The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  She brought up her walkie and scanned the channels. One was open, as it often was at this time, playing a tinny instrumental version of 'Dancing Queen' by ABBA. Peters loved that stuff.

  "Ho, Peters," she said softly into the receiver.

  "Anna, I thought you'd never show," he answered after a moment, in his lilting Swedish accent, comically like the chef off that puppet show Cerulean used to make her watch.

  "The same dream," she said.

  "I have been cataloging bullets," he responded brightly, ignoring her. "We have thirty-five different calibers."

  Anna smirked. She could have told him that, as she'd stocked up their gun store, but it was better to let him get on with things. They'd become very friendly after falling out of the sky together, and she knew the rhythms of his depression about as well as he knew hers.

  "Did they cross the three quarters point yet?"

  "Two hours ago," he replied. "Blinky overtook Sergei just north of the island Angra do Heroismo. I think maybe he's caught on a coral. It was very exciting."

  Anna nodded sleepily. The fox or whatever it was moved again outside, slinking along the side of Hangar 2. "I always knew Blinky had it in him."

  "He's a trier."

  They were all triers now, trying not to go nuts with waiting. For three months they'd waited while the one hundred floaters they'd tagged with GPS transponders made their long trans-Atlantic undersea crossing. For three months they'd tracked them and bet on their progress. Blinky and Sergei, named for the tendency of one to drop his signal at times and the other to randomly surge ahead, had been in the lead for most of that time.

  It wasn't really very exciting.

  "The PC-12's fuelled up," Peters said. "Jake's given the all clear for a full day's loop over the water. We're go for another navigation test."

  Anna grunted. Navigation tests were grueling, marathon affairs. Their new twin turbo propeller planes, Anna's Pilatus PC-12 and Peters' Italian P-180 Avanti, were both million-dollar feats of engineering in their day, with the range to go coast to coast from their Maine airfield to London, but they were heavily reliant on the old world for navigation. All of their internal systems depended on the infrastructure of GPS satellites in the sky, which had been drifting out of position for a decade.

  It made it harder. It required long haul testing, with accurate note taking on precise compass bearings, wind factors, and extremely careful use of the GPS systems they had. It was hard, slow work, but it was essential, considering the fuel tanks on their planes were barely large enough to span the ocean-crossing. The last thing she wanted was to crash-land in the ocean thanks to poor map reading. And all of that was just a prelude to the macabre bunker-killing work that would follow.

  "The same dream," Anna said again, and let it hang in the air between them. "Like there's something I need to see out there, but can't."

  Peters left it there for a time, respectfully, before giving his reply. "Abigail used to tell me her dreams," he said. "Every day. I loved to hear them very much. Sometimes she said she dreamed in Swedish, but when she woke up all she remembered was the accent. Hurdy-gurdy-gurdy."

  Anna chuckled. "You do sound like that. Maybe it was you talking in your sleep."

  "I haven't spoken Swedish in ten years, Anna. I think I've forgotten much."

  "You still have the accent."

  He chuckled too. "Yes. At night in the quiet hours, I think of my Abigail and I count bullets. You think of your father and tease me for my accent. We should be asleep. We are sad, lost souls, Anna, are we not? Not so unlike Blinky and Sergio."

  She snorted. "I'd beat you in a foot race, any day."

  "Not in a plane, sweet child."

  Anna shrugged for no one's benefit. That was true; Peters was still their best pilot. She grunted acknowledgement and let herself slump in the soft, worn leather driver's seat. This simple, hypnotic back-and-forth banter always helped relax her. She let her eyes drift out of focus so the myriad lights of stars blurred into a pale glow in the sky. Against that backdrop the outline of her Cessna was clearly silhouetted in front of Hangar 2, like a heroic figure on the silver screen.

  A wrinkle of movement drifted around its wheels. The fox. She could almost make out its vermillion hide.

  "Hurry on, little beast," she murmured to it in a singsong voice. "If Cynthia catches you, you'll be in the pot."

