A wild and fearsome joy.
The pleasure of crushing down. I catch tears in my eyes and turn them to bile. I take this weakness and burn out its eyes, until finally it sees that being Amo will not work. Offering love and hope will not mean a thing if we cannot first survive, which leaves only one way left to go.
My hands move to my belt.
"No!" calls one of them. Hatya, the quiet one. My gaze finds her and she shrinks. I look into her eyes as I undo the buckle and slide the smooth, sheer leather band from its loops. She knows this, I think. She's felt this before.
"You can't be serious, Amo," says Keeshom, staring at me in disgust. Now he sees it too, now he believes that maybe it was me who sent Lara off into that cornfield at Chino Hills. Maybe I'd hit her, maybe I'd put her in the fit from the start. Maybe everything they've said about me for so long is true. Mass murderer. Liar. Manipulator.
I grin.
"Step up," I tell him. The setting sun turns the sky to ash and blood all around, so it feels like we're back in the shadow of the great white eye, washed by the rain of cinders, fogged by that hellish, stifling heat. "Step up and see."
He gawks, and turns to Feargal, but finds no help there. Feargal hangs his head. He was beaten by Drake and now he's beaten by me, and good.
"Good," soothes Drake at my back, giving me strength. "Very good."
I stare at each of them, willing any one to step up and stop me, and with every second passing the anticipation grows, the wild joy thickens, and I'm right here in the thick of it. I should have done this a long time ago, to Witzgenstein and Julio, to Don and the Maine bunker. Hope is nothing next to strength. The lash is all that matters.
I raise my arm over Arnst's still body, holding the lash, and they gasp. Hatya burrows her face in her hands but I can't allow that.
"Open your eyes," I tell her, but she won't. "Open them!"
She doesn't.
I look at Lydia. I look at Keeshom. I settle on Feargal.
"There'll be a chance down the line," I tell him, aping his own excuses. "You'll work change from the inside out, later. But for now, I need you to open her eyes."
He looks at me with pleading, and I meet him with my wild grin. Screw his pleading. Screw it right to the sticking place, and let's have at it, boys, let's get it done. "Now."
He buckles. He moves behind Hatya and pulls her hands away from her face. He forces her eyes open with his fingers. He doesn't say a word but she shrieks, and there I am, triumphant before them with the belt raised. The real man. The great man, and it feels…
Drake presses himself to my skull like a purring cat. "This is nothing," he murmurs, just like he did in Screen 2. "There's far, far worse to come."
He's right. I have to be ready.
It feels amazing.
* * *
I drive through the night.
Nobody talks. The women comfort each other at the back while Keeshom tends to a feverish Arnst. Feargal vomited once, now he sits in the dark with a rifle in his hands, rocking back and forth while the stale stink wafts all around.
I don't know what I've done.
Drake sits in the passenger seat beside me, just like Cerulean once did. His head is broken open and oozing.
"Victory's not for everyone," he says.
I ignore him.
"Only the strong. You've heard that expression. It's not a Brit thing, is it?"
"I think it's in Rocky," I say softly.
Drake laughs, and reaches out a fist for me to bump. I don't bump it, but he doesn't seem upset.
Missouri passes by in the dark. All these states start to look the same, once you turn out the lights. Endless darkness reaching out to nothing; a dark continent.
I don't remember what happened.
"Ah, mate," Drake says, reading the uncertainty in me. He lolls forward attentively, and an eggshell sliver of bone rocks in the bowl of his skull like a dashboard bobblehead. "Lighten up. Enough with the self-analysis, already. You take everything so seriously. It'll come back to you. You either did, or you didn't beat a defenseless, helpless guy half to death. You may have made a bunch of weak-willed men and women watch. So what?"
He laughs. I can't help but snort a little too. It does sound bad.
"If you did, he'll heal. And he did worse to you. We both did worse to you, and look what I got?" He points at his wrecked head. "I got the short end of the stick on that, right?"
