Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light

by Grist, Michael John

  Olan Harrison wiped the slate clean.

  I hit another, a leper this time, and it fritzes at the moment of impact so that for a moment it's riding in the passenger seat beside me, giving off its prickling heat, perhaps a little confused.

  "Out," I tell it, but it's a mumble. I lean over to open the door and shove it through, but the effort drains me. It rolls and tumbles into another staticky flash, then appears in the wing mirror as the Jeep veers left to right across the road, regaining control.

  Maybe I don't want control.

  The bass of the demons booms out through the static. The treble of the lepers screams. The horde's voice rises toward climax then another song begins, Arnst telling me all about power while I'm tied up in the Chinese Theater, in between tortures, and I pump the pedal in time to the beat. I thought I could handle this. Even an hour ago, even a minute ago, I thought I could handle it.

  But maybe I can't. For all I've grown and sunk, for all the terrible things I've done, maybe I still cannot stomach this. I try to stop thinking about it, but I can't. Everything rings out his name.

  Olan Harrison. Power. Nobody should have so much, but he had it all. Not only over life and death, but over the very genetic code of humankind. And he warped it. With his multicameral signal he changed me, and the hydrogen line, forever.

  I blink a long blink, so long that it's really just me closing my eyes at the wheel.

  I've known about that change for years. I felt it on some unconscious level from the beginning, but I never understood what it meant. Before Anna we didn't know about the T4. Before Lucas we didn't know about the hydrogen line. Before Joran Helkegarde I didn't how the two combined.

  Now I do. I've seen the before and after graphs. I'm privy to all Helkegarde's latest research, relayed through James While's notes, and I know what the line was, and what was lost when the change went out.

  I almost lose control of the Jeep. There are tears in my eyes, not from sadness or shame or any normal emotion, but something I've never felt before. Something like despair, but worse than anything I felt at Drake's hands; this is bigger and deeper, and cuts into the point of me being alive at all.

  I drag the wheel harshly, bouncing up the mounds of ice to right and left like a pinball in a channel, plowing through my horde mindlessly. They spring up like weeds after I pass, stupidly faithful.

  What is the line?

  It wasn't written in any of the research, neither James While or Joran Helkegarde ever used the word that would make it clear, but I read it between the lines. I know what I can see, what I can feel. The line was us. Our minds, our consciousness, some kind of thought soup for the soul, made up not only of the seven billion humans who once roamed this planet, but also the many billions of the dead too; endlessly circling the Earth like a second atmosphere, merging and shifting and being reborn in some grand karmic circle.

  It's a lovely notion. It's ridiculous for a lifelong atheist like myself, but I never denied facts I could see with my own eyes. Helkegarde's research was mind-blowing; measuring the signals of his victims as he tortured them to death, then capturing traces of those same signals in the air itself, floating on the hydrogen line's continuum.

  What is that, but a kind of afterlife? He documented it in terrifying depth.

  Salle Coram comes on the radio, singing to me about all the ways she tried her best. I roll to her haunting harmonies for a time, trying to prepare myself for the run up to this abysmal truth. I think about the mulch of minds in the sky. We needed the line. We were the line.

  Then the Multicameral Array transmitted, and seven billion people were turned into the ocean overnight, and everything changed. Their signals were yanked down from the line and trapped in their bodies. I don't know the details because I can't understand Joran Helkegarde's endless pages of complex math, but I understand enough to know what it meant.

  One day heaven was full, then the next it was empty.

  My foot on the gas pedal eases off. I feel too exhausted to drive, and we slow right down. The Jeep drops to ten miles an hour, then five, and my horde gathers thick around me, embedding me in the wail of their ugly chorus. The sound of it beats me up, because these are my people, and this is all they can do. I shouldn't hate them, but I do. I shouldn't hurt them, or use them like tools to get what I need.

  But I will.

  The Jeep trundles on, and I think about the emptiness of the line. It's hard to catch a single butterfly out of a flock of billions. Colors run before me; Monarch Red, Green-veined White, Meadow Brown, Purple Hairstreak. Even if I paint a butterfly in the brightest colors, I think, even if I make it bigger than the rest, once I release it I will never be able find it again amongst a forest of so many flickering billions.

