The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  The Council meet here three times a week. There's a knitting club with four members, one of them a man; Keeshom. A cycle group uses her shop as their start and end point, and after Cynthia left with Witzgenstein the crèche was moved here too.

  I stand outside and watch a few people amble along the sunbaked road. I wave and they wave back. It's a new center now, away from the false, multiscreen cinema I chose for New LA's heart. That place served its purpose, but now there's this, and soon this too will move, and I'm glad. We are a village, and this feels better. We don't get overawed by the sheer scale of a building we could never in our lifetimes replicate or even hope to maintain. We forsake that temple of the past for this small, cozy community center.

  I push through the wooden door and a bell in the frame rings. Lara looks up from behind the counter; still gorgeous after all these years, with her big frizzy hair and lips. She's framed by the bar's dark teak boards in front and two large chalkboards in back, touting the full range of coffee and cake offerings. The walls are painted with solid blocks of deep red and yellow that could easily overwhelm, though in the muted lighting they seem rich and comforting.

  Will this be my last time, I wonder, emerging into the fragrant air of rich coffee and steamed milk in this place? Everything now is a last.

  Lara's face lights up when she sees me. This I can rely on, and it makes my heart beat harder.

  "Honey," she says happily. "How were the hills?"

  I smile and pull up to the bar. Here we are husband and wife, but also mayor and lead Councilwoman, and I enjoy the hint back to the moment we first met, just two people crossing paths at a coffee shop.

  "The 'Y' looks like it's going to fall next," I say.

  "So it'll be O D," she muses. "I expect they'll all be down the next time we pass through here. What can I get you?"

  "Pellegrino," I say. "I'm hardcore."

  She laughs. "You are soft through and through."

  I smile back, and she busies herself with the paraphernalia of coffee. She talks about the kids and her day while I grunt short answers and watch, enjoying the fluid rhythms of her movement. Her curly hair springs as she works the milk frother. I admire the curve of her back as it tightens against her white shirt. I look at her warm face, and I listen to her talk about Vie and Talia, and my eyes prickle with the threat of tears. It's so much to lose, but so much to reclaim.

  She sets the coffee down in front of me gently, looks into my eyes, and takes my hand in hers.

  "Hey," she says. "Come on. It's going to be fine."

  I smile back, but I barely trust myself to speak. There's a weight of emotion there; so many pent-up feelings clamoring to let go. I come round the open bar instead, brush past the fridge without looking, and wrap my arms around her. She is soft and warm and folds me in.

  "We're going to be fine," she says in my ear, though I can hear the telltale fizz of tears in the back of her throat too. None of us have escaped the last two years without pain and suffering of our own. Too many times we've been cold, and only now do I feel the thaw, as we're getting ready to start again.

  "I know," I say back. "I'm sorry. I haven't been there."

  Maybe she chokes up at that. Maybe I do. Warmth swells up from where our bodies touch, and I feel the tingle of it hot in my belly, like I'm back on that first date again, in the restaurant in New York with this beautiful woman and so many possibilities ahead.

  I kiss her neck and she lets out a heavy breath. It's been so long. She guides my face round, her hand on my cheek, and we kiss in silent, hungry heat for a moment, tasting the salty tears as they trickle down to our lips.

  Then she pulls back, and we're both breathing heavily, and it's as if the world has transformed. We haven't kissed like that in years, and suddenly I want more, and I can see the same thing in her eyes; like there's nothing more to feel guilty about, no more reasons to hold back. There's just us.

  We look at each other.

  "We've got to pick the kids up in half an hour," she says in a husky voice, then laughs, because it is ridiculous. She starts to say more, but I silence her with another greedy kiss. I run my hands down her back and her hip moves against my thigh. It gets hot until she pushes away again, slightly breathless, slightly flustered. She's still holding the coffee scoop in her right hand.

  "They're having a-" she takes a breath, "knitting circular upstairs. Let me just kick them out."

