The Last Mayor Box Set Page 23

I smile at Lara across the room, and it's magic. She's there like a buoy bobbing on a tide, always nearby; smiling, calling my name, looking my way, holding my hand. We're all together, and it's the best night of my life.

  At some point things quieten down. People sit in tiny clusters; Cerulean with Masako giggling by the doors to screen 1, Cynthia, Jake and Lara at the popcorn talking in low tones, Julio standing on patrol outside, and little Anna at the front glass of the Theater alone, looking out into the darkness.

  I walk over to her.

  "Hello," I say. "What are you looking at?"

  She looks up at me; a quizzical expression on her round little face, chewing thoughtfully on a red string. "The sea," she says.

  "It's beautiful," I say, and we stand there together for a little while looking out. Through the glass there are stars and clouds and the moon, and silvery light glinting off low breakers rushing in to shore. I think about all the lost ocean in the ocean, millions of us trudging along at the bottom, or swimming in the middle, or simply lying dead on the seafloor. Hundreds of millions of people in the largest mass migration the world's ever seen, and for what, and to where?

  "My Daddy's out there," Anna says quietly by my side.

  I look down at her, and my eyes fill. She doesn't look back at me; she's glued to the glass, as if at any minute he might pop back out and come for her. She can't turn away because she can't take the chance to miss him. Her teeth chew rhythmically at the red string, and I drop to one knee, brushing tears from my eyes as I think of everything she has lost.

  "He's safe out there," I say. "He's with his new family, like you're with yours."

  She turns to me then. There's such feeling in her eyes. "He left me."

  For a minute I struggle; it feels like I'm drowning as a fresh flood of tears comes to my eyes. What can I say to that? What comfort is there for that? I smile through my tears, but before I can think of something to say, she puts one hand on my cheek and smiles, almost mischievously.

  "It's all right. He didn't mean to. And I know where he is."

  I let out the smallest laugh. I don't know why.

  "Good," I manage.

  "He's not all the way across yet. He's swimming."

  "He's swimming," I repeat, because why not?

  She nods once, then lets go of my cheek and turns back to the glass, resuming her watch. I'm left roiling with emotions. I'm supposed to be the one reassuring her, but it's gone the other way now, and there's something in her certainty that makes me ask a question I never normally would; not to someone who's just clinging on to hope like anybody else.

  "How do you know?"

  She smiles, then, and I see the strength that's kept her alive this long. A five-year-old girl, alone for months in the apocalypse. Cerulean told me she traveled with her father halfway across the country, before he left her at the water's edge. What would that have been like? What things has she seen?

  "It's a secret," she says, tracing shapes I can't make out on the glass. "But I'm going to find him. One day."

  "One day," I repeat, and find myself wondering if there really is a secret; if she really does know something. "Maybe it's a secret you'll share with me."

  "Maybe," she says, and looks at me again. She's exhausted, but there's an inner light of hope glowing in her eyes. I don't know what it is, but I want to understand where it comes from.

  "But not tonight," I say, and offer my hand. "It's late, and there's a big day tomorrow. Now, there's camp beds already set up in screen 2, but you can put yours anywhere you want in the whole screening room."

  She frowns at me. The glass and the ocean beyond it are momentarily forgotten. "We're going to sleep in the theater?"

  "It's the best sleep you can get."

  "And I can sleep anywhere I want?"

  "Anywhere you want. No rules, tonight."

  She grins and takes my hand. I look up. Lara is smiling our way. Everyone's moving toward screen 2. Together we head back to where Cerulean and Masako are waiting.

  THE LAST - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I'd like to thank all my early reviewers and beta-readers, whose advice and suggestions have proved invaluable in fine-tuning this and my other books, in particular Bethany, Katy, Christina, and Lunara. Matt offered great advice and encouragement as ever, Ray made a number of very helpful suggestions about weaponry, and Elaine spotted an ample handful of missed Britishisms I wasn't aware of, like 'dressing gown' instead of 'bathrobe'. Rob dived in with some excellent saves, in particular the bit where Cerulean's avatar stopped being a parrot with a pirate on its shoulder and became a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder. Thank you all!

