The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  He'd found it himself.

  Twelve bunkers that circled the world in even, segregated bands.

  It explained why the infection began in the East, why the largest gathering of demons had originated there by far, because just like the system of longitude had a zero point in Greenwich, England, so did the line have a zero point in the northeast of China. There was a magnetic north pole and a south pole, with ley lines of magnetic activity striping the planet, and so the hydrogen line had poles too, and at one of them lay a little town in China called Da Hingang Ling.

  At the other lay a town he knew well, and that explained a lot: New York.

  He laughed when he picked that out, ostensibly working on the sixth generation of the helmets with the potential to replace the heavy apparatus with a kind of moderating skullcap. He laughed and probably they all thought him crazy, but of course he was crazy now, working for the enemy just to keep the skin on his back, because without skin what would he be?

  He laughed.

  He spun the world.

  And rippling through his models like the trails of a dying bug in a skin of butter, he saw the truth in their deception. It skittered across the Atlantic unevenly, hidden by false wave fronts that had never added up. There was a trail there, and in the echoes it left around it he could track it in real time.

  He could reproduce its signature, running the deep Euclidian calculations in the back of his head, comparing it to the radial graphs he'd ordered up himself, and coming to the final realization.

  Amo was alive.

  Amo was alive and trekking across the ocean to the East. He was coming to find him, to save him and the others, which meant New LA was surely alive, and maybe Anna too, and maybe even Jake. They all could be, and everything Marshall showed him was a lie, and there was hope yet.

  It took him only three hours more to figure out a way to blow the lab up. He made his preparations without switching speed and with no undue alarm; working and hiding his intentions just like he always had under Salle, playing three-dimensional chess at a level none of them could understand, because none of them saw the things he saw.

  It was a data bomb, built into their algorithms at the root. With the next update it would corrupt all the helmets and infect their understanding of the line in such a way that even their own central shield, modulating constantly against the regular shifts in the hydrogen line 'weather', would turn against them.

  Destroy them.

  He laughed and worked. He gave orders and grinned manically. He delved deeper toward the truth, while sowing the data at his back with the same lies that they'd fed him.

  It was easy. It was destructive. It was complete.

  13. THE DEAD

  I wake on the road, slumped in the passenger seat of a tiny electric car, humming along through desolate city streets rife with tall grass in a low, gravelly silence. My knees jam into the glove box, and there's a deep twinge behind my eyes, settled in like an old friend.

  I blink and watch a city in France pass by. This is Bordeaux, I suppose; glimpsed so many times through satellite link-ups with Anna. The tall buildings look much the same. The old ones are largely 18th century, with neoclassical pillars and triangular pediments stuffed with Greek gods, which we don't have much of back home. Not that culture and heritage matter much now. The sun is low and yellow, morning still, slipping between gaps in the buildings like a sharp kaleidoscope.

  I look away, focusing on the dashboard. There's a sat-nav map with the radar screen duct-taped next to it, blinking green. No more missile strikes, I hope. By my feet there's a drone box crammed in. I shuffle backward in the seat, trying to find a more comfortable position and stretch the kink out of my neck, but there's no room to move into.

  "It's all I could find," says Feargal, at the wheel. "Honda Accord. Voted best car, 2005."

  I snort. He looks sideways at me as if I'm sick, and I remember that this is not who I am to him anymore. I'm not the Amo who laughs easily, who can take a joke, who may even be fun to be around.

  "We're lucky I found this," he says, both angry and afraid. That he wants to take me to bits is obvious. That he's worried he'll fail is just as plain. "The cache we left behind only had two trucks."

  He points to the rearview mirror, and I turn. Behind us, shimmering in a heat haze rising from the asphalt, I see them. Maybe Jeeps; Arnst at the wheel of one, Lydia at the other.

  "Arnst and Keeshom hit another autocannon; they took it out. Lydia and Hatya came in clean, but for two guys in helmets, but they were already down when they landed. We got the brunt of it."

