What am I about to do?
I can only reach up. With the last of my strength I reach up and take hold of the corrupted version of the line, where Anna left it far above. Just like in Istanbul, she's saved me again. Just like in Maine we're going to do this together.
I pull.
At the last moment he understands, and a chorus of voices cries out from many throats. A deluge of bodies leap in, and I have no strength left to defend myself. Ancient teeth fasten into my thighs, sharp fingers dig into my guts, diamond blades slice into my chest, and all I can do is pull. He orders my arms chewed away, but it doesn't take much. Anna's up there guiding me even now, showing me 'here' like I once showed her how her father's phone worked, 'here' like I once snagged her interest with cellular research and catamaran racing. It's a simple twist that sets the twinge free, something I've done a thousand times before; on dates I never should have taken, on art I shouldn't have attempted.
In the end it comes down to this; the T4 may be his, but the line has always belonged to me, and like Samson I bring it crashing down. It falls like a guillotine, hits the ground like a meteor strike, and just like that one billion clones of Olan Harrison die.
FAR EAST
26. MARTYR
I think that's about it for me.
I breathe out, bodies slumped around me. There are wounds all over my body; bite-marks, slashes, gouges, breaks. My blood stains the floaters' pure white lips red.
Crimson, I think. Cherry. Tomato.
I'm almost dead already.
I laugh a few feeble laughs, pants of steam in the freezing air. It's really something to come full circle like this, but one billion is about my limit. I laugh more, each breath caught halfway toward a sob, and why not? It's Times Square all over again, and I know what has to come next. Olan Harrison is dead, so my work here is done.
One billion dead. It's a record, and it's obvious that I can't live after this. I don't deserve to, I shouldn't be allowed to. I think back to my conversation with Olan Harrison, and telling him what the difference between us was, and it's this. The guilt of killing. It's broken me, and it's time to put the broken people away.
"Olan," I murmur, light-headed now. "We really did a number on this place, huh?"
He doesn't answer, because he's completely dead.
He never had any right to those bodies, never had any natural grip on their insides. With the line returned there was no thread left for him to cling to. I just swiped a giant eraser across the board and rubbed him out, like he wiped out the line.
Of course, I had no right to their bodies either, but I used them still. For that I have to pay.
My blood runs down into the snow beneath my knees. That's pretty. My eyes glaze over in the silence. I've never been in a place this quiet; like the weight of so many dead dampens all sound.
One billion people are never coming back.
I used to think a cure was possible. I sent Lucas and Anna east to dig it out, but nothing could help these people now. They're cored inside, nothing left behind. Their bodies stretch away like a pale gray sky; no sun, no stars, just mottled white and gray settling down into stone.
At least they'll go back to the line. At least they're free, I tell myself, as I raise my fist to my head, the elbow angled out, knuckles to my temple. I liked those diamond blades, I think. I'd like to try that, Wolverine-style. It takes only a few seconds before I chuckle, remembering that I've done this before. So many times. I lower my fist to my throat, so the blade will exit through my spine and do the job properly. I can apologize when I see them, one person at a time.
Always committing suicide, Drake and Julio said about me, always looking to be a martyr, and they're right. I was always scared, first of the enormous loneliness, then of the crushing responsibility, but being scared doesn't make me wrong. Sometimes it's just better to die, to pay the bill at the end. The trick is knowing when the end has come.
It's come.
I think of my wife and my kids. Lara, Vie, Talia. Olan Harrison's death has freed me to love them again, and the love pours in so hard it hurts. They deserve so much better, and now they'll have that chance. I can't be a part of it. Without me their world can go on.
I've done a good thing here. I've done a terrible thing. It's all right.
I trigger the blade.
* * *
Lara ran.
For three weeks they'd been running, overground in whatever vehicles they could find, RVs and buses and coaches that sputtered and died after a day or two of corrosive fuel, clogging up the works, always swapping out for new ones.
Faster.
She wasn't the only one to feel it; the others sensed the storm coming, the gathering threads of power rising on the line. Some felt it in their dreams, others felt it as a prickling in the skin, a sudden overwhelming sense of emotion that led to unexpected tears, and laughter, and moments of madness.
Alyssa was found cutting shallow lines into her thighs in the back of her battered yellow saloon, and restrained. Lin sang songs in a language none of them understood, only stopping when Alan held him tight for fifteen minutes whispering about how much he was loved. George laughed until he puked at a comment that wasn't even a joke.
Lara felt light-headed all day and night. She felt the waves of power radiating out, washing over them on the line from some vast engine at the center of the world. In dreams she saw Amo standing in Times Square, holding the gun to his head again with Cerulean on the ground below, except where Cerulean should have been she saw herself, screaming and going unheard.
Boom.
She woke and the convoy raced on. Something terrible was coming. The rind of disconnected comfort that had gathered round her on the ocean voyage sloughed off as Anna made her jumps around the world, standing up her shields. By the last of those ripples on the line they had left their vehicles behind and were trekking ahead on foot. Lara wore special anesthetic wrappings inside her shoes, and took antibiotics to prevent infection, and leaned on others while walking and running until her feet sloshed with blood.
