The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  She almost spat the last word. The bridle tightened around Lara abruptly, shutting her mouth and squeezing her lungs. She tried to speak but nothing came.

  "Perhaps you thought this was my soul's confession," said Witzgenstein, mockingly now, as she rose to her feet. She looked stronger than she ever had, a solid oak of strength reinforced with red anger on the line. "That I'd fall into your lap a changed woman, having seen the wickedness of my ways? But you're wrong. You don't know me at all, Lara. Come, let me show you."

  She walked toward the South Portico arched window, overlooking the South Lawn. Lara found her own limbs responding from within, outside of her control. It was startling but irresistible, the power of Witzgenstein's blunt mind overriding her own. It forced her to stand, and moved her jerkily to the window, where she hung like a puppet from her master's strings.

  The Lawn was dark beyond, and plentiful stars overhung it. Dim shadows shuffled through the black, then a fire sparked, burning in an iron brazier. Others followed, circled in a ring around a large, dark mass at the center. She saw many people gathered around it now, some ferrying the flames from brazier to brazier, some standing motionless in a ring. All of New LA was there, and all of Drake's people too, waiting in the darkness with pale faces turning upward now, to her.

  The thrill of fear weakened her legs. If it weren't for the spine of Witzgenstein's will holding her up, she would have collapsed. Laid across the darkness, she saw the red trails of the bridle stretching between the people and Witzgenstein. She had laid her control over them all, though that was not the thing driving them now. Whatever they were planning here, it came not only from Janine, but from within them, from a place where they were angry, and afraid, and beaten down.

  "I've enjoyed this confession," Witzgenstein said, as Lara's eyes adjusted to the darkness outside. "It has helped me enormously. But now is the time for our new world to begin, and what better way than with a grand symbol to kick us off into the history books? That can be your role, serving me even at the end."

  Lara would have gasped, as she recognized what the dark mass on the South Lawn was, if it weren't for Witzgenstein's tight clasp around her heart. A heaped, pyramidal stack of broken furniture and chopped logs, from which rose a single, jutting stake at the center, tall enough to fit its purpose.

  A pyre.

  Witzgenstein pressed her face close to Lara's, and whispered in her ear. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, Lara. And I won't."

  INTERLUDE 9

  While James While tracked down coma-sufferers, Joran Helkegarde killed them.

  Testing to destruction, he called it. Every day, all day, he tested people to death.

  As the weeks passed and they steadily came out of their comas, beginning a slow road to recovery, he performed experiments that stopped that progress dead. He performed live brain vivisections. He overloaded their minds with transmission signals on the line until they burnt out. He tested them with a ravenous hunger, and they died one after another.

  Time slipped between his fingers like the line. Days passed and he was on a plane, then in a facility, then at the Prime Array construction site, then back in Istanbul. The world became fluid, sleeping and awake, so everything was a dream. His work was a mountain toward redemption he had to climb, but that mountain was made of gray type ones, and with each step forward his ex-coma sufferers were dying.

  "You have to do it," James While told him, in the brief moments when they spoke. "This is your calling."

  It was a cruel calling, though their deaths didn't seem to hurt. Instead the nightmares that woke him in the middle of too-short sleeps were of Piers Sandbrooke with the wraith flapping in his head.

  Type seven, one of the least understood of the T4's expressions. It fascinated him even as it disgusted him. He thought about it while he dissected spines, while he ramped up the transmission signal to overload the motor area of the brain, the speech area, the vision area. He thought about it as he mapped brain wave patterns at death to the first few readings he received off the Prime Array, as it gradually came online.

  He thought about Sandbrooke so much that he became real.

  Piers took to following him everywhere he went. Joran knew he was a hallucination, a symptom of too-little sleep and overwhelming stress, but his presence was oddly comforting. It wasn't forgiveness, nothing like that; rather it was a different kind of punishment, and the least of what he deserved.

