Earth's Survivors Box Set [Books 1-7]

by Wendell G. Sweet

  She had still been Molly then, but she had dumped Molly for Rebecca when she had made the change to television. Rebecca suited her better. The new her had come to channel eight as the weather girl a few years back and worked her way up to co anchor with Cindy's help. Last week some images of Bob in bed with Bethany, the old co anchor, had made their way around the station. Eventually ending up in the lap of the station manager, Tad Edwards. Edwards had kicked it up to the new station owner, Susan Isley. Although everyone knew that Bob had been banging Bethany, knowing it and then seeing pictures of it were two different things. Today Bob had resigned.

  "You are the new anchor," Cindy said. "You."

  It still made her heart beat fast. She had handled it alone tonight for the early news and she would again for the late edition. The ratings had been high. Next week they'd be interviewing for a co anchor. Cindy had told her to insist on a man even if they offered her a woman, which they weren't likely to do, but who knew? No more competition. Choose a guy who looked good because he'll make you look good, Cindy had said. Let people think things, just don't let there be anything. Cindy would be sitting in on the interviews. Rebecca had asked for that and had gotten it, along with a promotion for Cindy to her personal assistant; which she had unofficially been for nearly a year anyway. She had walked Rebecca through her career moves. Cindy was smart and Rebecca trusted in her sense. So Cindy would sit in on the interviews and Rebecca would go with her choice.

  "Did you do it?" Rebecca asked Cindy. "The pictures I mean?"

  "I think I love you," was all Cindy said.

  "We have an hour before we have to be back," Rebecca said. She loved Cindy's body. Short, dark hair to her own blond, almost 20 years older than Rebecca too: Until Cindy she hadn't even known she liked women like that. She had thought it would be a mutual climb up the ladder together, but it been more. Much more. She let her fingers trail over the side of Cindy's hip.

  Poza Rica, Mexico

  Evening

  Billy Jingo

  Billy sat on the deck and looked out over the gulf. There were no other houses for a few miles except Doug and Mayte's place. Poza Rica was the closest town and that was not really close. He liked it that way.

  A small fire burned nearby to take the chill out of the gulf air. He opened his wallet and took out two creased strips of photos and looked at them. Time spun away and he sighed as he began to shove the photos back down into his worn wallet, but his hand froze as his eyes caught the fire. A second later he was watching the edges of the strips of photos began to curl as the flames caught and took them.

  Most days he didn't think of his old life and what had brought him here at all, but when he did it wasn't with regrets. The hardest thing of all had been shooting Nikki. When she had said she had killed April, he had remembered that a body had been found the day before. He just hadn't connected the two things. And it would've made no connection in his head anyway. He hadn't known April Evans. Nikki Moore had become April Evans to him. He would never have known the difference.

  What he had known was that she had not been entirely honest with him. He had caught her more than once doing things that were stupid, outright dangerous when they had been on the run. And she would play stupid when he would catch her. You can't be stupid one minute and smart the next. The skill as a makeup artist had thrown him, but he just hadn't been able to believe she only learned it in school from a onetime class: And there was always that thing about her that made her appear older or maybe more mature to him than a girl that age would be. He had even mentioned it to her and she had laughed it off.

  He had stopped trusting her the second she had insisted on trying to make the deal even though their faces had been on TV, and the next morning when he had seen the paper and compared the faces he wondered. She looked so different. Again she laughed it off: Said it was an old junior high school picture.

  She had left the car to use the ladies room and he had checked the guns. He knew then that something was wrong. She had them parked in an enclosed area: There would be no place to run if something went wrong, and one of the guns had an empty clip. They were both the same model, one chrome, one blued-steel. The clips mounted exactly the same. So he'd switched the clips. It made the gun with the full clip heavier, but he doubted that she would notice. She knew which gun she had put the empty clip into.

  She had already been talking about calling the cop, and he couldn't reason it. He didn't feel like giving up, and he didn't care what the radio said about him he wouldn't give up, and he didn't believe she would either. He had been hoping she'd simply screwed up with the guns, but when she had looked at them both before she handed him the one that had been empty, he had known then she either meant to kill him or have him killed.

  He didn't feel guilty about it at the time, only sad: Now he didn't even feel sad, only grateful that her plans had fallen through.

  Doug had a small fishing boat. They went out most days and fished, selling their catch in Poza Rica. Life couldn't be better or more laid back: The house on the beach. The way time seemed to stand still, even so he was going.

  The word had come to him late last night that La Policia were looking for him, and not the local Policia, these guys were rumored to be dressed in military garb and carrying automatic weapons. The Federales, Dougie had said. All kinds of bad, especially for an American in the country illegally.

  He had been expecting it, just hoping it would hold off a while longer. He had briefly wondered what had led them to him, but in the end it hadn't mattered. He had purchased an old truck in town. Rolled a thirty gallon drum into the bed and chained it down. He had filled it with gasoline and once the sun set he would be on his way through the desert. California... Texas if that didn't work out: Or maybe he'd work his way up the west coast and head for Alaska. There were a million places there to disappear.

  "Second thoughts?" Dougie asked. He wore a funny little half smile on his face.

