The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  She bent to kiss him. It was warm and sugary and the perfect use of their time off. In the background, over on the flagstones where once millions of tourists had flocked to come see this beautiful location, flanked on one side by the graceful white sides and bulbous onion domes of the Aya Sofia, on the other by the fading turpentine walls of the Blue Mosque, Lucas's voice rang out on the walkie talkie.

  "Dammit, kids, I'm coming to you! Don't let me find you naked."

  * * *

  He found them sitting on the harbor side, watching shrieking gulls pluck at a rotten mélange of green-gray seaweed and a dead jellyfish down on the tideline below, heads leaning against each other as the sun set over the ancient city.

  "Anna, you have to see this," Lucas said, striding over. "It was big an hour ago and it's just getting bigger."

  "Hello, Lucas," Anna said lazily, not turning. "I'm not on the science team anymore. I can't help."

  Lucas stopped behind her, demanding attention with his silence, and after maybe ten more seconds of soaking in the view, Anna turned.

  There he was, still in his white lab coat, with his sandy hair cut very short and the stern look in his eyes, waiting. In his hand he held a tablet computer with a bright orange cover. Ah Lucas. She'd almost killed him when they first met. She'd almost killed him again in Bordeaux, when the zombie ocean turned, after which he'd saved her life. They'd been on a rocky road together but through all that she'd learned to respect him. He knew it, she knew it, they all did.

  Grudgingly she rose.

  "What have you got?" she asked, coming round to peer at the tablet in his hand.

  "Like nothing we've seen before. Here."

  He pointed to a graph with five wavy lines plotted, each a different color. There was a clear distinction in their distribution, with them interweaving tightly until a point halfway across the graph, where they diverged radically. The red line spun upward, the yellow shot down through the x-axis, while the other three modulated wildly.

  She didn't recognize it. "What am I looking at?"

  "It's the hydrogen line," Lucas said, to which she gave a blank stare. The hydrogen line was one area she knew very little about. The T4, the genetic coding, even the experiments they'd assigned to the various bunkers were all areas she had a good understanding of. She'd been at the forefront in making breakthroughs and designing their sets of tests.

  But the hydrogen line? That was Jake, Lucas and Sulman's area. They were the engineers bordering on physicists. In fact, over Lucas' shoulder she saw Jake jogging over now, his sandaled feet slapping over the square's flagstones.

  "Unpack that for me," Anna said, waving at the point on the graph where the five lines diverged. "What does it mean?"

  "We don't know," Lucas said. "That's exactly the problem. It's never happened before, at least not that we've recorded."

  Anna frowned.

  "This is how it normally looks," he went on smoothly, highlighting the earlier intertwined section and enlarging it with a reverse pinch on the touchscreen. The lines spread apart to fill the graph, and now it was clear they were waveforms that oscillated and regularly overlapped. "These are five strong signal markers we've learned to read on the hydrogen line. Each of them can carry a message, and between them they add up to a key; remember we talked about how these variations are the things that trigger behaviors in the ocean and the demons?"

  "I'm with you," she said, as Ravi pulled up alongside and leaned over to see. A shift in the hydrogen line at the Bordeaux bunker had made all the ocean and demons forget their war with each other and come after her. Control of the code was a powerful thing.

  "This pattern is normal," Lucas said, tracking the red line then the blue one. "There's very little variation, like background radiation. Tiny peaks and troughs, they overlap but then return, like a homeostatic balance. It's been like this as long as we've been recording, with the exception of Bordeaux."

  Anna looked up at his face. Now for the first time she saw the fear in his sharp blue eyes. A little bit of it crept into her too.

  "You recorded that shift on the scanner," she said, filling in the details. "It was amongst them, by the head of the Bordeaux bunker. I remember."

  "Exactly," Lucas said, as Jake came panting up. "We didn't know enough back then to even separate these five lines. The whole thing was a mess with no pattern visible at all, but in the year since then Jake's broken it down."

  Anna turned to Jake. His sensitive, damaged face met hers sincerely.

