The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  He ran over, scrabbled through their coats while the demon creaked along the walkway above, and came up with a card. He ran back, scanned the card over the reader, and a red light flashed.

  "No," he muttered and tried again.

  The red light flashed once more.

  "Shit!"

  Behind him came a screech of rending metal. Lucas spun and watched the walkway bend as the demon leaped, to fly and hit the warped metal edge of the encircling gantry across its chest. Its legs dangled amongst trailing wires and it scrabbled to get a firm grip on the weakened metal.

  Lucas was running before he knew it, scooping up a metal railing bar on the way, which he then used to jab into a crook of the demon's huge fist as it curled into the perforated metal. He strained back on the bar to pry the demon's grip loose, barely loosening a finger before the metal groaned and the demon snatched for another grip. Its giant fingers stabbed at another patch of the twisted grille-like flooring, and Lucas met it with the bar again, prying away while its face held only inches away from his own, staring blindly with those cold red eyes.

  It shifted, it grunted, but thanks to Lucas it couldn't find a solid grip, as finger by finger he wedged it loose until finally it slipped, and its own great weight dragged it down.

  Lucas stood there panting as it fell into the masses of the ocean below.

  Then he followed it.

  He climbed down over the burst railing, holding to a drooping length of rebar, to drop his feet on the railing one level down. It was darker there, with cables in places drooping from the gantry ceiling, coating the clusters of the dead like shadowy jungle vines. He scanned the walls, here segmented with hatches and access panels, until he settled on a door that ran roughly underneath the blast door above.

  There had to be a way. More than anyone else in his old Habitat, he'd known every pathway through the walls, vents and wiring, and instinct told him there would be some path into the Command module from below, if only he could find it in time.

  He risked a glance over his shoulder and down into the stairwell pit; far below the towering shadow of the demon was already surfacing through the barrage of ocean bodies. So little time. He ran to the door, another heavy metal affair, but this time the security card flashed green and the door's locks clicked. He drove it open and ran in to another dim corridor stretching away and leading down at a sharp angle.

  He sprinted on, kicked through the first door on the left, and found himself overlooking a great, dead jungle in a huge, fan-shaped hall. The floor sank away at an angle that matched the corridor outside, allowing for huge rubber and mahogany trees to scrape the metal-paneled ceiling. Black ivy crept up the walls and a low mass of sapling trunks filled the lower zones, along with the deflated bowls of large brown cacti.

  Everything was dead. The air was arid, dry and sweet with old putrefaction. He searched the dim walls, peering amidst the strangling ivy and up across the ceiling until a flicker of movement and sound drew his eye. Barely visible in the thicket of brown foliage, turning slowly at the mouth of a large but obscure ceiling vent, there was a fan.

  He leapt into the undergrowth, crunching and climbing through brittle dead leaves and sapling boughs. He hit a desiccated corkwood tree and started up, pulling on branches and coarse snarls of wrinkled bark like he'd pulled himself through the Habitat walls. Bits of tree came away in places, revealing rotten pulp beneath infested with wriggling black termites, but he managed to hang on, racing up until he hit the vine-slathered ceiling and the fan was right there before him.

  He punched through a rectangular ceiling panel and twisted it, sending the plasterboard sheet toppling down below to reveal a too-narrow crawlspace stocked with cabling backed by raw cement. He took hold of the metal panel grid, braced his back against the hollow cork tree's trunk, and kicked out with both legs at the spinning fan.

  On the first attempt he missed the broad side of the blade and instead pushed his left foot through, almost cutting his shin open on the sharp edge as it spun. On the second he missed and hit the vent itself, pulling it slightly away from its brackets in the ceiling. He cursed and calmed himself, took better aim and this time on the third blow dislodged the fan from its rotor with a metal-tearing groan, opening the vent.

  He pulled the fan blade out, pushed off the tree and scurried in to the closed, dusty vent. It grew dark in moments as he slithered inward, but he had a clear idea of his relative position. Long years of thinking of the Habitat as a three-dimensional, interconnected maze had prepared him well.

