The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I never saw a body pile in Times Square, though I painted it. Here it has become real.

  I look up and see feet, arms, hands, shoulders, backs, chests stretching up toward the sky. It's easy to believe that these were people. They look like people. It makes me nostalgic for a past when the ocean were an everyday part of life; before they all went west and ended up here, throwing their lives into piles to keep the rest of us safe. I realize how much I've missed them.

  I laugh a little.

  I kneel and stroke a perfect set of fingers, as smooth and pale as alabaster. I can't see the body, not even the arm, just this hand emerging from the heap's flank. They came here for the demons, but why did the demons come here? I can guess the answer to that now. I suppose they saw something we never did, about who the real threat was. They came here to destroy it.

  Olan Harrison.

  I feel him close by now, like a storm out to sea, making the air thick and scratchy. On a high, dusty road I stand, looking out at the rising escarpments of a Chinese mountain range over the southern border; all limestone karst cliffs that rise in leering, fang-like spikes. He's out there somewhere; a unique signal on the line, the first man to die and live again. I know James While will be with him by now, all his expertise and knowledge stolen.

  Will they know me? Do they know that I'm coming?

  I fall like a hammer into China. Down valleys crammed with the frozen ocean I lead my meager army of red, black and gray. As I stand at a crag's edge and look back at them, they seem very small and far away. Will they be enough?

  There's nothing else here. I walk up the frozen, rippled surface of a valley clogged with the solid dead, and I feel nothing left alive for me to reach out to. Maybe, deep below, there is the heartbeat of a demon pulsing still, but I don't have time to dig them out one by one. There's not enough blasting powder in the world to free them all.

  I have to go with what I have.

  Down rivers and past villages we go, through forests and mountains, led by this inner tug of the hydrogen line's GPS. The number of body piles increases as I draw closer. There have to be hundreds on one long, massive desert plain, stretching out as far as I can see. The yellow sand is barely visible for all the piles of gray and white skin, heaped up like mounds of sugar.

  They're all here. Tears come to my eyes.

  One day I'll paint this. Nobody would believe it otherwise. I wend my way through the heaps until the dead frame my world, towering either side like the canyon-streets of New York. Weirdly, I feel almost at home. There have to be millions here. Billions, maybe. I've never seen anything like it.

  They only grow thicker. The mounds overlap. The dusty roads I passed on earlier disappear, lost beneath the flood of sun-bleached flesh, and I have to leave the Jeep behind. It doesn't bother my army, but it slows me down. The lepers bark and fizz at my heels, urging me on. Alone and unarmed, I hike into the foothills of the dead. At night I lay down my head on their backs to sleep. By day I walk across their chests like flagstones laid down for my passage.

  One day in, I feel the blast ring out on the line. It hits while I'm taking a leak and knocks me on my ass.

  I'm up in seconds and roaming around, fists up as if there'll be something to fight. My ocean of lepers, demons and floaters look alarmed, but remain in their tight, self-segregated groups. Around us there's blue sky and bodies, no one alive anywhere near.

  What the hell was that?

  I feel the echo of it like the pain after a punch, lingering on the line. It feels like Gap or Brezno going down, when I blew the shields, but not quite the same. This feels more like the opposite, like a fresh shield just went up.

  It happens again half a day later, then again every few hours after that. Each time it comes as a shock, knocking me sideways as I hike, dragging me panting and panicked out of a snatched nap.

  What the hell?

  I pace around angrily. I talk to the lepers. I stand in the towering midst of the demons and demand answers they won't give. They just look down at me, numb and dumb.

  I feel it right in my chest. Something is happening out there in the world. If new shields are going up, is that Olan Harrison's work? Is this the next step in his plan for world domination?

  What the hell is he doing?

  Then I find the road.

