The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  That's a tough one. I am seeing that, really, but I'm not about to tell him.

  "In my next comic I'll compare your wattage to an energy-saving light bulb," I say. "I'll give your eyes the color 'piss-yellow'. I believe that's the technical term for goddamn cowardice in the soul."

  His smile widens. It's a truly ugly thing, slitting his plastic face into halves. "I do like this side of you. The defiance. I'll enjoy your days in the box."

  My days in the box?

  "That sounds like a really good time," I say. "Yeah, I'll put it in my diary, but for now, answer the damn question. Why don't you just fuck off and die?"

  He gazes at me. This is the only question that remains, I suppose. It won't change anything to know it, but I'm a completionist, and this'll be the final screwed up motivation in my psychopath's collection.

  But he doesn't answer. He stands there in the twinkling nest of his diamond shield, and I become aware of how silent and still the foothills around us are. After so many years there should be soil settled into the toothy cracks, with weeds and trees growing up, and birds and ants rustling about, but there's nothing. Nothing moves or makes a sound.

  I feel the old anger getting hotter, as if the silence is a pressure cooker bubbling up into the black eye. The diamonds around him rise. There's a metallic taste in my mouth, and I see that of course, I'm going to kill him now. All the rest, the peace treaty and the façade of reasonableness, is flirtation. My fingers twitch at my sides like a pistoleer's in a fast draw.

  "Come on, Olan," I taunt. "Spit it out."

  His smile widens further, opening his face like a chest cracked apart. "I've answered you already, Last Mayor. You can see it for yourself, in my every word and deed."

  "Do better."

  "Look harder."

  Perhaps that is all I'll ever know. So be it. The black eye pumps around me like a heart, and it isn't hard to make the cold rage go hot. This man erased my parents and brother from existence. He scrubbed the line's loam of its rightful richness, and for that he has to pay.

  "Come on then, you little bitch," I say. "Show me what you've got."

  I shake the bottle, pull out the cork, and fire the black eye right at his heart.

  12. BLACK EYE

  The blast hits his chest and sends him hurtling backward, his huge body ricocheting off the uneven floor of bodies like a pebble skipped across a lake, and I charge after him. The invisible wall tries to buck me off but this close and this hot it can't turn me round. Olan tries to get up as I charge up but the black eye hammers him down, thumping at his plastic head until I can jump astride his chest and put my fists to good use.

  As I throw the first punch at his jaw, the black eye wreathes around it, hardening at the last moment into a fritzing electric gauntlet that impacts his chin with a colossal CRACK, driving him inches deep into the raw stone of frozen bodies. Their shoulders and backs crumble to dust beneath the black eye's power.

  My second blow swings around in a massive haymaker, again gloved with the black eye so the strike point with his cheek goes off like a grenade blast, sending me flying backward through the air and him sideways, plowing a rutted line through the emerging forearms and thighs of the bodies that make up the ground.

  I bounce off my back, tumble onto my side, then roll onto my knees. I don't feel any pain, not with the raw rage of the line crackling up inside and the dampening crush of the wall from above.

  "You think you're better than us," I say, as I stalk toward him, where he lies at the end of his furrow like a landed comet. His body looks unharmed but his white eyes flash in a daze. "Like the rest, Julio and Drake, Coram and Don. Just a madman with too much power and a broken brain."

  I jump high over him and let the black eye hammer me down, forming a scythe-like blade along the line of my knee and shin that plunges into his chest and spikes right through his body.

  CRUNCH

  He cries out, then I'm pummeling him again, my gauntleted fists throbbing off his skull while my razor knee burrows deeper through his middle, wetting the frozen ocean with his blood. I'm ranting something outrageous along the lines of 'sic semper tyrannis' when the invisible wall finally knocks me back.

  I feel it like a coiled spring, the pressure winding tighter and tighter with every second I'm in its domain, until finally the trigger point hits and I'm flicked away like a speck of dust from the finger of a god.

  Whoooooooo!

