The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I look up at the smeared ochre sky, where a rain of cinders now falls. They spiral on the hot wind, once papers or buildings, once asphalt roads or window glass or the Formica worktops in one of LA's hundred of diners, or grains of sand, or mist from the ocean. They're coming after us like a tide of dark snow, like the feather at the beginning and end of Forrest Gump, bookending a life.

  Lara lays a hand on my shoulder, but I can't look into her eyes. This is not who I want to be. A cinder lands on my cheek like a scalding tear. The children start to shriek as ashes get in their hair. They cluster more tightly around me.

  "Back in the bus," I tell them, my voice a flat and dead thing. "Everybody in."

  The children shuffle with me. Lara takes the wheel. My jaw and sides throb where Drake beat me. The doors shutter and we pull slowly away, through a landscape of burning black snow.

  * * *

  Odd thoughts come to me as we drive.

  Out here in the desert it's dark. The dust obscures most of the stars and the road winds endlessly ahead. I think of Drake and his huge fists and his giddy smile. There were moments of levity in Screen 2, for him at least. Between blows, between threats, he'd sit back and make himself laugh.

  "I have to congratulate you," he said once, early on. "On everything you've made here. Crops. Order. Movies. Plus your wife is hot." He smiled, like he was paying me a compliment, just boys down in the bar. "Nice one."

  I spat blood.

  "Strong too," he said, leaning back. "Strong makes it interesting. I don't suppose you ever broke anyone, Amo? Not with a name like that. Yes, I studied Latin in school. You're all about the peace and love, aren't you? Though for a moment there, on the Theater's forecourt, I thought I saw something in you. With your guns pointing at my children; the man with the ammo."

  He tossed a handful of peanuts into his mouth, chewed them noisily. "Would you have done it?"

  I didn't speak, because I'd done all my talking by then. I'd already made my offers and counter-offers, negotiations with myself. I'd made my threats and none of them had touched him. Now I just stared at the ground, waiting. Hoping for a chance.

  He laughed.

  "Never mind. It won't come up again."

  Later on, after a little more hurting, a little more pain, he leaned in close. By then it already felt like we'd been doing it for a lifetime. He caught my eyes and peered into them, like inside he could read my soul. I tried to head-butt him, but it was a feeble attempt and he didn't even pull back. He just stared as my head clonked against his, and I stared, until a blow on the side of my head pulled me away.

  I blink now, and across the dark, scraggy dunes of the desert I see his pulverized head breaking apart in my hands again, on the Chinese Theater's forecourt. His skull was like a hard, thick egg coated with tough rubber. Once I'd cracked it the sharp shell pieces slit my fingers and palms. The gray yolk got everywhere, got into the wounds. It is everywhere now, crusted on me still.

  My son and daughter watched.

  I blink up from the reverie and look out, to the cone of illumination cast by the headlights onto the road, always changing, always the same, and take a breath. There are decisions I have to make.

  "Stop the RV," I tell Lara.

  She looks at me. She's pale and exhausted too. She's tired and broken, but I can't give her the support she needs, not now. Perhaps I never will fill that role again.

  "Why?" she asks.

  There are so many reasons. Her face reflects back at me from the dark windshield; uncertain, afraid, alone. It's what I feel too.

  "Please," I say.

  She does. We're still the lead vehicle, and those behind us slow. They stop.

  I sit there for a moment. I look at the walkie on the dash between us. I don't know where that came from, but I pick it up. Maybe Feargal set it down, reverently so as not to disturb me. So as not to anger me. I squeeze the button for transmit.

  "Everybody get out," I say.

  On the road outside you wouldn't know that a nuclear blast went off in Los Angeles. We are nowhere, now, some in-between space that will never be settled. The desert is dark and hot, filled with the sound of ticking engines and cicadas in the scrubby grass. Cacti stand in spiky outcroppings in the moonlight, like old West bandits sticking up a stagecoach. Stars are legion overhead, and the moon is putting on a good imitation of the great white eye.

  I look back along the convoy's flank, counting some twenty vehicles. People come out shyly. Drake's children are sleepy now, and fumble for my hand like newborn kittens. I wait until they're all out on the thirsty blacktop road.

