The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  "All go," Sovoy said, looking at Sandbrooke again and widening his grin. "Looks like you'll be out of a job soon."

  Sandbrooke set the clipboard down. "They'll always need hipster drovers. One day they may let us ride you, like rodeo clowns."

  Sovoy nodded seriously. "I can see you as a clown. A good career choice."

  Sandbrooke pointed at the clipboard. "Tighten those up. You're spinning your wheels in the fourth bracket."

  Joran placed a calming hand on each man's shoulder, stopping the back-and-forth. The results to come would be good news for them all. "We go in eighteen minutes," he said, reading off Sovoy's clock. "Wind up for final checks."

  "Winding up," said Sovoy, and spun around to his monitor.

  At seventeen minutes Joran sat at his desk with Sandbrooke hovering behind him. The Array of minds was represented on his screen by a grid of one hundred green lights; his placid, calm medium-detection pool. They had been trained to enter a coma-like meditative space. The architecture of their brains was as similar as he could find anywhere in the world. The environment around them was incredibly remote, to avoid any interfering signals. The hydrogen line up here was pure, and could be read.

  But could it be written upon?

  The new parameters today would break the final barrier between message and medium; for the first time his Array were not only going to receive.

  They were going to transmit.

  The SEAL had asked him to wait another year, gathering data, but after this they'd be falling over themselves to put his science into practical application. The world would hear. His silence would break, and everything would change.

  In seventeen minutes they would know.

  3. FREAK SHOW

  I stumble into a freak show.

  It's immense.

  I lurch forward through a flood of conflicting signals on the line, silver dots sparkling before my eyes, until I hit a railing and grip it so tightly it hurts, looking out.

  What I see defies comprehension. There's too much happening, too much chaos to pick out any patterns within, so all I see are details. Before me lies an enormous, light-filled hall as large as a football field, striped with dizzying shafts of light from above. The ceiling is all glass with no visible seams or supporting beams, laid over with ice in organic patches of blue and white, admitting drifts of light through which I see the swirling skies outside and the steady fall of snow. The walls on all sides are more seamless glass, giving the impression that this is some kind of atmospheric bubble pushed up through the Earth's snowy crust.

  The hall is a pit below. There's an encircling metal gantry one floor up; I'm standing on it. The floor below is a mottled gray, subdivided into square-shaped allotments by means of grooves, though the pattern is interrupted by wreckage and motion. There are hospital bed-frames and mattresses scattered everywhere; tipped over, resting on their sides, in places torn apart to metal slats and bars and foam. There are sheets lying like a strange facsimile of dirty snow, wadded and spread, mildewed black. There are wilted pillows and sprayed papers, smeared marks on the floor and cement walls, and there are the bodies.

  I can't think, when I look at them. Their eyes catch me and I am frozen; petrified, shocked, disgusted. It feels like looking into a vision of hell. Single lines of data creep across my thoughts like an ancient computer loading a visual image, one row of pixels at a time.

  The ocean are here. Their gray bodies strain, as alive as they ever were, not lying silent like every one I've seen since Drake. Some of them wear thick black cables wrapped around their necks, shackling them to the center of each grooved square. Others roam freely, bouncing off the cement walls below, with arms missing, with whole portions of gray skin on their chests and waists peeled back, revealing dry gray muscle. They breathe as one and reach blindly toward me.

  But the ocean are easy, compared to the rest.

  There are demons here too. There are probably a dozen dotted throughout the hall; lurching against their bonds, each confined to a square though circular stain marks extend beyond the gray dividing lines, where they've stretched out their bodies in a thirteen-year bid for freedom. They dive and snap like rabid dogs. Their huge red bodies slap over the floor, jostling beds, pillows and bodies beneath them. The cold rising off them burns my eyes.

