Marshall knew that. It had happened with their previous ploy, to turn the Bordeaux bunker into a trap for the Sailor and her team. A dedicated group wearing generation 4 helmets had gone to sabotage the inbuilt shield and flip the frequency to turn the Stage Ones and Primaries rabid, knowing there would be no return. The Bordeaux shield was the earliest fixed-locus emitter, and had no hope of sustaining the team. It had never been designed for that.
"Then they die," he said. It was a worthwhile ploy, to bring the Black Hawk in sooner and provide him with more men to build up their defensive line against the Mayor.
Control relayed that. Ruthlessness was second nature to them all now. Lives were assets on a page to be shuffled back and forth at will.
"Out." Marshall closed the line and looked up, taking a breath. Ending the discussion with Control felt like coming up from underground. Even here in the glass Dome, looking up at the blue sky through frosted glass, he felt cloistered. He only had to close his eyes and he was back on deck minus-5 again, sealing up the exterior of another blown helmet lab, watching the deformed humanoids ramble and stutter inside.
They called them 'lepers', these remnants of each failed build. Dark blood splattered the inner walls as they raked each other's white skin, revealing the iron-like black muscle beneath. He'd watched them with fascination, for as long as was safe, because they were terrifying. They were like radioactive waste that could never be disposed of; could only be contained. The chaotic signals they spewed had forced the Seal to double the shielding on their partitions, to prevent brain lesions and accelerated carcinoma on the nearby decks. They were the real demons, and looking into their black eyes was like looking into madness.
The Mayor wasn't going to enjoy meeting them, if it ever came to that.
Marshall looked up at Master Sergeant Park, sitting on the cot opposite him.
"It's time," he said.
She gave a slight frown. "It's been less than a day."
"It's time."
The last headache hadn't worn away yet, and probably he had trimmed years off his natural lifespan, but that didn't matter. This was necessary. Until Lucas Fallow came up with generation 6 this was all he could do, an experiment being replicated now all across the Seal, that was unaccountably working.
Go out in the line. Take his helmet off. Endure.
Each time he lasted longer.
He stood, and she stood. He wore his suit but made no effort to replace his helmet, even as she slotted hers into position. The world outside looked bright and alive.
Park opened the inner door.
The line poured in and dropped him to his knees beneath the weight. The pain was indescribable, the pressure intolerable, but he'd already done this five times. It was no worse than the pain of all the soldiers he'd ordered to their deaths, trialing generations one to four.
Park put her gloved hand out and he took it, stepping into the airlock as she opened the outer door.
His legs barely held him up, his hands grasped the doorframe and sweat streamed down his chest, then he was outside, and it was worth it. The air smelled a hundred times sweeter than in the filtered Dome. He sucked in lungfuls and held himself steady while the line beat down like a lash. The telomerase counts in his cells were shriveling by the second, ticking off the potential days of his life, but this was necessary.
"Thirty seconds already," Park said, reading off her sleeve display.
His other soldiers saw too; Myers in the front cab of the drone truck, O'Reilly on top as lookout, but neither of them would report it to Control. He was General 8 Lives Marshall, and this gave them hope too, adding to his legend and spurring them on to stay alive.
One day they'd all be free like this. They just had to meet the Mayor at the shore, and destroy him. All their many sacrifices would find their return, and the line would finally come down.
Their time in the sun was coming.
10. SHIP
I talk to Drake for hours.
We sit close together in my captain's quarters at the top of his luxury yacht, where his people once hunkered down and hoped for better things to come. We plan. I sketch out ideas in a rage while we beat a path across the water to the east, filling page after page with all the possible permutations of the bunker's forces arrayed against us, my pencil moving faster than I can think.
"They must have helicopters," Drake muses admiringly, studying a Flight of the Valkyries-like fleet I've drawn cruising over the grapevines of Bordeaux. He points at one sketch I made of a thin man with shark eyes standing in a long helicopter's side bay. He's not manning a gun, but he's watching the battle like some kind of all-seeing general. "This bastard here, they definitely have him."
