Far below the world burned around her people. New LA burned. Ravi burned. Amo burned in the very middle, a terrible look on his face.
"You," Anna said, descending above him, but he only shook his head.
"It's too late for me, Anna. Look to your own."
He lit the touch paper in his hands, and the dynamite wrapped around his chest like a terrorist's suicide vest caught, and boomed.
Anna woke weeping. Still she couldn't move. Still Ravi sucked and gasped nearby, and the room was dark, and she was so alone that all she could do was moan.
"Ravi."
She moaned his name again and again, because he was dead. He was dead and he was breathing next to her and she couldn't help, Amo couldn't help, and she was alone in this place and afraid.
Fear came to her as an unfamiliar thing. She'd never been afraid like this before, not when her father turned to a zombie or when he walked into the water with the thousands of others, not when Julio threatened her or the demons came or ever.
This was a deeper kind of fear, cutting into her bones and making her feel truly alone. Before there'd always been her father; even after he was gone his touch lingered on, blinking through the night on the screen of his phone. In those days she'd been the one rejecting the world, for him. At some point though she'd changed, and she'd started to want other things.
She'd wanted Ravi. She'd wanted peace. She'd wanted a world where they could raise children together.
She sobbed into the dark. Ravi sucked and smacked, answering her. Those things would never happen now, because she was going to die here, alone, suffering for nothing. The thought terrified her.
At some point in that misery the voice rose up from the darkness.
"I won't live to see this through."
Anna jerked. She sobbed harder. She tried to flinch back into her bed. In the dark she couldn't see anything. Fear seized her on a primal level.
"It's all right," the voice came again, warbling and wet now. Perhaps his throat was bleeding, and he'd drown on his own blood. "It's what I always expected. To be so close, though. I understand your pain, Anna."
She couldn't speak for the fear. Any minute he was going to hurt her. Dull echoes of the things he'd already done filtered back to her, smothered by time and sedation. Her stomach throbbed hard and she wanted to wriggle free and curl around it, but the frame held her fast.
"I lost everything I loved when the Seal came down. You're stronger than me, of course."
He sounded drunk; his cadences leering, lost in mid-sentence gargles.
"I've done things I'm not proud of. Just like you, just like your people. You haven't seen your leader yet, Amo." He paused, and Anna fitfully scanned the blackness, broken by tiny red and green lights spotted around the room like a diffuse galaxy of power lights on fridges and specimen boxes and computers. "He's turned. Become something different, something destructive. It can happen to all men. And women. It's interesting how it displays so clearly on the hydrogen line. We never designed for that."
Anna tried to stop herself from shuddering. The words he was saying didn't make much sense, but there was a meaning there. He was trying to communicate for the first time in, what, months? She had no idea how long she'd been trapped there, listening to Ravi suck at the air.
"I-" she began, but couldn't get any more out.
"I know," came his wet tones. "I know. I've hurt you, but what does an apology mean? I've been alone for so long. Pursuing the same goal for so long. I think you know something about this. Would you be surprised to know I've been watching you since the beginning? When you were only a child following your father. His signal on the line was particularly strong."
A different kind of tear came to Anna's eyes. "My father?"
"Yes. I watched you and him, traveling across the country. All of your people. I wasn't here then, of course. Before my cure, back when I still believed. Before my skin came away."
Something like a chuckle came from the dark, sounding like a dog vomiting. "There are so many things you need to know. So many lies I've kept to myself for a decade. Maybe, do you think, that is what's consuming me from inside? I think that sometimes, when there's no one to speak with, as if it's not just a perverse addition to Lyell's. It's my punishment for hypocrisy. My stomach is stripping itself. My throat, my lungs. I've studied the genome for the internal damage; it's a highly elegant time-delayed interpretation of tuberculosis. Beautiful in its simplicity. What a death he designed for me. For all of us."
Anna's tears stopped. Her head was clearing. For the first time in so long she felt the tide of the drugs ebb.
