He barked out black rage and forced himself onward, each step coming hard beneath the wall's massive weight, the pressure bending his neck and bowing his legs. Three steps he made before the wall slammed him down to both knees. Already he was far deeper than the first time, surrounded by a halo of clashing powers that flared like the sun's corona. Just ahead, so close now he could taste it, Olan Harrison's expression was changing from interest to surprise. Amo tried to take another step and felt his leg break.
He screamed.
The pressure was too high; too much for the black eye, too much even for his rage. He looked down and saw his ankle cracked sideways, the bone jutting through the skin and pouring blood onto a snow-white floater skull. He could barely lift his head as the rain of darkness washed down and pummeled him beneath it.
He was in the coma again, circling the drain as his parents urged him not to give up, as his girlfriend came and left and didn't return, as the doctors talked about their research and holding him under longer, while all the time he was just drowning, drowning and drowning with no hope of release.
"I'm right here!" he'd wanted to shout at them, but the coma's boot held him down, swirling in a darkness he couldn't understand; mouth stuffed full of sand, head locked in a vice, screaming into the nothingness alone.
His bad shoulder cracked under the strain, the collarbone shearing into the top of his rib cage. Even now he wasn't strong enough. Tears of frustrated rage splashed off a white back underfoot and sizzled to steam as his head bowed further to the ground, as his spine began to creak with the pressure.
All for nothing; all those weeks in the basement, all those months fighting for recovery, all those years of trying to be a good man came to an end here. So much for the Last Mayor and his dreams, he couldn't even draw breath to scream, as the last and greatest twinge crushed him under its heel. His body flattened to the stone, knees crushing beneath him, ribs snapping like dry tinder, skull warping so his eyes bulged. He felt the first dislocation as his spine began to break, the last flash of color as his irises crushed shut, and then -
- the ground fell away beneath him.
He tumbled into a pit made of shifting stone bodies, where everything was dark as arms and torsos and hips blocked out the light, and blocked out the terrible weight, and for a second he gasped in a breath.
What?
Then a hand folded into his own, and a hand took his arm and hands buoyed under his hips, and hands lifted his legs and guided his head upward as the pit of bodies parted to either side, and he was raised up out of the darkness into the light to see -
- the ground around him churning like a plague pit come to life, as arms and legs uncurled like tubers reaching to the sun, with chests twisting and heads lifting and the dead rising up upon the dead fifty bodies high and -
- the body hills collapsing in seconds like tides on a beach, spilling floaters and demons to come sprinting toward the black wall over their fellows, all moving as one like a great organic pulsing of muscle, so that –
- stretching back through the tattered wedge he'd torn into the wall came a charging delta of the dead, rushing in to meet him.
His jaw dropped, numb with disbelief. The hills were alive. Thousands upon thousands of withered white bodies were rising, and as the hands that had raised him set him down carefully, and sheltered him from the crush of the wall, he looked to either side and saw the same thing happening everywhere.
The ocean were awake, and roaring back to life, and pouring themselves into the wall, immense in their numbers. He flashed back to what Anna had done as she'd died, how she'd lifted and thrown off a version of reality that he'd never even known was there, like a color layer in a piece of art that changed everything. Even stunned and in pain from his freshly broken bones he could feel that the whole line had shifted, and the rules of the world had just changed.
Anna had died to raise him an army.
He blinked away tears and stood on one leg as a glowering tide of the long-dead rushed in. All around he saw the same thing happening, and understood what it meant, and then they hit and the power came with them.
Millions of stories flooded into his head; a hurly-burly of memories coming in different languages from different perspectives, from men and women and young and old, all crying out to be saved, all crying out for him to save them.
The black eye erupted like a volcano and ripped the shield wall in half.
Power soared in and out of Amo, healing his ankle beneath it, reforming his collar and pumping strength back into his legs. He shook off the guiding arms of floaters and took his first step forward with Anna's army of the risen dead at his back.
Everything had come to this.
He took his second step, then his third, then he was picking up speed and running straight into the black like it wasn't even there.
Olan Harrison wore a look of horror as Amo blazed an impossible trail through his unbreakable wall, lifting it just as Anna had lifted the line. He whirled around and saw the wall lifting all around the Redoubt, with the Last Mayor's army of the dead pouring in like an ocean filling into the crater hole of a bomb.
Olan flashed out of existence like a leper, but Amo ran on until he broke free of the wall and his army followed after, at his back and at every point round the shield's circle. He raised his arms like Anna had done and caught the falling wall as it resealed and descended, and there he held it like Atlas holding the weight of the world as Olan's righteous victims ran through for revenge.
Finally, they called with their every breath on the line, finally, yes, now!
INTERLUDE 8
Olan Harrison flashed back onto the Redoubt Operations floor, stunned by what he'd just seen. Standing where Rachel Heron would have done, he stared at monitors depicting the flood of type ones and twos rolling through his wall as if it didn't exist, stampeding up the Huangshan valleys like a cancer eating toward his heart.
The voices in his head didn't like that.
