The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  That may be the only use of my talents left. I think again of my New LA flag and nearly laugh. I was so ignorant. What use was that, when there was always this?

  I see fuchsia. Punch. Rosewood and ballet slipper, flamingo and peach. There's blood on my hands too. I look at my palms. Too late, they whisper back to me. I remember reading the colors on Lara's palms. I left her and my children behind; did I read that coming too? In my palms I see the word traitor. I see failure. These things are no longer great shames to me, though.

  I accept what I am and what I do. I see the stakes and I will pay them to play in this game. I am a man to be feared, now. For all my qualms, I have left a trail of bodies fifty miles wide behind me. I've burned and crushed them, I've choked and shot them, I've humiliated them beneath the power of the line as I walked in their midst like a god.

  So be it.

  On my feet I address the corpse of James While.

  "I know what he wants," I tell him.

  Perhaps James While knew also, at the end. Maybe together we glimpse the true shape of Olan Harrison's plan, and what it will mean.

  Endless suffering for the world.

  I walk out with the black eye stretching before me like a sword, to where the super-Array are waiting. Thirteen years ago Joran Helkegarde assembled them with James While's support, backed by the organization Olan Harrison grew for thirty years to encompass the world. Now they fall to me, a strange kind of inheritance.

  I stand on the second floor gantry encircling the vast Array hall. This space is ten times larger than the Alpha Array far to the west. The sky through the iced ceiling is a swirling kaleidoscope, casting stark light over the thousand chained in their dimpled squares below, surrounded by the detritus of thirteen long years of rambling, pointless motion.

  The demons clamor for me. The lepers fizz. The blue heads moan and the ocean tumble and the yellow candles melt and the ones with four legs and three arms roll, and the giant faces squidge softly in their puddles, and black wraiths flicker and fade, and I spread my arms like a conductor before them.

  The black eye rings out as the loudest instrument in the orchestra, silencing their shuddering and grasping. With it I dig shafts through their empty minds and pour my intent in, like a programmer dropping lines of code into a Deepcraft world. So I make them mine.

  * * *

  They stream out of the building with me at their head in a military-grade Jeep. James While was well prepared; in his storerooms were ample stashes of batteries and fuel, sparkplugs and spare tires, food and weapons.

  Outside a rushing snow sweeps across the tundra, blurring everything in a left-right hail of scratchy static. Visibility is minimal, but the road from the super-Array is mostly clear; not weighed down with permafrost like the ice-bitten fields and glacial forests either side.

  I imagine James While setting out here thirteen years ago, clearing a network with his team, filled with the hope that perhaps in a year or two they would find the location of the shadow SEAL and dig it out. In that time they built a secret communications network of their own, and laid a system of supply cairns throughout the countryside much like my own in America. They had the foresight to disguise everything they did from the air, in case the shadow SEAL were watching for them in turn.

  If they're watching now, they will see this.

  My private ocean spreads back over the white like a pale watermark. The cold doesn't bother them and it doesn't bother me. I spur the Jeep on and they try to keep up. The gray ones fall behind but the demons and the lepers keep pace; huge red arms pumping, staticky bodies flashing forward in impossible jumps.

  An army.

  I rifle through the radio channels, not because I think there'll be any music there but because I know there won't be. I keep tuning through the snow until finally I find the station I'm looking for. It plays in my head like an old jukebox in a cozy diner; all the voices of people I've lost.

  Feargal begs me to stop. Dr. Ozark cries out from his burning vehicle while a demon cracks open his jaw. Julio curses us as he tears out of New LA, and Keeshom asks if I'm sure this is the right path. I tap along to the tune on the leather-wrapped wheel.

  The horde sings along with me, calling out the words. They can't sing, but I have them try. They have to learn. They scream atonally. I wind the windows down and enjoy their performance. The words and the sounds run in time with the thunder of their many feet. Perhaps I can see tracks in the snow before me. The shadow SEAL came this way. They took from James While what they wanted, and now he is just one more enemy I will have to kill.

