The Last Mayor Box Set 3 Page 25

"It's Ravi's, from after he died. It's complicated. But it's hope, Lucas. I know about the Lyell's. I know about the false cure, the trap, all of it. This baby," she touched her stomach, "there's something special about it. It gives us a chance."

  His eyes narrowed. "You know about the Lyell's?"

  She nodded. Through her tears she laughed, because you couldn't only be broken and afraid. Being broken and afraid didn't give you strength, or not the right kind of strength. Feeding off that would make you like Amo, and she wasn't going to make that mistake again. She'd done it once when she had nothing else to live for but Ravi, when she would have killed any of her own people who got in her way, but now she was a different woman.

  She was going to be a mother.

  She held Lucas' head and smoothed the tears from his cheeks. "It's going to be OK," she said, and kissed his forehead. That only made him cry more. "We'll figure it out."

  "Maybe it can cure Jake," he whispered, and that caught her attention.

  "What happened to Jake?"

  Lucas pulled away. The misery sank into his eyes deeper, pushed there by the hope in her voice. "He's got advanced stage Lyell's. But maybe, if you're right…"

  He tailed off. Anna didn't need to ask. She nodded, then she pushed herself to her feet, pulling him up after her. People milled around them. Someone was crying. Many bodies remained down, coated with a thin layer of soot. Amo was gone, that was clear.

  "Who's in charge here?" she asked.

  Lucas laughed. He touched her stomach gently.

  "I think it's you."

  * * *

  Eight thousand miles to the west, Lara woke from another nightmare.

  The RV was moving; always moving, though slower every day. There was no reserve fuel left, and the turgid stuff they siphoned en route was slowly gumming and corroding the engine. When it failed, there would be no hope of fixing it. Perhaps they would find another. Perhaps they would continue on foot.

  The rolling siege with Witzgenstein was going badly.

  Seven more reserves they'd been to, and all of them had been burnt out, with fewer and fewer resources left for them each time. Some fuel, some scraps of food. It wasn't enough. They tried to supplement; once they went off hunting for a secondary cairn, but it was burnt out too.

  There was no decent food left in the world but ancient snack bars and protein powders salvaged from Yangtze centers. Occasionally they found random outcroppings of roadside fruit, and managed to shoot the odd wild animal from the road, but it wasn't enough to feed nearly eighty people. There was no fuel but the thick stuff they pumped up from beneath gas stations, and that was slowly killing their engines. Already they'd abandoned half their vehicles behind.

  It left them no choice but to keep going east. The range on their convoy was so tightly limited. Perhaps they could make it to New York and start from scratch, at least that was the dream Lara kept repeating, but Witzgenstein had them now and would surely not allow it.

  So they were starving. They crawled along roads in a fog. Lara was hungry and tired and not thinking clearly. The few people left with her were the same. She only had to glance in the rearview mirror to see the extent of their failure; a convoy of five vehicles, down from nine.

  Some of the children were gone. Many of the adults. Taken, or deserted. What difference did it make? Lara couldn't be awake all the time. She didn't have the strength. Every time she woke she saw Witzgenstein, grinning in the dark of Drake's RV. Promising her ashes and suffering. The children didn't even cry out when they were taken. Every time they abandoned an RV, more people remained behind. They got down on their knees on the road and waited for their savior to come. Seeing them like that in the rearview mirror had made Lara sick, but there was nothing she could do. She couldn't feed them, so what else were they supposed to do?

  She rubbed a hand over her temple. Dirty, sticky with old sweat. Out the windshield it was before dawn on some road in Kentucky. Crow sat at the wheel and drove, bleary-eyed himself. They hadn't heard anything from Amo since he'd left. They were alone here, and the dream of New LA had more than fallen apart. It had been shredded and looted, with only the dregs left behind.

  Perhaps twenty-one children remained, and those hungry and growing thin. None of them understood what was happening, but few had the energy left to cry. A few adults had vied with Lara for control, as their conditions grew worse, but now nobody had the drive.

