"Retreat: Roosevelt" (An "I Am Legend" inspiration)

[DeadManTyping]

"Retreat: Roosevelt"
(An "I Am Legend" inspiration)

Google Map link​

March 3, 2027 -- Wednesday -- 5:02pm

The isolation of Manhattan was complete. The tunnels connecting the island to the rest of the world were blocked by concrete barriers and cable nets. The bridges that had done the same had been destroyed by missiles from Air Force and Marine Corps jets. It had taken three days to perform the former. It had taken only seconds to complete the latter.

The reason for all of this had a name: DRS, or the Darkseeker Rabies Syndrome. It was a plague drawn right from the pages of a science fiction novel.

In the Fall of 2024, the ever evolving COVID-19 variants had killed 80 million people worldwide. Then, the Krippin Vaccine became available. Named for its developer, Dr. Alice Krippin, it had initially been hailed as the greatest advancement in medicine since the small pox vaccine.

It was produced by gutting the measles virus of its own DNA and replacing it with the miraculous cure to every variant of every Coronavirus known at the time. It had an effectiveness of 100%.

But the effectiveness of cure wasn't even the most amazing aspect of it. The Krippin Vaccine had been distributed to billions across the world in just weeks. But it hadn't been done by jabbing billions of needles into billions of arms.

Because of the transmissibility through the air of its measles shell, the Krippin Vaccine was easily and quite literally spread by word of mouth. Spending just 5 seconds speaking with (and thus inhaling the exhaled air of) a person who had been immunized at least 5 days earlier resulted in an 95% chance of becoming immunized.

The Krippin Vaccine was the ultimate social media.

Within a month of its approval by the FDA, hundreds of immunized doctors, nurses, and other volunteers had been immunized. They'd gone forth into the world to spread the vaccine. They interacted with tens of thousand of people in the largest of sports stadiums. They interacted with small, nuclear families in the tiniest of villages.

The mere act of speaking to and making physical contact with one person after another spread the Krippin Vaccine more rapidly than any program of inoculation could have. Across the globe, Coronavirus infection rates plummeted, eventually reaching zero or near zero across the planet.

Then ... shit went sidewise.

A mutation in the Krippin Vaccine suddenly had people calling it the Krippin Virus. Across the globe, thousands, then millions began suffering hemorrhagic fever like symptoms. Bodies began dropping faster than the original COVID-19 variants had ever caused.

The Krippin Vaccine had by then reached more than 90% of Earth's human population. And now, the Krippin Virus was killing 90% of those. Entire families, villages, cities, and even countries began to die off faster than bodies could be buried or burned.

As bad as all this was and as fortunate as the immunes thought they were, the Darkseeker Rabies Syndrome was a game changer. An estimated 5% of those who'd received the cure then lost all semblance to being human. They became wild, vicious animals. They hid by daylight, affected in an unknown way by UV light. At night (or even by day within buildings with no direct or indirect sunlight), though, they hunted, killed, and ate anything warm blooded: other humans, dogs, cats, rats, and more.

The original immunization testing sites of the Krippin Vaccine had been in Manhattan. And the Darkseekers Rabies Syndrome had begun there as well. Once the serious nature of DRS became known, the Mayor of NYC, Governor of New York State, and President of the United States had worked together to come up with a plan to cut off Manhattan from its surrounding communities.



Henry Davis had been trying for days to get his family away from New York City. But his wife, their two daughters, and his son (from an affair; long story) had been spread across four different boroughs of New York City. They'd been at home, at school, at work, and at the homes of friends and lovers.

He'd managed to get the four of them with him at his elder daughter's condominium building on Roosevelt Island. As they were about to head for the car and get away, a 70 foot wide gap was opened on the bridge connecting it to Queens by an aircraft fired missile.

Moments later, both spans of the Ed Koch/Queensboro Bridge suffered the same damage. Even though that bridge had no auto access to Roosevelt Island, Henry knew that they could have climbed its pillars and escaped the city of foot. That wasn't happening now either.

 

[AngelEyes1994]

Google Map link to Roosevelt Island

Maxine Davis-Templeton (Henry's daughter)
24 years old
Corporate Law Student, New York Universtity
Single, bi-sexual; liberal
Maxine's condominium at 555 Main Street, Roosevelt Island, New York City

Angela (Connor) Davis
42 years old
Novelist
Married to Henry, of course.


March 3, 2027 -- Wednesday -- 5:02pm

The family had been in the elevator heading down for the lobby, about to execute their escape from New York City -- from Roosevelt Island to Queens to be specific -- when they heard the roar of the jets passing directly over the building, firing their missiles, destroying the bridges that would trap the 5 of them in the middle of the East River. They arrived at the first floor and, when the doors opened, found Maxine's neighbors rushing about in panic. Not knowing what the explosion sound had been but knowing about the monsters the Krippin virus was creating, Maxine was hesitant to even leave the lift.

