She was happy.
They lay in bed together late most days, in a tent on the beach or atop the tenth-floor roof of an off-limits building, holding each other, looking up at the blue sky and dreaming.
"Let's make a baby," she told him at last, summoning the words from her hallucination nine months earlier to life.
His eyes lit up like she'd struck the jackpot on a Las Vegas slot machine. He nodded and grinned and shook her hand and cried, and then they got down to the task at hand.
In all she was deliriously happy, but still she grew bored, and set about preparing for the next work that lay ahead. She was ready to do it now.
She packed the RV; not much was needed, not for where they were going. Amo spoke to her at the last, as she loaded up two crates of frozen fish in white polystyrene boxes and three large barrels of Wynn's homebrew ale, along with sundry other items; some blueberry-cheese, a few loaves of rye bread, several medium-sized sacks of dried quinoa, an assortment of foil-packed seeds including rhubarb, chamomile and squash, three chickens and a cockerel, along with a large bag of the candies she'd brought from Europe.
Amo gave her a hug, then Lara. "You look after him," Lara warned, nodding at Ravi. She looked so much better now; back to her old cheerful, vigorous self. "We need him for the karaoke prom."
Ravi reddened and ducked away. He had a terrible singing voice, and for perhaps that reason they always made him emcee the parties.
"You're sure you want to lead this?" Amo asked.
She nodded. It was easy, really. After all she'd done before, having to blow up autocannons and shoot down drones just to get near the impenetrable bunker-citadels, this was child's play.
"I'm sure."
"Then good luck."
She drove away with Ravi, listening to Tracy Chapman and Bob Dylan and other deep, thoughtful songs. They sounded different to her now, coming from a whole other angle. She saw the hope in them more easily, the small triumphs that balanced out the despair. Like in Chapman's Fast Car, it meant something to escape the small town, even if it was not all you'd hoped for. It had value to love and dream even for a short time, because the dream would keep you warm at night and for the rest of your life.
People needed dreams. She had lots of spare printed flags in the back of the RV, because that was a dream too.
It took less than a day, as advertised. The roads all the way had been cleared, driving up through the deserts and Las Vegas, up past San Francisco and Sacramento, through throngs of giant redwoods by Redding and Red Bluff, onto the verdant green hills and ripe vineyards of Oregon.
Past Medford and Roseburg they went, by Eugene and Salem, to where the head of the Willamette Valley was waiting; brightly alive and thickly forested with tall chokecherry, bigleaf maple and black oak. The air hung heavy with the smell of maple sap and wood smoke.
The settlement was where she expected it to be, standing behind a proud wooden stockade toward the northern end of the great valley, overlooking a gorgeous sea of trees and the quilted land stretching into a heat haze beyond, bounded by the Oregon Coast mountain range. They had a watermill on a Willamette river tributary, flowing fast with melt water, and several plumes of smoke rose into the air over the tall log wall. Standing before it reminded Anna of the days immediately after the demons were crushed in Maine, when everything seemed so perfect, as if frozen in amber for eternity.
The stockade walls were manned, but of course she recognized the guards, and of course they were shocked to see her approach.
"Hello," she called up, with Ravi behind her beside the RV. "Is she in?"
It was a lot easier than approaching a bunker. Doing that so many times, each time taking her life into her hands as she strode over to the figure in the black suit, never knowing who it was, whether they held a weapon or the suit itself was a bomb, had inured her to fear. She was Odysseus in front of the gates of Ithaca, demanding entry.
Nobody called down. Ravi paced about nervously behind her, but then this was his first time, and she didn't blame him. No one liked a rifle being pointed in their face, and up there Anna counted three black barrel-holes aimed at her chest. Best was to wait, so Anna just stood and waited, while the gears of little bureaucracy turned beyond, atop the gate, until at last, wearing her cowboy hat and her denim jacket, she appeared.
