Empty Cities

by E. E. Isherwood

  “I’ll only be a minute,” she said to encourage the dog not to be afraid.

  Rose went in and found the key chain in Abbess Mary Francis’ belongings. She said a short prayer for her former leader, then walked back out the front door.

  Deogee ran laps around the trees in the yard, like she was still playing with the lab. It was an impressive display too, because she was very fast. But Rose also remembered the press of the clock; those dogs hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning.

  “Come on, Deogee! Come!”

  The wolf ripped around the trunk of the tree and came right at her. She bared her teeth and looked ferocious, making Rose wonder about her intentions, but she slowed down and almost skidded to a stop in the grass. Her tail wagged uncontrollably, like her human pal was about to hand out treats.

  “Good dog! Now, get in here.” She opened the sliding side door of the abbess’s minivan.

  She jumped up and got on the backseat without complaint. The old Sister Rose would have been mortified at how it could scratch the vinyl seats, but she took it in stride. She ensured the dog was inside, then shut the door.

  Rose walked around to the front and opened her door to get in. Deogee waited for her from the passenger seat in the front.

  “You want to ride next to me, huh?” She didn’t think it mattered. “Fine.”

  As she got in and buckled herself, she lowered the windows to give the dog some air. Deogee pawed at her and licked her face while she worked the controls with her left hand.

  “You’re welcome!” she laughed. After enduring as many kisses as she could stand, Rose pushed the pup onto the other seat. “This is for safety, okay?”

  When she turned around to face the steering wheel, she was scared out of her wits by a mechanical object hovering outside the open driver’s window.

  “Oh heavens!”

  The futuristic-looking contraption hovered with the assistance of four small fans. It looked like a child’s skateboard with circular blades on each corner. It also had a tennis-ball sized black orb hung underneath, and a tiny speaker.

  “Please identify yourself,” a computer voice requested.

  Pennsylvania Countryside

  Ted and Emily had been flying for about an hour before she noticed their fuel situation.

  “When were you going to tell me?” she said matter-of-factly.

  “I wasn’t sure until about five minutes ago,” he replied. Their fuel was already below half a tank, which shouldn’t have happened for another hour. That bullet had, in fact, penetrated the plane, even though they couldn’t see the hole from where they were. And, because Murphy’s Law enjoyed flying, the bullet had gone into one of the two fuel tanks inside the wings. “I’ve been thinking how I can tell you without worrying you.”

  Her laughter was tense. “I’ve been worried since yesterday. I doubt I could be any more worried. I can handle it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that. You’re a tough cookie. However, I’m protecting the President of the United States. I don’t want to fuck this up.”

  She reached over and put her hand on his. “You won’t. I won’t let you. Now, you’ve just told me, so what do we do now?”

  He’d never stopped worrying, either, but sharing it bled off a tiny fraction of the stress he’d been saving up in his clenched jaw. “We’re going to have to put down and find another aircraft. Every little airport across America will have these Cessna 172s and other small craft.”

  She pulled her hand back and looked out the window. “I wish we could take a big plane. That would get us there faster. Maybe even across the ocean. But we can’t…”

  “No, we might be able to get a slightly bigger plane in the air, but then it would be harder to fly and easier to spot on radar. If we went out into the Atlantic, we’d have to deal with those missile boats, too. I say we keep going up the coast, like we’d planned.”

  “So, what are we going to do about this doomed flight?”

  “Do you see an airport?” he joked. “We should probably do this sooner rather than later. New York City is on the horizon. Once we get there, we’ll only have big airports to deal with. Might be harder to find little civilian planes.”

  “So, where do we go?” she wondered aloud.

  “I think we’ll be fine at Newark. It’s a little short of New York. It will make a nice turning point before we go north again. And the best part is, we should be heading right for it.”

  He kept talking as the plane soared at about fifty feet above the fields and trees below.

  “Before we land, I want you to cover your face. We don’t know if they are already there or not. We might have to land and run. If that happens, it would be better for both of us if the bad guys didn’t know who you were.”

  “They won’t chase us if they think I’m Julie Six-Pack?”

  He shrugged. “I guarantee if they knew who was on this plane, they’d be covering every airport within our service range.”

  “I’ll do like this.” She pulled her arm up to her face, essentially hiding herself like Dracula.

  Ted rolled his eyes. “You know, for a vice president, you sure don’t take much seriously, you know that?”

  She laughed. “I told you, humor is what keeps me sane. It keeps me from thinking about what could be out there looking for us. It helps me forget all those cars and houses down there are now empty.” She looked at him from behind her mask. “It helps me endure not being told we’re running out of fuel.”

  “Yeah, about that—”

  “See, I told you,” she interjected. “Humor is what’s going to help me survive being with you.”

  “Am I really that bad?”

  Her eyes conveyed the smile hidden behind her elbow. “Find me another plane and all will be right again.”

  As New York filled the landscape, the comparatively small airport at Newark appeared as a large flat area not far ahead. A great fire burned several miles to the north of the field, inside what looked like a sea of houses. It was probably fueled by the millions of garages, cans of lawnmower gasoline, and flammable home decor inside each structure.