"We have to go!" someone said. "We have to go now. We have to get to the car and off the island."

But a man coming back inside and recognizing Maxine told her and her family, "We're not going anywhere. They just blew the bridge. A military plane with rockets, blew the fuck out of it. Most of it's sitting in the river. 'less you got a boat or are one helluva swimmer, you're trapped here."

Maxine looked to her father with panic, asking, "What do we do now?"

Her mother, Angela, was quick to answer. "We get back upstairs, back into the safety of your apartment, and we wait for all of this to blow over."

Angela grabbed at her husband's arm, tugging at him. "Let's go back upstairs. Honey, please."

 

[DeadManTyping]

Henry told his family to stay put in the lobby. He hurried out of the building to take a look. He couldn't see the damage to the bridges from in front of his daughter's building. He'd been expecting the missile attacks, though.

He hurried back inside, telling the others, "Get back upstairs. Lock the doors. I'm going to take a look around. Go!"

Henry hurried back outside (map), looked around again, and hurried to the cafe on the same block. Pulling on the door, he found it locked. No surprise. Pressing his face to the glass, he found it unoccupied as well. That was good news.

He returned to Maxine's condo, telling them, "We wait it out for now. See what happens."

Looking toward the kitchen, then back to his daughter, Henry asked, "Whatcha got in the way of food? Water? Booze? We might be here for a while."

Henry had every intention of raiding the cafe down on the street. Truthfully, he planned on raiding all of the empty condominiums in the building, too. Maxine had told him that most of the residents had beat feet out of town already. He wasn't the looting type of person in his heart.

But Henry was well informed about what was happening in Manhattan, just across the water. There were tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of dead every where. Some were stacked like cordwood behind hospitals, fire stations, police stations, and regular ol' apartment buildings. And by now, there were hundreds of Darkseekers running wild attacking the living. There were plenty of stories already about people who had been attacked but not killed. It was said they themselves became Darkseekers.

Henry wasn't going to let that happen to his family. He wasn't going to let this defeat them. They had beat the odds so far with a level of luck few could even imagine. Both Henry and his wife had learned they were immune to the Krippin Virus. That was like the two of them winning two different lotteries the same Saturday evening.

And that was only the start of their luck. Because the two of them were immune, so were their children: Maxine, Paula, and Harry, who were 24, 22, and 19 respectively. Harry, who had only his father's inherited immunity, had gotten very sick for several days. But he'd survived. He was still suffering some weakness and breathing problems. But he would survive.

Harry was Henry's son by an affair he'd had with a woman named Camille. Henry had been in his third year of teaching at NYU. Camille had been one of his Graduate students. Henry had ended the affair when he learned Camille was pregnant and planning on having the child. The two of them had made an arrangement: Henry provided Camille with an apartment, an allowance, and a trust fund to both complete her education and take care of Harry; Camille agreed to keep everything secret and to allow Henry visitation of his only son.

Then, when he was 6 years old, Harry's mother died in an auto accident. Henry told Angela everything. He offered her a divorce if she wanted it. He also told her that no matter what her decision was, he was going to raise his son. Amazingly, Angela had forgiven Henry and invited Harry into their home. He'd been a part of their life ever since.

 

[AngelEyes1994]

Maxine had no problem at all returning to her condo. She loved her place and found it comfortable, and with what was happening on the streets or even here in the lobby, she was more than happy to get back in the elevator and head upstairs.

When her father returned and asked about the contents of her cupboards, she smiled and gestured him to the kitchen with a curled finger. With humor, she reminded him, "You know me, daddy, I always eat like it's my last meal."

She opened the double doored refrigerator, the freezer, and then a number of cupboards. There was enough fresh fruits and vegetables to keep the five of them happy for a week. There were boxes, bags, cartons, and more from all the food groups. She looked to Henry again, smiling. "Told ya!"

"If I had to guess," Maxine said, pondering what she was looking at, "I'd say we have enough food here to feed the five of us for, maybe, a two weeks before we start grimacing at the menu, a month before we're going to bed hungry."

She looked to her father with a concerned expression. "How long are we going to be here, dad? I mean, what exactly's going on out there? And when's it all gonna end?"

 

[DeadManTyping]

March 5, 2027 -- Friday -- 9am

Two days had passed since the Davis Family had taken shelter inside Henry's daughter's condo. He'd wanted to do some more surveillance of the building's interior and exterior that first day they'd all been here. But during that first night, there was mayhem in the hallway. People had been screaming. People had been dying. The Darkseekers had gotten not just to the island but to and into the building.

The family had blockaded both of the doors leading to the hallway with furniture. They'd pulled the drapes and hung blankets as a second layer to further block out the out of doors. The power had gone out just a few hours ago for unknown reasons. The family had just sat there in total silence for 36 hours. They didn't cook, they didn't speak, and they didn't move about unless absolutely necessary.

