The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  * * *

  Macy sewed her up by Gate 17 while Peters, Jake, Feargal and Ravi gathered in. Apparently they'd been discussing the situation for hours on and off amongst themselves, looking in on both Anna and the man, but they'd come up with nothing. They'd contacted New LA but gotten nothing solid, as Amo was off on one of his walks.

  "What did Lara say?" Anna asked, through the pain of Macy prodding and inspecting her feet.

  "Lara said listen to you," Feargal said. "She's sent people out looking for Amo; they'll find him soon."

  Amo. Why ask for Amo, if not to foster division in their ranks? He wasn't here. If he over-ruled Anna, it was already a victory. After Witzgenstein Anna had had enough of division.

  "Do you think he's from another bunker?" Jake asked abruptly. "Perhaps they heard about our plan. Maybe he was trying to sabotage us?"

  She turned to him. Ah, Jake. He was handsome and floppy-haired as ever, though the scar on the side of his head still peeked through. He had a tic in his right eye and sometimes he didn't finish sentences, but otherwise he was the same Jake he'd always been before the plane crash; thoughtful, smart and compassionate.

  "He's not from a bunker," she said. "They're in the bunkers because they have to be, because they're not immune. No, this man's like us, a survivor."

  "Hold still," Macy said sternly, and Anna winced as the needle went deeper into her foot than the local anesthetic covered. She held still. Probably Macy was stabbing a little harder than necessary, but then she was angry at having to redo all her work, for what she took only to be Anna's stubbornness. Whatever.

  "I'm not certain of anything," Jake said. "If he was a survivor why would he act like this? Why wouldn't he just come up to us like everyone else does?"

  "Some kind of con," Feargal suggested. "He has his own agenda."

  "What kind of con? What's he trying to get?"

  Feargal shrugged, then Anna gasped as Macy dug deeply again. Was she smirking? What a bitch.

  "I don't know. We'll find out. Can you put me onto Lara?"

  Jake nodded and knelt to rustle in a rucksack, producing the hefty satellite videophone he'd put together out of tech salvaged from the bunker. It looked like an old-style boom box, with a long aerial that stretched almost two yards in length. Jake angled it straight up, switched it on, played with some dials, then handed a slim tablet computer to Anna.

  "Bluetooth," he said, "better than cables."

  She took the tablet and swiped to on. This was just another way they relied upon the old world, piggybacking on infrastructure and programming from the past, but it worked, and that in itself was a kind of miracle. Unearthing the bunker had lit a fire underneath them all, and Jake had been at his most productive ever since. Bluetooth connectivity was something new in just the last few days.

  "It's the VOIP button," Jake said awkwardly, trying to point at the icons on the screen even as she was swiping over to it.

  "I know, I've used it before," she said. Macy stabbed her foot again and Anna cursed, then tapped the icon Jake had designed, a weird purple squid-like design that was supposed to be the T4, and a new screen opened up.

  "No, not that one, Amo didn't like the logo."

  "I'm not surprised," Feargal said.

  Anna backed out and hunted for the new app. "Here," said Jake. "It's the white star, yes, on blue."

  Anna sighed and pushed it. Amo was a stickler for branding. You'd think with the duties of mayorhood he'd stop micromanaging, but it seemed the brand image of the post-apocalypse was just too important for him to let go. He was an artist, after all.

  The app opened up, a black field spread to fill the screen, and the phone rang.

  They sat awkwardly while it rang. Macy hummed to herself happily and applied fresh bandages to Anna's feet. "I should padlock these together," she muttered quietly.

  The screen came to life with Lara's face.

  She looked worried, and her usually pretty, vital face had a gray tinge to it. Behind her was the back wall of the comms room, along with a glimpse of a rumpled single bed.

  "Anna, thank heaven, it's wonderful to see you up," Lara said.

  The signal was strong, better than Anna had seen it before. There was no fuzzing or jumped frames, and the audio was clear and crisp. It was a kind of miracle.

  "I figured out some more satellite handshakes," Jake said softly. "We've got much better coverage these days."

