The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  He extended his hand but she couldn't bring herself to shake it. Not yet. Perhaps he was who Amo said he was, and perhaps he had even cured himself of the infection, but so what?

  "All of this," she said. "I almost killed you. Why?"

  He looked back at her impassively. On the screen Amo sighed.

  "You could've walked up to us," she went on. "At any time you could've told us all of this and we would have helped you."

  Lucas didn't type anything.

  "We caused the deaths of all his people, Anna," Amo said, skating over the truth about how the bunker really fell. "Not directly, but it was because of us. Is it any wonder he didn't trust us?"

  Anna frowned. "If he's been spying on us, then he knows what kind of people we are. We're not ruthless, we don't kill for nothing."

  Amo looked toward the man on the workbench bed. "Lucas," he said wearily, prompting him to take over as if they were old friends now.

  It annoyed her. Lucas started typing regardless.

  It's not the ruthlessness. It's the incompetence.

  Anna stared at the message. Incompetence?

  "What?"

  I've studied you. I know your group now. You are functionally incompetent.

  Your mistakes have led to death and division every step of the way. Indra died. Cerulean died. Masako died. Ozark, Chantelle and a dozen others died when the demons came, and after even that, you allowed Witzgenstein to break your group apart.

  I've studied you and learned that it's not your intent, but your judgment that I can't trust.

  Anna's mouth opened then closed. This was unexpected. It was bad enough that he knew so many of the names of their dead, but to use them like this? It was painfully on point. It was true that they had failed many times. A lot of people had died because of poor judgments; her own, Amo's, everyone's. New LA had split because she hadn't been able to think of a better way to keep it together. But to call that incompetence?

  He was staring at her. Amo was too. She wasn't going to take it lying down.

  "We're not perfect," she countered. "We have made mistakes, I don't deny it, and we haven't tried to hide them. But what about you? You snuck into my lab in the middle of the night, and look what happened. I almost killed you. I don't trust your judgment. Your gun had no bullets. Your whole bunker died! Who the hell are you to judge us?"

  Lucas watched her coolly. Judging her, still. If he'd been through what he'd said, that surely made him a hard, intelligent man, but it didn't mean she was going to budge one inch over to make room.

  He typed.

  I lived under Salle Coram's rule for six years. She was ruthless and highly competent, and she made research for a cure a capital crime, as a 'waste' of our limited resources. Still I found a cure. I worked with a dozen others right beneath her nose, and she never caught me. None of my people died. None of them but me suffered for what I did. The death of the Habitat was out of my hands.

  Anna stared at him, unwilling to back down.

  "So that's on Salle. But last night is on you. I caught you. You pointed an unloaded gun at me, in my lab, using my equipment. What did you expect?"

  I have always taken risks, that's true, and I took them with you last night. I didn't account for the speed of your metabolism. The dose I prepared should have kept you under until the morning.

  Anna's eyes widened. The dose he'd prepared? She looked sharply to Amo. "What is he talking about?"

  Amo gave the biggest, weariest sigh yet. "He pumped antihistamines into your RV last night, Anna. Sleeping drugs. He needed a sample of your and Ravi's blood, as part of his baseline for the cure. Apparently you were the last ones in his sample set; the hardest to get. You must have woken up just as he was leaving."

  That was too much. "He pumped drugs into the RV? Into my RV?"

  Amo was looking more exhausted by the second. "Apparently he did it to everyone in your group, one by one, night by night. None of them were harmed. I can't excuse it, of course, but we can't ignore his findings. Anna, you should-"

  "I don't care about his damn findings!" she exploded. Amo was far too calm and that just made her angrier. This was a goddamn outrage. "I don't care that he didn't harm us, I care that he could have. He could've killed us if he'd wanted, and you're OK with that? You're telling me he was sneaking around our camp drugging my people night after night, taking our blood, and I'm supposed to be OK with that?"

  Amo met her gaze. Lucas remained wisely silent.