  I hit the ground and roll again, scraping a partial furrow through stone bodies of my own, protected from instant death by the cocoon of the black eye. I've never used it like this before, but it feels second nature to me now. Of course it can take physical form and strike blows, form shields, shape up as a battle-axe in my hands.

  I roll up to my feet with Olan Harrison running at me and a massive double-bladed axe winching back behind my head.

  He leaps and I swing the vast weapon even as he throws blurry waves of diamond power at me. They travel through the air in a split second, as fast as bullets, and hit like a nine-tailed lash across my face and chest.

  The axe blow falters as I scream with the pain, blood gushing up from deep gouges across my body, severing muscle and sinew and opening me up to the outside. He kicks me in the split gut and rises a knee into my face, whipping me back while the black eye gathers in like rain, working to seal up the nine slits in my skin.

  "You think I don't know your tricks?" Olan asks, as he brings his nine-tailed lash back down again, this time glancing off the parabola of the black eye's shield. "I know everything about you. I've seen the future, Last Mayor, and I know how this ends."

  I laugh in the middle of the pain. Oh yeah, I splutter to myself, this is the good stuff, this is what I came for. Atonement! I move the black eye so when the next set of lashes fall they'll tear my throat apart, and on a tide of that exquisite pain I'll rise higher than ever.

  Hell yes!

  The lash lands and the pain sears and I soar on it like I'm riding a goddamn rainbow. The black eye whips round Olan's head like a noose, round his wrists and legs like shackles, and I use the pain and the laughter of that to pull them all taut at once in a schlocky, horrible firecracker.

  His huge arms and legs rip away in wet, raggedy pieces, chased by skewers of blood. His torso and head blow an instant later, sending gushes of red out and his white eyes off spiraling like orbiting moons, jaw wide open and lips raked back, little bits of spit flying.

  Boom and done.

  I stagger up, spitting my own blood and black bile, as his body parts tumble to the ground and settle. I summon the black eye in tight like a second skin, scooping my own neck and innards back into place and holding them while the skin re-heals. I watch from my knees, dizzy with blood loss, as the pieces of him settle, waiting to see if they will try to crawl back together again. His head rocks slightly in a lull in the ocean's bodies, until the movement finally settles like an infant's crib swaying to a halt, and that part joins its fellows in steadily draining silence.

  That was one hell of a rib crack, better than anything he did to James While. "Come back from that, you bastard," I mutter.

  Then he does.

  It starts as a faint sound, a kind of slapping tick that gets louder as I turn around and scan the foothills, searching the weaving horizon of rising and falling body piles, all gray and silent, until I make out the figure coming down the rise.

  Shit.

  It's Olan Harrison.

  It's the same plastic handsome face. The same dark pants and shirt. Did they resurrect him already?

  Except then he's standing just yards before me, and reality feels like it skipped a beat on fast-forward. Maybe I blinked for a whole minute? He's right there before me, flashed into existence like a leper. Now it feels like my eyes are filling with water, as the ground shifts underfoot and I am moved, and he is moved, and my knuckles clack back into position and the dead pieces of him fade, and….

  We're back where we started; back in the diamond silence, ba
ck in the face-off.

  There's Olan Harrison, looking at me. Here I am.

  "I wanted to see what you were capable of," he says, by way of explanation.

  I don't trust myself to speak. I remember driving my knee through his sternum. I remember the thick rush of his blood, and the joy of his arms coming away beneath the black eye. I remember each blow I struck, and the blood flaring out, but now I see pretty clearly that those things didn't happen.

  I begin to feel the silky touch of his diamond tendrils moving within my shield. I register that with horror. They're inside the black eye. They're slinking icily over my skin. How long have they been there?

  I blink hard, in the real world and on the line, but that doesn't shift them. I look at my stomach; the slits in my clothes are gone; how could he trick me about that? I touch my belly but there isn't any lump of a scar.

  Something has shifted here and I look into his white eyes. They seem fiercer now, and I feel smaller beneath them. What the hell did he just do?

  "That was savage," Olan says. "I see why Rachel Heron warned me. If it had been her, I have no doubt she would be torn apart and buried already."

