Cold Falling White

by G. S. Prendergast

  “Bro,” I say, gently slapping his face. “Wakey, wakey.” He moans feebly, his eyes fluttering.

  “Ah shit, troopers!” someone shouts. I look up from the insensible lump underneath me, seeing flashing lights over the top of the derelict gas station in front of the alley we’re in, this week’s Fight Night location.

  The spectators scatter, and David’s so-called friends give me a pleading, apologetic look before clomping off into the dark, their boots making clouds of snow as they run. I hear car doors slam, and shouts.

  “Come on, David.” I shake him. “We’ve got to go. Get up.”

  More shouting. A truck engine roars and the siren bursts to life, cutting open the silent night.

  “Did I win?” David mumbles.

  “Nobody won, dude.” All the spoils, the promised snacks, ran off with David’s campmates. “Get up. Get up.”

  “Hey!” Three troopers waving flashlights and rifles appear at the end of the alley. “Don’t move!”

  I try to drag David upward, but he slumps back as the troopers close in. I have a few milliseconds of wild impulses. I want to search his pockets. Maybe he has a working lighter or a pencil or something. I could take his socks. Socks are worth nearly as much as freedom.

  “Get your hands up!”

  I run instead. Three troopers, well fed and laden with gear and winter clothes, are no match for me. I’ve been running nonstop for the past year and a half. I can outrun these spoiled mall cops. I bend to grab my coat at the other end of the alley, ducking to the left and out of sight as two of the troopers yell after me. I catch a glimpse of the third trooper leaning over David. He’s busted now, but at least he won’t freeze to death. They’ll take him somewhere warm and patch him up.

  The dark is profound once I’m out of the alley. The reason we chose the fight location is that it’s one of the few places with a little light at night, from the security beacon shining down from the hillside above the road. Now I’m running in the dark, on pure instinct. I’ve run through here before and only hope I remember enough to lose the troopers without smacking into a wall.

  Hard left. A narrow gap between two empty stores. Nothing to sell. No money to buy anything.

  Right. Through the ruins of a burned-out house. Probably someone knocked over a candle during the blackout hours. No one rebuilds anything anymore. Get burnt. Stay burnt.

  Left. Two school buses parked in a vacant lot. No gas, no diesel, the military gets what there is. If you want to go to school, you walk. I stop there to catch my breath, zipping up my coat between the buses, pressed against a wheel so the troopers won’t see my feet. But I lost them. I bend and peek under the bus, not seeing any flashlight beams or movement. Not hearing anything. Troopers are about as stealthy as rutting moose. I think I’m good.

  Sweaty, I think, looking down at my feet. My face will be bruised tomorrow. And I’m covered in soot now too. It smells of…

  When I turn to continue around the back of the buses, there’s a large shape there. Unnaturally tall, a heavy rifle, barely visible. Like a walking shadow.

  “Ah no…” My heart practically jumps into my mouth as I spin, running before I’ve even processed it.

  A Nahx? Here? It’s impossible. We’re twenty miles inside the human-controlled territory. We’re below 2,000 feet—the so-called low country the Nahx let us keep. I look back as I emerge from the vacant lot. A smudge of shadow moves between the buses. I twist my head around as I run, trying to locate the Nahx’s partner, but I don’t see anyone. The adrenaline has sucked the blood from my hands and feet so it’s like running on blades. Ahead of me, an ice-covered car blocks a passage between two silent apartment low-rises. I leap it headfirst, sliding over the hood and rolling to my feet on the other side.

  “CODE BLACK!” I scream. Maybe someone in the apartments will have a gun or something. Behind me the shadow moves like a ghost past the car. “CODE BLACK! Someone help!”

  I veer hard left again, edging down through another alley, past dumpsters and piles of trash, which any other time I would stop and scavenge, before shooting out onto the open street.

  A trooper truck skids to a stop right in front of me. I’m moving so fast, I smack right into it, bouncing backward onto my ass. But I scramble away, because we’re dead if that Nahx catches up with us.

  “Stop!” one of them yells.

