The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "Thank you," Farsan said, as tears trickled down his cheeks. "Can I?" He gestured to the drip.

  Lucas wanted to wail. The pain was terrible, the sense of losing his own body tore him apart, but worse still was giving up and accepting he couldn't save himself, couldn't save Farsan or any of their number, and all he could do was accept Salle Coram's tyrannical way.

  But he nodded, and Farsan's nimble fingers went to the drip and closed the little yellow tappet. With a sterile pad in position he extracted the needle and bandaged the pinprick hole it left behind, on a forearm traced with old needle grooves.

  Almost at once the pain and pressure began to diminish, but that only made Lucas feel weaker, prying loose his tight grip on consciousness. Gray waves lulled him down into darkness, and as he sank the last thing he saw was the relief on his friend Farsan's face, so very long in coming.

  * * *

  A new kind of pain woke him.

  It throbbed in his chest with an almost pleasant kind of lightness, like the gentle electrical shock you got when pressing your tongue to a worn-down battery.

  He blinked and looked about, at the bar/laboratory in the flickering dark. It was hot and stuffy and he could hardly breathe. No fans operated down here, no air conditioner, nothing beyond the lamp and the equipment he'd managed to scavenge, improvise and steal. Now those items were like ancient standing stones in the hot dark, shadowy and vague around him: a centrifuge for spinning blood samples; a powered-up digital microscope and a precision slicer adapted from a 3D printer's innards; a super cooling freezer rigged with external tubes to a Freon supply.

  Artifacts from the past, all of which he'd promised Farsan he wouldn't use again.

  "Farsan," he called weakly, his voice a croak, but Farsan wasn't there. Perhaps he'd gone to check on the power linkage; it seemed the halogen lamp was failing worse than usual.

  He looked down to where fresh towels had been laid under his body. The soiled diaper curtains had been removed and now he was back in his uniform, as dictated by Salle Coram. He smiled sadly at the thought of Farsan stripping him and dressing him again, while unconscious. That was a feeble kind of pleasure.

  Still, Farsan was happy.

  A new drip tube emerged from his forearm, leading back to a bag of yellowish liquid. They'd made these themselves, a recovery pack of essential sugars, salts and other trace vitamins and minerals, enough to kick-start his system after another failed serum-inject.

  He didn't feel too bad, at that. Normally a post-serum session involved a migraine that lasted for days, whole-body weakness, incontinence, vomiting, but not this time. There was just the almost pleasant, insistent throb in his chest.

  What time was it, how long had he been out?

  The drip needle came out easily and he pasted another bandage in place.

  "Farsan," he called hoarsely again, but still nothing. Getting onto his knees wasn't a problem, surprisingly, and because he could, he pushed a little further and got to his feet. His legs wobbled stubbornly, almost tipping him forward, but he caught the drip stand and rebalanced.

  He took a few steps, off the mattress and over toward one of the workbenches by the door. They kept a radio here, hacked to receive Command's private communications; the only way they'd stayed under the radar for so long. Thank Mecklarin he'd seen fit to stock his Habitat with free-thinkers who also had the expert cryptography and engineering skills to break open Salle Coram's airwaves.

  He cycled the dial on, but there was no transmission going out, which in itself was not unusual. Sometimes days went by and nothing was said on any of the Command channels, probably when Salle was engaged with some other puzzle. There hadn't been a single transmission in almost a week, as far as he remembered.

  He picked his wallet, key card and watch off a clipboard scrawled with equations, theories and diagrams of molecular connections, and checked the time. 4:20pm, meaning he'd been out for seven hours. He had a shift coming up in protein-formation, in Farm Hall 3. It was odd Farsan hadn't come back to wake him, but he was up now, and able. It was surprising how good he actually felt, perhaps even better than he had before the serum.

  He shuffled through the lab door, out into a pitch-black corridor beyond, lit only by the faint glow of the halogen from behind. He could collect it, but it was better to leave it there; Farsan would be coming back anyway, and he'd made this short walk through the maze of corridors a thousand times. The dark wasn't a problem.

