The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  She wept, and he escorted her back to the trailer prison, though he didn't close the door. She didn't fight. She lay down on her bed and he left her there, gazing up at the blue sky through the roof window. Outside, he did the things required of him. The device he'd found was simple, just a syringe with a section of soft but sturdy rubber tubing. He filled it, and set it on a silver tray alongside an unopened pregnancy kit, with a little tub of lube and a candy bar for a treat.

  He slid the items in through the open door. Leaving it open now terrified him, but it was necessary. At some stage she had to want this too. She wasn't Myra, and the cage had to be of her own making, brought on by a shifted vision of what the world was. He couldn't keep her in a cage forever, not if he wanted a healthy new world.

  Now was the time for deciding, and he already knew his decision. If she ran, he would let her go.

  There was no benefit to keeping her any longer. To run this 'Stockholm' cycle on her again would only be needlessly cruel, and break her in the process. She would never build her own cage. She would just hate him forever, and he didn't want another child birthed in hate, birthed stillborn. He'd never get a second, and what use was she to him if she wasn't a sustainable resource? It would just be a greater, deeper waste.

  "I'll be out here," he said softly. "You can kill me, if you want. You can run. I promise I won't stop you."

  She didn't leave the cell again that day. The next morning when he woke, sleeping in a camping bag by the fire, he found she'd closed the door on herself. He knocked before typing in the code and entering. She was sitting on the bed, watching an old movie. The silver tray lay on the floor untouched.

  He made her a meal. He served it on the table. He took away the silver tray with its syringe, and left her alone with the door open and 'Atonement' on the TV. That evening he slid a fresh syringe in, and again she slept with the door closed.

  For those few days it felt that his world hung by a single gossamer thread. Inside that cell she might be transforming, like a caterpillar turning to a butterfly. It was terrifying and beautiful. He had no idea what would emerge, or if anything ever would. Perhaps she would choose to die, and he'd find her lying on the floor in a puddle of blood.

  It took two months. They barely spoke, no more than grunts, but she started using the syringe, and then the pregnancy test. When she returned the silver tray one day with the test showing two blue lines, he'd wept. He climbed in and knelt beside her and held her hand and sobbed and made all kinds of promises about what kind of father he'd be, and she petted his head, like a dog.

  "I'll kill it," she said, as she ruffled his hair. "When it's born. You'll see."

  But she didn't. When it was born she cried, a little girl, and she held her close, and whispered into her tiny ear.

  Soon they were moving again. She fell pregnant a second time. They met a man in Belgium, and another woman in Amsterdam, and he ran the cycle again. Moaning, in shock, reaching for rifles and guns they wouldn't fire. They were adults and children at once, like he had been, like Lydia had been, so he showed them the truth.

  The First Law. He made their responsibility plain. He gave them their cages and when the time came, with Lydia's help now, he opened the door. And one by one, man-by-man and woman-by-woman, they stayed.

  Now there was New LA.

  Its people lay spread before him, outwardly strong but living far more in denial than he'd ever dealt with before. He knew the sickness they harbored in their hearts, had battled with it many times himself; that there was some kind of hope outside themselves. They still believed some higher force would come and save them, whether it was other survivors, or the bunkers, or somehow the zombies themselves, returned to life with some miracle cure.

  It was a deep sickness. He'd read the comic, spread far and wide with a disturbing degree of confidence, as if there was no other possible way to be. They had overcome challenges before, but never even imagined a man like Drake.

  It made for a community filled with falsehood. They believed in demons and friendly zombies, in bunkers and cures and in one man in particular. Amo, who lay on the floor bleeding now. It wasn't pretty, it didn't make him glad, but there was no peaceful way to undo all that propaganda. He had to make them see the reality that the only cure lay within each one of them.

