On Top of the Dead

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  On Top of the Dead

  A Benny Slade Story

  Dean Wesley Smith

  On Top of the Dead

  Copyright © 2012 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Chapter One

  Somehow I survived everyone else in the world dying.

  One minute everyone was alive, the streets of New York were teaming with all sorts as is the case with this fine city; Then I went into my old steel vault at Benny Slade’s Personal Loans to get some cash for my next loan, and when I come out, everyone was dead.

  Car alarms were going off and the street in front of my place was a mess. Bodies littered the sidewalks, dead people filled wrecked cars, slumped over their steering wheels, or heads back, bodies held up by their seat belts.

  And both Madge and Maggie, my two right hands, were both face down on my newly installed brown carpet.

  Madge, who looked more like my old mother used to look before she got hit by that cab, had fallen next to her desk; while Maggie, about two years younger than my thirty-five years of age, had sprawled in the middle of the floor, her short skirt riding up and showing me a little of those wonderful white panties of hers that I liked so much.

  I called out to Maggie and checked her first, then Madge. Both were dead. I sat back, feeling that cold, hard feeling come over me like it did when I had been in a firefight in the Gulf. Emotions got shoved back and I just stared.

  It took me a minute to figure out what was different, what was wrong besides two healthy women being suddenly dead. There was no blood. Nothing. Now that I had turned them over, they just lay face up, eyes wide open, completely dead.

  My first thought was gas attack, so I scrambled back into the vault; but I had left the vault door slightly open when I came out, so if it was some sort of terrorist gas attack, I was as good as dead as well.

  After a minute sitting in the dark, I got disgusted at myself. “Come on, Benny, get it together,” I said out loud. Madge had always complained I talked to myself too much, but Maggie thought it cute.

  Maggie thought anything I did cute, and I thought she was cute, and we had flirted since the first day I hired her six months before. She was as sharp as they came and knew money and books and computers. I had somehow managed to keep the relationship on only flirt level.

  I starred at Maggie for a moment. I was going to miss those white panties she flashed at me all day. I was going to miss her laugh and her smile and that wonderful blonde hair.

  The coldness inside me whelmed upwards and I pushed those thoughts away. As my sergeant used to say, “Time to fight: time to think later if you survive the fight.”

  Clearly this was some sort of strange fight I was in.

  I turned away from Maggie and headed for the door.

  The moment I opened the door, the wave of sound hit me like a hammer. Hundreds and hundreds of car alarms were all going off at the same time.

  Cars engines were still running, some racing as if their dead occupant still had a foot on the gas. Up Lexington Avenue I could see a fire starting to take hold of a building.

  But what I didn’t hear were police and ambulance sirens.

  And no one around me in the cars or on the sidewalk was moving.

  No one.

  The day was a nice, cold but comfortable, December afternoon, some faint sun beating down on the buildings, so I didn’t need any coat at the moment.

  I checked a couple of young girls on the sidewalk to be sure they were dead. They were as gone as Marge and Maggie.

  Then up the street I saw some movement as people came up out of the subway and sort of stopped and stared.

  “So I’m not the only one,” I said, feeling fantastically relieved.

  I started toward the other people, then saw a couple of them panic and flee back down into the subway, followed by the others.

  “Won’t help,” I shouted. But no one was going to hear anything I said over the noise of the car alarms and engines.

  But they were doing exactly as I had done when I ran back into my old safe.

  I glanced around at the buildings towering over the canyon of Lexington Ave. I couldn’t see one window opening, or anyone even peeking out at all the noise.

  And as far as I could see in both directions, everything was stopped and bodies covered the sidewalks.

  I walked up to the corner of 54th and looked both directions. Same thing along the tree-lined street.

  Everyone was dead, knocked down by some sort of giant killer in an instant. From what I could tell, not a one knew what hit them. None of them looked shocked or panicked or showing any fear at all. Just normal expressions on very dead people.

  “What happened?” I said out loud, but the words barely made it to my own ears in the noise of alarms and running cars.

  Who knew that the end of the world was going to be so damned loud?

  Chapter Two

  “I need to find out how far this spreads,” I said into the noise of the running engines and car alarms.

  I could feel the panic I had learned to hold down when I was a kid in fights on the street start to ease up into my gut. I hadn’t felt that in many years. It wasn’t the dead bodies that bothered me, I had seen worse in the Gulf. Much worse.

  After the first few months in Iraq, dead bodies had stopped bothering me, at least on the surface. My counselor at the VA said I had a lot of buried anger and that the only way to get healthy was to let out some of the anger and tell him what I had seen. I didn’t want to tell anyone, so he and I hadn’t gotten too far in the last few years.

