Dust and Kisses

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “Sounds like I’m getting the better part of this deal,” she said, laughing as she dropped into the chair he usually sat at. He was never going to get tired of her laugh. It had a high ring to it, and just made him want to smile.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “You know how many times I wished I had someone to talk to while I cooked.”

  “Actually, I do,” she said, her smile fading slightly.

  They held each other’s gaze for a moment.

  How dumb was he? Of course she knew what that was like. She had told him she had been alone the entire time as well. What was he thinking? He nodded and smiled. “Sorry.”

  She shrugged.

  “To the story. I have cooking to do.”

  She laughed. “Ahh, where to start.”

  “The beginning,” he said.

  “Twenty-seven years ago I was born right here in Portland, grew up in Beaverton. My father was a stockbroker the entire time, my mother taught school.”

  As she was talking, he finished getting the corn ready and dropped it into the boiling water.

  “My birthday’s in October,” he said. “I’ll be twenty-seven then as well, also born right here, but grew up in Bend.”

  “May birthday for me,” she said. “Looks like we’re pretty close to the same age.”

  “So where did you go to college?” he asked, assuming that she had. He glanced at the table. Chicken, now cold, corn, eggs, rolls, what more did they need?

  “Eugene,” she said.

  He stopped and stared at her. Eugene was the hometown of the University of Oregon. “You’re kidding? So did I? What was your major?”

  “Physics,” she said. “I was working on my post-doctorate when all this happened. What was yours?”

  No wonder he thought this woman was smart. She was. Anyone who could go that far in physics had to have a brain that was far beyond his.

  He laughed. “Electrical engineering. No surprise, huh?” he said, indicating the room with all his equipment in it. “I got a four-year degree and came here to work. Best thing I could find was the alarm company. No regular engineering firm would hire me with only an undergrad degree and moderate grades.”

  “Turned out to be a great thing,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Guess it did, didn’t it.”

  He looked up from the boiling corn and into her eyes again. “So how come we never ran into each other at the university? I think I would have remembered seeing you.”

  She shrugged. “Actually, probably not. I was the shy, bookworm type, stayed in the dorms for the first three years, mostly just studying. I was a freshman at seventeen and never really paid much attention to the party scene. Actually, I was living here three years ago, working on my post-doc in electromagnetics.”

  “Electromagnetics? What were you doing in Portland?”

  “Working at a lab for a Dr. Canfield.”

  Now he was really impressed. Canfield was a known name, not only in science, but in advisory panels in Washington, D.C. Matt had even read one of his books during his senior year. “Wow, nice job.”

  “Actually, it was,” she said. “I had a nice apartment up on the hill in the Northwest section, off of Quincy Street. And I made some great money.”

  “Why didn’t you head back to your apartment when you came into town?” he asked, then instantly knew it was a stupid question. “Never mind,” he said, waving his hand and focusing on the boiling pot in front of him. “You don’t need to answer that.”

  “No, it’s all right,” she said. “Paine, my fiancée, was staying with me the night before all of this happened. His body is still there, and I didn’t want to see it again. At least not right away.”

  He looked up into her eyes. He could see there was still a lot of pain close to the surface there. He had topics like that as well. Both of them did.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She nodded and sat back. “Actually, I think the worst of it was that I couldn’t bury him, or either one of my parents. I just didn’t have the strength to move their bodies very far.”

  He nodded, remembering his parents and how hard that had been for him to do alone. “Yeah, I managed to bury my mother and father, but it took me most of a day just to move them to the small cemetery in Bend.”

  This time she looked deeply into his eyes. “Sorry, bad topic I guess.”

  “I don’t think it hurts to talk about it,” he said, putting plates, napkins, and some silverware on the table in front of her and in front of the other chair. “Considering that we haven’t had anyone to talk to for three years about any of this.”

  “True,” she said, smiling at him, “but not over a wonderful picnic lunch.”

  “Ahh, good point. Some topics just aren’t meant for food.”

  “So how are we going to know if the bikers get close?” she asked, pointing at the security room.

  “I have an alarm set that will tell us when they show up on a camera and set off a motion sensor. Same alarm that woke me up yesterday with you.”

  She smiled.

  “Drink?” he asked. “I have chilled bottles of white wine I was going to bring along, but not sure now that would be a good idea. I have bottled water, Tang, cans of Diet Coke, and that’s about it.”

  “Great thought on the wine,” she said. “That would have been nice, but now I agree that this isn’t a good time. Just water now.”

  He got them both bottles of cold water from the fridge, then drained the corn and put it on the table. He uncovered the chicken and rolls and then sat down.

  “This smells wonderful,” she said, waving the steam off the corn into her face. “I never thought I’d ever have another ear of fresh corn, let alone fried chicken.”

  She took an ear of corn, then a breast piece, a roll and two more deviled eggs. He watched as she bit into the chicken and her face lit up with sheer joy and pleasure.

  “Fantastic,” she said, looking up at him. “Thank you.”

