The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Lydia looks at the map of the Atlantic, whispering silently. Of course she has children back home. I hope she is thinking of them, as we do this work. These people would have wiped us out. They tried many times. We extended the hand of friendship to them, offered them a treaty and help in finding the cure, and this is how they repaid us.

  Arnst entertains himself savaging the room. He kicks dead bodies when they lie in his way. He tears open drawers and tosses the contents into the air so they fall like white autumn leaves to the ground, where they sop up blood.

  After he gets bored of that he ranges out into the corridor, where he starts shooting.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  He's a good dog, but the noise is distracting Feargal. I send a pulse that stills him, and the gunfire stops. Keeshom gives me a pathetically grateful look.

  In half an hour Feargal emerges, sweating and burned in places and swathed with engine grease. The air puffing out with him smells of ozone.

  "Done," he says. "There'll be nothing left."

  Nothing left.

  "Let's go," I say, and lead them out. Arnst picks up after us in the corridor. We reconnect with Hatya above ground. She sobs while Keeshom paces in tight, mad little circles on the flattened grass. Casualties of war. I silence them both with a pulse. I don't really need them now, though they may have their uses, so I'll keep them around. My doctor and my engineer, like we're an away team from the dark mirror episodes of Star Trek, where the captain leads his crew to bring devastation wherever he goes.

  "Do it," I tell Feargal, and he taps a button on his tablet.

  The physical blast doesn't reach us, but I feel the eruption on the line like an earthquake. The charge obliterates outward, blinding me to any sense, then sucks in with a gale-force violence that almost drags me down into the well. Only Arnst's hand on my chest keeps me in place.

  Then it is over.

  Arnst looks at me with a curious expression; part concern, part rising confidence. I show weakness that could damage our mission, and in that he sees his opportunity coming. There is no loyalty to me here, only to my strength. So I'll be stronger.

  Below us, the full weight of the line soaks into the earth, no longer repelled by the shield. My sensation of it comes back gradually, like vision returning after a flash goes off in a dark room. The shield's tides that had lapped at my mind and skin for the last eight hours are gone, and all the people underground are trapped.

  I don't say anything more. This is only the first, after all. There's Brezno, then the shark-eyed man in Istanbul and whatever surprises he has planned, and after that another seven bunkers. This is only the beginning.

  Hatya has gone silent, numb from the size of the loss. Lydia guides her. Arnst grins and Feargal follows with a weary step. Keeshom stands there until Feargal takes him by the arm and leads him away.

  We refuel. We get back in our vehicles.

  I'm doing this for my children, I think, for Vie and Talia, but that thought rings utterly hollow. They would not want to know about this, so I decide not to think of them again. It will only pollute them further.

  I put the Humvee in gear and we drive for Slovakia.

  16. BREZNO

  Brezno is far worse.

  We drive for a day and a night, and at some point I sleep. Arnst sits at his wheel throughout in the Jeep behind us, a manic expression on his face. Revenge. For him it's misplaced, since he didn't care about New LA. Rather he's just excited to cut down people because he can't cut me down. Just like he savaged me in Screen 2, because Drake gave him permission. I suppose he's an addict.

  From France we pass into Switzerland, cutting through the high, remote passes of the Alps. There's snow here, and skiing pistes riveted with gondola wires like sagging power lines. Through the blip that is Liechtenstein we pour, into the long stretch of Austria. There are castles around every corner, and deep fable-filled forests, and old roads and old lakes and somewhere maybe I see Cinderella, and somewhere Snow White, peeking out from this ancient place.

  I tell myself stories as I drive, to stay awake. I spin Disney tales so the hero must face a terrible choice. What if Simba could save his pride, but had to kill Nala to do so? What if Snow White could free her Kingdom, but had to kill the seven dwarves to get there?

  It's funny, watching their faces crater in my head. The movies they never showed us as kids. Dumbo's mother dies, yes, and so does Bambi's, but not because Dumbo or Bambi killed them. That's the kind of movie my children are growing up in.