  I'm walking on it before I really realize what it is. I hadn't noticed this stretch was easy going, though it is, too distracted by the blasts. But it's unusually smooth; a nice incline, a wide wheelbase, plenty of space for my army to spread out. Of course there's no asphalt laid down, no cement finishing or tar topping, but when I look closer I realize just how much effort this road through the foothills has taken.

  Here a leg has been sawn off at the thigh. I kneel beside it and touch the inner flesh. It is all as hard as rock, cut at a perfect angle. Nearby there's an arm sawn at the elbow, and a head cut in half, and once I start seeing the changes, I see them all.

  This road should be the V-base of a steep valley between two opposing body piles, closing in a tight ditch, when in fact it is a subtly squared-off path. I walk to the edges and study the flanking mountain piles. The line where the saws have done their work is obvious.

  Now I've seen it I can't stop seeing it. Bodies have been cut away in a thousand places. Limbs and torsos have been chopped off and cleared away like snow, creating this 'road'. It would be a bumpy ride in even the largest-wheeled vehicles, but it is eminently passable.

  I look back the way I've come and see the cleared path continuing downward and away out of sight, eclipsed by the mounds. It's the same up ahead. This path is not a straight line, but rather worked into the settled fabric of the dead.

  I climb one of the piles nearby and track the road back as it bends and swirls for what could be miles. I can't see the end point, only the distant orange line of desert. I look ahead and see it reaching higher, into a stretch where the dead blend in with the red peaks of mountains.

  I let my jaw hang.

  Olan Harrison built this road. This is how he comes and goes from his utopian home. His people blazed this trail by cutting a limb at a time, making it just smooth and organic enough that James While would never see it from above.

  I throw my head back and laugh. Poor James!

  "Do you see me now, you little shits?" I shout up at the sky. "Do you see me coming?"

  Nobody answers. I wonder if a bomb will come. Of course, they could have bombed me at any time.

  Then a voice does come.

  "Amo," it says. A woman? "Welcome. I'm going to have to ask you to stand your army down."

  For a moment I blink, not quite certain I've actually heard what I just heard. I rub my eyes and look around, then see them.

  They're on the road below, having emerged from behind the bends of the ocean's path; three people dressed in black bunker suits.

  My demons and lepers watch them. Probably they don't know what to make of them. Doubtless those suits are exuding shields that protect, or confuse, some such shit. As for me, I can't believe it. I feel a teeth-gnashing anger. I feel a bizarre kind of joy. I don't know what to feel, but here are people!

  It's been so long since I saw people.

  I bound down the mountain ecstatically, not sure if I'm planning to hug or kill them. Maybe both. When I finally hit the road, staggering on the uneven surface, they take a step back. It's good that they're afraid. They're holding rifles, which is proper, as I'm quite a threat. There's some kind of static buzz around them, a feeling in the air like a bunker shield.

  "Here you are," I say, reveling in the moment, spreading my arms. "I found you!"

  One of the black figures steps forward. The helmet has a glass faceplate, which turns transparent as a light comes on inside, revealing a beautiful, olive-complexioned face with dark eyes and lustrous black hair. She holds out one black-gloved hand toward me.

  "Welcome, Amo," she says. "My name is Rachel Heron. Welcome to the Redoubt."

  ANNA

  4. J
UMP

  On the path to save Istanbul, Anna jumped -

  - and landed surrounded by rusted cars on a long gray meadow of road, with Peters stumbling behind her and the troop of lepers fritzing like a drunken fog all around, and then jumped -

  - to a dark living room smelling of mold, with faint ribbons of light leaking in through the mildewed lace curtains, where one of the lepers stood comically on a faded pink sofa and she jumped -

  - onto a wide escarpment of sand by a lake where tiny gray crabs were scuttling madly away, like a cover pulled back off the land, and jumped -

  - and jumped -

  - and on each jump there was the same plunge into icy dark as her body sucked up into the line, and the staticky shivers rinsing over her, and the knock at the door.

