Rickie, 20-something Unfortunate

I didn't have a plan. Well, I had concepts of a plan. As I walked quickly through the hallway of my eerily quiet apartment building, my heart raced and my mind whirled. If this was what I thought it was, I might finally get to leave the ranks of The Unfortunate and claim a little harem of my own. I could finally ignore all of the gloating, snide texts from my friends with photos of their catches doing whatever they told them to do. Strip teases, blow jobs, full blown sex, anal. If there was something a claimed girl wouldn't do, no one had bothered to tell me.

They thought it was sooo funny to dunk on me, the guy who was at work all day on Claim Day without my phone. The guy who missed out on the first wave of hotties, then the leftovers, and then even the dregs. When my construction team resurfaced at 3pm wondering why we had lost contact with the support crew, there was hardly a person on the streets much less an unclaimed woman.

I guess in some ways I was lucky. The guys on my team who had girlfriends and wives generally broke down out of uncertainty and then, in some cases, concrete proof that they had just lost the most important person in their life to some schmuck at the right place and time. One guy, generally a good dude, got a call from his dad too see if he had anything worth trading to get his wife back. Brutal.

No, I was "lucky" to be single on Claim Day. And cursed to be an Unfortunate afterwards.

Maybe not for much longer, though. I moved quickly across the street, though I doubted anyone else was watching. New York City was turning into a collection of fiefdoms, but my neighborhood was just rich enough to avoid the gang wars and just poor enough to slip beneath the notice of the new manor lords. For now, at least. While I heard occasional noises that suggested there were luckier guys than me hiding out on my block, I hadn't seen another soul on both of my trips to the corner bodegas. It was beyond eerie. I wasn't complaining, though.

The old church dominated the block across from my building, but it looked as dead as anything else. If I hadn't seen Father McGuinness a few minutes earlier, I would never have given it a second thought. But I had been observing the street ever since I saw the old priest make a delivery in the early morning the day after Claim Day while I was despondently looking out my window. I had delusions that I would see some unclaimed woman trying to sneak home, and instead I started stalking an old man and his weird grocery runs. Weird because there was no way one old man needed that much food. Unless, of course, he figured that there were going to be no more groceries. I shook the depressing thoughts of the future out of my head and pressed my body against the old stone of the church building.

The basement of the church annex was below ground but a bunch of short windows running along the west side of the building to let in some light. I figured that seeing me run up to the window might alarm anyone inside, so I walked tight to the building's wall and stepped over the windows as I came to them. By now I was deep into the small cemetery adjacent to the church, and between the trees and the twilight darkness I was invisible to anyone in the neighboring buildings. After passing a half dozen dark windows, I was beginning to think that I had gone crazy. But at the seventh window my heart caught as I saw the tiniest sliver of light emerging diagonally. I dropped to my stomach and stuck my head between the rusting iron bars that protected the window and pressed my face to the glass.

Someone had put dark construction paper on the inside of the windows! No wonder it always looked so dark inside! But they had missed a tiny spot on this window, and it was just wide enough for me to see the dim lights inside and make out some movement.

As my eyes adjusted to the tight angle and lighting, I saw human figures. I failed to hold in a gasp when they came into focus.