  "I hope so," Peters answered. "I miss meat."

  The fox climbed the stepladder up to the cockpit, then stood for a long moment peering inside.

  Did foxes do that?

  Anna rubbed her eyes, but now the fox was gone. Too tired; her eyes were playing tricks on her mind. She couldn't fly a navigation test like this, she needed to sleep, but now the fox had got her thinking about the security of those chicken coops. If it could climb a ladder maybe it could capture a hen, and that would mean no eggs in the morning.

  "I'm going to the farm," she mumbled to Peters, "hold down the fort."

  "I'm sat on it already."

  She slipped the walkie into the glove box, rustled around behind the seat for her mud-splattered rain boots, shrugged them on over her pajama leggings, and pushed the RV door open. A chill wind blew in through the gap and she wrapped her jacket tight.

  "I'm just going out for a bit," she whispered back down the RV aisle, far too quiet to actually wake Ravi, but with these things it was the thought that counted.

  Out on the runway side her foggy thoughts slowly began to clear. The grass verge was overgrown with stinging nettles, and for some reason that made her sad. It looked like neglect, like a baby left wailing into the night.

  She pinched her own wrist and picked up the pace, leaving the small cluster of three RVs behind and heading across an open stretch of asphalt for Hangar 2. The Cessna that had saved them all sat parked under the broad awning, bumped into the cold for the Pilatus and Avanti, which stood on stocks inside.

  She reached the Cessna but there was no sign of the fox around the ladder, and nothing obvious there to attract it anyway, so maybe she'd imagined the whole thing. She rubbed her eyes again and stalked across the front of the hangar. Through a glass porthole in the big door she caught a brief glimpse of Peters inside, sitting in a ball of orange generator light and studying the bullets on his desk, each stood on end in order of size like a series of Matroska dolls.

  He grinned and gave a brief wave, which she caught and sent back, then continued round the hangar to stalk down the side, shadowed from the moonlight. Here they'd dumped a whole mess of rusty garbage that had been clogging up the hangar: broken air conditioning units, faulty engine bits, warped wing panels they couldn't beat back into shape, shelving units and metal desks and three big filing cabinets lying on their sides like sleeping hippos.

  The air smelt of sour rust, New England rain and the faintest tang of chicken shit. Sometimes it amazed Anna that eggs and shit both came out of chickens, in such close proximity.

  The farm lay kitty-corner to the back edge of the hangar, on a stretch of scrubby grass they'd cleared when Cynthia caught the first bird in the nearby spruce forests, before she headed back to New LA with the rest of them. The empty glass face of the airport terminal sheltered much of the westerly winds, while two ground support stair cars broke the wind to north and south, effectively corralling the chickens in their coop and fenced-in run. It was half-assed and ugly, not built to last, and that pissed her off.

  But there was the fox, sneaking alongside the chicken cage. Except it wasn't a fox.

  The last drifts of fog fell away from Anna's mind in a second, replaced by a sudden spurt of adrenaline. Comparisons rushed through her head in a flurry, but Jake was slimmer, Feargal was bigger, Peters was in the hangar and she'd left Ravi behind in the RV, Macy was surely in their RV, Wanda and Ollie would be on patrol somewhere on the outskirts, as usual.

  This wasn't any of them.

  For a long few seconds she stared. Who the hell was this, dressed all in black and stalking through their ca
mp? Had it come for the chickens?

  No, already it was past the coop. Anna's heart pounded against her ribs. Where was it going? Her hand went automatically to her waist, where she kept the walkie on one hip and a gun on the other, holstered in her heavy engineer's belt, but of course she was wearing pajamas.

  The figure turned to scan back along its tracks, and Anna melted sideways against the hangar, into the midst of the cast-off garbage down the side, her mind racing. Who the hell? She strained for any sound of it approaching, but only heard the hangar wall creaking in the wind, the soft rustle of tall grass, and bugs somewhere droning, pulled together by the wild thump of her heart. This was truly unprecedented.