Darkseekers.

The name itself told Henry what he needed to know about why the building eventually went silent. These creatures sought darkness, deep darkness. Maxine's condo didn't offer that. The condos and hallways both had a multitude of windows. The basement offered darkness, which concerned Henry.

The sound of his Beretta's slide slamming forward to move a round from the clip to the firing chamber started the others. Henry explained, "We have to know. We have to know what's happening out there."

He pointed to the front door, implying that out there meant in the hallway. "We have to know what's happening in the building and down on the street. Yesterday was quiet--"

His son interrupted. "Then why did we have to sit here all day being--"

Henry interrupted as well. "The reason it's quiet out there is because we were quiet in here. Those things didn't know we were in here. I think that's the reason we are still alive. But, I am confident that they are gone, and we need to know what the hell is going on."

They discussed it further, and when he was offered a sidekick for his little superhero quest, Henry said while displaying his pistol, "No. If I'm wrong, this won't save me, which means it won't save any of you. When I leave here, you blockade the door behind me. And you don't come out, for any reason."

There was more discussion, even argument. But Henry was firm, and a couple of minutes later they were clearing the blockade and he was stepping out into the hallway. Immediately, he thought better of what he was doing. Just yards away, a badly mutilated body lay on its back. Henry got closer, fighting back the need to retch up his breakfast. The neighbor's throat was ripped out. His belly was ripped open. What remained of his innards were spread all about the hallway's now blood stained carpet.

The second condo door down the hall was wide open. Henry investigated the home slowly. One room after another, he looked about. He found another mutilated body in the bathroom. The woman of the house had had a big kitchen knife for protection. It laid on the bathroom floor, as clean as it had been when she'd picked it up. It obviously hadn't found the flesh of a Darkseeker.

Henry returned to the hallway. Little by little, he made his way to each apartment door. He listened a long moment at each. He checked to see if each was unlocked. None were. And he moved on. He passed on using the elevators. With the power out, the lifts would be in darkness.

The stairwells had small windows that let in just enough light such that they would not be in total darkness. Henry felt confident that the Darkseekers would not be found there.

But, there was a problem with them, just as with the elevators. The stairwells were classified as Emergency Stairwells. They were for fleeing the building in the case of fire.

You could enter them from any of the buildings 18 residential floors. But you could only exit them in two places: the lobby, where fire fleeing residents could exit to the street level; the roof, where they could be lifted away by helicopter. If the power had still been on, Henry could have used his daughter's key card to get in and out of the stairwell. But, well, sometimes life sucked.

Henry wasn't ready to go down to street level without knowing he could get back to Maxine's 9th floor apartment. But then, they didn't have to do that yet. Baby steps, Henry told himself.

"We're gonna be stuck here for a long, long time possibly," he told the family. "We have to have more food, more water--"

One of his adult children interrupted, "More booze."

"The power is out, which means everything in a fridge or freezer is already ruined or on the way to being so," Henry went on, smiling at the alcohol statement. "We need to get and consume what we can before it all goes bad. There's gonna be lots of packaged food. There's gonna be weapons maybe. I can't possibly be the only person in New York City with a gun. We need mattresses, bedding, clothes."

Henry lifted an arm and sniffed at his pit. He laughed. "I could use a change of clothes."

"Where we getting all of this," one of his family members asked.

Henry looked to Maxine. "From your neighbors' places, honey. We'll respect the privacy and personal possession of anyone who is still alive in the building, if there's anyone still alive in the building. But if they're not here, they're not gonna be using it."

They discussed it more. Some liked the idea. Others didn't. But in the end Henry got his way. "We check the whole floor, make sure there's no one left. Or if there are, we tell them who we are, what we're doing, and get them onboard with us. Good?"

Again, some were with Henry and some were not, but out into the hall they went anyway. He and Maxine were the investigative team. She knew all of her neighbors by name. That kind of surprised Henry. When he'd come to the Big Apple for university, the only people on his dormitory's floor he knew by name were the pretty girls with nice bodies.

The two of them made the rounds. They stopped at each door and listened but took no actions. They heard nothing except at one door. Maxine said by the whining that it was Kitty Kat, who ironically was a Pug puppy. Here, Henry finally knocked lightly. The result was a sharp, short bark. Maxine reassured him that the dog was friendly.

"Well, let's see if this works," he told her.

Henry had been surprised to find a Fire Ax at the end of the hall by the elevator. He'd thought they'd been discontinued as a permanently placed fire battling piece of equipment. The new buildings all had metal reinforced doors anymore, so fire axes had gone the way of the dodo. The real action for getting through doors these days were big, solid pry bars. Those were only found on the fire trucks that responded to emergencies anymore. after all of the new building.

