The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  Long teetering moments passed as he coughed blood and leaked blood, and she picked an uneven path over the rutted bodies toward him. Then the wheezing stopped. The convulsions ended.

  Lara slipped the bridle out and looked up.

  On his side, splattered with blood and barely breathing, he was looking back at her.

  * * *

  She comes to me like a vision. She can't be real, an angel in the flesh, though she does stumble on all the bodies a lot, not quite like an angel. No wings. I try to get up to meet her, but I'm pretty far from that.

  Then she's here, holding my head in her lap, and for sure that's not the worst way to die.

  "Amo, Jesus," she mutters, stroking my face like I'm not real.

  She's not real.

  "It's good to see you," I say, a whisper through my ruptured neck, and that sets her off sobbing.

  "You're a sight," she says, laughing through her tears, "Good God, Amo, I just-"

  She doesn't know what she just. I smile, because this is how we began; in LA in the hospital, me laid up and her saving the day. It's a good way to close things out, looking into the face of my beautiful wife and seeing love and understanding.

  Does she understand? I think she does.

  I start to cry too, because it's the understanding that breaks me. She sees me, I think. She sees all the things I've done, and there's shame with that, and happiness with that, and a kind of resounding peace. I'm in the Rien restroom again and the weight is coming off, setting me free from the twinges, sharing the load, splitting it at least by two.

  She presses her face against mine, and it's hot. She's so real. I start to think for a minute that maybe this is really her. My Lara. Wouldn't that be good?

  "You idiot," she whispers, her forehead tight now against mine, her tears turning to ice on my cheeks. "You don't die from this."

  I laugh. It's not much. "I missed you," I say.

  She laughs, and I'm feeling something different than I felt in all the other visions, through all my months alone and going mad. I feel her here on the line. It's strange, a ticklish warmth that spreads to encompass other signals that are familiar too, but seems to come from another life.

  Vie. Talia. My people?

  They're all here? They've come for me?

  I hold Lara away and look into her eyes. Could it be? I barely dare say the words because they're loaded with too much impossible hope. There's no way…

  "Are you really here?"

  Her eyes fill with tears that spill. She kisses me on my battered lips, and in that moment her heat breaks through the ice, and that feels like something real.

  "Always," she says.

  27. EXODUS PROTOCOL 3

  They carry me to the Redoubt. I'm in bad shape, can hardly breathe for spiking broken ribs against my poor lungs and other internal organs, and no one seems able to work any healing magic on the line anymore to help.

  I don't remember what I did to unbreak my limbs and seal up my wounds earlier. Lara doesn't remember either. It's all fading now, just as these white bodies sink in amongst each other underfoot, slotting in to make a road that leads to the center of the world.

  Lara gets carried at my side, holding my good hand, barely daring to break eye contact. George, Marjorie, Cynthia, Alan, and some of Drake's people carry us. I ask their names; Fedvedy, Jan, Abubakr. I thank them. From such small things are new possibilities built.

  My children run up on either side. When I see them first I feel I might explode. The pressure in my head wells like a twinge before blaring out in joy. I struggle to even say their names.

  "Vie. Talia."

  They grab at me, not really noticing that I'm so injured, yanking at broken bits because they just want to touch me. I want to touch them. My troop set me down and we hug a little, haphazardly, my broken wrist screaming, my knee crackling, my ribs squeezing.

  Every bit of pain is good.

  "Mommy said you were far away," Talia says, always so smart, "but you're here."

  I nod sagely. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

  More hugs. I'm so grateful. In their minds, now, there's nothing to forgive. Whether I deserve this love or not doesn't seem to matter at all. It's real.

  It gets cold so we pick up the pace. The Redoubt isn't too far, watched over by spiky autocannons on every perch like watchful crows, and thank God Olan never triggered them. I couldn't use the black eye to do a thing, now. It feels like the line is changing, perhaps healing, and all the fantastical deeds I just did are myths from another age, fading already.

  Did I really stand on a platform in the sky, shelled with onyx, deflecting diamond missiles? Did Anna really lift up the world, and did I really pull it down again?

  At some point we must pass the remains of her body, but I don't notice. I don't know if we'll ever find her, buried within the churning of so many floaters, now locked into their stone embrace. But of course that's only her second body. Where's the first?

  So many have died.

  For the last part of the journey, up a camouflaged valley and into the Redoubt's entrance, the polished steel and glass façade looking obscene after so much death, we go in silence, each reflecting on all the costs it took to reach this point.

  A billion dead. Seven hundred angels. Anna.

  It's a lot. Now I have to make it worth it.

  * * *

  Peters saw the change first.

  It began at night, while he sat in the back of the Brezno escape convoy in a Lance 2295 recreational vehicle, at the rattling table in the long dining room while people slept on the couches and floor, working on his designs for a perpetual motion machine.

  He would have counted ammunition if he could. There was no shortage of it, but putting the bullets in neat domino lines wasn't possible with the vehicle constantly rocking from side to side, as the convoy worked a path up into the Slovak Ore mountains. The bullets clanked and toppled too easily.

