The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Still, Peters had been a sensitive guide. She liked him, especially considering he'd lost the love of his life barely a month earlier.

  "It is here we found the bodies," he'd said in his topsy-turvy Swedish accent, pointing down the bare concrete corridor toward a door stained dark with bloody handprints. "Would you wish to see?"

  There was something curiously innocent about the way he'd asked. She'd almost laughed at how ridiculous it was. Who would want to see that?

  "No, thank you."

  "The bodies are not in there now," he'd said, his intonation all unexpected hills and valleys. "We removed them." A pause. "It's empty."

  "Good," she'd managed. "That's good, Peters."

  He'd nodded and led her on, and now she followed that same path he'd led her down, along the trail of dark blood that seemed burnt into the smooth cement floor. Here Salle Coram had dragged the bodies of her co-conspirators, one after another, again and again, while waiting for Amo to come to her. It was a dark and haunted place.

  She peered into the small bunker-master's office, with its desk and filing cabinets, computers and multiple clocks. On her first trip with Peters the walls had been covered in maps and long complex charts and pages of text scribbled with notes. Now it was bare, with all the filing cabinet drawers open and empty, all the walls a blank gray, the desk thoroughly looted, with only a few scraps of torn paper crumpled on the barren floor.

  Amo wasn't in here, but he had been.

  She continued on. She looked in the dark dorm rooms, shining a flashlight over the twenty bunks and twenty tall upright cabinets, like blocks in an abandoned city. Spartan gray uniforms hung off the edges of beds. In the corner there was an ironing board with an iron sat atop it, ready to go. So sad, but he wasn't here. He wasn't in the small kitchen further along either, or the canteen, or the gym with its sad running machines facing blank gray walls, or the cavernous storeroom with all its rows of empty shelves, which left only two places: the body closet and the flight control deck.

  She prayed hard it was the latter.

  "Here she killed them all," Peters had said, on her tour, while pointing at the main Command hall's door. "Anna thinks she sealed the doors from within, then began her slaughter. It is strange what people will do, isn't it? From here also, they say, she saw Julio. She watched him do his terrors to me and my Abigail. You would think it gives me peace to know her people are dead, but it does not. It does not help."

  She'd laid a hand on his arm. "We don't have to go in."

  He'd smiled, like he was the one consoling her. "We go in. We know. That is a first step to find peace."

  He'd opened the door, and she did as much now.

  The hall was hot, dark and large, like a fever in an echoing cave. The lights above were dim orange flickers, while on the large central screen an image flickered and moved, like a movie. Lara felt her gorge rise, as her mind worked the angles and realized what movie was showing.

  A scene from Julio's pit.

  The angle was from high through a semi-fisheye lens, bulging the edges outward. The walls of that coarse concrete corridor ran either side, hung with filthy, straggly, emaciated prisoners, each set atop low stirrups mounted to the walls, their bony arms strung on manacles above their heads. Twenty of them perhaps, maybe thirty. At the end was the glass door, made small by distance, behind which the demon's red body hung like a tiny, fiery ant.

  In the middle of the screen was Julio.

  It sent a shiver of fear and hatred through Lara's heart. To see him there, to see what he was doing, cut a chunk out of her viscerally. His eyes were mad and wild. His body was bitten and deformed; his left shoulder swollen up like a hump, his left arm swaying uselessly. It horrified her.

  He was dancing.

  Faint music played, some classical waltz, and on the screen Julio danced while his victims looked on, hung on their perches. Hot bile rushed up in her throat and she barely held it back. In the murky center of the image, hanging nearest the demon with his black skin stark against the pale gray wall, was Robert.

  She wavered and lurched to the side, only catching herself on a desk in the upper tier of three rows, which let out a loud creak. Her legs were dizzy again and she felt herself about to collapse.

  Dancing, and smiling. And Amo was watching this?

  Cold dread crept up in her. She'd imagined him reading files, seeking military intelligence perhaps, maybe looking for the cracks in Lars Mecklarin's vision as his MARS3000 experiment began, but this? It was repellent, and it repelled her to think that this was the food Amo was dining upon, for days and nights without break. What squat, hideous monster would birth from such horror? What kind of man would he become?

