"Got it, noon." She winks at Anna. "Hey kiddo."
Anna blushes despite herself. I often forget she's the youngest adult we've got here. Truth is, I never really thought of her as a child, not since I first saw her get out of the RV in her cute blue dress. It may be strange to bring her into the leadership so quickly, but she's seen and done more than all these people combined.
"Hey," Anna answers with a quick smile.
It strikes me that Macy probably baby-sat for Anna more times than I did. Did they gossip with each other about their crushes? Did they bitch together about how I ran the town? The notion warms my heart. It's the little things amongst people, the bonds that tie them together like twigs settling into position in a strongly woven nest, that make me remember what all this is for.
Macy starts away and I look down at the guy. He's skinny but has a face that would be thin anyway, with pasty gray hair stuck to his scalp. He looks a lot better than before, with some color coming into his cheeks underneath the scraggly beard, but still not good.
"We need to wake him up," Anna says, "how do we do that?"
I drop to my knees and pat the guy gently on his bony shoulder. "Hey, buddy," I say, the old-fashioned way. "Wake up."
He stirs.
"Isn't this cruel?" Lara asks. "He needs to sleep."
"And we need to know what they were running from. Maybe they know where Cerulean is."
The guy's eyes open slowly. He looks at me, then Anna and Lara, then begins to cry quietly.
"It's OK," Lara says, resting one hand on his chest and the other on his cheek.
"You look," he says, working hard for each word, "just like in the comic."
Anna snorts.
"But I'm sorry," he says. "Your friend Cerulean is dead."
* * *
It takes the best part of an hour to get the whole story off him. At times he gets overwhelmed and has to rest, and some of the memories I almost wish he hadn't shared, but the gist of his story is clear.
His name is Peters Larenson, a Dane caught in the US on 'Infection Day' as he called it, on a business trip. He met Abigail a year after the infection, back when his English was still bad and he spent most of his days trying to learn it better so he could decipher the flight training manuals on his Cessna 400 TTx turbopropellor plane. He'd found it in a small Seattle airport, aiming to fly it back to Denmark. He was out on the runway one day when she'd simply walked out of nowhere, right up to him and planted a kiss on his lips.
They'd had sex before they even spoke. He thought it was a dream so went with it, this gorgeous older woman coming to be with him after a year alone, but when it was over she was still there.
"Call me Abigail," she'd said. Was it her real name? It didn't matter. His life instantly improved. They watched the sunrise and the sunset together, went jogging, lay on the sandy beaches, made love in the surf, ate old brisket from cans and pored over the Cessna's instructions. She seemed to have no drive to do anything but help him, so he asked her to join him.
"I already have," she said.
She taught him English, and months went by. He took the Cessna onto the runway and tried it out, but takeoff was always a challenge he couldn't quite grasp. They worked on CB radios with powerful antennae and tried to tune in AM frequencies transmitted from Europe, but nothing came. Perhaps everyone was dead there too.
So they studied, trained, and soon enough they flew. Peters got the craft up in the air and even managed to land it, soon becoming expert. At first he took looping circles round the airfield, with Abigail down below cheering him on, but soon she joined him in the cockpit as copilot and they undertook longer journeys.
They didn't go to Denmark, because the Atlantic crossing seemed too dangerous a challenge, and probably everyone was dead there too, so instead they flew around America. They marked off airfields on a map and joined them up with the jigsaw line of their passage, always watching the gray hordes pass by underneath. There was nothing quite so peaceful as soaring through the clouds above them, perhaps the only plane still flying in the entire world.
They made love at 10,000 feet with the autopilot on. Anna grimaced at this point in the story, but I waved her down. They made a home base for themselves on an airstrip by a beautiful alligator lagoon in Florida. Some days they did nothing but laze around in hammocks, watching gadflies and hummingbirds buzz around the giant lizards below. Other days they took off on long rambling 'holidays' on a gleaming silver airboat that felt a lot like flying, racing through swamps and rushes-filled creeks. Other times they'd take off in the Cessna, seeing the USA, sometimes flying out over the Atlantic for hundreds of miles in the hopes of seeing a ship somewhere.
