The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  I've never fought like this before, but there's nothing real about it. I can't even tell if I'm really moving, if he's moving, but on the line we weave in and out of each other's blows with a haunting, terrifying grace, as the ocean thrash against his thighs like breakers on rocks. His sixteen blades encircle me, jolting off my head and striking divots from my shoulders, but I anchor myself in deeper things; in my floaters reaching up, in my demons fighting for me, in my lepers flashing and striking like lightning.

  "I'm impressed, Last Mayor," Olan calls out over the storm of bodies chopping apart. I shouldn't be able to hear him over the roar but on the line his voice carries.

  "You made them," I answer, barely keeping my head away from his whickering diamond whips, meeting as many blows with the black eye blades as I can. "I just picked them up."

  If it weren't for the ocean I'd be crushed already, split a dozen times by a dozen blows, and it takes my every speck of concentration to fend him off. But I do fend him off. I move so fast I can't understand what's happening; some part of my brain is on automatic pilot and fighting to survive. I bounce and crack from blow to blow, and with each blow I draw a little closer. He grins manically, howls into the sky, and turns up the pace.

  Then there comes the sound of the ocean.

  It begins as the lapping of a distant tide, but rises until it sings on the line like a tsunami wave roaring into the coast. They're coming back for me. The bulk of the thousand are sprinting from their scouting trips around the shield dome to save me. The bone-deep thunder of their thousand footfalls gives me strength, even as it gives Olan Harrison pause. In the midst of a harmonious pirouette, taking out a demon's eye and cleaving three floaters down their spines, he turns back to his wall and gauges the distance.

  I gauge it too.

  On a dime he breaks off his assault and runs. A demon rises in his path and his diamond blade punches a neat hole through its forehead. Two lepers spark into his path and he leaps one, lashes the legs out from under the other. I toss out lassos on the line but he rips through them like they're spider web threads. He's getting away. I can't let him get away.

  I take three bounds, leap, and have a demon catch me halfway up and fling me after Olan like a javelin. The black eye sharpens round my outstretched arms like an arrowhead, and I pull on the line with all my strength into his thicket of whirling diamond blades. My weight and all the mass of the army at my back cuts a divot into his diamond sheen like a catamaran prow through the storm-tossed waters of the wall.

  I scream. He roars. I drive my searing arrow point through the tips of his defenses and home, into the side of his throat.

  Then the massive fist of the wall finally swats me down, and the line abandons me. I drop and strike the hard gray ground, tumbling out my momentum over solid humps of knees and elbows without any black eye to shield me, deeper into the muddling fuzz of the wall until there's nothing of the line left and I can barely manage to lift my head.

  Olan Harrison kneels before me. There is a gouge in his throat pumping blood, and a grin on his face. In back I can feel my ocean howling at the outer edge of the wall, trying to call me back to safety. Their stamping feet carry through the foothills like a heartbeat for the world.

  Olan looks at me. His diamond blades are gone too, here in the wall. I can barely think under the jackhammer weight of the wall's static. It's like the twinges have returned, crushing me back into my parents' basement, forcing me into myself and afraid, ashamed, no longer worthy of being alive.

  But I've been through this before. Pain is just pain. So it'll be more pain tomorrow, and more pain the day after, but what does that mean to someone like me? Just a comic book artist, just a Yangtze warehouse packer, but I've got vision. He says I don't have discipline, but he's wrong. I learnt discipline fourteen years ago when the first wave went out on the Alpha array, and I learnt it so well that I flipped the signal myself, and survived every terrible second that followed.

  I force myself up to my knees. Olan Harrison's eyes go wide. He holds one hand clamped to his bloody throat. The wall comes down around me like a crashing black rain, threatening to swamp my consciousness away, but it's no thing to someone like me. I get a foot under me. There are no black eye blades here, but my hand fumbles upon a shard of rock, a broken collarbone, and I lift it up.

  "Amazing," says Olan Harrison. "Truly."

  Then there is a leper-like flash, and he is gone.

