The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  He hangs around while we drive his tanker up to the field and over the sloping snow. The hose sloshes out a dense sludge, more like petroleum jelly than regular gasoline. This is what ten years of sitting in the heat and cold will do; the water vapor breathes away through the tiniest of gaps in the tanker's joints, leaving raw rocket fuel behind.

  Normally we dilute it ten to one with water, but not today. The jelly pumps in, acrid and brown, and Peters tosses in the lighter. The resultant fire is so fierce that flames lick out through the manhole mouth.

  We stand around for a few hours, bearing witness. When it's done the interior is a bare black hole with everything gone; the generators and the heaters, the chains and the bodies, all reduced to dust and ash.

  Cement follows a day later. We keep working for hours to load the bags and mix the contents, keeping a steady flow of gray slurry flowing into the hole. Filling it to the brim takes a day and a night, a real commitment of our time and effort, but there's something transformative about doing it this way, something healing, like scattering dirt onto a coffin.

  Afterward Jake works in the Habitat, setting the hydraulics to their original task, while I peruse the files Salle left for me in the commander's office. There's nothing really about the cause of the infection, except as it relates to this bunker. Of particular interest is the inbuilt receiver their 'primary' demon had, connected through something called the 'hydrogen line', baked in at a genetic level. This genetic switch would pass on to any 'secondaries' it infected, essentially providing a button Salle could press to deactivate them all, when the time was right.

  Though there is little on how they got their primary, it's clear that this switch is tuned to one specific primary, and won't deactivate demons from other bunkers, thereby defending us against the hundreds that may be coming. Still, I find the button and push it; a protocol buried deep in the computer system, guarded by four banks of passwords and security identification, kindly left behind by Salle.

  Anna and I do it together; so simple. On the screen in the control room the seven blue lights wink out. We get a call from Lars moments later, confirming what we'd already briefed him on.

  "They're climbing down," he says. "They're picking themselves up and heading off! It's amazing."

  "Where are they going?"

  "East!" he cheers. "They're all going east."

  I look at Anna. We're both thinking the same thing. This will be another line of defense for us, and also an assault. We'll put trackers into as many of them as we can, and follow. We'll take the other bunkers one by one and flip all the underlying switches, each time releasing our army to press on again.

  "We're going to be OK," Anna says.

  I think so.

  "We're coming tomorrow," Witzgenstein says. "And I have some other wonderful news. Lara seems to be showing signs of improvement, Amo."

  My eyes quickly well with tears, sitting there in Salle's control room. Hope, in such an awful place, comes so strangely.

  "Here," she says, and then there's Vie and Talia on the other end of the line, shouting out about the things they built with their pinecones, and how they're going to start a forest back in New LA, and how mommy maybe smiled at them earlier, and maybe she moved her hand, and isn't it strange that she might be waking up just at the same time as all the zombies wake up?

  I cry and laugh and go along with them, approving their ideas to build snowmen out of pinecones and reed grass, agreeing it's strange mommy's waking up right now, though she's definitely not a zombie, don't worry about that, and I'll see them soon, and we'll have snowball fights together of course, and so on for thirty minutes until I can barely stop myself from blubbering and hand them off to Anna.

  She's beaming at me. She beams and cries a little too.

  Lara's waking up, with the zombies. That's a kind of beautiful thing, no doubt. My wife is coming back. I sit and listen to Anna try to get a word in edgewise while I watch the map of America, with not a single blue dot anywhere to be seen.

  * * *

  We each find our own work.

  Feargal heads outward, roaming the nearby mountains until he finds the bunker's drone base, dug into a natural alcove in Mount Abraham's northern side. It's an empty hangar now, with bays for four Predator X-class drones. Presumably they dropped out of the sky somewhere to the west when they were chasing Peters and the other survivors across the country.

  "The automation here is amazing," Feargal tells me on the walkie. "Automatic docking, charging, reloading of munitions. It's like clockwork, and it's still working. If I had a drone now…"

  "Who would you bomb?" I ask. "The IRS?"

