Smith's Monthly #23 Read online

  SEVEN

  The power cut out on the tenth day.

  We all went to using propane lanterns and climbing stairs. The smell outside was getting so bad, none of us wanted to go out there.

  I had set up a portable generator on a balcony outside of an office suite that I had converted to a very large apartment, with a big screen television and a movie library that would take me ten years to watch if I never stopped.

  I had all the staircases boarded and sealed on my floor except for one, and that one I had fitted with steel bars locking it at night. And I had enough firepower to hold off a pretty good-sized attack. Not that I thought one was coming. I actually doubted it was, but in the Gulf I had seen my share of the underside of humanity. I had survived this, which meant scum might have as well. Not everyone was going to be nice guys like the professor and his kids.

  When the power went out we made sure all the doors were locked again, then set up a twenty-four-hour guard system in the security room and kept the exterior and lobby camera systems running on generators. If anyone wanted in, we would see them.

  It was on the twelfth day after humanity had been destroyed that the aliens showed up.

  The day had broken clear and crisp, one of those wonderful New York winter days that made you want to go outside. And I would have, except for the smell.

  The alien ships seemed to settle over the entire city, their massive shadows cutting off the sun completely. A couple of the ships had to be almost as big as the entire island and just hovered overhead.

  The damn kid had been right. Aliens had wiped out humanity.

  I called the professor on the walkie-talkies we had set up, and twenty minutes later he and the boys joined me in my apartment, staring out the large window at the alien ship closest to us.

  I wouldn’t even begin to try to describe it. Dark black with lots of different elevations on the bottom, like a city in and of itself was stuck to the bottom of the ship.

  “They are here to rescue us,” David said.

  I glanced at David who was smiling. “Why would you say that?”

  He kept his eyes on the huge ship. “They’ve been taking our kind to another planet for centuries. They knew we would be destroyed. They planned for it.”

  “And you know all this how?”

  “He doesn’t,” Freddy said. “Since they are here it’s pretty clear they were the ones that wiped us out like stepping on an ant hill. They just missed a few of us.”

  I was about to ask the kid why he thought that when a blue beam shot down from the ship and hit somewhere in the city. I was expecting noise or flash or smoke, but nothing.

  “Now what are they doing?” I asked the two boys.

  One said, “Rescuing.”

  The other said, “Killing.”

  The professor said nothing.

  Then more and more beams slashed down on the city. But again that didn’t seem to be like any weapon I had ever seen before. No smoke, no destruction.

  Then a blue beam hit the professor and he vanished.

  A moment later the two boys were gone.

  Then suddenly there was a blue light around me, and the city and my office apartment and the alien spaceship vanished.

  EIGHT

  Damn, I wish I could say that was the end of it, that the kid who thought the blue beam was a weapon had been right. But, of course, it wasn’t.

  The blue beam was some sort of transportation device right out of Star Trek, only without the stupid music and sound effects.

  I found myself standing beside the professor and the two boys, along with hundreds of other very tired and scared-looking humans who had survived the destruction of the world, only to be kidnapped by aliens.

  “Perfect,” I said. “Are we in the frying pan or in the fire?”

  “I’m guessing fire,” the professor said.

  “We’re lunch,” Freddy said.

  “I doubt they have a cookbook,” David said.

  I had no idea what they were talking about, but it didn’t sound good that the aliens with the blue beam could want to eat humans.

  Then one of the doors on one side of the room slid back, and one of the aliens walked into the room. Only it wasn’t an alien. The guy looked as human as I do, only he was clearly more rested and clean in his white shirt and dark slacks and military hat.

  The two or three hundred of us in the room just stared as he jumped up on a low stage. You could have heard the old pin drop in that room.

  “Fine people of the great city of New York,” he said. “Very sorry to startle you like this, but the next wave of the pulsar will be hitting Earth in just under four hours. We have over a hundred ships circling the planet, pulling all survivors from the first wave to safety.”

  “How come you couldn’t get here before the first wave?” one guy shouted.

  “And who are you, anyway?” someone else shouted.

  The officer just smiled. “Let’s just say I’m as human as the rest of you, and from a very distant place. We could not save everyone from the first wave, although we have saved millions over the centuries and humanity is flourishing just fine on five other planets around other stars. But we can save all of you who survived and let the second and final wave pass with no more deaths, and then put you back on Earth to rebuild.”

  “What happens if we don’t want to go back to that graveyard?” one woman shouted.

  A lot of people shouted “Yeah, what happens?”

  Again the officer smiled and said, “We’ll deal with that problem when the time comes. But for now, there is food and drink against the far wall and cots to take naps. This entire process will take about ten hours. Please relax, and I will be back to talk with you as soon as I can.”

  “One last question,” the professor beside me shouted at the officer. “How many survived the first wave?”

  “Worldwide,” the officer said, smiling, “almost two million. And we’ll get them all, I promise.”

