Nuclear Town USA

by David Nell

  NUCLEAR TOWN USA

  Tales from Post-Apocalyptic America

  A Dreamscape Press Anthology

  Produced For Kindle

  All Rights Reserved

  This digital edition published in 2017 by

  Dreamscape Press - United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, store in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher's Note

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyrights: Assigned to Individual Authors

  Edited by: David Nell

  CONTENTS

  The Nucleus Note by Adam Millard

  Druthers by Eryk Pruitt

  The Forty-Seven by Jesse Harlin

  Coherence by Eric R Schiller

  Assignment Seven by Richard Smith

  Unorthodox Nuclear Family by Nick Johnson

  I Will Watch For You By Starlight by Trak E. Sumisu

  The Last Moon Cowboy by Edd Howarth

  Rite of Passage by Robert J. Santa

  Throne Room by D. Krauss

  The Undead Legacy of the King by Jeffrey Veregge

  Portrait of a Girl by Jennifer Courtney

  Solving Holly by Damien Krsteski

  The Unmaker by N.S. Mariner

  THE NUCLEUS NOTE

  Adam Millard

  The cloaked figure ambled along at a leisurely pace, kicking things along the ground and stopping occasionally to either take a rest or mutter something incoherent. He looked to be intoxicated, which the man watching him knew could not be true; alcohol, in all its forms, had run out years ago. No, the cloaked figure was simply injured, limping ever-so-slightly, and only appearing to be under the influence of a substance long gone.

  The observer flicked a switch; the screen in front of him flickered momentarily before the cloaked figure was gone, replaced by two women. He edged closer to the screen to get a better look, and was surprised to discover that one of the women, the blonde one, was in fact a man in drag. He made a disgusted sound in his throat before settling back into his chair. What were they doing out there? Salvaging? There was nothing left, not since the world fizzled out over five years ago. People, for some strange reason, were actually trying to survive. But why? He couldn't understand it. For him, it was different. He was part of the in-crowd, one of the creators of The Nucleus Note. For him, life was a completely diverse affair to that of the vagabonds beyond the fence. He had luxuries, a life worth living. He smoked three Cuban cigars a day, ate food that didn't have maggots crawling through it, and washed it down with vintage wines from around the world. He was one of the fortunate ones, the ones who had decided, when the outbreak began, that containment was not an option.

  The damage was done, even if the uninfected people weren't aware of it. So he, Julian Graves (a nom de plume, not that anybody cared) and eight others, scientists and academics just like him, had decided to put their project to the test.

  Needless to say, it worked. It worked very well, indeed.

  The Nucleus Note was designed as a neat and effective way to euthanize the infected. An inaudible note, somewhere up in the frequency of thirty-thousand hertz, it renders everyone in its vicinity dead within a few seconds of hearing it. The problem was, it could not be trained to only kill the infected, those unfortunate victims of the pandemic commonly known as François Flu, named after the first person to have contracted it. No matter what, the only way to prevent the virus's spread, to keep those fortunate enough to know about the Nucleus Note safe, was to utilise it – to great effect – on the populace. Entire cities were wiped out in moments as the note was played over loudspeakers and Tannoy systems. Bodies had fallen in the street, infected or otherwise, and most of them remained in the same place now, for the clean-up operation was so vast that it would take years to accomplish thoroughly.

  "Anything out there?" a voice asked. Julian started, not expecting anyone to be awake at this time of night. He was, however, relieved to discover the voice belonged to Doctor Evelyn Waugh. She looked tired, as if she had been asleep but was now struggling to return to it.

  "Just a few stragglers," Julian said, jabbing a finger towards the black-and-white flickering monitor sitting on the desk in front of him. "I don't know why I bother watching them, anymore," he continued. "They all look lost, and there's nothing we can do for them." And why would they even bother? They, the people within the compound, were the safest humans on the planet. If the virus was still out there – and Julian was pretty sure it was; the majority of the people staggering onto his monitor in the preceding weeks seemed to be afflicted with something – then it was eventually going to get to the remaining civilians. Ten years, twenty, fucking fifty, one day they would be rid of it, and then they – or their children if the latter time-scale applied – would reclaim the earth. In the meantime, they must continue doing what they had been doing all these years.

  Making sure.

  "Why don't you just press the button and go to bed?" Evelyn said. Julian wished, though it was never going to happen, she had instead used the term "come to bed," but she didn't, and Julian sighed.

  The button she referred to was the tiny, red toggle next to the monitor. It was the same switch he depressed every night, and a few times during the day, should the monitors become a flurry of activity.

