Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light
Page 20
He tried to move, tried to say something, but his body was frozen. Something was different now after that little bitch had come down in Rachel's place, and he couldn't break the deadlock.
How had she done that?
How?
He didn't understand. Even if she'd somehow tricked the Lazarus beam then she still should have been ravaged on arrival like he had been, like James While, like every other person he'd ever brought down. But she hadn't been. She'd been solid, whole, complete, and that seemed impossible.
Thrusting his diamond blades through her chest hadn't made it any better. He hadn't done it fast enough to make her stop whatever she was doing. Time had slowed down and he'd plunged more blades through the clone body he'd prepared, but still she'd kept on, bringing permanent shifts to the line that he could barely grasp, that were undoing so much of his work.
How?!
He tried to give orders to his people now to track the change she'd made; how far had that surge gone, how strong was it, what was it doing out there to his beautifully silenced world?
But he couldn't speak a single command.
He felt crippled like the Last Mayor, torn by indecision as the voices inside him warred madly. He couldn't even avert his gaze from the screen showing the Last Mayor's approach. Minutes stretched on and in that time nobody spoke to him, no external interference came to jolt him out of this deepening fugue, because he'd boxed them all to better prepare for this war.
So what now?
"Your heart rate is dangerously elevated," came the voice of Little Olan in his ear, but that was nothing compared to the chaos of so many voices; raging, screaming blame, seeking recriminations and resurgence.
Rachel Heron was gone. James While was gone. Every person he'd used for fourteen years, for twenty, for thirty was gone, and there was no one to break him out and stop the interminable tearing inside, no one to remind him who he was.
"Calm yourself," said Little Olan, " breathe," but the voices muffled him and pushed him to the fringes, leaving only their outrage; pieces of himself that for most of thirteen years had existed in uneasy harmony beneath the over-riding shell of 'Olan Harrison'.
Now they tore into each other in bloody civil war.
If only Rachel Heron was here, some of them yelled. As a slave or not, she had always steadied him; with her manipulations, with her judging eyes, with her unbroken spirit and compelling competence. Her secret defiance had always given 'Olan Harrison' the drive to keep her close, if only to one day see the pleasure of her finally plowed under.
Now that day had come, and she was gone.
There was only emptiness where she had been. He'd planned his future with her ever-present, but in this moment she was out of his reach. Her betrayal didn't sting; he'd known it was coming since the start. What stung was her escape.
Would he ever get her back?
James While was gone too, lost in a silent death, and he'd have to drain hundreds off the line to restore him to his rightful cell beneath the Redoubt, and the Last Mayor was rampaging right now! Would he ever get Heron and While back?
She was to fault, other voices cried. Always, always it was her making us weak. She pulled us down. We grew dependent. We were so weak! We are so weak. Olan, Olan, do something, do something now, make us strong again! And all throughout Little Olan chattered in his ear too, adding to the chaos in telling him what was real and what wasn't, advising him based on a version of Olan Harrison who'd died fourteen years earlier.
The havoc was unbearable.
He jumped to escape it, appearing in the cells in the basement floors and looking down at the body of James While, but that only made the voices scream louder about his failures, about his mistakes. He'd had James While for such a short time, they cried, after waiting for so long? The tortures had scarcely begun. His grand scheme to make Rachel Heron a traitor had only torn her away from him forever!
How could the line deny him her suffering, the long delightful years of her humiliation, the endless image of her begging for forgiveness?
The madness slit deeper down fault lines he'd papered over for years, and he jumped once more to flee it, to a cragged peak four miles out from the Redoubt, crowning a crinkled and raw range of black granite cliffs. Shoulders of spiky rock shot out like the crystal spikes of a dark snowflake, their troughs and valleys leaving highways for the Last Mayor's horde to plummet down.
They were everywhere. He spun and saw the great army closing in like a white iris on all sides, composed of millions of bodies sprinting in tandem, breathing in tandem like a lung for the world, all somehow alive again.
How did she do it?!
The battle inside himself became a rending. He grunted and jerked as threads were cut that he'd never dared touch before. The parts that were most like 'Olan Harrison', that had always clutched for human connection even as he'd placed himself above all other humans.
He should never have tolerated Rachel Heron's deception, the horde of voices cried as their knives fell, and they savaged 'him'. He should never have wasted his time speaking with the Last Mayor; he should have dropped a bomb on him from the start. Those voices won too, whittling deeper into the fragile core of 'Olan Harrison'.
'He' never should have wanted their love. He shouldn't have needed their adulation. All he'd ever needed was their suffering, using their eyes as his mirrors, and that was all. Did the lion care about the gazelle's opinion as it died?
That was weakness, a weakness all of his own and comprised of the last shreds of whatever had made him human. In that battle he lost, and the final truth became clear, that 'Olan Harrison' himself was the weakness. He'd always been the weak link in that constructed Fabergé egg of disparate parts dredged from the line. His unspoken love for Rachel Heron and his un-abating need for approval had pulled him down.
