Masked

Evan O'Connor had been drifting into sleep as he looked at his phone. Then he saw those words pop up as he was scrolling down Facebook on his phone: 'NBA to suspend season.'

Suddenly wide awake, he clicked on the article and sat up. A player on the Utah Jazz had tested positive for COVID-19 and the NBA was going to suspend the season indefinitely.

He had been taking the Coronavirus about as seriously as he had taken West Nile, The Swine Flu and all of the other various illnesses throughout the years that the drama-lovers loved to spread fear about. He still had no fear of himself getting sick but he had never seen a sports season get suspended for any other reason than a player strike. All of the hysteria he had heard about things shutting down might actually have some merit.

**

'Enjoy the Silence' by Depeche Mode played on the 90's on 9 channel as Evan drove into work. He was already over his surprise about the NBA season being suspended. Just more drama, he assumed. How many players had been 'suspended' in the past only to be back long before they were expected to be? Within a few days, the NBA would realize how much money they were losing with no games and it would be back up and running like normal. It would be an interesting point of conversation around the coffee maker, though.

He pulled into the parking lot of his work and noticed far less cars here than usual. There were over 250 people that worked at this location alone and the lot looked up two thirds as filled up as it normally was. Were all of those people calling in sick? That was Corporate America, half of the employees milking whatever they could to get paid for not working while the harder workers like him never getting any recognition for carrying the rest of them.

Inside the building, the people that were there seemed happy enough, smiles on their faces, and talking to the same people they normally talked to. Only two girls in their mid-twenties were in the kitchen chatting when he went to get his coffee and they weren't talking about the NBA.

"My flight leaves at six a.m. on Friday," the girl with the glasses who always wore tight shirts that showed off her large breasts said. "If the flights end up being canceled I'll get my plane ticket refunded but I guarantee my hotel that I booked for ten days is going to be like 'oh well, you're out of luck."

'

"I just wonder how much longer it's going to be before they send us home," the girl talking to her with the curly hair and the glasses said. Dave got a text message last night that they were all to work from home until further notice."

Evan finished pouring his coffee and he stopped eavesdropping. There wasn't a chance this place was going to be sending anyone home and he had to bite his tongue to keep himself from interrupting the conversation of the two girls he didn't know to say that. Why couldn't he work at a company like that Dave guy worked at? He always got stuck at the place that had the hardest work.

Sitting at his desk with his computer loaded up, he started his day normally. The stock market was obviously bad and he was going to have to spend the majority of his day yielding calls from panicked customers that he'd have to recite scripted responses to until he finally told them that if they had any further questions they would have to call their advisor. His first email was just a normal email from a client who needed some help logging into the website to access their account. Just another boring day in his world.

"Evan, what are you doing?"

He looked up to see Janice Knapp who he knew was just 4 days older than him, walking by his desk, her laptop case over her shoulder, and a box full of various office supplies in the other. She had the look of someone getting canned, carrying all of their stuff, but she wouldn't have all of the office supplies if that were the case.

"What?" he said.

"They're sending us home. Didn't you check your email?"

One email at a time was his rule of thumb. Even an urgent looking subject line like 'All Employees are to Begin Working from Home Immediately' couldn't have taken his attention from his normal routine. When he exited the email he was in and went back to his Outlook inbox, that was exactly the email he saw right at the top. He opened it up, just doing a quick skim of it, already knowing the gist of what it said.

He stood up from his cubicle and had been so focused on his work that he hadn't even realized that people were packing up their things rapidly to get out. He worked off a laptop that he had the ability to take home but never had before. He didn't like the idea of bringing his work home with him. He worked hard enough when he was in the office, he didn't need his laptop in his house with him, tempting him to just do one more thing for work before he shut it down.

**

Work had been a pain in the ass that day, the majority of his day spent dealing with technical issues resulting from the transition to working from home and the IT chat line was backed up much more than it usually was. How his employer decided this was a better option than having everyone in the office and taking their chances if they got sick or not, he did not know.

What he did know was that the day had taken a toll on him and he needed to broil himself a nice big strip steak for dinner as opposed to getting creative and making something out of one of the chicken breasts that he had cooked on Sunday. When he pulled in to the parking lot of the grocery store and saw it more packed on a mid-March evening than it was on Christmas Eve he felt annoyed.

Inside the grocery store there were people everywhere and even the pharmacy had a line that stretched well out into the hand soap section. He wanted one damn item but he thought if it was really worth going to get when he looked at the lines. The 7 items or less line had to have close to 20 people in it, half of them clearly having more than 7 items. He hated the idea of using self-checkout but even that had quite the line. Should he just turn around and go make chicken at home? No, he came here to get a steak and he wasn't going to have that taken away from him because of all of these hoarding idiots. If he had to wait, he would wait.

Back at the meat section he could see from a distance that it was mostly empty and when he got close he saw that anything resembling steak was gone. There were some nasty looking chicken strips but there was more chicken juice surrounding the area then there was actual meat. There was no reason to be buying any meat tonight.

