The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  "Calm down," came Ravi's whispery voice. "Think."

  She counted her breaths. She focused on one spot and made it stand still.

  "You're too open, when you jump," Ravi said. "The line will rip you apart." It felt like his voice was coming from just behind her. Or perhaps inside her. She resisted the urge to turn around, because he wouldn't be there, and that would be just like racing after another knock.

  "I don't think-" she began, then paused, carefully weighing what she wanted to say, trying to frame thoughts she'd never had before into words. "There's something real, out there. There's a knock, for me. What is it?"

  "It's the dead calling," Ravi answered, floating around her now. "On the line. Think of it like one of the old data 'clouds', distributed on the Internet. When you jump, you upload yourself into the line, then download yourself when you land."

  His voice was insistently real. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and concentrated. He was talking about a world that had rarely been real for her, a world of video games and social media and geo-positioning, the world he'd hidden in to keep himself sane through so many solitary years.

  "And you're up there," she said, half a question, half a guess, as she felt her way through the memory of so many knocks, handles, doors. "I'm passing you by each time."

  The sense of him smiling came down to her.

  "Sweetie, you are the talk of the town up there. Everybody hears when you come charging through. It's premiere night at the Chinese Theater; lights, camera, action. I just get dragged along in your wake."

  Anna steeled herself. Wake. Chinese Theater. She flicked a maize kernel at the dead horse, and it tickled into the skeleton's pelvic girdle with a pleasant, rustly sound. She had to get a grip. They'd only made a hundred jumps, and there were hundreds more to go. That was real. Bombs were real.

  But maybe this was real too. On the mountain when Ravi's voice had come to her, she hadn't thought about the reality of it too much. In victory, it had seemed appropriate. But now, when she was so confused, when Peters was falling apart, what was it for? Was it even real, or was she just talking to some echo of her own dislocated mind?

  "It's hard," she said. "This."

  "I know. I'm sorry. But it's going to stop, soon."

  She gulped. Tears welled in her eyes, though she didn't know the reason. Did she want it to stop? Would that mean she never heard from Ravi again? "Why?"

  "Because I'm getting better at it. I think I can stop the knocks, from being dragged along when you come. And you're getting better at resisting."

  Anna looked around. Was that something she wanted? She was too confused to understand.

  "I don't want that. I want you."

  "But I'm gone, Anna. And this is hurting you, and Peters, and me. You're torn, because that's what the line does, sweetie. There's too much at stake."

  "You're at stake," she blurted.

  He laughed, though his voice was fading now. "I'll be here, waiting, at least the parts of me that matter. When the time comes."

  "When will that be?"

  His voice turned sad. "I hope, not for a long time. Many years yet. I hope you know how much I loved you. I won't knock again. Don't answer the door. Look after yourself."

  Anna gasped. "Ravi," she called, as the sense of him drifted away. "Ravi, please! I miss you so much."

  His faint voice came a final time, like mist on the warm summer's air. "So miss me. Let me miss you."

  After that, no answer came, and Anna wept beside the bones of the horse.

  * * *

  Gradually she calmed down. The worst of the confusion ebbed away, and his voice echoed like a distant memory already, drifting in the back channels of her mind.

  So it was.

  She squeezed a poppy head until white sap oozed out. She breathed in the intoxicating sappy scent. This was real. This was what mattered now.

  "Anna!"

  Peters' voice came, calling from nearby, along with the splintery ruckus of him stumbling through the dry maize stalks.

  "Get out of my way, monster," he said absently, and Anna felt him passing by one of her lepers. They were like antennae to her now, grounding her in the many layers of the air. Of the line? How strange, to feel that way. What kind of world had the world now become?

  "Over here," she called.

  "Anna," he shouted, putting a brave spin on the sickness he surely still felt. There was a sad kind of relief there, too, that she hadn't abandoned him again. He emerged through the maize wall and into the clearing looking drunk and sick. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips were cracked, and his skin was a translucent-looking gray. She'd done this to him.