  They were still living in the past. They still took the freedoms of the past for granted. Drake missed those days too, he missed his wife and their life together, but they were gone, and it was a terrible waste to pretend otherwise. It was a crime against the First Law to live falsely, but for twelve long years these people had lived that way, because to face the real truth was too hard for them. He understood that, even had some sympathy. To accept the true reality, that you were now a breeder generation, and the same would be true of your children and their children and so on for many decades with no hope of anything else, that was the hardest truth of all.

  But truth was truth.

  "Demon," the woman called again, sagging to her knees now.

  He walked toward her, through the wreckage and the smoke, over bodies and parting his flood of children around him. All eyes were on him now; people in the doorways of RVs, gathered at the windows, wide-eyed and terrified.

  "Where are your demons?" he asked her. Not a shout, but loud enough for everyone to hear. "Where?" He spread his good arm and looked into terrified eyes all around. In most places his children were standing again, returned to position by their respective RVs. His adults, including Lydia, were now moving amongst the wounded, tending where they could. Sally came running toward him, holding a bandage with worry on her face, but he waved her away. It was a flesh wound in his shoulder only.

  "Where are your demons?" he asked again, louder now, into the terrible silence. The wreck of the RV was no longer blazing so loudly, and all engines had been turned off, so his voice rose over everything.

  This was his first challenge to Amo's propaganda, and he had to make it hit. There was no way he could have planned it, but it was perfect. Amo had encouraged these people in their delusion like a cult leader, living off their adulation. It was true that under his leadership they'd done wonderful things, things Drake would never have considered attempting. Amo clearly had a power to inspire that he'd never shared. But still he'd led them on the wrong path.

  He hadn't been strong enough. He hadn't taken that blind leap into darkness, like Drake. Even though all the genetics textbooks he'd read hinted that you needed at least a hundred base genetic pairs to have any hope of sustainable procreation, he'd still tried. He hadn't given up when he'd failed, and he'd pressed on again and again, refining his Stockholm cycle down to a science and an art.

  Now he had forty-six people before him, minus however many had just died in the blast. This would be his largest cage yet, and everything rested on it. With New LA as part of his genetic pool, for the first time since he'd started following the First Law, he had a real chance at lifting the human race out of the abyss. He could make it work. He just had to make them take those first few steps into the real world.

  And he knew just what to say. He knew just how to put them into the cage with him, and make it stick.

  "New LA!" he said, his voice a deep bass that demanded attention. Even the dark woman fell silent now, slumped on the RV's steps. He turned to take them all in, ignoring the pain in his shoulder and the growing cold in his belly. "You say you're afraid of demons? I say you're afraid of the wrong ones. My name is Matthew Drake, and I've come to remake your world."

  ANNA 2

  The Pilatus was in Istanbul airport where Anna had left it, Hangar 7, with a bellyful of chemically rejuvenated jet fuel and a freshly painted white star flag on its flank.

  "Your Air Force One," she'd said, when she'd proudly presented it to Amo a month or so earlier via Skype.

  He'd given a wry, obviously flattered smile. "Capacity seven."

  "Eight at a squeeze," Anna had corrected. "Though who would sit in the mayor's lap, I don't know."
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  He'd laughed. He'd obviously been getting better. The cost of what he'd done so long ago in Maine was finally getting paid off, and as if in sympathy the world was moving forward.

  Now this.

  "Chocks and engine," she called to Jake, then, "please scan the runway," to Ravi.

  By the Pilatus' side she heaved on the access hatch and it unfurled smoothly down, like a slit segment of an orange. The door tip clanked neatly onto the oil-stained cement floor, offering five steps leading up and in, which she took and slid easily into her leather cockpit seat. The air inside smelled of ozone and over-polished leather.

  She fired up the battery and ran a quick visual diagnostic on all systems. Lights blinked on the instrument panel, all within parameters. The display screen booted and started automated pre-flight engine testing.

  "Anna, pick up."

  The familiar voice came over the walkie and she clicked to respond.

  "Here, Peters, what is it?"

  "You asked Lucas for a way to see the demons. It is me."

