The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "Keep looking for the main bunker," she barked into the radio. "I'm going in."

  "I want to-"

  "No, Lucas," she answered sharply. "I'll go in. You help Jake or I relieve you right now."

  "I can best explain the cure," he went on anyway, "I can-"

  "You accepted my terms, Lucas. Understand this. You are never going into a bunker before me, not until we're all cured and running happily through the fields, do you understand? Don't make me keep telling you this. We don't have time."

  The walkie fuzzed static back at her.

  "Jake?"

  "We're looking for the main bunker," Jake answered, acting as go between. Did he sound sullen? "Lucas agrees."

  "Good."

  She rang off and climbed down. If she was Salle Coram she might have had Lucas executed for such disobedience. Whipped at the least. The thought warmed her a little.

  At the base she told Wanda and Feargal the plan. They went to get explosives.

  * * *

  They drilled eight holes two feet deep into the cement box, itself around eight feet high, then dropped in military-grade sticks of C4. Ollie rigged each of them to a wireless trigger, they backed into the vines and took shelter behind their Humvees, then pressed the trigger.

  The blast rang powerfully and the earth trembled. Bits of shattered cement spattered off the Humvees' gored blast shields.

  "All eight?" Anna asked as her ears rang.

  "All eight," Ollie replied. "A clean burst."

  Anna strode over to the box. It looked to have been cut in half horizontally, with the cement inside a ragged and raw pale gray. The section of the gun turret that had long been sheathed in cement was a cleaner white, undamaged by the elements, like a thick root pulled up to the light.

  "Once more," Anna said.

  They drilled, and inserted, and Ollie detonated it. The blast rang out the same, but this time the cement block was obliterated down to the ground, and the gun turret began to waver. About two feet up from the ground there was an alcove framed into the turret. Anna ducked down and peered in. It was just big enough to contain a demon.

  "It's the elevator car," Jake said by Anna's side.

  She looked at him through the fine mist of powdered cement, then reached out and stroked his cheek. He smiled.

  "Come in with me," she said.

  His smile widened.

  With all three Humvees taking the strain on chains fixed tight to the turret's top, they uprooted it completely. It sucked out of the elevator shaft with a wrench and a twist, as the metal twisted and the cement walls cracked, then fell with a thump to the ground, plowing a long diagonal slice through the rows of vines.

  Anna was first to the wide hole. She shone a flashlight down, but there was little to see for all the floating dust. From one of the Humvees she unraveled a rope ladder, tied it off at the bumper and tossed it down.

  Another bunker. Another pit.

  Kill them all, that was what she'd said to Amo. That was what she wanted to do most, because it was safest. These people had murdered Cerulean. These people had forced her community under such pressure that it tore itself apart.

  "We should send a drone first," Feargal said. "To be sure."

  Anna looked at him. He meant well, and ordinarily she'd agree, but they were already a little pressed for time as it was. They had to drop this message, then find the main bunker and blow it, get inside if the response was negative, locate Command and figure out the shutdown code, all ideally before the demon, perhaps with any survivors it had converted to demons, returned.

  "There's no time," she said. "That dust will take hours to clear, and we don't have hours. There's no demon, every reading confirms it, correct Lucas?"

  "Correct," he said. "A residual charge in the shield only. Jake?"

  Jake put his hand on her shoulder. "I wouldn't let you go down if I thought it wasn't safe."

  She spared him a smile. That was sweet, so like Jake. Even after all this time he was trying to reassure and support her, like a big brother should.

  "Thank you," she said, and patted his hand. He gave his goofy grin, delicately handsome. He was a good man, and a good friend to have at your side.

  She took hold of the rope ladder and started down.

  14. DUST

  The descent led into a fine dry mist of floating cement dust. Short breaths through a scarf wrapped around her mouth kept her from coughing, while flashlights angled from above lit the route, though their effectiveness faded as she went, swallowed by the dust.

