by Emily Brewes
My mum told me much later that she heard Mr. McCullough had managed to make another call that went through, to Constable Ferris’s office. He’d left a message on the machine, his voice slow and slurred. She said they figured he made the call as he was going into shock from his injuries, which involved a significant part of his body being consumed by his feline assailant.
For years after that, I had nightmares about such a situation. My last words would be delivered to my parents’ voice mail, wavering with pain as I was eaten by a large predator. I begged Mum or Dad to pick up the phone, to tell me it would all be alright and that they were coming to find me. Every time, it ended the same way. The message time elapsed. I heard the beep and let the phone fall from my hand. Then my mind turned to the farmhouse, where it found my dad listening to the message. The voice mail robot was rhyming off available options.
“To erase this message, press seven. To save it, press nine.”
And every time, I imagined him pressing seven right before he hung up.
ENEMY MINE
WHEN OLIVIA WAS BORN, I was asked to stay home. I was just shy of nine then, really getting into the swing of the whole school thing. The routine of it, the occasional civil conversation with someone my own age. Jeremy’s family left shortly after the scuffle he’d found himself in. He had told me, “Jesse, it was like I woke up getting punched in the face, so I just kept swinging.”
Actually, I’m not sure they lit out for the Underground. Now that I think on it, there was talk of going someplace by boat. Mum made note of how dangerous such a trip was sure to be, with the storms and acid water. Dad said, “At least they’ve no more sharks to worry about.”
For a while, I hated Olivia for ruining things. She made our house loud and smelly. The routine became her routine. With the density of a tiny star, she pulled us all into her orbit. Even Dad — especially Dad. Nearly every moment he wasn’t repairing something in the shop, he was building something for her. I’m not sure what bothered me more: the jealousy I felt or the hypocrisy I saw in his behaviour. He’d built my bed when I got big enough to need one (the crib was a loaner from another much larger family), but this eventually became Olivia’s, too.
I hated my mum for having Olivia. She wasn’t an especially doting mother at the best of times, seemingly wrapped in the cocoon of her own troubles, but there were moments. I remember making modelling dough with her, from flour and water and salt. We shaped it and baked it, watching through the grime shadow of the oven window as it swelled and solidified. Then we painted it. It was a nativity scene, with a donkey splotched in primary colours that was my creation. Dad’s only comment was to point out that donkeys were brown. At that point in my life, I hadn’t been informed of my father’s role in baby-making, or I would have hated him, too. More than I already did, anyway.
The following year, the local school was disbanded for good. Mrs. Barfoot was ailing, and there were only a handful of students. With families itching to get gone, whatever their excuses, it didn’t make sense to waste time on old-world skills like reading. The future we were facing looked bleaker by the day.
There was little point hating anyone anymore, not that there had been any to begin with. Whatever friends I might have had were moved away by their families. Most went Underground. Some went north. It wasn’t as cold there as it had been, and the government was giving away land to families willing to farm there.
We stayed. We rooted in place, until we were the epicentre of absolutely nothing in all directions. Not a neighbour, not a public servant, not a bandit. Quiet, even for Trout Creek. We were like the meteorite that cleared out the dinosaurs.
Meanwhile, far above our heads on Parliament Hill, debates raged on about what was to be done. Whose role was it to correct the damage? How much should be invested? And where? On and on and on, as the seas rose, as the rain clouds gathered densely, as the immune system of the Earth prepared to purge its illness for good.
When we’d gone out west, it was one of the first and only times I’d been to a city of any size. Our wee town had about five metres of sidewalk that lasted until they didn’t. This place had sidewalks along both sides of every street! We were just strolling along when we came across a square patch of asphalt, ringed by radiating cut lines. I pointed and asked what it was all about.
“Why’d they do that to the sidewalk?” As though those pristine slabs of concrete, glowing in the midday sun, were holy relics.