  I laugh low. It feels like the world has closed around us so that we're all that matters, and I've missed that feeling. For the longest time I thought I'd never feel it again. "Kick out those damn knitters," I say, my voice tight.

  She wags the scoop at me. I love how befuddled she's become. "Park this. Right here."

  She hands me the scoop and I take it, while she heads off for the stairs. I listen as she ascends behind the blackboard wall, and faintly hear her shuffling them along politely upstairs while I stand at the quiet, warm bar. The milk frother hisses slightly, and I turn the handle to silence it. The fridge hums. Her papers are spread out along the back worktop; final timetables and logistics for the harvest and the move to come, scattered with fragrant crumbs of roasted coffee. I leaf through, savoring the sensation of raspy paper against my fingers. Here I am, and I feel every little sound and taste every little smell as if it's heightened, as if it's for the last time.

  Shortly the knitters come down, hustled past with a grin and a few waves.

  "Great-looking cardigan," I say to Keeshom, our tall young trainee doctor, as he goes by. He's been working on it for a month; he says it helps with the manual dexterity. All but one sleeve is finished, and the pattern's only out of sync in a few places. He grins shyly, throws a, "Thank you," over his shoulder then ducks out. The doorbell rings into silence.

  Then there's Lara, standing in the doorway to the function room stairs. She's let her tumble of tightly curled black and brown hair down, which she knows makes me crazy. She cocks her hip slightly and licks her lower lip.

  "Twenty-seven minutes," she says breathily, "until Floyd will get pissed and turf the kids out onto the street."

  I laugh. It's like a dream now, after so long apart. I can almost not believe it's happening, but it is. "We'll only need twenty-six," I say, and close in on her.

  We kiss and fumble steamily up the stairs.

  1. OCEAN

  Lara woke in the night with the faint trails of the same dream tugging at her memory. Just like always there was a great white eye blinking in the sky above, and fire in the streets of LA below, and just like always the details were already fading into the shadows.

  Her heart raced and a chill line of sweat dried down her back.

  She shuddered and snuggled closer to Amo, trying to put the dream aside. Memories of their vigorous twenty-seven minutes in the coffee shop came back and warmed her. That was a good thing, something to hold onto tightly. They hadn't done anything like that for a long time; a welcome change after a long, hard year of recovery for them both.

  She ran a hand idly through his dark, feathery hair, releasing the faintest clinging scent of wood smoke. He'd been out earlier that day burning his files from Maine in a brazier on the back balcony. So much had changed since then.

  "There's no point carrying them with me," he'd said, when she came over to stand beside him in the pre-dawn light. "Extra weight."

  Lara had surveyed the fifteen large crates packed with personnel folders spread around the brazier. They could easily have made space for them in one of the moving trailers, but she was glad he hadn't tried. He'd been obsessed with these people for long enough.

  "It's all up here though, isn't it?" she'd asked, pointing at his head. She hadn't meant to be cruel with that, had meant to meet him halfway, appreciative he was finally moving on, but the edge came through all the same.

  He'd smiled his trademark, sad smile. "I know you don't like it, honey."

  She'd sighed, beaten again by her own impatience. "You're right, I don't, but I know what it means to you
. You don't have to burn them."

  His smile became more genuine. "Yes, I do." He put his arm round her and kissed her forehead, then they stood there for a little while, looking out to sea, until Talia came stumbling out bleary-eyed in her PJs and asked, looking at the brazier.

  "Are we having a BBQ? For breakfast?"

  "Sure, honey," Amo had said. "Go get some eggs."

  Talia rolled sleepily back into the kitchen and went rustling in the fridge.

  "There's no eggs in there," Lara had said.

  "I know." Amo gave a half-smile and kissed her again.

  Now Lara shifted comfortably against him in bed, looking at the silvery outline of his face. The details were lost in shadow, but she knew them all. Him she would keep, but everything else, this room, this apartment, this life, it was a lot to leave behind, both good and bad. She'd been processing it for months, ever since Amo had suggested the move after Anna came back from the Willamette Valley, telling tall tales about everything Witzgenstein had achieved. The notion had breathed a new surge of life into him, a second wind after the promise of Lucas, and she'd welcomed it, but only now was it starting to feel real.