  She'd considered that. He was sensitive after his time with Julio. "Are you getting anything now?"

  "No. Perhaps. Something big is happening, it is hard to distinguish. I'm coming now."

  It was unavoidable that he would, though she'd hoped if she got away quickly, he might stay behind and look after the rest of them. Leaving half her crew behind without a single flight-trained pilot made her very uncomfortable, but Peters would be essential to the success of her mission too. How else were they going to track demons without him?

  "We're waiting," she said, and clicked off.

  "The runway south is looking cracked," Ravi reported in, his voice a crackle. "We'd have to do a lot of positioning. But one of the feeder lanes is completely clear."

  Anna frowned. "Feeder lane?"

  "Yeah, from the terminal to the runway. They're not very long, but they are the only flat section."

  Anna started calculating. "How long?"

  "Long enough. I'd guess a few hundred feet. Say three hundred."

  Take off in three hundred feet, slightly more if she got up to a low lick of speed tracking up the terminal beforehand. It was possible, but she'd have to near break off the steering wheel to achieve it.

  Jake's head popped into the cockpit beside her. "The engine's good, Anna, cleared for flight, just as we left it."

  "Peters is coming," she answered. "Let's get her ready to go."

  "Aye aye," he said, and rolled into the co-pilot's seat as she walked through the pre-ignition sequence. Even with the Pilatus, one of the most advanced single-prop planes in existence, there were dozens of tiny, subtle things that could go wrong, from flooding the engine early to not flooding it enough, misfiring a sparkplug, failing to switch engine gear rapidly, not warming the propeller belt gradually.

  A lot of that had been automated, but after flying for over a year Anna had learned to trust her instincts over the machine's. If it screwed up it often wouldn't know it had screwed up, and would keep on doing whatever the mistake was until the plane tore itself to bits.

  In the old world they had program updates and ultimately insurance for such unlikely software glitches, but not any more. Now it was grit and oil and grind it out.

  "Check," Jake answered as she worked down the list, until the engine itself coughed to life and she eased the plane out of the hangar with Ravi waving her on. In back Peters pulled in in his BMW.

  "Your tailfin is listing, Anna," he called.

  Of course. He never liked it that she took off like that. For her it was a kind of lucky precaution.

  "Hop in," she called back, as she brought them up to the start-point Ravi had picked out, with just enough feeder lane to take off on a wing and prayer. "You too, Ravi."

  Peters climbed up, and Jake ceded the co-pilot's seat to him smoothly. Ravi followed and pulled the ladder-door up after him with a slam.

  "Your fuel gauge is well," Peters said, then turned his plain, Nordic face toward her. "This plane is fit to fly."

  "Fit to fly," she answered, and punched the accelerator.

  The propeller revved up, the wheels turned, and they began the hard acceleration on the lane.

  "You are mistaken," Peters said, alarmed in his calm, flat way. "This is not a runway. That is the runway." He pointed.

  "The runway's buckled," Anna answered. "Picking a route through will take too long, and we don't have time."

  Peters nodded. "Then you must go faster, Anna."

  She answered by pushing the propeller beyond its safeties. You could take all the precaution in the world, but when it came down to it, hell, you were lifting a chunk of metal into the air. Risk was baked into the cake.

  The Pilatus rushed and rumbled, the propeller span at a high, dizzying whine, and the runway raced by. Anna was pressed back in her seat, the controls went loose and wobbly as they always did as the nose began to lift, then the craft bounced once, caught, and took to the air just as the feeder line ended in a hard wrinkle where it conjoined to the main runway.

  "Phew," Jake breathed from behind.

  They climbed up, and after a moment of gaining altitude Anna swung them toward the west.

  * * *

  Three hours in to the five-hour flight, somewhere ten thousand feet above Italy, Lucas came in on the radio.

  "You need to see this, Anna. Jake."

