The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Anna stared. Lara pressed on.

  "So this is what's going to happen. You're going to walk back over there now, gather the people, and bring them here. Then you're going to sit with your mouth shut while I get this thing moving. You're going to back me up, because this needs to be done and I can't do it alone."

  Anna's hands squeezed into fists by her sides. Lara watched her closely. Once she would have attacked, she had no doubt of it. This was a test of all that Anna had learned on the various oceans of the world. Would she stand for these insults? Would she see the truth in them and relent? Was she still the cruel, callous Anna of half a year back, or had she really changed?

  The moment stretched out, decisions clicking over like clockwork. There were guns nearby, available for anyone who wanted them. Anna had almost used one on Witzgenstein just two weeks back. Masako really was dead, literally for going in a direction Amo hadn't liked. Was Anna capable of that too?

  The moment stretched to breaking point, then at last Anna let out a breath, and the tension in her drained away. Her fists slackened and the grim set of her lips broke toward a tired smile.

  "Good, sweet girl," she said. "Is that what you see?"

  "It's what I've always seen," Lara answered without skipping a beat. "What Cerulean saw, Amo, all of us."

  "Huh."

  Anna toed the snow and tapped gently on the nearest seatback. "It's cold out here. Your conference in the snow."

  It was an olive branch, perhaps, but Lara couldn't afford to let her mask slip yet. It was exhausting to keep up the front, but they'd both played harder games before. She had to make this stick.

  "So get a sweater."

  Anna smiled properly now. "Ahh, Lara. I forgot you could be so spiky. I missed that."

  "Do not come over and hug me right now," Lara said, though at the end of the sentence she was fighting off a smile. "You little-"

  "All right," Anna interrupted, "enough with the 'little' and 'young woman', I get it."

  "I was going to say 'minx'."

  Anna laughed. "You've got it, you know. I should never have doubted. Witzgenstein was easy compared to this."

  Lara was pleased to hear that, though she managed to keep most of that feeling off her face. It wouldn't do for her to seem too happy to have 'beaten' a sixteen-year-old, not when there were much bigger tasks ahead. Like Amo. "Go get the others, please. We need to talk. We need to vote. We need to set a departure date from this hellhole and go home."

  Anna nodded, then looked back to the RVs. There lay their scruffy, temporary encampment; seven RVs with several mismatched marquee tents erected between and around them, surrounded by dirty, churned-up snow and spotted with rusting, burnt-out braziers. It looked like a sad little shantytown, in the cold light of a gray day. Further along lay the hole in the hill where the bunker entrance was, surrounded by heaps of hauling equipment and a broad band of churned dirt.

  Anna turned back again.

  "Yeah, OK," she allowed. "I see it, from here. Nice thinking, to put your table in the field. Our camp does look like a slum. I get that it's no good for the families. For the kids. They aren't healing, I accept that."

  Lara nodded. "This place is diseased, Anna. Think of what happened here, the scale of the death. It's bad for all of us, perhaps most of all Amo. We need to get away."

  "Yeah," Anna said, this time with more conviction, and again there was that hint of something, some secret thing that had happened but couldn't be mentioned. "You're right. We need to go. I'll get the others."

  Lara nodded. "Thank you."

  Anna pointed at the coffee machine. "Mine's an espresso."

  "It's self-serve."

  Anna laughed. "All right." She turned and started away.

  In her wake, Lara held tight on to the seatback to stop herself from collapsing, as her legs went to jelly underneath her. Damn, that was hard. In some ways it was the hardest part.

  Now the work could begin.

  INTERLUDE 2

  He thumped, and they thumped back. It was a good conversation really. It was better than anything he'd had right after the coma, when just the sound of their voices whispering used to scratch on his brain like the devil's talons.

  He thumped and they thumped back. It wasn't easy, this part. What would a man do? What would Jenny want him to do?

