The Last Mayor Box Set 3 Read online

  They came close to me, and this is what they get. I can't control my dreams, and even in my dreams I kill. Maybe I should bury all these poor bastards, set up a huge cairn of snow and boulders and scrawl some meaningless shit in the snow that will only be covered over in moments, taking credit for the murder I've done.

  I'm like Midas, but every thing I touch turns to cold.

  I walk north.

  A sign for Пинега passes me by. I can't read it. I don't know where I am, but I'm getting closer. A sign says Совполье. The feeling on the line gets stronger, leaking power like the black and white zombies of Istanbul. What were they, I wonder? My mind simmers slowly on the possibilities. I see Anna in the Istanbul bunker again, wearing her helmet and beating me with a bat, and think that I'm glad. Good for her. Maybe she'll get it right.

  One night I see the Northern Lights.

  I'm standing on the cusp of a frozen wave; snow drifted by the winds over a leaning thatch of brambles. Several creepers emerge furtively from the white, reaching toward a sunlight that won't come again for months. Instead there are the Lights.

  They are not like in the photographs I've seen; augmented and zoomed and colorized, vivid and glorious, but they are all the more impressive for it. They knock me on my ass, barely able to breathe, so for long moments I just stand and stare, until my feet grow numb and my cheeks sting with fresh trails of ice. They are alive in a wholly alien way.

  The way they feel on the line is indescribable. The ripples, the tones, the beauty. I wonder if any other soul alive has felt what I'm feeling now, and doubt it. There's nothing up here for us survivors, only emptiness and solitude.

  The Lights speak to me, and as I listen, things begin to shift. I see that all of my past to this point was one chapter; my LMA days, my New LA, my Lara and my kids, and that chapter is now over. I'm not the same Amo as before. The Lights are a doorway opening for me, showing I can still go forward, because there is no way back home anyway.

  So I go forward, and leave that old, broken Amo behind.

  I walk. Time sizzles and flows like ice, freezing and refreezing in ways I can't remember. My brain doesn't work properly, though the power of it crackles like a frozen puddle popping underfoot. Miles of cold and white pass by. I must be nearing the northern coast of Russia, bound for the Arctic Circle, and the pulsation on the line gets stronger every day.

  It's a complex, shifting signal that washes over me day and night. There are tones in it that I recognize, some that seem strangely like echoes of my own signal bouncing back, and others that are new. I can taste hints of the chaos of Istanbul's black and white zombies, along with the cold thrill of the demons, the jittering hot spots of the ocean, and more sensations I don't know how to describe. Through my dreams it spreads like a heartbeat, gushing in my veins and fuelling me onward, until the understanding finally comes.

  This is the heartbeat of the world.

  Of course I've felt it before. Like background radiation, like traffic on a highway ten miles off that never stops, like the air that I breathe, it has always been there. It's a soup I've been living in since the signal started and the world ended, and only now, up here in the isolation, can I really feel it.

  I laugh as I walk, tasting old flavors again. At times I think I catch a glimmer of Lara in the line, or Anna, or maybe a zombie I remember from a long time back. Every step further north makes it stronger, makes the delineations sharper, helps me distinguish the thing that has pulled me this far, the thing that is different.

  I even feel myself. When I'm quiet and walking, when my mind is on the snow and the world is calm, I sense my reflection on the line like a face in a broken mirror. When I'm driving, when I ride, when I get angry or frustrated and the black eye rises up, I see myself reflected in the line like an ugly bruise, and I wonder, is this darkness washing out across the world too? Am I tainting some communal well, sending nightmares and misery out over them all?

  I feel the thing that is different too; slippery like a greasy tide. Maybe there are many, stitched to a necklace across the crown of the world. I can't tell.

  Then it's there.

  One night, I see it.

  In the depths of the frozen dark, there is a light. The land around me is all crevasses; deep fissures in the permafrost that hide underground caverns. I go on skis, pulling a sled behind me laden with supplies, fitted with ice axes so that when I fall through the cracks, they spin and halt my descent.