  Now he was standing at the noise, turning. She saw him in the front row; his pale and thin face, his lackluster hair swept greasily to the sides, his red eyes, looking like one of Julio's prisoners on the screen. He didn't look at all like the man she'd married. He was some kind of ghoul, feasting on misery.

  They looked at each other for a long moment, then he spoke.

  "Anna said she wouldn't let you come down."

  The words dug an immediate chasm between them. That he would ask. That Anna would do it. That he would admit it now.

  "Why are you watching this, Amo?"

  He stared back at her, watery-eyed and only half there. He'd been headed this way for days, it was true, but never this far gone. Each time he came up from the bunker he'd looked a little worse, but this time things had degraded much farther, so fast she barely recognized him. Guilt and excuses vied in her head. She hadn't stopped him. She'd been sick, but she hadn't stopped him. Cerulean had been confusing her, the remnant of the coma had made everything a blur, but what excuse was that, for this?

  He looked halfway to becoming a part of the ocean. Perhaps that was what he wanted, and that thought scared her. She stared, knowing she shouldn't let her real horror show, but struggling. It was all she could to repeat herself, aiming for sympathetic but coming out with judgment and disgust.

  "Why are you watching this, Amo?"

  He watched her back. A lot seemed to hang on the answer. Even Amo seemed to realize this, as his stupor cracked open and some kind of feeling, the old Amo, leaked briefly through.

  "I'm not. I mean, I'm not really. Not now. I was, and I just-" he looked back at the screen. "I left it on. I was reading."

  He gestured to the desk in front of him. In the gloom Lara picked out a widely spread snowdrift of papers, stretching over the surrounding desks on the front row. There were blue and red files scattered about, and large plotted charts and thick spiral-bound handbooks, and several large books, and maps and tables and surely all the contents of the bunker master's office, dumped out in a haphazard array. On the floor were dozens of crates filled with more folders.

  Lara caught his eyes, which flickered guiltily. That same look, just like Anna; the complicity that seemed so much worse than what he deserved. They'd just survived, that was all, so why this? They hadn't done anything directly themselves. It was Julio, it was Salle, it wasn't them.

  "But why?" she pressed on. "Why are you watching it at all?"

  On the screen Julio stopped dancing and walked to the end of the corridor, pointing at the people strung to the walls as he went, like he was checking them off a mental list. At the end he reached Robert, the black smudge, and appeared to be talking. Amo must have had the sound off because she couldn't hear any of it.

  "Because I have to," Amo replied. His voice was wintry, like it was coming from very far away. His eyes swam redly. "I have to know, Lara. I have to understand."

  She took a gulp. She took a timid step forward. "Understand what?"

  Amo opened his mouth but didn't speak. He looked like he was trying to push something out of his throat that was too big for words, and he just couldn't get it to come. It made her angry.

  "What? Talk to me. You can tell me."

  He closed his mouth and let his arms drop, so defeated. "I need to k
now." He waved at the screen, then again at his papers. "It's not enough that they're names on a page, Lara. I need to feel it. I need to feel what they went through, or it wasn't real." He paused, like he was building himself up to something. "There were three thousand people here. Three thousand sets of dreams, locked in a can. They wanted to get out, they were willing to do anything, because that's how far they were driven." He paused, like a spent force, and Lara thought for a moment he was done, then he picked up again.

  "I've been reading Salle Coram's diaries. I've read them all now, and I start to see it. Her descent. She was a good person, you know? When they drafted her for this thing she was only twenty-seven years old. It's hard to believe. She was the same age as us, when the whole thing happened up above. But they didn't know it happened, Lara. They were lied to, even Lars. Whoever planned this place, they kept him in the dark too, probably to keep his vision so bright that all the people would follow him. And it was so damn bright. His dream encompassed the whole human experience, and it was about reaching out for the stars. These people believed in that vision, Lara, in spreading the best of humanity out through the solar system. Salle believed in it, Lars believed in it, and look what they became."