Anna smiled. Witzgenstein. Yes, she looked good. Natural living, in accord with God's law or however she saw things out here, had done her good. Command had filled her out. Hopefully she wasn't lying any more, wasn't cheating, wasn't underhand, but so what if she was? She had people, and people were the real purpose now.
"Anna," she called down, in that rich, luxurious voice. "You're a long way from home."
Anna beamed back up at her. She couldn't resist. "Not that far. You ensured you were only a day's drive away."
Witzgenstein didn't let that fluster her. "What can we do for you?"
Anna's beam widened. This was the best part. "I've got big news, Janine. I've also got cheese, and beans, and back bacon too. Some ale, if you God-fearing folks are allowed to drink it. This is a trade mission with news from the world. We don't have any weapons. Will you open the gate?"
Witzgenstein stared down, and in that gaze Anna saw the white flag in the black-suited figure's hand again. It wasn't the same, she hadn't trapped Witzgenstein in a bunker underground, defenseless and hunted, but it was just as real; hope mingling with uncertainty in pursuit of something greater than themselves.
This was what coming together looked like. You didn't make peace with your friends, after all. All Witzgenstein could do now was open the gate. Or shoot her where she stood. Or ignore her until she went away.
"It's great ale," Anna added. That wasn't a line she'd often been able to say in France, Italy, or Tunisia, because back there she'd had nothing concrete to offer. Here though it seemed to do the trick, because Janine turned back to make a gesture to her people below, and the gate began to open.
THE LIST - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Huge thanks to the fastest reader in the West, Pam Elmes, for picking up on a host of typos that somehow slipped through the net, and letting me know within a day of getting the ARC! Thanks to Rob Nugen, as ever, for his incredible work of encouraging, as well as catching plenty of typos, a few lingering Britishisms, important plot points that had been overlooked in the drafting process, tech issues, mismatching physical processes, and the odd stray it's when it should be its. Gotta catch 'em all. Thanks to Megan who offered invaluable feedback on slow sections at the beginning along with typos, and to Chris Hooker who pointed out the somewhat choppy back and forth-ing of the PAST section, which I did my best to smoothe out. Thanks also to Michelle who caught several tricky typos, and to Ray Ferguson offered a final, thorough once over that snapped up hopefully the last few mistakes. Thank you!
- Michael
THE LAWS CONTENTS
PRESENT
PAST
FUTURE
INFLUX
EAST
Acknowledgements
PRESENT
AMO 1
It's time to say goodbye to New LA.
I stand beside the HOLLYWOOD sign on the hill, looking through the one 'O' still upright. Most of the other letters are long gone, toppled in the 2025 quake then covered over with rough brown gorse after one good summer's growth. Y O D it says now, with large, gap-toothed spaces in between, like some primal, meaningless cry yelped out by the hill itself. Swap the Y for a G and it'll say GOD. Would that be funny?
Hmm.
The walkie burbles at my hip and I tap it silent gently, like I might a baby's head. Someone's calling me, but that's more a protocol on this day than a sincere appeal for directions. They know I'm out here saying my farewells, gazing out to sea and chewing on weighty issues, and they'll go on down the hierarchy line to Lara soon enough.
I turn away from the YOD and walk on. This trail along the back hills is one of my favorites, where I do some of my deepest thinking. I used to get
like this as a kid sometimes; I can remember way back to the days on the old Iowa farm, when my brother was off playing high school football and I was still too young even for JV. This was before he died, before I started stealing, before I got into drawing zombies in comics.
In those strange, in-between times it would just be me and the endless fields of corn, with perhaps Mom in the kitchen making up a batch of butterscotch for dessert pancakes, and Dad in the garage working on whittling a bookend. Out in the yard there was a magical stillness to the air, with the corn silent all around, not a breath of wind, like an intangible weight was holding everything in position.
I marked it then, that sense of nothing. My brother's shape in the air was a thing I could feel, like part of me had been snipped off, leaving only this emptiness behind. I'd walk out into the corn and wander while looking up at the blue sky, trying to navigate my way to the opposite side of the field then back again by the clouds alone. Hours could go by and nobody would know where I'd been.
