Chapter Text
49 Hours Before the Purge Begins
Charlotte Flair was feeling well and truly helpless; She found she didn’t much like the sensation but she supposed she was hardly alone in these things. She had no doubt that millions of other people felt pretty helpless right now as well and she doubted that any of them were enjoying it.
Charlotte was nervous about the purge, what else was new? Every year the days leading up the annual purge she became charged with a horrible kind of expectation. Neighbors, coworkers, even friends began to eye each other nervously or even expectantly. One never knew who would simply be trying to ride out the night or who would be out on the streets wreaking havoc. It was like some horribly twisted version of the anticipation before the holidays.
Charlotte was an elementary school teacher and, as such, not overly wealthy. Of course no one became a grade school teacher hoping to get wealthy but now she almost wished she’d stayed with her original career as a runway model. At least then she’d have enough money to feel reasonably safe on purge night.
It was generally agreed that, if one wasn’t of the wealthy politicians, part of any hospital staff, or anyone that enjoyed immunity from the purge, the safest place to be on that night was in one of the private shelters. This was a new industry that had sprung up in the years following the first few purges. Private companies would offer citizens who just wanted to ride out the horrid night access to a secure shelter. These shelters were usually built in suburban or rural areas and were constructed like fortresses.
Their exact details could vary but they all had a few things in common. A private armed security force sufficient to protect the compound, thick defenses, and accomodations for a large number of paying customers. In the whole history of the purge only a handful of shelters had ever been breached, and these were mostly the smaller fly by night operations.
When she’d lived back in North Carolina with her family, Charlotte had always stayed in a private shelter during the purge. Her parents had always paid the bill and Charlotte now kicked herself for never bothering to find out how much it cost. Now that she lived on her own she’d tried to book a space in one of the shelters for herself, only to find that she simply couldn’t afford to do so.
Of course one of the other industries that had popped up was a new kind of predatory lending, purge loans. These came from individuals that were happy to front cash so a desperate person could afford to protect themselves. As such, they often came with horribly punitive and restrictive conditions. It was only a slight exaggeration to say that the purge lenders would ask for your first born.
Charlotte had agonized over this for a long time. On one hand, it seemed odd to worry about one’s financial future if one’s literal future was in danger. On the other, Charlotte would get to live the rest of her life, if she survived this year's purge, and she would prefer to do so in a status other than ‘unofficial indentured servant’. So she’d been forced to look for another solution.
The internet was full of information and advice on how one might best survive the purge. Charlotte had watched more Youtube tutorials on home fortification over the last two weeks than she could even remember. She’d found as many ‘purge preparedness’ checklists as she could and done her best to check off every entry on all of them yet, as she looked around her apartment she saw how woefully inadequate everything she’d done so far seemed.
She’d bought special security frames and had prevailed upon a friend to help her install them, but now they looked so pitifully frail. She’d bought a metal device that was originally designed to seal doors in the event of a shoot out in a public place, say like a bank, and was ready to place it behind her door but now she realized that her door was just made of wood, even if someone couldn’t open it they could simply hack their way through.
She even bought a gun, a sub compact Glock 33. She’d taken it to a local firing range several times already but she knew she was no markswoman. Leaving aside if she could hit anything, would she be able to pull the trigger when the time came if the target was another human being? Charlotte honestly doubted it.
She considered the possibility of simply loading up her car and driving out into the countryside, but then she’d done some research and had learned the startling fact that rural areas were, if anything, even more violent than urban ones on purge night. She knew some people simply flew out of the country before the purge but that wasn’t an option for her financially.
“Maybe I should just sleep with him” She muttered to herself as she looked at the small pile of lumber she’d purchased. This would allow her to board up any openings into her apartment at need.
The ‘him’ in question was a man named Bobby Roode. He was a co-worker of Charlotte’s at the school and had been after her for a date almost from the moment she’d arrived. Charlotte for her part simply wasn’t interested. Roode was undeniably a very attractive man but Charlotte wasn’t in a place where she felt ready for a relationship. But she had to admit that she found the idea of having a very strong man with a vested interest in protecting her at her apartment on purge night to be very appealing.
