The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  She would be alone. She would become the mad woman in the yacht; roaming the ocean because it would be the only place left where their reach hadn't spread. She'd lie awake at night dreaming of their many hands trying to pull her down, and no matter how fast she raced her catamaran, she would never outrun it.

  She raced on in the wheelchair until she hit the end of the runway at full speed, and it tossed her out onto thick grass, where she lay face down and wept into the earth.

  * * *

  Peters came.

  She sat in the grass and watched him come. He didn't speed up when he saw her. He didn't slow down. He just kept coming, leaning on his cane, clacking smartly over.

  It was raining a little; tiny spots that cooled her skin wherever they touched. The earth was damp under her.

  Peters stopped by the tipped-over wheelchair and gestured to it. "Do you mind?" he asked. His Swedish accent was warm and lilting.

  "Go ahead." Her voice sounded sullen and thick.

  "Thank you." He picked up the chair and lowered himself in, then studied her. "You've been crying. Perhaps you could tell me why."

  She watched him. Tears didn't mean that much, she figured now. There were plenty of reasons, plenty of grief, plenty of anger with nowhere to put it.

  "It's nothing."

  Peters smiled. He pointed at her with his cane. "You're sitting in the grass like a Cabbage Patch child. If it's nothing, what are you doing there?"

  She looked at the grass. It was strange, no doubt, for New LA's self-appointed sheriff to be here, like this. "Cabbage Patch kid," she corrected half-heartedly.

  Peters nodded wisely and leaned back in the chair. "Kid, of course. Anna, do you know, I'm only 44? It probably sounds a lot to you. I once thought I'd have children, before all of this." He waved his hands casually at the world, as if the apocalypse were nothing but a minor inconvenience. "Then I asked Abigail two months into our time together. She almost left me that night. No, I never told you that before. It's painful for me still. She was barren, you see. That's the word, isn't it?"

  Anna nodded. Peters sometimes did this; taking off on a memory or digression. She'd grown to like it about him.

  "Barren," he repeated, as if tasting the word. "Or so she said. We never did a test, and I believed her, though of course I had my doubts. Perhaps she was taking the birth control pill? Could she have lied about that for so long, I suppose so. I did not pry. Perhaps she truly was barren, or perhaps she feared more than anything, the thought of raising a child in this empty world."

  Anna felt the old sadness welling up again. The sadness for her long dead father. For Cerulean. For the little girl she'd once been.

  "It is sad," Peters said, seeing her brimming eyes. "But imagine how long we'd been alone for, and then to find each other? It was a miracle. Perhaps she feared that miracle would never come for our child. What life lay ahead for it, given that one day we would grow old and die? Who would our child love, Anna? Who would hold our child when it was alone, when it was grown? What were we fating our child too, if we persisted?"

  He shrugged. His eyes sparkled too.

  "I chased her down. I killed my dream of that child, Anna, to make Abigail stay, because I couldn't be alone another day. To her it was worse to bring a child into this world than to be alone herself, and I had to accept that. I loved her so much, but I could never forget that. You know why. She saw her love for me as the end of the world. She wanted my face to be the last thing she ever saw, and nobody else."

  A tear trickled down his lined cheek.

  "She got her wish in the end. In Julio's corridor we hung opposite each other. For all the reasons I've hated him, for all the horrors he did to my dear Abigail, I was always thankful for that. I stayed strong for her. Every day, all day, I tried to send my love to her. She felt it at times. At times it was too much. You know how this is, when the smallest piece of kindness makes the cruelty unbearable? Perhaps I was a torment to her. But I never let her forget that I was there for her. I never looked away. I loved her fiercely, and in the end I was there when she died."

  He sighed and rubbed his cheek.

  "I heard you were there for your father. That was a good thing. You had a father who loved you, and you had the chance to find him and show him that you loved him too. That is such a rare thing, it ties you to this world in ways others dream of. It gives you a deep, abiding hope. But Masako didn't have that. Julio didn't. You are lucky, because you do."