  He pointed at Julio. He was kneeling now, before the red demon. Lara had heard about what followed and she didn't want to see it.

  "Turn it off," she said, and mutely Amo did, tapping a key on the keyboard, almost lost amidst the papers.

  "Why watch this, then?"

  He looked back at her wanly, like he was about to be sick. "Because this is what Salle Coram did. She allowed this. Lars killed himself because he couldn't face the possibility of it, leaving Salle Coram to face what followed, alone. The bunker was in revolution. People were fighting, going insane after five years locked in place. There were rapes, pain, all kind of torment. Salle took command of that when no one else would. She was strong. Do you know Anna thinks she's like Salle? But what happened to Salle, Lara? She lost herself somewhere along the way, and she came to accept Julio and his victims, and all for what?"

  He gestured at the empty hall.

  "So Lars made the right choice," Lara said.

  Amo snorted, followed by that look again. "The right choice," he repeated, as if the words held some kind of key. "But, I think, it's a question of what's possible. Three thousand people, Lara. You can't just kill them, like you'd kill yourself. You can't make that choice for them, but you can't let them kill each other either. So what would Anna have done, in Salle's place? What would I have done? There was no way to survive and stay clean. So they got dirty. And still, they died."

  Lara frowned. "We didn't kill them. It's not on us."

  He sighed. He looked so much like Vie, in those moments when Vie had had enough of playing make-believe, and would just give this beaten-down sigh like the world was a big disappointment. Normally they'd laugh at how he was old before his time, but it wasn't funny, coming from Amo now. It was crushing.

  "That doesn't matter," Amo said. "It happened on my watch. I didn't try to save these people, I just let them die. I was blinded. Salle said as much to me, you know."

  Lara frowned. She hadn't heard about this. "What?"

  Amo nodded, his eyes now fogging with fresh tears. "When she came up in her suit. She said she'd admired me, and the work I'd done in New LA. She said she'd lived to get updates from Julio on our progress, even as she was planning to kill us all."

  Lara had heard none of this. He hadn't told anyone, or at least not her. "She said that?"

  He sniffed and laughed. "Do you know what she said to me after that? After I threw that back in her face? 'To the victor the spoils'. And here I am, the victor, rooting through her life, but what spoils are these, Lara? What's the lesson here? What am I supposed to learn?"

  He looked so thin and lost, standing there amidst his flood of papers. Tears flowed smoothly down his cheeks. He didn't sob or shake. He was simply broken. And for a moment Lara didn't want to go to him.

  This wasn't her Amo. This was someone weaker. Where was the cocky flair of the Last Mayor of America? Where was the bright, proud man she'd fallen in love with, and who was this creature before her slinking about in Salle Coram's heart of darkness? She realized why Anna had wanted her to stay away. She realized the knife-edge she was walking on now. One wrong word, said the wrong way, and Amo would be broken forever.

  Cerulean had been right. A shudder passed through her. Cerulean in her dreams, after her coma, when he told her that Amo was her weakness and she was his. They'd made this world together. They'd found meaning in it together. And if she left him here…

  A sad world played out before her, in New LA with Vie and Talia and all the things that had been so real before, but no Amo. It was just like the vision from Anna's plane with Cerulean by her side, with everything destroyed. It was the same. It was the tension between these two extremes, so much loss, so much hope, encapsulated in the seed of the broken man before her, that made the whole thing sing.

  'Keep your heart open,' Cerulean had said.

  Tears sprung out and down her cheeks.

  "Lara," he said, a plea really, like her name spelled out on yard-high boards in the Sir Clowdesley window, like a trail of crumbs left across the country, but with nothing left to give. It cut Lara to hear it. It was an injury to them both, the way he gasped out that word like a drowning man, but if she ignored it what kind of person would she be, and who would she become?

  There was a wound here, a secret infection consuming Amo as surely as the zombie plague, and she couldn't fight it, just like you couldn't fight a broken arm or her wild panic attacks or a coma. You just had to accept it, no matter how horrible, how hard to understand it was, and deal with the consequences.

