The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Sawtooth bedrock spikes us from below as we roll too fast and entangled, each nick tearing skin out of us both, until he gets a blade through a crack in my guard and shoves it into my belly. I yell a blast on the line that hurls us apart, then somehow seal the wound from inside and spring back to my feet while the ocean fill in the gap between us, pouring on their attack.

  They swarm Olan Harrison like hornets, shoving me back as they jump off each other and grapple for his limbs, stone-toothed jaws snapping and fingernails raking downward. He spins through them like a ballet-dancer, cutting bodies in quarters with his flurry of diamond whips and blades. The torsos of five floaters in a row slice beautifully, a demon opens head to groin down the middle like an anatomy lesson, a leper crackle-pops into gunpowder static.

  I stare in a kind of trance, mesmerized. His every movement is perfect, every turn a kill and a re-set in one, setting him up for the next ocean wave as if he's the hero in a choreographed fight scene. Whoosh, three heads fire off like champagne corks under three different whips, and he's already turning to a spear-head wedge of demons rushing in, plunging one massive diamond lance through them all like cuts of chicken on a shish kebab.

  He kills as if it's nothing, an old video game he's played before and memorized all the moves. I watch agog as he stacks up special move after special move, hitting key combos I didn't know existed, slaughtering bodies with trick shots and multipliers until there's a mounded wall building around him and perhaps he's bored, because then he stops and barks a command and we all get blown backward by a gale-force wind.

  For three wild revolutions I hurtle through the air, battered off other flying bodies, spinning uncontrollably and unable to breathe until in mid-air I plant the black eye like an anchor. Swirling floaters and demons strike and almost dislodge me, so I swell the black eye to deflect them. His hurricane wind pulls tears from my eyes and I hang horizontally against it, gripping my black anchor and waiting for the torrent to fade.

  Before it can, something impales me from behind. I shriek, release the eye and am flung off by the gale. I lose count of the revolutions as I register the diamond blade slit through my chest and the person holding it, riding me like a surfboard through the tumult.

  It's one of his angels in full black strike suit.

  He laughs, and it sounds like Olan Harrison. He twists the blade and my insides twist with it, steering me into a solid shank of black rock jutting up from a ridge. I barely get the black eye up in time, pulverizing the stone into an atomized cloud that shreds the angel off my back.

  He screams and falls and I fall after him, landing with a rib-breaking thump on his chest. The rock shrapnel has chewed up his black gear like a dog's favorite bone; there's blood rising from a hundred divots through the armored fabric, his eyes are ruptured red balls and his legs kick frantically.

  I break his skull open with an iron brick made of the eye, and the blade fades from my middle. I gag as the pain hits me; blood pours out of my front and my back, more than I can stop with my hands. On my knees I try to remember how to heal with the black eye, and fail. I already did it once without thinking, didn't I, but how did that happen? I think…

  Three more of them come at me, firing arrows of diamond matter that hit my chest, my thighs, and bounce off my shields as I pull them up, then-

  I don't know what happens next.

  I'm tumbling, tossed like a die from a giant's hand over the scouring landscape. My head crunches into a crag, my knee breaks over a diamond blade, then I'm caught in the arms of a demon who himself evaporates beneath another diamond fusillade, dropping me into the thick of a horde of floaters.

  Shit.

  Their stony bodies scrabble up into a protective tower, drenching me in darkness. I lie back and reach a shaking hand to feel my staved-in skull. The whole of my left skull is fractured deeply.

  Shit, that's coma-inducing. What the hell do I do about this?

  I think back to the gouge through my belly that started this and try to remember how the hell I just healed that out of nowhere. A twist like this? A spin like that?

  I get it just as the tower collapses sideways like Jenga blocks, revealing a white sky in which five more are hanging in the air, suspended on unseen cables and variously armed with diamond daggers, axes, swords, guns. I hold up a hand as if to say, 'Just a second, guys', but they don't give me a second.