  But in an empty sky?

  More bodies bump into the hood. When I run over them now, it's slow. The wheels gather them in and grind them under, but they don't complain. They get up afterward, singing all the while, and we keep on at this painful, drawn-out pace. I don't want to think about this any more, but I can't stop. My arms feel so weak. One hand drops off the wheel and lies forlorn at my side.

  With his signal, Olan Harrison emptied the sky. He wiped the line as clean as the static coming through on my radio, then put himself up as a bright flag, marked by the intensity of a most painful death, and had his people suck it down.

  I see now that this was the purpose of all his research, dating back thirty years and more. Eternal life. In the days before the hydrogen line he believed that path lay through the Apotheo Net. He was making a deep copy of his neural patterns to live on after he was gone. But that was not true eternal life, because it was only a copy.

  He needed more than that. He needed continuity of the man that he was, and the hydrogen line gave him that opportunity; a way to recycle his actual self into a new body.

  The Jeep sinks to a crawl. We could almost not be moving. In the falling snow I can scarcely see a thing, especially with all the bodies around me, though I can feel it as I roll them over. I'm feeding them under the car now, my cruelty making no sense but only just keeping me this side of despair. We always punch down, to keep ourselves afloat. I am no better than the rest.

  Olan Harrison killed seven billion people just so he could stay alive.

  The Jeep trickles like an ice floe. It makes sense, somehow, and I know that if I let the speedometer drop to zero, then that will be it. I'll sit here with a cocoon of the ocean above me and slowly freeze. I won't be able to move a single muscle. I'll just lie here until I join the line, and I hardly care.

  The music stops. Snow gathers on my lap. I blink and look around. Demon faces leer by my side. Once they did such terrible things to Lara. They killed Cerulean. I think about my friend, and wonder where he might be right now. Up above, perhaps, drifting around on the empty line, looking for his family. But they're not up there with him. They're ossified down here, trapped in their floater bodies, kept from him by Olan Harrison.

  I slump in the seat. I'll become a snowman. There's a certain radioactive heat coming off the lepers, so I send them away. They line the road like black and white ghosts, at the extent of what I can see through the falling snow. I set the demons on the other side, red wardens of the North standing proud, watching like my honor guard as I sink toward death.

  It's cold. I welcome it. I'm so tired.

  This is a war I can't fight. I can't win. I can't fathom the depths Olan Harrison has been willing to go to. I think of my parents, my family, my friends, my brother, all lost. When he wiped the line, they were erased. I never knew they were even there, but now I know that they aren't, and it cuts through the old rage like it never existed. I can't get angry, because I've already lost.

  Nausea swirls in my throat. If not rage, then what do I have? A steady hand and a little creativity, but those things can't get me through this. I think of Lara, but it doesn't move the needle. I think of my children, but that well has been pumped dry. I can't mine anything from their memory any more
, can't summon a scrap of feeling through the numbness of this monumental loss.

  The engine stops ticking. Frost tries to settle on the hot hood, freezing and melting and refreezing, and I watch the tracery patterns it makes while the cold works its way into my extremities. The radio hisses static, and I think about that. At least I will be on the line. I will be up there, but alone. My family won't be there. My friends won't be there.

  It's what I deserve. I slump lower still, half my body in the foot well. Through the open doors I can see my honor guard watching silently. Like a pharaoh's slaves, they should all die with me. Bury me deep in a cairn, I tell them. Throw yourselves on top.

  And that's it. I think I'm done.

  I can't fight. I can't win. I can't beat a man who cannot die.

  2. OPEN THE DOORS

  I see Cerulean and my brother, sitting at a table looking at my art.

  It makes me want to cry. My brother died thirty years ago. Cerulean died two years ago. They can't possibly be together anywhere, but here they are.

  I roll forward in my Jeep to look at them. Cerulean is strong, like he always was, with those warm eyes that make me think of Christmas. My brother is a stranger; a man who never had the chance to grow up, but still I recognize him, handsome with a strong chin and short sandy-brown hair.

