Empty Cities

by E. E. Isherwood

  She opened the door to get out, but the hound didn’t move. It sat with teeth bared and stared at the white box.

  “Oh, you. No need to be worried. It’s with the authorities. We’re saved!”

  Newark, NJ

  Ted’s stomach twirled a few times as he figured out how exposed they were.

  “Lincoln Tunnel, ten miles! That’s where we’re going, right?” Emily pointed at the green sign above the eastbound lanes as they raced along the edge of the airport. He got a better look at the dozens of commercial jets, mostly A380s and 777s, taxiing back and forth, as well as scores of military drones lined up in one stretch of tarmac.

  “Fuck, this looks like an invasion,” he blurted as he kept the car between the white lines.

  “And look at those shipping containers,” Emily remarked, “over at the port.”

  Beyond the wide-open expanse of runways and taxiways, huge cranes lifted tractor-trailer-sized shipping containers off a massive ship stacked high with them. The level of activity at the docks matched the ant-like fervor at the airport.

  Ted barely had time to see where she’d pointed because he had to slow and dodge a wrecked fuel truck. He locked his elbows and jammed on the brakes.

  “Oh shit!” he croaked.

  It wasn’t only a wrecked truck, but a medium-sized jet had come down, clipped vehicles on the highway, then crashed into a field. The stretch of highway was the start of the debris field.

  Metal and rock clattered off the undercarriage as he did sixty through a patch of charred pavement. If they caught some bad luck and blew a tire, they’d have to stop on the exposed stretch of highway. They’d be visible to the entire airport.

  Ted went a little slower toward the far edge of the mess, hoping they’d get through. A metal bar made a pair of loud thumps as the tires struck it, but then it went silent. After a few tense moments waiting to see if they still had tire pressure, he kicked the Camaro in the gut to get it back up to speed.

  The highway turned north, away from the airport.

  “One-fifty,” he announced. Ted checked in the rearview mirror, but the small windows and bad angles didn’t allow him to keep tabs on the airport. “You tell me if anything is following us. They’ll never catch us on the ground, but that Predator is still out there, and there’s plenty more at the airport.”

  He wondered how many ships were behind those already dockside. Did the US Navy know these were converging on the coastline before the event struck yesterday? How many people could fit on a ship? How did they survive whatever death ray killed everyone else?

  If an enemy wanted to come to America, Newark was a good place to start. Everything was free for the taking. Just as he and Emily were scavenging their way up the coast of the northeast, any invading force would find lots of goodies ripe for the plucking. Maybe the bad guys here were preparing transport for the follow-on forces waiting at airports elsewhere in the world.

  If any of the intel spooks had survived on Air Force Two, they’d have a field day with this.

  There was nothing but questions for him as his Camaro thundered along the wide-open highway. The needle nudged higher, toward one-sixty, but the steering wheel started to vibrate because of the poor surface conditions.

  “I see aircraft back there,” Emily gulped. “At least two.”

  “How far?”

  She studied the sky for a few seconds. “They’re still by the airport.”

  He thought about their situation as a classic math word problem. How long would it take to go less than ten miles while doing 160 miles per hour? The solution was nearly impossible to compute because he ticked off another mile every forty seconds.

  “We can make it,” he said hesitantly. It wasn’t that he was being wishy-washy, but there were more wrecked cars up ahead.

  “They are definitely coming our way.” Emily had her face up against the glass of her window as she surveyed the skies behind them.

  “They can’t launch at us,” he said with another dose of barely-contained hesitation. They probably would if they knew Emily was in the car, but not for two joy-riding nuts. Missiles were expensive.

  The Camaro sounded happy to be going fast, and it coaxed him to try for even more speed. He held the wheel as tight as he could as they sped across a long bridge over a river. The sweeping turn collected the abandoned cars in the far lanes, so he was able to maintain his speed until he was across. Then the highway turned to the left, and more junk cars were in his lanes.

