The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "Don't talk to me," Sovoy said now, whenever he called him. He'd changed, as his work at Bordeaux took him away from Joran's circle of control. The anger was back, the blame. "I don't have anything to say to you. Read the reports."

  Sovoy's data was good, though it wasn't the data Joran wanted. It left him with no one else to talk to, as James While was fiercely engaged in his shadow SEAL hunt, constantly muttering to the ghostly holograph of Olan Harrison in the background. So he started talking to his own ghost: Piers Sandbrooke.

  He explained each new revelation, each brain broken open, each fresh attempt to build a shield by harnessing the frayed ends of a spinal column. Sandbrooke was a mute witness, even when he was screaming. It didn't help. Now Joran woke from nightmares clawing unconsciously at his own throat. In the pale mirror of whatever bunker he was visiting, scratches laced over scratches on his skin. He wore polo necks in the lab and strengthened his resolve to stop sleeping.

  Thirty-three of his hundred were already dead, tested to death.

  His first breakthrough came on a Tuesday, four months after the Event. Using new techniques and new patterns, he built a temporary shield on the line that prevented any signal getting through. It lasted for only twenty-seven seconds, but in that time it screened an area the size of a house.

  He whooped himself hoarse, not really feeling any joy but the beginning of a slow relief.

  "Twenty-seven seconds is a start," James While told him, with the young Harrison puttering at his back. "Get me twenty-seven months. Twenty-seven years."

  Joran took heart, but it was a hollow kind of heart. People kept dying and every death made the scratches on his neck worse. The blip signals off the coma survivors around the world grew stronger, each one a fuse on the coming apocalypse. He began tracking them with a morbid fascination, digging into all the data Sovoy passed along and requesting more. They became his only entertainment and only connection to the world, like a real-life soap opera. In a world of unlimited resources, it wasn't hard to dig up good gossip.

  He learned about Amo in New York, and Drake in St. Albans, and the others who were leading the pack.

  "So a hipster artist shall lead the survivors," he said to Piers Sandbrooke, and Piers Sandbrooke said nothing.

  On their infrequent calls James While grew even more distant, speaking like he was talking to the air. He'd grown thin and mad, even more so than Joran.

  "Focus on the shields," he would mutter, repeating himself.

  "I am," Joran said.

  "On the shields, on the Arks."

  His Prime Array reached completion. Standing at the head of its great glass-ceilinged hall, as big as a football stadium hunkered in the Siberian permafrost, Joran surveyed the thousand young men and felt the weight of what he was doing catch up to him.

  One thousand more sacrifices to the line. He could never climb fast enough.

  The new Array worked beautifully. It sucked down the hydrogen line like a lung, and taught him such terrible secrets. He learned about triggers and blips and the future to come.

  It was a Wednesday a few months later, after a Christmas spent picking the scabs on his throat, when he made another breakthrough.

  Stabilization.

  He told it to James While. James While listened and ordered it done.

  The signal went up through the Prime Array in silence, carried over the world on the hydrogen line like a smart phone firmware update, unseen and unheard. It rewrote brains and the T4, switching fragments of code so that instead of thirty-six types expressing on a given signal, there would only be one or two.

  "It's not a cure," Sovoy told him, when he went to Bordeaux on New Year's Eve and begged to talk.

  Sovoy was looking better. Divorced from the worst parts of their joint mission, focused on his role as the savior of Bordeaux's seven hundred, he had gone back to despising Joran. Now he looked at him with contempt.

  "It's no cure at all," Sovoy repeated, enjoying the difference between them, his own moral purity. "Now you trap seven billion innocents as type one rather than spread across thirty-six types. What good does that do?"

  Joran nodded hungrily, enjoying the censure. He almost pulled his polo neck down to show Sovoy his scarred neck. There was worse to say yet, and to be judged for his crimes by another living person, not just Sandbrooke's silent stare, was delicious.

  "It stops them killing each other. It gives us control. It affords us ten years," Joran said.

