3rd April, 2071

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, The Last Republic.

[To have been invited to the fifty-year remembrance at all came as a shock, given some of my less than complimentary reporting on the Republican government. To be told on my arrival that I am being given a two-hour, one on one with Marie Saint herself is as much frustrating as it is exhilarating. To say I feel unprepared is an understatement.

For all the pomp and circumstance of the occasion, Saint-Germain-en-Laye is still well outside the nearest PoL. Everything from the presenting stage to the support buildings are all prefab, intended to be torn down and returned to storage as soon as the event is over. As such, the room provided for our interview is rather intimate, with a small cafe table and two stools inside a room no more than twenty feet across.

Up close, it is easy to see why Marie Saint became the public face of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and later The Last Republic. Chronologically in her late seventies, I would not guess her to be more than half that at a glance. In fact, she still looks eerily similar to a poster I most definitely did not have on my crèche wall some decade and a half earlier.

I am greeted with a smile as she brushes back the stripe of pink hair she has kept dyed since before I was born. I try my best not to be starstruck.]

You're nervous.

I'm not. [1]

I am sorry this is all so last minute, I promise that I didn't intend to put you on the back foot. When I heard you had been invited to the event, I pulled some strings to set this up. Easier to beg permission, and all that.

So this is a personal interview then? Not something in an official capacity?

It is a bit of both. [She sips gingerly at a hot caramel macchiato before continuing.] I wanted it, and Alexandre[1 I presume she meant President Alexandre Philippe-Rollin] wants me to make more public appearances that don't embarrass him. So long as I bite my tongue on certain subjects during our interview, I'm allowed my little vanity project.

Certain subjects?

I'll let you know if you're wandering too close. Keep it away from modern politics and you'll probably be fine.

Understood.

So... where do you usually start?

Usually? For an interview like this, I'd usually have started a month ago, digging through every scrap of research and running through a mock interview or three to get a feel for it. [My honesty seems to surprise her, but she smiles despite the mild rebuke.] Let's start at the beginning.

Safe to assume you don't mean my birth? Or my parent's divorce, my first crush, or my secondary school dropout years?

That is one thing that hasn't really changed it all this. Not a single one of the hundreds of interviews I've given over the years cared about Marie Messagère. Only Saint. It was as though I sprung into being fully formed at twenty-two. I've done so many things since then, with so many people hanging off my every action, my every word. But even I am starting to wonder if those first twenty-two years even happened, or if I just dreamed them while I waited to wake up in that hospital bed.

Oh, don't put on the long face. I understand what you meant, and I'm not mad. Not at you, anyways. So, yes, let's start at the beginning.

Three-Four.

You know, I always wondered if they'd run out of numbers if they kept that up. Nine-Eleven. Six-Six. Three-Four. Eventually, they were going to start having horrible disasters doubling up, the way the modern world was circling the drain.

That was what it felt like for my generation, back in the early '20s. Climate change, income inequality, terrorism, ineffective government. With the coronavirus still circling the globe, it felt like the four horsemen were always standing just offstage, tapping at their watches and wondering when the rest of us were going to realize that our world was already dead.

I was unemployed for most of 2020, living off APLD compensation in my little bachelor apartment. I also had a little side income from... do you know what Onlyfans was?

I don't. A website, I'm guessing?

Yeah. [She smirks. Only after later research do I understand why.] One more way to earn a living and keep the lights on. Or at least, it had up until that point.

You thought the blackout was localized?

When I first woke up, yes. It's called Three-Four, but the Gate opened on April 2nd, just slightly before midnight. I'd gone to bed early that night, perhaps ten, or maybe eleven. I woke up a few hours later in the dark, and to be honest, my first thought was that I'd missed a bill payment. I always kept a light on in the hall, so to wake up in pitch dark, I knew something was wrong.

Then I heard the first screams.

St. Germain was a suburb, I moved there from Paris because it was safer and quieter than living in the city proper. You didn't hear blood-curdling screams in the middle of the night or the rending of metal. Or the wet yelps...

[She trails off briefly, staring into her coffee as she steadies her breathing.]