  He gestures to the place where his body parts fell. I finally find words. I'd expected him to have powers, but this? "How did you do that?"

  He frowns. "I built this mind thirteen years ago, Last Mayor. You shouldn't be surprised that I've learned how to use it."

  He clicks his fingers, and I'm forced instantly to my knees. His diamond tendrils compel me, and I can't stop them. They're inside my thoughts, snuck beneath my defenses. I try shuffling the black eye through different variations, adopting tricks I developed long ago on my trip across the Atlantic, back when I was the one forcing Feargal to his knees, humiliating him for Drake's amusement, making him misremember things that he did or didn't do.

  Olan Harrison has now done that to me. I spin the eye through different attacks but he deflects each with ease.

  "Arrogance, Last Mayor. You have raw power but you don't have discipline. Like a spoiled child." He touches my shaggy black hair and runs his fingers down my scalp. "But you'll learn."

  I already have.

  Now I know what he can do.

  In turn, it's time to show him the real me. With a thought I bunch the black eye and punch it through his diamond noose around my neck, opening just enough space for me to speak.

  "Now," I say.

  And we drop.

  13. DIAMONDS

  The ground underfoot falls away and we collapse into it. Gray fills my vision as ocean bodies tumble and kick, then I am caught and lifted in the tumbling scrum of bodies, demon hands hoisting me out of the crush. I roll up and off onto the road, looking back at the heap of my floaters that have now come to life, and even now clutch at Olan Harrison in their midst.

  His plastic mouth hangs open and stunned as he spins in their midst, lashing out with diamond-coated blows that hurl floaters arcing over the surrounding body-hills. They crawl over him like ants on a scorpion. Every blow he lands opens up space for two more to pour in, fastening around him like fast-setting cement. Demons snatch at his ankles, lepers pluck at his arms and the ocean mound either side to swamp him under.

  For a second only I stare, overwhelmed with this bizarre scene and flattened by the sudden chaos on the line. He looks like a dinosaur fighting to escape a tar pit. The hard cracking of stony bodies on stony bodies rings out like a stampede of castanets, punctuated by the whoosh and crash of his diamond lashes whipping and breaking. It's what I imagine the imprisonment of every demon went like, back when millions and billions of gray floaters circled the world to bring them down.

  I snap back to reality.

  I did this. Harrison talks about arrogance, but he's the one who stepped out of his protective wall onto ground I prepared in advance. Here I made the ocean dance, and here under cover of their thrashing bodies I made them lie down. Lepers beneath demons, demons beneath floaters, forming a perfect gray mound of flattened, rolling bodies in a shallow crease of this landscape of flattened, rolling bodies, indistinguishable from the rest.

  Olan Harrison never imagined I would do this, he didn't check carefully, and now he's paying for it.

  And paying well. He cuts chunks out of my army with every blow. His diamond whips glitter like crisscrossing ropes in a sped-up game of jump rope, invisible but yielding a terrible cost as a demon tears apart at the chest, a leper is caught in mid fritzing leap and pops out of existence in a stark yellow flash. Floater limbs separate from their bodies in gushes of whispery gray powder, like ghosts released after a lifetime of suffering.

  He is mesmerizing to behold, furious and glorious at the center of the storm. On the line his whips multiply, fed by the thousand streams pouring in at his back. They flicker between lashes and solid sabers, four of them at once, then eight, sixteen, spinning like helicopter blades.

  I've never seen anything like it. I don't know how to fight that. There's no time to waste.

  I throw myself into the fray.

  His diamond blades batter against the black eye and crunch deep through its shield like metal into thick glass. I throw my arms out and come back with twin swords forged from the black eye, and take up the dance; striking, deflecting, parrying, spinning.

  I've never fought like this before, but there's nothing real about it. I can't even tell if I'm really moving, if he's moving, but on the line we weave in and out of each other's blows with a haunting, terrifying grace, as the ocean thrash against his thighs like breakers on rocks. His sixteen blades encircle me, jolting off my head and striking divots from my shoulders, but I anchor myself in deeper things; in my floaters reaching up, in my demons fighting for me, in my lepers flashing and striking like lightning.