  She peered out from her cover and saw the figure had already cleared the stair cars. She watched it go, trying to guess the destination, but there was nothing that way but the airport terminal itself; a wide concourse lined with fashion boutiques and perfumeries selling hats, bags and floral-scented water, and of course her lab.

  She'd set up in the airport quarantine rooms, already designed to contain airborne pathogens of infected international passengers, making it an effective 'clean room' like her lab in UCLA. There she'd gotten on with her studies in evenings when there was no flight or combat training, though she hadn't been there in weeks. There was nothing left to find in the cells of the bunker zombies.

  So where was it going? Anna looked back along the hangar wall; she could get to her walkie in minutes and call the others in, to be sure, but then she might never know where this strange figure was really going, or what it wanted. She turned back; already the figure was by the concourse window.

  It was an easy decision. She delved into the junk by the hangar wall, where she remembered dropping a- yes, rusted crowbar. It was heavy and the rust crunched sharply in her palm. She held it close in one hand and folded smoothly out of the hangar's shadow, slipping out of her rain boots and running silently with them in the other hand, barefoot across the cracked asphalt.

  2. CONCOURSE

  The figure edged easily through a broken pane in the floor-to-ceiling glass of gate 26, entering the terminal's lower concourse, while Anna watched from the cover of the stair car, wondering if it had come this way before. There was something too smooth about the movement, almost practiced.

  Now it would be facing the dead escalators that led up to the concourse. She took a deep breath, waiting for it to reach the top and turn, where it would briefly face back toward the chicken coop. Seconds dragged on, and Anna became aware of the frosty asphalt beneath her bare feet, and the chill spring air seeping through her thin jacket.

  That was long enough. She puffed hot breath onto her hands, rubbed them on the soles of her feet like a basketball player putting grip on their sneakers, then dashed across the open gap to the terminal. In twenty seconds she was there, standing beside the concourse windows, which were mirror bright in the moonlight, reflecting silvery clouds.

  She peered in through the broken pane, waiting a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom within. No bullet met her, only the faint shushing of feet off the marble floor far away.

  She slipped silently through the gap, treading carefully over old broken glass, and felt the difference in the air at once; it was stuffy inside, with residual heat from the previous day still hanging wetly like a greenhouse. The sounds of insects droning and grass rustling in the wind were gone, as if she'd simply flipped a switch and entered a new world.

  Shush shush went the figure's footfalls, growing distant somewhere above.

  The escalator was so cold it stung her feet, and the grooves caught her toes at painful angles like little pinching traps. She paused at the top to let her senses adjust. It was nearly fully dark this far inside, with only the faintest impression of moonlight reaching through the darkened glass to paint the contours of furniture and solitary luggage carts with gray, fuzzy mantles. The air was stale and stank of plastic sofas and must. She could just pick out the outline of the concourse ahead, a long broad corridor broken by gate desks and seating areas.

  The shushing of feet came from the right, deeper into the terminal, but she couldn't pick out the figure in the darkness, which meant it couldn't see her either. She started out over the marble at a cautious run, so lightly her feet barely raised a whisper, but after a hundred or so yards she slowed, worried she might run full into it unawares.

  Shush shush, it was definitely closer now. She advanced at a swift, silent walk until she she could pick it out, a slim silhouette against the windows. Questions ran through her mind as she followed, of how another survivor would even have found them. All the cairns pointed to New LA; the chances of stumbling randomly upon them here were incredibly remote.

  A conversation with Amo came back to her, from before they knew who had taken Cerulean. "There could be another community of survivors out there," he'd said. "With a different idea of what survival is."

  She shook off a shudder. It seemed unlikely, but if another group did exist then it made sense for them to attack here first. They had no defenses beyond the patrols, because they weren't a permanent encampment; no cairns pointed their way and they had no reason to believe anyone would come and find them. Perhaps that assumed anonymity had made them complacent. Anna gritted her teeth and squeezed the crowbar. She would find out.

