"Young lady," he said at last, looking into her eyes while the Beechcraft above entered a steep dive that would, in less than a minute, result in a beautiful fireball against a rocky mountain flank. "What have you done?"
* * *
It got cold in the mountains.
"You could have jumped out with some jackets," Anna teased.
"I followed my hero," Peters replied, returning now to his deadpan delivery, though the twelve lepers still plainly made him uncomfortable. "You leapt with not even a parachute."
She smiled. That was a strange thing.
"If you'll let them carry you, we can be out of the mountains in hours."
Peters frowned hard.
So they hiked. They weren't wearing the right shoes. Probably they would freeze to death when night came, if it weren't for the heat fuming off her lepers. They had traversed only one mountain slope in hours. Anna could have jumped it in a second, perhaps two, tweaking the power that now seemed to live inside her, as accessible as a faucet, but it was better to walk with Peters.
They both needed it.
She'd tried to explain. He'd stopped being frustrated that he couldn't do what she did, and just come to accept this new ability of hers.
"So you blink?" he asked.
"I think, a twist," Anna answered, as if that made it any clearer. "Things just line up. I can feel them already, like a fifth limb, like I'm just making my hand into a fist. It's another muscle."
Peters nodded along. It was a lot to swallow.
"And these creatures." He gestured to the lepers flanking them like an honor guard. "What are they, really?"
Anna shrugged. She didn't really know any more than him. "Just people. Accidents. Like the ocean, like the demons, just different. I can see bits of them peeking through at times, but they're such a jumble. This one thinks about a movie he saw once, but the image is so degraded, then the memory flips to this other one, like they're sharing it, or eating it, and it goes down then something else comes up to replace it. They're feeding on themselves somehow, eating each other, but the fuel doesn't run out. It feels like, when they get done they just start up again."
Peters nodded. His breath steamed in the air. Already the sky was darkening, and they'd have to hunker down to rest some time soon. Anna didn't relish the thought of cuddling up to the lepers for warmth, but if they weren't going to jump their way out…
"Like perpetual motion machines," Peters said. "I have an interest in these."
Anna looked over at him. "You do?"
"Yes. I have many interests, Anna. I am an old man, after all."
"You're not even forty-five."
He snorted. "Well, I feel old. I used to build them, really as a hobby. My Abigail laughed at me. 'Water will not flow uphill', she would tell me, while she was laughing, and I kept building anyway. 'It is friction that is our problem' she said. And I would laugh then, and ask her about the ocean. Where do they obtain their energy from? They go and go, and they do not eat, but still they continue. The same is true of us. We eat little, but last a long time. I once went a month without eating, and I could have continued longer. My experiments."
Anna smiled. Peters rarely spoke this much, certainly not about his time with Abigail.
"She was a good match for you, I think. You kept each other sane for ten years."
He chuckled. "Yes, I think so. She did not want children, and every day that broke my heart, but she was a good woman. She did not deserve the end she received."
"She died in your arms. She died free."
He nodded.
Anna let a long moment pass.
"Cynthia is single, last I heard."
The look on his face made her laugh out loud. "You are not serious. I do not think you are suggesting I, and Cynthia, become a couple?"
Anna laughed again. It felt good, even if they were in the mountains humping through snow, with her feet soaked through and the wind picking up. "She's a handsome woman. She knows how to sow a field."
His expression became distraught. "She is twenty years my senior. Thirty, perhaps, Anna!"
"Perpetual motion helps with a lot. Less friction."
He jawed the air emptily, so offended he couldn't think of a sufficient reply, ultimately settling on, "You are a terrible matchmaker."
She laughed.
"I do not think it is funny," he grumbled. "It is my life."
"Maybe, but you shouldn't be alone any more," she said, then stopped, because that made her think about Ravi. Peters sensed the change in tone at once. He was good at that.
"Neither will you be," he said. "We will both be well. I feel this."
That was nice.
They trudged on in silence for a time. One of the lepers slipped and that was good for a half-hearted laugh.
We will both be well, Anna repeated under her breath. We will both be well.
* * *
After a cold night curled up together amongst the lepers, and half of another day trudging through the cold and snow, Peters relented.
"Let your servants carry me. This is unacceptable."
Anna rounded them up and had them lift him carefully. She had them lift her too, because they were better at jumping than her. Then she had them begin.
"Oh God," Peters exclaimed, as the first jump flung them fifty feet forward, then the second came fast on its heels, and the third. "I will be sick."
"Sorry," said Anna, and slowed the pace.
He sighed in relief.
They jumped, had a pause of a second, and jumped again.
"Actually, better to go fast," Peters said. "I will close my eyes."
Anna grinned, and revved the lepers up to full speed. Control of them came naturally now, like turning a dial on the wall, like leaning out to pull a catamaran into the wind. The world flickered by in a blur; up and down, the skyline jumping, the white snow changing angles.
In a few hours, perhaps, the mountains were behind them. Peters was actually asleep, like a babe in arms. She slowed her little army, and returned to walking along a road, carrying the sleeping Peters like a king on a chaise longue.
