The biggest problem was going to be clearing out the bodies that had died inside. He was going to need to do that quickly as soon as he made sure the building actually did have everything he needed.
It took him a good hour winding his way through the dead to reach the Empire State Building.
He stopped a block away and looked up at it. The damn building was a lot bigger than he remembered it.
Securing it was a crazy idea, but considering the situation, a crazy idea was exactly what he needed.
CHAPTER SIX
GINA WORKED AT her desk and monitor for almost five hours straight with only occasional breaks to get more coffee. She had three screens, one of which showed a map of the big island and the streets of the city, another had a simpler map with red dots showing each survivor.
And her main screen had an image full of green dots, showing which survivors she had tagged.
In those hours, she had managed to get the biometric signatures of every survivor she could find in the dead city, watching the number of red dots shrink as the green dots increased.
As the next day went by, the heat signatures of survivors would help her find even more, she knew.
She glanced at her screen and the green dots scattered around the island, almost all not moving. There were three hundred and sixty survivors still on the island.
For the next ten days she would have to monitor the entire area carefully to make sure to include anyone who came and went.
All over the ship she knew that others were also having long nights, working to track every survivor in their areas.
Four other large starships were now in orbit with the Star Conscious, three of them Seeder ships. All five ships were working on the same task she was doing over various parts of the world. There were billions dead, but by best estimates, over two million survivors.
Their mission was to not miss a person for this rescue from the second deadly electromagnetic pulse. If they rescued everyone, it would give the population of this planet a huge jump forward in a restart.
She spent another fifteen minutes going over everything, making sure she hadn’t missed anyone for the night.
She hadn’t.
Now she had to get some rest somehow. She would come back to this in a few hours as the sun came up over the city below and start tracking closely all of the people below to see their situations.
She dumped out the last of her cold coffee, slipped into her exercise clothes, and jumped to the ship’s gym. It was a huge room with a hundred different machines, a very long running track, a climbing wall, and courts for various racket games. She liked the weight machines and did a quick fifteen-minute workout alone. She almost never had the big exercise area to herself. It felt good.
And eerily silent.
When she finished, she felt better, her muscles from so much time at the machine now loose. She jumped back to her apartment and took a quick shower to try to wash away some of the day, then got into her running shorts, a light exercise shirt, and her slippers.
That was her normal evening-at-home clothes and even though this was far from a normal evening, she wanted to pretend it was.
She went with a snack plate of crackers and cheese to the big comfortable couch in her living room.
There she clicked on a comedy movie done on the last planet she had been embedded in. She had seen it before and knew it was good. Right now she needed something to clear the images of that dead city and all those bodies from her mind.
If that was ever going to be possible.
She stretched out on her couch, a soft cloth pillow under her head, a thin blanket over her legs and feet. She started up the movie and took a few crackers, munching slowly, focusing on the movie she had already seen.
Somewhere in the first third of the movie she dozed off. Thankfully, the movie playing kept most of the nightmares back.
Not all of them, but most.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BY ELEVEN IN the evening, Benny had borrowed the keys off a guard’s body and found the security room. It had twenty monitors that all seemed to be working.
Twenty different views of the area around the building and the lobbies. And a couple of the monitors cycled through eight images as he watched.
Nothing was moving on any of the monitors.
Nothing.
For a short time he just kept staring at them, looking from one to another, expecting something to move.
Finally he shook his head.
“Benny, you’ve got yourself into a real mess this time.”
His voice echoed in the bedroom-sized security room.
Staring at all the bodies showing on those cameras, he almost decided to just pack and head for Florida. Or maybe he could go north into the Canadian wilderness, join the bears shitting in the woods.
Then he shook that thought away.
This city was his home and he would be damned if he was going to let the fact that most everyone was dead scare him off.
It took him another half hour in the security room to clear out the three guard’s bodies filling the chairs and a fourth guard in a back break room. Then he spent an hour finding all the generators for all the floors and the ones that ran the elevators. The generators had more than enough fuel, and when that ran out, he could re-supply easily from all the cars and trucks on the street.
From a diagram in the guardroom, he could tell there was a good-sized water tank up high that had electrical pumps. He was going to have to check every room to make sure all the water was turned off so that didn’t drain out when the power shut off.
The Empire State Building was all offices and meeting rooms and tourist stuff. No apartments, so he would have to find a really high office and clean that out and set up an apartment. That would be easy to do.
He hoped.
He had a hunch none of what he was thinking of doing was going to be easy.