He knew he wasn't going to chop through the door as he might if it had been wood. But Henry brought the heavy piece of steel down at the gap between the door and the door frame. Unbelievably, he separated the two by just a fraction of an inch. Looking to Maxine, he said, "Jam it in there."

His daughter had had a rather large flat head screw driver in her junk drawer. She jammed it into the gap, and Henry withdrew the ax. He hit again, then again, then again. The third time opened the gap farther, and the screwdriver fell out. His daughter jammed it back in again, Henry pulled the ax back, and with a mighty whack at the gap, the door flew open.

Henry had been fearing that something would attack from the other side of the door, and he was right. The Pug came right for his calf and took hold of a piece of his slacks and leg. Maxine got Kitty Kat off her father, and after a few moments the dog was licking her face in joy.

"Stay here," Henry told his eldest child. "Let me check it out first."

With the Beretta before him, he investigated the entire condo before returning to Maxine. "There's no one here. Who cares for the dog when your neighbors are away?"

Maxine gave her answer. Henry suggested, "Why don't you take the dog back to your place and have the others join us here. We'll look around for what we need. By the way, you did very well, Maxi. I'm proud of you."

As his daughter did as told, Henry began searching the apartment. It belonged to an older couple. Thankfully, they seemed to eat more from the package aisles than from the produce section of the grocery store. The others arrived, and for the next two hours they pillaged the home of all its edibles, all its bedding, and the mattresses from both bedrooms.

Henry was surprised to find how much of the day had passed. His earlier surveillance had taken far longer than he'd realized. "It's almost 4pm. Everyone back to the apartment. We're done for the day."

They secured the door to #908 again. They moved furniture and other things around to satisfy everyone for the night. Maxine invited her sister to share her bed. Harry would use one mattress in one corner of the condo's main living space. His parents would do the same in another corner. They would find a way to provide more privacy later.

"Why can't we just move into one of the abandoned apartments?" Harry asked. "No one's coming back to them, right?"

"For now, I think we need to stick together," his father told him. "For now."

As the world beyond them began to darken, the Davis Family finished their renovations, ate dinner, and cleaned up. Henry had found that Maxine's neighbor was 4 inches shorter than him and 100 pounds minimum bigger than him. The man's clothes had been a bust. All except for the plush robe Henry had borrowed so that his own clothes could be rinsed out in the sink and hung to dry, anyway.

 

[DeadManTyping]

Introducing Peter Sullivan

Captain Peter Sullivan, US Air Force
SALH Tech
28 years old, 6'2", fit, handsome
Single, heterosexual


March 3, 2027 -- Wednesday -- 11pm

Peter wasn't entirely sure how he'd ended up hiding in the basement of the LaQuinta Hotel at 9th and 38th in the Dutch Kills neighborhood of Queens. He'd been operating as one half of a Semi-Active Laser Homing ground team. They'd been directing missile fire from the Ravenswood Generating Station on the bank of the East River. Their targets had been the Queensboro and Roosevelt Island Bridges.

Peter hadn't understood why their presence on the ground had been necessary. The jets had been entirely capable of destroying their assigned targets without SALH assistance. But someone higher up in the military echelon than Captain Sullivan had been calling the shots.

So, Peter had done his job. He and his partner had painted the bridges as ordered. And at 5pm, plus or minus a minute, the jets had passed overhead. One bridges blew, then another, then the second span of the first went down, too.

It had been both awesome and horrific to Peter. The last time he'd performed this task he'd been in Iran. He'd lost close friends before, during, and after the US had conducted what many people had nicknamed Operation Proportion Response My Ass.

During the first half of 2026, Iranian forces and Iranian-back Iraqi militia had killed more than 50 US troops and American contractors in missile attacks and IED explosions. Each time, the President had ordered attacks that had been determined to be of proportional responses. Basically that meant You kill one of ours, we'll kill one or yours.

Such attacks were meant to deter Iran from making further attacks. It wasn't working, obviously. So, the President ordered something a bit disproportional. Late in August 2026, US forces struck 29 Iranian missile and radar sites with more than 800 missiles. The attack lasted less than 4 hours and left Iran's long range missile capabilities devastated.

Apparent, the Ayatollahs got what I told ya message the President had been warning them with for months: with the exception of some shenanigans involving a drone, a pair of suicide bombers, and a fighter-bomber that turned back when it got painted by an American missile cruiser, Iran had become a very peaceful Middle East neighbor.

Peter had been on the ground in Iran for just 6 hours, but it had been enough scary for a life time. The radar installation he and his partner had been painting had been hidden in the middle of a small town. It had been surrounded by a school, a hospital, and a museum. The US hadn't wanted to destroy any of these structures. And they'd wanted to minimize civilian casualties.

