Most everyone had either their business clothes on, or summer clothes, so there was a lot of skin showing.
A lot of very dead skin.
He kept staring up at the buildings around him, looking for movement in any window.
Nothing.
Thank heavens the day hadn’t turned hot.
Down a dozen blocks, he saw a few more people gathered near the entrance of the subway, looking terrified and very panicked, but at least this group had gotten over the desire to flee back into the tunnels. More than likely this was their second time to the surface.
Benny crossed the street, giving them a friendly wave as he went toward them. “Anyone have any idea what happened?”
All four of them, including a nice-looking young thing with blonde hair and a light blue backpack over her shoulder, shook their heads no.
One guy held up his cell phone. He looked to be about five years older than Benny and had more hair than any guy should ever wear in his mid-thirties. It was tied back into a ponytail.
“Phones are working, but no one is answering anything,” he said. “Anywhere.”
The guy stressed the word “anywhere.”
The guy seemed to be the one who was in charge of the little group. Besides the college-age girl, there were two boys about the same college age, all looking stunned. More than likely this had been some sort of field trip for a class and the older, long-haired guy was the professor.
The guy again stressed the word “anywhere,” more than Benny wanted him to.
The other three nodded, all holding their cell phones as if they were lifelines. After walking a dozen blocks, Benny was starting to get the idea that no one was going to toss any of them a lifeline.
“Anyone try tuning in a radio?” Benny asked, something he kicked himself for not doing at once back at the office. He clearly wasn’t thinking as well as he seemed to think he was.
That wasn’t a good sign and he needed to make sure he was extra careful.
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 any of our family across the country, is answering any of us.”
Benny made himself take a deep breath and push back the panic from that thought. He figured this might have been citywide, not worldwide.
That thought threatened to crack his cold, hard shell and he pushed it back down.
What the hell had happened?
He took another deep breath, then asked the same question again out loud.
“What the hell happened?”
“Are they all dead?” the young college-age girl asked, the look of panic in her blue eyes.
Benny had seen that look a number of times in soldiers’ eyes in Iraq. She was about to flip and he wanted no part of that.
“They might be,” Benny 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.
She was very close to going into complete panic.
The guy who seemed in charge of his little group said softly, “Let’s walk.”
He turned them toward the river. They stumbled in the direction he got them started in.
Then he looked back at Benny. “You coming?”
“Got to check on a few people first,” Benny said.
He had no one to check on, but it was an easy lie to get out of going with them.
“We’ll head south if you want to join us,” the long-haired guy said.
“Thanks,” Benny said to him. “I might.”
Benny reached into his wallet and handed the guy his card. “Cell phone number. Call me if you hear anything or end up back this way if the phones are still working.”
Benny 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.
The older guy nodded and tucked Benny’s card into a pocket. “Good luck,” the older guy said and followed his little flock.
Benny was starting to think it was the human race that needed the luck now. No one online, no emergency declared, and no announcements coming across any emergency bands or over the radio.
From anywhere on the planet.
Benny 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.
Benny stood and looked around at all the death surrounding him. He had a hunch 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 him being in his vault had saved him from whatever killed all these people.
It hadn’t been gas and it hadn’t been an attack. That much was clear. He had read an article last month 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 him smile. He had clearly watched far too many late-night movies. Maggie really liked those old bug-eyed monster movies. He had really liked when she sat on his couch watching television, giving him occasional glimpses of those wonderful white panties. It had been a fair trade.
He was fairly certain he was never going to know the answer to the question of what happened. And to be honest, he didn’t much care. What he did care about was staying alive now that he had drawn the lucky straw.
He headed toward Broadway along 42nd Street, working his way among the bodies.
A number of dogs, still attached to their leashes were dead as well, but he caught a glimpse of a few cats still moving. So whatever had killed the humans had spared the cats. Strange.
Near some garbage cans he also saw a number of dead rats. Thankfully he wasn’t going to have to deal with those.
He kept walking, just looking at everything, trying to get himself calmed down, if that was even slightly possible.
What was really creepy about the bodies was the lack of blood. All the bodies he had seen in the past had become bodies because of holes that let out a lot of blood. No one sprawled on the sidewalk had any more than a bump on the head or a slight bloody face from hitting their nose when they fell.