  "You will be," Amo said at last, with some measure of strength and certainty in his voice. "OK with that, because we need him. He is a genius, Anna, I believe that, and he's offering us something truly amazing, a chance at redemption, and we have to grab it while we can."

  Anna spun to Lucas. "I don't care what you're offering- I don't trust you. I'm watching you. If you put a foot wrong around me again I'll break your neck. You think we've only barely survived this long by luck? You think we're incompetent, that we're saps for whatever scam you're trying to pull? You're wrong. It wasn't easy to survive this far. We've had to kill zombies and demons. We've had to kill our own, and your own, and three thousand people-" she paused, halting herself right at the crest.

  This was the big lie, and even though she was livid with fury, that was a Rubicon she would not cross. Lucas watched her with interested eyes. She had no doubt Amo was doing the same.

  "-and three thousand people died in the process," she went on, turning to face Amo. "I don't take any of that lightly. We have the rule of law here. We have mutual respect and we're rebuilding. What of that has he done?"

  She was shouting. The last words echoed round the dim quarantine ward.

  "Listen to what he has to say, Anna," Amo said. "Just listen."

  She would have shouted more, but for the respect that she had for Amo. He wasn't a fool, not easily suckered in no matter what she'd feared for the last several hours, so she forced her breathing to calm down. Her face was hot with a flush of blood but she willed it to cool. She gritted her teeth and made herself look at Lucas, this thin, weak man on his workbench bed.

  "So talk," she said.

  He began to type slowly, deliberately.

  I think I can save them all.

  "All who?" Anna asked. "Your people? The bunkers up ahead?"

  He shook his head slightly.

  All of them. My people. The bunkers. Your people. Your father in Mongolia. All the billions that we lost. I believe I can save them all.

  "Not possible," she hissed. "You can't turn back the apocalypse. The T4's too entrenched.

  "It is possible," Amo said firmly, "and it could change everything. Imagine it, Anna, if we could cure even just the bunkers? That's eleven bunkers with thousands of people each, joining us. Imagine the expertise, the genetic breadth, the resources we can pool. We'll have the world ticking again in a few years. And then if he really can cure them all? Even the millions turned to stone in mounds in Asia, and the millions out there trapped in buildings, cellars, high-rise apartments? Seven billion people returned, Anna, can you imagine that?"

  She couldn't. She'd never seen anywhere that number of people alive before. All she'd ever seen was the ocean. Amo's vision was a fantasy, because the apocalypse could not just be switched off. Her father was dead. Her mother, whose face she couldn't even remember, was long dead and gone.

  Her fingers curled into a fist. She could turn and drop one blow through his bandaged neck and it would be over. That would be the true mercy; better than string out this hope that would hurt them all in the end.

  "Look, Anna," Amo said, softly now, surely reading the tension in her muscles. He clearly saw the precipice they were teetering on, but still he kept going, and Anna didn't have to wonder why for long.

  Because he needed it. A grand undoing of all the horrors committed in his name, wouldn't that be wonderful? Witzgenstein's departure had broken New LA's union and undermined the message in his cairns. People didn't look at him the same way any more, didn't feel the sa
me sense of hope rising up from his easy, confident charm. Now they saw the picture Witzgenstein had painted, whether they really believed it or not.

  But this, a cure? It was exactly what Amo hungered for most. On one side of him lay reality, with eleven bunkers fated to death and thousands of people doomed, while on the other side lay this sweet, sweet lie.

  Anna didn't want to have to kill all those people. She didn't want to have to carry that burden and see the weight of it reflected in Ravi's eyes, but there were things that had to be done, and she would not let herself be distracted again.

  "Look at the screen, Anna," Amo coaxed softly. "Just look."

  She looked, because now it was about knowing her enemy. She had to see the pitch to withstand it and inoculate others against it.

  On the screen the video feed had been replaced with footage of a cell stained with a red dye, shifting slightly in the flows of heat rising up through the lamp beneath the microscope slide. She'd seen thousands of these since opening the clean room in UCLA, but none like this.

