When the Dust Fell

by Marshall Ross

Genres: Alien Contact; Dystopian; Time Travel

Synopsis

Sarah Long is looking for peace in a broken world. The fact that she helped break it, is only the start of her problems.



When Sarah Long gets the message that her sister is alive and needs rescuing, she packs a bag with survival gear, loads a coat with six kinds of weapons, and hopes her pregnancy won't slow her down.



It's been three years since the ancient, city-sized ship was discovered. And three years since it turned half the planet into deserts of black dust.



Sarah's treacherous journey will cross continents and an ocean, as well as the lines between Earther and Alien, friend and foe. The dangers, though, go beyond the brutal reality of the lawless world she travels.



For the last three years the mysterious ship has been Sarah's home. And she knows its powers.



And there are those who will do absolutely anything to get them.

Release date: August 2, 2022

Publisher: Permuted Press

Print pages: 240

Sample

1

The birds had flourished in the aftermath. Come morning, their commotion of song would enter her worried dreams and gradually build until the world and all its real frights rushed in.

Sarah pushed away the long coat that had been her blanket for the night and sat up in the musty back seat of the dead Buick. The windows of the abandoned car were caked with years of dirt and grime and the cabin was dark despite the dawn. She reached for the lamp stick in one of the coat’s many pockets and used it to check that nothing had tumbled out from the others while she’d slept. Satisfied the gear and weapons were all where they should be, she popped the old finger-pull lock on the left-rear door and slowly pushed it open, careful not to let the rusted hinges squeal too loudly.

The outside air was delicious compared to the rank confines of the old car. Crisp and clean. Sarah slipped on the long, heavy coat, slung the strap of her bag across her chest, and picked up the path she’d been on when she spotted the car the previous evening.

At night the shadows hid the wildness that had overtaken everything. With the dawn she was reminded again of just how exuberant the landscape had become without its tenders. The trees, bushes, grasses, and vines seemed ecstatic to have been left alone, free to sprawl over the walkways and roofs. Like everything else, they were determined to capture all they could. She walked alone, waiting for the sun to rise fully above the horizon and the air to warm. There were just six hundred miles left between her and Ohio. Five thousand more after that and she’d be back on ship with Trin.

If he’d forgive her.

The if was a new thing. It had entered her mind somewhere on the Atlantic after she’d lost sight of land and a panic rushed up in her as cold and sour as the ocean spray. Eventually, the panic had left. The if did not.

When she approached a narrow two-lane road heading west, she took the camera bot from a breast pocket and sent it flying ahead to scout. While the little machine surveyed, she remained in the tall grass and shrubs to wait and snack. But for the noise of the birds, it was quiet. No traffic, no voices on the breeze. She scanned the sky in all directions.

“No rain, I think,” she said aloud to no one.

It had been two days since Sarah and the French girl went their separate ways. Or maybe three. It was hard to keep perfect track of time, and hard to know why she was even attempting the trick in the first place. She and Gabi had not been close. There’d been language barriers at times, and other things in the way. It was, she had thought, a relationship of convenience. Of mutual safety. Except she and Gabi had shared something important, something Sarah hadn’t shared with anyone in a long time: a common birth planet.

Three years ago, Earth wouldn’t have been an address with any meaning. From where else could one be? But since the answer to that question had suddenly—and tragically—changed, a connection between two people as basic as each having been raised under the light of the same star, even if one called it the sun and the other le solei, was newly binding. It had made Gabi’s leaving painful in a way Sarah hadn’t expected.

They were always going to part ways. That was understood from the beginning. Once they’d made it to New York, to the Kingdom, they each had their own paths to follow. Gabi into the Kingdom proper, and Sarah to Ohio. To home. If it was still there. If truth be told, a part of Sarah had looked forward to the split. She hadn’t wanted a travel companion in the first place, and Gabi had been more liability than asset. She was weak, dangerously attractive to men, and she’d cut into Sarah’s dwindling food supplies. When they’d finally separated, Sarah thought her load would lighten. She’d be free once again to move at her own pace, make her own decisions about when to rest, when to eat, and where to sleep. She wouldn’t have to hide the truth. But if anything, the load had only gotten heavier. Gabi, by her absence, and in the sting of her parting words, had somehow joined the others. The ghosts that stalked Sarah’s dreams.

