Smith's Monthly #11

by Smith, Dean Wesley

Benny doubted that would happen, but he figured a guy could hope.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  OVER THE NEXT few days, Gina fell into a routine. She would crawl off the couch and check on the survivors in her city, finding any that had died in the night, and seeing if she had anyone new, or if others had left the city.

  After the third day, all the others who were doing her job for other areas under the Star Conscious had a meeting. There were forty of them and they all looked as tired and worn out as she was feeling.

  The upshot of the meeting was that after three days, every survivor on the planet had been identified by all the ships in orbit and tagged. As soon as the other ships got here, the survivors would be taken off the planet and out of danger for the time of the second electromagnetic pulse.

  They were told to start getting to know the survivors who looked like they would make it, the ones they could help, to figure out the best way to help the survivors after the rescue.

  She wasn’t willing to do that just yet. Too many were still dying.

  By the fourth day, she had under three hundred survivors alive on the island. And she knew that a few more of them didn’t have much longer to live, since they hadn’t been eating or moving in days.

  The five survivors in the big building she still watched from a distance, and four others in another tall building were working on it to clear bodies and make it livable. More than likely that would be the two groups she would work to help.

  All the other survivors huddled inside apartments or underground in the subway system, some setting up camps in the stalled trains.

  Except for checking on those that died, she kept her focus above the city, thinking of each person at the moment as a green light. That helped her nightmares some.

  And she didn’t have to see the bodies that littered everything slowly starting to decompose.

  She was going to embed in that city to help the survivors, and right now, she refused to think about what that smell was going to be like.

  Since all Seeders could teleport, she would be able to return to her apartment here at any point, but she had no doubt that would not be enough by any stretch.

  She knew those survivors below would need her help after the rescue. She knew that deep down. But she had no idea why she had applied to do this.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BENNY WAS STUNNED that Mother Nature and the electric company conspired to help them some. It remained fairly cool, the nights almost chilly, and the power stayed on.

  For five days, he and the Professor and his charges prepared the big building as much as they could.

  After a few hundred bodies dumped through windows, Benny was just numb to what he was doing.

  And after the first few days, they were all wearing masks and tossing their clothes out after working. Every night Benny took a long, hot shower to try to clear the smell from his nose.

  They finally got every body they could find out of the big building by day four. Benny was stunned it had been done. It was a very large building.

  The city was starting to smell in general, so after clearing the bodies from the entire building, Benny turned their focus to stocking up on bedding, food, clothing, and just about anything else they thought they might need and could get on carts or carry.

  Pretty soon they would just lock the doors and move up into the top floors. And after the power went out, they would run the generators for those floors, keeping them at a comfortable temperature through the summer.

  Benny took the top office floor as his apartment, and the professor and his three kids stocked up the floor five down from his, since there were six bathrooms and lots of offices that could be made into bedrooms there.

  From what Benny understood, they had spread out and each had a large area and a private bathroom.

  Benny wanted them to be prepared for fifty or more people living in the building instead of just five, even though they hadn’t seen anyone else in days. And the professor agreed.

  So even after they had more than enough, they stocked food and blankets and propane heaters and lighting and everything else on a dozen different floors.

  One day, David asked Benny why they were doing that.

  “The moment the lights go out,” Benny said, “and we keep some lights on in this building up high, people from all over will see us. We need to be ready for people to join us.”

  David had only nodded to that.

  All the kids and the professor had found their families, all dead.

  And every-so-often Benny would run across one of the kids crying. Nothing he could say to cheer them up. They were either going to make it or they weren’t.

  He had become very cold through all this, much more than he had ever been before.

  His counselor had taught him that. He had decided after that session with the counselor that Benny would be one of the soldiers that made it.

  And he would make it this time as well.

  The young girl, Candice, just slowly withdrew, working and eating less and less, no matter what any of them said or tried to do to cheer her up.

  Benny had seen that before in soldiers on the battlefield. He had no idea what to do about it.

  On the fifth morning she vanished, going out the south door before any of them got up.

  Benny had no doubt she wouldn’t be back, but the professor wanted to go in search of her.

  Benny stopped him at first with one simple statement speech. “It’s safe out there. She knows where we are. If she wants to come back, she will. Give her until tomorrow before we go looking for her.”

  Benny doubted she would return, but he might be wrong. He hoped he would be.

  The professor agreed and gave her the time and didn’t go out looking for her. But the next day he and the boys went out into the smell. The professor said they had to do something.

  Benny knew that feeling as well.

