Awakening Rielle by Crystal Cierlak

Virginity was a hot commodity in the city of Raving Thistle, or at least that's what Rielle had heard from a friend of a friend whose cousin once had a best friend's boyfriend's sister in the know. Or something like that. It began as what Rielle believed was a joke, an off color remark from a well-known man who said he stayed young by drinking the blood of virgins. A good-looking man could get away with saying almost anything if he had the smile to back it up. But that was decades ago, long before Rielle was even born, and the remark had not only become something of a legend, but had sparked a kind of revolution.
    No one actually called it a sexual revolution - that would have been far too pedestrian. Some referred to it as the awakening or the fuckening (in less polite circles), while colloquially it was known as liberation .
    Liberation was a kind of end-of-the-world-we're-all-going-to-hell-anyway-so-fuck-it-all attitude adopted by people who were tired of doomsday depression. Once upon a time there were books whose pages were filled with stories of post-apocalyptic life set in distant dystopian futures. Not a single one of them prepared anyone for life during the apocalypse, which is probably why liberation had such a convenient foothold in society. Why worry about something whose conclusion was inevitable when there no longer existed societal rules of how to actually live your life?
    Gone were the days of "the wars" - the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on civil rights. When humanity finally breached the threshold where naysaying and disbelief were absolutely ridiculous in the face of certain and overwhelming proof - remember when California wasn't just a beach that bordered Oregon, Nevada and Arizona? - everything changed.
    Not content to just give up and wait for death to come knocking on their door, most people took to surviving by their basest instincts. Morality, having been rooted out of a society whose intent was to survive on their own terms, was a rare possession to own.
    Perhaps that was what the good looking man with the mythical appetite for virginal blood had been waiting for, because no one seemed to question when he suddenly reappeared not one day older than when he initially disappeared all those decades ago. Immortality was an easy concept to believe in at the precipice of the existence of humankind.
    That's when the stories started.
    According to the friend of a friend whose cousin once had a best friend's boyfriend's sister in the know, a woman with her virginity intact had the bargaining power to obtain a bit of immortality for herself.
    "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life," Rielle muttered to herself even as she climbed the stone steps towards The Immortal's massive home high in the hills above Raving Thistle. Still, her belief in his immortality was enough to compel her to leave camp in the middle of the night in search of the truth, and she happened to be in possession of that rarest of rare commodities: chastity.
    Immortality . Maybe the prospect of surviving beyond the death of humanity was alluring to some, but not to Rielle. Her desire was in surviving well enough so that death came naturally, when it was supposed to. Currency came in many forms in this new era of end of days, but cash was still the main bargaining tender, and she suspected that her virginity would fetch a high price from the man whose own mortality supposedly rested in the blood of a virgin.
    She would sell it to him in whatever form he required it, and then leave Raving Thistle forever, never again knowing the recoiling pang of hunger or sleeping without a stable roof above her head. She would finally have the means to travel beyond the reach of liberation where society was still operating as though it were worth saving. Dying of natural causes was a luxury, and one she intended to obtain.
    From the base of the mountain and even in the city center of Raving Thistle, The Immortal's house looked