The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  She leaned into him. He sucked and smacked at the air, but there was no scent. Bodies in the ocean didn't rot and never had, they only grew tougher and wirier as they dried. Ravi was drying nicely, halfway toward becoming a mummy.

  She'd loved him. A tear ran down her cheek, and when she kissed him on his cold cheek, it dripped off and trickled down his.

  "How's the parallax in there?" she asked.

  He didn't look at her.

  He didn't look at her when she came back with the scalpel. It wasn't placed far away, and she could only think it had been left there on purpose. More tears came, but they felt healing. The world was larger than she'd ever guessed, and there were terrible things in it, but there was hope too.

  She pressed the scalpel to the back of his neck gently, and pressed in. He didn't react in any way. With care, she cut through a gap between his vertebrae and into the spinal column. A second, perhaps, and he went still. His breathing stopped, the light went out in his eyes, and that was it.

  Anna rested her head on his shoulder for a time, but not too long. He'd been dead for weeks, perhaps as long as a month. He'd died to save her in amongst the grapes, and his body here was just a headstone now, a marker for where his love had once lived.

  "I'll miss you," she whispered, then turned. She placed the scalpel reverently on a workbench by the door, following a dry blood trail on the floor. She didn't turn around, but flicked the switch by the door, marked with rusty smears of blood, and the light went out. In stillness he would finally rest.

  The door opened, and she left her prison behind.

  The remains of her captor's body lay curled on the floor of a bare bedroom that was spattered with years of sprayed blood, lying in a fetal position in a pile of moist white cladding. He seemed so sad, lying there without any skin, so Anna knelt at his side too, and placed a kiss on his crusty, infected forehead. It would be the first time anyone had touched him with tenderness in over a decade. It hurt just as much as kissing Ravi, if not somehow more so.

  It made it real.

  There was nothing else in his room. It was bare but for the white cladding and the body. He'd lived no kind of life for all that time. He'd worked for his cure, and suffered, and made others suffer, and that was all.

  There were other rooms spread along a plain corridor, though none with windows. In room after room Anna turned off the lights. Here were shelves filled with the white cladding material. She touched it; springier than wool, soft as a memory foam mattress. In one room were more shelves laden with various drugs, vials of genetic building blocks, raw chemical materials. In another lay strange medical apparatus like something from a torture chamber. She recognized the bubble that had been implanted in her stomach.

  She walked on.

  At the end of the corridor she emerged into a kitchen, where a pile of supplies lay on a plain metal breakfast bar. Meals Ready to Eat, vitamin and mineral pills, bottled water, and a note.

  It was brief. She read it three times.

  Lucas is in Istanbul. Amo landed in France two days ago, and is heading there, killing bunkers on his way. Gap has already fallen. If Lucas dies, then there is no hope.

  Good luck.

  There was no name.

  She hadn't eaten solid food in all her captivity, so the MREs tasted good. She ate part of a Beef Bologna raw, then cooked a batch of Broccoli Chicken Cream Mash in a pot of boiling water.

  There was dried blood on every surface, like dust; scrapings of it on the oven's knobs, dried smears on the pans, flecks on the cutlery. Her captor had clearly tried to clean up after himself, but how could you clean when every touch leaked more?

  On a workbench were new clothes: jeans, T-shirts, sweaters. She stripped off the loose medical gown and dressed herself. Some of her old strength was coming back. She drained one of the bottles, then opened the door leading out.

  Beyond there was a stunning view. It was day outside, and there lay the Swiss Alps, cutting across the edge of the world like white saw teeth nipping at a swimming-pool blue sky. The air was cold and sharp and carried the smell of earthy pine forests.

  The facility was built into a forested hillside above a gouged green valley, with a small parking lot recessed into the cliff to the right, and a road running by. There she saw three Jeeps, one with barrels of gas stacked beside it. She imagined her captor struggling to get these out with the last of his strength. Stains of him marked a trail on the snow-dappled lot.

  She went over and found the keys in the door. The engine started with ease, purring smoothly. It took her an hour to load it with supplies. It took her another hour with maps to sketch out her route to Istanbul, taking in Brezno in the hope of beating Amo to it.

