Cerulean laughed, and something shifted inside him, letting him press on and say the first words that came into his mind. "Why not? Does child abuse not exist in your brave new world, Amo? Don't you want to put this event in your comics?"
Amo's eyes narrowed and he leaned away. "What is that supposed to mean?"
Cerulean let his temper carry him on. "It means you're letting your dream get in the way of reality! You need bodies to spread the cairns, I get that, which means you need people like Julio, but at what cost? How many sacrifices for that goal?"
Amo frowned. "Where is this coming from, suddenly? What are you even talking about?"
"I'm talking about I saw you!" Cerulean barked, letting the worst of it vomit out of him. "In Times Square. You were on your RV and I was down below, crawling in the shit of all those innocent bodies you'd slaughtered, shouting up at you, and you were too damn lost in your dreams to hear me!"
The anger fell out of Amo at once, and his face went pale. "What?"
Cerulean laughed. Anger was making him cruel and he was glad; they needed some reality here, cutting through the happy-dappy bullshit. "I saw you. I came to New York after I woke up and my mom didn't kill me. Are you surprised to hear that? Where do you think I went, when I woke up in the basement still alive? I went straight to New York to see you. To help you."
Amo took a step back. His eyes widened as the realization hit. "You couldn't have been…"
"I was there! I saw you burn them from across the Harlem River. I came on the trail and found you slaughtering them. I crawled through the blood and guts to shout up at you, but you didn't see me. You didn't even look. Then you blew your brains out and they hit me in the face."
Amo's hand went to his mouth and he sagged against the railing. "No."
"Yes. You couldn't have waited for me? You couldn't have waited one more day for me to arrive? I drove as fast as I could."
"I thought you were dead," Amo whispered, barely making a sound. "I didn't-"
"I was as good as dead. I crawled, and I've been crawling ever since, Amo, to Matthew and back, to your RV where I finally decided enough was enough." He laughed. "Can you believe it, I was going to climb the Empire State Building then dive off the top? Best dive in history, enough to make you all proud, gold medal, everything."
Amo just stared at him, pale as an infected.
"Then there was Masako," Cerulean went on, losing some of his anger. "I told myself I'd see her to safety. Then there was Anna, and I was hooked. Do you see what I'm saying? She's the reason I'm still around. If it wasn't for her I might be diving off the Empire State right now, so don't give me that shit about being reasonable. If anyone hurt her I'd kill them, that's a fact. You think I give a shit what message it sends? Julio's lucky he's alive."
Amo slipped down the railing to slump awkwardly on the second bar down.
"Oh, brother," he said, a sad little wheeze.
"Damn right," Cerulean said, though the hot blush of anger was fading already. He was panting lightly. The two looked at each other in the quiet, broken by the lapping of the waves.
"You were really there," Amo said quietly. "At Times Square? God, I thought finding Sophia was bad. But to see that?"
Now there were tears in Cerulean's eyes. This day was crazy.
"And my brains, they hit you?" Amo asked, his voice very weak. He looked up, half-sickened, half-curious. "In the face?"
"Right in the face," Cerulean said. He mimed the splash with his hand. "Sploosh. It was the most disgusting thing that ever happened to me."
Amo shook his head. "Dammit. Sploosh, brains in the face. That's a new one."
Cerulean frowned. "Don't laugh."
Amo tried but failed to stop himself. It came on slow but didn't stop. "Ah, I'm sorry Robert, really. Oh God, brains in the face, it's so horrible. Right on you? I can hardly believe it."
"Stop saying it!"
"I don't think I can." His color was coming back now, and his slump was growing less feeble. He was definitely laughing harder. "Sploosh."
"It's not funny."
"Then why are you laughing too?"
He wasn't laughing, but perhaps he was smiling? He tried to straighten his lips but couldn't.
"It's funny," Amo sighed, "oh, it's sick. That's black humor. What a shot! But how could I know? Ah, I'm sorry. Sploosh."