  The collarbone cracks down on the gray road where he was, splintering to bits.

  INTERLUDE 5

  Rachel Heron strode through the Redoubt, filled with purpose for the first time in over a decade. Watching the battle between Amo and Olan had tempered her decision, already forged in the presence of James While. The time for pretending was over; it was time to take this chance and do what she could.

  You only ever had one chance. She'd had too many already.

  Seeing James While had done it. The figure in the cells didn't wear his face, didn't have his lanky body, didn't contain his brain, but it was him. He was in there. His eyes said it all, said it in ways his paltry, skinless body back at the super-Array in the shitty depths of winter had never been able to say.

  Then he'd had such hope.

  She'd felt it rising off him, as she'd stepped into his frozen office after the long week of painful jumps through the line, leading her strike team. She'd almost allowed herself to believe that his hope had been for her, in anticipation of her arrival. There'd been something between them, once. They'd slept together, and it hadn't meant anything then, but in the years that followed it came to matter more, because of who he went on to become.

  While he'd circled the world in his private jet, searching for a cure, she'd joined the others in the Redoubt and mocked him. He was a fool to think the SEAL would ever capture Olan Harrison. In the long days after Olan's death, she'd counted every day as her success, because he hadn't found them.

  But he never stopped.

  When word came through from her spies in the SEAL that both Joran Helkegarde and James While had taken their 'cure', a genetic therapy that would guarantee them a decade-long death in the agonies of Lyell's syndrome, she could no longer laugh. Her team stopped laughing. What was to mock about that?

  The world ended, billions fell beneath the line, yet James While's constant search kept them confined; unable to clear their exit routes of the fallen, unable to launch the scheduled assaults on the SEAL, unable to bring the world around to their control in time for Olan to arrive.

  James While's eyes in the sky prevented that. Every day that they remained trapped in a base only ever meant to serve as a temporary retreat, a redoubt, she grew to hate him more. But in the quiet moments at night when she was alone with her own thoughts, something new was growing beneath the hatred; grudging respect. It came on like the secret growth of coral, swelling until it filled her dreams.

  Then came the Severing.

  Olan Harrison had been watching, and waiting, while secret dreams grew in all their hearts. His rule had been harsh, and his constant training regime harsher, as he forced all his people to adopt the powers he'd learned on the line. In time their dreams became whispers, then feverish plots, until in the third year of the Redoubt the violence followed.

  When they finally announced themselves, attempting to kill Olan Harrison while he slept, he announced himself in turn. Throughout one terrible day he showed every last person in the Redoubt precisely who he was and what he was capable of.

  On the line he cut the threads holding their 'souls' to their bodies, effectively killing them. Snip snip snip, those flexible little tubers said all day long, as he cut his way through them.

  He hadn't needed any surgical tools other than the diamond scalpel of his will, earned after long meditative study of the line. The rebels didn't stand a chance, and Rachel watched as they were beaten back into the missile silos, where they threatened to blow up the Redoubt if he didn't cede control.

  Olan Harrison jumped
through the walls and cut their threads like so many sad helium balloons, snip snip snip.

  He saved Rachel Heron for last. She'd been loyal, had stayed away from the rebellious talk of the others, but still, she'd harbored her own secrets. A clean sweep was better, he said. She refused to beg. He cut her thread too, and she floated like the rest.

  So the Severing was complete, and Olan Harrison had complete control. The Lazarus project continued apace, with no more mutterings of dissent. When his slaves behaved well he gave them greater freedom. When they behaved poorly he crammed them into boxes so they could learn. In time they all learned.

  Even that didn't crush Rachel Heron's secret dreams. If anything they grew more intense, coming in stolen moments when Olan was distracted, as thoughts of James While surfaced unconsciously. She caught herself wishing he would find the Redoubt and rescue them. She'd never really chosen to stand at Olan's side, after all. He had snatched her from Whiles' custody at the Logchain and offered her a place in his lifeboat to ride out the coming storm. The only other option had been to die along with the rest of the world, and that was no choice at all.

