Earth's Survivors: box set

by Wendell Sweet

  She made her way into the bathroom without a light and then nearly tripped over something on the floor. She cursed quietly, toed the door shut and then flipped on the light.

  Ben's robe. He liked, for some reason known only to him, to hang it on a hook on the back of the door. Fine, except the hook was missing the end and the robe often slipped off onto the floor and lay there waiting to trip her up in the middle of the night when she least expected it. She scooped it up and returned it to the hook and that was when she saw the scrap of paper on the floor.

  She stared at it a long time. Things that were written on scraps of paper, to her limited experience, were always bad things. She could not think of a single good thing that could come from picking that scrap of paper up and doing anything other than returning it to the robe pocket it had fallen out of. Not a single thing. She picked it up and unfolded it: Smoothed it out against her palm.

  The handwriting was Ben's. No doubt about that. There was little written, but what was written caused her heart to go cold instantly.

  Call Jilly.

  Jilly. You could not mistake that name for a man's name. It was a woman's name. No number. And that implied that he knew the number well enough that he didn't need to write it down. Nothing else, just the reminder to call her. Why, Nikki asked herself, did Ben need to call Jilly? Ben said they shared everything. Nothing was hidden. She had certainly hidden nothing from him. So why had she never heard this woman's name before she had found this scrap of paper with it written on it.

  She reached over, turned the light back off, and sat down on the toilet lid thinking. She sat for nearly twenty minutes before she remembered why she had gotten up in the first place. She stood, raised the lid, remembered the slip of paper, now no more than a crumpled ball, wet with her sweat and opened her hand allowing it to roll off her palm into the water. She lowered her pajama bottoms and sat down once more.

  When she made her way back to the bedroom she was subdued, but the anger at being betrayed was building inside of her. She made her way back under the sheets, but she did not snuggle into Ben's warmth where she had been. Instead, she lay awake waiting for the sunrise. Wondering exactly who Jilly was and what she had that she didn't.

  Friday Morning

  Lott road

  Ben Neo

  "The girl... See the girl, Ed? Head for the girl. That's where we're going," Ben yelled. He leaned out the back window, took as careful an aim as he could, and fired eight rounds of his clip into the driver's side windshield of the Toyota. He turned back quickly. "I'm sorry, Ed," he said, but Ed didn't hear him. Ben placed the gun close to the back of his head and fired the last two shots. He levered his door handle and waited for the car to jump the ditch.

  The Ford came back down with a hard jolt, nearly tearing the door handle out of Ben's grasp: He pushed the door and rolled out across the blackness of the yard. Off to his side he heard the car hit a tree. He made his feet, his shoulder screaming in pain now, and spun around looking for the girl, he found her and limped to her. He had done something to the ankle, either kicking the door open or when he jumped, hopefully it was only turned. They limped off as fast as he could move. Her supporting him on one side as they made their way through the woods to where she had parked the car.

  "Your head is bleeding badly, Ben, very badly," Nikki said.

  He felt his head, but it didn't seem too serious. "Head wounds bleed heavily. It's what they do... It'll be okay," he told her. “Gotta check the shoulder when we get to the car it's worse than the ankle.”

  They reached the car and she unlocked the trunk and pulled out a small medical kit Ben had insisted upon. She took some gauze, pads and white tape, fixing up his head and one knee, while he stripped off his clothes and patched up his shoulder. The shoulder, she saw, was not as bad as his head, only a flesh wound. The head was gashed open. He redressed quickly in clean clothes. She pushed a hat onto his head carefully, angling it low to hide the bandaging and handed him a wallet. He flipped it opened and smiled.

  "You have to go, baby. You have to," she said.

  He kissed her and she pulled away. "Go," she said.

  "I don't want you to stay," he said. “The cop... The cop didn't follow...”

  "But he might. Can't change the plan now. Besides, we have to know what happens to keep them from looking for you... We have to if we're ever going to be able to breathe easy, baby." She kissed him again. "Go, if the cop shows up I'll get the shit into his car."