The bot returned and Sarah skimmed quickly through the projection. The road appeared empty. Safe enough at the moment. She left the shrubs and grasses of the neglected park and started down the pavement. The weight of the duster holstered in her coat shifted against her hip in time with her steps. She once hated its heft and the danger it conjured. Now in the way a favorite watch is missed when it isn’t worn, the heavy, alien gun had become part of her stride. Part of her. Somewhere along the way, certainly in Gabi’s eyes, and maybe even her own, she’d become something dangerous, something to fear.

Six hundred miles left between her and Ohio. Five thousand more after that and she’d be back on ship with Trin.

Unless by then there was simply too much to forgive.

2

How many words can be squeezed into ten seconds?

This had been the question swirling around his brain for days. Kino had been considering at least three different strategies he might employ in the dangerous game of words he knew he’d soon be playing. Tom Nader, the mayor, as he was known in New York, would insist upon it. Kino had seen this happen often enough to predict it with confidence, especially if the mayor had an axe to grind with someone. And in Kino’s case, the mayor most definitely had an axe to grind. Or two. The botched killing in Murray Hill and the unfortunate bedding of the wrong woman—both were dumbass moves worthy of a stubborn grudge. Even if the bedding was her idea.

Ostensibly, the ten-seconds game was an eccentric exercise in efficiency. A mind game that pitted the mayor’s skills of intimidation against a contestant’s skills of speedy persuasion. Convince him the meeting would be worth his limited and precious time and a few moments would be granted. Looking at this proposition with one eye squinted and the other closed, the game made perfect sense. The mayor was, in fact, a tremendously busy man. Holding his Scotch-taped kingdom together took all kinds of time. So sure, it was only right that getting his attention be a challenge. However, the real sense of the game didn’t show itself with the winners.

It was the losers who illuminated the game’s true purpose, because in their defeat, they shone a blood-red spotlight on the perverse proclivity that had established the mayor’s iron grip on power in the first place. He killed people. Often. Now, Kino knew all kinds of degenerates who could seemingly shoot without regret. But in the mayor, he saw an enthusiasm for murder that inspired Kino to wonder if it wasn’t a kind of oxygen for the mayor, an elemental need. The game, then, not only fulfilled the mayor in some twisted way it gave him one of history’s most proven tools for control. A daily body count.

Until now, Kino had only been a spectator to the game. To actually play the game himself would require something new from him: a plan. He used his walk downtown to run through his various strategies. No matter which way the game might go, Kino wanted his responses down cold. Of course, he knew that the words he’d ultimately speak would only carry him so far. The real trick to the game would be to keep his emotional footing under control, along with his bowels.

In this regard, Kino did have one tiny advantage upon which he had placed all his hope. He knew what he was walking into. This was the principal pro amidst the many cons of his endless mental machinations concerning his next step. Most contestants hadn’t seen the game coming. The game was sprung upon them by surprise, its rules hidden and seemingly random. Which, of course, they were. To the unsuspecting, there was no way to have practiced or prepared in the slightest. And in nearly every losing case, balance, or lack of it, had been the deciding factor.

The mayor had a unique gift for destabilizing things. People especially. His very presence brought out in people their weakest selves. Even seasoned killers seemed to rattle under the mayor’s gaze: one bright, piercing, blue eye, the other a light, milky green, and aimed slightly off from wherever the blue one was pointing. Although Kino had always addressed the blue eye, he worried it was the damaged green one that did the real seeing, that looked past the lies. Kino didn’t believe in superpowers, or in much of anything, but he believed the mayor had in him that certain something people of greatness sometimes have—a bewitching force that inspires in others a willingness to trade whatever shreds of goodness they might possess for nothing more than proximity. Mere charisma couldn’t explain it. In the mayor, there appeared to be more going on.

Kino had read once, Before, that nearly one-seventh of the world’s population was directly related to Genghis Khan. Apparently, once the great Khan had captured a village, he raped its mothers and daughters. Generations later, with the help of transoceanic trade and the bloody-footed migrations inspired by war and famine, the Khan’s DNA had spread across the world. Perhaps the mayor had received a bigger share than most. Whatever it was, it was a power that simply couldn’t be denied. Now, for better or for worse, Kino had decided to put himself squarely in the crosshairs of that power.