They never did. Happy years passed and they wanted for little, becoming used to sharing the world with only each other. They fell into rarely speaking though they were always together. It felt like slowly guiding the world into nothingness, becoming custodians as the human race's batteries gradually ran down and Earth was left for the birds and the bugs.
Then Julio came.
It was night when he crept into their house, and they were sleeping side by side. He must have shot them with sedative darts, because when they roused they were in the back of the same white panel van they'd ultimately escaped in.
Julio took them to a hole in the ground in Maine, where there was a hallway of horrors with a great red beast at the end, lined with wailing victims. He chained them up, ignoring their pleas and explaining that he was only doing what had to be done.
"It's for your own good," he'd often said, one of his favorite lines. As he raped Abigail the first few times, before he lost interest, he would say it along with other variations on the theme. As he whipped them both, and beat them, and stubbed burning embers out on their skin just to punctuate his day, he told them it was a punishment and it wasn't really their fault.
He blamed people they'd never heard of, though he acted as if they must have known them. "You really haven't read the comic?" he'd ask. "It's so good. Complete bullshit, but Amo's very talented."
He held it up for them to read. He pointed out all the major characters in the story. "It's for them that you're dying," he said. "It's their fault."
So Peters came to hate the comic and the characters in it too, because hating only Julio wasn't enough. He hated Amo and Lara and Anna, just as he was told to. The horrors visited upon him and his love were too much for words, and soon she stopped speaking completely. Still they had each other, gazing into each other's eyes across the hall, and that was something.
It could only have been months, though it was clear the others lined along the filthy hallway's walls had been there much longer. Some barely looked human anymore. Some of them droned in low, terrifying unison at times, craning their whip-thin necks toward the red beast in the glass at the chamber's end, like they were worshipping some cultish god.
Other times Julio told stories to the hallway at large, to entertain himself, and hurt them when the mood struck him. He entertained his whims and spoke to a woman's sharp voice in the air. He read the comic again and again, sometimes working himself into rages over the role he was given.
"Five panels!" he'd cry out. "Only five!"
He'd flail and lash out and wave the comic around, though each time before he fell to sleep on his pitiful and filthy bedding he'd smooth the pages carefully and set the comic reverently down on a little wooden altar.
Then Cerulean came.
He was brought, and for the week afterwards that Julio ignored the rest of them, forgetting to feed them, bringing no more tortures or rape. Peters could feel things building to a climax, the date Julio had been waiting for, as announced by the woman in the ceiling, until at last, one early morning, it happened.
The red demon woke up. It pushed its way from its glass cage and spewed bile into Julio, turning him into a red beast as well. It spewed bile into Cerulean and others, then Cerulean turned and attacked it.
At that point in the story Anna gasped. Lara took her hand. I urged
Peters on.
Cerulean fought the Julio-demon and tore its head off. He killed the others that had been infected and fought the demon to a standstill, forcing it back into its glass cage. He broke the shackles of all the victims and roared a warning at them.
"Go to Amo! Warn him."
As Peters gathered up Abigail and ran for the ladder, he had no intention of going to Amo. He hated the man almost as much as he hated Julio. His cruelty was the reason for all of this; the terrible things he'd done to Julio had now been visited upon them. Then, as he passed the giant, swaying red body of Cerulean, something changed. He looked into the strange beast's sad red eyes and understood something profound.
He was a victim too. He was Cerulean from the comic, a paraplegic who had lost everything and survived, who with his dying breaths had just fought a demon to save them all. He was surely dying even now.
It was enough to turn Peters around, turn both him and Abigail around and send them back to the others, to the victims who, when they fell from their chains, lay uselessly on the cold stone. They had no muscles left, no power to move themselves. So Peters and Abigail lifted them up, helped by others, and together they worked the winch to get them out.
