The Shelter (Survivors Book 1) by Jean Levant

The Shelter
     
     
    T he lobby of the shelter forms an elegant, thin and stretched arc, of which the central radius is pointing a south-north axis, if I trust the map that was put up in the entrance. When I look through the huge bay window slightly inclined forward, I feel like I am looking at the prow of a large ship from the bridge, and that ship would calmly sail on rough seas.
    In reality, it is not possible to catch sight of the sea—the real thing, not the metaphor—although it is actually just at the foot of those hills. At least, we could expect to find it there. The sky is much too dark to distinguish anything farther than one hundred yards or so. This grey twilight is brightened up with very large flakes that clearly stand out against the dark background, like strange swirling feathers. The difference with the night is pretty subtle. However, my watch says that it is already nine o’clock in the morning. It is February: so there are four months that we have seen neither the sun nor the stars. The day is forever enshrouded under this thick and ashen cerement, both literally and figuratively; the night is made of the blackest ink. Even the snow cover no longer produces this usual reverb which gave before, at dark, a salmon pink hue to the smog. It has to be said that there is no light in the area, except those of the shelter. No, this is not quite correct: sometimes there are some fugitive glimmers which pierce the darkness, but they are so unnatural that I wonder if I would not prefer the black night. The worst, for me, is the lack of color. Of course this is due to absence of light: clearly, our eyes are not designed for these low luminosities, apart perhaps Lussius’ eyes, this weird black man with bleached skin, a fellow who has visibly had a lot of training. But this is also due to the snow which has almost completely whitened the landscape, including the green of cedars and orange trees and to the cold that has frozen fruit of strawberry trees and oranges. Even peacocks are white, for most of them. There is also a blue male but you would think it hibernates because you almost never see it: either it is perched in a high fork of a cedar tree, almost invisible, or it keeps warm in its small wooden house, at the bottom of the park.
    Only the white peahens occupy the park now. The weather is much too bad for us, I mean humans. All residents in the shelter have preferred to stay in a dry and warm place. It is cold indeed for Nice’s country (if this name still has a meaning) once famed for its mildness. When I say “all residents”, I am joking because we are only three so far. It is all the more astonishing that the shelter was visibly designed for a large number of people, and I find hard to believe that we are the only survivors. Unless of course it was not designed for this purpose and that it is in reality a rest home with modern architecture, rather incongruous in the local context, which would have miraculously escaped from the universal devastation. Needless to say that such an assumption seems to me highly fanciful. If we consider that the shelter was built before the disaster, then it must rather be protected by some kind of invisible dome. As it cannot be material—otherwise how would the helicopter do to fly in and out of the shelter?—I rather believe in an energy field that could be cut off if necessary. But I must say that, with all these flakes, I sometimes have the impression to be prisoner in a souvenir, you know those landscapes under a glass dome that snow when they are shaken.
    As I said, there are only three residents. The building is so vast that we can spend days without ever meet each other. To tell the truth, we are not seeking it. We have no affinity, either because of our characters or our social classes (or both together). And our different visions of the world are in conflict almost on all the points that matter. In short, we are at our best when everyone is in his own corner.