"We need to talk," says Drake. "About this. About lots of things. But most of all, about Arnst."
11. ARNST
Drake leads and I follow, out of the madhouse and down to the deck where Feargal is squatting over a pile of brass shell casings. They look like 5.56mms for his AR-15. A mid-sea breeze washes over him like a puddle on the blacktop.
"Flying guns," he says absently, as if nothing in the room above just happened. "It'll give us the upper hand."
He talks like a robot, not really looking at me.
"Sure," I say. "Over nuclear weapons."
He turns his blank gaze to me. There's something wrong with his eyes.
"You wouldn't look right either, if someone puked black light down your throat," Drake says. "Come on."
I peel myself away and follow Drake. He takes us along the bow of the ship, a 220-foot explorer yacht named 'Wanderer'. Once it was owned by a pro-baseball player, apparently. He kept a helicopter on the deck where Feargal's now stripping shells out of magazines with a satisfying clink clink clink, like peas from their pods.
At the rear hatch we take the stairs down into the fever swamps. An ample living space opens out before me, well-lit via Plexiglas panels in the deck, at least twenty feet across. There's a dipped den area with a square of chic gray sofas, a faux fireplace, a space for a twelve-setting dinner table, and a svelte bar area with bright multicolored stools. I try to imagine Drake's brood of fifty children and ten adults hunkering down in this space at night.
"There are seven bedrooms as well," Drake says. "No need for the First Law program to halt because of a trans-Atlantic journey."
I laugh, then stop when I see his face and realize that, of course, he isn't joking.
"This way."
The air gets thick and noisy as we pass through the living space and down a beautifully appointed corridor past a number of bedrooms. At the back end of the ship we take a tight spiral staircase down, and the air gets thicker still. I know why, because the women are down here. Arnst is down here, and he's a real sticking point in my thinking.
The sound of the engine grows louder. Down here it's the servants' quarters. The rich hotel-like décor is gone, replaced by narrower and darker corridors, with pipes sticking out of walls and tiny hutch-like rooms off to the side. A pantry, a kitchen, a room full of explosives crates, a room full of drone boxes.
I feel like I'm on the conveyor belt again, moving along with no control, trapped in my cardboard box. There are no maggots and mold, there's no blue parrot Cerulean, but the damp tang of rotten meat is still there in the air.
Drake looks back to face me, and now the usual crack in his skull has spread down his face, splitting through his nose, like a broken Russian nesting doll revealing a second person underneath.
I stop, disgusted.
"Why are you stopping?" Drake asks. As his outer lips move, so the inner lips of the person inside him move too, though slightly out of sync, leaking a reddish juice from the layers between, like pulped tomato.
"You've got a person in you," I say.
He laughs, spraying flecks of red onto me. I brush them away and they hit the floor as wriggling white maggots, which I crush under my boots.
"Come on, Amo," he says. "Heart of darkness time."
"I think I'll go back upstairs," I say. "It's so airy."
His lips curl in a grin, and two sets of teeth blink at me from within, like a shark's. The outer layer is slipping more as whatever's inside him grows larger.
"You've done that three times already. We'll be in France in two days. There's no time for another pass."
"Even so," I say, because it's cold and rotting down here. The longer I stay, the closer I feel to the dream of the Yangtze center, to the Distribution area plastic curtain, and it makes me writhe in my skin. Perhaps there's a hidden person inside me too, waiting to crack my skull and seep out. I'm out of my depth, I don't know what I'm doing. "I'll take my chances with the drone-carried AR-15s."
"Don't be a coward," Drake says, reaching back to seize my hand. Even his forearm is splitting, revealing a red arm inside. "Man up."
I chuckle nervously. I feel sick. "We're going to see the girls," I say, like I'm persuading myself that's all this is. "I can do that."
"Sure," Drake says. "The girls."
We walk on and the back of his head slits open down the back of his neck and under his shirt. I gag. "You're not looking so good," I manage.
"That always happens," he answers. "Come on."