  Piers didn't speak. Sometimes he opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Joran didn't tell anyone. Nobody cared, anyway. He bore it.

  "Don't talk to me," Sovoy said now, whenever he called him. He'd changed, as his work at Bordeaux took him away from Joran's circle of control. The anger was back, the blame. "I don't have anything to say to you. Read the reports."

  Sovoy's data was good, though it wasn't the data Joran wanted. It left him with no one else to talk to, as James While was fiercely engaged in his shadow SEAL hunt, constantly muttering to the ghostly holograph of Olan Harrison in the background. So he started talking to his own ghost: Piers Sandbrooke.

  He explained each new revelation, each brain broken open, each fresh attempt to build a shield by harnessing the frayed ends of a spinal column. Sandbrooke was a mute witness, even when he was screaming. It didn't help. Now Joran woke from nightmares clawing unconsciously at his own throat. In the pale mirror of whatever bunker he was visiting, scratches laced over scratches on his skin. He wore polo necks in the lab and strengthened his resolve to stop sleeping.

  Thirty-three of his hundred were already dead, tested to death.

  His first breakthrough came on a Tuesday, four months after the Event. Using new techniques and new patterns, he built a temporary shield on the line that prevented any signal getting through. It lasted for only twenty-seven seconds, but in that time it screened an area the size of a house.

  He whooped himself hoarse, not really feeling any joy but the beginning of a slow relief.

  "Twenty-seven seconds is a start," James While told him, with the young Harrison puttering at his back. "Get me twenty-seven months. Twenty-seven years."

  Joran took heart, but it was a hollow kind of heart. People kept dying and every death made the scratches on his neck worse. The blip signals off the coma survivors around the world grew stronger, each one a fuse on the coming apocalypse. He began tracking them with a morbid fascination, digging into all the data Sovoy passed along and requesting more. They became his only entertainment and only connection to the world, like a real-life soap opera. In a world of unlimited resources, it wasn't hard to dig up good gossip.

  He learned about Amo in New York, and Drake in St. Albans, and the others who were leading the pack.

  "So a hipster artist shall lead the survivors," he said to Piers Sandbrooke, and Piers Sandbrooke said nothing.

  On their infrequent calls James While grew even more distant, speaking like he was talking to the air. He'd grown thin and mad, even more so than Joran.

  "Focus on the shields," he would mutter, repeating himself.

  "I am," Joran said.

  "On the shields, on the Arks."

  His Prime Array reached completion. Standing at the head of its great glass-ceilinged hall, as big as a football stadium hunkered in the Siberian permafrost, Joran surveyed the thousand young men and felt the weight of what he was doing catch up to him.

  One thousand more sacrifices to the line. He could never climb fast enough.

  The new Array worked beautifully. It sucked down the hydrogen line like a lung, and taught him such terrible secrets. He learned about triggers and blips and the future to come.

  It was a Wednesday a few months later, after a Christmas spent picking the scabs on his throat, when he made another breakthrough.

  Stabilization.

  He told it to James While. James While listened and ordered it done.

  The signal went up through the Prime Array in silence, carried over the world on the hydrogen line like a smart phone firmwar
e update, unseen and unheard. It rewrote brains and the T4, switching fragments of code so that instead of thirty-six types expressing on a given signal, there would only be one or two.

  "It's not a cure," Sovoy told him, when he went to Bordeaux on New Year's Eve and begged to talk.

  Sovoy was looking better. Divorced from the worst parts of their joint mission, focused on his role as the savior of Bordeaux's seven hundred, he had gone back to despising Joran. Now he looked at him with contempt.

  "It's no cure at all," Sovoy repeated, enjoying the difference between them, his own moral purity. "Now you trap seven billion innocents as type one rather than spread across thirty-six types. What good does that do?"

  Joran nodded hungrily, enjoying the censure. He almost pulled his polo neck down to show Sovoy his scarred neck. There was worse to say yet, and to be judged for his crimes by another living person, not just Sandbrooke's silent stare, was delicious.