  A second shudder snuck up over her, and she shifted as an extra detail from the dream resurged, like a body rising up from the depths. It was the view of Los Angeles from a plane, flying high above with Anna, while far below the city was burning.

  "What happened here?" she asked in the dream, turning to Anna at the plane's controls, but it wasn't Anna anymore; instead it was Cerulean. He looked well, with his broad hands comfortable on the control wheel and yoke, younger than she remembered, though his expression was serious and concerned.

  "They're coming, Lara," he'd replied. "I need you to be strong."

  The image faded away, and lying in the warm bed with Amo by her side, Lara faced the same question that always came after one of these dreams. What did it mean? After the apocalypse everyone had had dreams, and many of them had meant something. Amo had seen the zombies hungering for human affection long before the apocalypse hit, and immortalized it in his art. Anna had seen the demon in her dreams, coming as the Jabberwock from Alice in Wonderland, before any one of them even knew the demons existed. Cerulean had seen his long, endless dive, the final one that finished off the demon inside him. There were dozens of other stories from throughout the community.

  But not Lara. She'd never had vivid dreams like that, not until her own coma. Then there was rarely a night that went by that they didn't come.

  She rolled over to look at the glowing red digits of the side table clock.

  2:11

  Ugh. She'd only gone to bed a few hours ago, and she was getting up again soon. There was a lot to do tomorrow, with the final harvest in Chino Hills State Park to begin. So much could go wrong, but still the blend of images kept coming back to her.

  She contemplated waking Amo; perhaps they could run another twenty-seven minute workout, but she held back. They hadn't made love like that since before Maine and she didn't want to jinx it. Slowly he was becoming her Amo again, and though he was sometimes joking again, even sometimes showing his old charm and confidence, it had been a long hard road that wasn't yet done.

  She kicked her feet out of the covers with a shush and sat on the edge of the bed.

  "Come on," she whispered, but it wasn't any good. Now the dream was taking hold, and just like always there was no way to not think about the demon snatching her in Pittsburgh. She'd tried many strategies to stave the memories off, night after night when these panic attacks descended, anything to distract herself from walking down these same well-trodden mental paths, but few of them really worked. Singing songs in her head just postponed them. Reading a book saw her attention constantly slipping away so the story and the memories got confused. Taking walks outside just spread the contamination further afield, so the next time she was out walking by the sea she'd think of that moment over a year back, when the demon's hand had closed around her and…

  She got to her feet and clenched her fists. Come on.

  She looked back at Amo, preferring to think about him. She couldn't control these fits, couldn't stop them just like you couldn't stop a migraine, but she had learned to channel them into shallower waters. Thinking about Amo was one such path.

  For months after Maine he'd been almost impossible to talk to, and at every step that had made her own recovery harder. They'd grown distant, while he plunged himself into memorializing the MARS3000 victims, dwelling on the smallest details of their lives, while in turn she'd let herself be consumed by the needs of her children on top of essential Council business, all to keep the dreams at bay.

  They'd started in her coma and continued in the months that followed, sometimes even haunting her when she was awake. There was the fire and the white eye, Cerulean in the plane, the sensation of being crushed, and perhaps strangest of all there was the vivid memory of her bedside, with people sitting nearby while she'd laid unconscious, holding her hand.

  In some ways it was the most disturbing image of them all, though the panic it brought was more manageable. How could she even have memories of it, when she'd been in a coma? It made her feel like her own mind was unreliable, filled with spotty recollections that couldn't be real memories.

  She'd talked to Macy about it, before she left for Europe with Anna, but Macy wasn't even a doctor and far from a psychologist, so she'd started her own research. In silent bookstores and libraries around LA she read the pop psychology of Lars Mecklarin and those like him, before moving down into deeper, more scientific works on the mind. Yet even the best experts doing the deepest science didn't know for sure what happened in a coma or its aftermath.