  “No,” he said, his smile so big it felt like it might break out of his face, “thank you.”

  Until that moment he hadn’t realized just how much he had missed other people. Other special people.

  And Carey was, without a doubt, very special.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE HOT SHOWER, the laundry, and now this fantastic-tasting chicken and corn. Carey would have never thought that such a thing was possible, let alone have it given to her by a guy with looks that seemed right out of a GQ magazine.

  And besides the great looks, the superb body, and a smile that would melt a window, he had a wonderful personality, and actually seemed sensitive. He knew instantly when he had asked a bad question about her old apartment, even before she had said anything.

  She was amazed that he had been worried enough about her to come and find her when he saw the bikers. He could have just let her go it alone, and she supposed most guys in his situation would have. She might have let him go it alone if the situation were reversed.

  But Matt hadn’t.

  Was he too good to be true? Or was her ability to see another person just warped from three years of never seeing anyone?

  She was going to have to be careful. She knew, without a doubt, that she could fall in love with him easily. And that was something she had never dreamed might happen again.

  She didn’t need, at the moment, to have another loss if he decided he didn’t much care for her around. Even with them getting forced together faster than either one of them would have liked, they still needed to go very slowly.

  Or at least she needed to go slowly. She had no doubt, that was going to be difficult.

  After each of them had taken a few more bites of the wonderful lunch, Matt smiled at her. “So you still haven’t gotten to the part of the story where you know what caused this disaster.”

  “You’re right,” she said, holding her second ear of corn in front of her mouth, “I’m falling down on my part of this bargain.”

  He l
aughed as she enjoyed the bite, then he went to work on a piece of chicken, ready to listen.

  “I’m not sure where to start, exactly, so let me back into this a little. For a week before that last day, scientists around the world had been whispering among themselves about what seemed like a cloud approaching Earth. Actually Earth, and the rest of the solar system, was approaching the cloud.”

  “A cloud from deep space?” Matt asked, a chicken leg halfway to his mouth. “Sounds like a bad movie.”

  She nodded. “I wish it had been. But it was real. With the speed that Earth and the solar system were moving, and the speed of the cloud’s movement, it would flash over Earth for less than five seconds. The problem was, no one was exactly certain what the cloud was.”

  “You’re kidding?” Matt asked.

  She smiled. “Actually, the leading theory was the cloud was some sort of energy, visible only because of the light refraction it was causing to the stars on the other side of the cloud. Something out there was bending light, twisting it, ripping it apart, and Earth was going to pass right through that something.”

  “And no one told anyone this would happen?” Matt asked.

  “There didn’t seem to be a point. All the scientists believed that no one would notice anything. In fact, even on the night side of the planet, they thought that there wouldn’t even be a glow in the sky from the wave.”

  “And your working with Dr. Canfield got you on the inside of all this information?”

  She nodded. “His main lab was down near the river here in Portland. I was scheduled to work with him for the summer, and with luck, the fall semester. It made being with Paine hard at times, since the drive between Portland and Eugene is so boring, but we managed, making our time together special when we had it.”

  Matt nodded and said nothing. She wasn’t sure if mentioning Paine again was such a good idea, but too late now, so she went on.

  “Dr. Canfield’s belief was that Earth was about to flash through a low-level electromagnetic storm. He had sent out a warning to others on his theory, to give them a chance to protect highly sensitive instruments. Strong electromagnetic pulses, like from an atomic blast, could shut down most modern equipment and destroy computers, but no one thought this wave was strong enough to do that.”

  “But they were guessing, right?”

  “Yeah, we were all guessing.” Her stomach twisted at the idea of how many people they might have saved if they had known. But they hadn’t and there was nothing she could do about it now. She had already lost far too many nights to thinking about that.

  “Dr. Canfield, to prove his theory, designed an experiment with two dozen sets of sensitive electronic equipment, to monitor the effects of the pass-through. Part of the experiment was to have one set of control devices locked in a secure vault, designed to protect anything in it from any kind of electromagnetic pulse. Some banks and some government military installations have such protections, developed back in the days of the cold war. It was easy for Canfield to set one up.”

  “Let me guess,” Matt said. “You were in that vault, just like I was in the bank vault. That’s what saved us.”

  She nodded. “I had worked two long days and nights on the experiments, side-by-side with Canfield, getting them ready. Then during the hour before the storm was to pass over, Dr. Canfield decided I should be closed in the vault with the control-equipment to monitor them.”

  “No one thought this thing might be dangerous to humans?”

  “No one,” she said. “Not one scientist in the thousands who were aware of the cloud approaching ever thought it would be dangerous. It was just a big, astronomical curiosity. It would be past Earth in seconds. Papers would be written about it. No big deal.”

  “Yeah, got that one wrong,” Matt said, shaking his head.

  “When I came out ten minutes after the cloud had passed, Dr. Canfield lay dead on the floor. From there, for me, as I’m sure it was for you, life became a pure nightmare.”