  Death didn’t really scare me; but there were dead bodies on my street, in my own business, and I was still alive. Now that scared hell out of me.

  I started to head back to lock up my safe, then laughed at myself and looked around. Unless this was the second coming and everyone was going to suddenly spring back to life, locking up my money was the least of my worries.

  But I went in and locked the safe anyway, tossing the money back inside that I had taken out to loan Mrs. Tenny for her grandkid’s operation. More than likely, Mrs. Tenny and her grandkid weren’t going to be needing much of anything anymore.

  Then I headed downtown along Lexington, stepping over and around the dead bodies on the sidewalks. I thought these sidewalks used to be crowded when people were alive. When the same people are sprawled all over the place, the sidewalks got even smaller.

  Down a dozen blocks I saw a few more people gathered near the subway entrance, looking terrified and very panicked, but at least this group had gotten over the desire to flee back into the tunnels.

  I crossed the street. “Anyone have any idea what happened?”

  All four of them, including a nice-looking young thing with a backpack over her shoulder, shook their heads no.

  One guy held up his cell phone. He looked to be about five years older than me and had more hair than any guy his age should ever have. “Phones are working, but no one is answering anything. Anywhere.”

  He stressed the word “anywhere.”

  He seemed to be the one who had taken charge of the little group. Besides the college-age girl, there were two boys about the same age, all looking stunned. More than likely this had been some sort of f
ield trip for a class, and the older guy was the professor.

  He stressed the word “anywhere” again, more than I wanted him to.

  The other three nodded, all holding their cell phones as if they were lifelines. After walking a dozen blocks, I was starting to get the idea that no one was going to toss any of us a lifeline.

  “Anyone try tuning in a radio?” I asked.

  The guy nodded. “Nothing. The internet is still working, so is Facebook and Twitter, but not one new post from anyone anywhere in the world that we can tell. We are searching. And no one, including family across the country, is answering any of us.”

  “Are they all dead?” the young college-age girl asked, the look of panic in her eyes. I had seen that look a number of times in soldier’s eyes in Iraq. She was about to flip and I wanted no part of that.

  “They might be,” I said. “I’d head off the island, get away from the city.”

  The professor-guy nodded.

  “We can’t drive, and the subways aren’t working,” the girl said, her voice higher than a moment ago.

  The guy who seemed in charge of his little group said softly, “Let’s walk.”

  He turned them toward the river. “You coming?”

  “Got to check on a few people first,” I said.

  “We’ll head south if you want to join us.”

  “Thanks,” I said to him. “I might.”

  I reached into my wallet and handed him my card. “Cell phone number. Call me if you hear anything or end up back this way – if the phones are still working.”

  I had no intention at that moment of joining anyone, but better to leave the options open. At least this group seemed to be holding together, except for the girl.

  He nodded and tucked my card into his pocket. “Good luck,” he said and followed his little flock.

  I was starting to think the human race needed the luck now. No one on-line, no emergency declared, and no announcements coming across any emergency bands or over the radio. I had a hunch that no help was coming. That group could walk all the way to Florida and never find help other than other survivors.

  I had a hunch that most of the human race had just bought the farm in a really big way.

  Clearly being down in the subway had saved a number of people, and me being in my vault had saved me from whatever killed all these people. It hadn’t been gas and it hadn’t been an attack. That much was clear. I had read an article last week about some huge burst of energy that might take out the entire planet coming from some other sun. Maybe something like that had happened without warning.

  Or maybe this had been an alien attack. That thought made me smile. I had clearly watched far too many late night movies. Maggie really liked those old bug-eyed monster movies. I had really liked when she sat on my couch watching television. It had been a fair trade.

  I was never going to know the answer to the question of what happened, I was certain. And to be honest, I didn’t much care. What I did care about was staying alive now that I had drawn the lucky straw.

  I headed toward Broadway along 42nd Street, working my way between the bodies.

  What was really creepy about the bodies was the lack of blood. All the bodies I had seen in the past had become dead bodies because of holes that let out a lot of blood. No one sprawled on the sidewalk around me now had anything more than a slight bloody nose from hitting their face when they fell.

  And since it was December, they had all mostly been bundled up, so most of them looked like nothing more than piles of clothing with an arm or a couple legs sticking out.

  I wondered all the way over to Broadway, seeing only a few survivors picking their way though the streets of dead. I turned and went up Broadway, then finally, a couple hours later as the sun was starting to set, I found myself back at my loan company on Lexington.

  It had been a nice little business, funded by investors to help those on the streets who needed help to get by with short-term, interest-free loans. I had felt good running the little shop, helping out people, and Madge had been fantastic at getting us grants and donors to keep us going.