  The one with the daggers leads them in and takes a flashing leper mid-jump through her chest, stunning both of us. For a second the leper occupies the same space as her, and it doesn't do her any favors. When it flashes away she just drops, a tunnel cored through her body where its body had been. Her diamond knives drop and fade, and I'm on my knees by the time the next two get speared by airborne floaters zinging in like javelins, their feet broken off so only the sharpened shin bones stick out and I'm thinking-

  What the hell?

  Have the ocean learned to launch themselves like missiles? I glimpse two demons working in tandem, breaking off feet and hurling floaters sharp-end first to pluck more angels out of the sky. Where did they learn that? I remember vaguely writing something like it in a comic book once, but how the hell did they-

  The last two angels put blades through my chest and abdomen, further slitting my already slit guts, then try to dart swiftly away, but not before a leper blows between them like a phosphorous grenade.

  White light beams out like I've burned the contrast on an image to a thousand percent, and I can't see. Seconds pass blind as the light fades a little, though the white/yellow blaze where the leper went off hangs like a burning sun. The angels are just soot on the walls of the floater tower still building around me. Things are going crazy. I rub my eyes and desperately try to remember how to heal so I can -

  Something massive lands on my head.

  It flattens me to the floor, but the black eye concertinas me back into shape and I'm rolling before another angel who's a silhouette at best through the afterglow, only his bright diamond fists coming through clear. He veers in with a big haymaker but I manage to swipe it to the side, throwing a knee reflexively into his gut. I'm no fighter, but I'm hardly even doing this any more. The black eye knows what I want and somehow picks the route, leaving me mashing buttons on the keypad in my head.

  The huge guy doubles over my knee, I drop an elbow into his spine, and he explodes too. What the-? Blood sprays me like a damp firework, and I'm not sure if I even did that. There's no time to ponder it though, as there are already three more of them dropping from the sky, and more of the ocean scrabbling to complete the protective lattice over my head. The two tides hit and swirl like paints, the diamond blades searing through white flesh while white flesh encircles and yanks away diamond blades, and I think I might be about to die.

  So much blood has already poured out of me. I look down but I can't see anything except white and red, and again I try to remember how to heal, then stop, because I never really knew, did I?

  I just did it.

  I voice the wish in my head, and at once my eyes clear. My divoted head pops outward with a gristly crunch, my innards sew themselves up, and it's all the black eye doing it. I look up at the churn of bodies above and think, I've had about enough of this.

  A leper comes, takes my arm, and jumps me away.

  I flash back high in the air, kneeling on a floating anchor point of the eye that must be a thousand feet up, looking down while the battle rages below. It looks like madness. Diamond arrows jet everywhere like tracer rounds, diamond blades spin like light sabers as Olan Harrison's angels clear crop circles of bodies wherever they stand; diamond wings spread, firing diamond flamethrowers that melt through fossilized old meat, while my army swarms to overwhelm.

  I can't see the bedrock beneath them anymore; there is only this tectonic plate of shifting war. The sounds of cracking bones rise, the slicing of diamond blades on the line, the scrabbling of stony flesh. There are no cries, though, and my mind falters on that. It's normal for the ocean, but for
Olan Harrison's angels?

  I plunge into the line, probing into the angel signals, then rock back with my blood chilled. I'm not sure what I'm seeing, but perhaps the hints were always there; in him, in Rachel Heron, in his threads and boxes and Lazarus itself with all its body-swapping interchangeability.

  These angels are not people any more. They're all him.

  I scour the battlefield for the original Olan, reading the patterns of force on the newly transformed line as power zones emerge and submerge like colors in a fractal screensaver, until I find him standing on a mount of the dead like Liberty on her plinth, looking back and waiting for me to see.

  Tracer rounds shoot up toward me and the black eye bounces them away. He's half a mile distant but I see his face as if he's beside me, and I realize he's different; he's got no left arm, no left ear, and he's shifted inside. He's full of only noise, as if the gnashing voices have swamped what he was and built something new, leaving none of the old Olan Harrison behind. It takes me seconds to recognize that, but there it is, unavoidable.

  He's severed himself.

