The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Witzgenstein stared. Perhaps she was just beginning to realize the noose that hung before her. "I am a Council member! You cannot speak to me in this way."

  "You've been saying worse about Amo for years," Anna said. "About me, about my father, and it's enough. I'm offering what you've always wanted, much better than a bullet in the head, which is what I would have preferred. Take it, or remain and find out how this sheriff enforces the law. You have three days."

  Anna turned and walked up the middle aisle, between the ranks of the jury and into the elevator, feeling clearer and lighter than ever.

  INTERLUDE 3

  Lucas took samples.

  He sank an emptied daily vitamin syringe into Farsan's arm and drew 50ccs of dark, brackish blood into the cylinder. He sealed it, dropped it into a Ziploc bag already stocked with ice from the kitchen, then drew the second. He didn't have anticoagulant with him and the blood was already thick, so time was of the essence.

  Next he took Farsan's hand, held sharp steak scissors to his finger, and shaved off a thin sliver of skin. He wrapped it in sterile cotton wool from a small med kit and stowed it in another bag. He trimmed a thick lock of hair, trimmed three fingernails, and finally rubbed two cotton buds inside Farsan's open mouth, which was as dry as a coconut husk, sealed them in a sterilized toothbrush case, and dropped them all in more chilled plastic bags.

  Throughout, Farsan beat at the door. He wanted to get away. Like the others, he was drawn to the ones who had killed him.

  "It'll be all right," Lucas said repeatedly, but his voice sounded frail and fake and had no effect on Farsan at all.

  Last of all, he pushed the serum needle into Farsan's arm and turned the little tappet, starting the drip. If he was expecting a sudden reaction, he was disappointed. Nothing changed.

  Thump

  Thump

  Thump

  Back in the living room he surveyed the relics of another time; still so close he could almost reach out and grasp it. Here was Farsan's purple sofa, scented with Farsan's rich cypress resin incense. Here was Farsan's exotic carved acacia artwork and his jasmine candles. Here was Farsan's mahogany coffee table, now laid out with three changes of clothes.

  This was the plan. He was going to dress as Farsan. He was going to take a piece of Farsan away. He was going to bring him back alive.

  Thump

  Thump

  Thump

  Farsan beat mindlessly at the door. Around him the Habitat hummed as it always had, as if nothing had changed; flues running, electricity flowing, water in pipes sloshing by. Lucas listened for a moment to the hacked radio hissing at his side, but there was no signal running on it, no voices going back and forth, not the black girl, not the stony-eyed man, not the Goth. Not Command.

  He started to dress.

  One pack of ice from the freezer went into plastic bags duct-taped to his thighs, over the fresh burns. The pressure throbbed; these burns were worse than before, with the skin pink and raw underneath, cracked in places and seeping clear fluid.

  Over his work uniform he shrugged on shirts. At three it was tight and his core temperature began to rise. At five it was stiff to move his arms and sweat beaded down his cheeks.

  He pulled the pants on next, tightening at three pairs, becoming hard to move at four. It would be fine. Next he went to the bathroom, stepped into the shower and ran the cold tap on his head. The chill woke him up and soaked through the layers. He stepped out sopping wet and returned to Farsan.

  Thump

  Thump

  Thump

  The serum was all gone, but it hadn't cured him. It had done nothing at all.

  Swiftly, with the practiced hand of years, he took five more samples; blood, skin, hair, saliva, nails, sealed them in plastic, put them in his bag, and took a breath.

  "I'm coming back," he said to Farsan. He tried to look into his friend's eyes, but all Farsan wanted to do was hit the door. He'd put a crack into it already. Lucas wrapped his arms round Farsan's chest then pulled him away.

  He staggered four steps back and bounced off the wall, just enough time for Lucas to open the door and bolt through. The corridor outside was clear. Farsan was coming back and he slammed the door in his face.

  "I'm coming back," he said again, more quietly now, then set off at a waddling, watery sprint.

