She blinked.
"Ready for your shift?" Crow asked.
Even Crow was beaten. His deep reserves of strength couldn't stand up to losing so many of the children. It had torn the heart out of them all. What was the point of going on, with all hope for the future gone? With Vie and Talia gone? Yet Lara couldn't stop. To stop would mean to die.
Yet she was beaten. It hurt to her core to admit that. What did dreams of Amo's failure matter if she had nothing for him to come back to? She'd been beaten and there was no way to fix it. Witzgenstein had left them eight messages now, and they were all the same.
On your knees
They had no ammunition left, no vehicles, no base of operations, no time and no hope.
In the nightmare there was also a group of shambling ghosts, each striped strangely black and white, walking under a black flag that flickered and whipped in the wind. They were headed west, shivering and glitching in and out of existence, toward a place where thousands of frozen bodies lay waiting. Something about that image terrified her. At the very end there was a great flash, and a suck and a blast, and then the dream ended.
She shuddered.
Crow was watching her. Once he would have asked if she was all right, if she needed a little more time before she took the wheel, but he didn't have the energy for that. Perhaps he didn't care. He waited for her because it was too hard to insist. She hadn't eaten anything for three days, when they'd stopped briefly to raid a convenience store already ravaged by time and wild dogs, only to find a few melted candy bars left stuck under the counter.
But she wasn't ready. She couldn't keep doing this.
She looked at Crow, wondering if she was strong enough for what was to come, if he was. He was already losing some of the prodigious muscle that had always made him so impressive. His shoulders were wilting, and this was all that lay ahead of them. Every cairn dashed. Every supply cache burned. Scavenging off the ruins again, with too little time before the winter to plant a new rotation of crops.
The sores on her thighs were getting worse. Sitting for long hours brought it on, but none of the others were willing to drive. They lay in back and raged, or slept, or stared forlornly out of the window, and she couldn't blame them. Witzgenstein hadn't threatened them. She needed them. Maybe they'd be punished for a time, but once they'd proved how much they loved her, once they'd been on their knees long enough to crush any dream of future dissent, they'd be welcomed.
But none of that mattered, because there was no choice any more.
"I'm pregnant," she said.
Crow regarded her with slow, sleepy eyes. It didn't mean much to him, maybe. Another mouth to feed. She'd hidden it from him as best she could; hidden it from all of them, herself most of all, but she couldn't keep going on that road.
Starvation would kill the child inside her. It was barely a seed now, just as Robert had told her in a dream so long ago, but she could not live with it dying. Not for her pride, not when Janine would almost certainly let it survive, just to take pleasure in stealing it away as her own.
"What?" Crow asked breathily. He saw the reality of their defeat.
A tear raced down her cheek. She hadn't wanted to tell anyone like this. It was never supposed to be like this, but this was the truth and you couldn't run from that. They were refugees, and if she had to beg so her unborn child would survive, she would.
"I wasn't sure before. I took a test. It's true."
Crow deflated further, like an old birthday balloon. It was another final straw heaped across their backs.
"We can't do this any more," he said.
"I know."
For a time they sat in silence, not looking at each other, only gazing out at the dusty road as this new truth fell. Somewhere out there was was Amo, and Anna, and Witzgenstein. The world marched on, and didn't care. The dream of New LA was truly gone.
Crow reached out a hand. His forearm looked withered in the bright noon light, like a tough old root. "Come on," he said. "We'll go together."
More tears came. He was strong, still. She took his hand, and together they trudged out of the RV. The passengers in back watched them with wide, empty eyes.
On the road they stopped in front of the RV, side by side. Lara scanned the horizon, but the tears in her eyes made it all a blur. Possibly Janine was watching them even now. The humiliation was complete. Amo had left, and everything had fallen.
So she fell too, onto her knees.
The blacktop was hot, even through her stained, threadbare jeans. Her tears became sobs.