  Of course, there was no door. There was no house, no hallway, no sound, but still the knock came, and after each knock she laid her hand on a handle that wasn't there, and opened it without opening it, all the while knowing with a failure-defying certainty that he would be right there outside, grinning and waiting, but she would never see him because-

  She landed.

  In a field. On a mountain. In a silent schoolyard, with Peters gasping and her lepers fritzing. She'd take a second and grit her teeth, but a second only, then she'd jump them all again without any time to rest. Somewhere out there the shadow SEAL was sending bombs, and thousands of people in bunkers could die at any minute, and only she could stop it.

  She jumped, and every jump dislocated her thinking and thinned out her sense of reality, making her lost within the emptiness of the line. Was there a knock? Was there a voice? Was it really him or some dreadful fantasy?

  After perhaps a hundred jumps she landed, rocked in position, and didn't jump again immediately. Peters was vomiting on his knees nearby. She felt sickly and weak herself; the world was bleary and unfocused, as if seen through a dusty looking glass, but she could tell they were somewhere in a field, overgrown with a tangled crop of poppies and maize. Peters was a pale zigzag on the brown clay ground, shuddering amidst the crisp curls of dried poppy leaves.

  "I'm fine," he managed, between gurgling, panting heaves. "We can, we should…"

  Anna looked away.

  Was that a knock?

  She ran her fingers over the fat kernels of maize on their golden stems, and started toward the sound.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  The sound of it resounded in her head. The garbled undergrowth yielded to her passage with a satisfying creak as old stalks cracked. Her vision resolved slowly, and she paused briefly to study a particularly tall stalk of maize, considering its sheer golden stem, its boastful head of auburn seeds. It was strange to think that each seed held within it a world of its own, full of possibility, just like the T4. The possibilities unnerved her so much that the sky swirled and she staggered sideways, crushing a wavering path.

  Was that another knock? She turned and listened for it, but this time no echo came.

  "The wheat fields of Elysium," came his voice, drifting to her in the whisper of fat green poppy heads rubbing against spiky maize. "Just like in Gladiator."

  Ravi.

  She clutched a thick bundle of stalks for balance, popping a few maize kernels out with her thumbnail. They were as hard as little rocks, too spiky to crush between finger and thumb. She popped one in her mouth and bit down, just to feel something real. It tasted of bitterness.

  "It's not doing good things to Peters," the voice mused. "All this jumping. It's not doing good things to you."

  Anna spat the kernel bits out, not certain what she was hearing.

  "Ravi," she whispered.

  "Anna," he answered, "I'm right here."

  She looked around, but he wasn't there. Of course not. She hurried forward through the stalks blindly, as if she might find him and somehow answer the knock, but of course she couldn't, and every step toward an impossible door seemed to dislocate her mind even more.

  "Where?" she called.

  He didn't answer.

  She waged a rampant war through the maize stalks, crunching them under her giant feet. It made no sense at all, but perhaps, somehow, the jumps had done something good. Perhaps she'd brought him back with her, and dragged him out, or done something to bring him peace…

  "It is the jumps," Ravi whispered from behind. "But they're not helping either of us."

  Anna emerged into a small clearing in the maize, and stopped. Here the wild grass had been tamped down in a twisted pattern, like the photos of UFO crop circles that Ravi used to delight in. In the center lay the old corpse of a large animal, probably a wild horse, with its rib cage picked clean by scavengers. She looked at the taut gray skin of the horse's skull, into the dark hollows where its eyes had once been, and imagined a congregation of other animals gathering here as if at church, flattening the maize to worship at the altar of this strange, dead god.

  That was the madness of the jumps talking. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. She tried to root herself in her body, in her feet touching the ground, in the warmth of the sun on her cheeks. This had to be real.

  "Calm down," came Ravi's whispery voice. "Think."

  She counted her breaths. She focused on one spot and made it stand still.

  "You're too open, when you jump," Ravi said. "The line will rip you apart." It felt like his voice was coming from just behind her. Or perhaps inside her. She resisted the urge to turn around, because he wouldn't be there, and that would be just like racing after another knock.