I laugh more freely. He leans back in his seat and sighs. "And if you didn't, no problem. He's just tired. There's a long road ahead."
I mouth the words along with him. A long road. When I next look over, he's not there anymore, but someone else is. Someone I know well. A young black man with short dark hair, just looking at me.
Cerulean.
I don't have anything to say to him, and it seems he has nothing to say to me, either. He just wants to look, and that's fine. Looking is free, just like I looked at Arnst while he watched the road, though it does get uncomfortable. A shudder passes over me, and that sense of something wrong creeps up again, like in the dream. There's even a faint tang of souring meat in the air.
"I don't know, Robert," I say finally. "I don't know what I did. What should I have done?"
He just stares.
"It's not like whipping is a new punishment," I go on. "It used to be common. They put people in stocks, they hung them, they quartered them like Guy Fawkes, and what else could I do? We've tried banishment, but they always come back. I can't imprison people, not before and certainly not now. I could've killed him, but that's a crime too, when I need him. This is wartime."
He just stares. It makes me feel like laughing. There's something very light and airy in my head, like I'm the one with no skull top instead of Drake, like there's nothing but air above me.
"Come on," I say. "Lighten up."
"Don't lie to yourself, Amo," he says, at last favoring me with words. "He's no threat, and that wasn't punishment. That was something else."
I shrug. "All right. There's things I have to do, and he's my training. So what?"
"So don't enjoy it," he says.
I do laugh at that, a raucous bark that makes Keeshom jerk violently in his sleep. "Not enjoy it? Jesus, Robert, when did you become such a bleeding heart? You're the one who thrashed Julio, and you're telling me you didn't enjoy that? I saw the look in your eyes afterward. You were wild."
Robert keeps on watching me. I laugh some more.
"Robert," I say, wheedling like Drake, "old buddy. Come on."
"Not like this, Amo," he says, and I notice that he's speaking without moving his lips, which is a good trick.
I smile. "I don't know any other way."
"You're just afraid," he says. "Of the end. Of what's coming."
The sour smell grows stronger, stinging my eyes. I try to blink it away, but there are flashes of the fulfillment center in the darkness behind my eyelids.
"What are you doing?" I ask, but Robert just watches. I try to keep my eyes open, but like Arnst before me I'm fighting a losing battle with the Darkness closing in, and-
I'm back lying in my sealed cardboard box on the conveyor belt, rumbling along with white spores drifting in the air and maggots worming at my elbows, tumbling toward Distribution. My only connection to the outside is Cerulean's voice, but I can't read it from here, can't see his speech bubbles so I don't know what he's saying.
"I won't be there at the end," I shout into the cardboard, spilling all my plans. "I'll be dead by then, long dead, so what does it matter?"
The box rustles as it passes through the portcullis of hanging plastic flaps, then there's a cold that cuts through the cardboard and into my bones. The white spores flash and grow before my eyes like bacteria reproducing in a drop of water, then the box rocks and tilts.
I cry out as it drops off the end of the belt, but there's no one to catch me, and I fall. I scream and tumble, and down below I know something terrible waits, something worse than all the rest, and al
l I want in the world is to not see it, to not see that end and to just die before it comes, but-
ANNA
4. BLACK HAWK
Anna, Jake, Ravi and Peters fled north.
The stairs van rattled and groaned, running low on gas, but there was no time to halt and resupply. There was only the endless rush of their tires on the uneven grassy road, the occasional rough swerve it took to swing around a zombie body lying motionless in the weeds, and the white static hiss of the radio reciting the emptiness from Istanbul.
Anna stared and drove and stared, because there was nothing to say. The ocean had collapsed at a terrible, shocking signal through the hydrogen line. Something enormous had changed, and at the same time Istanbul had fallen, and surely New LA was next.
If the attack hadn't already come.