  He laughs.

  I let him loose on the stacks of military information in Command, and on the fourth day he comes up with an explanation for why Cerulean wasn't shot by the gun turret.

  "It was automated too," he explains, sitting behind the Command desk and plainly enjoying it. I sit before him like an underling and indulge him in this. "A kind of AI program designed to recognize anything that looked like a zombie by its profile, posture, way of walking. Zombies were the threat, so your man Matthew running was a viable target, but Cerulean crawling across the field? The turret couldn't waste ammo on every deer or fox that came near, so it was set to ignore them. Cerulean must've looked enough like one of them, crawling along, to earn a pass."

  It's interesting information. Once I was so desperate to know the answer, but this is so banal and obvious that it doesn't satisfy. There was no human choice involved in sparing him, only a simple machine intelligence. Cerulean would have gotten a kick out of it.

  Ravi and Anna spend their time working in the farm halls to harvest the widest range of crops and seeds they can. Ravi takes to it with gusto, constantly smeared with dirt and happy to be at Anna's side, while I think Anna enjoys the quiet time, involved with nurturing things to life.

  "They've got strains here I've never heard of before," Ravi explains to me excitedly. "GM sorghum that reseeds year on year, with yields like you wouldn't believe. Rice that's drought-proof, corn with more calories per kernel than anything in all of Iowa. It's high-tech, gene-spliced stuff."

  "We'll take it," I say. "Load it up. Cynthia will want to marry you."

  He grins. Anna frowns at me. Has she said yes to him yet? Cerulean's not around to tease them anymore, so I suppose that job falls to me. I'm recovering some of my old self.

  Peters mostly wanders, rolling quietly in his chair, looking at this place that he was tortured for. I catch sightings of him round the Habitat and Command, soaking it in. I know he's weighing all of this. That's good.

  In a week Jake has the system figured, and he hands me the plunger.

  "This'll do it?" I ask.

  He nods. It's a plunger like you'd see attached to TNT in a Road Runner cartoon.

  "Does it have to be so dramatic?"

  "It's like the cement," he says. His voice is back to normal and the wound in his skull is healing nicely, the gory gash from before fading to a tight pink line with scabbing round the stitch holes. It makes me very happy to see him heal. "You have to really mean it."

  "And it'll start explosives?"

  "It starts a process which begins with twenty explosives they planted, and moves on to the hydraulics."

  "Good work."

  We wait for the others to come. Seven more RVs join us in two days time, lined up neatly along the winding mountain road to get the best view.

  One by one we bring everyone down into the MARS3000 bunker and show them around. I show it to my kids. The zombies have long since lost interest in us, having fully charged, but Talia finds them fascinating. She's never seen this many together before, except for the battle with the demons. Now she walks between them holding their hands, like an enthusiastic, very friendly dog. They tolerate her. Vie is more interested in the layout of the Habitat and all the various controls in Command.

  I get Witzgenstein and the other Council members down too, and they vote on some things: o
rder of ceremonies, the words to use, who gets to speak when and what comes next.

  In the end, it's me who pushes the plunger and blows the cap off the bunker. It's not something I'm hungry to do, as it symbolizes the death of all these people, but for that same reason I don't want anyone else to bear the weight of it. It's on me already.

  It's not so dramatic as I'd expected. The explosions are disappointing, with all of them taking place underground. The earth shakes, some snow jumps up in the air on a section as big across as a volleyball court, then for a long time there's nothing. We all sit on our RVs watching the smooth slopes, like the ranks of scientists, soldiers and government people who watched the early atomic explosions.

  "These explosives are more like fracking," Jake whispers to Anna, respectful of the somber mood. "The charges fracture the earth above; they're not designed to blow it all out. The elevators will do the rest."