  The figure moved on through a central, open area of the terminal where the two wings conjoined. Ahead lay the security aisles, lines for passport control and beyond that baggage carousels, but the shushing sound of feet did not move that way, heading instead to her right. Anna course-corrected, wondering that there was nothing this way, except…

  She frowned. Her lab.

  Two gates went by on the right, then the figure turned into the corridor on the left, confirming it. This way led to the quarantine ward. Anna followed through the outer revolving doors and into a deep, inky darkness within. Thick, industrial-looking ventilation pipes and air-scrubbing filters ran along the sides of the corridor, barely visible in the dimmest hints of light.

  She nudged past a gurney on wheels. The shush of feet was gone now, as the figure must have entered the main containment room. Anna ducked below the level of the room's windows and crawled on toward the 'airlock' door.

  A light flicked on and she froze.

  White light glared through the glass above her and sent odd refractions dancing along the wall as it moved. A flashlight, roving back and forth. It roamed away and she chanced peeking her forehead above the base of the window to look in.

  The figure was inside, almost certainly a man judging by the backwash of white light on his angular face. He roved the flashlight along her workbenches, over notes lying in scrawled heaps, her high-powered microscope, her tall titration kit set up in the middle; all complex glass pipes, flasks and turrets, glinting oddly like a tenuous Fraggle construction.

  Even here, this man moved with a confidence and comfort that suggested familiarity, as if he knew his way around. Without pausing he carefully cleared a section of worktop, moving her notes to the side, then knelt to open a specimen tray in her refrigerated sample stack. She was surprised to see frozen gas spilling out in a wispy white fog; she'd definitely drained the supply when last she'd been in here a month ago. It couldn't still be cold in there, could it?

  The man extracted a test-tube slide, then spoke in a low, muted tone.

  "That is a strange discoloration."

  It wasn't loud, but in the silent lab Anna heard it clearly. Her frown deepened. Was he talking about one of her samples? Or was that, in his hand, a new one?

  She didn't remember anything discolored. She hadn't run any stain tests because she'd exhausted their effectiveness before she'd even gone to Mongolia. They never showed anything; only the electron microscope had exposed the T4 to her. But then, what else could he be talking about?

  She was so befuddled that she didn't realize what was happening as he went to the wall and pushed the breaker she'd installed. All at once, drawing from a battery she ha
dn't charged for a month, the roof lights flickered up to bright white sterile life, the air conditioner/scrubber surged to full power, and the lab came alive.

  What? The corridor lit with the sharp light, exposing her completely, but she was too fixated on watching him to care, with her nose pressed to the glass as he bent over, took a heavy-looking canister from his backpack, and poured fuel into the generator.

  What the hell?

  He pulled the cord and pushed the button and the cacophony of the generator joined in with the scrubbers and air cyclers. This was crazy. So he was charging the battery? Did that mean he was doing experiments? Was he using her lab?

  That was enough.

  She stood up and strode without hesitation to the airlock door, pushing through the blowers that blasted polluting dust particles off her, through the inner door, and emerged into the lab.

  He stared at her with his mouth dropping open.

  "What the hell are you doing in my lab?" she demanded.

  A long moment passed. This man before her, with his thin cheeks and slight raspy beard, bright eyes and short-cropped dark hair, seemed more shocked than her. Perhaps that was fear in his eyes, though it was quickly followed by a certain resignation, sinking in.

  She recognized it. She'd seen it before in Amo, had felt it in herself, but she didn't have time to forestall it now. Abruptly the unreal feel of this bizarre, midnight meeting fell away, as from his loose jacket pocket the man drew a gun and pointed it at her face.

  Lots of images raced through her head in that moment, taking less than a second and coming like shells fired from an autocannon. She saw herself again in a yacht off Hawaii, held at gunpoint by the madwoman who'd killed her own son to 'end his suffering'. That feeling of power when she hadn't cared if she lived or died came back in a heady rush, though other feelings came with it.