The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  The image of the pit compiles in my head, and I sag. There are other things here too, things I've never seen before, yellow nubs of humans, each one a melted candle that seems to be melting like drips of hot wax. Their figures are shifting concepts only, lumpy shapes of bodies with a hump for a head and waxy swellings for limbs. Their yellow mouths are open and wail softly, adding to the breath of the ocean and the slapping of the demons and the urgent scratching of the lepers. Their eyes are a sickly yellow, and as one catches me in its glare, its body seems to expand, inflating like a balloon on the fuel of my attention. I wrench my eyes away and there's a grotesque popping sound, then I turn back to see yellow goo burst everywhere.

  I gag, but nothing comes. I'm on my knees, clutching the railing.

  Still there are more.

  There's a blue thing in a corner with faces growing out of its back and arms plunging out where its hips should be. It feels me looking and rolls closer on many limbs, like tumbleweed. There's a wispy black wraith-thing in the center holding one of the lepers down and chewing on its face, while the leper flickers like static on a detuned television screen, trying to escape. There's a pinkish thing that is all distended sex; weighed down with a massive black slug hanging from its groin, dragging that bloated load after it in circles round its square.

  There are more, but I can't register any more. The black eye has abandoned me in the face of this, and I feel myself being rubbed out. My toes, perhaps, I can control. My fingers. My eyelids.

  I sink and surrender. Maybe it'll be good to give up. I don't want this to be my world. Darkness rolls in, and I welcome it. Voices talk over me, doctors discussing my condition from a past I barely remember.

  Have you ever seen a coma victim blanche so completely? I mean, they always lose their color in a week or two, it drains out of them, but this?

  It was overnight.

  I've never seen the like.

  The words come through like a digital brush-stroke, in large fonts and meaningless, from a coma I'm sinking back toward.

  His brain activity is off the chart too. Something is happening in there.

  But what?

  But what.

  I roll on an ocean of misshapen heads, like bald eggs, but I can feel their thoughts twist together like twine in a bungee cord, like intestines curling themselves into each other, like an embryo blooming to life.

  He may hear us. He may not. The eyes are the thing that get me though.

  It looks like they're lit from behind. How is that possible?

  Some simple phosphorescence, like a jellyfish. Whatever he's got inside him, it's changing his metabolism.

  Are we talking an infection?

  Not any infection we can see. It's a disorder of the entire nervous system. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say something is remaking him.

  His DNA shows no change. We checked that.

  Not at the genetic level, then. Structurally. Look at the alterations in his brain pattern over time. It's been remapped completely.

  The voices balloon into curious clouds, into animals folded out of meat and bone. They bend out of time around me, drifting on a breeze of scent.

  I smell my wife's perfume, I'd recognize it anywhere, and it stumps up to pat me on the shoulder. It speaks.

  My Amo.

  I breathe in my body and breathe it out again, flapping like a sail on the ocean of strange heads. There are glass walls around me and bodies outside, people lost and reanimated, reaching up for me.

  Whatever this thing is, it's beyond our control. It's not a virus like any we've seen before, not bacteria, it's something physical that's rewriting him.

  Like nanobots?

  Ha. If that technology existed out of a Crichton novel, I'd say yes, but it doesn't. This seems to be natural. It may even be evolutionary, a key that was always waiting in the brain to be turned.

  I rise and fall on tides of the line, lifted with each shifting wave. I'm on the way out.

  BANG

  A noise stirs me awake.

  BANG it comes again, and there's an answering pain in my body. Where? I'm lying beside the railing, close to where a demon strains to grasp me, and I'm melting too. Pieces of me run down the walls into the pit with them, and maybe that's where I belong. I can finally become one of the monsters and lead my horde to wipe out humanity. I laugh, but there's another-

  BANG

  And that stops the laughing. I peer down and see the black gun in the holster at my hip, with somebody's finger spiked arthritically through the trigger guard. It looks like they've never operated a gun before, like the finger is not a finger but a stick attached to another stick that they can't use properly. It's my finger. I follow the bullet track down my thigh with my eyes, and see the skin is scored with two shallow tears now, bleeding freely.

  I've shot myself three times already.

  That fact doesn't save me, or resurrect the black eye to shield me, but it does ground me for a moment. I'm right here. I run my hand down the cuts in my thigh and the pain is sharp and focusing.

  I have time enough to look out over the Array one more time.

  It remains too much to process. It keeps hitting me in the senses and the line, but is there something-?

  I squint. Bodies move like waves, heads bobbing, and perhaps there's something there, hidden behind the visual overload. I try to put the line to the side, push it to the edge of my mind and focus on what I'm seeing.

  It's not moving, not a body, not a piece of broken bed frame or a sheet or anything that seems to belong here. Rather it's blue, out in the middle like an island. I blink and lift my head, trying for a better angle. There's definitely something there, and knowing that helps me focus.

  I climb the railing onto my knees, where I can see it better. It's square, but with rounded corners. It's blue, laid flat on the floor, taking up one whole square within the dark grooved lines. I get to my feet, pulled by this thing, until I stand on shaky legs and get the angle that lets me see the whole of it, painted on the floor, and gasp.

