The Last Mayor Box Set 2

by Michael John Grist

He laughed through his tears. "You said the same thing to Ravi."

  She smiled. "I guess that means I love you, then? We're family."

  He squeezed her arm. "I love you too, Anna. Holy hell, if you died?"

  "I barely survived."

  "But things are changing now. The things you discovered…" He trailed off.

  She frowned. "What things?"

  "Of course, you don't know yet." He turned to Peters, who nodded. "I won't spoil it, it's for Lucas to say."

  "Say what?"

  "I'll get him." He let go and backed away. "It's great to see you awake, Anna, really."

  "It's great to see you too. I'm sorry for what I said in Bordeaux."

  His smile widened to a grin. "That wasn't you. Not the real you. It's fine."

  He slipped out. With him gone the tent was silent and muffling again, ruffled only by the breeze. She turned to Peters.

  "What's he talking about?"

  "Good news," Peters said.

  "Is it the cure?"

  "You will see. I can't tell you."

  That was infuriating, but she didn't have long to wait. Moments later Lucas strode in. He looked weary and bruised, but there was a brightness in his eyes that buoyed up his whole face. He looked like a man who had seen the light. He smiled at her, and the feeling it raised in her was confusing and wonderful at once.

  Here was a man who she'd beaten and almost killed, who she'd doubted and crushed and vowed to execute, and now here he was and she was so glad to be wrong. He made her feel a new kind of hope.

  "Would you come with me, Anna?" he asked.

  She nodded, not trusting her voice.

  In a wheelchair he rolled her out of the tent. The sky above was blue with high fluffy clouds and the hot sun felt good on her skin, like California. They rumbled over wooden boards laid down on the drying mud, past two mud-covered Humvees and through the remnants of the barren vineyard to the chute into the ground. It looked puckered and gouged where thousands of feet had pummeled it. Gray bodies lay here and there, crushed and stamped into the mud, but other than that there was no sign of the ocean.

  "Where are they?" she asked. "Did they move on already? What about the other demon, it was due in a few hours?"

  "You'll see," said Lucas, and helped her out of the wheelchair and into a rope sling. He handed the rope over to Jake, standing nearby and grinning widely, who took the strain and belayed her gently into the chute.

  There were bodies heaped at the base, five or six deep. Jake followed after her, helping with the harness and taking Anna's weight, then he let her down the elevator shaft, where another wheelchair was waiting. She sat and Lucas wheeled her through.

  The bunker within was as dark as before, and the dead bodies on the walkway were still there, but the thing that stopped her flat was what lay below. A deep, rolling ocean of gray bodies filled the bunker to the lip of the encircling gantry. There had been four decks stretching down before, and now they were all full.

  "It's a good fit," Lucas said.

  She didn't say anything. It was going to be a helluva job to get them all out again in time for the next demon, but that didn't seem to bother Lucas. Jake appeared behind them, followed now by Macy and Wanda too.

  "The bridge is a little tricky," Lucas said, and rolled her forward over the downward angled walkway, to a makeshift spiderweb bridge of ropes lashed across to the encircling deck. Jake went first, followed by Anna in her sling again, guided by Macy and Lucas.

  From there Lucas led her round to the blast door on the left, which now hung open.

  "Command," he said, and wheeled her through.

  It looked just like Salle Coram's Command hall. Everything was the same, with desks and the wall screen, workstations and chairs, except for the doors stacked on the left, and the row of black-suited bodies lying on mattresses on the right. Her hand went to her waist for a gun.

  "They're dead," Lucas said quickly. "Long dead, over two months now."

  Anna eyed them carefully, six bodies laid down to die on mattresses, so civilized, amongst the tossed-about tools of their saboteurs trade. The things people did to survive.

  "It was a trap," she said, finally. "They knew we would come here."

  "Yes," Lucas said warmly. "May I tell you my theory?"

  Anna nodded. Already the scale of this was beyond anything she'd anticipated.

