Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light

by Grist, Michael John

  This washed over Peters. The cure was good. It wouldn't save Anna, but it was good, a fitting legacy.

  "Please find it," he said. "You owe her that much."

  "I will. We have all eleven bunkers working with us. Now you take care, and keep your eyes open. Things are going to change quickly."

  The line clicked and went silent.

  Standing in the bustle of the rocking lab, Peters looked around, at computers with data streaming by, papers changing hands, complex graphs projected on the walls, researchers hunched over samples. He was looking for someone to give the chunky satellite phone to, but everybody was busy. Was there a special place to hang it? He thought about asking, but in the end just set it down on a workbench gently, out of the way, where it wouldn't bother anyone.

  In the front cab of the long lab trailer he stood beside the driver, lit by harsh rays of morning light spiking through the mountain range.

  "It'll be a bright one," the driver said, a heavyset man with a blue denim cap and leather driving gloves. He leaned toward Peters as he spoke but didn't look at him, keeping his eyes on the road. There were a lot of broken roads, these days, so that was good sense. He didn't look like a man who'd spent the last fourteen years in a bunker. Maybe he'd been up here all this time, driving carefully around, unaffected by the apocalypse.

  It was a strange thought. Peters sat in the passenger seat, not saying anything. The thoughts in his head were a whirlwind anyway, a slow one, but swirling, swirling. Nobody else here knew Anna, so there was no one to share this grief with. But was it grief, or a strange celebration?

  Perhaps he felt it coming, even then.

  Later that day the scientists made their announcements, and handed out pills, but most of it passed over Peters' head. He felt long and slow and quiet, and that suited him. Things were changing, and he was happy to watch those changes take place as a spectator. The line was shifting again, maybe forever, maybe for the better.

  In the back of the Lance 2295, some time in the middle of the night, the change came. He was just setting his sketch down, thinking he ought to go to sleep, when the line shifted.

  He knew at once what it was. He'd jumped with lepers enough times to recognize how it felt as they flashed out of existence, and there was only one leper nearby now.

  It meant the shield had just gone down.

  He felt the change on the line follow next, the unpeeling of a fuzzy sense of protection, and rose to his feet, expecting all the people around him to drop back into phase; their eyes would flare white, their breathing would synchronize, and they wouldn't move again.

  But that didn't happen. They slept peacefully.

  He didn't understand. He picked a careful, speedy path through the bodies to the front cab, where a different heavyset man steered them up into the dark, foreboding mountain road, the road ahead illuminated only by the headlights.

  "Did you feel that?" he asked.

  The man leaned in. "What, friend?"

  Peters picked up the CB radio. He had to ask the driver three times for the frequency, then sent out the request for the convoy to halt. There were grumbles, and threats to call up the leader of Brezno bunker because this was a breach of exodus protocol 3, but they listened when he said who he was. They'd held him in a certain awed regard after what he and Anna had done.

  "The leper has gone down," he told them. "The shield has died. Don't you feel it?"

  They hadn't noticed. They weren't sensitive to the line like him. Still it was there.

  "Stop the convoy," he ordered. "Do it now. I have to see."

  They stopped.

  Peters jumped out of the RV. Along the freezing road, slipping on ice and nearly going over the railing's edge down to a river very far below, he ran toward the convoy's middle.

  "Which one?" he asked random people as he went, patting the sides of vehicles, searching for the one they'd loaded the leper into. He didn't remember that time too well, back when all the jumps had left him addled. Their blank faces showed they didn't understand what he was looking for. Maybe they didn't speak English; many of these people didn't, or at least not well.

  "Where?" he asked, miming a shield like a big circle in the air. "Where is it?"

  Someone finally pointed and he ran on. He was first to it, though the driver of the vehicle was there, and said something in a language Peters vaguely recognized, perhaps Serbian.

  "Open it," Peters hustled, gesturing, getting frantic, desperate to know.