  In places large shadowy tires emerged smoothly from the walls like vertically-aligned fins. She touched one and it revolved slightly.

  "Contact motors for the turret," Jake whispered reverently from above, as if they were climbing down into a tomb. "It must be how they drove it up and down."

  "And that?" Anna asked, gesturing at a dark, narrow slit running down the wall behind her, out of which a kind of blocky gear train emerged a few feet above her head, a foot thick and warped at the end.

  "The ammunition carriage," Jake whispered. "There must be a cache behind the wall to feed the autocannons. The feed would have gone up and down with the turret. It would've snapped off when we pulled it out."

  Anna grunted and kept climbing. Everything here had been so carefully designed, and had worked so well for ten long years. It put her on guard.

  She reached the bottom, where the fog of dust was so thick and dark that she could hardly see a thing, and every breath tickled at her throat, threatening a sneeze. Underfoot lay an uneven heap of concrete and twisted machinery, fallen as they'd wrenched the gun turret/elevator out. To her left was a heavy metal blast door recessed into the circular shaft wall, probably several tons in weight. It hung open in a thick metal frame.

  "He came out through here," Anna said, as Jake arrived beside her. He unclipped his flashlight and shone it around the foggy circular space.

  "Fascinating." He leaned in to the point where the slit ended. "Here, there's a drainage trap in the floor. Where does that go, I wonder? And here, it looks like a motion sensor in the wall."

  "It's like being at the bottom of a well," Anna said. Very little light from above filtered through the dust.

  "You OK down there?" came Feargal's voice on the radio at her shoulder.

  "Fine," she replied. "We're moving in."

  She nodded to Jake, then aimed her flashlight through the doorframe and into the corridor. She'd never properly examined the Maine bunker; Amo had ordered it filled with cement too quickly for that, but she'd seen the schematics, and it seemed likely this corridor would be similarly equipped. That one had had a set of seven cameras; three infrared, two ultra-violet, two motion-detecting, plus seven high-capacity microphones spotted around the ceiling and walls.

  According to the diagrams, their original purpose, before Salle Coram repurposed them to communicate with Julio, had been to monitor the demon; when it slept, when it woke, as it exited. There was a book outlining a demon's normal stride parameters, breathing and pulse wave forms, speed and pace and frequency of eye movements, down to the most minute measurements of skin pigmentation. There was a program built into the Command override which analyzed it all, and perhaps, on some hidden coded level, had the capacity to modulate the hydrogen line signal in order to bring the demon into order, if something was amiss.

  "We need that," Lucas had said, when he'd heard of it. "That manual, those modulations."

  There hadn't been a manual for the hydrogen line, of course. Anything to do with it had always been a closed, heavily encoded system. There was no way in or out. But the cameras should be there, the microphones too, which Salle Coram had reversed to serve as speakers. It could be done.

  The corridor was pitch black and swam with dust, though the worst of the fog peeled away a little as she started inward. Jake shuffled along the smooth floor just behind her. She scanned the tall ceiling and walls as she went by, trying to pick out the pinprick glints that would give away th
e cameras, and after fifteen strides she found them in the ceiling, three tiny insect eyes gleaming back.

  "There," she said.

  Jake stopped beside her, staring up, but didn't say anything. Perhaps they were watching her now, from so far below. Anna looked at the three little glints and wondered if they knew how helpless they were. Did they realize she held the power over all their lives? She had penetrated this outer bunker with ease, so surely the message was clear; she could enter their Habitat any time she wanted.

  It fell to her. What she said now could influence everything to come. She looked up at their cameras and spoke in a clear, authoritative voice.

  "My name is Anna, and I came here to kill you."

  Jake shifted uncomfortably beside her. She hadn't told anyone the exact content of her speech, so this was a surprise, but he held his ground. It felt good to have him there, adding depth and sincerity to the words she was about to say.

  "I killed your bunker in Maine four months ago," she went on, the words ringing off the walls before dying in the fog. "In less than twenty hours I'll kill you too, if you don't shut down your demon. You may already know that I have a zombie army. You've seen my equipment. I'm offering you a chance I never gave Maine."

