Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light

by Grist, Michael John

  "He's testing the wall," she said blankly, marking out the lines in her head where the invisible shield ended. "Maybe not even consciously."

  Arter frowned, and looked again at the screen. "I don't think that's possible. It's scaled down to a level he can't possibly register, with modulations that…"

  He trailed off as Heron walked up to the screen and drew a bright, curving stripe down the screen, at the edge of where Amo's army frolicked. The monitor picked up the motion and added a yellow line to the feed, tracking her finger. "Resolve to the shield," she said, and the yellow morphed atop the existing boundary of their island in the line.

  The match was close to exact.

  "Ah," said Arter awkwardly. "Right. I haven't been out there much."

  "It's not detectable," Heron said. "You're right about that. And it phases too fast to see. You couldn't have known where it ended."

  Arter didn't say anything. It was just more evidence of the way Olan Harrison kept them imprisoned, and how well he'd shielded them from James While's numerous scans. If nobody could feel the wall or see it, then how could they possibly scheme to cross it in either direction?

  "But he feels it," Arter said at last. "This is no coincidence."

  Others in the pod were watching them now, their current work abandoned. Heron looked at them, and felt her own bonds to Olan tightening. The sense of frustration came back again, and she realized how much it had been exacerbated by speaking with Amo. His madness was like a word on the tip of her tongue, always eluding capture, bringing with it that curious sense of something she was supposed to have done, or be doing.

  Olan Harrison kept them like slaves. That was true. But in the world of the blind, the one-eyed woman was queen, and Rachel had always expected that position for herself. Now though, with this mad man on their doorstep, things felt like they were changing.

  That change brought a crushing sense of panic, at how truly trapped she was. Perhaps all her years of scheming amounted only to this. Amo was a mad man, and Olan was a mad man too, and here was she, trapped in the middle.

  7. TRIAL

  Lara voyaged west from Washington, with her people in tow.

  It began as a lonely, silent journey, full of agony in both her body and soul. She felt the fire's searing kiss on her skin without end, slumped on the back sofa of Drake's silver Airstream, rumbling over cracked old roads. The scorched soles of her feet rested in antiseptic bandages on ice. A dozen more bandages covered assorted burns up her legs, on her shoulders, across her swelling belly. Antibiotics and painkillers coursed through her system, numbing her senses, but none of them salved the pain in her soul.

  Her people had tried to burn her alive.

  The memories were never far away. She couldn't escape the righteous expression on Witzgenstein's face as she consigned Lara to the flames. She couldn't forget the screams as Witzgenstein took her place on the fire.

  She didn't sleep.

  She exerted control.

  Everything now was control, using Witzgenstein's bridle at all times, because none of them could be trusted. On the line she smothered the people from New LA and Drake's family alike, and steered them in a long convoy, their every breath and movement filtered through her, their every turn, their every thought regulated.

  So they left Washington, DC behind. They spidered west along I-70 toward West Virginia, and she suffered. The rage didn't calm, nor the outrage. The shame didn't cool, nor the pain, so she vented it outward into her people.

  They all burned. They all felt the joy and guilt of murdering Witzgenstein. They felt what it was to kneel naked in the mud, equally distraught and dominant. She gave them the memory of Crow's pain, and her own.

  Then the trial began.

  On the morning of the third day, as they crossed into Ohio toward Columbus, she began a rotation of people in and out of the Airstream, like courtiers come to kiss the ring. She sat them down before her and slit them open on the line, burning through the full contents of their minds in one sitting; their memories and emotions, intentions and drives, pains and joys, until their thoughts were worn down to tired nubs.

  Then she moved on to the next. There were no secrets between any of them; not anymore.

  Throughout the first long day came Cynthia, then George and Alan, a smattering of Drake's blank children, Drake's wives and husbands. All slit open before her, and not one of the interrogations used words. She didn't need them anymore, and neither did they. Her bridle was in all their mouths, stopping up their tongues. Her lash lay across all their backs.

  So their judgment would come.

