The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "But it's similar?"

  I feel him squirm on the other end of line, unwilling to let me bully him into an admission he can't make. "It's internal combustion, yes. I suppose we could-"

  "Let Peters sleep," I say, talking over him, and he's happy to trail off. "We need him to fly, that's the bottleneck. We need you up in the air ASAP, watching over us. We're going to pass the demon in less than twelve hours, I expect, and eyes from above on that would be a huge advantage."

  Jake takes a long breath. Anna's voice comes calling from a distance. "Tell him we'll be there."

  "Did you hear that?" Jake asks uncomfortably.

  "Got it. We're relying on you."

  "Understood," he says and closes the connection.

  I drive on, pushing the RV closer to ninety miles an hour. The frame begins to rattle and I get a few calls from behind questioning the wisdom of taking these sedate Recreational Vehicles anywhere above seventy, but I remind them what we're up against: a giant demon sprinting closer who'll vomit his infection directly into us and turn us against each other. The grumbling stops for a time and the convoy speeds up.

  We race ahead in a cloud of voices muttering, like dreamers mumbling out their dreams. The children will be asleep, my daughter Talia and son Vie, six and four, are now tucked up in their makeshift beds believing all of this is some kind of glorious adventure. Macy is a great motherly figure. I wish I was back there with them, but I can't be. Lara's at the tail end, angry for a dozen good reasons, and we're each in our own urgent bubble.

  This is the life of New LA, on the road.

  I fall into a hypnotic lull, racing along I-10 through nighttime scrub desert and urban wastelands I've been through countless times before. The road is mostly clear, with vehicles left over from the apocalypse long ago nudged aside, on one of the many cairn trips I or someone else made in the past ten years. The RV copes with ninety miles an hour well. I'm sleepy so I wind the window down and enjoy the buffeting flow of cool night air, smelling of sand and hot tar and the great American wilderness. I keep focus by turning my mind over the challenges ahead; the demon, the zombies and ultimately what to do with a bunker full of people.

  It must be deep. They must be hidden. But there will be a way. They had to get in and at some point they have to get out. They surely are not far from the demon they kept captive for over a decade.

  I look in the rear view mirror at all the explosives in back, held in plastic crates packed with Styrofoam: rack after rack of deep-well drilling bombs. In another age they might have been used to blow tunnels into mountains. More recently they were used for setting foundations for deep-sea mines.

  We found a cache of them years ago when we were raking LA for supplies. We used a few to clear a building off Santa Monica Boulevard when it came down in the 2023 earthquake. The burst was massive, clearing the wreckage and also tearing a huge chunk out of the road. We didn't use them again, but we stored them. We have plenty of storage. If anything will dig me down to the bunker and crack it open like a can of beans, it's these.

  It's just finding it.

  "Talk to me, Chantelle," I say, breaking through the reverie. "I'm drifting here."

  She's sitting there with a rifle crooked across her lap, a big Louisiana girl with a big set of teeth, big braids, big and strong in every way. She had a guy for a while, quiet Alan, before she settled in with Florence from New Jersey. They're a really cute couple, especially when we have our quarterly ball and they show us the moves they've been working on for months. I should put that stuff in the next Ragnarok movie.

  "What do you want to talk about, Amo?"

  "Whatever. You and Florence. She's in with the kids right?"

  "Right."

  The conversation lulls. She's not much of a talker, Chantelle.

  "You make any progress on your honeymoon plans?" I ask. It's an odd conversation to have in the circumstances, but I need to talk or I'll fall asleep.

  "No. She still wants to see Niagara Falls. I want to go to Hawaii."

  "Hawaii! That's awesome."

  "Anna went. She said she'll take us out there. It's safe."

  I grin. This is what sending someone round the world does, I suppose. People get bold. "Feel like doing some hula dancing? It'd be a good addition to your repertoire. Grass skirts, coconuts, all that."

  She shrugs, maybe not even aware I'm trying to tease her. Some people.

  I sober. "Well, I hear it's very beautiful."

  "I've never been," she says, which I'd thought was already obvious, but apparently not.