  Then I walk. I go down the line briskly, leaving the drowsy children behind, leaving Lara, with my chains clanking along the asphalt. I walk in the dark red dust at the roadside, kicking up old cigarette butts and sparkles of glass and old rubber tire strips, counting the people. I see faces I know. I see gaps where faces should be. People watch me with uncertainty and fear in their eyes.

  "Witzgenstein," I say, as I go. "Witzgenstein."

  People cower back from me. Nobody speaks. Witzgenstein isn't there, and nor are any of her people. I don't see Greg either, maybe a few others. I do see Lydia. I do see the man who beat me at Drake's behest, for two solid days. He stands proud, taller than me, apart from the others like a challenge.

  There's a gun in my hand, though I don't know where it came from. I point the gun at him, and to his credit he doesn't flinch. We gaze at each other, too weary for anger. He looks a little like Drake. Big. Strong. Short hair, though his is blonde.

  "What's your name?" I ask.

  "Arnst," he replies. "It's Belgian."

  I hear it in his accent, a strange warble. Foreign. "What were you before the apocalypse, Arnst?"

  "A soldier."

  I nod. I see the discipline in him now. "Private?"

  "Sergeant."

  "Did they teach you to beat captive people in the Belgian army, Arnst?"

  "Yes," he says flatly.

  They're watching us, nearby. My people. Lit by lurid red brake lights at the back end of the convoy, standing in grit and sand on this empty, wasted road. They're afraid, they don't really want to see what comes next, but they're craning their necks to peer around each other. They can't help themselves.

  "Did they teach you to like it?"

  He juts his chin out. He's not ashamed. He's ready to die for his crimes, as if killing him will tar me worse than the things I've already done.

  "No," he says. "Matthew Drake taught me that."

  I would laugh, but nothing is funny now. I know he'd do it again, and enjoy it again, if the conditions were right. He's dangerous. I remember him luxuriating in my pain when Drake was gone. People do this, when they are crushed from above, when they've been sick for so long they come to accept there will never be anything better. They crush downward. They learn to take pleasure in it because it's all they have. It becomes them, and it has become him, and for that he deserves to die.

  For that same reason I need him.

  I let the gun drop to my side. His surprise shows only in his eyes. He expected to die but he stayed anyway. He could have fled with Witzgenstein, but didn't, and that says something.

  "Come with me," I say.

  I walk back toward the front, and he follows. Along the way I find Lydia; a solid woman with wide, watery eyes, huddled in a trough of shadow beside a smoke-blackened RV. She is plainly terrified. She has lost her God, the man who remade her world, whose children she bore, whose cage she helped to build. Now that cage is gone.

  I feel so tired. I'm nearly asleep on my feet, with all the adrenaline gone from my system. Every part of me aches, from the little finger on my left hand which they broke to the cigarette burns and whip-welts and bruises they laid on my back and chest. I'm shaking. It probably makes me more terrible.

  "Who captained the ship?" I ask her.

  Feverish, shadowy people peel back from her like Drake's scalp slipping off his skull. My voice is poison to them. These a
re my people, or were, and now I am a dark light shining horrors onto their souls.

  Lydia blinks. She doesn't understand. "What?"

  "The ship," I repeat. "You didn't fly here from Europe. Not with this many. You came by ship across the Atlantic. Who steered it? Who ran it?"

  She stares at me, her eyes flickering back and forth from me to Arnst at my side. He could club me down any minute; he's bigger, he's stronger, but he won't. He saw the same world I just saw. We all just saw it, and the new alliances are clear. Everybody knows that the real enemy is the bunkers, or they will soon enough.

  Arnst starts to answer my question, but I put my hand up. I don't want to hear it from him. He falls silent at once, and I wonder what Drake did to break him so completely.

  I look at Lydia. "Who?"

  Something swims up in her eyes, some glimmer of understanding.

  "Hatya," she blurts, too glad to turn my attention on somebody else. "She steered it, mostly, at least when Drake was asleep. She navigated. She's a fisherman's daughter. I was the engineer."

  I nod.

  "Get Hatya," I say. "Now."

  I walk.

