The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Then that meant…

  "Have you felt it?" General Marshall asked. Lucas knew exactly what he meant. It was a fate worse than death, hanging in the air between them. "The symptoms begin with a ticklish sensation. It can last for days or weeks, before the first section slides away. After that I'm afraid it's a free for all. There are special ointments you can use, padding, but within several weeks typically there is a loss of all lasting cohesion. Fingernails, toenails, hair, and ears are the first to go. Genitals, nose, nipples and lips follow. Within a month or two, with even the best care, you will not be able to recognize yourself in the mirror. Most die within two years, defeated by the pain and the despair."

  Lucas looked at the readout and struggled to think. His cure? It couldn't be, but then if it really was a cure, why wouldn't they use it?

  "Here," said the General, and tapped the keyboard, bringing up a set of ten photographs that showed the progressive ravages of Lyell's necrolysis. Lucas winced. It began with a strong young man, standing naked against a pure white background, arms out to the sides, with a lead card at the bottom stating:

  Subject M284573

  Formula x9th3

  Oral ingestion 3/24/2019

  Day 0

  From there the photographs progressively deteriorated. It was the same young man in every picture, though he steadily shrank and sickened. Patches of his skin came away, like fallow fields absent any crop, showing raw red underneath. Just as General Marshall had said, first went hair and ears, next went genitals, nose, nipples, lips. By the final image, marked Day 154, he was bent almost double and so much of his body was red that it was hard to believe he was still alive.

  It was repugnant. To see such wounds viscerally shocked Lucas, made the gorge rise into his throat.

  "His name was Henry Wakefield," General Marshall said. "He was a volunteer, knowing what fate he would undergo. I have been through this cycle so many times, Mr. Fallow, that I can recognize the symptoms in you already. The way you favor your left side, even as you sit. The way you leave your forearms hovering in the air above the table, rather than resting them on the surface. I have seen it. I grant you, it may be that your cure has a longer lead time than we have accomplished, and for that you are to be commended. You have lived with this 'cure' for over 552 days, by my count, and still do not show any outward 'slippage'. But you will. The syndrome will emerge, and this is how you will be left."

  He tapped the screen with a solid thunk.

  "But-" Lucas began, then stopped. "That doesn't make sense. Lyell's syndrome, it's a million miles away from the T4. There's no connection, no reasonable way for one to go to the other. I banished the T4 from my system completely, and there is no such thing as late-onset Lyell's. There is simply no way these two disease factors could correlate naturally. It can't happen."

  General Marshall gave a tight, unhappy smile. "You're right. It took our scientists seven months to corroborate that. By which time we'd already run over a hundred through the cure. This is the fate that awaited them all, sooner or later. And it is not natural, but then, surely you've come to the same conclusion about the T4 already."

  Lucas's thoughts raced. Too many revelations were heaping up now. "I don't- I mean, of course I know the T4 was made. It's too complex, too tied into the hydrogen line, to be the result of a single natural mutation. There was design, but are you saying the T4 was manufactured to do this? In the event of, what? A cure?"

  Marshall almost seemed sympathetic. "Yes. As I said, it took us seven months to reach that revelation. Imagine a terrorist bomb attack on a school, and the school burns, killing everyone inside. A fire crew comes to put out the fire, and the terrorist kills them all with a second bomb buried in the sidewalk." He paused. "This is the same. The arrival of the fire crew is predictable, just as this route to a cure was predictable. You were guided to this path, following clues left throughout the T4 and the line, and this is what you found."

  Lucas stared at the vile images on the screen with a sick fascination. He couldn't stop. The logic was unassailable. Why wouldn't they cure themselves, if they could? Only because the side-effect of the cure was far worse.

  Marshall went on. "We've been working on it for all this time, Lucas, and we have found no genuine cure. The greatest minds in our world have been hammering at it for twelve years and found no hope. If the leader of your bunker, Salle Coram, had kept the ties to the rest of the Seal intact, she would have known too. She could have saved you your efforts, and allowed you to funnel your brilliance to the only direction that remained. Extermination of the immune."