  "It stops them killing each other. It gives us control. It affords us ten years," Joran said.

  Sovoy sneered, full of high-minded contempt. He hadn't kept up to date with their plans. "Ten years for what?"

  Joran bathed in his disgust. "To find a cure. If no cure comes in ten years, then it'll be much easier to wipe them out, if they're all of one type."

  Sovoy blanched. He hadn't seen that coming. Joran felt light-headed with pleasure.

  "What?"

  Joran cackled beside himself, like an old crone. That was the beauty of stabilization.

  "Kill all seven billion," he said. "We have type twos expressed and waiting to sweep them away. It's very neat."

  Sovoy just stared. Seven billion was a large number. Perhaps he'd been sustaining himself with dreams of saving them all. Sovoy the savior. Joran cackled more. He was here to tear those dreams down and drop Sovoy into the same sea of shit he'd been swimming in for months.

  "What about my survivors?" Sovoy asked.

  Joran had to stop himself from laughing madly. It was hard. Sovoy, the fool. Didn't he know Joran had already killed seventy-eight of them, one after another tested to destruction? What were seven hundred more?

  "They'll die," he said. "The type twos will cleanse the world for the Arks. A second flood."

  Sovoy blinked.

  Something inside him cracked.

  "You're planning to kill them, still? After all that I've done?"

  Joran cackled more. He didn't mean to. A year alone had made him crazy, and he knew that. He knew this was cruel, even, but how could he stop himself any more?

  "We have to save the Arks," he said, echoing something James While had told him many times, that he'd insulated Sovoy from. "Your seven hundred are incidental."

  Now Sovoy's face went red. His eyes welled with frustrated tears. There was satisfaction in that. Perhaps once they'd been friends, and now they were enemies, and that was good too, because at least it was better than dismissive silence.

  "Get out," Sovoy said coldly. "I never want to see you again."

  Joran nodded gamely. "You don't want to shout at me? Tell me how inhuman I am? How I'm going to pay?"

  "Just leave."

  He left.

  It was good.

  The day after that, Piers Sandbrooke was gone. It was a strange kind of miracle. The nightmares were finally over.

  * * *

  A year with only the ghost of Olan Harrison for company had certainly made James While crazy. That was something to reflect on. Sometimes he had dreams that were like Disney movies, but the villain always won. The Little Mermaid lost her voice and became a miserable weed in the Sea Witch's cavern. Beauty starved in her cage in the Beast's tower, while his heart hardened until the last rose petal fell.

  Sad, sad failure.

  Because he couldn't find them.

  Monitoring the coma-survivors hadn't led to anything. He'd scanned the world a dozen times via satellite, stolen every drop of computing power there was to track suspect global movements, raked through the financial data of every company and government on Earth, built entire new networks of optic fiber in case whoever did this had corrupted Olan's, and found nothing.

  Rachel Heron was out there somewhere laughing at him, he knew it. Standing behind a veil of information and watching his plane circle the world, getting nowhere, throwing out his feeble fresh tendrils of wiring and surveillance, like a child helpless in the dark.

  The old plates still spun around him, but now keeping the nations of the world in the dark about what was coming felt like a horrible echo; him doing to them exactly what was being done to him. It was so easy; that was the most humiliating thing. What they were doing to him was simple. The SEAL had built the maze of the worlds telecom networks, and no matter how he tried to see beyond its walls, he was still a rat running within it.

  He hadn't gotten off his plane for months. It only landed once a week, just long enough to check the engine, fuel up, take on fresh supplies and a new crew, though he didn't think there'd be another changeover now. The line was ready to burst. When it did he and his crew would be triggered by the coming blast, and down they'd fall with the world. A fiery death was better than whatever fate awaited the seven billion at the T4's mercy.

  Yet Joran Helkegarde was making progress.