  She saw herself sinking in, saw the filth getting on everything, corrupting it all, washing their future with despair. He stood there like a leper and every fiber in her being told her to run; to get out, to get up, to snatch up her children and her people and flee from this sick, twisted place, and never stop running.

  But it was Amo, and that was the hardest truth of all. He was their hope, and always had been. If it broke him it would break them too, the stink would get out and coat them all.

  But it was Amo, her Amo, and there wasn't really a choice. She strode down and wrapped her arms around him, and though he was deep in the muck, though he was so wiry and cold, she pressed him close and tried to will some of her newly grown strength back into him.

  He wept quietly and she whispered words in his ear.

  "Enough now, Amo. That's enough."

  INTERLUDE 3

  Matthew Drake, sole survivor of the Summer Wind and potentially the only man in all of Portugal, woke on the sofa of the cliff-top castle hotel feeling completely at peace.

  Warm sunlight slanted in through the open French doors, chased by a warm and salty sea breeze. Every inch of his body felt warm. Looking down he saw one of Myra's wispy brown layers covering his belly and hips, revealing his thighs. They looked broad and strong in the orange light.

  He'd always been strong. Now he was strong again for a reason, and that was good. That's what men were for.

  The lobby was posh, probably the best hotel he'd ever stayed at, as seen through long, lazy blinks. There were dark, carved wooden chairs with Regency-patterned upholstery, a Persian rug, elegant glass vases on elegant glass tables draped with crinkly brown flower arrangements, all sitting on antique-looking parquet flooring.

  He breathed in the air, which was sweet with some kind of citrusy scent. Damn, he felt good. There were no twinges of guilt from the night before. Jenny wasn't there hovering over his shoulder, as he'd half expected her to be. It had only been two months since she'd died, and already he was screwing around.

  But Jenny would understand. Being alone was hard. She was with him still, carried in his wallet, smiling down.

  He smiled too and stretched like a cat, luxuriating in the sun.

  "Ma-hew Do-rake," came Myra's voice
from somewhere behind. She was singing, pronouncing his name in her lilting way, part of a simple song along with more nonsense Portuguese. He caught the sounds but none of the meaning, but wasn't her voice beautiful? Husky, radiant, so damn alive. That made a wonderful change. She wasn't like Jenny, wasn't better or worse, just different. And the sex? It was hard to compare, as it had been so long since he and Jenny had done it, with the coma. But still.

  "Myra," he called back, trying to put the roll on the 'r'.

  "Oh, meu amante tem de acordar, Ma-hew?" she sang, drawing in closer, coming from outside. "Caro amante, que gostaria algum fruto?"

  He caught the last word, perhaps.

  "Fruit?"

  "Ha ha, sim, fruto!"

  He rolled and saw her as she swayed in, and at once his groin lit up again. She was completely naked, not even wearing sandals, which Jenny had always insisted on wearing any time they'd gone out into the garden to go 'au naturelle'. But not Myra. Every bit of her was a beautiful, delicious brown like a perfectly toasted meringue, glowing with the sun. Her breasts hung full and taut, the dark triangle between her legs was like a chocolate kiss, her hair was wavy and rich around her vivid face, and in her arms she held a silver platter on which sat a glistening array of sliced oranges, strawberries and pears.

  She gave a sly smile, and lowered the fruit tray to cover the kiss between her legs. "Só o melhor para o meu amante, apenas o melhor."

  He didn't know the words, but he knew the meaning in her eyes well enough. That was an incitement, and suddenly he was famished, a starving man again, but not for fruit.

  He rolled up and stood naked before her.

  "Oh, Ma-hew," she said, miming giddiness, like his body had made her feel faint. He laughed and she laughed too.

  She held out the tray suggestively. "Naranja?"

  He guessed right, striding closer and taking the tray right out of her hands. "I don't need a damn orange."

  She leaned in, raised her lips to kiss, and there was only one thing to do.