My Dead America

by Frank Weltner

  The humor was dark and ironic. Right now Ron Henderson was the undisputed King of Death. Through his lab work a virus had been created that attacked people where they lived. Nothing could stop it except time or the vaccine, and what had happened was absolutely perfect.

  “Got a report on Washington D.C.?”

  “Gone.”

  “The President?”

  “Yes. He's passed away.”

  It was to be expected. He had planned it to end like this. If the hierarchy of the Washington DC hegemony survived, the world could never be rebuilt properly. The President and his cabinet as well as the Senators and Congressmen had too many friends in high places. These friends had torn the entire world to shreds, attacking its entire natural infrastructure by placing profit above sound policy. The oceans were nearly dead, and most agricultural lands were compromised by the crazy genetically modified organism projects that had turned number one crops like corn into killer nightmares. Every loaf of bread was filled with carcinogens from wheat, corn, and oats that contained embedded insecticides, weed killers, and other freaky traits that sickened most people and animals. On top of that, the seeds were terminal. They could not be replanted without hauling in new and even more deadly seeds, all of them engineered by corporatist scientists who were almost as sociopathic and irresponsible as Eggplant himself who developed the killer strain that was emptying the world of the vast majority of its inhabitants including the vile, scientific mavens of Monsanto. Soon, the planet would be able to rest, and the few remaining humans, if there were any, could soon be re-educated into a structured existence without the deadly profit motivation that had nearly destroyed the most beautiful and productive planet in the cosmos in less than two hundred years of mining, manufacturing, over-fishing, war, and population stuffing to the point where most nations were on the verge of starvation, and, therefore, were busy popping out even more wars. They were all going to die of starvation. The artificial plague was a godsend for them.

  “I love it,” Eggplant said. “Soon, we'll have our planet back. After we clean it and give it the global husbandry it deserves, we'll have forests and clear streams up the ass. And the oceans will be filled with huge schools of fish, whales, penguins, and everything else that made Earth into a beautiful planet before mankind messed it up in the name of profit.”

  The voice on the other end of the line said, “Yes. It's a beautiful thing.”

  “The Great Dying,” said Eggplant. “This time it will be done correctly.”

  He fondled several vials of his beautiful virus. It was instrumental in saving the entire ecological structure.

  He looked out the window.

  The sky outside was brighter and bluer already, because no aircraft were being allowed to fly anywhere in the world to stop the virus from spreading. The atmosphere was already healing itself.

  “How do you mean?” The CDC's voice asked.

  “At the end of the Permian Period, the first Great Dying occurred. It was far more painful and simply happened on its own. The suffering went on for hundreds of thousands of years. Species croaked all over the planet, but it took a long and painful period of time to finish it. This new dying off is being accomplished in a few days only, and the suffering of the dying is so rapid, that the people don't feel it as much. It's humane, and I made it that way. Either way, people had to die off in order to stabilize our planet again so it could be rebuilt the natural way it was before we over-populated and ruined it. The outcome was never in question. We were going to die either way.”

  “You don't feel sorry for them?”

  “The people?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Harsh.”

  “On the contrary. If we hadn't done this, the suffering would have gone on for thousands of years. Wars for dwindling resources, burning of cities, nuclear winters. These would have turned Earth into a frozen snow ball from which it might not have recovered, and, if it did, there's no way of knowing what might have evolved. It could have been a nightmare of plants and animals that kill each other with indescribable efficiency.”

  “I think we already proved we had done that.”

  “We have. But now its going have planning. When we are done, the people who are left will be blessed, and they will have the information they need to insure that this sort of thing will never again need to happen. Suffering will be over.”

  “I suppose.”

  “No suppose about about it. We haven't calculated the immense suffering of the millions of species who died at the hands of farmers, explorers, airline pollution, the poisoning of oceans, lands, and streams by a mankind whose profit motive was more important than life itself. This time we will create a world that is once again filled with life and where mankind will be reduced to a few million people surrounded by plants, animals, clean air, and all of the things we had when we first populated the world. We wrecked it, tore it to shreds. It was on its way to total destruction. Now, it has another chance. Only a controlled and drastic depopulation program like mine could have healed it.”

  “I suppose, Eggplant.”

  “I'll go down as a world hero, CDC,” Eggplant said.

  “If they don't figure out how to kill us for this.”

  “That's a distinct possibility. Are you prepared for that?”

  “No, Eggplant. Are you prepared for that?”

  “Revenge is a terrible thing, my friend. There's no doubt that we deserve it.”

  “I know.”

  “I think we'll be all right.”

  “Really? How so?”

  “Because we will be the ones with the new seeds to replant the earth's forests, oceans, and meadows. We will be known by them as the blessed ones, because we are going to hide all the methods they would otherwise use to identify us and track us down. All the people will see is how we are helping them to rebuild their planet into a natural realm that is a million times better and more beautiful than ever before. In addition, we will train them to be its benefactor and not its killer. They are going to love us, my friend.”

  In the lobby of tens of thousands of hospitals and public buildings, the people were either dying or dead, and their blood oozed from their bodies.

  The blood made the floors red and slick.