  Somewhere amongst these people are my friends. They pass by like a barren landscape, a place I will never go again, until I see Lara. I stop and I look at her, really look. She was there for me in Maine, in the remnant of Salle's bloodbath, when I lied. She's here now.

  "I killed Maine," I tell her, my confession at last. "That's true. Drake was right."

  Drake's children hear it. The furtive, fearful people nearest hear it. It'll be up and down the convoy before I'm even gone.

  "Salle gave me a choice and I took it. I went down and Anna followed. It was a massacre of three thousand people, and now I'll do it again."

  Her eyes glisten. She gives an imperceptible nod. "I know."

  "They'll keep coming," I say. There is nothing for it now but to go on. "If they have more missiles, they'll fire them. You can't stop either. They may have satellites watching. They may be tracking us through the hydrogen line, like they tracked us in Bordeaux. They must have been watching all of this, to send the bomb just then, when everyone was together."

  She nods again, and the shine goes out of her eyes. No tears spill. She knows what's coming.

  I turn. My eyes are so dry they sting in the hot air. Here comes Lydia with a dark woman, Hatya. She is short, with Mediterranean looks, Greek or Turkish, and wears a shawl covering her head. She nods and drops her gaze as she stops before me. Lydia is shaking. Arnst is at my side like a granite block.

  "Collect these," I tell him. I point at the stuffed toys in the children's hands. "All of them. Load them up."

  He moves. He plucks a polar bear with ease from a little boy's hand, and the boy lets it go and does his crying silently. Lydia stands before me and her eyes dart to and from the gun in my hand.

  "You're coming," I tell her. "With Hatya and Arnst. Say goodbye to your children."

  Her panic surfaces and she begins to babble. She begs me to let her stay. She has seven children, she says, she can't leave them.

  "You're coming," I repeat.

  She sobs and I look past her, to Crow. He has an inch on Arnst.

  "You'll stay," I tell him. "Keep these people safe." He gives a solid, oaken nod.

  "I'm coming with you," says Feargal.

  He's there and I look at him. Feargal's an old, old friend now. He was there from early on, when we started the first irrigation truck runs to Chino Hills. We all laughed as he tried his hand at rappelling down a building in San Francisco, trying to paint a cairn marker on the exterior. He was afraid of heights, but didn't want it to beat him. He backed Lara in the weeks after Maine, when I was useless to everyone.

  "No," I say.

  "I'm coming," he repeats, and steps up closer, so the moment hums. He's my height. He's thicker in the chest than me. He has a gun too, at his waist. I look at him not with hate or rage, but with something far worse.

  He's nothing to me. I can't let him be.

  "I'm coming," he says again, close to tears too, and I turn away. Lydia is a wreck. Arnst has a thatch of toys in his big hands, like he's selling cuddly helium balloons. The sky burns and the world turns. I look down the straggly, beaten line of the convoy and think of past moments when we faced destruction, when I summoned words to carry us forward, but that well is long dry, and there are no words to soften this.

  Last, I look at Lara. There'll be no kiss for us, no hug, not because I don't want to but because I can't. Not now. I know there may be no reunion. We may never see each other again, but we've all made our choices. I held her hand on the stage, and that will have to stand.

  "We've stayed too long," she says, speaking the truth we all need to face. "We have to move."

  "Don't follow us," I answer, too fast, too easy. "Take side roads. Don't ever stop."

  Then Keeshom is there. A tall young man, a man who likes to knit to give his restless energy something to do.

  "I want to come too," he says, uncertainly. His voice is strangled, like he's fighting for control. "I'm not a doctor yet, but… You can use me."

  I look at him. I catch Lydia's arm. "You really have a doctor?"

  She rubs her eyes and nods.

  "Witzgenstein didn't take her, you're sure?"

  She shakes her head. Speech is too much for her now.

  Good. I nod at Keeshom. I nod at Lara. Her hand jerks up but doesn't reach as far as my cheek, then falls.

  I board the RV. I push through heaps of stuffed toys, each packed with plastic explosives. Feargal is there already, belting in a batch of rifles and ammunition, the metal making a series of satisfying, ratcheting clanks as they load. I almost miss a step in my fatigue and he moves to catch me, but I shove his hand away.