  It was severe brain damage, that's what it came down to. Some people were conscious throughout but unable to respond, while for others it was like they'd just closed their eyes one year and opened them ten years later. The one thing in common was that their brains were forever altered, and in some cases their personality was radically altered too.

  She began to pace softly over the carpeted floor while Amo breathed on unaware, as details from the dreams kept rising. Her brain seemed to think it was important for her to keep seeing these distressing images, like there was vital information in them she was supposed to learn, but never quite could. What was the benefit of seeing the white eye and New LA burning? What was the value in seeing Amo sitting by her comatose side, trying to hide his tears?

  She hated those fuzzy half-memories of Amo most; they felt so hollow and hopeless. Every time she chose this path through the panic it hurt, but still it was preferable to the others, where she lived again through the demon's terrifying grip round her chest, pouring visions of burning LA into her mind.

  The room began to feel confining and she sped her pacing. Perhaps a walk would be the only way now. It didn't matter if the dreams glommed on to the ocean or the beachside or the railings, because she was leaving soon and would never have to come back to this place again.

  She looked at Amo, then hustled to the desk and scrawled a quick note.

  Couldn't sleep, gone for a walk down Venice Beach.

  She set it on the pillow by his side, stroked his hair half hoping he would wake up, then left the room behind. On the way out she looked in on the kids' room, where their silent, small figures lay peacefully in bed. Talia might remember some of this place in the years to come, she thought, but for Vie at five years old, it would all be lost. His life lay entirely ahead of him.

  Was that happy or sad? A little of both. Lara blew them each a kiss then closed the door so it rested slightly ajar, with a sliver of orange light from the nightlight in the hall spilling through.

  Outside the apartment building the air was warm and still, and a sky heavy with black clouds left Santa Monica Boulevard largely in darkness. For a time she stood there on the cracked sidewalk, beside an old yellow fire pump and three racks of newspaper-vending boxes, letting her eyes adjust and breathing in the scents of salt, summer dust and cooli
ng asphalt.

  The waves down on Venice Beach lapped forward and backward like the steady tick of a metronome. She could just pick out the sparkle of foam on breakers, dashing through stray beams of light as the moon peeked out through crevices in the clouds. This was good, and peaceful, and though they'd outgrown it, she would miss this place. In the buildings to either side were their people, survivors all, gathered through twelve years of hard work, tucked up now safely in their beds and surely asleep at this time.

  That meant something. She chuckled, thinking of how Ravi and Anna had acted in the week before they flew off together to rejoin Lucas and Feargal in Europe. Their late night carousing and occasional drag-race down the front promenade in noisy, spluttering sports cars had woken her angry and cursing several times, but now with them gone New LA seemed almost too silent. Nobody was out drinking, dancing, baying at the moon, as they once would have, twelve years ago. Now it was a quiet, nurturing place fit for the very young and the middle-aged, with nothing much in between.

  She smiled sadly and strode out onto the dark road. Anna had called them earlier on the satellite phone, with a report on progress at bunker 5 in Istanbul. It all seemed to be going well, though there had been some delays. There was no hard schedule now though, with the demons gone and the bunkers pacified.

  The world was safe.

  She reached the edge of the beach and stepped down onto the soft sand, still warm through her thin plastic sandals. To the left lay a bench with the wood rotten through, now just another lump in the shadow. Amo had been talking about fixing it up with a few fresh two by fours for years, but now it was plain that was never going to happen.

  The bench would rot to nothing. The metal frame would corrode. The salt air and sand would swallow it slowly down.

  Images from the dream rose up again, and she sped her pace to escape them. For perhaps thirty minutes she walked, finding a pleasant balance between breathing and laying her feet down in the moist sand with a slight, hissing crunch. It became trance-like, so when a distant sound rang over the beach it barely registered, more of a mosquito buzz nearby as sleep beckoned than anything to truly be concerned about.