  “No, I was just thinking about how lucky I've been... Hope it holds out.” He took a deep drink from his beer, draining it. Dougie handed him another, but he refused it. The sun was right on the edge of setting and he wanted to be a far way into the great nothing before the moon came up.

  He left the deck and walked across the sand to the old truck. It would be a wonder if it didn't leave him stranded somewhere in the desert, but he couldn't chance taking the Suburban. He climbed in, shut the door with a rusty screech and raised one hand to Dougie and Mayte as he started the truck. They waved back, and a few seconds later he dropped the old truck and gear and lumbered off into the desert.

  Eternal Rest Lawns

  New Paltz, New York.

  Tommy Murphy

  The room was dark. He had dozed off... Dozed off and... No good. He couldn't bring it back. He had dozed off, that much was true. He had felt bad, ill... The virus was taking a toll on him, or the medication, both, so he had dozed off and slept for a while. Apparently a long while, and apparently deeply. Lita must have turned down the lights and pulled the heavy drapes, but he could not recall her doing that. He could not even recall her leaving him. It was something she rarely did, and it shocked him now to find that she might have.

  The living room where she had set up the hospital bed was entirely dark. Not a sign of light anywhere. He moved his hand, the thought was to bring it to his face to see if it could be seen. This seemed to be the darkest room he had ever experienced in his life.

  In his life, he found himself repeating as his hand banged into something substantial and stopped suddenly. Too suddenly. Had he rolled closer to the inside edge of the bed? The rail? Something like that? Pinned his arm? He rolled to the right to correct it, sure that was the problem, but he met with no success at all. The same hard structure stopped him, or seemed to.

  He blinked, squinted and tried to see better. No good, pitch black, and although he was a man who had little natural fear he had begun to panic right then.

  He had found that fear had become a near co
nstant visitor with him over the last few months. And he had come to find that fear was not the thing that most people thought it was, fear was something else entirely. Fear was every thing in the rational world that you did not understand. Every battle you had refused, run away from: And fear was the great unknown. The things that you could only know with any degree of certainty after you were dead: And then only if there could even be such a thing as knowledge after you had passed from life. He doubted there was. He had not always doubted there was, but he did now.

  He tried to sit up: His body was weak, but he managed to get it to start to rise when his head had slammed into the same immovable surface. Hard, iron hard, unmoving. In a near full blown panic, he raised his hands as slowly as he could from his side and felt at his surroundings. The shape was not familiar, but in another way, on a subconscious level, it seemed completely familiar to him. The shape, the volume, the texture of slippery satin against his fingers, the hard surface beneath the satin. A recessed seam running across, side to side, another, longer seam traversing the sides that he could not bend his hands into any sort of shape to follow. He continued along, feeling, probing, when he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to breathe. He had been so caught up in discovering this mystery that he had completely forgotten. He had never heard of anything like this happening to anyone, but he had no doubt that it had just happened to him. He was not breathing. He had not taken a breath in... He had no idea, a while.

  He tried to open his mouth and then the real panic set in. He could not open his mouth. His lips seemed joined together, unable to part. He put a little extra effort into it and felt them part with a hard, low ripping sound. Flesh stripped from flesh, like when your lips had dried out and then stuck together...

  Okay... Okay, don't panic, it's all fixable. He had probably just pulled a great deal of skin from his lips, but it would be fine. It would be...

  His fingers felt at his lips: It was not going to be fine. There were chunks and pieces of his lips attached to both lips. Thread woven from one to the other had held them together. Some ones idea of a joke: The thought had flashed across his mind, but even as it did he knew it to be untrue. No one would play that trick, not on him. Lita would never allow anyone to get that close to play that trick even if they had thought to.

  The truth of the situation hit him just that fast and he began to claw and tear at the satin lining. He tried to scream, but he could pull no air into his lungs. He felt his nails digging at the slippery satin, catching on the wood just below the surface and breaking, snapping off as the panic took over completely and he tried even harder to fight his way out of the casket.

  Route 81 rest-stop

  Watertown New York

  April 20th

  1:00 am

  A black truck pulled into the rest stop and two men climbed out; walking toward the rest rooms that sat in from the road. Concrete bunker looking buildings that had been built back in the early seventies. They had been closed for several years now. In fact the Open soon sign was bolted to the front of the building; rust streaked the sign surface. It seemed like some sort of joke to Mike Bliss who used the rest stop as a place to do light duty drug deals. Nothing big, but still that depended on your idea of big. Certainly nothing over a few thousand dollars. That was his break off point. Any higher than that, he often joked, you would have to talk to someone in Columbia... Or maybe Mexico, he told himself now as he sat waiting in his Lexus, but it seemed that since Rich Dean had got himself dead the deals just seemed to be getting larger and larger. And who knew how much longer that might last. He watched the two men make a bee line for the old rest rooms.

  “Idiots,” he muttered to himself. He pushed the button, waited for the window to come down, leaned out the window and yelled. “What are you, stupid? They're closed.” He motioned with one hand. “You can't read the fuckin' sign or what?”

  Both men stopped and looked from him to the sign.

