The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  But I can't fight that war. I can't help Anna. I can only fight here, and now. I look into Olan Harrison's bright white eyes, and see that he knows this as surely as I do. The end is coming.

  "It's a fine construction," he says, nodding toward my Stonehenge. "It won't help."

  "They're not watching?" I counter. "Your severed slaves."

  His smile widens. "They are. But they don't see if I don't want them to. You should know that. You've done as much to your own."

  I smile back. He's talking about Feargal, of course. He sees the shame in me. "They still fought for me, at the end. Do you think your people will?"

  "They will. They can't live without me, now, nor I without them. We are bound together."

  I shake my head. He doesn't get it, and he never will. I've been in this exact spot before, facing these same choices. "Maybe they'd rather die."

  He laughs a little at that. I can see it's a foreign concept.

  "You speak of yourself, Last Mayor. Your willingness to die a martyr. Don't fear, you'll get your moment."

  "Come out of your wall," I say, taking a step closer. "Put that to the test."

  He looks at me.

  I look at him.

  "Tell me," he says, as if it's a little bit of trivia that's been bugging him, "why do your people follow you?"

  It is an odd moment. I think of the old movie where Death plays chess with a man about to die, and they have a conversation about mundane things while souls are shuffled about the board. I can see that the notion of this final dialog appeals to Olan Harrison. He likes the drama.

  "Go fish," I say.

  He continues regardless. "You built symbols of another time for your people, and they loved you for it. Here you've built a symbol from the ancient past. It intrigues me. To what end?"

  Of course he wouldn't understand. He's worse than a child in many ways, with all the parts of himself that might once have understood already lost or whittled away. There can be no negotiation with someone like that, no treaties, no way to co-exist.

  I itch to kill him right now. Perhaps I could charge the wall and reach where he stands, but I'd be so weak I would scarcely land a blow. No. I have my plan; and reach casually down to where my army burrow through bedrock beneath my feet. Lepers explode the rock, so deep we don't even feel it. Demons hammer through the rubble with their huge fists. Soon they'll hit the wall, and perhaps they'll pass underneath. If Olan Harrison stays here long enough they'll come up behind him.

  "Earlier you told me you were old," I say. "Older than me, older than my grandparents. But you're not that same man anymore. You're like a child now, after your year on the line, except you're broken, Olan. I can hear the voices in your head, grinding against each other like faulty gears. Nothing works the way it should, and it never will again. You'll never be happy. You'll never inspire your people, or lead them to anything worth having. There can be no meaning in your world, only power, and discipline, and your boot on the face of humanity crushing down forever." I smile. "You should have stayed dead."

  He looks at me. There's not much he can say to argue. Everything I just said is true.

  "This is the moment," he says, "right now, which you'll regret forever. I welcome it. Hold up your mirror, Last Mayor. Show me what I am. I'll make sure you live with the consequences in eternity."

  I laugh. "Maybe. Or maybe I'll send you back." I glance up at the sky. "Not your favorite place, right? They'll have a big party mulching you to compost. The prodigal son. They always say the warden has the worst time in jail."

  There's the slightest flinch at that. He buries it deep, but I catch it. That's his fear. That's what drives him now. I drive it home.

  "They'll have a field day with you up there. All your severed slaves will follow you, and I expect they'll enjoy the reversal. They'll round on you like harpies. There won't be a single scrap of Olan Harrison left on the line when they're done."

  His eyes harden. Good. I'm getting to him.

  "Down here it'll fall to me," I go on. "And how do you think I'll memorialize you, in my comics, in our history?" I let that hang. "There won't be a single word. Not one. I'll erase your name and everything you did from the record. No one will ever know all the shit you caused. They'll be born and live and die thinking that this zombie apocalypse was just an accident. Or maybe, and I'm just spitballing this now, I'll turn your name into mud. When people want to say 'shit' in the future, I'll get them to say 'Olan'. I'll put it into common usage, like 'I really need to take an Olan,' or 'You think your Olan don't stink?'"

