The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  It wouldn't matter. So she laughed.

  "It's the drug," a voice nearby said. A man, standing outside of her vision. "That or the line, lowering your inhibitions. You'll have noticed the changes."

  She kept laughing. Yes, she'd noticed the changes. Everything had changed.

  "It also affects me," the voice went on. "Though in different ways. Mostly it took away all my subjects. But now I have you."

  "Where are you?" Anna asked. "You shit."

  "I'm out of sight. I think it's best for now. You would find my appearance disturbing."

  Anna found that hilarious, and laughed a lot. "Do you have a grille in your shoulder? That would be pretty damn hilarious."

  "The grille is gone," the voice answered, measured and calm. "Along with a sizable portion of muscle. But I've injected restoratives, my own pluripotential cocktail, and the repair will be completed soon."

  Anna laughed. "Pluripotential." That was a word she knew the meaning of, though it eluded her now. Something about growth and possibilities.

  "The drugs will wear off. Propofol, I gave you. You've been unconscious for twenty-four hours. You're now in Switzerland, in my lab. I have no intention of harming you, so please understand that."

  Anna laughed. This guy obviously didn't know who she was.

  "I do know who you are," he replied, and she realized she'd said the last out loud. "I'm honored to have you. I hope to offer you great news."

  She snorted. He was ridiculous. She was too tired to care. "Stop pissing about. Stop whining. Shit or get off the pot."

  This silenced him for a moment.

  "Get on with it," she said. "Kill me, torture me, just stop goddamn whining. You think I care about you or your bullshit? You think I'm impressed you've got me tied up here like a hog? You're a piece of shit coward. Bring it on."

  Another silence stretched.

  "My appearance would disturb you. I don't want that. There are a lot of things in this hall that would disturb you. That is why you're so thoroughly restrained. Also, it is for my own protection. Your reputation precedes you." He paused. "There is the matter of the helicopter I found you next to. You are a formidable woman, Anna."

  She knew it. "Shit – Or – Get – Off – The – Pot," she repeated, emphasizing each word. It was not something she'd normally say. Perhaps she'd gotten it off Cynthia. "I'm tired. I've got things to do. Get on with it or shut up."

  Another silence.

  "What if the shit I aim to do is talk? What if there are things you need to know, and things I have to ask?"

  "I won't talk like this. I'd sooner bite off my own tongue."

  "That can be repaired. There are many things I mean to show you. Great advances in science and theory."

  Anna laughed again. "So you're one of those."

  "One of what?"

  "Idiots who think they can save the world. Look what happened to Lucas. Look what happened to me! There's no point. We're all screwed. The bunkers may not have found you yet, but they will. They're hunting us down. They have helicopters, goddammit. You'll be next. We're done."

  A long pause, the longest yet. Then a shuffling. Slowly, a figure came into sight at the bottom of Anna's visual range. He had a few wisps of orangey hair, floating like sine waves above a blotchy, gray and pink head. The skin of his forehead was a jigsaw puzzle; interlocking patches of gray overlapping bubbles of pink with red slits between, like lava showing through beneath continental plates.

  He advanced. His eyes were red balls within wadded gray eyeholes, like bloody bonbons stuffed into chewing gum. His nose was a crooked hook of cartilage with a vain attempt at a tent of gray skin covering the nasal cavity like a flapping Band-Aid. His cheeks continued the jigsaw overlapping of gray and pink to his lips, which were mismatching purple slugs.

  His throat was raw red, uncoated in any layer of skin, just pure muscle like a burns victim. From his collarbones down his shoulders and chest were covered in what looked like soft white foam, in places taped. In the crooks where his elbows bent the pure white was stained yellow with iodine. His torso was lumpy beneath the coating of white, like uneven cladding on a pipe. His belly protruded gassily.

  His hands emerged from the padding like heavy pink clubs; many of the fingers fused together into lobster-like claws, with only the thumbs separated from his index fingers. Everything about him looked raw, and tender, and ready to bleed.

  Anna laughed loud. "Holy shit. Just hol-ee shit. You weren't kidding. That is disturbing as hell."

