He reached the top of the ladder and walked out along the board. The crowd sucked in a breath and held it. The dive filled his mind, preparing his body to rotate from takeoff through flight to landing, always aspiring to perfection.
At the halfway point along the board he ran. Three steps on he took a small jump, landed at the edge and sank low with the spring-loaded board's flex, then launched up and out. The air grabbed him and spun him tight and furious, the second or so of flight stretched out as he soared, then he hit the water.
This time he surfaced to rapturous applause. Grins met him at the water's edge. Coach Willings punched the air. Back at his starting line beside the other divers, he waited for the scores to come up on the boards.
7
7.5
8
7.5
8
He couldn't stop the grin spreading onto his face too. Those were close to perfect scores for a dive of such simplicity. Of course state-level judges were not the same as the Olympic agent, but they'd all be marking harder with the agent there.
The other divers' names were called and they rolled past him like items on a conveyor belt. Some were excellent, most were solid, all starting with their most competent, confident dives, leading in to their lists like the intro track on a greatest hits album, displaying their personality, skill and determination.
Soon his next dive was called up; a backflip off the middle board chased by a double pike and single tight somersault. He climbed, jumped and took to the air, executing it with clockwork perfection that ended in a slim and tight landing. Plunging through the surface felt like he was coming home.
More great scores followed and he topped the chart. More dives were called and he knocked them all down; a running flip off the platform, an inward off the middle, a simple rolling arm-stand. Two o'clock came and went, then three, until the crowd was buzzing at a feverish pitch of excitement.
The final round came. Leaving the hardest dive for last was normal, bringing the competition to a tight climax. His scores led the boards, but it all came down to this. Dives one to nine were his entry ticket only. Now he had to give up the goods.
The announcer called his name and he went to the platform ladder. The rungs were slick and cool, the edges biting into the wrinkled flesh of his palms. At the top it seemed colder and he shivered. He looked over the crowd and strode to the edge. The fog in his head was stronger now. Still he turned his back and bent over to place his palms in position at the edge, adopting his last arm-stand on this platform, ever.
Focus came.
This was why he'd always dived, for the moments when he lost himself in the dance between his body and his mind, in pure focus where nothing else mattered. It blocked out the pain in his past, the loss of his grandmother and his sister and a father hed never meant. This was what it was all for.
He took his weight on his hands and shifted, straightening so his body rose up in a perfectly straight line to the ceiling, ready for the calf flick that would pull him off the edge and into an arm-stand dive like they'd never seen before.
Then something happened. A head appeared over the top of the ladder behind him. It was massive and red. It had a gaping open mouth with no lips or teeth. It had slits for nostrils and holes for ears, and eyes that burned from within, and Robert's breath stopped. His stomach twisted and he dropped out of the arm-stand, barely keeping his footing on the platform.
A call came out over the PA.
"It looks like a flawed start, but that shouldn't affect the score; only what happens after the diver leaves the platform is scored."
Robert stood, listening but only half hearing, fixated by the giant red head at the end of the platform. They were explaining procedure as if there wasn't some kind of demon climbing up his ladder.
It rose a step higher. Massive broad shoulders came into view, rippling with muscle. The curdled milk in his belly seemed to burst, like a carton dropped from a height, and for a moment his vision went foggy and his balance wavered. He caught himself on the railing, to the concerned, "Oooh!" of the crowd.
"What?" he mumbled, trying to blink away this strange vision, but it didn't clear away. His focus faded. What was happening? He broke eye contact with the thing, and it felt like ripping off a bandage. He spun to the audience in the bleachers; somewhere his mom was out there, his coach, his agent. They were just a blur of dappled faces now.
"Don't you see this?" he asked, throwing an arm back behind him.
The crowd ahhed. The voice on the PA took on a different tone. "It looks like there might be some difficulty on the platform, we're just-"
Robert didn't hear the rest, because the red thing touched his shoulder. He screamed and leaped away, bouncing off the railing to shocked cries from below. He became aware of a deathly silence; hundreds of eyes straining his way, breath held, watching and waiting.
The red creature was before him, standing full on the platform right there. It was massive, easily twice his height and leaning over, naked and red and muscles. Its face was drawing in. Its round mouth-hole was drawing closer. It was a demon.
His left leg buckled. There was suddenly a sharp and throbbing pain in his right eye.
"I…" he said, not certain why or for what.
The announcer called something in alarm, a call for help perhaps, but it didn't register. His right leg buckled too, and the pain spread to his right eye. The cold milk was rising up. Something was wrong.
The demon leaned closer; its breath was so cold and its eyes drew him in, sucking his attention so completely that nothing else mattered but the sudden, absolute terror, nothing except the dive.
The dive!
His focus was gone and so was his control. The arm-stand jump was far out of reach and it felt like he was coming apart, but the dive was what mattered. The dive could save them all.
With a phenomenal effort he turned from the demon and lurched back to the platform edge. Something had to happen now. He bent over at the edge sloppily and more cries rang out. Now there was genuine alarm out there, but he had to dive. He tried to kick his legs up into an arm-stand but his arms wouldn't hold him and he thunked down solidly on his head, rolling clumsily away from the edge. The demon almost snatched him with one huge slow-moving arm, but he rolled away. Gasps sucked up from below but what did that matter now? His head was full of curdled milk and red eyes, and this was it.
