O-Negative: Extinction (26 page)

“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.”

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. 

Exits were rare but ‘falling in love’ with one of the clients or evidence of hard drug use were the primary reasons for such action.  The clientele by and large were less trouble than the girls but when she’d had an occasion to report a couple of guys to Alek she’d never heard from them again.  The worst incident had been when a youngish guy in town on business had turned up drunk and ended up hitting one of the girls.  She’d called Alek and within about 5 minutes two huge Eastern European body builders had turned up and after making the man apologise in person had given him a professional beating downstairs in the lobby/lounge before bundling him into their car and dumping him off outside his hotel.  The following day Alek had turned up with flowers for the girl who’d been hit and had then spent an hour apologising to Annette for the trouble caused.  Alek knew which side his bread was buttered and, looking out of her pent house loft apartment in the centre of Dallas, so did she.

To start with she couldn’t really understand why Alek wanted her to be part of the business at all.  She didn’t appear to be contributing that much but Alek had assured her that from his perspective she was a vital part of the operation.

“Annie you might not realise it but actually you’re one of the most important pieces.  You’re an American, you reassure the girls and most importantly you give the operation a sort of respectability.  In the two years we’ve been working together there hasn’t been a single run in with the police or any other agency.  Now though the girls don’t work as often as I might like I don’t mind – we’re all making good money from this no?.”

She had accepted this reluctantly. “But wouldn’t you make more money if your operation turned over more clients in a set of apartments based downtown?”

“Yes I would and I’m not going to lie to you I have another part of my business based there but those places service a different type of clientele and there is also more competition.  What you offer to me is a safe guaranteed income which to be honest pretty much runs itself.  The other parts of my business require frequent payments to the police and I have to keep a number of enforcers on the payroll to sort out problems that come my way on a regular basis.”

She‘d shrugged her shoulders.  “Ok well like you say it seems to be working well and if you’re happy then I’m happy”.

“Great.  Now I wanted to ask you if you’d consider something else”.

“Uh huh I can see you’re flashing your best smile at me Alek, what else are you looking for?”

“Well as I say it’s only a request.  You are under no obligation to say yes but as an American their might be certain advantages if you were to set up a business.  A business that maybe requires young foreign women to provide the services…I was thinking maybe an Au Pair agency.”

“So you’re basically looking for me to set up a business which provides you with a legitimate means to bring in women from Eastern Europe yes?”

“Exactly.  I knew you’d grasp this straight away Annie. What do you think?”

“I think, I’ll think about it Alek.  If I agree to something like that I’d want to have full control - like I have with the houses.  I’d be the one who sets the quotas of legitimate to illegitimate women and I get to personally vet them to make sure no one’s being coerced into this yes?”

“Absolutely Annie.  You’re the boss” he said with his most charming smile.

“No Alek you’re the boss, but you’re very good at persuading others into thinking you’re not”.