The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  * * *

  I drive on roads invisible beneath the snow. I see signs for the city of Arkhangelsk, heavily corroded and bitten by frost, one of the few written in English. There are tiny settlements and towns in between; clusters of white buildings with red and blue fronts, golden onion domes on tiny provincial palaces, lakes of ice, brutalist concrete communist monuments, forests of wiry spruce and fir, ice in the sky and in the air and all around.

  I've done this kind of thing so many times before, I'm an expert at it. In the end it's just driving through people; the ruins they leave, the diggings they dug, the dwellings they raised up atop the earth.

  I drive and make mental notes so I don't need to think. The mayor lived there. The priest here. That's a church though it doesn't look like it. In this house there lived a woman having an affair. In that house was the man she was having the affair with. Here they had five children. There they were barren. This woman dreamed of international journalism. This man wanted to be a masked vigilante.

  More signs pass in Russian, more towns.

  Холмогоры

  Брин-Наволок

  Заболотье

  I cross a frozen river, then another. The bridge is out on the first, so I cross it on foot. The ice creaks. The second reminds me of Pittsburgh; it's hard to say what, the bend in the river, the two bridges at right angles crossing, the city on either side then the sudden open sweep that takes my breath away.

  I think of Lara, like a sucker punch in the gut.

  Back then we rode together, she by my side, only moments before the demon crushed her ribs. On this long, slow ride, I think of how much I miss her. Her touch, her look, the strength she brought me just by being there. I think of the John Harrison and our last day, before everything went to shit.

  It could have been so good.

  Tears roll down my cold cheeks as I drive at ten miles an hour through choppy refreezing slush. Sacramento was going to be the making of us. I would step down from a leadership position, ceding it to Anna or Keeshom or whoever wanted to stand in the election. Maybe I'd play the elder statesman for a time, and I might be sad, but I'd be glad it was behind me, that the eyes of these people were no longer on me.

  I remember that Keeshom is dead.

  It's a strange thing to remember. I hadn't ever thought of it, I never even saw it, but I know it's true. I do remember Feargal's sad corpse lying in the rubble, just inches away from the shark-eyed man, and I cry for them both. I led him into that. I did that to him, as surely as anything.

  The things I did to Feargal shame me, but they only make me remember other things, all the other things I did on the road to this point. At some point I have to stop my trundling vehicle, now a creaking old green fire engine, and vomit into the snow. It's bitter and it's more than I deserve.

  I don't remember, but I do. I know who I was, I knew what I was doing, though everything from these past few months feels like a blur. I remember standing over Arnst and holding my belt in my hand while reality went slick around me, lowering the boundaries and making it easy. I remember what I said to them, how I treated them, how I left them all dead in the end.

  I remember Drake.

  He's a fog in my head. I remember Cerulean in a realm full of boxes, trying to guide me through, but what else is there?

  I don't feel Cerulean in my dreams anymore. I don't remember his face. The things I've done can never be forgiven.

  Gap comes back to me, and Brezno. I left thousands of people shivering without their shield, trapped on the broken line. I killed them like insects. I ground them beneath my tires. In Istanbul I mowed them down while they tried to flee.

  I almost killed Anna.

  I can't see for tears. I drive on, because if I die like this it'll be fitting. I deserve it. The things I did, the cruelties I stretched to, make me sick to the depths of my soul.

  It hurts. For days it hurts. Drake haunts me as a memory, his giddy voice in my head, his brains on my hands. Feargal haunts me as a face in the snow, bloodied from the time I punched him for nothing. I think of him kneeling before me in the rushes of my mad sketches, waiting to be told what to do.

  I humiliated him then, and in that humiliation I also debased myself, but the worst thing, creeping through this noxious self-indulgence, is the fear.

  What if I have to do it again?

  There are no good choices. I know now that I will. Wielding this power, this great black eye, I can crush on a whim whoever strikes at me. I could so easily fall back into that bleak, black place again, and who will dig me out again? Who will forgive me, give me absolution, make me whole?