The voices beat him to his knees. They took control of his right hand and tried to rip the last voice arguing against them away; Little Olan in his left ear. Little Olan cried out against this, and the left hand fought, loyal to the end, so the right hand coalesced into a diamond blade and chopped the left hand off at the elbow.
The pain was horrific. The pain was invigorating. The treacherous, loyal limb fell and the wound cauterized at the blade's touch with not a single drop of blood spilled.
Still 'Olan Harrison' did not surrender, so the right arm kept coming. 'Olan' weaved his head from side to side as it took wild blows from the blade, raking deep lines into his skull and severing the ear cartilage, the lobe, lopping them roughly to splat on the black mountain rock. It didn't end until the buzzing voice of Little Olan was finally dug free, along with a welter of blood and half a cochlea.
All the voices were silenced at once. The tiny speaker hit the ground and he crushed it underfoot.
He panted.
He straightened.
There'd been a victory, that was clear, and it did not belong to 'Olan Harrison'. The parts of him that remained shrank away in terror, while 'He' was something new, now. The strong voices stretched out inside this new self, finding only agreement within an echo chamber of certainty.
What was Rachel Heron to them? What was James While? What was any kind of love, need, companionship?
Weaknesses. All of them would suffer in due course. But none of them were needed. They were food. How else could He become a God, if He wasn't ready to give up childish things? There was no emotion left now. There was no hate, no perverted form of possessive love, only that purest sensation; hunger.
What else should a predator feel? Gods demanded sacrifices. He'd already lost an arm and an ear, but what was that in the ascent to Godhood? There would be many more sacrifices, severing every last tie to the race He had been.
First upon the altar was the man that had birthed this new creature, Olan Harrison. The last few pieces of Olan inside screamed. But he was weak. He'd always been weak, a narrative enforced upon disparate stories by will and an artificial voice in the ear, and it was time to pay the pri
ce. The bill always came at the end.
The voices plunged inside, into a vision of old Olan's chest. His feeble sternum cracked. His pulsing heart raced in terror, made of tattered memories of a childhood of wealthy neglect, an adolescence of heroic entrepreneurship, an adulthood of insane economic growth and a second life of monstrous voices in the darkness.
He screamed pathetically, because he was pathetic.
This will make us strong, the new God said. We want this.
'Olan Harrison's' ribs flayed open like an eagle's wings, again. 'Olan Harrison' screamed, and it was so sweet. This would be the foundation. Upon this all other things would be built. For long moments the scream echoed, as Olan's heart beat its last, and his last blood fell, and finally he was severed.
Silence followed. Then beautiful, perfect harmony. Then hunger.
He was strong; stronger than ever before. The line rippled beneath His thoughts; a dazzling array of strings that only He knew how to pluck. He was a God, newly crowned, and around him the Last Mayor's forces were a rabble.
He looked out and saw a ramshackle, watery waste of fuel; untrained bodies, unprepared minds unified only by anger and fledgling hope. Their hate would run dry, and their hope would only last as long as it outweighed the weight of pain pressing down. He could outrun both, because hunger lasted forever. It made Him purer than them.
He took a moment to pity them.
They were reactions only. He was the originator. Olan Harrison hadn't really been the one to start this war, because in the heart of 'Olan Harrison' there'd always been Him. Finally He was free, a legion of voices acting as one.
He kicked the arm off the crag top. It wasn't His any more; it belonged to another time now, an older and weaker version of Himself, now finally exorcised. He wasn't Olan anymore but something greater. Many had become one, fused in the ultimate sacrifice of self. It was good.
The jump came with rolling ease. He didn't need the petty contrivances of Olan Harrison anymore to protect Him. Guns and bombs were the weapons of a small, terrified man, and on the line He was glorious. Instead he took the fight to the enemy, and flashed back to reality on the valley floor, standing directly in their path.
The ground shook with the enemy's millions of stampeding feet. The air thrummed with their whistling breaths. The Last Mayor shot over a rise toward Him, wild-eyed and bleeding black light into the sky. He was fearsome to behold, but so simple; a bag full of chemicals driven by emotion, memory, hard-coded pathways through a primitive brain.
With Olan Harrison gone, He had become so much more.
On the line He gave orders to his slaves in the Redoubt, and at once the full complement of angels jumped to join Him on the battlefield, each one a weapon in His arsenal. He straightened to His full height against the oncoming tide and unleashed a swirling octopus of diamond blades; each one driven by a different voice, each one ready to drink blood and dust and satisfy the hunger for a few moments more, as it should be, as it always would be from this moment on.
Nothing would be denied. No whim of His would be stopped.
Down the line the first of His angels clashed with the first of the dead, and He laughed at the instant devastation they wrought. These amateurs were nothing next to Him. He jumped forward and the Last Mayor charged in to meet Him.
25. SAMSON
I dive at Olan Harrison with the black eye streamlined to a bullet, and we clash with a thunderclap. His diamond blades slash off my black casing like a grain harvester's threshing tines, striking dark sparks until my fist breaks through the weave and cranks into his jaw, and we go reeling together.
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.
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.