  A blue square with rounded corners, with a single white letter 'f' in the middle.

  I laugh. Not possible. But there it is. It firms up my legs. Now I ignore the creatures and look at this square. At the center of the f there's a small metal box.

  I can't believe my eyes, but it's real. I hear Shark-eyes somewhere in the distance telling me 'I told you so'.

  It's a cairn, left here for me.

  ANNA

  4. COMMAND

  Foul black smoke swelled down the Command hall in the Istanbul bunker, and Anna staggered blindly into it.

  A dozen conflicting thoughts rushed in her head, about what was really happening, how and why Amo had done this, but all that mattered now was before her. She needed the bunker. She needed these people alive, and now their bunker was burning.

  She lurched forward with a scrap of her shirt pressed over her mouth, sucking in sharp breaths that racked her lungs with the bitter tang of burnt plastic. Dead bodies tripped her underfoot. Amo had killed so many already. She ran her hand along the wall for balance, barely able to see anything.

  From the noxious black the gritty outlines of a few survivors shambled out, nudging her shoulder, coughing and holding their mouths. Others plunged blindly deeper in, fating themselves to a choking death in the gloom. She couldn't help them. She knew from the dead silence that the fans weren't working, and Command wasn't going to clear. It had to be an evacuation, and who else was going to do it?

  The wall fell away as she reached the shield room entrance. A hot gush of smoke hit her in the face, and she blinked and swayed away. Inside there were sparking electrical fires in the depths, like sheet lightning glimpsed deep in a thunderhead.

  "Shit," she cursed, then regretted it as the smoke scalded her mouth. Her eyes ran and blurred her vision. Her mind raced ahead while the oxygen debt built up in her system.

  He'd blown the shield here more thoroughly than at Gap or Brezno. There it had been done tacti
cally, probably a targeted blast engineered by Feargal to just take out signal protection, whereas here the blast must have been haphazard, ripping out parts of the generator and the transformers feeding the fans. Probably dozens of essential systems were compromised.

  There was only one way to save anyone, now.

  She took a deep breath and plunged into the hot gush of smoke, fighting the current long enough to get through the door, then tracing a path blindly along the wall through the gritty dark, burnt-plastic smoke, fumbling for the cool metal of a –

  Her hands clasped round the cylinder of a fire extinguisher. Already her eyes useless and her lungs burned, but she didn't dare wipe them or suck in another poisonous breath, not here. Instead she hefted the cylinder and made for the one thing she could still see; the sparks buried inside the ruptured wall. The blast must have torn open an oxygen line for them to still be burning in the thick of all this smoke.

  She ran to the sparks, stumbling over more bodies, barely catching her footing, while the smoke got hotter and poured harder. Her hands grew slick on the cylinder, she almost dropped it, but managed to tug the plastic guard out from its handle.

  Her shoulder hit the wall first, followed by her head, almost knocking her out cold. She staggered then felt for the contours of the hatch leading into the wall, through which the sparks were now a dancing, firework glare. She leaned in, got one knee up on the hot metal crawlspace, and squeezed the trigger.

  The extinguisher blew a cool white dust that drove the smoke back, firing for some twenty seconds before the hose ran dry. Smothering white swirled around her, sparkled with silver dots as her lungs heaved for air. Any second she was going to gasp and that would be it, a gulpful of toxins that would drop her in place, but there wasn't time now to run back for clearer air.

  The only way out was through.

  She dropped the extinguisher and flung herself into the riveted metal passage in the wall, crawling for all she was worth. The metal grew hot under her palms and panic thumped in her chest as she scrabbled deeper in, barely able to see a thing as the white dust mingled with the smoke.

  She heard it at the last moment, as her throat gagged on the need to breathe; a quiet hiss. She lurched at it, laid down full stretch on the glowing metal and clapped her mouth to a crack in the wall, where a cold jet of air meant life.

  She sucked in a breath, coughed, and was instantly giddy. Pure oxygen! She gasped in another breath, one more and held it, then backed up as quickly as she could. Her knee clanked over the extinguisher, but she kept on until her legs finally kicked out into the shield room. The black smoke was still dense, but no longer flowing.

  In the corridor she ran, and the smoke began to thin as she advanced, becoming a hazy night fog in the air. She rubbed at her eyes and that hurt too, but at least she could see a little better. Bodies lay everywhere, with people coughing and stumbling amongst them, unable to rally and organize, broken by whatever Amo had done.

  "This way!" she called, and some of them tilted toward her. "Over here."

  She herded them by their arms and shoulders, guiding them down the corridor and out of the thickest parts of the smoke, hacking out words as helpful as she could, leading them to the elevator at the end. Five of them fit in at a time, and she sent them up, then turned back for more.

  There were dozens already, more shambling like the ocean out of the spreading black, and she gathered them. Minutes only, she calculated as she darted in and out of the smoke, before the pocket of air near the elevator was swallowed. She set an internal counter and ran, leading them through the flickering lights and the black smoke, from offices and a room of bunk beds and a kitchen, back to the single elevator where she slotted them in like postal parcels and sent them up.