  I think I understand what Olan Harrison has done. I know what he killed every person on Earth for, and I need these voices in my head to keep me moving, because without the memories it brings of how the world used to be, and what I owe, I think I might just toss a noose over the nearest branch and go to the long dark right now.

  Continuity.

  I can only push myself so far. This far, but no further. I'm long past rage and revenge, to a place where the killing will be cold and clinical, like balancing numbers on a ledger, like mixing shades of paint. I've burned myself out on guilt already, on emotion, on outrage. There is just the imbalance, now. The injustice. I will do this, but only if I don't think about what it really means.

  Still, I see James While's spread-eagled corpse drifting out there amongst the flurrying snow, laid atop the same grisly death that Olan Harrison suffered. It all means something. They didn't traipse five thousand miles around the world just for sadism. It wasn't sadism when they did it to Olan Harrison either.

  This ugly realization has been coming for a long time. I push the accelerator down and hit one of my demons in the back. It is flung off to the side, into the solid drifts of snow. In the rear view mirrors I watch it get up and start running after me again.

  It's exhausting, all this pain. All this cruelty.

  I watch him running, and it makes me tired; tired to be me, tired to feel like I have to do this, that I'm allowed to do this. This demon was one of the people the SEAL transformed, too. Each one of these monsters in my horde was a person, and it's wrong for me to hurt them, but I can't help it. I need this to keep the worse thoughts at bay. The more I think what Olan Harrison did to us with his Multicameral Array, leaving us here alone in this broken world, the more I have to do this or step off the edge into madness.

  Olan Harrison wiped the slate clean.

  I hit another, a leper this time, and it fritzes at the moment of impact so that for a moment it's riding in the passenger seat beside me, giving off its prickling heat, perhaps a little confused.

  "Out," I tell it, but it's a mumble. I lean over to open the door and shove it through, but the effort drains me. It rolls and tumbles into another staticky flash, then appears in the wing mirror as the Jeep veers left to right across the road, regaining control.

  Maybe I don't want control.

  The bass of the demons booms out through the static. The treble of the lepers screams. The horde's voice rises toward climax then another song begins, Arnst telling me all about power while I'm tied up in the Chinese Theater, in between tortures, and I pump the pedal in time to the beat. I thought I could handle this. Even an hour ago, even a minute ago, I thought I could handle it.

  But maybe I can't. For all I've grown and sunk, for all the terrible things I've done, maybe I still cannot stomach this. I try to stop thinking about it, but I can't. Everything rings out his name.

  Olan Harrison. Power. Nobody should have so much, but he had it all. Not only over life and death, but over the very genetic code of humankind. And he warped it. With his multicameral signal he changed me, and the hydrogen line, forever.

  I blink a long blink, so long that it's really just me closing my eyes at the wheel.

  I've known about that change for years. I felt it on some unconscious level from the beginning, but I never understood what it meant. Before Anna we didn't know about the T4. Before Lucas we didn't know about the hydrogen line. Bef
ore Joran Helkegarde I didn't know how the two combined.

  Now I do. I've seen the before and after graphs. I'm privy to all Helkegarde's latest research, relayed through James While's notes, and I know what the line was, and what was lost when the change went out.

  I almost lose control of the Jeep. There are tears in my eyes, not from sadness or shame or any normal emotion, but something I've never felt before. Something like despair, but worse than anything I felt at Drake's hands; this is bigger and deeper, and cuts into the point of me being alive at all.

  I drag the wheel harshly, bouncing up the mounds of ice to right and left like a pinball in a channel, plowing through my horde mindlessly. They spring up like weeds after I pass, stupidly faithful.

  What is the line?

  It wasn't written in any of the research, neither James While or Joran Helkegarde ever used the word that would make it clear, but I read it between the lines. I know what I can see, what I can feel. The line was us. Our minds, our consciousness, some kind of thought soup for the soul, made up not only of the seven billion humans who once roamed this planet, but also the many billions of the dead too; endlessly circling the Earth like a second atmosphere, merging and shifting and being reborn in some grand karmic circle.