Focus.
He had to dive now. There was something wrong with his head and he had to get it done fast. He had to get away.
He turned and lurched away from the demon, working the angles with each slow step. It would be beautiful, but not the dive on his list, and that was the best thing he could do. They'd all understand. He'd get another chance.
He hit the edge and jumped.
It wasn't the front edge of the platform. As he jumped his knees caught the railing and sent him into an out of control cartwheel.
Screams rang out. One long second of chaotic, desperate flight passed, then-
CRUNCH
He hit the edge of the pool hard across his side, snapping his spine in half. The pain flooded in with the sickness and bound itself up with the dizziness behind his eyes. He was screaming on the edge of a deep black well, unable to move, unable to stop his body as it slid face-first into the cold, cruel water.
3. THE DEMON
For a long time the dreams came, and in all of them he drowned in the demon's embrace.
It held his arms and legs bound to his sides, its hands covered his mouth, and he hung there in the cold dark going mad with the need to breathe, a panic that went on and on until finally…
He surfaced, gasping. His head was filled with crushing pain. Lights danced behind his eyes in the shape of something evil, the thing that had done this to him: a red demon at the ladder top. Now it patrolled the darkness around him like a jailer.
He screamed and his mother came. Lights came on and made the pain flare. Her touch and her voice made it worse.
&nb
sp; A later time, he woke. It was dark but for a small nightlight glowing from across the room, plugged into his rotten old sideboard. He panted until the panic ebbed, then through cracked eyelids he surveyed his basement room in darkness. Here were his medals on their crooked stand, here were the posters stuck up by his long-gone sisters, barely holding the damp walls together.
He was back, buried beneath the earth in Frayser, a long long way from the Olympic training camp in Colorado Springs. He'd failed the dive. He'd failed his mother. Now when he closed his eyes he saw the red face of the demon looming large, whispering like a snake inside his mind.
"What did you expect?" its lipless mouth asked in a breathy gargle. "I'm only showing you the truth. Don't you know what you are? The least of all my creations, the most wonderful. Breathe, Robert."
He tried to breathe and sucked in water. The drowning began again.
He tried to get out of bed, plucking weakly at the sheets, but his legs wouldn't move. Panic sweat sprang up across his body. He ripped the sheets away and tried to lift his legs with his hands but they wouldn't move.
The demon laughed wetly.
"Your legs are gone," it whispered, "like a foreign land. Suffer for me, child of the water. Show me what you are."
* * *
His mother came. A doctor came. For short periods he could emerge, gasping up through the darkness long enough to hear snatches of their conversations.
They spoke to him and about him. He caught words like 'coma,' 'brain' and 'never'. He tried to reach up and answer but every time the red demon smothered him down.
Time passed like that, days or weeks or months. He drowned constantly, lost in helpless panic, until finally he glimpsed the only way out, and bit down on his tongue and blood welled down his throat and stopped up his lungs.
* * *
Things were different when he woke next. The demon was still there, but the veil of darkness fogging his senses had lifted. He saw his mother sitting by his side in a puddle of warm lamplight, occasionally tapping her phone.
He tried to speak. Only a mumble came out but she heard it, and dropped her phone on the floor.
"Robert?"
He gave the faintest of nods.
The doctors had surgically severed his spine below the L4 vertebra, hoping it would stop the endless epilepsy-like assault on his mind. Recurrent strokes, they called them. Hallucinations. A coma. He spoke briefly to the specialists when they came for his rehabilitation. It hurt to talk still, the drowning sensation still came on, but less so.
Nobody had seen the red demon on the dive platform. It was just another hallucination brought on by stress.
"Don't hurt yourself again," his mother begged him one night, holding his hand tight. "Please."
He'd never walk again. The doctors were clear.
At one point a wheelchair appeared in the basement. "We'll get an elevator fitted here," his mother said. "You can come and go as you please. The city will cover most of it. You can go to college now, they've got funds for the disabled."
He tried to smile for her. He even tried to get into the wheelchair with her help, but the demon weighed him down every time he moved.
"You'll get there," his mother said. "Bit by bit."
The bits were small. Even the slightest stimulation could send him into agonizing, panic-filled fits. He tried reading and watching TV. He listened to music and tried talking to old friends, but always the demon leaned in. He soon stopped trying to do anything. He could barely move. He lay in bed and simply existed, replaying past memories over and over again in his head, until a new specialist came and suggested virtual rehabilitation. There was a game that might help introduce him back to reality gradually, in controlled, measured stages.
It was called Deepcraft, and it was where he met Amo.
B. VAN
Cerulean woke in the rattling back of what looked like a windowless panel van, spread-eagled to a mattress with a heavy fog roiling inside his skull.
What had happened?
He shuffled quietly on the mattress, and handcuffs clinked at his wrists, attached to a chain that looped around a metal pole welded to the floor and ceiling. He reached out and pressed against it, testing the strength, but it didn't budge.