  And there are more. After that it only gets harder, because there are Istanbul lepers here too. Their jet-black bodies jerk like badly animated sprites, with strings of white skin flapping freely like a mummy's loosened wrappings. I can't count them, can barely track them as they fizz chaotically around their squares, dissolving and resolving in fits and jerks, twisting my perception back on itself. Some of them have slipped their chains and zigzag round the pit, manifesting with a crackle and a smudge of black before flashing away. Tracking them splinters my thinking. I remember the single one of them I killed in Istanbul, and the blast marks that explosion left in my mind. Fear joins the cold of the demons, and I try to pull back from the railing, but I can't move.

  The image of the pit compiles in my head, and I sag. There are other things here too, things I've never seen before, yellow nubs of humans, each one a melted candle that seems to be melting like drips of hot wax. Their figures are shifting concepts only, lumpy shapes of bodies with a hump for a head and waxy swellings for limbs. Their yellow mouths are open and wail softly, adding to the breath of the ocean and the slapping of the demons and the urgent scratching of the lepers. Their eyes are a sickly yellow, and as one catches me in its glare, its body seems to expand, inflating like a balloon on the fuel of my attention. I wrench my eyes away and there's a grotesque popping sound, then I turn back to see yellow goo burst everywhere.

  I gag, but nothing comes. I'm on my knees, clutching the railing.

  Still there are more.

  There's a blue thing in a corner with faces growing out of its back and arms plunging out where its hips should be. It feels me looking and rolls closer on many limbs, like tumbleweed. There's a wispy black wraith-thing in the center holding one of the lepers down and chewing on its face, while the leper flickers like static on a detuned television screen, trying to escape. There's a pinkish thing that is all distended sex; weighed down with a massive black slug hanging from its groin, dragging that bloated load after it in circles round its square.

  There are more, but I can't register any more. The black eye has abandoned me in the face of this, and I feel myself being rubbed out. My toes, perhaps, I can control. My fingers. My eyelids.

  I sink and surrender. Maybe it'll be good to give up. I don't want this to be my world. Darkness rolls in, and I welcome it. Voices talk over me, doctors discussing my condition from a past I barely remember.

  Have you ever seen a coma victim blanche so completely? I mean, they always lose their color in a week or two, it drains out of them, but this?

  It was overnight.

  I've never seen the like.

  The words come through like a digital brush-stroke, in large fonts and meaningless, from a coma I'm sinking back toward.

  His brain activity is off the chart too. Something is happening in there.

  But what?

  But what.

  I roll on an ocean of misshapen heads, like bald eggs, but I can feel their thoughts twist together like twine in a bungee cord, like intestines curling themselves into each other, like an embryo blooming to life.

  He may hear us. He may not. The eyes are the thing that get me though.

  It looks like they're lit from behind. How is that possible?

  Some simple phosphorescence, like a jellyfish. Whatever he's got inside him, it's changing his metabolism.

  Are we talking an infection?

  Not any infection we can see. It's a disorder of the entire nervous system. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say something is remaking him.

  His DNA shows no change. We checked that.

  Not at the genetic level, then. Structurally. Look at the alterations in his brain pattern over time. It's bee
n remapped completely.

  The voices balloon into curious clouds, into animals folded out of meat and bone. They bend out of time around me, drifting on a breeze of scent.

  I smell my wife's perfume, I'd recognize it anywhere, and it stumps up to pat me on the shoulder. It speaks.

  My Amo.

  I breathe in my body and breathe it out again, flapping like a sail on the ocean of strange heads. There are glass walls around me and bodies outside, people lost and reanimated, reaching up for me.

  Whatever this thing is, it's beyond our control. It's not a virus like any we've seen before, not bacteria, it's something physical that's rewriting him.

  Like nanobots?

  Ha. If that technology existed out of a Crichton novel, I'd say yes, but it doesn't. This seems to be natural. It may even be evolutionary, a key that was always waiting in the brain to be turned.

  I rise and fall on tides of the line, lifted with each shifting wave. I'm on the way out.

  BANG

  A noise stirs me awake.

