas she didn't really want to think about. A prison-like atmosphere. The carrot and the stick. Brutal, unyielding authority, like something out of the novel 1984.

  Mecklarin took a long swig of his coffee. It was almost more whiskey than coffee these days, but Salle couldn't judge him for that. He was Mecklarin the great man, a magician to the world, revealing secrets to the populace about themselves that only made them throw their panties at him and beg for more.

  But perhaps it was all BS. They'd talked about all of it countless times, as the algorithms increasingly suggested steering actions that no longer worked on these hyper-stressed people. Facing the notion that his model for human interaction might be built on unstable foundations was terrifying for him. People, perhaps, were not the creatures he believed them to be.

  Salle studied her map of the Habitat and the upcoming event schedule. They'd started going into the office later and later each day, as their research subjects and colleagues came in drunk, late or not at all. At first they'd taken it in their stride, as the two topmost authorities in the psych team for all three thousand, but now it was getting out of hand.

  "We could open up the last few areas," Salle suggested, sweeping a hand across the map. "Merge all the levels and throw a four-year blowout party."

  Mecklarin waved a hand. His eyes didn't glow as much as they used to. "Chaos. We can't do that, not with things like this. If anything, I was thinking about shrinking the zones."

  Salle frowned. "How much whiskey have you had?"

  Mecklarin smiled tiredly. "I know. We're all about motivating with inspiration here, not the threat of punishment. But Salle, darling, you can see that's not working anymore. I can't just recharge it. Offer motivational speeches; pump them up about the future on Mars? I've done it on every deck so many times I feel like a robot. It's not working. That carrot is no longer effective."

  Salle slumped back. Watching him drink Irish coffee made her want to drink too, but that would be no kind of answer. She'd had her fill of screwing around in the first few months.

  "So close the zones," she said, scanning the map. "Offer a warning. Back to third positions, or second?"

  "First," said Mecklarin.

  "First? That's eight separate pools of around four hundred people each. You know half of these people have made relationships across boundaries? Look at you and me. You'd be breaking us up. And how would we even do it? We don't have much of a police force down here, and those we do have will hardly be on our side. We can't hope to force everyone back across their boundaries."

  He nodded. "I know it, Salle. I've thought about it for weeks. But the algorithms are useless now, they can't predict a thing. We're left to our best judgment, and I'm down to thinking the stick is the way, and if you're going to use the stick, then damn well use the stick. We announce the barriers are returning to first positions, we let people choose their zone, and let the chips fall where they may. It's a last stand, really."

  Salle frowned at him. "This is the whiskey talking."

  "Do you think? Salle, you've heard the rumors. People are scared, and you can't motivate scared people with a dis
tant hope. You can only let them run or contain them. But how long can I contain unruly people, no matter what contract they've signed? There are video feeds of all this going out, you know, my grand experiment. Millions are watching out in the world. They could come down and arrest me at any time, if I breach human rights. I can't let things get out of control. Returning to first positions, that's not illegal. If it tamps the fuses down a while, then we can think."

  Salle shook her head. "That's bullshit. This is important, you told me that. I believe it. No one's going to come shut us down."

  He laughed. "Seriously? Ah, Salle, I suppose I hide it well. Have you any idea how much pressure there is on me to just open the doors and let everyone out? Do you have any idea how many appeals I get every day, pleading with me to just open the doors for a day, for a few hours, for a few minutes? Let them go out and see their family, or just see the sky, then they'll come running back in with their heads down and their tails between their legs, ready to work hard. They're begging me constantly! Can you imagine what it's like to keep saying no?"

  Salle set the pencil in her hand down. They were beyond making notes. "I never heard any of that."

  Mecklarin sighed. "I have the computers route it all to me directly. People are sending these messages at the rate of about, oh, twenty a day. 'Let us out, please.' You know."

  "Twenty?"

  He nodded. His eyes seemed to have a drunken film over them.

  "When were you going to tell me?"

  "I'm telling you now. We're in something of a crisis, dear. It's first positions or open the damn doors, crank up the lift and call the whole thing a failure."

  Salle looked at him. He looked broken.

  "It's just a damn rumor."

  "Loose lips sink ships," he said. "They said that in World War Two, and it applies now just as much as then. We called this place a cruise ship, yes? This rumor could be our iceberg."

  They looked at each other. Salle stared at him, daring him to overcome this challenge. He was Lars Mecklarin, her lover and a man of almighty vision, but a few words spoken in bars were breaking his will.