For the next hour, he went around taking all the keys and guns from the dead guards and then locking the five main entrances to the building. That felt weird, like he was locking out the dead, but if he wanted to be secure, no point in taking any chances that some other survivors had this idea.
The last thing he needed were survivors with more guns than he had. And in New York, nut cases with guns scared him more than almost anything else.
Outside the doors, the lights of the city looked very strange on all the people scattered dead on the sidewalks.
He went back to the main security area and spent the rest of the night making sure he knew all the details of the building, or at least as much as he could find.
He didn’t want to be on an elevator with no chance of rescue when the power went out. He needed to know that the back-up generators would kick in and if that didn’t happen, how to do an emergency escape from the elevator. He had a hunch he was going to be spending a lot of time in those elevators. Being trapped alive in one with no chance of rescue scared him cold.
Somewhere along the way, he fell asleep for a few hours on a cot in a side room off the security area.
He didn’t even remember lying down.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GINA AWOKE SWEATING on the couch, the light blanket twisted around her feet. Her mouth was dry and her short hair was plastered to her head.
She pushed away any thought of trying to remember any dream and managed to get untangled and get to her feet. The screen was blank, so the movie had ended and the system had shut down.
She clicked it off and glanced at a clock near the screen. She had been asleep for three hours. The sun would be coming up on the city below. She needed to get back to work.
She headed for the bathroom for another shower, then to her kitchen to get a few bagels with cream cheese and a large glass of orange juice. That was her breakfast of choice most mornings and it got her going.
Usually she headed to the ship’s gym after breakfast to do her regular hour-long exercise routine, but today she would skip that.
Too much
to do, too many lives at stake.
She got back into her office to her screens and discovered that while she had slept, five of her tagged survivors had left the island. She transferred them to the person monitoring the area they were in.
There were also six new red dots on her screen and she quickly tagged them. She had no idea where they had come from. More than likely deep underground, although her system could penetrate through a hundred feet of rock and any building.
But there was a good chance they had been farther underground than that last night.
She sat eating her breakfast while methodically checking her survivors to make sure they were tagged correctly.
She had just finished her breakfast and downed the last of her orange juice when one of her green lights winked out.
She instantly focused her tracking on it, afraid of what she might find, but knowing she had to look anyway.
The survivor had been a man about fifty. He had taken a gun to his head while sitting next to his wife and two teenage kids who had died while eating.
She felt sick, looking at the scene of death like a snooping angel.
She made a note with shaking hands that he was dead and then pulled back so she didn’t have to look at the scene any more.
She knew, and everyone who was doing her job had been briefed, that over the next ten days, while they were tracking the survivors for the rescue and waiting for all the ships to arrive, many survivors would either be killed or take their own lives.
She just hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.
She pushed back from her desk and took her orange juice glass and plate she had used for the bagels to the kitchen.
Then she just stood there, her head down over the sink, shaking.
She had been alive for almost two hundred years, had seen many things in the cultures she had worked, but she had no doubt the next nine days until rescue were going to be some of the longest and hardest days she had ever lived.
And then after that, it would only get worse.
After that, she would be down there, on those streets, with the survivors, trying to help.
CHAPTER NINE
AN ALARM WOKE Benny up.
He scrambled to the screens in the main security room, at first not remembering where he was or what had happened.
Then he saw all the bodies and nothing moving. The sun was slowly bringing light to the city.
The first full day of death was dawning.
An alarm was flashing and ringing like an insane doorbell that it was time to open the doors.
He shut it off, dropping the room back into welcome silence.
He went back to the cot where he had passed out a few hours before and clicked on a radio there. It gave him no more hope than it had yesterday.
Outside, it looked overcast and cool. That was good for the moment, since it would slow down the body decay slightly on the people in the streets.
And keep most of them from heating up in the sun, swelling, and exploding from the expanding gas inside of them. He had seen that a few times in Iraq as well.
He hoped to never see it again.
He banged open a candy machine in the break room and breakfast consisted of a couple packs of nuts and a Diet Coke.
From what he could tell from the monitors, there had to have been at least three or four hundred people in this building when humanities number came up. No way he was going to move all of them ahead of when they would start smelling.
He was just going to have to go up high, to the 102 Floor Observatory, and work his way down, clearing every body he could find from as many top floors as he could.
About a third of the way up, a person had to change elevators and there were a lot of bodies in that lobby area, so he just figured more there wouldn’t hurt.
But when he got to that lobby, he decided that was a bad idea. He was going to have to go through that transition floor all the time. He needed to clear that first.