  He dared not risk taking one of the stairs, not with the samples in his pack and the intruders roaming freely round. It was only a short distance then he was there; the panel access hung open, just as he'd left it, and he struggled in. Moving in the many wet layers was hard, climbing up into the vent brackets was harder, but the padding eased the pain a lot as his shins and knees carried his weight on the vent ribs.

  He started along, and quickly the chill of the water faded and his temperature began to rise. He moved quickly and economically, shining the flashlight ahead at times to locate the steam exhaust.

  Not yet. Nearly there.

  He rounded a corner, down an incline, then he was at the outer wall, where the steam was billowing up like a fountain from the broken exhaust. He pulled a knotted towel up over his face and climbed into it.

  It roared and he felt the raw wet heat even through the towel. With the bulk of his sodden clothes it was harder to change direction and get his legs leading down to descend the ladder, which meant he hovered on the precipice for longer, taking the full blast of the steam on his stomach, though the suit seemed to be saving him from the worst of it.

  He was over halfway round, one leg reaching down toward the vent rung, when something caught. He pulled against it but it didn't budge, stopping him from completing the turn to get his feet pointing down for the descent. It had to be the rucksack, snagged on one of the sharp wires or pipe-stays that lined the outer wall.

  He jerked with his full weight and there was a sickly unzipping sound as the nylon rucksack ripped, followed a few seconds later by a sharp clinking sound far below. A syringe? It might have smashed, but they were Perspex not glass, perhaps it was intact, but for how long? He couldn't lose all the samples, not when they were the key to all his plans, but he couldn't go down with them on his back, and the steam was already starting to cut through his wet outer layers and cook him like a rotisserie chicken on the spit.

  "Shit," he whispered as sweat poured down his neck and chest. The roar of the steam was like a waterfall, like being trapped in the barista's cup when the milk got frothed, and already he was getting delirious. He might not burn but he could still boil.

  He jerked upwards once, twice and managed to climb back over the edge a single step, pointing the full blast of the exhaust at his thighs again. The heat was really cutting through the outer layers now, the pain was coming on and he felt faint and woozy.

  No choice. He shrugged off the rucksack, struggling with straps and his thick layers in the dark while steam billowed all around, until finally, with a little more tearing, he got it off. He couldn't carry it down though- one clean blast of the steam would kill all the live samples inside. So he did the only thing he could think of, and dropped it.

  It fell and hit with a thump three floors down. It should be all right, he told himself, it had to be, as he tried the descent again. This time he cleared the snag and the steam and then he was through, panting and sweating so hard that his eyes stung. He ripped off the sopping hat and kerchief and continued. Every second mattered now. If one of the syringes had cracked it might contaminate the others. If one of the plastic bags had failed then who knew what dusty bacteria would get in and ruin his one shot at a cure.

  He hit the bottom on legs like jelly, wobbling and unsure. He felt like soft linguine ready to dissolve into mush. He could strip but there wasn't time, not if any of the samples had cracked, not if he wanted to salvage anything from this trip to the Habitat's top.

  He found the rucksack with ease, snatched at a tipped-out syringe three times before he finally grabbed it, bundled the whole thing down one of his shirts, and started on the final leg.
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  Vents went by in a feverish blur, as his vision phased in and out, with the dark chute warping dizzily ahead, until at last he emerged in the corridor. Fresh air on his face felt like heaven, and he ran at a wobbling, cavalier sprint until he was back on Blue two and shuffling through the secret hatch. He just remembered to seal it up behind him, then he flew through the darkness for the third time, finally back into his lab.

  There he stuffed the rucksack whole into the fridge, humming gently in the stuffy, fetid air, and quickly dropped to his knees so he wouldn't have far to fall when unconsciousness hit.

  * * *

  He woke sweating and panting perhaps only moments later, but had to think intensively for perhaps thirty seconds, trying to remember where he was and what he was doing.

  Too hot. He started stripping off the sodden extra layers, while waves of nausea washed over him, making the process slow and agonizing. His thighs were a searing highlight at the center of the throb that was his whole overheated body.

