The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "This is Amo's fault!" another voice called. "She's just like him, and who elected her? We need another leader."

  Lara turned to that, a voice she recognized easily, one she was surprised hadn't left with the others: Greg.

  "So vote," Lara said smoothly, transitioning her laser focus off Derek and onto him. "In the shadow of a burning reserve, with Janine's people possibly lying in wait, creeping up on us even now. You want to blame Amo for this? You want to blame him for Drake, and for the nuclear bomb which blew up our home? Wake the hell up, Greg! This is reality. I accept that I'm not the leader of this group, though I was elected to the Council of New LA, and that counts for something. But do you really want to hold a leadership election now?"

  "I'd vote for Crow," Greg shouted. "He gets along with Janine. He can make peace."

  Lara stared at him. Perhaps there was truth in that? Was it better to surrender to Witzgenstein than face the war she so clearly wanted?

  But then she'd seen who Witzgenstein really was, up close in Drake's trailer, and it was ugly. The pretty face she put on things, the pleasant atmosphere they'd heard about up in the Willamette Valley, was not the woman she was deep down. Deep down she was another Drake, ready to do anything to rule.

  "I'll call a vote right now," Lara shouted back. "Two options; as simple as can be, because you all know we can't stay here debating any longer, not when there are missiles raining down. A vote for me, which means we go into the fire with guns bristling, and we take what supplies we can. Or a vote for Crow." She pointed, and his face remained impassive. "Which means you try to talk to Janine. Maybe you surrender. You try to make a deal. I'm calling it now. So vote. All for me?"

  Hands went up hesitantly. Lara made the count out loud.

  "All for Crow?"

  More hands went up, but far from all. It was what she'd expected. They were shell-shocked still, not thinking clearly, not really able to vote. Uncertainty wasn't what most of them needed; Democracy wouldn't save the day here.

  What they needed was a tyrant, and she turned to Crow.

  "I agree with Lara," he said, thereby crushing the temporary rebellion. "We have to go in. If there's room to talk, we do it. If there's not, we fight. There is no choice other than that. Everything we need lies up ahead in the smoke, and the longer we wait, the more of it will burn. Agreed?"

  Nobody shouted a reply. Nobody argued.

  "Good," said Crow. His deep voice carried easily over the crowd. He looked to Lara and nodded.

  "We go in three minutes, and we go in hard. I want weapons at every window, every angle covered. Let's go."

  People began to move.

  Crow and Lara moved along the convoy, calling out weak spots that had to be protected, naming vehicle leaders, distributing weapons and ammo from the vehicle supplies, preparing as best they could.

  Black smoke drifted their way.

  When the three minutes were up, they drove.

  * * *

  The flames rising off the Reserve were visible from a mile away, towering like a hellish breath shooting up from the underworld. The road weaved and Lara led the convoy, re-ordered now, bristling at the edges with what few weapons they had; rifles, handguns and shotguns, whatever had been stocked in the RVs before they took off.

  "She must have tipped over a hundred barrels," Crow said in a whisper, gazing transfixed at the gushing fire that raged across the road and through the buildings. "Gasoline burns at nearly two thousand degrees. The air will be near boiling. The roads will be molten tar. Our tires will fall off."

  "So we'll get new tires," Lara said, teeth gritted. Black smoke rose from multiple cracked windows in the squat cement complex like the limbs of a black squid, conjoining into the black cloud that overhung everything.

  "Maybe not from there," Crow said. "She's been thorough."

  It was true.

  Lara remembered this place distantly; one of many Reserves just like it, each a copy of a copy on some federal planner's board. Blockish low gray warehouse buildings peeked above the ground like submerged icebergs, situated within a broad, grassy circumference of tall razor wire. Below the surface they extended much further, sinking into the depths of storage like a Yangtze fulfillment center. She'd last come by some three years ago, coming in and going out swiftly, breaking or blowing locks where they had to, taking what supplies they'd needed, figuring out the stirring spindles to keep the gasoline from sedimenting.