  I grunt, and we drive on. I don't squirm in the seat anymore. No one cares about my headache, just like no one ever did before, except my parents and Cerulean. I sit up straight.

  It looks like downtown. There's a warm gloaming to the air, burning off a low-hanging mist of dew that shrouds the old city like a phantasmal second skin. Of course, there are ghosts here everywhere.

  "How many did we kill?" I ask Feargal.

  He looks at me again with that same expression; half fear, half anger. Maybe he thinks it's incredibly callous that I don't know or remember. Maybe it just seems like deaths are so far beneath my sphere of attention that I didn't notice.

  "The four in the helicopter. Two for the ladies. That's it. The rest got away."

  Six. There's no relief in knowing this number, just as there's no disappointment. If we didn't kill them yet, then we will later.

  "Taking them out like that, it's what you did to me, isn't it?" Feargal asks. Now he doesn't meet my eyes. He bites his lip. He glances nervously in the rearview mirror, watching the curls of mist behind us swirl to fill our slipstream, before Arnst rams through. I can just feel the emptiness of the shark-eyed man fleeing along my skin, many miles to the east.

  "What?" I ask, not willing to give anything away. He can say it, if he thinks he knows.

  "That feeling," he says. Ripples pass over his cheeks as his jaw works underneath the skin. "Whatever you did to that helicopter, to the soldiers on the beach; I've felt it before."

  I look out at the road. What would Drake say now, I wonder?

  "That feeling," he keeps on, scratching at an itch he doesn't understand but can't let alone. "I barely remember, but I know you did it to me."

  "What did I do to you, Feargal?"

  His jaw grits hard. I'm not surprised to see tears shining in his eyes. Yes, I can say to this. This is what it takes, where we're all going.

  "I whipped Arnst," he says. "We all did. But I would never have done that, not for that reason. And other things. On the yacht, you humiliated me."

  I frown, because I only remember that faintly. I could say it was Drake, in the days when I wasn't in control, but that won't help him any. I pan for memories of what he's talking about, mixed in with all the sketching and visions of things that weren’t there. Perhaps Drake called him up to my room and made him get on his knees? Maybe he made him lap whiskey from a saucer placed on the floor?

  That sounds quite funny. Lots of things do, now. That I blasted a helicopter out of the sky with my mind. That I can feel the shark-eyed man like a burr clinging to the tail edges of my thoughts. That I know I'm going to kill him.

  It's all training, Drake would say. Victory's a bitch; hard to savor.

  At that I do laugh. You have to let it out sometimes. You can't hold it in forever. Feargal shrinks away, the anger redoubling. It looks like I'm laughing at the memory of his humiliation, but then I suppose I am.

  We drive.

  I forage for the radio, tucked down by Feargal's feet. I call the others for a report, keeping it short and sweet. They're all clear.

  Within a day the first bunker will be within our grasp.

  We pass a large yellow museum with broad wings, like Versailles, and cross the Garonne River on a broad stone bridge, the Accord humming sweetly.

  Cruelty is banal, I think. I whistle a tune to myself. Drake's done me a favor in this. The old Amo would never forget
the fleeting look on that man's face in the water as he tried to swim away, then got chopped up by his own helicopter blades. Now I play it back and it just seems funny, him getting so finely diced by his own machine. Anger and fear are both a big show, but when it comes down to it and the numbness sets in, cruelty is banal, like eating and drinking. It makes vampires of us all, sucking down the suffering of someone else like a source of sustenance, because if you don't swallow then it will drown you.

  Drake did it. I've learned it. Feargal will too.

  We roll through a tight business district of glass and steel, and out the other side.

  It makes me think about Don.

  I imagine the world from his viewpoint; what he must have felt when he saw me in the emptiness of Las Vegas, a weird hipster rocking up in a JCB with a battletank school bus in back. I laugh out loud and drum on the glove box, then wince with the old pain in my head.