What options did he have, though? None. He had done the calculations ad nauseam, weighed the situation every which way possible, and there was simply no getting around it. See, he was on a list. The Mayor’s List.

The List wasn’t a kill list, not exactly. But it was close. Or maybe worse. It was exile. Three years After Correction, a documented shunning like The List brought with it a whole host of painful exclusions. For starters, the door to city hall was literally closed to him, cutting him off from the big-money work only the mayor could dole out, such as enforcement jobs or resource commandeering. Needless to say, even subcontracting for others still happily in the mayor’s good graces was impossible. Those with more mayoral largesse than they could personally handle wouldn’t dare risk helping a Lister, however proficient and expert he might be. There were too many clean guns available hoping for a shot at getting on the inside. Crossing the line of The List was the same as crossing the mayor himself, which was the same as suicide.

Working, and therefore eating and sleeping someplace where the rats left him in peace, hadn’t been easy. He’d had some temporary luck in hauling garbage, construction, and as a shovel master at the water filtration plant. That last job, scooping and hefting raw sewage, had been the worst of it. Still, all of it had been real work, the kind his body disliked in the extreme. When he had a bed at night, he would fall into it exhausted and sore, his hands cracked and bleeding. But it was the knock-down back to civilian status, and the myriad of daily humiliations and deprivations that came with it, that represented the true punishment of exile. On the inside he had access to all sorts of luxuries. Two-ply toilet paper, coffee, and most precious of all, a name.

On the inside Kino was someone because he was at least the mayor’s no one. Now, without the mayor, he was back to being an ordinary nothing. Even Before, New York City was a ballbuster. In the After-Correction world, New York was a slog on a whole different level.

He was on Lafayette and nearly as close to the old city hall building as Foley Square. He turned to face uptown. It was a bright day. Apart from the red and black colors of the Kingdom, which were draped almost everywhere, the city, aglow with full sun, looked almost normal. He shook his head in wonder. It was true, the Correction hadn’t reached as far as New York. But it might as well have. Without the energy of tourism and the splashy money of diplomatic work, without the commuters from Queens, Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut, the business trips from Europe, Asia, and Des Moines, all of which pushed the population of the tiny island to nearly four million on weekdays, the streets appeared abandoned. He had come to New York for the crowds. He had come for the scale. While the buildings were still there, for him, the city was gone. As gone as the others that truly did disappear. The sight of the emptiness only expanded the one in his soul.

Nevertheless, more than a million people still lived in Manhattan Kingdom, all trying to do everything they possibly could to scrape out something that seemed at least slightly connected to Before. Yet Kino wasn’t trying to find himself a little scrap of normal. He knew Before was gone. He just wanted to get off the damn list.

He turned back downtown and began his walk again. Once he was within a block of City Hall Park there’d be no turning back. Spotters who were once his friends would radio to security. After that, if he didn’t show up, they’d come find him. He had walked this way down Lafayette toward the old city hall building at least four times before. He had always turned back uptown before reaching the Perimeter. On those other walks, he had filled his head with scripts of apology. He had even trained himself to cry on demand. Literally begging, he had told himself on those previous trips, was not altogether over the top. He had done the plusses and minuses, the pros and cons, of all his potential appeals. In his heart, though, he had always known that forgiveness would never be a realistic delivery of his absolution. The List would never have its power if a person could simply weep his way off it, however debasing the tears.

This time he was coming with a gift. One he knew was worth crossing the Perimeter and playing the game to give. He just had to survive long enough to give it.

As he climbed the stone stairs of the old building toward the columned portico that protected the main entrance from the weather, he touched the pocket of the greasy coat that carried the phone. It was the hundredth time he’d checked the pocket that morning. Getting to the phone as quickly as possible in the game would be important. He ran through his lines again, this time out loud, searching for the right tone of voice—something between too cool and the actual desperation he felt.

Of the five sets of double doors, only the middle was in use. The others had been bricked over. The center doors, the working doors, had been clad with steel and outfitted with an intercom and several security cameras. He pressed the dirty intercom button. He heard the digital buzz on the other side of the door and then the whirr of the gears that redirected one of the nearby security cameras in his direction.