  But it was one damn big city out there full of dead people, so he held out no hope.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  GINA JUST HAPPENED to be at her screens, watching the survivors green dots when one of the five from the big building in the center of town left. The other four didn’t seem to be moving.

  She focused her scan down on the moving survivor, surprised to find she was watching a young college-age girl wearing a mask against the smell, winding her way through the dead bodies on the street.

  The young girl seemed to be staggering more than walking and Gina didn’t like the looks of that at all.

  Gina focused in on the girl’s face as much as she could and could see the look of shock and despair in the girl’s eyes. This girl was going off to die, Gina had no doubt.

  And there was still a good five days until the rescue.

  Gina followed the girl for the next hour as she worked through the bodies, finally entering a large building with no survivors in it.

  The girl went up the elevator to the eleventh floor and into an apartment there.

  Gina could see there were two bodies in the apartment, both still in fairly decent shape because the air-conditioning in the apartment must have still been working.

  Gina watched as the young girl sat down on the couch facing where one man sprawled on the floor and a woman lay sprawled in the kitchen.

  The girl sat there for a few minutes, then went down the hall to a bedroom and crawled into a bed that must have clearly been hers before the disaster.

  She pulled the blankets up to her chin and closed her eyes.

  Gina knew exactly what had happened.

  The young girl had gone home to be with her dead parents.

  Gina switched back to the four others in the big building and for the first time focused down on them.

  Two were young boys about the girl’s age, another was a man with long hair, and the fourth man just flat took her breath away.

  It was if an electrical shock had come through the screen and pushed her back in her chair.

  He was clearly the one in char
ge. He had short dark hair and had shaved, something many of the survivors had not done. He wore jeans and a muscle shirt that clearly showed off how strong he was.

  She glanced back at her records. He was the one that had first started cleaning out the building on his own.

  She just stared at him, stunned that she was having such a reaction. Normally a man never really caught her attention. Over the last few centuries, there had been a few that had twisted her heart, and a dozen or more short relationships, but never had she felt a reaction like this to just seeing a man.

  After a short discussion as Gina watched, they all nodded and seemed to go back to work.

  Gina figured that they knew where the girl had gone and were going to give her time. That was the right decision for someone in shock and mourning as that young girl clearly was.

  Gina followed them, becoming more impressed by the minute that all four of them were fine, now working to build a future in the big building.

  As she followed them, they went out into the city streets and worked to get more bedding, more food, more supplies from nearby stores.

  All four of them had carts and they worked to stock floors where they did not live.

  Clearly one of them, more than likely the man she could barely keep her eyes off of, was setting up the big building to hold a lot more than five.

  Wow, he was good-looking.

  And clearly smart.

  She spent the next hour just watching him like she was beside him.

  And for the first time, she actually wanted to be down there, in all that death, talking with him, getting to know him.

  How was that even possible?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE POWER CUT out on the tenth day and, as Benny had expected, the heat started to climb to oppressive levels, making going outside into all the death just about impossible.

  All the bodies along the sidewalks were bloated inside their cloths and impossible to look at. Benny again just thanked the luck that the rats and other rodents had all been killed. Otherwise, there would have been no staying in the city with the rats having unlimited food supply.

  Benny had them all go to using propane lanterns and climbing stairs. He didn’t want to take any chances at this point on elevators run by a generator until they tested everything. They could do that tomorrow.

  Benny had set up a portable generator on a balcony outside of the office suite that he had converted to a very large apartment, with a big screen television and a movie library that would take him ten years to watch if he never stopped.

  He had all the staircases boarded and sealed on his floor except for one, and that one he had steel bars locking it at night. And he had no doubt he had enough firepower to hold off a pretty good-sized attack.

  Not that he thought one was coming. He actually doubted it was, but in the Gulf he had seen his share of the underside of humanity. And New York clearly had its share as well. He had survived this, which meant scum might have as well. Not everyone was going to be nice guys like the professor and his kids.

  When the power went out, Benny made sure all outside and front doors were locked again, then set up alarms in the security room that would ring on his floor and the professor’s floor if anyone banged on the outside door.

  He also set up the exterior and lobby camera systems with motion sensors to run on generators. If anything at all moved near a door, the alarm would sound and they would see who it was.

  Four days before, while it was still fairly cool out, the professor and the boys had gone out looking for Candice. They had come back depressed and smelling so bad, Benny just let them go take showers without a word.

  The next day, because the two boys were still depressed, Benny and the professor went out again, without luck.

  Candice had vanished.

  Benny felt bad, but it didn’t surprise him. Some people were survivors, others were not.