  Last of all, she looked for the bodies.

  They hadn't been in the facility. They couldn't be far, and it didn't take long. At the edge of the road, the hillside cut away sharply, and down in the leafy crux of the valley far below she saw them. A mound of them, mostly rotted and reduced to bones, though some still wore gray skin, tossed outside after they were used. She imagined her captor wheeling them out on a gurney and tipping them off the cliff, cursing his failures.

  It would be easy to hate him, but where would hate get her? What had happened to him was evil. The infection was evil, that had stolen her father from her at five years old. Her captor had been compromised by that, but did that make him evil too?

  Nothing was simple now.

  She said a few words, not prayers as she'd never learned any, but kind things, hoping for peace for the dead. Their struggles were over. She carried the strange fruit of their deaths in her belly. That had to mean something, and she would die to make it so.

  She got in her Jeep and drove.

  * * *

  From the mountains near Grindelwald, in the shadow of the Mittelhorn, Schreckhorn and Reeti mountains, she circled west then east for the 8 highway that surfed along the southern edge of the Brienzersee reservoir.

  The mountains had snow. The roads were clear. The reservoir was still and perfect and cold. Amo was ahead; she could feel him on her skin. Feargal was with him, and four signals more that she didn't recognize. She sped up, taking hairpin mountain corners at eighty miles an hour, leaning into the wind like she always had on her catamaran, lifting the boat out of the water and racing along on one hull.

  Switzerland passed by. The 8 was clear and she blazed through little mountain towns; Lucerne, Zug, Niederurnen. The 8 became the 3 became the 14 and she flew on with the windows open, veering round dead cars. Amo was so close. He was within reach, and maybe she could reach him in time. She'd spent months working on the treaty with Brezno. She didn't want all those people to die.

  At Bad Ragaz she chicaned north into Liechtenstein and crossed the corner of Austria, up into Germany and speeding for Munich along highways she'd cleared herself. She pushed the Jeep beyond a hundred and hung on. Back across Austria she flew in a blur of pastel buildings and clock towers, Salzburg and Wels and Steyr to Vienna, darting for the border with Slovakia at Bratislava and barely stopping to drink, caught up in the intensity until-

  The wave hit her and she almost crashed. It came invisibly on the line and almost knocked her out. The Jeep spun and she fought half-consciously for control; the rear end fishtailed and cracked off a postbox, the front dinged hard into a Lamborghini, then the driver side door ground along a wall of terraced houses backward before rocking to a stop.

  Anna gasped in the seat. Her neck was whiplashed. Her mind was reeling. Something had hit on the line, like the waves that used to wake her from micro sleeps on her first Atlantic crossing; each coming dangerously close to flipping the yacht.

  She didn't understand, but it was clear something catastrophic had happened on the line. It had to be Brezno, but Brezno was still a hundred miles away.

  In three hours she stood before the decimated bunker.

  She felt sick.

  There were bodies everywhere, crushed and torn. Blood lay in dense, coagulating po
ols in the deep tire tracks left by the wide wheel base of a Humvee. She gagged. She'd spoken to these people at length, knew them. She'd done everything she could to have them sign the treaty, and now this.

  She couldn't comprehend what she was seeing. Had Amo done this? She got out and picked a path amongst the dead, but it was hard to keep her feet clean. Everywhere were shreds of people; heads crushed and exploded like gray meat fireworks through the brain pan, guts burst like vomit, limbs tangled and twisted.

  They weren't gray ocean bodies. They weren't dried and withered. They were real people, massacred.

  She entered the bunker's Habitat in a dreamlike state, following the trail of blood and body parts. Someone had let loose here with gory abandon. Here a head sat posed on a table, looking at its body on the floor. Here two bodies were laid naked atop each other in a crude simulacrum of sex.

  The destruction was joyous. At every step, at every body, Anna said to herself that this couldn't be Amo. It couldn't be Feargal. They wouldn't do something like this.

  But they had.

  It was a new kind of cairn.

