The line had always been far too strong, though. Early executions had taken place by exposure to the outer world, via trials of their first shielded suits. The condemned were shielded up the ladder rungs by the bunker's core resonant bubble, but once they were above ground they were left alone with the portable shield embedded in their helmets.
The very first man lasted barely ten seconds, before he dropped to the ground then reanimated as another zombie. They'd affixed a tether to the suit so their vital prototype would not be lost, but they couldn't pull him back after infection. So for weeks that first victim of their infant science had tugged at his cord like a kite pulled by the wind, straining to be free.
His studies on the existing shield redoubled. Salle put more of their best scientists on the case, back when she could still be reasoned with, before the dictatorship of three thousand people closed her ears forever. They'd almost been friends, for a time, as he reported the findings of his team in this new field of science.
It had been exciting. Every day it had seemed their emancipation lay within grasp, perhaps only days away. Salle's rule might only be temporary, and the harsh laws she'd already laid down to ration the supplies that hadn't been destroyed in the revolution would only be temporary. She tightened the work on rebuilding sections of the bunker that had been crippled in the revolution, reducing work-hours to replant the farm halls and rewire habitation decks, in order to press ahead with the cure.
It had been a heady time. It was indeed distasteful that each volunteer to go above was not truly a volunteer, but a 'criminal'. At first Salle would tell him who these men, because they were always men, were. Rapists she'd caught out on camera during the insurrection. Murderers who'd killed for sadistic joy. She'd been proud when she sent them up to their deaths.
"They're serving their community," she'd say, and in those moments Lucas first really grew to fear her. It began as a seed, but it grew from a root in Salle that was not going to wither. It would only grow stronger with time, and so it did, as she ran out of rapists and murderers, and volunteers with lesser crimes had to be found.
She stopped discussing those crimes with anyone, least of all Lucas. She stopped speaking to him altogether after a time, and soon his only interaction with her came through Joseph, her first lieutenant, a sharp and unbreakably formal ex-lawyer.
So they sent more volunteers up. Dozens. At the height of it there were seven of them at once, all zombies pulling at their tethers and trying to escape like ribbons on a Maypole. Only the eighth, who had been promised that he would be allowed back in, if he could strip some of the suits off the zombies and return them.
He lasted almost ten minutes up there, and in that time managed to de-suit three bodies before he replaced one of them with himself. Of course when he came crawling back to the bunker entrance point, he'd found it sealed up. Soon enough he got to his feet again and stumbled away, to the extent of his leash. Lucas' team wound the now-empty three suits back in, and from the readings they'd captured they learned so much. Based on that they'd redesigned the whole suit program.
It took years to develop a suit that could keep any one of them alive for an hour. Four years in, after even the time that the agent, Julio, had started making his collection of other survivors in preparation for D-Day, they sent one out for the full hour, then brought him back in. They kept him for observation in a newly segmented functional hydrogen line airlock between the Habitat and Command, watching as he shivered and wept and begged to be readmitted. In the end, to everyone's surprise, he did not become a zombie but simply died.
He was not contagious. It wasn't the same disease that turned those up above to zombies, but rather a deep and destructive brain damage.
Lucas went back to the drawing board. Salle distanced herself further, perhaps disgusted by the number of volunteers she was committing to the cause, with no sign of a result. Lucas took his research and reasoned there was no way to build a suit that could ever sustain them permanently above ground, so instead began to work on a cure.
A year after that, Salle cut him off. A cure was a waste of resources, as D-Day was the only real hope for them all. She barred him from his lab and blocked any communication with his old lab-mates. Some of them were sent to the surface as volunteers, which he learned about only by their absence, and rumors. The suit program was continuing without him.
So he threw himself into his cure. He learned the back alleys and hidden ways of the bunker, spying and infiltrating and risking himself in the walls to find a better way forward.
Now he sat here, with a helmet on the table before him, and the General Gerald Marshall had just walked out without it.