  It's a lovely notion. It's ridiculous for a lifelong atheist like myself, but I never denied facts I could see with my own eyes. Helkegarde's research was mind-blowing; measuring the signals of his victims as he tortured them to death, then capturing traces of those same signals in the air itself, floating on the hydrogen line's continuum.

  What is that, but a kind of afterlife? He documented it in terrifying depth.

  Salle Coram comes on the radio, singing to me about all the ways she tried her best. I roll to her haunting harmonies for a time, trying to prepare myself for the run up to this abysmal truth. I think about the mulch of minds in the sky. We needed the line. We were the line.

  Then the Multicameral Array transmitted, and seven billion people were turned into the ocean overnight, and everything changed. Their signals were yanked down from the line and trapped in their bodies. I don't know the details because I can't understand Joran Helkegarde's endless pages of complex math, but I understand enough to know what it meant.

  One day heaven was full, then the next it was empty.

  My foot on the gas pedal eases off. I feel too exhausted to drive, and we slow right down. The Jeep drops to ten miles an hour, then five, and my horde gathers thick around me, embedding me in the wail of their ugly chorus. The sound of it beats me up, because these are my people, and this is all they can do. I shouldn't hate them, but I do. I shouldn't hurt them, or use them like tools to get what I need.

  But I will.

  The Jeep trundles on, and I think about the emptiness of the line. It's hard to catch a single butterfly out of a flock of billions. Colors run before me; Monarch Red, Green-veined White, Meadow Brown, Purple Hairstreak. Even if I paint a butterfly in the brightest colors, I think, even if I make it bigger than the rest, once I release it I will never be able to find it again amongst a forest of so many flickering billions.

  But in an empty sky?

  More bodies bump into the hood. When I run over them now, it's slow. The wheels gather them in and grind them under, but they don't complain. They get up afterward, singing all the while, and we keep on at this painful, drawn-out pace. I don't want to think about this any more, but I can't stop. My arms feel so weak. One hand drops off the wheel and lies forlorn at my side.

  With his signal, Olan Harrison emptied the sky. He wiped the line as clean as the static coming through on my radio, then put himself up as a bright flag, marked by the intensity of a most painful death, and had his people suck it down.

  I see now that this was the purpose of all his research, dating back thirty years and more. Eternal life. In the days before the hydrogen line he believed that path lay through the Apotheo Net. He was making a deep copy of his neural patterns to live on after he was gone. But that was not true eternal life, because it was only a copy.

  He needed more than that. He needed continuity of the man that he was, and the hydrogen line gave him that opportunity; a way to recycle his actual self into a new body.

  The Jeep sinks to a crawl. We could almost not be moving. In the falling snow I can scarcely see a thing, especially with all the bodies around me, though I can feel it as I roll them over. I'm feeding them under the car now, my cruelty making no sense but only just keeping me this side of despair. We always punch down, to keep ourselves afloat. I am no better than the rest.

  Olan Harrison killed seven billion people just so he could stay alive.

  The Jeep trickles like an ice floe. It makes sense, somehow, and I know that if I let the speedometer drop to zero, then that will be it. I'll sit here with a cocoon of the ocean above me and slowly freeze. I won't be able to move a single muscle. I'll just lie here until I join the line, and I hardly care.

  The music stops. Snow gathers on my lap. I blink and look around. Demon faces leer by my side. Once they did such terrible things to Lara. They killed Cerulean. I think about my friend, and wonder where he might be right now. Up above, perhaps, drifting around on the empty line, looking for his family. But they're not up there with him. They're ossified down here, trapped in their floater bodies, kept from him by Olan Harrison.

