The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "Cold," he said.

  She grunted and they sat quietly for a while. His breath puffed out whitely.

  "Lara's in bed," he said. "She's exhausted, she's so angry. She needs to sleep."

  "She was up with me all night," Anna said. "She's sick."

  Amo grunted. It was noncommittal, not like the usual Amo, not even the usual Amo of the past week.

  "You're upset with me," Anna said.

  Amo didn't answer for a time. He looked out over the white ocean and breathed, in and out, like a floater in the ocean.

  "Yes," he said at last. "Maybe. But I don't feel too real, if you know what I mean. Ever since the Habitat, I feel like I'm floating, like there's a crippling headache about to descend, but it never does."

  "You're not eating," Anna said.

  Amo shrugged. "I'm not hungry. Besides, it's all their food, Salle Coram's, and we stole that didn't we?"

  "We've been stealing from the dead for years. This is no different."

  Amo smiled for a moment, shining a light on the man he used to be. "Really, no different?"

  Anna looked away. "It should be. People need to see it that way. You need to eat because you're the mayor. Turning into a ghost like this is not OK."

  He gave a big sigh. "I may not be the mayor tomorrow. Who knows?"

  Anna frowned. "That's not OK either. You saw the vote in there."

  He started on another big sigh but stopped it halfway. "Anna, ah… Maybe. I'm not doing too well. I have a lot of dreams."

  "Nightmares," Anna said, "I know, Lara told me."

  He shrugged. "Yeah. I see the ocean coming for me, like flashes of the past, back when I thought they were just regular zombies from the movies. There's this moment from Sir Clowdesley I keep seeing, when I thought they had me in the night? Then I'm running through the streets of New York with a horde at my back. Finally I'm watching them burn, and I'm laughing."

  "It's just guilt. It's got nothing to do with Janine."

  He snorted faintly. "Nothing? Anna, there's no end to the killing in these dreams. Every time I wake up asking, 'How many more? How many more, Amo?'"

  "As many as it takes."

  He turned and looked at her. She looked right back. They hadn't talked about this since they'd delivered the zombies from the Habitat and sent them to the east.

  "You feel it too," he said, "you're not immune."

  "I feel it," Anna agreed. "I have nightmares. But they're not real. You've got to keep the difference clear."

  Amo rubbed his eyes. "So how do you do that? When Janine was up there and Alan was making his charges, I half-believed them. Maybe I want them to be true, so I can be punished? I'm too tired to think."

  "So let me do the thinking. Trust me. I get confused too, about what we've done and what we're going to do, but when I do I make myself think about Cerulean and Julio and all the people that died. I push back with that, and the anger helps."

  "I can't even get angry," Amo said. "I just get exhausted. So much anger, so much killing, and for what? So we can do it all again on a much bigger scale."

  "You're depressed. It's obvious. Sitting there in that court while Witzgenstein threw murder charges your way? She saw you were weak and that's blood in the water to her. She means to crush you underfoot."

  "She's not a bad person."

  Anna laughed. "Not bad? She's lying, Amo! She got Masako killed. She's trying to undermine an elected body. She's power mad and you're sitting in her spot. Now I've exiled her, but if that's going to stick, you have to back it. We can't be divided on this."

  He took a long moment. "That's why I want to talk to you."

  "I know."

  A silence grew between them. Somewhere an owl hooted ominously. The days were short and the nights drew in fast in Maine; so different from LA.

  "We can't exile her," Amo said.

  Anna let that stand. She scratched at the frosty boulder. She looked out to the horizon, where the forests flowed for miles in a snowy flood until they merged with the clouded white sky. There were no electric lights giving away towns or strip malls, no clean black lines of cleared roads where cars whizzed back and forth like blood cells in an artery, only the white and the wild.

  "You sent me away once," she said, "with Cerulean. A kind of exile. I know you remember."

  His shoulders bowed. "For Julio. Of course I remember."