  On the day after the power went out, over a light lunch, they got talking about what had happened again and what was going to happen.

  “The aliens will come to rescue us,” David said.

  Benny shook his head and asked David, “Why would you say that?”

  David shrugged. “They’ve been taking our kind to another planet for centuries. They knew we would be destroyed. They planned for it and will come back to help us.”

  “And you know all this how?” Benny asked as the professor just smiled, clearly having heard all this before.

  “He doesn’t,” Freddy said. “If the aliens caused all this, they just missed a few of us and will be back to finish the job so they will have the planet to themselves.”

  “No, they will rescue us,” David said.

  “Kill us,” Freddy said.

  The professor said nothing.

  Benny quickly changed the subject.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FOR THE LAST four days before the rescue, Gina no longer dreamed of death, but of the man with the black hair, dark eyes, and strong arms.

  He seemed almost scary smart in how he went about preparing the big building. She was so looking forward to meeting him, but she wasn’t sure what she was going to say. And that made her feel like a young kid again back in school.

  She hadn’t felt that way in two hundred years.

  Besides what could she say after he had lived through those ten days? “Hi, I’m an alien and I’m here to rescue you for only a few hours before putting you back?”

  She would have to think of something much better than that.

  A lot better.

  And then after she went to the surface to help them, she would have to think of yet another way to meet him.

  But meet him twice she would. She was going to make sure of that.

  Three days after the young girl left the group in the big building, it was clear she was never going back. The long-haired man and the two younger boys went out looking for her wearing gas masks to help hold back the smell.

  Gina watched them carefully every step.

  The first place they had gone was to where the young girl was hiding. They clearly had known her home address.

  When the young girl had heard them coming, she had hid under her bed, curled inside a blanket. She did not want to be found.

  Gina yelled at her screens, trying to shout through space that all they had to do was look under the bed. The girl was there and she needed help.

  The long-haired man and the two boys didn’t see her and left.

  For an instant Gina considering jumping to the girl’s apartment and making a lot of noise so the long-haired man and the two boys would return, but all the people in her job had strict orders to not go to the surface until after the rescue.

  So she just watched.

  When they left, the young girl got back out from under the bed and crawled back into bed, pulling the blankets over her head.

  She had been eating some, so she would survive until rescue, but not much longer. Gina would try to do something to help her after rescue.

  Gina looked at the tally of the green lights in her area. Just over two hundred and eighty survivors left.

  But over half of those were alone just as the young girl was. They would make it to rescue, but not much longer after that when they were returned.

  After the rescue, when Gina embedded on the surface, she might be able to find and help more of them besides the blonde girl. But she wondered if they even wanted help.

  She would have to figure out which ones did want help during the rescue. And work with those. Maybe get them to the big building run by the most handsome man she had ever seen.

  On the day before the rescue, she went to the big banquet-like room where all the survivors from her area would be transported. It would hold them, without a problem.

  She double-checked on setting up showers that had special chemicals in the water to kill the smell. She made sure that all of them would have fresh clothing if they wanted it. And she worked with the medical staff to make sur
e there would be enough help there for the injured and those who needed to be sedated.

  The extremely injured and near dead would not be sent back to the surface, but instead would be taken as refugees to another nearby planet. But everyone else would be sent back.

  One wall of the big room was clear and looked out at the beautiful planet below. That view would help some of the survivors realize where they were.

  Others, she knew, that view would shock. Again, medical would be ready.

  Almost all of the survivors in her area would be asleep when they were taken, since the time would be right before sunrise. That would help some as well, she hoped.

  The entire rescue was going to only take about ten hours.

  Ten very long hours for some survivors, ten very short hours for others. But none of them would remember it.

  She went back to her apartment and got ready for the rescue, making careful notes of the locations of everyone and what they looked like so she could talk with them when they arrived.

  If she was going to help these people, she had a lot of work to do both before and after they arrived in that big room.

  THE RESCUE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ONE MOMENT BENNY had been sound asleep on the big bed he had managed to get into the top floor office complex, the next he found himself standing beside the professor and the two boys with hundreds of other very tired and scared-looking humans who had survived the destruction of the world.

  Some were wearing full clothes, others were wearing very little. Clearly all of them had been as asleep as he had been.

  Luckily, he had been sleeping in sweat pants and a body shirt just in case. The light carpet under his bare feet was warm and slightly soft.

  The room, at first glance, seemed like a normal hotel banquet room.

  He looked quickly around him, but saw no real danger, just a bunch of very confused, sick, and smelly people.