  "Oy, OKee," the man said, held up his hands, and unlocked the side panel on the small transit van. Peters climbed in without waiting, shone his flashlight around the space to find the leper, and saw -

  28. THE LIGHT

  I lie on my hospital bed on the top floor of Olan Harrison's aboveground bunker, the Redoubt. The place is amazing, like a five-star hotel mixed with a Bond villain's research lab. There are cells far below, apparently, and a room with silver speakers on the walls like something from the Multicameral Array, and a cloning facility with some science fictional vats, and other strange things, but I don't care.

  It has power, and heat, and the best medical supplies you could ask for. They've sewn me up and set my fractured wrist, put a cast on my elbow, put my knee into traction, and now they're marveling at the various scars covering my body.

  "What happened here?" asks the doctor, Marjory, in awe. Really she's a nurse trained with Keeshom, who himself was a nurse trained by the last doctor we had, Ozark, but she's the closest to a doctor we have, so... She's pointing at the scar Olan Harrison's diamond blade made going through my sternum.

  "Cigarette burn," I say, and smile. "I'll be more careful."

  She frowns and gives me a hard stare. I think she might wag her finger and scold me. I'm older than her, but in some ways I'm still just a kid.

  "Really, I don't know," I say. "It's a blur. I think I was stabbed with some kind of diamond? Then I," I pause, embarrassed, "I healed it."

  She gives me the look even harder. She believes this less than the cigarette line. "You healed it?"

  "I, uh, think so."

  She writes something down on my chart. I feel maligned and ridiculous at the same moment. I want to ask what she's writing, but she gives me the hard look one more time, puts the chart on the end of the bed and heads for the door. I want to get up and see but I can't because I'm in traction.

  I look over at Lara, who's about to burst into laughter. When Marjory's gone she laughs her ass off.

  "What does it say?" I ask.

  She rolls in her chair to the chart. Our kids lie asleep in beds adjoining mine. Everybody was cold and hungry before, but this place is so warm, and the food so good, that they were asleep minutes after eating. All Drake's kids went out like a light. I was in the operating room for most of that, but they didn't put me under. I don't think Marjory or her team of amateurs know how to anesthetize. They had quite a time getting the plaster into the cast mold, and I think they might have caused another fracture getting it done, but I gritted my teeth and let it be.

  I can't complain. I'm alive. My family are here. Every second that passes the disbelief only mounts.

  Lara's eyes dance over the chart. "Delusions of grandeur," she reads, then gives me a look. "But we already knew that."

  "She's barely a nurse," I say, eliciting a snort. "She's hardly qualified. What else?"

  "A serious case of the heebie jeebies. Deep spine tingles. Extreme goosebumps."

  I laugh. "Get over here."

  She comes. It's tight, as she climbs onto the bed. There's a lot of pain getting appropriately entangled around my traction and my cast, and her bandaged feet are no pretty picture either, and it's weird doing it with the kids right there, but it makes me feel human again to try. This is what I survived for. The guilt seems to be gone, maybe driven away by shock, maybe just gone.

  We're tender with each other. It feels like years since I've touched my wife. Held her. Her hot skin against mine makes us both tremble. Only halfway thr
ough do I remember what the bulge of her belly means.

  It draws tears from my eyes. I can't believe it. How can this even be real?

  "What is it?" she asks, worried. I can hardly speak, so I just curl the flat of my palm on her swelling tummy. She places her hand on mine, and holds it there, and keeps on moving while we both cry.

  Afterward we hug tightly, her nestled around the cast and the traction, and she tells me stories about what she's done, about Witzgenstein and Crow and the long trek. I listen. I'd like to tell her about my voyages, about the bunkers and Anna in Istanbul, about Olan and Rachel Heron, but I can't do it, not yet.

  But I will.

