The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Lara felt tears welling in her eyes. That was ridiculous.

  "It was a warning," she said, getting her voice out. "But about the past. About things I'd done, things I'd failed to do." She looked at Crow. "About my mistakes."

  "And it was," he said, as calm and certain as the desert around them. "For all of us. We shared in that, Lara. All of us have our mistakes. Not one of us has lived this life just as we'd like."

  Lara wanted to laugh, but was too afraid it would come out as a sob. Crow was the epitome of purpose. He seemed like a solid block of willful intent.

  "Not many die as they'd like, either," she said.

  Crow said nothing to that, only watched out of the windshield for a time. Lara drove and wondered where Amo was. Probably halfway across New Mexico. When their fingers had touched on the stage, it had been like nothing she'd experienced before, except perhaps for the very first time. Kissing in his small garret apartment in Mott Haven, moving together in the dark.

  "Growing up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, I learned about death early," Crow said. Lara looked over, but he wasn't facing her, just gazing out toward the first orange crescent of the sun, peeping over the desert's lip. "We had a funeral every month, it seemed; always someone too drunk, too sad, too sick. They gave us kids books back then about how my tribe, Oglala Sioux, used to honor our dead. Four days of mourning, feasts, the bodies raised up on frames in a sacred burial ground, left with food where they could speak directly to the sky, resolve any differences they had."

  He stopped and smiled, turning now to Lara. She'd never heard Crow talk this much before.

  "That was a far cry from 'modern' reservation burials," he went on. "When my uncle died they put him in the ground within a day, with a Catholic priest to give him last rites. The wake was three hours and bankrupted his daughter, my cousin. The food wasn't even good. I just remember the liquor. Somebody gave me a plastic cup from a Wal-Mart across the border, two fingers of whiskey, and they waited for me to drink it. I did, though it almost made me puke. I was twelve."

  Lara didn't have anything to say. There wasn't anything, because everyone had their own ghosts.

  "Three friends died before we were done with school, to suicide. One of them did it with his father's hunting rifle while I was in the yard out back, lining up the bottles for us to shoot. So fast, and I was only yards away. I came back in and found him."

  "Jesus," Lara whispered.

  Crow went back to looking at the desert. "The strange thing was, it didn't really bother me at the time. I was engaged in the old myths, then. The land as our father, the sky as our mother, the path between birth and death just a battle we have to fight every day. Part of that was just Dakota, I think. Growing up in these cities, you're from New York, right?"

  Lara nodded.

  "When you're there, you only see city. Roads, buildings, lights, history. You look out at where the wilderness once was but you don't see the empty spaces; you see yourself looking back, in the world your people have built, like a comfort. On the reservation we see the wild, but we don't see ourselves in it, because all around that wilderness are the prison walls. They're made of barren dirt; empty scrub that goes on and on through the Badlands until finally it stops, at an invisible line we didn't write. You see that line and it gets into you, from the youngest age. You can't unfeel it, can't unsee it. It gets in and it hardens, and some of us turn against the old ways, or turn back to them, or just turn to whiskey, crime, or suicide. It's a heavy thing, to look out at the world that should be yours, that should reflect who you are right back at you, and not see yourself. It stays with you."

  Lara swallowed. Everything was sad, now. Everything had weight. She looked out of the window and remembered Drake on the stage, remembered all those people staring back at her, cheering as she reached toward Amo.

  Her people. That vision was in her now, making her hard.

  "Most of my generation left the reservation," Crow said. "I had to. My sister went first, took a job at a car wash outside of Whiteclay, washing wheel rims and mudguards for white truckers passing through the lands where Sitting Bull once ruled. I got a place at Mid-Plains Community College, and I took it. My mother wanted me to go to Oglala Lakota College in Wounded Knee, but I couldn't do it; couldn't be around all that defeat any more. Mid-Plains was no better though. I didn't belong, and nothing I did would change that. I saw those other kids, for whom the Native American story was just some kind of historical myth, not a tragedy from the real world, and it made me angry. Angry at the legacy I'd been born into, angry that I wasn't like them, that I had that cold, burning hardness on the inside. And they saw it in me, and it made a barrier between us."