  "So this means-" she started, then trailed off. She didn't know what it meant. Abruptly she felt cold and guilty that while they'd been working she'd been out here playing.

  "We d-don't know, Anna," Jake stammered between pants, picking up the thread. "But it's big. We're w-working to map these five markers to a meaning based on patterns we've observed before, but you have to remember that these markers are only five of hundreds embedded in the line. It's far denser in its information signature than, say, a fingerprint. We're talking t-terabytes of data. All we know is that the hydrogen line has gone wild, and it's not just limited to us here. At first we thought it might be d-demons incoming, I know that's what you're thinking now, but it's not."

  She'd just reached that supposition. If it was demons that was huge. It was an imminent threat. "How do you know?"

  "Because none of us feel a thing. That's still the best early warning signal, especially amongst the sensitives like Peters. Plus Sulman sent a ping off the hydrogen line relays we set up in Maine and Bordeaux, and they're both reporting the same crazy readings. This change seems to be global, and whatever it is, it's seismic. There's no telling what havoc it could wreak."

  Anna took a mental step back, trying to grasp the entirety of what they were telling her. The whole hydrogen line? Not demons incoming, but then…

  "Is this the bunkers? Are they cheating us?"

  "There's no way to know. We can't triangulate on a source for the signal, not now and not before. It's just everywhere at once, in the air. We can't track it."

  Anna's mind raced on. Both the ocean and the demons operated on the hydrogen line, controlled from outside. It plucked the strings of their brains, it directed them, and for a time she'd used that as a weapon against them. She'd baited the Bordeaux bunker with the bodies of her team, then used simple locally transmitted codes through the hydrogen line shield to entrap every demon that came, by reversing the behavior of the ocean.

  A thought dropped into that knowledge like a cold, shiny dime down a wishing well, splashing into the water and sending ripples out in every direction.

  "Bordeaux," she said, and turned urgently to Lucas. "What are your readings?"

  "The same. Sulman pinged it. But yes."

  But yes, that was all he had to say. The enormity of it grew as the ripples spread, becoming tsunami waves that threatened to shoot up from the well in a huge, wrecking geyser.

  "What?" Ravi said, still a step behind.

  Anna couldn't speak, still reeling with the repercussions, so it was Jake that answered.

  "It means Bordeaux may be c-compromised. The ocean may change their programming and let the demons out. They could go free."

  The demons could go free. More ripples flowed out, hammering at her mistakes. If she'd insisted they'd kept the Bordeaux shield tuned to an enforced signal, perhaps they'd be safe now; but then there'd been no hint of a global change in the hydrogen line back then, and Lucas and Jake had lobbied to use that shield and transmitter as part of their research. She'd agreed because it made good sense with minimal risk. If they'd just sealed the place up with cement they'd be fine, but once again, there was valuable experimental data down there, trapped in the ocean's bodies.

  But, but, but.

  "So, they're out again?" Ravi asked. Disbelief vied with fear in his voice; so different to the playful, flirting tone of a few minutes ago.

  "They may be out, or they may be worse."

  "Worse?" he asked, while Anna was already three ste
ps ahead and planning her response.

  "We don't kn-know," Jake said. "The hydrogen line could control any element of behavior. It could t-turn all the ocean against us again. Perhaps it could turn them all into demons. Maybe it could make them all grow to be twenty foot tall. We just don't know."

  "Shiiiit," Ravi breathed. "You guys should've said that on the walkie."

  "We did," said Lucas coolly. "Now Anna, we need to-"

  She interrupted him, taking control, which was what she had these periods of rest for, to make her better at leading in crisis.

  "We need to get to Bordeaux, I know. The Pilatus is at the airport, I'll take it, Ravi will fly with me, and Jake too. We sealed the bunker up with the hatch covers, which may hold for a time if they're trying to break out. Perhaps we can get down there close enough to switch the shield back to containment remotely. Jake?"