  Also, as ever, thanks to my wife for her stalwart support of my writing career, as well as to my mom and dad, my brother Joe and sister Alice too, for all their encouragement and interest. Thank you all very much.

  - Michael

  THE LOST CONTENTS

  ALICE

  WONDERLAND

  LOOKING GLASS

  ODYSSEY

  WEST

  Acknowledgements

  ALICE

  1. DADDY

  Seven hours before the world ended, five-year old Anna lay in bed listening to her father read Alice through the Looking Glass.

  "When I was your age," he said in the high voice he used for the Red Queen, "I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

  Wrapped up in the tight covers, Anna listened to the words intently. Her Daddy had a cozy brown voice that always kept her calm, and Alice was one of the few stories she could hear without the hurt becoming too much. It helped that her small bedroom was dark, and the covers were dark, and her Daddy's pajamas were dark; all except the yellow lightning bolt on his back, but she was used to that.

  Darkness helped. Quiet helped. Impossible things didn't, but if she couldn't even enjoy imagining those, what did she have left?

  "Tell me an impossible thing, Daddy," she said.

  He smiled down at her. He had a dark and stubbly face, lit by the low orange light from the side-table lamp. She knew he wasn't that old, but there was gray in his dark beard, twinkling like Christmas snowflakes. His brown eyes were warm and full.

  "I could quote just about anything in this book, I should think," he said. "Card-men? Bread and butterflies? The Jabberwock?"

  Anna smiled and closed her eyes. Her Daddy was another thing that didn't hurt her head at all. After the coma the doctors said that anything she already knew would be all right, and wouldn't make her head hurt. But the only things she could really remember from that time were Alice, her Daddy, and a vague sense of her mother.

  Her mother had gone though.

  "What about ham-fly?" she asked. "Or potato-bird?"

  The hurt kicked in, a persistent throb that quickly spread through her head.

  "Alright button," her father said softly. "I think that's enough."

  She opened her eyes. "Tell me one. Just one then I'll go to sleep."

  He sighed. "You'll be up all night, Anna."

  "I won't I promise, just one."

  Her father frowned, and tapped her nose gently. "One, all right. Let's make it good." He leaned back and thought for a little while.

  This wait was delicious. Most nights it was one of their routines: to make up something new, something to dream about, something to chew and digest and make herself stronger with.

  "OK," he said at last, "I have it. In the rainforests of Peru, some of the women wear birds instead of clothes. Did you know that?" His eyes twinkled. "They pleat the feathers together into beautiful patterns. Why?"

  Anna screwed up her nose. That idea hurt her head sharply, like a lump of freezing snow behind her face. It was new and vivid. "Not just for fashion?"

  Her Daddy chuckled. "Probably for fashion, ladies do like fashion don't they, but what else?"

  The hurt thumped. She screwed her tongue up in her mouth. "So they can fly into the trees and get coconuts?"


  "Good guess. Yes. They fly up for coconuts, then fly up higher and plant the coconut seeds in the tops of the other trees. Why?"

  Her head banged and her eyes throbbed. "To make an arch? A rainbow out of trees. So they hang down on vines like a canary in a cage? So they become birds."

  "They become birds by dressing up in birds, exactly. Like the caterpillar in his chrysalis. It's what makes them happy."

  Anna sighed, part in satisfaction, part with the hurt. Her father stroked her forehead.

  "You're getting hot, Anna. That's enough now."

  It was enough. Too much, probably. She'd have to lie silently and still for hours now before sleep would come, thinking through Alice's familiar adventures to clear these new images from her head. But that was OK. She'd be able to add them in to her collection soon, as their newness faded.

  "All right," she said, narrowing her eyes to hurt-reducing slits. "But can I kiss the Hatter goodnight?"

