When they got outside the normally busy street was eerily quiet. Though there were several cars out on the road they weren’t moving. Some had their doors open and bodies of people hanging out of them. Others had locked their doors but to no avail, circular holes were visible in the sides of doors or on the windscreens. There was no sign of any living person.
After further moments of indecision and an almost overwhelming desire to go back up to her flat she eventually strode across to one of the cars with the body of a Middle Eastern man hanging out of it. With Lila’s help she pulled the body out and laid it on the floor in the middle of the road. The man looked so peaceful in his suit and tie that she felt a stab of jealousy that he no longer needed to worry about anything - in this life at least.
The car the man had been driving was a white Nissan jeep. The keys were in the ignition and after they had both got in she started the engine. The car immediate leapt forwards about three feet before stalling and coming to a rest.
“I think you need to put it into neutral Mistress.”
“Yes thank you Lila I realise that….now.”
Pressing down with one foot on the larger of the two pedals, which she assumed was the brake, she slid the gear lever into neutral and tried the ignition again. The car started and remained idling over this time without leaping forwards. She repeated her previous manoeuvre with the pedal and slid the gear lever forwards into drive as she’d seen Salem do the car began inching forwards slowly. She switched her foot away from the brake and on to the accelerator. Although there was an immediate jerk forward the car continued to move forward and began to pick up speed. She immediately took her foot off the accelerator and back on to the brake bringing the car to a screeching halt.
“Not as easy as it looks Lila if I’m honest”.
She gently put her foot back on to the accelerator and the car moved off again. She let the speedometer get up to 15 kph an hour before easing off the pedal slightly. They were away. She maintained this sedate pace for a while until she got used to the sensation of driving as opposed to being driven. When she felt slightly more comfortable she increased the speed marginally. Fortunately she knew the route to her parents’ house and so her main problem was having to weave in and around the stationary vehicles and the occasional body scattered across the road. She thanked God it was a Friday which in the Kingdom was the main day off for people. If this had been a working day the road would have been filled with far more cars and she probably wouldn’t have been able to drive down the road as she was doing. As they reached the edge of the urban area and just prior to entering the on ramp to the duel carriage way leading to the suburb where her mother lived a Pakistani man dressed in blue overalls suddenly ran out of one of the office building’s they were passing. Lila in the passenger seat screamed and she swerved almost rammed into a street light, clipping the kerb hard before pulling the car back on to the road. For a moment she thought about stopping but instead pushed her foot down on the accelerator and sped away. It wasn’t so much that she was afraid of the sight of another human than it was that she didn’t think she could take having to converse or assist someone else when it was all that she could do to keep herself and Lila from disintegrating into quivering wrecks. Though the man made an attempt to run after them he soon vanished from the rear view mirror. On the duel carriageway there was more evidence of vehicles being attacked by the metallic creatures. There were several mini pile ups that she had to negotiate her way round and on one occasion could only get past by scraping the side of the car up against the left hand crash barrier.
Now they were up on a more elevated roadway they had a better view of the city and there was evidence of other survivors. They spotted a woman in full abaya and hijab leading a small child out of a side entrance of a shopping mall and further on two men using sticks to smash open the doors of a branch of the Alinma bank. Why they were trying to get hold of paper money she wasn’t sure. Money was going to be worthless at the moment, it would be food and water that people needed and perhaps access to power to allow them to cook or operate the electrical devices they’d all become so reliant on.
A couple of kilometres from the turn off for her parents’ house they saw two vehicles coming the other way. Their paths were separated by the concrete barrier between the lanes and so she slowed down slightly. The first car was being driven by a Saudi man wearing a dish dash and sunglasses the second by an Indian in a blue checked shirt. The Saudi brought his vehicle to a stop and put his head out of the window to shout over to them.
“Salem alaik um. Are you ok ladies? Do you need any assistance?”
The words seemed to be stated in good faith but she didn’t feel like letting her guard down and so she didn’t stop completely as she let her window down.