Through my twenties, as I got started on my career in comics and moved to New York for a life of parties and girlfriends and low art, I would sometimes think about that odd, empty feeling, and very occasionally I would feel it again, like an old friend with a cold, clammy touch. Those moments felt like temporarily glimpsing through the veil into a kind of madness, and I'd pull away quickly, like a car glancing off the highway guardrails, diving into something else just to get away.
I stop at the edge of a steep curve in the hill and look out over the empty land to the north. More hills, and beyond them, receding through the sweet gin-smelling haze rising off wild juniper bushes, more towns. Empty buildings moldering in the sun-rain cycle. Empty lives. A world of ambition brought crumbling down beneath a brilliant blue sky; all of it hollowed out by twelve years of New LA survivors raiding for canned food, water, gas and so forth. We are parasites, really, dug in to the flank of old LA, living off its rotten old meat, though soon that is going to change.
I walk on.
I used to think this feeling was about loneliness. In my twenties I worked to keep my life full of people. There was always somewhere I was supposed to be and some person I was meant to meet. But when the apocalypse hit, it wasn't loneliness that brought me down. It did hurt, of course, and at times I went a little crazy, talking to zombies when I wasn't massacring them, but it wasn't the same as that solitary cornfield feeling, of slipping through the cracks while the world spun on around me.
In the last few years, ever since Maine, I've been feeling that way again. Some days it's there with me from the moment I wake to the moment I lay my head to sleep. I pull away from it most of the time, as I play with my children and spend time with my wife, as I read Council meeting notes and attend to the enormous logistics required for the upcoming move, but I never get that far. When it's on me in full it feels like the world's become a ghostly fog; a place where other people bustle around importantly, working on important things, making a difference.
Now I understand what that feeling's really about, and it's not loneliness. It's a lack of purpose.
I kick a stone and it skitters over the dry red loam and off the edge of the trail, lost in the undergrowth. The sea to the left would be pretty if there wasn't such a haze of humidity in the air. Instead it looks murky, like I'm gazing through old glass gritted with a decade of dust. Twelve years is a long time, there's no denying it.
For most of those twelve years I've had purpose. Every day since the apocalypse hit I was neck deep in the water and swimming like crazy just to keep my head above the waves. At first I was just surviving, then there was Lara and then the others, and after that I barely had a chance to think for all the balls I had to keep juggling in the air.
Then one day it stopped.
I killed three thousand people in Maine, and things changed. Lara almost died. Witzgenstein tried me in court for crimes I didn't commit, and for some reason I couldn't muster the energy to fight. After that people didn't look at me in the same way. I think back over that time now with a kind of hazy uncertainty. Was it really me, sitting there in the court dock and bowing my head while she poured on the accusations? Was that Amo, the same man who started New LA with Lara by his side?
Perhaps I thought I was doing the right thing for the community, taking the blow to allow the healing to begin, but now I don't know. I think rather that I was glad of the censure. It wasn't about the attention, as Witzgenstein charged. I'm not a narcissist. I just wanted to atone in whatever way I could, for all the deaths I had caused. But Anna put a stop to it, and Witzgenstein was banished.
It left me feeling lost. I was still mayor, but for what? Perhaps my job was just to keep the lights on in New LA until the next person came along to take the reins.
I floated along like that for months, untouched by reality, spending all my days reading Salle Coram's files and visiting the homes of the dead MARS3000. I was hardly even in the water anymore, no longer struggling for anything. I was up on the surface on a little raft with nothing to do, occasionally dipping my hand into the water and halfheartedly paddling a few strokes. I was like a toy train running round an old, old track, getting ready to skid off the too-smooth rails and lie on my side, wheels still spinning, no more aware that I was going nowhere than the big white ball of the sun knows which way is down.
Then there was Lucas.
