Basil Orlov's Story

As the phone rang, Stefan paced his living room. His house was pretty much just a living room, a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and one bedroom. He didn't need much space; He liked having everything right where he needed it. Close. Stefan's stomach grumbled quietly, causing him to inadvertently look to the pile of supplies he had gathered that was sitting complacently on the floor. He had gathered up all the cans and bottled water in his house. He had around 7 bottles and 10 cans of all sorts. Beans, sliced fruit, tuna, etc. Not quite the plethora he had wished for. He had been scraping by on perishable food for the past week. His milk had gone bad shortly after the power went out, along with a lot of his food. He drank from the faucet until it too went out.

His medicine, laptop, a blanket, a flashlight, an old Zippo, a worn canvas backpack he used for school, an extra shirt, a dull pocket knife, and his "Advanced Programming" book also populated the pile. The phone stopped ringing, then a soft, sweet voice spoke to him. Stefan was elated. He immediately stopped pacing as his heart jumped into his throat.

"Hi, this is Mist." She said, in the cute little voice of hers.

Stefan hesitated a few seconds, breathless. Mist? Who? He looked at his phone; Yup, it was Josephine's number. He ignored it, his elation getting the best of him.

"Oh, thank God you're okay! Josephine, Have you heard from the others?" He said, his voice slightly muffled by the rag over his mouth.

A few tense, silent seconds passed. Stefan held his breath. Josephine finally responded. She said "What did you say?"

Stefan bit his lip. She sounded like she was out of it. As if he had called her while she was sleeping and she wasn't quite 'there' yet. And Mist? Who was Mist? Was she talking about the Haze? He tried something else.

"Jo, this is Stefan. Remember me? We used to watch movies at Nilda's house? Basil showed up sometimes too... Were you sleeping? You sound out of it, bud... Have you been outside recently? Do you have a mask? More importantly, are you safe? Is everything okay?"

Stefan rattled off question after question. In retrospect, it was probably annoying, but he was physically shaking with worry. He couldn't stand this place without the help of his friends.

He was shocked to find he had subconsciously strode to his desk and opened the drawer as he spoke. HE had a habit of doing that sometimes. His mind would be so focused on one thing, body would just wander and sometimes take him outside or to the bathroom or he'd take things from the fridge and so on. This time, however, his body recalled a more painful experience to subconsciously act upon. Within the drawer lay a .357 S&W revolver. It held exactly one bullet; no more, no less. His mind was flooded with darkness as some hidden memories resurfaced. He grimaced and pulled the revolver out, clicking the safety on and tossing it to the couch. There was so much darkness attached to that damned gun, but he figured he would carry it for protection. Maybe he could cleanse it of its dark past.

He tapped his foot in anticipation to Josephine's response, a deep frown and furrowed brow cutting through the rest of his features.

The Haze lay more like a liquid than a gas, or like the foul Black Smoke used by the Martians in War of the Worlds. It seemed to roll and fall over uneven surfaces, as it now fell in little swirls off the roof of a small apartment building. Inside, a man on the younger side of middle age peered out through a window. Unlike others, these windows were unboarded. The lone inhabitant had not had the time to buy any, and had honestly expected to be out a long time ago. However, one thing or another had kept him at home. Primarily, he wanted to maximise the power left in his electronic items, though all he really cared about was the cell phone. If he had that, he could communicate. Which, he decided, was what he would do now. He checked the charge (40%, he noted) as he started dialing the first name that popped up. Aleksandrov, Stefan. Hopefully he was still alive.

The man put the phone to his ear and waited. A steady repeating tone was all he heard. Busy. He hung up and began to think. At the least, this meant Aleksandrov was still alive, if his phone was in use. Who was he calling? That was something to find out. He couldn't leave a message, but he could make his way over there. He doubted anyone would be on the roads now, what with the world being "completely fucked." That certainly was a cheery way to put things. Christ Almighty.