  He stood while she laughed and stared. His wafts of orange hair floated on a faint draft, like seaweed on the ocean's surface. He looked more jellyfish than man. He looked barely alive.

  "You look like you got dressed in a zombie," Anna said. "What the hell happened?"

  His sluggy purple lips opened, revealing a perfect pink tongue and polished white teeth. "I have Lyell's syndrome, or something very like it. Toxic epidermal necrolysis. It never used to be this bad."

  Anna just looked at him. He was a patchwork. "What the hell does that mean?"

  "It means my skin peels off," he answered. "In batches, sometimes as much as thirty per cent at a time. I wear these moist foam pads to prevent that. As you might imagine, it's incredibly painful."

  "It looks like a horror show. No offense, but would you mind letting me go? I don't want to die trapped in here, when you keel over and bleed out."

  His mask of a face smiled slightly, though it was clear the movement pained him. A piece of gray over his left ear shifted, and Anna realized with a sick churn in her belly that his ears weren't real. They were plastic facsimiles, stuck in place like a Mr. Potato Head. That thought almost made her vomit.

  He was talking but she couldn't focus. "Those are not your ears," she said.

  "No," he answered. "Would you prefer I take them off?"

  Anna gagged but held down the bile. To vomit like this would only make things worse. It would be all over herself. "No. Thanks for wearing them. What happened to your…" She tailed off.

  "Throat?" He indicated slowly with one clubby hand. "The skin peeled off before I could put my foam on. You were waking."

  She could see the muscles of his throat twitching as he spoke. They glistened like fresh red dew. She gulped.

  "This was the cost of my cure," he said. "Hard-won immunity, you may agree. And yes. I am one of those seeking to save the world. I've brought you here to help me. You have no idea the pain I had to undergo to make this happen. I haven't left the safety of my laboratory for nearly ten years. For you, I made an exception."

  Anna snorted. Now she was getting used to his face, it wasn't so bad. Well, it was. But she was getting used to it. "I'm flattered. But the fact is, I need to be somewhere else. My people are in danger and I have to help them. I'm sure the work you're doing is very important, but I can't be here."

  He just stood there, gazing at her with his bloodshot eyes.

  "I'm a monster," he said. "We could agree on that. I use the skin of the dead to cloak myself, you're right. I have abandoned many of my morals on this path to salvation. I have become a different man, very different from the man I once was. Please believe me, Anna, that if I saw any other way for this global plague to end, I would take it."

  She frowned. "All right. So you've come down in the world."

  He smiled, and there was the pain again, the tickle of his fake ear shifting. "I made a promise at the start, ever since I was first cursed with this 'cure'. I said I would not allow it to happen to anyone else; I would work day and night until I found a way to reverse it, and now I'm so close. But there are so many traps. So many false avenues, built in from the start. For a decade I continued fighting towards the destruction of the T4 virus. Everything your friend Lucas has done, I did. I have walked the paths he is walking now, and I have seen where they lead, and I know the truth. The T4 cannot be killed. His own cells are misleading him, and the evidence he has will doom the rest."

  Anna watched him. He seemed passiona
te. It knocked the last of the giddy mockery out of her. "You're saying his cure will make us all like you?"

  "Yes. Worse, most likely. Every cul-de-sac in the T4's maze has been designed, so that we might suffer all the more. Every path toward a cure I could imagine was put there for me to find, and leads to something worse. It's-"

  "Wait a minute," Anna interrupted, trying to get a grip on herself. "Are you telling me that the T4 was specifically designed to cause," she frowned at him, "this? Of course I get it, the T4 causes the ocean, the zombies, but this too? You? You're saying Lucas' cure will lead him to this? Will lead us all?"

  The deformed man looked at her with pity in his red eyes.

  "Anna. Yes. There's so much you don't know. There are so many things you need to know, if there's any chance of you steering Lucas in the right direction. I believe it can still be done, the tide can yet be turned, but the cost will be terrible. And the first one to bear it will be you."

  Now she gulped. Of course. "What are you going to do to me?"