  Sovoy sneered, full of high-minded contempt. He hadn't kept up to date with their plans. "Ten years for what?"

  Joran bathed in his disgust. "To find a cure. If no cure comes in ten years, then it'll be much easier to wipe them out, if they're all of one type."

  Sovoy blanched. He hadn't seen that coming. Joran felt light-headed with pleasure.

  "What?"

  Joran cackled beside himself, like an old crone. That was the beauty of stabilization.

  "Kill all seven billion," he said. "We have type twos expressed and waiting to sweep them away. It's very neat."

  Sovoy just stared. Seven billion was a large number. Perhaps he'd been sustaining himself with dreams of saving them all. Sovoy the savior. Joran cackled more. He was here to tear those dreams down and drop Sovoy into the same sea of shit he'd been swimming in for months.

  "What about my survivors?" Sovoy asked.

  Joran had to stop himself from laughing madly. It was hard. Sovoy, the fool. Didn't he know Joran had already killed seventy-eight of them, one after another tested to destruction? What were seven hundred more?

  "They'll die," he said. "The type twos will cleanse the world for the Arks. A second flood."

  Sovoy blinked.

  Something inside him cracked.

  "You're planning to kill them, still? After all that I've done?"

  Joran cackled more. He didn't mean to. A year alone had made him crazy, and he knew that. He knew this was cruel, even, but how could he stop himself any more?

  "We have to save the Arks," he said, echoing something James While had told him many times, that he'd insulated Sovoy from. "Your seven hundred are incidental."

  Now Sovoy's face went red. His eyes welled with frustrated tears. There was satisfaction in that. Perhaps once they'd been friends, and now they were enemies, and that was good too, because at least it was better than dismissive silence.

  "Get out," Sovoy said coldly. "I never want to see you again."

  Joran nodded gamely. "You don't want to shout at me? Tell me how inhuman I am? How I'm going to pay?"

  "Just leave."

  He left.

  It was good.

  The day after that, Piers Sandbrooke was gone. It was a strange kind of miracle. The nightmares were finally over.

  * * *

  A year with only the ghost of Olan Harrison for company had certainly made James While crazy. That was something to reflect on. Sometimes he had dreams that were like Disney movies, but the villain always won. The Little Mermaid lost her voice and became a miserable weed in the Sea Witch's cavern. Beauty starved in her cage in the Beast's tower, while his heart hardened until the last rose petal fell.

  Sad, sad failure.

  Because he couldn't find them.

  Monitoring the coma-survivors hadn't led to anything. He'd scanned the world a dozen times via satellite, stolen every drop of computing power there was to track suspect global movements, raked through the financial data of every company and government on Earth, built entire new networks of optic fiber in case whoever did this had corrupted Olan's, and found nothing.

  Rachel Heron was out there somewhere laughing at him, he knew it. Standing behind a veil of information and watching his plane circle the world, getting nowhere, throwing out his feeble fresh tendrils of wiring and surveillance, like a child helpless in the dark.

  The old plates still spun around him, but now keeping the nations of the world in the dark about what was coming felt like a horrible echo; him doing to them exactly what was being done to
him. It was so easy; that was the most humiliating thing. What they were doing to him was simple. The SEAL had built the maze of the worlds telecom networks, and no matter how he tried to see beyond its walls, he was still a rat running within it.

  He hadn't gotten off his plane for months. It only landed once a week, just long enough to check the engine, fuel up, take on fresh supplies and a new crew, though he didn't think there'd be another changeover now. The line was ready to burst. When it did he and his crew would be triggered by the coming blast, and down they'd fall with the world. A fiery death was better than whatever fate awaited the seven billion at the T4's mercy.

  Yet Joran Helkegarde was making progress.

  He'd stood up his shields across all twelve Arks, with one for Bordeaux too. They all functioned just as he'd planned, the coverage neat and complete. He'd even found a cure of sorts, good for a short time at least, and had tried to persuade James himself to take it, but there had been no point. They'd argued back and forth, but he didn't want his skin to peel off.