  Lucas stared.

  Of course.

  It made sense.

  He tapped the screen himself, at the extension of his chains, shifting the display back to the radial graph. He tried to see some fault in their calculations, in the wavelengths or the genetic coding it would imply, but could find none. This was the essence of the cure he would make himself. It was right here.

  And it wouldn't work.

  That fact changed everything. Thoughts of Farsan spiraled into his mind, of all those long pathetic hours spent in their hidden lab tucked away in the darkness where Salle Coram couldn't find them, suffering with his various formulae and dreaming of a better world.

  For nothing.

  Farsan had died believing in a lie. Lucas himself had lived because of a lie, and ahead of him lay the worst, most drawn-out death imaginable. He slumped in his chair, utterly deflated, but noticed even in doing so that he carefully kept his forearms from resting against the arm rests. He'd never consciously thought they were tender, but now he realized it was true.

  He did have an aversion to being touched, one that had come on in the last year. It had amused Jake. Now it seemed it was the T4's revenge.

  "So you see, we have been planning for this eventuality all along," Marshall went on, not unkindly. "Your treaty, your offerings of a cure, we had no choice but to play along, while planning to wipe your people out. There is no other path, I am afraid, no route left by the T4. To that end, I have something more to show you."

  He clicked the laptop several times. An aerial image of a city came up in a video panel, frozen. Lucas barely had the strength to look but again he couldn't draw his eyes away.

  "It's New LA," he said in a slur.

  "It is," said Marshall. "Footage from a satellite taken yesterday, at the same time we raided you. Our timing was dictated by the gathering of all your people in one place, together with a second group that traveled from Europe, led by a man named Matthew Drake. We had been waiting for this moment for months."

  Lucas looked down on New LA. He'd never been. He'd never met Amo in the flesh, or any of them. His only go-between had always been Anna, and he'd been happy with that. The things his people had done to Amo's, and vice versa, were too harsh for him to ever want to be in their midst.

  Still, he recognized the curving line of beaches, the low sprawl of gray. In a way, considering what he'd already seen, he knew what was now coming.

  Marshall pressed play, and it was perhaps a minute before the white circle engulfed the city. A halo of dust spun out around it, then the white began to peel away from the inside, as the smoke of destruction rose up through the middle. He'd never seen one before, but it was easy to know what it was. It stamped on his heart and sank him lower in his chair.

  "Nuclear," he whispered.

  "There were no survivors," Marshall said. "An entire hemisphere wiped out. I'm sorry to tell you this. I don't take joy in their deaths. But I do accept the reality that this is the only way. In this new world, they are the cancer. We cannot fight the T4, but we can cut out the infecting agent. There is hope for the rest of us."

  The people in New LA were mostly just names to Lucas. Amo and Lara and their kids, though he knew Feargal, and he'd spoken to each of the victims of Julio, offering his deepest apologies. Crow's forgiveness had struck him in particular. Most of them were just stories Anna had told him, but their dream had been very real
. He'd built that dream himself, in concert with Amo, both of them seeking some kind of forgiveness and way forward after all the crimes they had committed.

  Now all that was gone, wiped out in a flash of light. It stole more from him than he had to give. It was hard to breathe. On the screen the white circle was mostly absorbed by the inner yolk of gray. The mushroom cloud.

  "Turn it off," he said, sounding numb, and Marshall did.

  "There's only one more. I'd show you these later, but every minute we wait, another minute passes that you will not regain, Lucas. And make no mistake, we need you. You are a genius, though you reached the cure later then we did. You reached it in your own way, and with modifications that have allowed you a normal life until now. Your work with the shields in both Maine and Bordeaux has offered us innovations not one soul amongst our people has matched. So we need you. We need you to refine our suits and our shields. It's our belief that even after the last of the immune are destroyed, their impact on the hydrogen line will continue to resonate. We will need protection for possibly years to come, and I believe you want the best for your race. You want humanity to survive, and I assure you we are human. We are humane. We don't want this any more than you do."

