My Dead America

by Frank Weltner

  Ricky saw himself driving a scooping machine. He drove it up and down the streets, pushing bodies, lifting bodies, then dumping bodies into the back-end of trucks. The trucks took them to the official burning places. There was nothing decent left to do. Cremation was totally dignified and fitting. The few priests and laymen who survived said well meant prayers over the flames to give the citizens last rites and a final sense of dignity. The catastrophe was too immense to allow for 300 million graves, DNA identifications, and engraved stones to memorialize their lives. Things had gone too far for that. But the prayers were said religiously. At least they got that much. The six million remaining Americans simply could not bury 300 million corpses one-by-one. Besides, they were rotting and dogs were eating them. Mankind did not need more diseases attacking the few who remained. Burning was non-traditional, but it was always used during plagues and wars when the bodies were piling up faster than people could bury them. So that is what they did. Cremation was respectable, especially the way they carried it off with such dignity and prayers, and it slowly ended the nakedness of these abandoned corpses and the swarms of disease-carrying flies that were everywhere. The nations around the world did their best in these worst of times. Everyone worked hard and agreed that they needed an end to this endless horror scene strewn everywhere about them.

  Ricky heard voices up ahead. As he turned a corner, he found himself nearing Clemente Recreation Park. This was the place where hundreds of kids gathered after school to play games and to socialize with other kids. It was a natural place for kids to come in an emergency. In fact, they had been told by their teachers and parents to go to parks like this if they were in trouble. They were in a lot of trouble. Ricky stayed back for several minutes to survey the park. He wasn't going to walk into a gang of untrained kids with semi-automatic handguns and a yen to kill someone and become an extremely dead neighborhood hero.

  As it turned out, the place was safe. The kids were playing on swings, and two women were there to chaparone and protect them. He holstered his weapon and walked toward the women with his hands in the air and a white flag in one of them, the perfect symbol of coming in peace. Suddenly, the women yelled to the kids to get off the swings. The kids immediately ran to the women and leaned close to them. They hugged their waists and pushed their faces into the women.

  “I'm here to help you,” Ricky yelled. “I will not harm you.”

  They should have run away, but they stupidly stood their ground. As he approached them, their faces were weathered and worn, and he guessed they were too sick to help themselves. It was enough that they were watching the children. That was all the energy they had left. Life was not good in these darkling cities. Most of them had probably lived by eating canned goods, and there were no working stoves left to cook them on, everything was eaten cold. Where food was scarce, people learned to make do.

  “Who are you!” one of the women yelled to him.

  “My name is Ricky!” he yelled. “Just remain calm. You are perfectly safe with me. I am a trained soldier. I am going to be very civil with you. Trust me. I won't hurt you. I know what you must have been through already.”

  He got within talking distance in a few more steps. The women were plain. Their faces were filthy, wrinkled, and sad.

  “I bet you've had a rough time of it,” Ricky said. “Am I right?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” the oldest lady said. “There isn't a lot that's wrong that we haven't had to do to stay alive, sir.”

  “Just call me Ricky. I'm nothing special. We are all equals here.”

  “I'm Denise. This is Bernice. The children here are Brenda, Robert, Tessla, Quincy.” She put her hand on each child's head as she named them. “This is Donna, Riley, and here's Deena. Over there is Billy, Ralph, Winnie, Dale who's the oldest. Dale's our little man. He's been extremely helpful with the two of us and these kids. We couldn't ask for a better person to be here to help us.”

  “Hello, Dale,” Ricky said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I'm not here to replace you, Dale,” Ricky said. “I want you to continue doing what you have done. I'll only be here for a few minutes. My job is to locate pockets of people, to find a place to relocate them when we start to fix up the cities, so we can help them better. We all have to stick together now,” Ricky said. “One of the things we are going to also do is to find the people who set these viruses loose and insure they never do it again.”

  “You mean someone did this on purpose,” Dale asked him? It seemed impossible to his innocent teenage mind that adults would do that sort of thing to people.

  “That's right. It's very unfortunate. Our job is to find them.”

  “And?”

  “We are going to kill them, son. There's no room on Earth for people who develop deadly viruses and release them on you and your families like this.”

  “You can say that again, sir. I lost a lot of family here. I cry over them. All of us have. We are all so full of tears, we can't see straight, sir.”

  “Me, too,” Ricky said, “I lost them all. Mother, Father, brother, sister, aunts, wife, and two children. I'm all that's left, Dale.”

  “I'm sorry for your loss,” the youth said. He was wiping fresh tears from his eyes.

  “And I'm very sorry for yours, Dale, and all the losses of everyone who is here.”

  Ricky could not help but notice that a tear would trickle here and there down their childish faces. Other tears had emerged to rest awhile in the corners of their eyes. They were certainly a sorry group of survivors. There were millions of little pockets of kids just like these all over the world, and survivors were busy trying to find them and keep them alive.

  “We are all that's left, kids. We have a responsibility to stick together and to stay alive. Otherwise more of us will die. We can't allow that to happen.”