This was Romania, she supposed. She'd never been here before. There were patchwork fields full of pink wildflowers, and lots of panoramic hills.
She found a nice-looking red-roofed house, and broke her way in. She had the lepers set Peters down on a sofa, then packed them into the garage, settling them down with the door closed. They liked to be in the dark. While he slept she went to the kitchen, where she found a few edible things: what looked like tinned anchovies in bitter-tasting olive oil, crackers that crumbled to dust but were at least calories, some dried lasagna sheets and a jar of tomato sauce.
She cooked the lasagna sheets on a camping gas fire rummaged out of a closet, served with sparkling bottled water that still had a hint of fizz. She woke Peters to a feast and they ate by candlelight.
"Ravi was a good man," Peters said.
Anna smiled. It was about time for this, a proper wake. So they talked about Ravi, and grief. Peters shared stories about Abigail that he'd never told her before. Not only their best moments, but their worst too. The fights they had, the moments he'd thought she might leave one day and he'd never see her again. One time Peters had thought to surprise her with a bed full of roses, a wonderfully romantic gesture, and as soon as she'd seen it she just laughed and laughed and couldn't stop laughing. Afterward she'd never been able to explain why it struck her so, but she did call him a 'Dear man' and after they'd cleared the bed of roses and thorns, they put it to good use.
Anna blushed. Peters chuckled. "Why? You are a grown woman now. Soon to be a mother."
She blushed more.
She shared the things about Ravi that had always annoyed her; what a pushover he was, his lack of ambition, the annoying way he always had of just getting calmer when she got worked up in a fight, and was surprised to find herself crying halfway through.
"It's good," Peters said. "To make you clean."
They ate crumbled biscuits and sucked a few hard candies she found in a rusted tin. Still good.
Three days passed like that, during which they did nothing but eat, and talk, and recover while taking slow walks around the house, looking at the distant mountains. It was easy enough to forget the lepers in the garage, and with them contained, it didn't feel like there was any rush. There was no place they had to be right then, and nothing urgent they could do to help Lucas with his various challenges. It was nice to play at this act of domesticity; the ritual of bidding each other good night, as they each retired to their rooms; to bid each other good morning and sit to breakfast together like being a family, having a real life, like being back in New LA.
After the three days were up, Peters showed her the radio.
It had been built from spare parts scavenged from nearby houses.
"Where did this come from?" Anna asked.
Peters gave a kind smile. "I made it. It is time, Anna."
That unbalanced the careful equilibrium they'd built. "What do you mean? Time for what?"
"Time to go home. The real home."
She looked at the radio, and understood, even though she didn't like it. There was a resistance there, a kind of dream that maybe they could just stay here and live like this forever, but of course that was only a pleasant fiction. They had to go.
"You built this at night," she said, not a question. "While I was asleep."
He nodded. "I do not need much sleep, Anna. You know this about me. Yet you do. You have lost a lot. You have a baby coming. This rest has healed you very much. But it is time."
She sighed. It was funny to imagine him sneaking out at night, smuggling these materials in by flashlight, assembling them piece by piece. It was a kind of betrayal, but not really. In truth it was a kindness.
"We have to go back," she said.
He just smiled. They both knew it was true. Three days was long enough.
He turned the radio on. It took a little while, tuning to the frequency for Istanbul, boosting the gain enough to get over the mountains, but at last they got through. The person on the other end came through crackling, but clear enough to hear. They fetched Helen.
The news Helen told them changed everything.
The remaining eight bunkers had been bombed.
Every shield had been taken out, leaving the people there trapped and helpless on the line, just like Gap and Brezno. A bomb had also fallen on Istanbul two days ago, a large-scale cluster bomb that completely destroyed the airfield and wiped out almost everyone who'd been above ground. Some seven hundred people.
And more bombs were falling.
Peters and Anna listened in stunned silence.
They'd left the bunker behind, organizing a rag-tag evacuation to Istanbul; an enormous refugee train of the sick, injured, and mad, only able to travel within the confines of the crater on the line.
Peters looked at Anna, and she looked back at him, as Helen went on listing losses. There was a choice there to feel guilt, that maybe they should have returned faster, done something earlier, but there was no point in that now. Nothing they could have done would have changed this, but still, it soured the three days they'd spent indulging a fantasy.
It also raised a new threat, one only hinted at on the line and in all the literature she'd heard about the days of the apocalypse. A shadow SEAL that brought the apocalypse about in the beginning. Someone that even now was trying to eradicate not only her own people, but every other survivor in the world, the bunkers included.
"We have to go," Peters said. "Now."
Anna was already pulling the lepers out of the garage.
20. FORTY YEARS
Lara made her people move.
The pyre still burned before her. It would burn through the night and into the next day, a new symbol for the country and its people. She stood and watched the flames while her people prepared.
The net she'd cast over them hummed with her anger, controlling them just as Witzgenstein's lusts, petty grievances and bigotry had controlled them before. Now their minds had changed. She didn't care what stories they told themselves, about why they were doing these things. Perhaps they'd just changed their minds. An epiphany had struck them all.