  Lyell's Syndrome, Joran called it.

  "It's manageable," he'd insisted. "With the right conditions and treatment, we can live with it for years. We can keep this fight going."

  James While didn't care about the fight. He'd seen the signals down below ramping up. The artist in New York, the boxer in London. It was days away.

  "Bring your plane down," Joran Helkegarde had told him, in their last communication. "Or I will bring it down for you."

  It was strange, to be spoken to that way. Once he'd run the SEAL and Joran had been the lost man, choppered out of Alpha Array. But Helkegarde didn't have any clue about what they were really up against. The enemy were everywhere, and nowhere. They couldn't be stopped.

  He'd told Joran no, and gone back to watching the flood rising below.

  Then his jet bucked.

  The dive knocked him off his feet and sent him rolling against the wall. The holographic ghost of Olan Harrison watched him silently.

  "Sir, we're under incoming fire," came the pilot's voice on the intercom, "three F15s on our tail, another salvo incoming, brace for maneuvers."

  The jet peeled into a hard bank that sent James While rolling against the other wall, knocking the wind out of his lungs.

  "They're steering us, Sir," came the pilot's voice. "Not aiming to hit, but they easily could. We're not equipped to fight back. Sir-" his voice cut out for a moment. "They're sending a message. He says, 'Take your medicine.'"

  James While laughed. Joran?

  "Ignore them," While replied, picking himself up. "They won't shoot us down."

  The pilot didn't reply for a long moment, as the plane leveled. This one has been flying him for only two weeks. They'd barely even met.

  "That's a negative, Sir," the pilot said. "I'm taking us down. They've sent coordinates for an airstrip. Strap in."

  So the jet began its descent.

  James While took the only seat in the cabin, with Olan Harrison watching. That was always a weakness in any plan; human fragility. His crew didn't want to die.

  "Well played, Joran," he said softly.

  * * *

  They met in a room, on an airstrip somewhere in the middle of Africa. Joran Helkegarde and James While. The irony of their role reversal was not lost on either of them. Joran seemed a little embarrassed by it, standing awkwardly by a table in the middle of a plain white room, atop which sat a small metallic case.

  That was it.

  Nobody else.

  "Bordeaux says we're reaching fever pitch," Joran said. His words in the silence were a declaration, really. A statement of allegiance in a battle James While had largely cut himself out of.

  "It doesn't matter," said While. "However many you save, they'll have a plan for it. They know more than us."

  Joran just stared. He kept staring. There was disappointment there, certainly. He was hard now. Before he'd been all soft ragged edges, hungry for approval and respect, to be taken seriously as a great, visionary scientist. Now he was a fighter. He'd been carved in the fire and found true. James While couldn't say the same for himself. If anything the opposite had happened. The coming apocalypse had filled him with self-doubt.

  "You turned me around," Joran said, into a long, empty silence. "You threatened my eye, my arm, but that wasn't what made the change. Perhaps the threat to my reputation helped get me moving, but it didn't play the larger role. Do you know what really made me sit up and work?"

  James While didn't care. It didn't matter. "Self-preservation?"

  Joran smiled. "Yes, that took me quite far. Then I got past that and saw the reality underneath; my life doesn't matter."

  He went quiet. James didn't want to fill the silence, but Joran's gaze dug into him like a drill, demanding it.

  "You wanted to win."

  Joran shook his head. "Not that either. Winning's too far off. You have to remember that we came into this game already years behind. The things these people have done could never be undone in a year. Maybe not even in ten. No win condition was possible for us here."

  James While snorted, because that was bullshit. He'd always won. Every test, he'd passed. Every pattern, he'd found. He'd always believed he was up to any challenge, so there was no way not to see this as his failure.