  I don't deserve it. There can be no atonement, and insanity is no excuse. I am going back into the world with my eyes open, knowing what I've done and what I might do, and that is the most terrifying thing of all.

  I see Lara and my children out there in the snow. I see Anna and Jake and the rest. Shark-eyes was right.

  What wouldn't I do, for them?

  I stop thinking and I drive.

  Верхняя Тойма

  Красноборск

  Визиндор

  There are flickers on the line at times, coming from the south. It feels like Anna, like she has some of the same skill as me. I don't know what she's doing, but it grows stronger with time. One night I dream of Lara, standing at a window and looking out over a huddled crowd of people clustered around a huge heap of wood, waiting for the spark to light it up.

  The butterfly dances around me. James While's enormous weight of research seeps steadily into my brain, like a well-squeezed cheese in muslin cloth, and new ideas mingle with the old. There is something there still, but I can't name it. A tickle in the depths of my past, shadows painted on the pavement by rainfall, never lasting long enough for me to sketch them with chalk.

  There's something.

  Сейва

  Кудымкар

  Кунгур

  I look at myself in the dark, mirror-like glass of a little town's department store, and see a crazed stranger looking back; a man who belongs behind the dumpsters in Times Square, drooling for spare change. My left shoulder rides slightly higher than my right, after the break that Anna gave me. My hair is long and my beard thick and unkempt, scored with clinging lines of frozen snot, tears and vomit. My clothes are bulky and filthy with old blood, my boots are filled with water.

  I strip.

  In the steaming cold I look at my pale, shivering body. At the wounds, the scars. I run my badly healed fingers over them, cataloging the ones I remember, whether they are wounds I can be proud of or ashamed of. A round divot on my left shoulder marks the beginning, when an indicator lever from an exploding car in New York knocked me down.

  There are so many others; the pale, hairless patch on the side of my head, where I blew a bullet through my own skull. The dense, interwoven lacerations on the backs of my thighs and calves, where Don shot me in Las Vegas. An injury taken in Chino Hills, handling one of the pneumatic plows. Flecks from forgotten, ricocheted explosions. A burn where I mis-cooked an egg. My lumpish shoulder. My broken fingers.

  My hand shakes, but I can't stop tracing this unforgiving landscape.

  There are new wounds I didn't know about, sustained perhaps in the chaos of Istanbul, in my fight with Anna; a weal down my back, a chip in the bone on my forearm. Across my chest and thighs I count the marks of Drake's torture: cuts, cigarette burns, little fractures, patches of skin missing. From the plunge into Alpha Array I have two bullet furrows in my thigh, never stitched.

  My body is a map of what I've done. On balance, I'm ashamed of more than I'm proud. It's a sad tally, but at least it isn't a lie. It's good to be honest. It's necessary.

  My chest is turning blue, and the shudders make it hard to stand. I go into the store, where I make a fire and scrub myself down with raw snow. I scour my wounds so hard some of them bleed. I apply what pressure I can to my shoulder, but it will require another break t
o correct, and I don't have the time or expertise. Maybe, if there's a future.

  I shave my beard. I cut my hair. I look at myself in the mirror, and see a different man. Not the same man as before. Not a man Lara would hold close, and kiss, but a stronger man than I've been of late.

  What else can I be? If I must do what I've done already, perhaps now I can do it better. Perhaps I can be like Joran Helkegarde, strong enough to give sympathy to the ones I have to kill. That would be a dream. I don't think I can kill any more with rage and cruelty in my heart; it will kill me.

  But I can still kill. Even the people who did this, I will kill them when I understand, and when I understand and they're dead, perhaps then I will be able to forgive. Maybe then, if I forgive them, there will be a path toward forgiveness for me.

  I make myself cry again, too full of self-pity.

  I drive, and some of the signs are in English now.

  Yekaterinburg

  Omsk

  Novosibirsk.

