by Frank Tayell
“Oh, why not?”
They’d eaten another half-loaf before the politician, Napatchie Ashoona, arrived. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “We had engine trouble, but most people, our mechanics among them, are taking a day’s holiday.”
Plucking Sholto from among the children nearly required a crane. Around his neck hung a garland of multi-coloured plastic that might have been flowers, certainly wasn’t festive, but was colourful.
Outside, the snow lay just as thick on the street as it did on the woodland behind the house. The exception was the partially ploughed corridor down the centre of the road, and the wide circle where the two electric cars had turned. Along with the chains attached to the snow tyres, curving oblongs of steel had been bolted to the front of the vehicles. With not a spot of rust in sight, those ploughs were a very recent addition.
Inspecting the cars with professional curiosity were Jonas and a pack of teenagers. Three boys, seven girls, one of whom detached herself and trudged over, giving a wave as bright as her smile. “Good morning, Mrs Ashoona,” she said. “Mrs Carson, Mr Carson, Mr Clemens, welcome. Merry Christmas.”
“And good morning to you, Tapessa,” Napatchie said. “Why are you all here? Don’t tell me you’re going hunting today.”
“Um, no,” the teenager said. “We were going over to Jimmy’s for breakfast. We wondered if, um…” She turned to Jay. “We wondered if you’d like to come. We’ll give you the tour first.”
“Jay would love to,” Nilda said quickly.
“I thought we were going to take a look at the wall,” Jay said.
“Which will still be there tomorrow,” Nilda said. “Go on. Have fun.”
Tapessa took Jay’s arm and hurried him over to the waiting group.
“Jimmy is one of your old mates, isn’t he?” Chester asked.
“He is,” Sholto said. “Used to run a bar.”
“He runs a culinary school now,” Jonas said.
“Culinary science and agricultural experimentation,” Napatchie said.
“With too much emphasis on the experimentation,” Jonas said. “We’re ready when you are.”
“How far do we have to go?” Nilda asked. “Is the plan still to go to the watchtower overlooking your wall?”
“The watchtower in Digby, yes,” Napatchie said. “It’s forty kilometres north. Digby is at the end of this peninsula.”
“And that’s where your power station is?” Nilda asked.
“No, that’s a further twenty kilometres north, in Annapolis Royal,” Napatchie said.
“Beyond the wall?” Sholto asked.
“Our first wall ran between New Glasgow and Truro,” Napatchie said.
“You’ve a Glasgow and a Truro in Canada?” Chester asked.
“We did,” Jonas said. He opened the car door. The loosely churned ice glistened and shimmered as a wave of warm air washed out of the vehicle. The old detective retrieved a map. He laid it on the car’s hood. “New Glasgow, in the north, is one of the closest points to Newfoundland. Truro is here, in the south, on the edge of the Bay of Fundy.”
“You didn’t think of building a wall further east?” Chester asked, peering at the map. “Up near Amhurst, that neck of land looks even narrower.”
“We planned to,” Napatchie said. “The nuclear war upended all our intentions. The wall around New Glasgow was built before then, when refugees had bolstered our numbers to the millions. After the nuclear war, the power went out, and there was chaos. People fled. And people fled the other way, towards us, away from the atomic fire. They brought the infection. Even so, we planned to build another wall, but by the time order had been restored, we had to prioritise preparing farmland.”
“Then the disease came,” Jonas said. “Flu.”
“We call it The Great Flu,” Napatchie said. “The symptoms didn’t quite match, but the name stuck. The undead had arrived outside our wall, and we no longer had the time, the energy, or the supplies to drive them back. People still left. We extended the other walls, the other fortifications built immediately after the outbreak, converting roadblocks into barricades, turning towns into fortresses, but the undead got through. We ran out of ammunition, and now we are here, on this peninsula to the south of Digby. And here, in Annapolis Royal, and in Grenville Ferry. But the undead are in the streets of Annapolis, and we no longer have the numbers to dig them out. Not in this weather.”