  "You think we're ever going to be able to forgive ourselves for what we do here?" Julian asked, though he didn't know where it came from, and immediately regretted it the moment it passed his lips. Evelyn thought silently, contemplating her riposte. He considered telling her to forget it, that he was just being silly and sentimental, that fatigue had simply crept up on him and now not only was he feeling the effects, he was speaking them, too.

  "No," she said, just as blunt as that, and Julian knew that she was right, that he had merely sought to confirm his own suspicions. And now that he knew she was in agreement with him, he didn't feel so bad about it.

  "Why don't you go and try to get your head down?" he said, forcing a smile. "I"ll be going to bed in a little while myself, I promise."

  She patted him gently, yet without affection, on his shoulder before turning and disappearing through the door. Julian couldn't help staring at her ass as she ambled slowly out of the room; something else he would never experience.

  He turned back to the monitor, the grainy greyscale images of desolation that he was required to watch in twelve-hour increments. The two women were riffling through an industrial bin, the kind that restaurants and bars use for empty bottles and dismantled cardboard boxes. One of them found something to eat, and they began to fight over it. Julian used the dial on the monitor to zoom, and was unsurprised, yet still sickened, to find they were brawling over a dead rat. One of the women had the head in her mouth; the other was pulling on the tail, to no avail, and slapping the woman upside the head with her free hand in a frantic attempt to release the rotting rodent from the other woman's jaws.

  Julian had seen enough for one night. Evelyn was right; he s
hould be in bed, for tomorrow he had to do this all over again.

  He pressed the red toggle next to the monitor, and turned to the screen.

  The women, who were so animated just a second ago, were now frozen solid. The half-devoured rat hung listlessly from the jaws of the one lucky enough to have had a final supper; its tail swung deliberately in the night breeze, a sign that rigor mortis was either yet to attack or had already passed.

  And then her nose began to bleed. Julian wasn't offered the scene in all its chromatic glory, but when you had seen it happen as many times as he had, the blood being pitch black didn't detract from its intensity.

  And then, as quickly as it had started, it was all over. The two women fell forward, bouncing off each other – almost in a final embrace – before landing in a heap beside the industrial bin at the edge of the street. The dead rat fell from the first woman's lips and lay motionless, and headless, between them.

  Julian leant in and flicked the monitor to make sure everything had gone as...yeah, there he was, the cloaked man who had been limping along as if inebriated, only now he wasn't limping anywhere. He had died on his feet, taking a piss against a six-foot aluminium railed fence. Somehow his wrist had caught up in the rails and he was wedged, prevented from dropping to the ground, where he would have remained until the clean-up crew got around to shifting him. They would have to disentangle him from his aluminium restraint. Until they did, he was going nowhere.

  So that was how The Nucleus Note worked; it really was that easy. The compound where Julian and the others resided was soundproofed, impossible to penetrate. If there was such a thing as a higher-frequency note than that of the Nucleus – and there wasn't – then it would still be unable to affect the people within the perimeters of the compound. A great deal of time, work, and money – despite being useless – had been used in ensuring the safety of every man and woman on the inside. They were the only true survivors of François Flu. Sure, the few stragglers shambling aimlessly around on the outside were immune, otherwise they would have succumbed to the virus's effects years ago, but they were just as dead as those who contracted it initially.

  They just didn't know it yet.

  Julian pressed the switch on the monitor and it flickered a few times before blinking off. He yawned, stretched, and headed for bed, hoping that Dr. Evelyn Waugh, in a strange turn of events, was waiting for him beneath his sheets.

  Julian had been asleep for an indeterminable amount of time, but he knew that it wasn't long because he couldn't recall suffering any nightmares – as was his wont – and the pillow beneath his head was still dry. He lay motionless in the semi-darkness; something had woken him, it must have.

  After almost a minute of listening in silence, he noticed that he had ceased breathing. He slowly allowed air back into his lungs, being careful not to make a sound. Not only did he believe that something had brought him out of his unconsciousness, he sensed eyes upon him, eyes that, despite the almost impossible darkness in the room, could see him just fine.

  And then something grasped onto his wrist, and he was being yanked from the covers. Another hand – sweaty, salty – slapped down over his mouth so hard that a tooth cracked. What would have been screams for help turned into nothing but incoherent mumbles. This hand, however, belonged to another, which meant that he had at least two attackers.

  A voice, deep and guttural, said, "Be careful with him," and Julian wanted to thank the possessor of kind words, although he knew that ultimately his days were numbered.

  What was happening? Who were these people? They had to be insiders, people that he had lived amongst for the preceding ten years...

  They dragged him across the room, still in the cloak of darkness, and began to bind his wrists and ankles together, being ever-so-silent as they ripped through the tape. He knew, in that moment, that there were at least four men in the room. Two were holding him down while another made sure he couldn't move for shit. A fourth man spoke from the edge of the room, and it was the possessor of the kind words, the man who had urged caution in man-handling him from his bed.

