"It's enough for one day," he calls up to me. He sees this for what it is, an addiction, and that's an honesty I appreciate. "You're needed."
I nod. Of course.
* * *
He gives the overview on the road back, and it wakes me up like a punch in the nose. Halfway there I get on the walkie to Lara.
"He asked to speak only to me?" I ask.
"He wrote it down," she answers. "He can't speak since Anna broke his throat." There's definitely a note of pride in her voice, which worries me a little. Once she found violence so distasteful, but now I think she quite likes it. After the demon crushed her ribs she acquired a new edge. It's one reason she won't go in my study and look at Salle's files; she doesn't want to dilute her hatred for them with sympathy.
"But only me," I puzzle, rubbing at my temple as the Jeep catches air for a second, going eighty miles per hour over a slight rise on the 405, down through Santa Monica. "How would he even know who I am?"
"Everyone knows who you are, Amo from the cairns, though Sulman says he could've been listening in to our walkie frequencies too, for who knows how long. We don't use encryption, it's all just up there in the air."
I curse beneath my breath. The cairns, of course, but radio too? I thought with Julio gone we wouldn't need to worry about that again. "So he knew about Anna's lab. He could've known their guard rotation. He could even know about our plans and what we're aiming to do in Europe."
"He could," Lara confirms, "but why would he want to interfere with that? That's what we can't figure out here; his motivation. He's out in the air, a survivor like the rest of us, so it's in his interests for all the demons to be crushed. What's his game?"
"It's got to be something else," I say, as Crow revs us into a sharp right turn onto 187, bypassing the section of 405 that collapsed in the 2026 quake. "He could've just walked up if he wanted to join us."
I remember words I said a lifetime ago to Anna, that we might not be alone above the ground. There could be others, groups less welcoming than us, with very different ideas of what survival was. There's already one out there.
Witzgenstein. Could she have sent him?
I change my tone. "Lara, tell me we've pulled everyone back from the farms and the university. We need a tight cordon, gunners on the roof, guards on every entrance to the Theater, and the radar scanning the streets."
"Already done," she says, and that brings some relief. "You're the last one out there, and your walkie was off."
There's no rebuke in this, no nagging, just a fact plainly stated. She is of course right, and that's all the rebuke I need.
"And Anna's team?"
"They're clustered in the airport concourse near the quarantine zone, where they're keeping him. They've rigged the sat phone to a keyboard so you can talk. He's not said anything else since he requested you."
I nod.
We fly past the Marina Del Rey and down to the Vista Del Mar by the beach. It's a foggy, humid day and the ocean is a grayish blue, with skirls of sand swirling up in little zephyrs on the beach. I get myself ready. I grit my teeth. That's enough being Amo the apologist. It's time to turn the spikes outward again.
* * *
Everyone's gathered in the Chinese Theater lobby. There isn't the air of terror there was three months ago, when Peters' van rolled in and changed the world, but the anxiety is blooming.
People have roles though; they've been through worse before and they're ready. Even the children have a look of steel in their eyes, while everyone of age is carrying a weapon at their hip. Ross and his crew are on the roof even now, manning the machine gun pillboxes. Sulman will be monitoring our makeshift 'radar', really a system of motion detectors installed on every intersection for three blocks around. We're covered.
Council members move amongst the people, touching arms, calming fears and relaying orders. The missing faces amongst us are hardly noticed now; lost to the demons, lost to Witzgenstein's dream. Here's Darius, a Council member who inherited Masako's position, talking in a tight little circle. Here's Kasey who took Witzgenstein's seat, talking with her new boyfriend. Here's my kids, Talia and Vie, sitting on a bench. I know they both miss Lin still, ripped away when Alan left. I wave at them and Vie waves back, while Talia nods seriously. She reminds me of Anna; always so serious. They're becoming their own people already.
I pass by without making any kind of proclamation. I don't go in for big speeches now.