  The vent was snug on his shoulders and he advanced at a silkworm-like crawl on his knees and elbows, sneezing on decade-old dust and ensuring to keep his weight as well distributed as possible. He reached ahead with his hands like feeler antennae, seeking a chute leading up.

  He almost missed it in the dark, as it led off at a curious diagonal, though he caught the breath of falling cold air on his heels. He slid back, then carefully, spreading his weight as smoothly as possible so as not to jolt the old brackets and drop the whole section to the forest floor below, wriggled to a standing position, leaning at an angle into the rising vent. He reached up, braced his hands to the upper walls, and delicately, so carefully, rested his weight on the diagonal slope.

  The thin walls flexed under his weight. Metal brackets groaned, something clicked, and he had time enough for the tiniest of pushes before the floor gave out beneath him. He slipped like the demon, scrabbling desperately for purchase in the diagonal shaft as his legs dropped through and his body straightened out as the horizontal ceiling vent fell away and tumbled to the crusty canopy below.

  He slid, gripping only with his damp palms against the dusty vent interior, bracing so hard his shoulders burned, as the vents crumpled below and his hips slid out of the edge and the metal there buckled, leaving him dangling with his upper body inside the cement ceiling and his lower body dangling below.

  "Shit, come on, shit," he grunted, trying to get his feet up to grip something but failing, trying to latch onto something in the vent but failing. He slid another inch, then another, so barely his torso was still in the vent and his whole body hung below.

  Then he caught it, a cable in the vent. It was thin and fed in through a roughly-drilled aperture, continued a short while, then fed out again like a worm briefly surfacing above ground. He switched both hands to it, dropping another inch, and pulled. It creaked and dropped an inch in slack, jerking him down, but held.

  "Holy, goddamn…" he grunted. He was exhausted already, but none of that mattered if he couldn't make this one, single pull up.

  He pulled. He sucked at the air and pulled, and bit by excruciating bit he slid up. With a tremendous huff he got his belly back on the crumpled vent, inside the cement ceiling, and that gave him traction. He slid further up, in, until he was at last able to brace his knee on the diagonal and shuffle his shoulders higher, and pull his last remaining leg in.

  He lay braced through the ceiling, in the vent, and panted and gasped. Sweet Jesus, he thought. Sweet mother Mary, that was close. All he wanted was to lie there and rest and alternately curse or pray to the gods, but he couldn't.

  The demon had to be back on the top level by now, heading down the long corridor toward Anna. How long could it take?

  He climbed.

  His shoulders and back were exhausted so he enlisted his legs, shuffling and kicking up the slide for a long minute until finally it leveled out. He slithered along smoothly, through dust and old mouse droppings, made a turn left at a junction, right at another, navigating in the total dark by feel, until the vent began to lighten and he caught the chopping sound of another fan.

  He rounded a final corner and there it was; blades ahead slitting a bright white light beyond into staccato bursts. He raced over and peered through the fan to a large, brightly lit hall below. There was no time and he punched the fan five times until it dislodged, clattering to a hard floor below. He caught sight of desks, a screen, then he flowed his upper body through
, taking hold of the vent's lower edge and rolling the rest of his body lolloping out above it. He hung there for a second, examining his landing spot far below, then dropped.

  He hit the floor and tweaked his ankle, but that was nothing. This room was the pay dirt. It was brightly lit by four electric lights standing on desks, illuminating a space much like the Command hall of the Maine bunker. There was a huge blank screen filling one wall with three rows of semi-circular desks arrayed before it, each with its own workstation. Along one of walls there were dozens of gray doors stacked atop each other, while along the facing wall lay six mattresses from the dormitory. Atop the mattresses lay six bodies, each wearing a heavy black suit with a fully sealed domed helmet on top.

  For a moment he stood there frozen, waiting for one of them to rise and take up the black rifles lying by their sides. He went slowly for a weapon at his hip but of course there was none there; Anna had not allowed him that.

