Come
Like sirens. The sound was a storm threatening to tip her tiny catamaran at any second, and only she could hold the tiller. Down below their black and white bodies spun in a jagged, skipping circle, like dark children playing a game of Ring-A-Round the Rosie. The engines roared and the plane body creaked, and she watched the dial on the dash spin below one thousand feet.
Then Peters was on her, shouting something she couldn't hear. She didn't fight as he stripped her safety belt and yanked her out of the pilot's seat, dropping her hard onto the steeply tilting floor.
He pulled on the stick and the Beechcraft's nose jerked up, making the engine scream and slamming Anna's head into the metal floor. In that moment of white stars and pain, it happened. Something like lightning lashed out on the line and snaked round her head, snapping her gaze up to see-
A leper leapfrogged into the plane.
Anna gasped at its impossible, stop-motion beauty. It struck her dizzy and numb. It looked like something unearthed from beneath a rock; with black slug-like muscle and ribbons of stripped white skin. In its strength there was a dazzling rightness.
It lurched toward her, and she felt the terrible power pouring off it like a fever.
Peters was screaming now at the controls, and the storm was right here, in him and in her, and she luxuriated in it. It was so strong, so incredibly powerful, and it made her wild. She felt Peters wink out beneath it, felt herself shrinking, and understood.
Come
Called the lepers, and down the plane went. Was it time yet, was it already time?
She ran to the leper, and it embraced her, its skin crisping her own. She embraced it back and kept moving. It couldn't stop her, just like the waves couldn't stop a catamaran they were already tossing aloft. She could read the ocean, as she always had. This was her skill.
They wanted her to come, and she was coming.
With one smooth movement she yanked the emergency lever on the hull, snapped the door open. It broke off in the slipstream, and the rush of air tugged her and the leper bodily out.
She flew. It was a dive like Cerulean before her, like everyone who'd died and come back without their mind in place, who'd never had a choice or a chance, this was her chance and her choice. The wind grabbed her and flung her and the leper away from the little plane, tumbling madly on the crackling line.
An anguished cry from Peters rang after her, as consciousness snatched him back, but already her sense of self was fragmenting into the leper. The wind ripped the life from her lungs and buffeted their bodies as they plummeted to Earth together, offering fleeting glimpses of the creatures spinning below, the reeling sky, and the little plane pulling away.
INTERLUDE 10
James While and Joran Helkegarde didn't see each other in the flesh again.
Joran went to the Alps under cover of night, to where Olan Harrison's facility was waiting, outfitted with his team and everything he would need.
Together they watched as the radial fuses of Amo in New York and Drake in London raced toward eruption, until finally Amo won the pool, on a date with a barista from his coffee shop.
The second blast on the line rang out, and ended the world. The transmission spread in a wave; from New York it leapt the Atlantic in hours, cropping Eastern Canada, the Caribbean and the whole of South America before the long silence of the open ocean, chopping Greenland and Iceland almost as afterthoughts, and making landfall in Africa to rush east. Mauritania and Morocco went first, followed by Portugal and Ireland then Spain, France and England as the wave front spread, taking a swathe of African nations, as the hydrogen line convulsed.
It hit Drake on his Mediterranean cruise. It took Holland and Belgium and washed over Switzerland, engulfing their little oasis in the Alps with a sensation he felt burning in his skin, as the neutered T4 uselessly tried to trigger. Onward it flowed, sweeping across Germany, Scandinavia, flooding through Egypt and down the Nile toward the Middle East, where it swallowed the vast empty swathes of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran and Syria, silencing the conflict of generations around Israel and racing inexorably on, leveling all beneath it.
Mountains and rivers didn't slow it. It swept across land and water alike and left the emptiness of gray-skinned, white-eyed type ones in its wake, who sniffed at the line and stampeded and formed herds to seek out the coma survivors who'd suffered so much already. Joran's heart went out to them, as the tsunami rolled over their heads. They couldn't have prepared, they couldn't have been saved.
Already he'd watched Drake kill a dozen helpless type ones, transmitted live from cameras on his cruise liner. Amo still slept in New York. Other survivors around the world were waking to the carnage, each living or dying in their own ways.
Still the wave swept east, engulfing Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, biting deep into Russia and encircling Nepal and the great subcontinent of India, swallowing millions per second, gathering billions into its bosom, until at last it met itself somewhere in the middle of China, where the eastern tide hit the western tide and sealed a dome of infection over the world.
A ridgeline of type twos rose briefly along the front where the two waves clashed, down through China and Mongolia, but he'd always expected something like that might happen. The type ones acted exactly as he'd expected; piling themselves up on the twos to end the threat, like white blood cells overwhelming an infection.
Then it was over.
His shields stood up. The cure endured. The whole process took a little less than twelve hours.
Nobody moved for a long time, after that. There was a lot of processing required. Then one by one they trickled outside, as if by unspoken agreement, into the wan afternoon light where they looked at the sky, some cried, some stood alone, and made peace with this new world they lived within.
Years only remained, for all of them. The timer had been set.
Soon enough, they went back to work.