Over ground for the first time in perhaps half a year, barefoot in the snow Peters dragged their shivering bodies through the white fields, to the white van Julio had brought them in.
Together they filled it up, bodies stacked on bodies on the stained mattress in the back, then he got into the driving seat, turned the key waiting in the ignition and tore away. Explosions rang out all around them, bombs falling from above with the woman's anger, and once the van was almost blown off the road and down into a gulley, but he managed to keep them moving until the worst of it was over.
After that the journey was a blur. They must have stopped but he didn't remember it. Some times Abigail drove or one of the others but he didn't remember changing over. The road stretched on and on and they must have collected gas and food a dozen times but he didn't know how or when.
Then there was LA. Road signs from another world led them there, to here, looking up into his old enemy Amo's face, and realizing he was a friend.
"Thank you," Peters said, as he finished talking. "Thank you for being here and for trying to save my Abigail. Now we have to run. The red demon is coming. He wants to kill us all, just like he killed Cerulean."
I look at him, and I look at Lara and Anna, then round at the lobby and all the people in it. Then I pat Peters' hand, tell him thank you, and walk out of the Chinese Theater into the light.
3. CERULEAN
I walk along the Pacific Coast Highway, unable really to think at all. I reach Santa Monica Boulevard and head out onto the long stretch of Venice beach, for no other reason than it looks so clean and fresh. The golden sand underfoot is still moist from last night's high tide and there's a few jellyfish down by the water, translucent little bubbles like plastic packing wrap burped up from the water.
I feel just as translucent, like I've been pumped full of helium. I'm a big balloon and above me hang a dozen razor sharp knives waiting to drop.
I walk. It's hot in the sun but the sea breeze helps take the edge off. Somewhere to the east, God knows how far, there's a red demon running my way.
The walkie at my side buzzes. It's fair enough, if I were Lara or Anna or any of them I'd be buzzing me too. But I'm not them, I'm me, and ultimately it falls on my head. I bring the insistent device up and press the master button to broadcast to them all.
"We're meeting at noon in the Theater, folks. Feargal and Chantelle, bring your teams down for now, there's no immediate threat. Everyone hydrate, get some food, and I'll see you in screen five." After that I switch the walkie off.
It probably isn't chaos in the lobby. The community is orderly and organized, and nobody but Lara, Anna and I heard Peters' story. Perhaps some others caught it too, or heard snippets from some of the other survivors, but not many.
They'll talk, though. I would.
I walk while the knives loom menacingly overhead, juggling in slow circles. Until now the demons were a bizarre story from Mongolia. Cerulean's loss was awful but manageable. Julio was dead and gone.
What a joke.
I find myself standing in front of an old surf bar. The front wooden shutters were once painted black, with bright reggae figures dancing atop them like the silhouettes from the Apple iPod ads. I reach out and touch the faded, brittle wood, and wonder who I might be in that world now.
A famous comic artist, perhaps. An editor. Maybe I would have graduated to storyboarding for TV shows.
I sigh and look at the walkie by my side. I should call Lara, my wife. She'll have ideas and suggestions, she'll offer support, she'll do what she can. But it won't help with this. I know it instinctively.
I keep walking. At this point it's really a choice about how much misery I can take before I break. I could call Anna and she might understand, but that wouldn't be fair. The things I've done, I need to face on my own.
My apartment building is only one block over from the Theater, so I sneak in via the back entrance, past the dried-up pool and through a garden of moderately well-kept Matilija poppies that look like overcooked eggs, husky purple Lemonade berry and dying vermilion California fuchsia set over a bed of yellow parched grass. Every now and then Lara gets a hunger for gardening and she'll plant up some lovely designs, only to remember that LA is basically a drought-zone these days, and we just don't have the water to spare, leaving them all to die.