  He was about to tell her he had his target, in the spirit of openness, but he caught sight of movement on the airfield, causing him to change his message.

  “We have to land right now!”

  Ted jammed the nose down and searched for an alternative landing strip.

  The airport ahead was already full.

  Amarillo, TX

  Brent led the charge of four vehicles across the flat grassland north of Amarillo. He was in the lead, his big F-250 belching diesel fumes as he jammed the pedal to the floor on the empty two-lane blacktop.

  Paul and Cliff were in the green sedan behind him. Ross and Kevin were in a second pickup truck. Carter was in his friend Greer’s old Volkswagen bug.

  And the prisoners were armed to the teeth. Once he opened the armory, he had to accept they would take everything they could. Each man readily accepted a riot shotgun and a Glock 22. They didn’t shoot him in the back when he walked out, nor did they harm him while he found keys for the cars on the lot, so he figured he was in the clear.

  “I’m lucky they’re coming with me,” he said to himself. He wanted them in separate vehicles to give the appearance there were more than seven of them. He wanted to storm Trish’s place and scare the attackers away, if he could.

  His rig downshifted as he turned into Trish’s dusty gravel street. Her trailer park wasn’t much more than one short road with ten single-wides clinging to the earth inside a small clump of trees.

  Trish’s trailer was obvious because of the three or four trucks parked around it.

  “Fuck,” he drawled. “I should have known some of them would be interested in the one beautiful young woman they knew was still alive.” His ploy to use numbers wasn’t going to work.

  He touched a small cross hanging from his rearview mirror. He prayed God would be his co-pilot outside the truck, too.

  The other vehicles
pulled up behind his, but he was out and running up the front steps before his pals had gathered behind him. There might not be an extra second to waste.

  “Trish!” he shouted.

  He racked the shotgun as he got onto the top step.

  “Open up!”

  When the door opened, it wasn’t any prisoner he expected to see.

  “Curtis?”

  “What do you want, boss man? You let us go.” Curtis watched as Brent’s backup arrived, but he didn’t seem worried.

  Curtis wasn’t someone he ever thought of as trouble. He was young and stupid, like most of the guys, but he seemed willing to work hard in the prison so he could get out in a few months and get back to his real life. Now he wore a teal bandana and had a pistol wedged into the front of his pants. One hand sat on the bottom of the grip.

  “Trish said there were uninvited guests giving her trouble here. Is she okay?” He tried to look past the guy, but the inside of the place was dark. The curtains were drawn, and the lights were off.

  Curtis frowned. “Did you boys come with this law-dog? If so, me and my gang might have something to say about it.”

  Brent half-turned to greet them, expecting them to back him up.

  “Fuck no,” Paul said. “We’ve been chasing him since the prison. He ran out the door to rescue his babe, but he left the armory doors open. We’ve got all the guns!”

  Paul held up his shotgun to show it off.

  “Fuck me,” Brent said under his breath.

  That made Curtis laugh. “What’s the matter, boss? You re-thinking letting us all go?”

  He tried to keep his cool. “You were a good kid, son. You almost cleared your six months. You would have been back out in no time, getting life back together.”

  They’d spoken often about how the young man wanted to get his GED certificate to finish high school more than anything. He even mentioned wanting to go into the corrections industry to help other inmates.

  “Dude. You don’t get it. Life out here is brutal. I’m in a gang, not your fairy tale world where I get a degree and do something lame.” He motioned back in the house. “We’re all in a gang now. Mine.”

  “Dammit, you have the whole of Amarillo to take from. Why are you here with Officer Perez?”

  He didn’t dwell on the fact his crew had abandoned him. He would die trying to protect his friend. Curtis had surprised him, but he could end his life with a quick flick of his shotgun barrel.

  “She’s nice,” Curtis agreed. “Come inside and I’ll show you what we’ve got lined up for her.”

  The kid he once thought of as bright now seemed dark and sinister. Someone who deserved to take a blast of buckshot in the teeth.

  He was about to do it, too, when he felt the barrel of a gun in the small of his back. Another man grabbed his shotgun and made him lower it.

  Paul brushed his wavy hair aside and motioned for him to give up his guns. “Let’s go inside, boss. See what Curtis has in store for you and your lovely friend. I believe I’m interested in the last woman left alive, too.”

  Curtis laughed. “Bring him in, guys.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Newark, NJ

  “The Newark airport is already being taken over,” he said dryly, searching out his window for somewhere to land. “If they’re in the tower, we might have showed up on radar as we got close.” It was hard to stay at treetop level as they entered the suburban sprawl. Sometimes they had to go over treeless hills or avoid tangles of high-tension power lines.

  She braced herself as Ted descended as far as he dared. “They think we’re going to land there?”

  He craned his neck, looking out every window. “Yep. Probably figured they’d grab us when we got there. We have to get on the ground before they realize we’ve had a change of heart. Let me know if you see anything.”

  They both watched the ground. They’d already been flying low, but now they were only high enough to stay over the treetops.