Crow dropped down beside her, and together they knelt, until the people in the convoy limped up, and one by one joined them in defeat.
They knelt. They wept. They waited for Witzgenstein to come.
* * *
I drive, and when the gas runs out I walk. It gets colder fast, and there are steppes; vast expanses of gray nothing where the black eye can spread out above like a thundercloud. I suppose this is Georgia, round the far end of Turkey. Or maybe it's Russia. I should put on warmer clothes, but I'm too tired to make that many decisions.
By day my feet bleed. By night they bleed too. It's easier just to walk.
At some point I splint my shoulder but it doesn't hold well. I know it's healing wrong, but it doesn't matter. I try not to think. My wrist too, it fuses weirdly, so my fingers don't really work. This is what I am now.
I walk.
I find a bicycle and I ride.
Barren steppes give way to barren tundra. Soon there'll be snow everywhere, but I hardly feel the cold. I'm numb.
I walk.
Sometimes I dream, and what I see are endless vistas filled with the ocean, all staring at me. They breathe as one with one giant lung, and they blame me with every breath. I know this. I stand there and take the blame. I know what I did.
But I also know that it wasn't only me.
There are steps to take, that will lead me forward, and they aren't hard to see.
If Anna was right, then the T4 was designed. Her false cure was designed, and so the apocalypse was made from scratch. Somewhere, someone dreamed up a nightmare scenario just like this, and willed it into reality.
It's thoughts of that person that keep me alive. That keep me trudging north.
Because I feel something different now. There's something on the line that's new; a hollow in the darkness above, far to the north, that I only feel when I'm walking. When I drive it fades, lost in the roar of the engine, but when I walk, and everything is perfectly still in this dead world around me, I feel it.
It speaks only to me. Through the long night it calls my name. It wants to see me before I die, and I want to see it too. I'm finally aiming myself in the right direction: at the people who made this hellscape, who did this to us all, who reduced us to this face-tearing savagery.
I'm going to tear their faces off. I'm going to make them suffer, and nothing will be too harsh. I will have justice for seven billion souls lost. I may be battered and broken, but in truth I am stronger than ever. I can pull birds out of the sky with a thought. I can stop deer running in the fields with the flick of an eye.
I send the pulse out over the line as a promise, to let them know their days on this Earth are numbered. No quarter will be given. No mercy offered. Every drop of blood shed shall be repaid a thousand-fold.
Because I am the lash for their sins, and I am coming.
THE LASH - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Sincere thanks as ever to the Ocean Elite: Katy Page, Pam Elmes, Rebecca Barnes, Renee Beauchamp, Melissa Dykeman-Abourbih, Alyse Wolfard, Steven Kenny, Jacinda Matzer, Brita Morrow, Amber Reid and Jill Scalzo for racing through and providing such useful, in depth feedback and literary criticism.
- Michael
THE LIES CONTENTS
ANNA
AMO
LARA
HUNT
FAR EAST
Acknowledgements
AMO
1. LIGHT
Snow falls ar
ound me like motes of decay in a dying world, as though the sky itself is sighing off infected skin. It comes silent and cold, deadening my every step and smoothing away the shape of the earth under my feet. I can't help but wonder that I'm finally reaching the end.
I walk.
Tears freeze on my cheeks, and I imagine the ashes of New LA mingling with the concrete-colored clouds overhead. Strange winds carry such strange fruit. I heard once that radioactive material from the Hiroshima bomb rained in Australia for years, rained in Papua New Guinea, rained on the Galapagos Isles, caught in swirling atmospheric currents ten miles high. So it's the same here, and each fat, drifting flake becomes a Deepcraft world I've built and abandoned, or a person lost, or a friend I've betrayed. So many dead already, from the noisy beginning of this apocalypse right up to the frozen, silent end.