In the end, because of Peter and his partner, Ahmad (who ironically had been born in this very town before his parents took him to Canada, then America as a toddler), they'd accomplished both, for the most part. Destroyed was one radar installation; killed were most of the troops manning them and a handful of civilians. The buildings had suffered minor damage to windows and walls but all had remained standing.

Unfortunately, Ahmad was killed after between the time the pair had fled the area and the Marine helo swept in to exfiltrate them. Peter's partner was 1 of only 3 American troops killed. Another 4 were captured but secretly returned in some classified agreement between the President and Iran's secular leader.

The exfiltration of Peter and his new partner, Clark, had gone similarly badly. Bridges and tunnels, some of them historical structures that were more than a century old, had been destroyed to keep the Darkseekers on the island of Manhattan. It had been a waste of firepower. Certain people in the CDC, the military, and the various levels of government had already been informed: the Darkseekers were being found through the Five Boroughs of New York City.

Peter and Clark's extraction had been delayed for unknown reasons. The sun had fallen behind the skyscrapers of Manhattan. And within minutes, the Queens neighborhood in which the two soldiers had been assigned exploded with the same mayhem taking place on the island they'd helped isolate.

The two of them had found themselves shooting Darkseekers as they themselves fled for shelter. They'd killed one after another after another of the wild cannibals came at them. They'd left bodies on the street, in the lobby, in the stairwell. They'd almost made it to the basement laundry when one of the creatures got Clark. Peter tried to get his friend free. It had been hopeless.

As Clark cried out in terror and pain, Peter made the decision to end his friend's pain. He put a couple of rounds of his nearly diminished ammunition into his partner's neck. Then he emptied his next to last clip on the Darkseekers who were ignoring him and eating on Clark.

And now here he was, hiding in the laundry behind locked and blockaded doors. He had gone through very much the same horror the Davis family was experiencing across the water. The difference for Peter was that he had no food. He'd gone without since a few hours before the demolition of the bridges. He was hungry. And he knew that tomorrow morning he had to consider venturing out into this mad, mad world.

 

[AngelEyes1994]

March 5, 2027 -- Friday -- 9am

Maxine was at the end of her rope by the time her father pulled out his pistol and said he was going out to investigate her condominium building. She had always been a very social and very active person, so sitting still and silent for a day in a half while surrounded by family with whom she would rather be conversing and laughing and playing cards and cooking extravagant meals was driving her insane.

But she understood the reasons behind her father's demand that they live as if they were in 1940s Amsterdam as opposed to 21st century New Amsterdam and their family surname was Frank. Maxine had heard calls of panic between the married couple who lived just down the hall at one point, followed by screams of pain and terror mixed with the most horrific, wild animal sounds, followed eventually by what would later be concluded to be the sounds of the Darkseekers eating Maxine's fellow 555 Main residents.

"I'll go with you, dad," Maxine offered when she realized he was going out. "I know the building and the people." She thought it made sense, but Henry turned her down, saying there was no reason for two of them to be killed if this venture of his went wrong. She peeked out the door as her father left and saw the neighbor she knew she'd lost. She nearly threw up then and there, but kept her composure, hugged her father, and -- trying to interject some comic relief -- said, "Don't come back without chocolate."

Maxine reminded him about the stairwells and returned to her home. She looked around and suddenly saw the place not as the comfortable, luxurious City abode to which she was beyond lucky to have but as a prison cell with nice carpets and a comfortable couch. Maxine was certain that they were going to be stuck in here for the rest of their lives, whether those were hours long or decades long.

No knew what to expect with this new rabies pandemic and these Darkseekers that had arisen from it. Maxine -- who had always been a true pacifist -- recalled those horrific images of the citizens of Syria during the recently ended civil war there, with their homes gone, their family members killed by poisonous gasses, and their lives in danger every moment of every day. She'd always had such sympathy for them and such anger for the world leaders who allowed Bashar al-Assad to treat his own people in such a way. It was the closest Maxine had ever gotten to screaming out kill that fucker!

It was strange that the situations faced by the Syrians before Assad's eventual assassination and the situations she and her fellow New Yorkers were facing now were so similar and yet so different at the same time. The Big Apple wasn't a smoldering pile of destroyed buildings, and yet the Davis family could very well be looking at living their lives hiding in fear and worrying about from where their next meal would come while their friends and family died all about them.

It seemed forever before her father returned and, after just a few minutes he was gone again, this time with Maxine at his side. They used a fire ax and screw driver to pry open the door of one of her neighbors, freeing Kitty Kat from his own captivity. Maxine laughed as the pug attacked her father, then pulled the dog away and giggled more as it lapped happily at her face.

"Looks like I have a pet," she said, ignoring her father's disapproving reaction.
Her father had never liked little dogs, nor had his parents. They were farm and ranch people, and dogs were supposed to be large and mean enough to run off the coyotes, feral dogs, and other predators who endangered the property's stock animals. "He won't be a problem, daddy," she said with a pouty expression. "In truth, the first time I ever heard him bark was just now, before you opened the door." He asked who had been responsible for the dog's care before this; her neighbors had apparently left the dog behind. Maxine explained, "A woman down on the 6th floor, Abigail, she came up three times a day when my neighbors were away, to walk the dog and sometimes even take it to her own place. I'm guessing their all..."