  "I'm impressed, Last Mayor," Olan calls out over the storm of bodies chopping apart. I shouldn't be able to hear him over the roar but on the line his voice carries.

  "You made them," I answer, barely keeping my head away from his whickering diamond whips, meeting as many blows with the black eye blades as I can. "I just picked them up."

  If it weren't for the ocean I'd be crushed already, split a dozen times by a dozen blows, and it takes my every speck of concentration to fend him off. But I do fend him off. I move so fast I can't understand what's happening; some part of my brain is on automatic pilot and fighting to survive. I bounce and crack from blow to blow, and with each blow I draw a little closer. He grins manically, howls into the sky, and turns up the pace.

  Then there comes the sound of the ocean.

  It begins as the lapping of a distant tide, but rises until it sings on the line like a tsunami wave roaring into the coast. They're coming back for me. The bulk of the thousand are sprinting from their scouting trips around the shield dome to save me. The bone-deep thunder of their thousand footfalls gives me strength, even as it gives Olan Harrison pause. In the midst of a harmonious pirouette, taking out a demon's eye and cleaving three floaters down their spines, he turns back to his wall and gauges the distance.

  I gauge it too.

  On a dime he breaks off his assault and runs. A demon rises in his path and his diamond blade punches a neat hole through its forehead. Two lepers spark into his path and he leaps one, lashes the legs out from under the other. I toss out lassos on the line but he rips through them like they're spider web threads. He's getting away. I can't let him get away.

  I take three bounds, leap, and have a demon catch me halfway up and fling me after Olan like a javelin. The black eye sharpens round my outstretched arms like an arrowhead, and I pull on the line with all my strength into his thicket of whirling diamond blades. My weight and all the mass of the army at my back cuts a divot into his diamond sheen like a catamaran prow through the storm-tossed waters of the wall.

  I scream. He roars. I drive my searing arrow point through the tips of his defenses and home, into the side of his throat.

  Then the massive fist of the wall finally swats me down, and the line abandons me. I
drop and strike the hard gray ground, tumbling out my momentum over solid humps of knees and elbows without any black eye to shield me, deeper into the muddling fuzz of the wall until there's nothing of the line left and I can barely manage to lift my head.

  Olan Harrison kneels before me. There is a gouge in his throat pumping blood, and a grin on his face. In back I can feel my ocean howling at the outer edge of the wall, trying to call me back to safety. Their stamping feet carry through the foothills like a heartbeat for the world.

  Olan looks at me. His diamond blades are gone too, here in the wall. I can barely think under the jackhammer weight of the wall's static. It's like the twinges have returned, crushing me back into my parents' basement, forcing me into myself and afraid, ashamed, no longer worthy of being alive.

  But I've been through this before. Pain is just pain. So it'll be more pain tomorrow, and more pain the day after, but what does that mean to someone like me? Just a comic book artist, just a Yangtze warehouse packer, but I've got vision. He says I don't have discipline, but he's wrong. I learnt discipline fourteen years ago when the first wave went out on the Alpha array, and I learnt it so well that I flipped the signal myself, and survived every terrible second that followed.

  I force myself up to my knees. Olan Harrison's eyes go wide. He holds one hand clamped to his bloody throat. The wall comes down around me like a crashing black rain, threatening to swamp my consciousness away, but it's no thing to someone like me. I get a foot under me. There are no black eye blades here, but my hand fumbles upon a shard of rock, a broken collarbone, and I lift it up.

  "Amazing," says Olan Harrison. "Truly."

  Then there is a leper-like flash, and he is gone.

  The collarbone cracks down on the gray road where he was, splintering to bits.

  INTERLUDE 5

  Rachel Heron strode through the Redoubt, filled with purpose for the first time in over a decade. Watching the battle between Amo and Olan had tempered her decision, already forged in the presence of James While. The time for pretending was over; it was time to take this chance and do what she could.