  Up and up.

  More kept coming. The black was everywhere now, but she wasn't thinking straight, only trying to save lives. She ran back in, coughing with every breath, holding their groping hands, sucking in smoke until she fell to her knees and couldn't get back up again, until firm hands grasped her own and a familiar voice called out.

  "Anna? Anna! God, look at you!"

  Was it Ravi? Had Ravi come for her now?

  "We have to go!"

  She let Ravi tug her into the elevator, then there was the climb up the ladder toward a circle of light, and she was just one part of a train of bodies. Strong hands lifted her at the top, there were faces she might have recognized, but who could say? Maybe that was Sulman standing there, but wasn't he dead? Was that Macy, could that be Jonathon, ushering people out into the hangar, clearing a path of dead bodies, handing out water and rinsing people's eyes?

  Then someone held her, and tilted her head back and poured a liquid that stank like a swimming pool over her face which got into her mouth and stung her eyes in a different way, then they were smearing roughly at her cheeks with a wet towel until she mumbled, "I can do it," and took it away.

  She rubbed, and blinked, and her eyes began to feel human again. She rocked back and someone guided her to sit on the floor, and she looked out through bleared vision and saw the hangar filled with hundreds of people.

  More pouring up from the bunker hole like smoke. So many. Amo had almost killed them all. They were bunker people up here in the world, and none of them turned to zombies. Tears streaked down her face.

  "It is OK," came the voice again, "you are OK," and she turned, and saw him standing there, plain brown hair and warm brown eyes. Not Ravi.

  "Peters?"

  "Anna," he said. "We are all here. It is all right."

  The tears came faster. She'd thought he was dead, but he wasn't. Ravi was still dead.

  "Peters," she gasped, and lunged up at him. He dropped down into an awkward embrace, then held her tight while she sobbed and coughed.

  "Keep crying," he said. "It will be good for your eyes."

  She laughed and pressed her face harder into his chest. So she was pregnant and Ravi was dead, and Istanbul was a ruin and Amo was lost, and hundreds were probably dying even now in the smoky ruin of Command, but at least Peters and the others were alive.

  * * *

  After a time they stopped coming up.

  "Habitat's empty," called Sulman from the bunker entrance. He didn't need to say anything more, that only the dead remained. It was obvious. There had been no reports from Command for an hour; the elevator sealed off to stop the smoke leaking out.

  Anna lay on the ground on her side, struggling to hold onto the fresh air that blew in through the open hangar door. Her lungs felt scorched, nauseating her with every shallow breath. Sporadically someone came to check on her; Peters, Sulman, Lucas or Macy, and she gestured them away to tend to others, but not before they'd rinsed her eyes again, and made her drink, and cleaned the foul gunk that oozed steadily from her lips and nose.

  Around her others were coughing, and vomiting, and gasping out their last as the hot Turkish sun scrolled across the sky like a searchlight. Anna could feel them dying as their signals popped like soap bubbles, spitting a final spurt of life up into the air and fading.

  She drifted on a sea of their pain and her own. After a time she tried to get up, but her body wouldn't move. She squinted through the hangar opening over the spread of Sabiha Gokcen International Airport. She knew this place, had been coming here for months with the treaty negotiations. Now bodies covered the cracked runway and the grassy embankments.

  Thousands of bodies. The ones from Command were easily spotted for the dark soot-stained clothes they wore. Further out, in the sun and spread evenly amongst the dead, were ones from the Habitat.

  Now figures moved amongst them, driving a truck carefully, lifting the living out from the weave of the dead and loading them up, transporting them back to the shade. Anna nodded along to their motions. All of these had been crushed by Amo. Her head was confused still, but she'd felt what he was doing with his signal despite the helmet; crushing them beneath its weight, driving them first mad, then beyond. Many of the survivors wou
ld never be the same, their minds burned out in whole or part. Some may recover, but suffer migraines for life.

  Amo.

  She didn't understand what he'd done, or why, or what had happened to change his mind.

  She tried to snag the hem of Peters' trousers as he passed by, but her arm moved too slow, barely lifting above the ground. Even that much movement made her sick. She let her eyes close again.

  When next they opened, the earth seemed to jerk beneath her, as if she'd just fallen back into her body. She looked out, and saw the van stationary amidst the fields of the dead, while figures moved around it holding rifles.

  CRACK CRACK CRACK

  She recognized gunfire. They were shooting someone. It didn't make sense. They were hunting for Amo? They were hunting for her?

  She tried to get up again, but still couldn't. At most she could crane her neck and watch as somebody beat somebody else round the head. She tried to call out, but couldn't muster more than a strangled whisper. Another figure approached them, speaking in a reasonable voice, and she recognized Peters approaching them with his hands up, trying to explain.

  CRACK

  He dropped. Perhaps he was shot. Her mouth opened to scream but all that came out was a hiss. They picked his body up and tossed him into the van, then kept on, stalking across the asphalt like reapers across a field of grain, harvesting the dead.

  Anna could only watch as they swept methodically back and forth. There were eight of them. With one rifle she could pick them all off, if only she could lift her arms, lift her body, but she couldn't move an inch.