With the weight of their strength thickening her bulk, firming up her trembling legs and quivering back, Anna let out an enormous roar and lifted yet again, this time pressing the line to her shoulders. Finally Amo saw what she was doing. Relief played across his face, and disbelief, and awe. He'd never imagined this. What changes this would bring!
Then the first blow landed.
Anna saw it emerge through her chest before she felt it; a diamond blade as thick as a fist, punching out of her sternum and carrying with it a gush of blood and splintered bone.
Jabberwock, she thought, from a distant place high in the clouds, rising still with the line at her shoulders, channeling the powerful surge of her own death into lifting this immense slave's shackle up, up, until a second blow slammed in beside the first, hefting her body into the air.
The line fell.
Into the black wall before her Amo came charging and roaring, though what could he do now? She was dying on her feet, but then she'd always known this moment would come. There was so little strength left, and she couldn't hold back the flood as the blood poured from her like it had flowed from Ravi's chest. Poor Ravi in the corn. A third and fourth blade slammed through her, pinning her to the air like a butterfly in a case, off her feet while the line dropped…
But she wasn't a butterfly in a case. She wasn't the T4 twisting beneath the light of the electron microscope, wasn't a slave beneath Olan Harrison's global yoke and she would not die a slave.
With a final roar into the wind and draining every glimmer of strength, she caught the falling line and thrust it up, up into the light, up over her head and soaring higher still, until the rising swell of tiny lights from the frozen ocean achieved its own momentum, and rocketed Olan's corruption up further, and up, until the world could breathe clean again.
The giant body collapsed around her, its work done, and Anna sagged onto the diamond blades, watching the beautiful colors and shapes of an old world unfurling like a rainbow sail; a wonderful and terrible vision from another time, swirling up from the bodies in the ground and spreading. As her vision failed and her limbs drooped lifelessly, she saw the new surge of defiance race over the body hills like a tidal wave.
Its breath loosened the fastnesses of time set upon frozen stone limbs, and smoothed out the rough, cracking contours of minds long-surrendered to corruption. In her final seconds before Olan flared his blades and ripped her body to pieces, she glimpsed the first hand raise up, and the first head lift, and the first eyes open a burning, pitiless white.
The doors of hell opened at her command, and the dead rose to her call.
24. RISE
Amo hit the shield wall like a man on fire and ripped a path in, tearing out gouges of black static as the rage boiled up within.
That was Anna!
Somehow it was Anna, in a different body in a place he'd never expected, inside Olan's impenetrable wall, and the bastard had just torn her to pieces. Rage splintered out of him like the blast over New LA, chewing deep into the shield and erupting afresh with every step forward; as the final look on her face played again through his head, as the blades shredded her body in quarters, as he stood by helpless one more time watching another person he loved fall down to the dust, because he just wasn't strong enough.
The fury was agonizing and absolute; stronger than smashing his fists into the brain pulp of Drake in front of his children, deeper than lashing Arnst at the side of the road and trying to enjoy it, wider than crushing living bodies beneath the wheels of his Jeep in Istanbul. It became a living, screaming beast inside him that had to be let out.
He let it out in screams and lashes into the meat of the wall, ripping away shreds that tore back through his own skin in turn, burning through the rage. Slits opened down his cheeks and chest with the black eye's overheated fury, spilling blood down his thighs as he lurched further into the wall's crushing static.
He'd done so many terrible things, he'd hurt so many people, so why couldn't it be him, why did Anna have to die? He'd sent her to kill bunkers and she'd written a treaty to keep them alive. He'd sent her to Witzgenstein and she'd come back with peace. In the earliest days of the apocalypse when he'd been out massacring the dead, she'd spent her days setting them free. It should have been him!
He roared into the wall as it dropped him to one knee, the weight so immense. Through the furious fog of the eye and the wall in crackling combat around him he saw Olan Harrison just ahead, splattered with blood and watching with a cool, dispassionate interest, and felt hatred like he never had before.
If nothing else happened today, this man had to die. It didn't matter if the death was long or hard, if the pain matched the tortures he'd forced onto others, he just had to die. It was the only way to make things right, to pay for the loss of seven billion people and finally begin to heal this tremendous wound.
He barked out black rage and forced himself onward, each step coming hard beneath the wall's massive weight, the pressure bending his neck and bowing his legs. Three steps he made before the wall slammed him down to both knees. Already he was far deeper than the first time, surrounded by a halo of clashing powers that flared like the sun's corona. Just ahead, so close now he could taste it, Olan Harrison's expression was changing from interest to surprise. Amo tried to take another step and felt his leg break.
He screamed.
The pressure was too high; too much for the black eye, too much even for his rage. He looked down and saw his ankle cracked sideways, the bone jutting through the skin and pouring blood onto a snow-white floater skull. He could barely lift his head as the rain of darkness washed down and pummeled him beneath it.
He was in the coma again, circling the drain as his parents urged him not to give up, as his girlfriend came and left and didn't return, as the doctors talked about their research and holding him under longer, while all the time he was just drowning, drowning and drowning with no hope of release.
