The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  In a sickly confluence of light and angles as I circle back to the wreck, I watch one of the black-helmeted figures leap from the open front cab and into the water, making four strokes before the blades whirl round and slash him into bloody sushi on the water top.

  Seconds later the whole craft is gone, swallowed without trace by the waves.

  We're so close to shore, but now the twinge is shutting down my thoughts and blurring my vision. It falls to Feargal to take over the boat, and in the light of a freshly fired red flare from above, he picks off two flapping survivors with his AR-15.

  Smack smack smack say the rounds as they hit the water. Smack smack smack.

  I sag back in the boat, and bright colors rinse over my vision, pulling me down into the worst migraine I've had in over a decade. I moan and cover my head with my hands, while Feargal drops the AR-15 and propels us toward the beach.

  INTERLUDE 5

  The helicopter went down.

  General Marshall watched in disbelief from the waterline on the Bordeaux beach as it dropped onto the water and sank. There was no fire, no smoke, just four more lives lost in the darkness, and he didn't know why. One moment he'd held all the cards; a stronger force, better weaponry, eyes in the sky looking down, and now this.

  Dozens had died to bring that helicopter online, working for months. It represented a sickening loss.

  "Report, what just happened," he called to Specialist Myers back in the Humvee, hoping for something on radar or thermal imaging or some kind of reason why the Black Hawk had let a drone get close enough to blow, but no answer came. His mind raced in the stillness, staring into the black as if an answer might emerge from there, but the only one that came was the sound of the boat's engine drawing closer over the waves.

  SLAP SLAP SLAP

  He switched his visor back to infrared and magnified, tracking the hot rectangle of the boat's engine block bouncing through the cold dark. One of the figures aboard it was standing, one lying on the floor. This was definitely a live boat, now that the other two in its chain had blown.

  Smart tactics, to outfox their drones. It was smart to split into three chains with the decoy boats, smart to come at night, but those maneuvers alone would not have been enough to bring down a Black Hawk.

  So what had happened? Their tiny commercial drone couldn't have even got near the helo if it hadn't stopped dead, but it had, and there'd been a tweak of something then, a cold feeling in the air that made his thoughts loose like scree on a steep mountainside but-

  SLAP SLAP SLAP

  They were closing.

  "Rub them out," he said to O'Reilly at the artillery on his left, tucked behind their forward defensive wall, a maneuverable metal screen. He leveled his rifle through the slit in the screen and addressed the rest. "Fire at will."

  It took a moment to realize that none of his soldiers moved.

  He looked at the men and women either side of him, and found them silent and still like plastic models in a battle diorama. Here was Park, on one knee with an M40 on her shoulder pointed out to sea, and here was O'Reilly with the mobile artillery on the ground, paused in the act of dropping a mortar into the chute, and there were Saunders and Karak with their rifles up and their mouths open inside their helmets, but none of them were moving.

  "Park," Marshall barked, but she didn't turn. He tried to reach over and smack her helmet, but his hand didn't move.

  For a second he only stared, half sure that he'd done it and the slapping sound of his palm had already rung out, though all the evidence argued otherwise. His hand was still on his rifle, leaning against the screen, and he hadn't leveled it yet either. He began to sweat in his suit, though the night air was cool.

  Something was happening that he didn't understand and couldn't control. "Myers, have we been hit by chemical ordnance?" he called over the radio, but Myers still didn't reply.

  SLAP SLAP came the boat's engine, perhaps a minute distant now. There was a sense of something he felt in the back of his mind, vaguely familiar, but he couldn't put a name to it. He broke protocol for an active engagement and connected directly to Control.

  "Are there nerve agents in the air?" he called across the thousands of miles back to Istanbul, the only explanation he could hazard.