"He?"
His voice laughed back at her. "He. Yes. And who is he? That is the question I have asked for so long. Who did this to me? Why did I deserve to be punished so completely?"
Anna blinked, the fear falling behind her now, replaced by a desperate curiosity. Something was changing in the air. "The infection was made."
The voice laughed again, and coughed, and spat thick fluid. "Yes. But you always knew that, didn't you? I've been listening. You knew it from the moment you first saw the T4, just as I knew. It is a truly great work, such intricacy, perhaps mankind's crowning achievement, standing atop a pyramid of giants."
He fell silent. Anna came back to herself more every moment passing, growing aware of the bed beneath her, a slight draft over her left cheek, and the dull cold pressure on her stomach from the restraining belt. She began working the angles in her head. Perhaps this conversation could lead to her escape.
"You were one of those giants," she said, aiming to play into his vanity. "You designed it too."
He laughed again. He spat again. "Perhaps the smallest. I was no challenge for the greater intellects in our compact. Pierce. Romirez. Al-Abra. They towered above me, and humored me like I was a child fumbling in the darkness. Like now."
Anna ran those names through her head, but they matched nothing she'd heard before. "Who are they?"
"Nobody. Dead, now, all of them. So it wasn't them, I know that. Whoever did this to me, to all of us, is still watching. I can feel them out there, enjoying seeing the pieces of me fall away. They take pleasure in my feeble efforts to bring a cure. They enjoy the depths I sink to, the depravities I commit, just to fail time after time."
Her eyes flicked to the left, where the ceaseless soundtrack of Ravi sucking at the air continued.
"What have you done?"
"I? What terrible things." He paused. "Many. Morality is a prison, Anna. It binds men together, and it blinds them. For so long I didn't see what had to be done. Perhaps he hid it here, so I would stumble upon it at the end. What have I done? You would weep even more, to hear the number of survivors just like yourself that I have taken apart in this lab. Some of the greatest tortures ever committed, I wager, peeling down to the code. Extracting. Removing. Seeking answers in the pattern of the mind as I change the fundamental programming of thought. Digging, always, looking for the key, and failing. Failing time after time, all that suffering for nothing. And then you came to me."
Anna shuddered. Memories of another time returned, before this whiteness took over her world. "I didn't come to you. I came for Bordeaux, because there was a change on the line. The zombies were all dead. Was that you?"
More chuckles. "No. But it drew me also, like a fly to carrion. It's what I am, what he made me; the living dead." He sighed. "Anna, no. The depths, I can't see how to express them to you. Your role, what you might do. But above it all is the key. I will not survive the maturation, that is the only reality that counts. My fuse is close to running out, so you will have to carry that burden yourself."
"What burden?"
"A burden of nine months."
He let the words hang. He said no more. He'd said it earlier, and it came back to Anna now with a flattening finality.
"Ravi's baby?"
Just the words made her want to be sick.
"Yes. There are terrible secrets blooming within you now. A code th
at may be the key for us all, though too late for me. With that task completed, now I can afford to be selfless, though I remain the coward I always have been. I get to die like this, both my crime and my punishment in one. More elegance."
Anna wormed her feet. She could feel them. She could feel her back, her thighs, the cold weight on her belly which she'd thought to be the tight band, but now had to be something else.
"So let me go," she said. It was the gambit he was offering. It was the next step; a world away from the place she'd been just a short time earlier, but everything had changed since then.
He hacked in the darkness and spat. "I can. But there are promises I must extract. Truths you need to know."
"What truths?"
"The truth that there is a dead creature growing inside your body. It is your and Ravi's child, but it is not alive. It is something fundamentally different. It may be another species, or another trap in the disease he designed for. It could chew its way out of you at any moment, or perhaps reach into your nervous system and take you over from within. I can't predict those futures. I just know that it is something wholly new."
Anna shivered at the thought of something chewing its way out her stomach. She'd seen the movies, and it was best not to think about it too directly. It helped that she couldn't move, perhaps. Couldn't touch her own belly.