  We're different now, lying like this. I feel like there's some barrier crossed that we never knew was there before. We've always been separate people at the same time as we were a unit, a family, but now we're more than that. She crossed the world with our children to save me. That's a sense of belonging like nothing New LA or Sacramento could ever provide.

  I kiss her head.

  "What was that for?" she asks sleepily.

  "For saving me again."

  She smiles and snuggles in. "You better be worth it this time."

  It's good.

  Still, I can't sleep. There are so many things to think about. Wonderful things, terrible things. I heard that the bunkers have been checking in. They're working on a cure, something Anna initiated. I didn't get a chance to talk to Lucas or Sulman, but the reports sound exciting.

  I can't kill bunkers anymore. It's obvious now. Olan Harrison did this to us, and he's gone, and now we have to do something better. We have to be better, and I'm ready to play whatever role I can. I'm just a comic book artist, but for some reason people listen to me. Lara makes me better. My children give me value. It's the people around me that make me real, that raise me up, and I owe my life to them.

  I think back on my cairn trail across the world, the crimes balanced against the good deeds, and hope that the scales will come out in the positive. I'll do what I can. I'll try to be a better man.

  Some time in my late ruminations there's a clatter in the hall outside. Lights flash on, then in runs Alan; his face is red, his eyes wide, and in his hands he's holding a satellite phone. He comes to me and holds it out.

  "You have to hear this, Amo," he says, grinning like a madman. "It's Peters in Brezno."

  He's grinning and he's crying at the same time, and I don't get it. More people rush in after him, like there's a party in my room and now they're all invited; Cynthia and Lin and George and Marjory, rubbing sleep out of their eyes. Lara wakes by my side, and I take the phone and hold it tentatively to my ear.

  "Peters?" I ask.

  "Amo!" he answers, his voice very far away, then there's a sob, and a laugh, and what the hell is happening?

  "What is it?"

  "Lucas told me it was Anna's cure," he begins, babbling, "her DNA, but I do not care, I just know what I can see. I saw him, Amo! I saw his eyes!"

  A shiver runs through me. I don't know what he's talking about, but somehow this feels important, maybe immense.

  "Whose eyes?"

  "Our leper shield went down," he says, calming himself slightly, so his singsong Swedish accent lilts along like a lullaby. "I went to the leper but he wasn't a leper any more, Amo. He didn't have glowing eyes. He looked at me, Amo." He laughs a little. "He looked right at me!"

  I frown. I look at Lara, and she looks back at me. I can't remember that ever happening before. Sure, they always saw me, their eyes had to work, but really at me? Something bright starts to shine in my head, and I feel like I'm being pushed back in time, sinking into my coma bed. He looked at me? It's the first day after my date with Lara again, and she's lying here in bed, and everything is about to change.

  "What do you mean, he looked at you?"

  "I don't know!" he shouts gleefully. "But it is not only here! Everywhere. I go out, and it is becoming dawn here now, and I see them. They are in the mountains, there is a house here, and they are trying to talk to me through the glass. Talk, the ocean, Amo, with their mouths! They don't make sound but they are trying. The ocean!"

  Tears blur my vision. It's too big. I look at Alan and he nods.

  "In their millions," he says. "We've had reports in from half the bunkers; across Asia the mounds are spreading apart. We can see them on satellite. They're not flocking, they're helping each other." He grins hugely. "The world is coming back."

  The world is coming back?

  I can't think of anything better than that. It feels like a dream, a too-happy ending, but everything is unreal now. It's too big to really understand, so I just open wide and take the biggest bite I can.

  Finally, I think. It's what the ocean said as they flooded for Olan Harrison.

  Finally we'll be whole again, and in that moment I see that this will be my work going forward. I will be there at every place I can, with popcorn and movies to meet them and greet them and tell them, 'Welcome home.'

  "Welcome home," I mutter now. Lara kisses my face. I kiss her back.

  "Welcome home," she answers.