  At last I reach it, looming on the line like a mountain: Joran Helkegarde's Prime Array. The feel of his one thousand steers me in from a thousand miles away. I couldn't miss this if I drove deaf and blind. It is a blot on the line as big as Istanbul.

  The exterior stands out on a barren steppe, looking like a half-built sporting arena, with oval, massive metal support struts and a lot of glass. There are signs with enough English on them to show that this was its cover identity. Under construction, I gather. A new ice hockey stadium, judging by the faded picture. What an ice hockey stadium was doing out here, in the middle of nowhere, I don't suppose anyone cared to ask.

  I can't feel him inside, obscured by the churn of the thousand, but I know he's here. James While.

  I'm almost there.

  * * *

  I blow open an ice-glazed window with a small mining charge, picked up along the way. The blast echoes emptily inside, through the soup of signals fired off by the thousand. I can pick through them now, labeling type one, two, three, all the way to thirty-six. I know all about what they are, the tricks they can do.

  Here they're held by a primitive shield. It's weak but it's enough.

  I pass through with the black eye fitted to me like armor, framed to my body. What they did to me at Alpha Array they can't do anymore. I head toward the main office at the back, because that is where he lives. The best views, like Istanbul. I expect it will be completely empty but for him; no desks, no chairs, just a pacing man in a room, although I doubt he can pace any more.

  I've seen the effects of Lyell's. I've seen the pictures Joran kept of them both, that James While cross-filed. I know what to expect; a bloody worm of a man encased in moist white fabric, huddled into a specially-fitted motorized wheelchair, barely able to lift his head, barely able to move. I can look past all that, though, because it's his mind that I need, it's what he knows.

  I climb an elevator shaft. I walk on a gantry round the massive open arena with the thousand in the Prime Array striving below, just like Alpha but ten times the size. My people. They flow with the gravity well of my passage. I climb another shaft, and kick through a door, until the final corridor stretches ahead.

  My heart hammers, as answers lie ahead. I stamp down the gray corridor to the door, every step beating a path to the future, bringing the butterfly's wings thumping into synchrony with my pulse.

  Thump

  Thump

  Thump

  Empty offices pass either side as I walk back in time, back to an era when the apocalypse could be forestalled and the power of the SEAL could solve world hunger, end war, and rewrite the carnal cruelty buried in the human genome. Shudders ripple up my back and make my knees weak beneath me.

  Thump

  Thump

  This moment has been coming for so long. This man at least can understand. This man knows what I've done, and why, because he's done far worse. He watched billions die and couldn't stop it, so if there's anyone who can look into my eyes with understanding, it is him.

  Thump

  I need it. My whole body yearns for it as I lay a hand on the handle. He surely knows I'm coming. This will change my world, I know it.

  I open the door, and see the man inside.

  At first I can't be sure of what I'm seeing.

  In his chair, in the middle of his empty office, he is white bandaging and blood and raw purple skin. I pick out his face, his gleaming white eyes, bright teeth, two dark holes for nostrils, and then I realize what is wrong.

  His ribs have been spread-eagled.

  It drops me to my knees.

  I'm looking into his chest cavity. It's hard to tell because everything about him is red, inside and out. His skinless face is a rictus snarl of white tufts and cheek muscle. I feel pain. I see his dead heart, his entrails heaped in his bloody lap. He sits in a puddle of red, head thrown back, frustrated at the last.

  There are no words for this. It's as if my own chest has been spread-eagled, as if someone has reached into my chest and ripped out my heart.

  They got here before me.

  Suddenly it is too hard. This man waited for me, and I'm too late again.

  I drop my thumping head into my hands, and I hurl the black eye after them.

  FAR EAST

  19. A NORMAL LIFE

  After the battle, Anna stood atop the mountain with her new troops arrayed around her. It was like a video game. Ravi would have loved it.

  "You can teleport?"

  She imagined him standing beside her, laughing, nudging her elbow and needling her like it wasn't really real.

  "How far? Bet you can't reach that mountain."