  In Cynthia she saw everything, from the bashful hillbilly racism entwined around her heart to the welter of jealousies and rages she'd felt at Jake after he came out, at Drake for never taking her to his bed, at Witzgenstein for not raising her up higher. Throughout there was a heady mixture of impotent rage, cruel thoughts, confusion, shame and distaste.

  She looked into Alan's soul. Masako's partner, Lin's father; he was an empty, insincere, insecure man. Even within his own memories he second-guessed himself, from his actions to the actions of others, whether they liked him or hated him or were laughing at him behind his back. Even his own son was a mystery to him, with his fey, half-Japanese eyes, and his muttered scraps of a language Alan had never mastered. Alan had felt belittled and shunted every day of his adult life, and followed Masako, then Witzgenstein, then Drake because following others was the only way he knew.

  In a child of Drake she found acres of nothingness. Whole realms were empty, that should have been packed with ant-burning and girl-shoving and moments of bullying and being bullied, of parental love and friendship and excitement and fear, all treasured and sutured around with the scar tissue of childish interpretation. All that remained were gray spaces still bearing the glove-like imprint of Drake's puppet-master hand.

  She wept after each child like him.

  She opened up Lydia, and wept more as the past came spooling out like the rot finally unleashed from a gangrenous wound. A decade of degradation. A lifetime of being abused, of going against her sexual orientation, of fulfilling the survival dreams of a vindictive, empathetic, dominating master, becoming his baby-making machine and little more. She saw back to Lydia's first days in her semi-trailer cage, to the time she held Drake's life in her own hands, with a knife she could have stabbed into his heart, and felt that agonizing choice play out in her mind every day since.

  There was so much pain and shame.

  In some hearts the anger remained. In a woman named Alyssa there was little more than naked, brittle hatred, but then terrible things had been done to her, for so long. Sat upon the chair before Lara, her abuses poured out like vomit. Drake had used her for years: in long days of meaningless humiliation; in senseless, joyless orgies that lasted far beyond the outer edge of pleasure; in games of passive emotional blackmail that amused only him. Madness had come and gone from her several times, harnessed to a growing cruel streak that Drake fostered.

  He liked darkness in others. He liked the splintering, and the sharpening, and the trials.

  She cracked open George, who'd been there the day Drake had arrived as they prepared to leave for Sacramento. He'd always been quiet, decent and respectable in a classic middle-America way, calling Amo 'Sir', and her 'Ma'am' for his first year in New LA. Deep in his heart she found an honest desire for rules and order, for the same laws to apply to all equally, though that desire had been inflated to the exclusion of all else. Now he was sore and leaking from a cancerous mass inside.

  Lara found the core of the cancer, and watched it replay in brittle, brutal vignettes. George broke Crow's legs, and shoved him into his hutch beneath the pyre. George tightened the gag around Crow's mouth, and cinched his bonds, and finally threw the first burning torch onto the pyre's gasoline-soaked baseboards, believing what he was doing was right.

  It made her sick; only more so for the rest of him that screamed for relief. He had been the first to help when L
ara was refurbishing her coffee shop in New LA. He'd baked a coffee cake at her side, and they'd laughed about the difference between a 'cortado cake' and a 'latte cake'. "Size," was the answer, Lara had said, waving her pinkie, this just after Amo had ordered a one-shot cortado. George had cracked up, and looked guiltily at Amo, then cracked up some more.

  Yet he'd tortured and killed Crow. What punishment did that require?

  She found traces of Crow lingering in all of them, a knowledge of what they'd done, and it reduced them all. None were proud of it. The ones who might have vaunted it as a great deed were dead or gone. Amo had taken Arnst. Drake was dead, as were Witzgenstein and Frances. Even Alyssa felt shame, and what did that leave but these poor, misguided, rage-filled sheep…

  Eighty-seven souls remained. Lara interrogated them all, and wept until it hurt, until the pain and rage in her own heart bubbled to the surface and finally spewed out.