The apartment building is a freshly repaired white stucco block one street back from the beach, where the worst of the ocean spray doesn't reach. It probably cost a thousand dollars a week to rent, back in the day. Every year now we have to redo the exterior plaster or cracks develop and the whole façade would peel off the brick and timber frame.
I should go see my kids instead of this, I know, but I'd be useless to them now, floating like a crack addict through the ruins of a life. Reality feels paper-thin around me, like if I reached out with a finger I could poke big wet holes in it. I almost expect a twinge to settle across my brain and lay me up in bed, taking me back to the beginning in my Mott Haven tenement in New York, with the first zombies breathing loudly outside and me standing there while they hammer at the door below, not knowing what to do.
Cerulean saved me then, so I do as he once told me: I hole up. I creep in and up the stairs, into our bedroom where I hunker down, ridiculously, in the closet.
With the doors shut it's stiflingly hot, sitting on carpet with Lara's dresses hanging down and tickling my head, but it's no worse than the survivors of Maine have been through, so I can manage. I sit up against a beanbag in the dark, slide my laptop onto my lap, and lower the immersion goggles onto my head.
The Deepcraft boot screen comes up, familiar still though I haven't been here much in the last few years, and I select the Yangtze darkness. It unfolds around me; a warehouse full of digital goods I built myself, based on the real fulfillment center I worked at in Iowa shortly after my coma. Rows and rows of plain metal shelving stretch into the darkness like a very boring maze, stacked with endless supplies of pixelated consumer products.
I fumble the headphones into my ears, blocking out any ambient California sound and replacing it with the cool and quiet of an Iowa nightshift. Already I feel myself calming down as this place works the magic it always had. It saved me a hundred times before, back when the post-coma twinges were triggered by any sudden movement, any bright color, anything too strange and new. Also it saved Cerulean.
I see him now, a little way down from me. His ghostly avatar is a bright blue parrot with a little pirate on its shoulder, wandering toward me with a diviner in its feathery hand.
Emotion wells up in me like a tide, and I start to cry. It hits and I can't fight it, crying until the cups of the immersion goggles fill up and I have to pull them away from my cheeks so the saltwater can run down.
Cerulean walks up to me and stops
, blurry through my fogged-up lenses, and I can't do anything but experience this god-awful wave of sadness.
"Hello, Amo," he says, a speech bubble popping up above his head.
"Goddammit, Cerulean," I mutter through my tears, in my closet, "you son of a bitch."
His parrot avatar stands a moment longer, then walks on by, following the click and signal of his diviner, taking him to collect mushrooms that glitch between shelves, robotic cocktail servers, a thirty-foot-long plastic slip-and-slide.
"Goddammit," I whisper.
The knives spiral overhead, promising guilt, pain and a sadness that cuts to the bone. I stop myself crying and glare up at them, because I'm here now and I need to get through. In their reflections I see Julio's bunker in my mind, sketched like panels in a comic strip. There are tortured bodies hanging by the wrists and Cerulean is striding from one to the next on bright red legs, breaking them free. The pages flash by as though someone's riffling through them, conjoining the images into a staccato film. Here he's a hero again, saving them like he saved me before.
"Goddammit," I curse for the third time. More knives twinkle, bringing home the stink and fear of the van as the survivors fled west across the country, not knowing how far the demon was behind them, not trusting what lay ahead. All my fault. In a very real sense I put them there, for all the things I did or didn't do.
I shake off the images and look to the next knife. There's plenty more, dating back the full ten years. At the same time I rub my eyes and get the tears under control. Now I do have a twinge in my head, like a toddler making himself sick with crying.
I couldn't break down like this in the lobby. The community's faith in me is a tool I can't afford to dull through such displays of weakness. We're going to need all the resources we have to survive.
In the darkness Hank walks by. Tall Hank, the lady's man. Above his head a bubble pops up explaining the best way to get red wine out of a carpet. I frown at his serious face. I know I programmed him with pick-up routines a long time ago, but did I accidentally copy-paste this in by mistake?
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 61