This could have gone in any number of categories. On reflection, it being a love story, I think it belongs here, in Romance. I hope you enjoy it.
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Prudence slumped on her sofa. Lifting her eyes to her image in the large mirror on the wall opposite, she vaguely felt that she should be ashamed of her low mood. Her father had always stressed bravery to his daughters.
"Even if you aren't brave, kitten, pretend you are; nobody can tell the difference."
It was his favourite line.
She smiled at the memory of his love. Suddenly, tears erupted in a waterfall of self-pity. She so missed him! It'd been... how long?
She thought about that through her sniffles. It had eight been months since she'd found her dream job after graduation, across the continent from her family.
It was a great job, really. Well, it had been, before... OK, it paid well, even if the owner had Hands and HR no spine. It paid well, that was the thing. Enough for this rented condo, which she had to admit was nicer than anything she'd ever lived in, even if it was across the continent from her parents and sisters.
She hadn't seen her family-- really seen them -- since they'd dropped her off at the airport. They'd talked several times about a visit, but she'd postponed it again and again -- because overtime, right? To be sure, there'd been FaceTime and Zoom, but even those had ended when the power went off a week ago.
Towards the end, she'd tried to keep the worry and fright from her face when she talked to them. So had they. All of them had failed.
She got up, strode into the bathroom and, using but one square of toilet paper, carefully blew her nose. She ran some cold water -- at least that was still running! -- and splashed it on her face.
Outside came the distant wail of a siren, itself increasingly rare in the past few days. Pru wondered if that was due to less calls for help -- unlikely -- or perhaps police and fire trucks no longer had to worry about traffic now that everybody else was quarantined. Maybe there weren't even police cars and ambulances anymore?
There were soldiers, she knew that, onesent by the government to enforce the round-the-clock iron curfew. The armed figures in the streets were a last desperate attempt to stem the progress of yet another epidemic even now peeling the world.
Four days ago, she'd watched from her seventh-floor balcony as a burst of machine gun fire from a patrol vehicle had without apparent warning executed an elderly couple on the sidewalk. Appalled, she'd ducked low on her balcony as echoes of the gunfire died away, fearing that the soldiers would check for witnesses. Then it occurred to her that the everybody knew, that the shoot-on-sight curfew had been published on every news site she'd seen, announced on posters everywhere.
Below her on the street, the patrol had made no apparent attempt to identify the couple. The soldiers hadn't even gotten out of their vehicle; they'd just driven slowly off, leaving the bodies where they lay. An hour later, a city sanitation department garbage truck had arrived. Two men in biosuits had seized the corpses by their hands and feet and, after swinging them back and forth to build up momentum, heaved them into the hopper, That done, they'd sprayed something -- disinfectant, probably -- onto themselves and onto the ground where the old couple had fallen before getting back into the truck and driving off, leaving only a large dark spot on the sidewalk to mark the end of two more people.
Now nobody went out in the daytime. No matter how hungry you were, your only hope was that the official announcements about upcoming food deliveries would come true. They hadn't so far, but when the option was a summary public execution, most people had become very cautious indeed.
It was in one sense easier at night, but, even so, where would you go? The few shops she could see from her balcony were all either shuttered or else gutted by desperate looters before the soldiers arrived.
Pru put her shoulders back. Bravery. That was the thing. You didn't have to be a soldier or firefighter to be brave. And things could have been much worse. she knew. After the first of the global pandemics years before, she'd quietly built up a stock of supplies - long-lasting food, liquor, drugs, soap, sanitary needs. Most people had done that of course, although nobody would ever openly discuss it or admit to it.
The reports of the new disease had begun a month before. Unlike earlier epidemics, this one gave society no time to react; it seemed to have begun nowhere and everywhere all at once. Her laptop screen was suddenly filled with nothing but red circles scattered across world maps, accusatory acne on a planet yet again found unprepared.
Everybody had thought the governments would've learned, would've been ready, but nothing seemed to work as it should have. Public and private gatherings were banned, most businesses closed, travel forbidden. It had worked before, but not now and nobody knew why.
As country after country, city after city shut their doors, most people withdrew into the familiar routine of self-isolation. Some of course, the very foolish, the insane and the openly foredoomed, entered a frantic round of unrestricted hedonism --
let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!
It was far more than mere eating and drinking, of course. Pru had watched with wide eyes some of the scenes on increasingly candid news sites. Usually, the police arrived to break up such orgiastic gatherings, but it was generally a case of too little, too late.
She herself had never been formally laid off or sent home from her job. One afternoon, she had simply realized that she was the only person left in her office, that the entire floor was deserted. Puzzled, she'd tried to telephone her supervisor and then
her
supervisor. There had been no answers and she eventually had just tidied her desk and gone home. Having no keys, she'd left it all unlocked. Once outside the building, she'd stopped and watched as the big glass door slowly closed on her past, then turned and stepped off into her future.
A week later, she'd woke up to find the news sites she normally visited airing only music interspersed with official bulletins. Some alternative sites, blogs mainly, had still showed life around the world, until, one by one, streaming services and platforms had themselves simply gone dark.
She had taken to going for long walks in the daytime, always making sure to stay well away from others. It was on the last of these that she had seen a printed notice stapled to a pole, one announcing a full 24/7 curfew. Martial law was proclaimed as of midnight that day, a military governor appointed for her city and lethal force mandated for anyone found outside for any reason.
It took about six lines of print.
She had walked home very quickly after she'd read that. There had been a duplicate pasted to the front door of her apartment building. Shaking, she had avoided the elevator, walking the seven flights of stairs to her floor. Once inside her apartment, she'd stripped down, put her clothes in the washing machine and took a long, long shower. She hadn't been out of the apartment in almost two weeks now.
At first, she had occupied herself with social media, but those too had soon died. She had had a Kindle reader and, for some reason, movies and documentaries remained on the Net until the very end.
She'd been lying in bed, reading something inconsequential, when she realized how silent it was outside. Putting the reader down, she'd stopped in the bathroom to get a sip of water. When the light wouldn't go on, she'd flipped the switch up and down, faster and faster. She'd pulled open the refrigerator door, saw only darkness before closing it quickly to keep the cold in.
From the balcony, the city was had been dead quiet. No lights were to be seen. To her ears then had come a growing roar, voices rising in frustration and anger and -- above all -- fear. It had lasted a long time before gradually fading. Since then, the silence had been broken only by sirens, dogs barking - and gunshots.
Pru went outside, move a chair so that she could sit in the sun.
Her unconventional building and its duplicate across the way had been experiments, the rental agent had said. Perhaps, she thought, that's why people had shied away from it, making the rent affordable even for someone just entering the job market. The long-term lease even included furnishings. Perfect.
The balconies were all quite large but of curiously irregular shape. The condo board's literature claimed these were to provide and promote individuality. The ceiling or roof above each one angled up from normal ceiling level at the door to almost two stories at their edge, giving the tower an appearance like a column of monstrous ears. The clever design provided not only the impression of endless space, but good privacy as well. Unlike typical apartment balconies separated at best by a short privacy screen, here there was no way to see into another's space without actually climbing out over the iron railing and clambering around a wall.
