The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Hit, hit, smack, smack, miss.

  He pummels the shark-eyed man's chest, breaking ribs inward. He hammers his throat and clubs in his skull. He beats the body until he's panting, then he rolls onto his haunches, but overbalances and rolls backward. He turns to me and stands. I can barely see his face through the blood-spattered helmet's visor. It looks strange, a little too small for him really, jammed on his head like a tight black bottle mouth on a swollen cork.

  I'm too exhausted to even try and fight. I slump back. The blood's drying on me but I must look a terrible sight.

  "Killed him too, did you?" Arnst asks, nodding over to where Feargal lies.

  I don't look. I've seen enough of dead Feargal.

  "Yes," I say, because I don't care to mince words with this. I didn't, but I did, so let the record stand. "I like your hat. It's petite."

  Arnst snorts. "I remember that mouth."

  He walks over. He's wobbling. Probably he rolled his ankle somewhere along the way. I'm impressed he took a helmet off one of these men; that he thought it might help, that he was able to do it. From the look of them on the rooftops, from the look of the shark-eyed man, they were well-trained and not too keen to give up the very equipment that was keeping them alive. Surely they were the best the bunkers had to offer.

  But then Arnst is ex-military too. Trained and in shape. I never took him seriously enough.

  He kicks me in the thigh, deadening it instantly. Just a warmer, really. A reminder.

  "You talked a lot then, too. In Screen 2." He leers down at me. He's remembering. I don't really blame him.

  "Live by the lash, eh?" I say.

  He blinks. He doesn't get it. "What?"

  "Live by the lash, die by the lash?" This doesn't draw any sparks. "Every drop of blood spilled shall be repaid with the sword?"

  Nothing. Maybe his English is not that good. He didn't talk much in Screen 2 either, as I recall. Mostly I was smart-mouthing with Drake. Now the lieutenant wants a go.

  "What sword?"

  "Forget it," I say, and he does, kicking me in the balls.

  It's a piercing shock that drives right up into my belly. I puke to the side, and the puking itself hurts like a bitch. It's cold and throbbing. Shit, what a mess.

  "You talked and talked," Arnst says, reminiscing. "In your chair. It looks like you miss it. I can find you another chair."

  "I'm fine here," I manage, wheezing out the words.

  He stamps on my chest. Crack. Some ribs break and suddenly it gets harder to breathe. This is new; I suppose he was restrained before. Now he's all-in.

  "I can't talk if you break my lungs."

  He considers. He looks about us. He sees the dead black and white thing.

  "What happened with that?"

  I don't really know. Maybe these will be my last words though, so worth making them good.

  "Fuck you."

  Not that good.

  He puts one foot on my hip and rocks his weight on top. It is actually incredibly painful. The skin is pinched. My hip creaks and threatens to pop out of the joint. That's a new kind of pain.

  "All right," I gasp, "some kind of fight on the line. I killed it; it blew up. What a mess, right?"

  He eases up slightly. "That thing?"

  His accent has gone stronger. He sounds almost Russian.

  "Yeah. I see you put a helmet on. Where'd you get that idea from?"

  He frowns down at me. "From?"

  "Yeah. You don't need it anymore, though. The blast's over."

  He grins, then taps the faceplate. "About this? You think I wore this for your light show?"

  Now it's my turn to frown. If he didn't, then…

  "Yes," he says, enjoying my slow realization. "From the time you whipped me, this is what I have wanted. You should not have made them whip me. Lydia was my wife!"

  Ah. He seems angry about that. If it wasn't for the pain in my groin I'd laugh.

  "Wife?" I scoff instead. "You called Drake's raping shitshow a family too, didn't you? She wasn't your wife, you dumb-"

  He ducks in and slaps me across the face. After the other blows it comes as a dizzying wake-up call. There's something very personal about being slapped in the face. It literally moves the world for you, and the pain from a slap can be worse than a punch, with so many surface level pain receptors firing like a thunderclap.

  Just to be sure, he slaps me the other way, to make things even.

