The huge guy doubles over my knee, I drop an elbow into his spine, and he explodes too. What the-? Blood sprays me like a damp firework, and I'm not sure if I even did that. There's no time to ponder it though, as there are already three more of them dropping from the sky, and more of the ocean scrabbling to complete the protective lattice over my head. The two tides hit and swirl like paints, the diamond blades searing through white flesh while white flesh encircles and yanks away diamond blades, and I think I might be about to die.
So much blood has already poured out of me. I look down but I can't see anything except white and red, and again I try to remember how to heal, then stop, because I never really knew, did I?
I just did it.
I voice the wish in my head, and at once my eyes clear. My divoted head pops outward with a gristly crunch, my innards sew themselves up, and it's all the black eye doing it. I look up at the churn of bodies above and think, I've had about enough of this.
A leper comes, takes my arm, and jumps me away.
I flash back high in the air, kneeling on a floating anchor point of the eye that must be a thousand feet up, looking down while the battle rages below. It looks like madness. Diamond arrows jet everywhere like tracer rounds, diamond blades spin like light sabers as Olan Harrison's angels clear crop circles of bodies wherever they stand; diamond wings spread, firing diamond flamethrowers that melt through fossilized old meat, while my army swarms to overwhelm.
I can't see the bedrock beneath them anymore; there is only this tectonic plate of shifting war. The sounds of cracking bones rise, the slicing of diamond blades on the line, the scrabbling of stony flesh. There are no cries, though, and my mind falters on that. It's normal for the ocean, but for Olan Harrison's angels?
I plunge into the line, probing into the angel signals, then rock back with my blood chilled. I'm not sure what I'm seeing, but perhaps the hints were always there; in him, in Rachel Heron, in his threads and boxes and Lazarus itself with all its body-swapping interchangeability.
These angels are not people any more. They're all him.
I scour the battlefield for the original Olan, reading the patterns of force on the newly transformed line as power zones emerge and submerge like colors in a fractal screensaver, until I find him standing on a mount of the dead like Liberty on her plinth, looking back and waiting for me to see.
Tracer rounds shoot up toward me and the black eye bounces them away. He's half a mile distant but I see his face as if he's beside me, and I realize he's different; he's got no left arm, no left ear, and he's shifted inside. He's full of only noise, as if the gnashing voices have swamped what he was and built something new, leaving none of the old Olan Harrison behind. It takes me seconds to recognize that, but there it is, unavoidable.
He's severed himself.
I laugh but it's not funny. In his bid to become a god he's burnt the scaffold to the ground, but perhaps he has become a god. I see him inside his people now. The lines of control arcing back to him are gone. He doesn't need them any more, because all of these angels are him.
Copies.
My throat tightens. He's outsourced his own mind. The people inside those people are dead. There's only this ex-Olan thing that he's birthed into the world, made of half-formed voices and a past clung onto for so long that it rotted alive, spreading wider.
I try to think of a way to kill that. How can I fight a thing made of seven hundred angels, that wouldn't even have to die when all the angels die because…
The last stage in the process crashes my brain. For seconds I forget to breathe. He never could have planned this, he didn't know what Anna was going to do, but now that she's done it he must see it, and like it, and…
It hits me like a knee in the face, because it's already happening. No matter what I'll do, this is coming.
He's spreading into my army.
It's obvious and perfect and unkillable. I look again at the patterns of power and see my floaters and lepers and demons turning into him. His DNA, his mind, spreads like an infection, starting with those closest and widening exponentially.
I suck in a sharp breath. My heart races. I can see how this would appeal to his desire to be more than human, distributed in a horde a billion strong. He built the T4 off his own DNA, so each one of them should be a perfect match for his mind. I will never kill them all.
Unless…
I stop thinking and start doing. It's horrific, the worst thing I will ever do, but what the hell else was all this for if I can't be cruel now? This is what I've become, this is what I'm good for, and I won't turn away from that truth now.
I dive off my platform like Cerulean. Perfect ten scores rack up, and as I fall I can't help but think of Don so long ago in Las Vegas, and how the ocean listened to my unspoken command as I bled out on the blacktop.
Save me, I cried, and they saved me then. Can they save me again?
In seconds I'm before him, the original copy of Olan Harrison. He throws up his blades but now the black eye falls with all the strength of the ocean behind it, a double-headed axe that splits his head open like a rotten pumpkin.
He dies, but it's just the beginning. Twin diamond bolts shoot through my calves from behind and yank, and I spin to face a seven-strong platoon of angels advancing as one. All have this new Olan Harrison in their eyes.
"Last Mayor," they say in unison, "see what we've become."
"It's not a good look," I answer, and hurl the loyal members of my army upon them, bodies surging as I sprint into the ones in the middle, savaging their throats with icy stiletto black eye blades. They shove short blades at my chest but I'm already spinning up a fresh shell of onyx black that turns them away. More of them come and stamp atop the shield, hammering diamond battering rams into the seams, so I tense and pincushion the onyx shell, spiking them through with anemone-like spines.
They drop and I shudder. The killing is wearing me out and my strength is fading. I reach out to the ocean but they're fading too, many of them dead, many others becoming extensions of Olan Harrison. The doubly dead lie everywhere, ruptured like dry old seedpods, slit like shed snake skins, sprawled like a pale lunar moonscape of rock and dust.