With no intention of waiting in the long lines, he took a stroll around the store just to check things out. The majority of the pasta section was cleaned out with wheat pasta being the only thing there was a fairly good supply of. He saw two regular boxes of regular spaghetti. He prepared to take them when an anxious looking middle-aged woman swooped in and grabbed them before he could even start to make his move. He ended up leaving the store with nothing.

**

Monday evening came around and it was time for Evan to go to the store after staying in all weekend. Seeing how busy it had been on a Wednesday night, he wasn't going to dare attempt his weekend shopping but now that it was Monday, he had to assume things had settled down, and that he could grocery shop. There was no way it could still be as chaotic there as it had been 5 nights ago.

He walked in the cold towards the automatic doors and when they opened up he saw a woman standing there with curly hair, a burly build, big breasts that stuck out her collared shirt, and she was wearing a mask.

"Mmm-mmm," she said through the mask, the negative tone in her voice the only reason he could tell that she was telling him no. "You can't come in here without a mask."

She reached her hand towards a box that was on a table that had probably four face masks sticking out of it, looking wrinkled, and it looked like multiple people had had their hands in that box. She grabbed an extremely wrinkled one and aggressively put it right up towards his face.

"No thanks," he said, backing away, thinking the amount of germs on that mask had to be more than any it could possibly prevent from getting in or out of him. "I'll buy a box for myself in there."

He started to walk by her and she shoved the mask even closer to his face. He was close to ripping it out of her hand and shoving it in her masked face. "We're all out and are going to be for a while," she said, sounding distressed about it. "You can't go in there without this!"

She continued to hold it in his space, his anger increasing, as he resisted the strong urge to punch her in her masked face. "I'm all set," he said as he backed away from her and she actually stepped towards him holding it in his face more. "I'll take my chances without it."

"Zeke!" she called out.

Over there in no time was a large, round guy who stood at close to 6'4 and had to weigh close to 300 pounds. His mask covered his nose and mouth but Evan could see the anger in his eyes, the guy clearly not messing around. Evan was angry too but the longer this guy stared him down, the more that anger turned into fear.

"You're not goin' in the store without a mask on," Zeke said to him, calmly but sternly.

"There's no law saying that I need to wear a mask," Evan said. "You can't make me wear that."

"You're not goin' in that store without a mask on," Zeke repeated, his tone and word pace so similar to the previous time that he said it that it sounded like it was a recording coming out of his mouth.

Evan looked at the woman and he could see the pleased look in her eyes. He looked at Zeke one more time then grabbed the mask out of the woman's hand and put it on his face.

He walked into the store that now had a completely different feel than it had even the last time he was here with everyone panic buying. Although there were less customers here than the previous time, it was still fairly crowded. Every single person in there had a mask on their face as they walked around picking out their groceries. They looked to him like a bunch of rats in a cage, just scurrying around for food, none of them talking to each other, the masks making human interaction less natural, and they were all a few feet apart from each other due to the panic of not getting too close to each other.

Evan made his way towards the back of the store, feeling like one of the rats himself, with his mask on as he weaved through everyone. He needed some meat, they had to have restocked by now, but even if all they had was that nasty chicken, he'd have to live with that. When he got back to the meat section he saw a big sign that read 'LIMIT ONE PACKAGE OF MEAT PER PERSON -- NO EXCEPTIONS".

First they were forcing him to put this thing on his face and now they were limiting the amount of food he could buy? He had never taking his freedom for granted, always grateful he didn't live in another time or country where he didn't have the freedom to do the things he wanted. Now he felt like that was gone and it scared him even more than he ever thought it would.

"Hey!" a guy practically yelled at him as he stepped closer to the meat. Another security guard, this one an older gentlemen, who Evan guessed was close to sixty based on the limited amount of his face he could see, with huge arms, stopped Evan in his tracks. "Six feet apart!"

He pointed to the floor and Evan saw that there were actually circles painted on the ground, six feet apart from each other, leading up to the meat, the circles wide enough for a person to stand in the center of them. He looked back up at the guard, pointing down at the circle, the one that Evan was required to stand in. The rats had to learn to stay in their places.

After impatiently waiting in the line for a few minutes, advancing to the next circle every time someone went up to select their meat, he finally got to go up himself. There was no steak, no ground beef, and this time there wasn't even any chicken. All that was there was bison meat. Evan had never tried bison meat before and he wasn't about to now. He walked away to go see what was in the frozen section.

"Hi Evan!" he heard.

He looked over to see her with a button-up white long-sleeved shirt on and he could see her boobs bouncing around on the inside of it like he often did based on the shirts that she wore. That's the only reason he knew who she was right away as she also had a mask covering the majority of her pretty face. He waved back. Seeing Janice Knapp in public wearing a mask made him realize just how real this was.

**

A week and a half later Evan was sitting on his couch on a Friday night flipping through the channels. He had heard when this first started that all non-essential businesses would be closed -- including bars -- but he didn't actually believe that every bar was going to be closed down. He didn't consider himself one of the regular drunks like the ones who were always at the bar sitting in their same spots every time he went, but he did go out drinking every Friday and Saturday night. Being a 28-year-old single guy, there wasn't much else for him to do on the weekends, especially if he wanted to have any chance of meeting women.