  Further on there were some who had not been physically damaged, but writhed as if in pain. Blotches of gray passed over their skin, and their eyes flashed white like guttering flashlights. There were children amongst them, twisting like with the rest. Their shield was gone, but they weren't becoming zombies, were somehow trapped in-between.

  Amo had done this.

  She smelled the bitter smoke from the elevator before it reached Command. Inside there was thick smoke, rich with the stench of burnt-out batteries. She held her sweater to her mouth and advanced deeper, coughing along a trail of gore until she reached the shield room.

  She'd seen its equivalent in Maine. A wall of readouts that led inward to the huge machine, though here the outer frame was buckled outward. Metal panels were warped and many of the inbuilt displays had blown, leaving blackened rectangular holes in the metal, trailing wires.

  So three thousand people had died.

  On the floor lay a little girl with red hair, coated in black soot with a metal panel half-severing her at the middle. Anna leaned in and wiped the black dust from her cheeks. There was no hope for her. Even if the shield came back up, she would not survive, not with an injury severing her like that.

  Anna pressed a knife into the back of the girl's neck, just as she had done for Ravi, until finally she went still.

  Amo had done this, and it was wrong.

  She rose with the anger burgeoning brightly. This was unnecessary, and wrong, and it should never have happened. She had to do something to help them.

  "I'm coming back," she said in that acrid room, quietly at first but then more loudly as she went. Striding out of Command, back in the elevator, she said it with more confidence at every step she took.

  "I'm coming back," she promised, and meant it. "I'm coming back for you."

  * * *

  She didn't rest or eat, because this was a race now and she'd never lost a race in her life. There wasn't any need to navigate; she knew the route by heart, and the flash of Amo's signal on her skin pulsed like her father's dot on the smartphone screen, pulling her on

  Hours flew by and she took every turn at full speed, through Hungary and Serbia, through Bulgaria to Turkey, gaining on them every second. Amo's signal resolved on her skin, revealing erratic patterns that swelled and ebbed like she hadn't felt before.

  She was within twenty miles of Istanbul when the second wave struck and blacked her out.

  She woke at the wheel with the Jeep lying on its side, hanging across the gearstick, held by her seatbelt. Her neck throbbed, and the airbag had deployed in her face, perhaps breaking her nose. It took long moments for her to regain orientation, and even after that the world kept spinning. The air felt strangely empty, insubstantial somehow, and it wasn't until she unclicked herself from the belt and fell to the window, crawling out through the broken windshield, that she realized what it was.

  The line was gone.

  For years she'd felt it all around her, like the kiss of the wind on her skin as she sailed, but now it was gone. It felt like she shouldn't be able to breathe. Sounds came muted, even gravity felt weaker, or the ground less substantial. She walked away from the Jeep as it caught fire and burned, dizzy and clutching her stomach.

  The seam had opened slightly, and blood leaked down in a razor-sharp line, soaking into her pants. What could she do?

  She lay down on the dry yellow grass on the highway's verge, gazing up at the blue sky, holding pressure on the slit. If it opened all the way she would die.

  It had been another wave, but on a different scale to the first, causing lasting damage.

  Still, there were things to do.

  She got up. The Jeep was a bonfire now, but they weren't far from Istanbul. She'd left caches there. She looked around at the barren stretch of orange tundra and took her bearings.

  After a fifteen-minute walk she found a bicycle in the open garage of a resort home. The rubber in the tires was desiccated but there were spares nearby, and in twenty minutes she fitted and pumped them, then she rode.

  Istanbul was a great silence. Where the line would have buzzed endlessly around its high-rise buildings and interwoven blocks, there was an emptiness. She felt like the first astronaut pushing out into empty space.

  But she wasn't the first. There were three vehicles flipped on their roofs and sides lying in a convoy near the Mall of Istanbul, blown there by rocket fire. The sandy asphalt was marked with fresh pockmarks from explosions. One of the Humvees had exploded and was burning still. Peering in she saw two bodies in the front seat, reduced to deeply seamed charcoal.

  Further on there lay a body in the road, wearing a black suit and helmet. A rifle lay nearby, and Anna picked it up.