  He looked at her once more, threw all the old stuff into the back of the car in a plastic bag that he would dispose of later, and started the car. “Make sure you get the pot out of the Toyota... Leave here and go right there and get that.”

  She shook her head. “What's so special about that?”

  Ben laughed. “I'll tell you later. You better go. Just don't forget to get that... Leave everything else.”

  She nodded. "You and me?" she asked as she kissed him.

  "You and me," he agreed. He tried to hold her eyes, but they slid away.

  Nikki

  Nikki turned and ran back through the woods. She had been gone too long. Everything was swimming around in her head.

  In the last few days before she had left she had decided a few things. First, Ben was a killer. She knew that. It was how he made a living. It wouldn't be hard for him to kill her, she supposed. She knew that sounded unreasonable, probably was wildly unreasonable to anyone else, but she couldn't get it out of her head, and who lived with a man with those capabilities anyway? She did. What if they were over and Jilly was now in the picture? And suppose he needed her gone because she knew too much. Way too much. What would he do? Tell her it was over and show her the door? She didn't believe it. What she did believe, what had gotten into her head, was that he would take her somewhere and kill her. She would never know it was coming. It was what he did, and he was good at it.

  The second thing she decided, was to take the suitcase of money for herself. She didn't have it all planned out as well as Ben would have. He was a good planner. He drilled that into her head, plan, plan, plan! But she had done a pretty good job nonetheless. She would go back, get the money out of Ben's car, and she would take it right back to April Evans trailer. Hide in plain site for a day or two until everything calmed down. Then she would buy a bus ticket for California. One way. No one, Ben included, would ever find her. She had April Evans ID. She had made herself up so that she looked just like her. It wasn't a long drawn out plan, but it was solid. It was solid and it would work. Fuck Ben Neo and Jilly Whoever-the-fuck-she-was.

  She concentrated on running. There was a path that led through the woods that helped, but even with that she had to slow down as she got closer to keep the noise down. She finally reached the edge of the woods, settled herself just inside the tree line, and watched as Billy Jingo took everything that she had decided to take for herself. She had come very close to shooting him and then she had heard the sirens coming in the distance.

  The cop still had not shown up, but she didn't have any intention of trying to plant the drugs and money on him anyway. The way she felt about Ben she couldn't have cared less if his former boss came after him. In fact it would suit her plans better. Keep anyone from looking for her.

  The money was in the purse she carried, the drugs she had thrown into the woods two days before in a fit of anger: Even after she had calmed down she had not gone back to retrieve them. Let someone find them in a week or a year or never, she didn't care.

  She thought for a second longer as the sirens grew louder. Billy Jingo was now back outside his trailer, sitting on the front steps as though nothing at all had just happened. Oblivious to her presence just a few hundred feet away in the tree line. She took a deep breath and then threw her gun deep into the woods: She made her way quickly, back to the trail that would take her back down the road to April Evans trailer.

  Thompson Park

  The Cop

  He had been about to leave when one of the unifor
ms told him that dispatch had said to have him call. They were giving the call to him since he was on the scene and it looked like the problem may have left the park and culminated in some shooting and a car crash out on Lott road.

  He got on the radio and got the particulars. There had been no way to avoid it, but maybe it was better this way. He had a reason for being here now. He might have to come up with a reason why he was out driving around so early, but he would figure something out if it came up. He may not even need to come up with anything at all. Maybe no one would ever ask him and it would just blow over.

  He walked back to his car, climbed in and put the bubble on the dashboard. He called two of the uniforms over and told them to secure the scene for the techs that would be coming out and told them where he was going.

  He backed the car out, pulled out of the look out and headed down out of the park. He wondered if this was the same thing. And if so what had happened out on Lott road to bring it all to an end. He wondered too about the bundle of cash he had held, if only for a very brief time. He lit a cigarette, cursed the habit and sucked the smoke greedily into his lungs.