  "Not chemical," came the harried voice of O'Flanerhy in Control, losing her fabled calm. "The hydrogen line just pulsed with chaos like nothing we've seen, except maybe the lepers. All readouts assess," Control paused as crackling voices broke in. "It could be overloading the helmets and buffering through. Reports coming in-"

  Marshall tuned her out, because yes, of course it was the line. He'd felt it as the invisible blast wave came out from the Mayor's speedboat, a faint tang of floor five-minus in the Istanbul bunker, but he hadn't recognized what it was, too caught up in the aerial assault. Now he felt it clearly, a dampening signal lodged in his helmet as the boats SLAPped closer. He closed his eyes to cast about for it, rummaging in the parts of his mind where it touched, but it was everywhere. It held his thoughts trapped in a static fog, seeping through the generation 5 shield like an anesthetic, filling his thoughts with a drowsy gray paradigm that he didn't understand and didn't know how to fight.

  He couldn't move. He couldn't shoot. He could barely talk with the fog squashing any impulse his mind fired off.

  He had to change the paradigm.

  "Control, deactivate my helmet," he said through gritted teeth.

  "What?" Control came back, "I can't do that, you'll die."

  Of course he hadn't told them about his experiments. That didn't matter now.

  "I'll die if you don't. They killed my helicopter and four of my men. I'd do it myself, but I can't move. Switch it off!"

  No more argument came. The helmet clicked and the shield died, and at once the great weight of the line forced him to his knees, more powerful than ever before, carrying with it an assault of bizarre images. He gasped as black stick figures lanced into the hollows of his mind, battling scrawly demons and zombies in the wilds of America, bringing with them a kind of frolicking madness that almost knocked him unconscious.

  But the pain of the line was far stronger, and familiar, and gave him room to think. In its brutal embrace he could see the numbing black fog for what it was; a kind of weapon, and weapons were a paradigm he understood.

  He told his body to move, and now it moved.

  His helmet clicked and hissed off with ease, and he breathed fresh sea air that spurred him on. The helmet dropped to the sand, and he moved to Master Sergeant Park, hitting the clasps of her helmet, twisting, and pulling the black molded plastic away. She buckled at once, but caught herself on her knees.

  "Wake up the others," he commanded, shoving the helmet against her chest so her arms wrapped involuntarily around it. "Take off their helmets and get to the Dome. Go!"

  She tilted shakily to all fours, hammered by the full force of the line for the first time in her life, but that was all he could do for her, because SLAP SLAP came the boat over the water, only a few hundred yards out now. Marshall caught the M40 launcher off Park's shoulder, twisted over the screen and sighted, then fired.

  WHOOSH

  The rocket missed wide and didn't even explode when it hit the water, but the boat shifted angle. It was seconds away only.

  "Wake them up," he shouted at Park, then hefted his rifle and ran out from the cover of the screen and into the water, firing.

  RATATATATATATAT

  The boat veered wider and answering fire came back, but Marshall didn't flinch. He'd lost too many already to lose a single man or woman more. He waded further into the water and the pain, battling a flurry of jagged black stick monsters and exploding children in his head, and fired.

  RATATATATATATAT

  He fired until the magazine clicked empty and the sound of the boat's SLAPs grew further apart as they fled, then he let the weapon drop and almost collapsed in the water. His record in the open had been three minutes and twenty-three seconds, and how m
uch of that had he used already?

  He turned to see Master Sergeant Park staggering up the beach supporting two others, each of them stripped of their helmets. Two more lay on the sand with their helmets off, convulsing, and he went to them first. Perhaps he could carry one, not two, but still he seized them both by their collars and pulled.

  In his head visions of a black space filled with cardboard boxes popped up, and he pulled so hard it felt the tendons of his forearms would rip, but they moved. First an inch, then another, and his legs burned to match the throb in his head, but they slid and he gained momentum even as the numbness began to disentangle from his thoughts.

  He dragged their bodies up the beach, plowing furrows into the sand until he reached Park at the dunes. She lay collapsed across the bodies she'd rescued, and in the flickering light from the cracked autocannon turret he saw blood trickling evenly from her eyes.

