The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  He didn't become a zombie.

  "The hydrogen line is changing, Lucas," he said. "You would do well to remember that."

  Then he stood up and walked out, leaving the helmet behind.

  5. CORN

  WHOOSH

  The first missile missed the stairs van by inches, left a ghostly trail of propellant smoke beside the passenger side window, and erupted fifty feet away upon impact with the road.

  BOOM

  The van jumped at the tremendous blast, the shockwave leveled the surrounding corn like a UFO landing site and dust billowed out to envelope them. Anna moved.

  "Run!" she shouted, yanking Ravi awake and pulling him out of the van through the cover of dust. Two steps on she lurched off the road and into the dense ranks of wild corn and grass, dragging Ravi stumbling behind her. Five steps further in there was another whoosh and an enormous-

  BOOM

  That flung her flat to the ground like a whole-body slap, while a storm of shrapnel shredded through the undergrowth all around and the helicopter sailed by THUMP THUMPing overhead. She couldn't breathe for long seconds beneath the tidal wave of pressure and noise, her head spinning and the iron tang of blood on her tongue.

  She cried Ravi's name and barely heard her own voice. Dust got in her nose and mouth and came out in hacking coughs. She tried to scrabble up to her feet but there was a dead weight on her legs. Wriggling numbly, she peered back through the curtains of corn as they swayed like waves under the helicopter's thumping onslaught, revealing the stairs frame blown drunkenly off the van and the front cab blasted open and burning.

  The heat stung her eyes. Everything was happening too fast, too loud. She looked down at the dead weight on her legs and saw Ravi lying prone across her. His arms and legs were tangled amongst pale grass tubers and corn roots, while his back was torn up like a freshly furrowed field in Chino Hills, raked with lines where the van's shrapnel had struck. Gouges in his flesh filled swiftly with deep wells of blood.

  Anna stared uselessly as the helicopter came THUMPing back around. Too fast. They wouldn't survive another missile. She couldn't think.

  She dragged weakly at her own numb legs, tugging them free like senseless blocks of wood, then on her knees tugged on Ravi's outstretched arms. He only shifted an inch or two, and from his back spilled the dark reservoirs, rolling thick and slow like syrup. Anna fumbled to her feet and pulled harder, driven by a desperate urge to get him away, until-

  RATATATATATATAT

  The helicopter swooped overhead through the billowing smoke like a kind of fuzzy black god, thrashing the corn with a flurry of high-fire rate ordnance. Anna tracked its dark shadow until it stopped to hover near the burning wreckage of the stairs van, just visible through crevices in the corn jungle.

  RATATATATATATAT PING PING PING PING it went as hot metal ricocheted off hot metal.

  Anna strained at Ravi's weight, but his body was a deadweight she could barely shift.

  "Come on!" she cried, and the helicopter inclined its blades and drifted closer. The overgrown corn flayed back under its thunderous downdraft, stalks snapping in brittle bursts of sap, until finally both she and Ravi were revealed like bugs beneath a rock. She dragged desperately on Ravi's arm to get them back under cover, but it did no good. A figure stood in the open cargo door manning a matte black Minigun, dressed in tactical black with a black-visored helmet, looking right at her and training the barrel in, then-

  RATATATATATATAT

  An arcing hail of stinging bullets punctured Ravi up the middle, slicing though his innards and burying themselves in the heavy clay soil with deep percussive THUDs, their heat sizzling off in the moist ground like frying eggs, just missing Anna. She fell backward into the corn with Ravi's torn torso tumbling after her, while the scything stream of bullets came swinging rapidly back around.

  Ravi's dead face slapped against her chest, his organs strewed back through the buckling corn, and Anna realized that this was it. The black god hovered closer and she saw everything end, the walls came down and the ocean dried up; her body and her blood would fertilize the ground for future generations to till, alongside Ravi and all their dreams. RATATATATAT came the stream, and she closed her eyes to see her father in the darkness beyond.

