Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light Read online

  THE LIGHT – Last Mayor 9

  From the darkness comes the light.

  Ever since the world broke apart, 'Last Mayor of America' Amo has known what kind of world he'd like to build.

  Until now.

  Now there is no light at the end of days. Only darkness. And darkness will rule over all.

  The end is here.

  LAST MAYOR SERIES

  The Last (Book 1)

  The Lost (Book 2)

  The Least (Book 3)

  Box Set (Books 1-3)

  The Loss (Book 4)

  The List (Book 5)

  The Laws (Book 6)

  Box Set (Books 4-6)

  The Lash (Book 7)

  The Lies (Book 8)

  The Light (Book 9)

  Buy Michael John Grist's books via links here.

  For Su

  CONTENTS

  AMO

  INTERLUDE 1

  1. COLORS

  2. OPEN THE DOORS

  3. SHADOW SEAL

  ANNA

  4. JUMP

  INTERLUDE 2

  5. BREZNO

  6. GAP

  LARA

  INTERLUDE 3

  7. TRIAL

  8. PARTY

  9. FOREST

  10. ESCORT

  SIEGE

  INTERLUDE 4

  11. SKULL MOUNTAIN

  12. BLACK EYE

  13. DIAMONDS

  INTERLUDE 5

  14. APIA

  15. JAKE

  16. MOSQUE

  17. BOATS

  INTERLUDE 6

  18. STONEHENGE

  19. TALK

  20. RAIN

  INTERLUDE 7

  21. THE LINE

  22. LAZARUS

  23. ISHTAR

  24. RISE

  INTERLUDE 8

  25. SAMSON

  FAR EAST

  26. MARTYR

  27. EXODUS PROTOCOL 3

  28. THE LIGHT

  Author's Note

  The Saint's Rise (excerpt)

  AMO

  INTERLUDE 1

  Olan Harrison stood by the body's side and waited.

  They were in his private chambers on the Redoubt's eleventh floor; floor-to-ceiling windows spanned the exterior wall, offering a view out over the spiky gray Huangshan mountain range, Eastern China, now bathed in a low mist. The scale and scope of the panorama was dizzying, with the drop falling away to the winding river far below, where the missile arrays, access road and sentinel autocannons were effectively invisible within the carefully sculpted lay of the land.

  All of this for James While, to evade detection from above. He caught himself smiling, and tapped the body's hand.

  "You were dogged," he said. "I'll give you that."

  There was more than a grudging respect there. He'd loved this man, in his own way. Using him, turning him against himself and watching his madness grow, had been one of the greatest disappointments of Olan's life. Also one of the greatest victories. It came naturally, these days, to hold opposing views in his head at the same time.

  The body's eyes flickered beneath the eyelids.

  It was strange still, even after thirteen years of working with the Lazarus protocol, to think about a fractured mind trying to find itself within a new body. No one understood the process better than Olan Harrison; he'd been the first person in human history to have his consciousness dragged down off the line, and even he didn't understand it fully. The things the line did to you, while you floated helplessly up above…

  He focused, rallying his mind back to the body before him. It didn't look anything like his old friend; the Redoubt wasn't that far advanced with their clone technology. Still, minus the ravages of the line, it would be the same man, and with his mind back in a new body, it was all about steadily synchronizing the two. When you got down to the hardware vs. software argument, it was all academic really, only an order of magnitude away from updating the operating system on your cell phone.

  It was strange to think that such matters had once occupied his every waking moment, back when he'd run a global communications company. He'd agonized over the ethics of sending out brute force system updates to millions of cell phones across his many networks, just to counter the threat of a potential computer virus in one region.

  He'd gotten over those moral qualms, and come a very long way since. What was the fall of the old world, but the ultimate operating system update, an upgrade to human 2.0? He allowed himself a small smile. So the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Did that make this hell? Another smile.

  Not for him.

  "He's rising toward consciousness," came the small voice in his left ear; an implant surgically attached to the inner cochlea.

  Little Olan, he called this, the strongest of the voices in his head. Thirteen years of use had integrated it thoroughly into who he was; neither an angel or a demon on his shoulder, only an artificial echo of his own mind, providing a steadfast reminder of what 'Olan Harrison' really was, in the face of so much chaos.

  The Apotheo Net had worked such wonders. Back then, he'd dreamed of uploading his consciousness into the Internet 'cloud'. He'd had them drill into his skull just to place the electrodes closer to his brain, to make a higher resolution record of his living mind. Their efforts had succeeded beyond all expectation, producing an accurate artificial intelligence version of him, but still there was no way to actually transfer 'him'.

  They could make electronic copies. But the Olan Harrison that he was, trapped in his skull and his aging body, could not just be beamed out through a telephone wire. He'd had to turn to the line for that…

  Still, he'd found a use for Little Olan. Without him none of this could have existed; the Redoubt, the Lazarus program, the pitfalls they'd placed on the road toward the cure. Without Little Olan's shepherding hand at the tiller Olan himself would still be far above, floating alone while the hydrogen line cannibalized him for parts, with his 'Shadow SEAL' organization fallen into disarray.