  Too slow.

  He looked back to the two he'd dragged and saw their faces: blank, empty, screwed up and flowing blood smoothly.

  He dropped to his knees. The line pummeled him like never before, longer than ever before, getting into his head and ripping at his resolve.

  DIE DIE DIE it thumped in his head.

  DIE DIE DIE

  It beat him like a nail and his head pounded down into the sand, into the darkness where he saw something lurking, an image of a man in a labyrinth of boxes that receded into infinity. In every box was a thumping human heart, and in every heart was a life struggling to be set free, etched in black ink across plain white skin, endlessly fated to fade, and there was nothing he could do but watch and fade himself.

  DIE DIE DIE hammered the line.

  The boat was coming back.

  He was by his daughter's side again, twenty-four years earlier, and thinking that if perhaps she'd been just a few days older then she might have survived. But she was so small, two months premature and her little heart was just not strong enough to keep the blood moving.

  8 Lives they called him, and he would have given any number to let her live. He would have given any number to keep his wife by his side, instead of letting her sink into the depression that ultimately claimed her a year later, when he found her clutching a razor in the bath, washed by blood, and lifted her body himself.

  He buried her in the same grave as their daughter, because there was nothing else he could do. He'd stood over the grave and promised to join them when the date came, until the date came, and perhaps that time was now, though there was no peace in that thought. There would be no hope for anyone if he fell now, and that was too much a betrayal of his tiny, premature daughter to let it stand. To give in to that meant spitting on her grave, saying she never should have been born, and he could never do that, because in the brief moments when she'd looked up into his face with recognition in her tiny eyes, he'd known.

  His life belonged to her. His life still belonged to her.

  He burst up through the crust of consciousness with a gasp. How long had passed? The slapping of the boat was out there and so was the line, crumpling him still, with the dark undercurrent of something else digging away below. He looked up; in the dark Park was still bleeding, perhaps she was still breathing.

  He pulled her helmet from under her belly and sealed her back in. He did the same for the others. If they were alive, they might survive. If not, their bodies would be needed for research and their suits would be needed for others to fill.

  He left them and ran raggedly over the dunes to the Dome and the Humvee, where Myers lay slumped against the wheel, frozen solid. Marshall climbed in, pushed him to the side and powered the vehicle on, driving it back to the bodies with the Dome tumbling along haphazardly behind. Lifting them in took the last of his strength, feeding deadweight bodies in limb by limb, but he couldn't stop.

  Halfway to the tide the line felled him, and for a time he crawled. Beside three ranks of artillery he rolled his helmet back on, just as the SLAP of the speedboat started growing louder again. They thought their work was done.

  Click, hiss.

  The shield was still off. He slapped at the buttons on his wrist numbly, struggling for the correct combination, until by blind chance he hit it and the stunting weight of the line faded, replaced by an echo of the numbing blackness, though now it was fainter. He got to his feet and looked out to where the boat skipped over the waves, drawing in.

  They were going to die. He would make it happen.

  Then he ran, scrabbling on all fours as the black fog drew in again, shutting him down. He barely reached the Humvee, barely climbed in with his load of bodies, and barely took the wheel. But he did. And he drove. And every mile he covered cleared the fog from his mind a little more, though it did nothing for the wracking pain.

  Gradually, some of the bodies in the back began to wake.

  * * *

  Lucas worked in a fever.

  Sulman joined him first, then Macy, then the others. Some of them were a help and the others a hindrance, but he gave them all work to do, to keep them essential in the eyes of the Seal. They didn't talk about Amo or Anna or anyone else that they'd lost, because there was nothing to say.

  They'd seen the videos. They knew the hideous fate that awaited them, too. They worked hard.

