Then he saw it.
It changed everything.
Julio dropped to his knees. Tears welled in his eyes and he reached toward it. The cold was a blast furnace now, scouring his skin and leaving him pure.
"Oh God," he whispered.
A woman's voice rang through the still, mortuary air, like a fugue called out on a single trumpet.
"Welcome, Julio," she said. "Welcome home."
INTERLUDE 3
Julio found his first victim at Amo's cairn in New York.
He watched her approach from his hiding place on the fourth floor of the Empire State Building. She was a young woman, blonde hair, a little slim for his taste but sassy. She wore two guns in hip holsters and bright red lipstick on her lips. Once she stopped to write a message on a car window in lipstick, and he liked that.
Later, he watched her up close. Six years she'd been alone, by then. He read the confidence in her motion; the easy amble, the steadfast gaze ahead, unconcerned that anyone might be watching. She was such beautiful prey.
He came up on her easily, friendly. She was looking at Amo's desks of garbage in the lobby; his coffee cups and comics and computer memory sticks that stretched from here across the continent like a trail of pebbly shits.
At twenty feet away she heard him and turned, then actually jumped in the air.
"Jesus!" she cried, too flustered to pull a gun. "What the-"
"Sorry," he said, raising his hands and playing into the delusion. "I didn't think you were real. I've been seeing people, I mean, visions of people, for so long. I thought…"
She rested her hand on her chest, just above her breasts, and breathed heavy gasps. "God damn," she said. "God Jesus dammit, are you real?"
"Are you?" he asked back.
They talked a little. They shared coffee at a distance. She kept her hand near her gun throughout, but that didn't concern him. She couldn't possibly see what he was.
"I love your lipstick," he said, after chatting about Amo and his comics, sharing their notions about how wonderful it all was and what great hope he offered. "It's so red, like blood."
"Thanks," she said. How long since she'd spoken to anyone, he wondered? How many times had she told herself the story that she was the sole survivor? He wondered what other false images she had rattling inside her mind, that time would peel back like shucking free a pearl. "Designer prices are no obstacle any more."
He grinned. "I think you should put a little more on. Would you oblige?"
That confounded her. Of course it did. "More lipstick? Why?"
"I think it would look great."
Her hand closed round the grip of her pistol. It looked like a Smith and Wesson, '79. A solid make. He knew them all. Just looking at it, he felt like he could jam the mechanism with his thoughts alone.
"It's in my car," she said. "I haven't got it with me."
He knew that was a lie; he'd seen her drawing on windows. "Let's go there then. We can do hair, make-up, the works."
The lovely tension broke.
"Who are you with?" she asked, eyes darting side to side. "How many?"
He grinned, showing his missing teeth from the time Cerulean beat him. He took a step closer, his usual odd shuffle, necessitated by the deformation in his shoulder. "I'm alone. I'm just a cripple on the road."
Her eyes narrowed and she backed up awkwardly against Amo's table. They made a perfect U-shaped corral.
"You're acting weird," she said, "stop it."
"All right," he said, then drew his gun and shot her in the thigh. She'd carried a gun for years but never used it against a real person. She wasn't prepared. She screamed and went down.
After that it was easy. It wasn't really torture, because he wasn't exactly a sadist. It was more a mission, the un-shucking that had to be done to get to the pearls. You didn't apologize to the meat you had to eat, nor did you torment it needlessly.
He used a chain, padlock and cuffs gathered from a police station on his way down, rigged in one of the basement RVs. He dragged her into the RV and chained her to the table leg, then drove north, wondering what Amo would think of how he was using his supplies.
After he was finished with her, there were more. He gathered them all, these lost survivors, men and women, boys and girls, aged and infirm. Amo had lef the cairns and now he preyed upon them like a spider in a web. He traveled the country far and wide to bring them in.
* * *
Standing now above Cerulean's unconscious body, Julio felt the excitement welling up. He'd waited for this moment for so long, and it was everything he'd hoped for, this most desired of flies.