  He must have thought I was a prize idiot when I called myself 'Ammo', boasting about all the rockets I had. What could he have been thinking when we got on the bus and it became clear all I had was comics?

  I have another good laugh.

  "What the hell is this?" Don said, holding up my comic.

  Zombies of America

  Probably he should've cut my head off right then. I was a loony Left Coast Liberal, a sugar-headed Social Justice Warrior, pleading for the zombies.

  Pleading for the zombies?

  "Don't you know they have feelings?" I chided him. "Have you really been having illicit sexual relations with the dead?"

  It's a good laugh.

  It was the ocean that killed him, and that gets me thinking about what Drake said, and how I've been broadcasting on the line since the start. Sending out the things I wanted to happen, and making them happen. Maybe they turned on him for me.

  The Accord hums onward. I look at my squashed legs and think this is probably the tiniest vehicle I've been in since the apocalypse. That seems such a potent thought that I repeat it out loud.

  "This is a tiny car. The tiniest."

  Feargal's head shifts as if he thinks he heard something, but he's too far gone now, under the thumb of my madness.

  I smile at the memories. Ah, I must have been insufferable. Smug, glib, self-satisfied hipster, rolling in and claiming a superior moral order because I'd done a bit of graffiti. I can clearly see how Julio would have thought I was a joke.

  In my head I sketch Julio punching old Amo in the face. I sketch an alternate history where Don rules New LA, making sure to keep a stable of zombies on hand for taking care of business. Real women chained up too, and why not? Drake did it, and they were faithful. Lydia hates me more than any of them. It would've been fun. It's better to throw off the shackles.

  My madness pumps out across the land. Feargal drools beside me, getting the full wattage. It's a good remedy for me, actually, keeping the twinge at bay. Who would've thought I could take refuge in my art now, when it used to be the thing I hid from most?

  "Feargal," I say. "Buddy, wipe your chin."

  He does. I laugh. It's like having a tamagochi electronic pet.

  Time fades, and the city tapers away around us as we advance into wild country, tangled thick with grape vines. The haze of dew rising off asphalt is replaced by the low steam of rotten, fermenting fruit. I open the window and whistle my way into it, grasses rushing off the little Accord's front bumper like paddling pool waves, getting drunk on the air.

  I spy a windmill off in the thickets. I spy a wild dog sitting beneath a bowing power line, pink tongue lolling. I spy birds swooping into the dense weave of vines either side like seagulls bobbing for fish.

  I sketch it all.

  The first zombie in the road almost flips the car.

  Feargal shouts and fights with the wheel as we hit it hard in the river of grass. The car hops and we rattle left, skid, rattle right and finally pull to a stop; the others drawing up just behind.

  Arnst's voice comes through on the radio but I click him off.

  "What the hell was that?" Feargal asks, pulled out from under my control.

  I get out and walk back, Feargal following. Our trail is pretty clear, marked in crushed grass that seeps a clean sappy scent in the alcohol-fogged air. We go past Keeshom and Arnst, past Lydia and Hatya, and I signal for them to stay inside. Soon I'm standing over the blockage that tripped us, burst open now at the belly and spewing a few shriveled purple organs like a stillbirth on a bed of hay.

  "What is that doing there?" Feargal asks. "Just lying there?"

  I kneel down and look into the thing's glazed gray eyes. There's nothing here though, no buzz, no feeling of cold, nothing on my radar. I touch the neck, turning it over carefully and looking for signs of a break, but find none. This zombie just laid down and died, and somehow I'm not surprised.

  "Drive more slowly," I say, standing. I walk back and Feargal follows.

  We drive on, and in a few minutes we hit another. This one's a demon sprawled across the country road, skin still a furious red.

  "What's going on?" Feargal asks me, standing over it, expecting an answer.

  "The center cannot hold," I say. "Run for the hills, Feargal."