  He sighed. "I had meant to save this. I had hoped for you to recover. But perhaps you are right, and there is never any time. The call will not wait, and good souls must rise to answer it. It shouldn't harm you physically, though mentally, I have no idea. Only know this. From the very outset, all I ever wanted was a cure. For pain, for suffering, for all the travails of humankind. I hoped to reduce that."

  Anna shrank back into the bed. From the start? "What are you going to do?"

  He looked at her flatly. "You're going to have a baby."

  "Your baby?"

  A shiver of disgust played across his hodge-podge face. "Nothing so sordid. The act itself would likely kill me. I won't stand up to a stiff breeze. No. With another."

  Guilt crept over his eyes. Anna felt the first cold shiver of fear creep through her outer wall of numbness. The sucking, smacking sound of breath filled the silence.

  "What other?" she asked. Though in a way, she already knew. She'd felt it. It was there, in the air.

  The mismatched figure shuffled closer, smelling of iodine, disinfectant and the iron tang of blood. By her side he reached one clawed hand up to the frame behind her head, and slowly twisted a lever. Inch by inch the frame holding her head twisted her to the side. First she saw the lower edges of the white cupboards arrayed along the far wall, all so clean and sanitary. Next was a low line of specimen fridges, stocked with test tubes and covered beakers, familiar from Lucas' labs, and next were the beds.

  Bodies lay in them all. Gray shapes, many of them emaciated, all of them intubated with pipes that kept their lungs steadily inflating and deflating, all of them at least partially skinned. The pale gray-pink fiber of muscle gleamed in patches beneath the gray skin.

  Last of all, she saw the body next to her.

  He stopped twisting the lever and stepped back. "This was always for the cure," he said, like an apology. "I thought my dream was shared."

  The body to her left was male, naked and gray; a fresh member of the ocean, young and muscular, and the only one who hadn't yet been skinned. Thick stitches ran across his belly and crept around his back, while numerous smaller wounds in his sides and shoulders had been patched with staples. He had short dark hair and a diamond stud in his right ear. He was breathing with a wet suck, suck, smack.

  Anna's own lungs froze.

  His eyes were open and flickered over her, revealing hollow, empty depths with the vaguest hint of recognition. His lips twitched in meaningless, ceaseless motion that might have been her name. The last time she'd seen him it was torn apart in the corn.

  It was Ravi. He was dead, but…

  She vomited. Braced sideways, the contents of her stomach forced their way up and out to splatter on the floor. She tasted acid and bile, her eyes watered as if to take the horrible vision away, but it went nowhere. Suck suck, smack, went Ravi's dead gray lips.

  "You will have his baby," the deformed man said, words that rolled through her head without meaning. "As you had always planned, and from that unique union the true cure will come. I am very sorry Anna. It's the only way I know."

  She sucked in a sticky breath. She slid her gaze to the man in white and snarled, because this was too much, and as he took a step backward she went berserk.

  Every muscle fired at once. She tried to thrash. She tried to rant and roll. She tried to buck and break the bindings, break the bed, break the frame, she wheezed and her face got hot with racing blood and she tried to kick free, but she couldn't.

  Nothing happened. The not-Ravi thing watched. The man in white watched.

  She wasn't strong enough. Nothing she could do would stop this now.

  INTERLUDE 3

  They'd given him a bedroll on the floor. They'd provided a portable toilet in the corner, and given him hot food; a platter of beef teriyaki that tasted just like the Meal Ready to Eat field rations they'd had thousands of in Maine. There'd been huge sections of them in the storage rooms, lining the walls ten deep and fifty high, like bricks.

  He ate. He sat on his bedroll, while two of them in black suits and black helmets moved him over and fastened his chains to another small loop embedded in the metal floor. He asked them questions but they didn't say a word, and left him alone with the helmet on the table.

  He couldn't not look at it. It helped steel his resolve, and it terrified him. He would make them listen to him. They'd already ignored him.

  He didn't mean to sleep, but it had been days already, and there was nothing else to do. Even the fire of his own determination waned as time passed by. With no clock or indication of light or dark from outside, he had no idea how much time had passed by the time he woke. A day, two?