  They're looking at my art. It's not a piece I remember making, though the setting is familiar. It shows Times Square in New York, like the painting I made and showed to Lara the night the world ended, but there are differences. Where the tower of the dead stood before, there is now something different.

  Zombies fill the streets; white eyes glowing, gray skin naked, muscles withered to the bone, but they are not shambling, or chasing, or even climbing. They are instead looking up at the painter, and every one of them has an arm raised in the air, ending in a clenched fist.

  It makes the tears spring from my eyes. I look over them, like a Where's Waldo of the New York dead, and see that every one of them is looking up at me; men, women, children, all.

  What does it mean?

  "What does it mean?" asks my brother.

  Cerulean turns a jigsaw piece thoughtfully in his fingers. "I don't know," he says, then slots the last piece into place. Only then do I realize that this painting is actually a jigsaw they've assembled together. The last piece in the very middle shows a figure standing amidst the dead, and as Cerulean slots it into place I see…

  Not me. Not Lara.

  Anna.

  Her arms are up. Her fists are clenched. But her eyes are white and her skin is gray, just like the ocean.

  "Your daughter," says my brother.

  "Your niece," says Cerulean. My brother chuckles.

  "What would Amo say?" he asks.

  I try to say something to them. I never think of my brother these days, but there's nothing I'd like more than to talk to him now. I want him to see me, to tell me everything is going to be all right. But he can't see me, and I can't get any sound out to be heard.

  "She's one of them, now," he says.

  "She's their leader," Cerulean answers. "Amo would be proud of that."

  I gasp at the air. I want to scramble the jigsaw into pieces. I don't want this to be real, even if Anna is the leader. I don't want Anna to die, too.

  "I didn't paint this," I finally manage to say, but they don't hear me. "It's not mine."

  "Why do you think he painted this?" my brother asks. He's not the same as I remember him, weathered, but strong; the man he would have grown up to be, a bulwark against the hardness of the world.

  "I don't know," Cerulean says. "But he's just a man. Art is art."

  My brother laughs. "Or it's a wireless link to the hydrogen line. Who's to say he didn't tune in and see this in the static? Who's to say, really? What's a dream, Cerulean, and where does it come from?"

  Cerulean considers this.

  "It isn't real," I yell at them. "Stop saying it is."

  "I don't see him much anymore," Cerulean says. "I used to."

  "You're fading," my brother says. "Mulching into the line, like ripe compost. There's not a lot that's uniquely left of you."

  Cerulean smiles, and taps the table. There's a metallic clink. In his hand he holds two silver necklaces; the ones he picked for both him and Anna.

  "Some would say I'm growing stronger. Spreading out my roots."

  My brother chuckles. "Then what am I?"

  "You're gone," Cerulean says. "Wiped out by Olan Harrison."

  My brother nods. Then slowly, he disappears. Cerulean sits alone at the table.

  "Cerulean," I shout. "Robert!"

  He turns. He looks in my vague direction and my heart thumps in my chest, though his eyes don't settle.

  "Is that you, Amo?" he asks. There's a wry grin on his lips. "Looking for another prepper Bible, is that it?"

  Now I'm in floods of tears. "Don't be dead," I tell him. "I need you for this. I can't do it on my own."

  Cerulean inclines his head, as if he's heard me, but he isn't sure. Maybe it was just a drifting breeze on the wind. "But you're not alone. You've got Anna." He points at the jigsaw. "She's going to break open the doors."

  "What doors?"

  "What doors?" he repeats, amused. "What other doors, Amo? Heaven. Hell. Perception. The whole of it. She'll march her army right through." He taps the jigsaw. "You'll see. But she can't do it alone, either."

  "What army?"

  Now Cerulean too begins to fade.

  "Seven billion souls," he says. "You'll see, my friend. Keep the faith. Look after our little girl. She's going to need you."

  Then his body glimmers away.