  Into the high, clear valleys and lakes of Slovakia I play folk music CDs on maximum volume, picked up from dusty gift shops along the way. There's one with beer steins on the front cover and a man playing bagpipes. I laugh every time I see that, because bagpipes are Scottish! It takes so little to cheer me now.

  Feargal sits and drives while I laugh to myself. Occasionally we swap and he sends one of his drone patrols out, but they find nothing. I could tell him that, but he's a stickler for security. Kind of like Julio. When I think that it sets me off laughing again. Oh, how Julio must have seen me. Jumped-up hipster idiot, painting shit on buildings and calling it hope. I totally get him, now. If I wasn't me, I think, I would have been him.

  On the outside, slowly stewing in my own juices. I could have been him, I could have been Don, I could've been dead already.

  It's funny. We ascend through more fairy-tale castles on roads Anna cleared painstakingly a year back. Cars shunted to the side by her construction equipment, rocking a JCB like I once did on the trek to California.

  Brezno is a small town, population 21,000. Like Gap. There are mountain ranges, which seems a prerequisite for bunkers these days, and a river called the Hron. The town has a nice central square; probably they had a stellar Christmas market here. As we circle up narrow, switchbacking roads toward the bunker, I recite information to Feargal from tourist guides I picked up along the way.

  "Their hockey club was very strong, in the 1st Senior League." I leave a gap for Feargal to show his appreciation, but he is not forthcoming. I flick through the pages looking for something better. "Brezno's most famous son was Slovakia's first astronaut, Ivan Bella. Cosmonaut, actually. He did experiments on quails in space! That's quite a claim to fame."

  He wants to tell me to shut up, I know. That's why I push.

  "There's nothing in here about the bunker though." I riffle to the index but indeed, there is no mention of it.

  We come upon the bunker a few hours after dawn, and it's not like any of the others we've seen before. This one is not a hole dug directly down into the ground, but a large metal doorway built into a face of rock. Those doors would take some opening, but then Feargal always knew what we were coming up against, and he's got the requisite explosives.

  Except we won't need them.

  The doors stand open, leading into a well-lit cement gullet that stretches in and down. But that is not the most extraordinary thing either. The most extraordinary thing is the people.

  They are everywhere; lying in the gullet like bits of undigested food, clogging round the doors, mounding and writhing. In the clearing before the door, where now the stump of an autocannon bristles raggedly, they lie in their hundreds.

  Like in Gap, they're alive and phasing under the line. Some of them shudder. Some of them crawl. Some of them even see us.

  Arnst calls something terrible over the radio and roars ahead, ramming his Jeep onto this low ocean of bodies like a little kid running through piles of autumn leaves.

  Crunch, splat, splurge. Bodies burst and stop wriggling under his truck's big wheels. He does donuts as we pull up. In a few moments the clearing is a churned wound of mud and blood, which even tweaks my stomach a little. Perhaps I haven't seen anything quite as bad as this. Of course I've done worse to the ocean, but these are not the ocean.

  These are people.

  God knows why they left the shelter of their shield. I suppose they knew they had no other choice. They
were afraid. They ran for the hills. Maybe they thought they could get on their knees and beg, and I would take pity.

  Feargal pulls up our Humvee and sits at the wheel, knuckles white on the wheel. Clearly furious. "He's enjoying it."

  I nod along. Arnst hops out and starts stomping on skulls. He breaks wrists and ribcages with his boot heels. He's having a hell of a time out there. He starts singing what I think is a Bavarian beer hall song, bawling lustily while he stomps and savages. It would be cartoonish if it wasn't real. He's cracked worse than me.

  "You should stop him," Feargal says. "This is not right."

  I look at him. Maybe this is about a kind of revenge, because hearing him say that makes me feel good. Perhaps I really am that petty. In Screen 2 when Arnst was hurting me, and Drake was hurting me, Feargal didn't even look my way. That was a hard choice, and it hurt me more than I can say. But then I'm weak too. We're all weak. They're all going to die anyway.

  "Not the right kind of genocide?" I ask calmly. "You'd prefer your mass slaughter a little more bloodless, perhaps?"

  His lip twitches. He wants to cave in my head, and I don't blame him. Maybe I want him to.