  General Marshall was standing over him, looking down. He was wearing his helmet again, and the expression behind the visor was severe.

  "You've put it back on, I see," Lucas said.

  The General didn't show any response, merely indicated for one of his soldiers, another man in a suit, to transfer Lucas back to the table. He unlocked Lucas' chains, lifted him gently, and guided him to the chair. Never mind that he needed to take a piss. He'd have to wait now, or just let it go. He wasn't going to ask for permission to use the toilet unless he really had to.

  "That's an impressive trick," Lucas said, as the chains were padlocked again to the loop in the table, next to a laptop computer. "But the line's still there, isn't it? You can go without for a few minutes, perhaps? You don't need to confirm it, I can see as much. It means you still need me. General," here he paused, emphasizing his use of the title, showing respect, showing they could still be on the same side. "General, I swear to you, I can cure all of you within twenty-four hours. I know what I need to do. I know exactly."

  The General watched him with a steely flatness. "You believe that. Mr. Fallow, I know that you do. But there are realities you are not aware of. Have you heard of Lyell's syndrome?"

  That was out of left field, and he inclined his head in curiosity. As a geneticist, of course he had. It was a horrific condition that killed most of those afflicted with it before they were even one year old, causing large portions of skin to slough off through necrolysis. Horror babies, they'd been informally called. Those who survived into adolescence had it even worse, as the bodily changes and emergence of new hormones made their suffering even worse. The oldest recorded case was a twenty-five year old man who'd required round-the-clock care, and begged his mother every day to kill him.

  "Yes. What does that have to do with anything?"

  "It's where your cure will lead. We've known this for seven years, ever since one of our own found the same cure that you did. It's a trap designed into the virus, and it will not save the world. On the contrary, it will cause you to begin exhibiting Lyell's syndrome yourself. Perhaps you have noticed it already; the shifting sensation within your own skin? That is the gradual separation of the epidermal layers from each other. Soon they will slide as smoothly as if they were oiled. That is the fate that awaits you."


  Lucas gazed at him. This was a strange tactic, and one he didn't really understand.

  "You're not listening," he persisted. "I've found the cure. It was hidden in the line, in the way the line talks to the T4. I can-"

  The General held up a hand. "We can simplify this process, if you'll indulge me. You believe you've found a cure. You feel it in your own body. Allow me."

  He opened the laptop and it powered up, bathing the black suit in white light that reflected off the visor. Marshall tapped several keys, the suit gloves making a neat clacking sound. Then he spun the laptop sideways so Lucas could see it too.

  On the screen was a radial graph, just like the ones from Bordeaux, though it featured readings he hadn't seen before. Beneath it lay a line graph showing a complex wave form representation of the hydrogen line.

  "Here," said Marshall, tapping the screen. "This is what your research has led you to, correct?"

  Lucas blinked and studied the graph. It was different, it didn't represent any living survivor like he'd seen before, but there was something about it that sparked his imagination. He tried to put the pieces together, until in a flash of inspiration he saw it.

  It was his cure.

  "Yes," said Marshall. "We've had it for years."

  "But that's-" Lucas began, then spluttered off. This was a cure he hadn't even made yet. It had been there in the back of his mind, steadily forming after all the changes in the line, not as fully formed as the graph before him, but…

  But he hadn't written it anywhere. He hadn't thought to represent it this way. It was different, some of the harmonics came in places he hadn't expected, hinting at genetic mark-ups he hadn’t anticipated, but it was the same. It was the cure.

  "So, you have it," he said, confused as to whether he should be celebrating. "This is what I used on myself. I didn't realize it, but look, yes, I'm here! You can treat all your people with this, just like me. There doesn't need to be a war."

  General Marshall just stared at him, and in that cold gaze Lucas remembered what he'd already said about Lyell's. He peered again at the graph and tried to puzzle that out. If they had the cure they would surely use it, there was no reason to do anything other. They wanted more than anything to come above ground, he knew that. But then…