  As the noise of three hundred people talking at once filled the room like a hard wave, I turned to David who had been talking about the aliens.

  “Well, now what?”

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  At that moment, a girl’s voice called out, “Professor,” and Constance hit the professor with a hug, sobbing.

  Even I was glad to see she was still alive, but not as much as the boys in her class. She looked like she had gone through hell, and she smelled awful, like she had been sitting next to a dead body for days.

  “Where have you been?” he asked, clearly fantastically glad to see her,

  “At my mom’s apartment,” she said between sobs. “I hid when you came there looking for me.”

  That made sense. She had simply gone home to die beside her mother.

  The owners of this big ship clearly were going to make sure that didn’t happen. At least not for the next ten hours.

  NINE

  I had no idea how the hundreds of other people in the room felt, but I kept verging on sheer panic that came close to cutting through the black screen in my head and then five minutes later I would be elated to be a survivor.

  After we had stood in line for some of the best-tasting food I had ever had, I asked the professor why he had asked the question about how many survivors.

  “Because there is a magic number of humans that it takes to build a population and to survive and have a large enough gene pool to make the effort even worthwhile.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “It’s my field,” he said, smiling. “Or it used to be.”

  “Is two million enough?”

  He laughed. “Far, far more than enough.”

  At least that was good to hear.

  During the next six hours, both the professor and I mentioned to numbers of people that we had set up the Empire State Building for survival, and if we were put back, they were welcome to join us. He and I had talked days before about how it would be an advantage to have a few hundred
people in the building, all working toward the same goal of survival.

  At nine hours, true to his word, the officer of the big spaceship came back in and everyone got quiet.

  “Everyone has survived the second and final wave of deadly electromagnetic waves. We are returning to Earth and will be in orbit in about fifteen minutes.”

  “So do we have an option of going to another planet?” someone shouted.

  “No,” the officer said, which caused my heart to sink and the room to explode in shouting. I loved New York, but not in the condition it was right now. Anywhere would be better than that killing field.

  The officer held up his hand for silence and got it. “We will take the wounded and the sick, but all of you, and the two million others on this ship and the other ships, are the future of humanity on Earth. We can’t rob Earth of that.”

  “How do we survive?” someone shouted from behind where I stood, staring at the man in the white uniform who was sealing my fate.

  “Some of you won’t,” he said bluntly. “But many will; enough to rebuild a wonderful culture and society and preserve much of what is already there. Your job is to save the old art and culture and build new on top of it.”

  Building on the dead was all I could think of, just as every society did.

  Suddenly, beside the Professor, Freddy shouted out, “We won’t remember any of this, will we?”

  The officer smiled. “A few of you will,” he said. “Most of you won’t. And the ones that do remember won’t be believed by the others.”

  That stunned everyone even more than the death sentence he had just declared on many people in the room.

  “I wish each and every one of you luck,” he said. “The future of the human race on the planet Earth depends on all of you.”

  With that, a wave of purple beams swept over the room and I knew I was going home, to the city I loved, and my new home near the top of the Empire State Building.

  TEN

  I awoke with a slight headache on the carpet of my new office suite apartment. The professor and the two boys were sprawled on the carpet beside me.

  The aliens had sent us all back to the exact spot we had been when taken.

  “Aliens!” I said, jumping to my feet and looking out the window. The night sky looked bright, with many stars. Below most of the city was dark. No sign of any spaceship or anything odd.

  Except for the fact that the professor and the two boys were passed out on the carpet behind me.

  Crap, I was one of the people who would remember. Damn, that was all I needed inside my screwed up head. Had I imagined it all?

  The professor moaned and sat up, holding his head. “What happened? How did I get up here?”

  Beside him the boys were starting to stir.

  I was about to tell him about the aliens, then decided against it. “What do you remember?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Boys,” I said, “do you remember how you got up here?”

  “No,” both said at almost the same time, looking around.

  “I think a milder version of what killed everyone hit us and knocked us out. I don’t remember anything either.”

  “Maybe the aliens came,” Freddy said.

  Dave and the professor both just shook their heads.

  “We’ll figure out what happened tomorrow,” I said. “We need to go hunt for Constance in the morning. I woke up with an idea of where she might be. And I also have a hunch we’re going to have some new tenants in the building soon.”

  “Bad dream?” the professor asked. “I didn’t dream anything.” He glanced at his watch. “We were out for a good twelve hours.”

  “Yeah,” both boys said. “I doubt I could get any sleep.”

  I nodded in agreement. I had no doubt I could sleep. We had a very large world to rebuild, one person at a time.

  “All right then,” I said. “We need to go save Constance right now. Boys, you guard the security system, professor, get your gas mask on. You and I will go to her mother’s apartment. I’m sure she’s there.”

  “I always wondered about that,” the professor said, shaking his head. “But we checked there.”

  “I think she was hiding from you the first time,” I said.