“Peace be upon you sir. Though we are much confused about what has happened we are heading to our relatives in the suburbs. Blessings upon you for asking. I wish you well”.
At that the Saudi man nodded his head and waved sympathetically. “Blessings and fortune upon you ladies. Please make sure you are inside come sun set. I don’t think night-time will be a good time to be out on the road. Allah Allah uh Akbar”.
He then drove onwards and she drove off in the other direction. She raised her window again so that the air conditioning could continue to keep the interior of the car at an ambient temperature and thought about what the man had said.
“He’s right Lila I don’t think I’d like to be out at night in the City. Whatever we find at my mother’s house we might well be better off there than in the flat. Those of us who have survived are going to be shocked to start with but then despair will begin to set in and desperate people do desperate things. We’re going to need to keep our wits about us in the coming days.”
“I agree Mist…err Javeira we’ve probably made the right decision, I can see that a number of fires have started back in the City.”
She slowed the car and turned to look through the rear windscreen and saw several plumes of smoke rising from the cityscape that now lay back in the distance.
“God its beginning to look like it’s been bombed or something. I only hope whatever authority remains can keep some semblance of order.”
She turned back to the road and shortly afterwards pulled to the right on to the off ramp leading to the exclusive suburb built for the richest families in Jeddah.
As in the city itself there were several cars simply stopped in the centre of the main thoroughfare and bodies lying on the walkways. But when they drove down the small high street the only signs of bodies were bloody drag marks. It was then that she saw a group of people including several women gathered around a table outside a Starbucks. Though most were wearing their hijabs one of the younger women had dispensed with hers. She realised she recognised her from one of the parties held at her flat in the city. On impulse she stopped the car.
“Lila I know that woman, I’m going to go and talk with her but I’m going to leave the car running. Are you ok to stay in the car?”
“Of course Javeira. Please be careful.”
“I will”. She got out of the car and walked over to the group who had stopped to look at her with it has to said with some surprise. After all it wasn’t often they saw a woman get out of the driving seat of a car without her abaya on. She stopped about 20 paces from the group and called out.
“Salam alaikum. Peace be upon you all. Salamah it’s Javeira Al Bajubair do you remember me.”
The woman not wearing the hijab looked slightly startled to hear her name but then recognising Javeira made her way over to where she was standing.
“Javeira peace be upon you I’m glad to see you. Are you ok? Have you driven yourself from the city? What’s the situation like there? Is that Mani in the car with you?”
“Oh Salamah it is good to see you too, though I wish it were in different circumstances. No I’m afraid it isn’t Mani. It’s my maid Lila. Rahmaniah’s dead along with Salem and my husband Rashid.”
“I feel your pain Javeira. My immediate family are also all dead. Mama, Papa, Safia and Darius. Those creatures even killed our cat Ranique.” Salamah then also started crying and the two of them hugged each other in the middle of the hot dusty street.
“Come and sit with us Javeira we’re just deciding what we should do, you and your maid are welcome to join us.”
“Thank you so much for the offer Salamah it means a great deal to me and we may well do so later but first I need to go and check my mother’s house. I know it’s unlikely but I am hoping against hope that she has also survived.”
“Ok I understand well you know where we are. My house is just behind the shopping mall. Number 1128. My cousin Latif and I will be there later this evening. I can’t see us moving from there at least not for the next few days unless something changes. Did you see the police or the army in Jeddah? How are things there?”
“We saw some people Salamah but not many. Those we did see looked pretty desperate – two guys were trying to loot a bank and there are also several fires in the City. We didn’t see any sign of the police or army. I did get an emergency text message telling us to go to emergency shelters but I have no idea where these are located”.
“God have mercy Javeira I think the city is going to be a bad place to be at a time like this. At least here we can bury the bodies but in the city there will be too many. It won’t be long before they start to stink and the rats move in. You say you got a text message? I didn’t realise we had any emergency shelters; there’s certainly none near here. Knowing how our government works I wonder if they built a system to send the message but didn’t actually get round to building the shelters.”