  THUMP THUMP

  THUMP THUMP

  It was a conversation, but it didn't provide any answers. It was a dialog that went round and round, never ceasing, but perhaps it was all he deserved; slumped in this deck four corridor, surrounded by the bodies he'd killed and dreaming that his wife and daughter beyond the door might somehow be all right, though he was too afraid to open the door to find out.

  And it stank.

  At least two days had passed since he'd first chopped a path down this corridor, two days of slaughter, and the bodies had been lying here in the stifling heat all that time, bloating up and now buzzing with flies. The stink was almost a physical thing, a hot fog that seeped into him, raw as fresh vomit. There was no escaping it and it worked on him. Every second he stayed there, every thump and thump in return, it drooled down his face and wormed into the cracks of his mind. It was the future, spreading out before him like a putrid landscape.

  This until he died. The wreckage of what he'd done, forever.

  THUMP THUMP

  THUMP THUMP

  In the end it was the stink that got to him. After the tears and the deep well of self-pity ran dry, it came like a hammering fog, beating its way in. Raw chicken in the trash, left three days in the sun. The scene in the detective movie where the rookie pukes from the stench of a week-old corpse. Acidic decay and piss, ammonia suffusing his eyes, percolating and pickling him, sucking on his brain like a molding egg.

  It cut through his misery like a scalpel, peeling back the layers he was struggling to maintain. Gnashing teeth and rending clothes were all very well, covering himself in ashes was deserved, but what then?

  What then?

  Deep, utter grief didn't last forever. Misery couldn't be maintained for days, not in the face of this. He'd expected to die right here by the door, pining like a dog into starvation, but how long would it take to die? He'd been lying there for twenty-four hours already and still felt fine. He was barely even hungry and had only a mild headache, nothing like the migraines of the past. How many more days would he need to breathe that stink before he died?

  Plus, and this was terrible to admit, but once admitted there was no way back: it was dull.

  At the start there'd been the thumping, and each of those early thumps had seemed so loaded with meaning, but not after a day. After a day they were just thumps; they weren't a conversation at all. It was easy to rationalize. They had changed, they had gotten infected, but not him. In truth he felt better than he had in a year, the migraines were gone, and wasn't that cause for celebration? He was healed, praise Jesus hallelujah, shouldn't he be out singing the Lord's righteous praises?

  Instead he was here. He was hiding his light away. He was suffering out of pure selfishness.

  It came on him slow, but when he acted it was swift. He'd given them plenty of time and they hadn't started talking. They hadn't gotten better, and they wouldn't, so that was that.

  Man, not boy.

  He hefted the axe, opened the door, and cracked open their heads in less than a minute. Afterwards he stood there panting, watching if they would move. They didn't even look much like Jenny and Lucy any more, with their cheeks all gray and sucked in. Jenny moved her leg and he cut her head off. He did the same for Lucy. He fished Lucy's necklace free, a tiny, tinkling gold rainbow, and tucked it in his pocket. From Jenny he took her wedding ring and folded it into his wallet.

  These weren't his family. Once they had been, but not any more. His family were dead, and him dying just because they were dead too was not going to help anyone. Jenny wouldn't want it.

  He got out. The corridors were a hellish, vile nightmare, but soon the nightmare
ended, and out on deck it was gorgeously sunny. The sea was an emerald plain, the sky an azure so deep he thought he might fall up into it.

  Everything that followed came easily.

  He stripped off his bloody clothes, crusted and foul, and traded for new ones in their old cabin. It was hot and stuffy in there now with all the air conditioning off. He packed a bag, then changed his mind and left it behind. There'd be clothes, if he needed them. He walked back through corridors lined with bodies, holding a balled-up T-shirt to his nose. There were gray maggoty faces and bloody swollen torsos. There were shirts furled up to reveal straining gray bellies. An old woman lay with her skirt around her knees, her varicose veins throbbing with flies. Here lay a congealed puddle of gut, going crusty like egg yolks stuck to a wall.