  "Of course you can, angel."

  He picked up the Hatter, their brand new black Dalmatian puppy, from his bed on the floor and held him up to Anna. He was so sleepy and sweet. He still had the little white bandage on his back, where the vets had injected the 'tracking chip'. Her Daddy had explained; it wasn't like a potato chip. With this they could find the Hatter wherever he was in the world.

  "Goodnight, Hatter," she whispered, and kissed his velvety head.

  Her Daddy kissed her forehead, tucked her tightly in, then clicked off the dim lamp and eased out of the room.

  Darkness surrounded her.

  She lay very still and pushed back at the hurt. This was the final routine that ended every day; trying to claim for herself whatever strange new ideas they'd come up with. The birdwomen took a long time to swallow down, though she had techniques that helped: most of them involved telling herself variations on Alice's adventures.

  She looked up at the glowing clouds on the ceiling. These were left over from before, so they were OK, but so much else had gone. Her TV was a dim memory; her dolls, once scattered around the room ready for the next tea party, were all tucked away in boxes. She never went outside. She hardly ever left the room. Even looking at the pictures in the Alice books was too much. The most she could handle were the stories themselves, spoken in her Daddy's cozy brown voice.

  At last she fell asleep.

  When she woke six hours later her Daddy was standing over her, lit only by the glowing white of his eyes.

  * * *

  "Daddy?" she whispered.

  He lunged toward her. His right hand glanced off her forehead and his left caught in her pillow, while his white-eyed face plunged closer like a nightmarish worm.

  Anna screamed.

  His forehead thunked off hers and stars popped across her vision. Instinctively she recoiled, ducking her head into the covers and burrowing deeper. The covers were so tight she could scarcely breathe, but now he was slapping at the pillows so she scrunched herself up at the bottom like Alice in a giant's pocket.

  It was so dark and she felt dizzy, and breath came in hot stifling gasps, then his hand slapped hard on her back and she shrieked, "Daddy stop it!" but the words were muffled by the covers.

  The bed rocked as his weight flopped onto it. Anna instinctively froze.

  Silence thumped in the dark like the hurt. She strained to hear above her own panting breath.

  "Daddy?" she whispered.

  The bed jolted and something snaked across her shoulder. His arm nudged her through the blankets, matched by a tightening of the blankets. The terror redoubled as she realized what it was: he was pulling the sheets off the bed.

  She screamed and burrowed to the side, until her foot found the mattress edge and she pushed as hard as she could against the tucked-in sheets. They untucked a little. She squirmed harder, using muscles she hadn't used in a year, until her toes popped through into the cooler air of the room.

  Her father kept pulling and Anna kept pushing, so together they widened the hole until she could pour herself through it like hot tea, tumbling out to slump awkwardly onto the carpet.

  She lay for a second panting in the cool air. Luminescent clouds glowed above in an eerie white light. It was a dream; it had to be a dream.

  Then her Daddy's face popped over the edge of the bed like a horrible jack-in-the-box. She froze. It was her Daddy but not her Daddy; the black centers of his eyes were gone, covered over with shining white like Humpty's cracked eggshells. His dark skin had gone gray and his breath sucked in and out with loud raspy wheezes.

  He reached down for her and she yelped and rolled under the bed. In four dizzy revolutions she reached the other side, just as he tumbled to the floor with a thump behind her. She stared in disbelief as he got on his belly and started crawling toward her.

  For the first time since the coma she stood up. It felt incredibly high up, like Alice after biting the cake. The dark room spun and her frail legs wobbled beneath her. She barely remembered how to walk, and she didn't have a clue what to do. Most of all she wanted to call for her Daddy, but he was right here chasing her, and-

  THUMP

  A horrible sound came from below, shaking the house and making her jump. Another followed then another, and her heart skipped a beat with each one.

  THUMP THUMP

  More hit. Her Daddy was still crawling under the bed so she chanced a trip to the window. The black velvet curtains were tacked to the frame, protecting her from the light of the outside world. Now she slipped her hand underneath the fabric and tore it away.

