Red Masque

[lusciously]

Lucy would never forget her 20th birthday. May 25th, 2012. That was the day that the power finally went out for good. They had been having a party, and she was wrecked on whichever pills they had been washing down with Daniel's 50 year old champagne. Blackouts had become pretty common by then, and they lit candles and went on with the party while the techs tried to sort out the generators. Then she had been kissing someone, and stumbled out to the beach with his arms around her. Then she blacked out too. That had become pretty common too, since the end of the world.

Daniel had said the end had been the water wars, but Marco insisted it was the food riots. Jasper picked the day the market closed. Everyone could agree that when the sickness started spreading, the world was pretty much over, but they were young and they had been rich when money still meant anything. Terrance got the idea from a story, and they had slipped away to the walled estate, with food and water and drugs and liquor. Until the TV stopped broadcasting, they watched the disease wipe out millions, and saw the few survivors who were grotesquely scarred with odd growths. They took bets on the numbers who would die when the quarantine around Manhattan was broken, but then the news broadcasts stopped.

When Lucy woke on May 26th, wretched and face down in the sand with her silk dress bunched up around her waist, she didn't know what had happened. She only knew that she felt awful. Daniel was lying in the sand a few yards away, but he was a monster when he was hungover, so she left him alone. She found her panties hanging in a bush and limped up the hill to the house with her shoes in her hand. It was cool in the house, and dark, and she didn't notice that Jasper was dead until she tried to wake him up to see whether there was enough hot water for a shower. His throat had been cut, but in the shadowy room, the dried blood had hardly shown against his dark skin.

She screamed, and for a moment, that was all there was. Then there was a laugh, and she saw Lauren, limping towards her with a horribly swollen knee and a fireplace poker in her hand. Blood poured from a hole in her shoulder.

"What are you doing?" Lucy screamed, seeing the murderous intent in Lauren's eyes.

"There's too many of us," Lauren said. "Not enough water."

Lucy backed away slowly, unable to believe what she was seeing. Lauren swung the poker behind her like a baseball bat, and Lucy would have died there if she hadn't tripped over Kirsten's corpse. The weapon cut the air with a whoosh and she fell back on her ass. Her foot stabbed out, protectively as Lauren loomed over her, and hit the swollen knee. Lauren collapsed, howling with pain, and Lucy ran.

She didn't have a plan, exactly, but when she saw the other bodies in the front yard, with their horrible lumps and scars, she knew their compound had been breached. The sick creatures had found them and come over the walls when the electric fencing had gone down. There was no place safe anymore, and she realized that for her, the end of the world would always be her 20th birthday.

She was too weak to run far, but she made it out the gate and down the road. There had been a small town here, but nothing was left but the shells of burned out buildings, and the dead. She put her shoes on, giggling at the idea of wearing high heels in what was clearly a ghost town, but her bare feet were raw from running on the scarred pavement.

 

[TellMeAStoryGuy]

Deleted. Accidentally posted in wrong thread.

 

[LeBasqueBarber]

Muscle, bone and blood gathered together in protest. The man surrendered his grip, dropped to his heels and planted hands to knees, raising up only to glance at the clock: 7:11am. The Flower Duet from Lakmé was building to a final climax. Two sopranos and a swig of well-water eased the after-burn of the chin-ups. He jotted down "19" in a notebook log and reached for the floor and a final set of push-ups. The gymnasium gleamed, clean, bright and modern, as did the entire shelter. Every room had been cleverly thought out; each designed to serve its purpose efficiently and reliably.

He had built and stocked four others south to the Keys, one near Battery Park and this one at the shore. Hidden in plain view, these compounds were an obsession for him since boyhood. An adolescent fascination with the sciences and his study of human survival through war and plague, famine and disaster had sealed his fate.

In one of the earliest notebooks, he had carefully rendered the plans for the shelter. Each drawing was captioned and notated in grade school penmanship: kitchen, library, lab, triage and surgery, power plant, water treatment, fuel storage, root cellar, shop and garage, laundry, bathroom, guest room, master bedroom, music room, armory, warehouse, roof gardens, solar field, cistern.

By his 20th birthday, he had accumulated enough liquid capital to satisfy the pro forma for the Montauk site. His computer models for mathematical analysis of politics, finance, industrial infrastructure, weather cycles, shipping routes, international commerce and endemic disease had paid off. He'd played global markets, currencies and indices with tremendous success... and was only beginning to find his groove.

Now, nearly 23 years later, the wealth, the knowledge and the systems he had built, measured and managed, were symbolized by a secret hole in the ground.

Lakmé and Mallika bowed into a river of reeds. The man groaned and pressed his last, setting his knees to the floor. "Never," he thought, "was there a more sublime expression of beauty in language." He hit repeat and listened while he toweled the sweat from his arms and chest.