  Little Olan had kept it all running after Olan himself died, working in close tandem with Rachel Heron. He owed them both his life, which in some ways made what was to come even harder.

  "How long until he wakes up?" he asked the AI.

  "Red cell count elevated," Little Olan answered. "I estimate three minutes. He will be vocal. Shall I anesthetize?"

  Olan toyed with that prospect. Should a painful death be met by a painful birth? Life was not supposed to be easy, and the lot for this particular man less easy than others. He was here primarily, after all, to suffer. It wasn't fair to promise him anything else.

  "No," he answered. "He'll handle it. He's used to pain by now."

  The voice in his ear gave tacit approval.

  Olan waited quietly.

  It was not often he had a chance to reflect. He didn't give himself the opportunity usually, too engaged with the endless fine-tuning of his world, too focused on controlling the myriad voices within. Besides, there were always new Lazarus arrivals to guide in, and failures to dispense with, and fresh maneuvers to be made in his decades-long plan for remaking the world.

  Now all that dropped away, and he thought with a singular mind about the man before him, simmering steadily to consciousness. The first thing he would remember, and the experience he would be born directly back into, was one of the most extreme pain. Olan had watched on a live feed while the black-clad team had spread-eagled his ribs in his Siberian super-Array. It was cruel, but necessary for what was to follow. Olan had gone through the process himself as part of his Lazarus preparation.

  The deceased had to be a burning hot signal on the line, for the Redoubt to latch onto it and bring it back down. In
tense pain at the moment of death was one way to achieve that; it threw up a burning flare they could easily locate. But it wasn't only for the pain that they cracked open ribs; it was also for the sense of horror when seeing, with your own eyes, your chest cavity being opened up to display. That struck a deep note of spiritual horror that turned the hot flare into a blazing lighthouse on the line.

  It had been the worst experience Olan had ever gone through, at least until that point, and he'd tried a lot of experimental science in his day. The Apotheo Net deep brain scans had sent him into a kind of semi-comatose state for hours, unable to do anything but hurt. The Logchain cellular sampling, including multiple spine biopsies, had been an endless parade of indignity and pain.

  None of it compared to having his ribs cracked open in his Himalayan lab, and that itself paled into comparison to the effects of the line.

  Ah, the line. He didn't like to think about it. A year he spent up there alone, torn at by winds like Prometheus, his liver plucked out every day. It had whittled him into a different man. When they'd retrieved him a year later, after the line had been finally emptied out enough after the Multicameral Array fired, allowing the Redoubt to find his signal, it had taken him months to recover.

  Years. He was still recovering, and without Little Olan in his head, offering a clear spine for the torn pieces of his psyche to rebuild themselves around, he never would have succeeded. It helped him identify which parts were Olan Harrison, which parts were not and could be cut away. There were still many voices in his head, but for the most part they were unified.

  Different times. A different world, really.

  "He's coming up," said Little Olan.

  He steeled himself for the screaming.

  The body opened its eyes. There was a second as it remembered to breathe, and the shattered mind latched on to a newly wired nervous system, then the screaming began.

  It was all consuming, swelling out on the line with soul-deep disarray, yet even through it Olan Harrison saw the recognition in those pain-filled eyes. It left no doubt. Of course the brain waves had already confirmed it, his signal on the hydrogen line had been a total match, yet you were never really sure until you looked into the eyes; the windows of the soul.

  Now these eyes were filled with the greatest, deepest hate.

  It was James While.

  1. COLORS

  I begin to understand.

  I kneel there in front of James While's corpse, gazing into the hollow heart of his opened ribs while the backdrop of driving snow whips by behind, and I see the patterns coming together like paints mixing beneath a masterful brush.

  Colors turn and gambol like spring lambs. Here his blood is a bright arterial red, trickling in a florid rivulet over the marble floor. The wintry Siberian light glistens off it like beads of dew on ripe grapes. Here his blood is a brewing, dark ale of tawny sangria, pooled and drying toward currant black. There are trails and whiskers of many shades in-between; cherry slashed over the ceiling in staccato lines, ruby settled like a fine mist in dimples across his agonized face, merlot at the edges of his ribs where the ivory of his cracked sternum peeks through slit flesh.

  The bandages that cover his skinless body blush with the hint of watery blood. The viscera in his lap, left like the predictions of some Aztec soothsayer, blink and whisper to me in ochre, mulberry, raisin and mauve. I could mix some startling shades from this, I wonder. What a painting I would draw. Pac-Man on the side of a building. Pac-Man reduced to a stencil on a desk. Pac-Man painted on the head of a pin, using strokes from a single-hair brush.

  That may be the only use of my talents left. I think again of my New LA flag and nearly laugh. I was so ignorant. What use was that, when there was always this?

  I see fuchsia. Punch. Rosewood and ballet slipper, flamingo and peach. There's blood on my hands too. I look at my palms. Too late, they whisper back to me. I remember reading the colors on Lara's palms. I left her and my children behind; did I read that coming too? In my palms I see the word traitor. I see failure. These things are no longer great shames to me, though.