  “Five miles!” Emily pointed to the road sign.

  “Madam President, hold on. It’s going to get bumpy.”

  Ted feathered the brakes to take off some speed, then he switched lanes to avoid a T-bone collision with a school bus. As he came around the back bumper, he had to brake again because a second bus was behind the first.

  “That way!” Emily pointed to the right shoulder, by a concrete barrier, because it was the only lane open. The buses must have turned sideways and caught other vehicles.

  He jumped in his seat when the tires rubbed up against the median wall.

  “One more deduction,” Emily remarked with dark humor.

  His heart pounded in his chest with the same ferocity he’d experienced on his first deployment. People depended on him to do a good job and pull through this.

  “I’m getting the job,” Ted reassured her. He exhaled a deep breath because he’d been holding it since before the bus wreck.

  She pointed to another overhead sign that alerted drivers of the need to be in the right lane to get to the Lincoln Tunnel.

  “C’mon,” she encouraged him, “you’ll get us there.”

  They blew through another toll booth, then went up and onto a flyover ramp. For a few moments, they had a front-row view of the mega-fire burning to the north. It was only a few miles away. So close they could smell it.

  “Glad we aren’t going that way,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road.

  The curved ramp took them off the first highway and onto one heading directly for the city. Many of the cars had rolled into the wall, making it easier for them to use the cleared inside lane, but once the highway straightened out, it became more difficult to see a path through the wrecks. Both directions of roadway were stuffed with wrecked cars.

  “We aren’t stopping,” he deadpanned.

  Ahead, the skyscrapers of New York City beckoned them from three or four miles away. However, as they headed due east through the ever-narrowing gaps in the stalled traffic, Ted had to keep dropping speed. It gave the enemy a chance to close the distance.

  Emily tapped on her window with a fingernail. “The planes are coming.”

  Amarillo, TX

  When Brent got inside the trailer, he immediately found Trish on the floor next to the kitchen table. Her phone was crushed on the linoleum next to her, and she’d been crying.

  “Are you okay?” he asked after he’d rushed over to her.

  “She’s fine, pops,” Curtis assured him. “Why would we hurt someone we wanted to treat real nice? We need her.”

  Trish smiled weakly. She was normally a cocky, self-sure woman, but a few punches had beat her down. Still, there was fire behind those eyes, like she was ready to get even.

  He tried to reason with them. “Boys, this is ridiculous. The whole world has gone to shit. People have disappeared. You are free of your old lives. You don’t have to be criminals.”

  Curtis strode into the kitchen with a shotgun over his shoulder. It was one from the armory, which meant the men he’d come with had betrayed him. The young man moved a chair across the floor so he could look directly at him and Trish. “I’ll never be free, pops, don’t you get it? No? Try this on for size…”

  He threw the gun on the wooden table, then sat down.

  “I got caught dealing last year. Small-time shit, no big deal. It was in some West Texas town I don’t even remember. As I’m sitting in the police cruiser, some asshole in a suit comes up to me and says I work for him now. I told h
im to fuck off, but he opened the door in front of the deputy, pulled me out, and held a gun to my head.”

  Brent shifted uncomfortably on his sore knees.

  “Do you see where this is going?” Curtis said with exasperation. “The guy whispered in my ear, giving me marching orders for his operation. He said if I didn’t follow them to the letter, he was going to kill my whole family. The officer told him my home address, as a way to let me know he had me by the balls.”

  Curtis touched his bandana. “If I cross them in any way, I’m fucked. So, I figure it’s better to embrace my job and survive this thing as top dog, you know?”

  Brent was caught in a crouch, but he had to stand up to relieve the pressure on his legs. He groaned on his way up.

  “You need help, pops. Why are you even here?” Curtis pointed to Brent’s legs. “We’ll let you go if you simply walk away.”

  That made some of the other prisoners mumble in disagreement.