  He'd stood up his shields across all twelve Arks, with one for Bordeaux too. They all functioned just as he'd planned, the coverage neat and complete. He'd even found a cure of sorts, good for a short time at least, and had tried to persuade James himself to take it, but there had been no point. They'd argued back and forth, but he didn't want his skin to peel off.

  Lyell's Syndrome, Joran called it.

  "It's manageable," he'd insisted. "With the right conditions and treatment, we can live with it for years. We can keep this fight going."

  James While didn't care about the fight. He'd seen the signals down below ramping up. The artist in New York, the boxer in London. It was days away.

  "Bring your plane down," Joran Helkegarde had told him, in their last communication. "Or I will bring it down for you."

  It was strange, to be spoken to that way. Once he'd run the SEAL and Joran had been the lost man, choppered out of Alpha Array. But Helkegarde didn't have any clue about what they were really up against. The enemy were everywhere, and nowhere. They couldn't be stopped.

  He'd told Joran no, and gone back to watching the flood rising below.

  Then his jet bucked.

  The dive knocked him off his feet and sent him rolling against the wall. The holographic ghost of Olan Harrison watched him silently.

  "Sir, we're under incoming fire," came the pilot's voice on the intercom, "three F15s on our tail, another salvo incoming, brace for maneuvers."

  The jet peeled into a hard bank that sent James While rolling against the other wall, knocking the wind out of his lungs.

  "They're steering us, Sir," came the pilot's voice. "Not aiming to hit, but they easily could. We're not equipped to fight back. Sir-" his voice cut out for a moment. "They're sending a message. He says, 'Take your medicine.'"

  James While laughed. Joran?

  "Ignore them," While replied, picking himself up. "They won't shoot us down."

  The pilot didn't reply for a long moment, as the plane leveled. This one has been flying him for only two weeks. They'd barely even met.

  "That's a negative, Sir," the pilot said. "I'm taking us down. They've sent coordinates for an airstrip. Strap in."

  So the jet began its descent.

  James While took the only seat in the cabin, with Olan Harrison watching. That was always a weakness in any plan; human fragility. His crew didn't want to die.

  "Well played, Joran," he said softly.

  * * *

  They met in a room, on an airstrip somewhere in the middle of Africa. Joran Helkegarde and James While. The irony of their role reversal was not lost on either of them. Joran seemed a little embarrassed by it, standing awkwardly by a table in the middle of a plain white room, atop which sat a smal
l metallic case.

  That was it.

  Nobody else.

  "Bordeaux says we're reaching fever pitch," Joran said. His words in the silence were a declaration, really. A statement of allegiance in a battle James While had largely cut himself out of.

  "It doesn't matter," said While. "However many you save, they'll have a plan for it. They know more than us."

  Joran just stared. He kept staring. There was disappointment there, certainly. He was hard now. Before he'd been all soft ragged edges, hungry for approval and respect, to be taken seriously as a great, visionary scientist. Now he was a fighter. He'd been carved in the fire and found true. James While couldn't say the same for himself. If anything the opposite had happened. The coming apocalypse had filled him with self-doubt.

  "You turned me around," Joran said, into a long, empty silence. "You threatened my eye, my arm, but that wasn't what made the change. Perhaps the threat to my reputation helped get me moving, but it didn't play the larger role. Do you know what really made me sit up and work?"

  James While didn't care. It didn't matter. "Self-preservation?"

  Joran smiled. "Yes, that took me quite far. Then I got past that and saw the reality underneath; my life doesn't matter."

  He went quiet. James didn't want to fill the silence, but Joran's gaze dug into him like a drill, demanding it.

  "You wanted to win."

  Joran shook his head. "Not that either. Winning's too far off. You have to remember that we came into this game already years behind. The things these people have done could never be undone in a year. Maybe not even in ten. No win condition was possible for us here."

  James While snorted, because that was bullshit. He'd always won. Every test, he'd passed. Every pattern, he'd found. He'd always believed he was up to any challenge, so there was no way not to see this as his failure.