  I grin at him. His hardness is turning to diamonds. I'm getting him hot again. I shrug.

  "You're empty, Olan. That's it. You're a vessel, and maybe you always were. It's not worth getting angry with you. Like a dog that takes an Olan in the house, you didn't know any better. But I'm here now. Olan-training is in season. I'll jab some good sense into you if it's the last thing I do." I poke toward his neck, where the black eye sank in. The wound is a sealed line now, not even any scabs. His new body heals fast.

  He looks at me, the hardness dissipating. Then, impressively, he yawns.

  It's pretty good.

  "I don't see it," he says. "What they follow. Just a lot of noise from a scared little man. You spew out words, Last Mayor, like there's an unlimited supply. Like you have every right to them. But I took James While's tongue, when I brought him back down. I'll do the same with you. You can look at each other for eternity, from your cells, while your bodies age and decay, then are replaced to age and decay again. Millennia will pass like that. You'll beg for forgiveness so many times there won't be any other words left in that self-indulgent brain. 'Please' will be the only word you'll know. And I'll enjoy you trying to say it. You think I know no meaning? That is meaning to me. You will be my foundation and my banner for all to see. Everyone will know how you failed. Everyone will see how you suffer. It won't be my boot on the face of humanity, but yours."

  Maybe I flinch at that. Eternity? I believe he has the ability. It's dark stuff. Should I yawn?

  "That's a great plan, yeah. Universal misery. Humanity under your thumb. Is that what you wanted when you started down this path, Olan, when you first formed the SEAL? Or can you not remember? Sorry, is that a sensitive subject?"

  His white eyes burn holes in me.

  "Of course, right," I go on, while at the same time my army underfoot seem to have found a route under the wall. Ten feet down the wall ends. If I can make just ten or twenty more feet forward, I'll be able to jump the lepers up behind the wall and shred him. "We talked about it before, and you didn't know then. What the reason was. But I get it now. Not all the bullshit reasons you made up for your slaves; the Homo Dominus crap, the angels, the advancement of human civilization, the impending collapse of the Western global order. I saw it in your head." I wave a hand. "All horseshit. Even at the start, forty years ago when you first spun up the projects that would go on to become the Apotheo Net, the Logchain, it wasn't really about any of that."

  He stares. Maybe he really doesn't know why he's done this. Perhaps that's why he's here, talking to me now. He genuinely wants to know, and he thinks I have the answer. "Why did I do it then?" he asks.

  I laugh. It's not funny. "I think it's funny you say 'I', as if you're a person. You're not anyone, son. You don't even know why you're here. You're just here. You emptied out the line to have continuity, to be the same person continuing alive, but every moment is a fresh moment for you, isn't it? You live in an eternal present, and every second of it is a test. You don't have a history to cling to, any more than that voice of your creator in your ear. You've torn yourself so much I don't think any part of you is original. You're Frankenstein's monster run amok, and you don't even know it. Honestly, that would fill me with an endless dread. Maybe that's what you feel. Every day, every hour, every minute, you're filled with doubt. It's why you do what you do. It's why you crush everyone else. It's the only way to know what you are."

  He stares
. These are hard truths. He can deny none of it.

  "So why did you start it?" I press on, hammering the metal while it's blazing hot. "Why start us down this convoluted path forty years ago? Maybe it was an accident of birth. You had your Homo Dominus theory, your Homo Deus, but if anything divides you from me on a genetic level, it's the fact that you were always a psychopath, and I wasn't. I've learned some of the tricks of the psychopathic, now, the things that come naturally to you. I've been cruel and uncaring. I've killed thousands. But it just doesn't sit right with me. I've got those internal controls, and you don't, and that's the whole thing."

  He looks on eagerly. Yes, he's enjoying this. He doesn't know this.

  "It's that simple. Everything else is an excuse. All your stories about angels and master races are feeble attempts to interpret it, to understand it, to spin it to your people and to yourself in some way that sounds good. But really, you just did what you wanted, and what you wanted was always more. You're like a cancer that kills the patient, even though that means the cancer dies itself. You'll keep growing until you reach absolute collapse, because nobody ever made you stop."