  "I don't think-" she began, then paused, carefully weighing what she wanted to say, trying to frame thoughts she'd never had before into words. "There's something real, out there. There's a knock, for me. What is it?"

  "It's the dead calling," Ravi answered, floating around her now. "On the line. Think of it like one of the old data 'clouds', distributed on the Internet. When you jump, you upload yourself into the line, then download yourself when you land."

  His voice was insistently real. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and concentrated. He was talking about a world that had rarely been real for her, a world of video games and social media and geo-positioning, the world he'd hidden in to keep himself sane through so many solitary years.

  "And you're up there," she said, half a question, half a guess, as she felt her way through the memory of so many knocks, handles, doors. "I'm passing you by each time."

  The sense of him smiling came down to her.

  "Sweetie, you are the talk of the town up there. Everybody hears when you come charging through. It's premiere night at the Chinese Theater; lights, camera, action. I just get dragged along in your wake."

  Anna steeled herself. Wake. Chinese Theater. She flicked a maize kernel at the dead horse, and it tickled into the skeleton's pelvic girdle with a pleasant, rustly sound. She had to get a grip. They'd only made a hundred jumps, and there were hundreds more to go. That was real. Bombs were real.

  But maybe this was real too. On the mountain when Ravi's voice had come to her, she hadn't thought about the reality of it too much. In victory, it had seemed appropriate. But now, when she was so confused, when Peters was falling apart, what was it for? Was it even real, or was she just talking to some echo of her own dislocated mind?

  "It's hard," she said. "This."

  "I know. I'm sorry. But it's going to stop, soon."

  She gulped. Tears welled in her eyes, though she didn't know the reason. Did she want it to stop? Would that mean she never heard from Ravi again? "Why?"

  "Because I'm getting better at it. I think I can stop the knocks, from being dragged along when you come. And you're getting better at resisting."

  Anna looked around. Was that something she wanted? She was too confused to understand.

  "I don't want that. I want you."

  "But I'm gone, Anna. And this is hurting you, and Peters, and me. You're torn, because that's what the line does, sweetie. There's too much at stake."

  "You'r
e at stake," she blurted.

  He laughed, though his voice was fading now. "I'll be here, waiting, at least the parts of me that matter. When the time comes."

  "When will that be?"

  His voice turned sad. "I hope, not for a long time. Many years yet. I hope you know how much I loved you. I won't knock again. Don't answer the door. Look after yourself."

  Anna gasped. "Ravi," she called, as the sense of him drifted away. "Ravi, please! I miss you so much."

  His faint voice came a final time, like mist on the warm summer's air. "So miss me. Let me miss you."

  After that, no answer came, and Anna wept beside the bones of the horse.

  * * *

  Gradually she calmed down. The worst of the confusion ebbed away, and his voice echoed like a distant memory already, drifting in the back channels of her mind.

  So it was.

  She squeezed a poppy head until white sap oozed out. She breathed in the intoxicating sappy scent. This was real. This was what mattered now.

  "Anna!"

  Peters' voice came, calling from nearby, along with the splintery ruckus of him stumbling through the dry maize stalks.

  "Get out of my way, monster," he said absently, and Anna felt him passing by one of her lepers. They were like antennae to her now, grounding her in the many layers of the air. Of the line? How strange, to feel that way. What kind of world had the world now become?

  "Over here," she called.

  "Anna," he shouted, putting a brave spin on the sickness he surely still felt. There was a sad kind of relief there, too, that she hadn't abandoned him again. He emerged through the maize wall and into the clearing looking drunk and sick. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips were cracked, and his skin was a translucent-looking gray. She'd done this to him.

  "How many jumps is that?" he asked in a hoarse voice. He looked like he was in a lot of pain, and that hurt her too. She'd done it, chasing the knocks. Ravi was right. She was jumping recklessly.