It was a dizzying revelation. It changed many things, reorienting the way he saw the world. Amo was one thing, Anna was on one side, and on the other were these people. Obviously he still needed the helmet, but…
But he didn't.
Yet they'd raided with the helmets and suits on. None of his captors had taken them off for the duration of his rendition to this place. Marshall had worn his throughout, through the interview, only removing it at the end.
But he hadn't changed immediately. He'd gotten up and walked out. Perhaps there'd been a slight lurch in his last step out of the door, but what was that but a matter of degree?
The line had changed. It was a clanging hammer on his plans. Even if suits were still necessary, their duration and safety would only be improved if the line outside had weakened so considerably. The ramifications stretched out ahead of him.
He'd registered the seismic change on the hydrogen line. Perhaps it also meant a cure was closer. If only he could make Marshall listen to that. The gap between the immune and non-immune had never been narrower. If ever it was possible to bridge that gap, it was now. Perhaps it would take only a day to design a new formulation. One day and they could all be immunized. The thought of all these survivors flowing up from the earth overcame him, and he wept.
Things could get better. There would be no more war, no more volunteers, and no need for genocide. Finally he would reach the cure that Salle had so long barred him from researching.
* * *
Marshall woke in the night, laid on a bed in the Dome. The crippling weight of the line still lay upon him, squeezing his head in a vice, but he'd done hard things before. In the Gulf he'd taken out a sniper nest with a bullet in his chest and a piece of shrapnel the size of a STOP sign embedded in his back.
Gentle lights from the Dome's many-jointed armature illuminated the Spartan floor space, drawing a glow off the face of Master Sergeant Park. She was watching him with an awed, somewhat cautious expression.
"Sir?" she said tentatively.
He could imagine what she was thinking. '8 Lives' had earned his nickname again. Even the line couldn't lay him low. Control had told them the line may be lessened in strength, so he'd taken off his helmet and taken a stroll. It was how he presented himself to them, an indomitable force, using the power of his reputation as a way to beat back despair.
"Soldier, you're out of uniform," he said, rising to a sitting position. Lightning engulfed his head, but he allowed no outward sign of the pain to show.
"I, yes sir," Park managed. Her top button was undone, and she refastened it swiftly. "It won't happen again. We thought-"
"Nothing to think," he said. "Tell me Control hasn't interfered."
"I-" she started, before getting ahold of herself. "No, sir. Control ordered us back into the tent, but no one's spoken to him. He's still sitting there, next to your helmet. Sir, if I may ask, why did you-"
"Expedience," he answered sharply. "It's what he needs to see."
Park nodded. She had dark eyes, a cloyingly sweet round face, and was highly competent. Her sensitivity made her an excellent Master Sergeant back in the bunkers; out here that empathy made the difference between life and death.
There was no time to waste. He looked down at his uniform; crumpled and sweat-stained now. They must have stripped the suit off
him piece by piece. His body still felt feverish, but there was no time for rest. At once he started to strip. Park was unabashed, didn't turn away, only went to his trunk to fetch a fresh uniform. They'd been through this countless times before, when she'd come upon him still drunk on a morning after a funeral. Covering for him. Perhaps, if he'd been twenty years younger…
"Report," he commanded.
She handed him a crisp white shirt. She knew better than to question the pointlessness of wearing a smartly pressed dress uniform to see the prisoner, when none of it would be visible beneath the shield suit. It was just the General's way.
"Sir, suggest you sit to hear the news from Manning."
That stopped 8 Lives' blood cold. He pulled on the shirt and focused on her. It could be only one thing. "He's dead." A silence passed for confirmation. "How?"
He wavered with the pain, and Officer Park stepped forward as if to catch him, but his acid glare saw her off sharply.
"They reported eyes-on the Sailor and her team shortly after you walked through the line, sir, then moved to engage. Rockets deployed, they buzzed a corn field with Minigun-fire, then as best as I can detect from watching the cockpit feeds, the girl shot them down with a pair of handguns."
