The Mad-Happy - 1st two pages

[Marlena]

The Mad-Happy

 

Chapter 1

 

I always wanted to be beautiful. My partner told me I was and I’m sure he had meant it, but I didn’t want to be beautiful only like that. I wanted to be the type of beautiful that stops a stranger mid-step, turns him around and makes him run after me. They do that now. That’s why I hid in the trees.

So, I sat in a tall, tree canopy, concealed by leaves, and watched the weedy, unkempt parking lot of the Kingston Penitentiary in the distance. Everything was silent, as it had been for almost two years. The majority of the inhabitants of Kingston, Canada were dead, as were the majority of inhabitants of every city, everywhere. But I still hid.

Within the penitentiary were most of the survivors of Kingston. It was now a communal living base, as well as an ad hoc research facility where they experimented on women like me.

The treeless parking lot around the prison in the distance looked empty, but I knew that the guards were hiding in shaded spots, sleeping. There was no one left to attack them. Guarding was just a game to stave off boredom.

Initially, I would come and watch the prison for my own protection. I figured out routines, took stock of the weapons, counted the number of men. That part I still did. There were precisely 279 men…that day. Every now and then a fight would break out and the number of men decreased by a couple. Not all of the men in there were archconservative goons, but enough of them were for me to make sure that they didn’t know I existed.

After some time, I continued to watch the prison to try and figure out how to rescue the other women in there, who were like me. But I gave up on that too.

So, finally, I just watched the prison as a routine, and out of loneliness. Just as I watched every other concealed survivor in the city, most of whom had no idea that I existed. I found some when they hunted in the safety of night. Others I found when they stole little moments to sit in the sun of whatever balcony or yard they thought blocked them from view. There weren’t many of them and most hid so well, it had taken even me a long time to find them. But eventually I found them all. I had nothing else to do.

I lived all alone in a well concealed home I had claimed outside of the city. It was safe and comfortable and other than me, it was completely empty. I quickly grew tired of emptiness, preferring to spend most of my days watching other survivors from a distance.

Emptiness was all around me; in the long-ago looted buildings, the streets and sidewalks that the weeds had claimed as their own, and the remnants of houses that the wind ripped off and blew around. A long time ago, they used to have those cowboy, theme-park towns where you could go and see people in period costumes demonstrate life in the eighteen hundreds. The world around me now was like a deserted theme-park town of the twenty-second century.

Ninety-nine percent of men and women died. Out of the remaining women, half began to mutate.  It happened so fast, they never did figure out how or why. All we know is that it happened at the DNA level. And it happened to me.

I was now, what they called a Femme. The name they use for us ‘mutant women’ came from a combination of Femme Fatale and La Femme Nikita. It describes us well. We are something that looks like living anime dolls, with huge eyes and hair in shades that remind you of precious stones or metals, from rose gold, to black pearl and diamond, always sparkling in the light as if glitter had been thrown on it. Our physical proportions are perfect and our physical strength, agility and speed are like those of a panther.

Whenever I got a bottle of wine and got drunk on a treetop I would inevitably start wondering if all this was the evil plan of a deranged feminist, gone horribly awry.

None of the male survivors mutated. The goons at the penitentiary called the unmutated women ‘Clean’. The Clean women that were at the penitentiary, either willingly or by force, were being ‘preserved’ for the future of human procreation. The Clean women who were determined not to be used to restart the human race, were very good at hiding, as were the men who were determined not to be part of the penitentiary goon gang.  But there were not enough of those people to make a difference and they were not brave enough to band together. At least not yet. Till now, they just hid, and I watched.

[Ariel Slick]

[Marlena]

Hi Ariel,

Thanks so much for taking the time to read my first pages.

I appreciate the advice!