“I agree Salamah. If there are shelters what are we going to find there anyway? More desperate and distraught people I guess. Listen I’m going to check out my parents’ house and then if it isn’t too dark we’ll come back this way. If not we’ll stay over in their house and then try to meet up with tomorrow ok?”
“Stay safe Javeira. Blessings and fortune of the prophet upon you.”
Chapter 19 – ANNETTE - January 2016
She’d been transfixed by the television for hours now, only leaving the comfort of her plush purple sofa to fix herself a sandwich and visit the bathroom. Though she wasn’t a great watcher of the news she’d been unable to drag herself away from the rolling coverage playing on all the major networks. Starting with rather shaky and grainy footage of a huge black structure on Antarctica the news had soon moved on to speculating about the thousands of silvery robotic crab like creatures seen swarming around the camera operator. Was this a previously undiscovered creature that had been living for millennium beneath the Antarctic ice crust now freed by man’s insatiable desire for resources? But before that question could be satisfactorily answered the news had switched to reports of a disaster of biblical proportions in the Middle East. Very little actual footage was available but those transmissions that had made it out of the region seemed to show identical looking silvery creatures appearing out of nowhere and swarming once again towards the camera operators before the footage cut out. More worrying than this all normal forms of communication with the major Saudi Arabian cities of Dhahran, Riyadh, Jeddah and Mecca had been severed - as they had with the city states of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The only form of contact that remained appeared to be a few webcams transmitting from the top of various skyscrapers. All of which seemed to show unusually quiet cityscapes broken here and there by what appeared to be fires burning out of control. No one seemed to know what had happened but an almost endless stream of pundits did their best to speculate on the cause and scale of the disaster and if and how it was linked to events in Antarctica.
After getting up to pour herself a large glass of wine, which she hoped would quell the nagging tendrils of concern beginning to emanate throughout her body, she came back to see the President giving an address to the nation from an unusually non-descript location. The fact that he wasn’t speaking from the Oval Office or outside the White House increased the tension in her stomach. The President didn’t really provide any additional information but asked that all Americans ‘remain calm’ at this time. He simply reported the facts that she’d already heard from the news networks, that he’d met with his security advisors and that they were following the situation closely using all the resources at their disposal.
As it was every time she saw him on the television she couldn’t help thinking of her old college boyfriend Graham who had been so passionate and driven. Little did she know he’d go on to become the leader of the free world. They’d kept in touch after college and he’d even been a guest at her wedding to Mike. Graham had only been a Senator then but she’d been pleased that he’d came. Mike hadn’t been so enthused, but then that was only natural given the nature of their previous relationship. After the wedding she and Mike had moved to Dallas and they’d lost contact other than the yearly exchange of Christmas cards. However when Graham had decided to run for President he’d turned up in person to chat to her about what that might mean in terms of press coverage etc. Initially he’d been somewhat formal with her and she with him but it hadn’t taken long for them to be chatting like old friends and the smile and hearty laughter she’d first fallen for all those years ago had returned with a vengeance. She’d assured him that should she be contacted she’d confirm that yes they’d dated in college but that any further questions other than perhaps a ‘yes of course I’ll be voting for him’ would be met with polite reticence. In the end only the local journalists had gotten in touch, the mainstream press choosing instead to focus on his relationship with an exotic dancer he’d dated some years after her and well before his own wife.
In a way she’d been glad that the press largely ignored her as, despite appearances, her own closet wasn’t quite as bare as it might have seemed. Her husband Mike had been a few years older than her when they married and though their marriage had been a happy one it was curtailed rather abruptly when he’d died in an auto accident. His sudden death had left her financially vulnerable. Though the life insurance was enough to cover their personal debts it had not been enough to pay off the mortgage, nowhere near, and the subsequent loss of income from the primary earner had meant she’d come close to losing the house.