He wandered all the way over to Broadway, seeing only a few survivors picking their way through the streets of dead. He didn’t talk with any of them, but instead turned and went up Broadway.
He had no idea why. He just needed to explore, see the city he loved totally dead, help the reality sink in completely.
Finally, a couple hours later, as the sun was starting to set, he found himself back at his loan company on Lexington.
It had been a nice little business, funded by investors to help those on the streets that needed help to get by with short-term, interest-free loans. He had felt good running the little shop, helping out people, and Madge had been fantastic at getting the business grants and donors to keep everything going.
He went into his 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 looking out over the street on a cool summer’s evening. He smoothed down Maggie’s dress so her white panties didn’t show.
He had been around enough dead bodies to know that in short order they would start smelling. No point in having Marge and Maggie smell up his office.
He 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 quicker than he wanted to think about. It was scheduled to not get hot for a week, which would help a little.
But not that much.
He had smelled his share of three-or-four-day-dead human bodies and didn’t much care for it.
Yet in a city full of
the dead, where could he go?
Where could he go in a world full of dead?
CHAPTER FOUR
AFTER TALKING WITH the others for an hour or so, Gina had gone back to her apartment on the ship and the office in her apartment.
The apartment seemed, for the first time in a while, empty. She wished she had someone to talk with, to share all this with, but she didn’t. In two hundred years, she had only had a dozen relationships, all fairly long-term, but none of them had really been right for her.
And none of them had been with other Seeders, so after a few years, since she didn’t age, she had always moved on.
So now she lived alone and seldom dated. Being embedded in less-advanced cultures for a decade or two per mission sort of kept the possibility of relationships down. And she had gotten used to that fact.
Most of the time, she actually liked it that way.
Helping others was worth it to her. That was her passion and what had made her sign up for this job. She sure didn’t need the money anymore, since she hadn’t spent hardly anything besides apartment costs in the last few hundred years.
But she didn’t do this for the money. She did this as a calling, to help people improve themselves.
But on days like today, having someone close would have been nice.
She had the lights come up to just under bright and brought up some lively dance music as background to lighten her mood.
Her apartment was comfortable, with a small living room furnished in what she liked to call graduate school comfort. Huge overstuffed chairs, a long, deep couch, and a coffee table stacked high with reading material and files. One wall of the living room was a large screen, the other walls were covered in various cultures’ art she had liked from her different missions.
She mostly used the living room for reading or watching movies she had collected from different planets. The apartment also had a nice kitchen where she cooked basic meals and a small bedroom. Another room off to one side of the living room functioned as her office.
The walls of her office were also decorated with pictures and art from various planets.
And some images of people, of children, families, she had helped along the way.
The apartment felt a lot like the one she had lived in while going to college on her home world to get her degrees in social science. But that apartment had been in a six-story building just down the hill from the university while this apartment was on a massive starship.
She had been on board the Star Conscious now for six months and the ship would remain in orbit being a support for all the embedded Seeders going into the planet below. She was glad of that, since that way she could come and go from this apartment when she wanted over the next ten years.
That would help her stay level, she knew, during the coming mission.
She now sat in her office, using a grid system over the island covered by the massive city below. That was her area, that island, and all the survivors on it.
That room she had been in as the ship first arrived in orbit would hold most of the survivors from that island city that the locals called Manhattan. But before the rest of the ships got here, she needed to track and make sure she knew where every person on the island was, so no one got missed.
She would put a tracker on each person in the Star Conscious computer for the extraction moment. The tracker was nothing more than a recording of each person’s biometric signature and general location. The computer would do the rest in tracking them.
Right now, as the evening started to settle over the dead city on the surface and the automatic lights came on, most of the survivors had settled down. Only a few were still moving around, so it was easier for her to start tagging the survivors.
Her equipment in her office could allow her to zoom right in on each person, so close she could see facial expressions and often read their lips as to what they were saying.
She didn’t think she would need to get in that close on any of the survivors. At least not this soon after the disaster. She just needed to start putting tracking on them, putting their biometric signatures into the computer so that they would not be missed.
She knew she was in for a long night.
The idea that she might miss someone just scared her to death.
