The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Feargal looked worried. Peters nodded.

  "His recovery. He was getting better, getting rid of the migraines, and being with Lara cemented it. It didn't happen overnight though it looked that way. It was a long, slow build since the coma, like a finger slowly squeezing a trigger. You don't have to add sudden pressure to make it fire, you just add one tiny bit more and it blows. That was Lara. So, put all that together, it means these people knew the end would begin in New York, because look at Amo's signal. It's massive compared to the rest. He was the most advanced."

  Feargal's face screwed up in thought. "So they knew in advance that Amo would start it?"

  Anna shook her head. "Not at first. They had no idea. Look around, they were monitoring all of us. This whole hall, look at these section numbers, they each relate to a map. How many halls like this are there here? How many staff to monitor them all? Maybe they even coordinated the cover-up from here, tracking each of us, shutting down media attention, turning away scientists and researchers. Hushing it all up. The resources involved would have been enormous, but it's all right here. They mapped us and followed us all."

  "But a cover-up of that size," Feargal murmured, "it's…"

  "It's a weapon," Peters interrupted. Anna turned to him. Yes, of course. "One we can use too," he went on. "If every survivor is listed here, it means we can find them, or at least where they started from. Perhaps they left a sign where they were going, like Amo. We can hunt them down and bring them to New LA one by one."

  It was possible. Peters' eyes were bright. It opened up a new world of possibilities. They didn't need the cairns left scattershot in capital cities, waiting like honey-traps. They could go out and find them.

  "But how did they monitor us?" Feargal asked, pointing at the red lines. "I went to the hospital only once. They thought it was a car accident, concussion. I was at home in a week, out in the woods. I don't know-"

  "Helicopters flying over," Anna offered. "Maybe they dropped a scanner near your home. Perhaps it was even the kind of thing they could do from a satellite. Maybe they still can. Perhaps they've been watching us for ten years."

  That reality sank cold in her belly. Was it possible?

  "But-"

  "Salle said something about the day she joined the bunker," Anna said, speaking as she worked it out, "in one of her diaries. She'd been rejected by Lars when she first applied, but one day he called her in at the last minute, months earlier than the MARS3000 deadline. Why would he speed up the deadline like that?" She pointed at the red dot. "Because of this. Because of Amo. The moment he invited Lara on a date he pushed his progression right up to the edge. He only had to take one more step, and…"

  She tailed off. The pieces fit. She studied the little red dot with the long red lines. This was really Amo. It was overwhelming to contemplate; him sitting there in Sir Clowdesley ten years ago, drawing zombie comic books and flirting with Lara, completely unaware he was about to blow up the whole world, while these dead people in this bunker in France watched it happen. "They watched him do it."

  She stepped back. She felt strange, like a magician after the trick has been given away. It didn't help blunt the sharp clarity inside her; the imperative to kill anyone involved in Cerulean's death, but it shifted something.

  Who was the target, now? Not the people here, who'd spied on them and reported to their masters, because they were all long dead. Was it Lucas, had he known about this? Salle hadn't so how could he? Did she hate Salle, who'd only done her best to keep her people alive?

  "So this whole bunker," Peters said, taking it to the next step. "Is it supposed to be dead, was that part of the plan?"

  "I don't know," Anna answered. "Maybe. Or it was a mistake, or they didn't care. It looks like they've been dead a long time. They served their purpose, they predicted the end, and when they died they weren't replaced, because they weren't needed any more."

  "But the defenses? The gun turret, the drones."

  "Automated."

  "Then why is there even power?"

  Anna shrugged. "It's probably a nuclear plant, like Maine. It didn't need any maintenance. Nobody was going to come here and shut it down."

  They fell silent for a moment, all lost in thought. There were a lot of possible conclusions to draw, a lot of directions to take their theories in, but how much did it really matter? Whoever had built this bunker and prepared this radar, they knew who the survivors were going to be, and they knew who the trigger was at the end, but they did nothing to stop it. They didn't even try to keep their own radar operators alive.