  Another long silence passed. Lara thought of her own world, now gone. When would the memory of the white eye go away? She'd dreamed it for so long, it felt as if she'd brought it on herself. Like her dreams had brought it into reality, and her inaction had doomed them all. In any future history, if they even survived, the destruction of New LA would be mentioned. Her children would grow up knowing how badly they'd been beaten.

  "Why are you telling me this, Crow?"

  He looked at her, and smiled again. A dazzling array of white teeth greeted her. He was handsome, charming, strong, but now she saw the hardness that she'd always taken for purpose. It wasn't intent or confidence, at least no more than she felt those things. It was merely patience; a long, weary patience with holding in the anger and holding back the outrage. It made him strong even as it made him slightly unreal, like he was living on some higher plane, like reality for him was just one more step until the next step in his journey.

  "Because we'll need to learn," Crow said. "How to be a beaten people. The despair of that will kill everyone here, if we're not careful. Amo led us for the longest time; he carried the burden so it didn't seem as if the ocean had really beaten us. Once we all found New LA, things were different, weren't they? Amo made a dream for us to live in, and it kept us going, but that dream is gone now. Drake made it scorched earth. The people here are darker, so the dreams will be too. If we don't find a way to channel this and become its master, I know where it will lead, and there's no future in it."

  Lara grimaced. Perhaps. She was teetering on the edge. She'd peered into the depths when Witzgenstein came to gloat, and she already knew the answer, but she had to ask anyway. Crow had the right to say it aloud. "So how do we do that? Channel defeat."

  His grin withered. "There is no easy way. First you have to accept it. Then you have to move on. Accept the old ways are gone, and new ways must be found. It's something the reservation system didn't make easy for my people. Integration became impossible, or a kind of betrayal, and what did that leave us? Pockets of a broken people, always seeing the glory of the past in the echoes."

  Lara grimaced. "Or win. Take it back."

  Crow's brow wrinkled. "There's no clean win after this, Lara. Past glories are not coming back."

  Lara sighed. She knew it. This was the choice Amo had faced, twelve years ago on the road through Iowa. It was the choice she'd faced on Drake's stage, where her decision had come at the expense of everything else.

  Better to live an hour as a lion than a lifetime as a mouse. It was true. It was wise. But how would that help her now?

  "Look at the Jewish people," Crow said. "I often think about them as an example. They made their own nation-state and called it home. I used to wonder why the Native tribes didn't unite like that; travel from their individual reservations to some central place and call it a nation, but the US government would never allow it. All that left was integration, so that's what I did. I didn't go back to the reservation again after college."

  After that he fell into his customary silence. Lara drove, though the wheel felt clammy in her palms. The RV skidded on the sand and the sun rose up hot and bright. She thought about Witzgenstein's voice in her ear in Drake's RV, promising her the taste of ashes in her mouth. Enjoying her pain. She tried to imagine the emptiness
of the reservation.

  "When I find Janine Witzgenstein, I'm going to kill her," she said, but the words didn't come out with the authority she'd hoped for. Drake had shaken her. Watching him die hadn't made her stronger. If anything, it had just made her more afraid. There were no guarantees anymore. There was no safety.

  Crow looked out to the road.

  She drove on.

  * * *

  Crow saw the smoke first, ten miles out from the Aurora Strategic Reserve cache in Utah. He pointed wordlessly, and Lara saw it, and her heart sank a level deeper. An inky black column rose over the landscape of red rock chasms and deep rushing rivers.

  Five miles out, with the scent of the fire on the sweet, fresh air, she pulled over the RV and waited for the convoy to stop behind her. She climbed out along with Crow and stood in the middle of the dusty road, waiting for the others to come.

  None of them had asked why they'd come this way. They were still shell-shocked by the loss of New LA. Witzgenstein had taken the angry ones. Amo had taken the few leaders. That left this; the white bread in the middle of the loaf.