  RATATA-

  The geyser of bullets abruptly stopped, leaving a terrible ringing that swelled beneath the THUMP THUMP. Anna opened her eyes, thinking she heard a faint popping sound through the chaos, followed by a tiny voice yelling from far away-

  "Run, Anna!"

  She opened her eyes and there was Ravi's torn upper body, and beyond it through a valley of cracked and buckled corn stems she saw the fiery chassis of the stairs van. Above it the helicopter rocked on a strange axis, sparking with incoming fire.

  "Run," the faint voice shouted again, but she couldn't run, could only lie in the dirt and watch Ravi's blood soak into the ground. His eyes held open and his jaw lolled and it didn't seem possible that he was dead. They'd been planning their next match-up on the open ocean, her RokShox against his PowerBoat, and she'd been confident she'd crush him, because he was never any good at predicting random motion.

  That wouldn't happen now, because he was dead.

  RATATATATAT

  THUMP THUMP

  The helicopter stopped its wobbling spin and fired a blur of streaking bullets to the other side. Perhaps someone was shouting still, Peters or Jake, or perhaps they were already dead, but she couldn't hear them, couldn't hear anything over the RATATAT in her ears that seemed to say-

  Ravi.

  Ravi.

  Ravi.

  Her eyes fogged, because they'd been planning to make a baby. They'd been best friends since she became a teenager. They'd opened the Willamette Valley together. They'd-

  RATATATATAT said the helicopter as it rattled away, and each RA was Ravi's name and each AT was her own, and it didn't-

  She understood suddenly, with a fearsome clarity, that she was going to stay and die right here. Her fingers clawed stupidly at the earth, because this was where they both belonged. There was no good in fighting any more; it was over, especially if New LA was down. The helicopter moved away on its pummeling cushion of air that bowed corn and broke grass, running the others down, but that didn't really matter. It all seemed perfectly normal, part of a natural cycle she'd seen many times before.

  The THUMP THUMP receded and the RATATAT scream of bullets became sporadic and choppy. Chasing up and down the field, she watched it go. First Peters, then Jake. First Jake, then Peters, then Anna too. Dear Jake, she thought, dear Jake. She didn't want to be the one to tell Lucas he was gone too.

  She snorted, because of course Lucas was dead already. Everyone was dead. Warn New LA, he'd said, and she'd done no such thing.

  Ratatatatat

  Thump thump

  She leaned forward and brushed her palm over Ravi's eyes, catching his eyelashes and closing them. That was better. Peaceful. Her clay-clotted fingers left smeary brown marks on his temples, but that was all right too. There was blood everywhere else.

  She found she was on her feet, swaying.

  She didn't remember standing. Through the black smoke spewing up from the van she watched the helicopter, far away down the field now, roaming randomly like a buzzing fly. Zigzagging. Spinning.

  Thump thump

  Ratatatatat

  Maybe Jake and Peters would get away.

  It wasn't a conscious thought, more a kind of instinctive reaction. If she'd thought about it, she would have realized it was impossible. What chance did they have against a helicopter?

  But it was flying low. It was right there. It wouldn't see her coming.

  She moved without thinking, starting at a brisk walk through the dense crop but climbing to a mad run, thrashing a path through the corn and grass, cutting her arms and hands up on sharp stalks. It was like swimming through the great Pacific garbage patch; always more green shot up before her, chafing and scratching at her passage, thumping at her
shoulders with their fat, beetle-infested corn-teeth. Grass lashed her legs, her arms swept in front of her in a breaststroke through the green and gold, like her father had taught her to swim off Venice Beach.

  Ha ha, ha.

  Ratatat

  Thump thump

  She hit a wooden fence on her hip and rolled over it, tumbling onto her shoulder and into a heap. There she rolled to her knees and found her guns, still holstered at her waist; twin Glock 17s. The cool haft of each pistol felt reassuring in her palms. She knelt and waited, watching the sky through the swaying corn fronds while the black god circled, strafing with its fire, and as she waited her tears dried and the madness receded.

  Anger took its place.

