The Mask Avenger

9 August 2020

The Brave New Normal

“Bob, we need more masks” called Alice upstairs. “OK, I’ll go get some” replied Roberta, taking down the AK-47  from above the fireplace and pulling on her visor.

She headed out of the apartment taking care that there weren’t any of the NMA hanging around the bridge to the small shopping street where she could still buy the necessary.

The National Mask Association were a global movement of paramilitary nutters, spun out from the National Rifle Association in the US (or what was left of the US). They believe in the right to bare faces, and insisted on going right up to people on the street, risking infection. While many of them then died from Zephyr, the remnants regarded this as martyrdom, and continued to attract more and more adherents.

Alice called them “the new face of offensive weapons:. Bob preferred to shoot them as it was a quicker death, and they’d not then infect anyone else too.

There weren’t too many of them in Amsterdam these days anyhow, luckily. But Alice and Bob were still planning to move on as soon as they could get the boat in good enough shape - it is a long way to Crete round the channel, across the bay of Biscay, around the straights of Gibraltar. And they’d like to make it without any landfalls in France, Portugal, Spain or iIaly, where things were still rough in the current pandemic.

Things had been this way for ever -Alice used to study history at the Vrijie Universitaat and explained how since medieval times, once populations were large and dense enough, and travelled more frequently, the disruption to wild life meant that diseases crossed over from there to domestic and to human every year, and then spread across the world, killing millions. People adapted. In the reformation, and later enlightenment, there began to be an understanding of the processes of epidemics and later still the underlying causes. But people were just not willing to change their lifestyle enough to prevent them altogether, so slowly people made individual choices to avoid contact with others, to wear protective gear, and wait til each one til it died out, only to meet the next one sweeping round the planet. Plagues were just part of human existence, always had been, always will.

Alice was just getting some eggs ready, when Roberta burst through the front door, shouting “Get your skates on darlin’, we’ve gotta blow this town in a hurry” - there seemed to be a whole street full of maskless thugs chasing her.

There followed  the usual escape over the rooftops and down to the docks, where the boat was just  about ready, and they’d been fooling themselves that it just needed one more tin can or one more spare GPS.

They were on their way.

A week later, they were docking in the harbour in the western town of Phalasarna. Many people came out to the dock to welcome them, and shake their hands. Alice couldn’t help herself from flinching at human contact - the first with strangers in her life. She held fast to Roberta - to see people jostling and hugging and embracing was scary - somehow people on the island had found the new normal, and were no longer scared of intimacy after 1500 years of plagues.

As Eve, the mayoress, showed them to their new home just up the hill, she explained that they had found how 5G radio signals interact with something in the water from the White Mountains, to boost the human immune system to deal all viruses….as soon as the scientists from the university of Crete could isolate the chemicals, the priestesses would synthesise it and share it with the world. “This will change everything” she declared. Alice and Bob wondered.