  "She was gay," I manage, before a third slap comes. "I suppose you think being gay was just a phase too, like she'd never had a real man?"

  Now he does punch me, damn hard, crushing my nose and grinding my skull onto the hard road. Blood flows down my throat and I spit it up at him. It splashes off his visor and he grins.

  "I will enjoy this. Taking you apart."

  "Take your helmet off, you pussy," I gush, my voice gone nasal with the break. It's harder to suck in breath and talk at the same time.

  "I will listen to all that you have to say," he says reasonably. "I will listen until the moment you break, and then I will listen more. You like people talking. I think I might let you talk yourself to death."

  I don't have much to say to that. He's too excited about it, getting his revenge for the long drive where I made him talk through the night. It's all so petty. He smacks halfheartedly at my chest, jostling the broken ribs, like I'm some kind of talking doll he can jog back to life.

  "Kill me and you'll all die," I say. "You need me to-"

  He stuffs his boot in my mouth, and I gargle into silence. That's new too. He presses harder and my jaw creaks, threatening to dislocate. I can't breathe and can't stop the blood flowing down my open throat. It's too hard to swallow, so instead I choke.

  Waterboarded on my own blood.

  When he finally leans back, I cough for at least a minute straight, hacking up sticky red slime. It's everywhere. Shit. It dawns on me that I am going to die. I am going to break, and this asshole will win. But what will he win?

  "I'm serious," I go on. "Do you even know where the bunkers are?"

  "Of course," he answers. "I have listened, friend Amo." He gives me a wry grin, made grotesque by how damn big his face is crammed into that helmet.

  "I should have killed you in the desert."

  He nods. "Yes."

  He stands on my calf. He balances there while I scream. It hurts a ridiculous amount.

  "You are my balance beam," he says, and takes a step onto my thigh. "You see, I can talk too. I was once a gymnast." He pulls a pirouette, which probably tears a disc of skin off, before he topples laughing to the side.

  "Talking is your skill. I will make it my skill. I will find your bunkers and kill them. Maybe you will come with me for some of this? I would let you see that you are not necessary; there are other ways to run this world. Perhaps I will put you on a chain and have you do the killing for me."

  I manage a smile. "That sounds like a really good time. Let's do it."

  His good humor insulates him to my sarcasm. "I am glad you are excited. There are so many days ahead, Amo. Together we will-"

  BANG

  His chest blows outward.

  I jerk as blood sprays over my face. Arnst himself looks confused. He tries to look down at his own chest but the helmet is too tight to get a good angle. Instead he looks at me, suddenly lost.

  "Am I-" he manages, gesturing down with his eyes, too horrified by the possibility.

  I nod at him, dumbstruck. It's a pitiful communication, really. There's a sucking exit hole in his chest that looks to be through his lung. I can see flesh inside palpitating. God knows what is keeping him on his feet.

  "I think-" Arnst begins, but he never gets to finish that thought. Probably it was momentous, but the moment can't hold him up, and he goes down. Not to one knee, not toppling like a tree, just crumbling inward like a well-dynamited building. His tailbone cracks off the asphalt then his helmet, then he just lies as still as Feargal.

  I'm shocked. I'm still bre
athing hard. I look over and see the shark-eyed man holding a huge silver Magnum on me, smoke still curling from the barrel like a spaghetti Western. It's awesome.

  He pulls the trigger again.

  * * *

  The gun goes click.

  Click click click.

  That's a sweet sound.

  I let my head sag back and laugh. Ah, to survive. He gurgles away over there; his face way more smashed than my own, but there's no reloading now. This is surely it for both of us. He lies flat, a spent force, just like me. Whoever has the strength to get up first is going to win. All we'd need to do is lie on top of the other, tilt their head back, and they'll drown.

  In the end, it's me.

  I crawl over, groin still throbbing from that massive kick. I stop in front of Arnst and prize his helmet off. His thick, curly-headed cork of a head pops out, and I shake sweat and blood droplets out, then I crawl the rest of the way to the shark-eyed man.

  He's in a bad way.

