Dust and Kisses

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  He had picked the apartment because it was a completely defensible place to live. He had locked all the staircases and they could be easily blocked at three different levels. He had gotten an elevator working and he controlled it as well from the top floor. He had even installed a tight cable from his roof to the roof of another nearby building to use as an escape if something trapped him in the building, like a fire.

  He had furnished the living room with a deep, comfortable recliner placed directly in front of a large screen television. He had also brought in a couch for the times he wanted to just lay down. To the right of the living room, he had put together a weight and exercise room to keep his six-foot frame in top shape. He lifted weights every day, and ran on a treadmill facing the windows. He figured that he would never know when being in top shape would save his life.

  Another recliner sat in front of a massive picture window overlooking Portland and the Willamette River. It matched the one in the living room only because there had happened to be two of them in the furniture store the morning he had been looking, and they both fit into the bucket of his little tractor that he used to haul things around.

  He loved just sitting in that chair with a drink in his hand staring at the mountains. Sometimes, he sat in the chair and read when it rained, watching the patterns of the water on the glass between chapters. When the rest of humanity had still been alive, he never would have been able to afford a place like this. Now, he figured he deserved it.

  Besides, who could tell him no?

  The loud beeping of the alarm continued, drawing him toward the computer room he had installed in the west corner room of the big penthouse. He had been an electrician before everyone had died. He had installed security cameras for a living for River Drive Security and Alarms. In fact, he had been installing a bank camera with his boss and two others the day everyone just keeled over dead. He and Jenkins had been down in the vault when suddenly everything went silent on the comm link with the boss in the truck.

  Jenkins had gone up to investigate, leaving Matt in the vault. Matt had never seen him again. Matt had no doubt Jenkins was alive somewhere, but where was another question.

  By the time Matt had given up waiting, left the vault open, and went to investigate, Jenkins was gone, and everyone else was dead.

  Everyone.

  Just killed instantly in the middle of whatever they were doing.

  Matt had freaked, to say the least.

  At first he thought it was something airborne that had killed everyone, and it would soon get him, so he had gone back inside the bank. But after a short time of staring at dead bank customers and tellers, his brain kicked in and he knew that staying in there was stupid. If it were something airborne, he would have been dead with everyone else.

  Clearly, something about the big bank vault had protected him and Jenkins. He just didn’t know from what.

  For most of that first day, he had wandered the streets in shock, staring at bodies, not really heading anywhere in particular. After a while, he took to turning off the idling cars, reaching past bodies to yank out keys.

  Slowly, as the day wore on, and no one came into the city to start rescue operations, and no planes circled overhead, it began to dawn on him that maybe he, and Jenkins, wherever he had gone, were the only ones left alive in a very large area.

  Then, as Matt was turning off an idling car that had ended up against a light pole, he thought of his parents in the resort town of Bend. Had whatever caused this been larger than just the Portland area?

  Suddenly, it had become important to him to find out just how widespread this disaster had been.

  Bend was a little resort city over the Cascade Mountains at the foot of Bachelor Ski Area. He had managed to make the normal six-hour drive to Bend in just under twelve hours, using four different cars. When he came upon areas of the road that were so jammed with wrecks that he couldn’t get around, he would simply leave the car he had been using, and hike until he found another usable car on the other side of the blockage.

  He had hoped that his parents had been outside the influence of what had happened, but the closer he got to their home, the more he knew that they had not.

  He found his parents both dead, as well as everyone else in the small town.

  For an hour that night, he had sat in the middle of the main intersection, with the light changing from green to red over his head, honking a car’s horn.

  The sound seemed impossibly loud, echoing off the buildings and the pine-covered mountains.

  No one came and told him to stop.

  He knew right then and there that he was alone. Really alone, and the thought scared him more than he had ever been scared before.

  The next few days were only a blur of memory and nightmare.

  He had somehow managed to bury his parents next to his grandparents in the cemetery. Then he had gone down to his favorite bar and dragged all the bodies out onto the sidewalk and sat them at tables he had put there, posing each body as best he could in positions of drinking. He had figured if they died drinking, then they may as well spend eternity drinking.

  Then he had gone inside, alone in the empty bar, filled the top of the bar with bottles of booze from the bar’s storeroom, and sat down on a stool. That day, and for a number of days after, he had gotten so drunk he couldn’t think.

  Finally, a nasty hangover and the smell of death drove him away from the small town and out into a cabin in the Cascade Mountains. He stayed in that cabin, pretending everything was just fine, for a long winter.

  When he hiked back into Bend the next spring, he knew for a fact he could no longer pretend it all hadn’t happened. He hadn’t been dreaming and he hadn’t gone crazy.

  It had happened.