  "This was the first bunker," Lucas said, "built at least a year before the apocalypse hit. I think you're that far already. They used it to predict when the T4 would be triggered, using the radar boards you saw in the halls. But, and here I'm starting to make informed guesses, it was early in their research into the shield technology. It was imperfect, much like in their suits, and it failed rapidly. So when the infection spread and the shield switched on, all the staff here died."

  Anna grunted. It seemed possible. There was certainly poetic justice in being killed by their own shield, but she stopped herself from taking any pleasure in it. That was the old Anna. The new Anna would have fought for them to survive. That change would take some getting used to.

  "So they died," Anna said, picking up the thread. She looked at the six bodies lined up along the wall. "Then these six came to turn it into a trap. They must have come from another bunker, in some kind of coordinated attempt to trap us."

  Lucas nodded. "Go on."

  Anna looked over to the stacked doors. They looked about the right size. "They took off all the doors so we had nowhere to hide. They even took out the elevator and made the main door lock open, so we couldn't seal the bunker up and hide."

  "It also explains why the demon hadn't been released yet," Lucas added, "but why Peters and Wanda felt that it had. They were channeling a new frequency in, which blocked the demon's signal. That same frequency too kept it nearby, when it was released. They needed it near, to draw the ocean in for when the main signal shift went out."

  Anna ran all the moving pieces through her head. It was complex, but really came down to one thing. "They did all that on the hydrogen line. They changed the frequency and the signal. But I thought you said you couldn't do that."

  "I couldn't," he answered. "Not with the solid state shield we had in Maine. But in this older bunker, along with a special piece of equipment they brought with them?" He pointed at a black box on one of the desks. "They had it all pre-programmed. Perhaps they've been working on it as a backup for ten years. They're all geniuses."

  Anna slumped back in the wheelchair. With this news, the whole landscape was changed. Before it hadn't been possible to change the shield frequency or send behavioral instructions on the hydrogen line. Now it was. What possibilities did that unearth? There was so much they hadn't known, and perhaps they really had been lucky to survive this far.

  But still, Lucas looked happy.

  "Why aren't you more worried?" she asked. "If they can turn the ocean against us, how can we ever get close enough to the bunkers to kill them? We can't even talk to them."

  "We don't need to."

  This only made her more tired. Weeks and months of this pressure were weighing her down. Always the need to kill. "Just tell me."

  "The answer's outside."

  * * *

  He wheeled her out to the gantry round the stairwell, then round to the corridor on the other side and back down the path he'd led her on a day earlier, up and down stairs, through a maze of turns, until the corridor ended in a solid wall of frozen gray bodies.

  She looked at the bottleneck, crammed in from floor to ceiling.

  "I've seen the bunker's plans," Lucas said. "Above this there's twenty feet of solid concrete with a rebar steel mesh running through it, and above that another hundred-odd feet of earth. Beneath us are the other decks, where there are more of the ocean, pressing up to the ceiling to lock the demon in."

  Anna peered at the gray. She didn't feel any hint of cold emanating out. "It's in there."

  "It's in there, partially contained by the natural structure of the bunker, pa
rtially by the ocean. How many zombies do you think it has taken to contain it?"

  His point hit home, then. She counted the bodies on display then ran a quick calculation, guessing at the length of corridor before it turned at the corner, where she'd last seen the demon.

  "A thousand? A few thousand, maybe."

  "Much less than a thousand," Lucas said. "Even with conservative math. More like five hundred."

  Anna stared. It changed everything. It made so many things possible. When she looked again at Lucas, it was with tears rising unbidden to her eyes.

  "Five hundred?" Her voice cracked.

  His smile widened and his eyes sparkled too. "Yes, Anna. I believe we can contain them all here. We can use their trap against them. We don't need to kill the bunkers or hit the off switches. This is all we need."

  She laughed despite her tears. Goddamn. It was too good to be true, but if she really didn't have to kill ten more bunkers, possibly thirty thousand more people, that was a mercy sent from heaven. It was the best news she'd ever heard.