  I slump on my side, holding myself up on my elbow, and look at him. His nose is pounded flat. His lips are smashed. The regal look of command is gone, but still his eyes pierce me like steel teeth. I shiver under that glare. Just looking at him makes me surprised I've made it this far.

  I don't have eyes like that.

  He coughs and blood sputters up. His chest is sunken too, like mine. Arnst wearied himself out hitting this iron wall, before he came to me. Everything I took, this man took worse.

  "Here you go," I say numbly, holding out the helmet. "Put it on."

  He just breathes, raspy, and stares. "You told him to take it off."

  I look back at Arnst. Heart blown out of his chest. "Yeah. That's true." My arm slips and my chest almost thumps to the ground. I catch myself in time, barely. "But he was a dick."

  He just looks at me. I can imagine what he's thinking. To be beaten by an idiot like this. To die at an idiot smart mouth's hand. I get it, one hundred percent. It sucks.

  "You'll feel better," I mumble. My lips get in my tongue's way, too thick and unwieldy. I set the helmet down and roll it to him. "Just for now. Just to talk."

  "I don't need it," he says. "Don't you feel that?"

  I weave in place. For a moment I don't know what he's saying, then I remember. There is no line here. I can't feel it because it's gone, washed out to sea leaving a clean beach behind, littered with dead crabs and rotting fish.

  I nod.

  "We call them lepers," he says, every word an effort. "They happen when we make helmets. Only one in two attempts are successful."

  "Lepers," I muse. It's a fitting name. "How many?"

  He looks in my eyes. "If I said it was a hundred, would you-"

  "It's not a hundred."

  His thin, gray lips purse in something like a smile. That obviously pains him, but he holds it. "No. There are thirteen here. Twelve, now you've killed one. Just like the primaries."

  I nod. Twelve primaries for twelve bunkers. "Your demons are all dead now."

  "They are. But these are different. Do you know why we kept them?"

  "A measure of last resort?" I ask. I don't know why, but I quite like talking to him. All business, straight to the point, no screwing around. He'd make a good father figure. "To take me out if ever I got this close?"

  He shakes his head slightly. His cheeks have gone an ashen gray. "No one expected you to reach this far. No. We keep them because they can't be destroyed." He takes a breath. "The devastation each one would make as they die was too strong. You saw what happened here. This whole region," he encompasses Istanbul's suburbs with a roll of his eyes, "will bear the stain for a generation. Like radioactive waste. The line won't return here for years, and nothing will grow. People who pass through will sicken and die. They're a scourge."

  I almost chuckle. I'm addled, half my brain sucked away in the blast, and I can't take anything seriously. "Eye for an eye. You blew up LA."

  He looks at me. "Eye for an eye. We did."

  We both slump silently. For a little while he tries to sit up more, maybe reach a rock or something to hit me with, but he's too weak and getting weaker.

  "Why did you send the bomb?" I ask him.

  It's been preying on my mind ever since we started this descent into darkness. I want there to be some good reason, maybe full of mystery, but with something real at the end.

  "We had the treaty," I go on. "We were working on a cure together. Lucas said we were so close. Why?"

  He snorts, which must be painful because he has no nose now. Blood spurts out of cracks in the mashed middle of his face. "Lucas said. Mr. Fallow is a child stumbling in the dark, like you. His cure was a trap. Hundreds of my people took the same cure, only to die months later in the most agonizing pain. There is no cure for the thing we face. It doesn't exist. We signed the treaty to earn time. To kill you. When it was ready, we sent the bomb."

  This breaks through the shell of disaffection surrounding me. This is something true, and not the thing I'd expected.

  "The cure isn't real?"

  "Not real. Made by whoever made the infection." He shifts position slightly and a reservoir of blood rolls out of a fold in his suit, pooling by his thigh. "There is no cure. I wish there was. Killing you was our only chance."

  This hits me three times. Each time I rock. No cure.

  It salts my resolve.

  "I understand." I say.

  He looks at me. His shark-gray eyes are already flagging. He'll die soon, I expect. He understands too. I can't imagine what things he's seen.