  I accept what I am and what I do. I see the stakes and I will pay them to play in this game. I am a man to be feared, now. For all my qualms, I have left a trail of bodies fifty miles wide behind me. I've burned and crushed them, I've choked and shot them, I've humiliated them beneath the power of the line as I walked in their midst like a god.

  So be it.

  On my feet I address the corpse of James While.

  "I know what he wants," I tell him.

  Perhaps James While knew also, at the end. Maybe together we glimpse the true shape of Olan Harrison's plan, and what it will mean.

  Endless suffering for the world.

  I walk out with the black eye stretching before me like a sword, to where the super-Array are waiting. Thirteen years ago Joran Helkegarde assembled them with James While's support, backed by the organization Olan Harrison grew for thirty years to encompass the world. Now they fall to me, a strange kind of inheritance.

  I stand on the second floor gantry encircling the vast Array hall. This space is ten times larger than the Alpha Array far to the west. The sky through the iced ceiling is a swirling kaleidoscope, casting stark light over the thousand chained in their dimpled squares below, surrounded by the detritus of thirteen long years of rambling, pointless motion.

  The demons clamor for me. The lepers fizz. The blue heads moan and the ocean tumble and the yellow candles melt and the ones with four legs and three arms roll, and the giant faces squidge softly in their puddles, and black wraiths flicker and fade, and I spread my arms like a conductor before them.

  The black eye rings out as the loudest instrument in the orchestra, silencing their shuddering and grasping. With it I dig shafts through their empty minds and pour my intent in, like a programmer dropping lines of code into a Deepcraft world. So I make them mine.

  * * *

  They stream out of the building with me at their head in a military-grade Jeep. James While was well prepared; in his storerooms were ample stashes of batteries and fuel, sparkplugs and spare tires, food and weapons.

  Outside a rushing snow sweeps across the tundra, blurring everything in a left-right hail of scratchy static. Visibility is minimal, but the road from the super-Array is mostly clear; not weighed down with permafrost like the ice-bitten fields and glacial forests either side.

  I imagine James While setting out here thirteen years ago, clearing a network with his team, filled with the hope that perhaps in a year or two they would find the location of the shadow SEAL and dig it out. In that time they built a secret communications network of their own, and laid a system of supply cairns throughout the countryside much like my own in America. They had the foresight to disguise everything they did from the air, in case the shadow SEAL were watching for them in turn.

  If they're watching now, they will see this.

  My private ocean spreads back over the white like a pale watermark. The cold doesn't bother them and it doesn't bother me. I spur the Jeep on and they try to keep up. The gray ones fall behind but the demons and the lepers keep pace; huge red arms pumping, staticky bodies flashing forward in impossible jumps.

  An army.

  I rifle through the radio channels, not because I think there'll be any music there but because I know there won't be. I keep tuning through the snow until finally I find the station I'm looking for. It plays in my head like an old jukebox in a cozy diner; all the voices of people I've lost.

  Feargal begs me to stop. Dr. Ozark cries out from his burning vehicle while a demon cracks open his jaw. Julio curses us as he tears out of New LA, and Keeshom asks if I'm sure this is the right path. I tap along to the tune on the leather-wrapped wheel.

  The horde sings along with me, calling out the words. They can't sing, but I have them try. They have to learn. They scream atonally. I wind the windows down and enjoy their performance. The words and the sounds run in time with the thunder of their many feet. Perh
aps I can see tracks in the snow before me. The shadow SEAL came this way. They took from James While what they wanted, and now he is just one more enemy I will have to kill.

  I think I understand what Olan Harrison has done. I know what he killed every person on Earth for, and I need these voices in my head to keep me moving, because without the memories it brings of how the world used to be, and what I owe, I think I might just toss a noose over the nearest branch and go to the long dark right now.

  Continuity.

  I can only push myself so far. This far, but no further. I'm long past rage and revenge, to a place where the killing will be cold and clinical, like balancing numbers on a ledger, like mixing shades of paint. I've burned myself out on guilt already, on emotion, on outrage. There is just the imbalance, now. The injustice. I will do this, but only if I don't think about what it really means.

  Still, I see James While's spread-eagled corpse drifting out there amongst the flurrying snow, laid atop the same grisly death that Olan Harrison suffered. It all means something. They didn't traipse five thousand miles around the world just for sadism. It wasn't sadism when they did it to Olan Harrison either.

  This ugly realization has been coming for a long time. I push the accelerator down and hit one of my demons in the back. It is flung off to the side, into the solid drifts of snow. In the rear view mirrors I watch it get up and start running after me again.

  It's exhausting, all this pain. All this cruelty.

  I watch him running, and it makes me tired; tired to be me, tired to feel like I have to do this, that I'm allowed to do this. This demon was one of the people the SEAL transformed, too. Each one of these monsters in my horde was a person, and it's wrong for me to hurt them, but I can't help it. I need this to keep the worse thoughts at bay. The more I think what Olan Harrison did to us with his Multicameral Array, leaving us here alone in this broken world, the more I have to do this or step off the edge into madness.