  After a moment of silence, Matt asked, “What did you do next?”

  “I’m not really sure, to be honest. I think I was in shock. I remember stumbling around, checking for life in almost every body. Once I realized that was fruitless, I headed home, to my apartment. I found Paine still in my bed.”

  With that, the silence in the penthouse got very intense. She forced herself to take another bite of corn. Matt was nice enough to not say anything as she let the memory of that moment go past.

  “I then made a nightmarish three hour walk over the hill and to Beaverton where I had grown up. My mother was slumped over the sink of our family home with the water still running. She had been preparing what looked like one of my favorite meals, corned-beef and cabbage. I moved her to the couch and made her look as peaceful as possible, as if she had fallen asleep watching television. Then I headed back into town.”

  “Why?” Matt asked.

  “I wanted to find my father,” she said. “He was in his office, slumped over his desk, his secretary on the floor in front of the desk. I managed to put him upright in his chair and turn it so it looked out over the city. At least his final resting place would have a view. I wish I could have done more for them.”

  “It just wasn’t possible,” Matt said.

  She needed to keep going with this story, get it all out. She was amazed she had held her emotions together so far. She clearly was getting strength from Matt, and just telling this story to another human made her feel better.

  “Finally, after a day, I managed to gather enough of my wits about me to think about what to do, where to go. I found myself at one point back in the lab. A part of the scientist-in-training in me took over. Since all the data had been recorded, the least I could do was try to discover what exactly had happened.”

  “Did you actually find out what in the cloud caused this?” Matt asked, sitting forward now, the picnic lunch between them ignored for the moment.

  “I did. To be honest, the answer wasn’t hard to find. The instruments designed to record and test Dr. Canfield’s theory told me that he had been right, the storm was electromagnetic, but it had been resonating at the exact right band to shut down the human brain’s electrical systems.”

  “Didn’t know that was possible,” Matt said.

  “The military had been working on weapons using electromagnetic pulses for exactly that reason for years.”

  “Didn’t know that, either,” Matt said, shaking his head in disgust.

  “I double-checked my findings, again coming up with the same answer. All the signals that are sent constantly from the human brain to the heart and lungs were short-circuited and simply shut off. In essence, everyone died before they even knew what had hit them. No one was in any pain.”

  “That’s something good to know,” Matt said, nodding. “Makes me feel a little better about my parents.”

  “Luckily, though, the storm’s electromagnetic band had been very narrow. Over the years, I discovered it had killed all dogs, but not small cats. Horses are gone, but not cattle. Rats, mice, most rodents were killed, but not most fish. Deer survived as well. And raccoons. And a lot of bees and insects of different types. I have no idea of the long-term effects the massive disruptions in the food chains will have, and I really have no way of actually measuring why some animal’s brains were short-circuited by the storm and others were not.”

  “Humans just drew the short straw,” Matt said.

  “They did,” she said. “After one full day of doing that research, I had to escape.”

  She didn’t mention to him that she had stopped and visited Paine and her parents on the way out, to say good-bye.

  “I headed for the coast and now, three years later to the day, I came back.”

  “And I’m very glad you did.”

  “So am I.”

  Matt leaned back in his chair. “So, as I thought, the bank vault protected me, and the experiment vault protected you.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Th
e electromagnetic pulse in the wave that hit the planet was weak, but sustained for just long enough to do this level of damage to humanity.”

  Matt leaned forward and stared at her. “Weak meaning what exactly?”

  “Bank vaults would normally not have enough shielding to protect anything from a large electromagnetic pulse. Neither would the vault I was in. That means that just about anyone underground a good distance, or in any kind of military installation shielded for atomic blasts, would have survived. Or even someone behind a lot of metal.”

  “Oh, wow,” Matt said, his gaze looking out over the city.

  She watched him as he sat back and let what she had said soak in. Matt was clearly a very smart man and he had a common sense way of thinking that served him well. She admired that, wished she had more of it, to be honest.

  “So, there might be a lot of people out there still alive?” Matt said after a few moments. “Which is why it didn’t surprise you when I said the bikers had plates from Nevada.”

  “Exactly.”

  “After being one of the only people around a city this size for so long,” Matt said, “I thought there was no chance of ever finding a large group of humans again.”

  “Portland didn’t have any military protected areas,” Carey said. “We don’t have subways, or military ships on the river. I’ll bet there are more people in Seattle, a bunch more in California, and who knows how many in Colorado and Nevada.”

  “Subways, like in New York or Washington?” Matt asked. “You think there might have been enough to protect people? Or in submarines, or deep mines. Would any people in those have been protected?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” Carey said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me that they were. Was the bank vault door you were in open?”

  Matt nodded. “It was.”

  “So even with an open vault, you and your co-worker were protected. I sure don’t see why there wouldn’t be others. Maybe a lot of others.”

  His eyes were alert, alive with the excitement of what she had told him. “Don’t you want to know how many people might actually be still alive out there?”