  He found gasoline in the ship's rear belly, in large secure tanks bolted to the walls. He couldn't lift them, but they had taps and he decanted them into buckets, which he splashed liberally up and down the liner's many staircases. The airflow there would help the blaze spread.

  He doused the room his dead wife and daughter were in liberally. He smashed the portholes with his axe, ensuring there'd be enough oxygen. On the lowest deck with an exterior walkway, standing by the door, he lit the trail. The gas whuffed alight and the fire raced away, down into the dark.

  On deck he cranked his lifeboat down. Heavily laden with supplies, he climbed in and finished the descent to the ocean, working the pulleys until the base hit the thump of the ocean. The waves were choppy but the boat had a strong construction. He tossed the last ropes into the water, then set to the oars and pulled himself away from the towering black cliff side of the liner's flank, until he was far enough to stop and watch.

  It was huge, like a floating New York skyscraper. Drifts of dark smoke rose up from three points on top, like the chimneys on an old steam liner. Those were the three main staircases, venting. Smoke wafted through his broken portholes like incense.

  A Viking burial. He watched it drift for a time, wondering if the fire would ever be hot enough to warp the hull and make it sink, or if the Summer Wind would remain this way for decades, burnt out inside but floating endlessly on the tides, a ghost ship filled with the dust of the dead.

  He bent to the oars, set his face to the sun, and rowed.

  THUMP THUMP, said the waves on the base of the boat.

  THUMP THUMP

  He rowed on, ignoring it. It was no conversation. It was nothing at all.

  * * *

  Thoughts came and went. That first night he lay back and saw his life play out amongst the stars. This was the wake after the funeral. Here was his Jenny, and their first kiss down by the litter-strewn canal running along Worcester's old industrial heart, where huge cotton mills once loomed, leaving now only their grafitti-coated brick chimney stacks. There was the faint, pungent smell of some drunk's piss on the air. A canal barge glided smoothly by, and over Jenny's shoulder he'd seen a guy inside, through a porthole, grinning with his thumb up.

  Well done, mate. Good haul.

  In the wispy, drifting clouds he saw Lucy, tumbling around their Worcester flat, before they moved close to London and his City job began. They were both still students then, with Lucy just old enough to run and roll and tumble round and round.

  "She's clumsy like her father," Jenny would say.

  "She's a drunk like her mother," he'd tease, and they'd kiss.

  The boat was cold under his back, and hours went by with sleep not coming, but that was all right. This was his trick, learned in the months after the coma, after the hospital had done everything they could think of and sent him home with a high-strength migraine prescription and a list of trigger-warnings to avoid, printed off the Internet.

  He'd lie in the darkness of his downstairs bedroom and think of the past, which almost always meant Jenny and Lucy. They'd been his best thing, better than winning glory in rugby in school, better than late nights watching TV with his step-dad Jeff, better than stolen moments with Ms. Franks the biology teacher, the best memories he had.

  The boat drifted and he let the tides carry him. His body ached. Three days of murder took it out of you. But he was good at lying still, letting memories come like a friend with a flashlight, searching for him in the darkness, only sometimes flashing the beam across his face.

  He slept at last. The next day he rowed. Three days and three nights passed like that, like the big JC in his cave before rolling back the stone. That was a sign as much as anything.

  The boat hit land in a cool fog and he rolled out onto cold, dreary sand. The beach was gray and stretched into the mist, with scruffy, balding dunes just visible ahead, rising into the outline of sharp gray cliffs on the right.

  Up the beach and over the dunes he went, to where a dirt footpath led across a shabby thin golf course, to a road with some kind of large guesthouse in white plaster stucco. The stucco was stained black from lichen growth dripping down from the rain gutters. There was a Benz in the drive, not so different to his E-class Wagon back in St. Albans, but this one had passengers.

