Empty Cities Read online

  Empty Cities:

  Minus America

  Book 2

  E.E. Isherwood

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  Copyright © 2019 by E.E. Isherwood

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Illustration by Covers by Christian

  Editing services provided by Mia at LKJ Books

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER 1

  Near Dulles International Airport, VA

  Ted and Emily wasted no time in the residential home where they’d spent the night. They woke up with first light, gathered what little they had, and borrowed the family sedan to leave the neighborhood.

  “Where should we go?” Emily asked once they were on the road.

  Ted rubbed his throbbing temple; the crash yesterday only inflicted a few scratches, but he did have a nasty headache. “Eventually, toward help. We must report to any authority left and warn them Jeffries and his pals have the nuclear briefcase, possibly the codes. Right now, I have to make a stop. You’ll see.”

  They were still close to Dulles airport, which he wanted to avoid, but he’d spent a lot of time thinking about this question last night.

  Emily sat for a few seconds like she’d misunderstood him, then seemed to have enough of it. “Officer MacInnis, I’m the Vice President of the United States, I order you to tell me where we’re going.”

  “President, actually,” he said calmly.

  She did a double take, then caught on. “Oh, you’re being funny.”

  He snickered. “You said you liked to joke around. I’m playing the part of funny sidekick today.”

  She melted into her seat, as if glad she didn’t really need to boss him. “I shouldn’t have said that, actually. I do need to act more serious now. The nation is in crisis. Preventing more war is obviously urgent. Once we get in touch with someone in the military chain of command, I can let them know what’s happened to the president. Hopefully, we can get some proper protection.”

  “What? Old Bessie and I aren’t enough for you?” He patted his hip, where he kept one of the two pistols he’d taken from the White House. She still had the P229 that John Jeffries had tried to kill her with.

  When he’d touched the gun, he thought of his phone, so he pulled it out as he listened.

  “I want an entire division of US Marines on the White House lawn pronto,” she said while staring at the wooded country of northeastern Virginia. “That’s when I’ll feel safe.”

  He snuck a look at his phone.

  To his surprise, Emily whipped her head around and caught him. “Hey! You’re not supposed to text and drive. That’s dangerous when you have a VIP on board.”

  He glanced at her to see if she was serious. She was.

  Ted handed over his phone. “Will you tap voicemail? It says I have some messages. Might be Lieutenant Colonel Maxxon asking why I didn’t bring his plane back. Put it on speaker, so I can hear, okay?”

  “I know how phones work, Ted. I just…” She held the device for ten or fifteen seconds, then leaned over to him and spoke with great reluctance in her voice. “Which button?”

  Far from making him upset, he found joy in her lack of technical skills. She was supposed to be one of the premiere politicians in America—a woman he normally wouldn’t chat up in a bar given her political bent. However, she’d turned out to be far different than her image, and her flaws made him like her even more.

  “This one,” he said with a grin.

  She held it in between them so he could listen.

  ‘Hello, and good day. This is Constitution One Banking. Your minimum payment is overdue. You will—’

  “We’ll get these calls until the power stops, I’m sure. Skip,” he said while tapping the appropriate button.

  “I’ll do that,” Emily complained. “You drive.”

  There were no other moving cars on the road, though there were lots of wrecks, and a few still smoldered from fires. When the people were sucked out of them yesterday, the cars themselves often drove for short distances. Most of them went into the nearby trees and yards of the suburban houses along the roadway, though a few came to rest in the middle of the lane. One or two crashed head-on with those coming from the opposite side.

  His biggest fear at the moment was running into those convoys he’d seen the day before. While they both wanted to find friendly troops, nothing about the units on the road immediately after the attack had conveyed “friendly” to him.

  The next message played.

  ‘Ted. It’s me. I’m safe here in Fairford. I heard…the plane you were in went down. I don’t… I hope you are okay.” The call ended.

  “Who was that?” Emily asked with concern.

  “My ex-wife,” he said with mixed emotions. He’d not heard from her in years, but news traveled fast in the service. She was Air Force, too.

  “Are you two…” she pressed.

  “What?” He turned up his nose. “Hell, no. We split five years ago. Different career choices. That sort of thing. She’s serving over the pond.” He didn’t want to talk about it.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. It tells us something important that we already suspected. England wasn’t hit by whatever weapon wiped us out. That means we still have an ally out there.”

  The next message began, cutting off his train of thought.

  “Hi, Uncle Ted. It’s Kyla. Your niece—”

  “Holy shit! She’s actually alive!” He swerved the car in his excitement, then slammed on the brakes. He’d gotten about halfway onto the shoulder, but it was close enough. Belatedly, he realized he’d yelled over a good bit of the message.

  “Play it again. Hit rewind. Please!”

  Emily fidgeted with the controls but soon figured it out.

  “Hi, Uncle Ted. It’s Kyla. Your niece.” She laughed nervously. “I guess you figured that out. I’m sleeping on board the ship tonight. I’m safe for now. I don’t know why our phones aren’t reliably connecting. The tech person here thinks a foreign power has hacked into some of the cell towers.”