  Fresh tears ran down Anna's cheeks, though she didn't know why. Something about Peters; the way he carried himself, after so many horrors, moved her deeply. Perhaps it was simply that he was still alive. Survival every day was a choice, and every day he continued to make it.

  "Cerulean saved me, Anna," he said. "Your second father. He gave me my hope. Now I owe it to him, and so I owe it to you. These words mean things to me. I don't understand what has upset you here, but I want to remember what both of your fathers did for you, at the end. Love that strong is a seed from which many wonders can grow. Here we have the chance at a bright, grand future. I know you see the risks, perhaps more than any of us, but Anna, we must face them or we will simply be the end of the world for each other. You see this, I know."

  He smiled.

  "My Abigail couldn't bear the thought of having a child. I cannot say how much this hurt me, because I loved her so well. To have the one person you love accept such defeat is a terrible thing. To see the hope drain from their eyes, but the soul live on? There is a failure there I never can quite accept. But you? You who were born from your coma into the apocalypse, who never saw the world as it once was, as it is meant to be, how can I expect more of you?"

  He shrugged. "But I do. You will lead these people one day, Anna, and I will follow you. I don't forget my friends, or my family. You saved me when our plane crashed. You saved all these people. These are things to be proud of, so be proud. Be big enough."

  Anna sniffed loudly. Damn Peters. She wasn't even sure what he was saying, what any of it really meant, but it helped. It always did.

  "Like I said, I don't have much to say," he said, and she laughed. He smiled. "Though I think I said the important things."

  She nodded. She must look terrible. She had something ready to say, thank you or some such, but when she opened her mouth to speak that wasn't what came out.

  "I miss him."

  Peters nodded. He spread his arms, and without thinking, without concern that she was no longer a child, she sprang up and embraced him, like little Anna had embraced Cerulean so long ago, and held on as if they were the last two people left alive on Earth.

  * * *

  She rolled into the quarantine ward twenty minutes later, where all the others were gathered. Amo was still on the screen, with Lara sitting next to him now, far away in LA. Jake and Ravi stood on one side of Lucas, Wanda and Macy stood on the other, while Feargal was by his head.

  They had a second screen up with a PowerPoint presentation on it. Anna almost laughed. That was Amo, of course.

  They all went quiet as she came in. Jake smiled broadly at her, full of faith. Ravi smiled nervously, while the others just watched, waiting to see what she would do. She'd left in a harsh way. She'd been on the verge of murdering a wounded man and they all must have felt it.

  Peters squeezed her hand then separated himself, sidling over to stand by Ravi, who seemed slightly comforted. This was her family now. She loved the ocean, but they'd never loved her back, and it was time to let go of that childish bond. They followed the T4's programming, and you couldn't love a virus that had killed so many people.

  You controlled it. You used it. You might even thank it. But you couldn't love it, because it offered no kind of future. But a cure did.

  She coughed to clear her throat, then spoke into the quiet.

  "I have conditions."

  11. CONDITIONS

  "We're going there to kill."

  Anna looked around at everyone present, waiting for someone to
raise a protest so she could crush them flat. Ravi. Amo. Wanda. They all looked away except Lucas, who gazed at her intently.

  "I need that to be completely clear. Our primary goal is to kill the demons, because if we don't then they'll kill us first. We'll all die in a horrific way, like Cerulean, like Ozark. We'll convert and join their ranks to come finish off New LA. Does everybody understand that?"

  She stared at Amo on the screen, and he nodded. She stared at Lucas but he didn't budge.

  "This is not a game," she went on. "A cure would be wonderful, but it cannot be the priority. Survival is, and for the last three months we've been preparing for that priority. We know that the only way to kill eleven demons is to do it fast. We have eleven windows once we land in Europe, just a few days each. We strike fast each time, we bury the demon with the horde, and we hit the button inside the bunker to shut them down."