It was early the next morning that the call came in from Bordeaux.
Sovoy stood before them on the video screen, holding a gun in his hand, with blood trickling down his jaw. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes crazed.
"I've turned the shield up," he said. "Any moment we'll go under. This isn't natural, Joran. I can't live like this and I won't."
The Alps team watched helplessly on internal cameras as he ran onto the top gantry of Bordeaux, shooting at anyone who came near. He was not the same man he'd once been. They approached him with an armed security team, and soon enough they brought him down, but the damage had been done. Post-analysis showed he'd spun the shield into overdrive, and the result came within minutes.
Thousands of scientists all throughout Bordeaux, every member of Sovoy's team, dropped. They didn't phase into type ones, like those beneath the flood above. Instead they were trapped in a diminished cycle of the shield, unable to move, unable to speak, but still there, blinking at times.
In five days the last of them were dead. Joran watched throughout. Three thousand people lost for nothing.
It was the only shield that failed.
* * *
James While watched the world end from the Prime Array, tucked into the Siberian wilderness between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, two hundred miles southeast of Novosibirsk. The bellows of Joran's one thousand Prime Array subjects let him know when the wave had passed over.
His people; a handful of those most trusted, most dedicated, most loyal, looked to him for leadership.
He didn't have any words, because he'd never been that kind of leader. Rather he led them to the Array, where they stood on the circling gantry and looked over the mass of one thousand howling beasts. All the thirty-six types were there in all their gore, expressed into reality. They lashed each other and strained to be free. James While saw in them a metaphor for the past year of his life.
But the tide was turning now.
He led his people down.
Together they walked a gauntlet through the ranks of creatures. Gray ones and red ones, b
lue ones and yellow ones, wraiths and beasts and monsters. He could almost feel the line burning off them.
They couldn't see him. The cure hid him and his people completely. This was the new reality, and he stood amongst the thousand for a long time, letting the chaos wash over him.
He didn't need to give a speech, after that. Everyone knew their roles. They were caretakers only, tending to the world until a new generation could come and pick up the pieces. So they began the long work of laying all the groundwork they could.
* * *
In the aftermath, Joran stole people.
The first was an old man in Belgium, eight days after the end. It was their earliest foray into the post-apocalyptic world, and it went smoothly. Wrecks on the road were easy to move. Throngs of type ones ignored them and flowed past like tides.
His name was Maxime Willem, sixty-three years old, a postman in his past life. They found him in his back yard, huddled by a low wood fire in a too-new barbeque set. He had a table set out on his porch laid with various meats that were already going off. He had beer and wine enough for thirty people. He'd even put up bunting.
"He's going to kill himself," said Kaley, one of the youngest on Joran's team, as they spied on Maxime with a drone. "That's what this is for."
Joran went in alone.
There was no way to do it without lies. Still, he tried to steel himself for the moment when the hope fell out of the old man's eyes. He wanted to shout out the truth before he even saw him.
He stepped around the wooden gate into Maxime Willem's back yard, amongst all that sad regalia and forlorn hope, and held out his fake badge, dressed in his fake uniform. He didn't speak Belgian, but Maxime spoke English.
"I'm from the United Nations," he said. "I've come to help."
Maxime stared. He didn't believe what he was seeing. Perhaps he thought he was dreaming. When he spoke it was roughly, remembering the parts of his brain he'd already started to forget. He asked questions. He wanted to know about his family, his grandchildren in other countries. He embraced Joran. He wept. He offered him a hamburger, though the BBQ fire was now guttering in a drizzly rain.
He got in the vehicle and met the team. They smiled as if it was real, as if they were really going to help him. The journey back took a day and a night, and throughout Joran answered Maxime's questions, offering him hope. It was the least he could do.
They gave Maxime one day of happiness in the bunker; good food, good people, the chance of a future, before Joran broke it to him in the experimental room.
"What would you do, if you could save your grandchildren?"
"Anything," Maxime said swiftly. "Of course, anything I could."
"Would you die?"
"In a moment. What good is my life? Why, when you found me-"
Joran held up a hand. He let a silence develop. There was no kind way. There was only the quieter way.
"Would you suffer?"
Maxime's expression changed. He saw something.
"Why should I suffer?"
So Joran showed him. He explained what would happen. The battery of tests was designed with breaks for recovery, so it would take two weeks for him to die. There would be peaks and troughs in the pain, but there would always be pain. Gradually Maxime would lose his mind as they shaved pieces away, measuring every second for analysis.
Maxime accepted. He'd fought in a war, or so he said. He made them promise to save his grandchildren, and they did.
Within a day he begged for them to stop. He took back his permission. In tears, he begged Joran so much that he grew hoarse. It hurt, he said. It hurt inside his mind, not just his body, not just his head, but in who he was.
Joran listened. He always listened, to them all, even when his team could not. He held the hands of his subjects, and stroked their brows, and said kind words, but still he killed them. Drop by drop, sliver by sliver, he cut them to pieces and turned the pieces into data across a thousand spreadsheets.