  Outside it was night still, and the road was filled with people.

  They were everywhere, hundreds of them in pajamas and sweatpants. They all had the same strange gray skin and the same glowing white eyes, and all of them were trudging in the same direction: toward her house.

  She screamed.

  THUMP THUMP

  She jerked away from the window to smack up against her Daddy.

  She screamed again, and his hand came up to stroke her face and she ducked and staggered around him, running jerkily back to the bed. If she could just get back under the covers and close her eyes then this horrible dream would go away, she knew it. She started to climb up the mattress but her Daddy stopped her with a hand on her back.

  She screamed again. He pressed closer trapping her against the bed frame so she couldn't move at all. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  "Stop it, Daddy!" she wailed. "I don't like this game." He pressed closer still and his gray face with its white eyes loomed in and she thought she was going to die.

  Then the Hatter barked from the other room.

  She barely heard the weak sound of his bark over the thumping of people-waves outside, but her Daddy did. He stopped lumbering at once and went very still. Anna went very still too, not even daring to breathe.

  The Hatter barked again, more of a yelp than a real bark, and now her Daddy moved sharply away. He went through the bedroom door roughly, banging his shoulder off the frame.

  Anna let out a quiet sob. The Hatter barked again and her Daddy was stalking toward him. He'd saved her, but now who would save him? She was small but the Hatter was much smaller.

  She got up and started for the door, almost tripping over her bony ankles. She could hardly run; her body wasn't used to fast movement at all.

  "Wait!" she called over the crashing sound.

  It was dark and she stubbed her toe on the edge of the bedroom door. The corridor outside was a dark foreign territory, a place she hadn't seen in a year, half-remembered from an old dream.

  The dim light of her Daddy's eyes receded down the hall.

  "Wait, Daddy!"

  He turned into his bedroom. Anna bounced along the walls after him, calling all the time. Her legs were not used to this, her balance was weak, but the Hatter needed her and this was her one job. She reached the doorway gasping, exhausted from the exertion, to find her father holding the Hatter up before him in both hands.

  "Here he is sweetie," her D
addy would have said, "come pet him, I'm so proud that you got out of bed."

  But this was not her Daddy, and he didn't say any of that. Instead he lifted the struggling puppy to his face, opened his mouth, and bit down hard into the Hatter's soft and furry back.

  2. THE HATTER

  She'd begged her father for a dog for months.

  "I'll be so good, I promise," she'd told him, "I won't pull his little ringlet tail or play the drums on his head or anything."

  Her father had laughed, all chocolate brown in the comfy dark. "Pigs have ringlet tails, honey, not dogs."

  "I know Daddy," she'd urged, "I know that, that's my whole point."

  "I don't know about the drumming though."

  "But I won't drum, don't you see? I won't!"

  He laughed and stroked her hair. "Anna, you are a silly thing. I see your mother in you, you know. She was playful."

  She never answered when he said things like this. This was the sadness, which loomed over him like the hurt loomed over her. This was the reason she wanted a dog so much; her mission, just as his mission was to help her get well. They would get well together.

  "He'll hardly make a sound, I promise, and he'll keep us company, and when he's big enough I'll ride him around the room like a knight."

  He raised an eyebrow. "We'd have to get you a saddle."

  "I'll have a beautiful saddle!" she crowed, though of course quietly. "It can be leather or velvet or tomato-skin, I don't care. Just a dog Daddy, it would be wonderful. We can take walks and if I'm tired you can go out in the park with him, in the fresh air."

  He popped his finger on then off her nose, like pushing a button. "I know what you're doing, sweetie. I get it."

  "What am I doing?"

  "I know you worry too. You want me to go out more."

  She looked at him blankly. Of course this was true, but it felt very important he not know this, or she not admit it. All day every day he lived by her side. He had nothing else. After her Mommy had gone half the life had gone out of him too.