  "You don’t believe me," Joran said, reading it in his face. "I understand. I’d rather not have to give you a pep talk, it's humiliating for us both, but here we both are." He spread his arms. "If you give up, it won’t matter if I find a real cure. They’ll block it."

  They sat quietly for a time. Both of them knew this was true.

  "So what do you want?" James While asked. "If you're not trying to win?"

  "I am trying to win," Joran said, and smiled. "Just not yet."

  James While found that annoying. "You'll have to explain that a little more."

  "I started seeing things differently after my Array blew. A bigger scope, perhaps. Victory in one year was impossible, so I started looking at two years, ten, even beyond my lifetime. I imagined our struggle as a kind of generational goal, a movement. Call it a secret society, if you like, because that way we get to be knights." He grinned. "Something like the shadow SEAL Olan Harrison built for himself. A conspiracy."

  James While frowned. "I've seen the readouts. We have days left, only, then the Arks are underground for ten years. What generation is coming after us?"

  Joran didn't say anything. Instead he tapped the case on the table. James could guess what was in it; the cure. Joran had suggested it might buy them ten years; a potent combination of drugs and genetic therapies, extremely expensive, each dose worth something like a billion dollars.

  "Who's the next generation?" While asked again. "Who carries the torch on after we die?"

  Joran shrugged. "I can't predict that. Someone from the bunkers, perhaps. Maybe one of the coma survivors out there."

  "We're killing the coma-survivors off. You wrote that part of the plan yourself."

  "Maybe," said Joran. "But we don't know what will happen. Perhaps this Amo in New York will turn out to be a great leader. Maybe Drake will be a genius who sees things on the line that I can't. It could be anyone. We need to be ready for that possibility, we need to prepare the tools for them to carry our fight across the finish line. That's our goal now. Not so we're going to win, but so the next person to come along might."

  While watched him.

  He hadn't thought about that. It was a timescale and a worldview he hadn't considered. It required a kind of blind faith that was the opposite of all the work he'd done as COO. Still, he turned the concept in his head. Not to win, but to ready the ground.

  It was alluring. For years he'd run the SEAL and considered himself just one part of a bigger idea, an ideal; to improve people's lives. He'd known that he wouldn't achieve perfection within his lifetime. Perhaps this was the same, a different kind of legacy.

  That moved the end zone. It said that this wasn't the end, but the beginning.


  He put his hand on the case. Nothing more needed to be said.

  "Give it to me," he said. "Cure me."

  Joran pulled out a series of syringes. One by one, he gave James While the injections he required.

  Three days later the apocalypse finally came.

  15. BEECHCRAFT

  The Beechcraft King Air 350i purred through the air above the snowy mountains of Romania, circling the herd of twelve lepers far below.

  They were too far ahead.

  In the eight days that had passed since Anna and Helen Tailor had assumed control over the Istanbul bunker, the lepers had traveled an incredible eight hundred miles. Three times further than expected, halfway to the Brezno bunker already.

  They'd thought they had more time.

  In those eight days of control, they'd done a great deal. Survivors were put into teams and set to the various necessary jobs: shifting and burning the corpse piles, getting power back up to parts of the bunker, clearing Command of smoke, shifting the injured down into proper wards with air conditioning and running water and supplies, training new nursing squads to tend to those injured mentally by what Amo had done.

  All that was done, but the challenges that remained were overwhelming. The shield was irretrievably fried. Comms with other bunkers either were non-functional or were being ignored, just like comms with New LA. And more people were getting sick every day.

  "It's because of the line," Lucas had explained, when the first of them came in three days after the blast, complaining of headaches, dizziness and exhaustion.

  "But the line's gone," Anna had said. "The leper in Istanbul blew it away."

  Lucas was exhausted too. They all were. They all had headaches and dizziness to some degree. He had barely slept since the handover, wracked with the pressure to help Jake and the other Lyell's sufferers, to come up with a cure for the bunker survivors using readings from the baby in Anna's belly, figure out a way to halt the advance of the lepers on Brezno, and deal with this crater on the line.