  “Yeah, closed. You can read right? Closed. That's what it says. Been closed for years. Go on into Watertown; buy a fuckin' burger or something. Only way you're getting a bathroom at this time of the morning.” He had lowered his voice for the last as he pulled his head back into the car, and turned the heater up a notch. The electric motor whined as the window climbed in its track. He looked down at his wrist for the time, 1:02 A.M., where the fuck was this dude. He was late, granted a few minutes, but late was late.

  A sharp rap on the glass startled him. He had been about to dig out his own supply, a little pick-me-up. He looked up to see the guys from the truck standing outside his window. “Oh... Fucking lovely,” he muttered. He pushed the button and the window lowered into the door, the motor whining loudly, the cold air blew in.

  “And what can I do for you two gentlemen,” He asked in his best smart ass voice.

  The one in back stepped forward into the light. Military type, Mike told himself. Older, maybe a noncom. A little gray at the edges of his buzz cut. With the military base so close there were soldiers everywhere, after all Watertown was a military town. It was why he was in the business he was in. It was also why he succeeded at it.

  “Did you call me stupid,” The man asked in a polite tone.

  “Who, me? No. I didn't call you stupid, I asked, what are you, stupid? Different thing. The fuckin' place is closed... Just doing my good deed for the day... Helping you, really, so you don't waste no time,” Mike told him.

  “Really?” The man asked.

  Mike chuckled. “Yeah really, tough guy. Really. Now, I did my good deed, why don't you get the fuck out of here 'cause you wore out your welcome.” He opened his coat slightly so they could see the chrome 9 mm that sat in its holster.

  “Really,” the first guy repeated.

  “Okay, who are you guys, frick and frack? A couple of fucking wannabees? Well I am the real deal, don't make me stick this gun in your fuckin' face,” Mike told them. He didn't like being a dick, but sometimes you had to be.

  “You know what my mother always said about guns?” The second guy asked.

  “Well, since I don't know your mama it's hard to say,” Mike told him. He didn't like the way these two were acting. They weren't cops, he knew all the locals. If it had been someone he had to worry about he would have handled this completely differently. These guys were nobodies. At least nobodies to him, and that made them nobodies to Watertown. If he had to put a bullet in... His thoughts broke off abruptly as the barrel of what looked like a .45 was jammed into his nose. It came from nowhere. He sucked in a deep breath. He could taste blood in his mouth where the gun had smashed his upper lip against his teeth.

  “She said don't threaten to pull a gun, never. Just pull it.”

  “Mama had a point,” Mike allowed. His voice was nasally due to the gun that was jammed hallway up to his brain. “Smart lady.”

  “Very,” the man allowed. “Kind of a hard ass to grow up with, but she taught me well.” He looked down at Mike. “So listen, this is what we're gonna do. You're gonna drive out of here right the fuck now. And that's going to stop me from pulling this trigger. Lucky day for you, I think. Like getting a Get Out Of Jail Free card, right.”

  “This is my business spot... You don't understand,” Mike told them. “I... I'm waiting for someone.”

  “Not tonight, Michael.”

  “Yeah, but you don't.” He stopped. “How do you know my name?” he asked. There was more than a nasal quality to his voice, now there was real fear. Maybe they were Feds. Maybe.

  “Yeah, we know you. And we know you use this spot as a place to do your business. And I'm saying we couldn't care less, but right now you gotta go, and I'm not going to tell you the deal again. You can leave or stay, but you ain't gonna like staying,” The guy told him.

  “Listen... This is my town... If you guys are Feds you can't do shit like this... This is my town. You guys are just...”

  The guy pulled the trigger and Mike jumped. He fell to the right, across the front seat. Both men stepped a
way from the car, eyes scanning the lonely rest stop from end to end, but there was no one anywhere. The silence returned with a ringing in their ears from the blast as it had echoed back out of the closed car interior. The shooter worked his jaw for a moment, swallowing until his ears popped. He lifted his wrist to his mouth. “Guess you saw that,” he said quietly.

  “Got a cleaner crew on the way up. You'll pass them in the elevators. The boss is waiting on you guys.“ The voice came through the implant in his inner ear. No one heard what was said except him.

  He nodded for the cameras that were picking him up. “In case you didn't hear it, someone is supposed to meet him here so your cleaner crew could have company.”

  “Got that too... We'll handle it.” He nodded once more, and then walked off toward the rest rooms as the other man followed.

  Once in back of the unit they used a key in the old rusted handset. It only looked old and rusty, it was actually an interface for a state of the art digital system that would read his body chemistry, heat, and more. The key had dozens of micro pulse sensor implants that made sure the user was human, transmitted heartbeat, body chemistry, it could even tell male from female and match chemical profiles to known examples in its database. Above and to the sides of them several scanners mapped their bodies to those same known profiles. Bone composition, old fractures, density and more. All unique in every man or women. The shooter removed the key and slipped it into his pocket. A few seconds later a deep whining of machinery reached their ears, the door shuddered in its frame, and then slipped down into a pocket below the doorway.

  A second later they stepped into the gutted restroom. Stainless steel doors took up most of the room; the elevator to the base below. They waited for the cleaner crew to come up, then took the elevator back down into the depths.