  They just let it happen.

  Abruptly the walkie on her shoulder crackled, and Jake's voice came through, intermittent and broken by static, damaged by the distance and depth.

  "… you do something? The m-…. all coming…"

  Anna frowned. "What's that Jake? Please repeat."

  "The mountain!" he called back, the words coming through with a brief clarity. "Th-…, did you … al…?"

  He sounded panicked, or perhaps that was cheering behind him, it was hard to tell.

  Anna started back the way they'd come.

  "Jake, I can't hear you, say again," she said into her shoulder mic as she left the radar room and went out into the dark, guttering corridor beyond.

  "The mountain!" he shouted. "It's…-zing, … you … the button? Why didn't you …?"

  The urgency in his voice was plain. Anna began to run.

  "Jake, what's happening with the mountain," she shouted, "repeat, what's happening with the mountain?"

  She breached the end of the corridor and dashed to the stairs leading up, her feet clanging loudly off the metal gantry, while a creeping dread stole into her heart.

  "They're … down, … of them … we won!"

  She sped through the open bunker door and into the elevator shaft beyond, where a cool breeze wafted down and there was an almost straight shot up.

  "Jake," she panted into the walkie, "say again, what is happening up there?"

  A long moment passed. She took hold of the rope ladder and started up, as Feargal and Peters clanged up the stairs behind her, then Jake's voice rang through clear and bright.

  "Repeat, did you push the button, Anna? The ocean are coming down! They're all coming down from the mountain, we've won!"

  Now she heard the cheering in the background, but it wasn't right. They hadn't punched the button, they hadn't done a thing, and the zombies shouldn't be moving, unless…

  Her heart leapt and didn't land.

  They'd prepared for everything, the people who'd made the bunkers, with the radar, drones and demons, with shields and suits and the hydrogen line. Was it really possible they hadn't made a preparation for her?

  Her mouth went dry. On the other end of the walkie they were hooting and laughing aloud. "It's so beautiful, Anna! I never saw it the first time, but God, is it gorgeous. They're just unpeeling and running this way."

  Anna tried to fathom it. If they knew what had happened in Maine, if they knew she was coming and bringing an army with her, what could they have done? What wouldn't they have tried, to stop her dead at the first bunker?

  She raced up the rope ladder rungs. He'd said they were running, but why were they running, with the nearest demon still hours away? It was too much to contemplate the alternative, too massive a betrayal, but what else could it be? The T4 had never been hers. The zombies had never been hers. She remembered her dream of the ocean rising. She remembered Peters pointing out how the mountain was in the wrong place. She remembered what Lucas had said about new signals on the hydrogen line triggering different expressions of the T4, and in that moment she understood what was coming their way.

  "Jake, you have to run!" she shouted into the walkie, racing up as fast as her weak left arm would allow. "We didn't push the button, we didn't do anything. The ocean has turned!"

  "What?"

  "Goddammit, Jake, run! The signal must have shifted, I don't know how, but why else are they runni
ng? There are no demons nearby! They're running at you."

  "What? That's impossible, Anna, they're…" A rush of movement and thumping crackled through the walkie like a thunderstorm, followed by a pounding that had to be hundreds of feet stampeding, then there was shouting and gunfire.

  "Jake," she shouted as she crested the top of the elevator shaft and dodged into the concrete pod, glaring up at the bright circle of sky above. As she put her hands to the rungs there was a BANG through the walkie followed a fainter BANG clanging down the chute, then Jake was back and gasping. "Ollie! Shit, they got Ollie, Anna, and they're… Oh my God! It's.. They're tearing him to bits, Anna, we have to…"

  "Run, goddammit!"

  She started up the rungs, but at the same moment a figure overhead blocked out the sky, casting shadows down the concrete walls. Anna realized what it was at the last moment, and threw herself backwards just in time.