  “No, it’s fine,” Curtis assured them. “He’s one guy, and we’ll send him packing with a butter knife for a weapon. No one has to get hurt over this girl.”

  Brent shook his head in disappointment. “Would you get out of your arrangement with those assholes if you could?”

  Curtis nodded. “Of course, but I can’t.”

  “You can,” Brent insisted. “Everyone is gone. Don’t you get it? The top level of the prison was cleared out. The surrounding towns are empty. Amarillo and Austin aren’t picking up their phones. No one is on any of the radio stations. The world has gone quiet.”

  Curtis squinted at him. “Can you prove to me all the cartels are gone?”

  He shrugged. “How the hell should I know? But I’d bet anything the dickhead threatening you is gone. Everyone in Texas is apparently…gone.”

  The man seemed to think about it.

  “Naw, I ain’t falling for that. I’m—” Curtis didn’t get a chance to finish. Paul put a pistol on Curtis’s cheek, which caused a chain reaction of gun pointing throughout the rest of the prisoners.

  Brent’s six friends hadn’t abandoned him after all.

  “Don’t shoot!” he yelled.

  CHAPTER 17

  West Portal, Lincoln Tunnel, NJ

  “I can see a problem developing,” Ted remarked as the traffic continued to get thicker. He wasn’t able to do more than fifty and had to brake and swerve every few seconds, though they were still moving forward.

  “Let me guess this one. They know where we are and where we’re going.” Emily remained fixated out her window.

  They were close to the tunnel now. To his right, through the trees and brick homes of this New Jersey neighborhood, the highway wrapped around in a spiral as it went down into the tunnel entrance.

  “You are pretty smart, for a politician,” he mused.

  “Well, pilot, what are you going to do now?”

  There was no time to think of elaborate schemes. In his view, there was only one viable way to end this before they would be forced to stop anyway.

  Ted scraped against a parked car, startling himself in the process. When he gave it some more gas, he glanced over to Emily. “Hold onto your gun.”

  She turned and held onto her rifle, then he steered the expensive Camaro to the right—toward the median. He stood on the brakes to remove some of the danger, but he also jammed the wheel so the car would spin around next to the barrier. It reminded him of wiping out on a kid’s bike.

  “Whoa!” Emily screeched.

  The Camaro was in-line with the rest of the traffic, so it wouldn’t stick out.

  They’d stopped near an overpass. Below him, to the left and right, the tree-lined residential streets offered more anonymity.

  “Go! Get below this bridge and then we’ll go from there.” Ted scrambled to grab his gun and backpack, then he struggled to force his door open. It opened about a foot, then banged into the wall.

  “Take a deep breath, dumbass,” he said to himself. After shutting the door, he slid across the center console and hurried to Emily’s door. He closed that too as another way to blend the car back into traffic. An open door would be a giveaway that someone had used it after the attack on America.

  She was already running over the side of the highway and down the embankment.

  The engine whine of multiple drones carried across the quiet landscape. One of them came from behind, like it had finally caught up to them. Its distinctive wing configuration and weapons payload lined up along the crowded highway.

  Orange fire spurted from underneath the bird, signaling the launch of a missile.

  “Fuck!” Ted dove behind a nearby truck, then rolled toward the slope where Emily had gone.

  The screaming hiss of missile thrust whipped by the instant before an explosion. A blast of heat washed over him as he tumbled down the hill and small pieces of metal rained all around. He came to a stop near the bottom, and looked up toward the highway—

  A flaming four-door sedan rolled down the hill.

  “Jump!” Emily shouted from somewhere far away.

  The car bounced left and right, so it was hard to pick a side. In the end, he guessed and stumbled to his right to get out of the way.

  The wreck bounced by, hitting a tree trunk close to where he’d been standing.

  Ted fell to the ground panting after the quick bursts of energy.

  “We have to keep going!” Emily said, again from somewhere far away. No, she was close… He saw her twenty feet from him. The problem was in his head. His ears rang from the concussive blast, muffling the sounds.