"So it's in there," she said coldly.
"It is. It's healthy, if such a thing can be said of the dead. It will grow. It may kill you in any of a hundred different ways. Or it may save you."
"And you want me to protect it."
A shuffling sound came from the darkness to her right. He was moving. He took a step, and like a planetary body blocking the light from distant stars, his passage was marked by the little lights around the room blinking as he passed.
"I want your promise that you won't kill it. That you won't dig it out."
She shuddered. "Why would I?"
"Because I put it there. Because it's horrible. Anna, are you ready to see? I wish we had longer, but I feel the cliff edge approaching."
"Ready to see what? It's inside me."
"Yes. But you can still see."
The lights flickered on sharply, hurting her eyes, but through the film of tears she glimpsed him and flinched. He was far worse than before, stripped down like a standing slab of meat, with barely a shred of skin left. He was a raw, glossy red, naked and oozing slow, pale blood. His chest was a ripe, striated peach of muscle fiber glistening beneath a thin layer of waxy fat. Only tiny patches of skin tasseled with tiny shoots of hair remained in places, like dirty ice floes lost on a red ocean, waiting to melt. His thighs were thin and wasted drumsticks, pocketed with sallow swellings of muscle that bunched and contracted as he moved, revealing glimpses of bone beneath. His face was an empty red mask with bloody red balls in his eye sockets.
She gasped. She pulled away. It was a miracle he was still alive.
"I kill the nerve endings," he said, lurching to the base of her bed. "It helps for a time, but the T4 forces them to regrow. It would be all right, if not for that. But the skin always returns." His voice cracked. "I can't stop that. So it grows, and then it comes away. Have you heard the story of Prometheus?"
Anna nodded, her eyes wide. In all her days of zombies and demons, she'd never seen anything as horrific as this. That he was alive, and moving, made her sick to her stomach.
"He lost his liver. I lose my skin. I can only hope it is worth the pain, and all the many sacrifices I have made. An irony, perhaps." He stopped at the foot of her bed. There was a tight white sheet over her, covering her from the chest down. "But I don't know. Nobody will know, until your baby comes. Maybe then, yes? Maybe then."
He reached to the sheet at her side. The overwhelming smell of bile, blood and vomit came with him, and Anna gagged. "Brace yourself," he said, and took hold of the sheet, leaving dry bloody smears on the white. Slowly, carefully, he walked backward, stripping the sheet away.
First she saw the tubes. Second she saw the swelling. Third she saw the creature within.
Then she vomited.
Three tubes ran up to her stomach, each as large around as an apple, and there they slotted into a kind of transparent goldfish bowl wedged into her spread-eagled stomach. Her dark skin had been folded and gathered back, held now in clamps to make room for the bowl; glass or plastic, it served as a viewing window inside what had to be her own womb, revealing a tiny shred of matter inside, floating in a murky stew.
She gagged and vomited again.
It was gray and so thin, not yet recognizably a baby, more a chunk of mottled bark in dirty sea foam.
"Naturally I will remove the viewing piece," he said, continuing as if this was normal. "I will seal you up and remove the gene treatment hoses. Then it will fall to you to protect this creature. To keep it in its steady state until the code growing within it is complete. Then it can be extracted, and a cure may be created."
Anna tried to wipe her stringy lips on her collar, but of course she couldn't move. The vomit lay on her neck and chin and chest. As she watched, the little gray thing twitched, and she felt the slightest kick in her spine, almost vomiting again.
It was as terrifying as anything she'd felt earlier. It was worse. It was inside her.
"What do I-" she began, gasping, "how do I 'extract' it?"
"Yes," he said. Looking at his pink, purple face was almost a relief after seeing the sick thing in her belly. Attached to her. "I'll be dead by then. I won't be able to finish the work, but there is one person I know who might. Whose natural intellect could stand alongside those other giants I mentioned. Price, Romirez, Al-Abra. You know him already."