  She fell silent then, giving them time. She didn't expect a response, not yet, and none came. Jake began to tremble beside her in the cold.

  "We have a cure," she announced.

  That half-truth floated in the powdery mist for a time, as frail as a solitary flake of snow. Let them swallow it down and begin to doubt. Everything rested on this as the hinge.

  "In the Maine bunker a scientist discovered it. Now he's with us, and his cells are clear of the T4. I can show you his samples, bring down a whiteboard and walk you through the theory, but I know that won't convince you. It's just the carrot, while you need to think about the stick."

  She watched the cement motes in the air curling on the warm tides of her breath. There was something beautiful about them, like the drift of the T4's arms as it tugged randomly at its cell walls. Even here in this godforsaken place, there was beauty.

  "There are eleven bunkers left, of which you're the first. I'm hoping you'll listen, because I'd prefer not to kill you. I'd prefer to save you, and that could start right here. Shut down your demon, and I swear you will get the cure. You'll come join us in the light. It is a risk, but you don't have any choice. Refuse, and within a day every one of you will be dead."

  The dust swallowed her threat. She waited. She didn't expect it to be so easy, but in these moments, standing here, it did feel strangely possible. They had to want this to be over too, their long confinement underground. They had to see the reality of their position, that this chance was their only hope. No more death would be good. Perhaps Lucas was right, then-

  Clank

  A noise came from the far end of the corridor.

  Clank

  It came again, something metallic and heavy, and Anna frowned. Could that be the sound of the microphones inverting? She took a step closer, shining the light, but the dust was still too thick to see far. A cold breeze blew off her cheeks.

  Clank

  It sounded like a lock disengaging, and she had long enough to start to say, "Shi-" before the wave hit.

  A cold flood rolled in and blew the dark corridor away, knocking her to her knees and filling her up with ice. It wasn't possible, it couldn't be happening, but she'd felt this way once before and now another sound came, of a heavy door grinding open on concrete.

  SKKKRRRR

  The flood grew stronger and freezing images pummeled her like slugs from an autocannon: an ocean stretching forever into the distance; water seething as if alive; Cerulean was down at the tideline with his head in his hands, and…

  SKKKRRRRR, THUD

  A footfall came, while the cold punched her in the heart and lungs. Her arms and legs were frozen, her throat wouldn't open, dread gripped her brain and squeezed the juices out, and she just had the presence of mind to think that none of this should be happening.

  "Anna get out, the demon's down there!" came a voice from her shoulder but it was so far away, so meaningless that…

  The dust furled side to side and a great figure stepped through, too huge to be alive, too vivid to be real. A demon. Her eyes bugged wide. It was huge and red, muscled and powerful, with eyes that burned a hot crimson, a mouth that gaped black. It took another step forward, and she was thrust right back to Mongolia.

  Fear bit into her and she felt like a helpless child before it, lying on the sand with her father torn to bits nearby, while the dark weight fell. It hurt to think, it hurt to try and think, and all she could do was surrender. In the hall she dropped the flashlight to clatter on the ground, and she realized that now she was going to die.

  "Get out, get out, get out!" screeched a tiny voice far away, like a person on the other side of the world, but they were too far away to save her. No one could, not her father, not Cerulean, because now she was alone and the demon was coming closer, with every step forward driving her further back into the past. She wanted to get up and fight, but what she wanted didn't matter in the face of this.

  Thud

  Thud

  Thud

  THUD

  Closer and closer it came, and she saw the path leading on from this point, from her to the people above, to New LA, and that was that.

  "Anna."

  A voice nearby called her name, barely a whisper but it rang clearly in her mind, like Amo shouting to Masako in the snow, heard over the radio so far away.

  THUD

  Closer still; she blinked hard but her fate hadn't changed. She was still-

  "Anna."

