Empty Cities

by E. E. Isherwood

  “This must have been a busy place,” Emily suggested. “I’ve only been to Harrisburg a couple of times, and those were all in nice reception halls and school gymnasiums. The campaign trail didn’t lead into railroad grades, like this one.”

  He admired her walking confidently in the baking sun. She’d taken off her long-sleeve outer shirt and tied it around her waist, leaving only the black tank top. Still, she didn’t seem to mind sweating and didn’t complain at all until they’d almost walked past the entire property of the airport.

  “Are we going to pass the whole thing?” She pointed to the right. The giant main terminal and air traffic control tower were behind them.

  “Yes, this is our stop. It might surprise you to know this, but the National Guard is way down on the end, in this smaller building.”

  “Is that a funding joke?”

  It was meant as a slight against her party, but the truth was both political parties seemed to enjoy reducing the expenditures for the military. He decided it wasn’t going to do any good to complain, even as a joke.

  “No, just a statement of fact. The place we want is on the end, out of the way. That’s good for us. I didn’t want to leave the safety of these tracks until we reached this side. Now we walk right in the back door.”

  The paved landing strips were on the far side of the row of buildings, so they wouldn’t be seen by anyone watching those. He’d picked the path with the least chance of being detected, but the next part would require them to go out in the open.

  “You ready to do some more running?” he asked.

  Emily was undeterred. “I once ran a half-marathon for charity. I almost threw up, but I made it. I’m sure I can run across one little parking lot.”

  Ted chuckled. The long-term parking area between them and their destination was as big as a typical mall lot. It was a mile long and half a mile wide. The orderly lot was filled with cars left by travelers before flying to their destinations.

  “Stay close,” he encouraged.

  Once more, they ran into the open. Emily had it right by calling him out on being safe under the tree, but it did offer a minimal amount of safety. The truth about surveillance was they could be spotted from space when they ran out in the open.

  If a satellite happened to be watching an obscure lot in Harrisburg.

  San Francisco, CA

  Dwight was in his mid-thirties, though people often mistook him for fifty. Life on the streets had been rough on him, though he accepted the trade-offs because he also believed it gave him the wisdom of a much older person, at least in respect for how to read the ebb and flow of the city.

  Morning was a good time to hit up people near coffee stands.

  Lunch was when he went down to the wharf area. Tourists gathered there to eat and gather up before the afternoon tours of Alcatraz.

  Dinnertime was when he mingled with tourists and locals on the streets around the restaurant district. After a nice meal, people were often in a good mood to give him a kingly tip.

  But today, there was no ebb or flow.

  Every car was abandoned. All the restaurants were empty. The wharf had no ferries coming or going, though one still floated in the bay like it was lost.

  “Did the aliens come and get us, Poppy?” he wondered as he craned his neck to look at his shoulder. His colorful bird had found him after he’d left his sleeping quarters, like she always did. No one else ever saw it, try as he might to get them to see it, but he always found the bird had plenty to say to him.

  A shiny new Mercedes sat in the middle of the next street. The windows were open, like the owner had been enjoying the cool sea air on her drive through the city. A large designer purse sat all by its lonesome on the passenger seat, like it had been her travel buddy.

  Poppy didn’t like him stealing from people, but it was sometimes necessary when days of rain kept away his normal clientele. He rationalized it as necessary to stay alive; plus, he always intended to pay back whatever he took. Someday.

  This time, he left the purse where it was.

  He held up his hands. “I surrender! You can have the city! Take me to your ship!”

  The fire burning in the upper floors of the nearby building created a dull roar in the background, and car alarms chimed endlessly far away, but all the normal city noises were gone. Especially laughter and talking.

  “What, Poppy? I should go to the stadium? That’s a great idea.” He paused as if listening to his friend. “What? No, I can’t fly.”

  The stadium was miles away, through the heart of the city. He only went down there when he knew there’d be a baseball game, because he preferred the sure bet of tourists at the wharf. He had no idea what day it was, and there was no one to ask, so he couldn’t be sure if anything was happening there.

  He glanced at the bird. “No, I don’t have a phone to check the date. That’s what normals do. Yes, I know everyone else has one. I’m sorry to disappoint.”

  The pair argued back and forth incoherently for the next couple of minutes, and his voice got louder as their dispute amped up. Only after Dwight realized he was inside one of his famous “crazy scenes” did he put on the brakes and look around. “I don’t think anyone saw us,” he reasoned.

  The crazy scenes always hurt his panhandling takes, so he tried to keep them at a minimum. Over the years, he’d realized the sometimes-nasty bird liked to instigate them. That was why she wasn’t allowed to go into the basement where Dwight spent his nights. When the bird was around, it never shut up. Arguments ensued. He couldn’t risk the loud racket calling in security and ruining the good thing he had going on. But, out in the open, he often had loud conversations with it.

  “Yes, okay. I’ll walk you down there.”

  Today, he didn’t mind all the walking. Every new street brought the possibility of seeing someone new, and that would mean he could go back to his livelihood of panhandling.