  "Surrender," Greg had told her, before she pulled away from him and his little group somewhere in New Mexico. He'd been one of the first. "She'll have mercy."

  Lara had known otherwise. She'd kept hoping. But hope had been a vain mirage.

  Now the nightmare came back to her, drifting across the darkness over the wild forests outside. It was a new vision now, no longer a great white eye over a burning New LA, but a black one that hung in the air over a broken man on a barren plateau. She knew without seeing his face that this was Amo, though he trudged with a limp and his shoulder hung slack from an amateurish sling. He was alone. He had failed too. He trudged north.

  She blinked.

  "Ready for your shift?" Crow asked.

  Even Crow was beaten. His deep reserves of strength couldn't stand up to losing so many of the children. It had torn the heart out of them all. What was the point of going on, with all hope for the future gone? With Vie and Talia gone? Yet Lara couldn't stop. To stop would mean to die.

  Yet she was beaten. It hurt to her core to admit that. What did dreams of Amo's failure matter if she had nothing for him to come back to? She'd been beaten and there was no way to fix it. Witzgenstein had left them eight messages now, and they were all the same.

  On your knees

  They had no ammunition left, no vehicles, no base of operations, no time and no hope.

  In the nightmare there was also a group of shambling ghosts, each striped strangely black and white, walking under a black flag that flickered and whipped in the wind. They were headed west, shivering and glitching in and out of existence, toward a place where thousands of frozen bodies lay waiting. Something about that image terrified her. At the very end there was a great flash, and a suck and a blast, and then the dream ended.

  She shuddered.

  Crow was watching her. Once he would have asked if she was all right, if she needed a little more time before she took the wheel, but he didn't have the energy for that. Perhaps he didn't care. He waited for her because it was too hard to insist. She hadn't eaten anything for three days, when they'd stopped briefly to raid a convenience store already ravaged by time and wild dogs, only to find a few melted candy bars left stuck under the counter.

  But she wasn't ready. She couldn't keep doing this.

  She looked at Crow, wondering if she was strong enough for what was to come, if he was. He was already losing some of the prodigious muscle that had always made him so impressive. His shoulders were wilting, and this was all that lay ahead of them. Every cairn dashed. Every supply cache burned. Scavenging off the ruins again, with too little time before the winter to plant a new rotation of crops.

  The sores on her thighs were getting worse. Sitting for long hours brought it on, but none of the others were willing to drive. They lay in back and raged, or slept, or stared forlornly out of the window, and she couldn't blame them. Witzgenstein hadn't threatened them. She needed them. Maybe they'd be punished for a time, but once they'd proved how much they loved her, once they'd been on their knees long enough to crush any dream of future dissent, they'd be welcomed.

  But none of that mattered, because there was no choice any more.

  "I'm pregnant," she said.

  Crow regarded her with slow, sleepy eyes. It didn't mean much to him, maybe. Another mouth to feed. She'd hidden it from him as best she could; hidden it from all of them, herself most of all, but she couldn't keep going on that road.

  Starvation would kill the child inside her. It was barely a seed now, just as Robert had told her in a dream so long ago, but she could not live with i
t dying. Not for her pride, not when Janine would almost certainly let it survive, just to take pleasure in stealing it away as her own.

  "What?" Crow asked breathily. He saw the reality of their defeat.

  A tear raced down her cheek. She hadn't wanted to tell anyone like this. It was never supposed to be like this, but this was the truth and you couldn't run from that. They were refugees, and if she had to beg so her unborn child would survive, she would.

  "I wasn't sure before. I took a test. It's true."

  Crow deflated further, like an old birthday balloon. It was another final straw heaped across their backs.

  "We can't do this any more," he said.

  "I know."

  For a time they sat in silence, not looking at each other, only gazing out at the dusty road as this new truth fell. Somewhere out there was was Amo, and Anna, and Witzgenstein. The world marched on, and didn't care. The dream of New LA was truly gone.

  Crow reached out a hand. His forearm looked withered in the bright noon light, like a tough old root. "Come on," he said. "We'll go together."

