“You’re not the mayor,” she said. “There’s no city council. No taxes. No election. You’re just a guy with a key.”
The UN came. The “Great Panic” was over. They had a vaccine, or a cure, or at least a way to make the dead stay dead. The helicopters landed on the roof of the parking garage we’d turned into a hospital.
On D+112, a teenager named Chloe came to me. She’d found a locked strongbox in her grandfather’s attic. Inside was a deed. Her family had donated the land for the original waterworks in 1924. There was a clause: if the city ceased to function, ownership reverted to the heirs.
I didn’t use the key to unlock a door. I used it to lock one. I pointed to the old fuel depot. “That’s city property,” I shouted. “And I’m the mayor. You take one step closer, and I will blow it sky high. I have the key to the ignition. That’s what this is.” wwz key to the city documents
A young officer in a clean uniform asked for my credentials. I laughed. I handed him the brass key.
He didn’t. He wrote a report. He filed it under “Provisional Civil Authorities.” And then he asked for the key back, for evidence.
UN Post-War Commission, Archive #WWZ-4478-B Excerpts from the testimony of Elias Vance, former Mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida. Recovered from a fire-safe lockbox, alongside a tarnished brass key. Entry 1: The Evacuation (D+14) “You’re not the mayor,” she said
We talked. She became the head of sanitation. I stayed the mayor. The key became a gavel.
The problem wasn’t the dead. It was the living. A flotilla of refugees from the north, desperate, sick, and armed. They wanted the docks. We couldn’t share—we had barely enough fish. On D+35, a man named Garret, a former state trooper, gave me an ultimatum: surrender the marina or he’d burn the fuel depot.
He looked confused. He scanned a database on his wrist. “Sir, the last recorded mayor of St. Petersburg fled to Georgia on D+12 and died of sepsis on D+19. There is no legal government here.” No election
“What’s this?” he asked.
I pointed to the two hundred and eight survivors lined up on the dock—fishing, building, crying, laughing. “Tell them that,” I said.