  Probably it had been Amo at her side, or Cerulean, with hope still plentiful ahead. Now she could feel the inferno through the windshield. Even with the air conditioning roaring, the heat from those immense fires had her skin streaming with sweat.

  "We do it fast," Crow said, pointing, "maybe there, that building is still untouched."

  Lara scanned the grounds as they pulled closer. Witzgenstein could be here, lying in wait, or she could be many hours ahead, heading for the next reserve to burn. It didn't make any difference, though, because the convoy needed to resupply now. They had to keep moving, and without gas they'd be stranded, loaded down with children, no food, no nothing.

  It was all or nothing.

  "Any sign of movement?" she called on the radio.

  Negatives came back from the convoy, with the final voice being a boy called Andon, one of Drake's kids with serious black eyes. He had his own rifle in the final carriage, along with four of his own hand-picked troops. Tomas had objected to her arming the children, but she wouldn't be stopped now.

  The burning buildings drew closer. The very fields here were smoking, a noxious white mist rising like wraiths out of the earth. The asphalt was tacky and she sped up. The Reserve structures were largely engulfed in flames, in places already reduced to blackened cement frames, burst open by the warping heat. Here a stairwell peered out through a ruptured section of wall like an exposed spine. There orange and red flames poured out through the windows.

  RATATAT

  Gunfire rang out down the convoy, and Lara barked roughly into the radio, scanning up and down even as she tried to pick out a target from the flames.

  "Are we under fire, where are they?"

  It was hard to see anything through the smoke.

  "False alarm," came the answer. "Sorry."

  They rolled through, leaving a sticky trail of tire rubber behind. Both Lara and Crow coughed with the smoke, until they reached the outskirts of the complex, where the building Crow had sighted earlier stood. The flames were near but hadn't yet reached it.

  "She's watching us," Lara said. "The bitch. It could be booby-trapped."

  Crow stopped the RV and bounded out before Lara could stop him. He walked swiftly up to the building; little more than a concrete hut, probably used for storing tools, and peered inside. Lara followed hard behind him, but no blasts rang out.

  Lara darted over the grass, coughing crazily, to stand beside Crow in the entranceway, looking in.

  Witzgenstein was not there, though she had been. In the middle of the small space there was a wooden pallet, atop which were limited supplies; a red barrel of gas, some rations, some water, but not enough. Not nearly enough. She'd left this cairn for Lara to find, along with a message spray-painted onto the wall in large pink letters.

  ON YOUR KNEES

  It was an easy one to remember. It was a simple message that could crush their hope.

  The nearest reserve was a hundred miles away. The gas in the barrel probably wouldn't even get all their vehicles there. The food and water would barely sustain them. They'd crawl into the next place even weaker and more stressed than they were already; climbing on top of each other while hunger ripped them apart from inside.

  "Shit," said Crow.

  "Shit," Lara answered.

  It wasn't enough, but there was no choice but to keep on. Witzgenstein was ahead now, and she'd stay ahead, and there was nothing Lara could do about it. All the anger and weapons in the world wouldn't help if her own people couldn't eat, if they were forced to walk along the roadside like beg
gars. There wouldn't be a single shot fired.

  It was a kind of rolling siege.

  Her bold vision of a united nation sputtered and died. Witzgenstein was in control. She could spin it out for as long as she wanted, but there was no other way for things to go. Lara had already lost.

  ASSAULT

  9. NEW YORK

  THUMP

  The box hits and I blink awake in the driving seat.

  The cardboard's gone. The foul smell is gone too, and it's peaceful here, and dark. My heart races and I whirl around, but there's nobody here. I'm back in the RV, but the engine's dead and I'm alone. I take my hands off the wheel and breathe.

  4:47 says the dashboard clock. It's night outside, though dawn will be coming soon.

  I don't know how I got here.

  A cold breeze runs over my lap, driving away the nightmare of Distribution, and I shiver. It's gone chilly.

  "Hello?" I call back down the RV. "Anyone?"

  No one replies. I get up and look back down the aisle, searching for the contours of Feargal's silhouette hunched in the dark, but I don't see him. I listen for Arnst's labored breathing, whistling in and out still, but that's gone too. Where are they?