  "For Julio. We went to San Francisco for two weeks as a temporary banishment. I was five years old. Do you know what we did in that time?"

  Amo looked at her with heavy-lidded eyes. "Talked? Explored? I don't know, Robert never told me."

  "We freed them. The ocean. We went from building to building and let them out; smashing locks, breaking windows, opening up cellars. It was all we did, non-stop, and I was so happy. I loved them and I loved helping them, and with Cerulean by my side it felt almost like I had my father back."

  Amo nodded. "It sounds lovely."

  "But it made no difference," Anna answered sharply. "It was a waste of time."

  Amo shifted. "That's not true. It had value for you."

  "Of course, it helped a few zombies, and it made me feel better and it probably made Cerulean feel better too, though nothing was really any better. The fact is, you should never have sent him away for that. You should have sent Julio, and you know it, but it wouldn't have been easy. It would have felt a lot like this; damning someone for a crime of words." She paused. "But words are intent, Amo, and we can't just forgive without punishment. It doesn't work that way. Julio should have been out there alone with the ocean, going slowly mad the full ten years ago. He should have felt what it's like to be pointless and hopeless, not us."

  "Unh," Amo said, not a grunt and not a word but somewhere in between.

  "Now compare that to what you did," Anna went on. "You herded thousands of them into Yankee Stadium, and that saved us in the end. That mattered. Everything you've done has mattered. We can't all claim that. Janine, she feels that keenly. She's done nothing and she knows it. She hasn't even freed any of them, because she's afraid of them, did you know that? They're ungodly to her, a sign that she wasn't taken up into the kind of rapture she expected. She's done nothing for the past ten years but survive and feebly resist executing your vision, and it eats her up. She wants to rule New LA because it's the only thing that will satisfy that need in her. Would she be another Salle Coram? I don't know, but she would definitely split this group, or break it to keep it together. She has to go. Send her away and get it right this time."

  Amo said nothing, just looked out over the wintry landscape with the world on his shoulders.

  "That weight is crushing you, isn't it?" Anna asked, then paused. "So much guilt."

  He looked up at her. His eyes were dry but full of hurt. "Three thousand people, Anna. Because they might have hurt us. Not because they would, or even could, but because they might. It's the same as Witzgenstein. Let her have her theories and throw her charges. They would never stick, and even if they did, so what? The people of New LA are not so stupid to believe she's pure. We need every person we have."

  "They might have stuck," Anna answered, "they might still, because New LA is not so sturdy as you think it is. I can see them wavering, even if you can't. Ten years they've been under you, and that just breeds contempt. Even though they've seen you be the hero, 'might' is enough when it comes to survival. We learned that from Julio. Mercy is for the weak and the dead, Amo. We've warned her. Cerulean himself warned her, years ago, but she's still doing it. Still! Think of it like this. If you hadn't opened up the Habitat, I would have, but I'm not made to rule. I'm another Salle Coram waiting to happen, I think we both see that."

  Amo snorted. "You're not that bad."

  Anna shrugged. "I could be. But you're not. You can do something neither Salle, Witzgenstein or me could ever do, which is inspire people. You embody all our hopes, and this weight on you now is making that hope even stronger and fiercer. I can see it even if you can't, like rays o
f heat burning out of your middle. You crush coal and you get a diamond, Amo. We're all in the furnace becoming something greater, but if you let the pressure end, if you back off with hands raised and say, 'Nope, this is not for me', you get nothing but burnt. See it through, or New LA itself, the legend of it, will fall apart in her hands. There'll be nowhere for survivors to gather, and where will we be then, our race, our people? Extinct. We'll all be gone. Those are the stakes we're playing for. There is no time for mercy."

  Amo ran his hands through his hair and gazed out over the endless forest. Anna leaned back and dangled her legs down the boulder's side. Snow began to fall gently, coating their footsteps leading back down the hillock with a thin layer of fresh, unblemished white. So simple, so beautiful. The snow covered all manner of their sins. The rain and sun would wear them away. Everything could change. There were so many ways to think of the road ahead, and any one of them could lead to extinction. It was a high-wire balancing act all the way, and the wire only got harder to walk the further along it you went.