Dad shrugged and said, “See that valve there? Probably had to repair it, or replace it. So they needed to cut the concrete into pieces to break it out of there — that’s those saw marks. Cut it up, bust ’em out, put in the new valve. Then they had to fill in the hole, but new concrete doesn’t stick to the old stuff. Cheaper to fill it in with asphalt till the whole stretch needs replacing.”
To me, narrating this from the future, the process sounds a lot like what the higher-ups did to the rest of us. Carelessly splitting us up, breaking us apart, then offering one flimsy plastic bandage for our wounds.
DODGING JOHNNY LAW
MY ILLNESS STARTED SMALL. Just a cough. Maybe allergic to Doggo? Who could know. Doctors cost their weight in gold down here, and I wasn’t about to spend my last tokens on a sawbones so I could keep sticking around here, working the Heap till I keeled over. Dressing Doggo in a trench coat and teaching him to walk upright to fool my fellow Underground denizens.
There was a time when I would have barely noticed a cough, let alone would it have set off alarm bells for the neighbours. But everything was different now. After the epidemics on the surface — rabies-B, sporecemia, septo-sclerosis — quarantines locked down most entrances to the Underground. Things relaxed a bit as immigration thinned out, as people became reluctant to guard the borders. Some clever so-and-so whipped up an easy and accurate blood test that could be done with a drinking straw pipette, some glow-stick fluid, and a low-voltage jolt from a cellphone battery.
In the Underground was a different story. Everything was close and closed. Citizens were watched for signs of sickness the way agricultural inspectors used to check for hints of hoof-and-mouth in everyone’s herd. Friends and family ratted each other out on the regular.
Herd immunity was what we had on the surface. Vaccines protected most of us from the most virulent diseases. Diseases that had crippled my own grandparents, great-grandparents, were unheard of when I was growing up. Turns out they were just waiting for us to trip over our own pride and fall down a hole. Well after we were buried, when we thought we were safe, they all came creeping back: polio, measles, mumps, rubella. It was one of the many reasons there weren’t a lot of little kids crowding up the place, if you see what I mean.
Anyway, I wasn’t planning on sticking around. Doggo was getting itchy, too, being cooped up all day, which was making it tricky to keep his presence secret. Plus, much as that secret privately thrilled me when I thought about it, the stress of keeping it was winning out. With Metzler nosing about like I had the map to some buried treasure, that tiny thrill was hampered by fear.
Just a few more tokens, I kept telling myself. Another day of rations to keep us going. Where we were going was undecided. Ostensibly the surface, but in the decades since I’d been near the lift, the way there had become faint, garbled. I had only the vaguest idea how to find it again. And all of that bother was on top of the very real possibility that the way I’d come in had changed, become blocked off or sealed up altogether. People in the Underground weren’t much for filing building permits with the appropriate authorities.
The scrap supervisor noticed it first. Before I did, even. Just a tickle in the throat that bubbled up through the day into a series of barks. Out of reflex, I covered up with the crook of my elbow. If I thought about it at all, it was as a dry throat. Maybe thought about getting a drink of water.
“Vanderchuck!” The supervisor hollered loud enough to get everyone’s attention, not just mine. When I looked up, she waved me over. Everyone else went back to work w
ith an ear perked toward the action. In a world without television or radio, and that valued books for their flammable qualities over their contents, gossip was nearly as valuable as tokens.
The supervisor was a stocky woman who was wrapped year-round in woollen scarves. The top-most one covered her face up to her eyes, so that they looked like a pair of glittering stones stitched to the top of a mound of yarn. Broom-straw blond hair stuck out from beneath a grimy Maple Leafs toque.
Her job at the scrap was to see that new loads were spread out evenly, and that any fights that broke out were short-lived. It was an unofficial position (which ones weren’t, these days), so we all chipped in a few tokens per week to keep her around. Maybe we could’ve gotten by without her, but it wasn’t unheard of for her to make cheapskates regret their refusal to pay. The scrappers all called her Big Ethel. She didn’t stop them, so it’s the only name I knew to call her.