  "Just you and me now," comes a voice. "We're stuck with each other."

  I see him standing at the open side door, split head poked half in and half out, lit by pale moonlight. "Drake."

  He nods solemnly. "You need to come and see this."

  I follow him, and emerge onto the grass-strewn street of a city I know well, enclosed by canyon-like buildings, lit by a sky peppered with stars. Manhattan spreads away in the silvery dark. There are rust-encrusted yellow taxicabs on the road and squat newspaper boxes on the cracked sidewalk. There are dusty department store display windows reflecting the sparkling sky and stop lights dangling low on slackened wires across a nearby intersection.

  "Look at that," Drake says. "Take a look."

  He's standing in the middle of the road and pointing up. I look, and see that there's a great tower of bodies rising from the middle of Times Square.

  I laugh.

  There are thousands of them, and they are beautiful, better than anything I imagined in my comic book art. They shimmer like a nest of hornets slowly stinging a man to death, but these are not insects; they are the ocean, dozens of bodies wide, hundreds high, all gray skin and bony limbs climbing each other to the sky. I look up and see Lara's face in the dark clouds above, and feel the urge to run join them.

  "And you didn't even know we were in New York," Drake chides. "What a homecoming, son. Welcome home!"

  He's laughing. I'm laughing too. It's a celebration here at Times Square, site of my largest atrocity, and there's honesty in that. I'm glad to no longer lie. I drop to my knees before it, spread my arms and bask in the tower's organic, coral-like growth, glimmering with the blink of so many blind white eyes. Perhaps this is where I truly belong. Perhaps I was always meant to stand at their head and lead; for twelve years I've neglected my most loyal constituency, the ones who were with me from the start, who have saved my life so many times.

  "You're right," Drake says. "Go to them."

  I get to my feet and go. Their ranks open to admit me, their bodies spread to make room, and I climb. Arm to head, foot to belly, hip to chest, forehead to toes, I climb. The heights grow dizzy and the tower sways, and now Cerulean is there too, climbing beside me. In his hand he holds two diviners, one of which he offers to me.

  I take it.

  Eye for an eye

  reads the display, and-

  Tooth for a tooth

  I know what it means, and what I have to fetch. I look up and see my family in the clouds and press on, feeling so good to be alongside my old friend again.

  "Amo."

  Then I'm not climbing anymore.

  I'm standing alone in Times Square, in a cold blue dawn, and there is no tower of the dead. There are only the blank, dead advertisement screens hanging on the towering buildings around me, and the same old soggy billboards advertising Ragnarok III and Gucci and Apple. There are parched yellow plants rising from the gutters, and thick banks of greened silt at the curbs, and coating the road there's a brittle carpet of old yellow bones, matted with flattened gray skin and rain-wadded clothing.

  There is no tower of the dead. I go from laughing to silent.

  "Amo," comes the voice again, and now I see Feargal standing in front of me. His broken nose and blackened eyes make him ugly, and it takes a moment to remember that I did this to him.

  "What are you doing?" he asks.

  I say nothing. I could tell him about the tower, but it's gone now so there's no point. I don't remember coming here. Events drift on a tide of rotten kelp. I look around but Drake is gone, in the sky Lara and the kids are gone too.

  "Amo," Feargal says, and I look back at him.

  "I killed a lot of people here," I say, the first thing that comes into my head.

  "Zombies," he corrects. "Not people."

  Does it make any difference? I feel a dark heat evaporating off me like morning dew. Words jumble in my mouth and head, coming out all wrong.

  "Is he dead?" I ask.

  Feargal frowns. "Is who dead?"

  I struggle for an answer to that. The kelp is tangled, and there's panic threaded into its knotty weave. It seems important to answer his question, but I can't see through to the truth. Faintly I remember that night on the road, with the feel of my belt in my hand, but I can't quite-

  "Arnst," I say, spitting out his name like it was blocking my windpipe. "Is he?"

  Feargal's frown deepens into his eyes, where it frolics with the edge of fear. "Amo. Shit. You can't ask me that."