"Dôme épais le jasmin... Sous le dôme épais où le blanc jasmin... À la rose s'assemble, À la rose s'assemble..."

The man envisioned the Brahmin's precious princess and her servant picking flowers at the river's edge... intoxicated by the scent of morning jasmine and rosebuds. As the girls sung of flowing together in the current, he found he was becoming aroused. He imagined himself emerging from the water. Naked, spying the maidens through the rushes.

Warm currents drifted to his center. He ran his left hand across the crotch of his sweat pants. A tone rang from the tablet indicating 7:15. There was much to do today and a goddamn opera was not going to drop him in his tracks. He replaced the sopranos with some horn and drum blasting salsa in order to trigger productivity.


"... Gaviota que vuela libre... Libre... por el mar..."


The man had forecast an ultimate failure of the public power grid for May 21st. The fits and spurts that had interrupted the blackouts over the last three days came as a surprise. The grid had been down now for nearly seven hours. He fully expected, from this point forward, he would be 100% reliant on his internal systems.

He grabbed the tablet--which was set to monitor six outside surveillance cameras and made way to the kitchen. He hand-cranked a blender to liquefy a mix of dried fruit, almonds and protein powder with well-water.

Taking his breakfast and the tablet to the bath, he showered; four minutes at 40 degrees Celsius. Before grabbing a towel, he studied himself in the mirror, framed by an arch of mist. He was tall and lean, wide shouldered and narrow at the waist. A long-standing discipline of diet and exercise created an athletic build rare for a man of his age. Good genes had blessed him with a full head of dark brown hair, which he kept closely cropped. He stared into his own eyes, olive green and deep-set under ample brows, then looked away. Who was he to become? To hell with the obsessive folly that carried him to this day. Planning for every detail of sustenance, he had not been ignorant of the torments of isolation. He'd read the personal accounts of Solzhenitsyn and Mandela, the countless journals of men locked away with nothing but their thoughts. He faced himself again, promising to enlist every resource to guard against madness. After his plans for companionship had been so cruelly destroyed, he wondered if the loneliness or the heartbreak would vanquish him ahead of the menace growing above ground.

The irony, of course, is that he had been such a loner in the years before the virus. He mistrusted men in general. He found most to be cloddish and weak, fixated on trivial matters, keen to manipulate and control conversations. He preferred the company of women. He delighted in their complexity and was fixated on their nature and physiology. His sexuality drove him into an obsessive examination of the female mind and body. For all the perfection he carefully crafted, every detail he massaged to suit a greater purpose, and despite the discipline that drove him to excel, he had struggled with what he considered a vain and perverse weakness... His desire to completely control a woman for his pleasure and for her own.

Dasha had understood her role. She teased him and played his games. She trusted him never to harm her. She counted on his attentiveness, tenderness, strength and perversity to create delicious moments of joy. She shared his appreciation for beautiful things. She matched wits with him and had a gift for making such a serious man laugh out loud. His predictions intrigued her--and more often than not--frightened her. He had been right about Tōhuko and Sichuan, the oil in the gulf and the failure of the Mississippi deltas. His preoccupation with the West African meningitis outbreak and the early stages of the 2009 flu pandemic led him to reveal the Battery Park shelter to her. This was two days before military oversight was implemented at reservoirs and water treatment plants on the Eastern seaboard.

As always, Dasha was astonished by his attention to detail. He had outfitted her closet and bath with a wardrobe, grooming supplies and comforts that mimicked those she enjoyed in her own apartment. He took her through the warehouse. She mused at the two large cases of tampons, "Jesus, that should last me right up to menopause."

He didn't laugh. Instead, he took her hand, "I need to know you will be with me... to stay with me... when the time comes."

The man found himself at the mirror, re-imagining Dasha's death. He shuddered and buried his face in a towel. After a spell, he dried himself and reached for the tablet.

Camera six caught his attention. There was the figure of a woman in some sort of party dress. He expanded six to a full screen view. She was staggering in high heels. Most likely she was one of the college-aged revelers who'd sought refuge at the Charmion beach house. She seemed in a panic... and then he spotted it, a mob of the infected entered the frame. They were easily gaining on her. He estimated the mob and the girl were no more than 70 meters apart.

For weeks now, the man had been regularly breaching his own protocols. While he had avoided harm, the odds proved his recklessness would surely lead to a catastrophe. He looked again at six. The mob was closing the distance. The woman's anguish was clear as she froze in place. He pictured Dasha's face again; her anguish and his powerlessness...

He grabbed his sweatpants from the countertop, racing to the armory and the southern egress.