  THUMP THUMP

  RATATAT RATATAT

  The god came closer, rocking sideways in tight backwash, spinning and spraying, and she waited. Stray bullets split the fence nearby into fragrant cedar kindling, and she waited. It went further, it came back, and she waited for the perfect moment, until it swung a fast arc overhead and hovered over the field corner post, facing back toward the column of smoke rising from the stairs van.

  The THUMPing was beyond intense; it charged into Anna's head, so deep it felt like her past was impregnated with the noise of it, as if she would never escape this moment because it was the whole of her life. And she rode it. All her life she'd been at home on the ocean, rolling with the waves of the water and the apocalypse that followed, taking the reality that came her way and finding a way to blaze her trail through it.

  This was no different.

  She put one foot on the fence and straddled it, putting her head above the waves of corn, swaying in the strong downdraft, and leveled her Glocks.

  The helicopter was so low and close now, hovering low above the tops of the wild crop scarcely twenty feet away, sending shimmering ripples across the surface like Cynthia skimming butter off churned milk. It was side on to her, in profile an immense and muscular beast, but she'd taken down bigger beasts before. Dozens of demons had come for her and she'd buried them all. Thousands had died at her feet.

  The figure at the cargo door saw her. His Minigun coughed to life, slashing over to face her, but by that time Anna was already emptying the magazines in both her guns. The sound was nothing compared to the RATATATAT, but the recoil in her palms felt right.

  BANG BANG BANG

  She loosed seven rounds in a second, striking sparks off the lower bodywork and runners as the blade's powerful wind shunted her shots down. RATATATAT came the Minigun, and she adjusted and loosed another rapid eight rounds that glanced off the already-pitted Plexiglas cockpit, cracked through, sparked a suit chest-plate inside, then finally burst through the helmet of the pilot. He sagged over the controls, sending the streak of RATATATAT over Anna's head as the machine lurched away.

  THUMP THUMP THUMP

  The helicopter jacked upward as if caught in a skyhook, spinning and yawing drunkenly to the side, tightening into a mad and rising pirouette as RATATATAT ordnance sprayed out like celebratory fireworks. The THUMP THUMP grew louder, matched by a dreadful straining whine as the machine went mad, spinning in spirals so tight it almost rolled in mid-air onto its side. Smoke spat out from the top rotors as the whine became a grinding shriek.

  Anna hopped down from the fence and advanced through the corn like a shark, both guns raised. She didn't shoot, as the helicopter fought with itself, as the body of the dead pilot was tossed back and forth on his controls and suited bodies leapt or were flung out of the cargo doors like black ballast, each flailing in the air before THUDding down to earth.

  BANG

  She plucked one through the chest as he fell. The others she let rain down as she closed in, unafraid of the black god's dying throes, feeling like an avenging angel. A last ditch effort at control sent the machine rising again but a crunching grind in its THUMP THUMP rotors failed, and it spat down more smoke in a dry rain.

  Calmly, coolly Anna stalked it. Her own pain was forgotten now. Nothing mattered but that, and she was the huntress in the forest, she was Odysseus at the doors of hell, hammering for them to let her in, hammering to bring back the dead. The black god reached an outlandish height, like a whale beaching itself to die, where it sputtered and yawed wildly, this time unable to pull out of the roll. The blades chopped a staccato THU- THUMP -UMP THU- out of sync as the great beast twisted.

  Anna didn't skip a step. The god hung high in the air a second longer, then one blade catapulted outward while another crumpled, and the top of the machine tore open like an old tin can as it rolled in mid-air and fell. Flames broke out and Anna fired as more bodies tried to leap clear.

  BANG BANG

  They stopped writhing in mid-air. They stopped striving. Their bodies thudded down, chased like a rain of fire by the helicopter's ruptured carcass, torn apart at the middle, searing down to the corn with a deep whine of metal and whispering gust of fuel that made it strike with an instantaneous-

  BOOM

  The explosion rose up higher than the stairs van, and Anna kept walking until the heat from the blazing inferno of slag became too intense. The corn and grass nearby caught fire and peeled away in cinders, so Anna walked a steady circuit around it. Two figures she found on the ground, broken-legged and armed, one with his helmet broken open to show a bloody face beneath, trying to escape by crawling through the corn.