  Halfway down the RV I collapse into a booth. I can't keep my eyes open. I'm so deeply and completely tired.

  "Go," I call, as reality liquefies into darkness and the RV's engine rises like a sleepy summer's dust. "Go now."

  2. DARKNESS

  I'm in the Darkness with Cerulean by my side, and we're walking. Tall shelves on either side form a labyrinth of products that guide our path. The air smells of acetate plastic wrap and freshly pressed cardboard. Our synced diviners chime to direct us, and whatever it is, wherever it's stored, we get it.

  Bespoke waffle irons. Basin wrenches for amateur plumbers. A bundle of parachute ripcords. Three thousand Bit-coins on a gold-coin-shaped USB.

  Cerulean waddles along, a blue parrot with a pirate on his shoulder, and I am the me of twelve years ago, dressed in khaki cargo shorts and a long-sleeve white T-shirt, just like it always was. It's peaceful, so simple. Around us the sprites of my old colleagues roam; tall lanky Hank, round blue-haired Blucy, North Korean Bobby, traveling Linda. They trace back and forth over their old tracks like blind ghosts in a game of Pac-man, endlessly circulating.

  "You're worried about the end," Cerulean says. The white speech bubble hangs starkly over his head as we walk. "You don't know what's coming."

  "I'm worried about the beginning," I reply, though I don't know what I mean. The beginning of what, in this place that never changes?

  We walk on, fetching a large red RokShox power kite, a twin-pack of rare black Estonian truffles, a dozen pink power ties rolled into a tube.

  At the packing conveyor belt we deposit our pickings, and Cerulean turns to face me. Beside us the belt rolls on like a sad plastic stream, carrying our items on to Distribution at the far end of the fulfillment center.

  "We're the beginning, Amo," he says. He points at the diviners, at us. "It starts here. We get the order and we fetch it. We lay it here. There's nothing to worry about with us."

  I shrug. I feel the beginning of a distant unease, like something is becoming wrong in the world. A box rolls by and I catch an unpleasant tang off it; that empty kind of freshness like you get walking into a butcher's shop, the taste of cleaved bones and raw meat.

  The box's corners have damp ring
s circling them, and a furry patina of white mold has sprung up around them, like hair follicles sprouting on a recently shaved head.

  "What?" I ask, the word hovering in a speech bubble above me. I'm not listening, only watching the box receding on the belt. The damp patches look old and sour, like concentric rings of scum in one of LA's empty swimming pools, left to rot and mildew after all the water evaporated away.

  I blink, and already the smell is fading. The box is far off now along with all our pickings, and I can't help but feel glad.

  "I'm talking about the end," Cerulean says, and points one bird wing down the conveyor belt. I look into the depths of the dim warehouse, to the dangling plastic strips that hang from the ceiling like a flapping portcullis between the Picking and Distribution wings, beyond which I never went, which I never bothered to code.

  "There's no end," I tell him. "The center ends here. This is all I made."

  Cerulean smiles, and the sense of unease comes back. I never coded the Distribution space. "There's always an end," Cerulean says, his bird's beak somehow grinning, the yellow keratin warping like an image in Photoshop being skewed, and I flinch. "You just have to see it through. Come on."

  He drops the RokShox kite onto the belt, and the truffles and the business ties, and then he follows as they are carried away.

  "Come on," he says again. "We can't stay in one place for too long, remember?"

  I try to follow but now I can't, frozen by the illogic of a dream. My legs are paralyzed, my body won't move, and I realize I can't breathe. The unease ripens to full panic, then I'm no longer standing beside the conveyor belt but lying flat upon it, like just another package for delivery. I can't move, can't roll off, can't do a thing.

  "You'll see," calls Cerulean from up ahead. "Nothing to worry about, really."

  His speech bubble turns a sickly, mottled green, and the font turns a veiny red. The bad scent rises again, as brown cardboard walls fold up to my left and right. The same white mold furs them, spreading like radiation sickness, though now it wriggles, each little hair a living thing.

  Maggots drop down. The smell becomes a stink. I glimpse the gateway of plastic flaps nearing. "We'll be there soon," Cerulean says, folding the top flaps over and taping them shut, just as the soft meat of the maggots rises around me like an incoming tide.