  "Make sure he can't warn the others," he said. "We've come too far to fuck this up, now."

  It wasn't the way in which the man spoke that frightened Julian; it was his words. They confirmed that this whole operation – for that was what it was – had been premeditated, planned to within an inch of its life. That was what made Julian Graves (not his real name, of course) sit up and take notice while his bowels relaxed beneath him.

  Suddenly, a radio crackled; a voice said, "We're in position. Everything okay your side?"

  "Everything's smooth," the voice across the room replied. "Just make sure that nobody gets hurt. He wants to set an example here, remember?"

  "They're all cooperating like we said they would," the crackling radio-voice said; there was the tiniest of sniggers following his statement, a sign that these people – whoever the fuck they were – seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  One man who wasn't enjoying any of it, Julian, could hardly breathe through the twisted tape jammed between his trembling lips. He blinked tears and sweat from his stinging eyes, and all the time thought of Dr. Evelyn Waugh and her almost-perfect derrière. Quite why he pictured her, walking away from him, leaving him sitting at the monitor as she ambled off to bed, was beyond him, but it took the edge off an otherwise unbearable situation. He knew that things were about to go tits-up, not that they hadn't already, and if this was to be his final night on a godless earth, then he was going to go out with some semblance of a smile painted on his face.

  "Right," the voice said, determined and somewhat eager. "Take him to join the others. If he gives you any shit, you have my permission to knock him out."

  As they hoisted Julian up from his cowering position, the last thing on his mind was to give these maniacs any shit.

  Sixty-eight people, all in night-gowns or whatever garb they had been wearing when they had retired for the night, were placed in the centre of the main hall. A few of the women – especially the younger ones; the elder women knew that it was fruitless – were trying to scream through their gags.

  They didn't have to scream, though. Their eyes, wide orbs that suggested sheer terror and confusion, said it all.

  Julian was led into the room, and as soon as he saw the ensuing chaos – people being clouted across the back of the head by masked men dressed all in black; children also gagged and bound as if to prove there was no prejudice in what this group were trying to achieve – he knew that things had nosedived drastically.

  The men dressed uniformly in black were armed, though not with guns. Each of them carried a blade of some description. A machete here, a Bowie-knife there; blades that glimmered beneath the incandescent lighting, shimmering with each movement of its employer. Julian was mesmerised, and yet as he was forced through the hall, between scampering children and hysterical adults, he searched for the one person who could possibly make this transition into death passable.

  "All of you need to calm the fuck down," the man, possessor of kind words, bellowed at the top of his lungs. "This will all be over shortly, and we will be gone just as quickly as we arrived."

  Was that supposed to be comforting? It meant nothing to the people gathered on the cold, hard floor of the main hall. Julian, especially, was aware of its connotations. They said they would be gone, but that didn't mean anyone would be left alive when they were.

  People, seemingly sensing that there was no point in struggling further, began to fall silent, and when they were suitably hushed, the balaclava-wearing speaker at the edge of the room gestured towards the door.

  Now, there were two men at the doors, and each of them grabbed their respective handles and pulled inwards. Julian, still struggling to breathe through the gag which was starting to cut away at his top lip, thought this was a little over-the-top. He half-expected the President to walk in, or at least the Queen of England. When a little man, the only one of the group sans-balaclava, strode i
nto the main hall – flanked by a further two uniformed men – he felt somewhat cheated.

  The man paced confidently into the centre of the room, stepping over cowering people as if they were minor inconveniences. His two guards remained with him until he waved them away, to which they duly obeyed.

  Julian couldn't help but stare at the strange, little man. He didn't look like a mercenary, or anything of that ilk. He would have been more suited, perhaps, to office-work, or telling at the local bank. There wasn't an ounce of muscle on him; and why would he need it? His muscle was scattered haphazardly around the room.

  "I"ll bet you all have a thousand questions you want to ask right now," he said, surveying the miserable room. "Which is why I"m going to give one of you the chance to speak. Since you're hardly in the position to nominate your spokesperson, I"d like one of you – anyone, for what it's worth – to raise your hand slowly. One of my men will come to you and remove your gag. Is that clear?"

  There were mumbles and hisses, though Julian didn't think anyone would put themselves forward for such an act. Which was why, for some reason, his hand slowly edged into the air as he leaned back on his haunches. At first, the little guy in charge didn't see him, but the guard behind Julian coughed to grab his attention.

  The man turned to Julian, nodded to the guard stood behind, who proceeded to remove Julian's gag, albeit forcefully.