Now they were both laughing. Probably it was more relief than humor, some ridiculous reaction to shock and violence and horrible truths, but it took hold of him and wouldn't let go.
"Oh my," Amo said between gasps. "Oh, Lord!"
"I couldn't even climb up the ladder to see you," Cerulean said. "I wanted to bury you."
"Bury me!" Amo hooted, gasping for breath. "Ah, I had no idea."
They laughed a while longer, until they stopped, and a slow silence fell between them. The sun was closing its long descent to the sea, leading the ocean into the water.
It was good to laugh.
It was good but it didn't change the fact that he'd beaten Julio to a pulp, or that his blood-smeared arms were shuddering in his lap now despite the summer heat. The more he looked at them the stranger they seemed, as foreign as his legs when he'd first seen them after he'd broken his spine.
"You'll have to punish me," he said, looking up. His head felt cleared out and free, making room for reality to creep back in.
Amo watched him.
"You're right that it's the wrong signal, and even worse because it's from me, even if he deserved it. You can't be seen to play favorites. There have to be rules, and they have to bind all of us equally."
Amo nodded. "Julio too. Unless we go back and kill him now, we have to deal with him, Robert. We can't crush him, you know, not completely. Obviously we keep him away from Anna; you just can't talk to a child like that. But in other ways, he is useful. We should be more cautious; he's got a point there. Don was real. Your gun tower was real, and we'll have to deal with it at some point. Not everyone out there is friendly."
Cerulean sighed. He couldn't believe he was walking himself into this, but it did have to be done, and he'd never shied away from doing hard work.
"So what punishment? It has to bite."
Moments passed as they considered. To the left a group of gray infected ambled down the sand, their dull footfalls crunching on brittle shells. Cerulean watched them walk together into the water.
"Banishment," he suggested, at last.
Amo met his eyes.
"It's the only thing. We can't start corporal punishment, and imprisonment is just a waste. You send me away and I go, something public for everyone to see. I don't know how long. I can't leave Anna behind, though, not with him here."
"You could take her."
"If she'll come. We'll go make a cairn together."
Amo nodded. "Somewhere nearby," he mused. "San Francisco? It had a high population, so there may be survivors. Those are risks too."
"It's all risks."
Amo sighed. "True. You could go and be back in a week."
Cerulean shook his head. "Better make it a month. We need systems for things like this. You can work on them, and you can work on bringing Julio into the group while I'm away, if you think it's possible. That or kill him."
"It's not ideal," said Amo, "and I hate to lose you so soon, but you're right. It's all we've got."
20. PROMISE
They left the next day. The others watched as the sentence was pronounced and accepted. Julio was in hospital, unconscious still. Masako had asked to come, but he'd said no.
"Why can't I come?" she'd demanded.
He'd held her hands gently and looked into her eyes. "Because it's supposed to be a punishment. If you come, then…" He trailed off, letting her fill in the gaps. He knew more clearly now that he didn't really feel what she felt, but he had no desire to hurt her. There were so few people left.
It worked. She smiled. She kissed him. "I'll be waiting."
"Why is it just you and me?" Anna asked as he packed a few final t
hings; a charger for her phone, some candies, stock for the next cairn.
Cerulean smiled. His hands were both bandaged heavily, limiting what he could do. He'd broken one knuckle and slit the skin badly in three places, requiring stitches. They ached, now that the last of the anesthetics were wearing off. He hadn't had them sewn up until past midnight, after Cynthia had finished work on Julio's face.
She'd talked little throughout the operation, in one of the back rooms which they'd rigged with running hot water. Julio's blood was still splattered on the seat.
"You want this?" she'd asked at the start, holding up a syringe. "I'd like to do it without, so you feel every stitch, but Amo told me to offer."
He gave a wan smile. "I'll take it."
She injected him then got to sewing, not making any effort to be gentle.
"You wish I'd killed him?" Cerulean asked. "Is that why you're angry?"
She grunted. "You still will. Or him you. One of you's going to die, in the long run."