  "Lara," Anna said. "Tell me you've had some success finding Amo."

  The pleasure in Lara's eyes faded a little, back toward the low level of dullness that had haunted them all since the bunker blew. "No. I thought he was off in the hills, we checked the Hollywood sign and the wisdom tree, some of his favorite haunts, but he wasn't there. It looks like a long one."

  Anna gritted her teeth. This was Amo, now. He performed his duties as mayor admirably, with a steady influx of people coming in from Asia, but at times he'd started taking long, isolating walks through the city and hills, often leaving his walkie behind. Anna knew why, but she couldn't ever say.

  "It weighs heavily on him," Lara said. That was close, but not even Lara knew the full truth. In history the winners branded the losers the villains, every time, and it was the same here. Amo had yet to immortalize the death of the Maine bunker in his comic book, and she had a feeling he wouldn't ever get round to it.

  "Have they tried his office?"

  Lara frowned. The satellite phone captured the expression perfectly, the squashing of her fine caffe latte features. She'd barely aged either; so few wrinkles. "I'd know if he was there, Anna."

  "I mean the files. He's working his way through them, right? He'll have gone to the next in line."

  Lara sighed. She didn't like the files, or that Amo spent so much time in there. "You're right. Crow goes in there sometimes. I'll ask him to take a look. In the meantime, the Council's prepared a list of questions we want you to ask him. There's a strategy here."

  Anna nodded. She had her own strategy, but everything was in the interpretation. It wasn't so much the questions as the way they were asked.

  "Send the file."

  "Done. You should have it now."

  Anna looked to Jake, who gave a thumbs up.

  "Then we're all set here," Anna said. "I've got Ollie and Wanda trying to backtrack where he came from. We're on high alert. I'll go in and question him soon."

  "Good. Godspeed, Anna."

  "And to you."

  She tapped the connection closed, then looked round at the others.

  "I'm not asking those questions," she said.

  For a moment Jake looked like he was going to comment, but instead held his tongue. Feargal nodded his approval. Peters barely seemed to be listening. Macy looked away, as if it was none of her business. Did they know what this meant, and what she intended?

  Mercy was a mistake. She'd fallen foul of it earlier, when he'd been choking and so weak, but not now. Mercy was a liability, just like Maine, just like Witzgenstein, just like Julio.

  But Ravi was looking at her with a soft pleading in his eyes. Ah, Ravi. Ravi who liked to plait her hair and kiss her neck and who sometimes mumbled the strangest things in his sleep. If he knew what she and Amo had done, if he really knew what she was planning to do now, would he look at her the same way?

  She managed a smile.

  "All right. Macy, can you check on him? Check he's comfortable."

  "I can," she replied sharply. She was different too, after Dr. Ozark died. She used to be such a nurturing type, always cooking and seeking to make other people happy, but so much loss had beaten that out of her.

  "Then you go first. Feargal and Peters, you'll flank her. I'll be out here. Check him, feed him something if you can, and I'll follow afterward. Don't talk at all."

  "Good cop, bad cop," said Feargal. "Done."

  They left. Anna lay back and took a moment to breathe.

  Outside the tall airport window, there was a jumbo jet; marked with the Virgin Atlantic ins
ignia. That was just another bit of branding from the past. It leaned slightly to the side now, with one of its wheels more deflated than the other. The top slopes of the fuselage were scaled with gray dust, baked dry in the sun, while the underbelly dripped with green moss and lichen. At the tips the wings were starting to bow under their own weight, and all the windows had perished, fogged on the inside with condensation.

  She took her breath, trying to find her calm center, but the jet didn't help. It was ten years since anyone had opened the hatch and depressurized the hull. Ten years of sitting there while the innards broiled in the sun and cooled in the winters; ten years in a can, just like Salle Coram and all those Mars colonists fated to die.

  "I'm still here," Ravi said, by her side, pulling her back to the moment. She looked at him, then took his hand and gave it a little squeeze. That was all she could do right now, the most commitment she could make when she didn't know what they were up against.