  More tears came. He was strong, still. She took his hand, and together they trudged out of the RV. The passengers in back watched them with wide, empty eyes.

  On the road they stopped in front of the RV, side by side. Lara scanned the horizon, but the tears in her eyes made it all a blur. Possibly Janine was watching them even now. The humiliation was complete. Amo had left, and everything had fallen.

  So she fell too, onto her knees.

  The blacktop was hot, even through her stained, threadbare jeans. Her tears became sobs.

  Crow dropped down beside her, and together they knelt, until the people in the convoy limped up, and one by one joined them in defeat.

  They knelt. They wept. They waited for Witzgenstein to come.

  * * *

  I drive, and when the gas runs out I walk. It gets colder fast, and there are steppes; vast expanses of gray nothing where the black eye can spread out above like a thundercloud. I suppose this is Georgia, round the far end of Turkey. Or maybe it's Russia. I should put on warmer clothes, but I'm too tired to make that many decisions.

  By day my feet bleed. By night they bleed too. It's easier just to walk.

  At some point I splint my shoulder but it doesn't hold well. I know it's healing wrong, but it doesn't matter. I try not to think. My wrist too, it fuses weirdly, so my fingers don't really work. This is what I am now.

  I walk.

  I find a bicycle and I ride.

  Barren steppes give way to barren tundra. Soon there'll be snow everywhere, but I hardly feel the cold. I'm numb.

  I walk.

  Sometimes I dream, and what I see are endless vistas filled with the ocean, all staring at me. They breathe as one with one giant lung, and they blame me with every breath. I know this. I stand there and take the blame. I know what I did.

  But I also know that it wasn't only me.

  There are steps to take, that will lead me forward, and they aren't hard to see.

  If Anna was right, then the T4 was designed. Her false cure was designed, and so the apocalypse was made from scratch. Somewhere, someone dreamed up a nightmare scenario just like this, and willed it into reality.

  It's thoughts of that person that keep me alive. That keep me trudging north.

  Because I feel something different now. There's something on the line that's new; a hollow in the darkness above, far to the north, that I only feel when I'm walking. When I drive it fades, lost in the roar of the engine, but when I walk, and everything is perfectly still in this dead world around me, I feel it.

  It speaks only to me. Through the long night it calls my name. It wants to see me before I die, and I want to see it too. I'm finally aiming myself in the right direction: at the people who made this hellscape, who did this to us all, who reduced us to this face-tearing savagery.

  I'm going to tear their faces off. I'm going to make them suffer, and nothing will be too harsh. I will have justice for seven billion souls lost. I may be battered and broken, but in truth I am stronger than ever. I can pull birds out of the sky with a thought. I can stop deer running in the fields with the flick of an eye.

  I send the pulse out over the line as a promise, to let them know their days on this Earth are numbered. No quarter will be given. No mercy offered. Every drop of blood shed shall be repaid a thousand-fold.

  Because I am the lash for their sins, and I am coming.

  THE LASH - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Sincere thanks as ever to the Ocean Elite: Katy Page, Pam Elmes, Rebecca Barnes, Renee Beauchamp, Melissa Dykeman-Abourbih, Alyse Wolfard, Steven Kenny, Jacinda Matzer, Brita Morrow, Amber Reid and Jill Scalzo for racing through and providing such useful, in depth feedback and literary criticism.

  - Michael

  THE LIES CONTENTS

  ANNA

  AMO

  LARA

  HUNT

  FAR EAST

  Acknowledgements

  AMO

  1. LIGHT

  Snow falls around me like motes of decay in a dying world, as though the sky itself is sighing off infected skin. It comes silent and cold, deadening my every step and smoothing away the shape of the earth under my feet. I can't help but wonder that I'm finally reaching the end.

  I walk.

  Tears freeze on my cheeks, and I imagine the ashes of New LA mingling with the concrete-colored clouds overhead. Strange winds carry such strange fruit. I heard once that radioactive material from the Hiroshima bomb rained in Australia for years, rained in Papua New Guinea, rained on the Galapagos Isles, caught in swirling atmospheric currents ten miles high. So it's the same here, and each fat, drifting flake becomes a Deepcraft world I've built and abandoned, or a person lost, or a friend I've betrayed. So many dead already, from the noisy beginning of this apocalypse right up to the frozen, silent end.