"I'm right here!" he'd wanted to shout at them, but the coma's boot held him down, swirling in a darkness he couldn't understand; mouth stuffed full of sand, head locked in a vice, screaming into the nothingness alone.
His bad shoulder cracked under the strain, the collarbone shearing into the top of his rib cage. Even now he wasn't strong enough. Tears of frustrated rage splashed off a white back underfoot and sizzled to steam as his head bowed further to the ground, as his spine began to creak with the pressure.
All for nothing; all those weeks in the basement, all those months fighting for recovery, all those years of trying to be a good man came to an end here. So much for the Last Mayor and his dreams, he couldn't even draw breath to scream, as the last and greatest twinge crushed him under its heel. His body flattened to the stone, knees crushing beneath him, ribs snapping like dry tinder, skull warping so his eyes bulged. He felt the first dislocation as his spine began to break, the last flash of color as his irises crushed shut, and then -
- the ground fell away beneath him.
He tumbled into a pit made of shifting stone bodies, where everything was dark as arms and torsos and hips blocked out the light, and blocked out the terrible weight, and for a second he gasped in a breath.
What?
Then a hand folded into his own, and a hand took his arm and hands buoyed under his hips, and hands lifted his legs and guided his head upward as the pit of bodies parted to either side, and he was raised up out of the darkness into the light to see -
- the ground around him churning like a plague pit come to life, as arms and legs uncurled like tubers reaching to the sun, with chests twisting and heads lifting and the dead rising up upon the dead fifty bodies high and -
- the body hills collapsing in seconds like tides on a beach, spilling floaters and demons to come sprinting toward the black wall over their fellows, all moving as one like a great organic pulsing of muscle, so that –
- stretching back through the tattered wedge he'd torn into the wall came a charging delta of the dead, rushing in to
meet him.
His jaw dropped, numb with disbelief. The hills were alive. Thousands upon thousands of withered white bodies were rising, and as the hands that had raised him set him down carefully, and sheltered him from the crush of the wall, he looked to either side and saw the same thing happening everywhere.
The ocean were awake, and roaring back to life, and pouring themselves into the wall, immense in their numbers. He flashed back to what Anna had done as she'd died, how she'd lifted and thrown off a version of reality that he'd never even known was there, like a color layer in a piece of art that changed everything. Even stunned and in pain from his freshly broken bones he could feel that the whole line had shifted, and the rules of the world had just changed.
Anna had died to raise him an army.
He blinked away tears and stood on one leg as a glowering tide of the long-dead rushed in. All around he saw the same thing happening, and understood what it meant, and then they hit and the power came with them.
Millions of stories flooded into his head; a hurly-burly of memories coming in different languages from different perspectives, from men and women and young and old, all crying out to be saved, all crying out for him to save them.
The black eye erupted like a volcano and ripped the shield wall in half.
Power soared in and out of Amo, healing his ankle beneath it, reforming his collar and pumping strength back into his legs. He shook off the guiding arms of floaters and took his first step forward with Anna's army of the risen dead at his back.
Everything had come to this.
He took his second step, then his third, then he was picking up speed and running straight into the black like it wasn't even there.
Olan Harrison wore a look of horror as Amo blazed an impossible trail through his unbreakable wall, lifting it just as Anna had lifted the line. He whirled around and saw the wall lifting all around the Redoubt, with the Last Mayor's army of the dead pouring in like an ocean filling into the crater hole of a bomb.
Olan flashed out of existence like a leper, but Amo ran on until he broke free of the wall and his army followed after, at his back and at every point round the shield's circle. He raised his arms like Anna had done and caught the falling wall as it resealed and descended, and there he held it like Atlas holding the weight of the world as Olan's righteous victims ran through for revenge.
Finally, they called with their every breath on the line, finally, yes, now!
INTERLUDE 8
Olan Harrison flashed back onto the Redoubt Operations floor, stunned by what he'd just seen. Standing where Rachel Heron would have done, he stared at monitors depicting the flood of type ones and twos rolling through his wall as if it didn't exist, stampeding up the Huangshan valleys like a cancer eating toward his heart.
The voices in his head didn't like that.
They screamed like never before. They grated and tore into each other. While the white tide raced closer, every second eating up yards, every minute churning up tenths of a mile with only five miles radius before the war struck home, a different war raged inside his head.
He tried to move, tried to say something, but his body was frozen. Something was different now after that little bitch had come down in Rachel's place, and he couldn't break the deadlock.
How had she done that?
How?
He didn't understand. Even if she'd somehow tricked the Lazarus beam then she still should have been ravaged on arrival like he had been, like James While, like every other person he'd ever brought down. But she hadn't been. She'd been solid, whole, complete, and that seemed impossible.
Thrusting his diamond blades through her chest hadn't made it any better. He hadn't done it fast enough to make her stop whatever she was doing. Time had slowed down and he'd plunged more blades through the clone body he'd prepared, but still she'd kept on, bringing permanent shifts to the line that he could barely grasp, that were undoing so much of his work.
How?!
He tried to give orders to his people now to track the change she'd made; how far had that surge gone, how strong was it, what was it doing out there to his beautifully silenced world?