  She stopped. They all knew it, but it had to be said again. It had to be said until it sunk in like the T4 bacteria itself. "If we delay on taking even one single bunker, we lose our lead time, and the more time we lose, the more likely we are to be overrun. Our zombie pile will stay in a pile, while the other demons will keep coming. They won't wait for us. The ocean handled seven demons last time, so maybe it can take seven again, but if more than seven demons hit at once? I have to assume the ocean can't handle that. They'll overrun the horde, and we'll all die."

  She paused. "And that's if we're lucky. If we're unlucky, and it turns out each one of those demons has managed to infect and convert six other survivors in the three months since they were released, then we might die on the very first wave. We might not even get to the first bunker. And there's nothing we can do about that."

  She paused again, waiting for the immensity of the odds against them to really take hold.

  "There are so many ways we can die. We need to all be one hundred percent clear that this mission is first and foremost about our immediate survival; as a group, as a community, as a race. A cure is an excellent second target, but a serum in a syringe is no good to us if we're dead; and the schedule is already impossibly tight. We don't know what conventional weapons they will have. We don't know how long it will take to blow them out of their holes. We can't expect them to open up and let us in like Salle Coram did."

  She let that hang. She'd been planning the logistics of this blitzkrieg assault for months; constantly honing the weight load they could carry with them on their two planes, researching supply dumps across Europe where they could gather the extra fuel, vehicles, explosives and munitions they would need, trying to make the schedule fit within the bounds of what was humanly possible.

  "If we make just one slip up, or just one bunker is not in the place we think it is, or the defenses are stronger than we expect, or the earth is too hard to blast into, or the demons have stumbled upon a large survivor settlement, it will fail. There's barely any slack at all. A cure would change all our lives, but it won't do a damn thing in the face of a demon stampede."

  She strode over to the whiteboard, then roughly rubbed out all their notations. It looked like a lot of biological terminology and cell maps sketched out by Lucas. It didn't matter. Amo started to object but fell silent as Anna kept on until the whole board was clean. Then onto the white she sketched a rough map of Europe and Asia. She'd been studying this map until her eyes watered since Salle handed it over three months ago, trying to calculate the odds.

  "I estimate that once we make landfall here," she tapped a spot in south-western France, near bunker one, "all the nearby demons will come for us. How many is that? The bunkers are spread out pretty evenly, about one every thousand miles from west to east, so at first it'll be one, then another and another after that, if they can sense us that far away. Peters, you stopped sensing the ocean when they crossed the Atlantic mid-point, correct?"

  Peters nodded.

  "That's about a thousand miles. I'm assuming they sense better than we do, so I'm expecting a steady stream of incoming demons. We know they run fast; that means one hitting us every few days. The schedule will be punishing, as we keep moving on to the next and they keep coming for us. It's a systematic extermination, and we have to sweep across the world like a wave."

  She took the eraser and ran it from France eastward, erasing the bunkers one by one in a long unbroken line. "Like so, finishing in the far east." She slammed the eraser on the board for effect. Ravi jumped. "But you all know this. I've told you. And you want me to add Lucas into that."

  She turned to him.

  "He talks about a cure, but he doesn't have one yet. It's in his cells, but he can't get it out. He needs us, but he wants to pretend it's the other way around. He wants me to pick out sixteen people, his experimental samples, in an ocean of over a hundred thousand, just so he can try to understand the cure he's made. It's a pipe dream on top of an already impossible task. So let me be perfectly clear."

  She looked around again. You could never have too much looking around and weighty glaring. She'd learned that from Witzgenstein's trial. "If I take Lucas with me, on my expedition, it will be with the understanding that his cure is a secondary, expendable target. Mine is the primary, and if any sacrifice must be made, it will be his." She turned on Lucas. "To that end, you will do exactly as I say, when I say it. I don't care if you think I'm incompetent. If I think for one second your experiments are putting us at risk, I will end them. If you get in the way of that, I will end you. Is everybody clear on this? Can everyone accept these conditions?"