  At last Amo looked up. There wasn't a renewed purpose in his eyes or a new strength, but there was a decision.

  "All right," he said. "She leaves. I'll stand by you."

  Anna took his hand. He barely had the strength to squeeze.

  * * *

  Three days passed quietly.

  Work continued in the Habitat, as its supplies were counted, gathered and prioritized. Work continued in the surrounding towns, as they found semi-truck trailers that could still run, fuelled and charged them, then prepared them for the return journey. There were more supplies than they could ferry back in one go, whole warehouses underground that they'd barely touched, filled with still-frozen seed packs and vitamin syringes, well-preserved medicine and medical equipment all well within their use-by dates, the latest technology and computers still in pristine condition. Jake took the lead in designing a schedule to fetch and carry it all, requiring multiple trips back and forth from Maine to New LA.

  Work continued in the Command bunker, where Feargal, Anna and Ollie worked to glean every scrap of information they could from the computer systems and records left behind; on the other bunkers, on their military capacities, on their crews and their plans. Feargal led them to the hangar in the mountainside and they learned all about drones.

  Work continued with the ocean. Almost a week had passed since they were freed, and Anna was still making forays out to meet them. Many of them had already passed into the Atlantic, but the slower ones were still straggling through the eastern edge of Nova Scotia. They caught them one by one and implanted GPS transponders taken from the bunker. They had everything down there, from transponders and satellite phones to in-vitro fertilization kits, for the day it came time to start the repopulation. In the end they implanted around two hundred, which read out on the tracker screen as a dense cloud of dots steadily heading east.

  Work continued with the survivors from Julio's pit. Four were still in comas. They had them in the Habitat, rigged to brain scanners and heart rate monitors, following along as best as they could. Macy took responsibility for them herself, while at the same time she worked constantly to improve her medical knowledge.

  "I'll be a doctor in a year," she told Anna, and meant it. Perhaps it was her way of remembering Dr. Ozark.

  Work continued with hunting and supplies. Feargal led daily hunts in search of fresh meat, the one staple they couldn't find in the Habitat. Deep-frozen meat and meat from a can were not the same, and nobody wanted to take on the regimen of vitamin and mineral injections the MARS3000 colonists had undergone.

  Work continued with the children, as they strove to make this radical change in their lifestyle as normal and painless as possible. Parents told and retold the story of what had happened in the flight to Maine, seeking a way to make it feel less terrifying.

  Work continued everywhere, except around Janine Witzgenstein's RV. She remained locked inside for the whole of the three days, with her eleven compatriots locked in with her. Rarely did any of them enter or leave; for food and water only.

  Anna watched them, and set a watch on them when she couldn't watch them herself. She began to feel that three days was too long. She began to worry about what Janine was planning. She wasn't a fool. She wasn't weak. She wasn't going to accept her banishment without a fight.

  So the work continued, but the settlement of New LA, temporarily based in Maine, held its breath, and watched the door to an RV, and waited.

  And waited.

  And when the three days came, that door opened, and Janine Witzgenstein emerged.

  INTERLUDE 4

  Farsan was gone.

  His room was empty. Every door in the bunker stood empty, on the day they were leaving. Two days earlier there'd been a trial and he'd listened through the ducts, hidden in a crawlspace beside the entrance hall, as this community of New LA severed itself in pieces.

  He knew so much more about them now; about who they were and what plans they had. Perhaps it was true that Salle Coram had killed all her own people, herself. He could believe it of her, but still he couldn't shake the image of the bodies transforming before him, moments only before Anna and Amo came into view down corridor Blue three.

  It didn't have to mean anything. Perhaps it meant everything. It would be the best reason for seeking revenge he could imagine.

  The panic was over for him now, and the new reality had settled in. So he prepared. He kept records. He gathered samples. He charted the flow of the 'ocean', as they called it, the flood of infected bodies they'd released, as best he could from overheard snatches on the radio.