  Now she saw that it was the only choice that mattered.

  She'd thought going to James While in the super-Array might be a moment of triumph, exorcising thirteen years of self-doubt, but it was anything but. Huddled there in his chair, so pathetic yet hopeful, so withered and pained, it had not felt like a victory to crack his ribs and usher him into Olan Harrison's hands. It was just proof of how much a slave she had become herself.

  So when she knelt before him in his glass cell at the Redoubt, and looked into his eyes to see a pain that could never be excised, she realized how cowardly she'd been.

  She'd never seen that pain in the others they'd brought down; Olan Harrison must have swamped it beneath his influence, but in James While she saw the full depths. The dislocation inherent in the Lazarus protocol was carved into his desperate, fragmented mind, and cut through her on the line like a sickness.

  Man wasn't meant to come back, it said.

  She'd meant to ask him questions. They'd been a muddle in her head, confused with the distracting thoughts of missiles to trick Olan, but no questions were necessary in the end. The bloodied splinters of his once-great mind were too much for her to bear, and he had been on the line for hours only before the Redoubt pulled his agonized signal down. Olan Harrison had been up there for a year. For a year his mind had frayed, almost entirely alone on the line, and the thought of it terrified her.

  If James While's eyes were a window into hell, what was she seeing when she looked into Olan Harrison's? What did that make him now, what chaotic fault lines were bursting inside his head, desperate to find a way to make their pain end?

  In that moment hunched by the glass, everything Olan had done took on a terrifying, torturous slant. The severing of their threads was just the beginning. The 'boxing' of those who rebelled was a crime against humanity of the greatest order. But what of the souls brought down from the line? Hundreds had rejoined them already. They'd never had any choice. They were forced into bodies that didn't match their minds, forced into boxes that kept their pain crushed beneath the surface so they were never able to speak of it, couldn't even show it in any of their words or deeds.

  The depths of Olan Harrison's cruelty rang out around her in a way she'd never considered before. To call him a monster wasn't enough. He wasn't human anymore but something else, some grotesque incarnation caught in between human and the place beyond, half torn to bits by what he'd done. What kind of victory would ever satisfy the savaged depths of his broken soul?

  James While couldn't talk. His body didn't have that capacity, because suffering was what mattered to Olan Harrison. James While had defied him for over a decade, and for that he would suffer forever; a bag in a cell with a person trapped inside, unable to ever escape the crushing dislocation.

  One taste of that was enough to make Rachel decide. She opened the cell door without thinking, leaving her trail all over it. She held his strange hands, and cupped his new chin, and nodded as tears welled down his cheeks. Finally, finally. She did it as gently, as tenderly as she could, with his head pressed against her breast, whispering soothing words, just as she would to a terrified child.

  The knife worked a forgiving path up his arm, slitting arteries and spilling him out onto the cell floor. He looked into her eyes, and as the life drained slowly from him, not painful enough to leave a retrievable spike on the line, his gratitude almost broke her.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered.

  In his eyes lay the promise of atonement. Of course, the promise was no longer enough. It would never be enough. She'd enabled Olan Harrison in everything, and now she saw that it would never end. Nothing could fill the bottomless void inside him.

  She kissed James While's forehead as it chilled. The light was gone from his eyes.

  She sealed the cell door buoyed by this new drive. On the ride back up from the 'missile bay' she watched Amo's battle with Olan, and understood what her regret had been, and what his defiance really meant.

  It meant there was a choice.

  Sometimes your life was all you had to give. She'd always had that choice, but she'd never had the bravery to take it. Maybe now she would.

  * * *

  When Olan flashed into existence in the upper reach of the Redoubt, she was waiting.

  The fury and the fascination bulged off him in equal measure. He saw her at the door and grunted, slumping at his desk with one hand clamped to his bloody neck.

  'Missile bay', she thought, concealing what she'd done as best she could. 'Launching missiles'.

  She didn't rush to help him. He wouldn't welcome any acknowledgement that he'd been hurt. She knew him well, now, both the man that he'd been and the creature that he'd become.