  And it left one thing to do. Looking into his eyes, just as happy as her own, the one lie she'd carried for too long already bubbled close to the surface. She didn't want it any more, didn't want to be that person or do those things. The T4 had taught her a valuable lesson, so long in the learning.

  It was her true enemy. Wherever it 'expressed' in her or in the demons or the ocean, it was the enemy, and everything else, everybody else, was just a victim. And like Amo before her, she had slaughtered her share of victims.

  "It was us," she said abruptly. Lucas's eyes narrowed. She took a breath and got the rest of it out. "Not Salle Coram. Amo and I, we made the decision to kill your bunker together. All your people died, because of us."

  Lucas looked at her. She didn't know what to expect. If he wanted to hate her now, then he should. If he wanted revenge that was all right too, she was too tired to fight back.

  Instead he smiled, a gentle, sad smile. "I know," he said. "I always knew. The people ran to you, Anna. Not to me. I've always known, even if I didn't let myself see it. But thank you for telling me."

  Anna felt like she couldn't breathe, or perhaps she didn't want to. Was that it? She had nothing more to say; nothing of consequence, nothing of meaning, nothing that could excuse or explain what they'd done but for one simple phrase.

  "I'm sorry."

  Lucas moved toward her. He knelt and took her hand and looked into her eyes.

  "I forgive you, Anna. You and Amo both. I forgive all your people for their crimes against me and my people, and I hope you will do the same for me, because that is how we will move forward. You see that now, don't you? We have to save them all, Anna. All of the bunkers, even if they don't want it. I have all my friends here now, every soul in the ocean, and they're going to help. We have two days before the next demon comes, and perhaps two days until the one after that. We will find a cure, I promise you. We will bring it to the others because we're all in this war now together, and we can only win if we stop fighting amongst ourselves."

  She nodded. The tears were flowing easily now. So this was what the old world felt like, at its best, with unity, faith and understanding. She held Lucas' hand to her lips and kissed it.

  "Thank you. Yes."

  INTERLUDE 8

  Lucas searched for the fourteen, but most of all he searched for Farsan.

  In the two days before the next demon came, he worked tirelessly with Macy, Wanda and Jake to shepherd groups of subjects around the bunker, guiding them through narrow corridors and into holding bays where they would wait until their demon came.

  All throughout he studied their faces. He looked at them in their thousands, seeking the people he'd once known in the shrunken peanut faces of the infected. It was both cathartic and destructive, to look into white eyes that didn't look back, that didn't see him as he saw them. This was what his people were reduced to; slaves to the T4. Still he continued.

  As a group, they planned. Feargal and Peters recovered quickly, and worked to map the bunker and plan the fullness of this trap, now converted to their own ends, dedicating its many empty corridors to a demon each, then stocking each arm and branch with enough pockets of the ocean to brace them in place.

  And Lucas looked at faces. He pored over them one by one, searching for familiar features that were now pale and sunken from their oceanic voyage. In some ways they all looked alike, with the same pocked cheeks, tight purplish lips and colorless, empty eyes, but the differences were still there. Smile lines remained. Wrinkles around the eyes. Bone structure, even hair styles were still recognizable.

  In two days, the next demon came. They lured it underground with the signal of their own bodies, all standing as bait behind a corridor mined with the ocean. There they trapped it, locked in position by some five hundred. Peters said the next one was three days away, and they went straight back to work.

  Anna worked by his side, as the nerve damage to her back healed. They hobbled together about the corridors crowded with gray bodies, as once she'd walked with Amo in his home, and talked about genomic patterns and hydrogen line triggers, about potential base pairs that might build up to a cure. He outlined the full scope of his research and theories to her, delving into ever-increasing depth on mitochondrial building clocks and telomerase reset counts, genetic strand drift and bacteriophagic regeneration, and she swallowed up even the most challenging ideas.