  "Me too," I say seriously, then decide to give up.

  "I want to see the volcanoes," she adds a few minutes later, startling me. "You ever think about volcanoes?"

  I look over at her. "Sure. Yeah, why not?"

  "Me too," she says, and that settles that really.

  The road rolls on and I drive.

  Hours later the radio buzzes for an incoming private signal. I glance at the clock, 4:34 am. I haven't slept in two days, which is no good. I'll have to switch over soon.

  I push to send. "Anna."

  Her voice comes through. "Peters is sleeping, but I think we got the Cessna to work. The engine's running and we're out on the runway."

  I imagine what that must be like, on a dark and windswept asphalt plain, standing next to the vessel all our hopes are pinned on. Any fault in the engine, after lying ten years silent, could bring it down. I see a pile of burning metal on the runway lighting up the night. Once again I might be on the edge of sending Anna to her death, but I know that she'll go, and I know that I have to send her.

  "Wait for the dawn," I say, "you can't take off in the dark, and there'll be time."

  "We're leaving now," Anna says, obstinate and willful as ever. "I've set a generator and lights at the end; something to aim for. Peters is in a bad way but we don't have any choice, do we?"

  I can't argue with that. We need to know where the demon is. We need to know where the zombies are, if this crazy plan has any hope of working. For a moment I consider calling Lara and checking in, confirming with her what needs to be done, but I can't face it. What if she says no? What if she begs me to let Anna stand down, what then? If I trust myself then I have to trust myself, because there isn't time to argue. It's another wedge I'm driving in myself, but I don't know what else to do.

  "Then do it," I say.

  "Roger that."

  The RV whips through the desert town of Kingman on the western edge of Arizona, while sounds of movement come from Anna's end of the radio. She speaks to Jake and they rouse Peters to life, then clank and click into the cockpit.

  Kingman is a fossil, ringed with dark bluffs overhanging the Wal-Mart's, gas stations and tourist shops touting Route 66 along I-10. Above the bluffs are stars and a heavy round moon. Two hours and the sun will be up again. Anna should be up there with them by then, scouting ahead.

  I look at Chantelle and she looks at me. We leave Kingman behind in a flurry of water towers and tilting telephone lines.

  "We're in," Anna says, "locked and belted. Jake?"

  "In."

  "Peters?"

  He mumbles something.

  "Good enough," Anna says. "Amo, if you have any last words of encouragement now would be the time."

  "Godspeed," I say, "get in the air."

  "Roger that. Peters?"

  "Ignition," he says faintly, and there's the sound of an engine kicking roughly to life. A choppy mechanical whirr starts up, which I take to be the propeller. Seconds pass and it speeds up and smooths out.

  "We're moving!" Anna shouts over the droning sound.

  The sound of the ground rushing by becomes a low roar through the radio. I imagine Peters at the controls, nodding forward with tubes dripping vital fluids into his arm, while Anna nudges him to stay awake. I imagine the darkness flying by either side, the roar of the engine, the lights up ahead growing larger and the vibration rising up through the seat.

  Then there's a who
op, I can't tell who from, and I guess they're airborne.

  "We're up," Jake shouts. "Dammit, Amo, I can't tell you how good this feels!"

  "Altitude rising," Anna shouts, "a hundred feet, hundred fifty, two hundred, keep it up Peters."

  He mumbles something, perhaps about alligators. There's a palpable joy on the other end, buzzing through the vibration of the plane and the feel of the rush of the wind. How long since anyone flew above America?

  "We'll be there in less than two hours, Peters says," Anna reports. "The top speed is three hundred and forty, so scouting ahead should be no problem."

  "That's amazing," I say, running the schedule through my head. They should be overhead us after Flagstaff, maybe even as far ahead as Holbrook, but well before our expected cross with the demon at Albuquerque. "Good job, Anna, Jake, Peters too.

  "Thanks, Amo, we really-"

  BANG

  Abruptly the steady drone of their engine is broken by a sharp explosion. Chills race up my back and I accidentally jerk the steering wheel, almost toppling us right there on the highway. I barely get control back, correcting the RV after a sickening zigzag. But now Jake is shouting something, Anna too, and the banging sound of before is getting louder.