  In a few minutes they do, with a grinding bass vibration that shakes the earth. Gradually the volleyball court's worth of snow begins to lift up and roll to the side, as a dark gap yaws open like a big metal jaw. A moment later the first flush of a hundred zombies steps out into the light, lifted a hundred feet up a pre-built shaft by an industrial grade elevator.

  They hobble out. The snow and the cold don't bother them. They start as one toward the east.

  "Next demon," Anna says, below her breath.

  "Next demon," I repeat.

  In the RV below I sit with my kids and hold Lara's hand, looking into her eyes and explaining everything to come.

  She's weak still, but she's awake. She can't speak well at the moment, still recovering from the battering the demon gave her, with a bruised throat and healing ribs, but I understand every croaky whisper she attempts.

  She loves our children. She loves me. She's glad to be alive.

  I hold her hand and press it close to my lips.

  "Honey," I say, so glad that she's here with me again. "We've both been in comas now."

  She laughs but that hurts her a little, so she just smiles.

  "I missed you," I say. She squeezes my hand.

  "I'm here," she answers, in a faint and croaky voice. Though she's sick and she's been in bed for nearly two weeks, she still looks as beautiful as the day we first spoke in Sir Clowdesley.

  She's here, and that's what matters.

  I kiss her hand. The kids hug in. Outside, the rumble and grind of another elevator load rises up, and another hundred of the ocean are released from their prison, to trudge steadily east.

  THE LOSS - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A big thank you to Advance Review Squad members Nicole Esquibel, Katy Page and Pam Elmes, who really helped improve the book by nailing down typos, spotting Britishisms (soya is the Brit version of soy? I had no idea) and pointing out redundancies. To my Dad for the encouragement, and to my wife for her encouragement and patience as I put off essential gardening duties to work on this book. Hearty thanks to Ray Ferguson for some essential fixes in flow and phrasing, while as ever catching a number of stubborn Britishisms that refuse to die ('brilliant' in the UK means something like 'amazing'), plus of course very useful comments on ammunition and weaponry. Thanks to Sue D for catching a set of age-based continuity errors and tough typos. Finally thanks to the tireless Rob Nugen, who beat the difference between it's and its into my head, and suggested elegant fixes for a number of snarly, overlooked continuity/logic problems. Thank you!

  - Michael

  THE LIST CONTENTS

  PRESENT

  PAST

  FUTURE

  ODYSSEY

  EAST

  Acknowledgements

  PRESENT

  1. FOX

  Anna was on the beach again, looking out over the water. So often she found herself in this sad, bleak place, more and more these days.

  The water was gray and stretched on forever, with frothy white waves studded with the bald white heads of zombies, sticking up like spikes in a trap. Once her father had been here too, sitting on his island far out to sea. She would run to him over the frozen waves, but no matter how fast she ran she never drew any closer.

  "Anna," he'd call back to her from his island, his voice reverberating like distant thunder. "Dear Anna."

  The end of the world had stolen him from her, like it had stolen so much. Ten years later she'd crossed the world to find him, only for him to die a final time in her arms in a Mongolian desert, torn apart by a red demon that didn't even know his name.

  Now he was gone, and so the beach had changed.

  There was a new figure crawling down by the water now, a deep black man who had loved her when they'd both needed love so much, who she'd abused and abandoned in return, who still wore the silver necklace of their mutual adoption round his neck.

  Cerulean.

  His face was red and featureless but for a gaping black hole where his mouth should be. His arms were massive and bulging with muscle, his legs trailed uselessly behind him, curled up like rotten old red peppers, and he was crawling down to the lapping water line. Every night he crawled down to the water, and every night the ocean gathered him in to its cold, killing embrace, and every night for a time the tide receded.

  In this sacrifice he was saving her, she knew. Every night he drowned again and again to save her, but standing there on the edge of the beach, looking out to a sky black with billions of the dead, she didn't know if he'd managed to save her from anything at all.