  Moving slowly toward the stairs with the boys following him, the professor said, “I sure wish I knew what happened.”

  “Aliens,” Freddy said.

  “A second weaker pulsar blast,” David said.

  I didn’t want to try to tell them that they were both partially right. I wasn’t sure if I believed it myself.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said. “Eventually. But right now my gut is telling me Constance needs our help. We do that first.”

  All three nodded and started down the stairs ahead of me.

  I had once asked my counselor at the VA how he did his job every day, digging in the trash of people’s minds trying to save them.

  He just smiled and said, “I just do it one person at a time.”

  I had followed that motto when I opened my little loan office to help people, one person at a time. Now we had to dig around in the junk of a ruined planet and give a helping hand up to one person at a time.

  And by doing that, given time, we just might build something a lot bigger.

  He killed her with a magic spell, buried her in the basement, and now she nags him every day to take her to the movies.

  Just as she nagged him when she lived.

  The woman never got tired of buttered popcorn and a dark theater.

  A really strange ghost story about love, death, and the movies.

  “The Yellow of the Flickering Past” was first published in the Daw Books anthology Wizard Fantastic edited by Martin H. Greenberg.

  THE YELLOW OF THE FLICKERING PAST

  ACT ONE: A YELLOW OIL MESS

  Sixteen days after I killed her, I took my dead wife to a movie.

  She had always loved movies.

  Actually I think she loved the memory of movies more than any one film. And she loved the smell of the buttered popcorn you could buy in theaters, even if the butter was actually only a melted yellow oil from big yellow cans. She said it was part of the movie- going experience and that was all that mattered.

  On our first date to a movie I laughed when she asked for an “extra large, extra butter, please.”

  “You know that shit will kill you?” I said as the guy with a thousand pimples pumped the handle of the butter machine like he was huddled over his first Playboy centerfold. Miss July.

  “Sure,” my date, soon-to-be wife, later-to-be-dead wife, had said. She never once offered me any of her popcorn. That was sort of how we argued from then on.

  And we argued a lot.

  She asked for the same “Extra large, extra butter” every time we went to a movie. She never missed a movie.

  We went to a lot of movies.

  Of course, people who saw us at the movies thought we made the perfect couple. “Fit together,” they would say, but after I came out of the coma induced by new love and the first year of marriage, I just didn’t see why. She was a light blonde, with a large, white-toothed smile, and wide, innocent green eyes. I actually had light brown hair, but I suppose it looked closer to her color because I kept it cut so short. I had dark brown eyes and people said I squinted a lot. I was almost five-six when I wore my good shoes, and even in heels she still wasn’t as tall as I was.

  Besides that, we argued all the time and I hated movies and didn’t eat popcorn, especially with yellow oil.

  The last year of our marriage I started daydreaming about the dreaded yellow oil. I figured no human body could digest that stuff, so it must have been building up in her body over the five years and seven days we were together. Maybe even for years before, just waiting for the right circumstances to set it all off in a huge bang. I dreamed she would explode and the police would just nod and say, “Yup. Yellow oil build-up.”

  But I could never figure out how to
set off the explosion. I watched the papers for months hoping to read about another yellow oil explosion, but never did.

  I even consented to sex one night that last year, thinking that might set her off. But the thought of her exploding had me so excited that she said I didn’t last long enough to even get her hot. Maybe that was why it didn’t work.

  Sadly, she never did explode, or even melt. The yellow oil didn’t kill her.

  I did that. I killed her with a curse from a book of Wizard curses I bought at a used bookstore downtown. A big brown book with a guy on the cover wearing a pointed hat and a star-covered robe.

  I wish the yellow oil had killed her instead, in a huge, messy wife-explosion. I wouldn’t have minded cleaning up the mess.

  After my now-dead wife would get her “extra large, extra butter,” she used to love the walk down the carpeted halls of the multiplex theater, past the posters of the other movies showing in all the other theaters. She would stop and point out every show she wanted to see, as if I really cared. The last few years I even stopped pretending I did care, but she kept right on pointing them out.

  Then, after the pointing-at-the-poster routine was done she would go into the theater and look around in the low light to find just the right, perfect seat. Finding the exact right seat was always treated as one of the most important events in life. I think a good seat meant more to her than Christmas or her mother’s birthday.

  Once she had found that perfect place, she always whispered to me that she hoped no one would sit in front of her.

  I always just nodded and she would settle in, happy, content, wide eyes focused on the blank screen ahead.

  On the times when someone did have the nerve to take the seat in front of her, she would make a rude, almost pig-like noise and make us move to new, perfect seats. Which, of course, again took time. And once settled she would again whisper to me that she hoped no one would sit in front of her.

  For a popular movie we moved a lot and usually ended up sitting down front. Then I would get a sore neck from looking straight up at the screen. I always felt I was looking up the actor’s nose. Nose hair can really distract from the plot of a movie.