  "How many jumps is that?" he asked in a hoarse voice. He looked like he was in a lot of pain, and that hurt her too. She'd done it, chasing the knocks. Ravi was right. She was jumping recklessly.

  "A hundred, perhaps," she said. Producing words in response to him felt hard. They were both out of sync, somehow.

  He came over to stand weaving beside her, and looked down at the dead horse for a long moment. "I see why this place appeals to you," he said. A dry joke.

  She grunted.

  "Did you do it?"

  She didn't have the energy for humor, though he was trying. Nothing was as it should be. Her skin itched, like it no longer fit, as if all she wanted to do was step outside of herself and take up this new mantle of power and make Peters better, though she didn't know how.

  "The jumps will be better now," she said, focusing on something she thought they both could understand. "Smoother. I promise."

  He weaved a little, struggling to focus on her. "You figured some new thing out?"

  She flashed him a brave smile. His little Anna. That would help him now, even if it wasn't what she felt. She had energy enough to give that.

  "I did."

  He smiled in return. Perhaps he saw through that façade. It made her glad, in a way, and she let the childish smile drop.

  "Ravi," she said. "I've been hearing him, like a knock. Every jump I was chasing him."

  "Ravi," Peters answered, as if this made abundant sense. He didn't understand, but she knew he was trying. "The air is thick, now, Anna. The dead walk with us. They've been here for thirteen years, and we just see them now. I am not surprised."

  A different kind of tears pricked at her eyes. She willed them back. "He says he'll try to stop knocking. But it's hard. He misses me too."

  Peters laughed. "Who wouldn't! You are special."

  She chuckled through the rising tears. "You're just saying that because you'll be stranded here without me."

  He nodded solemnly. "Yes, that is true. Where are we?"

  Anna shrugged. Jumps through the hydrogen line didn't come with a precise map. "A tenth of the way there, I think? Probably still in Romania."

  He nodded. "We have many jumps to go. A thousand. Perhaps you should leave me behind."

  She rested her hand on his upper arm. "Oh, I will." It was meant to come out as a kind of joke, because of course she meant to leave him behind at some point; they couldn't jump like this together indefinitely, but instead it came out showing some of her own frustration, and that dismayed her. Quickly she tried to undo any hurt it might have caused. "They'll need you, where we're going."

  Again he gave her that smile; so much faith, and so faithful. "Anna. Please. I know you. You are a general in this war, now. I am just a soldier. We are still the best of friends. But you do not need to pretend with me."

  She squeezed his arm. Peters was wise, and kind. She thought about how lucky Abigail had been, and how she would have loved to meet her, and any children she and Peters might have made together.

  "We need to go," she said.

  "Only nine hundred more jumps," he said. "I am ready."

  Anna nodded, and took his hand, then reached out through the layers and gave that familiar little twist-

  * * *

  The jumps sped up.

  The knock on the door went away, and the sense of R
avi didn't come again. Each jump seemed to last seconds, but who knew, really? With no radio to communicate with Istanbul, there was no way to know. Perhaps each jump was a week long, a month, a year...

  They landed beside a tranquil blue pond in a forested idyll. They landed in the middle of a little town with banana-yellow plaster on every building, and Anna had the sense that at any minute the church tower ahead was going to chime and the doors would open and the people would spill out. They landed in a city where the road was floored with shards of weatherworn glass.

  Cracked roads met across a hilltop slathered with creeping purple bramble.

  A family of brown toads peered up at her with nonchalant disinterest in the bogs of a foul-smelling swamp.

  Off the steep side of a gray slate ravine, a tumbling waterfall made a beautiful rainbow in the bright spray.

  From the top floor of a tall office building they looked out over the sad giants of dusty skyscrapers, stretching away through the broken windows.

  The jumps sped into a blur, as the real world and the deep darkness intertwined like maize and poppies, like Amo's Deepcraft world written across reality, bringing the line down to earth and earth up to the line, growing faster until-

  She collapsed on gravel with a gasp.