  He kicked the fan on then turned on the second freezer, opened and wedged the door, and lay in front of it while gulping down lukewarm bottled water. Normally he was careful about how much current he drew from the Habitat's system, only running one freezer at a time, but surely no one was monitoring power use now.

  The samples would be alive or not.

  He gave himself five minutes, then got to his feet. His legs trembled but he could work with that. He put the radio back in its charging dock and set the frequency dial to auto-scan for a signal. If they were talking up above he wanted to hear it.

  Nausea drove him back down. The work would have to wait. He slumped on the old, stained mattress and sleep stole him away in the dark, where he dreamed of incense and Farsan and a droplet of serum powerful enough to burn out the T4 for good.

  * * *

  But he didn't find it.

  Three days had passed, or was it four? After the sweaty, burning passage back through the vents, and after running every test and trial he could think of on Farsan's samples, trying to isolate the cure, he still hadn't found it. Perhaps, he had to conclude now, it wasn't even there.

  His hands were a mess of stains, nicks and alkali-burns. The workbench was covered in his notepapers, scrawled over with spidery representations of protein chains, bacterial lifecycle charts, long lists of genetic pair bond patterns and pages covered in the T4 genome map; more than 38 colored arrows all linking together to form the T4's programming.

  He'd never fully decoded it; not with the equipment he had here, not in all the time he'd been working on it. For six years he'd been like an amateur hacker, blindly guessing at the function of huge sections of DNA and RNA, attempting to interrupt the promoters and terminators on faith that one of them might have an impact.

  Sixteen trials he'd run, starting with fourteen people in the pool and gradually whittling that down to nine, then five, then two, himself and Farsan, until finally it was just him. The pain of the dosages and the risk, the fading sense of hope that a cure was likely, all contributed to them leaving him behind.

  He'd tried to persuade them to keep on, that he was getting close, but in truth he'd never been close. He didn't understand the T4 bacteriophage any better now than he had before. Studying his own cured cells was a revelation, but it was only one map to an endlessly complex maze. Studying Farsan's triggered T4 was like a light in the darkness, but the darkness was still so vast.

  He lay on his filthy mattress and wept. He was exhausted, his legs throbbed and the burnt skin on his thighs was probably permanently damaged. He'd barely slept, had barely paused for a moment to eat or drink, and now his fingers trembled so badly when he held a slide that he couldn't continue.

  Maybe with a full-spec lab, and with a team of ten trained geneticists, with a grant and leisure and peers to bounce his ideas off of, he might be able to crack the T4. It was so dense, its genetic information seemingly doubly encoded, as every strand linked to another strand in a unique way, changing the internal chemistry and integration depending on any of a thousand potential variables, none of which he could control for. Every single strand of DNA in the T4's 38 genomes had ten thousand on-off switches, computing out to millions of potential states.

  He had his electron microscope. He had old data and old equipment, with one set of samples from one triggered subject; Farsan. It was like trying to crack the Enigma code with a chalk slate, or see the whole of the Grand Canyon with a high-powered telescope. It couldn't be done.

  But somehow, some time in the past six years, through some combination of the serums he'd taken or any other environmental factors, he had done it. That was the one thought pulling him through, preventing him from collapsing completely or handing himself over to the outsiders who even now were repurposing his home. Somehow, blind as he'd been, something he'd done had cured him. It promised a path that might lead him to a cure for them all.

  But he needed the others.

  The lab data was out there, in their bodies. They'd all taken different combinations of his serums. Farsan alone was riddled with rich information, but alone he was just a single data point. He needed the fourteen others. He needed samples from them all, compared against his notes on which serums they took at which times, when they stopped taking them, what they ate, their blood type, and maybe, just maybe, he might be able to retro-engineer a cure.