  So he worked on reducing friction for his machine. He sketched out crazy ideas, like what would happen if he built it under water or in space. Space was promising, a vacuum, largely frictionless, but also lacking gravity. Hmm. If he started a centrifuge spinning was there some way to harvest energy without slowing it down? Lucas would know.

  Lucas had called throughout that day, starting with the first revelation early in the morning. He'd asked to speak to Peters, apparently, and one of these nameless Brezno people had brought him the message, then led Peters back to their lab trailer hitched behind a semi truck. Everything had felt muted, even with all those scientists staring back at him.

  Once they got on the phone together, after a few brief pleasantries, the things that Lucas said ended up meaning very little. It was all wavelengths and T4 technobabble, far beyond his realm of understanding.

  "I will put you on with the scientists," Peters said, after a time of doing his best to take notes.

  "What?" said Lucas, "I thought you already had."

  It was confusing. The scientists fiddled with making an uplink. Peters registered the rising mood of these people, so different but infectious. There was a lot of faith in there, after what Anna had done, and some of it bled into him.

  He'd felt somewhat useless in the days after she'd gone. The ruptures on the line that followed hadn't felt good, keeping him constantly off-balance with a worry that he couldn't help. Things were changing, and he'd come to love her like a kind of surrogate daughter, and if she died…

  He tinkered with his sketch. If she died, then she died. Probably she already was dead.

  Strangely that thought didn't make him too sad. He didn't know for certain, but some of those explosions on the line, the size of them, surely one of them had been her fading away…

  Perhaps it had felt like goodbye when she left him at Brezno. When he couldn't go any further with her, that was already the end for them. He wished he'd been a bit more sane back then, a bit more able to say the right words, and give a hug with a bit more truth, but that wa
s OK.

  She knew. That was the best thing about their relationship. She'd never needed him. It had made him happy, that the best he could ever do was make her just a little bit happier, a little bit more secure. She was fully formed before he'd ever met her, and had found everything she'd needed without his help.

  Probably he'd always needed her more. He smiled at the thought. He'd been a shell after Abigail died. He'd kept everyone at one remove, protecting himself, just trying not to think about the humiliations and horrors of Julio's pit. Then there'd been this girl, vivacious and arrogant, confident and competent, who listened to him, who thought what he said had some value.

  It had made him feel seen. He was grateful for that. And even if she was dead, nothing was really over; if he'd learned one thing from Abigail's death, it was that.

  The scientists had spoken to Lucas at length while Peters stood and watched, forgotten. With their satellite data link they downloaded information, and the long, narrow lab became a flurry of activity. A deadline was projected on the wall and began ticking down: eleven hours and twenty minutes. He watched the digits scrolling by. He understood they were working on a cure. He didn't have any real doubts. If Anna was behind this, it would happen.

  It took a while for someone, an under-secretary or some sort, to come back with the satellite phone.

  "He wants to talk to you again."

  Peters took the phone numbly. "Lucas?" he said.

  "Jake died," said Lucas abruptly. He sounded different than earlier, more worn down, but also strangely stronger, like there were reserves he was drawing on that he hadn't even known he had. "Anna came here and tried to bring him back. From being dead. I think she could have done it."

  Peters thought that yes, she probably could. He'd always liked Jake. But then with the Lyell's as advanced as it was, had he ever had a chance?

  "I am sorry. He was a brave man. You were lucky."

  Lucas strangled the emotion. "Thank you. We also believe Anna is dead."

  The words came like the church bell tolling in his hometown of Ystad. He'd known this was coming. She'd always burned so brightly; how could she live through this and not blaze as the brightest firework of them all? It only felt right, like the clock ticking down to zero. Somebody had to die.

  Lucas was talking.

  "…know she meant a lot to you. There'll be a place for you here in Istanbul, when all this is over."

  Peters tried to think of something to say. He wasn't distraught. Only temporarily empty. "We have both lost someone very dear to us."

  Another strangled sob. "I have to work, now. I hope we can talk more. But let me tell you this. Anna and I didn't always see eye to eye. I'm sorry for that. But the thing she's given us? It's phenomenal, Peters. I think I'm looking at the cure. We're all building it, the whole world is carrying forward what she started."

  This washed over Peters. The cure was good. It wouldn't save Anna, but it was good, a fitting legacy.

  "Please find it," he said. "You owe her that much."

  "I will. We have all eleven bunkers working with us. Now you take care, and keep your eyes open. Things are going to change quickly."

  The line clicked and went silent.

  Standing in the bustle of the rocking lab, Peters looked around, at computers with data streaming by, papers changing hands, complex graphs projected on the walls, researchers hunched over samples. He was looking for someone to give the chunky satellite phone to, but everybody was busy. Was there a special place to hang it? He thought about asking, but in the end just set it down on a workbench gently, out of the way, where it wouldn't bother anyone.

  In the front cab of the long lab trailer he stood beside the driver, lit by harsh rays of morning light spiking through the mountain range.

  "It'll be a bright one," the driver said, a heavyset man with a blue denim cap and leather driving gloves. He leaned toward Peters as he spoke but didn't look at him, keeping his eyes on the road. There were a lot of broken roads, these days, so that was good sense. He didn't look like a man who'd spent the last fourteen years in a bunker. Maybe he'd been up here all this time, driving carefully around, unaffected by the apocalypse.