  I'm left for a moment in the darkness, looking at the jigsaw with Anna punching her gray fists into the air, wondering if any of this is real or just a piece of make-believe my mind is telling me as I die…

  * * *

  There's a fizzle in the light, and I open my eyes to see a new cairn.

  Black and white bodies fill my vision. I twist my neck. The heat is sweltering. The Jeep is full of lepers crammed in around me. Demons loom in a circle like standing stones outside.

  I force a dry, ambivalent laugh. Probably I did this, with all my thoughts of pharaohs dying with their slaves.

  "I'm not dead yet," I tell them. "Too soon."

  My lepers don't reply. My demons don't move. I see that their backs are to me, facing outward.

  Are they guarding me?

  "Get off," I whisper to the bodies pressed around me, but nobody moves. The lepers fritz and blink but they don't shift.

  I wake up the black eye and use it like a lever to work at them, but I can't pry them loose. I ramp up the power, but it isn't enough. They're locked into each other in a way I don't recognize at first, until I think of Anna's tales of great mounds of the ocean in Mongolia, locked into position above demons at their centers.

  Is that this?

  "Let me out," I insist, but they don't. The black eye towers overhead, but there's something seamless about the way they've joined together, and I can't get the black eye into any crevices to pull them apart.

  "Get off!" I yell, but nothing happens. I kick and punch them to no avail.

  Then I realize something important; they're not killing me. I'm not controlling them, but still they're here, clustered close for warmth, keeping me still in a moment when all I wanted was to die, protecting me from the cold, and from the despair, and most of all from…

  I gulp.

  Myself?

  "All right," I say. My voice catches with emotion. I don't understand this. All I've done to these poor bastards is torture them. I've been rolling over them. I've been making them sing. That made Arnst mad. Are they mad? "That's enough, you can let me up now."

  They don't budge. I heave again, but it's pointless. I let the black eye drop limp, useless against this kind of unity. It reminds me of another time, another world, when the ocean saved me in Las Vegas. I never understood that. I've carried the scars of that fight ever sin
ce. But I didn't die. They killed Don and left me alone, and is that what this is?

  I ask them, and they don't answer. None of them budge.

  "Answer me!" I shout at them. I make demands. I kick and punch more, and heave, and yell, but they don't move.

  Then I lie still. I remember my dream. I remember Anna in the middle, with both fists raised. What is this, I wonder. What is happening? For a time I sob, though I don't really know why. I'm beyond tears, now. I don't feel anything anymore. I can't afford to feel anything. Still I sob.

  * * *

  Drake sits at the same table, turning the jigsaw pieces in his hands, across from Julio. Drake is huge, as ever, with the cruel gleam of wit in his eyes. Julio is meager and twisted, angry even here.

  "He's gone soft," Drake says.

  Julio just snorts.

  "Weak. He had the edge. Now he's lost it."

  Julio glares.

  "He was becoming something better, with the softness hammered out. When you give yourself permission, wonderful things can happen."

  Julio scoffs, and speaks. "Like your fifty children, and your seven sister-wives? Was that permission?"

  Drake grins big and spreads his muscular arms. "He speaks."

  "You're a liar," Julio says. "Not even a very good one."

  "And what about you?" Drake says, eyeing him. "Didn't you lie, to stock that underground pit as thoroughly as you did? At least I did it with vision. You were just bleak, bleak, bleak, all the way down into the shit. Did you plan on ending up as a demon? That's a real paucity of ambition, brother."

  Julio just gives his twisted grin. "You wouldn't understand the depths we plumbed together. In the bottom of all that shit, we found beauty."

  Drake laughs. "Beauty? Now who's lying to himself? I knew my people hated me, but screw them! We made babies, and in the middle of the deed they loved it despite the hate, because they knew they didn't have any bigger vision than me. Without me they would have died of despair, one by one, alone. They needed me to stay alive."

  "It was the same with me."

  At this Drake hoots with laughter. "Because you had them locked up, son! They would have starved if you'd left. Give them the choice to run though, and they would have. My 'sister-wives' and 'husbands' never ran, though I never stopped them."