  He reached the bottom of the hill, blew the stop sign and bore left. He fell in behind two other units that were on their way out to Lott road too.

  USGS Alaska

  Mieka Petre

  Mieka leaned forward overshadowing Jane Howe as he studied her monitor.

  “Looks good,” he said. Her monitor showed a running seismic graph representing the valley floor of the Yellowstone Caldera. All change had been negligible for the last seventy-two hours.

  “It is,” Jane agreed. “All the equations show nearly the same thing... Our equations anyway.”

  Mieka laughed. “Ours are the only ones that matter, Jane. The only ones. They pay us precisely for this. Years of waiting, all validated in a few weeks time.”

  “Time will prove us right, Mieka. I know that.”

  “If anything changes, let me know... I'll be rechecking David's final calculations on DX2379R.”

  “Anything?” Jane asked.

  “No... No, I'm sure he made a miscalculation...” He leaned close to her and lowered his voice. “Such a minor mistake can make such a large error in distance. I'm confidant my initial figures are correct.” He absently patted her shoulder and wandered off, his mind already turning to the problem with DX2379R, the same meteor he had already announced would miss the Earth by a few hundred thousand miles. David's calculations had narrowed that margin to less than thirty thousand miles. Much closer: Much more capable of crust deformation at that distance. It worried him.

  He realized at that moment that a frown had slipped onto his face. A frown showed lack of confidence, worry, concern with things that he should not be concerned with. He pushed the frown away and smiled out at the room as he crossed to his office.

  Friday Morning:

  Lott Road

  Billy Jingo

  Billy Jingo had sat watching his television just minutes before: An old war movie, boring, but it was three A.M. and there were only the local stations that he could get, plus the one from Canada when the weather was right, or what-ever had to be right for an antenna to work. Tonight it wasn't working. Excuse me, he corrected himself, this morning. Whatever needed to be right wasn't. It had looked like a good film too, but the goddamn thing had kept fading in and out so much that he had gotten a headache trying to watch it. He'd finally settled for the old war movie on one of the local stations.

  He had been trying to nurse his last beer. He'd been sure that there was one more left, but he'd been wrong. Somehow he had miscounted and that was unlike him. He always knew how many beers he had to the can: Somehow he'd messed up the count tonight. There were no more. He'd even moved the green loaf of bread, which he had hated to do, but he had moved it only to find nothing behind it. He had hoped the one remaining can had rolled behind it, but it had not been behind the moldy bread. He had been wrong.

  It hadn't occurred to him to throw out the moldy loaf of bread while he was at it. Instead, he had gotten one of the spatulas from the silverware drawer, levered it under the bread and then pushed it to the side only to find no beer can hiding there. He had then levered the loaf of bread back into the original position it had been in.

  So he had been nursing his last beer. Last beer and no money for beer. And it was Friday: That meant the rest of Friday, Friday night, and the whole weekend loomed ahead dry. It was too depressing to think about. He had tried to focus on the movie instead.

  His trailer was located at the end of Lott road, a dirt road on the outskirts of the city two miles beyond the county dump. Nobody really wanted to live on Lott road it seemed, except Billy, and if he were honest with himself he didn't really want to live here either, he simply had no choice. His crappy job only paid him enough for a crappy place to live. This was it. The crappiest of the crappiest. In fact, he reminded himself, the morning before the cops had taken the body of a young girl out of the ditch just down the road. Found by someone driving by. She hadn't been there very long either, someone had killed her and dumped her there. It was definitely a crappy place to live. He knew that for a fact because he had gone looking. There were no crappier places. Except maybe the trailer park down the road, he thought, but that was also part of Lott road, so it didn't count.