  Ted used his knuckle to wipe away a tear filled with joy. He went a full day hoping she survived on the ship, though he’d pretty much accepted she was gone, like her mother. Now…

  The message went quiet, and he thought it was over, but she continued in a lower volume. “I’m scared. A rumor has gone around that people on the outside have been killed, like they were here on the ship. Is that true? I haven’t been able to reach my mom. Can you let her know I’m all right? I’ll try to call again in the morning.”

  The line went dead. It was the last message.

  Emily put the phone on the center console, but before she could do anything else, Ted threw his arms around her, disregarding all rank and decorum.

  “She’s alive!”

  Poor Sisters Convent, Oakville, MO

  Tabby stood at the back window, looking outside. She was struck by the beauty of the sunshine as it beamed through the trees and lit up the well-manicured landscaping of the convent and vineyard. A doe chewed at some leaves at the edge of the forest toward the back of the property, reminding her she needed to eat.

  The delightful scene also confirmed what she’d hoped to be true last night: they weren’t overcome with poison gas.

  “Good-bye, little doe,” she whispered before turning around.

  The common room was well-lit this morning
. Sun burst in from large windows all across the back wall. Sister Rose said the convent would provide a peaceful resting place for her and the kids. For the kids, that was true. They were still asleep on the couches.

  Peter and Audrey slept on the same sofa. She thought it was cute how he held his new girlfriend—like he was still protecting her from anything bad. Tabby was less certain if their parents would approve of them sleeping in the same spot, but her job was tour leader, not parent, for the teens.

  By contrast, she’d hardly slept. The kids were her responsibility, whether she liked it or not. That burden refused to let her sleep soundly like the others. Her goal had been to return them to their parents, but now that was impossible. Her mind struggled with the logic of it for most of the night.

  “How can you sleep so well, knowing your parents are dead?” she thought.

  Her parents had been evacuated during the disaster. She was sure of that. All she and the kids had to do was find the police cordon set up to protect the citizens of eastern Missouri; her parents would be waiting for her there.

  Mom and Dad weren’t like the other kids’ parents. They wouldn’t have been caught flatfooted and helpless. Dad was ex-military and a businessman who took pride in being prepared for any emergency that could befall the mine. It was those preps that had saved her and the three kids. When disaster struck on the surface, no one would be more prepared to get to safety than him.

  “Good morning,” the kindly Sister Rose said in a soft voice.

  “Hello, Sister.” She took the offered coffee cup. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, child. I’m happy to be of service.”

  “We didn’t get a chance to talk last night. I don’t see any clothes dropped around here. Were you the only one living in this place?”

  A cloud passed over the nun’s otherwise cheery face. “I was not alone when God passed through this home. There were ten other sisters, but they were all taken. You do not see their clothing because I moved their belongings into their bedrooms.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Tabby replied.

  “You have seen many losses on the outside?” Sister Rose asked. “Like the cars crashed out front?”

  Tabby gulped, not sure she liked where the conversation was going. “There are lost clothes all over Bonne Terre, where we’re from. I’ve seen empty cars on the highways. We’ve also seen the…clothing of the children’s parents.”

  Rose’s eyes were hopeful for a moment, until Tabby failed to add to the story. “So, the children lost their loved ones, I presume?”

  Tabby nodded grimly. “It makes no sense. What did we do different that kept us safe?”

  The nun held a necklace of beads. “I’ve been praying for guidance every waking moment. The ladies were chatting in here, like always, when Abbess Mary Francis asked me to get some seeds from downstairs. I did as she requested, but when I returned, she was gone.”

  Tabby didn’t know how that helped her. “Can I see what’s downstairs? Maybe there is something down there which protected you?”

  Sister Rose set her coffee down, inviting her to do the same. The pair quietly walked across the carpeted great room to the doorway for the stairs. It was already partway opened.

  “I never closed it when I came up.”

  They made their way down a long stairwell reinforced on the sides with slats of wood. It reminded her of going into a bunker. Or a mine.

  “What do you call this space? It’s huge.” The stairwell revealed a big chamber below as they neared the bottom.

  “The Archdiocese bought this property from a winemaker who went out of business. He had this cellar constructed as a place to store casks of wine, but as the story was told to me, he couldn’t afford to build the dumbwaiter lift to get the wine down here and back up.”

  “And you were all the way down here?” The narrow stairwell was so tall she imagined they’d gone at least two stories underground.

  “Yes. I was in the back, with the seedlings.”

  When they reached the bottom, Sister Rose pulled a string for a single bulb. It did little to illuminate the dank space.

  “The kids and I were down in the Bonne Terre mine, as I told you last night. We were a lot farther under the surface than you, but there has to be a connection. If you were down here, and your sisters died up top, and I was down there…”

  She purposefully skipped what that meant for the fellow students of Peter, Audrey, and Donovan. They’d just taken the elevator to the top. The kids still had hope their peers would be found.