  I slump in the seat. I'll become a snowman. There's a certain radioactive heat coming off the lepers, so I send them away. They line the road like black and white ghosts, at the extent of what I can see through the falling snow. I set the demons on the other side, red wardens of the North standing proud, watching like my honor guard as I sink toward death.

  It's cold. I welcome it. I'm so tired.

  This is a war I can't fight. I can't win. I can't fathom the depths Olan Harrison has been willing to go to. I think of my parents, my family, my friends, my brother, all lost. When he wiped the line, they were erased. I never knew they were even there, but now I know that they aren't, and it cuts through the old rage like it never existed. I can't get angry, because I've already lost.

  Nausea swirls in my throat. If not rage, then what do I have? A steady hand and a little creativity, but those things can't get me through this. I think of Lara, but it doesn't move the needle. I think of my children, but that well has been pumped dry. I can't mine anything from their memory any more, can't summon a scrap of feeling through the numbness of this monumental loss.

  The engine stops ticking. Frost tries to settle on the hot hood, freezing and melting and refreezing, and I watch the tracery patterns it makes while the cold works its way into my extremities. The radio hisses static, and I think about that. At least I will be on the line. I will be up there, but alone. My family won't be there. My friends won't be there.

  It's what I deserve. I slump lower still, half my body in the foot well. Through the open doors I can see my honor guard watching silently. Like a pharaoh's slaves, they should all die with me. Bury me deep in a cairn, I tell them. Throw yourselves on top.

  And that's it. I think I'm done.

  I can't fight. I can't win. I can't beat a man who cannot die.

  2. OPEN THE DOORS

  I see Cerulean and my brother, sitting at a table looking at my art.

  It makes me want to cry. My brother died thirty years ago. Cerulean died two years ago. They can't possibly be together anywhere, but here they are.

  I roll forward in my Jeep to look at them. Cerulean is strong, like he always was, with those warm eyes that make me think of Christmas. My brother is a stranger; a man who never had the chance to grow up, but still I recognize him, handsome with a strong chin and short sandy-brown hair.

  They're looking at my art. It's not a piece I remember making, though the setting is familiar. It shows Times Square in New York, like the painting I made and showed to Lara the night the world ended, but there are differences. Where the tower of the dead stood before, there is now something different.

  Zombies fill the s
treets; white eyes glowing, gray skin naked, muscles withered to the bone, but they are not shambling, or chasing, or even climbing. They are instead looking up at the painter, and every one of them has an arm raised in the air, ending in a clenched fist.

  It makes the tears spring from my eyes. I look over them, like a Where's Waldo of the New York dead, and see that every one of them is looking up at me; men, women, children, all.

  What does it mean?

  "What does it mean?" asks my brother.

  Cerulean turns a jigsaw piece thoughtfully in his fingers. "I don't know," he says, then slots the last piece into place. Only then do I realize that this painting is actually a jigsaw they've assembled together. The last piece in the very middle shows a figure standing amidst the dead, and as Cerulean slots it into place I see…

  Not me. Not Lara.

  Anna.

  Her arms are up. Her fists are clenched. But her eyes are white and her skin is gray, just like the ocean.

  "Your daughter," says my brother.

  "Your niece," says Cerulean. My brother chuckles.

  "What would Amo say?" he asks.

  I try to say something to them. I never think of my brother these days, but there's nothing I'd like more than to talk to him now. I want him to see me, to tell me everything is going to be all right. But he can't see me, and I can't get any sound out to be heard.

  "She's one of them, now," he says.

  "She's their leader," Cerulean answers. "Amo would be proud of that."

  I gasp at the air. I want to scramble the jigsaw into pieces. I don't want this to be real, even if Anna is the leader. I don't want Anna to die, too.

  "I didn't paint this," I finally manage to say, but they don't hear me. "It's not mine."

  "Why do you think he painted this?" my brother asks. He's not the same as I remember him, weathered, but strong; the man he would have grown up to be, a bulwark against the hardness of the world.

  "I don't know," Cerulean says. "But he's just a man. Art is art."