  Before the week had even run out, Lucas had formulated a fresh approach to the shielding helmets. There were so many assumptions the bunker science teams had made and held, many of which he'd shared, that the recent revelations on the line had shredded. Now he knew that the T4 and the line were linked in ways not yet suspected, and the secret to decoding both lay in a multidisciplinary effort to translate one to the other; mapping genetics directly onto theoretical waveform physics.

  It made him think of Jake, but Jake was gone, burnt to death in Bordeaux, so he pushed the thought away and worked harder.

  The chaos on the line was his Rosetta stone, and Drake's signature was the key. The odd combinations he'd created in New LA revealed the possibility of a new genetic language encoded in the T4's tiny head. He worked on feverish and wild theories, and the bunker scientists struggled to follow along behind him, watching his every moment. It felt like being under the microscope himself, studied as closely as he studied the T4, but in a way it was comfortable. The tight confines of their lab and living quarters felt like it always had been with Farsan tucked away in the Maine basements, pushing out the limits of human understanding with every experiment, potentially changing the world.

  So he worked.

  In an intuitive whirl he sprayed out orders to cameras that fed them to teams across the world. His experimental vision progressed in tandem across a dozen labs, with revelations about the path to ending Lyell's coming hard on the heels of fine-tunings for the helmets, along with a rudimentary map of potential gene codes that could be transmitted to control the ocean over the hydrogen line, plus a global breakdown and timeline of the earliest spread of the apocalypse.

  It took shape rapidly before him, and all of it was a clue to the truth; where the infection began, why it began, and how it could be stopped. In the throes of it he began to transcend even the need to sleep. It had been like this at times before; heady periods of mad productivity when everything just seemed to click. In snatched moments of brilliance he glimpsed seeing the whole vision in the details, as the world fell into order before him.

  Mongolia, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia.

  Maine, Bordeaux, Gap, Brezno, Istanbul.

  Lars, Salle, Amo, Marshall.

  Fresh readings off the line poured in from a network more complete than any he'd hashed together from retro-engineered helmets and the shields of Maine and Bordeaux. The data was overwhelming, and Sulman at his computer fed it all in and worked the algorithms under the barked out instructions from Lucas, every tentative connection between the line and the T4's code building a rung in a ladder leading him upward toward something better, to some meaning, to finally knowing why all those people had to die.

  He saw the whole w
orld in the line, and the line in the smallest things. Eating meal packs of mashed potato, peas and roast beef in gravy, when faceless attendants forced him to, he etched the lines of power that circled round the world in his mashed potato like the madman in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  Wavy lines, thin lines, rippling like weather systems across the globe.

  He had them build him a large globe so he could watch the pressure systems revolving in real time, seeking the pattern in the data that had to mean something, seeking a unified theory that would combine the real world's soup of magnetic resonation, background radiation, solar waves and space-time fabric with the hydrogen line; knitting them together like a four-dimensional needle, bringing sense to the senseless.

  He watched the T4 shiver and reproduce atop the head of a pin, and saw ten thousand worlds evolve and expand and die. The truth was there and he raced desperately to find it, growing hungrier by the day, the hour, the minute, as if somehow knowing would let him reach out and touch the face of God, let him have Jake back and bring peace to Anna, let the suffering end and bring heaven down to Earth.

  Along the way he saw the most recent of their lies.

  He saw how they'd tried to hide it from him.

  Satellites shifted, he knew that. The world turned and reality turned with it, but they didn't do a good enough job of hiding their secrets, and they never really stood a chance. He started doing his work on the helmets on autopilot, while digging deeper into the only thing that mattered now, seeking out the truth in the echoes, because there was an enormous discrepancy in the global flows.

  Yes, there were hydrogen line 'bands' that striped the world like strips of longitude, limiting the activity possible in any one section. Days ago that had explained to him why there was only one bunker per every two time zones, because any more than that would override the delicate balance of the line too much, like putting water under so much pressure that it atomized to steam. At some point these people must have understood the theory and constructed it into their plans for the bunkers, but they'd never told him.