Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light

by Grist, Michael John

  Julio smiles glibly. "All except the very first. The Portuguese girl. What was her name?"

  "Don't worry about her name," Drake says quickly. "That was a mistake."

  "Mistake," Julio muses. "What wasn't a mistake? I should never have joined Amo's group. I should have known from the start. I could have made my own community. I could have had respect."

  Drake shakes his head slowly. "No, little brother. Wasn't going to happen. You didn't have the vision. I'm sorry, but it's true. Look what you did when you went mad. It's nihilistic. A torture pit. A glorious death, killing off your own people for some petty revenge." He frowned. "Then look at what I did. Look at what he did." He tosses a glance over his shoulder, in my general direction. "We both built things. You had nothing on that."

  Julio grimaces.

  Drake waves a hand generously. "But don't feel bad. It's not how everyone's wired. Look one table over." He gestures. I see nothing, but Julio appears to. He smiles.

  "Can you believe that guy was actually screwing the zombies?" Drake asks. "Dressed them up in cheerleader gear. What a good time, right? I'm glad Amo took him out."

  "Amo didn't take him out."

  "No," Drake agrees wistfully. "He was anointed, wasn't he? Prime mover. I've heard them say, if it hadn't been him, it was going to be me. I was second in line for signal strength. I would've been untouchable. Imagine that, with all the dead to flow at my command?"

  "You've got an overbite," Julio says. "I wouldn't want your genes spread across the world, like a master race."

  Drake touches his chin, briefly self-conscious.

  "Besides, he's listening to us now," Julio says. "He probably wants to hear something about his precious Anna."

  "I never met Anna," Drake says. "But she's fierce, I can see that. There's no compromise in her, no doubt."

  "True. I was an idiot. I didn't want much. Just a little respect."

  Drake leans in. "It all starts there, brother. Poison in the soul. Sweat it out."

  "I'm sweating it out. But what shall we tell him?"

  "I think we've said enough," Drake says, but all the same, he turns to face me. His eyes don't fix on me fully, slumped here in my Jeep, but he gets my general direction. "Idiot, isn't that right?"

  "It's always suicide with him," Julio says. "Break a nail, shoot yourself in the head. Feeling down, hang yourself from the eaves. He's obsessed. And so dramatic!"

  "More's the pity he always fails," says Drake. "He'd play chess better than you."

  Julio laughs.

  "Seriously, though," says Drake. "Amo, old friend. Take a look." He spreads his arms and gestures all around, at the darkness. I get the faintest impression that there may be other people out there, ghostly bodies moving, but the impression fades. "You like the line? You want some of this? Keep it up. It's all mulching up here, buddy, all the time. Recriminations. Reparations. A grand coming together. It makes me sick, but whatever. I see the value. But your man Olan, he's set that back without compare. Seven billion is too much to lose. You see how hard I fought for just fifty? Seven billion is a whole lot more. That's a crime in my book. He wiped out my wife and my daughter too, back when I was a pretty good man. You need to sort this out. If I see you up here before you deal with it, there'll be no coming together between you and I. Not ever."

  Julio stands up. "That goes for me too. If you leave our people on their own against that bastard, there'll be no coming together with me either."

  Drake holds a screening hand to the side of his mouth, so Julio can't see, and mouths "Follower." I almost laugh, except Julio saying 'Our people' hits me hard.

  He was one of us too, for the longest time. He betrayed us, our people, but still he was family for years. Yet we're all family, aren't we? Up here in this place, it's easy to feel that even Drake is my brother. We want the same things, just in different ways. We are for humans. We are against those who would wipe humans out.

  "Sort it out," Drake says, and points. "Put your existential angst aside. Now you've peeked behind the curtain, and this is it. This is what we're fighting for."

  "Jigsaws," says Julio. "Chess."

  I open my mouth to say something. I don't get to say it though.

  * * *

  The Jeep is caught in the full flush of a wintry sun. I blink, and trickles of cold water run down my back, driving me up in the seat.

