The Masque of the Red Death (Doctorow novella)
The Masque of the Red Death is the fourth short story in Cory Doctorowʼs Radicalized (2019). It is about a billionaire survivalist and their bunker.
Stats
Details
People
Places
- Fort Doom
- The bunker
Things
- pandemic
- A disease that wipes out a majority of humanity.
Narrative
A hedge fund owner has a private bunker in a very rural part of the US southwest within a day's driving distance of a large city. They invite men based on how trusted they are by alpha dude and their technological expertise. They invite women based on how hot, submissive, and eugenically breedable they are. No one else is permitted inside once the alpha dude sends the signal.
One day, alpha dude's dream comes true and a global pandemic begins wiping out most of humanity so he sends the signal to his chosen people. He let's them inside until the deadline then locks the door and readies the anti-personnel turrets for stragglers. Bunker inhabitants number a few dozen.
One person arrives a few weeks after the pandemic strikes and it's the wife of a software engineer chosen by alpha dude who died; the wife isn't let inside because she is visibly sick with the disease and brought others with her. Alpha dude orders his friends to shoot warning shots to scare them away. Eventually, brown wife leaves using the last of their gasoline to try and find help elsewhere.
Alpha dude and his hot survivor friends get drunk, have orgies, and eventually get bored. After some months they travel out to scout the area and get some supplies by trading some precious gemstones with some farmers. Then, out of boredom and a sense that civilization might restart without them seizing power, they preemptively neutralize a nearby armed enclave which results in heavy losses. Alpha male and company retreat to the bunker.
At some point they travel to the nearest large city to claim one of alpha dude's estates but are repelled by gunfire from the estate's new residents: people who chose to stay rather than hide in a doomsday bunkers.
Then, it turns out one of their adventures was enough for one of them to become an asymptomatic pandemic carrier. They exile someone with symptoms. However, nearly everyone gets sick and dies. The last survivor is alpha dude who discovers brown wife is back at the bunker's front door.
The story then recounts brown wife's story in which, after she was shot at from alpha dude's bunker, ends up a lucky survivor who returns to the nearby local city to work with other survivors. While alpha dude was enjoying a vacation of booze and orgies with his subordinates in his amply furnished survival bunker, brown wife was working to rebuild city infrastructure (e.g. water supply). She and survivors in the city succeed because despite most people dying, a small fraction of a large city's population is still a large amount of people who can cooperate to solve problems. Brown wife returns to the doomsday bunker to strip the place of technological artifacts useful for survival (e.g. water pumps, electric motors, etc.). She and her crew aren't heavily armed with the weapons necessary to fight against the armaments alpha dude prepared because she and other survivors have learned that most rural bunkers like these end up abandoned or filled with corpses of people who failed to work together in sufficient numbers.
History
See also
External links
References
Footnotes