  She was a sponge for new knowledge. At times it took him by surprise, when he found himself looking into her eyes, that she was only sixteen. She shouldn't even have finished high school, yet here she was conversing meaningfully about PhD-level genetics that would have confounded even many of his peers back at Carnegie-Mellon.

  At times he thought about what she'd been through, from such a young age until now, and it always left him reeling. It was a wonder the stress of so much loss, coupled with so much guilt, hadn't broken her mind apart. Rather, it had made her into this a wonderful, bright young woman with so much potential ahead.

  Five days after the bunker fell, they found one of his people.

  It was Catherine, a botanist from deck two-minus, who he'd first met ten years ago in their first rotation through Lars Mecklarin's shuffling program of zones and working teams. They'd drunk together in a bar and she'd actually propositioned him to go back to her room, and he'd almost gone.

  Back then he'd always been uncertain. He hadn't known what he was, and he'd learnt to hide it so well that even that genius Mecklarin hadn't dug it out. But now he knew. Ten years in a contained environment with three thousand others showed him a truth he hadn't been able to ignore.

  He was what he was. It was a lesson everyone faced at some point, and once he'd faced it it gave him strength; strength that allowed him to fight back against Salle Coram. Under her laws on future reproduction he was just a wasted resource, due for execution, so he had sought to change those laws, by bending reality to a kinder, more generous shape. That Farsan had joined his movement, and become his closest friend and confidant in the doing, became both his greatest delight and greatest torment.

  But he did not find Farsan, he found Catherine.

  Looking into her lost white eyes, which looked back through him as if he was not there, he felt all the old emotion well up. He missed Farsan. If only he could hear his soft voice again, or feel his kind, supportive touch on his elbow. Such small things were all he dreamed of.

  But he was not there, and Catherine was, so he embraced her, and promised her he would bring her back. Now it was Anna's touch on his back that brought support, and her voice in his ear that offered quiet reassurance. So things changed.

  Together they rounded up fresh laboratory equipment, and they took samples, and so commenced the long, slow process of elimination that his research would entail. Catherine's cells were different in very slight, subtly altered ways. The T4 was there, but expressed in a muted fashion, tickling its cell walls in minor deviations from the cells of other subject
s.

  It was a starting point. He had his notes, salvaged from Maine, that detailed precisely what cocktail of serums he had given to Catherine over the years, until she'd stopped participating five iterations earlier. They recreated the full range of serums until that point and began tests on other subjects, administering different combinations of serums in different orders. In some cases they caused a similar 'muting' in the T4, in others nothing. They gathered more data and scheduled more experimental variations.

  There were endless variables. Perhaps the cure required certain environmental factors in place, like the precise harmonics of the Maine shield in the four-minus bar he'd taken it in. Perhaps it required the full range of all fifteen experimental serums he'd taken himself, injected in the precise order he'd taken them, with the precise same delays he'd allowed. Perhaps it was about something he'd eaten that day. Perhaps it was a reaction with a vaccination he'd taken as a child, leaving tiny strains of mumps, rubella, polio in his system that had somehow conjoined with the serum to defeat the T4. Perhaps it was something in his genetics, or something in the air, or somehow connected to what he'd been thinking as the serum went in.

  It was an insurmountable task; a billion points of data, but there was only one way to unravel it, and he had nothing but time on his hands.

  Weeks passed. Demons came and were locked away in the corridor pockets assigned to them like balls on a pool table, but that became a background event. He wasn't needed as bait; his body didn't draw the demons anyway, so he worked throughout. Somewhere far away seven were captured, then ten, then fourteen, with always more coming, gravitating to them like the tides rising to meet the moon.

  In time Jake joined them, working alongside Anna to learn what he could, while also teaching what he had learned about the electronic components of the hydrogen line emitters, the control block and the suits. He'd back-engineered several of the suits, investigated the override controller, and his finding brought a vast new array of data that had to be explored, understood and synthesized into the calculations. For days on end Lucas barely looked up from his work, but when he did, it was to see Jake.