  She gasped. It had to be a trick, but it was too simple to check. It had to be real. Amo was not so gullible that he wouldn't demand proof. It was a cell without the T4.

  It simply wasn't there. The bacteria that caused the infection, with its triangular head, drill-bit body and four waving tentacles clinging to the cell walls like sail cords taut in the wind, was just not there. There were no thick tracts of waste, splattered like gore. The telomerase strands were still elongated, but here they were healthy and clean. It was different to every living cell she'd seen before, whether from zombie or immune, because it did not have the T4.

  "It's one of his, Anna," Amo said. "He showed me three samples, prepared while I was watching. Blood, hair, saliva. There's no T4 in his system at all. He's not immune like us, with cells, tissue and a brainstem adapted to the presence of the T4. He just doesn't have it. He's completely cured."

  10. TESTS

  She ran tests.

  Lucas offered up fresh samples willingly; blood, saliva, skin, hair, nail clippings. She took them in a tense silence, finding a vein and tapping it; running a swab round the inside of his cheek; clipping a flake of skin; trimming some hair and a nail.

  He didn't speak and neither did she. Sweat dripped down her nose despite the draft of the cooling air filters.

  She found her equipment ready and prepared; laid out where Lucas had just used it. The electron microscope was warmed up. She cooled the glass knife on the piezoelectric plate to sharpen the edge, then using a separate microscope as a guide shaved nanometer-thick slivers from each of the samples, which she decanted carefully onto the Plexiglas slides.

  "What kind of stain is this?" she asked, handling the small bottle at the edge of the cleared workspace.

  Lucas was watching her closely and typed his response.

  Uranyl acetate. It's a negative stain, good for contrast, which is all we can see without an ultramicrotome. Apply just a drip from the mini pipette.

  "I know how to apply a stain," she said, and picked up the pipette. She'd never heard of a negative stain before and never used uranyl acetate, but his results had been good so, better than anything she'd achieved with a glass knife, so…

  Behind her Lucas started typing hurriedly. She turned back to the screen.

  You're holding it wrong.

  She glared at him. This was too much. "I'm holding it. There's no wrong way."

  Lucas started typing again but Amo stepped in. "Anna," he cautioned gently, "if nothing else, let's believe he's an expert in his field. He's got a doctorate, and what do we have? We can stand to learn something from him, don't you agree?"

  So it began. It didn't help that Amo was right. Her skills as a chemist/biologist were entirely self-taught. She forced any hint of petulance out of her voice, producing a neutral, empty tone.

  "So how should I hold it?"

  With the clamp. You guide the clamp with your fingertips. Even the tiniest motion of your fingers as you drop the stain can damage the samples.

  She took a deep breath. She found the clamp, yes there it was, attached to the electron microscope. She'd always wondered what that was for.

  "And I should mount it first?"

  Mount it, stain it, then read it, yes. I could give you tips on slicing samples too.

  Anna stared at him. The man had gall. "Will I get a reading from my slices?"

  Yes. Not a very clear one. But yes.

  "Yes is enough. I'm not trying for my doctorate right now."

  Did he smile a little? Screw him.

  She mounted the slide. She attached the pipette to the clamp and dripped the stain on. She turned the electron microscope on and the image came up on the screen.

  The results were fuzzy, nowhere near as clear as the slices Lucas had cut and light years away from the clarity of her ultramicrotome-cut samples in New LA, but she could read this well enough to be certain. It helped that she now knew what to look for, and Lucas' negative stain highlighted the contours of each cell with high contrast.

  "Negative."

  There was no sign of the T4.

  She ran the rest of his samples and found them all empty, just like the cells in the textbooks she'd studied, though his retained the small difference in telomerase strand length. After that she ran her own samples; blood, saliva, skin, hair, nail clippings, and found the T4 squatting there as ever, blurry but unavoidable, swimming in the red stain.

  "Positive."

  She ran them all, falling numbly into the highly ordered, clockwork process of slicing, staining and studying. The concentration it required allowed her not to think for a time, and she welcomed it. Dry, simple procedures were safe.