  He let the door close with a reassuring clunk and started down the hall into blackness, tracing his fingertips along the wall to his right. Here was a vending machine's broken glass front, long since emptied of candy and soda. Here was an open archway where the door had been torn off. Here was a crazy kind of modern art mosaic, burnt and stippled down by a Molotov cocktail.

  The revolution had been at its worst down here. Salle's soldiers had come in force, to dig out a drunken cabal of farmers who had started forming their own feudal kingdom. Things had gone crazy, but not Lucas.

  He'd taken the chance to grab the supplies he'd known he'd need, and stash them in a place he could access later. He hadn't been the one to start the rumor of a zombie apocalypse above ground, which ultimately brought the Habitat down, but he'd believed it. It fit the observable phenomenon better than Lars Mecklarin's dream of Mars, so he'd prepared, gathering the equipment and materials he'd need.

  He smiled to mask the bitter taste of his current situation. All his preparations had come to this; not even true failure, just surrender. At least the serum hadn't left him feeling sick.

  He circled sightlessly round a heap of broken pallets from the abandoned farm hall. Now he used the soil in the ravaged hall to culture bacteria for his serums. A few grow lights used sparingly were enough to harvest a wide range of bacteria genotypes. He passed the spot where the walls were still stained with old blood. Salle had had three men shot there, followed by three more men caned to death, as a warning to all that might follow.

  Heady days.

  Up a flight of metal stairs and through a labyrinth of winding access corridors, he finally reached the access port, where they'd drilled around the barricades Salle's soldiers had put in place. All this area had lost power and much of its carbon dioxide scrubbing ability in the chaos of the revolution, with the wiring, machinery and plumbing stripped or so badly damaged that they'd deemed the whole floor irretrievable. After a few forays to scavenge all that they usefully could, Salle's black-clad soldiers sealed it up.

  It hadn't been too hard to drill a way in, though. Lucas was supposed to be a genius, after all. Figuring out the best spot to break through, memorizing the soldiers' patrols, planning his slow second revolution, was child's play. Now in the dark he worked on a small hatch at eye level, opening it on an oiled hinge to rest on a cushioned pad, to reveal a peephole to the corridor beyond. No one came down here really, since it was a dead end, but it was safer to check every time.

  Corridor Blue two stretched ahead beyond the wall, itself poorly lit and still scarred with the bullet pocks and scorch marks of the revolution. A hundred yards on it reached a sharp corner, but for now no one was there. Lucas reached down and worked the latch for the crawlway door, which swung open. He dropped to his knees, reached in and extracted the heavy metal block that filled the cavity, then peeked once more through another peephole drilled in a screw hole. Still empty.

  Swiftly and with practiced motions he opened the outer hatch, crawled through the wall like a pet going through a pet door, then pulled the metal block back through after him; slotting it into position so it resembled the interior of the fuse box through which they'd made their passage. He reached beyond it and pulled the inner door closed, then closed the outer fuse box door and stood up.

  His heart thumped hard, as it always did when he did this, and his head spun.

  Nobody was coming still.

  "Farsan?" he called.

  There was no sign of him. There wouldn't be, though, not lingering out here.

/>   He walked along corridor Blue two, rounded the corner and passed a series of storage halls to a lesser-used part of deck one-minus where three corridors intersected.

  Along corridor Blue three ahead a woman was walking towards him. He recognized her vaguely, she was Stacey or Tracy or something like that, possibly a psychologist but maybe an engineer. He might have had drinks with her once or twice, but that wasn't unusual. For ten years, three thousand people was not much. There was also an odd low rasping sound now, like the carbon scrubbers were cycling up.

  He waved at Stacey/Tracy, preparing his excuse for being down here at this time. He had a lot of excuses, which his job in requisitions gave easy cover for with all the storage rooms down here. She waved back. They would probably stop and chat, catch up a little. She'd ask him if he'd managed to pair-bond yet, and he'd lie. He'd ask her, and she'd say she had three or four pair-bond matches lined up, for the day Salle Coram gave them the green light to go ahead and have children.

  But that didn't happen.