  It was a strange thought. Peters sat in the passenger seat, not saying anything. The thoughts in his head were a whirlwind anyway, a slow one, but swirling, swirling. Nobody else here knew Anna, so there was no one to share this grief with. But was it grief, or a strange celebration?

  Perhaps he felt it coming, even then.

  Later that day the scientists made their announcements, and handed out pills, but most of it passed over Peters' head. He felt long and slow and quiet, and that suited him. Things were changing, and he was happy to watch those changes take place as a spectator. The line was shifting again, maybe forever, maybe for the better.

  In the back of the Lance 2295, some time in the middle of the night, the change came. He was just setting his sketch down, thinking he ought to go to sleep, when the line shifted.

  He knew at once what it was. He'd jumped with lepers enough times to recognize how it felt as they flashed out of existence, and there was only one leper nearby now.

  It meant the shield had just gone down.

  He felt the change on the line follow next, the unpeeling of a fuzzy sense of protection, and rose to his feet, expecting all the people around him to drop back into phase; their eyes would flare white, their breathing would synchronize, and they wouldn't move again.

  But that didn't happen. They slept peacefully.

  He didn't understand. He picked a careful, speedy path through the bodies to the front cab, where a different heavyset man steered them up into the dark, foreboding mountain road, the road ahead illuminated only by the headlights.

  "Did you feel that?" he asked.

  The man leaned in. "What, friend?"

  Peters picked up the CB radio. He had to ask the driver three times for the frequency, then sent out the request for the convoy to halt. There were grumbles, and threats to call up the leader of Brezno bunker because this was a breach of exodus protocol 3, but they listened when he said who he was. They'd held him in a certain awed regard after what he and Anna had done.

  "The leper has gone down," he told them. "The shield has died. Don't you feel it?"

  They hadn't noticed. They weren't sensitive to the line like him. Still it was there.

  "Stop the convoy," he ordered. "Do it now. I have to see."

  They stopped.

  Peters jumped out of the RV. Along the freezing road, slipping on ice and nearly going over the railing's edge down to a river very far below, he ran toward the convoy's middle.

  "Which one?" he asked random people as he went, patting the sides of vehicles, searching for the one they'd loaded the leper into. He didn't remember that time too well, back when all the jumps had left him addled. Their blank faces showed they didn't understand what he was looking for. Maybe they didn't speak English; many of these people didn't, or at least not well.

  "Where?" he asked, miming a shield like a big circle in the air. "Where is it?"

  Someone finally pointed and he ran on. He was first to it, though the driver of the vehicle was there, and said something in a language Peters vaguely recognized, perhaps Serbian.

  "Open it," Peters hustled, gesturing, getting frantic, desperate to know.

  "Oy, OKee," the man said, held up his hands, and unlocked the side panel on the small transit van. Peters climbed in without waiting, shone his flashlight around the space to find the leper, and saw -

  28. THE LIGHT

  I lie on my hospital bed on the top floor of Olan Harrison's aboveground bunker, the Redoubt. The place is amazing, like a five-star hotel mixed with a Bond villain's research lab. There are cells far below, apparently, and a room with silver speakers on the walls like something from the Multicameral Array, and a cloning facility with some science fictional vats, and other strange things, but I don't care.

  It has power, and heat, and the best medical supplies
you could ask for. They've sewn me up and set my fractured wrist, put a cast on my elbow, put my knee into traction, and now they're marveling at the various scars covering my body.

  "What happened here?" asks the doctor, Marjory, in awe. Really she's a nurse trained with Keeshom, who himself was a nurse trained by the last doctor we had, Ozark, but she's the closest to a doctor we have, so... She's pointing at the scar Olan Harrison's diamond blade made going through my sternum.

  "Cigarette burn," I say, and smile. "I'll be more careful."

  She frowns and gives me a hard stare. I think she might wag her finger and scold me. I'm older than her, but in some ways I'm still just a kid.

  "Really, I don't know," I say. "It's a blur. I think I was stabbed with some kind of diamond? Then I," I pause, embarrassed, "I healed it."

  She gives me the look even harder. She believes this less than the cigarette line. "You healed it?"

  "I, uh, think so."

  She writes something down on my chart. I feel maligned and ridiculous at the same moment. I want to ask what she's writing, but she gives me the hard look one more time, puts the chart on the end of the bed and heads for the door. I want to get up and see but I can't because I'm in traction.

  I look over at Lara, who's about to burst into laughter. When Marjory's gone she laughs her ass off.

  "What does it say?" I ask.

  She rolls in her chair to the chart. Our kids lie asleep in beds adjoining mine. Everybody was cold and hungry before, but this place is so warm, and the food so good, that they were asleep minutes after eating. All Drake's kids went out like a light. I was in the operating room for most of that, but they didn't put me under. I don't think Marjory or her team of amateurs know how to anesthetize. They had quite a time getting the plaster into the cast mold, and I think they might have caused another fracture getting it done, but I gritted my teeth and let it be.