She didn't finish the thought. She just couldn't. So far, with the exception of the dead couple in the hallway, Maxine had been able to think of the deceased of New York City as just random, unknown people. Her father checked out the apartment first, then got everyone involved in pillaging the condo of anything and everything they could use back at their place: food, bottled water, booze, bedding, clothing -- mostly just sweats and sweaters -- and the sleeping-separately married folk's two double mattresses.

It took hours, and Henry finally called an end to their looting. Back at the apartment, they enjoyed their first hot meal in two days. As they ate, Maxine pulled one of the drapes open and looked out upon her neighborhood. From the 9th floor, she could a bit farther than Henry had from the sidewalk the day before. And, of course, a day and a half had passed. She was surprised to see smoke rising from so many different directions, particularly since she could only see a sliver of the city because of the high rises across the street and down the block.

Most of the family members had been glued to their phones, pads, or laptops -- with the sound off, of course -- and now Maxine asked Henry, "So, dad, what do you think?"

(OOC: I didn't think it was my place to describe the City's condition. That should be your prerogative.)

 

[AngelEyes1994]

Kimmy Cramer's first post

Kimberly "Kimmy" Cramer -- fashion model
18 years old, barely
32B-22-32, petite and lightweight
Wavy, light brunette hair to her lower back
Very light hazel eyes


Kimmy was likely one of the most frightened people in all of New York City right now. She'd recently finished a three day long photo shoot in Central Park for a hair style magazine and -- as was part of her agreement with her parents -- had come home to Dutch Kills, Queens, to spend a few days with them when the Darkseeker Rabies Syndrome was announced. Her father owned D&R Ornamental Ironworks, right across the street from the LaQuinta Hotel at 9th and 38th. She, her father, and her three older brothers had gone down to the business to collect some more wrought iron gates and materials to further secure the house her parents had recently bought -- with Kimmy's modeling money -- but Kimmy would never leave the property.

As they were working frantically to load their two trucks, Kimmy's father -- who was only 50 but not in good health -- suddenly fell to the concrete, suffering from a heart attack. The called an ambulance, but when -- after 40 minutes -- it hadn't arrived, two of the brothers loaded their father into one of the trucks and headed for the hospital. Kimmy would never see them again.

Her eldest brother, David, stayed with her initially, but as night was nearing, he crossed the street to the hotel to see if they could get a room there for the night. David didn't return either. He called her cell phone just after dark, just as the streets outside were coming alive with the terror of the Darkseekers. He told her to sit tight and that he would be back in the morning, immediately after sunrise. He didn't return.

The fortunate thing about being the daughter of a man who constructs wrought iron and steel barricades for a living was that the building in which Kimmy now found herself was fortified better than most banks or country jails. All of the windows and doors were secured with metal barriers, both for security and for customer demonstrations. Even the skylights has steel fortifications on them. So even though Darkseekers had tried to get into the building during the night, Kimmy was a safe as could be.

Her only problem, of course, was that now, as she entered her 3rd night of isolation, she was out of food. Well, not all food. She was out of nutritious food. Her father had always stocked the office refrigerator with what he called model food when he knew Kimmy was coming home for a few days, but she'd already eaten her way through the vegetables, fruits, healthy drinks, and more. Now she found herself standing before a dark, deenergized vending machine with a 5 pound sledge hammer, looking at chips, candy bars, chewing gum, and Lifesavers, and wondering whether she would ever have to maintain a healthy diet and watch her perfect, petite figure again.

"Fuck it," she whispered as she stepped back, swung the heavy tool to and fro a couple of times, then released it. To her surprise, it bounced off the Plexiglas and clanged to the floor, having only barely cracked its intended target. "Hmm." She picked it up again, swung it back farther, and again released it with much more oomph. "Well, fuck," she said as this time it went through the transparent layer and stuck in place, plugging the hole through which she'd hoped to retrieve a Snickers bar. She considered the situation, drew and released a deep breath, and told herself, "Time to get mean."

And she did. Kimmy beat at the Plexiglas until nearly all of it had finally crumbled and fallen away. She donned a pair of her father's welding gloves and carefully removed all of the bad food on which she'd be eating until her brother returned. Kimmy was certain David would get back to her. He had to. No one else close to her had answered her repeated calls to them since dark that first night: not mom, not her father, not the two brothers with her father, and not even David. But he was just across the road, likely safe and sound in the LaQuinta without a charged phone, right?

 

[DeadManTyping]

Maxine asked Henry, "So, dad, what do you think?"