The radio room is waiting, as ever, in what used to be the smaller screen 11. Sulman is sitting at his desk, with the blocky, wire-spouting satellite unit he and Jake built beside him, rigged by a thick red cable to the dish on the roof, targeted at whichever satellites still remain. There's a computer screen and a keyboard with mouse, just like the old days.
Lara pings up from her seat and grabs me in a hug.
"I'll be right here," she says.
"He's just one man," I reply.
She nods and I take the seat. People bustle around me. Buttons are pushed, dials spun, the dish on the roof targeted manually with a joystick, but I focus on the screen. Just like Skype. The pale blue of the logo is strangely calming.
It boots up as the connection is established. Sulman does something to dial us in, then looks at me. "She's standing by."
I nod and at the other end the phone rings. Seconds later it's answered and the screen wakes in a wash of white light, broken by Anna's dark face.
She looks older and tougher than ever. I hear she had 34 stitches in her feet but walked on them still, just to make a point.
"Amo," she says, all that we need by way of greeting, "he's here. He's got the keyboard."
"Let me see him."
She steps aside. The screen whites out again as the contrast adjusts, then resolves to a pale figure strapped to a bed in a seated position. The bruising on his throat is a vivid black creeping out from under the bandaging. His hands rest on a keyboard on his lap, but his eyes are focused intensely on me, staring as if we know each other, as if he's willing me to see something that I can't possibly see.
And I see it.
I take a shallow gasp. He stares and I stare back, even as his fingers start to click over the keys and his first words to me shoot up into the sky and back down again from three thousand miles away.
Hello Amo.
I know him. Those eyes, that jaw, those high cheekbones.
"What is it?" Lara asks quietly. "What do you see?"
My throat goes dry. I watch transfixed as more words appear on the screen.
It's good to see you again.
"What does that mean?" Lara asks. My mind races ahead, working out the connections. Did I? Could I have? Then his third message comes, and perhaps it shakes something loose in me.
I know what you're planning to do. I have a better idea.
He is as flat as a face on a printed page. Anna steps in to the picture and holds her hand open by his neck. The message is clear.
"What does he mean?" Lara repeats. "What does he know?"
Anna has the back of her hand almost touching his throat now, and I know she's seconds away from killing him. She's done it before to keep our secret safe, to keep New LA safe. She did it to Witzgenstein three months back and I didn't stop her then, so why should I stop her now? Her eyes flash in the bright lights and I try to make one more impossible decision; does this man need to die?
Salle Coram flashes into my mind; locked in her bunker, crushing her people down to ensure the ends justified the means. Am I like her, will I end up like that? My mind flashes back to my study and all those files, all those names and pictures so carefully collected by Lars Mecklarin and jealously guarded by Salle Coram; a power that only she could wield.
Now they're all dead, and doesn't that make me worse than Salle already? They were a danger to my people, and did that end justify the means?
I look into Anna's eyes, into her certainty, and just as her hand touches his bandaged throat, the revelation hits.
; "His name is Lucas," I say. Abruptly my voice sounds very far away, like it's coming through on the end of a satellite call from Mongolia. Faces from the files rush up; every name and every face memorized as my own private penance, so there's no denying what I'm seeing on the screen.
"He's a geneticist. He was in Salle Coram's bunker."
PAST
INTERLUDE 1
Seven hours before the zombie apocalypse destroyed the MARS3000 Habitat, Lucas Fallow lay on a stained mattress in the corner of his dark and dirty makeshift laboratory, shuddering in agony. He'd taken too much this time, or too little. The dosage was wrong, or it was right. There was no way to know if he would live or die.
Shadows flickered with the guttering halogen lamp, hung from an extendable arm on the wall where once a 52" plasma screen had hung. Six years ago this had been a bar, and the walls were still a gaudy array of Plexiglas primary colors: red, yellow, orange, though in the dying light they looked dark and sickly.
The TV stood propped against the wall now, spider-webbed with cracks that dated back to the revolution. Dust lay thickly over chairs and tables that were scattered and burnt, where rampaging mobs had left them six years ago. Heaps of broken glass rested in mournful little mounds in corners, where Lucas had brushed them aside at the start of this sad, hopeless endeavor.