  Jake nodded. "It's possible, if I can just remodulate the-"

  Anna cut him off. "Good. Lucas, I need you on this," she tapped the graph on the tablet, "break it down however you can. I need to know what these markers mean and where they're coming from, and I need some way of tracking the demons, if they really have escaped. I'm not going back to living in fear, not knowing what's out there. Is that clear?"

  The things she was asking were probably impossible, but Lucas swallowed them down with a nod.

  "Take my Jeep," he said, handing over the keys. "You can be in the air in an hour, at Bordeaux in a few."

  "Has anyone contacted New LA?"

  Jake shook his head. "We tried after the ping to Maine, but nobody's answering."

  That wasn't unusual. Amo usually kept the comms room staffed, but it was harvest over there now and it wouldn't be strange for them to have pulled all bodies in, especially with their numbers split to Sacramento.

  "Keep trying. If you get through you warn them, then you get Amo and you patch him to me. I'll leave my walkie tuned to base."

  "Understood," Lucas said, "you should go."

  Anna cast a glance to Ravi by her side, to Jake just ahead, and for a moment was struck by how beautiful the setting sun was over the ancient city's skyline of mosques, like soap bubbles rising off the hot dry streets. Racing toy boats was already a thing of the far distant past.

  "Come on," she said, and started across the square at a run.

  INTERLUDE 5

  More dead.

  Drake stood in the midst of the wreckage, with some people screaming, some people dying, and blood, flames and smoke everywhere.

  Amo lay prone at his feet, the mayor of this town. He'd ruined things. He'd made his choice and now he was going to own it. One of Drake's own children had just died, because there'd been no time to set up the bombs properly, because of this damn superstition about demons. One child plus how many people had been on that RV?

  It was a waste, the worst crime possible under the First Law, but he couldn't have let them leave, couldn't have given them time to regroup and prepare. This had been his only chance to take control.

  The dark woman across the way was still calling out, "Demon!" She looked sick, slouching against the doorframe. There was something strange about her, not just because she was pointing directly at him. She raised a strange cold sensation in his belly that ran back into his spine; not fear or even anticipation, but something different and not unpleasant. It intrigued him and he marked it out for later investigation.

  For now he had work to do.

  Faces gazed at him in fear from the fleet of stationary vehicles. Faces gazed up at him from the floor, spattered with blood. His shoulder throbbed where Amo had shot him, and a trickle of blood flowed smoothly down his chest.

  He pressed his hand to it. It was funny, really. If he'd been better prepared, Amo wouldn't have gotten a single shot off. Maybe nobody would have needed to die. But then he'd been making mistakes since the start, and wasn't that the only way to learn?

  Myra came back into his thoughts, as she often did. She'd been his first mistake.

  She hadn't even looked at him after the rape. She hadn't looked at him when he fed her, holding food to her lips because she couldn't do it herself with her hands tied, or when he poured it in liquid form down her throat when she wouldn't chew. She hadn't looked at him when he washed her, or when he talked to her, or when they watched DVDs together, or when he talked about possible baby names.

  She didn't look at him when he did it again.

  It seemed to him then that it was never as bad as the first time, out there in the cold snow, flattened to the frost like a piece of crushed liver, but perhaps in other ways it was worse. He couldn't really tell, because she didn't make a sound in complaint, didn't say a word at all.

  The change in her stunned him. She'd gone from vivacious, aggressive, outlandishly sexual and overtly extroverted to this silent, gazing body in the bed to which she was tethered. In conversations that were all one-sided, he tried to reason this out with her.

  "I don't want to keep you tied up, Myra," he'd say. "Honestly. I don't want to do this either. Don't you see, I'm just the messenger? It's in my genes, it's in yours. I don't enjoy it any more than you. If you just speak, say something. If you look at me, maybe I can let you go. If you promise not to run. We're remaking the world here."

  He was a child, back then.

  Now, standing before the smoking RV and this town's terrified people, he felt very differently, and that was because of Myra. She had beaten the last of the doubt out of him, in the eleven long months it had taken for her to conceive, carry and birth his first child into the new world.

