The Hot Chick & Other Weird Tales

by Charles Christian

  ‘And then the plague struck. I begged her to come stay with me here, but she refused, so each Monday I would cycle around the headland and into the old part of the town to visit her. That Monday was just like any other Monday. We talked, we drank, we ate, we laughed, we made love. But, the following morning I awoke to find her lying cold and dead, next to me in our bed.’

  Olivier paused, swallowed hard and then continued. ‘I dressed her in her finest clothes - there was a Versace dress she loved - brushed her hair, reapplied her eyeshadow, mascara and lipstick and laid her out on the bed as best I could. Then I emptied her wardrobe of all her clothes. There was more Versace, some Valentino, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and Chanel. I told you she was high maintenance.

  I piled the clothes up around her body and then I set fire to her bed. I watched the blaze consume the room for as long as I could bear the flames, before getting out into the street.

  ‘I watched the fire take hold of the building from the far end of the Place Masséna, right down by the Fountain of the Sun. Of course there were no pompiers to extinguish the blaze, so I stayed there until the roof of the apartment block fell in and the fire burned itself out. Then I walked home.’

  There was a total silence in the bar. I knew the story had been for my benefit and I suspect many people had already heard the story before, but nobody felt they could interrupt or intervene.

  ‘That was three months ago,’ said Olivier, ‘and there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about Françoise-Hélène and whether I should have lain with her on her funeral pyre.’

  Finally, after what seemed an age, Solange spoke. ‘What I miss most are the trains. Before all this happened there were maybe seven or eight trains an hour running into this station. From Marseilles, Cannes and Nice in the west, and Monaco, Menton and Italy in the east. Each train would bring people. Old friends and neighbours returning, new faces coming here for the first time. And now, rien, nothing.’

  She looked wistfully along the promenade towards the steep flight of steps that wound down to the beach from the station, perched on the embankment immediately above the café. There were no tourists travelling by train into Villefranche station today. I doubted there ever would be, ever again.

  We were sitting in the café one day drinking, there was no shortage of wine in this post-apocalyptic world of ours, when one of the regulars caught me glancing at my phone, checking for messages.

  ‘What have you there, then?’ asked a drinker at another table. ‘You know nobody is sending out emails anymore.’

  I glanced around to see who it was. It was Boy Zabreski. His name was Antonio, but he’d answered to ‘Boy’ since his school days. Originally because he was the heir to the Zabreski domestic appliances empire, though now it had taken on a more ironic tone.

  ‘A fat lot of good my inheritance is now,’ he’d said during one of our previous conversations. ‘Did you know the Zabreski company spent the last three years working on a radical, new design for domestic dishwashers. One that used less electricity, less water and pumped less waste into the drains. At this very moment there are tens of thousands of them stored in depots all across Europe. And do you know when we were going to launch this green machine that would save the world? This summer, that’s when. Talk about bad timing. A perfect end to my brilliant career.’

  Boy was now a frequent visitor to the bar as his family’s villa, complete with its own jetty, boathouse and moorings, lay just a short distance across the bay. This particular day he’d rowed across in a skiff and clearly decided to have some fun at the expense of the twitchy English journalist, who still couldn’t shake the habit of a lifetime of forever checking his phone for messages.

  Then, to our mutual surprise, when I glanced back down at my phone, I saw I had received some new messages.

  ‘Un-be-lieve-able,’ I heard myself saying. ‘It’s all bloody spam. I can’t believe there are still people in Nigeria with nothing better to do today than send out emails phishing for my bank account details. And would I like some cheap Viagra or a penis extension? I don’t think so. What else is there? A travel agency in Lille can offer me a reduced rate rental on a luxury villa on the French Riviera.’ I heard Boy and Olivier, who was leaning over the counter, laugh.

  ‘Wow,’ I continued. ‘This is a real message, sent by a public relations consultant in London just five days ago. He says a conference due to take place next month has been temporarily postponed. I like his optimistic use of the word temporary. But he hopes to reschedule the event and will let me have the revised dates when they are available.’