  Amo and Lucas waited until she'd run them all, and she stood between them, uncertain of what to do next. She should be happy, she recognized that dimly, because this meant there really might be a cure, but she couldn't just let her guard down. A cure was a fine thing, if it really existed. Perhaps Amo was right to hope, but guardedly.

  "So you have the cure?" she asked him. "The formula, serum, whatever?"

  There was a pause.

  "No," said Amo, uncomfortably. "Not yet. But I believe he can find it. He's close. There are samples he needs, and he can't get them without your help."

  Amo looked at her plaintively. So did Lucas, and then she saw it all. It didn't matter if both of them thought the cure was real. The fact was, it wasn't real. Not yet. And to make it real meant shifting their priorities, when all they should focus on were the bunkers, and the demons, and survival. They would be coming even now. They had months, not years.

  And this? She tightened her hand into a fist again.

  "The ocean," Amo said flatly. "He wants to go with you after the ocean. To Europe. There are samples within the horde, his people who took different stages of the cure as he developed it, that should hold the key."

  Anna snorted. "And you've agreed?"

  "I've said that you'll escort him. You'll do everything in your power to bring the cure to fruition. It's what we all want."

  It's what we all want. She looked into Lucas' eyes. How could he know what she really wanted? What if his cure was a poison to them? What if all he wanted was revenge? What if his plan was to lead them right into a trap?

  "Anna, can I count on you for this?" Amo asked. Perhaps it was the second time, she wasn't sure. Too much was changing.

  She looked down. Lucas was holding out his hand again. Did they really think she was so easy? Amo always gravitated toward hope; it was his greatest strength, but also perhaps his addiction. He needed it to survive. He didn't want to go on without it. But hope was a distraction and Anna couldn't afford it.

  She looked at him. She looked at Amo.

  She swiveled and rolled away.

  * * *

  Outside it was a gray day with an almost warm wind. The runway stretched as far as she could see in both directions, gray asphalt of too fine a grade to have cracked yet, scattered with the gritty sa
lt they'd been spreading to melt the last of the snow. There were no weeds here, though the verges were overgrown with crusty brown elderflowers and cranberry bushes, just starting to come back to life.

  These runways too, she wondered, they were another thing they owed to the old world. It was strange to imagine giant jumbo jets roaring in to land, carrying hundreds of people for thousands of miles as a matter of course.

  The world was so different now. In another ten years this runway would crack and they'd have to repair or replace it. Maybe by then they'd have mastered jet engines. She tried to imagine a world that was healed, but it eluded her.

  Millions of people. Billions. It was too big a dream; Amo's longest reach yet. Hope was important, but false hope? She'd grown up with the ocean. She'd marched with them as a child and helped them find their way, and in return they had comforted her and saved the people she loved. They'd saved Amo in Las Vegas and they'd saved all of New LA in Pittsburgh. With her father at their head, they'd saved her from the demon in Mongolia.

  That was real. In a way she loved them. She relied upon them in ways she'd never really thought of before. They were a solid presence, utterly reliable in their calm, placid intent. They'd always been her allies when there was no one else around.

  Now this man promised to cure them.

  She sped faster along the runway, trying to outrun the new reality. She cursed herself as a coward for not killing him, then cursed herself the other way for even thinking that. If he truly had a cure then killing him would be the worst thing she could do.

  She rubbed tears from her cheeks.

  How many more Julios would there be, if all the ocean turned back to people? How many more Salle Corams?

  She drove the wheelchair on hard, pummeling her palms and trying to outrun the fear. She'd grown up in their ruins, watching their films and enjoying their achievements, but the thought of having them back terrified her. Beyond the danger that kind of hope represented, there was the fear that she wouldn't belong in their world. She'd be abandoned again, as Ravi moved on to someone else who deserved him better, and Amo moved away with his real family; his daughter and son, and all of them would find a better way to fit in, all except her. The future spilled out before her like a ruined landscape.