  "We can't take the children into this," Crow said softly, as people shuffled and gathered down the line, stretching limbs and avoiding eye contact with Lara. "Janine could be waiting. It might be a firestorm."

  Lara knew that. She'd been thinking of it for hours. Everything she'd learned about managing people from Amo, about inspiring them, told her Crow was right. But things had never been like this before. They'd faced the threat of dissolution numerous times, on convoy journeys across the country, when Witzgenstein was first pushing for her vote in Maine, but back then there'd always been a home to return to.

  New LA had anchored them, but now the anchor was gone, and what was to keep anyone with her? They could all easily drift. If she left a group of the timid and the children behind, staring up at the threat that smoke represented, what were the chances they'd be there when she returned?

  What were the chances they wouldn't be bombed from the sky?

  There were numerous other supply caches around the country. There were many years' worth of supplies to be had, but not if Witzgenstein destroyed them. It was an awful plan, but it could work. Janine still had her anchor, her home in the Willamette Valley. If she could hold it while destroying every other resource, she wouldn't face a united opposition again. The last survivors under Lara would splinter as they began to starve, trapped in a barren prison as big as a country. Many of them would go back begging to Witzgenstein, and the destruction of Amo's legacy would be complete.

  That thought raised a little anger. It was hard to feel, but the flicker of it felt good. She'd been beaten down, and this fire was necessary. She had to breathe gentle air across it, protect it, stoke the embers until it erupted. She had to do that for everyone, despite the tickle of panic at the outer edges of her mind. It was just another case to be made. The largest she had yet to make, and not one she could afford to fail.

  "We have to take them all," she said, and Crow said nothing more. He of all people should know. When the Native tribes went to war, they often took their entire civilization with them. Every bet was all-in. "We all have to fight."

  She strode forward, toward her people. Those nearest showed the weary tracing of fear on their faces. Those were wrinkles she had to smooth out with her own hands. She began to run logistical calculations through her head, appraising the RV count, the people, their characters and abilities. She knew them better than anyone did, except the handful of adults from Drake's family.

  But even his children were fighters, raised as human bombs. They'd been a nomadic people. The first thing she had to do was get them on the same page as her. It had to be confident and assured, done smoothly and concisely, as if this was a plan she'd always held, as if this was the natural order.

  Then they would follow her. Then they would fight for her.

  The glimmer of a smile began to play on her lips. They'd lost so much. Taking it back was going to bind them in a new union. A new nation.

  8. STRATEGIC RESERVE

  Lara walked and Crow came with her, spreading silence back through the remnants of New LA like the chill off a demon. She remembered how Amo had done this very same action some twelve hours earlier, picking out his team while they were still under the red shroud of the explosion.

  She looked into their eyes. It seemed that at any moment one of them would shout out a challenge, call her a fake, defy her right to lead, but none of them did. They were too cowed. Drake's children stared soullessly at her, fidgeting with their hands now they'd been deprived of their explosive toys. Six of Drake's adults stood amongst them, gazing at her as she went by.

  "They're remembering the vision," Crow whispered as they went. "You on the stage, Drake at your feet."

  At the midpoint, four vehicles down, she saw her children. They stood outside their RV, watching with limpid, uncertain eyes, but she couldn't go to them. Not yet. Instead she kept walking down the convoy, tracing the soot-blackened and dust-hoared RV flanks with her eyes. In the bright light of day her people looked like what they truly were; refugees. She looked at people she knew and willed them to understand. Gracie who led the cyclists' group. James who was a great freestyle surfer. George who drove the corn thresher, Little Terrence who loved to read old zombie comics. Silas who'd helped her build her coffee shop, Merrit who'd taught them how to restart the hydroelectric dam on Folsom Lake, plus many faces who were not there.

  Alan and Lin, big Samuel, Akela, Georgina and Harris, Yugyong, Jack and Phillipa; all the people from the Willamette Valley as well as a few others. It seemed so unlikely that watching Drake parade on his stage had actually converted some of them, but the facts were undeniable. Those people had been swayed and were gone. Tapper was missing. Alicia.