  BANG it comes again, and there's an answering pain in my body. Where? I'm lying beside the railing, close to where a demon strains to grasp me, and I'm melting too. Pieces of me run down the walls into the pit with them, and maybe that's where I belong. I can finally become one of the monsters and lead my horde to wipe out humanity. I laugh, but there's another-

  BANG

  And that stops the laughing. I peer down and see the black gun in the holster at my hip, with somebody's finger spiked arthritically through the trigger guard. It looks like they've never operated a gun before, like the finger is not a finger but a stick attached to another stick that they can't use properly. It's my finger. I follow the bullet track down my thigh with my eyes, and see the skin is scored with two shallow tears now, bleeding freely.

  I've shot myself three times already.

  That fact doesn't save me, or resurrect the black eye to shield me, but it does ground me for a moment. I'm right here. I run my hand down the cuts in my thigh and the pain is sharp and focusing.

  I have time enough to look out over the Array one more time.

  It remains too much to process. It keeps hitting me in the senses and the line, but is there something-?

  I squint. Bodies move like waves, heads bobbing, and perhaps there's something there, hidden behind the visual overload. I try to put the line to the side, push it to the edge of my mind and focus on what I'm seeing.

  It's not moving, not a body, not a piece of broken bed frame or a sheet or anything that seems to belong here. Rather it's blue, out in the middle like an island. I blink and lift my head, trying for a better angle. There's definitely something there, and knowing that helps me focus.

  I climb the railing onto my knees, where I can see it better. It's square, but with rounded corners. It's blue, laid flat on the floor, taking up one whole square within the dark grooved lines. I get to my feet, pulled by this thing, until I stand on shaky legs and get the angle that lets me see the whole of it, painted on the floor, and gasp.

  A blue square with rounded corners, with a single white letter 'f' in the middle.

  I laugh. Not possible. But there it is. It firms up my legs. Now I ignore the creatures and look at this square. At the center of the f there's a small metal box.

  I can't believe my eyes, but it's real. I hear Shark-eyes somewhere in the distance telling me 'I told you so'.

  It's a cairn, left here for me.

  ANNA

  4. COMMAND

  Foul black smoke swelled down the Command hall in the Istanbul bunker, and Anna staggered blindly into it.

  A dozen conflicting thoughts rushed in her head, about what was really happening, how and why Amo had done this, but all that mattered now was before her. She needed the bunker. She needed these people alive, and now their bunker was burning.

  She lurched forward with a scrap of her shirt pressed over her mouth, sucking in sharp breaths that racked her lungs with the bitter tang of burnt plastic. Dead bodies tripped her underfoot. Amo had killed so many already. She ran her hand along the wall for balance, barely able to see anything.

  From the noxious black the gritty outlines of a few survivors shambled out, nudging her shoulder, coughing and holding their mouths. Others plunged blindly deeper in, fating themselves to a choking death in the gloom. She couldn't help them. She knew from the dead silence that the fans weren't working, and Command wasn't going to clear. It had to be an evacuation, and who else was going to do it?

  The wall fell away as she reached the shield room entrance. A hot gush of smoke hit her in the face, and she blinked and swayed away. Inside there were sparking electrical fires in the depths, like sheet lightning glimpsed deep in a thunderhead.

  "Shit," she cursed, then regretted it as the smoke scalded her mouth. Her eyes ran and blurred her vision. Her mind raced ahead while the oxygen debt built up in her system.

  He'd blown the shield here more thoroughly than at Gap or Brezno. There it had been done tactically, probably a targeted blast engineered by Feargal to just take out signal protection, whereas here the blast must have been haphazard, ripping out parts of the generator and the transformers feeding the fans. Probably dozens of essential systems were compromised.

  There was only one way to save anyone, now.

