Page 1 of Doomsdate

Chapter One

T Minus Five Hours and Thirty-Seven Minutes

Until Shit Hits the Fan

Maisie

First dates are inherently terrifying, whether a debilitating GI virus is sweeping the nation or not, but dammit, I refuse to go through another pandemic lockdown a virgin. I slip on my favorite olive-green jumpsuit for tonight—practical, generously pocketed, with belt loops sturdy enough for my utility belt—and consider my facial attire next. I hold up a dainty black mask in one hand and a heavy-duty white N95 in the other. Which one says, I’m cautious, but not that cautious?

I fling the N95 over my shoulder and sigh. It’s been one week since GI-27 hit the United States, and already the country’s grinding to a halt. Schools have closed, hospitals are overrun, and airports shut their doors this morning. With a flight to New York City booked for next week, the first plane ticket I’ve ever bought, that particular joke’s on me. Turns out they won’t fly a plane when everyone on it has uncontrollable diarrhea. Rumors are a nationwide mandatory lockdown is coming tomorrow.

Which makes tonight’s first date critical. It may be my last chance to have sex before I turn thirty. An arbitrary deadline, I know, but it seemed reasonable when I first left the isolated farmhouse I grew up in and headed for the big town of Durham, North Carolina, almost ten years ago. When your doomsday-prepping mother is the only person you’ve exchanged more than five words with since she yanked you out of society at age five, you need to ease into the whole talking-to-people thing. Dating, sex, marriage—those were all distant theoretical constructs when the last guy I met was in kindergarten, pre–the yanking. So, after Mom died and I scrounged up the courage to reenter the world she poisoned me against, twenty years old and completely on my own, I decided to do what I do best: research, make a plan, in a word—prepare. To avoid chickening out, I set firm deadlines for my goals, and I’ve met each one, more or less.

By twenty-five, I’d have a stable job and career.

Done. I’m an actuarial analyst, calculating risk of death every way under the sun for a major insurance company, well paid and working fully remote. Could you get a better job for the anxious, reclusive daughter of a paranoid schizophrenic who taught her that evil men were recording us through the toaster? I think not. Also, RIP Mom, you foresaw the dawn of Alexa and smart devices twenty years early.

By twenty-eight, I’d make a friend.

Done. He’s a seventy-three-year-old Vietnam vet I met online in a virtual course on preservation and canning, but Gramps is like family to me now, sending me pickled green beans, strawberry jams, and mail-order guns I keep having to return. Is it technically cheating that my only friend is a prepper I’ve never met in real life? Maybe, but Gramps understands me in a way normal people cannot. He knows what it’s like to be isolated with nothing but your anxiety and a compulsion to dismantle it through systematic preparation. Plus, his jams are great.

In the way of most procrastinators, I saved the scariest, most exciting goals for last, and now here I am, almost thirty, and I’m still a virgin who’s never left North Carolina. While I at least purchased that plane ticket to New York, I’ve made zero progress in voluntarily allowing another human’s body to touch my human body in a consensual sexual way. I’ve certainly tried. But after dozens of failed attempts, I’ve learned dating is hard, finding someone you want to have sex with is even harder, and it’s about to become impossible now that another cockblocking pandemic is upon us.

Still think the world’s so great? The ghost of my mother’s voice echoes in my head. Pandemics and loser men and insurance companies betting low on the value of human life, pennies to the dollar?

I push her words away. Over time, I’ve come to realize that’s all they are—it’s not her, not really, but the perspective she drilled into my very marrow.

Other people can’t be trusted. Not to help you, not to save you, and definitely not to love you.

Believing anything else will just get you hurt, Mom adds.

But thanks to that thinking, I’m a lonely twenty-nine-year-old virgin with a small armory in the guest room who’s terrified to travel, and I still don’t own a toaster. Suffice it to say, I’m in the market for a new perspective, preferably one that involves getting a life. I didn’t realize that loneliness was something you could still feel when surrounded by people. But ten years later, ten years spent in the real world, the hardest part remains making connections to others.

Which is why I’ve been studying for tonight all day.

I sit at the desk in my prep room, wake up my laptop, and press play on another episode of Dreamsdate.

In this episode, Contestant Shayla has four dates with four potential partners. If she picks the one that dating coach, relationship expert, and happenstance billionaire Gigi Masterson claims is her most compatible match, as determined by interviews, personality testing, and, somewhat distressingly, blood work, Gigi will make Shayla’s dreams come true, which as far as I can tell always means a check for fifty thousand dollars and a trip to the Caribbean.

You can’t beat reality TV for dating practice. It’s real.

“Tell me about your trauma,” Shayla says across the small, intimate table from Date #1. “It’s okay, we love it.”

“Whoa, it’s so deep of you to put that out there, before I’ve even told you my name.” The man places a hand over his heart. “This is a safe space, I can feel it.”

“My therapist says I’m very brave,” Shayla says. “And sex-positive. Are you sex-positive”—she squints at his name tag—“Paul?”

Paul nods, very sex-positively, and I blow out a breath, impressed. Shayla’s nailing this date.

I hit pause to take some notes, jumping when an explosion of static bursts from the ham radio’s speakers to my left. Gramps clears his throat directly into his microphone some five hundred miles away.

“CQ, CQ, CQ, this is Gramps, calling for Maisie-girl.”

I scoot my rolling stool toward my radio. The push-to-talk button lights up beneath my finger. “This is Maisie-girl, come in, Gramps.”

“I’ve been thinking, Maisie, and this date’s too risky. It’s gettin’ real bad out there. Is this boy even a survivalist?”

“First of all, he’s a man, and second, no, but I like that about him.” I tap my toes against the floor in a quick rat-a-tat-a-tat, feeling my heart rate spike in tandem. Gramps has been questioning my decision to go out tonight damn near nonstop, and frankly, so have I. When I agreed to this date, school buses still chugged down the roads, people milled about on the sidewalks below my apartment, and you could leave this country if you wanted to. It’s scary how fast all that’s changed.