A prisoner. He'd been shot? He remembered the talk with Amo on the pier, then the slow roll back toward the Chinese Theater, and the monstrous figure that had stepped out of the darkness.
A shudder ran through his body as he remembered the BANGs; a gun surely, but then how was he alive? Slowly, moving deliberately and quietly, he curled to look down at his belly. He still wore his buttoned blue shirt, and in the dim light cast through the semi-opaque screen separating him from the front of the van, he could see there was no blood.
Three BANGs but no blood? He shuffled further, until he could pluck at the shirt and reveal his familiar six-pack, marred by three scabbed dots.
His head throbbed. Not bullets. Not Taser darts, the skin would be burned and he'd have felt that differently.
Needles, then? Sedatives, from some kind of dart gun? That explained the fog in his head.
He craned his neck back to peer through the forward screen, but all he could make out was the rectangle of light through the front windshield, and the outline of the front seats. In one was a figure.
He had to do something, but he didn't know enough; about where he was, what he was doing, why he'd been taken. He didn't know what risk the others were facing right now, or what this figure wanted.
"Hey!" he called. It hurt his belly and his head to shout.
The van abruptly braked and stopped. The front door opened and slammed closed, footsteps paced round the side, then the back doors opened.
Light blinded him, and in climbed the figure. It pulled a stool from the side of the van, unfolded it, and sat haloed in the blinding light, no more than a red-tinged shadow. Beyond it through the van's doors lay a sweeping expanse of orange desert in daylight, speckled with sagebrush and brown cacti, to either side of the sandy black road. Perhaps they were a few states over from California, if they'd driven through the night. Utah or New Mexico, depending on where they were going.
He was glad they were out of New LA, safely away from the others.
He turned his attention back to the figure, as his eyes adjusted. It definitely wasn't one of Anna's demons, though there was a constellation of red scars sprayed across the left side of his face. It was definitely a man, dressed in jeans, check shirt and cowboy boots. Spurs glinted at his heels. One of his shoulders rode up higher than the other, like a hunchback, twisting his body painfully to the right. It made him look monstrous, though the expression on his face was anything but.
He looked like he was at peace. His eyes were calm and content. His brows were settled and smooth.
His face was familiar, but Cerulean couldn't place it.
"Hello, Robert," the figure said, and the voice was familiar too. "You're calculating now, I imagine. Where we are, how far from Amo and Lara, if they're safe. Thinking how you might knock me down again."
Cerulean frowned, squinting against the light, trying to place his captor.
"Again?" he said, his voice hoarse.
The man gazed down at him impassively. "I look different. I know it. But I could never forget you. Look closer, Robert. Look at my broken nose. Look at the buckshot that's made me so pretty and thrown my shoulder out of joint. Surely you recognize an old friend?"
Cerulean leaned closer, to the extent of the chains fastening him to the pole, peering with the sense of who this was on the edge of his mind. Names and faces blipped up and were shot down; a lifetime's worth of faces he'd known, those he'd offended or hurt, until finally…
He let out a gasp. It was all in the heavy brows, bustling together in concentration, though it was impossible. He was dead.
"Julio?" he whispered.
A slow, satisfied smile spread across Julio's buckshot cheeks. "As I live and breathe."
Cerulean stared. It w
as Julio, without a doubt. Five years older, deformed and scarred, but Julio all the same.
His personal demon, come back to haunt him.
"I don't feel it anymore," Julio said, smiling now. "I have to say, I used to. A constant low ebb of anxiety whenever I saw you. While I tiptoed around New LA, worried I might offend Lara or Anna or anything to draw your anger, but not anymore. I'm here and you're here, and that's all there is. I'm not afraid anymore. But that doesn't mean there wasn't still a crime, does it? It doesn't mean you shouldn't pay now for what you did to me then."
Cerulean tried to iron the disbelieving frown off his face. This was Julio, and he was serious. What he was saying hardly seemed to make sense, but he had to try. He had to focus, because his life might depend on it.
"You're so lost," Julio said, enjoying himself. "You really thought I was dead. You always underestimated me."
Cerulean stiffened inside. This was Julio, the same Julio as before, if a little more mad. He had to take the initiative back.
"And disrespected you too, isn't that right, Julio? All those injustices we heaped on you. You're just setting the world to rights."
Julio gave a cold smile. "There you are. Robert, my old friend. Want to try and jump me again?"
"You won't see it coming," Cerulean said.
Julio laughed. "Maybe, if I gave you the chance. But I won't. Look at yourself, Robert. It's sad to think I ever was afraid of you. That I ever wanted your respect. Now I understand that respect is not given, it's taken. Real power means never asking for permission. You'll see that for yourself, when you tear Anna's head off her fucking shoulders."
Cerulean flinched. "What?"
Julio just looked at him. He still had his low, surly stare, but now there was real menace behind it. Cerulean's heart throbbed in his chest. There was something in Julio's tone that terrified him. A secret confidence.
"I would never do that."
Julio rose off the stool. "There's a lot you don't know, Robert, about our glorious apocalypse. I'm going to show you. And then you're going to help me bring it all down."
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 45