I walk through the dark, twisted stretches of ice-chipped pine forests. I cycle past frostbitten Siberian villages, submerged to the pale tips of their rooftops and lampposts. At times I drive over the endless expanse of this barren white land. Days pass, maybe weeks, and I see no other survivors, speak to no one; I only think of the end to come, and the ends I've left behind.
I think of New LA.
The Chinese Theater is dust in the air, now. Venice Beach is dust. Lara's new coffee shop, the John Harrison, is dust. Chino Hills, Disneyland, the malls and the hills and the roads we cleared and cairns we placed, our home and the room where my children slept, the knitted goods made by Keeshom's knitting circle, all of my legacy is turned to dust.
I push falling flakes to the side like I'm caressing lost friends. Here a piece of Cerulean remains, gazing back at me. Here falls a memory of Anna on the beach, shouting at me, angry at something we've both probably forgotten.
Anna. Cerulean. Lara.
Words and memories scroll on a repeating reel through my mind, because I've lost so much, and failed so many, and made so many mistakes.
I'm following a road, like a river white with snow, though I can't see the blacktop beneath. I tried digging down to it once, but it must be ten feet deep. Instead I slalom through the frozen wastes alone, and I imagine cars trapped beneath my feet, like mammoths locked in the permafrost. Maybe they'll last there for millennia, perfectly preserved, to one day be dug up by a new race and resurrected. Future peoples will puzzle over Russian pop cassettes and the true purpose of cup-holders.
I walk, and it's so cold my gums bleed. I have all the thermal gear I can wear, and still my toes blacken. At night I take shelter in dugouts in the snow like a hibernating bear, huddling close to a pitiful jumble of smoking sticks as though heat on my skin has any chance to warm up the ice I feel within.
How many have I killed?
The words beat like a drumbeat in my mind, day after slogging day. Even when the humming in the air that draws me North is strong, when the signal reaches out like a hot purple beam across the sky and I dream of the vengeance I'm going to have, I hear the drumbeat of guilt play out.
How many have I killed, and for what?
Sometimes it's guilt for the people I mowed down under my tires at Istanbul, or left for dead in the bunkers of Gap and Brezno. I think of the little boy's face on the floor of the shield room, and it's his face that drives me on.
Then the guilt flips, and I see the effects of my mercy. Because I didn't kill more, because I couldn't kill them all, that means my own people will die. My weakness has doomed my family, right when Lara needs me most, my children need me, but I couldn't do what I promised. I have turned away from them in order to save people I do not even know.
I've been kind. I've been cruel. I've killed and I've killed, and all I've done is ensure the conflict will grind on and on and on…
I wake up in one of my burrowed snow tunnels and there's a fox standing at the entrance, vermilion and gold in the bleak morning light, more beautiful than I have any right to see. Against the white he shines like a bead of blood, and I reach out to touch him, because perhaps his purity can heal me, perhaps his certainty can make me see, but…
He drops to the tunnel floor, instantly dead.
I didn't know. I didn't mean it. This power of mine flails out in my sleep. I wake from it bleary. Birds fall with the snow, sometimes. Once I saw a great elk collapse. I tried to eat it, to butcher it, but even in this frigid waste the flies descended before I could set to drying strips of its meat over a fire. The whole thing became a putrid carrion pile in hours.
I'm a cancer, is what it means. I'm better off up here. Pulled up here, like a rotten tooth out of a rotten jaw. Snap, more animals die.
I emerge past the fox and see them; hundreds of them splayed like the ocean that time in Times Square, after I'd shot myself dead. Not only foxes lie before me but butterflies too, God bless them, and rabbits, and deer, and a family of beavers huddled together, and matted gray wolves. Their bodies steam as their heat fades.
They came close to me, and this is what they get. I can't control my dreams, and even in my dreams I kill. Maybe I should bury all these poor bastards, set up a huge cairn of snow and boulders and scrawl some meaningless shit in the snow that will only be covered over in moments, taking credit for the murder I've done.
I'm like Midas, but every thing I touch turns to cold.