  Once he got back into the skyscrapers of downtown, Poppy got nervous.

  “No, I’m not going back to bed, you don’t have to worry. I’ll worry for both of us because there aren’t any people to talk to.

  “What? That’s insane. You really think everyone is invisible? Including me? Including you?” He tried to wrap his mind around the suggestion, and Poppy figured out a solution he assumed was ingenious but seemed quite dangerous.

  “You sure about this?” he asked the flightless bird as he strode over to where she wanted him.

  He sat inside a crosswalk at a normally busy intersection. Poppy’s plan was to make it so he could see down four different streets to catch sight of invisible people driving their cars. He’d also feel them walking by, because they’d stay within the lines of the crosswalk. The regular people always did.

  “You’d better be right,” he said, “or I’m going to keep going to the stadium.”

  His bird said to be patient, and he always listened to his bird.

  He waited to be knocked over by the invisible people.

  CHAPTER 7

  Harrisburg, PA

  “I think these cars make it fifty degrees hotter,” Emily remarked as they crossed the wide parking lot. After all their starts and stops today, it was already close to noon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the sun was almost directly overhead.

  “I can think of one thing we forgot when we left my house.” Ted constantly thought about gear. What he could drop. What he forgot. Modifications to make it all better.

  “An air conditioner?” she said in jest.

  “A hat.”

  “Well, I hope you know,” she panted, “I’m going to have to dock your pay for that. I’m keeping track of every mistake as part of my evaluation process for your job as my bodyguard.”

  He jogged to another row of cars, then stopped. When he looked back, Emily’s face wore a look of concern.

  “Come here,” he insisted.

  “Did you hear that?” she whispered.

  He nodded affirmative. The faint whine of an airp
lane motor came out of the sky, but it was hard to tell from where.

  She was going to say something, but he gestured for her to stay silent a little longer. The sound continued for a minute, but then faded. Finally, the world went back to silence.

  “It’s gone.” Ted got up to look over the hoods of the two cars he’d jumped between. It all appeared the same as before.

  “Any idea what it was?” she asked.

  He’d been flying big four-engine jumbos for so long that he’d lost touch with his roots at smaller airfields like Harrisburg. It sounded like a single-prop civilian craft, but he couldn’t say for sure.

  By contrast, if any of a number of different jumbo jets had flown over, he’d be able to tell the make and model number of the airframes, and probably the type and model of the engines, too.

  “For now, let’s go with unknown. It sounded small, and possibly non-military, but I wouldn’t bet our lives on it.”

  “Should we keep going?” She swept her arm across her forehead to clear the beads of sweat. It really was an inferno on the asphalt parking lot.

  “We have to,” he said dryly.

  “That’s what I thought. We’re too close to turn around.”

  They smiled at each other for a second, then he got up and ran for the next row of cars. Emily followed a few seconds later.

  He kept running after passing through the entrance to the lot. A ticket booth and gate had a few cars parked in front of them, as they were when the people disappeared, but he ran right by.

  “Come on!” he called.

  He’d been to the small Air National Guard facility a couple of times in his travels. It was basically a short row of one-story office buildings and a couple of small hangars. However, the main aircraft of the base were modified versions of the C-130 Hercules transport planes.

  The sign above the main building said “193d Special Operations Squadron. Never seen, always heard.”

  “Jackpot,” he said when he walked through the unlocked glass front doors.

  “Thank God for air conditioning,” she exclaimed when she got inside with him.

  He was in a hurry, but he turned around to watch the small-framed woman approach. Her shirt was soaked with perspiration, and her hair was a mess, but she maintained her politician’s smile.

  “Yeah, power is still working here. I guess it pays to live next to a nuclear power plant, huh?” He turned and led her into the facility, not sure what he was looking for.

  “Doesn’t it worry you? That the plant will blow up without human control? It melted down before, even with human oversight.”

  “That was decades ago. I’m sure they have safeguards in place for situations like this. Maybe the reactors shut down if no one touches a button for a few days. They have to plan for this, right?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not an expert in nuclear power. Not even an amateur, really.”

  “Me either, but I do have some experience with this.” He went through the door labeled ‘Radio Room,’ knowing he’d found what they’d come for.

  The inside was filled with so much radio equipment, it forced him to stop and figure out what was what. Much of it was redundant, but he sifted through the amplifiers, repeaters, and equalizers to get to a desk with a common microphone.

  “Here we go.”

  Ted went right to work shifting the dial to look for radio traffic. However, a few seconds after he began, he glanced at the chair next to him. A camo uniform lay uselessly on the seat, and some pants and boots were underneath.

  “First, I’m going to listen,” he advised Emily. “This radio can scan frequencies and tell us if there is anyone talking to the mainland from offshore. I would assume there is.”

  He adjusted the controls for a few minutes, sure he’d pick up some traffic.

  “I’m not getting what I thought.”

  “Are you sure it’s working?” she asked.

  He rolled the chair back and forth by the nearby equipment, sure he’d notice if there was something turned off or otherwise squelching his signal, but it all looked normal. It should have been possible to hear something over the airwaves.