  But there was no hope of that now either, because the outsiders were opening the Habitat and releasing his people. He heard them on the radio now; congratulating themselves, giving orders, talking with such sickening emotionality of their horror and sadness at Salle Coram's legacy. They went on and on about their feelings of guilt until he was physically sick.

  Worst of all were Amo and Anna, the two he'd seen on that first, fateful day. He hated them but whenever they spoke on the radio, he listened. He understood why they were driving his people out now, risking the vital experimental data trapped in their bodies.

  It was madness on a global scale. They intended to steer their 'ocean' as they called them across the Atlantic to Europe, where they would find and slaughter eleven more bunkers, just like his, of thousands of people each.

  The scope of it horrified him, making him feel even more helpless, sitting on his mattress with no clear path to the cure ahead. It was there, it existed, but he didn't have it. Perhaps he would have done, given a few more months, or better equipment, or more volunteers. If Salle Coram had not tried so hard to crush his dream, perhaps it could have come true.

  Perhaps it still could.

  He had nothing else to do. Farsan would be gone with the rest of them. He heard they cleared all of deck 0 a day ago. They had the mass exit elevators working to ferry them all out. His only hope was to follow. It meant taking samples that no one would allow. It meant chasing his people across the Earth to get the lab data he so badly needed.

  It meant being a ghost in the system again, but this time truly alone. There would be no Farsan to stand by his side, nobody to share this terrible loss with at all. But for Farsan, and the hope of Farsan ahead, he would do it.

  He had no other choice.

  7. THREE DAYS

  Amo came.

  He followed her up into the Maine forest, along a hunting trail beaten out through the ferns and mulberry by Cynthia and Feargal. She'd stopped an hour along the trail, sitting atop a boulder on a raised hillock that placed her just above the tree line. From here the forests around Mt. Abraham were an ocean of white, spattered with the underlying green of spruce, like breakers on frozen waves. It was peaceful, and sitting there in the cold, damp air, with white overcast skies above, her breath fogging out in thick white plumes and the clean smell of raw sap in the air, she was able to gain perspective for a time on all the things they'd done.

  Murders. Genocide. Sacrifices. Witzgenstein.

  It had all seemed so promising at first; in the days immediately after the Habitat fell. The convoy had come up to join them and Lara had come out of her coma, along with some
of Julio's victims. Cynthia hunted down a stag and they ate venison for dinner, in a feast of circled RVs outside the bunker entrance. They'd sung songs, had a fire, toasted s'mores stolen from the Habitat's supplies, and things felt good. They had a mayor and a Council and a path moving forwards. Anna had even stood with Witzgenstein and shared a beer.

  Her outward demeanor had been happy then, seemingly content with a role on the Council. But Anna knew demeanor was no clue to the heart. For four years Julio had fooled them all with his demeanor, then committed murder. Even on that happy night, Anna later learned from Ravi, the rumors had started to fly. Even as Janine was smiling at her by the fire and sharing a few words of congratulations, she'd been spreading her infection.

  Deeds made character, Anna knew, not demeanor, and Janine had tried to secede before. She'd backed Masako in the middle of their escape from California. Five years ago she'd tried to split New LA into two, and take her part away with Amo's blessing.

  Now this. Janine was ambitious and she'd taken her chance. She ruled the Council already with the soft stick of bureaucracy. If Anna couldn't make the exile charge stick, she'd doubtless rule all New LA within a week.

  Anna scraped at a bit of crumbly stone by her thigh. Faded green lichen decorated the old boulder's dead skin like a Celtic tattoo, frosted bright white in places. It was a question of timing, really.

  Amo came huffing up the trail.

  His breathing and footfalls in the crunchy snow were the only sounds in the surrounding ocean of quiet. Anna watched him and thought of her father. She'd been seeing him in dreams for ten years now, warning her of the Jabberwock. It came in many guises, it would seem.

  "Anna," Amo said, cresting the stubbly top of the hillock. He was wearing jeans, a big red jacket, and that tired look on his face. He wore it all the time now.

  "Amo."

  She shuffled over and he sat down on the boulder beside her.