  I went into my little business and pulled both Madge and Maggie out onto the sidewalk and sat them with their backs against the front of the business, like they were taking a break and just looking out over the street. I smoothed down Maggie’s dress so her white panties didn’t show.

  I had been around enough dead bodies to know that after a while they would start smelling. No point in having Marge and Maggie smell up my office.

  I stood on the sidewalk and looked in both directions, suddenly realizing something that was very obvious. This entire city was going to be one stinking mess in very short order. It was scheduled to freeze tonight, and that would help with the people outside, but everyone who had died with the heat on in their apartments and businesses were going to start smelling really, really bad very shortly.

  I had smelled my share of three-or-four-day-dead bodies and didn’t much care for it.

  I sat in my chair behind my desk, put my feet up, and tried to think while keeping the cold of the “emotion screen,” as my counselor called it, in place. Breaking down now might just end up getting me as dead as everyone else.

  Outside the car alarms had calmed down and the city was actually much quieter than I ever remembered hearing it, even late at night.

  I looked around at the business I had put my heart into since getting out of the service, and sighed. “Not much to do here. I think you need to figure out what to do with the next part of your life, Benny. Right?”

  No one answered me. My voice just echoed, and that seemed damn creepy as well.

  I stood and headed back out into the light of the city, heading home. Luckily the electrical systems were still working, the stoplights still going through their cycles, the streetlights and building lights still making the night in the city seem like daylight.

  More than likely that wouldn’t last very long without people maintaining the power systems and lines. First good winter storm, and this place would be a giant frozen city of dead meat.

  My apartment felt unusually silent, so I clicked on the television, hoping to find something or someone to tell me what happened.

  Nothing. Some stations that had automatic programming were running, but the rest were just dead air.

  The radio was the same, so I finally tuned the radio to an automatic light jazz station and let it play just to have some background music.

  Then using my computer, another appliance that would soon be worthless, I pulled up some maps of New York and the area going south.

  After an hour of studying those, I decided the idea was too stupid for words. Assuming I made the hike all the way to Florida, even taking some cars once I was outside of the city, what was I going to do down there with alligators and snakes and rotting-in-the-sun bodies?

  “Think, Benny, think!”

  I couldn’t think of one darned thing, so I decided to make sure this was as bad as I had a hunch it was. I started dialing friends I knew in Southern California, Chicago, even Texas. I even dialed five of my old buddies who were still stationed overseas. Not a one answered.

  I dialed twenty people. All machines or no answer. Not rock-solid proof things were bad everywhere, but adding in the internet and television silence, enough for me.

  So I grabbed a yellow pad and asked myself, “What are you going to need to survive this winter?”

  Then I started making a list.

  –I was going to need power for lights and heat for long term.

  –I was going to somehow need to figure out a way to get a place that I could hold back the smell until that passed, which was going to take some time and help from Mother Nature.

  –I was going to need a place to store food and lots of canned supplies and safe drinking water.

  –And considering the nut cases in this town that might still be alive, I was going to need a place I could protect.

  –And from the faint glow out m
y window from the building on fire ten blocks up the street, I would need a place that wouldn’t easily burn.

  And maybe I could get a band of other survivors together who could work together to search for food and for defense.

  Now I liked the sound of that.

  I walked over to the window and stared toward the center of the city. Suddenly I could see it. The answer was right there in front of me. I knew exactly the place that fit the bill perfectly. But I was going to have to move fast, before anyone else had the same idea.

  Chapter Three

  I cooked myself a good steak dinner and scanned the television and radio channels again as I ate, coming up blank yet again. Nothing was working besides automatic systems, and those weren’t going to last long at all.

  I put my coat on with my trusty .45 in one pocket and a flashlight in the other, and headed out.

  At night, even with the lights of the city still completely on, the bodies looked even stranger, piled and sprawled on the sidewalk. It took me a good hour to reach the Empire State Building.

  I figured the Empire State Building had pretty much everything I would need. It was a secured building so I could defend it, it would have a pretty fine security system and extra supply of weapons for the guards, and it would have generators. Lots of generators to run all those elevators during power failures. I think the building had something like eighty different elevators or something like that. Also it was high enough and windy enough that even at the worst of the smell, it should be survivable.

  The biggest problem was going to be clearing out the bodies. I was going to need to do that quickly as soon as I made sure the building actually did have everything I needed.

  By ten in the evening I had borrowed the keys off a guard’s body and found the security room. It had a lot of cameras that all seemed to be working.

  Nothing was moving on any of the cameras.

  Nothing.

  “Benny, you’ve got yourself into a real mess this time.”