She shifted gears and her wrist smacked into Ravi's knee for the dozenth time, crammed in beside her, but he didn't seem to notice. He was reading a map; the paper folded out and spread over the dashboard. Nobody knew what was coming. Not even Jake knew for certain if their signals could still be read, if the bunkers could track them, but-
"Here," Ravi said, tapping the map. "There's a weapons silo in an Air Force base. We scouted it when we resupplied a year ago. Guns, mortars, the works. We could strap artillery to the stairs and charge at them. Stairway to heaven."
Anna looked at him and he grinned guiltily, which was strange, because it wasn't the time for making jokes. Yet he was almost giggling at the outlandish suggestion, and even Anna felt a little like laughing too. She imagined the first few bars of Stairway to Heaven, crooned out by Ravi as he stood atop the charging van, letting rip with an artillery fusillade, and…
She caught herself drifting with a slight twitch to the wheel, setting them back on course. Ravi let out a little chuckle, as if crashing the stairs van would just be another good joke.
That wasn't right. Anna blinked and focused, though concentration was hard and her mind seemed to slip and slide around the question. Of course they were exhausted, they'd been up for days without any real rest, spiraling the ocean and the demons in, watching them waterfall down into the Bordeaux bunker, but she'd been exhausted before, and this was different. It was something else, something new.
"Jake," she barked. "What's going on with the line?"
He roused slowly from a fugue by the door, crushed in next to Peters and lost to staring out of the grille-window. Probably he was thinking about Lucas, about where he was now and if he was even still alive.
"I- what, Anna?"
"The line, what's going on? You said it was some kind of blast?"
"Yes," Peters answered for him. "I am certain. It was very powerful."
Anna nodded, trying to maintain control of her own thoughts, but her head felt strangely airy, like there was too much room in her skull and her brain was bouncing off the walls like a Ping-Pong ball.
"What do you feel now?"
"I have been thinking this too," Peters answered. "There is a not usual feeling. Like drunk, perhaps. Like I am drugged."
Anna had been drunk plenty of times before, especially in the last few years with Ravi. It was mostly good, but there was also that swirling sense of disconnection, the little taste of vertigo when you lay down and tried to go to sleep. This feeling was a little like that, like a warping lens between her mind and the world. "I feel the same. It's hard to concentrate. Ravi? Jake?"
"Like things don't matter so much," Jake said. He was back looking out of the window already, speaking in a far-away voice. "Like things aren't real."
Ravi patted Anna's hand supportively. "We'll figure it out. We always do."
She frowned. That wasn't the question. "But do you feel it?"
"Oh," he said. "Yes. I feel something. Sleepy, mostly." He grinned.
"Jake, can you explain any of this?"
He turned and looked at her for a long moment, while the van rushed through a gently thwapping stretch of tall grasses, and Anna thought she may have to explain again, but slowly he focused on her.
"Yes. I think we're looking at some kind of global shift in the hydrogen line."
"Global? What are you talking about?"
He took a moment, as if winding himself up for a big speech, then only let out a heavy breath and looked at Peters.
Peters nodded, as if it was only natural for him to pick up on matters of hydrogen line physics. "I felt it from the west, Anna. Like a gale, it blew through me, but familiar. It was like Amo, like Lara, like they were standing near to me but not, because there was another."
Anna grimaced. "Matthew Drake."
"Perhaps it was. It was a corruption. The line is not what it once was."
They drove in silence for a time, but for the endless shushing of sparse grasses off the front fender. This was the A10, once the major highway leading from Bordeaux to Paris, and now it was just a shallow green belt through tall trees and dead villages.
"A corruption," Anna repeated, and Ravi beside her chuckled again. "Ravi!"
"I'm sorry," he said. "I can't help it."
"And it's making us laugh?"
"Not laugh," Jake said, still leaning his head against the window. "Or not only that. It's more like a systemic signal fluctuation, interrupting the way we think. It's very simple."
Anna frowned. She could make guesses, but she hadn't been involved in the hydrogen line research for months, so she wasn't up to speed with the latest working model.
"So make it simple. Spell it out."
He sighed. "You talk a lot, you know that?"
"Hey," Peters said, patting Jake's thigh. "Come down."