  Instead she abruptly stopped walking, with her hand still raised awkwardly in the air, and the faint smile faded from her face, leaving behind an empty mask, as if she'd just seen a ghost.

  He stopped in his tracks, startled. He turned; were there soldiers behind him? No, there was nothing.

  "Stacey," he said, then noticed her skin. It could have been a trick of the weak lighting, but it seemed the color in her cheeks was draining away, from a pale pinkish tone to a grayish white. Then she blinked, and when her eyelids opened again her eyes were a glowing white, swallowing up her black pupils and irises in a halogen-like light.

  His own eyes widened. This wasn't possible, but here it was happening, and if it was there then soon it would be him too. He took a step back, as if he could somehow outrun the zombie infection, then Stacey/Tracy abruptly jerked, like a toy that had had its off button punched then switched back on. On a dime she turned away from him, and started walking back the way she had come.

  He stared after her, hardly believing it. Had he just seen what he thought he'd seen? It had all happened too fast, but the way she was trudging away now was strange; her feet fell oddly and her balance shifted strangely.

  "Stacey," he called after her, but she showed no sign of hearing. It felt like his mind was trudging through mud just to keep up. Had he really seen that, or was it some delirious side effect of the serum, making him crazy? The Habitat had been sealed for ten years, that was the whole point of containment, but right now Stacey/Tracy did look a hell of a lot like a zombie was supposed to look.

  A door behind him on Blue two slammed open and then two more of them were coming, answering the question. They were dressed in farmer's coveralls and dirt streaked their faces, but there was no denying the grayness of their skin or the white lights in their eyes. Seconds later more came from other angles; a woman loped out of the old recreation room halfway down Blue three, now Salle Coram's prison, and a man dropped down an access ladder from above with a CRUNCH, hitting the deck a few yards ahead of Lucas and breaking at least one bone.

  "Holy shit," Lucas muttered, and lurched backward. The two farmers brushed by him like football players driving toward the quarterback, and Lucas bounced to the wall in their wake, watching as they shoved past the man who had fallen down the ladder. He was on his feet already, bleeding heavily from what looked like a broken eye socket, but with his eyes glowing he didn't seem to care.

  "Wait, you've got-" Lucas began, but the man ignored him and ran unsteadily after the others through the intersection and away down Blue 4, following Stacey/Tracy.

  It was an outbreak. Lucas leaned against the wall through a fit of dizziness. They all had the same glowing eyes, they all had the same pale white skin, and they were all going in the same direction.

  Farsan rose up in his mind. Where was he, and was he safe?

  The thumping sound grew louder, a tramp like dozens of feet stamping out a path, and he looked up as a throng of clamoring, white-faced bodies came around the far corner of Blue 4. There were the two farmers and the man who fell and the woman from prison, along with dozens more, all folded in around two figures in the middle. They pressed their bodies close and reached inward hungrily, but they didn't bite or scratch, didn't scream or cry out or do anything Lucas would expect of zombies.

  If anything they looked like enthusiastic dogs seeking attention, or fans hankering for an autograph.

  Lucas gawped and stood on his tiptoes and tried to see through the throng to the figures in the middle, catching glimpses of them only in shifting flashes as the heaving mass of people shifted. One was a tallish white man with dark brown hair and a scraggly beard, dressed in jeans and a military-looking jacket, with glistening eyes and a hard, stony face. Beside him walked a young black woman with big frizzy hair, younger than anyone he'd seen in ten years, who had a look of such steely determination in her eyes that it sent a shiver through him. She was talking in a low voice while the man just stared ahead, right into his eyes.

  Did they see him? He felt trapped with nowhere to hide.

  He'd never seen these people before.

  They walked on calmly and purposefully amidst the crowd, and now Lucas saw the extent of the 'zombies' following them. There were dozens, a crowd stretching back round the corner and beyond, moving in a raspy, thunderous tandem, with the sound of their breath wheezing in and out like a rustling gale.

  It was impossible but it kept happening. They kept coming, and with every step and breath he realized the truth was undeniable.