  I walk through the dark, twisted stretches of ice-chipped pine forests. I cycle past frostbitten Siberian villages, submerged to the pale tips of their rooftops and lampposts. At times I drive over the endless expanse of this barren white land. Days pass, maybe weeks, and I see no other survivors, speak to no one; I only think of the end to come, and the ends I've left behind.

  I think of New LA.

  The Chinese Theater is dust in the air, now. Venice Beach is dust. Lara's new coffee shop, the John Harrison, is dust. Chino Hills, Disneyland, the malls and the hills and the roads we cleared and cairns we placed, our home and the room where my children slept, the knitted goods made by Keeshom's knitting circle, all of my legacy is turned to dust.

  I push falling flakes to the side like I'm caressing lost friends. Here a piece of Cerulean remains, gazing back at me. Here falls a memory of Anna on the beach, shouting at me, angry at something we've both probably forgotten.

  Anna. Cerulean. Lara.

  Words and memories scroll on a repeating reel through my mind, because I've lost so much, and failed so many, and made so many mistakes.

  I'm following a road, like a river white with snow, though I can't see the blacktop beneath. I tried digging down to it once, but it must be ten feet deep. Instead I slalom through the frozen wastes alone, and I imagine cars trapped beneath my feet, like mammoths locked in the permafrost. Maybe they'll last there for millennia, perfectly preserved, to one day be dug up by a new race and resurrected. Future peoples will puzzle over Russian pop cassettes and the true purpose of cup-holders.

  I walk, and it's so cold my gums bleed. I have all the thermal gear I can wear, and still my toes blacken. At night I take shelter in dugouts in the snow like a hibernating bear, huddling close to a pitiful jumble of smoking sticks as though heat on my skin has any chance to warm up the ice I feel within.

  How many have I killed?

  The words beat like a drumbeat in my mind, day after slogging day. Even when the humming in the air that draws me North is strong, when the signal reaches out like a hot purple beam across the sky and I dream of the vengeance I'm go
ing to have, I hear the drumbeat of guilt play out.

  How many have I killed, and for what?

  Sometimes it's guilt for the people I mowed down under my tires at Istanbul, or left for dead in the bunkers of Gap and Brezno. I think of the little boy's face on the floor of the shield room, and it's his face that drives me on.

  Then the guilt flips, and I see the effects of my mercy. Because I didn't kill more, because I couldn't kill them all, that means my own people will die. My weakness has doomed my family, right when Lara needs me most, my children need me, but I couldn't do what I promised. I have turned away from them in order to save people I do not even know.

  I've been kind. I've been cruel. I've killed and I've killed, and all I've done is ensure the conflict will grind on and on and on…

  I wake up in one of my burrowed snow tunnels and there's a fox standing at the entrance, vermilion and gold in the bleak morning light, more beautiful than I have any right to see. Against the white he shines like a bead of blood, and I reach out to touch him, because perhaps his purity can heal me, perhaps his certainty can make me see, but…

  He drops to the tunnel floor, instantly dead.

  I didn't know. I didn't mean it. This power of mine flails out in my sleep. I wake from it bleary. Birds fall with the snow, sometimes. Once I saw a great elk collapse. I tried to eat it, to butcher it, but even in this frigid waste the flies descended before I could set to drying strips of its meat over a fire. The whole thing became a putrid carrion pile in hours.

  I'm a cancer, is what it means. I'm better off up here. Pulled up here, like a rotten tooth out of a rotten jaw. Snap, more animals die.

  I emerge past the fox and see them; hundreds of them splayed like the ocean that time in Times Square, after I'd shot myself dead. Not only foxes lie before me but butterflies too, God bless them, and rabbits, and deer, and a family of beavers huddled together, and matted gray wolves. Their bodies steam as their heat fades.