  “To the tunnel!” he said, as if remembering why he’d abandoned the car.

  Somehow, he still had his pack in his hands, so he slung it over both shoulders and started to run along the street that ran under the highway. When they’d gone about a quarter of a mile, he turned back to see where they’d come from.

  Emily stopped with him. “Do you think they’ll give up?”

  “No,” he said without a pause. “I’m sure they saw us escape. Our only hope now is that they don’t see us go into the tunnel.”

  He pulled at her hand to keep her on the move.

  By the time they’d gotten within sight of the tunnel entrance, there were three Predator drones cutting across the sky above them. If they were all armed, it meant there were five Hellfire missiles with the names Ted and Emily on them.

  “I see the way down,” he whispered. “We go through those trees, stay under that billboard, then climb down the rock wall.” The tunnel entrance was basically a long ramp that went into the earth. Three individual tubes carried two lanes of traffic each, and it appeared as if the two tunnels on the right were going into the city because they were stuffed with cars and trucks. The one on the left must have been coming out of New York, because there wasn’t a car on it.

  She whispered back, “We’ll be exposed. Are you sure? Maybe we can wait now? Until dark?”

  “Nah. Nighttime is still hours away. They used an expensive missile on our car. They can’t have missed us tumbling down that hill. I’d bet anything they are going to send in ground forces to investigate.”

  Emily rubbed her neck. “I’m going back to the gym after this. I used to jog from time to time, but politicking has made me soft.”

  He didn’t think that was true at all. She might have been petite, but she wasn’t weak or out of shape. She’d been keeping up with him on their journey like a boss. It wasn’t by chance he’d been looking at her legs when they were back on Air Force Two...

  “Get a grip,” he ordered himself. It wasn’t the time to be checking out the President of the United States. Not now, not ever.

  “Now,” he ordered.

  They hopped a small black fence, then climbed over the edge of the rock wall marking the border of the ramp area going down toward the tunnels. He hopped onto a small ledge, then waited for her to do the same.

  “I hear them,” she said with rising panic.

  “Me, too,” he admitted. “Do
n’t stop.”

  The next leg was a drop of about ten feet to the asphalt below. He first chucked his backpack down, then hung off the ledge to let himself fall after it. When he hit the ground, he scooped up his bag and waited for her.

  She dropped down right as he looked up. Emily stuck the landing but stumbled back a few steps as she struggled to gain her balance. That sent her right into his arms.

  “Got ya!” he whooped in triumph. They’d come down next to the empty tunnel going out of the city, which was the one he’d wanted, but before she could turn around or say thank you, he shoved her hard toward the tunnel entrance before them.

  Outside, the growl of a missile launch suggested they were out of time.

  “Run!” His voice echoed in the tunnel.

  St. Louis, MO

  “My name is Tabitha Breeze. I’m from Bonne Terre, Missouri. I survived the poison gas with three students from Seckman High School.” She relayed all the names, but also had Peter, Audrey, and Donovan stand next to her at the desk. “We are here in the studios of Channel 5. Please help us evacuate.”

  She looked around, not sure what to add.

  “There are also a couple of sanitation workers.” She looked at Gus and Vinny. “Would you two like to say a few words?”

  Both men crowded into the shot. Gus stated his name and occupation with the sewer company, but his message was more personal. “MJ, if you’re still alive, I’ll be here waiting for you.”

  The old man looked to his partner. Vinny turned to the camera, gave his name and address, then seemed at a loss for what to say next.

  She leaned his way. “You don’t have to say anything more.”

  “I know,” he agreed, “but I guess I want to say something to my parents. If you get this broadcast, I’m sorry for saying those mean things before I left…”

  The air became stale as they all stared vacantly into the camera. Tabby imagined they’d found a method of rescue, but it was going to take time before someone saw the message and came to get them. It was no different than stuffing a letter in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean.

  What started with so much hope and excitement now ended with uncertainty.