John the wimp

 

John was a survivor. As far as he knew, there must not have been more than a hundred survivors in all in the city, which had numbered more than 300,000. Among the survivors, there were only a few people over the age of thirty in all of Nice. There had been one guy, a drunk, who lived on the side of the Vieux-Port. He must have died by now. And there was also Régine, the neighbor. Régine must have been about sixty years old. But she had lost her mind lately. She was locked up in her apartment. She didn't have much time left, either. John had never known her well. He left a little food outside her door every now and then, more to make sure she was still alive than anything else. He would rather take her out quickly and put her in the back of the park, to be eaten by the chickens, than let her rot in his apartment and have her corpse stink up the whole building like Mr. Dunart whom he had found after a month. Jean had preferred to burn the apartment and sacrifice part of the building rather than take the body out. John was not a mortician. If he couldn't get Regine's body out, he would burn down her apartment, as he had done with Dunart. And if the whole building burned down, he would move to another residence. But it pissed him off to have to move all his stuff.

Nice, like all the cities on the French Riviera, had been a city of old, petty, moneyed assholes who'd blamed the whole world for having to die. Now, their hundreds of thousands of corpses were rotting everywhere in the apartments, villas and hospitals of the region. They hadn't even bothered to die in the gardens. That could have been compost. Now it smelled less, but the smell had been stenchy for a year.

Their bones had turned white all over the city. They were a real pain in the ass, the old ones, even when they were rotting.

John was on a business trip to Italy at the time of the last crisis. When he came back to France, he was immediately quarantined in Nice, without being able to reach Marseille. Afterwards, it was too late, the highway was blocked. Marseille had been subjected to looting. The villa he lived in had been squatted and burned. The inhabitants of the neighborhood had been massacred. John no longer had a home.

The last epidemic had finished wiping out the world's population. The few adults who had survived the previous epidemics had been mowed down.

There were only a few kids left who didn't know much. They could barely read. They could barely string three words together. Most had lost their parents when they were ten years old. They were twenty at the most, rarely less than fifteen, the younger ones having been unable to find food. A psychologist would have had some work to do. They were all shocked, traumatized, full of emotional deficiencies. But John was not a psychologist. He was already struggling to find a reason to live. He had no time to waste with those who were not cut out to survive.

The few young people came to John, as if attracted by a magnet. He was the father they were missing, a reference point, a reference, of course. The problem was that John did not want to play this role at all. his wife and his son were dead. For his wife, by the way, it was not a loss. She had been a pain in the ass all her life.

His daughter also had to stay there somewhere in Asia. The kid wasn't brilliant but she knew how to sell her ass. John and his wife had taught her to love money, she had made do with what she had. She had married a rich guy, the only son of a trader, who had made her live the life of a millionaire in the palaces and yacht clubs of the jet set. So she was in a beautiful villa in Phang Nga Bay, Thailand, at the time of the last health crisis. She was stuck there.

John had not heard from her since the phone and internet networks were no longer working. The last few times, she was not doing so well. Her husband had died. She was stuck in this luxury resort in Thailand, in a country that was losing at least three thousand people a day. Her money didn't count anymore, people were dying. John didn't know if she had survived, but it was obviously a long shot. If she did, she would at least try to sell her ass to whoever offered her a way to survive. John could count on her, she knew how to do...

In any case, there was no possibility that he would ever see her again. There were no more planes, no more boats, no more things that looked like the old world. Seeing what he saw around him in that city, he didn't even want to imagine what had happened there for tourists. But John didn't care, really. He had always been an asshole, an egotist with a shitty temper. Now he didn't hide it anymore.

John had worked all his life as a salesman, a sales manager thanks to his cousin, and then he'd gone out on his own once he had his network. With his wife, they had tried to make connections, to frequent the bourgeois circles of Marseille, to be on first-name terms with the deputies. Now there was no electricity, no computer, no business, no socializing. John had become again what he had always been: a guy without interest. Since he had never been an intellectual, an artist or a poet; since he had never liked gardening or DIY, he had nothing to pass on to the young.

He soon realized that he had to find a way to survive. Looting food stocks in supermarkets and grocery stores had worked for a while. John had concentrated on the grain stores. He had planted hundreds of square meters of carrots, potatoes, radishes, whatever he could get his hands on. He had planted fruit trees all over the grounds of the residence. It didn't work out so well. But, out of numbers, he managed to pick a few wild lettuces, a few worm-eaten vegetables and twisted fruits, nothing more. He had given up, what was left grew by itself.

Fortunately, there were the chickens. There were about a hundred of them surviving in the park, safe from stray dogs. So there were eggs, almost every day. The rest had to be found every day in the houses. Breaking and entering, rummaging through closets, stumbling over dead bodies, this was his contemporary hunter-gatherer activity.

John often took some young people with him on these expeditions; those he supported, that is, those who listened and kept quiet.

There were some very young women, too, whom he had selected to live with him. He had discarded the women over twenty-five, those who might contradict him. The ones who remained were his sex slaves. He fucked them whenever he could, whenever he wanted. He even fucked them all together, sometimes. Everything was allowed in this falling world. He was a little disgusted of himself sometimes. They weren't as old as his daughter. But that was the shitty world he lived in. There were no more women his age, no whores, no internet to jerk off to. He was one of the only alpha males in town, one of the only ones who could teach them something, reassure them, let them fall asleep at night. He had not forced any of them. They had all come to offer themselves, like the hens gathered around the rooster in the barnyard.

So he had organized his "harem". They had been four, but Emilie had died. She was psychologically fragile, she had thrown herself from the top of a building in Cimiez. John had felt nothing.

He tried to be nice, but he only thought of himself. If a girl pissed him off, she left. He didn't tolerate any challenge to his authority. On days when he was in a bad mood, girls had to put up with it, get yelled at, shut up. He tried not to overdo it, though. When he felt he had them all wrong, he'd leave for a few hours, a few days, or he'd lock himself in his room, with a "no trespassing" sign. It was a code. Everyone hung on him. Life would stop until Jean came to his senses, dispensed the hugs, the caresses, the affection that made the present events acceptable.

John had never been a proponent of the conspiracy theory, that thing of the poor and frustrated. He had managed to stay on the right side of the wall all his life, but now he understood that there was nothing natural about this catastrophe. Somebody, somewhere, had made the decision to spread these deadly bacteria. Maybe things had gotten out of hand, maybe this near-eradication of humanity had been planned. Perhaps somewhere in Patagonia or in the Midwest, the people responsible for this catastrophe were still living quietly and counting their winnings. Perhaps, but John could do nothing about it. Above all, John knew that he was not responsible for this chaos. And he had every intention of spending the last years of his life on this earth as he wished.