Dust and Kisses

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  Copyright Information

  Dust and Kisses

  Copyright © 2014 by Dean Wesley Smith

  First published in Smith’s Monthly #1, WMG Publishing, October, 2013

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2014 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Konradbak/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.

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  For Kris, always the love of my life,

  And Janis Ian and Mike Resnick,

  two great writers who sparked this novel.

  Thanks.

  PROLOGUE

  IF SHE HAD THOUGHT ABOUT IT, Carey Noack would have figured that the world would end in a big build-up, with lots of panic and time to say good-bye to loved-ones in tragic scenes of crying and hugging like it always was in the movies. But she had never thought about it. None of her friends read science fiction, and the closest thing she had come to an end of the world thought was worrying about how the Greenland ice cap might melt.

  So Wednesday morning, when the world did end, she wasn’t expecting it. No one was, actually. But she did remember the exact moment it happened, right down to the second because her job that morning was to stare at scientific measuring instruments and a clock while taking notes about the readings every fifteen seconds.

  At 23, she had gotten lucky in life, and she figured in love as well. A post-doc in astrophysics from the University of Oregon, she had landed a plum job working in Portland, Oregon for the famous Dr. Canfield, a man she both admired and hated, often in the same breath when talking to her friends and family. She stood at five-foot-two, a good sixteen inches shorter than Canfield who looked like a cross between a bad Dicken’s character and a stretched Santa Claus because of his white beard. She had long, brown hair and brown eyes that everyone said were “fiery” whatever that meant.

  Canfield had gotten the habit of patting her on the head like a child every time he was pleased with her, and if she didn’t need the job working with him so much for her career, she would have just broken his hand in about a dozen places. If he caught her on the wrong day, she still might. Screw the career.

  Her fiancée, Paine Kennedy, worked as an assistant coach at the University, and even though with her working for Canfield in Portland, the two-hour drive down I-5 between the cities didn’t stop them from having a wonderful relationship, one they both planned on turning into a marriage next year. This morning, she had kissed him good-bye at seven while he tried to grope her to get her to come back to bed. As much as she wanted to rejoin the man of her dreams in that bed, she didn’t dare be late for work. So she had left him to go back to sleep with a promise she would see him at lunch.

  Lunch didn’t happen. At 10:18 and seven seconds on Wednesday morning, the world ended.

  At 10:18, she was sitting in a protected steel vault watching the “control” readings for an experiment Canfield was doing in another room. Canfield’s hope was to get some variance between two readings, hers in a protected control vault and his in the open.

  At 10:22, as planned, she logged in her last readings and the exact time and opened the vault door.

  Dr. Canfield lay sprawled on the floor of the lab, his eyes rolled up into his head.

  For an instant, the sight shocked her. Then she quickly moved, grabbing the phone on the desk above Canfield and jabbing in 911.

  “Don’t you die on me now!” she said to the thin man.

  While it rang, she tucked the phone under her chin and knelt beside him, feeling for a pulse.

  Nothing that she could find.

  She quickly flipped him onto his back and went through the quick procedures she had learned in her first aid class three years before. With the phone still ringing in her ear, she started pumping on his chest.

  “Come on, damn-it! Answer!”

  She kept at it, working to keep her pace steady, her pressure solid on his chest, but not too hard.

  No answer. The phone just kept ringing.

  After about a minute, she knew she couldn’t wait any longer. She needed help, and no one was coming into the lab to give her help. She needed to go find help if Canfield had a chance of pulling through this.

  Leaving the phone connected to 911 and ringing, she checked for a pulse on Canfield, then ran for the door, heading down the lab hallway and out onto the street to get help from someone.

  She burst through the exterior door and took two staggering steps before stopping on the hot sidewalk between two tall buildings.

  The sound hit her first.

  At least a hundred car alarms in the surrounding blocks of the city were going off at once.

  She looked around, trying to grasp what she was seeing. The morning promised a hot day ahead. Two blocks down the hill was the Willamette River, two blocks to her left was Burnside, a major arterial through the city. The buildings around here were ten to thirty stories tall. Canfield’s lab was on the main floor, tucked to the back of the building.

  An intersection with a streetlight was to her right about fifty paces, and parked cars lined the street.

  Everything was so familiar. She had seen it all every day for months.

  Then her mind suddenly let her see what was wrong.

  Nothing was moving.

  Bodies lay crumpled in piles along the sidewalk going in both directions from her. Cars had crashed into other cars, their drivers slumped against their seat belts, heads rolled to one side or the other.

  She ran to the nearest woman on the sidewalk and checked her.

  Dead.

  She checked another woman.

  And then another.

  All dead.

  She could see hundreds of bodies around her, all seemingly dead.

  Bio attack? Terrorist attack? What had happened?