We reach a door, which Drake opens, and the heat and noise of the engine room slaps out. I peer in to a grimy, dark space engulfed with pipes, lit by a few dirty portholes and a halogen lamp in the corner, with the two baking metal engines blocks. Two hammocks hang on the walls, but there is no sign of Lydia and Hatya in them.
I look around. "Where are they?"
"Must have gone up for a spell," Drake says casually, which sends another shiver down my spine. We just came down by the only route, and looked in every room.
"Not every room. Plenty of toilets we didn't look in. Maybe they were hiding among the drone boxes."
A cold flush shivers over my skin, and I look down to see my own hands are starting to split, along seams that mirror the bones within.
"Shit," I mutter, though it doesn't hurt. I bring my left hand up and study the slit, like a fault line through my palm. The skin that lies beneath looks black.
"Keep moving," Drake says, and shoves me from behind. "This way."
I clatter down the bare metal steps, through the heat and fog from the engines, though I'm trembling with cold. I stagger on while my forearms split and even my chest begins to peel. "What the hell is happening?" I whisper.
"Transformations don't come easy," Drake says, and prods me forward, circling round the throbbing engines. I see dark palm marks on the walls, as if left by black-ink zombies hammering to get out. Perhaps they were. "Come on. Arnst is along here."
I keep on, as beneath my clothing my thighs and back start to split. Dark trails of black liquid soak through my jeans, leaking out around my shoes and leaving oily flowers on the metal floor.
"Where? There's nothing here."
"There." Drake points at a curtain of hanging plastic strips across the back wall, where the drive shafts lead through the hull and out to the propellers. I stop dead, because I know they shouldn't be there, not in this place.
"It's the way to the med bay," says Drake, grinning a twin grin. He takes my hand and pulls, and away comes the skin like a paper glove, revealing vivid black tendons and muscle beneath. My heart hammers hard.
"What is this?" I ask.
"What you are inside," says Drake. "Just how enormously special you are."
I pull back my shirt sleeves and peel tentatively at my forearm, where the skin tears away easily, revealing a fresh black limb beneath. I gag.
"Oh God."
"Not yet," Drake says, "through the curtain, first."
He kicks me from behind and I stumble forward. The sour stink of maggots and rot fills the air, damp stains flash up on the walls, then I'm tumbling into the Distribution curtain, black arms outstretched, and-
I fold through.
The plastic strips trickle over my body like jellyfish fronds, and I don't hit the hull, or chew into the propellers on the other side, instead I land and roll on an uneven gray surface that stretches on in every direction, that shifts slightly as I come to a halt and look down to see that-
It's bodies. Thousands of gray bodies.
My knee rests on the surface of a squashed face. My hands rest on curled limbs and liverworted backs. I jerk away and back, wheeling around to take this new place in, and I see that it's an ocean of the dead. They are everywhere, in their thousands, in their millions, all frozen with their limbs and bodies interwoven, shaped into the rutted peaks and troughs of static waves.
I lurch to my feet, as if the extra few feet distance from this mass burial event will save me, even as Drake advances
from behind. His head is fully split now, and his outer skin unravels down his sides like a too-big set of clothes. Underneath he is all red, like a demon.
I backstep rapidly, my ankles rolling on the uneven surface, until I stumble on a box.
I turn and catch myself on it, a large cardboard box out in the middle of the ocean, packed with familiar duct tape showing the company's logo.
A Yangtze box.
I didn't see it a second earlier. Now it's here, and as I watch more come, up from within the ocean like square brown bubbles, forcing the bodies to fold and shift to make room.
I stare.
They come in all shapes and sizes, burping up with the rustling of old cardboard on dry flesh, building into heaps; little boxes for DVDs and books, medium ones for protein bars and hand drills, big ones for handheld leaf blowers and backyard trampolines. They rise higher as I gawk, climbing until they loom overhead like the canyon streets of New York, like a maze that blanks out the ocean.
Drake advances through the weave of them easily.
"Every delivery you ever made," he says, his head now entirely that of a demon. He is huger than ever, and redder. "Dropped into nothing and left there amongst the dead. Welcome to Distribution."