I have to be faster. I have to kill the angels before all the army turn.
I fly. Loyal demons fling me on. Lepers jump with me. Floaters make ramps for me to dive off. Seven hundred angels, he said. They come to me and I go to them, and in the air or on the ground or in the thick of rasping, scraping bodies raised up like towers we fight.
I kill them. They cut into me; death by a thousand cuts, and each one looks into my eyes as they die, saying my name when they can, 'Last Mayor', like a taunt. This Olan thing doesn't care anymore for individual losses; I'm shaving off individual cells when the body is made of millions. Perhaps he's even happy for it, because this is purer, proving how inhuman he really is.
I rise on a creaking lattice-bridge of floaters and shoot the black eye like an autocannon into their ranks.
RATATATATATATATAT
Black rounds arc across the mountain range and bring his avatar angels down; wings clipped, throats pared, human bodies falling to burst on rock.
RATATATATATATATAT
They come at me and I grind myself out on them. They wheel and fire, sending diamond shots into me that weaken me further as my link to the ocean dwindles. Still I won't stop. His arrogance will be his death. I kill three angels with a black boomerang. I lop two with a broadsword. I fire imaginary pistols into seven and I ramp up the autocannon again at a new wave, spitting out ammo made of desperation.
RATATATATATATATAT
Seven hundred is a lot. I lose count. I look up from a head-cleaving stroke like a man waking from a dream, and wonder if this is it? Is this seven hundred?
My body leaks with a hundred cuts, holes, gouges. I try to summon the eye to heal them but it sputters feebly. No strength comes from the ocean anymore. The fighting has stopped, the field is silent, and nobody but me is moving. I weave in
place, treading on bodies ten deep and truly dead.
I see they are already gathered.
Floaters, demons, lepers and the others, the wraiths and the candlewax monsters, the blue heads and the many-legged rollers have built themselves into a structure atop the dead; arena walls circle around me, rising in grand columns and arches. I recognize the Roman Colosseum, and have to laugh.
They're not mine any more. They're his, with only him inside them. From their white, red, yellow, blue, electric eyes I see the hunger that was always lurking inside Olan Harrison, looking back at me.
It's the same hunger that broke Julio, that drove Drake, that ruptured Maine and corrupted Witzgenstein. I want, it says. I want, I want, I want.
I'm on my knees in the middle, thick red spit drooling from my mashed lips, laughing. Why not? He comes. I know it's him, the last angel, because the line tells me so. He's a young man, the last of his kind, with the trails of Rachel Heron clinging to him. Perhaps they were colleagues in Olan Harrison's counterfeit world.
He stands there. We look at each other.
"How do you like my construction?" he asks, gesturing around the Colosseum. He's proud. Maybe he thinks this rivals my Stonehenge.
I try to spit, but mostly blood comes out, trickling slackly down my chest. "Copies," I say. "That's all you'll ever be."
He smiles, then touches his chest. "And you. There's room for all in here. You'll make comics for me, Amo. You'll make us a wonderful flag."
I snort, and slur. "You're not Olan." The urge to just lay down and go to sleep is strong. That'll be the mounting blood loss. Maybe the cold too. Without the eye to insulate me it's freezing.
"No. We voted him off the island."
I manage a laugh. At least this gestalt poltergeist thing has a sense of humor. "From where I'm standing, you're all the biggest loser. Every last one of you."
"You can't upset us," the young man says, advancing. "We're on another order from you."
I spit more blood, as contemptuous as I can. "Homo Deus."
His smooth brow smoothes further. "Not even Homo, Last Mayor. Simply Deus."
He jumps through the air then, a leper's trick to cover only five steps, and backhands me. My chin cracks, one more pain on top of the others. I topple and catch myself on jagged rock, and that hurts too. I see my wrist is broken and look at in wonder. When did that happen?
"We're God," he says calmly, as if he didn't just break my jaw. "Your people used to feed each other to beings like me. From the top of pyramids they cast the bodies down, raising their voices in praise to idols that never answered back. Won't it be better to have someone who will?"
He flicks his wrist, and a diamond blade appears in his hand. He could do anything to me now. Crack my ribs. Carve out my eyes. Peel me one inch at a time. Instead he presses the blade into my good hand and sets the point over my heart.
"Make this last sacrifice," he says, "and I will spare your children."
I stare at him. If there was ever a way to get my engine hot again, it was that. Mention my children. Mention my wife. Defile my world one more time. It's what he wants.
Here's what I want.
With my last fragment of strength I reverse the blade, sending a black streak sizzling into his chest. He gasps, his mouth a perfect O. I smell the seared flesh, the iron tang of blood, coming through now with ash and grease and the ozone stink of leper's jumps, and he sags. The light goes out of his eyes, and the last bit of Olan Harrison tethered to a human body slips free.
So he spreads faster.
The ocean turn. His mind stretches for miles, until he is in them all, a single organism with a single will spread across a billion bodies. The scale of it wilts me. They breathe with one set of lungs. They turn their gaze to me with one great eye, and I wonder, what have I done?
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 they 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.
Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light Page 21