That late at night, the most common thing on the street were animals. Stray dogs, roaming house cats, that sort of thing. They didn't fare any better than we did.

What did you do?

What anyone of my generation would do. I reached for my phone. It was my clock, my emergency alert system, my flashlight, even my telephone. And it was dead as those poor street animals. So was my tablet, so was my computer, so was my old computer. Here I am, stumbling around in the dark trying to find something electronic to make the world seem normal. And outside the world is collapsing second by second.

Eventually, I found the peak of functional technology in my little apartment. A scented vanilla candle and a bic lighter. I can still smell it.

Emboldened with the power of fire, I finally went to my window and saw... absolutely nothing. The sky was overcast and the power out there was as dead as the power in my apartment. You could still see the glint of Paris off in the distance, and some small fraction of that reflected down off the clouds, but all you could make out on the street were shapes. People, stopped cars, and maybe something more moving among them.

You couldn't see any of the horrors of it, not until the fires started, and then it was distorted through all the smoke. You could only hear it. I still don't know if that makes it better or worse. The ripping sounds stayed with me for a long-time in my nightmares, but as I get older all I remember most is the guitarist. [2]

I genuinely don't know how long I waited in my apartment, just listening to it all. I do know that my skeleton actively tried to flee my body when my neighbor came pounding on my door.

Did you know him?

Them, actually. But no. The building had twelve suites, with four to a floor. I was on the top with two other occupied suites, but one was at work and the other... I never did find out what happened to him. We had a bit of a thing when I first moved in, and I know enough to think that he should have been at home. Maybe he was one of those poor fools who wandered out into the street trying to figure out what was going on.

These two were from the first floor at the back of the building. The kid was Patrice, he was fifteen. His grandmother was pushing eighty and very senile. I never did get her name. Long story short, they wanted to get off the ground floor, which seemed like a very good idea. And given I was verging on a panic attack with neither weed nor Ambien to tide me over, the company was very welcome.

Not that I was able to entertain for long.

The gas main rupture?

That will never stop being surreal to me.

What won't?

[She laughs, and it feels genuine despite her somewhat bitter tone.] Imagine telling the most traumatic story of your life to a complete stranger, but knowing that stranger can probably tell it better than you can. You've definitely seen my first few interviews, back when all this was fresh in my mind. Not to mention research you've done for your work. Come on, what details am I missing, what am I getting wrong?

...His name was Patrick, not Patrice. And the neighbor you had a fling with was ultimately found in his car.

Bastard didn't even try and rescue me. The joke is on him though, given how things turned out.

[She shakes her head briefly before continuing.]

Yeah, the gas main ruptured.

One moment Patrice... Patrick, and I, are sharing what little we know with one another, the next it is like the sun has abruptly risen. Heat rushes in through the open window, and squinting against it I can see a building on the other end of the block completely engulfed in flames.

And you can see them.

Yeah.

There were two on the street, at least, I think. It was still hard to get a good look at them with my eyes trying to adjust to the sudden brightness. They were sleek and black, liquid latex being licked by firelight. And so fast that you only really track them when they caught up to something. Even then they were still a blur.

I finally got a good look at one when someone came running out of the flaming building. Insane choice, that. Burn to death, or run into the street to face...

You know that there isn't really an animal they can be directly compared to. They carried themselves like a cross between a komodo dragon and a wolf, that lumbering, thick shouldered upper body with a comparatively smaller lower half. At first, I thought they were quadruped, but at that distance, I couldn't see the other two legs, nor could I make any sort of sense about how there was a creature running around with an insect-like black carapace that also had tufts of hair growing down the length of its spine. And it was huge. Bigger than my car, bigger than any land animal I'd seen outside of an elephant at a zoo.

I remember staring in wonder and disgust, right up until the two sets of pincers erupted from either side of its jaws as it pinned the poor woman to the ground.

I threw up. Probably not the best thing to do in front of the kid, but I was twenty-two, I was barely an adult myself.

We didn't look outside again, and I kept him away from the window. The police would come, I kept telling myself. No, not the police.

[She laughs derisively at the thought.]