  Bernice asked him if he had any medicine. He did. In his sack there were vials of antibiotics. He dropped the sack and gave her several vials of medicine, some bandages, needles, cleaning fluids, and salves. He also gave her aspirin which was still the miracle drug in times like this one.

  “You can have these. Anything you can find in the city which is medicine, you can just take it. That's the only way you are going to get it. There's no professionals anymore. We will have to treat our illnesses and injuries ourselves. If you run out of stuff to put on scratches, you can use your own urine. It's a natural antiseptic. It kills almost all bacteria and viruses on contact. The cave man used it. We are now almost like cavemen.”

  “Don't we know it,” Denise said. “Our lives even feel like it.”

  “We are all in the same boat.”

  “It's not a boat,” Dale said. “It's not anything. We are just out here alone, and we are all scared to death, sir. We have no electricity. It's dark at night. The dogs growl and claw at our doors and try to get into our rooms. They've dragged some of us off and torn them apart to eat their bodies. It's crazy out here. I can still hear the screams.”

  It was surreal. The world was terrifying. What separated us from the animals no longer existed. We were the animals. Everyone was potentially food, even for smaller animals who could run in packs and attack as groups like the feral dogs and cats had become.

  Ricky debriefed them and handed them several meat cans with pull tabs. Every little thing helps.

  “We suggest you train some dogs to help you. Then, you can keep them as patrol dogs to fight off the others. They don't look like it now, but they love humans, and they are very trainable. Once they are trusting you and trained you can use them as your first lines of defense against these predator dogs. You can also train a dog to find food. I'm leaving this booklet on how to train and use dogs for protection.”

  Soon, Ricky had to leave, but not before hugging each one of them. He was heart felt in his feeling for these children. He knew what they had been through and what they faced. He'd faced it all himself. All they had were three tins of meat, booklets on urban sur
vival, a dog training manual, and their own bravery to face the long inhuman nights.

  Soon, these soldiers discovered their first few millionaires. They were hiding like mice in their bunkers, ready to come out and make the non-millionaires into their new worker forces, enslaving them the same as they had done for ages. So, they just figured that they'd do it again, but they were wrong about that. It wasn't going to happen. This was the final moment for them. Ricky, Thornton, and the others were hunting them down and killing them by the thousands. These rich one percenters were deadly demons of greed, so they were being killed inside and outside of their bunkers. It didn't matter if they were adults or children. All of them were rapidly shot to death. Mankind had suffered enough at their hands, and, if they didn't kill each and every one of the filthy rich who had murdered seven billion people worldwide, then they would be more than likely to do this again and again. These bastards were like child molesters. Once they killed like this, they wouldn't stop. Reducing the population was a sickness in their hearts and souls. They were filled with greed, endless greed, and a desire to kill off those whom they called “the useless eaters of this planet.” The only thing to do with these bankers, scientists, executives, and others who thought they had the right to be little kings in authority was to take them out, because the only way they could have authority was to diminish those beneath them, giving them enslaved lives. It was a head trip. Their entire thought process of greed and being better than other people in this world had evolved over the years into a war crime against all of the Earth's humanity or what was left of it. The survivors were going about the planet killing them all once and for all. Otherwise, they'd just wipe the world out again. Once bit, forewarned. The survivors knew exactly what to do, even if it meant warring against nations that wouldn't do it. It was going to be finished, so the human race could be safe from these monsters once and for all. It was a matter of worldwide security to totally rid the planet of their kind, because the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree, and this fruit was poison.

  Page 9

  Chapter Thirteen

  Gotham City...

  A haze hung over New York in a kind of perfect death shroud. The once great city was now a sarcophagus for nearly 30 million decaying corpses. The bodies were strewn across the boulevards along with abandoned cars from taxis to Lexis sedans. The mix looked like thousands of little misused toys tossed here and there by angry boys who could care less. Their moms were all dead. So were their brothers, sisters, dads, and uncles. The world had become a lonely place. New York had emerged from the plague as the city that never stirs.

  Although plans had been otherwise, Helen and Frank were the ones who eventually led the trekkers up to the Big City where the skyscrapers loomed like cadavered tombstones disappearing high above, somewhere in the early morning fog. Scarcely any people were around. Who would ever want to use these buildings again as offices, apartments, and restaurants? For one thing, their elevators didn't work. For another, there just weren't too many New Yorkers left around here. The city of cities was deadly quiet everywhere. The wind was the only sound to be heard. Far away drifted hints of life. Evidently birds, dogs, cats, squirrels, and rodents were still around. They fed upon the rapidly decaying corpses. The ninety-nine-percent had met their maker. The bad news was that most of them had been exterminated by the one-percent, those who owned everything and wanted even more. For some people, everything in the world is never going to be enough, until every one else is dead and they have even the very little the poor people owned. The good news was that the little ones would no longer be slaves to the bankers. They would no longer need to be persuaded that America was the most wonderful thing that ever happened in the erotically spinning cosmos. Not that America hadn't been erotic. It had the reputation of being the most sexually active nation in the world next to ancient Rome, Cairo, and Corinth which was the home of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love. What most people never realized was that Sin City in the ancient world was right there in Greece, because in Corinth tens of thousands of visitors vacationed annually. It was a city of whores of both sexes, and anything you could think of was already thought of there and well-practiced. The tourists' private parts were always poking into places where they'd never been before as Uncle Walter would say deep in the Ozark woods where the old homestead was still occupied by the dying breed that was once a heritage family dating all the way back to the Scottish migration to the New World and its horrors of inbreeding in small isolated villages from New Jersey to Arkansas had led to their inbred, inferior minds. It was a New World, but the old ways were alive and well.