  Jake accessed a passing satellite and, with the help of Sulman in their basecamp in Istanbul, downloaded a new set of graphs and data. While Peters piloted the plane, Anna, Jake and Ravi hunched over Jake's tablet in the back and scrolled through fresh datasets while Lucas explained what they were looking at.

  "In trying to decode the hydrogen line changes, I hit on something that seems to be the key. But it's strange, not at all what I expected, and really I only included those variables by accident, as they were part of a larger table I was using for the most recent experimental set."

  "What variables?" Anna asked. "What did you find, Lucas?"

  "Something that may shift our whole conception of the hydrogen line, the T4, all of it," his crackly voice answered. "Look at the first graph again, with the divergence. You see how those five markers were on similar paths before they spread out? We'd assumed that was some sort of resting state. The hydrogen line in nature, as it always has been, with the current divergence as abnormality. But here's the kink, where things get strange: what if they're both abnormalities? Neither is 'right' or 'wrong', they're just different."

  "What?"

  "I mean neither the line before the divergence or the line after are natural."

  Anna frowned. It didn't add up to much, but she could follow the logic. "I'm with you."

  "So take that idea, and look at the second set of data."

  Jake selected, and an array of spiral diagrams popped up, each with a range of spiky lines and columns radiating out in a circular shape from a central point, like strange hands on a clock, each stretching to varying lengths and with a range of thicknesses. Some had very short, stubby protrusions, while others were long and thing and some had a mixture.

  "What's this?" Ravi asked.

  "I recognize them," Anna said. "But I didn't even realize we'd hung onto that data."

  "What data?" Ravi asked.

  "I keep it all, Anna," Lucas answered. "And Ravi, these are human hydrogen line signatures from the Bordeaux bunker. You remember the long halls with the map screens? They were tracking every coma survivor on the planet, to see when and where the infection would begin. This is that data, transcribed. It was by using this data that we gained our first insight into how the hydrogen line works, and isolated the five markers you see in that first graph."

  "How does it play into the divergence?" Anna pressed.

  "I fed all this data into a pattern-seeking algorithm, and I got a result. Something matched."

  Anna frowned. "What would that even mean? We ran pattern matching on that data to the hydrogen line a year ago and came up with nothing."
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  "Exactly," Lucas said crisply. "Back then we had only one data set: how the hydrogen line looked 'at rest'. Now we have two, before and after divergence, and that opened up the possibility of correlation, which was the key."

  "So you've correlated one of these signals to the divergence?"

  "Almost. Yes. There's one more file I fed in, and that was all the hydrogen line signals we had Sulman take of the New LA people a year back, right after Bordeaux. Most of them were identical, unchanged since they were first mapped eleven years earlier, all except for one."

  Anna's eyes widened as his meaning became clear, then grew all the muddier. There was only one survivor in New LA, in the whole world that she knew of, who'd never had her hydrogen line signal read before, because she'd never had a coma and never been immune.

  "Lara?"

  "That's right. Lara had no record in Bordeaux, because there was nothing special about her. She was never a signal producer."

  "And she had no signal when Sulman scanned her," Anna said. "I remember that, she was like a blank."

  "Almost a blank," Lucas corrected. "She had a tiny signal that we disregarded at the time, barely a variance from zero when compared to the strength of the other signals, but something. Along with the rest, her signal got fed into the pattern-matching algorithm too."

  He fell silent for a moment, presumably allowing this to sink in. The Pilatus engine droned on, and the A/C flowed, and the metal balls in a Newton's cradle in Anna's mind steadily clanked together, reaching toward some greater meaning.

  "And?" she asked, failing to keep the frustration out of her voice.

  "And Lara was the key. With her in the mix we can see a clear correlation between the hydrogen line both before and after the divergence. We always wondered what her role was, how she survived the infection when every other non-immune succumbed? We theorized she was randomly unique, or else her proximity to Amo somehow conferred immunity. I can't answer that now any more than then, but I know for certain that she plays an essential role in the makeup of the hydrogen line, influencing both the signal that Amo puts out and the way the ocean behave."