They screamed like never before. They grated and tore into each other. While the white tide raced closer, every second eating up yards, every minute churning up tenths of a mile with only five miles radius before the war struck home, a different war raged inside his head.
He tried to move, tried to say something, but his body was frozen. Something was different now after that little bitch had come down in Rachel's place, and he couldn't break the deadlock.
How had she done that?
How?
He didn't understand. Even if she'd somehow tricked the Lazarus beam then she still should have been ravaged on arrival like he had been, like James While, like every other person he'd ever brought down. But she hadn't been. She'd been solid, whole, complete, and that seemed impossible.
Thrusting his diamond blades through her chest hadn't made it any better. He hadn't done it fast enough to make her stop whatever she was doing. Time had slowed down and he'd plunged more blades through the clone body he'd prepared, but still she'd kept on, bringing permanent shifts to the line that he could barely grasp, that were undoing so much of his work.
How?!
He tried to give orders to his people now to track the change she'd made; how far had that surge gone, how strong was it, what was it doing out there to his beautifully silenced world?
But he couldn't speak a single command.
He felt crippled like the Last Mayor, torn by indecision as the voices inside him warred madly. He couldn't even avert his gaze from the screen showing the Last Mayor's approach. Minutes stretched on and in that time nobody spoke to him, no external interference came to jolt him out of this deepening fugue, because he'd boxed them all to better prepare for this war.
So what now?
"Your heart rate is dangerously elevated," came the voice of Little Olan in his ear, but that was nothing compared to the chaos of so many voices; raging, screaming blame, seeking recriminations and resurgence.
Rachel Heron was gone. James While was gone. Every person he'd used
for fourteen years, for twenty, for thirty was gone, and there was no one to break him out and stop the interminable tearing inside, no one to remind him who he was.
"Calm yourself," said Little Olan, " breathe," but the voices muffled him and pushed him to the fringes, leaving only their outrage; pieces of himself that for most of thirteen years had existed in uneasy harmony beneath the over-riding shell of 'Olan Harrison'.
Now they tore into each other in bloody civil war.
If only Rachel Heron was here, some of them yelled. As a slave or not, she had always steadied him; with her manipulations, with her judging eyes, with her unbroken spirit and compelling competence. Her secret defiance had always given 'Olan Harrison' the drive to keep her close, if only to one day see the pleasure of her finally plowed under.
Now that day had come, and she was gone.
There was only emptiness where she had been. He'd planned his future with her ever-present, but in this moment she was out of his reach. Her betrayal didn't sting; he'd known it was coming since the start. What stung was her escape.
Would he ever get her back?
James While was gone too, lost in a silent death, and he'd have to drain hundreds off the line to restore him to his rightful cell beneath the Redoubt, and the Last Mayor was rampaging right now! Would he ever get Heron and While back?
She was to fault, other voices cried. Always, always it was her making us weak. She pulled us down. We grew dependent. We were so weak! We are so weak. Olan, Olan, do something, do something now, make us strong again! And all throughout Little Olan chattered in his ear too, adding to the chaos in telling him what was real and what wasn't, advising him based on a version of Olan Harrison who'd died fourteen years earlier.
The havoc was unbearable.
He jumped to escape it, appearing in the cells in the basement floors and looking down at the body of James While, but that only made the voices scream louder about his failures, about his mistakes. He'd had James While for such a short time, they cried, after waiting for so long? The tortures had scarcely begun. His grand scheme to make Rachel Heron a traitor had only torn her away from him forever!
How could the line deny him her suffering, the long delightful years of her humiliation, the endless image of her begging for forgiveness?
The madness slit deeper down fault lines he'd papered over for years, and he jumped once more to flee it, to a cragged peak four miles out from the Redoubt, crowning a crinkled and raw range of black granite cliffs. Shoulders of spiky rock shot out like the crystal spikes of a dark snowflake, their troughs and valleys leaving highways for the Last Mayor's horde to plummet down.
They were everywhere. He spun and saw the great army closing in like a white iris on all sides, composed of millions of bodies sprinting in tandem, breathing in tandem like a lung for the world, all somehow alive again.
How did she do it?!
The battle inside himself became a rending. He grunted and jerked as threads were cut that he'd never dared touch before. The parts that were most like 'Olan Harrison', that had always clutched for human connection even as he'd placed himself above all other humans.
He should never have tolerated Rachel Heron's deception, the horde of voices cried as their knives fell, and they savaged 'him'. He should never have wasted his time speaking with the Last Mayor; he should have dropped a bomb on him from the start. Those voices won too, whittling deeper into the fragile core of 'Olan Harrison'.
'He' never should have wanted their love. He shouldn't have needed their adulation. All he'd ever needed was their suffering, using their eyes as his mirrors, and that was all. Did the lion care about the gazelle's opinion as it died?
That was weakness, a weakness all of his own and comprised of the last shreds of whatever had made him human. In that battle he lost, and the final truth became clear, that 'Olan Harrison' himself was the weakness. He'd always been the weak link in that constructed Fabergé egg of disparate parts dredged from the line. His unspoken love for Rachel Heron and his un-abating need for approval had pulled him down.