  That was the good news.

  Page 9

  Chapter Nine

  Babies...

  New York City was devoid of its usual people. The plague had torn its guts out. What used to be the city that never sleeps was now nearly empty.

  Of the forty million people who lived in the New York sprawl, there were now only forty thousand remaining. A fraction of them lived in the old Greenwich Village area. The single town homes there were almost small enough to be more easily maintained by such a tiny remaining population. These ancient buildings were two stories high which was just about right for one small nuclear family. With a thirty-five foot ladder one person could easily climb onto the roof to repair leaks.

  Nellie Shane and her three babies lived a few houses down from Sheridan Square, which was now the nucleus of this tiny cluster of small homes. This was all that had been left after the plague's overkill practically left the entire earth denuded of the huge fuck load of people who were wasted by this well-engineered global collapse. Nellie was a twenty-five year old part Jewish girl from the Bronx. Before the dying off, she was extremely popular in the public school. The school was all but gone now. The building stood empty. She had done her best to lock it down, closing all the windows against the weather. She loved that school. Nellie was the only person she knew at her own Bronx PS who still lived. Her prom date, Paul Shockley, passed to the other side on the third day the great dying fever hit the area and closed down her school. The entire student body rapidly perished, but Nellie lived. She had been sick as hell, covered with sores, and nearly bled out on the inside. Her turds were black as Chris Rock's left arm from internal bleeding which turned dark in her stools. But she survived.

  Nellie
had been wobbly as heck for about three days. Her weight was down to only ninety-five pounds when she made her way down the stairs of her family's home and walked outside where the dead New York City air was only a little fresher than in the house where they had all died together, all except her, that is. Later, she would come back, dig graves in the backyard and bury them. Then, she'd bury her boyfriend and his family. Until then, it was all she could do to move her legs and ramble through the streets like a crippled manikin almost afraid to walk for fear she'd fall and hurt herself even more. She found a six-foot wooden pole that wasn't too heavy and used it as her walking stick. It provided some stability, and it gave her a feeling of protection.

  Nellie was a virgin, something almost unknown in The Bronx PS where her future husbands kissed their party asses away along with their parents, rabbis, and dope connections on their last days alive.

  The electricity was out all over town, and little groups of gangs made their way down the streets, scared shitless that they were only days, hours, or even minutes from their impending deaths.

  Nellie slept in the parks. Her only friends for three weeks were dogs, cats, and a clatter of birds who came and went. These were the animals that benefited from the dying. They could survive for months off the flesh of the dead people who were lying all over the place. Nellie watched the birds gently pecking at the faces and eyes of the kids who straddled some of the gutters, each in strangely bizarre contortions where they had fallen. Boils had rendered them easy feasts with plenty of delicious fluids just below the flesh where wicked tumors the size of hailstones or golf balls pushed against their faces and arms from the inside out. The odor had a foul sweetness to it almost everywhere.

  Tiny flames blew along the streets, carrying black dust from the burnt bodies that had been doused with gasoline and set ablaze on the last days in a fruitless effort to finally get control of the contagion, but it was already too little too late. Flames still leaped inside the city's canyons here and there. Fortunately, the buildings had been constructed to prevent these fires from spreading rapidly. Even the apartments were isolated from small eruptions of flames in single units, besides their windows were mostly closed to stop the virus. The fires just burned themselves out, and the water tanks atop the buildings held huge stores of clean water for drinking and bathing. The apartments contained tons of iPods and iPhones, so that whatever music, TV shows, and movies Nellie always wanted to see were hers just for the taking. At first, she broke into cars and recharged her iPhone from the cigarette lighters that had been idly waiting for human beings day after day, but the people never came to start them. She had learned to pull bodies from the cars and take the keys to start vehicles that she wanted to use.

  Nellie found children mostly surviving in the buildings where they had been trapped when their families passed away. Because she was in her late teens, the children who were lucky enough to get out in time wanted to adopt her as their mom, because they were constantly hungry, sick to death, skinny as hell, afraid for their lives having seen everyone in the world dying all around them. Their big eyes expressed a sadness that betrayed their many losses of which there were just too many to count. Brothers, sisters, moms, dads, grandparents, teachers, rabbis, ministers, cops, dogs, goldfish, canaries, all were dead now, and the few surviving kids were filled with the fear of being next in line in this death march that took from them everyone who had lent meaning to their lives.

  She loved these little kids. Their closeness covered up her loneliness. Nellie was still ashamed of being the only survivor out of millions of people. They were far more worthy than she was. Nellie was not the only person who felt that way. The kids who considered her to be their new mother suffered from the same survivor shame. In a universe of death and decay, the winners were the few who were lucky to hang on. They had won the right to walk amid the severe horror of rotting bodies whose deadly stench trailed invisibly into the air with mortal suffering and poked the boney fingers of a zillion corpses into their soft guts in the darkling dreams through which they woke up and screamed in the night.

  Sleep was reversed for them. The nightmares were the streets and the scent of death in the brightness of daytime. Sleep had become a place of newly created and secured pleasures in which their unconscious minds built for them a protected inner world in which beautiful skies, parks, and schools filled with healthy laughing kids surrounded them. Their sleep was where heaven existed. Their world was where the horror-stricken streets and buildings filled them with dread.