8 Lives stared. "Handguns?"
Park winced slightly, as if she were responsible. "Yes, sir. I would guess she shot Davies; they were flying low. The helo went down with no sign of survivors."
Marshall restrained a grimace. This was bad news. This made his straitjacketed heart pump harder, but it also made it easier to push back at the electric cloud currently fragging his brain. This required an overwhelming response.
"I'll need a handgun," he said, shrugging on his fresh jacket, sparkling with medals, brass buttons and gold stars. "Two, in fact. And that footage."
"Yes, sir," answered Park, and started climbing into her own suit.
6. THE CURE
Anna swam up from the same old dream.
She was racing on her catamaran toward a giant figure sitting on an island on the horizon. His face wasn't visible, but she knew it wasn't the weighed-down bulk of her father anymore, as it had always been before. Now it was Ravi, waiting to say goodbye, but he wouldn't look in her direction. No matter how fast she raced round to face him, he kept turning, so all she ever saw was his back.
She woke to smoke.
It wafted across the blue sky like parallax scroll in an old 16-bit video game. Ravi used to wax lyrical for hours about all his old platform-scrolling favorites; the games he'd loved most in his five years spent alone, before leaving his parents' home in Tennessee and discovering the cairn trail to New LA.
"Call of Duty is all very well," he'd hold forth, while snacking on ancient Cheetos and pointing at Ken and Ryu fighting in a Chinese village, while the varying background layers smoothly scrolled left and right, simulating a depth that Anna never quite understood the appeal of. "Tell me that is not a work of art. This whole game should be in museums."
Anna would laugh and roll over and go back to plotting her strategy to outrace him on the water.
Now she lay on her back and tears trickled down into her hair, slipping like the arms of sunglasses above her ears. The smoke kept drifting, and the clouds kept scrolling, simulating depth. Two layers, like two pieces of Ravi, torn apart by gunfire.
Her left arm didn't work well.
She got to her feet.
On her feet the world was a hazy gray corn maze, and smelled of burnt plastic and popcorn. The helicopter body lay on its side nearby, surrounded by a dark crater-like blot of smoldering vegetation and cinders. The cabin was rolled on its side and blown open at the rear, where the fuel must have caught and made the BOOM. One blade still hung from the ruptured main rotor, sticking up in the air like a raised middle finger, offering an obscene final salute.
No bodies, not here. There was no movement. The glass was all gone in the cab. The black sides were marked with sweaty streaks of soot. The sound of something clicking inside carried through the smoke, and she wondered what it was. A plastic dashboard pelican, perhaps, slowly pecking itself down a pole. A Geiger counter clicking off the changes in the hydrogen line. A body tapping to be free.
"Peters!" she called.
Her voice was weak. She felt weak. Each step was more of a stumble. The ash underfoot spat up in little puffs of black and glowing red. She felt the heat through her feet. The corn nearby was smoldering upright.
"Jake!"
Her throat was dry. She needed water. She looked down and saw herself airbrushed with gray powder. A dark line of dried blood ran down her left leg, and she tried to track it back. Her left arm swung weakly. She craned her head to look for the wound, and clunked against something hard and metallic over her shoulder, like a backpack with a shovel strapped across the top.
She laughed as she realized what it was, as the clunk was matched with a pain in her shoulder. She turned to better angle her shadow on the ashes, and saw what looked to be a kind of thick, rigid net. She laughed again. Shrapnel from the blast, stuck in her shoulder. It was part of the grille they'd welded to the stairs van's windshield, to protect them from zombies, now welded into her.
That made her think of Ravi, which made her want to cry, so she shouted Jake's name instead.
"Jake!"
The corn looked all the same. She realized she'd been tramping in circles round the fallen helicopter for many minutes, watching the smoke and the corn and the skies all scroll at different speeds.