For that matter, how was he supposed to get out? The Haze may not have been the mysterious instant killer the Black Smoke was, but it was certainly lethal, and quick. He would need something to protect his airway, some kind of filter. He looked around, and his eyes alighted on bedsheets. He shrugged, then began tearing one. He layered two strips and tied them to fit over his mouth, then put on his favoured black jacket over the turtleneck shirt he was already wearing. Lastly, he took the one item he knew he would need in an anarchic world: his prized De Lisle Carbine, a rare and wonderful, though not especially powerful, weapon. Slowly, almost solemnly, he loaded a magazine into it and closed the bolt, then clicked the safety on. He took the two other magazines and as many bullets as could fit into his jacket pockets, and thus outfitted, took his car keys and a deep breath before dashing out to where his car waited. He all but forced his way in, only daring to take a breath when he was quite sure he was inside. He turned the vents off, not daring to let any more foul air in, and started the car.

The drive was hellish and nerve-wracking, to say the least. Several times Basil wondered if the Haze was slipping through his improvised mask. No way to tell until he lost consciousness, and then it would be too late. No time to worry about that now. Aleksandrov's house was on the right. He pulled to the side, parked haphazardly (not like the police were around to give a shit), and took another deep breath before exiting the car, rifle in hand. He ran to the front door, and as he reached it started banging insistently. He called through the door, "Aleksandrov? It's me, Orlov! Are you alive? Can you let me inside?"

Stefan listened in horror as Josephine told him her story. She didn't remember anything; Poor girl. She didn't even remember him. He clenched his fist and released it repeatedly, trying to keep his heart rate down. He was fairly stressed. "Oooooooh, Fuck. This is REALLY happening. All this. It's HAPPENING and YOU'RE in the middle of it." Stefan thought to himself. He found himself pacing again as Josephine (Or "Mist", he figured he'd have to call her from now on), laid it out to him.

Stefan took a deep breath through the moist rag, then said "Jo, erh, Mist, don't go anywhere. I... I'm Stefan Aleksandrov, and I live in Moscow, Russia, remember that. I'm Stefan, and I'm a good guy. I'm going to help you. Don't leave the house; you could get hurt. I'm gonna come get you, okay? Just sit tight, I'll be there soon. Are you at your own house? The one you lived in before whatever happened?"

He again got self-conscious about the amount of questions he was asking, but he rationalized that it was an emergency. Hell, the whole WORLD was in a state of emergency. Stefan walked to his pile and sat down, attempting to shovel all his supplies into his pack with one arm when he heard a pounding at the door. He jumped a mile out of his skin as his handgun found its way into his palm and his feet steady upon the floor, a swift reaction which he later regarded with mild surprise. His arm pointed true towards his barricade door as a familiar, but muffled voice met his ears.

"Aleksandrov? It's me, Orlov! Are you alive? Can you let me inside?" Basil said from outside.

After a moment of realization, Stefan stuffed the revolver into his pocket and ran to the door. He had no idea whether his comrade had any sort of respiratory protection, or if he was wounded, or some other bad thing. Stefan was sometimes labelled as a worry-wart, but in reality, he just liked to realize all possibilities in a situation. At first thought, he was worried Basil might have mental damage as well. Did the Haze affect the Human brain? Stefan wrote it off, though; Basil had called him by his surname.

Stefan said to Josephi- Mist, Dammit, "Mist, Hang on a moment, another friend is here. His name is Basil. The one that we watched movies with? Do you remember him? Please, Try as hard as you can to remember." Stefan's words were punctuated by grunts as he pulled the furniture barricade away from the door to let his friend in. With one hand, at that. After a few curses from a hasty and over-extended pull, Stefan moved the furniture away enough to open the door enough to allow Basil through. "C'mon in quick, Basil!" Stefan said, beckoning with his free hand. He watched with worry as snaking tendrils of Haze seeped in through the breach in his house's seal. It creeped in like rotten, skeletal fingers on a living corpse, bringing on its back a pestilent, festering evil.