  She could feel the hard ground and the sharpness of individual points digging into her back. Peters lay beside her, flat out and gasping. The lepers stood nearby, as disinterested as the toads.

  "Oh my … God," Peters croaked.

  "God," Anna echoed feebly. The sense of the great depths beneath her reverberated massively, bringing a swimming sense of vertigo. How far she could rise. How far she could fall. It was a tightrope, really, with nothingness on all sides.

  Bowed beneath the weight, she pushed herself swaying to her feet and looked ahead. The massive metal doorway into the mountain was there, as was the spreading delta of gray bodies. They were still trapped, as they'd been when she'd passed this way before; half in phase toward ocean-hood. Some were still chewed up in old tire ruts, dead and gory, where Amo had run them over.

  It wasn't Istanbul. Istanbul needed her, but for now they could help themselves, and the people trapped in phase here could not. The stakes were too high to let any other SEAL bunker fall by the wayside.

  "Brezno," she muttered, and started forward at a lurch.

  INTERLUDE 2

  Amo laughed in Rachel Heron's faceplate.

  She stood before him at the outer edge of the stealth shield, five miles out from the Redoubt, and he laughed. He looked like a madman, dressed in dirty rags and old scars, his hair disheveled and sticking out at crazy angles, more leper than man.

  "Welcome?" he repeated, as if that was the most ludicrous thing he'd ever heard. "Seriously? Has he actually sent you out here to welcome me home, Rachel?"

  That stymied her for a moment; not only the question or the casual, mocking way it was asked, but the blizzard of emotions accompanying it on the line.

  It was dizzying. This man, self-styled as 'the Last Mayor of America', was well known to be mad, but knowing about that madness and feeling it up close were two very different things. Her suit didn't do anything to shield her from the raw, writhing passions snaking round him on the hydrogen line, each a probing root looking for a place to bed in.

  Joy, fear, rage, redemption, desperation, all boiling at a feverish pitch.

  There was no room for her to feel anything else, especially this close to the disruptive effect of the wall. Looking into his eyes was like looking into a kind of fire; a fire that surely hurt him just as much as it hurt her, if not more, because somehow he kept that fire inside his head.

  He was watching her now, waiting and judging her silence, seeing her in the flesh for the first time, and who knew what he would try to do next? She'd watched him for so long; his ascent and descent, had even played a hand in parts of it, but none of that had prepared her for this moment, looking into his eyes and wondering if she was going to survive.

  "Not home," she answered, feeling like minutes must have passed when it had probably been a few seconds at most. "But to a safe place."

  He laughed again, eyes wild with what could be joy? Rage? "Safe? This place isn't safe for anyone." He looked past her, around at the body heaps, back to her eyes. "So this is the shadow SEAL. And you are Rachel Heron, of the Logchain. You're the one who betrayed James While. I've just come from his hollowed out body."

  "So have I," she answered.

  He laughed again, seeming genuinely happy. "You were there, then. At the super-Array."

  She just nodded.

  "You sucked him up. You pulled him down."

  She kept her face impassive at that, though inside she was startled. Was he talking about the Lazarus protocol? There'd been nothing in James While's files about that. Neither him nor his partner Joran Helkegarde had ever figured it out, despite having all the data they'd needed for over a decade. Their minds somehow never made the final, impossible jump.

  Had Amo's?

  "James While is dead," she said. "I saw to that."

  His eyes danced with amusement. "And is that because you loved him? Or because you didn't?"

  That jolted her. How could he know anything about her relationship with James? She stifled a shudder. This man was not what she'd expected. He felt like a force of nature before her, capable of erupting at any moment, starting an inkling of fear worming its way down her spine. Maybe all her long years of preparation, the scalpel-like training Olan's powerful mind had forced her through, had not prepared her for this hurricane trapped in a human being.

  "He's gone," was all she said.