But he couldn't speak a single command.
He felt crippled like the Last Mayor, torn by indecision as the voices inside him warred madly. He couldn't even avert his gaze from the screen showing the Last Mayor's approach. Minutes stretched on and in that time nobody spoke to him, no external interference came to jolt him out of this deepening fugue, because he'd boxed them all to better prepare for this war.
So what now?
"Your heart rate is dangerously elevated," came the voice of Little Olan in his ear, but that was nothing compared to the chaos of so many voices; raging, screaming blame, seeking recriminations and resurgence.
Rachel Heron was gone. James While was gone. Every person he'd used for fourteen years, for twenty, for thirty was gone, and there was no one to break him out and stop the interminable tearing inside, no one to remind him who he was.
"Calm yourself," said Little Olan, " breathe," but the voices muffled him and pushed him to the fringes, leaving only their outrage; pieces of himself that for most of thirteen years had existed in uneasy harmony beneath the over-riding shell of 'Olan Harrison'.
Now they tore into each other in bloody civil war.
If only Rachel Heron was here, some of them yelled. As a slave or not, she had always steadied him; with her manipulations, with her judging eyes, with her unbroken spirit and compelling competence. Her secret defiance had always given 'Olan Harrison' the drive to keep her close, if only to one day see the pleasure of her finally plowed under.
Now that day had come, and she was gone.
There was only emptiness where she had been. He'd planned his future with her ever-present, but in this moment she was out of his reach. Her betrayal didn't sting; he'd known it was coming since the start. What stung was her escape.
Would he ever get her back?
James While was gone too, lost in a silent death, and he'd have to drain hundreds off the line to restore him to his rightful cell beneath the Redoubt, and the Last Mayor was rampaging right now! Would he ever get Heron and While back?
She was to fault, other voices cried. Always, always it was her making us weak. She pulled us down. We grew dependent. We were so weak! We are so weak. Olan, Olan, do something, do something now, make us strong again! And all throughout Little Olan chattered in his ear too, adding to the chaos in telling him what was real and what wasn't, advising him based on a version of Olan Harrison who'd died fourteen years earlier.
The havoc was unbearable.
He jumped to escape it, appearing in the cells in the basement floors and looking down at the body of James While, but that only made the voices scream louder about his failures, about his mistakes. He'd had James While for such a short time, they cried, after waiting for so long? The tortures had scarcely begun. His grand scheme to make Rachel Heron a traitor had only torn her away from him forever!
How could the line deny him her suffering, the long delightful years of her humiliation, the endless image of her begging for forgiveness?
The madness slit deeper down fault lines he'd papered over for years, and he jumped once more to flee it, to a cragged peak four miles out from the Redoubt, crowning a crinkled and raw range of black granite cliffs. Shoulders of spiky rock shot out like the crystal spikes of a dark snowflake, their troughs and valleys leaving highways for the Last Mayor's horde to plummet down.
They were everywhere. He spun and saw the great army closing in like a white iris on all sides, composed of millions of bodies sprinting in tandem, breathing in tandem like a lung for the world, all somehow alive again.
How did she do it?!
The battle inside himself became a rending. He grunted and jerked as threads were cut that he'd never dared touch before. The parts that were most like 'Olan Harrison', that had always clutched for human connection even as he'd placed himself above all other humans.
He should never have tolerated Rachel Heron's deception, the horde of voices cried as their knives fell, and they savaged 'him'. He should never have wasted his time speaking with the Last Mayor; he should have dropped a bomb on him from the start. Those voices won too, whittling deeper into the fragile core of 'Olan Harrison'.
'He' never should have wanted their love. He shouldn't have needed their adulation. All he'd ever needed was their suffering, using their eyes as his mirrors, and that was all. Did the lion care about the gazelle's opinion as it died?
That was weakness, a weakness all of his own and comprised of the last shreds of whatever had made him human. In that battle he lost, and the final truth became clear, that 'Olan Harrison' himself was the weakness. He'd always been the weak link in that constructed Fabergé egg of disparate parts dredged from the line. His unspoken love for Rachel Heron and his un-abating need for approval had pulled him down.
The voices beat him to his knees. They took control of his right hand and tried to rip the last voice arguing against them away; Little Olan in his left ear. Little Olan cried out against this, and the left hand fought, loyal to the end, so the right hand coalesced into a diamond blade and chopped the left hand off at the elbow.
The pain was horrific. The pain was invigorating. The treacherous, loyal limb fell and the wound cauterized at the blade's touch with not a single drop of blood spilled.
Still 'Olan Harrison' did not surrender, so the right arm kept coming. 'Olan' weaved his head from side to side as it took wild blows from the blade, raking deep lines into his skull and severing the ear cartilage, the lobe, lopping them roughly to splat on the black mountain rock. It didn't end until the buzzing voice of Little Olan was finally dug free, along with a welter of blood and half a cochlea.
All the voices were silenced at once. The tiny speaker hit the ground and he crushed it underfoot.
The Last Mayor Box Set 3 Page 72