  He blinks, too foggy now to really register that. We drive. It takes another hour to reach the Bordeaux bunker, going so slowly. For the last thirty minutes I drive, easing up on the laughing and madness so Feargal can launch a drone, which he sends ahead to scout for gun turrets and other automated defenses I can't feel on the line, but there is nothing, just a bunker mouth and about a thousand dead zombies and demons lying sprawled around it. Perhaps they used up all their defenses on the coast.

  We pull up and look around. Hundreds of scrawny corpses surround the hatch in concentric rings like straggles of gray and red hair swirled down the bath drain. No birds swoop here. It's a massacre with no wounds, brought on by changes in the line I'm beginning to understand.

  It's not just me causing this. These bodies have been here for weeks, perhaps caused by the moment on the stage when Lara linked Drake and I together, and her vision poured out.

  Strange things.

  Feargal wants to stay and look around, take the chance to resupply and absorb this, but there is no time. Anna left a cache nearby, and we drive for that.

  Tucked under the rickety aluminum roof of a faded red barn, a mile or so north on a dirt track, there are two Humvees, along with more weapons, several barrels of gas, food, medical supplies. It only takes ten minutes to transfer our few drones over to the trunk, then another thirty to bring the vehicle online; airing up tires wilted by a season's passing, refueling and loading in the barrels, tossing rifles in on top of the drones.

  If I was the shark-eyed man, I would have blown this depot, another cairn in the spine Anna built leading out to Istanbul. Probably he didn't know about it, though. This is our world, and it's gratifying to know they don't have eyes everywhere, at all times.

  I get in the passenger seat and wait for Feargal to take the wheel. There's a new look in his eyes when he climbs into the driving seat, even coming through the fog. He's seen me do this before, to Arnst.

  "Get us to the next bunker," I tell him. "Get us to Gap."

  14. HUMMINGBIRD

  Time passed Anna in a mélange of broken instances, endlessly sedated, with the soap-skinned man at her side looking down. Sometimes his face was gray and striped, like a patched pair of jeans, while other times it was a raw and bloody purple, like marbled venison steak. Moments shuttered forward as a flipbook, with his nightmare face jerkily bobbing up and down, dragging her on.

  She tried to get control.

  Like a prisoner who only saw their jailer once a day, in the brief periods she drifted up from the cotton wool of the sedative's solitary confinement, she tried to recognize patterns. At times her body was shifted in a different position; there seemed to be some kind of crane hung from the ceiling which rolled her. She caught the disinfectant scent of alcohol and felt parts of her belly and back
being scrubbed.

  The white ceiling shone with different brightnesses of light, which could be the days turning. The suck suck smack sound of Ravi's dead breath changed in pitch and volume, which had to mean he was moving further away, moving closer. She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling through blurred Coke-bottle glasses, everything leering and strange.

  "Who are you?" she managed once, coming up from a dream of Ravi holding tiny little white eggs in his hands, each as big as a jellybean.

  "Hummingbird eggs, Anna," Ravi had told her. "Aren't they lovely? Don't eat them."

  "Just a survivor," the man said. His red mouth blabbed open like a spilling wound. "How do you feel, Anna?"

  She was still thinking of the jellybean eggs as he spoke, though every urge in her insisted that she find out some meaningful data; coax something from him that would help her escape.

  "Raspberry," she said, slipping the word carefully past her sluggish tongue. But that was wrong, and she had to think a long time to get it right. "Vanilla."

  "Sounds good, sweetie," said Ravi.

  Suck, suck, smack, said Ravi.

  The darkness brought her back down.

  Periods of separation sent her aloft, where she was no longer Anna on a sailboat on the ocean, but an Anna thing in the air, floating from person to person like a happy T4 bacteria on the line, deciding who would live and who would die.

  "You," she would say from above, dusting them with a magic wand. "You too."

  The sky was white and wrong. Zebra-striped monsters lumbered around her, and she flitted amongst their heaving flanks like a child.

  "You," she said, saving and damning with the same strokes. "You."