She instantly felt a wave of guilt and disgust at herself for even thinking this. Not only would she basically be prostituting herself but she didn’t want manipulate someone like that. However she examined her circumstances it seemed that she would most likely be facing purge night alone. A whole night in which she’d have nothing to do but worry for her own safety. The prospect was not attractive. But, she reminded herself, things could be worse for her, she could be out on the streets during the purge instead if her apartment.
She shuddered at the very thought. Everyone knew how dangerous the streets became on purge night and everyone knew about the countless murders, assaults, and other heinous acts that would occur and yet, this never deterred hordes of people from taking to the streets anyway. Broadly speaking, they fell into three categories.
The first were the psychopaths. They were the people who spent all year waiting for the chance to go out and become a complete animal for 12 hours. These were the ones who committed the overwhelming majority of the crimes on purge night and they didn’t confine themselves strictly to murder and assault, they also sexually assaulted people, set massive fires, and sometimes even engaged in such behaviors as cannibalism.
The second group were the opportunists and they were the largest group. These were the people who went out on purge night hoping to gain something in someway. Usually this meant they spent a large portion of the night seeking plunder or simply robbing other purgers. Despite their prevalence, or maybe because of it, the opportunists rarely found what they sought. For every one of them who managed to enrich themselves many more were wounded or killed in the attempt, sometimes by their fellows.
The third group, and by far the smallest, were the vigilantes. These were people who believed in being more proactive about protecting themselves and their property; Sometimes even to the extent of seeking out those psychopaths or opportunists who had particularly bad reputations and killing them. But like the opportunists, the vigilantes failed more often than they succeeded. Worse, many of them weren’t much better than the psychopaths in their methods. They were the lone wolves.
What made all three of these groups even more disturbing had nothing to do with how they planned to spend purge night. It was that there was no true way to predict who might be part of what group. There were as many waiters and soccer moms among the psychopaths as there were ex-cons. Your friendly neighbor might just be the opportunist who tried to steal your car and grizzled old ex-con might be the very man who was out trying to clean up the streets on his own as a vigilante.
Charlotte had never, and hoped to never, be out on purge night. It simply was not something that decent people did in her view. But then she caught herself, she could no longer believe that absolutely. She now knew at least one decent person who did go out on purge night, or at least someone she believed was decent.
Charlotte thought back the woman she’d met at that bar, Sasha Banks. When she’d first laid eyes on the woman, she’d thought that she might be the exact type who would be out marauding on purge night. But then they’d had a drink together, and then another, and then a final one. Charlotte was a good judge of character and she sensed that Sasha was being entirely honest when she talked about how much she hated the purge.
Charlotte had done some quick research when she’d gotten home that night and had learned she was right. Sasha was a pulitzer prize winning journalist who had spent time embedded with American troops overseas and even briefly gone undercover as a prostitute to get a story on a notorious pimp. But recently she’d seemingly been losing some of the luster off her reputation as she embarked on her one woman crusade against the purge.
Most people would deplore the purge’s excesses, but few would call for its abolishment. The narrative that the purge was responsible for the dramatic drop in crime and unemployment in recent years had been sounding in people's ears for so long that most started believing it. Charlotte was personally highly skeptical of these claims, or at least the idea that one night of mayhem was the only way such positive ends could be achieved.
Still, she didn’t have Sasha’s courage. She wouldn’t have been caught dead outside during the purge, no matter how noble the cause. She wished Sasha Banks all the luck in the world in her crusade but Charlotte would not ever be personally participating. She really did wish Sasha the best of luck, both for abstract and selfish reasons.
Charlotte was new the area and sensed that she and Sasha might someday become good friends. This couldn’t of course happen if Sasha got herself killed on the streets or, for that matter, if Charlotte got herself killed in her apartment. There was always more she could do to prepare, she told herself. So pushing aside her grim reflections, she got back to work.