Fulfillment.
His hatred for the man had changed over the long years since they'd first met. Once it had seethed in his belly all day and all night like a cold sore, keeping him awake and making him sick, bringing him out in hot, frenzied sweats that only Indira could soothe away. She'd tried to scoop the fear out of him and replace it with her love, but what was her love but another insidious kind of need?
All symptoms of a disease.
He'd acted like a surgeon and cut her out like a tumor, maiming himself in the process, but all that left behind was another hole. Digging out the bunker had filled the hole for a time, then what he'd found within had filled it the rest of the way, blasting the doubt out like a cleared mountaintop, gone forever.
After that his hatred was changed, becoming a thing he cherished, like a lover held close in the night, like a furnace in his heart that kept him warm above all things.
He kicked Cerulean in the gut three times, and his breathing went spluttery, like he was choking on something. He took him by one leg and dragged him onto a low pallet cart. He looked down on that handsome black face and smiled.
Hate was close to love, they said. They would be comrades soon. That was the real goal, not petty hatreds. He smoothed down Cerulean's shirt where his kicks had ruffled it. That was a kind of apology. He wasn't a sadist, not really, he just had a mission to complete.
He took the cart's metal handle and pulled it to face the bunker hole. It was always a difficult pull over the furrowed, snowy ground, but he'd dragged heavier before. He looked at his watch. Two days, thirteen hours left. Long enough.
The cart reached the hatch to his bunker. Long ago he'd sealed it over, and fitted a ladder for himself, a pulley and winch for his guests. He rolled Cerulean off the cart, fastened him with a harness, then opened it up.
The stench that rose up was vile, as ever. He fastened the mask over his face then carefully guided Cerulean's skinny legs in, lowering him on the winch.
Julio looked around a final time, at the mountains, the fields, the blue sky. Probably the bunker people were watching from their satellites above, as all his efforts came to a final head. He would bring a flood like Amo had never seen before.
He started down the ladder into the dark.
EAST
22. CHAINS
Cerulean woke in the darkness with a sharp pain in his arms, shoulders and back, breathing in staccato little pants. Next came the stench, like an open sewer, and after that came the sound of other shallow pants; an orchestra of them spreading around him.
He opened his eyes. A dirty gray wall lay before him, part of a broad and tall corridor of moldy, smoke-stained cement that receded into the candlelit dimness on his left, lined with wasted bodies strung on chains.
It took him a long moment to comprehend what he was seeing. He gasped and choked on a wet breath. It was like waking up in a medieval torture dungeon. There were three bodies displayed on the wall before him, perched on narrow concrete saddles like trophies, slumped over with their arms shackled overhead. It didn't seem real. There were two more to his left visible in the flickering gloom, each naked and thin as corpses, their pale flesh streaked with muck.
Julio had done this? He gagged. The one directly in front of him was sagging horribly on her chains, her ragged yellow hair pasted to her shoulders and face. Her shoulders seemed to be dislocat
ed, hanging too high out of their sockets with the skin marked by long stretch lines.
He tried to rub his eyes but couldn't move his hands. He looked up and saw them chained to the wall above his head, hung from a metal pinion by cuffs. He was sagging too, his arms pulled down by their own weight and putting pressure on his chest, making it hard to breathe. He looked down and saw a saddle emerging from between his legs too, but of course he didn't feel it.
He shifted and cold stone stung his bare back.
"Julio!" he tried to call, but his throat was constricted and barely any sound came out. He rubbed at his neck with his shoulder and felt a cold metal band clamped around it.
Panic swelled in him. He couldn't move, locked in place like he'd been so long ago in his basement bed. He began to choke and his throat convulsed against the metal collar.
Then he saw the demon.
It stood at the end of the corridor, a giant figure behind a sheen of glass, only glimpsed in snatches through the foul, smoky air. It was three times the height of a man, heavily muscled with angry red skin the shade of an infected wound, with no mouth but a haunting black hole.