  The dark heat radiates harder. I know how I sound, how I must look out here, climbing in the empty air and talking to no one, but I can't-

  I don't know-

  I start away.

  Feargal says something, then follows. He doesn't lay a hand on me; he wouldn't dare.

  The RV tracks us from behind. I weave and stutter, picking a path through the matted bodies. I stumble into cars; like rusty shells on a giant beach. If I were a hermit crab I would crawl into one of these and make it my own home, dragging it along with me until-

  The bodies ebb away and I make better time, walking as the sun rises. I reach 34th Street and see The Empire State Building ahead, marked with its huge blue 'f'. I follow it, disturbing a flock of deer grazing in front of Macy's, which makes me laugh. I'm drunk but not drunk, and I'm pretty sure there's no sobering up from this. Whatever has happened, it's stuck, and this is how it will be for me now.

  I find 2nd Avenue and head south.

  I remember where I'm going when I reach 23rd Street, and see the Greyhound buses parked across the intersection. There are more leathery bodies here, and I kick a path through. Each is a kind of gray skin sack, containing bones which shuffle and bounce noisily as I pass, angered by my arrival.

  Clic-cloc, they say. Clic-cloc. I keep on and soon the whole road of them are bouncing like Mexican jumping beans, clic-cloccing in a chorus that tells the sad, long story of their pointless deaths.

  They bounce and I kick them out of the air, sending bone bits spraying like buckshot. I climb up a Greyhound and stand on top with the metal roof flexing under my weight. Feargal stands amongst the bouncing bone bags with some inscrutable sadness on his weathered red face. He wants to say something to me, I know. He wants me to heal.

  "Say it, if you've got something to say," I bark at him. "Let's hear it. We're all dying to have the benefit of your wisdom."

  He just shakes his head, like I'm a disappointment, and I find that hilarious. It keeps me chuckling inside.

  "They can't understand," says Drake, waiting for me as I descend down the other side of the bus. "What the weight of leadership is really like."

  I grunt agreement, then slither over the blackened windows and onto the asphalt I once spent a few weeks scrubbing. I look at the shops and buildings to either side
, where once I'd burnt the ocean then cleaned up the mess. It seems ridiculous now that I actually tried to scrub away that atrocity. I only need to blink and images come back, of me standing atop a ladder and brushing down a greasy wall with bleach, trying to wash out the stain.

  It makes me laugh. I'd like to go over and kick out the ladder's legs so that Amo falls in the bubbly black off-wash, a hurt look on his face, asking 'Why?'.

  "No reason," I'd tell him. "Just because."

  "They don't see the big picture," Drake says, leading me down the street. "That's our responsibility. We make the hard decisions so the race can continue."

  In death his shoulders seem to have grown even more massive, bulging in his jacket. He is more like the cartoon Bluto than ever. I walk in his broad footsteps and think about my fingers in his brain.

  "And you'll note that I kept my promise," he says. "I said I'd be punished for what I did, and I was."

  That's true. As we near the place I need to see, I remember his promise to pay for his crimes. I remember my own too; almost twelve years ago, it was here that I first envisaged my long road to California, and here that I imagined how it would end, with me strung by the neck from the Chinese Theater's eves, looking out to the Pacific Ocean.

  That is a promise I have so far failed to keep.

  "It takes conviction," Drake says. "You've been too much of a little bitch."

  I snort, and stop in front of Sir Clowdesley.

  It all began here. But even Sir Clowdesley died for the new world to be born.

  The cafe looks much like it always did, though grayed by an accumulation of dust, so the name of that ancient admiral stands in dull golden relief across the dusty blue sign. The letters of LARA's name are on the sidewalk, the chalk long-erased from the blackboard. Even most of the black has been washed off, revealing pressed chipboard beneath.

  So it goes.

  "Hope is a cancer," Drake says, and I repeat his words like a mantra. "We all have a terminal case. There's no glory in it, no righteousness, just that insidious voice that says 'live'. That voice is a coward. That voice is full of shit."