  His mind raced ahead, putting together the possible sequence of events that had led to these six bodies being here, to the hydrogen line shift, to the change in expression of the T4, to him standing here now gasping and surveying the space for some sign of…

  What? He didn't know, not exactly, but some kind of device to override the closed emitter they'd found in Maine, something like the solid state scanner he'd adapted with Jake but not the same.

  He sprang up onto a desk and surveyed the command space, looking for anything changed, anything out of place, any sign of which computer they'd used, how they'd done it, where he should begin. Around the motionless figures were many black bags spilling out equipment; lengths of thick red cable, heavy-duty soldering irons, folders fat with papers covered in illustrations, a long device that looked like a metal detector, and a wide spray of circuit boards.

  It didn't help. Panic set in. He turned, studying the wall screen, the desks, the computers, even the chairs and tables, but there was nothing, nothing except-

  He dropped to the floor and ran over to a desk in the back, favoring his right leg. He wrenched the chair out of the way and fell to his knees before the green glow. It was coming from a large black block like an old computer tower, with one defining feature; a radar-like screen on the face, which displayed a dancing green line.

  His breath stopped. He recognized it; a waveform from his calculations, back when he'd been working with Jake on possible permutations of the hydrogen line to match receptor strands in the T4's genomic code.

  He laughed. This was it, proof that his theories were correct. The shield in the Maine bunker had been solid-state and un-hackable, but here? He spun the box. It was incredibly heavy, like trying to slide a washing machine over a carpeted floor, but he managed to edge it out, to find a thick splice of red cabling leading out and up into the computer above.

  Could it really be that simple? He had to take the chance. He gripped the red cable at the point it fed into the black box, and pulled.

  Click.

  It snapped out. At once the green line on the readout died. He dropped the cable and looked around, but nothing had changed. How would he know?

  He ran to the blast door, pushed the press plate, and this time it opened, leading him back onto the flickering stairwell gantry. The ocean below were churning in the pit below, more were following in a regular through the stairs above, but that didn't mean anything. The demon was here now.

  He circled the gantry, shoved open the swing doors and ran limping down the shadowy corridor in the midst of a stream of zombies, all wending the same path up and down stairs, left and right through the maze of hallways until they reached their destination.

  There was a knotted wall of gray bodies blocking the corridor, bulging from floor to ceiling with a single red leg thrust out from the middle. It looked obscene and Lucas could only stare as more of the ocean piled on, smothering the red beast with their weight, crunching in tightly in the confined space of the corridor, until their bodies covered the red limb completely.

  He hobbled back the way he'd come, ducked into some kind of storeroom, pushed through another door in the far wall, and emerged on the other side of the zombie knot. He jogged unevenly to the right, round a corner and there lay Anna, right where he'd left her, alongside Feargal and Peters, all splashed liberally with blood. One of the demon's great hands was near her foot, even now grasping, but the crush of gray bodies was grinding it to a halt.

  "The tide's coming in," Anna said in a daze, looking at her own foot, then up to him. "We should leave."

  He laughed. Any moment now this whole corridor would be clogged.

  "Come on," he said, and bent over to help her up.

  EAST

  20. COMMAND

  Anna roused in a white canvas tent, with the bright summer sun shining through the thin weave. The air smelled of pollen and freshly turned earth and a warm breeze fluttered over her skin through the rippling tent flaps. At the same time her brain felt battered, like it had been baked inside her skull. That was what the tail end of a migraine felt like, unfamiliar for so long but never forgotten.

  What had happened?

  She turned, taking in the tent- tall enough to stand up in, wide enough to encompass three makeshift beds made out of reinforced portable tables. To her right lay Feargal and to her left lay Peters, both stripped to the waist and plastered with white bandaging, lying on dark mattresses from the dormitory. She craned over and saw a mud floor below, coated with a large sheet of translucent plastic. She leaned further and felt a sharp twinge in the small of her back.