"I don't-" I say, trying to understand. Everywhere there are boxes now, and do I remember any of these? With Cerulean I packaged thousands of items, whatever the diviners told us to fetch, and in the years that followed the apocalypse I went back to the Darkness many times, seeking calm, seeking a quiet place to think for a time. I packaged blenders and skipping ropes, devil Halloween costumes and little headphone packets, and maybe they're all here.
A city of my unreal deliveries. I tilt my head back and look up to the sky, but there's only darkness. So this is what Distribution looks like.
"Yes," the Drake-demon says, "Distribution, a place where the empties go. If we look hard enough, we can probably see some real people amongst all these zombies." He scans the frozen waves. "There, I think I see …"
He points and bounds over on his too-long legs. I just stand, taking it in, thinking that I'm really going mad.
"Gone mad," Drake corrects without turning. "We're well past 'going'. Take a look at this."
Despite myself I take a step forward, and my ankle twists on someone's ear. I mutter a quiet apology and stumble sideways onto a shoulder.
Drake laughs at me. "You think she cares? Maybe when you killed her she did. Now she's just blacktop. Paving stones for us to walk on. Come see this. I found Dr. Ozark."
Dr. Ozark? I remember him.
"He died on the road out of New LA," I say faintly. "When the demons were coming."
"There's always demons coming," Drake says. "Look at his giant red head." He holds it up, like a big red apple, but I don't look. I study the boxes, trying to find balance in that.
"Balance?" Drake sneers. "Is that why you think I brought you here? Wake up and smell the genocide, Amo. This is real."
"So where's Arnst?" I ask, pushing back. "Where's Keeshom? You said they were down here."
The Drake-demon laughs. "You haven't got a clue, have you, Amo? Ah, you're so innocent still." He takes a step out of the Drake skin, which stretches like rubber to the floor in a slapping, wet pile. "Let's do something about that."
He kicks a box in the nearest wall of brown, and it flies backward as if on rails, receding into a black tunnel with a light at the end. "You first," he says, then kicks me forward, and I duck just in time to fall on my face into the tunnel. At once the bodies underfoot grab me and propel me forward, like the conveyor belt in the fulfillment center, but made out of hands and feet. The Drake-demon slots in behind me and kicks me again so I tumble faster, rolling on the rolling ocean, boxes flying by either side in growing darkness, until I emerge onto-
A road, in a desert, in the night.
Headlights illuminate a body by my feet. Arnst.
I'm there too. I see myself, standing over him with a belt in my hand. The others stand opposite; Feargal holding little Hatya in position, forcing her to watch. Keeshom bites his lip and blood rolls down his chin. Lydia's eyes are wide with fear.
"It's quite a tableau," the demon says.
I'm back. I've blanked this out, but now I'm here.
"I don't know what happened," I say.
Drake stands over me. "Stop whining. You're about to find out. Watch."
I look up, and the figure of Amo strikes a terrifying figure. There's Drake's blood on him still, making him cragged and cruel, whitewashed in the headlights, with a kind of crackling nimbus of black energy swirling around him.
Then the tableau spools to life. Amo pants and I hear his breathing. The belt wavers, the buckle sparkling in the white light. Hatya struggles and Feargal grunts as he holds her. Keeshom hums with tension.
Amo raises the belt higher, to the apex of his reach, then brings it down.
CRACK
It whips off Arnst's broad back, drawing a bead of blood through his clothes where the buckle strikes his shoulder blade. The big man wakes with a howl, and Amo greets him with another blow.
CLUNK
The buckle bounces off Arnst's skull and he drops back to the pavement. Amo places one foot on his head and looks down.
"You take this," he says.
Arnst looks up in terror, and I stare too. I don't remember any of this.
"Say it. Say you'll take it."
Arnst doesn't know what's happening, much like me. He's flat on the road, in pain, and there's terror in his eyes. He sees the others just watching. He blinks away blood that runs down from his gouged skull. He's on the verge of fighting back, then the cloud of black encircling Amo touches him, leaks into his face through his eyes, nose and ears, and he stops.