“You have got some very large-sized testicles,” a thick, educated, Mumbai accent crackled from the tinny speaker in the door.

“Good morning, Lonny,” he answered back as flatly as possible.

“Good morning? Fuck you. How’s that for a good morning?”

“About what I expected.”

“Glad I could be so accommodating. I feel my life is fulfilled. You can go now.”

“Listen. I have something.”

“You have something? Yes, my friend, I believe you do. You have a disease. A dreadful disease. And it has infected your mind. If you think you are in any way welcome here, you are delusional.”

“You think I’d risk crossing the Perimeter if what I have wasn’t something he’d want?”

“Who knows with you, Kino? You are not the sharpest knife in the block.”

“Drawer. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

“Exactly. And your continued harassment of my command of the idiomatic inanity of American English, even in bloody exile, is only proving my point. I would be as crazy as you to open these doors for a Lister.”

“I’m trying to do the right thing here, Lonny.”

“You and the right thing? Now, this is hilarious. Advice for an old friend: leave while the only holes on your head are the ones nature has given you.”

“Lonny, please. I need this.”

“I’m sorry, Kino,” he said in a tone that, to Kino, didn’t sound particularly regretful. “I cannot help you.”

“That’s your last word?”

The speaker was silent except for the soft, telltale hiss of a line still open. A sign that maybe the conversation wasn’t quite over.

“Okay, Lonny. I’ll take it to King George. Deeper pockets there anyway.”

He turned and headed back toward the long, stone stairs.

“You are wagering that we would let you off this island,” the speaker crackled.

Kino faced the doors, but remained where he was, closer to the stairs down than the doors in. He heard the gears of the camera refocusing the lens to its now more distant subject.

“If I walk down these stairs right now, we’re both betting, aren’t we? And I can get on and off this rock anytime I want.”

The hiss continued.

“Perhaps I should understand the quid pro quo,” Lonny finally answered. “It might help in my decision process.”

Kino looked around him before answering. He didn’t see any of the lookouts or security guns that might make a run for it impossible. “You let me in, old friend, and I’ll forget that you almost didn’t.”

“Asshole.”

Asshole was good. It wasn’t “fuck off” or even “goodbye.” “Asshole” was merely a statement of fact. So, even though the intercom had clicked off completely, its hiss gone abruptly silent, Kino pictured Lonny making his way from the monitor station to the doors, the three US silver dollars the doorkeeper always kept in his pocket jangling all the way. Sure enough, a minute later he heard the heavy bolt from the top lock shoot back into its metal cradle. Then the middle lock and, a beat later, the bottom. The door opened a few inches, enough for him to see the shapes of Lonny’s eyes and his bright, white smile emerge from the dark skin around them and the much darker gloom of the entranceway.

“He hasn’t shot anyone today, yet,” Lonny said with mock cheer as he swung the door open wide. “Please, come in.”

Kino stepped into the large, stone-clad entrance. It wasn’t much warmer than the outside temperature, and other than the soft light coming in from the rotunda, it was dark as hell.

“Running low on bulbs?” Kino asked as he surveyed the hall.

“Lights are for guests.”

Lonny slammed the door shut and shot the bolts back home one by one. When he was done, he turned to Kino. “Arms out.”

Kino spread his arms and the doorkeeper gave him a quick patting. He took the phone out of Kino’s jacket pocket, looked it over disinterestedly, and slid it back in place.

“You know the rules, Kino. Straight back, no detours. I am well aware of your sticky hands.”

“Fingers, Lonny. Sticky fingers.”

Lonny smiled slowly and hit Kino hard in the gut. It was a perfectly timed sucker punch and Kino doubled over, surprised by the blow and embarrassed to be surprised. Especially by Lonny, who’d see any screw up by Kino as a win.

“Jesus, Lonny!” he coughed.

“Old friend, why must you always prove my point?” Lonny gently grabbed Kino by the shoulders and got him standing straight again. “Enjoy the game. And please do not vomit on his carpets. They’re new.”

Kino slowly made his way through the large, unfurnished hall toward the rotunda and beyond it, to the mayor’s office. Before, the room was home to dozens of desks and their occupants doing city business. Now it was a heavily guarded buffer zone that shielded the mayor’s office from the street entrance. The city work attended to in this hall had died three years ago with the city itself. Now Kino was walking through the makeshift Court of Manhattan Kingdom, government seat to a semi-feudal city-state, one of hundreds that formed after the Correction set the clock of civilization back half a millennium.