So it had hit him hard when he went out the previous weekend, driving two his usual spots, the ones that were always lit up on the outside with lights on, on the inside and people in there regardless of what time of day it was and even if it was Christmas. Seeing them dark on the inside and outside without a single vehicle in the parking lots of any of them depressed him a great deal.

Now it was his third straight weekend having to stay in and watch TV by himself and he was really starting to feel miserable. He didn't even have the desire to break into the case of Budweiser that he had in his refrigerator. He had been drinking a lot the last couple of weeks, even during the week, but it was starting to get old. He was used to going out and drinking by himself but there was something about drinking alone at his apartment that made it an unpleasant experience.

He had been scrolling through Facebook earlier seeing people posting about how this was a good time to spend more time with your family and how that was a better way to spend your time then just 'b*tching and complaining' about everything being shut down. If Evan had a beautiful wife to cuddle up with right now he might be able to live with that, but it angered him how insensitive those posts were to single people like him.

It didn't help that there was nothing on TV either. There was no sports on but there weren't even any new shows on anymore because all of them had stopped filming. The only thing he could watch that wasn't old was reporters on CNN blaming republicans for making the pandemic worse by not cooperating and reporters on Fox News saying how the democrats were going to destroy the economy by being overly cautious.

He flipped away from the news stations. A couple of reruns of sitcoms. A documentary about living in Alaska that was about four years old. When he flipped to a sports station and saw Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant in each other's faces about something and saw they were showing a WrestleMania from over 30 years ago, he turned it off. He had to get out of this house and he needed company.

**

He turned his Tesla onto Angel Street, barely seeing any other vehicles on the drive here. If there was one place where he'd be able to find people out and where he could find some company it would be Angel Street. The hookers still needed to make a living and most of their cliental probably weren't too worried about Covid.

He got out of his car on the dark street. Angel Street had a reputation of being dangerous and a place that you didn't want to be at night but the people that said that had never actually been here before. All you'd find here at this hour was prostitutes and drug dealers but despite the bad rep that it had, most of them were just interested in doing honest business. Pay for what you buy, don't complain, and you shouldn't have any troubles down here. If you heard gun shots you just walked in the other direction.

He felt the happiest he had in a couple of weeks as he walked down the street away from his car. Maybe he'd run into Monique. The first time he came to this street, unsure of what to expect, he was driving and he saw the woman walking down the street wearing her white dress which looked even whiter on top of her dark skin. He was checking out her big butt and her big boobs bouncing around in the dress. When he looked up at her face and saw that she was looking at him, his first reaction was that he'd get a dirty look. Instead, she had a look on her face like she had just spotted in old friend. Her white teeth in and that beautiful smile of hers sucked him in. She raised her hand to wave him down and he felt like stopping the car was the obvious option.

He got out, parked, and went over to talk to her. She was a great small-talker and slipped in casually that for two hundred bucks she'd take him to her spot and let him do whatever he wanted for an hour. That deal seemed more than reasonable the way she presented it, even quite enticing, and their first meeting was plenty to make him a regular client of hers.

But now as he walked down the street, his happiness was quickly going away. With no one around at all and a lot of the graffiti and abandoned buildings on this street, for the first time to him, it started feeling like the street that had the kind of reputation it had. The quietness was eerie and he stared to get a feeling he couldn't shake that at any point a gang was going to pop out of nowhere and mug him.

"Hey man!" he heard a male voice call to him from the darkness that startled him enough to make his whole body shake. He looked to the source of the voice and once he made eye-contact the voice was quick to again say, "Hey!"

He could see the whites of the man's eyes, and not much else as not only was he wearing a black hoodie but he had a black mask on over his face. What kind of world were they in now where people on Angel Street were wearing masks outdoors? From the little he could see and that he heard of the guy, he guessed him to be only 20-years-old or so. He also had a pretty good feeling that this guy was up to no good.

Evan turned in the other direction and began sprinting to his car. He felt like a coward doing so but he deducted that if the worst case scenario was some stranger thinking that he was a coward, that was more favorable than the possible bad scenarios that could happen if he didn't run.

"Hey!" the guy yelled at him, and he could hear in his voice that the guy was not pleased to have someone that he was calling running away from him.

Evan was a pretty fast runner anyway and when he was afraid he normally had lightning quickness. But he could hear the guy chasing him and despite how fast Evan was running, he could hear this guy was gaining on him. He felt extremely lucky that he had as much of a head start as he did as he heard the footsteps getting closer and he was also glad that he hadn't walked too far away from his car.

When he was just a few steps away from the car but he could hear the footsteps getting close as he was quickly starting to tire out, he realized that getting the car unlocked was going to be a problem that could slow him down enough for this guy to catch him. For the first time ever he wished he had one of those car doors that he could just unlock with his hands as long as the keys were in his pocket, that feature that so many people at his work had that he found ridiculous.

He waited until he was right next to his driver's side door before reaching his hand in his pocket and started fumbling around, his hands shaking, and the keys weren't coming out as quickly as he had hoped. His chaser was closer now and he resisted the temptation to look up at him, fearing that if he were to see a gun or a knife pointing at him, it would be enough to freeze him in his tracks.