  "We need to make an example of him," she said.

  Olan looked at her, danger flashing in his eyes. To even speak to him like this, to see him like this, was risking her life. She felt his influence hovering over her severed thread like a thumb and forefinger, ready to pinch her out. The box would be waiting. Perhaps that would give him some relief, for a time.

  Unless she could offer him something better.

  "Of them all," she went on, speaking in a dead tone while allowing her real rage to show through. He wouldn't understand the source unless he probed her. Hopefully he wouldn't see the truth for many hours, long enough for her to reach her destination, transmit her message, and bring the real war back here. "We need to bury them so deep that they'll never dare raise their heads out of the shit again."

  The pain rising off him was palpable. She'd never seen him this fragile, not since the moment they'd birthed him after the first Lazarus operation. The intensity of those few minutes before he sent them all away had been agonizing, and those who hadn't fled fast enough ended up comatose on the floor, flattened on the line beneath his suffering.

  Only days later had he emerged, with rough bandages of control patched over the jagged pieces of his broken self. She should have seen it then; those pieces would never fit again. They could only be made to fit, and the force required would not only break him further, but would break every piece in the jigsaw. Every soul living and dead would have to crack to make room.

  She saw it now.

  But there wasn't only pain steaming off him, there was also fascination. His eyes shone like a child's, as if the pain was nothing to him.

  "Would you follow a man like that, Rachel?" he asked her.

  She was lucky he was distracted, not really listening, or he would have felt the yearning shoot up inside her. Her discipline was flagging. He looked over at her, white eyes sparkling now with flecks of dirty red. "Well?"

  "To battle, yes," she said, measuring every word. There was always a balance with Olan. Too much adoration would repel him. Too much challenge would enrage him. There was a brittle line of honesty somewhere in the middle. "To the ends of the Earth, perhaps. But not beyond." />
  Olan snorted. He liked that. "He tricked me. He planned it well. He stood up beneath the wall."

  She had seen it. Watching a man stand under the massive weight of that pressure was unbelievable. Not a million type ones and twos in the heyday of their assault had managed to drive that deep and survive.

  "I saw him. I warned you. You underestimated him."

  Olan's eyes flared. There, that was the line. But keeping him angry was important, so he couldn't see through the fog of his own emotions to her. She'd always done this, needling him to a point, until he signaled her to stop. He'd always respected strength, as long as it reflected back his own strength to him.

  "Watch yourself, Heron." His thumb and forefinger pinched tight on her thread. She felt him squeezing, looking for an excuse. "Don't think this is your chance to flee."

  She stared at him defiantly, and took a step forward. To back down was to lose. To push too hard was to lose. She had to walk the line.

  "Name the ways I've failed you, Olan. List the times my resolve has flagged."

  He stared. His pinch didn't relent.

  "Force is all that matters now," she pressed on, and pointed out of the glass over the jagged mountains. "And that man has force. You underestimated him, though I know you won't make the same mistake again. It's no weakness to acknowledge a mistake. You went out there as arrogant as him. It's luck he didn't die, and luck you didn't. What do you think would become of us, were you to fall? Have I not the right to be angry? These are my people too." She spread her arms. "We've all seen the Last Mayor's mercy. We've seen him destroy the SEAL indiscriminately, and torture his own people to no avail. I don't dare imagine what he would do to us, if your protection were to fail."

  Olan Harrison stiffened at this. Perhaps her speech stirred an iota of pride in his dried-up old breast. It was a pleasant fiction, perhaps, for him to believe, that he 'protected' them. It was one of the messages he'd once filled their heads with, back when he'd crooned stories of mercy and liberty and a great world to come, even as he'd severed their threads. He'd told them elaborate stories of the greater utility of human cooperation, beneath the mantle of one controlling figurehead. At times he'd lectured them on the many failings of democracy, and outlined the inexorable fall of America into civil war. He'd often railed about how his genocide had averted a global war that the world would never have recovered from.