“If the undead were outside the walls, how did people leave?” Chester asked.
“It was a long wall,” Jonas said. “The living dead were clumped together. Thousands in some places, none in others.”
“Annapolis has the tidal barrage?” Nilda asked.
“It does,” Napatchie said. “And it is secure. For now. Digby is twenty kilometres from Annapolis Royal, connected by two roads. The Evangeline Trail hugs the coast. The Harvest Highway curves inland. Just south of Digby, the two roads meet. These major roads are our only link to the power station, and it is along them that our overhead power lines hang. If the undead reach the road, our communities will be cut off. We, here, could be without electricity, while those in the north would be without supplies. Protecting that road-link is vital.”
“Unless the zombies are dead,” Nilda said.
“Let’s go see,” Napatchie said, but in a tone that suggested she already knew the answer.
Jonas and Sholto took the lead car. Napatchie took the wheel of the second, Nilda took the front passenger seat, and Chester took the back. As he relaxed into the seat, another concern flashed across his mind. What would happen to a tidal barrage if the sea froze? He decided now wasn’t the time to ask.
Beyond the cluster of cliff-side homes, the buildings became further spaced. Occasionally nestled together for company, sometimes squatting alone on shallow slopes where the topmost windows allowed a glimpse over the evergreen treetops. At road level, other than an occasional coiling smoke-plume, the trees were almost all they had to see other than the snow-clear tracks the cars had ploughed on their journey south.
The road straightened, revealing forested hillsides ahead, but immediately in front was a towering wooden palisade. The trees had been felled this side of the wall, creating a wide clearing, stretching back at least sixty metres in which was nothing but stumps and a solitary house. The lights were on. In the living room window, the curtains were pulled back, and a breakfasting pair watched them. Outside, a solitary pine, barely a quarter as tall as the massive trunks that formed that defensive line, had been trimmed with plastic, shaped metal, and some old-world tinsel. It was an oddly comforting sight, as was the clearly tired guard standing by the gate itself. She’d opened it as they’d approached, but of course, as the cars had come from the north that morning, they knew to expect the vehicles’ return.
Chester gave the yawning guard a wave as they drove through, but his grin froze when he saw what was on the other side. It was a graveyard.
“How many are buried here?” Nilda asked.
“Over a hundred thousand,” Napatchie said. “The first five thousand were given individual graves. The rest were buried together. That was after the flu, but the graves were dug before. This land is remote, and not as suited for agriculture as that further inland. It was decided to turn it into a graveyard. First we had to clear the land, and fell the trees. So when we needed to build more walls, we built them close to the felled timber.”
“This was from immediately after the outbreak? On orders from your government?”
“My government, yes. My orders,” Napatchie said. “I was given command here, because I was here. I had booked a holiday in the warm, and believe me, this is far warmer than up in Nunavut; that was the constituency I represented in parliament. But I also wanted to see the substance-dependency programmes they were running in Halifax.” She tapped the wheel. “So I was here when the world changed. There were generals, of course, and local representatives, but few wanted the responsibility of command. We built the walls, and it kept people busy
. We identified those with experience in the military, in policing, in medicine, and drafted them to wherever there was need. It was chaos from which we dragged order.”
“And elsewhere in Canada?”
“I can tell you rumours and stories, but few facts. Ottawa was overrun. I don’t know what happened to the prime minister, or who was in charge. But someone devised a plan. Many U.S. military units made it across the border. Tanks and helicopters had been gathered, along with individual soldiers and separated units. The intention was to push east and west from the Great Lakes to the mountains. Secure towns, fortify them, then push south. In the east, Nova Scotia would become a bastion. To the west was British Columbia. We would build up a conscript army from those who arrived by sea.”
“And did they arrive?” Nilda asked.
“No. The ships avoided us. They continued north. Some made it to Newfoundland, but the harbour at Port-Aux-Basques quickly reached capacity. The later arrivals continued onward.”