"You like him?" I ask.
"I love him," Drake says. His bulk looks funny curled over the sketch, sitting on the edge of my disheveled bed. "He thinks he's so righteous, you can see it in his little eyes." He looks up with fire in his own bloody gaze. "Doesn't that just turn you on? I love to crush a righteous man. You've no idea how much fun it was to bring you down, Amo."
I smile, because I understand that now, and dash off more sketches. The shark man in a submarine. The shark man on a tank. "No," says Drake, screwing up his face like I've offended him. "A tank, why would they? What good would a submarine do?"
I shrug, and draw him in a Humvee. I draw him under a sky full of soaring Predator drones. I draw him at a line of artillery pieces, flanked by soldiers wearing black suits and black helmets like the ones Anna found in Bordeaux.
"Yes, exactly," Drake says, stabbing the paper so hard he pokes a hole through it. "The little bastard's mobile like this. He's not bound by the bunkers."
I don't bother to remind him he didn't even believe the bunkers were real. We're brothers in this thing now, battling forward together. Just me and Drake and nobody else, because Anna and her team are gone.
"Don't think about Anna," Drake says, but that doesn't work, because she's always there in the background now, especially as I cross an ocean. This is really her domain, but she doesn't answer on any frequency when I call. We found plenty of satellite radios in our days of cashing in old New York caches, foraging for weapons, equipment and supplies, but none of them pick up any signal from her, and she answers no transmission I send.
Drake takes a silver pencil while I muse and colors in the shark man's eyes until he tears more holes in the paper.
"This guy," Drake says admiringly. "He's the one we have to break."
I buckle down and sketch more. I draw the map route from Bordeaux to Istanbul and all the routes beyond. I draw maps of the world with all the bunkers highlighted from memory; twelve at regular intervals around the globe, spread evenly across longitude and latitude, none closer than a thousand miles apart.
Drake does dot-to-dot with my earlier drafts. "It's like a zigzagging line," he says thoughtfully. "Where's the center?"
I shrug and dash off a fresh diagram with no geographic markings, just the line of bunkers. It looks like a long, meaningless constellation.
"I give up," Drake says. "Draw more comics."
I sketch on. I show us landing off Bordeaux and facing missiles that turn the beaches to glass. I draw arms and legs flying through the air like Saving Private Ryan, more horror and fog than a zombie comic.
"You're good at this," Drake says. "A real vocation. I can't believe I burned all the others."
I laugh. "That was propaganda. This is real."
He shrugs. "Art is art. Draw me some biological weapons. Drawn some autocannons that pop up out of pillboxes on the coast. Draw me drones."
I draw us landing and facing bad weather, which Drake screws his nose up at. I show us landing to see a thousand people in suits and helmets, just staring like zombies.
"I am Spartacus," Drake says, and I draw one of the helmeted people putting up their hand. More follow.
I guess we're becoming friends. He's forgiven me for smashing his head in, which is good.
Days go by and I ba
rely sleep. I don't eat and I certainly don't wash. Around me I sometimes hear the people on the ship moving, living their lives, preparing for what's to come as best they can, but they don't know. They could try to imagine, but they don't have that skill anymore.
That's my skill.
On the broad luxury deck Feargal is always out polishing his array of weapons. From him comes the steady clank clank of finely honed metal clicking into place. There's a real satisfaction in watching a perfectly bored 80mm round slot into one of his artillery pieces, as the chamber closes, as he triggers the firing pin and-
BANG
BANGs ring out day and night as he trains, homing in on orange flotation jackets that he strings behind us on a long strand of blue rope. Water splashes up as he finds his range. He's in his own war, a one-man killing machine, trying to pull the others in as much as he can, though the others are little better than zombies.
Keeshom doesn't come up above decks much. He spends his time in a festering sick room with Arnst, suffering though the fog together. Lydia and Hatya hide out near the engines and the comms room, fine-tuning mechanisms that don't need to be fine-tuned, coming to terms with the things done to us, the things we've done.