I walk north.
A sign for Пинега passes me by. I can't read it. I don't know where I am, but I'm getting closer. A sign says Совполье. The feeling on the line gets stronger, leaking power like the black and white zombies of Istanbul. What were they, I wonder? My mind simmers slowly on the possibilities. I see Anna in the Istanbul bunker again, wearing her helmet and beating me with a bat, and think that I'm glad. Good for her. Maybe she'll get it right.
One night I see the Northern Lights.
I'm standing on the cusp of a frozen wave; snow drifted by the winds over a leaning thatch of brambles. Several creepers emerge furtively from the white, reaching toward a sunlight that won't come again for months. Instead there are the Lights.
They are not like in the photographs I've seen; augmented and zoomed and colorized, vivid and glorious, but they are all the more impressive for it. They knock me on my ass, barely able to breathe, so for long moments I just stand and stare, until my feet grow numb and my cheeks sting with fresh trails of ice. They are alive in a wholly alien way.
The way they feel on the line is indescribable. The ripples, the tones, the beauty. I wonder if any other soul alive has felt what I'm feeling now, and doubt it. There's nothing up here for us survivors, only emptiness and solitude.
The Lights speak to me, and as I listen, things begin to shift. I see that all of my past to this point was one chapter; my LMA days, my New LA, my Lara and my kids, and that chapter is now over. I'm not the same Amo as before. The Lights are a doorway opening for me, showing I can still go forward, because there is no way back home anyway.
So I go forward, and leave that old, broken Amo behind.
I walk. Time sizzles and flows like ice, freezing and refreezing in ways I can't remember. My brain doesn't work properly, though the power of it crackles like a frozen puddle popping underfoot. Miles of cold and white pass by. I must be nearing the northern coast of Russia, bound for the Arctic Circle, and the pulsation on the line gets stronger every day.
It's a complex, shifting signal that washes over me day and night. There are tones in it that I recognize, some that seem strangely like echoes of my own signal bouncing back, and others that are new. I can taste hints of the chaos of Istanbul's black and white zombies, along with the cold thrill of the demons, the jittering hot spots of the ocean, and more sensations I don't know how to describe. Through my dreams it spreads like a heartbeat, gushing in my veins and fuelling me onward, until the understanding finally comes.
This is the heartbeat of the world.
Of course I've felt it before. Like background radiation, like traffic on a highway ten miles off that never stops, like the air that I breathe, it has always been there. It's a soup I've
been living in since the signal started and the world ended, and only now, up here in the isolation, can I really feel it.
I laugh as I walk, tasting old flavors again. At times I think I catch a glimmer of Lara in the line, or Anna, or maybe a zombie I remember from a long time back. Every step further north makes it stronger, makes the delineations sharper, helps me distinguish the thing that has pulled me this far, the thing that is different.
I even feel myself. When I'm quiet and walking, when my mind is on the snow and the world is calm, I sense my reflection on the line like a face in a broken mirror. When I'm driving, when I ride, when I get angry or frustrated and the black eye rises up, I see myself reflected in the line like an ugly bruise, and I wonder, is this darkness washing out across the world too? Am I tainting some communal well, sending nightmares and misery out over them all?
I feel the thing that is different too; slippery like a greasy tide. Maybe there are many, stitched to a necklace across the crown of the world. I can't tell.
Then it's there.
One night, I see it.
In the depths of the frozen dark, there is a light. The land around me is all crevasses; deep fissures in the permafrost that hide underground caverns. I go on skis, pulling a sled behind me laden with supplies, fitted with ice axes so that when I fall through the cracks, they spin and halt my descent.
Now I'm here, standing on the purple-dark snow with all those stars and the moon and the Northern Lights fizzling like ribbons of energy in the sky, and I see the light in the distance, atop a rising spike that at first seems to be a column of rock.
I stare.
A light out here doesn't seem possible without a person to tend it.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 167