  A zombie soared down the chute and hit the cement floor before her with a loud, shattering CRACK as dozens of its bones broke at once. Dust spat out from it and Anna stared as its sagging arm reached out, and its cracked-open head angled up with one white eye blazing. Its jaw lolled wide, smashed at the hinge, showing bright white teeth in withered pink gums.

  Then it was crushed as another fell on top of it.

  CRUNCH

  Bones broke again, dust huffed out, but already this one was rising on one good leg as she shuffled madly back toward the shaft. More fell like meteors and crushed the ones below.

  CRUNCH

  CRACK

  THUMP

  Each time they began to rise faster, with each fall padded more. The ocean had turned. The walkie fritzed at her shoulder. Jake was on his own.

  "Back!" she shouted down the elevator shaft. There was no time, not for her or for them. She took hold of the rope ladder and flung herself into the hole just as one of the ocean lurched for her. She barely caught her own weight as it fell past her, tumbling off the walls to CRUNCH at the bottom.

  "Oh shit," she panted, descending as fast as her wounded left arm would allow, as more CRUNCHes hit above and more bodies came toppling down past her, their hands whipping off her back.

  One, two, three lashed out as they plummeted by, raking her hair and shoulders with their nails, their legs ricocheting off her arms, until one snagged her sling and dragged it out of position with a horrible click in her collar, pulling her away from the ladder. She held on, but in the second it took for her to pull herself back in, a fifth hit her full in the chest.

  Her hand was torn from the rope. Her body was sent into a crazy somersault. She fell for a terrifying, aching few seconds with the zombie on her chest before CRUNCH they hit together against the concrete floor below.

  INTERLUDE 5

  "You don't have to leave," Jake had said.

  Lucas, Jake and Peters had sat in a boulangerie in the dark, two hours after the demon almost caught Anna in the first bunker. Feargal and Ollie were pacing restlessly in the street outside, while Macy and Wanda were watching over Anna in the house across the street, still unconscious from the sedative.

  Bordeaux.

  Lucas sighed and looked out to the silent street, barely visible through the reflection of lamplight in the dark window. He'd been here once, many years ago, before he got his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon. Back then he'd been a punk, sporting a purple Mohawk and listening to rock music. Punk was in a resurgence and in Europe, out of the stifling constraints of his hometown, he felt authentic in ways he never had when hanging around the malls and parking lots of Derby, Kansas.

  It was impossible not to think of those days now, sitting in this little restaurant that still, somehow, smelled of baking bread and butter. He only had to close his eyes to remember his first kiss, first proper kiss, stolen on the Garonne river with a fey-eyed canal boy.

  "Lucas," Peters said firmly, bringing him back to the moment. The moment was truly miserable. Perhaps it was his fault. Perhaps he was wrong to have thought he could save the world.

  "She will kill me if I stay," he said.

  "She won't," Jake protested. "She's a sweet girl, really, you just have to-"

  Peters laid his hand over Jake's. "She is not a sweet girl, Jake. Maybe once, but not now. Maybe never."

  "She won't kill him."

  Peters sighed and looked at Lucas. Lucas liked him. He carried himself like an old man, full of the worries of the world, though he wasn't much older than Lucas. It could come across as false, but it didn't. There was a deep understanding in those twinkling eyes.

  "Where will you go?" Peters asked.

  There was only one answer to that. "With the ocean. I'll keep looking for my friends. With your permission I'll take the electron microscope and other equipment. I still need to find the cure."

  "Still," said Peters.

  Lucas shrugged. He dreamt of Farsan most nights now, though never in a pleasant way. They were kissing, as they never had in real life, but it wasn't really Farsan, it was a gray-skinned, white-eyed version of him with blood splashed around his lips.

  That was guilt, or something. Fear.

  "There's nothing else for me. I'll follow them and do my research."

  "We're following them too. She'll see you."

  "She won't. Salle Coram never did."

  Peters shook his head. "That was in a bunker. Not on roads in a foreign land."

  He shrugged. There wasn't much more to say. Jake chewed on his lip.

  "We could give you gas. Food, too."

  "I have food. I can get gas."