  “No, child, I’m afraid it’s worse than that. God died for our sins once. Now he came back and took only the good souls he wanted. No amount of rock or soil could prevent him from taking us if that was his will.”

  Tabby looked at her sideways. “My dad says it wasn’t a big deal for God to die for our sins. He said he would die for me without blinking an eye.” She shuddered at the notion of laying down her life for the kids, but she’d do it. She was pretty sure.

  Sister Rose seemed to get defensive. “I’m sorry you don’t understand.”

  “You’re saying we’re the bad souls left by God?”

  The nun bowed her head. “I don’t want it to be true, but we are sinners, yes. It is the only explanation that makes sense. God died for humanity once, but he finally ran out of patience.”

  Tabby looked once more around the musty storage area, then glanced up the stairwell to the small door at the top. Rays of sunshine penetrated the first few feet of the tunnel, but nothing more.

  “We’ve got to get going, Sister. Thank you so much for your hospitality. We’ve got to find my parents. They’re with the evacuees, you see, and I have to find them.”

  She didn’t want to stick around the nun, as nice as she was, because she clearly held onto a lie, and Tabby wanted no part of it.

  “Where will you go?” Rose asked.

  “North,” she said aloud. To my parents, she said to herself.

  CHAPTER 2

  On board the USS John F. Kennedy

  “Just line up the front and rear sights so they are level, exhale a little to steady yourself, then pull the trigger, not the pistol.”

  Meechum handed the pistol to Kyla. Last night, she’d also given her one of her Marine blouses. As one of the only civilians left on board, the warrior woman said she needed to dress tougher so she wouldn’t be mistaken for a civvy anymore. Having a gun helped dispel that non-military feeling, too.

  “Sounds easy enough.” She’d fired the same pistol in the hallway yesterday. Kyla still wasn’t sure she’d hit anything, but she wanted to make sure the next time would be different. It was the pistol she’d used to shoot Ben as he tried to get away, but she was convinced that was luck.

  Meechum had set up a firing range on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier. There were no flights going in or out, because most, if not all, the pilots had been killed yesterday. The wide-open space was now a gigantic, empty parking lot.

  They were out of port and far from shore, but a thin, hazy line of land hugged the horizon to the west.

  “Where do you think we are?” she asked.

  The Marine frowned. “Don’t worry about that. Worry about your M9.” She gestured to the pistol.

  Kyla took a moment to feel the weight and appreciate what it was, then she did as instructed. She positioned herself in front of the box-like target, lined up the front and rear sights, exhaled, then squeezed the trigger.

  Her ear protection blocked out most of the pistol’s report, but it was still loud.

  “Nice!” Meechum yelled. “You almost killed a bad guy.”

  Kyla stood about twenty feet from the target. A black hole appeared on the rectangular piece of paper, about six inches above the head of the man’s outline.

  “Again!” the Marine shouted.

  Kyla repeated her routine, doing her best to squeeze the trigger without moving the gun off target.

  “Yes! You hit the guy!”

  Meec
hum slapped her on the back. “Now empty the mag. Fire at will.”

  She brought the pistol back up. Kyla held it steady with both hands, then pulled the trigger a couple of times. Once she had the hang of it, she fired off however many bullets were in the ammo box. The magazine, as Meechum called it.

  Finally, the pistol wouldn’t fire.

  “Great job, dudette! You hit the man one more time, right in the center of his chest.”

  She pulled back her headphones. “I missed the rest?”

  The blonde woman flashed a knowing grin. “I had you fire them all to show you how each shot takes you a little further off target. You have to continually adjust every couple of shots, or you might as well be firing at the sky.”

  They both looked up into the hazy morning air. The white smudge of a contrail caught her attention. “Are planes still up there?”

  Meechum looked at the same place. “You’re asking the wrong girl. I don’t know jack about what’s going on outside this ship, but by the looks of it, there is something flying.”

  While they were looking up, the sound of a propeller caught her attention.

  “What the fuck is that?” Meechum heard it, too.

  A warning claxon activated a second later, suggesting the arrival wasn’t friendly.

  They both watched as a car-sized airplane came up over the front of the carrier’s deck. It was light gray, with long, thin wings. Its cockpit was an oval-shaped bulb, but there were no windows. A propeller drove it from the rear.

  “Get down!” the Marine ordered.

  She fell to the deck but craned her neck to keep watch.

  It flew slow, like it wasn’t afraid to be seen. It came across the number 79 painted at the front, then it soared about thirty feet off the deck toward the back. As it went over the two of them, Kyla noted the plane was shaped a lot like a plus sign, with a thin fuselage to go along with the narrow wings.

  A black ball hung out the bottom, right in the center of the plus.

  It banked to the left once it motored by.

  “Run,” Meechum insisted. “Over there!” She motioned for Kyla to head for the island. A hatch waited for her on the other side of the arrestor cables. The Marine got to her feet, and Kyla scrambled to catch her.