  I laugh but it's not funny. In his bid to become a god he's burnt the scaffold to the ground, but perhaps he has become a god. I see him inside his people now. The lines of control arcing back to him are gone. He doesn't need them any more, because all of these angels are him.

  Copies.

  My throat tightens. He's outsourced his own mind. The people inside those people are dead. There's only this ex-Olan thing that he's birthed into the world, made of half-formed voices and a past clung onto for so long that it rotted alive, spreading wider.

  I try to think of a way to kill that. How can I fight a thing made of seven hundred angels, that wouldn't even have to die when all the angels die because…

  The last stage in the process crashes my brain. For seconds I forget to breathe. He never could have planned this, he didn't know what Anna was going to do, but now that she's done it he must see it, and like it, and…

  It hits me like a knee in the face, because it's already happening. No matter what I'll do, this is coming.

  He's spreading into my army.

  It's obvious and perfect and unkillable. I look again at the patterns of power and see my floaters and lepers and demons turning into him. His DNA, his mind, spreads like an infection, starting with those closest and widening exponentially.

  I suck in a sharp breath. My heart races. I can see how this would appeal to his desire to be more than human, distributed in a horde a billion strong. He built the T4 off his own DNA, so each one of them should be a perfect match for his mind. I will never kill them all.

  Unless…

  I stop thinking and start doing. It's horrific, the worst thing I will ever do, but what the hell else was all this for if I can't be cruel now? This is what I've become, this is what I'm good for, and I won't turn away from that truth now.

  I dive off my platform like Cerulean. Perfect ten scores rack up, and as I fall I can't help but think of Don so long ago in Las Vegas, and how the ocean listened to my unspoken command as I bled out on the blacktop.

  Save me, I cried, and they saved me then. Can they save me again?

  In seconds I'm before him, the original copy of Olan Harrison. He throws up his blades but now the black eye falls with all the strength of the ocean behind it, a double-headed axe that splits his head open like a rotten pumpkin.

  He dies, but it's just the beginning. Twin diamond bolts shoot through my calves from behind and yank, and I spin to face a seven-strong platoon of angels advancing as one. All have this new Olan Harrison in their eyes.

  "Last Mayor," they say in unison, "see what we've become."

  "It's not a good look," I answer, and hurl the loyal members of my army upon them, bodies surging as I sprint into the ones in the middle, savaging their throats with icy stiletto black eye blades. They shove short blades at my chest but I'm already spinning up a fresh shell of onyx black that turns them away. More of them come and stamp atop the shield, hammering diamond battering rams into the seams, so I tense and pincushion the onyx shell, spiking them through with anemone-like spines.

  They drop and I shudder. The killing is wearing me out and my strength is fading. I reach out to the ocean but they're fading too, many of them dead, many others becoming extensions of Olan Harrison. The doubly dead lie everywhere, ruptured like dry old seedpods, slit like shed snake skins, sprawled like a pale lunar moonscape of rock and dust.

  I have to be faster. I have to kill the angels before all the army turn.

  I fly. Loyal demons fling me on. Lepers jump with me. Floaters make ramps for me to dive off. Seven hundred angels, he said. They come to me and I go to them, and in the air or on the ground or in the thick of rasping, scraping bodies raised up like towers we fight.

  I kill them. They cut into me; death by a thousand cuts, and each one looks into my eyes as they die, saying my name when they can, 'Last Mayor', like a taunt. This Olan thing doesn't care anymore for individual losses; I'm shaving off individual cells when the body is made of millions. Perhaps he's even happy for it, because this is purer, proving how inhuman he really is.

  I rise on a creaking lattice-bridge of floaters and shoot the black eye like an autocannon into their ranks.

  RATATATATATATATAT

  Black rounds arc across the mountain range and bring his avatar angels down; wings clipped, throats pared, human bodies falling to burst on rock.

  RATATATATATATATAT

  They come at me and I grind myself out on them. They wheel and fire, sending diamond shots into me that weaken me further as my link to the ocean dwindles. Still I won't stop. His arrogance will be his death. I kill three angels with a black boomerang. I lop two with a broadsword. I fire imaginary pistols into seven and I ramp up the autocannon again at a new wave, spitting out ammo made of desperation.