He counted how many guns he could see as he walked. Eight, ten, twelve. He counted the number of computers. Zero. When he was a boy, he dreamed of flying cars. He got the Middle Ages instead.

For New York City, they had arrived via the Midtown Tunnel, in a caravan of Streets and Sanitation trucks stolen from the outer boroughs and jury-rigged with black-market RPGs. The two hundred trucks and the army they carried had required just three days to take city hall. It was crazy. So was the man in charge.

Tom Nader, lacking any real moral compass beyond one that pointed to his own desire for power, had been far more willing to kill in his quest for control than the depleted and exhausted NYPD had been in its mission to keep it. Nader was a man who knew an opportunity when he saw one. And, as far as Kino could tell, the mayor had never missed one since.

Actually, in the days right before Nader’s army swept into town, it didn’t take a shark’s nose to smell blood in the water. Everyone picked it up. Too much had already happened. The discovery of the ship, the Twenty-One-Hour War, and the cheap shots from Russia. Three big ones that left a radioactive hole in the middle of North America that couldn’t be crossed in either direction. It didn’t take long before the U in US stood for Unraveled. Russia’s nuclear scumbaggery was almost the least of the problems. The Correction had been the white-hot match to the soft, dry wood that undergirded the global order. Modern life and everything that had held it together went up too fast to even run for the buckets.

It was only a matter of time before a Tom Nader would come along.

After the smoke had cleared and the bodies were picked up, a kind of resignation had set in. If the National Guard had been too leaderless to help, if the Congress and the Cabinet had all locked themselves behind the doors of their summer homes, if even the military had left its post and torched its own vast armory to keep its contents from joining the coming chaos, then someone had to establish order. Sure, Tom Nader was a sociopath, but he made sure the power was on in most places, made sure the water ran, and made sure enough people could eat.

His only price? Total control. “Deal,” said the desperate residents of Manhattan. For most of human history it had been kings, emperors, and queens. He was simply one more. Hours after the last of the police had given up, the tunnels and bridges in and out of the city were transformed into armed border crossings. Nothing and nobody went in or out without knowing the right people, blowing the right people, or paying the right people. Manhattan had become an island in every sense of the word. Still, given all that had happened, it wasn’t the worst that could’ve occurred. If a person tried hard enough, he could still find booze.

Kino touched his pocket again, making sure the phone hadn’t fallen out when Lonny’s welcome punch bent him in half. The door to the mayor’s office couldn’t be missed. It was at the end of the main hall, surrounded by four men and four machine guns.

“Gents,” Kino said casually as he approached.

“Kino,” said the biggest. “Long time.”

“Maybe not long enough,” he replied straight faced.

They laughed, and Kino pushed through the doors.

The mayor’s office was much as he remembered: palatial, with a soaring barrel-vaulted ceiling and a tall dentil-notched mahogany crown between it and the paneled walls. Ornate carpets covered the parquet floors. Nader’s staff was scattered about the room. Two guards were standing along the back wall behind the desk facing the door. On the big leather sofa were two women who looked to be around Kino’s age, mid-thirties, both Asian, both beautiful. In a large chair next to the desk slouched a long-legged man with gray hair and a tired face. Kino didn’t recognize any of them.

Nader himself was perched on the leading edge of the seven-foot-long desk, his signature mirror-finished Smith & Wesson 686 in his left hand. He wore what would have been a six-thousand-dollar suit Before. A blue chalk-stripe, two-button. His dark brown shoes were polished. He was trim and well groomed, slightly tanned, and looking not a day older since Kino had last seen him. Was he fifty? Sixty? Kino had never known. It had never mattered.

The most important things to know about Nader were that his patience was nonexistent, his temper misleadingly controlled, and his shot never missed. It always hit its target precisely between the eyes, exactly centered. Dead center, Nader called it. Also, Nader was smart. Perhaps the smartest person Kino had ever known. Smarter, he knew, than any of the other kings. The plus that was also a minus. But the matter of The List outweighed all cons, which was why Kino had risked standing on the mayor’s new carpets, waiting for Nader to start the game. ...