  Now I'm here, standing on the purple-dark snow with all those stars and the moon and the Northern Lights fizzling like ribbons of energy in the sky, and I see the light in the distance, atop a rising spike that at first seems to be a column of rock.

  I stare.

  A light out here doesn't seem possible without a person to tend it.

  My black eye blooms large overhead, rising involuntarily and burning back at me in the line's reflection. The rage is so cold, built of my old madness, rising off the memory of a man called Amo. He's just a bundle of pain and loss now, left behind but always there. The cold has split us apart, but still his rage towers over all.

  The light on the rock wakes the black eye, and up it climbs, flattening the signal before it, and I have no choice but to listen as it speaks. Justice, it says. Up ahead. Another few steps. Another few miles. Justice waits.

  * * *

  It's not a rock, but a long building of dark glass rising from a pale cement base, with a slim glass tower rising from its southern edge like a land-locked lighthouse. It looks for all the world like some high-tech office park plucked out of Silicon Valley, except for the mottled layering of blue-ish ice coating it, obscuring any detail.

  Around it lies an empty expanse of flat snow; probably once a parking lot or a security perimeter. There are no signs announcing what it is, or if there are, they've been obscured by years of creeping ice. At the top of the tower the yellow light shines toward me, and with it the signal pours out, and I know what it is now.

  A shield.

  But it's not like any shield I've felt before, nor is it the source of the signal I've been feeling for weeks. It's one thread only.

  I advance slowly over the hard crust of white, my skis scraping loudly in the wind-blown silence. Overhead the Northern Lights ripple like a welcome mat. I approach the crusted snow near the front, where it looks most like a church, but there are no doors apparent. I unclip my skis and toe the ground, but the snow here is packed solid, probably harder than stone. I'll never burrow down even to the topmost door arch, not without a pneumatic drill.

  I stand and look around myself. Standing in the building's shadow, the Siberian wind has cut out briefly, and I prize my goggles off my face, tuck the muffler under my chin and slide back my heavy parka hood. It's at least minus thirty degrees here, but without the wind it's not so bad, and I can probably go without my hood for five minutes before my nose starts to freeze.

  I touch the structure's frozen side, and peer in through the thick skin of ice, but it's too dark inside, distorted by the ice. Maybe a hallway, or a lobby; I can't be clear.

  I look up at the tower, to where the light shows now only in the flakes of snow caught in its beam. My nostrils chafe at the freezing air, and I lift the muffler again. In a minute I'll have to cover my eyes too with the goggles, but I want to take this in.

  There's something special here.

  I unhook from my sled, strap a pair of ice crampons onto my boots, and start around the structure. It takes fifteen minutes to circle it, and at no point are there any doors or open windows. Frequently I peer through the ice, but get no more clarity than a poorly sliced fragment of the T4 virus seen through a conventional microscope; just blurs and runny smears that I could paint any kind of meaning onto.

  Back beneath the tower, I rummage in the sled for my pick. With my goggles back in place to protect me from ice chips, and my hood up to seal in the heat, I heft the glinting metal back, then bring it forward.

  CHONK

  The imp
act rings up my arms and into my crippled shoulder so painfully that I have to drop the pick. For all that, I've barely knocked a chip out of the ice.

  From the sled I get more layers and wrap them round my gloves to deaden the impact, then I take up the pick, heft it over my shoulder, and hit the ice again.

  2. ALPHA STATION

  It takes hours, bashing out a chip of ice at a time. It's not so different from walking over the tundra. I drop into a calm, near-comatose state of focus, driving the pick in and in and in.

  When the metal first breaks through the glass, there's a sigh of gas from within, as though the interior was hermetically sealed. I suppose it has been, by ice. Over a decade of freeze-thaw cycles, beaten by the sun. God knows what kind of toxins are in this air.

  I step back while the wind whistles out, and swing the pick again.

  CHONK

  CRASH

  The pane smashes inward, a plate of glass as big as a trash can lid. Air puffs out in a last gulp that is swallowed by the cold winds, and I lean in to see.