Everything was falling apart.
The red plastic ceiling phased in and out of darkness as the power to the lamp faded then returned, like a tide ebbing, and the pain gripping Lucas' body phased with it, shifting from his guts to his spine and back again. His fingers palsied like frozen claws, his feet twisted and his face convulsed. Spit dribbled frothily down his cheeks, piss and shit leaked out of the haphazard diaper he'd fashioned from a much-used velvet curtain, and tears poured from his eyes.
It was his sixteenth time.
"We can't do this anymore," Farsan said.
Farsan knelt beside him, as ever, despite the stink and the fever, with his warm Persian eyes, his dark brown eyebrows, his mellow tan skin. He was the last faithful remainder of their motley group of genius biologists, physicists and geneticists who'd survived the revolution together, who together had waged a lasting, secret rebellion against the new and brutal rule of Salle Coram.
Now his voice barely broke through the fog of pain that surrounded Lucas, but the resignation in it was clear. He said this every time, as Lucas sweated and shook through the dose, but this time something was different.
"Nggg," Lucas managed to reply, gritting his teeth and forcing his throat to work.
Farsan took his rigid hand and squeezed, though Lucas barely felt it. "You know it's true. Lucas, you're getting weaker. Salle Coram knows it too, or she will soon enough. They've started random blood sampling, and what happens when they sample you or me or one of the others? What if you die here, what am I supposed to do with your body? You're toxic beyond hiding. You'll be a beacon pointing back to us all."
Lucas gritted his teeth, pushing briefly through the burning spasms in his gut and groin. "It's … OK."
Farsan gave a dry, un-amused laugh. "It's not OK. You know, I used to think doing this was courageous, an important rebellion we were brave to keep driving ahead, but you know what I think now? 'Lord, give me the courage to accept the things I cannot change.' Alcoholics used to say something like it, and what are we but addicts now, hungry for a past that isn't coming back? Salle Coram is one of the things you can't change, Lucas. The infection, the end of the world, that's another."
A fresh wave of pain rose up in Lucas' head, grinding him beneath its tremendous pressure. All he wanted to do was take a hammer and crack a hole in his head, but he couldn't move, and that wouldn't work anyway; he'd already tried.
"She's got a plan, at least," Farsan went on, repeating words he'd said since the beginning, when Salle Coram had barred their research outright and they'd continued anyway, going deeper 'underground', into this long-walled off section of the Habitat ruined by the madness of the revolution. "She's talking about D-day coming soon, about the world above being cleared. We won't need to do this then. You don't need to keep risking yourself."
Lucas pushed up through the gray pain and fixed his gaze briefly on Farsan's deep, warm eyes. Farsan was the strong one, always had been, though he didn't know it. He could accept Salle Coram's lash and live with it, while Lucas never could, and that was a more useful kind of strength. Flowers looked weak but they bent with the wind. A stubborn oak tree cracked and fell.
"No," he managed.
Farsan shook his head and squeezed Lucas' hand. "It's me too," he pressed on. "Not only you. If they find you they'll find me and the others, you must see that. This has to be the last time. I don't want to die, Lucas. I want to walk up above again, under the sky. I want to make a grave for my parents, I want to stand there and wish them well in the next life. There's so many things I want to do, and if I die here with you I'll never be able to do them."
Lucas could barely think. The words surfed atop the ocean of gray pressure in his head, with little of their actual meaning seeping in.
"I know what you're thinking," Farsan went on, "but it wouldn't be surrender. This whole thing, it's a phantom show anyway." He spread his free hand to encompass the dingy, dark, makeshift laboratory. "It's a dream we'll never even be able to test, because when will Salle Coram give us access to the world above, to samples of the infected? We've put on a good show, we've mixed some powerful serums, but what does that matter if we never get to test them against the activated T4?"