  “Code black!” I wail again, but the other trooper crash tackles me. We roll into a snowdrift. “C-c-code black. Code black. There’s a Nahx.”

  His partner spins, raising his rifle, while the other one hauls me to my feet.

  “Where? Do you see one or two?”

  I point back to the apartments.

  “He was following me… there. I didn’t see his partner.”

  We wait, counting the seconds, but nothing happens. No walking shadow, no Nahx, no brown bear, no lost moose, nothing.

  Ten interminable seconds go past while the three of us wait to learn whether we live or die.

  “Get him in the truck,” one of the troopers says at last. “Handcuff him.”

  I know they don’t believe me, but the speed at which we skid off gives me some satisfaction.

  An hour later I’m in a dim jail cell with three drunks and someone who thinks the Nahx are fallen angels come to make us pay for our sins. There are worse theories, I guess.

  There’s a poster on the wall outside the cell, a stylized drawing of a giant Nahx looming over a sleepy-looking village. AVOID AND REPORT it says in bold black letters. ENGAGING WITH THE NAHX IS PROHIBITED BY LAW AND WILL BE PROSECUTED. I’m interested in the design of the poster more than its pointlessly obvious message. It’s an old-style screen print—bold shapes and simple colors, black, gray, red. Most of the digital technology was disabled by electromagnetic pulses in the first siege, so we’re back to propagandizing like they did during World War II. I wonder who in town had an old printing press that they dusted off and cranked into this new life.

  Behind the giant Nahx on the poster, you can just see his partner, rendered as a dim gray shadow in the background against a swirling sky. I close my eyes and try to picture the Nahx I saw by the school bus. I didn’t engage with it. I avoided it. I reported it. So I don’t know why I’m in jail.

  “Liu! You’re up!” a voice says through a crackly speaker. The speaker makes me feel, of all things, nostalgia. I miss my crappy sound system at home—my phone plugged into some cheap speakers Tucker gave me. He didn’t tell me until it was too late that he stole them.

  I move over to the cell door as an officer unlocks it and slides it open. Following him, I read some more shabby posters on the walls of the frigid hallway. HOARD AND GO NORTH one reads—an edict to not hoard food, one that everyone ignores. Another reads HELP KEEP PEACE AND ORDER: JOIN THE ICDF. I already looked into this. You need to be at least twenty years old and to have finished high school, so that counts me out.

  The officer ushers me into a cramped room, where I recognize the uniformed woman behind the desk. Captain Roopa Chaudhry, former RCMP, now part of the ICDF, the International Cooperative Defense Force, a new collective of militarized patrols responsible for policing the human-controlled regions most affected by the invasion. Peace and order, just like the poster says. They keep the refugee stew in Prince George at a slow simmer rather than a rolling boil. She sighs as I sit down.

  “Xander, can’t you give me a small break?”

  “I can explain. I—”

  She has a file. My file, which she flips open, pointedly interrupting me. “Fighting. Again. These camp rivalries are ridiculous. Buying black market liquor. Selling black market cigarettes. And two weeks ago you got added to the watch list for kids who are trying to join the insurgents? Because you were up by the border web? What the hell?”

  “I wasn’t! I don’t know anything about that.” A lie, but only partly. I do know about the insurgency, though mostly as legend. “I was just hiking.”

  “Hiking to within a hundred feet of the web
in weather like this? That zone is restricted. By us, and by the Nahx. You were there for fun, I assume?”

  “No, I was…” Looking for a way through, because I want out of this nightmare and I can’t think of a better way than to try to get back to the people I left behind. Even though most of them are dead. Half the rumors about the insurgency are that they are already on the other side of the web, doing whatever insurgents do. If they got through, so can I. If I get through, I can go back to the base and bring everyone out. Bring Topher out. I have to fight to keep from rolling my eyes at myself. I know it’s just another weird obsession. I like getting a close look at the web because it reminds me that the things I remember actually happened. “Hunting,” I finish.

  “Weapons are also contraband,” Captain Chaudhry says in a bored tone. “Did you have a weapon?”

  “No. A lot of animals are hibernating. If you can find their dens, you can just dig them up and whack them.”