I start back through the hills, kicking up little puffs of baked red dust underfoot. The grass here is spiky and stern, all yellows and scrunched-up browns. I'll miss this place when I'm gone. I set my sights back on the stretching grid of West Hollywood to the south, bobbing up and down amongst the hills. To the right there's Universal Studios and the Hollywood Reservoir. All these places are full of memories.
Now Lucas is out there doing vital work on the cure. Anna is out there offering the treaty to more bunkers, bringing them over one by one to our side. It spells hope, and I do what I can to fan that flickering flame. Still a few people trickle in every now and then from the cairn trail, but it's clear now that the cairns will not be our salvation.
There just aren't enough people left alive. Lucas diagnosed it correctly; with any less than a hundred genetically viable humans, there isn't the variance for sustained population growth. Asia was wiped clean twelve years ago by the vast flow of demons. Much of Europe was erased in the three months after Maine, when the demons from eleven other bunkers roamed free, before Anna and the ocean arrived to take them out. We can't expect fifty more people to come now, not after so long.
But I accept that hard truth gladly. The cairns will no longer be the only hope for humanity. My histories and my comics may too have had their day, because what person of the thirty-odd thousand out there in bunkers would find much meaning in my story? Not even Witzgenstein did, who lived through it.
But that's OK. I smile as I walk, because the world is changing for the better, and I can change with it. If they don't want my comics or my Ragnarok film or even my new, united world flag, it's all right. I'm not too old to adapt, and the big adaptation is on us now.
Because LA can no longer meet our needs. Water. Food. Power. A place of our own. It means leaving this desert of empty white concrete behind, and for the first time truly setting out on our own. Farewell to the old world, twelve years gone, and perhaps the first real time I'll say goodbye since the apocalypse. I've clung to my movies and my cairn trail for so long, but the maps are different now, the past is gone and reality has shifted under me.
Now I'm getting excited for the future, and what it holds for my children. There are so many possibilities ahead, and the hole in my heart from Maine is no longer so empty. Time heals, and we will be on our own again soon, following in the footsteps of our distant forbears to settle in a new land. I'm ready.
So farewell, Los Angeles. Farewell my friends Cerulean, Indira, Abigail, Ollie, Chantelle, Dr. Ozark, Sophie, and all the other souls lost here and along the way. It's time to move forward. Looking up to the blue sky, I feel as though
I am finally finding my way out of the endless fields of corn, and my brother is coming home.
I take the left turn that'll steer me back toward the Chinese Theater, and pick up the pace over the broken-backed hills as my mind races ahead to the days and weeks to come.
* * *
Lara's in her coffee shop on Montlake, the 'John Harrison'. She's got specials up in the windows on chalkboards, reminiscent of how they used to do it at Sir Clowdesley all those years ago. There's a wide variety in the special blends she stocks now, since she moved off the pre-packaged pods I've been filling cairns with for over a decade.
She is, after all, a trained barista, the Last Barista of America (LBA), and she's sourced hundreds of beans over the years; from other shops, from warehouses, from wholesalers, and now she even mixes and matches her own combinations.
We're running out of lots of things now, like usable gasoline and canned food, but foil-packed coffee beans will probably never run dry.
Vivada
-reads the board on the left, marked up in her elegant scrolling hand. In purple and green chalk she's taken the time to draw blooms of lavender and ivy wreathing the board.
A delicate, soothing blend of smooth vanilla beans from Paraguay, with a hint of English cottage garden lavender.
Her description sets my mouth watering. These specials may seem a frivolous thing to do, but most people in New LA drop through her shop at least once a week, with the coffee either as the main reason or an excuse to get a word in with Lara herself, the Council head.
Pellegrino
-reads the board on the right, and this one is festooned with red chilis, flames and a rambling zombie.
Wash your mouth out with espresso heat from darkest Gambia, only for the hardest core survivor.
She's got artistic skills, and I'm pleased by that. Her coffee shop is really the hub of New LA now, more than the Chinese Theatre. If there's to be a community-wide meeting we gather in the function room upstairs.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 112