  Killing one person should be easy. After all of the other deaths they'd caused she should barely even notice it, but she did. She only had to look at Amo to see how deeply killing the bunker had broken him. It had hurt her too, with the dreams coming every night now. She never slept enough and could never outrun the weight.

  You'd think so much death would numb you to killing, but in truth it made it worse. Every death added to the load. Eleven more bunkers lay ahead, with who knew how many thousands of people to die. She would do it, she knew that, but she was afraid of who she would be at the end.

  It started here.

  "I know, honey," she answered Ravi.

  For three months they'd had a kind of holiday, waiting for the trans-Atlantic crossing, but now the question was here before her again. The zombie horde was almost to Europe, and this intruder in their midst meant they still weren't safe, and Anna wasn't going to be first to blink.

  "I know."

  * * *

  If anything he looked weaker.

  The feeding had taken it out of him. Nobody liked having a hose pushed down their throat.

  Anna lifted herself onto her workbench, after Feargal dragged it closer. She'd wanted to stand, but that wasn't possible. Ravi had wanted to be there too, but she couldn't let him. She didn't want him to see her like this. She didn't want any witness.

  They were alone. The man looked up at her. She looked down at him.

  "You know Amo's name," she said to him. "Perhaps you know mine. I'm Anna. I'm guessing you've read the comics from our cairns, so you know something about us."

  He gazed back. He was calm now, resolved perhaps. Perhaps he expected torture and was putting on a brave face. She owed as much to him.

  "If so, you know who Julio is." She watched for a reaction, but he gave none. "He started off like you, in a way. Unwilling to join, unwilling to work together for the good of our community. You'll know how that ended."

  He frowned.

  "This is your last chance." She laid a hand gently on his throat. His eyes widened. "And I hope you don't believe I'm bluffing. You'll tell me who you are and why you're here, or I'll push. They won't know. I'll say you struggled, and by then it will be too late. You're going to talk to me."

  He stared back. With her free hand, she placed the pen and clipboard on his chest. "Talk."

  He glared at her. He was so angry, and that fired her up. So scream, so rage, but in the end buckle your head down. He stared, then reached for the pen and paper. Without breaking eye contact he wrote, three simple letters that filled up the paper.

  AMO

  Anna felt sick. But she'd warned him. Now she couldn't take the risk.

  She pushed. His throat beneath the bandaging flexed inward. He struggled against the cable ties holding him down, but it was no use.

  "Shhh," she soothed.

  "Anna!"

  She spun, letting go at once. Ravi was there, standing there with the tablet computer in his hand, staring at her. She hadn't heard him come in. Shit. He blanched white, and so did she.

  "What are you doing?"

  She pulled away from the man. He gurgled once but otherwise his raspy breathing continued.

  "Nothing," Anna said, "what is it?"

  He held the tablet out, trembling now.

  "It's Amo."

  AMO

  I go to see Jenny Gil.

  Her house is nice, on the outskirts of Thousand Oaks close to Camarillo. There's a pool, a scrubby hill in back dotted with strangleweed and struggling redwood pines, a carport and a two-door garage. She lived with her parents, it seems, a middle class life, toward upper for LA. From the look of all the film posters on the walls her folks were in the movie business. I find a few awards downstairs; a silver plaque, a trophy cup on the den mantelpiece over a fake wood fire.

  I wonder what her parents thought of her becoming- I check the papers again- a medical tech engineer. Were they upset she was going underground for ten years with Lars Mecklarin, or were they proud?

  There are the regulation two pictures in her thick crimson psych folder, one a headshot and one full body. She was an attractive woman. Like all of Mecklarin's 'colonists' she was young on admittance, younger than I was at the time and slender like a young sapling, with very straight dark brown hair and wide, knowing eyes.

  Now she's at the bottom of the Atlantic. Her hair is tangled with seaweed and krill. Her eyes are a blind, staring white. She's become a kind of slave, driven by a signal on the hydrogen line to sacrifice herself against the cold of the demons.

  Caused by me.

  I sigh and put the folder down on the dresser in her bedroom. The walls are a fawn-brown in here, like Lara's skin, with some posters of volleyball teams. Jenny Gil played defensive for her college team, I know that from Mecklarin's copious notes.