"I'm down," Jake answered. "I'm here. She's the one excited."
"I'm not excited, Jake," Anna answered, trying to keep her tone measured, trying to keep her head screwed on straight. "I just think this is important."
He sighed and swiveled his shoulders. "All right, if you think so, Anna. I'll make it very simple for you. Imagine a radio station."
"Got it," she said, a little more sharply than she meant to.
"The station spews out a signal all day and all night. Radios all round the world, if it's long-wave or bounced off satellites, will pick it up. The radios play the signal, whether it's music or chat or whatever. Got it?"
"Yes," she said through gritted teeth. This was perhaps a little more basic than she needed.
"So the radios are us. The signal is the hydrogen line. The station was Amo, or maybe some combination of Amo and Lara. But now switch it, and make the signal something more like oxygen. Water. We need it. It keeps us afloat, it helps our brains run, like electricity powers the radio. Right?"
She just nodded. "And the corruption interrupts that?"
"Interrupts our thinking," Jake said. "Makes our brains not our own. Perhaps we're lucky the signal didn't cancel out altogether, because who knows what would happen then. Maybe we'd all be dead. Maybe all the ocean would wake up. Nobody knows."
Anna focused on the road.
"So is it long-term? Is it going to get worse?"
"How can I know that, Anna?" he asked. "I don't have a magic wand."
Peters tapped him again. "Shh, yes. Down."
Jake eyed Peters, sitting almost on top of him, and his eyes welled up with tears. "Did you know they killed Lucas? Did you know that, Peters?"
"No," said Peters. "I don't have the magic wand either. None here do."
"We heard it," Jake said. "He's dead."
"We don't know anything," Anna said firmly. "We heard a raid, that's all. We don't know."
Jake put his head back to the glass, crying quietly, and they drove on.
Ravi gave directions, tracking their progress up the map toward the base near Angoulême, and Anna turned the radio theory over in her head, trying to keep all pieces of it in sight at once. Perhaps the effects of the corruption would be cumulative, which meant they'd all only get 'madder' as time went by. They'd lose themselves more and more, until they were sobbing, fighting, laughi
ng hysterically, howling up at the moon.
Or perhaps they would turn into the ocean. They'd end up following the flows of hot and cold around the world, endlessly seeking demons to crush or humans to charge up off. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad fate.
Ravi directed her, and she pulled off the A10 onto a smaller road. The tarred surface was heavily ruptured and jolted the stairs van constantly, slowing them to twenty miles an hour. Either side broad expanses of green corn crops rose, glinting in places with golden kernel-teeth peeking through husky brown lips. Into the midst of that they bumped along like a catamaran over choppy waters, rising and falling at each wave's peak and trough.
Thump
Thump
Thump
It was hypnotic. It led to madness, in the end. What else was there? Where else was she headed? She tried to imagine what the attack on New LA would have been, to cause this loss of focus on the line. Perhaps another military squad, like Lucas had described? Dozens of them, all flown to California. Organized, he'd said, disciplined and precise.
Ravi by her side nuzzled sleepily at her shoulder, his map-reading forgotten. The shush of the corn was like a lullaby. Here they were thumping across the countryside, fleeing who knew what in a van with a set of stairs on the roof, heading to nobody knew where.
Angoulême, of course, but where next after that? Where was safety now? If New LA was gone, if Lucas was dead, then it was just the four of them left. What would survival mean in that world? Always running from squads sent by the bunkers, always afraid, never being free, and to what end?
Resisting would mean nothing if New LA was gone. She wouldn't kill thirty thousand people for vengeance alone. The only decent thing then was to stop and let them come. Let her world end, so it could begin again for someone else.
Under the wheels the broken road thumped like a fevered heartbeat. Of course, she was only guessing. New LA might be fine. There was hope left, but it was hard to hold on to with the engine slowing and the gas gauge pointing deeper in the red.
Thump thump thump.
Steadily the stairs van slowed, like a clock finally winding down, like the world stopping its spin and rolling into cushiony corn to sleep.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 145