“To Greenland,” Nilda said.
“We think so. Why? No one really knows. Rumours said it was safe, and so that is where they fled.”
“And some made it across to us, to Anglesey, in the end,” Nilda said. “But not many. Not many at all. This was after the nuclear war?”
“Before,” Napatchie said. “Afterward, we lost contact with everyone. We only have guesswork and rumour as to what happened elsewhere. Eastward, towards Europe, the most popular rumour came from Jonas, the children, and the others from Maine. Tom Clemens had gone east to England, but with the promise he would return. Until now, no one has. To the west, we had the pernicious rumour of a Pacific Alliance, a grand coalition of every nation between Japan and Australia, and India and Mexico. They were organising a fight-back, a great assault, and it would begin by landing troops in Vancouver.”
“I think we heard about that,” Nilda said.
“Yeah, Martha told us a bit about it,” Chester asked.
“No,” Nilda said. “I mean in Bill’s journals. Didn’t he write something about Australia? That’s Thaddeus’s, Tom’s, brother. While he was trapped in London he wrote down all the rumours and stories he’d heard and seen online before the power was cut.”
“I’d like to read that,” Napatchie said. “But what I know, with absolute certainty, is that Vancouver fell almost immediately. It was overrun in days, and in flames soon after. The U.S. Pacific Fleet was being coordinated out of Guam, but they were organising an evacuation and consolidation of military personnel, not a relief effort. But you know how rumours are. People want to believe them, and so, when the situation worsened, that is where they went.”
“To Vancouver? How far away is that?”
“Six thousand kilometres,” Napatchie said.
“That’s farther than Faroe,” Nilda said.
“It is the other side of the continent,” Napatchie said. “The only people who ever returned were those who turned back after a few days. Others left by sea. The sailors, for the most part, and in the sailing boats to begin with. But before harvest, they took the other ships. The ferries, the freighters, and they took our fuel. Some of those ships came from Newfoundland. It’s how we knew about the failed air-lift and the crashed planes.”
“Martha told me about that,” Chester said. “The island was overrun during the first few days.”
“Refugees arrived by plane, and brought the infection with them, but more arrived even after the nuclear war. We saw the planes fly overhead. A massive formation. A few days later, the last fleet arrived here from Newfoundland, with the last survivors from The Last Flight. That was when the Great Flu emerged. Some people thought it came from Newfoundland, and so the chaos began.”
“Violence? Recrimination?” Nilda asked.
“Of course,” Napatchie said. “That is human nature.”
“And there were millions here before the nuclear war, hundreds of thousands before the flu, is that right?” Nilda asked.
“We didn’t have time to complete a census,” Napatchie said. “A million, perhaps two, before. And now there are a few over four thousand.”
“How much electricity does your tidal barrage generate?” Nilda asked.
“Enough to power all our homes. Enough to power three times as many homes. In the beginning, it was enough to keep the factories running, to keep lights on in the hospital. But of course, in the beginning, we had other power stations. Ah.”
She slowed as they reached another palisade, and another gate. Again, it had been built near a house. This wasn’t the first home they’d seen since the wall around East Ferry, nor even the first that looked occupied, but it was the only one since the last guardhouse that had been decorated.
Beyond this wall, there were no graves. There was more woodland, and there were more houses. Here, though, there were no decorations on the trees; not everyone was in the mood to celebrate the arrival of winter and the beginning of a new year. People clustered inside the open doors of garages that had been turned into workshops. Sparks danced as steel was ground to a point. Another kilometre up the road, a giant plume of smoke billowed from a forge behind a house that had been turned into a junkyard. Partially cannibalised cars waited their turn to be cut and melted into shape. The tyres were missing, but they found them at the next wall, adding weight to the unseasoned timbers.
Beyond that gate, the silence grew, as did the density of the woodland. There were still walls, but these were now built around individual homesteads rather than across the road. And those houses were dark and empty.
“No one lives here?” Nilda asked.