  More glaring.

  "It's clear, Anna," Amo said. "I agree with everything you've said. You're right. Survival first and the cure second. Take the demons out. If there's room to save the bunkers, do it. I trust your judgment completely."

  Anna extracted a nod or a similar acceptance from every other person in the room. Last she returned to Lucas. She'd almost killed him twice now. He had to know she was serious. He started to type.

  I survived for this reason alone.

  I mean to save the human race from itself. To do that I need to be alive. I accept reality. I accept your conditions, Anna, as long as you accept mine.

  More glaring. It did the soul wonders. "What terms?" Anna asked.

  That you try. Honestly, earnestly and as if you want it for yourself, you try to make room to save these people. You try to see the cure as the ultimate best path to survival, because even with the demons all dead, without the bunkers, what are we?

  He took his turn to glare around. He made it softer, though, and welcoming. To Anna it was a punch in the eye.

  Nothing. Nobody. With 41 people, with Witzgenstein gone, with so few left to join you yet from the wider world, this community will wither out in two generations. It's not enough people, not enough genetic diversity, and you can trust me on that as I've studied this exact field extensively. It's the reason Lars Mecklarin wanted me in his bunker at the beginning. Even if you do try a cross-breeding program, mixing the least-related chromosome sets against each other multiple times, in a baby-a-year drive where every woman is pregnant on a loop, you'll wither out in genetic malformation. You just don't have the genetic range.

  His clacking on the keys faded briefly as he met Anna's eyes.

  Your work is necessary, I accept that, for the immediate survival of this group. But immediate is nothing, Anna. For the survival of the group in the long-term, you need more. Are there enough others out there in settlements waiting to come join you? You'd need at least a hundred genetically viable male-female pairs to achieve that, and I doubt they're out there, not now with the demons on the loose. Any remaining survivors won't know what hit them.

  No.

  Our only hope is converting the bunkers, and perfecting the cure so we can bring them out. Without that, we may as well call game over right now. New LA will die on the vine. Your children and your grandchildren will be the last recognizable humans to walk the Earth, before genetic deformation turns us into monsters. It's not enough just to survive the threat, Anna
. We have to survive the peace that follows.

  He stopped. He glared. Anna's lips pulled back from her teeth in a snarl.

  So I accept your conditions, if you accept mine. The demons have to die. We have to survive. But so do the bunkers. We have to do everything in our power to convince them to push their own buttons, and kill their demons themselves. We have to keep them alive, because we need them.

  Can you accept my terms?

  Anna's face got hot. Everyone was looking at her. Worst of all was that he could be right.

  It was possible. For ten years they'd pinned all their hopes to Amo's dream, of cairns and a united world and enough people pouring in to New LA to keep the human race afloat. Informally they'd encouraged people to marry and have children, building a generation to lead the way forward, but in spite of that New LA only had six children. One of them was Lin, and he was gone now.

  There had been thirteen couples in the community before Witzgenstein took three of them. Now there were ten. Even if they could somehow arrange a gene-swap arrangement with the Oregon settlement, it still wouldn't be enough. Amo's dream had been his Ragnarok IV video, enough of a draw to bring the rest of the world to California.

  But now there were eleven-plus demons on the loose in Europe, vacuuming up any remaining survivors. They wouldn't be coming to New LA now, not as humans anyway.

  It was a strong, undeniable argument.

  But at the same time, she couldn't just trust Lucas. They didn't know him, didn't know what he wanted. He'd lived through the extermination of his people; who was to say this wasn't going to be his revenge? Who was to say he hadn't already coordinated with another bunker in Europe to lead them into a trap? Who knew if he had even found a cure? Perhaps he was just a different kind of immune. There was no way to say for sure. Even if he had somehow cured himself, there was no guarantee he could do it again, or that his cure wouldn't end up destroying their own immunity.