  Down an alley she saw several bodies clustered around a pile of masonry rubble. Closer, she saw Feargal lying dead in the dust, bloody marks on his forehead. There were three other bodies; one a giant who'd been shot in the chest; one a military-looking older man with a black helmet by his side, his face and chest battered; and one a black and white zombie like she'd never seen before.

  All dead. No Amo.

  She rolled a little further and found one of their vehicles, an AM General troop carrier truck. The keys were in the ignition. She dumped the bicycle and drove off.

  Amo's signal resolved on the empty line. She knew where he was, already. At the bunker. She revved the truck up and sped through the city center. Lucas was there. Three thousand people were there. She couldn't let him kill them all.

  The rifle sat on the seat next to her. The truck roared on.

  NORTH

  20. BLACK EYE

  Istanbul bunker is waiting for me.

  In Sabiha Gokcen International Airport, encircled by a chain-link fence, there are people spread wide across the runways, aiming weapons my way.

  RATAT AT AT come the first volleys.

  I don't blame them. They have seen the line is gone and they've run out to take their chance, for the first time in twelve years. I pull off the road and climb the embankment to meet them, crunching through the metal fence and onto the flat plain of the grass-covered runway. They flow towards me firing rifles, launching artillery; some in military gear but many who are just regular citizens.

  Bullets prang off the hood of my stolen Engerek Utility Vehicle, and I respect this effort. It is what I would do, if I were in their position; throw myself on the grenade to keep my people safe, except the grenade I'm left with now doesn't make me look like a hero. It makes me a butcher.

  It can't be remembered.

  They shoot at me and I shoot the great black eye back, and it flattens them. Their bodies crumple across the weed-choked runways like large-scale domino art, and I drive over their bodies. They crunch under the Engerek, real deaths and real costs, until I reach the hangar and step out.

  I may have the black eye, but my body is still broken. My nose doesn't work and every
breath is a bloody sniffle. My hand with the broken finger is swollen and useless. My ribs tweak at my lungs with each step. I'm falling to bits, but I can do this.

  The hangar door is open. I enter the shadows and more of them fall; they keep coming and they keep dropping. Perhaps they think they can exhaust me, but there's enough anger in the eye to burn through ten thousand of them. There'll always be more. I'll never run out, because each death only makes it worse. I hate myself. I hate this. I spew it out.

  FLUMP FLUMP their bodies go down, paralyzed.

  FLUMP FLUMP FLUMP

  I step on and over them. It's like the New York slaughters again, where I killed so many and still called myself a good man, but I'm not a good man and I never was.

  The bunker hatch is thickly clogged with their bodies, so I send the black eye ahead of me, down the ladder shaft and punching through the shield, dropping everyone it touches. I send it deeper, like string threading a long needle, down into Command where they hunch with fingers on remote triggers for bombs in the walls that'll blow as soon as I get in.

  I paralyze them all.

  FLUMP FLUMP FLUMP

  I climb down.

  The shaft is empty now, bodies piled at the bottom. I pluck magnetic bombs off the walls as I go, stowing them in my open jacket, jostling like hockey pucks. I take their elevator into Command, and walk down the corridor toward the shield, so familiar now. Shark-eyes lived here too. All his people are here, everything he was willing to die for, everything he fought for twelve long years to save.

  I pluck grenades off the belts of fallen soldiers, stilled by the black eye. It surrounds me like a shield, feeding on itself and pumping outward like a heart, twisting me and the things I do.

  In the shield room are the triggers; simple cell phones rigged to detonators. Their last redoubt. I clamp a magnetic mine to the sealed hatch cover for the shield, find the trigger in one of their hands, and step out of the room for the moment it takes to blow it.

  BLAMMM

  The metal ruptures inward while the mine casing sprays off to pepper the walls. Black smoke puffs out through the door hinges. In the corridor there's a man at my feet, more a boy really, looking up with terror in his flashing eyes. Black, blue, black, blue. I'd like to say something kind to him, but there is nothing kind I can say, so I settle on the truth.