The landscape became one of bodies; thousands at first then millions, spread in pitted peaks and vales that stretched as far as the eye could see, heaped like wrinkles in the skin of the earth, a coating of human misery. She knelt by the peanut face of one in the jumble and traced the lines scored into its cheeks, its lips as pale as trim slices of cheese, its eyes hard as marbles, and saved her tears for fuel.
She led. They were tired and she was exhausted, her feet already damaged beyond repair, but never thought about stopping. When voices were raised in fear and anger, as the switchbacks on the line grew stronger and her people began to talk of stopping this mad trek and leaving, she only asked them the simplest question.
"Where will you go? There's nowhere else now. There's nowhere to hide from what's coming."
She wanted to hide too, to take her children and flee, but she'd spent too much of her life hiding already; from the beginning when she'd hidden in her dead parents' home to the years she'd let Amo dictate their every step. She'd ducked her head as much as she could while he committed his atrocities, pretending things could still be just as they'd always been, trying to hold onto a civilized past when the past was already so far gone.
Now she'd committed her own atrocities. She'd burnt Witzgenstein alive. She'd drowned Frances in mud. She'd dominated and ridden eighty-three people into the dust of I-80 before finally the two parts of herself, the old and the new, found a way to co-exist.
She ran forward on that understanding. She ran to share it with Amo. It would change things for him, if only he could see it; it might finally soothe his anguish on the line.
When Anna died the line rang with the force, and she ran into the ripples, like she was back in Las Vegas and racing to find Amo for the first time, sprawled on the blacktop, bleeding from savage shotgun wounds in his calves. He needed her, needed her right now, and she ran as fast as she could.
Then the whole of the line lifted
, the earth moved, and she fell into a pit as the body hills came to life; a shoulder smacked off her elbow, a head slammed against her belly. She cracked her shins off a rock-hard hip, her neck jammed into a flailing arm and her forehead struck off a foot kicking for purchase, sending stars swirling across her vision. Daylight chopped away as newly moving bodies climbed on top of her, grinding her like a person trapped in a set of gears.
She screamed, drowning again in the waters off New LA, but the weight of the bodies soon stopped that. Everything became dark and her bones squealed beneath the pressure, and there was nothing she could do except what she'd learned from Witzgenstein. The sense of them was different from real people, but the same pressure points were there.
The bridle arced out, and the crush ended. At her command, floaters reached down to pull her out. Floaters lifted her into position on the massive red back of a demon, as she tightened the bridle to release her people too.
Then the demon ran. Great bounds ate up the distance, and together they flew.
Bodies parted before the bridle like waves. Her people raced in her wake. Now she could feel the war waging up ahead; brittle lights flaring on the line, souls shearing and breaking. Black and diamond missiles raked the sky above like shooting stars, and all around she felt the ocean changing, infected by some alien sense. Lights were winking out on the line every second, killed by Amo, killed by the dark presence in the ocean's minds.
The demon crested a rise and ahead the full scale of the war spread in a terrible tableau. Shimmering warriors buzzed through the air on diamond wings, wielding crackling electric cannons that shot arcs of force down into the morass of thousands, starting the changes that remade their minds. Bodies churned in the mountains like a boiling stew, drawn to the pummeling pulse at the center.
The demon ran and she whipped it faster.
There was a tiny distant orb of darkness in the distance, sparking with deflected diamond missiles. She reached ahead with the bridle and tried to tell Amo she was coming, then a stony hand suddenly slapped her in the shoulder, throwing her off the demon and reeling into the opposite wall of bodies, where more hands seized hold and dragged her in.
She screamed, stunned and disbelieving as an infected floater reared over her and opened its pale purple mouth, stony teeth sharp as clamshells. Nothing she worked on the bridle now could stop it from biting into her neck.
There was pain and horror, the terrible realization that she was about to die, then its head came away, swiped clear by a single blow with a machete. She saw Alan standing above her with a look of disbelief in his eyes.
"I didn't," he began, but she pushed herself up, ignoring the blood pouring down her chest. Her demon was down and savaged by the ocean, so she ran on foot. Every step was agony but she buttressed the bridle upon herself, working her will to command her body.
More of the infected snatched at her but now she snapped the bridle at them like a lash. A leper flashed into existence and she leapt over it, feet sizzling off its boiling surface. A demon plunged out of the press to block her path and she flung the bridle into its face, stunning it long enough for her to slide painfully between its legs on a patch of grainy ice, rising back to her feet to -
Something crushed her flat to the ground.
Everything fell.
It was like being stamped by the whole of the sky, an impossible weight that ground her cheek into a puddle of gristly ice, her hips flush to a serrated mound. She tried to scream but couldn't get her empty lungs to suck a single gasp of air. The pressure made her ribs creak, buried her body and mind beneath the mass of the -
Line.
Abruptly the pressure relented, and the line changed, and she was already up and running into it, feeling some terrible end drawing near. Around her the world was a graveyard; bodies fallen and silent where they'd fought, none of them rising again. Each one met the touch of her bridle like a dead end, no more alive than a piece of furniture, so now the last man alive in their midst shone like a lighthouse on the line; the only living thing in miles.