  The good news was that they were now on the western edge of the metropolis of New York City and there was a little of everything below. He could pick a landing site from among the long stretches of interstate, the golf courses, or the many huge parking lots.

  “I’d go for the highway,” she remarked.

  He’d been thinking along those lines. A golf course would be perfect if they wanted to get out of sight immediately, but fairways could have overhanging trees or sand traps. Either could be deadly.

  The highway would make it impossible to hide the plane, but the level pavement would be a safer place to put down.

  “There’s where we’re headed.” He pointed to a long stretch of interstate twelve lanes wide. The plane banked left as he lined up his approach.

  “Watch the street signs,” she advised.

  As he got aligned with the roadway, he tried to see out her window toward the airport. No planes were in the air, but some giant transports were taxiing on the ground. Nothing that big would risk landing without tower support; someone had to be watching he and Emily.

  “We’ve got to get out as fast as possible, okay? Grab as much gear as you can, then run like hell for the houses.” They were coming down in the middle of an ocean of single-family homes. The highway cut through suburbia like a narrow bridge on its way to the island of Manhattan. Its tall skyscrapers stood in for tropical palm trees fifteen hazy miles away.

  Ted adjusted the choke and flaps as he guided the Cessna over the highway. There were a lot of cars on the eastbound lanes, but almost none going westbound. He’d seen the rush hour traffic pattern back in DC, too.

  “Hang on,” he said in his pilot’s voice.

  The nimble little plane went down below the trees lining the highway, and he was about to commit when he realized a wrecked car might be a little too close on the right side. He drifted at about ten feet until he got by, then he let the plane bleed off the last of its altitude.

  The three tires of the landing gear hit concrete a few seconds later, and he engaged the brakes after just a moment.

  “Touchdown!” he exhaled. Every landing had the potential to be his last, so Ted treated each one with a great deal of respect. “Air Force One is on the ground.”

  She chuckled with her own sense of relief. “We really doing this? Calling me the president?”

  Ted goosed the motor to carry them down the highway toward the next overpass. If he could put the plane under there, he might be able to avoid detection from the air. It wasn’t something he’d considered while in the air, but it was obvious once he was down.

  “Until I hear differently, I’m going to treat you as the most important person in America. You are the only woman I know for an absolute fact is still alive and is in line to be president.”

  She seemed to consider it for a few moments. When Ted got the plane into the shade of the wide overpass, she sighed with relief. “This was smart thinking, pilot. Can you see about getting me a boarding staircase so I can climb down? The president deserves that, don’t you think?”

  He guided the plane into the shoulder of the highway and pointed it at the sloped embankment under the bridge so it was out of the way of most of the lanes. If cars did go by, they wouldn’t bash into the Cessna. He figured the owner would appreciate that.

  Ted opened the door, then jumped out. As he grabbed his gear from behind the seat, he watched Emily do the same. He wanted to joke around with her, but this was the most dangerous time for them both.

  He’d pulled out his backpack, but before he could sling his AR over his shoulder and get moving, the engine whine of another aircraft came in on the breeze. It was a single-prop plane like the Cessna, but the drone wasn’t the same.

  “Aw, shit,” he drawled.

  Emily looked at him from across the front seats. “Let me guess…”

  He shrugged. “They have to be on to us.” They hadn’t seen any other aircraft during the flight, but now there was one snooping around. When all the other people of America were gone, meet
ing someone wasn’t a coincidence.

  The propeller rumble got closer and suddenly he was at a loss for the sure thing to do. They were under the overpass, but they were visible from the sides. Their large, white plane was impossible to miss for anyone looking for it.

  He got her attention. “Get your stuff. We’ve got to move.”

  She scrambled to pull out her gear. He slung his rifle and put himself behind the door as the plane cruised over the highway to the other about a quarter of a mile away.

  “It’s a Piper Cherokee. Six-seater, I think.”

  Emily seemed to have trouble getting her rifle from the backseat, but he didn’t move until the plane went out of sight. Once it was gone, he stepped away from the door and ran around the tail to get over to her.

  “Go, Emily. We’ve got to get away from this plane.”

  She yanked her rifle out. “The sling got stuck on the seat.”

  He gently shoved her away from the door.

  Emily hustled, but she also turned back like she’d forgotten something. “Hey! Where’s my staircase? This airport is getting a strongly-worded letter.”

  Ted appreciated what she was trying to do.

  The lawnmower-engine whine of the search plane came at them from one direction, but there was also another motor higher up. His pilot’s eye picked it out of the sky: a long, swept-wing Predator drone.

  “Fuh—” he started to say, before realizing he didn’t want to frighten her unnecessarily. “Come on, we—” He saw the puff of smoke. A missile fell off the wing and flew in a graceful arc right at them.

  Scaring her was unavoidable.

  “Run!”

  St. Louis, MO

  Tabby and the kids ran behind her Ford to hide from the drone. The two men moved with less haste, but they also crouched behind her car. Tabby’s focus was on waiting for the drone to come back, but she glanced at the men to make sure they were down. Gus’s attention appeared mostly on his cigarette, but his eyes also went to Audrey’s shotgun.