  Lucas weaved in the chair. He couldn't speak.

  "It may be the hardest to see yet," said Marshall, and brought up another frozen video. This one showed an overgrown cornfield, shot from an elevated position, with a barely discernible dirt road running through the midst. Square in the middle of the frame there sat an outlandish sight; a low white van with a set of stairs climbing the hood, the kind of thing you would see at an airport for boarding passengers.

  Lucas almost laughed, but didn't have the energy. Strapped across the front of the van was a metal grille of metal, and within the cab-

  "I'll zoom in," Marshall said, and the image tightened in on the windshield, through which Lucas could see them, all four of them sitting in a squashed-together row staring wide-eyed up at the camera.

  Anna at the wheel, then Ravi beside her, Peters and Jake. Jake looked so scared, crushed against the door.

  "No," he whispered, and a tear ran down his cheek. He felt himself crumbling inside. First Farsan, now this, to be exterminated like animals.

  "I'm sorry," Marshall said, "I truly am," and zoomed the image out. "This was taken from a Black Hawk helicopter, one of a fleet we have painstakingly restored. It carries a full stock of Hellfire missiles, each with a kill-range of one hundred yards, and that is what you're about to see."

  More tears ran down Lucas' face. All hint of defiance in him was gone. He leaned in closer to see Jake's face. In Jake he'd found a kind of warmth and peace he hadn't known since the promise of Farsan, but better than anything Farsan had been able to offer, because Jake truly loved him back.

  They'd protected each other against the harshness of the world.

  Marshall ran the video. The first missile shot out on a string of smoke and erupted near the van, sending a cloud of smoke that obscured the shot. Moments later there was a second explosion, even larger, and gouts of flame rose up through the dust.

  Lucas sobbed.

  "I'm sorry, Lucas," said Marshall, slow and measured, using his first name for the first time. All a trick, but a trick that would work. "There were no survivors. The only immunes left are here, sitting in cubicle tents nearby, and for them I have one more solution."

  He lifted a pistol from its holster at its side, placed it on the tabletop, and Lucas sank the final few feet down inside himself. "No," he muttered, desperate now, willing to do anything. "Please." He reached out to Marshall, but the chain on his wrist prevented him, and the pain of it chafing was new and terrifying. Lyell's was coming.

  "I'm sorry," Marshall said again, "but this has to happen."

  He rose to his feet, and Lucas felt his face cave in. He wailed like an animal. "Please!"

  "You'll see," said Marshall calmly. "You'll see this is not done with any hate or cruelty, but with a terrible regret. I am not a murderer. I am a surgeon cutting out the cancer to save the body. If I could do the same for your people, Lucas, I would. But I can't."

  Marshall moved toward the door. He laid his fingers on the handle while Lucas tried to frame words through his sobbing. And there, for a moment, he paused.

  And turned back.

  "Unless…" he said.

  Lucas leapt upon the chance. He babbled incoherently and begged, eyes streaming. If any of them could be saved, he would do it. No matter what they asked of him, he would do it, if there was just a chance.

  It wouldn't save Jake or Anna or Amo, it wouldn't bring back Farsan or any of the Maine dead, but it would be something, and he had to draw a line somewhere. He had to save somebody, or everything he'd done was for nothing.

  "I'll do it," he barked through his tears. "Anything."

  General Marshall smiled, not cruel but kind. "Anything. Good. Thank you, Lucas. I'll arrange for your transport at once."

  LARA

  7. DIASPORA

  Lara's pain didn't ease, but gradually grew distant.

  Crow sat in the passenger seat and navigated northwest. The children in back cried and fussed and mewled in their sleep. The radio crackled with intermittent check-ins along the convoy, while Lara drove and watched the deserts of Nevada outside grow light. At some point they would have to stop, if only to resupply on gas.