  "You've already killed six thousand of my people," he says.

  "Nine thousand," I correct, "including Maine." Already I feel some of my earlier steel coming back. This man is my enemy. Never mind that he speaks well, and seems good, and I like him. I have to kill him.

  "Nine thousand," he says. "For your one hundred. Though that's far fewer now." He pauses for a wet breath. "You haven't kept in contact with your wife, have you?"

  My eyes widen. I left almost one hundred people behind. Another lie?

  "What do you mean?"

  "They're dying. Less than a quarter of those who remain are with your wife." He sucks in a tight breath. "Your people are broken, Amo. There's no unity left."

  I stare. Broken? I left Lara with everyone, except Witzgenstein. "What are you talking about?"

  He shakes his head. He's so gray now, but I can't let him die. I need to hear this even if it is a lie. "The center can't hold, son. You left your wife with fifty children. You left the preacher too. But children are the only resource that matters, now." He rears briefly, piercing me with those sharp gray eyes. "Really, what did you think was going to happen?"

  I shuffle closer. I don't know, but I'm starting to see pictures. My voice goes tight too. I imagine a hundred horrors. "What did Witzgenstein do?"

  He looks at me, and now there's the mysterious smile I was looking for. "Go home," he whispers. "Find out."

  Then he slumps and says no more. I lean in and shake him, I make his lips move, blow breath into his crushed throat, but he's already dead.

  I roll into the dust and chipped masonry and blood beside him, utterly bereft.

  There it comes back. It comes slow, trickling like bile, but the rage and the madness are welcome friends. There's nothing else to fill gaps like that. I can't help Lara, whatever trouble she's facing. I can't go home and just wait for the next missile to come. There's only one thing I can do.

  My body doesn't work, but I make it work. The bile drives me on. There's murder to do, so many murders, until the whole world burns.

  I stumble off like a drunk. The shark-eyed man has his eyes open behind me. Feargal's a limp body, silently recriminating in the dust. Arnst is a bright flow of blood. Somewhere there are guns, and bombs, and more bodies, and I know how to find what I need. I know what I need to do, and nothing can stop me.

  I stagger up the street. I feel nothing on the line, apart from the horde of twelve strange, shifting signals somewhe
re to the west, but they're growing fainter. Soon the line is empty, and all I can hear is my own rage, swelling to fill the space left behind like a great black eye overhead.

  19. ISTANBUL

  When Anna woke, the bindings were gone. The white lights were on and there was a sucking, smacking breath in the air still, but no voice. No footfalls pacing around her. The hall was empty, but for the living corpse of Ravi lying on the bed beside her.

  He was as gray as the ocean. His eyes shone white and stared blindly upward.

  Ravi.

  Once losing him would have broken her. When he came close to getting snatched by the demon in Bordeaux, she'd lost control, leading an army of the ocean for revenge, right into a trap.

  But not now.

  She moved for the first time in weeks. Her head was no longer strapped to the frame, nor were her arms, and she pushed herself to a sitting position. Vertebrae in her back cracked like breaking sticks, and the cold pain in her stomach pulsed deeper. She looked down at the flat black skin of her belly, bare in the warm air, which once had been wedged open with a glass bowl forced inside.

  There were no bandages now, and the stitches were invisible. She sketched a finger down the seam. There was no swelling bump yet, but she couldn't forget that little gray clump of cells, dividing. Alive but dead, he'd said. It throbbed, but at least it was a piece of Ravi.

  She looked over at him again, and slid her feeble legs off the bed. Her muscles were slow and weak to respond. Wastage had already set in; she could see the thinness in her calves, but they held her.

  She took the step to Ravi, but he didn't see her. He didn't know her. He'd died in Bordeaux, because she'd brought him there. It was on her head, but it was on his too. They weren't children and they never had been, not really. Not since the world ended and left them alone.

  She straightened up. Her body wasn't strong, so she would have to do the work for it, because there were things she had to do. In her belly she carried the hope of the whole world, and for that she had Ravi to thank.