  I open one of her dresser drawers and find mementoes, nestled together in a cardboard box decorated with glinting sticker hearts: some bracelets, intricately-folded letters that smell of perfume, a tiny little book of black and white photos bought in Europe on some old family holiday. There's also a little, frayed beanbag frog; it's probably mentioned in the file too.

  I sit in her dresser chair. Through the window there's a view of the street; a calm black snake winding through this bland residential zone, like a million others just like it across America. Sandy brown dust coats the graying asphalt road top. There are overgrown palm trees lining the sidewalk with thick rushes of cast-off brown fronds about their feet, like someone's pulled all their pants down. There's a rusted lawnmower across the way, sitting in the middle of a patch of dead brown grass like a piece of modern art.

  Cars wilt up and down the street on melted rubber wheels like faithful aged dogs; at a limp kind of attention, ever ready to take their lost owners to work, to the store, chase a tennis ball. No one's coming back, though. A sepia layer of dust on the window glass makes everything seem even more hazy and unreal.

  I touch it with a finger. I could write anything here; something witty or glib, something reverential or mournful, but nothing comes to mind. Maine and Witzgenstein both hammered some of that out of me, so I spend a lot of time in quiet reflection these days, watching what I do and say. Everything has an impact, and I'm tired of watching the ripple effect of the actions I take, causing pain. These days I can hardly bear to take a step for fear of treading on a bug.

  "Jenny," I muse, as I always do at these places. Jenny Gil, medical tech engineer, the twenty-third of twenty-three of Mecklarin's colonists who lived in LA before they entered the Maine bunker. I've been to the other twenty-two already, and Jenny Gil is the last. I want to stretch this last one out, because after this it becomes a little crazy.

  There are seventeen addresses in San Francisco. Five in San Diego. Many more scattered across the smaller coastal towns like San Jose, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and that's just in California. I could spend the rest of my life visiting the homes of my three thousand victims, but it'll never change how dead they are.

  I only have to close my eyes and I'm back in
Salle Coram's bunker with Anna at my side, watching as person after person turns gray. Perhaps these visits are my new addiction. Once upon a time I used to drink, back when I thought I truly was the last man alive. I drank to get through the terrible things I'd done, then I did penance with all the admissions I left across the country as cairns.

  I sigh. My absolution is in every comic book I printed, but I can't make this home a spot on the cairn trail. I can't tell the truth to New LA, not after Witzgenstein, because this is not the kind of weight that gets lighter with sharing. This is the weight that tears communities apart; a wound around which the skin can never knit, and New LA can't bear another wrench like that. So I'll bear it alone, along with the knowledge that I'm sending Anna east to do it all over again, eleven more times.

  I can't bear to think about that at all.

  In the distance a car's coming. Good.

  I hear its engine for a time before I see it; a rough barking that many of our vehicles make now that they're burning the reclaimed, rehydrated fuel we scavenge from the old world. This one has a guttural cough, a signature I recognize. Soon there's a trail of black exhaust smoke rising up from nearby, like a Wild West steam train approaching the station.

  It pulls up the dusty street; a Jeep Wrangler in cherry red with the windshield pushed down across the hood. I smile. At the wheel there's Crow, long black hair gleaming in the sun, wearing a solemn pair of shades that make him seem incredibly wise, like Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse from legend. He spots me in the window easily, through all the wind-blown grime of years, and raises a hand.

  I smile. I like Crow.

  He's strong, with that seamy face and that calm way about him. I like that he wears flowers in his hair sometimes, that when he touches the grass he says a prayer, that he looks at the sky with a kind of wonder in his eyes. He was buried with Julio and the demon for almost a year, and now he looks at everything with a glorious appreciation. I want to be like that.

  I find the clasp and open the window.

  "Crow," I call as he gets out and comes over. He stands for a moment looking up at me, like a statue. He'll have followed the copies in my study, where Salle Coram's files of the three thousand are spread everywhere; pinned to walls, organized in geographical batches, lying in stacks. He's spent more time in there with me than anyone else.