  "I can blow that mountain up," she whispered, to no one, to herself. Her hands rested unconsciously on her belly. Where the last piece of Ravi lived, now.

  "Istanbul, then. Can you teleport to Istanbul?"

  She smiled. The lepers flickered around her like dogs twitching in their sleep. How much had she lost, in the battle for control? That was a night land, and perhaps she'd never know. Energy fired in the dark spaces of the mind, hard to remember now, but leaving her buzzing like a live wire.

  At first they had knelt, as if in worship of a god, but she swiftly corrected that. Now they stood like soldiers. She was all too aware of the people they had been. Those parts of themselves, like the flickers of light in her father's eyes as he hurled her to safety in Mongolia, still remained. It was in bringing them to the fore, and giving them some measure of control over their chaotic skins, that she had earned their obedience.

  So they stood to attention. She had saved them, after all, from the hell of themselves.

  "Goddess number one," Ravi whispered. "Super primo ultimate lady."

  She snickered. That was one of his things, maybe from geek video game culture, maybe just something he'd made up.

  "All your base are belong to us," she whispered back, a video game reference from a time before she was born. He used to wear a T-shirt with that printed on the front, proudly a geek long after being a geek wasn't even a thing. It had kept him alive, though, while everyone else was dead.

  "Spiderman had it right," he said, the ghost of him, though he wasn't really there, she knew that. "With great power."

  "Comes great respiration, yes, I know."

  He chuckled. Another thing. "Great perspiration."

  "Great aspiration."

  "My favorite," he said, and kissed her on the cheek. His touch was cold, just like his cheek had been in the Alps bunker. Cold forever.

  "My White Rabbit," she breathed.

  Then he was gone, or perhaps the moment was gone, or the sense of him in her mind was gone. She knew she was alone again, despite the twelve circled around her. How long had passed? Not long.

  She became aware of a low drone, buzzing in on her from above. She looked up, and saw the Beechcraft up above, buzzing and arcing. Just minutes ago she'd been up there too, but that felt like another lifetime now, so long ago. Up there was Peters, still watching down through his
belly-mounted camera.

  That amused her. She gave him a grin, waved, then blew a kiss.

  Ravi's voice surged again in her head, just for this. "Conqueror of Hell," he whispered. "Ishtar, who broke down the doors of damnation and waged the dead against the living."

  She laughed, and then he was gone again.

  In his absence, she reached up, augmented by her circle of twelve. The energy coming off them filled her up like light in a lens. In a second she homed in on Peters, sensing things about him at a level of detail like she'd never felt before.

  She felt the fear he always wore beneath his surface of calm. The love he felt for her, like the daughter he and his Abigail had never had. Pride and worry, mixed into a deep tangle of emotions that even he didn't really understand.

  Then resolution.

  She laughed, as she felt him strap on a pack, and open the plane door again, and jump out. A second later his parachute opened; a billowing white cloud that got caught in the wind and sent reeling.

  She blinked herself over to where he would land. Her lepers blinked with her. She looked up as he came down, and landed in the snow, and looked at her with wonder, awe, and glory in his eyes.

  "Anna. My God."

  "Goddess will do," she said, and smiled.

  He just stared, at her and her twelve disciples, while the parachute skittered over the snow in the stiff wind. "Are you?"

  She shrugged. A moment passed, then he lurched forward, pushing aside her lepers to wrap his arms round her in perhaps the tightest embrace she'd ever had.

  "Never do that again," he said fiercely into her ear. "Or, do it, but warn me first."

  "Sure thing, Dad," she said, laughing, but that had a far bigger impact than she'd expected.

  He began to shake. He held her closer and tried to bury the emotion, as he always had since Abigail died. It opened a door she hadn't ever considered, but that had been there all the time. Dad. And why not, one more on top of the pile after her real father, and Cerulean, and Amo? It was what Peters had always wanted, after all, and she was proud for him to think of her that way. She patted his back while he struggled with his pride enough to pull away under control.