The certainty in her voice had haunted his dreams that night. He'd woken up with water in the back of his throat, terrified he was drowning. He felt pale and shaky, like the demon was coming for him again.
Anna was looking at him now, standing by the RV. The air was hot and close, the armrests of his chair slick with sweat. Perhaps it was truly this simple. He smiled. If there was no Anna, would he stay?
The answer came easily. No.
But she didn't owe him a thing. His life shouldn't be balanced on her presence. She was wearing her Alice uniform. That's how he'd remember her.
"Robert, why is it just you and me?" she repeated.
He cleared his throat. He owed her the truth, even if it drove her away.
"It's a punishment, honey," he said. "For me, not for you. You remember the things Julio said to you?"
She frowned. Cerulean went on. "He shouldn't have said them, it wasn't fair. Amo told me, and I got angry. I hurt Julio a lot." He held up his bandaged hands. "I hurt myself too. But now I have to go, because we can't do that kind of thing here. It's not all right. So I'm getting punished, and I have to go away. You can come with me, but you don't have to. You can stay here, if you like."
She stared at him, unreadable for a long moment. He felt a wave of emotion rise up in him. "It won't be for long," he lied. "If you want to stay, it's OK. I'll be back soon."
She stared a moment longer, then her face seemed to collapse in on itself in misery and she began to cry, deep rolling sobs that shook her little body.
"I'm sorry," she said, barely audible over her gasping. She hugged her hands around her middle. "I told Amo not to tell you. I didn't mean it, Robert. I'm sorry, please don't leave me."
Tears welled in his eyes as soon as she started. He hadn't expected this, and it punched a hollow in his gut. He rolled over and wrapped her up in his arms, trying to smooth away the pain with his touch. He pressed her sobbing face against his shoulder, stroked her tangled hair as she wept and gulped for air, and whispered in her ear.
"I'm sorry, Anna. I'll never leave you, I promise."
21. ATROCITIES
Time passed.
Cerulean and Anna returned from their exile to an uneasy peace in New LA. Julio was different after the month away, no longer talking so much about the need for defenses, no longer so aggressive in his demands for respect.
"What did you do?" Cerulean asked Amo, his first night back.
"I took him to Maine," Amo answered with a tight smile. "We went to see the gun tower."
Amo wouldn't tell him any more, and Cerulean had no intention of asking Julio. He accepted that it was their secret, and that seemed to work. Julio didn't bother anyone, didn't say strange things, and as the months passed New LA thrived under Amo and Lara's careful stewardship. Cynthia expanded her farms and started fishing expeditions out to sea. Lara oversaw the build-up huge stockpiles of fuel, canned food and bottled water stored in the cool underground of a nearby multistory parking lot. Amo ran fresh missions out to build new cairns, pointing the way to New LA, and soon enough, in dribs and drabs survivors trickled in.
There was sad-eyed Alan from Kentucky, and his son Lin who didn't remember anything from before the apocalypse. Born again Janice Witzgenstein came out of Iowa with two others in tow, fresh from their Christian redoubt in the hills after seeing one of Amo's latter day cairns. Indira from Canada came down, a beautiful woman of Indian origin who wore flowing sari dresses, and somehow found something to love in Julio. They were married within a month. Teenaged Ravi came from Washington, where he'd spent years playing video games and tending his parents' graves, waiting for a rescue that never came.
New LA grew correspondingly, with tasks and roles for them all. More delegations were sent out, more cairns built. They set up a school for Anna alongside Ravi and Lin, but she spent a little longer every day staring out of the window to the sea, ignoring her sums and her essays in favor of a fantasy.
Things changed for Cerulean, too. The fault lines in his relationship with Masako, based on a kind of lie from the start, only cracked further with every fresh arrival into New LA. Soon they numbered fourteen, and it no longer seemed necessary that they remain together. The apocalypse was no longer urgent, and he began to disengage. He smiled less, and spoke less, and took his cue from Anna, who rarely came in all day long, and preferred to spend her time racing on the open ocean in the small yacht she'd retrofitted with Cerulean's help, or setting up fresh research equipment with new arrival Sulman to investigate the cause of the original infection.