  BANG BANG

  She executed them both.

  She walked the corn until she was certain all the figures were still. Then she stood by the fire and watched the thing burn, guns tumbled at her side. A wave of tiredness came over her, and she saw blood pooling on the ashy soil before her, running down her body from a wound she couldn't even see. Her back, perhaps. She laughed, and sank down into darkness.

  INTERLUDE 2

  General Gerald Marshall barely made it out of the cubic cell.

  Through the outer door he stumbled and dropped to his knees on the cracked runway asphalt. The weight of the line bearing down was greater than he'd imagined possible; a migraine of behemothic proportions that crushed him like a cigarette butt underfoot. The pain was bad but the weight was the thing, buckling his legs and rubbing out his mind.

  He hadn't planned it. He'd never meant to remove his helmet, not in such proximity to the others, not in front of Lucas Fallow, not at all. The line was bad enough with the helmet on for fifteen hours plus, but with the helmet off he had perhaps a minute left to live.

  "The line's become erratic," Control had told him, more as a warning that they should limit their exposure even further, spending more time in the Dome under the full shield. "Like a random radioactive decay interval, it can't be predicted. Currently it's so low out there we could probably remove our helmets and survive, though in an hour it could shift completely, becoming strong enough to bore through the Dome."

  That had spurred him on. If even the Dome wasn't safe, there was no time to wait. The line had to be stabilized at any cost, and he'd seen in Lucas Fallow's eyes both the knowledge to end this war faster, and the will to refuse to do it. Only the scorched earth of complete subjugation had any hope of changing his mind.

  As it had with the death of Maine.

  Marshall gritted his teeth and rose again to his feet. The world was very far away, but there was the Dome like a glinting safe haven up ahead, and he'd never been a weak-willed man. A core of iron made him who he was, and he wasn't about to surrender to an unbearable weight. Crippling blows rained down, growing stronger by the second, but he made himself walk on.

  He had no family and no friends, but he found strength in his belief; not in a flag or a nation but a dream of the future. There were too many good people to die. The end of the world had angered him deeply, and the refusal of Amo to cede his world to an overwhelming majority only enraged him further.

  He took a step and another step.

  Injustice drove him. A sense of what was right and fair. His people deserved a chance, they had the right to breathe this same air,
to walk these old ways, to live above ground and bring their children into the light.

  Step, step, step.

  The line crushed him down but he didn't stop, though his back stooped and his neck creaked under each strike. The look of absolute shock on Lucas Fallow's face drove him on, because it was the first crack in the façade. It opened the path for him to hammer through, and he would hammer right through, making Fallow his own beast before the day was up.

  Things were going to change. Justice would prevail.

  Step step step.

  The Dome was near when the line finally crushed him to his knees. He grimaced and strained with all his prodigious focus to stand again, but he could not. All he could do was throw back his head and cry out. To die here would erase the effect he'd hoped for on Lucas Fallow. It would set them back to the beginning, back to burying his men in the walls when the weight grew too much for them, back to the merciless dominion of despair, and that he could not allow.

  He got one foot underneath him, then another. There was no way to think it, only a way to do, and he pushed forward. Step, shuddering step. His whole body shook. The Dome grew closer and the air smelled so fresh, fresher than anything he'd experienced in so many years.

  Then the Dome was opening, and Sergeant Park's terrified face was flashing closer in her suit, and her arms were on him and supporting him, helping him forward. Together they got his body up the steps, got him into the Dome's airlock, and the octahedral armature-door shushed closed, and the familiar low drone of the shield closed in around him.

  But the weight didn't lift. It crushed in tighter and he curled into an undignified ball that did nothing to relieve it. Waves pounded him down, and he could do nothing but endure.

  * * *

  Lucas stared at the helmet.

  What he'd just seen was impossible, or at least it always had been. In the early days after the Maine insurrection, when they'd first learned the truth about their imprisonment and the zombies and the line, he'd run experiments constantly and sequentially to find a way out. He'd been in charge of seeking a cure, back when Salle believed that was still a valuable use of their time.