  Logistics of the long flight to come ran through her thoughts, on a larger scale than any she'd managed before.

  There were supply caches out there. It had been one of their earliest tasks in the months after the original apocalypse; locating the resources they would need and ensuring they would last, gasoline being the foremost. After rummaging through the emergency preparedness plans in Los Angeles City Hall, they'd discovered maps to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve's locations. The Reserve held over a billion barrels of unrefined crude oil, stored in vast underground caverns in Texas and Louisiana, airtight and kept in constant circulation by natural geothermal churn.

  Unrefined crude oil was little use to them, but the SPR's satellite storage facilities had proved essential, comprising dozens of smaller emergency facilities across the country, each containing thousands of barrels of refined kerosene, gasoline and diesel. A 2008 order had modernized the national infrastructure; burying the last remaining above-ground tanks, upgrading the airtight seals and installing automatic stirring spindles to keep the fuel from going stale.

  Together with Amo she'd hunted many of these satellite facilities down across the country. They'd maintained as many as they could, monitoring the vacuum seals, recharging the spindle batteries, especially those on important cross-country cairn routes, and regularly siphoned what they needed for temporary storage in New LA. Each one also held large stocks of meal rations, water and medical equipment, and every cairn run they'd ever executed had relied upon those supplies. There was enough to sustain a population of three hundred million for weeks, which meant they would never run short, as long as they had the maps showing their locations.

  She'd never worried about them before. They were there, they were a comfort to know, and they would cover them for years.

  But Witzgenstein had those same maps, a standard feature in every vehicle in the New LA fleet, and Witzgenstein hated Lara with a startling intensity. She hated Amo and his vision, hated New LA and many of its people, and in the hours after Drake and the great white eye, that hatred had crowded in on Lara's thoughts, demanding attention.

  A rough count via comms through the convoy showed Witzgenstein had taken a total of nineteen adults with her, nine children, and four RVs. Approximately a third of the total population of New LA. Perhaps they were heading back to the Willamette Valley together, and Lara hoped that was true, but there was another possibility. A much darker possibility.

  It was the reason she'd called for the map three hours earlier, and had Crow mark out the point where Janine had left them. There were plenty of routes she could take to get ahead, if
she was willing to burn through fuel and take risks with her vehicles. It was the reason Lara had sped the convoy up, to reach the next SPR cache before Witzgenstein could.

  Unpredictable, Amo had said. This was unpredictable.

  "About your vision," Crow said.

  She turned to him. In the pre-dawn light he looked somehow ancient, immovable as a pyramid, with his proud nose and broad cheekbones, his massive rounded shoulders and hog-thick thighs. His intelligent blue eyes pierced right through her, and against the purplish desert outside, slowly turning orange in the rising sun's light, he seemed more like a figment of her imagination than a real man, more spectral philosopher than flesh and blood.

  "What about it?" she asked.

  "You'd seen it before," he said, speaking low and soft as ever, cutting right to the quick. "It wasn't new to you, like it was to us. You knew this was coming."

  She looked back to the road. Drifts of sand had almost obscured the sun-bleached asphalt, rippled in a frozen wave formation. The RV's tires planed over their gritty lubrication.

  "Ever since Maine," Lara answered flatly. "Since my coma."

  Crow chewed on that quietly for a time.

  "That morning, of the harvest. I saw something in you. It was this."

  Lara gave a tight smile. Yes, she remembered that. Leaning against Amo's JCB, she'd suffered a fleeting panic attack, lost in flashbacks to the night before, nearly drowning in the ocean. It was hard to believe that was less than a week ago.

  She looked in the rear view mirror. In back they were mostly sleeping. Roger sat at the table and stared at his hand, held up before him. Drake's children lay everywhere.

  "Yes," she answered. "It was. For a year I dreamed of the great white eye. I didn't tell anyone. I held it in."

  Crow nodded. "I could see it was consuming you. I knew."