  A mom, a dad, a kid in the back. They thumped on the glass. The dad had his shirt torn off, where he'd wrestled partway out of his seatbelt. The mom was still in her seat but her arms were waving around like fronds on a sea anemone. The kid had slipped her belt and now snarled at him through the glass, her nose squashed like a button mushroom.

  Drake touched the glass. Thump, he thought. Here too.

  In the guesthouse he drank filtered water from a bottle in the fridge. He ate old chicken from a plastic box, not bad. He walked outside and breathed the foggy, salty air. It was a cold and raw morning.

  Spain, he wondered. Perhaps Portugal? It was hard to say. Surely not Africa, with this fog.

  He found a baseball bat in the garage and used it to finish the family in the car, starting with the little girl. Their bodies decorated the drive like liverworts on an old man's back. That image pleased him.

  He got into the E-class and turned the key, kindly left in position. The engine started, and a blast of hot air warmed him. It was good to have power back. He closed the door and revved up the heat, getting comfortable in the luxury leather seat. There could be luxuries, still.

  He waved to the family as he eased the Benz down the drive. The dad was jerking still but couldn't move. It seemed like something should be said, but he hadn't said anything about the Summer Wind, so why start now?

  The road rose up to meet him. He drove.

  * * *

  It took two months to find her.

  There was no plan and no sense of urgency to it. When it did happen, he wasn't even aware what a beginning it was. Two months of roving had turned his mind to a simple corn soup, and he didn't mind. He had all the time in the world.

  So he drove. It turned out his Portugal guess was right. There were so many little terracotta fishing towns lining the coast, down on their luck and a bit shabby round the edges, just like Northern England but warmer. He drove through Albufeira to Faro, through Tavira and Alcoutim and up through the Parque Natural do Vale do Guidian with its heady forests of cork oak and acacia and stone pine. He drove north through the Algarve along the E1 highway to Lisbon, to Coimbra, to Porto.

  England was not far off, but he felt no desire to rush home. St. Albans wasn't home anymore, not with Jenny and Lucy gone. Worcester was a long time ago, and London had never held much appeal. Portugal was just fine, like a holiday.

  He killed the dead along his path. When the Benz ran out of gas he switched to another car, and another. When he was hungry he popped a can of Minerva gourmet canned fish, a Portuguese staple, and delicious. When he was thirsty he drained a bottle of Pedras mineral water, which according to the bits of the label he could discern, dated back to Roman times.

  Sometimes he killed the dead with his car and sometimes with some bat or other. He threw a few bodily off cliffs. He tossed one into a well and left him splashing in the water down below. He tried a bow and arrows pilfered from a sp
orts center, but ended up with a raw forearm where the bowstring kept snapping him. He stabbed a dead woman to death with an arrow, right through her eyes.

  Easy.

  Portugal was perhaps his best holiday ever, completely divorced from everything that came before. It was a new life, out here. The Summer Wind was in the past, and each day he thought less about Jenny and Lucy. A little sadness came with that, but it surprised him how little. That was another life, and in the wilds of empty Portugal he was becoming a new man. A survivor.

  Then he met Myra.

  It was a little after midday, moving into summer and the sky was a baking, swimming-pool blue, somewhere north of Porto on the coastal road, close to crossing over into Spain. There was a castle that had been converted into a hotel behind him, a luscious sweep of white-ish chalk cliffs ahead, and a tilt-shift village of stucco walls and red tile roofs nestled into a culvert in the middle distance.

  And there was Myra.

  She was standing ahead of him on the blacktop road midway down the long downhill sweep, dressed in flowing beiges and browns, like an old onion peeling off its crumpled skins. She had long auburn hair that hung like secret curtains, partially concealing the glorious stage of her face.

  Drake stopped his car, a sleek black Jaguar XJ by then, and got out. She watched him, a drift of hair whispering to the sea breeze. That was a different kind of conversation. What felt like an embolism burst in his chest and groin at the same moment, crippling him. He clung to the door like it was a bulletproof shield.