"Now, you should see the Mode 7 parallax effects in F-Zero," Ravi said in her head. "I don't even like flying games, but I defy anyone to see that and put Michelangelo above it! It's just moving, you know? Moving emotionally, I mean. Obviously physically moving, that's the point. The ingenuity of it."
She chuckled and traipsed. He would go on and on with a passion she'd always admired and never understood. Of course he'd been sad when his parents left him, when he'd spent years alone, but he'd found a new way to live; in his games. Setting high scores. Rewarding himself with candy. Having candy when he failed too. It was amazing he'd turned out the way he had, but then, he'd been amazing. He was a little crazy with it, but it was a crazy that she'd learned to love.
Her crazy had never been as kind.
"Ravi," she mumbled, and walked. Tears fell down her cheeks. She looked out over the corn, seeking the place where he'd fallen, but smoke was rising everywhere. There was no way to pick out the stairs van's location. She didn't remember if it was even this field. There'd been a fence, she knew that, but was that this field, or another one? Perhaps she would walk through these scrolling pixel stages for years and never find him.
"Ravi."
She plunged into the corn, leaving the wrecked helicopter behind. Smoke filled her lungs but she didn't have the strength to cough. She imagined the grille of metal in her shoulder was a friend, talking in her ear, like Cerulean's pirate on a parrot's shoulder.
"Polly wants a cracker?"
Browning corn sheaves crinkled and parted like hair. It felt that she was underwater. A submarine level. She was Mario and her fireballs would no longer work.
"Jake!" she shouted.
A body grabbed at her feet and she stumbled, dropping to her knees beside a dead man in a black suit. His head was ensconced in a full black helmet and his chest had a helicopter blade in it. Anna laughed and moved it like a joystick. She patted his visor like a button.
"Got you," she said. "Special move."
She struggled for a few minutes to get his helmet off. When it tumbled away into the corn, she saw a normal-looking woman beneath. Kind dark brows. Pinned-back blonde hair. No cruelty in her vacant eyes.
It made her tears stop.
She wandered through the field, searching for Ravi.
"Ravi!" she cried, long and empty. She looked for the road, and for Peters and Jake, but they didn't come. She was alone. She'd been bombed, welded, and this was the end.
She sat down in the ruined crop after a ti
me, too weary to keep going. She wanted water but where would she find it here? She lay back down, careful to accommodate the grille, and watched more faces scroll by in the clouds and the smoke.
"Daddy," she said, as his giant face loomed in. "I'm sorry."
He stood there and his twin necklaces sparkled in the sun. She'd never gotten her necklace back, and maybe that was why he wasn't waiting for her on his island anymore. She'd abandoned him. There was a lot to be sad about.
"Ravi!" she called.
When the man stood above her, she thought it was him. He came up slow, and shone like an angel in the sun. They looked at each other for a long time, long enough for Anna to realize she didn't know him at all. He wasn't in a suit. He wasn't Jake or Peters. He was someone new, dressed all in white
She reached up a hand. He took it, and carefully dropped to his knees by her side. Neither of them spoke. He had a cloth in his hand, and he pressed it to her mouth like a kindness.
It smelled astringent, like forgetfulness and the morgue, and she was too tired to resist. She breathed in, and the dizziness fetched her away.
* * *
She woke in a large white hall, a hollow kind of space that was clinical and bright, with white walls and fluorescent strip lights, like a hospital. She tasted iodine on her lips. There was a faint sibilant sucking sound in the air, capped by a wet swallowing sound, like a fish trying to breathe.
Suck suck, smack.
She tried to rub her eyes but her hands were bound. Her body was tied, and when she tried to move her head to see, she couldn't. Cold metal bars were pressed to her temples, and as she strained forward she felt a taut band across her forehead.
She laughed and lay back.
Some kind of ward, maybe. Some kind of mad scientist, out in the wilds. Another Julio perhaps, and who cared really? Ravi was gone, and Peters and Jake. Lucas and her team had been taken. Was there any chance New LA remained?
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 148