  In the last month in Maine, when he hadn't been working to narrow down his best possible pathways toward a cure, isolating likely gene strands and ranges of treatment components, he'd focused on learning how to siphon fuel and fit a battery, how to jumpstart a car and replace the tires, how to get a generator going and so on, in case of something like this.

  Now it had happened.

  "So you'll want one of the Humvees."

  "I can find another vehicle. But yes, a Humvee would be good. To carry the equipment."

  Peters sighed. He leaned back and signaled Feargal over.

  Within an hour he was checking the load. No guns, no bombs, only scientific equipment. In the street a few pale stragglers from the ocean were drifting by, lighting their paths with their eyes. He studied each of them, standing by the oversized Humvee.

  Any one of these could be Farsan. The chances of it were infinitesimal, but still he looked and saw Farsan's face everywhere. Finding any of his people was a highly unlikely dream; fourteen needles in a haystack of well over one hundred thousand. Still he had to try.

  "You should go," Peters said. "She will wake soon. Good luck."

  They shook hands. He nodded. So this was the end. He slipped into the driver's seat and drove away.

  * * *

  He took a looping, circuitous route through the western ranks of the ocean. The demon was still out there somewhere and he didn't want to take any chances.

  Bordeaux faded away, and for a time he took a highway leading north along the Garonne river, allowing himself to drift, cruising at a stately thirty miles per hour where it was clear. Tree branches jutted out into the road. Pale bodies nudged up against the fender as he slowed through traffic-clogged sections.

  He pulled over at a rise in the landscape and watched the Garonne flow by for a time, rolling round a shallow bend marked with boulders and a small muddy beach. The zombies staggered down the incline to the side, traipsed through the dark mud, and walked directly into the river, leaving thin and bony footprints behind. Moonlight frittered away on the waves.

  He drove on, pulling east steadily. It felt strange to be alone and on the outside again. Spying. For three months after his bitterly cold bicycle ride to the Maine airport, he'd spied on them. He'd found an outbuilding near the edge of the airfield, crawled in through a broken window, and begun.

  Everything that followed was a blur of loneliness and purpose. He was hungry a lot of the time
, often forgetting to eat though he'd brought a bulging knapsack of rations from the Habitat. He spent his days asleep or lying on his low rooftop, watching them run their bunker assault drills through binoculars and listening to them talk on the radio. At nights he ran his generator and worked on the cure with what weak equipment he had.

  He took to stalking their encampment, growing bolder night by night. They ran patrols, but rarely did they come out as far as his little signalman's shack. One night he dared himself to enter Anna's laboratory in the quarantine bay of the airport, far better equipped than his own, and decided on a careless, defiant whim to use it.

  It was a risk, but he didn't have half the equipment available in the ward, and no other way he could access it. It was far better gear than he'd had in the bunker even, because it was all built for purpose; a real centrifuge, a flash-freezer, an impressive range of dyes and stains, even some genetic building block liquids he could mix and match.

  He found a gun in a security room and stripped the bullets. He knew he wouldn't use it, not even to save himself, but it was good to have. He accepted that at some point he would have to talk to these people. The ocean was gone, taking with them Farsan and his other test-subjects, and he had to follow, but he couldn't cross the Atlantic without their help.

  Yet he waited. He watched them, enjoying this small sense of fleeting power he held over the people who'd brought on the destruction of his world. He studied them and worked on his cure, so that when he took his case to them in the broad light of day, they could not say no. He wanted to be sure.

  Loneliness became a problem. As the weeks passed he grew careless. Perhaps he went a little bit mad, in the run-up to Anna breaking his throat.

  Now he was here.

  He tapped the wheel and drove on. That she hated him was clear. What he felt for her was confused. It wasn't hate, perhaps, but it was strong. Admiration was part of it. Fear was another. She was so like Salle Coram it was sometimes hard to breathe around her. There was also, weirdly, a kind of pride. He'd never felt that before; pride for someone he didn't know, whose life he'd had no role in, who felt so negatively towards him.