Grants Pass Read Free Page A

aberrations, the effects of global warming. The
hurricanes, the droughts. The earth gone crazy. But then the plagues came, the
Black Death, the hemorrhagic fever. And then the super flu. Rob told us that it
was the end of days, thrusting a moldy New Age tome in our faces. We laughed at
him, of course.
    We stopped laughing when the plagues
hit New York.
    This is my city, for all that I was
born on the other side of the country. I came here ten years ago, drawn by
Broadway, the television shows and movies. I was going to be a model, an
actress, a star.
    I think you can guess where I ended
up, even if you can’t see my thigh-high boots and miniskirts.
    I’m not ashamed of it. I made good
money, sharing an apartment in a good building with another one of Rob’s girls,
Renee. Life was easy.
    I was working the night it started
here. A Japanese businessman. He’d been a customer of Renee’s, but she had
called in sick. I’d been happy to step in for her, borrowing one of her Versace
gowns for the night.
    The dress had been discarded on the
floor, the champagne popped when he started to cough. This deep, rasping cough
that went on and on until he was coughing ropey strands of mucus and blood.
    It was at this point that I blanked
out. It’s something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. When I’m with a
particularly repulsive client, my brain just switches off, and I go through the
motions on autopilot.
    When I came back to myself it was to
find the bed littered with the pillaged remains of the mini-bar. Even the
chocolate bars had fallen prey, and a crumpled cigarette packet was on the
nightstand, for all that I had given up years ago.
    It seems so insane now that I
thought that renewed habit was the worst of my problems.
    I returned home to find Renee gone,
and Rob seated in the living room. I had blanked out again on the trip, but
found myself unlocking the door with a bottle of bourbon and carton of
cigarettes under one arm.
    Rob fixed me with bleary eyes as I
entered. “Renee’s dead,” he said, his voice flat.
    I dropped the bottle of bourbon, the
cigarettes following to splash into the puddle. “What?”
    He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “It
was the flu. Just the flu,” he said. “But, at the hospital, there were people
everywhere. With the flu. Dying from the flu. There were bodies in the
corridor, on the lawn out front.”
    I pulled the cigarettes from the
bourbon puddle. “People don’t die from the flu.”
    He strode across the room and seized
my arms. “They do from this flu,” he said, his eyes wild. “People are dying.
There are corpses out in the street. They’re dying of the flu.” His fingers
tightened on me hard enough to bruise. “The goddamn flu.”
    He began to cough.
    That’s when I tuned out again. I
don’t know how much time passed in that fugue state, but I know that when I
came back to myself again, Rob was dead. It must have been days. He lay on
Renee’s bed, fetid fluids staining the silk coverlet. His eyes were still open,
bloodshot and staring.
    That’s when I got really scared. I
ran from the apartment to the elevators, and punched the button hard enough to
crack the plastic face. The first doors to open revealed a group of elderly
people clustered on the floor of the cab, all dead. A rat was gnawing leisurely
on the neck of the closest woman, whiskers beaded with blood.
    My stomach heaved, but nothing came
up but thin, acrid bile that tasted of ash. Thankfully, the next elevator was
empty.
    The electricity flickered halfway to
the street, bringing the elevator to a screeching halt. It swayed from side to
side in the shaft, metal clanging on metal like the ringing of a church bell.
After a long moment it started again, shuddering its way down.
    The lobby of the building was empty,
but someone had covered the walls with hundreds of pages of paper. When I moved
closer, I saw that each page was identical. As I took one down, the electricity
flickered again, the hole I had