  "What happened?" I shout back. "What's going on?"

  Anna replies but the engine is hammering harder now, like an autocannon shooting down zombies, until with a sickening absence of sound, it goes utterly quiet.

  For a moment the signal goes clear, and Anna speaks with uncanny calmness. "We're falling, Amo."

  I stare at the radio.

  "Amo," she repeats.

  I don't know what to say. I don't have the words for this, as all the oxygen sucks out of my lungs. I imagine the cockpit filling with noxious black smoke, I imagine the fear in Anna's eyes and the plane dipping forward into a dive, and I can't move at all.

  "Amo," Anna says, shouting now, "are you there?"

  It's all happening so fast. She's just a little girl again, Anna in my arms on the Chinese Theater forecourt dressed in her Alice in Wonderland dress, and now she's in a plane I put her in and she's falling out of the sky and there's nothing I can do.

  "Amo!" she cries urgently.

  "Anna," I shout back at last, breaking the emptiness in my lungs with a brittle bark, barely making a dent against the gathering storm of broken clanking sounds as their little plane falls. "I love you, sweetheart. Jake, thank you. I'm so sorry."

  "Amo-" she shouts, then there's a vast-

  CRASH

  and the signal devolves into hissing.

  I stare at the radio in horror. It's too fast. They'd only just taken off. It can't be real.

  "Anna?" I shout again. "Jake?"

  No answer comes.

  "Anna?"

  Tears well in my eyes. I can't breathe. Chantelle's staring at me and everyone in the RV must be listening, but I can hardly breathe.

  Too fast.

  The plane crashed.

  Anna's dead. Jake's dead. Peters too is dead.

  10. DRIVE

  I drive but it's hard to see. Chantelle says something but I don't look at her.

  "Anna," I say into the radio. "Jake."

  I drive until the tears stop and the headache sets in. 5:37, the clock says. Any minute the sun'll rise up ahead, symbol of a new day.

  "Don't tell anyone," I tell Chantelle, my tongue moving like a numb jellyfish in my mouth. My head is thick and fuzzy. She says something kind in reply but I can't really listen.

  Get a grip. I have to get a grip.

  "Lara," I say over the open radio, before I can stop myself.

  "Go ahead, Amo," she answers a minute or two later.

  "Private channel 1," I say then sign off, spin the dial to our setting and call through again.

  "Take me off speaker."

  I hear the click, and now there's concern mixing with the hurt in her voice. "What is it?"

  There's so much I want to say. I want to spew it out like the demon, and probably she can handle it, but I'm not sure that I can. Just repeating this truth may break me, make me lose it here at the head of the convoy in front of Chantelle and the others in back, and I can't afford that.

  I manage to stop myself short. There's truth and then there's truth, and some things I'm better off not putting into words. They'll know soon enough, it'll all be clear and they can do what they want with me, but for now I just need to get through. It feels like lying to my own wife, to Lara who would be nothing but supportive, but I don't know what else to do.

  "I wanted to talk to you," I say, and my voice goes tight.

  Chantelle on my right gives a signal and goes to the back, joining Lucy amongst the crates of explosives.

  "About what?"

  "Sweetheart," I say, but I can't come up with anything more.

  I want to talk about them all, Cerulean and Anna and Abigail and all these deaths, but I can't get them out without breaking down. Instead I freeze and the silence hangs between us, broken by the shush of the airwaves and the steady growl of the RV's straining engine.

  "How's Anna?" she asks.

  Again I almost spit it out, but force myself not to. My instincts may be shit, they saved Julio and they saved the bunker, but they're all I've got, and I have to listen to something. If the convoy thinks Anna's still alive we have a chance. If they think she's coming through the air even now, there's hope. If she crashed on the runway and her corpse is steadily burning to a crisp, which is what certainly happened, all hope is probably lost.

  "Fine," I manage, and begin to float again as helium pumps into my head. "They're working on the propeller still. How's everything at the back?"

  "Good."