  For the next year, he had wondered the Northwest, going from Seattle to Boise to Salt Lake, over to Sacramento, and then back up, looking for anyone else alive. He had run across a number of people, all coping with the death in one fashion or another. None of them were the types of people he wanted to stay with, even though some of them were friendly and happy to see him.

  Finally, he had returned to Portland two years ago and set up his penthouse apartment.

  Now his computer alarm kept beeping, getting louder as he entered the room he had set up for security.

  “All right, all right,” he said, “I’m coming. Damn deer, anyway.”

  He expected to see nothing on the monitor, and to have to rewind a recording to see what had triggered the alarm. He had set up the system of motion detectors two years ago right after moving into the penthouse. The sensors triggered cameras, and ran off of batteries that he exchanged and recharged every six months. He recorded the camera feeds in a bank of recorders here in the apartment.

  He had installed the system when he realized the lights from his apartment could be seen for miles around the city at night. In fact, from across the river, his place stood out like a beacon.

  He figured it would be better to know when someone else alive was getting close enough to see him. The cameras, waiting with motion detectors, guarded over twenty different ways into the main area of the city, and the entire area around his building.

  “Stop it, already,” he said aloud, dropping his nude body into the chair in front of his monitor command screens. He punched off the loud, annoying alarm, sighing at the sudden silence around him.

  Then he glanced at the big control board map of the city. It filled one entire wall of the room. He had green and red lights showing the location of each of his motion detectors and cameras. A red light showed on the old Interstate 5 headed south in the Twiliger Curves area. Deer often went through there, since that area was between the hills and the river. And every year, since the disaster, the deer seemed to be getting more plentiful.

  He flicked up an image from a camera he had hidden on a pole, expecting to see either deer, or nothing at all. The sight of a woman, standing on an overpass shocked him to his very core.

  His fingers fu
mbled over the controls for a moment before he brought up the zoom.

  A woman standing there by herself.

  A very attractive woman.

  It wasn’t possible.

  Yet there she stood.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE HOT WIND WHIPPED around Carey, brushing the trees nearby, drying the sweat to her skin as she walked down the freeway on-ramp and moved around some wrecks, working her way toward the center of the city.

  “I sure don’t miss this heat. How can anyone live in this?”

  She laughed. “Oh, yeah, I forgot, no one does.”

  These days she talked a lot to herself and her cats. It broke the silence. Often she had tapes and CDs playing while she worked or read. But mostly, she just talked to herself.

  Sometimes, she actually cracked herself up. There sure wasn’t anyone else to laugh at her stupid jokes.

  So far, she had been traveling for three days from her home on the coast. She might have done it a little quicker, but she had been careful, taking her time and doing a little exploring along the eighty-mile trip. She hoped to be back to the coast within ten days total, which meant three days into the city, three back, leaving her four days to explore her old hometown. She had figured her cats would be all right for ten days.

  She sure hoped they would be. They had enough food for a month, yet she worried about them.

  Twice between here and her home, she had come across other live people, all from a distance. One man and a woman had sat on their porch and just watched her walk by, the man holding a rifle across his lap. Those two had looked the sanest of the people she had seen so far, and she had had no desire to talk to either of them.

  Once she had had to hide from what appeared to be an insane man, walking along talking to himself. She could smell him from a hundred yards. Granted, civilization was gone, but bathing was something still easy to do. In fact, it was one of the more enjoyable things to do. She could spend hours in a hot bath with a good book and a glass of wine.

  She used to cover the same eighty-plus miles between the coast and the city in a car in two hours. Back then, she would have never dreamed of walking that route. Of course, back then she would have never imagined doing some of the things she had done over the past three years to survive.

  Mostly, she hadn’t let herself think about the day everyone died. No point. Now, being back here in the city, she pretty much didn’t have that choice. She was going to walk right back into the middle of those horrible memories.

  Purposefully.

  “Such a brave little girl,” she said, and then laughed.

  At times, she had trouble wrapping her mind around the fact that the world really was gone, yet she was one of the few still here. Back when she had lived and worked in the city, she had thought nothing of jumping in the car and heading to her parent’s small beach home on the coast for a weekend, or even just dinner and a show at the casino. But now, for this trip back to the city, it had taken her a year to actually get up the nerve to leave the beach.

  Damn, she missed her cats.

  She adjusted one strap slightly so that it didn’t rub her shoulder too long in the same position. The backpack contained enough water to get her by for a few days, changes of clothes, food for a week, and extra ammunition for her rifle and the pistol in her belt.

  She had spent a good amount of time over the last two years learning how to fire that pistol and rifle quickly and accurately. The need for it had come clear one afternoon when she had gone down to the closest grocery store to haul out another load of canned food. Before she had gotten there, she had heard a man laughing. Then he had started firing round after round from a pistol into car windshields in the parking lot.