An idea of what dreams she might have if she tried to sleep scared her even more.
CHAPTER FIVE
BENNY WENT BACK inside his office as night started to take over and sat in his chair behind his desk. He put up his feet and tried to think while keeping the cold of the “emotion screen,” as his counselor called it, in place. Breaking down now might just end up getting him as dead as everyone else.
Outside the car alarms had calmed down some and the city was actually much quieter than he ever remembered hearing it, even late at night.
He looked around at the business he had put his 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. His voice just echoed and that seemed damn creepy as well.
He stood and headed back out into the light of the city. Luckily, the electrical systems were still working, the stoplights still going through their cycles over piles of wrecked cars. The streetlights and building lights still made the night in the city seem like daylight. That was one of the many things he loved about this city. It never really got dark.
Now, more than likely, that wouldn’t last very long without people maintaining the power systems and lines. First good heat wave of the summer and this place would be a smelling pile of dead meat without electricity.
He headed the five blocks to his apartment, walking carefully around the bodies.
His apartment, a place he liked in most times, felt unusually silent. He clicked on the television, hoping to find something or someone to tell him what happened.
Nothing.
Some stations that had automatic programming were running, but the rest were just dead air.
The radio was the same, so he finally tuned the radio to an automatic light jazz station and let it play just to have some background music to pretend that society still existed outside the walls.
Then, using his computer, another appliance that would soon be worthless, he pulled up some maps of the New York area and the area going south.
After an hour of studying those maps, he decided the idea was too stupid for words. Assuming he made the hike all the way to Florida, even taking some cars once he was outside of the city, what was he going to do down there with the alligators and snakes and rotting-in-the-sun bodies?
“Think, Benny, think!”
He couldn’t think of one darned thing.
Nothing.
Then he figured he could go north, get away from all people in the woods, but he had never been one for camping. If he was going to rough it without power, he was going to do it in a plush apartment or suite. Bears shit in the woods, he liked indoor plumbing if he had a choice.
He then decided to make sure going south was as bad an idea as he had a hunch it was.
He started dialing friends he knew in Southern California from the service, another friend in Chicago from his college days, even an old girlfriend in Texas.
Again nothing.
He even dialed five of his old buddies who were still stationed overseas.
Not a one answered.
He dialed twenty people in total.
All machines or no answer.
Not rock-solid proof things were bad everywhere, but adding in the internet and television silence, enough for him.
He pushed the phone away and made himself take a deep breath, to make sure the panic would stay down.
Then he grabbed a yellow pad and asked, “What are you going to need to survive this summer and the following winter?”
Then he started making a list.
—He was going to need power for lights and air-conditioning and heat
for long term.
—He was going to somehow need to figure out a way to get a place that he could hold back most of the smell until that passed, which was going to take some time and help from mother nature.
The bodies on the street would eventually dry out and mummify, which wouldn’t smell as bad, but then when the rains came, the smell would return for a time.
—He was going to need a place to store food and lots of canned supplies.
—And considering the nut cases in this town that might still be alive, he was going to need a place he could protect.
—And from the faint glow out his window from the building on fire ten blocks up the street, he would need a place that wouldn’t easily burn.
Maybe he could get a band of other survivors together who could work together to search for food and for defense.
He liked the sound of that.
He walked over to the window and stared toward the center of the city.
He stood there for a moment until suddenly he saw it.
The answer was right there in front of him. He knew exactly the place that fit the bill perfectly.
The Empire State Building.
Perfect.
He cooked himself a good steak dinner from his fridge and scanned the television and radio channels again as he ate, coming up blank yet again. Nothing was working besides automatic systems and those weren’t going to last long at all.
Then he put on a light jacket with his trusty .45 in one pocket along with a flashlight 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.
He figured the Empire State Building had pretty much everything he would need. It was a secured building so he could defend it, it would have a pretty fine security system and extra supply of weapons for the guards, and it would have generators. In fact, he was betting it had lots of generators to run all those elevators in power failures.
He seemed to remember that the building had a lot of different elevators. Also it was high enough and windy enough that even at the worst of the smell, it should be survivable up high in the building with windows sealed.
High Edge: A Seeders Universe Novel Page 2