  She brought in the last two as the convoy tore through Colorado; her children. Vie and Talia sat side by side on the judgment chairs before her, so pale and sallow and alone, unable to take each others' hands because of the bridle cinched tight around them, so small and forlorn. They had seen their father beat a man's head in. They had seen their mother launch from a burning pyre and cast another back in her place. The things they had seen…

  Lara wept.

  'There but for the grace of God go I,' came the words of her father, Ezekiel, lecturing her as a little girl on their porch. She'd had a bad dream about the men who'd killed the black boy in their neighborhood. 'The Lord walks with us, don't you know that, child? Look back on the beach of your life, and see in the hardest times there's only one set of footsteps. Where was the Lord at those times, Lara?'

  Through her tears she'd always known the answer.

  'Carrying me,' she'd answer, and her father would nod, and kiss her head, and didn't she miss her father now, and wish her mother was still alive, and Amo was here too, and why couldn't they all be together?

  Why couldn't they all be together again?

  Looking into her children's eyes, with the pain too powerful for her to take anymore, and the anguish of their sad little eyes bearing her down, she finally let the bridle drop.

  Somewhere east of Denver, Colorado, five days after the pyre on the White House lawn, the convoy came to a grinding halt. Her children snapped awake and began to sob at once, flinging themselves at her. They tucked their shuddering little bodies under her arms like baby birds, pressed hard and hot against her chest where they trembled and wept, and Lara clutched them desperately tight in return. Savage emotions burst out of her like a geyser, and together they shook while the torrent raged.

  So it went across the convoy, with every vehicle stopped, and every heart broken. George embraced Alan, Lin embraced Margery, Cynthia became the hot little center of five of Drake's weeping children, Alyssa sobbed while Lydia sobbed beside her, and the two took hands and wept together.

  The survivors of New LA and the survivors of Drake sobbed as one. Their pain rose up in a burning, cleansing gush, mingling and ascending into the line together, resolving into a deep wail of human redemption.

  Lara held her children tighter than she ever had before.

  Hope.

  There had to be hope above all, she could see that now. There had to be forgiveness no matter the crime, because the cost of carrying old rage was too high. They had to do better, and they had to do it together. With no God come down to carry them across the beach, they would have to carry each other.

  8. PARTY

  A calm descended.

  Outside, it grew dark. Hours must have passed. Lara's head ached with crying, and her burns throbbed, but still she held the hot heads of her children close.

  They were asleep. Perhaps the first true sleep they'd had since Drake had come, with their mother by their side. She felt their weary minds on the line, now dreaming of simple games on the beach back in New LA.

  New LA was gone forever; not only the place, but also the idea. Now they needed a new idea. Amo was out there still, fighting the people who had to be fought. Anna was there with him. Lara was here, with her own people. She felt them on the line dotting back through the convoy, settling into their little pockets, finding the strength in each other, and wanted more.

  She laid Vie and Talia's heads gently down on the chaise beside her. She couldn't walk; the soles of her feet were ravaged and it was hard even to bend her legs, but she could shuffle forward on her knees.

  She slipped off the couch and crawled along the empty Airstream, looking out through the windshield onto a silent, purple nightscape of dunes and desert scrub. Against the starry horizon, rocky buttes shouted upward. That was beautiful, because there was room for beauty still.

  The blacktop was warm and scratchy with sand beneath her knees.

  'On your knees,' Witzgenstein had said. It had been the hardest thing for her to do, prevented by fear, by pride, by rage. Now it was easy. The words to one of her favorite hymns came back to her, 'At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow,' and a fresh blush of tears ran down her cheeks. These cleared the headache and strengthened her.

  Jesus was not here with them. Maybe once he had been, but she didn't feel him now. Yet she was here, and these people were here, so she would bow down to them.

  At the first RV she knocked. Hushed whispers beyond fell silent. There was fear there still. They didn't know what was coming. The sound of footsteps followed, and the door opened, and a shotgun barrel pointed in her face.