  Frank walked down the Avenue of the Americas, kicking at bodies to test their ripeness. He guessed they were halfway between semi-hard and skin as dry as paper and ready to be recycled and used for newsprint. But the New York Times like the rest of New York was dead and still as a day without wind. No longer would reporters stir false hopes within this nation of myriad corpses where wedding rings glistened on boney fingers in the streets and even diamonds were worth exactly nothing because too few were left to desire them.

  Frank guessed that the fabled Holocaust could not be denied. It was right here, now. In the streets, millions of dead Jews finally mingled amid the Christians and Muslims peacefully. Each person wore a deadly mask of death with an end-to-end smile caused by their shrinking facial muscles that pulled their lips toward their ears. The rifles had fallen by the wayside. Perhaps in military reservations and in downtown Tel Aviv there were rifles still held in the tightly gripped hands of soldiers, but, if so, the lives that might have squeezed the triggers were no more. Peace was not alive there, but the death knell had silenced the bullets, and the buildings no longer had to fear that deadly wickedness of the pelting bullets pecking frantically against their flattened concrete skins.

  Bob Valens, a corporal of the lowest order, a boy from a small country farm was just behind Frank, and he was whistling at the corpses, saying over and over again, “The only good New Yorker is a dead New Yorker.”

  If that were so, perfection had finally come to Wall Street, Bleeker Street, and Avenue D, all of which were always outcasts of a different urban order, filled with people of various distasteful and demanding idiosyncrasies. The Wall Street folks were purely one-percent greed suckers. Those on Bleeker Street were new arrivals to wealth and middle class hauteur. They had matured into stuffy little spoilers. They had once been young rebels out to change the world for the better but were now the nouveau riche living in the city's ancient one million dollar slums who shopped regularly at the most expensive shops including the massively expensive Bloomingdales for wild plums from faraway places, all of them expensive and fun to purchase, because it made them better than the rest to afford to buy what others could only envy. In other words, they had become just like their parents whom they hated. Now, they had learned how much they really hated themselves, but that was before the dying. Now, they were at peace. Class warfare was over. Exploitation was over. Even the Avenue D scrounges with their ancient cold water flats and creaking floor boards had died into a strange new cosmos and become one with their rich and indifferent counterparts in the netherworld.

  “Oh, love me, I'm dying,” sang Bob Valens in his best country and western drawl.

  “That's a bit edited, Bob,” Frank said, laughing.

  “Got to show a little respect,” Bob explained. “Since I come from a small dead town out there in the hinterlands where everyone died also, I need to confirm that which Mama told me to be, a sickening and ill-mannered farm boy.”

  Helen laughed. She knew what Bob was. He was one of the biggest male sluts in the group, and all the girls including herself loved him. He was virile, verdant, and always ready.

  “I have to respect my Mom,” he said.

  “Get off it. You are a slut. I doubt you wrote home to Mom about your male exploits,” Helen laughed.

  “I wrote her about you,” he said.

  “I doubt it.”

  “I did.�
�

  “And?”

  “Mom wrote me that sluts like you were bad for little Bobbies like me. She always thinks I'm nine years old.”

  Helen smiled. In a way, that was right. Bob was a free guy. He would never grow up. What girlfriend would want him to? As a middle-aged man, he'd be useless. He was only good as a horny, good-looking, super pink, super hard, Ever-ready battery-powered rabbit pounding even pinker drums along the cottony Mohawk of dark bedrooms where he glowed like an angel of redemption.

  “You are nine years old. You are just well developed for your age, Bob. That's your main strength, and we all love you for it.”

  “Thank you. That's what I told mom, before the plague came for her.”

  “Sometimes I think the plague was developed,” said Frank, “in order silence overly picky parents and give their kids carte blanche to make love and have tons of kids.”

  “Some day, we are going to need all the kids we can get,” Helen said. “I'd like to think that my Mom would have wanted me to pop out babies right and left just to repopulate these empty towns and cities. It's gotten pretty lonely on Mother Earth, you know. In fact, New York seems downright dead, to me.”

  “It's a morgue, toots,” Frank said. “You couldn't take a half pint of freshly made whiskey out here now and raise hell. The silence has taken control. It's a perfect English class where the kids read and no one passes any notes to disturb Miss Evans.”

  Bob laughed. “It's so frigging perfect, baby. I think we need to date tonight just to celebrate. They say nothing you do in New York leaves with you. It all stays right here.”

  “That's Las Vegas, Bob,” Frank told him. “Where do you hide that you don't know that?”

  “I got everything I know from my iPhone,” Bob said.

  “Get a bigger screen, buster. You're missing one-half the world.”