  ‘Deluded, more like,’ suggested Boy Zabreski.

  ‘And that’s it. No more messages and I don’t know why I received those. There must be some power grids that intermittently trip into life and, when they do, any systems connected to them also come back online.’

  ‘Wait a second,’ said Olivier, as I was putting my phone back into my shirt pocket. ‘I just saw a flash, you must have another message.’

  I checked, he was right. I clicked open the message. ‘Sorry, we lucked out. More spam. This time it’s from a Russian mail-order bride.’

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ said Boy, so I let him and Olivier read the message.

  Hello!!! How are you? Thanks for your letter!!! Well, let’s begin our email acquaintance?!!! As you already know, mine name is Tasha. It not my true name, it’s my nickname on the internet. My real name is Tatyana but I love more when people call me Tasha.

  I want that you sent me also some photos of you. Agree? What it is more interesting to communicate and receive a photo? It will be remarkable to have your photo on my computer and to look at you more often. I will wait it. It is a pity but I really have few photos on my computer. I will send some photos with this letter. Inform me what you think about them. Do not hesitate because I love compliments!!!

  I will tell to you not much about me. Mine name is Tasha. I go in for sports at leisure because it is my second work. Certainly, I love sports and am a very sports person. In my free time I like to walk in park. For me the season and weather is not important. I think this very good and useful to health. Sometimes it is necessary to have a break from dirty city air and to leave on the nature! Sometimes, when it turns out nice I happen on picnics with my girlfriends on the nature.

  I love animals. Especially I love cats and dogs. I have three dogs which live at my summer residence. In cold time they live at my place. You love cats? Right now on my knees sits my cat Tomis who also helps me to write you this letter:))

  I can assure you that I wish to learn you better! It will be good if you tell to me more about your hobby? You like to read books? You prefer what literature? I love detectives and books about psychology.

  Well, I think that I will stop writing this letter. I think next time I will tell to you more about my family and why I search for relationships on the internet! I hope it will be interesting for you to learn it? If it is interesting then I will tell it to you.

  Mine name is Tasha. I wish you a good and sated day!

  By now Monique, Brigitte and Solange had also joined us. ‘What does she look like?’ one of them asked. I clicked open the JPEG file attachment to display her photograph.

  ‘Ah, she looks nice,’ said Solange.

  ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ replied Boy. ‘That’s probably a library picture of some fashion model. I bet if you met Tasha in real life she’d either be some smelly, old babushka with excess facial hair, else a hard-faced bleach-bottle blonde in a cheap leather blouson jacket and tight stonewashed denim jeans. And she’d probably bring along her three brothers who were thrown out of the Russian Spetsnaz special forces for being too brutal’

  ‘There again, she might be genuine,’ said Olivier. ‘I think she’s sweet and if Alexis has enough battery life left in his phone, I vote we invite her down here.’

  I nearly choked on my drink and I could see Monique roll her eyes. But, who were we to argue with le patron, so we composed a
reply that, though I say it myself, was pretty irresistible.

  I emphasised the fact Olivier was the proprietor of one of the best cafés in the Villefranche/Cap Ferrat area, which was true in the sense that Olivier was the proprietor of one of the only cafés still open in the Villefranche/Cap Ferrat area. I talked about the fleet of luxury cars Olivier had at his disposal. Also true, except if the cars’ original owners hadn’t been considerate enough to leave the keys in the ignition, the only way Olivier would ever be able to start them was by hot-wiring them. And then I pressed the email command, privately convinced that would be the last we’d ever hear or see of Tasha.

  At night we’d hear them racing their freshly liberated Porsche Cayennes, Mercs, BMWs and Bentley Continentals along the corniches - the coast roads - that straddle the hills and cliff-sides between Nice and Monte Carlo.

  At night we’d see the flames from their burning wrecks lighting up the sky, as they careered into each other or else ran off the roads and down the sheer rock faces. Philippe confirmed what we all suspected, that many of these crashes were deliberate.