Amo.
He was perhaps half a mile ahead surrounded by a low wall of bodies, on his knees and bleeding and panting, looking up at the sky. She shouted but he didn't hear. She started toward him at an ankle-snapping sprint over the morass of tumbled bodies, and he lifted his fist to the side of his head.
She screamed but he didn't hear. She knew what that meant on the line. The dead wouldn't part for her bridle anymore, their ranks were too disrupted to run, and now he was lowering his fist to his throat, and -
"Stop!" she cried, but he didn't stop.
He triggered the blade like a spike out of his forearm. It rushed into his neck and shot the few inches toward his spine, where it snagged.
Lara was yanked off her feet, but heaved against him. She'd never flung the bridle so far, so fast, but she'd caught it. Amo looked at his fist and drove the blade harder, but Lara pulled harder still, forcing the black diamond blade back into its invisible sheath in his arm, leaving him puzzled and pale.
Then he collapsed. The blade had still savaged his throat and the wound now bled profusely. His chest convulsed as blood aspirated into his lungs, and it would all be for nothing, but she didn't panic. She reached out with no time for tears or fear and worked the bridle instinctively, moving in ways she'd never imagined, just like she'd worked the needle so long ago to save his legs. She plunged the bridle so deep that the T4 itself listened, and followed her orders to save his life.
Long teetering moments passed as he coughed blood and leaked blood, and she picked an uneven path over the rutted bodies toward him. Then the wheezing stopped. The convulsions ended.
Lara slipped the bridle out and looked up.
On his side, splattered with blood and barely breathing, he was looking back at her.
* * *
She comes to me like a vision. She can't be real, an angel in the flesh, though she does stumble on all the bodies a lot, not quite like an angel. No wings. I try to get up to meet her, but I'm pretty far from that.
Then she's here, holding my head in her lap, and for sure that's not the worst way to die.
"Amo, Jesus," she mutters, stroking my face like I'm not real.
She's not real.
"It's good to see you," I say, a whisper through my ruptured neck, and that sets her off sobbing.
"You're a sight," she says, laughing through her tears, "Good God, Amo, I just-"
She doesn't know what she just. I smile, because this is how we began; in LA in the hospital, me laid up and her saving the day. It's a good way to close things out, looking into the face of my beautiful wife and seeing love and understanding.
Does she understand? I think she does.
I start to cry too, because it's the understanding that breaks me. She sees me, I think. She sees all the things I've done, and there's shame with that, and happiness with that, and a kind of resounding peace. I'm in the Rien restroom again and the weight is coming off, setting me free from the twinges, sharing the load, splitting it at least by two.
She presses her face against mine, and it's hot. She's so real. I start to think for a minute that maybe this is really her. My Lara. Wouldn't that be good?
"You idiot," she whispers, her forehead tight now against mine, her tears turning to ice on my cheeks. "You don't die from this."
I laugh. It's not much. "I missed you," I say.
She laughs, and I'm feeling something different than I felt in all the other visions, through all my months alone and going mad. I feel her here on the line. It's strange, a ticklish warmth that spreads to encompass other signals that are familiar too, but seems to come from another life.
Vie. Talia. My people?
They're all here? They've come for me?
I hold Lara away and look into her eyes. Could it be? I barely dare say the words because they're loaded with too much impossible hope. There's no way…
"Are you really here?"
Her eyes fill with tear
s that spill. She kisses me on my battered lips, and in that moment her heat breaks through the ice, and that feels like something real.
"Always," she says.
27. EXODUS PROTOCOL 3
They carry me to the Redoubt. I'm in bad shape, can hardly breathe for spiking broken ribs against my poor lungs and other internal organs, and no one seems able to work any healing magic on the line anymore to help.
I don't remember what I did to unbreak my limbs and seal up my wounds earlier. Lara doesn't remember either. It's all fading now, just as these white bodies sink in amongst each other underfoot, slotting in to make a road that leads to the center of the world.
Lara gets carried at my side, holding my good hand, barely daring to break eye contact. George, Marjorie, Cynthia, Alan, and some of Drake's people carry us. I ask their names; Fedvedy, Jan, Abubakr. I thank them. From such small things are new possibilities built.
My children run up on either side. When I see them first I feel I might explode. The pressure in my head wells like a twinge before blaring out in joy. I struggle to even say their names.
"Vie. Talia."
They grab at me, not really noticing that I'm so injured, yanking at broken bits because they just want to touch me. I want to touch them. My troop set me down and we hug a little, haphazardly, my broken wrist screaming, my knee crackling, my ribs squeezing.
Every bit of pain is good.
"Mommy said you were far away," Talia says, always so smart, "but you're here."
I nod sagely. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
More hugs. I'm so grateful. In their minds, now, there's nothing to forgive. Whether I deserve this love or not doesn't seem to matter at all. It's real.
It gets cold so we pick up the pace. The Redoubt isn't too far, watched over by spiky autocannons on every perch like watchful crows, and thank God Olan never triggered them. I couldn't use the black eye to do a thing, now. It feels like the line is changing, perhaps healing, and all the fantastical deeds I just did are myths from another age, fading already.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 216