  "Send a drone in," I say. "He'll tire himself out."

  He doesn't.

  The whole time he stomps on heads. As Feargal sends his drones in, blowing a few traps with their probing blasts, Arnst keeps dancing until he is sweltering in sweat. When we finally stand in front of the shield mechanism, deep in the belly of the mountain, then he stops. There are no dead bodies here waiting for us. They must have accepted their fate with greater equanimity than Gap, and the shark-eyed man didn't need to kill them. He just let them open the door and crawl into freedom on the line.

  "Beg," I imagine him saying. "It won't save you, but it's all you can do."

  Or maybe they just grew tired of waiting for death to come. Better to bring it on yourself.

  "You should try this, Amo," Arnst says.

  He is sopping with blood, like he's taken a bath in the stuff. It must be sloshing around in his boots. I smile at him, then I hit him between the eyes with the haft of my gun. He goes right down, plonk, like a stone. He's like a little kid who had too much ice cream, and now he needs a timeout.

  Feargal watches me with something beyond disgust. "Now? Why now?"

  I shrug.

  "You just brought him to torture us. That's the only reason." He looks so sick. "Who are you?"

  I look at him. "What I need to be. Pain is weakness leaving the body, Feargal. Haven't you heard that? These people are becoming strong."

  He shudders and shakes his head. I'm sure he has hopes of returning from this voyage into hell as a human being, but I have no such delusions. We're damned for this, so may as well be doubly damned. But I'll admit, it is better with Arnst quiet.

  While Feargal goes to his work, I kneel by a child, maybe eleven years old. Probably conceived in the first year after the Seal came down. Her eyes flicker a panicked gray then green then gray, like a traffic light gone out of control. I stroke her soft red hair, tucking a strand behind her ear. Is she in pain? It's hard to say. I wonder how long she'll survive like this, locked into the line. If her current state is anything like the ocean, then it could be for years. I hope it doesn't hurt. I don't want that for anyone. If this is about revenge, then it's not against these people individually.

  Still it is cruel to leave them. Maybe we'll come back when we have more time and kill them all properly. It's the least I can do. Though that is a lot of stops, and I rather doubt that I'll have the appetite for it, when the whole trek is complete. After I finish up in Kamchatka, twelve bunkers down the line, thirty thousand dead or thereabouts, will I really want to retrace my steps and finish coloring within the lines?

  "Done," Feargal says.

  We head out and he blows the shield. The pulse washes through me like before, and wakes Arnst. We had to drag him out; the big bastard is heavy. He rubs the crust of blood on his face and grins up at me.

  "You see? It feels good."

  I have to laugh at that. Victory. Yes.

  We leave the people of Brezno as they are, caught in their fits like mosquitoes in the amber of the line. Even when I'm ten thousand miles away they'll still be here, phasing between life and death. What a life. They survived the apocalypse and more than twelve years in a cooped up can underground, but they couldn't survive me.

  We go south.

  From Brezno it is another thousand miles to Istanbul; down through Hungary, Serbia, south-east across Bulgaria and then into Turkey.

  It gets warm again as we go. Hungary looks ancient and flea-bitten through the window. I dream of hands reaching up through the asphalt to pull me down. Serbia is a world of ugly little villages scoured by dry sandy winds. Bulgaria is a long nightmare of demons cracking open my head and sucking out the contents with a straw.

  I'm sick.

  I feel Istanbul coming. There are things on the line ahead that I don't understand, filling it up with a kind of rippling static. I can't get any kind of read on what they are, but neither can I stop. I caution Feargal, and he twitches in the seat beside me. I tell the others via radio, but no response comes back except a giddy cheer from Arnst.

  I've stopped trying to reach Keeshom, Hatya and Lydia now, because they're useless, serving only to stare in horror. The shock has eaten deeply into them, and the kindest thing I could probably do is kill them too. The wounds in their heads will never heal.

  Keeshom was a good man. Maybe Hatya was a good woman.

  The static swells ahead, fizzing over the line like spilled Coke. I don't know what the shark-eyed man is doing, but it's changing the fabric of the air.