And it was real.
The panic swelled and he drowned on it, his vision dimming. This was the demon from his nightmares come to life.
"Stay calm," somebody whispered nearby.
A face beside him gazed back; just a boy, a teenager perhaps, with feathery black hair that looked just like Jake's. Every one of his ribs was clearly visible, like a washboard. His stomach was so sunken it hurt to look at, his pelvis was a sad sallow bowl with emaciated legs dangling below like pigeons' feet.
He looked like a floater. His face was a death mask, with sunken and wrinkled eyes, lips pulled back tight from a mouth full of gumless teeth, smiling a death's head grin. "Keep calm," he whispered. "Wait for his touch. All will be well."
Wait for his touch? Cerulean thrashed against his cuffs. The metal rattled and the pressure in his chest throbbed harder. He pulled himself up, lifting his weight so the pressure on his throat relented, but in moments his arms began to tremble and he sagged back.
He was weak. In the back of the van he'd barely eaten or drunk anything for days. The panic swelled up so hard it rose over him and carried him down, drowning, toward the concrete edge of the pool.
* * *
When he came to next the light was different, augmented by a hissing white halogen lamp hanging from a cable. The heavy stink in the air had cleared a little, replaced by the stark scent of winter fog.
Julio was standing before him, putting down a syringe. He looked tired, his motions slow and thick, but there was a feral kind of excitement in his eyes.
"Welcome back, Robert," he said. "Welcome to the sanctum."
In the harsh white light the dinginess and dirt of the corridor only became starker. The bodies were all there still, strung off to his left in varying shades of living decay. Yellowish drip bags had been added to some of their chains, with tubes coiling down into their sunken noses and mouths. Fluid flowed slowly, inexorably inward. Some of them, those at the furthest reach of the halogen's staticky glow, almost looked human.
"Hey," said Julio, clicking his fingers in front of Cerulean's face then pointing to the right. "You've seen the big guy, right?"
The demon was still there. It wasn't possible, but there it was. Ever since Anna had found one in Mongolia, Cerulean had questioned the visions that had broken his back. Why had he seen that of all the possible hallucinations?
"He's the real thing," Julio said, pulling up a stool and sitting down. The floor beneath him was stained with dried marks like splashed brown paint. Cerulean noticed a channel carved crudely into the edges of the corridor, where even now a thin slurry of waste was slowly curdling. "An angel, or so I'm told," Julio went on.
Cerulean tugged at his chains and they rattled weakly. He tried to lift himself again but he could scarcely raise his body an inch.
"Of course you're tired," Julio said. "You've already been hanging there for two days, unconscious." He waved a hand, taking in the scene, then continued in an oddly apologetic tone. "I'd do things differently, with the chains, but there were issues. People were trying to cut each others' throats in the early days, when I let them move around." He frowned, brows working hard as ever. "This one in particular," he pointed at the shriveled woman across from Cerulean. "She was the first, and she never quit, not even after the angel spoke to her." He shook his head. "A bad business."
"The demon," Cerulean said. His voice came out a hoarse whisper, forced past the band encircling his neck. "It's like Anna's. Mongolia."
Julio nodded. "Yes, I overheard that transmission. I've been spying on you for years, Robert. Who would have thought she'd almost set one free by accident? Hardly like the situation here, all so meticulously planned."
"You're," Cerulean croaked, "insane."
Julio nodded. "I know it looks that way. It's a matter of perspective. Has he spoken to you yet? You are here at the head, after all, by his side, amongst the most honored of all his disciples. I've reserved this place for you since the start. He'll show ou such wonders, Robert, images of days past and all the glories to come?" He peered at Cerulean, then turned to look down the parade of his other victims.
"Anybody?" he asked. "Have we had a recent visitation?"
They hung broken and silent. Perhaps there were twenty or thirty of them, close to the population of New LA.
"What have you done?" Cerulean whispered.