  He put together a pack. He laid out a plan. And when the time came, he executed.

  Walking back through their court was strange; like he was a stranger in his own land. The chairs of their jury still lay in long, even rows. The judge's desk stood imperiously at the head atop a low stage.

  Anna was brutal, he knew that now. Merciless. She reminded him of Salle Coram in many ways. Amo was a different beast. He didn't understand him, though he'd since read his comic, left lying in their 'cairn' of USB sticks, propaganda and candy beside the judge's desk. It told of a different world up above, of suffering and killing, but also hope.

  So much hung on the question he couldn't know the answer to. Was it Salle or was it Amo who had killed Farsan?

  The elevator was there at the end of the hall, waiting. For ten years he'd dreamed of this moment. The button chimed at his touch and the carriage came. The doors opened.

  He couldn't stop the tears from coming as he rode up. He'd promised Farsan they'd do this together, so many times, but Farsan had been hoisted to the surface on the mass elevators in Farm Hall A two weeks earlier. Farsan was far away already.

  He emerged into the small junction space where a second door marked the Command module, and looked up. They'd left the manhole cover unsealed at the top of the chute, a strange mercy, so he could see the disc of white sky up above. It was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

  He climbed the ladder almost blinded by tears, and at the top stumbled into the world like a newborn, into the snow and bright light, into a biting cold he hadn't felt for ten years. A sharp wind cut through his clothes and he staggered to the side, dizzied by the massive size of the sky and the land. Harsh winter sunlight hurt his eyes, the keen smell of snow and churned mud overpowered him, and there he dropped to his knees and wept.

  He was free. He was alone in a lonely, empty landscape. There were no people, no RVs, no burning campfires, nothing but a few tendrils of smoke rising from a dying brazier.

  He was free and alone.

  The cold enveloped him, seeping deep into his skin through his wet knees, through his boots and burning into his soft skin, and he welcomed it. He raised his hands to the wide-open, pure white sky and shouted out his promise for any gods to hear.

  Free.

  * * *

  He walked.

  Little things from the world stunned him, de
signed in such brilliant, awesome detail, in ways Lars Mecklarin's copied world could never rival. Here a jackdaw was cawing from the thorny skeleton of an apple tree. Here the glint of light splashed off puddles of perfectly clear ice, making them shine like polished steel. Here came the crunch of fresh frost in the tire treads their vehicles had left behind.

  He walked to the place where Salle had kept her victims. It was marked by a single granite headstone atop a sheer concrete foundation, with just one name listed.

  CERULEAN

  Five more indentations had been carved for names to go in, but had been left blank. Nobody knew who they were. Another body lay down there; Julio, by all accounts a madman. His name was nowhere to be found.

  And this was Salle's legacy. He touched the headstone. Cerulean.

  If he had a jackhammer, perhaps he would drill down to find Cerulean's body. A sample from a demon could help him, because the demons and the zombies had to be related; a different mutation from a common shift in the human genome, but without a sample he couldn't guess. He stroked the cold stone.

  He didn't have a jackhammer. He didn't know where to find one. He didn't have the time.

  He walked away, over the field and away from the bunker that had been his home for so long, carrying his heavy pack on his back. At a rise in the forested road he looked back, but couldn't even pick out the hole he'd emerged from. Such a small home, he thought, and a wave of guilt washed over him. He wasn't leaving Farsan behind, but it felt like it. It felt like he was abandoning them all, but it wasn't that, because they weren't there anymore. If anything he was moving toward them.

  The burn wounds on his thighs were getting better. He pulled the pack's shoulder straps tighter and dried his eyes. Soon enough, snow would fall that all sign of that place would be covered; not only the hole into the ground and the headstone, but all the marks in the earth the RVs had made, the scorch marks of their fires, gone along with the scent and sound and warmth of human bodies in the air.

  That would be good. It was all better off buried.