Sometimes I walk down to stand near Feargal and we talk about the munitions he brought on board. We have hundreds of drones and battery packs to drive them, and sometimes I work with him to attach little bags of ANFO explosives to their bases. It takes a while to get the weight right, to set them to trigger reliably, to wire one handset into a tablet computer so he can control multiple units at once.
I'm impressed. I watch as he lays out a dozen drones on the deck, then fires them up en masse, launching them together. It actually takes my breath away, because there's something beautiful about it. These drones are a team in a way we will never be. The atomic blast in our stories will forever prevent that.
"Useless toys," Drake says, but I ignore him. He knows not to talk to me in front of other people. I have to maintain at least that much semblance of sanity.
Feargal buzzes them up, left, right. Each carries a tight little bag of ANFO at its belly like a venom sac. He practices his maneuvers and the sound diminishes as he takes them to the furthest limit of their range, over a mile away in this open air, then detonates them.
The fireballs blossom briefly then fade, leaving stale puffs of black smoke like asterisks in the ocean air, quickly dispersed. Feargal brushes past me, saying nothing. I wonder briefly what he thinks. He goes on to his anti-drone radar and missile locks, trialing their auto-fire functions with drones sent five thousand feet high.
Back in New York he spent days loading all this onto Drake's yacht with a forklift truck. I wonder what his next plan is, as he sets an AR-15 down on the deck. If he slaves enough drones together, can they carry that into the air? Can they aim it?
He's ambitious.
"He's an idiot," Drake says. "A distraction at best."
I laugh, then retreat as Feargal glares back at me, taking it as mockery of him.
"Good work, Feargal," I say as I go back up my stairs. "Really solid."
He's angry. I guess nobody talks to him now. Lydia and Hatya are from a different world and I'm sure he hates them. Keeshom never leaves Arnst, and Feargal won't go down there. I was his leader once, a man he respected, but I'm not anymore. There's some fear and some disgust and who knows, maybe a desire to toss me overboard.
"He needs watching," Drake says as we climb back to my top deck 'castle', once a Russian oligarch's presidential suite. My rooms have a four-poster bed and windows all the way around, a large hot tub and a one-hundred-inch TV screen, plus a small elevator in the corner for sending up food and champagne from below decks.
Now I notice that the walls are covered in my tacked-up sketches. The number of them I've done is surprising even to me, because they do look mad. I thought I'd been working better than this, but what I'd taken before for neatly done comic panels are actually a whole lot of jagged stick figures rendered in a disturbing black scrawl. They parade around the room, and everywhere there's the shark man with his scribbled-through eyes.
"Did you do this?" I ask Drake.
He grins and sits down with a chunk of graphite. Ha. I thought I was using a pen, but I guess not. He starts to scrawl a new picture, and I'm fairly sure that's actually my hand scrawling.
"You're getting madder," Drake says absently.
I can't argue with him. It comes and goes in waves, with towers of the dead one moment, then giant hands made out of the dead rising from the ocean, then the next I'm back here in this sweaty room with just myself and my sketches.
Sometimes I just sketch until Drake comes by to talk to me. Sometimes I glimpse others round the edges of my vision, fleeting sightings of Hank and Blucy in the Darkness, even Cerulean stalking silently by, but they don't come to see me any more. Sometimes I stand on top of my yacht and it's like being back on the Iowa Yangtze center, when first I was drawing my comics, surrounded by an ocean of corn. My old colleagues left me then too, a mad captain on a mad comic book ship, and things haven't changed so much.
"You've matured in your madness," Drake says. "This is a rare vintage."
I drink whiskey and roam the yacht, letting my madness swell out like a cloud of black light. Once I read a book about a man who was followed everywhere by a pillar of night, and this feels like that.
"This is the real weapon," Drake says, reclining on my bed. Now his head is split open again and leaking gray onto the sheets. "You know that, don't you? None of this drone bullshit."