  The cheer goes up, then we're all saying it, to each other, to the air. Welcome home, welcome home. We hear from Lucas next, then a steady stream of bunkers from around the world check in and we welcome them all, and they welcome us. The line has leveled out, they say. There's no infection anymore, nothing to separate us from the bunkers, so we're all human together again. I look over at my children, and their eyes shine with pride, with hope, with a new inner light.

  Welcome home, I tell them. We are all home, now.

  END

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Thank you for reading The Light! I can't believe we've finished book 9 of this series. Wow. I'm so glad you've come on this journey with me. What a trip. I never knew all the twists and turns it would take, and have been thrilled to discover them. I didn't know Anna was going to die, or exactly what kind of man Olan Harrison would be. The one thing I always knew was the very end – the zombies come back.

  That always seemed beautiful to me. Amo's killed a lot of people, or been a party to a lot of killing, but this is a good step toward atonement.

  I'd love to hear what you think of this finale – could you please review it on the shop site where you bought it? Reviews from readers like you are the lifeblood of indie authors.

  Thank you!

  Shop links

  Goodreads

  So what's next? Will we ever return to Amo, Lara and the others for more adventures? The door is definitely open. The world is going to be in some serious disarray, as billions of people come back to life. There'll be psychos. New heroes. It's pretty exciting thinking about all the new adventures there. So, maybe…

  To be first to find out about that, and my other projects like the cyberpunk series, and the epic fantasy, and the upcoming thrillers, why not join my free newsletter? You'll get special offers, free books and discounts.

  Get me on the newsletter!

  Now, read on for the first chapter of The Saint's Rise, Book 1 of my epic fantasy series.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Sincere thanks as ever to the Ocean Elite: Pam Elmes for reading in less than a day and giving great comments, Debbie Middleton, Walter Scott for excellent suggestions and encouragement, Lee Atherton and Melissa Dykeman-Abourbih.

  - Michael

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael John Grist is a bestselling British/American writer who lived in Tokyo, Japan for 11 years and now lives in London, England.

  He writes science fiction and fantasy thrillers, and used to explore and photograph abandoned places, such as ruined theme parks, military bases and underground bunkers. These explorations have drawn millions of visitors to his website michaeljohngrist.com, and often provide inspiration for his fiction.

  OTHER WORKS

  Last Mayor (science fiction thriller)

  1. The Last

  2. The Lost

  3. The Least

  1-3 Box Set
1

  4. The Loss

  5. The List

  6. The Laws

  7. The Lash

  8. The Lies

  9. The Light

  Soul Jacker (cyberpunk sci-fi)

  1. Soul Jacker

  2. Soul Breaker

  3. Soul Killer

  Ignifer Cycle (epic fantasy)

  1. The Saint's Rise

  2. The Rot's War

  Short fiction

  Cullsman #9- 9 science fiction stories

  Death of East - 9 fantasy stories

  THE SAINT'S RISE

  No heroes endure…

  Three thousand years ago the world fell into darkness, when the great black mouth of the Rot ravaged the land. Across the glorious library city of Aradabar its dark tongues hammered down, leveling the glass towers of learning and entombing the bookyards in a thick blanket of lava. Only a single child survived the devastation; an infant with a prophecy carved into his skin, promising the rise of a hero powerful enough to slay the Rot for good.

  Now that child is a young man, beginning to question the meaning of his many scars…

  Now those scars are hunted by a jealous King, ruler of a brutal industrial city, where a thousand bizarre castes toil away like slaves…

  Now a dark beast is watching, an Unforgiven, seeking to fulfill a promise made long ago…

  And now the Rot has returned, its great black mouth gaping large in the sky, bringing chaos and fear to a world where no heroes endure…

  THE SAINT'S RISE (excerpt)

  The children had come.

  Sen stood in the grass before his mother's grave, in the shadow of the Abbey, looking at the scars on his hands. He was supposed to be at the front of the grounds by now, welcoming the children as they came in, but he wasn't ready for that.