  RATATATATATATATAT

  Seven hundred is a lot. I lose count. I look up from a head-cleaving stroke like a man waking from a dream, and wonder if this is it? Is this seven hundred?

  My body leaks with a hundred cuts, holes, gouges. I try to summon the eye to heal them but it sputters feebly. No strength comes from the ocean anymore. The fighting has stopped, the field is silent, and nobody but me is moving. I weave in place, treading on bodies ten deep and truly dead.

  I see they are already gathered.

  Floaters, demons, lepers and the others, the wraiths and the candlewax monsters, the blue heads and the many-legged rollers have built themselves into a structure atop the dead; arena walls circle around me, rising in grand columns and arches. I recognize the Roman Colosseum, and have to laugh.

  They're not mine any more. They're his, with only him inside them. From their white, red, yellow, blue, electric eyes I see the hunger that was always lurking inside Olan Harrison, looking back at me.

  It's the same hunger that broke Julio, that drove Drake, that ruptured Maine and corrupted Witzgenstein. I want, it says. I want, I want, I want.

  I'm on my knees in the middle, thick red spit drooling from my mashed lips, laughing. Why not? He comes. I know it's him, the last angel, because the line tells me so. He's a young man, the last of his kind, with the trails of Rachel Heron clinging to him. Perhaps they were colleagues in Olan Harrison's counterfeit world.

  He stands there. We look at each other.

  "How do you like my construction?" he asks, gesturing around the Colosseum. He's proud. Maybe he thinks this rivals my Stonehenge.

  I try to spit, but mostly blood comes out, trickling slackly down my chest. "Copies," I say. "That's all you'll ever be."

  He smiles, then touches his chest. "And you. There's room for all in here. You'll make comics for me, Amo. You'll make us a wonderful flag."

  I snort, and slur. "You're not Olan." The urge to just lay down and go to sleep is strong. That'll be the mounting blood loss. Maybe the cold too. Without the eye to insulate me it's freezing.

  "No. We voted him off the island."

  I man
age a laugh. At least this gestalt poltergeist thing has a sense of humor. "From where I'm standing, you're all the biggest loser. Every last one of you."

  "You can't upset us," the young man says, advancing. "We're on another order from you."

  I spit more blood, as contemptuous as I can. "Homo Deus."

  His smooth brow smoothes further. "Not even Homo, Last Mayor. Simply Deus."

  He jumps through the air then, a leper's trick to cover only five steps, and backhands me. My chin cracks, one more pain on top of the others. I topple and catch myself on jagged rock, and that hurts too. I see my wrist is broken and look at it in wonder. When did that happen?

  "We're God," he says calmly, as if he didn't just break my jaw. "Your people used to feed each other to beings like me. From the top of pyramids they cast the bodies down, raising their voices in praise to idols that never answered back. Won't it be better to have someone who will?"

  He flicks his wrist, and a diamond blade appears in his hand. He could do anything to me now. Crack my ribs. Carve out my eyes. Peel me one inch at a time. Instead he presses the blade into my good hand and sets the point over my heart.

  "Make this last sacrifice," he says, "and I will spare your children."

  I stare at him. If there was ever a way to get my engine hot again, it was that. Mention my children. Mention my wife. Defile my world one more time. It's what he wants.

  Here's what I want.

  With my last fragment of strength I reverse the blade, sending a black streak sizzling into his chest. He gasps, his mouth a perfect O. I smell the seared flesh, the iron tang of blood, coming through now with ash and grease and the ozone stink of leper's jumps, and he sags. The light goes out of his eyes, and the last bit of Olan Harrison tethered to a human body slips free.

  So he spreads faster.

  The ocean turn. His mind stretches for miles, until he is in them all, a single organism with a single will spread across a billion bodies. The scale of it wilts me. They breathe with one set of lungs. They turn their gaze to me with one great eye, and I wonder, what have I done?