  “With a shovel, I presume. Where did you get the shovel? Did you steal it?”

  “No!” I say it a little louder than I mean to because it’s the middle of the night and I’m cold and tired and starving. I haven’t eaten a proper meal in days because poachers took out the supply truck to the camp for the second week in a row. The elusive snack fest I fought for is now a distant memory. “There was a Nahx tonight,” I say, to change the subject and as a distraction and because if there was a Nahx out there, I want someone to do something.

  “About that,” Captain Chaudhry says. “I sent ten men on patrol with two Humvees and we didn’t find a thing. Not even tracks.”

  “I…”

  “False reports of Nahx activity are also a chargeable offense, Xander. You are running out of lives here.”

  “But I saw one!”

  “You screw around. You refuse to go to school.” She shakes her head, closing my file. “Do you want to get moved to a work camp? Is that what’s happening? You know they sleep in tents up there?”

  “I don’t want to be moved.” I look down at my boots. They’re too big for me, and I only have two pairs of socks to my name. “I swear I thought I saw a Nahx.”

  She’s quiet for a moment. “And how often do you think you see Nahx?”

  I resist the urge to rock back and forth, chew my lips, or engage in any other stereotypically crazy behavior. Hunger has kept me awake for two nights, and the truth is, when I’m tired I do sometimes see things—people I know are dead, for example, or my old dog. Or Nahx.

  Captain Chaudhry is not a shrink. There’s only one shrink who sees to the mental health of the thousands of refugees crammed into the camps outside Prince George. I got “counseled” in the hospital when I was juiced up on painkillers, my scorched fingers wrapped in weeping gauze. That was five months ago. Five months in a refugee camp, keeping my mouth shut, silent as a Nahx. I fight and steal, but I don’t talk.

  “Sometimes,” I say. It’s not so much a lie as my unwillingness to discuss the truth. I know what’s in that file. They all think the story I raved about when they found me, blistered and incoherent, floundering in a freezing stream, is some kind of delusion. A Nahx escorted me out of the occupied territory? Nahx don’t do that.

  “Xander.” Captain Chaudhry sighs. “There’s no way through the web. We can’t even get data through anymore.”

  “So no one is even trying? What if there are people still alive in Nahx territory?”

  “There aren’t.”

  “But what if—”

  “Xander!” Her sharp tone makes me twitch, and maybe she feels bad because she softens. “People have tried. Hundreds of people have died trying to breach the web. There’s no way through. It’s over. We’re rebuilding now. We’re salvaging what the Nahx let us keep.”

  My hands and face are starting to hurt from the fight. I want to go home, such as my home is—a cold shipping container shared with seven other guys. This is what the Nahx let us keep.

  There is a kind of fragile treaty with our taciturn new overlords. Any violent resistance against the Nahx is considered a crime, even in the human world. Those caught trying it get sent to camps a lot less comfortable than the one I live in. Ordinary infractions are still crimes here—though, on the face of it, no one, not even Captain Chaudhry, seems to really care. Drugs and prostitution are rampant. Violence is an everyday hazard. And theft, well, I would know.

  But the khaki-kitted bureaucrats like Captain Chaudhry are mostly interested in the detection and prosecution of two crimes. Resistance is one of them: messing around with the mythical insurgents, diverting supplies or weapons to them; or worse, attempting to violently engage with the Nahx, whose disproportionate response to any aggression is now legendary. Resistance will get you a tent and a blunt ax in the work camps up north. The other crime, collusion with Nahx, aiding, providing comfort, all that stuff, will get you dead in a dark alley. One of the guys in my trailer claims he saw it happen.

  And this is why my particular truth is so dangerous. August was both a Nahx and a rebel against the Nahx. And he was my friend.

  “Are you charging me?” About half the times I get in trouble I get off completely scot-free. I’m hoping this is one of those times.

  “Snow clearing. Twenty hours.”

  I curse under my breath.

  “Want to make it forty?”

  “No. But someone stole my gloves.”