He went down three floors from the transition area and into a huge office suite. There were a good twenty bodies in the big room that he could see.
Using a large fire ax, he broke out some of the windows in an office there, letting in the morning-chilled wind from outside. The office had a door on it that he could close after he was finished.
Then, one-by-one, he dragged all the bodies in that large office area to the window and just dumped them out, leveraging them up over the edge and turning away as they fell.
After about thirty bodies, a couple of which could have used less pasta when alive, he decided he was going to need a better system. He wouldn’t have a back after a short time.
Plus touching the dead bodies that much gave him the creeps.
He went down to the building mail and shipping room and got a large cart used to haul heavy boxes. Then on the service elevator, he went all the way to the top.
It took him two hours to clear the two-dozen people on the top observation deck and take them down a dozen floors to another empty office suite, where he again broke out a window in an office that could be shut tight after he was done. This time he just stacked the poor souls near the window to take care of later.
He felt bad that he wasn’t treating the dead in a more respectful fashion, but at this point, his own survival was far, far more important. And that depended on getting the dead out of the building as soon as he could.
By eleven in the morning, he knew that stacking those bodies there wouldn’t help his situation at all. He had to toss them outside. Which meant that by the time he got done clearing out the bodies in this building, there would be a stack of human flesh a story tall around the north base.
He would be living on a pile of the dead.
But again he could think of no other choice.
But he could toss them out only on the north side, leaving the other three sides open.
Like they used to say in the service, he was already walking dead. Not a way to keep from making a mistake and getting himself injured or killed. He was going to need more food and more rest, if that was possible before he went on.
He went back down to the security area and did a check of the area outside the building.
Just death.
No movement.
He ate a quick lunch of some guard’s sandwich stored in the fridge and then took another nap. Two hours later, he was just about ready to go again when his cell phone in his pocket rang and scared hell out of him.
“Yeah,” he said after he scrambled to get it to his ear.
“This is the man you met yesterday with the three college kids,” the voice on the other end said.
“Find anything?” Benny asked, for a moment excited at the idea that he might have been wrong about everyone being dead.
“Nothing,” the man said. “We’re coming back to the city. It’s where we all live, doesn’t seem right leaving it. You got any ideas on where to hole up to get through the summer and all the smell?”
Benny’s stomach twisted in disappointment, then he pushed that aside as he had been pushing all feeling aside since this started.
He glanced at the security cameras showing room after room of bodies and shrugged. Why not? He could use the help.
“I’m setting up the Empire State Building,” Benny said. “It won’t burn, it’s got generators, a great security system, and a good water supply. It can be defended.”
“And it’s high enough to escape some of the smell,” the guy said.
Benny was impressed. He had been worrying about the same thing.
“You and your merry band want to join me?” Benny asked. “There’s a lot of work to do.”
“It will take us about three hours to get there,” the professor said. “Thanks.”
“Pick up anyone else you see that looks sane along the way,” Benny said. “This is one big building. And go to the South Entrance. I’ll be waiting there in three hours.”
“Okay,” the professor said.
“And one mo
re thing. Stay away from the building on the north side.”
“Why?” he asked, then before Benny could tell him, the professor said, “Oh, I understand.”
This guy really was smart. That was good. It was going to take Benny’s street smarts and military training and the professor’s brains to get any of them alive through the coming year.
“Three hours, call me if you get stuck or run into problems.”
“Three hours,” he said and hung up.
Benny once again checked the television and radio. Nothing.
At least he was going to have help.
CHAPTER TEN
AS THE DAY wore on, Gina was handed four survivors coming back onto the island from the south, and in turn she had handed off more than a dozen leaving the city, most headed north.
From her original three hundred and sixty, she was down to three hundred and twenty-two.
From the maps of the area, going north made sense, since in that direction was more wilderness and fewer people. It would be a lot easier in the wilderness to survive the smell of all the death that was coming.
One-by-one, she checked in on the survivors in her area. Most of them had gone home. Many were just sitting in shock next to a dead loved one.
A few were working to fortify and remove dead bodies from upper areas of apartment buildings and one man was working to remove bodies from one of the tallest buildings in the city.
There were only a few people working with another person. Almost everyone worked alone and she couldn’t imagine that. It showed the really true survival ability of the human race.
The man in the big building seemed to have been moving almost constantly since she awoke and her interest kept going to him. She didn’t focus in close because he was always moving dead bodies and tossing them out windows. She didn’t need to see that up close, but she admired what he was doing in trying to survive.
High Edge: A Seeders Universe Novel Page 3