His eyes flicker to black.
The Drake-demon kneels at his side and grins up at me, pointing like he's posing for a selfie. "Do you see this?"
I look between Drake and Arnst, with both of them trapped in the strange tides rippling from Amo; a palpable force in the air like the black light Drake vomited into Feargal, but I can't discern it clearly.
"I'll take it," Arnst says.
Amo lifts the belt and brings it down again.
It's hard to watch. Five blows he strikes, ten. By the end Arnst is bloody and panting. Amo is bloody and panting. Hatya wails. Then Amo looks at Keeshom and holds out the belt.
"Never!" Keeshom blurts out, his eyes flaring. "No, Amo, I won't."
"Keeshom," Amo says, flat and cold. "You wanted to come. This was your decision."
The strange glow of black light ripples harder in the air, rising off Amo in hot, mad waves, reaching out to Keeshom. It touches him, and the Drake-demon moves with it. Keeshom's eyes turn black, then Drake gives him a shove and he takes one step forward.
"Stop it," Keeshom manages, but the fight has gone out of his voice now, and he takes another step further into the black. "Amo, please."
"We do what we have to," Amo says dully. He doesn't see what's happening, not like me, though he's the one doing it. The black light comes from him. "Take the belt."
Drake keeps on pushing, the black light keeps on pulling, and so he steps up to Arnst's body. Keeshom takes the belt and lifts it up. He shudders and tears spring down his cheeks, then he brings the lash down.
CRACK
A fresh band of blood rises up through Arnst's shirt.
"Again," Amo says.
Keeshom brings the belt down.
I watch Keeshom give ten strokes, and realize I am witnessing a great crime. I don't think there was ever a law for this, but it's certainly against every notion of human rights I've heard. It is cruel and unusual.
It doesn't stop there. Next comes Feargal. He takes the belt more easily, but the black cloud of compulsion is upon him too. He gives ten hard, sizzling strokes.
After Feargal comes Lydia. After Lydia comes Hatya, each prodded forward by the Drake-demon, sucked by the black. Each blow rings a sharp CRACK off Arnst's back, until Arns
t lies unconscious, his shirt torn away, his back chewed-up and bloody like a freshly tilled clay soil in Chino Hills.
Last of all Amo takes the belt back. Though it is dripping with blood, he makes a long, slow show of feeding it back through the loops at his waist.
"This is what we need," he announces. "This is what Drake taught me."
He fastens the buckle, then his dark fog of control on the others pulls back, and they drop to their knees. They scream. Feargal tears at his own hair. Hatya vomits and Lydia holds her. Keeshom leans in and tries to stop the bleeding, but there is so much.
I scream a little too. I don't believe it. I don't want to, but I can't deny what I've seen here. There is something in the air, something black and violent and just beginning, and it comes from Amo, rising off him in mad, random waves. It is the same thing that forced Feargal to his knees in my madhouse, and it's clear now that it's something I need to master.
"You've already mastered it," the Drake-demon says. "What do you think we've been doing for the past two weeks? We've been sharpening, Amo. Honing your weapon. Who brought down the apocalypse? You. Who kept New LA together in the face of hopeless odds? You. Now you just need to embrace it."
I look at Drake's bloody eyes, and know that he's right. I can feel it within me even now, the black crackle of madness rising, ready to blast out like a bomb, focused by the self-control of my art. It's in me, and always has been.
And I know that this is necessary.
I drop to my knees and tilt my head back. The Drake-demon moves over and grips my head like he gripped Feargal's; tenderly, with care. I open my mouth and he leans over, bringing his lips down to close over mine, and then the flood begins.
I see the light.
The false history of the past two weeks strips away like Arnst's skin, and what is left behind is the truth; in New York I destroyed my past, but it was on this desert road that I defined my future.
When it's done, I stand. The empty skin of Drake lies spent on the floor of bodies before me, like a sad carnival mask, and I know that I'll never see him again, because now I don't need to. He's become a part of what I am.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 155