  “They’ll find you a pair. City Hall parking lot. Seven a.m. Don’t be late.” She looks at her watch. “There’s a one a.m. patrol past the South Camp, leaving in about twenty minutes. They can give you a ride.”

  “Can I check the register while I wait?”

  She nods sadly because I ask this every time I get brought in here. And every time there’s nothing.

  The register is a database, a kind of social media for the survivors of the apocalypse. Because the Nahx knocked out so much of our technology, it’s pretty lo-fi. Couriers travel around the human territories with great reams of paper, and updates are entered into the few working computers by hand. The names are people who have been found alive in remote places or who have finally been counted in Vancouver or Seattle, both of which are apparently overflowing with refugees. Or dead. The register also includes names of those confirmed dead. And then there are the hundreds, the thousands of names of all those missing without a trace.

  For five months I’ve been checking the register five months; and I haven’t found a person alive that I know.

  Topher is alive, on the other side of the border. At least he was alive last time I saw him. And maybe August is alive. Maybe. Though he would never appear on a register, of course. As for the rest, my family, my friends in Calgary, and the ones who survived with me for a time at the hidden base in the mountains, who knows?

  I follow Captain Chaudhry out to the reception desk, and I swear I’m not trying to look at her ass but it does occur to me that from this angle she looks pretty well fed. I suppose that’s true of all cops these days. She pulls a chair up to the computer terminal and plugs in her password. The bright red and white interface of the register pops up as I sit.

  Each time I’ve done this my heart has skipped hard against my ribs, rattling in hopeful anticipation of the answer I never get. Has someone looked up my name in the search register since the last time I checked, maybe someone who has run out of other names? Anyone who knows me and cares about me enough to give me a bed and a home so I can get out of this rat hole?

  I don’t think the people of Prince George set out to make conditions so crappy in their refugee camps, but for a town of seventy thousand to suddenly be dealing with tens of thousands of refugees, with transport from the coastal areas very limited, with hardly any fuel or power… well, what can we expect? I still dream of the hot showers back at the base in the mountains and wonder why I ever left there. As it is, I wash in cold water, once a week, and usually in the dark. And food? It’s not quite a famine yet. But I don’t think that’s far off.

  In hindsight,
it’s almost funny how woefully unprepared we were for this calamity, how easily our human civilization deteriorated and decayed. Schools barely operate; hospitals offer the minimum of care. Every man-hour is dedicated to the most basic tasks of living. Or dying. In summer, when the ground was soft enough, I earned extra rations by preemptively digging mass graves because we don’t want to waste fuel by burning bodies. That’s fucking macabre.

  Once I’m on the register’s search page, I try all the usual names—Mom, Dad, Nai Nai, my sister, Chloe. Names I entered as “missing” myself. I always pause before I hit enter on Chloe’s name, because if she comes up confirmed dead there will be an Oscar-worthy scene with me in the starring role. Thankfully nothing seems to have changed in that regard. That means I can still play out one of my favorite fantasies, the one where they got into the minivan and headed north, plowing through Nahx barricades, Chloe hurling obscenities and Molotov cocktails out the window, Nai Nai hanging out the other side, cursing in Mandarin. I let it run through my mind as I tick off the rest of my list. Aunt Ruby in Edmonton. Nope. The principal of my school. Nope. My karate teachers. Nope and nope. Topher and Tucker’s parents. Nope.

  I added Tucker and Topher’s names myself too. Tucker: confirmed darted along with the date, which I’m sure of to within a day or two either side. Topher: confirmed alive on the last day I saw him, walking away from Raven’s death scene on the side of the mountain. That was in spring. It’s now winter again. I don’t know how he and the others in the base could have survived this long. But I can hope.

  Naturally I check Raven’s name next. I’m not expecting anything but her name and date of death—details I added myself just after I arrived in Prince George. I’ve checked her entry a few times since then but gave up about two months ago. There are only so many times you want to be reminded of something like that.

  But I suppose Captain Chaudhry has put me in a mood to confirm certain details. I saw Raven die. I know who was with us. I didn’t imagine the silvery gray tears streaking down August’s face and the awful, despondent noises he made. I’m not going crazy; although if I were, no one could blame me.