  The voice came again, barely a whisper but acting like a key that unlocked her mind just a little, just enough.

  Jake.

  She remembered him and then she could see him; from the corner of her eye he was there beside her; his usually cheerful face gone pale, his eyes wide and terrified, his dark hair wild in the dusty air.

  Jake who'd nearly died. Jake her brother and her friend.

  THUD, the demon's foot fell ahead like a coma, and Jake was there looking at her like Peters looking at Abigail across the divide, and perhaps that was enough strength to-

  She moved.

  Her left leg shifted first, inches only, pushing against the torrent of cold, but the other leg followed jerkily. She moved as the demon closed in, only a few strides away, and reached out to clutch Jake's arm. She tried to pull him away, but he only lurched sideways, as if he couldn't turn away from the demon.

  "Jake," she hissed through gritted teeth, forcing the sound up with her gut. She took a step and dragged him along, then another and another.

  THUMP THUMP

  The demon was striding now, warming up, but so was she, and the light from above was just visible through the dust above, if she could only-

  She stumbled over a chunk of broken concrete and fell, barely catching herself on her palms. Blood welled up in the dust.

  THUMP THUMP

  She dragged herself up and staggered through the doorframe into the circular shaft, snatching at the netting of the rope ladder. Yes. The cold was everywhere now, but she was safe and… She spun and saw Jake, frozen in the dark five paces back, looking so slender as the demon drew in.

  She reached out and stumbled one step back but the demon found him first.

  THUMP

  Jake didn't scream as he fell, knocked to the side by the demon's massive thigh. His head crunched off concrete and the demon stood there for a moment, mouth gaping, perhaps uncertain, perhaps still coming back to its wits before it could lean over and-

  Anna had him, was dragging him over the gravel and rocks to the rope ladder in the faintest rinse of light from above, as the demon gave chase.

  "Get in the Humvee!" she shouted into her shoulder radio, silencing the cries coming through, and snatching at the rope ladder.

  "Aleady in," Peters called back, "are you
hooked in?"

  She wrapped her arms round Jake and through the loops, hooked his legs with her own and stepped onto a rung and shouted, "Drive, drive, DRIVE!"

  Suddenly the ladder went taut and shot up, yanking her off the ground and wrenching her arms in their sockets. Jake sagged against her, almost too heavy to hold, but she wrapped her thighs tight as the ladder soared, and there were more voices shouting now and the cold air rushed by and THUMP THUMP THUMP.

  The demon leaped and caught a trailing rung of the ladder, halting the sharp rise. Anna held on with all her strength as the rope grew taut, strained then the rung snapped, catapulting her up to strike the edge of the gun turret chute, cracking her shoulder so hard it numbed her whole side and left her dangling by her right hand alone.

  "Stop!" a voice far away called.

  She was dizzy, spiraling slowly in the air while something snatched at her from below, so high and so far down. In the wash of cold she saw Cerulean down below reaching up, and she dreamed of letting go.

  Then strong arms caught her elbow and pulled the weight of Jake off her chest. She could barely see in the rush of motion as the shaft shifted and there was more shouting and the dust was everywhere. Somebody pulled her up; their feet by her chest, clinging to the ladder too, drawing her in tight.

  "Jesus she's freezing!"

  "Drive!" came the command again.

  She struggled weakly in the half-dark, not even knowing against what anymore. Had that been Cerulean down there, alone in the dark, holding his own head in his hands? Nothing made sense.

  "It's alright, Anna, I have you," Feargal called over the havoc, pulling her in close as the ladder carried them to the lip of the shaft and more hands reached down to pull them out onto the hot brown ground in the midst of vineyards and a circle of terrified, staring faces.

  This was a different world and she wasn't ready for it, but still Feargal picked her up and ran. From below the demon roared and there was a slapping crunch, which had to be the sound of it digging its great fingers into the shaft slit and climbing. The cold was chasing her and now it wore Cerulean's face, his head separated from his body and calling out her name.