Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light

by Grist, Michael John

  The pain defined him. His edges were built out of agony, matured like whiskey in a keg for decades to leave only the rawest, brightest urge toward dominance. He was a mouth gnashing in the darkness, not a person, and there was nothing left to do but put him out of his misery.

  "Rachel," he said. There was uncertainty in his glowing white eyes. Anna saw through them to the fear lurking within. "Aren't you going to scream?"

  He'd expected something different. He thought he'd hooked a helpless woman like a baby by the toe, dropping her into a pain to match his own, where only an endless cycle of self-mutilation could alleviate the suffering.

  But Anna didn't feel that. The line wasn't jagged in her mind, because of Ravi's sacrifice, and Helkegarde's sacrifice, and Jake's sacrifice, and so many sacrifices piled up like a mountain for her to climb.

  Instead she looked into Olan's eyes and saw the fear curdle. It wouldn't take much. One blow on the line and he'd be gone, though she knew she wouldn't survive beyond that moment. In dying he'd drag her with him, with no second extra life to help her on a second return. He'd be sucked down by the Lazarus protocol and when her chance came around again, it would be as a slave into one of his cells.

  Her death wouldn't mean anything.

  Instead she smiled at him. His brows beetled. She couldn't speak, but if she'd had a tongue she might have said something kind. Not forgiveness, but sympathy, for the extent to which he'd mutilated himself. What was coming now couldn't be stopped by anyone; it was too big, bigger than Anna herself, bigger than Amo, as big and expansive as the line.

  She'd seen what he'd done. The billions he'd banished; trapped in bodies turned to stone, frozen into stardust, locked out in the cold while he drained the line into silence.

  It was too much to forgive, but there could be sympathy, still.

  "You're not Rachel," he whispered, finally seeing the light. Other people came rushing in then, brandishing syringes and frantically working electrical and magnetic signals through the wires and the walls, but that was nothing to her now. Every second drew out like an age before her, offering so much promise. She waited through their bumbling efforts, urging Olan on to deeper understanding.

  At last, realization dawned. "You're the girl," he said, tinted with disbelief. "Anna."

  It was good for him to know. She gave a slow, sad nod. And then she jumped.

  * * *

  Five miles away, she flashed into existence at the inner edge of the massive black wall, where the rolling hills of ocean bodies stretched away in every direction. They were white as bones, all pigment bleached by the sun, rising and falling in frozen waves.

  Millions, perhaps a billion just here. Images of her father lodged within a body pile in the high plains of Mongolia flashed before her, and a seamount in the ocean of Japan, and all the tumbled heaps she'd seen on her long voyage west. It brought prickling tears to her eyes, that she'd always been so totally blind.

  These were all people. They still were people. Trapped within every one of them, crammed down deep by the massive boot of Olan Harrison's corrupted line, was a person screaming to be let out.

  It was time.

  Now tears sped down her cheeks; she'd never really known it before, never seen them so thoroughly, never felt what the loss truly was. She'd seen her father in his pile and felt something even then, but never put the pieces together. Perhaps as a child, away from the touch and voices of civilization, she'd understood it best. Those days leading the ocean to the ocean, opening doors that imprisoned them, setting them free from cellars and locked houses, had been some of the most beautiful and rewarding of her life.

  What was this, she thought, but a grander version of that? Ishtar come to smash the doors of hell and set the dead free; a story Peters had told her once. It was time to throw the shackles off, to lift the boot and change the line forever. It had taken dying to see it; but now she saw and had the power to make a change, fuelled by all the people she'd seen above; her family, her friends, her lover. Those things meant something. Those connections had value. That was something Olan Harrison could never understand.

  She flexed her powers, and felt reality ripple outward like a stone dropped in the water. Up ahead she saw the man who all this would come down to. He was staring back at her; he'd felt her arrival despite the thick black wall between them, and perhaps he'd recognized her. He looked so old it made her want to sob; broken and battered, dressed in rags with wild hair and wild eyes, raving on the edge of defeat and still pushing forward.

  Amo, the Last Mayor of America.

  He'd fought her in Istanbul and almost killed her. They'd taken separate routes to this place, but they were both here now, and that had to mean something. He had to be a good man still, despite all the horrors he'd done, because if he wasn't then all of this was for nothing. In her heart she forgave him, because how could she not? For all the things he'd done, for all she'd done, nothing mattered more than the link between them now. She longed to call to him, to promise that everything would be OK and they'd see each other again soon, but of course she could not.

  Instead she only smiled. It was all right that he wouldn't recognize her yet. He soon would.

  She reached down into the depths of the line; deeper than she'd known it existed before, down through the bodies and into the roots of the world, to the bottom of Olan Harrison's slippery corruption, where she grasped hold and took the strain.

  Her face turned red. Her presence on the line expanded, pumping up into a giant version of herself, with immense arms and legs, a back as broad as the Chinese Theater, fingers as big as semi trailers, great muscles bunching hard as she strained with all her strength to lift up the line itself.

  The weight of it was enormous, crippling, heavier than the hurt had been while she'd hunkered down in bed as a girl, heavier than Ravi's loss or Cerulean's sadness, but she had so many sources of strength now; not only Alice and her father but all the extended family of New LA.