"Come on, we talked about this." I point at his brain juice on the sheets, trying to be reasonable. "How am I supposed to sleep there now?" I hustle over and start stripping the bed.
"Amo."
I stop, because that's Feargal's voice. I turn and see him there behind me, sneaking up again, and looking at the walls where my sketches hang. His eyes look, and I can understand how it seems. It is a lot of sketching. It probably doesn't help that the floor is also coated in thousands of screwed up rejects.
I drop the bed sheets.
"Feargal."
"What is this?" he asks. "What are you doing up here?"
I look back at him. "Making plans."
His expression doesn't make a lot of sense. Maybe this is disbelief becoming terror. Maybe Drake was right. "This is your plan?" He waves a hand. He kicks at a drift of crinkled paper. "This grade-school shit?"
I clear my throat. "It's actually quite complex," I begin, "if you'll just let me-" but he cuts me off.
"I followed you out here. I thought you had a plan, but this? It's-" he's lost for words. Is this hope failing? God knows what he thought I was doing up here other than sharpening my madness.
"I know it doesn't look like much-" I begin, but he cuts me off with a mocking laugh.
"It's nothing! Amo, we're going to get killed. I thought you had a plan! We did all those things because I thought it was necessary, but…"
He tails off. What things, I want to ask, but then he picks back up.
"This is just crazy. It's not even a PowerPoint. Shit."
So the last bits of hope drain out of him.
"I think he needs another dose," Drake says. He nods in the general direction of Feargal. "Come on."
I have no idea what he's talking about. Dose? "You mean, hit him again?"
I say it out loud, and Feargal sees, and it makes him crumple more.
"Of course not hit him again," Drake says. "Dammit, Amo, do I have to do everything myself?"
I'm not so sure what's happening as Drake approaches Feargal. His feet don't rustle in the autumnal blanket of papers, but the air shimmers with black light and Feargal wavers on his feet.
What?
"Amo," he says, as Drake walks behind him. "If this is really it, then we need to go back. We can get Lara, Crow, some of the others. We won't take a single bunker like this, not when they're ready to fight, when they've obviously got access to nuclear weapons."
"It's OK, Feargal," I say, half-heartedly. "I know it looks bad, but it's to a purpose."
Drake lays his big hands on Feargal's shoulders.
"What purpose, Amo?" Feargal asks.
"I-"
"What purpose?" Now there's anger spiking through the misery. "You're not the man I thought you were. Shit. What's left?"
He turns to go.
"Enough of this," says Drake, and pushes down on Feargal's shoulders. Feargal goes right down to his knees, but doesn't say anything. I frown because I'm not at all clear how Drake can do that, especially with me standing here, since Drake is really me after all, but Feargal doesn't respond. He just kneels.
"Watch," says Drake, and leans over Feargal, and it takes a second before I realize what is happening. It looks like Klimt's The Kiss, with Drake holding Feargal's head in his hands, folding it back so his neck is open and exposed, popping his mouth open so-
"No," I say, a second before it happens.
Drake places his lips around Feargal's, his back and shoulders convulse, then he vomits. The seal round their lips is tight but still I see it. The stuff that passes between them is black. Drake's back huffs and Feargal beneath him inflates, then it's over.
Drake straightens up. Feargal sags for a moment, then straightens too. He gets back to his feet and looks at me.
"I'm working on my drones, Amo," he says, as if I'm the one bothering him. His eyes are tinged slightly black and don't seem to see my sketches. He's not angry any more. Instead he turns and walks out, leaving me with a beaming Drake.
I look at him, realizing something important. "You've done that before."
"And you've said that before," Drake answers. "We've had this conversation many times. Will it stick this time?"
I'm not sure, but there is a familiarity there. It must have been two weeks since we left New York, but time is a soup behind me, full of flotsam. Haven't I always been here, working on my sketches? Or have I been somewhere else?
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 154