  He's nodding now. There's a brighter light of comprehension in his eyes. "Go on."

  I feel again for my advance teams. The lead lepers are within feet of exiting the wall's shadow. Any second they'll break through.

  "I committed my share of atrocities," I say, "but each time I stopped myself. Someone like you might see that as weakness. I call it essentially, primally human. After Times Square I shot myself in the head, because that was the right thing to do. In Istanbul I pulled back at the last moment. I almost didn't, but I did."

  As I'm saying it, I realize it's true. Anna helped me, but her efforts only worked because a part of me already knew I'd gone too far. Seeing that now helps in ways I hadn't considered. For the last few months I've thought myself irredeemably broken, but maybe I'm not. Full atonement may never come, but at least I can try…

  "That's me," I say, almost sheepish now. "Comic book artist, hipster. I'm soft. Every person I've hurt or killed, I feel it, and that's what you should be afraid of, Olan Harrison. I feel it, but I will still wipe you out, and that's what makes me better than you. Without it, you're no more than an animal acting on its programming. You can't be a true master or god, because those both require the ability to control your own appetites, which you can't do. It's why you'll never build a world that means anything, why you'll never be happy or whole. Without reflection, you're just a goddamn computer program, and I think that's pretty sad."

  They're at the edge now. It's going to be seconds. I'm already lining up the orders for lepers to flash up and rip him apart.

  Then his head turns. The light in his eyes intensifies, as if he's seeing something I can't. It's not the lepers coming for him, as they flash up and take his arms. It's something else, something I can feel on the line too, so very far away.

  Anna has gone into battle with his army halfway round the world. And something's very wrong.

  Olan Harrison smiles at me.

  "I've enjoyed our talk, Last Mayor. But it's time for this to end." Then he flashes like a leper, out of existence before my lepers can tear him apart.

  20. RAIN

  Rachel Heron jumped west at the head of her three hundred angels, exhausted, emotionally drained, and terrified that at any moment Olan Harrison would put her in a box.

  He must have seen James While by now. He had to know what she was planning.

  Her anxiety filtered out on the line and echoed back to her in bulbous, phantom creations; all her non-choices coming home to roost, each one a ladder leading down into darkness. In jumps across featureless tundra she saw James While lying in his own blood, cementing this course.

  Betrayal.

  For fourteen years she'd lived for Olan Harrison, attuned to his moods and needs as a matter of survival, and even now she felt him back at the Redoubt, perhaps too obsessed with Amo to see what she'd done. Now she held the severed threads of his angels in her hands; the three hundred most likely to rebel, who'd been boxed the most, who would fight Olan if she could only give them the choice.

  Everything came down to that. Would Anna listen? Would Olan let her speak? Would the nightmare of the last fourteen years finally -

  Something hit her like a cluster bomb to the brain.

  She was -

  Then -

  She was yanked inside out, and her thoughts bit off abruptly and her jump collapsed with a violent yank on the cocooning fuzz of the line so that she -

  - fell.

  A scream whipped out of her mouth and was pulled away by the rush of descent. What the- ? Her body spun wildly and freezing winds slapped her face, setting her black strike suit snapping like sails in a thunderstorm, pulling blinding tears from her eyes and what the hell was - ?

  The line was gone. Realization hit like an aftershock, an impossibility, but now she was falling out of the sky and that was real. She blinked and glimpsed a ground of gray and ice spinning far below, and a dazzling white sky above, and her host of angel bodies falling all around her like a dizzy black rain.

  Her thoughts were jumbled and she tried to clear them, but the yank off the line had snapped her mind. Olan Harrison had drilled them on falling out of a jump before, but not like this. She tried to grab the line and jump again, but the pathways of her brain ran like non-intersecting train lines, leaving her to fall, paralyzed in both mind and body

  In the midst of that, flashes came. She watched with mounting horror as hundreds of lights popped like coordinated fireworks on a falling plane around her. It couldn't be, but it was; an army of type threes flickering into existence in the air.