  With that strength she hoisted, and heaved, and lifted the whole of the line to her waist like she was hauling up a whale from the ocean depths. Amo's eyes widened as he felt the epic shift of it. He didn't understand it, but then how could he, because he hadn't died and come back. Only someone who'd tasted the purity of the line on the solar winds could recognize this for what it was; the lifting of Olan Harrison's boot stamped across the world.

  She cried out a giant's wordless cry, and blood poured from her giant palms where the line cut in, washing a river down the vales of the dead as she drove it higher still, scraping to her chest. Now in rushed the frozen millions with it; fragments of their thoughts, their hopes, their dreams set free. Fourteen years ago their lives had ended, but still they hadn't died. Their bodies had come here seeking to erase the dagger stabbed into the line, but they had failed, and in the long years that followed they'd turned to stone.

  With the weight of their strength thickening her bulk, firming up her trembling legs and quivering back, Anna let out an enormous roar and lifted yet again, this time pressing the line to her shoulders. Finally Amo saw what she was doing. Relief played across his face, and disbelief, and awe. He'd never imagined this. What changes this would bring!

  Then the first blow landed.

  Anna saw it emerge through her chest before she felt it; a diamond blade as thick as a fist, punching out of her sternum and carrying with it a gush of blood and splintered bone.

  Jabberwock, she thought, from a distant place high in the clouds, rising still with the line at her shoulders, channeling the powerful surge of her own death into lifting this immense slave's shackle up, up, until a second blow slammed in beside the first, hefting her body into the air.

  The line fell.

  Into the black wall before her Amo came charging and roaring, though what could he do now? She was dying on her feet, but then she'd always known this moment would come. There was so little strength left, and she couldn't hold back the flood as the blood poured from her like it had flowed from
Ravi's chest. Poor Ravi in the corn. A third and fourth blade slammed through her, pinning her to the air like a butterfly in a case, off her feet while the line dropped…

  But she wasn't a butterfly in a case. She wasn't the T4 twisting beneath the light of the electron microscope, wasn't a slave beneath Olan Harrison's global yoke and she would not die a slave.

  With a final roar into the wind and draining every glimmer of strength, she caught the falling line and thrust it up, up into the light, up over her head and soaring higher still, until the rising swell of tiny lights from the frozen ocean achieved its own momentum, and rocketed Olan's corruption up further, and up, until the world could breathe clean again.

  The giant body collapsed around her, its work done, and Anna sagged onto the diamond blades, watching the beautiful colors and shapes of an old world unfurling like a rainbow sail; a wonderful and terrible vision from another time, swirling up from the bodies in the ground and spreading. As her vision failed and her limbs drooped lifelessly, she saw the new surge of defiance race over the body hills like a tidal wave.

  Its breath loosened the fastnesses of time set upon frozen stone limbs, and smoothed out the rough, cracking contours of minds long-surrendered to corruption. In her final seconds before Olan flared his blades and ripped her body to pieces, she glimpsed the first hand raise up, and the first head lift, and the first eyes open a burning, pitiless white.

  The doors of hell opened at her command, and the dead rose to her call.

  24. RISE

  Amo hit the shield wall like a man on fire and ripped a path in, tearing out gouges of black static as the rage boiled up within.

  That was Anna!

  Somehow it was Anna, in a different body in a place he'd never expected, inside Olan's impenetrable wall, and the bastard had just torn her to pieces. Rage splintered out of him like the blast over New LA, chewing deep into the shield and erupting afresh with every step forward; as the final look on her face played again through his head, as the blades shredded her body in quarters, as he stood by helpless one more time watching another person he loved fall down to the dust, because he just wasn't strong enough.

  The fury was agonizing and absolute; stronger than smashing his fists into the brain pulp of Drake in front of his children, deeper than lashing Arnst at the side of the road and trying to enjoy it, wider than crushing living bodies beneath the wheels of his Jeep in Istanbul. It became a living, screaming beast inside him that had to be let out.

  He let it out in screams and lashes into the meat of the wall, ripping away shreds that tore back through his own skin in turn, burning through the rage. Slits opened down his cheeks and chest with the black eye's overheated fury, spilling blood down his thighs as he lurched further into the wall's crushing static.

  He'd done so many terrible things, he'd hurt so many people, so why couldn't it be him, why did Anna have to die? He'd sent her to kill bunkers and she'd written a treaty to keep them alive. He'd sent her to Witzgenstein and she'd come back with peace. In the earliest days of the apocalypse when he'd been out massacring the dead, she'd spent her days setting them free. It should have been him!

  He roared into the wall as it dropped him to one knee, the weight so immense. Through the furious fog of the eye and the wall in crackling combat around him he saw Olan Harrison just ahead, splattered with blood and watching with a cool, dispassionate interest, and felt hatred like he never had before.

  If nothing else happened today, this man had to die. It didn't matter if the death was long or hard, if the pain matched the tortures he'd forced onto others, he just had to die. It was the only way to make things right, to pay for the loss of seven billion people and finally begin to heal this tremendous wound.

  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.