  “This isn’t what I—” Emily began.

  He’d gone to civilian channels on the FM band to see if the radio was working. Sure enough, he heard an old rap song when he hit the right frequency.

  “It’s the same station we heard in your Jeep,” she remarked.

  They listened for a short time.

  “I want to hear what happens when the song ends.” He leaned back in the chair, content to rest for a few moments.

  “You really wanted to hear this song, didn’t you?”

  He shook his head. “Rap isn’t my thing. Old rap, even less so.”

  She rolled over a chair that didn’t have any loose clothes in it. She sat down and slid up next to him. “Let me guess. You like music about pickup trucks, lost dogs, and cowboy-smitten women. Am I right?”

  “Country? No. I do like rock from the seventies and eighties, though.”

  “Ah, classic rock.”

  “No, I call it rock from when I was a kid. Nothing classic about it. They broke the mold when the music industry went into the nineties. I haven’t understood music since eighty-nine. Anyway, I—” The song came to an end. “Here we go.”

  A short series of beeps filled the air, but the playlist went into the next song.

  “It sounded like a computer is running the DJ booth,” Emily suggested.

  “Yeah. Weird. I guess it really is on a digital loop. Nothing too exciting about it.”

  Absently, he thought the owner deserved an award.

  ‘Last station on the air.’

  St. Louis, MO

  “This is the most confusing place I’ve ever been!” Tabby threw her hands in the air, despite being behind the wheel. “None of these streets go to the Arch. They go everywhere but there.”

  She’d parked in the middle of a wide avenue with wrecked cars all around her. The Gateway Arch gleamed bright in the morning sunshine from only a few blocks away, but it was seemingly impossible to find the road that went underneath it.

  “Maybe we can try going on the highway again?” Donovan suggested from the navigator’s seat.

  The highway went into a channel below ground, cutting the city from the park-like grounds of the monument next to the river. Being on the highway got them closer, but they wouldn’t get close enough.

  “Why don’t you drive on the grass?” Audrey said as an offhand remark.

  Tabby slowly turned to see her and Peter in the backseat. They’d each moved closer to their respective windows to try to help her navigate the confusing downtown streets. “You’re a genius. Why am I trying to find roads and parking lots when I can drive into the park the old-fashioned way.”

  She got the car moving again and found the first cross street. It was one-way in the opposite direction, but she didn’t pay attention to that. After going a couple of blocks, the roadway ended at a large church at the edge of the park. She drove onto a small parking lot, then continued onto a paved walking path lined with young trees.

  “This is so much easier,” Tabby crowed. “We don’t have to follow the rules, because there are no people around to complain.”

  “We could give the Arch a lawn job,” Peter giggled.

  Audrey reached over and slapped him.

  “Thank you,” Tabby said to the girl.

  As their tour guide, she couldn’t lay a hand on them, but there was no stopping Audrey. She seemed to enjoy the role of riding herd on the unruly Peter. He seemed to like it, too. He laughed after she slapped him.

  “I’m kidding!” he protested.

  Tabby drove the path for about fifty yards, guiding the car to the top of a small rise. The Arch towered above like a sixty-story steel skyscraper. The other leg of the monument came down across a wide, flat field of grass. The open space was several football fields wide and long.

  “What are those?” Donovan pointed ahead.
<
br />   The field looked like it was being used as a staging area for a huge science fair. A long row of yellow bulldozers had been parked on the far side. Two more trundled along the tree-lined footpath on the other side of the most distant Arch leg.

  Tabby stopped the car.

  The middle of the field was dedicated to multiple models of flying drones. Those, she recognized right away. There were two rows of the smaller type her dad used to use, perhaps fifty in a line. Another row contained larger four-propeller drones, and they looked like they could carry cargo under their raised middles.

  The closest row was a line of dozens of small, horse-like robots. Those were painted in uneven colors, like kids had come by and glued fall leaves all over them.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” Tabby said to herself. “Where are the survivors? The police? The fire department?”

  “It’s probably just the police.” Donovan pointed into the air over the Mississippi River to their right. A normal helicopter flew above the mud-colored channel, then veered toward the far side.

  “I don’t know. This isn’t what I expected.” She still experienced unease about the floating drone she believed had been hiding behind that school bus. If it was being flown by the police, why hide at all? But what else could it be?

  She happened to turn to the left, toward a bench next to the path. Two clumps of clothing sat on the chair with hands locked, like they’d disappeared at the same time.

  “Go talk to them,” Peter suggested. “They have to know something, right?”

  “I’ll do it,” Audrey added. Both kids in the back seat leaned forward, so they were almost between her and Donovan. Everyone seemed excited to see signs of people.

  And there were survivors over there. The two tractors weren’t moving by themselves; living, breathing drivers were inside of each one.

  “Can we wait a second? I need to think this through, okay?” She smiled at the kids, hopeful she could suppress her own panic.

  Donovan opened his door. “Don’t worry, Audrey. I’ll go check it out.”

  “No!” Tabby said at almost a scream.

  Donovan flinched in fright.