  The Habitat had fallen. Salle Coram's mission had failed. They'd been invaded, the infection had gotten in, and now it was coming for him, and somehow he was still alive. He looked at his hands; no paler than before. He had full control of his limbs, though he was still frozen in shock.

  The serum.

  He thought of Farsan, who had given up taking the serums five iterations ago, and that woke him out of his shock. Perhaps it was an earlier version that had cured him. Perhaps there was still time to give him the latest.

  There had to be a chance.

  He turned his face away from the stony man and the girl with the terrifying gaze, and ran back the way he'd come, down the corridor and into a new future where Salle Coram's laws meant nothing, into a world that he didn't understand and couldn't predict at all.

  5. TRIAL

  One week after they'd opened up the MARS3000 bunker, Anna stood in the witness box at the head of a makeshift courtroom, in the orange entrance hall of Salle Coram's Habitat, preparing to give testimony in the 'trial' of Amo for Masako's death.

  It was a joke, really. They'd cleaned up the hall the night before to give this charade the semblance of authority, but even that was a failed endeavor. Three people had been spared from otherwise essential work to go up and down the walls and scrub away at old blast stains, yellowish damp marks and the crinkled paint of fire damage, all evidence of another revolution in another time and place.

  But they hadn't even done a good job. They'd torn out the remaining TVs and boarded up the gaps they left behind, aiming at some sense of weighty intent, but still many sprays of wires poked out where they hadn't finished in time. The paintwork had bubbled where they'd damped it down, causing large streaky patterns following the arcs of a cleaner's arm span.

  Now she was sitting here, waiting, all because Amo had asked her to. Amo who now sat in the plaintiff's box with his head bowed humbly in front of everyone; beneath Witzgenstein at the high judge's desk, beneath Anna in her pulpit, beneath this jury of peers in their rows of seats, being judged.

  She didn't like it. She didn't think it was right. But Amo thought it was necessary.

  She looked at Witzgenstein, sat at her desk with the gavel in hand, enjoying herself. Her blonde hair was pulled tightly back, revealing high cheeks, a sharp nose and fiercely intelligent eyes. She looked every bit the judge.

  "Anna," Witzgenstein prompted, repeating herself. "Please tell the court what you heard."
/>
  "I heard it all," Anna said.

  It had been chaos in her Cessna; 7,000 feet high and at the edge of despair, desperately trying to make radio contact with Amo. Poor Jake had been tapping madly at her seat back, Peters was barely conscious from the pain in his broken legs, while her whole body throbbed from having fought with the gusting, hailstone winds of a massive snowstorm for the past four hours.

  On top of that she'd been already exhausted from a solid day's flight up from the West coast 1,500 miles due east, after already crashing once a day earlier. Her first successful landing in Idaho was rocky, followed by a frantic hour of getting the refueling equipment there to work by sheer force of will, before taking off again to finish the slog to the East coast. They'd hit bad weather right away though, and become trapped in a snowstorm for hours.

  Chaos. The memory of it reached into her even sitting in the dock; the bone-numbing cold in that little, rickety plane; the click and fritz of the de-icer on the wings; the endless buffeting of the winds dragging at the throttle, and the constant deep knowledge that at any moment one of the engines could cut out and the whole thing could tumble from the sky, for the second time.

  She shuddered in the witness stand. Worst of all, they'd been flying completely blind. She'd had no clear idea where Amo was, as they'd been out of radio range for over two days, and now the storm was blocking all signals. Still she'd pressed on, trying over and over to raise him on the radio, so that when they finally burst out of the storm somewhere above the Pennsylvania border she'd redoubled her efforts. He had to be near. As they flew above the silent city of Pittsburgh in the dark, charting a path by ancient GPS signals and Peters' dizzy sense of the horde up ahead, with the demons closing in, she'd kept the channel open constantly.

  Then she'd seen them. There were thousands of them north of the city, sprawled across a huge swathe of highway and forest like a moonlit ocean. Their pale gray, stick-thin bodies glinted like breakers on slow-moving waves. It had stunned her so much she barely heard it when Amo finally answered her call.