  The guy had been clearly crazy, and Carey had managed to stay hidden and watch him for most of the day until he headed north on the coast highway.

  That afternoon, she had found herself a pistol, and the next day the rifle. Now she considered herself a good shot with them, but had no way of really knowing, and she sure didn’t want to test the theory on anything living.

  As she moved in and around wrecked cars, she still couldn’t shake that feeling of being watched. There was someone out there, of that she had no doubt. Whether or not they would show themselves was another matter.

  She did a quick check to make sure the rounds were in place in the rifle, and then snapped a bullet into the chamber.

  Her hope, and her fear, was there would be other survivors in the city. Hope for a community of them, with enough good people to have conversations. Fear that all the people she would find would be in a gang of thugs who would try to take her and make her a slave or something movie-horrid like that.

  She had had the discussion between hope and fear many times over dinner with her cats. She was convinced that a normal, sane person would have given up hope of a real society reforming by now, but still, here she was today, standing on the edge of the city, ready to look for one.

  Risking her life in the search.

  Did that mean she was insane like some of the people she had seen alive? She didn’t want to think she might be, even though she always talked to herself. She didn’t feel insane, but then, does an insane person know she is insane?

  A question for the century.

  She would sometimes lay awake at night listening to the waves pound the beach and rocks below her home and worry about the answer to that deep question.

  And then she would worry that wondering about such a question made her sane or insane.

  The cats offered no answers.

  On still other nights, she would lay in bed thinking of people, and how nice it would be to talk to someone, or even listen to someone. Just have companionship. Those nights often ended up in nightmares, or no sleep.

  Other nights, after a long hot bath and a few glasses of wine, her mechanical, battery-powered friends helped her fall asleep. She liked those nights the best since the dreams were often of her old fiancée Paine and his wonderful smile on a naked Brad Pitt body.

  But during the day, the constant question about being the only sane person left alive haunted her like a ghost.

  She knew how to be alone, how to live alone. Actually, she had gotten very good at it. But for some reason, the thought of dying old and alone scared her a great deal.

  That final argument was what had gotten her out of the house and on this trip. The fear of dying alone and the desire to find people to talk to were the reasons she was here. She just had to keep that firmly in mind.

  The memory of Paine’s face flashed back to her, and she found herself smiling as she walked. Paine had been the man she had hoped to marry, spend the rest of her life with. He had been funny and had had a grin that could make a person just laugh at its silliness.

  And he had loved her, something that made her feel lucky every day they had been together.

  Even with everyone alive, she had been a loner of sorts, and except for Paine, and his wonderful smile, and green eyes, she might have stayed a loner, surrounded by millions of very-much-alive people. So some of this desire to find others made no real sense for her.

  Still, even a loner needed company at times. It seemed, now was one of those times.

  Around her, the dead city closed in on the freeway as she got closer and closer to the downtown area.

  Nothing but the wind and the dust moved.

  Oh, yeah, she was going to find Mr. Right here.

  She laughed.

  Sure thing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, the only women he had seen at all had been with rough-looking men. Three different couples that he knew of lived in the surrounding areas around Portland, but none of them Matt wanted anything to do with, and he was sure they felt the same about him.

  This was not one of those women.

  This woman wore a black, sleeveless tee shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. She had long brown hair pulled back tight, light skin, and a clearly muscled body.

  He
leaned forward, trying to get closer to the screen. He couldn’t take his gaze off of her. In the last two years, he would have never expected to see a beautiful woman.

  Hell, any single woman.

  He watched as she jumped back off the concrete railing and dug into her backpack.

  He stared as she wiped down her face and arms and then put on more suntan lotion. Clearly, she could sense that he was watching her, as she kept looking around her at all times.

  He suddenly realized that she was a woman he would have been attracted to when everyone was still alive.

  How was that possible that she was now standing there on the freeway?

  Alone.

  He had had a number of steady girlfriends before everyone died. He had just broken up with Sunni the week before everything happened. Sunni had been a short, blonde Swedish-type from Southern California. They had met in a bookstore out in the Tigard area. She was working for Hewlett Packard, doing something she could never quite explain to him.

  After six months, they had both just grown tired of each other, even though the sex had been great. He had no idea if she had survived. The chances weren’t good, and it hadn’t occurred to him to even go looking for her body where she worked.

  He had kept the idea of ever meeting a decent woman again so tucked away in his mind, he wasn’t sure yet if he was still dreaming. He had to be dreaming; yet he knew he wasn’t.

  Yet he had to be.

  “Wake up, Matt old buddy!”

  His voice echoed off all the equipment.

  All right, he was awake. That meant that woman out there was real. Very real.

  As he watched, she put a water bottle away, picked the backpack up, and slipped it on her shoulders. Then, with the rifle in her hand, she headed off the overpass, walking with the assured gait of someone who had confidence to spare.