  The lepers are out there, no longer in here. They're clustered together in a black and white clump, like the red clump of the demons beside them. They're not looking at me, but they're organized. They're waiting.

  I rub my eyes and roll out of the Jeep. My legs are unsteady beneath me.

  "What the hell was that?" I ask, but neither the demons nor the lepers have any answer for me. I wander a bit, over the snow and frost. It's cold but in the bright of the sun I don't notice it. The snow all around cuts a piercing glare in my eyes.

  I take a piss in the frozen bushes. I drink some water. I eat an MRE cold, sitting in the driver's seat with the tray on my lap.

  I look peevishly at the lepers and the demons. They don't look at me.

  What happened?

  I don't feel the same. I remember the dreams. They were all dreams, weren't they?

  "Were you in here?" I ask the lepers, pointing at the Jeep. They don't answer. I put the MRE down and walk over to them. I look in their faces. The heat of their radioactivity blares away, but it doesn't hurt.

  "Did you?" I ask again, knowing I won't get any answer. Still I point, to help things along. "Did you get in there?"

  Nothing. I round on the demons.

  "You! What were you guarding against? There's nobody here!"

  They studiously avoid my gaze. They're enormous, towering over me. I shove one of them on his tree trunk-like leg, like I'm starting a fight. "What?"

  He doesn't even look down.

  I sit back in the Jeep. I get up again and pace around it.

  Something is different. I feel through my thoughts and memories, trying to find out what it is. Everything is the same as yesterday as far as I can tell, but still I feel different. The weight, maybe. The emptiness, perhaps. It feels like I've been reset. I still know everything, I still am everything, but it's like those things don't drag me down the way they used to.

  I don't get it.

  There can't be an afterlife. Even if there is a line, it can't be anything like people who once would've hated each other, getting together in a room and playing chess. It can't be so simple, so human as that; it's almost certainly just signals blurring, no more sentient than the fuzz as I tune from one radio station to the next.

  But then…

  I don't know.

  Wouldn't it be nice?

  I stroke my head, where the scars are from blowing out my brains. Maybe it's because of this. Hallucinations. Vivid dreams. Maybe that's exactly what I needed, so who cares if it was 'real' or not?

  I get back in the Jeep. Someone has decently turned the key, so the battery didn't drain in the night. I turn it again, and the engine hums to life. There's only forward left to go.

  "Come on then," I tell the lepers and the demons, and start away.

  They follow. I don't even have to use the black eye to make them move.

  3. SHADOW SEAL

  I drive fast over roads barely visible beneath the frost, through snowy flurries and icy downpours and brilliant clear skies, day after day. My demons and my lepers keep pace behind me in two packs, stopping when I stop, as obedient as dogs. Sometimes I glimpse the floaters in the distance, catching up when I sleep. We drive, and I think, and together we cross the border out of Russia into slightly warmer climes.

  It's pleasant enough, all this time spent on the road, but I know it won't last. It's more like an eye to the storm than a sign that the storm has passed. All the terrible things I've done will come back around, when the eye is gone and the storm passes over, and the bill comes due.

  But for now, I enjoy the distance I feel from the last thirteen years
of my life. It's like the worst memories have been cut out and put on a mental DVD shelf where I can comfortably peruse their spines, labeled things like 'MARS3000 massacre' and 'Tortures with Drake' and 'Feargal's Death', and not feel the way I did before. I look back on that earlier Amo, struggling across the Siberian wastes, lying down to die in the Alpha Array, and feel pity for the weight crushing him down.

  PTSD, I expect, deep psychological trauma sustained in the post-apocalypse. This is what Olan Harrison has done to me, so what am I now? Who knows. Strangely, I feel cheerful. I stop the Jeep and roll a snowman beside the road. I don't know what country I'm in and don't care. The snow is looser here, not the hard pack of a few hundred miles north. There are bits of green showing through. Soon it'll be sand; I must be somewhere in Kazakhstan or Mongolia, heading southeast, following this subtle tug in the air.