  "Where's Amo?" came a cry at last, and Lara turned to meet it. It was Tomas, speaking for fourteen souls in the Sacramento group. Of course, he was angry and confused; he'd arrived back in New LA only to be corralled at once by an occupying army of children. Nobody would have explained anything to him. Then there was Lara and Amo on the stage, and the vision, and things falling apart.

  "Gone for Europe," she answered. "To kill the bunkers who sent that bomb to destroy us. That's his war." She paused, looking out at the black smoke rising over the horizon. "This is our war, and if we don't win it, it won't matter if Amo wins or loses his, because the thriving civilization on this continent will not be ours. It will be Witzgenstein's; driven by religion, thriving on humiliation, and I will not let that be our history."

  She fell silent briefly, but no more cries came.

  "You can see that smoke," she said, pointing again. They were all around her now, curling closer like yellowed pages in a book. "Maybe you can guess what it means. Things like that don't happen naturally; that's Witzgenstein's work. She's raced ahead of us, and now she's burning supplies. There's only one reason she'd do that; to crush our new group before we can begin. I know that's hard to hear, but it's what we're facing. This is our war, now."

  Repeating the word war had a visible effect on them. Some of them shrank back, getting ready to roll over and quit. A few set their jaws and leaned in. Lara watched and made mental notes.

  "I propose we take the fight to Janine. There are more of us; we're better armed, better prepared. Whatever she throws at us, we can fight it off. And we need to resupply. But I need everyone here to be on guard, as we advance on that."

  A third time she pointed. A man at the edge of the crowd cried out.

  "Are you mad? It's on fire. We can't go there."

  Lara turned on him. It was Derek, an accountant from Missouri. He had a daughter, Clarissa, who played the oboe.

  "There are no other known supply caches for several hundred miles," Lara said, using the most reasonable tone she could manage. "Half the vehicles in this convoy will run out of fuel before we cover that distance. And there's a very good chance Janine will have beaten us to it."

  "What are y
ou talking about?" Derek persisted, "I'm not going into that. It's crazy."

  Lara could understand that, the stubborn refusal to see reality. He was afraid; for his daughter, for the dream. At the moment perhaps all this still seemed like a kind of inconvenience, one more indignity heaped atop them after the travails of Drake. It was possible he thought Lara was at fault; that there was some other way to go forward if they just had a different leader. But that was just trying to live in a past that no longer existed.

  She had to crush that wrong way of thinking right now.

  "So leave," she said. He blinked back at her. "If you think you can make it to another cache, I won't stop you. You'll be vulnerable to Witzgenstein, and you're not likely to safely reach supplies, but if that's what you want, I can't hold you back."

  Derek didn't move, though he muttered to the people nearby.

  Lara didn't like it. It wasn't how Amo would do things. But right now, at this point with her leadership in question, with the convoy on the edge of fracturing into bits and Drake's people plainly accustomed to a harsher style of governance, she had no choice.

  The idea had to be thoroughly crushed, and along with it, Derek.

  "What was that?" she asked. Crow put a hand on her arm but she shook it off and advanced.

  "I didn't say anything," Derek said, like a kid in the back row caught out talking trash to his peers.

  "Yes you did. You don't believe me, maybe. You're angry that we're in this situation, and you want to express that anger to make yourself feel better. But Derek, we don't have time for bullshitters." He flinched. "If you want to call a flash election, you can do that. Stand yourself, and if you can offer a better idea, I'll follow you. Otherwise I need you to pull yourself together, so we're all pulling in the same direction. Breaking our union is what Janine wants. That's why she's burning our supplies, to put us under pressure and make us crack. We can't give her what she wants."

  Derek glared at her, but didn't say anything more, and Lara pulled herself back, scanning the eyes around her. More of them seemed hostile now than before, but perhaps that was necessary. She was about to tell them to prepare arms and go into a warzone.