It was animal control. I thought animal control was going to come rolling up and shoot tranq darts at them. Like they were misplaced deer that had wandered in from Forêt de Laye.

For all their size, they didn't roar. Not like the movies that came out later. They had this guttural, pig-like sound. A deep 'huff' that they made on occasion. Like eradicating us was a chore. But that was it. No screeching, no growling, or crying out. Just the lumbering thump of thousands of pounds of muscle ripping and tearing through the neighborhood.

I thought that maybe we could just wait them out. Help would arrive, or they'd wander away once things stopped moving. But that fire was growing, and over the crackle of it, I could hear that dejected 'huff' repeating more and more often. The footfalls became more frequent, as did the shattering of glass, cracking of wood, and shrieking of metal as the things tore into apartments and ripped through walls in search of new prey.

Their hunting instinct?

I didn't know it at the time, but yes. They didn't leave the block because there were still living creatures nearby. If I'd tried to wait them out, they'd have either climbed the side of the building in search of me, or they might have just kept hitting it with their bulk until they knocked out enough supports to topple the whole thing over. I often wondered what happened to Patrick and his grandmother. I hope it was quick.

I did try to convince him to come with me. But not very hard. Grandma couldn't make it back down the stairs, she wasn't going anywhere, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that if he stayed with her he'd be dead too. Though if he'd tagged along, I'd probably be dead too.

Which brings us to my great escape.

People treat me like a hero, and I get why. We needed hope, after what happened on Three-Four, and everything that came after. Finding me alive was a paltry symbol, but it meant something to almost everyone. At the time, though, I was just trying to survive, and I was a real bitch about it. You can recite the story back to me, can't you?

About how you escaped? How you managed to kill one of them? Probably not verbatim.

Good. It is all lies anyway. All that sneaking around, distracting them by throwing a rock in order to... yeah. Complete fiction, I made it up while I was recovering. If you go back and look, it is totally absent from my first statement.

Truth is, I was still pretty clever, just a lot less moral. Do you know the old saying about outrunning a bear?

Can't say I'm familiar. Not a lot of bears left by the time I-

It goes like this. There are two people in a wood, and they run into a bear. The first person gets down on his knees to pray; the second person starts lacing up his boots. The first person asks the second person, “My dear friend, what are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear.” To which the second person responds, “I don’t have to. I only have to outrun you.”

I just waited for someone else to make a break for it, hopped on my bike, and took off like a bat out of hell the moment the beasts were busy running him down.

You're shocked. I can see that. Don't be. Most of my reputation is very well earned.

I'm more shocked that you're being so candid than anything else.

What is the point of scheduling one more telling of the story after all these years if I'm just going to lie about it? People needed their symbol at the time, I think it might do the world some good to see that I was only just human after all.

Given your later exploits, I suspect some might still disagree with that claim.

What can I say, I'm a girl of many talents. Where was I?

The bunker, I think.

Right! Yes, that did happen, more or less as in the official version, other than that I went straight there on a bike, rather than having a protracted chase with one of them.

Saint Germain is littered with those old Nazi bunkers. Back from when the city was the occupation headquarters. One of them was just close enough that it seemed like it would make for a good hiding spot. In the end, it nearly made for a good grave.

I slammed every door I could between the outside world and the beasts, but one started hunting me anyways. It tore through half a dozen barricaded steel doors over the course of two days trying to get to me, and I do not doubt that it would have finished the job had NATO not buried us both in rubble during the bombing.

That they found me at all was nothing short of a miracle. A city of forty thousand people and there are only two types of survivors. Those who managed to get out of the city within the first hour, and a twenty-two-year-old girl found comatose and buried in rubble nearly two weeks after the city is bombed into oblivion.

I probably would have called me a Saint too.

[1][I was.]

[2][Seven of the two hundred and twenty-three survivors of Saint-Germain-en-Laye reported hearing a series of somber melodies being played during the attack. Conspiracy theorists concocted numerous claims about the identity and purpose of the so called 'guitarist' before the dismembered arm of local artist Pierre La Lemond was found in the wreckage of his home, still clutching a guitar, during the reclamation of 2026.]