On my trip up the heap to her seat of office, I took sudden notice of how deeply tired I was. My climb wasn’t steep, nor especially hard. I ended up out of breath, anyway.
Big Ethel got to the point. “You’re sick.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m n—” I managed before being interrupted by a longer, deeper fit of coughing. These weren’t tickles but came from the very base of my lungs and left my chest and head tingling.
“Sick,” she repeated from her woolly keep of mufflers. “Oughta call the doc ta section you out to a hospital. Gimme a month’s pay an’ I’ll let you go home, see if you heal up.”
“Jesus wept! A month? I don’t have it. Even if I did, I’d need it to keep myself fed and watered, else I’d just end up a different kind of dead.”
When she shrugged, it was like an earthquake rolled through Yarn Barn. For a moment, the sliver of her face normally visible was obscured as the bottom of her toque and top of her scarves came together. Then they parted again, revealing eyes as unmoved by my plight as a boulder is unmoved by a wailing wind.
I looked out across the scrap, a burning knot of emotion swelling in my throat. Metzler was on his usual patch, poking through the loose top layer with his broom handle. When his eyes caught mine for the briefest moment, he turned away to stump downhill.
Underground, sickness was serious. One person with a cough could turn into thirty people with plague. Everyone knew at least one story of someplace Underground that had to be closed off, decontaminated. Whole neighbourhoods lost.
Come up sick, and you may as well already be dead.
“Maybe you could take and sell those fancy new shoes of yours. Sure to fetch some tokens, those.”
“But I just got ’em!” I could hear the plaint in my voice — childish petulance — and hated it. Over-forties oughta know life’s not fair, but I guess I’ve yet to get the memo.
“How much you spend on those, anyhow? A month? Two?”
I glared up into Big Ethel’s beady eyes and it was all I could do not to cough in her face. Being sick was bad enough, though. If I got done for incitement of illness, I’d get banished for sure. And Doggo …
Shit, Doggo!
“None of your beeswax, Ethel,” I spat, then turned for home. Inklings of a plan were coming together in my mind, much of it based around the notion that maybe being banished wasn’t the worst thing after all. At least we’d find ourselves topside in a hurry.
Before I got far, I felt a heavy hand land on my shoulder.
“Hold up, kiddo. I’m gonna need your weekly in advance. Who knows when you’ll be well enough to come back.”
Ethel was pretty big, but she was round, too. When I made to turn back around, I got the blade of my shovel between her feet and twisted. There was enough new scrap so it shifted out from under her. She grunted and fell backward, rolling all the way down the heap and into a group of folk trying to lever out a whole washing machine.
No one was gonna stop me on her behalf, but I wanted to be well away before she could get after me herself. I half ran, half skidded down the front face of the slope and took off down the trunk tunnel that led back home. Behind me, I could hear a cacophony of shouts mixed with the clank and clamour of a fresh scrap dump. That’d keep ’em busy.
First, I’d grab up every token I had saved that wasn’t already on my person, plus every scrap in my place that wasn’t nailed down, and cash in for all the supplies I could carry. Then me and Doggo would light out. Head for the surface. The thought made me giddy, so I pushed it aside for later. I needed to concentrate.
Tokens.
Supplies.
Doggo.
Gone.
THE FIRST FEW STEPS of my plan went off pretty smoothly. I piled up anything I thought was worth taking onto the bed frame: woollen blanket, some clothes, a canvas duffle I could pull on like a backpack, and my small pantry of dry goods, matches, fuel tablets. The rest went onto the mattress, which I pulled down the hall like a really awkward, inefficient sled.
At the trading post, I ended up handing over my new shoes for a humbler pair, plus a warm coat. Then to the commissary to fill a dingy TVO tote bag with as much as I could afford in dried krill — which wasn’t as much as I’d hoped for but would get us on our way — and a supply of purifying tablets for water.
But before that, while I was still sorting, Doggo was very curious about what I was doing the whole time.