So Maxime died. So Joran's team came to look at him as a machine. They held him in awe. They called him the Angel of Death. And one by one, they waited for their turn at the bench.
Kaley's skin was the first to peel away, only six months in. Her death was slow, and from it they learned a lot about how to postpone the deaths of the rest. New developments in their treatment regime came, and they shared the data on James While's new fiber Arrays with the Arks, who did their own work, and processed the information for all it was worth.
The next death came at eleven months. By that point they'd captured nineteen different survivors, and learned enormous amounts. Every death took them closer, as Joran learned to better work the hydrogen line at the same time as the T4.
He talked infrequently with James While at first, keeping each other appraised of their progress. But that frequency grew as their teams died around them, until they spoke every day, and then multiple times a day.
Years passed by.
The last of Joran's team died at four years, around the same time the Maine bunker underwent its revolution. Joran and James watched it together along with all the other Arks. The flaws were there to see, in retrospect, fueled as they were by Lars Mecklarin's lies. Not all the Arks had required lying. Many of the Arks had been open from the start, but each person had been a fresh calculation. It was deemed that some of them could handle the truth, while others couldn't.
These were routed to MARS3000. In the end it was a failed experiment, and one by one the feeds from within Maine were lost, until the last image of Salle Coram in her Command hall faded to black, with her words echoing across the SEAL at large.
"No more lies."
Joran kept lying.
He'd killed sixty-seven more survivors by then; their dead bodies tipped off the cliff edge, their data captured in his shifting algorithms. He'd lied to every one of them, though now his lies were different.
He wasn't from the United Nations anymore, too much time had passed. Now he was an ambassador from a new civilization of survivors. He made up a backstory and designed a tatty uniform. He decked out the Alps bunker with the sad raiment of that imagined growing empire, though he couldn't afford them a full day of happiness any longer. Once they were in, already under the control of sedative drugs he slipped into his van's air, he gave them a choice of their final meal.
Most of them didn't eat it. To be at the mercy of a single man, a man promising torture with no hope of salvation, was quite different from how it had been before.
At seven years, his skin began to slip intolerably. At eight he was at forty percent. His work rate slowed. It grew harder to capture the specimens he needed, but he innovated ways around that; voice-controlled mechanical lifts to move their bodies, new ways to administer the drugs, a vehicle that could largely self-drive. He minimized his physical contact.
At ten years he was at eighty percent, and for the first time lost a lip. It didn't grow back. His ears left him next, his nose, his fingers began to stick together. It was always hardest to place replacement skin grafts on his back. He found a way to mechanize it.
James While grew ugly and monstrous, just as he did.
Eleven years passed, and together they watched the growth of Amo's little empire in Los Angeles, through the few satellites still remaining and snatches of long-distance radio transmissions. It was hard not to root for him, though he of course stood in opposition to the Arks. Joran even tried to argue the Arks into signing Amo's treaty, when those days rolled around, but by then the Arks had stopped listening to the two mad hermits who'd started this thing.
At thirteen years, when the Arks struck New LA with a nuclear weapon that changed the line completely, they didn't warn him or James While. Amo's treaty forces in Istanbul were broken and scattered in a land assault, sending them west, which offered a chance he could not ignore.
Then Anna's team fled to within range of him, and he roused himself for one final pick-up. He hadn't done any for a year. He knew it would be his last effort, and that it wo
uld kill him. He was already at one hundred percent and barely eking his way through each day. His faith had been flagging, with the fear that no second pair of hands would come to take up his research and carry his mission forward, and all the murders he'd done would just float away on the wind; the delusions of a madman no better than Garibaldi Sovoy.
On the pick-up of Anna, in a burning field after she'd brought down a helicopter, he received a second great gift that proved the true breakthrough; the intact brain and spine of a dead coma survivor. He'd never had one before, since he'd sliced them all into pieces as they died. With the spike on the line and this discovery, new possibilities surged to the fore. Back in his lab inspiration found him, and he condensed the best of his findings into a constructed embryo, part taken from the dead man and part from the girl, imprinted with his own hand-stitched code, which he implanted in the girl's belly.
So the telomeres had to be restarted from scratch. So Rachel Heron's vision would be blended with his own.
When he told Anna, she didn't plead with him. Her gaze burned, and looking into her eyes he knew he'd found his successor.
He died in a back room with James While on the line. The two old friends celebrated, as Joran slumped before him, waiting for the Lyell's to finally claim him.
"You have your heir," James While said. Every word came slowly. He was at one hundred percent too, but held himself together with willpower more than anything. "Now we just need mine."
"Yours is coming," Joran said. Every breath hurt. It was only right he should feel some of the same pain his victims had felt. "I know it."
They talked about other things, about a world before the world ended. They painted fuzzy, fading dreams of the world they might birth, as Joran faded.
"You're a hero," James said, one of the last things Joran heard before the darkness finally took him. "I'm glad I didn't take your eyes."
Joran laughed. Mid-wheeze he stopped breathing and slumped to the ground.
James While stayed on the screen for a moment longer, looking out at nothing. Then he cut the transmission for the final time.
The Last Mayor Box Set 3 Page 48