  “Help, someone!” she shouted, but her voice was drowned by the massive wave of noise from the car alarms and running engines.

  No one was alive to hear her.

  Then the smiling image of her fiancée flashed into her mind and she screamed “Paine!”

  He was fifteen blocks away.

  She turned and headed for her apartment in the northwest section of town at a run, jumping over bodies, trying not to look at them, trying to ignore the dead staring at her from their still running cars.

  The nightmare had begun. The world had ended.

  She was still alive.

  And very much alone.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THREE YEARS from the day the world ended, Carey Noack stood on the abandoned freeway overpass and wondered exactly where she was going to stay that night.

  In front of her, the gray of the dead city of Portland, Oregon, filled the hillside for miles in all directions. Beside her, the deep blue of the gently flowing Willamette River moved silently past. She figured she had every building in the city to pick from. Apartments, houses, hotel suites, and those really nice condos she remembered being down on the river. For all anyone would care, she could set up camp right in the middle of the old city hall. She doubted anyone was left alive there. From what she had understood of the old city politics, there hadn’t been much life there before everyone died.

  Actually, there were two places she wasn’t going to stay. Her old apartment and her pare
nts home out in Beaverton. Both those places weren’t options because the bodies of Paine and her mother were still there. But just about every other building was, unless she actually found someone else alive and living here.

  She hoped for that. Dreamed about that.

  Didn’t expect it.

  It had been exactly three years ago to the day that the city and almost everyone in it, and in the world, had died, sending her running eventually to the Oregon coast to get away from the smell of a million dead.

  Now, on today of all days, like celebrating some sick birthday, she was back, facing the city again. Facing the nightmares of having everyone die around her.

  “Such a brave little girl,” she said aloud, then shook her head. As a child, her mother said that to her all the time, every time Carey started to feel sorry for herself. Over the last three years, she had repeated that saying a lot to keep from going completely crazy.

  Carey leaned her backpack and rifle against the edge of the overpass, then levered her short frame up onto the concrete guardrail so she could get a better view of what was ahead.

  It was a good fifty feet to the surface of the freeway below her. The warm wind coming from the direction of the Columbia River Gorge jostled her, so she spread her feet for a better stance. She worked and exercised so much; she didn’t have an extra ounce of fat on her body, and often felt a good wind could turn her into the Flying Nun without even having to wear a stupid-looking hat.

  Her light-brown hair, left long and pulled back out of the way, whipped at the side of her head and shoulders. She had let her hair grow long mostly because she didn’t feel like she had the skill to do anything else with it. Besides, who else was going to see it?

  She glanced down at her arm to make sure she wasn’t burning in the hot sun. Her skin was light, with freckles, and she had smothered it every day on this trip with lotion. At times, she had so much lotion on, she felt that if she fell down, she would slide like a kid on one of those old Slip-and-Slides her dad bought for the back yard. He’d only tried it once and instead of sliding, did a belly-flop, cracked a rib, and hadn’t bothered to try again. Carey remembered her mother hadn’t stopped laughing for days.

  She slid her hand along her arm. She was greased up like a Thanksgiving bird, enough so that at the moment there was no sign of burning. Good.

  She stood there on the overpass, hands on hips like Superwoman, staring into the dead city. For her grand entrance back, she had worn a black sleeveless tee-shirt, jeans, and her favorite tennis shoes. As she was looking into a mirror this morning, the old worry of being under-dressed in the big city came flooding back. It was amazing how old habits died hard.

  She glanced down at the wreck-strewn freeway below the overpass. “Man, Carey, how stupid is this trip?”

  Her words echoed against the pavement and vanished into the silence of the warm wind.

  Stupid. She knew the answer.

  Shaking her head, she jumped back off the railing and grabbed a small towel from her pack to wipe the sweat from her face and arms. The weather had turned out to be one of those typical Oregon late-summer days, where the bright sun and clear skies made the air feel hotter than it actually was. And on top of that, the wind from the Gorge was sweeping in even warmer air from the state’s central deserts, heating up the valley and the city of Portland like an oven.

  She couldn’t say, standing there in the center of the freeway overpass, that she had missed that dry, brittle wind during her years away. It seldom got above seventy degrees where she lived overlooking the beach and the waves of the Pacific Ocean. She loved the coolness, the constant pounding of the surf, the fresh, crisp air. But she had also loved this city three years ago.

  And right now, if forced, she would admit she still missed it.

  She finished wiping off her arms, put the towel back in her pack, and grabbed the water bottle. She was going to have to be careful, make sure she didn’t push too hard. The last thing she would need would be to get heat stroke.

  She leaned against the concrete side of the overpass and let her mind drift back three years. She didn’t remember much about those nightmarish last days she had spent in the city, and the trip escaping to the coast. The overriding memory was of the bodies everywhere, the smell of death growing by the moment, and her desire to run as far away as possible.