The voices beat him to his knees. They took control of his right hand and tried to rip the last voice arguing against them away; Little Olan in his left ear. Little Olan cried out against this, and the left hand fought, loyal to the end, so the right hand coalesced into a diamond blade and chopped the left hand off at the elbow.
The pain was horrific. The pain was invigorating. The treacherous, loyal limb fell and the wound cauterized at the blade's touch with not a single drop of blood spilled.
Still 'Olan Harrison' did not surrender, so the right arm kept coming. 'Olan' weaved his head from side to side as it took wild blows from the blade, raking deep lines into his skull and severing the ear cartilage, the lobe, lopping them roughly to splat on the black mountain rock. It didn't end until the buzzing voice of Little Olan was finally dug free, along with a welter of blood and half a cochlea.
All the voices were silenced at once. The tiny speaker hit the ground and he crushed it underfoot.
He panted.
He straightened.
There'd been a victory, that was clear, and it did not belong to 'Olan Harrison'. The parts of him that remained shrank away in terror, while 'He' was something new, now. The strong voices stretched out inside this new self, finding only agreement within an echo chamber of certainty.
What was Rachel Heron to them? What was James While? What was any kind of love, need, companionship?
Weaknesses. All of them would suffer in due course. But none of them were needed. They were food. How else could He become a God, if He wasn't ready to give up childish things? There was no emotion left now. There was no hate, no perverted form of possessive love, only that purest sensation; hunger.
What else should a predator feel? Gods demanded sacrifices. He'd already lost an arm and an ear, but what was that in the ascent to Godhood? There would be many more sacrifices, severing every last tie to the race He had been.
First upon the altar was the man that had birthed this new creature, Olan Harrison. The last few pieces of Olan inside screamed. But he was weak. He'd always been weak, a narrative enforced upon disparate stories by will and an artificial voice in the ear, and it was time to pay the price. The bill always came at the end.
The voices plunged inside, into a vision of old Olan's chest. His feeble sternum cracked. His pulsing heart raced in terror, made of tattered memories of a childhood of wealthy neglect, an adolescence of heroic entrepreneurship, an adulthood of insane economic growth and a second life of monstrous voices in the darkness.
He screamed pathetically, because he was pathetic.
This will make us strong, the new God said. We want this.
'Olan Harrison's' ribs flayed open like an eagle's wings, again. 'Olan Harrison' screamed, and it was so sweet. This would be the foundation. Upon this all other things would be built. For long moments the scream echoed, as Olan's heart beat its last, and his last blood fell, and finally he was severed.
Silence followed. Then beautiful, perfect harmony. Then hunger.
He was strong; stronger than ever before. The line rippled beneath His thoughts; a dazzling array of strings that only He knew how to pluck. He was a God, newly crowned, and around him the Last Mayor's forces were a rabble.
He looked out and saw a ramshackle, watery waste of fuel; untrained bodies, unprepared minds unified only by anger and fledgling hope. Their hate would run dry, and their hope would only last as long as it outweighed the weight of pain pressing down. He could outrun both, because hunger lasted forever. It made Him purer than them.
He took a moment to pity them.
They were reactions only. He was the originator. Olan Harrison hadn't really been the one to start this war, because in the heart of 'Olan Harrison' there'd always been Him. Finally He was free, a legion of voices acting as one.
He kicked the arm off the crag top. It wasn't His any more; it belonged to another time now, an older and weaker version of Himself, now finall
y exorcised. He wasn't Olan anymore but something greater. Many had become one, fused in the ultimate sacrifice of self. It was good.
The jump came with rolling ease. He didn't need the petty contrivances of Olan Harrison anymore to protect Him. Guns and bombs were the weapons of a small, terrified man, and on the line He was glorious. Instead he took the fight to the enemy, and flashed back to reality on the valley floor, standing directly in their path.
The ground shook with the enemy's millions of stampeding feet. The air thrummed with their whistling breaths. The Last Mayor shot over a rise toward Him, wild-eyed and bleeding black light into the sky. He was fearsome to behold, but so simple; a bag full of chemicals driven by emotion, memory, hard-coded pathways through a primitive brain.
With Olan Harrison gone, He had become so much more.
On the line He gave orders to his slaves in the Redoubt, and at once the full complement of angels jumped to join Him on the battlefield, each one a weapon in His arsenal. He straightened to His full height against the oncoming tide and unleashed a swirling octopus of diamond blades; each one driven by a different voice, each one ready to drink blood and dust and satisfy the hunger for a few moments more, as it should be, as it always would be from this moment on.
Nothing would be denied. No whim of His would be stopped.
Down the line the first of His angels clashed with the first of the dead, and He laughed at the instant devastation they wrought. These amateurs were nothing next to Him. He jumped forward and the Last Mayor charged in to meet Him.
25. SAMSON
I dive at Olan Harrison with the black eye streamlined to a bullet, and we clash with a thunderclap. His diamond blades slash off my black casing like a grain harvester's threshing tines, striking dark sparks until my fist breaks through the weave and cranks into his jaw, and we go reeling together.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 214