  I drive. Tiny icy villages go by and the snow melts. At night I sleep better than I have in years. My appetite is impeccable. I just feel good.

  I think about Olan Harrison.

  I envisage him in a different kind of bunker; a genuine utopia, for him at least. I imagine a society built to serve his needs, combined with a Drake-like focus on re-population. Maybe there are thousands of them by now. How many have been sucked down from the line, like Olan himself? What other magical properties have they unlocked?

  I probably should be afraid, but I'm not. It may be Olan Harrison's world now, but I've remade the world before. I built the Darkness out of hope. I built New LA out of a dream. I can do it again.

  I'll turn his reality upside down. I'll make him regret he ever started down this path. I step out of the Jeep on a rocky road devoid of snow, in the midst of a dusty orange landscape, and pluck a sprig of lavender from a fragrant bush. I slip it into the buttonhole of my jacket.

  I'm coming.

  * * *

  Mongolia passes in a blur of dust and rock and sand, and I barely stop anymore. I drive twenty hours a day; focused, laser-like, no longer dawdling. Every mile I draw closer, the sense of my destination becomes clearer. I feel them out there; the people who broke open James While's chest. Their tracks are long smothered by the weather, but I feel the intermittent sense of them on the line.

  Then there are the bodies.

  At the first pile of them I am stunned; it's easily a hundred feet high, a heap of gray floater corpses standing proud in the middle of the desert steppe. Even though I've heard of these from Anna, when she first came out to Mongolia, the grand scale and simple number of the dead overwhelms me.

  When I see the second a few miles on, I am still baffled, but by the time there are three, and four, and five all within sight of each other, I start to understand something we never really knew, and never even thought to question.

  All the demons came here.

  Anna saw these piles when she came for her father. From around the world she followed him, after he'd joined ranks with other American zombies and British zombies and African zombies, all coming to pile their bodies atop the demons.

  But why were the demons coming here?

  I stop at a larger pile and try to make a count of the withered gray frames pressed into this human pyramid. I climb a little, up limbs and shoulders completely petrified by time and dehydration. They are as smooth and hard as cement.

  It's strange to think Anna dug her way into one of these to the middle, where her real father was buried atop a demon. I close my eyes in this landscape of gray mounds and try to imagine what that unholy battle must have been like, thirteen years ago: the ocean streaming in like a tide tipped from its basin, swarming over each red giant and heaping up, up, up. I imagine the sound of it, with no calls, no voices, no shouts or screams, only the terrifying sound of thundering footfalls, rending flesh, the flat smack as hard bodies heaped higher.

  I never saw a body pile in Times Square, though I painted it. Here it has become real.

  I look up and see feet, arms, hands, shoulders, backs, chests stretching up toward the sky. It's easy to believe that these were people. They look like people. It makes me nostalgic for a past when the ocean were an everyday part of life; before they all went west and ended up here, throwing their lives into piles to keep the rest of us safe. I realize how much I've missed them.

  I laugh a little.

  I kneel and stroke a perfect set of fingers, as smooth and pale as alabaster. I can't see the body, not even the arm, just this hand emerging from the heap's flank. They came here for the demons, but why did the demons come here? I can guess the answer to that now. I suppose they saw something we never did, about who the real threat was. They came here to destroy it.

  Olan Harrison.

  I feel him close by now, like a storm out to sea, making the air thick and scratchy. On a high, dusty road I stand, looking out at the rising escarpments of a Chinese mountain range over the southern border; all limestone karst cliffs that rise in leering, fang-like spikes. He's out there somewhere; a unique signal on the line, the first man to die and live again. I know James While will be with him by now, all his expertise and knowledge stolen.

  Will they know me? Do they know that I'm coming?

  I fall like a hammer into China. Down valleys crammed with the frozen ocean I lead my meager army of red, black and gray. As I stand at a crag's edge and look back at them, they seem very small and far away. Will they be enough?