Lucas wanted to answer, but Farsan always waited for moments like these, when it was all he could do to keep his own heart from exploding, when he could scarcely think. He wanted to list out all the progress they'd made: the iterations on their base treatment that signaled well on a dozen scales of bacteriophagic reduction; the regenerated sample cells in a simulated zombie outbreak scenario; the recent breakthrough with bacilli they'd made that had led to this latest serum, even now causing havoc in his system.
But he couldn't say those things, and besides Farsan already knew them. Damn, faithful Farsan.
"Tel-m'rase," he managed, more a burp than a word.
Farsan smiled, humoring him. "Telomerase? Lucas, that's where we started. We've come full circle, hammering on the telomerase drum, and what has it gotten us? You're on the edge right now, and I'm tired. I want us to go up above under Salle Coram's instructions, after the demons sweep the world, and be free. We can get houses next to each other, white picket fences, a weeping willow that straddles our yards, and work on this puzzle all you like as an intellectual conceit, but we have to be alive to do that. Right now it's just dumb bullheaded stubbornness driving us on. It's you, and I can't let you do it anymore."
Lucas stared up at him, with a sick longing no doubt obscured by the blood trickling down his nose and the brackish purple vomit seeping from between his lips. It wasn't twin houses he wanted, but one house. One yard. One family, but he could never say that to that Farsan. It was too much, even after all this; it was too hard.
Farsan wiped his lips tenderly. How many times had they been through this? He cleaned the blood from Lucas' nose, then checked the drip bag feeding the clear serum into his arm. It resembled chemotherapy more than any other treatment; pumping poison into the body to toughen it up.
But you couldn't toughen up against the T4. In all the models they'd constructed, based on dried up records from Command that Salle Coram had allowed out in the early days of testing when she'd allowed hope of a cure to exist, the T4 flitted between cells with ease, as if the membranes dividing them weren't even there. It went wherever it went and it killed or converted everything it touched, and nothing they did could stop it. It used the telomeres in every cell, those tiny wick-like strands that limited genetic lifespan, like an open door it came marching on through, taking over the existing control architecture and turning it gray.
White eyes. Shuffling steps. Pale skin. They stole the world and Lucas had never accepted it,
not for Salle, not for her plan, but could he for Farsan?
For Farsan. Farsan gazed down at him now, hopeful and hungry for something, though it wasn't the same hunger Lucas felt. To him Lucas was a friend, a great friend perhaps, but that was all and it would have to be enough.
Ten years of dreams. Six years of resistance and never losing hope throughout. He never expected the end would come like this, at the hands of the one he loved most in the world, but how else could it come in this cruel new existence? He looked up at Farsan and blinked tears away, then gave a nod. Everything he said was true. Salle was becoming more vigilant. He was risking them all every time he ran a test.
He was risking Farsan.
"OK," he managed.
The great weight of relief in Farsan's eyes was a joy. In such a cruel, hopeless life, it seemed strange that surrendering hope could cause so much happiness, but it did. Hope was a cross that wore you down, and perhaps surrender was better. The relief washed over him, as Farsan blinked back tears and squeezed his hand. Farsan wouldn't have to lie any more, and that was worth so much. He wouldn't have to pretend, wouldn't have to live in fear every day, wouldn't have to watch every thing he said and suspect every person he met.
For Lucas those things wouldn't change.
Homosexuality was outlawed in Salle Coram's bunker, not for bigotry but for the simple belief that gays were a genetic dead-end in a world that would need repopulation. Wasting resources on someone unwilling to procreate was a criminal offence.
It didn't matter that he wanted children. It didn't matter that he hoped to donate his genetic material to a birth mother and then do all he could to raise the child. In Salle Coram's black and white world he offered a sub-optimal pairing, and the wages of sub-optimal were death.
In time they'd find him out. He'd kept the secret all his life, but this surrender would wear him down until there was nothing left but the truth, and he'd be done for. Shame would come, followed by death, but for Farsan's sake he could accept it.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 89