  The attack began.

  Rachel Heron stared helpless as the black and white creatures jumped faster than thought, so fast that they weren't falling anymore, they were flying. Like stuttering images in a zoetrope they jumped in hundreds of tiny increments to strike amongst her frozen angels; slashing ramshackle defenses, hacking every attempt to reconnect to the line, pouring over her tumbling force like a crackling black tide.

  Then they were on her too. One snatched her ankle and sent a numbing shock up her spine that jolted her thoughts briefly into alignment, affording just enough automatic coherence for her to kick free. That synchronization broke the deadlock, and instantly she erected sputtering diamond shields built out of raw panic, just in time to meet the renewed assault.

  A burning elbow clubbed across her face, barely softened by her flexing shield, while on the line a black blade plunged through to dig into the meat of her mind. She screamed, spun up a fission response and churned it out, but that only burned the head and shoulders off the creature at the tip of the spear.

  She blinked and saw the spear.

  A platoon of type threes had somehow hooked into each other mid-air, mid-fall, to take this spear-like form that now jabbed into her again, this time slicing into her thigh and latching on to her shield like a grapnel. She tried to kick away, starting a spin that showed her the retrogrades arraying everywhere, forming into physical spike-structures like bizarre cheerleader scrums, each one a spear or a blade or an arrow. They ignored the desperate rush of gravity and held coordinated group position via the constant thrum of jumps, allowing them to strike in sleek formation with the force of fifteen or twenty at every blow.

  Already her angels were dying.

  She felt their signals winking out on the line even though none of this was possible, none of it made sense. How could they be dying when Anna was still so far away, when there were so many jumps left to Istanbul, when she couldn't possibly -

  She cried out her shock and pain as her shield buckled again, flinging herself in a wild jump fifty feet down. It earned her time but there was never enough, as a fresh spear of type threes flashed with her and slammed again into her shields. She had to think, staring up at the falling black sky of angels and retrogrades as she desperately swiped the spear's assault away. Not only was this impos
sible, a power she'd never dreamed of, it was also stupid; so stupid to die in a battle when all she'd wanted to do was surrender.

  She turned that fury into a diamond blade that lopped the lead type three at the waist, cindered the clamps it had dug into her shield, and propelled a massive blast deep into the throng of its plunging spear.

  The spear structure broke, its constituent members tumbling away like leaves in a gale, bouncing up and off other spears and her own falling angels, but in seconds they were replaced with another formation that swelled as it accelerated again at her chest, already fifty or so strong and growing.

  She couldn't fathom it. The number of jumps required to re-form and maintain a bonded structure in the midst of free-fall dizzied her mind. It was impossible even for her angels, but for type threes? She'd experimented with them years ago as a military force and surrendered after the dozenth blew; they were far too volatile, too frantic to control with any reliability, at best they would be hand grenades tossed into the fray.

  As if on cue a ball of ten nearby exploded.

  She barely shifted the bulk of her diamond shielding in time to stave off the blast. The diamonds shredded the brunt of their flying flesh but couldn't prevent the meat spray impacting across her face and torso; each one a weakening seed that set more hooks in her, bending her across an iron will.

  Of course, she realized at last, this was Anna.

  She reeled and spun, seeing her last few seconds of existence playing out as the spear thickened into a battering ram a hundred-strong and closing, until she finally found her voice and cried on the line.

  "I surrender!"

  She pulled the threads of all her angels at once, yanked like marionettes into sudden stillness, and bared her shields to the ram as it steamed in. The ram's head slammed through her open shield, type three bodies impacted her in the air and hurled her back through the tumbling sky of bodies like a pinball, but they didn't impale her on the line.

  She crashed and veered and fell, recognizing that the ram had pulled its punch at the last moment. She tugged on her angel's threads further, cracking open every shield to let the type threes push through and encompass them all like type twos buried in a flood of type ones, encasing her army of unkillable angels in a steely trap of fritzing flesh.