  There's nothing else here. I walk up the frozen, rippled surface of a valley clogged with the solid dead, and I feel nothing left alive for me to reach out to. Maybe, deep below, there is the heartbeat of a demon pulsing still, but I don't have time to dig them out one by one. There's not enough blasting powder in the world to free them all.

  I have to go with what I have.

  Down rivers and past villages we go, through forests and mountains, led by this inner tug of the hydrogen line's GPS. The number of body piles increases as I draw closer. There have to be hundreds on one long, massive desert plain, stretching out as far as I can see. The yellow sand is barely visible for all the piles of gray and white skin, heaped up like mounds of sugar.

  They're all here. Tears come to my eyes.

  One day I'll paint this. Nobody would believe it otherwise. I wend my way through the heaps until the dead frame my world, towering either side like the canyon-streets of New York. Weirdly, I feel almost at home. There have to be millions here. Billions, maybe. I've never seen anything like it.

  They only grow thicker. The mounds overlap. The dusty roads I passed on earlier disappear, lost beneath the flood of sun-bleached flesh, and I have to leave the Jeep behind. It doesn't bother my army, but it slows me down. The lepers bark and fizz at my heels, urging me on. Alone and unarmed, I hike into the foothills of the dead. At night I lay down my head on their backs to sleep. By day I walk across their chests like flagstones laid down for my passage.

  One day in, I feel the blast ring out on the line. It hits while I'm taking a leak and knocks me on my ass.

  I'm up in seconds and roaming around, fists up as if there'll be something to fight. My ocean of lepers, demons and floaters look alarmed, but remain in their tight, self-segregated groups. Around us there's blue sky and bodies, no one alive anywhere near.

  What the hell was that?

  I feel the echo of it like the pain after a punch, lingering on the line. It feels like Gap or Brezno going down, when I blew the shields, but not quite the same. This feels more like the opposite, like a fresh shield just went up.

  It happens again half a day later, then again every few hours after that. Each time it comes as a shock, knocking me sideways as I hike, dragging me panting and panicked out of a snatched nap.

  What the hell?

  I pace around angrily. I talk to the lepers. I stand in the towering midst of the demons and demand answers they won't give. They just look down at me, numb and dumb.

  I feel it right in my chest. Something is happening out there in the world. If new shields are going up, is that Olan Harrison's work? Is this the
next step in his plan for world domination?

  What the hell is he doing?

  Then I find the road.

  I'm walking on it before I really realize what it is. I hadn't noticed this stretch was easy going, though it is, too distracted by the blasts. But it's unusually smooth; a nice incline, a wide wheelbase, plenty of space for my army to spread out. Of course there's no asphalt laid down, no cement finishing or tar topping, but when I look closer I realize just how much effort this road through the foothills has taken.

  Here a leg has been sawn off at the thigh. I kneel beside it and touch the inner flesh. It is all as hard as rock, cut at a perfect angle. Nearby there's an arm sawn at the elbow, and a head cut in half, and once I start seeing the changes, I see them all.

  This road should be the V-base of a steep valley between two opposing body piles, closing in a tight ditch, when in fact it is a subtly squared-off path. I walk to the edges and study the flanking mountain piles. The line where the saws have done their work is obvious.

  Now I've seen it I can't stop seeing it. Bodies have been cut away in a thousand places. Limbs and torsos have been chopped off and cleared away like snow, creating this 'road'. It would be a bumpy ride in even the largest-wheeled vehicles, but it is eminently passable.

  I look back the way I've come and see the cleared path continuing downward and away out of sight, eclipsed by the mounds. It's the same up ahead. This path is not a straight line, but rather worked into the settled fabric of the dead.

  I climb one of the piles nearby and track the road back as it bends and swirls for what could be miles. I can't see the end point, only the distant orange line of desert. I look ahead and see it reaching higher, into a stretch where the dead blend in with the red peaks of mountains.

  I let my jaw hang.

  Olan Harrison built this road. This is how he comes and goes from his utopian home. His people blazed this trail by cutting a limb at a time, making it just smooth and organic enough that James While would never see it from above.