  Silence. A tiny group of buildings whizzes by on my right, too small to be on any map. A gas station and a pancake house out in the middle of the Arizona desert.

  "Where did you go?" she asks, the leaves a pregnant pause. "Before, after Peters. I was calling. I went looking."

  It's another blow. Of course she's hurt. She'll think I should've have trusted her, taken her with me, but I couldn't and I can't explain why. I didn't trust myself enough. I couldn't handle anything but being alone, though I wish I'd been strong enough to take her. I wish I could do it now.

  I can do something.

  "I walked on the beach," I say quietly. "I went to our apartment. I saw Cerulean."

  Lara takes a sharp breath. "Cerulean? You mean in Deepcraft?"

  "Yeah. He's looking well, considering."

  She laughs, but it's more pain than humor. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  Why didn't I? Because of the knives I couldn't share with her. Because of the decisions I couldn't let her bear. Because of the guilt I didn't want her to feel, and because if I told her, and she hugged me and helped me, I'm not sure I'd have had the strength to go on.

  I don't say any of that, though. "I was going to. I needed some time."

  "I don't like it when you get like that, especially about such important things. You know I don't."

  I know. I rub my eyes and sniff. Not just one lie now but so many, stacking up like zombies in a pile.

  "How's your fuel gauge?" I ask, a kind of petty distraction.

  "Good. Another five hundred miles, should be. We'll be past it by then."

  "Long enough to get some rest. Have you been checking in with the others?"

  "Some. The speed's got Ozark in a flap, but I think his patients are OK."

  "Better a flap than dead."

  "Touché . Listen, Amo?"

  "Lara."

  "We're going to be OK, all right? I know it. All of us. You and me."

  I almost burst out in tears at that. It's this kind of thing, the sympathy that I don't deserve, that will break me. There can be no forgiveness for the mistakes I've made, only atonement. I know I should tell her it all, but if just coming this close does this to me, how can I go any further?

  "I know," I manage. Of all the charges against me, being too soft is by far the greate
st. "Keep checking in. We'll talk soon."

  "Sure."

  I switch off the private line and turn to Chantelle.

  "Can you drive?"

  She comes over. I set the cruise control and lock the wheel then slip out of position. Chantelle slides in, not even looking at me. I just need an hour or two to sleep and not think. I've been awake too long already, two days and now driving for over five hours, so all I can see are flashing road lines and Anna falling in flames.

  "Wake me in two hours," I say.

  I stagger back down the RV, nudging off the stacked crates and into one of the bed booths along the side. I fall into it and come up looking across at Lucy. Though it's dark back here some stray flash of light catches in her open eyes, staring back at me.

  "It's coming," she mouths.

  I know it. I turn and put my face to the shuddering wall.

  * * *

  Anna's in my dream, sitting on the wrecked propeller mount of the Cessna and waving a stick about like it's a wand.

  "It won't be so bad," she says. She's talking to my kids Vie and Talia, who sit in the sooty black wreckage with smudge marks on their faces like students in a classroom, looking up at her. "It'll be gentle, really. Just open very wide and you'll barely feel a thing."

  She opens her mouth, and Vie and Talia copy her.

  "Will it taste like ice cream, Anna?" Talia asks. I almost chuckle at that. Talia really loves ice cream. Cynthia just started to make it, after we rounded up enough cows to get a steady supply of milk.

  "Like ice cream and chocolate," Anna says. "You just open very very wide, and-"

  She opens her mouth so wide that her jaw clicks and breaks open. Still her mouth keeps opening, wider and wider until her whole body unzips pinkly down the sides of her grin, then folds back on itself like a watermelon gumball, spinning in space and shrinking until-

  POP

  She disappears.

  "That's not ice cream," Talia says, disappointed. "I hate gumballs."

  "Daddy, look," Vie says, and points out across the water. I look to the horizon, and see thousands of red demons there, marching toward us like breakers on the tide. The skies are full of them too, flying with their arms widespread, and I find myself reaching up to the clouds above for salvation like that lost zombie atop his pile in Times Square, but there's nobody up above to take my hand.