It was all a wonderful kind of happiness for him, but there was always pain too, the sense that he was not living a real life. By the time of Anna's tenth birthday he'd been with Masako for five years. At times he'd felt rich, like a true family man, but they'd never been a real family. The wounds that had forced them together were now pulling in different directions, and no matter how he tried to sew the pieces together, the stitches wouldn't hold.
He didn't love Masako enough, probably. He didn't need her the way she needed him, and then in the midst of that, Anna was growing sullen. She spent longer looking out to sea or tracking her father's position on her phone app. Sometimes she'd rail against Cerulean whenever he asked her to do something, saying cruel words that lingered between them long after.
He didn't have the energy to keep the lie going after that. Anna's withdrawal sucked the love out of him like a slowly deflating balloon, and there was never enough left over for Masako. He took to staring out over the water too, not dreaming of a lost family member but of his own demon…
In the end he split with Masako amicably. At least he tried to make it amicable. She cried a lot at the end. "How can you do this to me?" she asked, over and over again, like he was the one who'd brought the apocalypse down on them both. "How can you do it, after everything?"
He had no answer for her. He didn't know. He was drained from pretending to be the man she needed. In the year or so previous she'd seen his withdrawal and grown desperate, clinging to him and only demanding more of his energy. That had just sped up the end.
"You'll find someone," he'd told her. "There's people coming in all the time now. I promise."
She found Julio.
One night she went to him, for comfort or genuine desire or to make Cerulean jealous, nobody really knew, and he raped her. The evidence was clear-cut. Perhaps it had started in a better way, with her looking for something in him that she couldn't find any other way, but the bruises on her face, the marks around her wrists, the scratches covering Julio's head and chest spoke the truth.
He didn't deny it, when Amo, Cerulean and Cynthia came for him bearing arms. He was waiting, sitting with his wife Indira by his side like she was supportive of what he'd done, though she couldn't possibly have known. Down the years he'd convinced her he'd been misunderstood and unfairly scapegoated by the others, and she often took his side at meetings of the New LA Council.
Now Julio smiled at Cerulean and Amo as they came into hi
s house with their guns drawn.
"You were waiting for this," he said. "Any excuse to bring me down. You should know she was asking for it."
"Asking to be raped?" Cerulean demanded, just as angry as he'd been after the time with Anna, only held in check by Amo's steadying hand on his shoulder.
"I gave her what she wanted, what you couldn't. I showed her what a real man is."
Cerulean charged, easily breaking free of Amo, but this time Julio moved faster. He drew his own gun and fired; the first shot glanced off Cerulean's ribs, the second went point blank through Indira's neck. Her blood sprayed out and she lurched forward into Cerulean's lap.
One of Amo's shots took Julio in the shoulder as he fled, almost knocking him over. On the street Cynthia was waiting with a shotgun near his Mustang, and she shot him twice through the window as he climbed in and revved the engine, spraying his face and arm with buckshot.
Then he was gone.
Indira died in seconds. Cerulean needed only a few stitches.
They sent out search parties for months, scouring for some sign of his Mustang, beyond the outskirts of New LA and out into the desert, seeking a trail to ensure he could never hurt them again, but there was no sign of him. They kept up patrols for a time, a night watch that Julio himself would have been proud of, but in time they came to believe he was dead; swallowed up by the sands, forgotten.
Masako was never the same afterward, though she managed to move on. She found a new man, Alan from Kentucky, and seemed happy enough, but who amongst them was really happy, anyway?
At least Julio was gone. They had a chance at a new start.
JULIO
INTERLUDE 1
Julio didn't die.
His Mustang served him well through the dark streets of LA and out into the empty desert, before he fainted from blood loss at the wheel, steering wildly off the road and crashing into a stand of cacti at the foot of a blocky mesa.
The crash saved his life. The patrols from New LA didn't find him that night or the next.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 54