  Billie Johnson was five years old. Last night, Billie dreamed he was trapped in a building. Down the corridor, he found a pebble on the floor which he put into his pocket. Once inside his room, he flipped the pebble over in his hands and held it up in the window's light. It had a nice patina to the surface. It was greenish, and the sunlight outside the window fell on it like a flash of light against a lampshade. The stone was special. It lit up from the inside. The light gave it an interesting sheen which amazed Billie. On the floor of the dark building it resembled nothing at all. Now, it was something he treasured.

  He flopped into the bed. In his mind, the past family he had known came back to life. His mom and dad were not only alive again, but they also were vibrant. In fact, they seemed so much nicer now that they had made themselves scarce. Dying seemed to be that way. Alive, people, even parents and siblings were commonplace. However, once the mysterious veil of secrecy fell upon them, and they clammed up, there was nothing to interrupt a boy's mind in developing interesting stories concerning their happenings. In fact, dead kids and moms suddenly reached a mental dream-state, and Billie could pretend they were movie stars and not just Mom or Daisy. Besides, a gorgeous girl like Evangeline Lilly whom he'd seen in several films including The Hobbit, White Chicks, and Real Steel was a treat to behold. Not that a mom wasn't good, too. However, the extreme magnification of reality imparted by the movies shown on televisions glowing in one hundred million kids' homes gave stars a shine that looked down upon parents and siblings from their mountaintop on a summit to which others simply could not rise no matter what. Billie saw them receding into the distance. Evangeline Lilly had him in her arms. She was crying. “Billie,” Eve said with those big beautiful warm lips of hers, “you are fine, son. I like you better than Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, because you are so wonderful and alive, and I love you. Don't ever forget that, Billie.”

  Eve was one of Billie's best pretend Moms. Although he didn't really know what sex was, he sort of figured that, in the future she'd want to sleep with him, but that was then, and this was, now. He awoke later in a sweat as a rat skittered across his sheets, sinking its claws into his face, something that he feared, and he knew in his heart that eventually rats would eat him alive, the same way the disease had eaten away his city, his building, and his family. It had changed everything. Now they were all gone, and only Evangeline Lilly and Nellie mattered to him. Sometimes he confused them. They seemed to meld together as one. Nellie was a godsend just like Evangeline Lilly had been. Nellie was his new non-pretend mom.

  Nellie could be trusted. Billie knew this from the first moment he met her. He feared that he had pushed her into becoming his new mom, because he had pressed up to her as she walked through the street, and he wouldn't stop pressing her, ever. He was scared to death of being all alone. He was afraid of dying all by himself and no one's hand to hold his as he slipped into the deadly darkness. She smelled like a mom, acted like a mom, and was a mom. This mom wasn't going to leave him. He wouldn't let her. If she started to recede into the darkness of dreams, he would reach out and grab her. He'd even kill her if he had to if only to keep her by his side. One way or another she wasn't going to leave him.

  When Billie woke up, the building was as quiet as the city. Either everyone was asleep, or they had left town. He knew they could be dead, always feared a second repetition of the dream in which people were sweating, jumping about in their beds, moaning, and then lying in paralysis until it was obvious that somewh
ere in that final horrible monkey dance they had died and were lost. That was really sad, because he figured that everyone who died was another dad he'd never be held by, another mom or brother or sister who'd never play with him, and he'd eventually have to move to avoid the stench of death that accompanied their personal finality of silence.

  Later, when the sun was up and the room was beginning to glow with that tiny golden orb's light, he heard the house coming awake. Kids were crying a bit, realizing as he did constantly that their brothers were still dead.

  That was the first sound of each day. It was an integral part of everyone's life. They all knew it. They were satisfied with it. There was not much they could say about it. They had survived. They had dragged the dead bodies of their families down the stairs and into the back alley way. They'd been mourning all of the rest of their lives. They lived in these lonely messed up days and evenings that they wanted to forget but could not. So they cried in their sleep. They also cried at the slightest sound. It was the least they could do to show respect. This was their way of simply saying, “Good-bye,” and “I loved you. Please remember every day that I loved you.”

  Breakfast was nearly always candy bars at the corner drugstore. The shelves were still well-stocked, but the better ones were getting scarce. The warehouse in the back had more, so he'd find their boxes. He then put more candy bars on the shelves, the good ones, to keep them neat. It made him feel better. The wrappers were mighty fine. Nellie and her family helped him whenever he asked them. They also loved the colors. They still grabbed the favorite brands first. Old habits really don't die. Later, as the new starvation pressed another dying button, the kids would be happy to eat whatever they could find. Candy would be more than a breakfast treat. It would be rare stuff, hard to find. Food could eventually be worthy of dying for in a knife fight, and many such fights loomed darkly upon this new world's unseen future horizons. But for now there was a ton of food. If the food didn't rot, there would be enough to last for what was left of mankind for 75 years. And, who knows? Maybe people would start making food again just before it ran out. That way, the species would survive without civil wars over the last crumb.