Julio ignored him, nodding as none of his prisoners replied. "He didn't come, then. He does sometimes, visiting us with dreams. He's sleeping too. Hibernating until the time is right."
"For what?"
Julio smiled. "For the people under the mountain. They want to come out Robert. They need us all gone, and he is the flood to cleanse the world." He pointed. "I've been helping them."
Cerulean glared. Pieces of information from the van trip came together slowly in his dehydrated brain; how all the survivors were actually infected, how the people in the bunker couldn't come out. It still didn't make sense; not for Julio, who would be infectious like the rest of them, who would also have to die.
"Why?"
Julio leaned in. "Because it's right. I'm tired of all this, Robert. Amo's bullshit, Amo's world, the way you've all bought into it so completely. I see now that I never had a chance with you. But now we're going to make it all clean. The angel's going to make us like him, Robert." His smile widened, as if this was a delightful prospect. "His kiss will transform us forever. You should be proud. It'll be your hands that tear Anna and Amo apart, that tear down their lies. I want you to see that for yourself, so then you'll understand."
Tears blurred Cerulean's vision. His throat tightened in its metal band. What could you say to a madman? "Understand what?"
Julio shrugged, an odd gesture given his twisted shoulder. "We never should have survived. This world was never for us. These people have a greater right to survive than us, and they have prepared their own way. He is their avenging angel, and we will be in his host sent as to wipe out the unworthy." His eyes shone with a kind of holy light. "It begins in a few hours."
Cerulean stared. He didn't want to hear any more, to see any more; this sick madness about demons and angels and lies. It was too much. He felt like weeping and gagging. Faced with it he couldn't even be angry. Rage didn't mean a thing to madness.
"I'm sorry, Julio," he said, whispering through the metal band. "I'm sorry this happened to you. I never wanted this. I wish we could have helped you more."
Now Julio seemed sad too. "I know." He reached out to touch Cerulean's cheek. "You were caught in his lies as much as any of us. I know this is hard, but it will be better, I promise."
"You've gone mad," Cerulean said, his voice cracking. "It's madness. You'll die. We'll all die. How can that be better?"
"Shh now," said Julio, as if anything he said now could matter. "The people down below will do better. We're all so hungry and
lonely inside that we're weak. We listened to Amo, Robert, when he was the worst of us all. He killed so many. He broke me, and for what? So he could win, so he could stand proud. Now we're going to wash it clean. The people in that bunker will do things better. You think they want these horros?" He waved at the corridor. "I don't like this, and neither do they. It's the only way."
Cerulean shifted on his saddle. In Julio's wide-eyed glare he could still see the truth, the flicker of pleasure through the pretense. "You do like this. This was what you always wanted from the end of the world. I should have listened to Cynthia."
Julio breathed out slowly, the warm air stroking Cerulean's bare chest. He ran a finger down Cerulean's withered thigh. "He has you so completely, doesn't he? Amo. You belong to him, and you always have. I think that's the saddest thing of all, Robert. Now I'm going to open your eyes. It's beginning."
Julio sucked in a breath sharply, then turned and walked toward the demon behind its glass door, kneeling before it as if in prayer.
Cerulean shouted. He strained against his chains. He called to the others, but they were all gazing dotingly towards the demon, too far gone to do a thing.
"Julio, please!" he shouted.
Julio didn't even turn, eyes trained on his angel.
"I'm sorry, you're right, we should have listened to you. We should have respected you. Just stop this!"
The glass wall of the demon's cell clanked three times, deep and loud as ancient locks released. Cerulean stared in horror as the door began to swing open, his stomach swelling with the cold sensation of curdled milk.
The demon's eyes flashed open.
Its mind poured into him like the touch of the demon of old, speaking through his nightmares.
"Do you remember me, Robert?" it whispered. "You dove for me once. Will you dive again?"
Julio let out a gasp. A cold wind flooded out from behind the glass. Cerulean couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't do a thing.
"You've seen what hope brings, haven't you?" the demon whispered. "You've seen what I bring?"
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 56