He couldn't help but laugh. He had a lot of thoughts. Most of them he wanted to keep to himself. Henry and each of his family members had been following the news initially. Eventually, after the power went out, their cell phones, tablets, and laptops each went dead.

So, what had they learned and what did Henry think?

The Darkseekers were all up and down the length of the island of Manhattan. There were reports of attacks from the Battery in the south to Inwood in the north. Despite the bombing of the Queensboro Bridge, the Dayseekers were here on Roosevelt Island, too.

Henry's first thought was that some of the cannibals had gotten across the bridge before the missiles hit. What he couldn't know was that the Dayseekers Rabies Syndrome wasn't restricted to Manhattan, as initially thought. One or two or three of them were popping up in neighborhoods all across the Five Boroughs. Manhattan had only been the location of the first occurrences of Dayseekers. By the end of the month, they'd be in nearly every country across the planet.

What else did Henry think? What did he know or not know? He knew the power was out. There were some fires here and there, which had likely affected the power grid. What he didn't know was that it wouldn't be coming back for quite a while. When they learned that, he would, as Maxine has phrased it, think that they needed to get power back. The best way to do that was to get their hands on some solar panels and put them on the roof.

555 Main Street had an emergency diesel generator in the basement, Henry knew that. It hadn't turned on, for reasons he didn't know. He thought he might be able to get it turned on. But by design, it was only connected to two items in the building: the floorboard heating, and the emergency lighting in the hallways and lobbies.

Henry had read all of this in the brochure that had come with Maxine's moving in. It had seemed like a stupid engineering mistake at the time, a move to save the company money. In the case of winter blackouts or wind storms, they would only supply what was necessary to keep their tenants alive, not comfortable.

"We need to make sure that the building is secure," Henry told the others. "We need to find out if there is anyone else alive in the building. We need to round up all the food, water--"

Again Harry cut in, "Booze!"

Again, Henry ignored him, "--and other things that will help us."

"Guns?"

Henry looked to the questioner. "Yes. Guns. There won't be as many of them here as we could find in the homes back around Grampa's ranch, but I'm sure there will be a few. Legal or illegal, there's gonna be a few."

 

[DeadManTyping]

Captain Peter Sullivan, US Air Force

Post for: Captain Peter Sullivan, US Air Force

Location: LaQuinta Hotel, 9th Street and 38th Avenue, Dutch Kills neighborhood, Queens.


March 6, 2027 -- Saturday -- 0600 hrs

Peter awoke to the vibration of a small alarm inside his uniform, against his chest. He flinched in surprise but very quickly regained sense of his situation. He'd piled hotel sheets and blankets in a corner as a makeshift bed. Surprisingly, Peter had slept better last night than he had in years. His second night here in the basement laundry had certainly been more peaceful than the first.

He was disappointed to still be here in the basement laundry room. Peter had received the full briefing on the Darkseekers. He knew that they hid from daylight. There was something about UV radiation that caused them extreme pain. Enough of it, such as direct sunlight or high powered artificial UV lights even disabled them.

So, Peter had assumed that yesterday morning when he awoke, he could leave the basement and report back to Headquarters. That wasn't to be, though. No sooner had he began pressing down the door release arm then a Darkseeker or two or three slammed against the other side of the door. He hadn't taken into account that there might be Darkseekers in the darkness of the unilluminated basement hallway.

He'd managed to get the door secured again. But he'd been at a loss for how he was supposed to get out of here. The laundry had two entrances for safety reasons, of course. But jiggling the handle on the other door had resulted in a similar Darkseeker assault on it.

Last night, though, had been far less crazy. The Darkseekers had been out and about in the hall for the first hour or so of night. But then all had gone quiet. So, again, Peter tried the door. Nothing from the creatures who wanted so badly to eat him. He opened the door, his rifle at the ready. Still, nothing. Lighting up the hall with his gun's flashlight, Peter got out of the basement and to the hotel's lobby.

What he saw there made him turn to vomit. But all he did was dry heave. He hadn't eaten in almost 70 hours. He turned back to view the dozens of mutilated, partially eaten bodies. Struggling, he forced himself to find the restaurant. He found one serving boxes of cereal. The fridges were still cold enough that the milk hadn't yet turned. He wolfed down three boxes: Frosted Flakes, Raisin Bran, and Cocoa Puffs.

All the while, he did his best not to look at the bodies scattered about the room. Peter tried not to imagine how the hotel guests and staff found themselves fleeing Darkseekers through the restaurant, down the halls, across the lobby, and up the stairs to the guest room floors.

Peter had lost his pack during the flight from the waterfront two days earlier. Now, he went to the luggage check room, found a weekend backpacking kit, and dumped its contents. He kept a few items that would come in handy. Then, returning to the kitchen, he filled up on portable food that was healthy but lightweight. He had no idea what he was going to find available to him once he got outside.