She turned, while they bustled in and out of the White House. It wasn't what it once had been; not sacred, not glorious, not inspirational. Witzgenstein's death in the flames had wiped that out. There was no foundation stone here to build a new civilization upon. There was nothing. There was shame, and a new collective guilt, bigger than the guilt of manifest destiny.
Had Crow been the last of his people?
The wicked work was done. So let America rest.
She watched her people work. They knew where the stores were; everything Witzgenstein had stolen from the Strategic Reserves before she'd put them to the torch. Trailers full of food, good gasoline, clothes, clean water, everything they would need for the months to come.
And the months would come. Years.
After a time, Lara moved. It hurt to walk on burned soles, with burned skin pulling tight. She went into the White House, where nothing really remained. No clothes for her, no memories but misery. She walked the halls, looking into sad staterooms that passed by in a blur of elegant decoration and lost dreams.
The shining city on a hill.
She brought a doctor to her, and she tended to her burns. The pain was there but at one remove, filtered through the line. Her legs and feet had it worst. Her scalp in places, her face, her back, her arms. She looked at the raw wounds as they were doused with cold water, then cleansed with burning antiseptics, wrapped carefully with thin gauze.
Tonight would mark her for the rest of her life.
She had them put her in a wheelchair. She almost wept, when at last her thoughts turned to her children, and what she'd made them witness.
No better than Amo as he killed Drake. The things they'd seen. It wasn't fair, and she wanted nothing more than to go to them, but she couldn't. Her emotions would be too volatile, and she couldn't let her control slip, not for a second, not after what she'd done to Witzgenstein, and to Frances.
They'd all seen it, her naked show of power on the line. Some of them might recognize it. Some of them might have learned, and be waiting for their chance to walk her back into the flames.
Seeing her children would make her weak, and she couldn't afford that now.
She looked at her face in a mirror. She wouldn't be the same. No longer beautiful. Mottled, now. Handsome, perhaps. Fearful. The patches singed out of her hair wouldn't regrow. Her neck would always be raw. She would wear these wounds with the shame they merited.
Witzgenstein's screams would never be enough. They would always be too much.
She looked round the Oval Office one last time. There was no cairn to leave behind. No one would ever come this way again. No one would sit in that chair. The power of the old world, along with all of its symbols, was now thoroughly broken.
The convoy stretched down to the gates; thirty-one vehicles loaded with supplies, people, and failure. Thirty-one pairs of hands let off the parking brakes at once, and thirty-one feet pressed on the gas pedals, and every one of them was Lara. She lay in the back of the tabernacle, Drake's silver airstream, her eyes closed while the convoy rumbled to life, working the net deeper into her people. She would sleep soon, and she couldn't let them rise up while she was unconscious. She knit her net deep around their hearts, a bridle so far in they would mistake it for their own hopes and dreams, a lie for the ages.
So she made them like Drake's hollow-eyed children; flat and obedient, not trusted with their own free will.
She didn't pause to think it was impossible. She only acted. Crow had died, and in death some remnant piece of him on the line had physically hurled her from the fire. If that was real, what couldn't be?
What wouldn't be?
She pinched off all her threads, and in the midst of the pain in her body, she fell into a dark, dreamles
s sleep.
* * *
The bombs didn't fall that night or the next day.
Lara lived out fever dreams, while her dressings were checked and changed, and they pumped antibiotics into her system, and long discussions went back and forth about skin grafts.
She cut them all short, swimming up from the depths of the line to exert control. She didn't speak, didn't open her eyes, because she was in another conversation now.
She was speaking with Crow, deep in the line. There was some of him there still, exchanging dreamy explanations and inspirations. What next? What now?
He wanted her to trust. To let the people go again, and forgive. He said the fever had broken with the death of Witzgenstein, and they could now be trusted to do the right thing. Lara only had counter-arguments. Everything she'd lived argued against that. They had cheered for her death by fire, and that had come from within them, and she couldn't find it in her anywhere to forgive them.
What forgiveness could there be? What foundation stone would remain?
They would keep going, just as Amo had told them. They would wander for forty years in the desert, if that was what it took. She thought back to his days after Maine, when the guilt of what he'd done held him deep in its embrace, and she'd done everything she could to snap him out of it.
Now all she had was the ghost of Crow, and he couldn't snap her out of it, because he wasn't even real.
"You're dead," she told him. "You aren't real."
He couldn't argue. He argued, but she didn't listen. His arguments had no weight.
Forty years of wandering had a ring to it. Her generation would be done. The next generation could start afresh. Let all memory of the past be erased in an endless stream of disheveled gas stations, crumbling cities and rusting cars. Let it all be erased.
"And if Amo needs you?" Crow asked. "If the real world calls?"
"Let them call. We are nothing now. A genetic remainder, left from an equation we couldn't balance."
Crow just shook his head. "People have lost more."
"I don't think so," said Lara, and stopped listening to him. Part of her knew, even in the depths of the line, in her sleep, that he would be gone soon. Nothing would be left. He'd used up his purple spark in saving her, and she couldn't offer anything in return.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 194