  When he looked out at the scene before him, these people of New Los Angeles, he saw his failure with Myra writ large. He didn't take any kind of sadistic pleasure in such destruction. It wasn't good that they were broken while he was high, it didn't bring him any kind of satisfaction. It was simply necessary. For all the sacrifices so far, for all the billions of his people lost, this was necessary. Because without this, without the First Law, what was left?

  No happiness. No joy. No fathers and no daughters, no lovers and no friends. Just a sad whimper into the night, bodies crumpled under their own weight and beginning the slow march into decay. Emptiness. Silence. A sad and lonely Earth covered in the scars of its own dead, forever.

  Only the First Law could prevent it.

  The Law had come to him in fits and starts during those long winter months in Germany, where every night trying with Myra became a torture for them both. Afterwards he'd lie there and hold her, or sit and stare at the side of her face, attempting to put words to what he was feeling and frame excuses that would make it all right.

  All self-pity, he knew now. For a time he looked outwardly for guidance, reading whatever books on human interaction and spirituality he could find in English in local bookstores. There were few, dominated by the rows of bright, optimistic books by Lars Mecklarin; a pop psychologist whose ideas about controlling behavior to achieve happiness inspired him, but offered no valid excusing philosophy to underpin what he'd done.

  So he looked wider. He made a brief foray into the Bible, at first feeling foolish for every word read, having been a casual atheist for as long as he could remember, but it quickly sucked him in. He read it from cover to cover in a matter of days, fascinated by the insights it offered. Within its pages he found a balance of both recrimination and permission. In the first few chapters lay the exact thing he'd been looking for; the pivotal underlying message of the whole damned book, rendered in the clear, clean prose of the King James version:

  And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

  Go forth, multiply and rule, was what it boiled down to. In that ancient book this primal message came long before Moses and his commandments, before the wrecking of Sodom and Gomorrah, before Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego entered the lion's
den, before Joseph's coat and Job's trials and Jesus' stations of the cross, before any of those others whose lives and teachings formed the basis for so much of Western civilization.

  At the base of it all was this simple message, this fundamentally aggressive order of acquisition: Go forth, multiply and rule.

  He had to read the whole book to fully understand, but then his prior bumblings and fumblings towards a muddled form of righteousness all snapped into diamond-bright focus. It was the first law in the Bible, from back in a time when the Bible was the ultimate guide to survive and thrive in a hostile, terrifying world. Go forth, multiply and rule meant out-populate the enemy. Crush him under your numbers. Find spiritual meaning and safety through sheer weight of bodies, then bring with that weight the judgment to brand order atop chaos and raise reason from confusion.

  Only then could you have Jesus. Only once you outnumbered your enemy, once you'd sown the world with your seed, could there be kindness and love.

  It resonated with him, and he refined it further while Myra lay silently by, her belly steadily swelling. At times he got drunk like Noah in his tent, and in his drunkenness fell from the dizzying heights of righteousness, and took her again, because wasn't she the aggressive one now, refusing the reality of their lonely situation? Wasn't her resistance a form of satanic defiance, her snake in the tree of good and evil? Even then, fuelled by an inbred mish-mash of biblical rhetoric and his own endless need, he'd believed he was following the First Law.

  Of course those childish days were behind him now. The days when it was rape, when he allowed the liquor to make his excuses for him, when he eased his own suffering through her deeper pain, were long gone. The temptation was there as ever, to see this great mayor 'Amo' felled and his people cowed, to ravage his women and grind his men into dust, but he wasn't tempted to indulge it. He couldn't, and it was Myra who taught him that too.

  The birth had been horrendous. It lasted days, with her screaming wordlessly on the bloody, stinking bed like an animal. He'd prepared, he'd read everything he could on midwifery and the right kind of drugs and how to ease the baby out, but in the end he could do little more than stand by and encourage her on, though she wouldn't hold his hand and she wouldn't look him in the eye.