“I pulled them back towards East Ferry when the first snow came,” Napatchie said. “Resupplying them by ski would have consumed too much time, too many calories. Now we keep a garrison in Digby, another in Annapolis, and in Granville Ferry, but everyone else lives further south.”
Finally they reached Digby, driving into a snow-cleared parking lot, and through the open garage doors of an auto repair shop. A young woman wearing a neon-green ski-suit and a far too serious expression opened Napatchie’s door. Chester opened his own, stepping out into the chill chamber. A third electric car, complete with recently attached plough, was the only other vehicle in the room. Otherwise, the chilly building contained plastic bins stuffed with spears and lances. But in the far corner was a well-lit, empty office through the window of which he could see armchairs and books.
“Thank you,” Napatchie said softly to the woman who’d opened the car door. Another woman had opened Jonas’s door, while a third was closing the garage door behind them. They appeared to be the only people there. As to where there was, it clearly wasn’t a watchtower.
“These are the Christinas,” Napatchie said, nodding to each in turn. “Chrissie M, Chrissie L, and Chrissie K.”
“Chris,” Chrissie M said.
“Tina,” Chrissie L added.
“Christy,” Chrissie K finished.
“We changed,” Chrissie M said.
“To make things easier,” Chrissie L added.
“And simpler,” Chrissie K finished.
“Of course,” Napatchie said, her smile fixed.
The three women were nineteen, give or take, dressed identically in neon-green ski suits, though with thin grey strong-grip gloves and military boots into which their trousers were perfectly tucked. Each had their blonde hair cut into a near-identical bob, but they weren’t triplets. They weren’t even sisters. And he was pretty sure that there was an edge of black at the roots of Chrissie L’s scalp. Or was she Chrissie M? He couldn’t remember, and decided it didn’t matter. They reminded him of Starwind, if there’d been three of her.
“We’ll walk from here,” Napatchie said. “But we’re not far from the wall, so we should keep the noise down.”
“Right down,” Chrissie M said.
“All the way down,” Chrissie L added.
“To zero,” Chrissie K finished.
Napatchie’s smile froze a little further, but at least t
hat matched the weather outside. Though the sun was still rising, the temperature wasn’t. The sky was opaque, the star nothing more than a faint yellow glow, a harbinger of the weather to come before the new year was born.
“We call them the coven,” Jonas whispered when they were trudging along the road, and out of earshot of the garage.
“The Christinas?” Sholto whispered back.
“Because of the three witches in Shakespeare,” Jonas said.
“I’m sure no one really calls them that,” Napatchie said, her own whisper pointed.
“They’re good guards,” Jonas finished. “That’s the watchtower ahead.”
Chester looked up. Then looked down. And down again.
Ahead was a stop sign over which someone had sprayed the words Silence! Zombies. Beyond that was a sprawling warehouse. Chester had expected a lighthouse, a church tower, or a multi-storey, but this building lacked even a scaffolding gantry. It had a wall, though, made of vans, lorries, and tyres, reinforced with steel and wood. Not felled timbers, but salvaged furniture. To get in, they climbed a short ladder up to a high-wheeled truck whose door had been removed and replaced with a cage-gate. Inside, the windscreen had been removed. The front of the cab had been squared off with steel plates, and those had also been joined to the rear of the lorry in front. Inside the cab, the seats had been removed, creating a low corridor it was just possible to walk through single-file, to the driver’s door. This door hadn’t been replaced, but it had been modified with a heavy lock-bar that had to be pulled up before the door swung open.
Chester was so busy calculating the effort and time that had gone into creating that barrier, he didn’t realise where they were until he was inside.
“Now that is a sight to behold,” Sholto said.
“It’s a supermarket,” Chester said. Except there was no food on the shelves. There weren’t even many shelves. What there were, and what had caught Sholto’s eye, were the weapons. Crudely machined, but wickedly sharpened, spears and short swords filled plastic bins and shopping trolleys, and were arrayed on the few shelves left in place.