  ‘I can’t stand the lack of originality.’ I turned round to see who was speaking. It was one of the entourage who normally hung out with Tina Turner, Mike something-or-other, a record producer who’d been stranded here when all the dying started. ‘I mean, this is straight out of that Gregory Peck/Ava Gardner movie On the Beach. Remember the road race the Fred Astaire character organised?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘but you’re hardly in a position to complain, holed up with Tina Turner. I seem to recall she once had a role in a movie called Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome about life in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world. And now here she is living in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world. Next thing you know, she’ll be in here singing “We Don’t Need Another Hero”.’

  Mike laughed. ‘I know. There again, what’s civilisation got to do with it, it’s just a second-hand emotion.’

  A couple of days after this conversation, I entered the café to find Philippe and a grim-faced Edouard giving the last rites to a bottle of cognac. The previous evening’s death races had witnessed a major pile-up on the Moyenne Corniche, at the mouth of the Col de Villefranche tunnel, and the two of them had been up there since first light attending to the survivors.

  ‘All we could offer them was battlefield triage,’ said Edouard, not looking up from his drink. ‘We patched up the walking-wounded with a first-aid kit and left them to find their own way home. Those who were fatally wounded, I sent on their way to the next world with a shot of your morphine. As for the others, those who were seriously injured and requiring immediate surgery, Philippe put them out of their misery with a shot of lead bullet through the temple.’

  He paused and then looked at me. ‘What else could we do? There are no operating theatres or hospitals still functioning round here. And I’m not a surgeon. My speciality is, or was, psychiatry. I dealt with the neuroses of the rich and famous. And now the whole world’s gone mad.’

  There were still plenty of fish, in fact the entire animal kingdom was thriving, it was only us humans who were dying off, so one evening I went fishing with Edouard and Boy Zabreski. We’d done this before, heading out into the deeper waters of the bay in one of the many abandoned motor cruisers at our disposal, but this evening was unseasonably cool so we quickly adjourned to the comfort of the cabin.

  After a bottle of wine, or two, the conversation turned - as it inevitably always did - to the subject of death. Why had the human race been dealt the Ace of Spades?

  ‘Lex,’ asked Edouard, ‘you’re a journalist. You must have been following this story when it first began. Have you any suggestions?’

  ‘True,’ I replied. ‘Of course I was interested. This is arguably the greatest mystery of all time, so like everyone else I was looking for answers. And, before we had the great communications failure, I’d been discussing an interesting theory with a couple of scientists based out at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the States.

  ‘Their big idea,’ I continued, ‘picked up on the fact that throughout history there have been civilizations with cyclical creation myths. You know, that the world we are living in will be destroyed in some cosmic cataclysm, but then everything will start over again. The best known of these is the Mayan End of Times prophecy, which gives a calendar date for when we run out of time and the world ends. But the Vikings had a similar belief that they called Ragnarok. Many Christians believe in an End of Days that will be followed by the Resurrection. And, if you want me to bore you rigid, I can rattle off a dozen more cultures with similar beliefs. The point is, it is a global belief.

  ‘So, these scientists told me, what if there were some factual basis for these beliefs? Some kind of race memory? I mean the Mayans thought we were coming to the end of our fifth cycle. If you read the Bible Old Testament, the Great Flood of Noah and his Ark sure sounds like another end-of-world cataclysm.’

  I could see I had Edouard and Boy intrigued, so I continued. ‘If you go into the realms of palaeontology, you will find there are also these mass extinction events.’

  ‘Like the KT event - the Cretaceous Tertiary extinction event - 65 million years ago,’ said Edouard, ‘which wiped out all the dinosaurs.’

  ‘Precisely. But palaeontologists reckon there have been at least five mass extinction events during the course of Earth’s history,’ I continued. ‘Including one at the end of the Permian period 250 million years ago that almost obliterated all life-forms. That one is called the Great Dying as it saw off 96% of all marine species and 70% of land species, including animals and plants.