She gasped. "Lucas?"
"Lucas Fallow. Yes. He found his own cure through innovative brilliance, and brought on his own case of Lyell's. His time will be limited too, just as mine is. So the Prometheus' of this world are punished. So we are treated for trying to bring fire."
Anna stared. Lucas. The dead shred of meat in her middle. "I can't-"
"'I can't' is exactly what I said," he interrupted her. "Every day of my life for the last twelve years, ever since I was cast from the garden and chained to this mountainside, I said it as I tortured your people to death, looking for understanding, I said that I could not. I said it to myself a hundred times, in the mirror as my skin shed, to the air when I could no longer stomach my own reflection, but still I did it, what had to be done. Again and again, and you will too. Lucas will. Take my life's work to him, and pray that he understands what to do."
He shuffled closer. His hands raised to one of the cables feeding into the clear ball in her belly, and he worked a dial.
"What are you doing?" she asked, but already she felt it. The return of the drugs.
"Knocking you out. You would not want to be awake for the extraction of this." He tapped the glass dome. "You would be-"
His voice faded out, and she sank, until she was back with Ravi in the darkness, and he held his hands out to her and opened them slowly, revealing a tiny white egg in the cupped bowl of his palms, slowly cracking open.
"It's a hummingbird egg," he said, so sweetly, so gentle. "It'll be a beautiful thing, Anna, don't you think?"
In the dark she wept, and took his hands, and sheltered the egg while the tiny creature pushed its beak into the light.
INTERLUDE 6
The Western Seal was in chaos.
General Marshall spoke to Control in bursts as he drove, willing the weight in his head back, but only caught pieces of the panic burning through the three bunkers that had signed the Sailor's treaty.
Gap, Brezno and Istanbul.
The Mayor had broken his defensive line at Bordeaux with an ease that was terrifying. He'd reached inside Marshall's own head, through the generation 5 helmet that was supposed to keep him safe, and implanted a terrible paralysis.
It was hard to remember now what that had felt like. The three worst-affected of his soldiers were now in the Dome, whistlin
g behind in convoy, bloody and dead to the world. The three behind him in the Humvee spoke in tepid bursts, trying to reassure each other, trying to fit the pieces together, but they added up to no known effect of the line. This was something new, and the Seal had their best people on it, all except Lucas Fallow, who was making phenomenal strides in his own area.
But there wasn't time. He hadn't anticipated this.
The Mayor's force had crushed his own before they'd even engaged. He'd prepared a defensive barricade that should have held off a battalion; drones, autocannons, sniper and high-powered rifle-fire from cover, artillery shells and the Black Hawk itself, firing twin M60D machine guns on the move. With the Dome in back as their nexus they'd spent a week clearing roads and setting up advantageous defensive screens, allowing them to cover a range of beach a hundred kilometers in length with a fast response time of minutes.
It should have been unbreachable. For the last two days they'd run the simulations again and again of the Mayor's landing; where he would hit, when he would hit, how the battle would go. They'd seen his high-spec yacht was towing eight speedboats behind it and considered the possibility that he would split his forces, and accordingly set fast-response units in lower-grade generation 4 helmets to cover that eventuality.
Then he'd chained and camouflaged his ships in the night, making drone and artillery strikes highly unreliable, getting close enough to send the devastating paralysis through the air, and the battle was lost. Two men in generation 4 helmets had died on the road before Marshall swung by to pick them up. One of the generation 5 helmets had overloaded and scrambled the soldier wearing it so badly that Marshall had no choice but to put a bullet through his head.
Now his force was in full retreat. He had soldiers in back who needed the Dome, but it was at capacity. Instead they lay on the seats and groaned with the weight of whatever the Mayor had done, already deep into their respective kill-zones, well beyond twenty hours of exposure. Worse still, tracked every inch of the way by the Seal's satellites, came the Mayor on their tail.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 159