“Food Bringer, why you borking?” he asked, jumping up on the naked bedsprings, getting startled by their creaking, jumping down, then getting onto the mattress-sled. “Borking is my job.”
“Please don’t! And I’m not borking. Barking. It’s coughing.”
He trotted around my feet as I crossed and re-crossed the room, packing things as they came to mind, relegating others to the selling pile.
“Coughing. Did you eat your food too fast? When I cough, this is why. Sometimes it makes food happen again, so I may eat twice. Will you make food this way?”
The coughing and pacing were making me tired. So were Doggo’s unending questions.
“Could you shut up for two seconds?” I demanded, rubbing my closed eyes with my palms.
When he didn’t reply, I glared at him. “Well?”
“You demanded silence, which I have provided. Now will you make food?”
“Jesus, if this is what dogs were like before? It’s a wonder we waited for doomsday to stop keeping them as pets.”
I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands again, willing the ache in my chest to subside long enough to finish clearing out. When I started seeing stars, I stopped and looked at Doggo. The moment my attention was on him, his ears shot forward and his tail took up its tattoo against the floor.
“Yes, Food Bringer. I am ready!”
I shook my head. “Even if I could, I’m not gonna barf so you can eat it.”
He looked as crestfallen as he could, which was still the near side of hopeful, which made me laugh. I picked up a stack of stuff, and the laugh became a cough. Just then, for a second, I was ready for the authorities to come. To break down the door and haul me away to die behind a curtain made from an old bedsheet. Adventures were exciting in the planning, but actually doing them was for the young. And I am many things — young is no longer one of them.
In the place where a pile of terracotta pot shards had been waiting to be glued together, I caught a glimpse of gold. Its colour and texture rang a bell of nostalgia deep in the recesses of my mind. Reaching down, I found it was lodged under a corner of the bed, impaled by a broken leg. It was a book of fairy tales my dad used to read to me when I was very small.
The writing on the cover was illegible, and as I uncovered it, an absolute swarm of silverfish wriggled out and away. Yet I knew it was from Reader’s Digest, just as I knew the inside cover was that special kind of seventies orange and that my aunt’s name was printed in all lower-case pencil beneath the words “This book belongs to.”
My father’s sister. I don’t think I ever met her, and I’m not sure why.
I felt my resolve return. The h
ero doesn’t give up in the middle of a story. Not Prince Lir. Not Atreyu (who I thought for the longest time was played by a girl, his voice was so sweet). In spite of everything, the quest goes on.
I left the book and turned to Doggo. “How about a story?”
So I kept packing and sorting, with Doggo finally still and listening to what I could remember of one of the stories in the book.
“Once upon a time, there was a boy and a girl. They lived next door to each other in Copenhagen and loved each other dearly. Every day when the weather was fine, they opened their windows and spoke to each other across the alley that separated them. And when the weather was cold their windows froze shut, so they would write messages to one another in the frost on the glass or melt peepholes with coins warmed on the stove.”
As I packed, Doggo watched my every move, lopsided ears held at attention. Before the story ended, I’d loaded the last necessity into my overfilled bag and fell silent. There was a beat before someone asked, “Well, what happened next?”
It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t Doggo speaking. It was Mr. Metzler.
He was altogether too big for the broom cupboard I lived in, so he stood hunched in the doorway.
“Made quite the impression at the heap today. Don’t expect you’re welcome back there anytime soon.”
Shouldering my bag, I replied, “Wasn’t planning on going back.”
He nodded. “I see that. Sold the shoes, did you?”
“For the coat.”
Another nod, then he reached into the vest under his jacket. He pulled out an envelope gone grey with dirt and fuzzy with wear. He handed it to me with one hand, clapping my shoulder with the other. The letter was addressed To Jesse, in Olivia’s handwriting.
“How did you get this?”
Metzler ignored the question and ploughed on.
“Stel’s gonna miss you somethin’ fierce. All our boys gone, now you. She was planning to throw you a birthday party next month.”