  Feargal feels it too. He gets woozy. He holds his head. I'm not laughing anymore or checking tourist guides. It takes all we have to keep pressing forward. There are more mosques now, fewer churches, persimmon trees by the roadside. Edirne on the border of Turkey is particularly glorious, but everything feels jagged. Sometimes I just stare.

  Clouds leer down. I almost catch a glimpse of Drake on top of a creamy yellow minaret, waving down with a sniper rifle trained on me, but then he's gone. Cerulean moves behind walls secretly, following me and leaping room to room, never seen.

  "What do you want?" I whisper to him. "What would you have me do?"

  He doesn't answer but keeps tracking me, never showing his face.

  I feel strange things out there on the line, burning wildly like pulsar stars. Their random waves hit me in the head and that gets the twinges started. I can't make a screen of madness strong enough to keep them out, so as we drive they keep impacting off my thoughts like meteors, leaving craters behind.

  At times I forget where we're going. I'll look at Feargal and in his eyes see a hatred that makes no sense to me, and I'll almost start crying before I remember; I put that hate there. Something is happening, but we can't stop now. We turn up the speed. We forget to launch drones and just advance. Nobody looks at the radar anymore, and my sense for what lies ahead cannot be trusted.

  The road leads through Ahmetbey. The countryside is a barren, featureless brown. My eyes stop working and I try to blink my vision back. Evergreen ferns loom like the legs of giants, and I beg them not to take my head.

  "I need it," I tell them.

  "Need what?" Feargal asks.

  We race down E80, getting closer. The air starts to smell of the salty breeze from the Sea of Marmara, then we hit the coast and blue shimmers away for a hundred miles. We pass Çorlu and Gilivri and Büyükçekmece, and they each look like perfect backdrops for the zombie apocalypse; empty highways leading to derelict gray tower blocks.

  Coming in to the built-up core of Istanbul I begin to sink. I sag with my head against the glove box. The muscles in my body go weak and flop like wet pasta. Nausea comes from my insides and shuts me down. I break out in a cold sweat and reach out to the others for strength, laying a hold on Arnst in the vehicle behind to draw off him, though it barely keeps me afloat. A goo
d dog, still. I'm just about to tell Feargal to send a drone ahead when-

  BOOM

  The rear vehicle in our convoy, Keeshom and Hatya, jumps up in the air. There's some fire, and it flips. I lean over to watch in the side mirror as it tumbles, then lands, and another-

  BOOM rings out, and this time it's Arnst and Lydia that take the brunt of the blast, sending their Jeep rolling sideways into a rusted Mercedes and careening off to crash through a shop window.

  The third BOOM comes for us, and almost flips us too, but Feargal's too canny for that. He swerves wildly across the road, taking us into the shadow of buildings I barely noticed were there. I suppose they're shooting at us, but now I don't really care. I'm like that girl in Gap, phasing in and out, no longer part of what's happening around her. Anything will be a relief now.

  The fourth BOOM doesn't get us, nor the fifth, though the sixth clips our tail and sends us shattering off a brick corner and spinning into an alley. We come to rest with the hood embedded in a large blue plastic dumpster. I note that the bricks here were once plastered with handbills advocating political regime change, but the print has long since been reduced to blurry smears on a white wattling.

  My head's bleeding. I look at my hands and see my one finger bent comically backward, the same one Drake broke a month back, and give a little, sickly laugh. How the hell did that happen, again? I grab it and twist it straight, almost fainting from the pain. Probably I shouldn't have done that.

  There is gunfire close by. Probably they're polishing off the others. Soon they'll come for us, but that's OK. I deserve this; I suppose in one way this is just what I was coming for anyway. Kill or be killed, and isn't it better if I'm killed? I don't want to kill thirty thousand people just to save my children. I love them, but there's only two of them. Are they really any better than that little girl on the floor in Gap, someone who Arnst would have crushed underfoot just to feel good? I don't want to do this at all.

  I weep in the front seat as Feargal jerks awake, bleeding from his temple. He looks at me crying and he's so shocked it flips me over to laughing.