After a moment, Basil saw the door open and heard Aleksandrov call through the small opening, "C'mon in quick, Basil!" The man needed no order to stir him to action. He squeezed through the small opening in the door, and past the barricade. He exhaled violently and inhaled in relief, but did not remove the improvised mask. He couldn't be too careful, after all. He saw the Haze slip in as he did, and didn't know how much of it had disseminated into the air yet.

"Well, good to see you're alive, Aleksandrov," he said after a moment. "I'm not entirely sure what we can do. I think if we can get to Kamarov Headquarters, we can-" He stopped abruptly. "Did you hear something?" He eyed the door carefully. "I think someone's here. Let me look." He edged toward the door slowly, then asked sharply, "Is someone there?"

The wholesale club had been a bad idea.

Turned out that, in the face of an apocalypse, there are--in fact--other people who possess some degree of intelligence and common sense, scavengers that (not entirely unlike Roaker himself) believed that the best way to survive was to find the largest caches of preserved food and camp out near those. Places like the wholesale club Roaker had planned to steal food from.

When he'd arrived, climbing in through a back window that had been improperly boarded over, leaving just enough space for a semi-fit journalist in his mid-thirties to crawl through, he'd immediately taken note of the fact that something strange was afoot--namely, that the store's lights were on. Fluorescent bulbs buzzed feebly overhead, providing the entire store with a hazy bluish tint. Jon stood for a second, basked in the seemingly unfamiliar light, realizing it had been weeks, maybe even months, since he'd seen functional fluorescent lights. Wonder turned to bewilderment as he suddenly wondered how they were still working--a question that was quickly solved when he looked to his right and saw a series of car batteries daisy-chained together into the store's power grid via an alternator.

Then he realized who was running it. Five or six armed figures of indeterminate gender appeared out of the corner of his eye, moving towards the grid. Roaker immediately realized he was outnumbered and outgunned and slipped away, down a row of shelves, heading for what may have at one point been the butcher's or the frozen goods section. He slid into a cooler, now serving as a bunkhouse, as the others reached the power grid. Roaker realized he wasn't getting away with any grand old spoils, so he decided to do the next best thing: moving up and down the rows of bunks, Roaker removed any food, water or supplies he could find, which was maybe two tins of tuna and a half-empty bottle of vodka, and a map of the city apparently edited for the destruction the post-Haze chaos had wrought, and split.

He was near the front door when he heard shouting from above him, followed by the sound of cans being rattled. Roaker kept moving calmly, carefully, towards the front doors, when a volley of shots rang out. 'Yeah, they found me,' he thought to himself, throwing his body through the front doors and scrabbling through the broken glass and twisted chicken wire that formed an outer barrier, angry shouting in Russian and the occasional warning shot hot on his trail.

Roaker didn't know how long he ran, but he was sure by this point he was lost. The buildings all looked the same, now; residentials, but not familiar ones. Worse, he could tell by the fact that his breathing was becoming more labored that his filter was running low. He would have to stop soon.

As luck would have it, he didn't wander much farther down the block before he was greeted by human voices. He stood at the far end of the block, crouched in a doorway, looking at a small group being ushered into a building about four doors away. And parked out front--was that a running car? How the hell was that possible? The Dust was capable of choking out even the sturdiest air filters in a matter of seconds.

Speaking of filters...

Roaker let out a sigh. He didn't have a choice now: he had to get indoors and change his filter, and figure out a way back to the hotel. It was either that or he was going to die out here in the cloud, his lungs ripped apart by the tiny Dust particles that even now were beginning to infiltrate his mask.

He slipped out of the doorway and raised his hands high above his head, moving towards the door. Once he was nearly at the doorstep, he let out a yell, his voice hoarse with disuse:

"Hey! My filter's almost down, I need to change out! Let me in!"