  Amo smiled. "And is that where I'm headed?" He shot his gaze up and made a strange sucking sound, followed by a high keening whine as he traced an invisible missile falling to earth, climaxing with a loud clap. "Up into the soup, back down to the ground?"

  She studied him. Olan Harrison had sent her here, and she'd come. For twelve years Olan had given her orders, and she'd done them. She hadn't questioned them, and she didn't dare question them now, but maybe…

  Amo opened cracks in her thinking that she hadn't known were there. He opened doors to a different kind of world; one where Lazarus was nothing special, and certainly nothing to build a new civilization on top of.

  "You're here," she said abruptly, breaking that flow of thought. "You are welcome, if you consent to leaving your followers behind." She gestured to his army of the fallen. Every one of them was staring at her. "I will gladly escort you inside, where all your questions will be answered. We have much to teach each other, I'm sure."

  He licked his lips. He scratched his chest.

  "Will you crack open my ribs? Drill holes in my head?"

  "That won't be necessary."

  "Pull off my skin, then? James While had no skin left at all. I don't want to be given any special treatment."

  She let her expression grow stern. He was mocking her again. While he was powerful and wild, he was also unruly. There was no discipline in his thinking or his speech, and Rachel Heron was disciplined if she was anything. "He did that to himself."

  Amo nodded along. His eyes seemed to bounce, the pupils unfixed, his gaze seeming to take in things she couldn't see. He pointed at the two people flanking her.

  "These others with you, why don't they show their faces?"

  "You'll see them once you're inside."

  "I see you. I know your record, Rachel. I want to know about these others. Are they like you, or are they more of my people, people who had comas, people who were immune?" His eyes narrowed. "Did you steal them from the world before the apocalypse descended? Did you drag them down off the hydrogen line?"

  That was another angle she hadn't expected him to take, more confusion piling up in her head. "Come inside. Everything you want to know is there."

  He grinned, but the sense of threat she felt only grew. "Do you take me for a fool, Rachel Heron?"

  "No," she answered sternly. Now she felt afrai
d, and angry too. Had Olan Harrison known what he was sending her out to face? She felt like a bomb disarmer trying to tease apart the red and the blue wires, fingers trembling…

  But fear too was an emotion, and she'd learned well how to manage it. Manipulation of the line required steely control to avoid the kind of madness Amo was now suffering from. She'd seen others who'd started down his path, channeling the line's raw power without limitation, but none so far advanced and still alive, bar Olan Harrison himself...

  "I don't think you're a fool," she said. "The restrictions I've suggested are for our safety. We don't know you. We don't know what you stand for, or what you've come here for. Let us make you welcome."

  Again his smile came, though the anger remained, seemingly sewn in to the joy, so no one moment with him was completely one or the other. His emotions were a blend that she couldn't understand.

  "Welcome," he repeated, the mockery now dried out and bitter, turning to contempt. "In this world, after what you've done? Don't waste my time. Get your master, Rachel."

  She didn't understand him for a moment, distracted while his intense gaze bored through her. Did he mean Olan? It had to be, but he shouldn't even know that Olan Harrison was alive. Yet who else could he be talking about?

  "I've offered you everything I can," she said. "You are a guest here. Come in peacefully or don't come in at all."

  "Everything I do, I do peacefully," he said, not breaking eye contact or missing a beat. "I whip my own people peacefully. I crack open heads in front of my own children, peacefully. I murder thousands with peace foremost in my heart, and I don't need to prove anything more to you. Now get him. Tell that wrinkled old rib-cracking bitch to come down here and face me himself, before I pull your goddamn walls down and burn you all alive."

  Heron watched him. She was stunned. Pull what walls down? He couldn't possibly see the stealth shield. Could he?

  "I'll wait," he said, and turned to fold in amongst his army of the fallen. It left Rachel Heron with a troubling blend of emotions fusing in her own chest; anger at Olan for sending her, fear of this mad and powerful man from the wilds, along with a strange, unbalancing unease in her middle that might have been regret.