  It's a lobby. I cup my eyes to cut the snow's white glare, adjusting to the darkness inside. It's like peering beneath the surface of a lake. The floor is a dusty dark tile perhaps two yards down, where maroon seating runs along the wall, flanked by wiry, dead potted plants. The ceiling is high, making a generous, glamorous lobby that stretches some hundred yards to the far wall. Below and to the right there's the main entrance door, a large revolving glass affair, buried beneath the level of the ice, and to the left there's a row of electronic security gates with a large airport-style walkthrough metal detector.

  I almost laugh.

  It's like I'm back in the Valley, wandering the headquarters of various Hollywood studios looking for a decent copy of Ragnarok III. But I only need to pull my head back to return to frozen Russia. Reality goes slick and fluid and I almost fall through the gap. Did I bring my security pass? Have I brought coffee for the team? What floor was my interview on again?

  I cackle, then slap myself in the face. There's no pain with the muffler covering my cheeks, but there's a jolt. I need to pull myself together. I back away from the entrance and try to get a read on what's happening. My thoughts feel slimy, like they've been deep-fried, and I can't catch onto any of them.

  The signal is changing?

  I feel it slipping into my thoughts like a subtle blade, poking here, prodding there, making me crazy. The moment I cracked the glass it started, and now it's threatening to scramble my brains like an egg.

  Was it, what?

  I-

  I turn round for a slippery few minutes, feeling it threaten to pull me down. In the ice I see my own body reflected like distortions in a funhouse mirror. I laugh, and my face splinters. My breath goes ragged and I stop trying to map the contours of what is happening to me. I try not to think of the terror lurking just beneath the surface.

  Instead I focus on one thing: the rage.

  I'm good at this. I've been doing it for weeks. I focus on the list of deaths, repeating each one like a puff of breath blown into the black eye, expanding a bubble of anger around me. I lash myself with the past, because fear is not a warning, it's a challenge, and haven't I already learned that a dozen times? Drake taught me well, and I think about his cracked-open head, about dead Feargal and traitor Arnst, about poor helpless Keeshom and everyone else I've killed, crying out for a reckoning.

  It helps, but that help wilts when faced with the hole in the side of the building. I feel madness drawing me in, and know that the eye is no match for the chaos pouring off this place. It's like the leper in Istanbul, but stronger still, chopping up my thoughts and pulling out the plug, leaving me like I'm-

  What did I-

  Hope to be?

  Another slap, ringing in my ears.

  Still, I have to go in.

  I duck back to my sled to get some gear, sucking in deep breaths as if that will help, then turn back and climb in.

  It becomes a fall, and I flop down on the leather seating, sending echoes through that desolate space for the first time in God knows how long. The signal wallops me at full strength, like one of the worst twinges from my post-coma days hitting me square between the eyes, throwing me into a past of failure and dull books and slow, stilted conversations with my parents, croaked out in a whisper, so that-

  I pull myself back into the present with a painful jerk, then writhe on the seat for a while, struggling for control. The signal is a cacophony in here and the black eye is barely keeping my head above water.

  Feargal, I think, crushed and abused. The boy in the shield. Keeshom who did nothing but try to help others. Anna in Istanbul, looking up at me with some curdled kind of disappointed rage…

  The black eye sputters outward, and I lurch forward into the space it buys me. There's a flashlight somewhere, in my pocket, and I lift it. A gun too. I sweep them across the dark, dusty space.

  "Hello?" I call.

  The bright light beam picks out more maroon seating, more dead potted plants, and framed posters hung on the walls. One looks like a cell dividing, another like a schematic of the brain. The security gates are unmanned, the bank of elevators lying beyond are shuttered.

  "Anyone?" I mutter, and lurch forward.

  I hit the reception desk hard on my hip. There's a corporate logo on the wall behind it; the letters squirm and dance.

  ALPHA STATION – MULTICAMERAL ARRAY

  My thoughts turn with a glacial slowness. Alpha may mean more stations than this? I make weak guesses at 'Multicameral', drawing on what I know of the mind from Mecklarin's pop psychology books. The mind is bicameral, he said, two parts of the brain that together make…

  Make-

  So, multicameral?