  She took a deep breath and plunged into the hot gush of smoke, fighting the current long enough to get through the door, then tracing a path blindly along the wall through the gritty dark, burnt-plastic smoke, fumbling for the cool metal of a –

  Her hands clasped round the cylinder of a fire extinguisher. Already her eyes useless and her lungs burned, but she didn't dare wipe them or suck in another poisonous breath, not here. Instead she hefted the cylinder and made for the one thing she could still see; the sparks buried inside the ruptured wall. The blast must have torn open an oxygen line for them to still be burning in the thick of all this smoke.

  She ran to the sparks, stumbling over more bodies, barely catching her footing, while the smoke got hotter and poured harder. Her hands grew slick on the cylinder, she almost dropped it, but managed to tug the plastic guard out from its handle.

  Her shoulder hit the wall first, followed by her head, almost knocking her out cold. She staggered then felt for the contours of the hatch leading into the wall, through which the sparks were now a dancing, firework glare. She leaned in, got one knee up on the hot metal crawlspace, and squeezed the trigger.

  The extinguisher blew a cool white dust that drove the smoke back, firing for some twenty seconds before the hose ran dry. Smothering white swirled around her, sparkled with silver dots as her lungs heaved for air. Any second she was going to gasp and that would be it, a gulpful of toxins that would drop her in place, but there wasn't time now to run back for clearer air.

  The only way out was through.

  She dropped the extinguisher and flung herself into the riveted metal passage in the wall, crawling for all she was worth. The metal grew hot under her palms and panic thumped in her chest as she scrabbled deeper in, barely able to see a thing as the white dust mingled with the smoke.

  She heard it at the last moment, as her throat gagged on the need to breathe; a quiet hiss. She lurched at it, laid down full stretch on the glowing metal and clapped her mouth to a crack in the wall, where a cold jet of air meant life.

  She sucked in a breath, coughed, and was instantly giddy. Pure oxygen! She gasped in another breath, one more and held it, then backed up as quickly as she could. Her knee clanked over the extinguisher, but she kept on until her legs finally kicked out into the shield room. The black smoke was still dense, but no longer flowing.

  In the corridor she ran, and the smoke began to thin as she advanced, becoming a hazy night fog in the air. She rubbed at her eyes and that hurt too, but at least she could see a little better. Bodies lay everywhere, with people coughing and stumbling amongst them, unable to rally and organize, broken by whatever Amo had done.

  "This way!" she calle
d, and some of them tilted toward her. "Over here."

  She herded them by their arms and shoulders, guiding them down the corridor and out of the thickest parts of the smoke, hacking out words as helpful as she could, leading them to the elevator at the end. Five of them fit in at a time, and she sent them up, then turned back for more.

  There were dozens already, more shambling like the ocean out of the spreading black, and she gathered them. Minutes only, she calculated as she darted in and out of the smoke, before the pocket of air near the elevator was swallowed. She set an internal counter and ran, leading them through the flickering lights and the black smoke, from offices and a room of bunk beds and a kitchen, back to the single elevator where she slotted them in like postal parcels and sent them up.

  Up and up.

  More kept coming. The black was everywhere now, but she wasn't thinking straight, only trying to save lives. She ran back in, coughing with every breath, holding their groping hands, sucking in smoke until she fell to her knees and couldn't get back up again, until firm hands grasped her own and a familiar voice called out.

  "Anna? Anna! God, look at you!"

  Was it Ravi? Had Ravi come for her now?

  "We have to go!"

  She let Ravi tug her into the elevator, then there was the climb up the ladder toward a circle of light, and she was just one part of a train of bodies. Strong hands lifted her at the top, there were faces she might have recognized, but who could say? Maybe that was Sulman standing there, but wasn't he dead? Was that Macy, could that be Jonathon, ushering people out into the hangar, clearing a path of dead bodies, handing out water and rinsing people's eyes?

  Then someone held her, and tilted her head back and poured a liquid that stank like a swimming pool over her face which got into her mouth and stung her eyes in a different way, then they were smearing roughly at her cheeks with a wet towel until she mumbled, "I can do it," and took it away.