  She'd killed thousands of people. She'd lied, cheated and brought pain to the ones she loved. So many people had died, and so many more were going to die, because there was no stopping now. The ocean was there and she'd been drawn to it all her life, never able to escape the pull of its great weight. Now every time she came to this place the gray disc of the sun sank a little further down on the horizon, and the waves pulled a little further out, and the darkness came on a little more deeply.

  Every time, she followed the tide out. She strode across the cold and lonely sands that the tide left behind, plunging into the night and the depths, searching for some lost thing that she couldn't ever name, and couldn't ever find.

  * * *

  Anna jerked awake in the too-hot bed, in the RV in Portland International Jetport, Maine. The bed was narrow and she was slick with sweat, trembling as it chilled off her skin in the cold spring air.

  Ravi by her side mumbled something and rolled over, his face pressing against the metal wall of the booth. Though they'd extended it with a folding coffee table, the bed was still too slim for the two of them, and somehow his knees always ended up exactly in the spot her knees needed to be. There were so many new things to learn, as a couple.

  She kicked her legs gently out of the thin cover and sat for a moment on the creaking coffee table's edge, rubbing her eyes and working her fingers back through her tightly knotted braids. Ravi had had a grand time learning how to knot them, weaving the knappy threads back and forth, and he took such pleasure in the long work of grooming that she didn't have the heart to tell him that she'd rather just shave it all off.

  Goddamn it.

  Three months had gone by, and the waiting was killing her. The fog in her head, probably brought on by the dream, didn't help. She got to her feet and padded unsteadily to the front, where the digital clock on the dashboard displayed the time in glowing green.

  3:25

  The middle of the night. It was still plenty dark outside, though the open expanse of runway shone with moonlight like a glistening lake. The sky was a rich dark purple, the moon was almost full, and stars filled the arc of heaven with a million little eyes.

  She slumped into the driver's seat in the dark and sighed. The dreams were getting worse, always the same, always so tantalizingly close to peering right into the coming dark, but never quite seeing through to the other side.

  Three months had passed and all she could do was wait.

  Three months since their blistering trek east across the country, since the Yankee Stadium hor
de took down all seven demons sent by Salle Coram's bunker, since she and Amo had entered the Habitat together and watched the three thousand budding Mars colonists transform into soulless, white-eyed zombies. They'd pushed the button, the demon had died, and the zombie horde had started east.

  She sighed. After the debacle with Witzgenstein, three months of preparations, plans and trial runs had followed; of weapons practice, bomb runs and drone navigation; of meetings, politics and PTSD dreams. It was all good, all necessary, but she was exhausted with all the waiting.

  She sipped chilly water from a worn plastic bottle. Her breath came out as vapor in the cool air, lit faintly green by the dashboard clock, and she pulled her jacket on from the back of the chair. Everything was tired and breaking down out here. Maine above ground had been dead for a decade, lying largely undisturbed but for the pilfering Julio had done for supplies.

  There were no steaming croissants in the morning, fresh from Jonathon's New LA bakery; no warm milk straight from the udder poured over still-crisp, foil-packed Lucky Charms; no blueberry ice cream beaten and mixed that day. They had only rations of ancient canned leftovers left over from a past and ancient people.

  Images of the waves danced before her eyes, and she ran a silent tally of all the ways they still depended on the old world for resources, infrastructure and equipment: preserved food, water, roads, vehicles, planes, runways, fuel and walkie-talkies. GPS, satellites, boats, buildings, electric lights. Space ice cream, first aid, the electron microscope, the remnant cables of the old Internet, DVDs, Ragnarok 1 to 3, and of course, lest she forget, the zombies.

  Something stirred in the darkness outside, likely a deer or a fox come to dig through their trash. All the zombies were long gone now, chasing demons in Europe, somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic in mid-ocean crossing. That left wildlife free to roam everywhere, wandering in and out of broken buildings like raiding Vikings. She squinted to try and pick this one out, but her eyes were blurry and she couldn't. All the trashcans had lids on anyway, for just this eventuality. The few wild chickens Cynthia had trapped for them were secure in their coop.