  A shudder trickles down my back.

  I catch myself staggering out into the open space of the lobby. The air is full of dust kicked up by my own passage, then I'm on my knees while the twinge bears me down.

  All a mistake. I start laughing, and lift the gun to my head. I'm not thinking, not doing, but it happens and it's hilarious, and maybe none of this is even real! I draw love hearts in the dust with the tip of the flashlight, humming a tune I don't recognize, while counting down from ten.

  BANG

  BANG

  I shoot the gun but miss my head. It doesn't feel real, and maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm already lying in the snow outside surrounded by dead animals, dreaming this while I freeze to death.

  "Stop it," I mutter to myself, more afraid than I am angry, more amused than I am worried. "Stop it."

  The black eye is flagging. I feel it dropping away from me like pieces of skin unraveling. This is me, my anger, and my rage. Justice is not enough, I suppose. Anger won't cut it. I need…

  I look at my love hearts and giggle. Love!

  I think of Lara, my Lara, but no rush of sanity comes welling up from within, no conquering of the signal by the power of love. It makes me laugh more, and I drool wickedly everywhere.

  BANG

  The gun goes again, this time so close that the recoil smacks me in the cheek.

  What the hell is going on?

  Did I just shout 'What the hell is going on?'?

  "What the hell is going on?"

  I shout it to be sure. I kick my legs, spinning a circle into the dust, like a snow angel, like Homer Simpson walking himself round in circles.

  Not enough. I wheel through the possibilities, but not revenge, not love, not justice, not righteousness, not madness, not the twinge, not my Lara, not-

  "Get up."

  I roll and giggle and look, and there he is. I give him a big old laugh, standing spectral and serious in the darkness.

  Old Shark-eyes. Geoffrey Marshall. My old nemesis.

  "Shark-eyes," I say.

  He grimaces down at me. I've let him down. I'm a disappointment, and that's only to be expected.

  "I didn't die for this. For you to giggle to yourself until you shit and die."

  I giggle at that.
<
br />   "Shit and die?"

  "Shoot and die, you idiot. Just shoot yourself in the head and be done with it."

  I put the gun to my head. This is familiar, I've been here before.

  "Shoot," he says. "For Arnst. That bastard wanted it. Imagine what he would have done to your Lara, if you'd let him. Think of that while you snigger."

  I hold for a second. My finger strains on the trigger. Shit, I want to pull it and hit home again. My spine, I guess. I want it. But-

  "What?" I say.

  "Kill Lara," he says. He barks. Maybe he's saluting. It's not a dance. It's a march. He's standing still. The signal is playing havoc with his reception. "Or Drake. Have you any idea what's happening to her, right now?"

  I frown, because what does shark-eyes know about Lara?

  "You tried to kill me."

  "And I failed! Discipline didn't help me, but it can help you. Only discipline about the right things."

  I get angry and point the gun at him. It's so frustrating. I feel like a child, lying in the dust. "What things?"

  "Like what Janine Witzgenstein is doing to your wife. Listen to me, little man, pay attention, open your eyes and remember what you're doing here. What did you kill me for, and all those other innocent people? Don't lose track of that now. It's all that you have."

  His words echo. He sputters and starts to fade.

  "Shark-eyes," I call.

  "Don't be a –" I strain for his last words, but they come slow, so slowly stretched out. I think the last word is 'fool'.

  Then he's gone, but it gets me thinking on a new track, a parallel track that isn't justice or revenge or even love, with all my squiggly dust-hearts erased now, but something different and deeper.

  It's why I did all this. Why I lashed Arnst in the dust, and beat Feargal, and killed hundreds and thousands, not because I'm cruel or want the power or even for justice or revenge but because-

  I strain toward it.

  For the weak people. For my weak people, and my children and my friends and my family.

  To save them.

  It's why I started this whole thing. I giggle and sob. I started off clean, I promise! I wanted to do good things, to help other people, not to kill them, not to break them, but to save them.