  ‘The problem has always been trying to find a convincing smoking gun to blame these deaths on. As you know, currently the favourite explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs is a massive asteroid or meteor impact in the Gulf of Mexico. But there are problems with the timing. A meteor wouldn’t have helped, but the MIT scientists reckoned these mass extinctions could have been genetic. What if there was some kind of cosmic clock gene ticking away inside of all living creatures? Then, after a certain point a species comes to the end of its evolutionary time-scale and just dies out? Perhaps that is mankind’s fate, our sands of time are just running out?’

  ‘Built-in redundancy, you mean? Damn,’ said Boy. ‘And to think I gave up smoking on the advice of my doctor because he said I’d live longer. And, I should hasten to add, on behalf of the defunct Zabreski Domestic Appliance Industries, that we have never factored built-in redundancy into any of our product lines.’ We all laughed.

  ‘OK,’ said Edouard, ‘good theory, but why now? And who set the time limit? God? Evolution? Maybe even Gaia, if you accept the hypothesis that the planet Earth is one big, complex, interactive system?’

  ‘Or aliens,’ said Boy. ‘There are plenty of myths and conspiracy theories to suggest mankind’s evolution was engineered by external, extraterrestrial forces.’

  ‘Oh, Mister Zabreski,’ said Edouard with a sigh, ‘you really mustn’t believe everything you see on the Discovery Channel.’

  ‘Maybe we are like computers,’ I said. ‘You remember the Y2K millennium computer bug? That was all about double-digit date formats. You know, ‘99’ means ‘1999’ but when you get to ‘00’ does that mean ‘1900’ or the years ‘2000’? And in the case of a lot of computers, the answer was ‘don’t know’ and a system crash. Well, there’s a similar problem with the UNIX operating system, which is expected to strike in 2038 although as we’ll all be dead by then, it’s not something to worry about nor need keep us awake at night.

  ‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘the problem is UNIX systems store date and time as the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight 00:00 on the 1st January 1970. And, because the time count is stored as a 32-bit integer. That’s 2 to the power of 31 - stay with me guys, I can see your eyes are glazing over - the largest number of seconds that can be handled is 2,147,483,647. This point will be reached during the early morning of 19th
January 2038, after which the counters will flip back to zero and commence a new 68-year cycle.

  ‘Now I lost touch with the MIT guys before I could start going into the details, but they had taken this analogy and were looking at it as a generational thing. If you include our smarter monkey ancestors, mankind has been kicking around for three million years. That’s about 100,000 generations. Maybe that’s our quota? We are the final generation and our evolutionary clock is just about to flip back to Year Zero?’

  ‘I’m liking this computer analogy,’ said Boy. ‘It also helps explain why the deaths we are seeing are so random. If it was purely an age thing, then you’d expect to see us dying off in strict chronological order, with the oldest first and the youngest the last to go? Instead, there’s no clear pattern. Young, old and those of us somewhere in between, we’re all dying.

  ‘But that is also so like Y2K! I know, you all think I’m the reprobate playboy but I was working in IT for the company back then. When the 1st January 2000 rolled in, we found that many of our older PC systems continued to work perfectly adequately. Why? Because although they were not Y2K compliant, they were only being used in applications where the double-digit problem wasn’t an issue. So, they didn’t crash, they just kept on working. Maybe it is the same for us survivors? That there is some part of our genetic make-up that means we few still keep trundling along while, all around us, everyone else is dropping dead.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ said Edouard. ‘It could mean some of us will live out our normal life expectancies. In fact, we may be the progenitors of the next stage in the evolution of the human race.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Boy, ‘I’ve always fancied being Adam. Now all I need to do is find myself a suitable candidate to be my Eve!’

  ‘Don’t get too excited about the Mark Two version of the human race, though,’ I added. ‘Remember what happened to the dinosaurs.’ The two of them looked at me. ‘Poor old Tyrannosaurus Rex evolved into a chicken!’