  The house she had found on the coast was just north of a little town called Depoe Bay. The house sat on a rock ledge jutting out into the ocean, and sprawled over three floors, with windows on all levels facing the empty sea. The breezes were always off the water, and seldom did the smell of death reach her.

  Nothing to see, nothing to smell, nothing to remind her that almost all of the human race had suddenly died.

  Also, the house was hidden from view of anyone who might be left alive, and who might be moving along the coastal highway. That distance from the road gave her a sense of safety. She knew there had to be others who survived besides her. She didn’t know how many, or where they were. But if she had survived, others had as well.

  Her biggest, “ugly fear,” as her mother would call it, was what someone else would do if they found her. The safest way to get around that fear was to not push the question. Her old, and now dead friends had called her “plucky.” But being plucky didn’t defend her from someone who wanted to rape or kill her. Being smart did, and the house allowed her lots of smart options.

  So, she had a nice, safe, smart place there to live. Why, after three long years of living alone, safe, on the coast, was she back in the dead city risking her life?

  Was she really that lonely?

  Did she really think that there might be a group of survivors living here?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  She should just turn around and go back to her cats.

  Damn, she missed her cats.

  She hoped she had left enough food for them to make it until she got back. Since she had nothing else to worry about beside herself, she tended to be over-protective of her two cats. Centaur was a yellow tabby with one bad eye, and Princess a small female with pure white fur. She really missed them. Maybe she should head back and forget this stupid exploring.

  “Such a brave little girl,” she said out loud, staring at the dead city. “You’ve come this far, see this through.”

  She studied some of the details around her. Windows in nearby buildings were covered with dirt and film, weeds were growing thick in the cracks of the sidewalks, and nothing was lit. She had seen parts of the city look like that when it still had hundreds of thousands of people in it.

  No power to be seen, and she hadn’t expected any. The power on the coast had gone down the first winter, and nowhere along the way from the coast had she seen any place with power. The stoplights at the end of the overpass were now nothing more than dead eyes hanging over deserted streets. It gave her a sudden feeling that someone was watching her.

  Could that be possible?

  She studied the area around her, turning slowly. Nothing moved besides the leaves on the trees and the weeds blowing in the wind.

  She did a second slow circle, staring at the blank windows, the dead cars scattered everywhere, the overgrown weeds.

  Nothing.

  No one was watching her. There weren’t that many people left alive who could.

  She shook off the feeling, took a second, long drink from the bottle of water, and stood on the overpass, just staring at the city down the hill. She still had to figure out where she was going to stay the night. She didn’t want dark to catch her without a safe room.

  The feeling of being watched again twisted her stomach.

  She had to be careful. She had to be smart. There was no telling what waited for her ahead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MATT LADEL WOKE with a start as the alarm from his computer security room beeped loudly, echoing through his penthouse apartment.

  At first, he couldn’t figure out exactly what he was hearing. He had been dreaming about wakin
g up in the morning in his old college dorm room, to his old alarm clock, and the dream had morphed into a nightmarish feeling of the alarm clock going off forever while he searched and searched for it under ten foot deep piles of clothes and stacks of books that seemed to stretch to the ceiling. He couldn’t find it, no matter how hard he tried.

  And the stupid ringing kept going and going.

  He had lived that damned dream more times than he wanted to remember back in his college days. Now, years later, the dream still haunted him.

  He needed to wake up, get out of the nightmare.

  The reality of its high-pitched, quick-beat alarm slowly replaced the old ringing alarm in the dream. He opened his eyes and stared at the white ceiling and wood beams over his head.

  College was long over, a thing of the dead past.

  Something had triggered his security alarm again.

  “Damn deer,” he said, tossing aside the sheet, and standing. He was nude, but since the morning seemed hot and bright outside the windows, he didn’t even bother to slip on his robe or slippers. He moved across the soft carpet toward the computer room, trying to push the sleep and the dream back completely.

  College was gone, his friends were gone, and he was one of only a few people left alive. And if he ever found that old alarm of his from college, he’d smash it into a hundred pieces, just with the hopes that stupid dream would stop.

  Outside the expanse of tall windows in his penthouse apartment, the sun had already cleared off the summer haze, and he could tell without even going out that the air was hot and dry. In the distance, Mt. Hood towered into the sky, snow still covering most of its peak. To his left, Mount St. Helens was smoking again. It had been doing that off and on for years, rebuilding itself from the huge explosion back in the eighties.

  The penthouse apartment covered the entire thirty-second floor of the Baxter building. He had set it up to cater to his every need. It had soft, rich carpet, big expansive rooms, and an island kitchen in the center of the main room with bright lights and every appliance known. He loved cooking, and used the kitchen almost more than any other area.