Carefully looking about the streets, Peter stepped outside the hotel. He looked east down 38th Street and southwest down 9th Avenue. There was no movement, but there were plenty of bodies. No, correction, there was movement. It startled Peter for a moment until he realized it was just dogs. He lifted his rifle and scoped them, then nearly retched again. They were eating on a body. A human body.

He moved his finger tip to the trigger of his rifle and nearly pulled the trigger. He refrained, though. He only had one clip, and he really didn't want to announce his presence to anyone. He didn't expect Darkseekers out here in the daylight. But what other kind of dangers might be out here. In the worst of times, good people did bad stuff.

He stepped out off the curb to get a better look in all four directions. Then, he flinched again at a sudden and consistent rapping of something on glass. He looked to the north, across the street. It was coming from inside a building with signage saying D&R Ornamental Ironworks.

Then Peter heard the cry for help. There was someone alive in there. He raised his rifle -- not entirely, but just to a ready position -- and hurried cautiously across the road to the opposite sidewalk. And sure enough, beyond a steel grate and dirty glass was a young woman, beating on the transparent surface for his attention.

 

[AngelEyes1994]

Kimberly "Kimmy" Cramer

March 6, 2027 -- Saturday -- 0600 hrs

Kimmy didn't wake refreshed in the same way as had the soldier across the street, of whom she wasn't aware, yet. Her father's office had no furniture worthy of being called a bed, so she'd slept the pass two nights on one of the bench seats removed from the company's full sized Dodge Ram van. There hadn't been any bedding either, so she'd gathered up all the clean clothes she could find and used it instead: she'd removed her skirt and blouse, then donned in order two tee shirts, a pair of smallish slacks, a pair of smallish coveralls, a larger pair of the same, then put a coat on over her upper body and then wrapped a second one around her legs. It had kept her warm through the night, but there had been so many seam lines pressing into her body that she felt like she was sleeping on small limbs.

Breakfast came from the vending machine, of course, and consisted of a bag of potato chips, a small bottle of orange juice, a Milky Way candy bar, and a package of seriously stale Planter's peanuts. She wound up the hand crank radio she'd gotten her camping enthusiast father one year and listened for some news but got very little. Most of the stations had gone silent or were playing a repeating Emergency Broadcast System message about remaining indoors. She did find one station on which a station engineer was dividing her time between speaking by phone to various governmental and military figures and replaying earlier recordings of such conversations.

The news was not good, obviously. Those creatures, the Darkseekers, were everywhere by now. After tens of millions had died of the multitude of Coronavirus variants and hundreds of millions perished due to the Krippin Virus, now tens or hundreds of thousands were suspected to have been killed by the cannibals who ruled the night.

The guy on the radio said that no one truly knew who was in charge of the country anymore. The President had died; Kimmy didn't know how, only that it had happened in the past few days. The Vice President -- who'd become the President, obviously -- had died, too. Again, Kimmy didn't know how or when. A second new President had also died, or at least, the guy on the radio said that was the rumor. Kimmy didn't even know who that would have been. She seemed to recall from her high school civics class that it would have been the Speaker of the House; even if that were true, it wouldn't have meant anything to Kimmy because the guy on the radio had said the Speaker had died also. Hell, was there anyone left running this country?

And both New York State and New York City were facing similar situations, at least according to the radio news. There were reports that the military was running the show -- coup, martial law? -- and there had been a lot of flyovers by and helicopters since even before the bridges into Manhattan exploded. But Kimmy knew even less about how the army worked than she did about how the government did.

Right now, the young fashion model had other concerns, like what the hell was she supposed to wear now that she had no access to her closet at home or the racks at the studio out of which she worked. Aside from the midriff revealing top and skirt Kimmy had been wearing when she got here, all that was personal to her here was her thong and four inch stiletto heels. She didn't even have a bra, which wasn't uncommon for the girl with the A-cup titties.

She dug through the lockers of the workers again, only to find that the overalls she'd worn to bed were the best fit she was going to find. She added her skirt's belt to her waist, rolled up the sleeves and cuffs, and reluctantly conceded that it wasn't going to be any better than this. Kimmy began wandering around the building, contemplating her situation, when she neared a window and looked out.

And there she saw a soldier in the middle of the road!

Without hesitation, Kimmy rushed to the glass and began rapping her knuckles so hard that it hurt. She looked around, found a metal tool, and returned to signaling the man in desperation. He saw her, then headed her way. By the time he was on the sidewalk, Kimmy's eyes were filled with tears of joy. She gestured him to come around to the door, went to it, and threw it open. When he appeared, she didn't hesitate: she threw herself into his arms, sobbing, "Oh my God, oh my God, thank you, thank you, thank you! Come in, please.""

 

[DeadManTyping]

(OOC: If you have been reading along, we're going to start something new and leave this alone for a while.)