To make ends meet she’d decided to supplement her secretarial income by renting rooms to Eastern European language students. Though this kept the wolves from the door her quality of life was nothing like it had been before. It was a year or so after starting to rent rooms that her ‘closet’ began to fill up.
As a precautionary measure she’d only ever let rooms to girls as she hadn’t felt comfortable about the thought of have strange men living in the same house. Of course she’d let the girls’ boyfriends stay over as long as this trust hadn’t been abused and this had generally worked well from everyone’s perspective. However one of the girls Erika, who she was quite friendly with, suddenly seemed to have a different boyfriend every week - and not only that but some of the other girls had begun complaining about the noise coming from Erika’s room. When she’d challenged Erika about this she come clean straight away and admitted she’d run out of money and that the only way she’d been able to pay the rent and continue her studies had been by meeting up with ‘acquaintances’ introduced to her by a ‘friend’. Of course these acquaintances were in a position to provide Erika with a fee for her attentions. Initially she had been too shocked to speak and had come within a whisker of chucking her out of the house but just as she’d been about to do so Erika had produced a wad of fifty dollar bills from her purse and suggested that maybe she could look the other way for a cut of her earnings. She’d stood up at that point to order Erika to pack and go but Erika had realised what was coming, burst into tears and begged her to let her stay. Of course she found herself relenting – after all what would happen to Erika? She’d
just end up in one of those dreadful brothels down by the theatre area and she wouldn’t wish that on anyone. In addition that morning she’d just received a rather large gas and electric bill and like Erika she wasn’t sure how she was going to pay this.
She’d told Erika she’d sleep on it. In fact she hadn’t actually slept much at all but in the morning she’d pulled Erika to one side and told her she could stay but that if she was going to do what she was doing there needed to be some ‘rules and regulations’. She’d also told her she wanted to meet her ‘friend’. A couple of days later she’d met with ‘Aleksandr’ in a coffee shop downtown. She’d been expecting a sleazy ‘gangster’ like figure with a leather jacket, paunch and greasy slicked back hair. Instead a 6 foot tall, smartly dressed man wearing cords, brown brogues, a crisp white shirt and a fashionable leather jacket (at least she’d got that right) had sat down opposite her. Initially she’d started by saying ‘I’m sorry I’m waiting for someone’ but he’d smiled and said in hardly accented English ‘I know. You’re waiting for me’.
Aleksandr had proved to be entirely charming and despite her reservations she found herself agreeing to act as Erika’s ‘house mother’ and thereby take a cut of her earnings. Aleksandr had also asked her whether any of the other girls might be interested in following in Erika’s footsteps. She’d hesitated at this and started to refuse but Alek told her that he personally vetted the clientele and at the rates he was charging the vast majority were ‘gentlemen of some means’ – many were in ‘stable relationships’ but were looking for ‘no strings liaisons’ outside of their marriage. Alek promised that if she didn’t like someone she only had to say and that would be the end of it. Though she declined to give an immediate answer she did agree to think about it, after all she knew at least one of the other girls was struggling to find enough money to pay her bills – maybe this was something she’d consider. And that was that. Within a year every girl in the house was supplementing their income with the occasional ‘visitor’. Of course some of the girls weren’t interested and over time they’d moved out and been replaced with more ‘enthusiastic’ tenants. She didn’t want to exploit the girls and so kept a strict house which meant no one was allowed more than 3 visitors a week. Even at this low turnover the money began to flood in and before long she was able to move out to an apartment in downtown Dallas. Within two years she’d paid off the mortgage of her original house and put down payments on another 9 other houses in the same suburb – all of which were rented out to ‘language students’. Erika had qualified from her course with top marks but rather than go back to her homeland had asked if she could stay on and work in the ‘business’. Though she no longer slept with clients Erika acted as a sort of defacto manager for the ten houses meaning that Annette as the ‘house madam’ could have as little or as much contact as she wanted with the business – most of the time she only got involved when something went wrong or there was a need to ‘exit’ one of the girls.
O-Negative: Extinction Page 26