  He owned neither the trailer nor the lot. He did own the furniture, that had been easy. He had simply cruised every street in the city on garbage day. A chair here, another one there. The mattress and box springs he'd gotten from the Salvation Army. Thirty bucks and only pee stained on one side, well mostly only the one side. There was some other stain on the other side, but he wasn't sure what that stain was. It didn't exactly look like a pee stain. Anyway, it was barely noticeable and the guy in the store had sworn that they weren’t really pee stains, but water stains. Billy wasn't too sure about that. His own brother had wet the bed until he was ten and they had slept in the same bed. He knew what a pee stain looked like and this looked like a pee stain. Still, it had been a good deal and stains couldn't hurt him: After all when his brother had been wetting the bed he had probably peed on him a time or two, if he could live with that he could live with a little pee stain: If it was a pee stain. And if they were pee stains, they were on the other side of the mattress, he had added optimistically. Besides, they disinfected those things. The guy said so. Sprayed them down with something that killed everything on them and in them. He had grinned, tipped his beer, nearly took a large swallow, took a small sip instead and then lowered the can depressed all over again about the long, dry weekend ahead of him.

  Five or six garbage runs and one trip to the city dump, where they didn't mind if you took half the dump away with you, and he had been furnished. It was amazing the things people threw away. He had sipped carefully at his beer as he reminisced, pulled a crumpled cigarette from his pack and lit it with a long, wooden kitchen match.

  There was an old fashioned wood stove store in town and he stopped there once or twice a week for kitchen matches. Not that they gave them away for free, but they used them for the stoves so there was always a box or two lying around that he could help himself to.

  Day old bread and doughnuts at the bakery twice a week, those cheap ten pound bags of chicken and what they had called Crack Head soups in Jail, noodle soups to the rest of the world, and there was his weekly food budget. The only other things he needed were gas and of course beer and cigarettes.

  The rest of his paycheck went for the rent and utilities. Sometimes it was close, but he always made it somehow. The real bummer this morning was that he had today off and the whole weekend too and he'd have to stay here watching the crappy T.V. … Sober...

  His job Monday through Thursday was cleaning for a maintenance company. They only required that you showed up. They ran you all over the city to clean supermarkets; banks; mall shops that were closed. He worked the nights away pretty quickly. Go to work at five P.M. Next thing you knew it was one thirty in the morni
ng and they were through for another night. He kept telling himself that he would have to get a better job if he ever wanted to be better off in the world. A job that paid more than minimum wage had to be in his future. He was sure there were plenty of them out there, he just didn't know where to look. Some day, he told himself, some day.

  He had taken another deep drag off his cigarette and then sipped carefully at his beer. He thought about the girl's body and realized she could have been killed while he had been sleeping. The thought had made him shudder, he hated this place.

  He had just set the beer down carefully on the coffee table. It was scared with cigarette burns and missing the tip of one leg, but it had been free and an old paperback novel held up that corner of the table well enough. As he had looked back up from the coffee table, lights had swept across the living room wall, bouncing up and down and back and forth. Because his was the last place on the road, every car that came down the road lit up his living room. These headlights however seemed a little more frantic, bobbing, darting across the wall and then a second set shot up onto the wall too, jittering and jumping across the cheap wood paneling.

  Twice now cars had come down the road, shot right across the bare dirt of his front yard and into the woods before they had been stopped by the trees. Billy had a fear about some car, some day, hitting the bedroom wall while he slept. So far it had just been the woods, but you could never tell. He had jumped up quickly and run to the window.

  It had been immediately obvious that this was something different from just some drunk not realizing that the road was about to end. The lead car had been flat out. He had heard the whine of the engine as it came. The car behind had been trying to stay close, tapping the back bumper of the lead car, causing it to slew all over the dirt road. Apparently that hadn't been good enough because a second later the passenger had leaned out of the car's window and opened up on the lead car with what had looked to be some sort of hand held machine pistol. Billy had let out a startled squawk, ducked below the window and then popped right back up. Now he found himself staring out the window, breathing fast, where what seemed like only seconds ago he had been carefully sipping at his beer watching the TV.