  "Shit," she murmured and lay flat again. That was what falling down an elevator shaft did to you. She pushed back the covers as far as she could, looking at her thighs in their cotton pajama pants. She tried to move them but they didn't respond, which was terrifying in a distant kind of way.

  She shuffled up in the bed, out of the snug covers, and tried again. This time the big toe on her left foot moved. She focused hard on the right, and now the little toe moved. That was worth a brief cry.

  "I thought you'd never wake up," said Peters.

  Anna turned. His face was purple and bruised and his eyes were almost swollen shut, but his accent, though hoarse, was as lyrical as ever.

  She smiled. "I'm here."

  "Of course. It takes more than a zombie ocean to kill my Anna."

  She snorted. It hurt. "You did it. You fought them off."

  He shrugged and said nothing more.

  "Is Feargal OK?"

  "He is OK. He lost a lot of blood; one bit him in the stairwell very badly. It tried to eat his breast, is this the right word," he tapped his own chest, "breast?"

  Anna shuddered. "Chest. Ugh."

  "Chest. He is sleeping. You have been sleeping for a day."

  Anna lay back. A day. "And you?"

  "I don't sleep, you know this."

  She laughed. "Have you been counting ammunition?"

  "Lucas will not let me. I asked. He advised me to count dimples in the tent weave."

  Anna looked at him, not sure if he was kidding.

  "It is very dull," Peters said.

  She laughed, and though it hurt it flushed away a load of the stale weight in her head, like an incoming tide steadily washing away sandcastles on the beach.

  "What happened? There was a demon. I don't remember anything after that."

  "Lucas saved us. Though you should ask him yourself."

  There was a brief kerfuffle outside, then suddenly the tent flap flung open and in bounded Jake, wide-eyed and mouth open.

  "Anna, thank God!"

  He rushed over and pulled her into an embrace, squeezing so tight it hurt, but she welcomed it. She patted his back, with Peters smiling at her over Jake's shoulder.

  "He has already hugged me," he mouthed. Anna laughed.

  At last Jake let her go, and she wasn't surprised to see tears in his eyes.

  "Oh, you," she said.

  "I should have gone with you," Jake said. "I knew it."

  She shook her
head. "I'm glad you weren't. We're lucky we're all whole. What happened up here, is everyone OK?"

  Jake's smile fell and he went somber. "We lost Ollie."

  The good feeling faded.

  "The ocean took him. I didn't see it, exactly what happened, but there was blood and we can't find the body now. He's gone."

  "Oh," Anna said, and left a moment for that to settle in. Ollie who'd saved Amo with his RPG, Ollie who'd always made Amo's kids Talia and Vie laugh with his impressions of different kinds of zombie animals, Ollie who'd been a good, solid guy and one of Ravi's closest friends.

  "And the others?"

  "They're well. Wanda's on patrol and Macy's resting. She was working on you three all night."

  Anna lay there and looked up at him, suddenly feeling very tired. This was Jake, one of her favorites, with his dark floppy hair and the half-moon scar on the side of his head. She reached up and took his hand and fresh tears swelled up in his eyes. It was hard, always hard, but for people like Jake it was worth it.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  "We got your warning." He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. "They got Ollie, but it was enough for the rest of us to get in the Humvee and go. We kept going for maybe an hour, until the horde chasing us stopped and turned back. Lucas came through on the radio shortly after. We helped lift you all out, and Macy fixed you up."

  Anna nodded. He was probably feeling guilty that he had run away. If she knew Jake, that would hang over him for years now.

  "You did the right thing," she said firmly. "There was nothing you could've done, and I could not handle it if you'd died pointlessly trying to save me."

  He laughed through his tears. "You said the same thing to Ravi."

  She smiled. "I guess that means I love you, then? We're family."

  He squeezed her arm. "I love you too, Anna. Holy hell, if you died?"

  "I barely survived."

  "But things are changing now. The things you discovered…" He trailed off.