  Lara met the barrel with spread arms. "It's just me," she said.

  Alyssa stared down at her. Her arms trembled. They'd never spoken, but they knew each other now with a deep certainty, better than Lara had known anyone.

  "You," she said, hate and terror mingling.

  "I'm throwing a party," Lara said. Her voice felt very small in the dark of the desert, on her knees, looking up into the twin dark holes in the shotgun's barrel. "I think you've got some Cheetos on board. In one of the supply boxes. Do you want to bring them out?"

  Alyssa's rage was spiked by a frown. It took her long moments to work the question through her dense, intense mind. "Cheetos?"

  "And you've got chairs," Lara pressed. "I want you all out here, Alyssa. William and Andreas, Mary and Joseph, Eldrid and Lenore, all of you. It wouldn't be a party without you."

  Alyssa stared. It was too much to process. "You're mad. We're leaving. None of us know you anymore."

  Lara nodded, tried a smile. "You do know me. You know everything about me. Now I want you to trust me. I want to trust you." A pause. "Maybe you have some good tunes on an iPod also? The more the merrier."

  Alyssa looked sickened. An iPod? Her thoughts rang out clear. They had to run. They had to get away from this crazy, all-powerful woman as quickly as possible.

  Lara caught herself thinking how easy it would be to nudge her just a little, to massage her thinking on the line and help her take that first step toward reconciliation. But that would undo the point of all this. It had to be real.

  "It'll be good for the children," Lara said, aiming for the sweet spot, the reason Drake's wives and husbands had endured so much for so long. "I know you're all mothers and fathers. They need this more than us. We've got a long journey ahead. I hope we can make it together."

  Alyssa said nothing. Questions jumbled in her head. What long journey? Why together? Her arms shook violently now. "You can't just come here and ask for a party. You can't do this."

  Lara shrugged gently. "I know that. But we have to do something, don't we? Why not this? Whatever you decide, I'll be out here." Then she shuffled away on her knees, leaving Alyssa staring, gun pointed at nothing.

  At the next RV she did the same, this time requesting Big Red and grape soda, battened somewhere away in boxes snatched from one of the supply depots, before Witzgenstein burned it. They were equally confused. She did it again at the next, and the next, until she'd visited them all, and scraped her knees bloody o
n the sand-strewn road. Then she shuffled out to sit on a rock off the verge, plain as a siren in the moonlight, and waited.

  She could feel them watching her from the safe little glow of their capsule RVs. She could feel them thinking. Now there was trust within each pod, but the spine linking them to each other could break at any moment. They were seconds away from fragmenting and lighting out each on their own.

  Yet the confusion forestalled that. Lara was sitting out there now, quiet, unarmed, smiling. She'd invited them to a party? She'd asked them to bring instant coffee and canned corn? What did that mean? Hadn't she just been controlling them? Hadn't she forced them all to their knees? Hadn't she been the one to kill Witzgenstein in the vilest way possible?

  And yet…

  Alyssa's RV revved its engine and started away, circling the Airstream and plunging into the night. Lara let it go. The warm air hummed with potential. Its lights receded over a rise and the sound of its engine faded, then abruptly cut out.

  Lara felt the people in that vehicle deciding. She felt the pull of what she was offering, just like she'd offered the same so long ago, in an icy field beside the Maine bunker. Back then their people had been blasted apart by Witzgenstein's first trial, and it took a gamble with all her remaining respect to bring them together, at a table in the midst of the snow.

  Now there was this.

  'She hasn't stopped us,' she heard them saying, in Alyssa's RV. 'She came on her knees. She's just waiting. What if there really is a party? She's got most of the kids. We can't just leave them. We have to try.'

  The engine noise resumed.

  The RV puttered back, parking where it had started. No people emerged. They only watched through the porthole windows.

  Lara felt Vie wake up, in the back of the Airstream, and she soothed him with a touch on the line; his mother was outside, and waiting. He took Talia's hand without needing to be told, and pulled her awake, so they walked out together.