The Apocalypse Club

by McLay, Craig

  I was quite proud of this plan. I thought it was a good, possibly even great, plan. One of the top ten, all-time, best-ever plans, in fact. The take wouldn’t be as high as the great train robbery or the Lufthansa heist, perhaps, but the execution would be no less brilliant. Even better, we didn’t have to worry about the morality of it because we were stealing from meth heads. I had never actually seen a meth den before, but I had seen the inside of a house in my old neighbourhood that had been used as a marijuana grow op, and anyone who associated with the type of people who caused a quarter million dollars in mould remediation were not worthy of sympathy. These were junkie scumbag dealers.

  It didn’t work, of course, but in all other respects it was still an excellent plan.

  We staked out the convenience store parking lot from a park across the street. It was supposed to rain, but it didn’t, which was good, because I would have felt strange if I’d tried to jack a car while holding an unreliable folding umbrella. One that would probably open unexpectedly and poke one of us in the eye during the getaway.

  “Where are they?” Max asked. Although it was already 3:30 in the morning, the usual onslaught of cars had not materialized.

  “They’ll be here,” I said, trying to maintain my confidence. By this time, there should have been ten or fifteen cars by now, but we hadn’t seen a single one. The only person who had even set foot in the place was a skinny guy on a bicycle that he left propped against the wall next to the door. In terms of our required speed and load-bearing capacity, a bike was not going to cut it.

  Had they changed their delivery night? Had they been busted? Had the shipment failed to arrive? Was I thinking about the wrong store? Had I just imagined the whole thing? No matter what it was, I was starting to get pretty desperate by the time the camper van pulled in.

  Max and I hunched down behind a tree as a middle-aged-looking man got out of the driver’s side, coughed so loudly that we were both surprised to not see any lung tissue come flying out, spat on the sidewalk, then lurched into the store like he was carrying an invisible air conditioner on his back.

  He had left the engine running.

  Max and I nodded to each other. It was go time.

  So what the hell was I doing? I still wonder about that. I was a typical middle-class suburban kid from a nice family. Sure, my father sometimes experienced some PTSD-related flashbacks and would show up three days later, buck naked and in line at the bank where he would always apologize profusely for forgetting his ID and my mother was slowly going crazy trying to pretend that this wasn’t a problem, but it wasn’t like family life was a Broadway play. Bottles didn’t get smashed. We didn’t have screaming arguments that ended with tearful explanations to law enforcement officials. School was okay. I was good at English and history, but sucked at math. My brain just doesn’t seem to have the calculator function installed. If I needed to add even two relatively simple numbers together – like seven and eight – I couldn’t just automatically do it and come up with the correct answer. I would add seven and ten and then subtract two. More complicated things, like the concept of per second per second, would leave me scratching my head for days. And, as soon as I thought I had it figured out, I would relax for a moment and the explanation would run out the back door of comprehension like a stray dog.

  So why was I now running across a darkened parking lot at three in the morning about to commit a felony?

  When you’re a kid, you have so little control over what happens to you that you’re not even aware of it. You just breathe it in every day. You get up when you’re supposed to. You eat what you’re told to eat. Learn what you’re told to learn. As far as I could see, it was a situation that didn’t improve a whole hell of a lot when you became an adult. In fact, an argument could be made that it got even worse. Most of the adults I knew did not appear to be doing the kind of work they wanted. Or living where they wanted. Or even living with the people with whom they genuinely wanted to spend their time.

  Max was the first person I had ever met who suggested that there might be some choice in the matter. If control wasn’t ours, then we were going to take it back. If there was a man out there calling the shots (Max never referred to this mysterious string-pulling figure as “the man”, but he might as well have), then he wasn’t going to be doing it for us anymore. The man’s days were numbered. We were coming for him. We just needed to arrange transportation.

  We hit the first snag as soon as I pulled open the driver’s side door and jumped up into the seat.

  “It’s a fucking standard!” I yelled, looking at the stumpy black gearshift sticking up from the matted floor immediately to my right. The van smelled strongly of cigarettes and wet dog. I took a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure there was no attack beast loose in the back about to lunge for my throat, but it was too dark to see.

  I wanted to abandon the whole operation right there. I had never actually driven a vehicle before, but since I was, at that time, the (marginally) taller of the two of us, I had been assigned that duty during the planning and pre-operations phase. I grabbed for the door handle, but Max was remarkably calm.

  “Relax!” he commanded. “Just push down the pedal on the far left. That’s the clutch. I’ll handle the gears.”

  I took my hand off the door and did as instructed. The pedal provided little resistance and in my excitement, I pounded it to the floor with a thud. Max manoeuvred the gear shift into place. It sounded like a large and rusty clockwork.

  “Okay, let your foot off the clutch and give it a lot of gas or it’ll stall,” Max said.

  I lifted my foot off the pedal on the far left and stomped on the one on the far right. The engine grumbled, but we weren’t going anywhere.

  “Parking brake!” Max said, grabbing the shorter lever next to the gear shift and disengaging it with a click. The engine noise dropped to a low rumble. “Give it more gas!”

  My foot was already as far down on the accelerator as it would go. After a moment, the pitch began to rise and the camper van started creeping forward instead of backward. There was a bump as the front wheels hit the sidewalk in front of the store and climbed over the edge, pulling the vehicle up like a sea monster climbing out of a swimming pool.

  I looked at the gear shift. Max had pulled it over and down, but he hadn’t pulled it far enough. Instead of reverse, we were in fourth, and now that the sidewalk was out of the way, the van was getting ready for highway speed.

  I let out a yell and tried to stomp on the brake, but I missed and hit the clutch again instead. The van had enough momentum to drive forward over the sidewalk and straight through the front window of the store, shattering the glass and sending a large display of energy drinks rolling across the floor.

  The owner of the van was standing at the counter holding a knife while the clerk was in the process of emptying the contents of the register into a large but uncooperative plastic bag. The van owner was younger than I thought. He had a bald head, heavy five o’clock shadow and a T-shirt with the words “No, Fuck YOU” printed on the front. The sight of his vehicle crashing through the front window was apparently too much for him to process, as he just stood there for a moment with his jaw hanging open.

  “Hey!” he shouted as comprehension dawned. “That’s my fuckin’ van!”

  Turning momentarily away from the clerk and the register, he took a step toward us and tripped over a loose can of Roid Rage, which caused him to fall sideways into the lottery machine. Forgetting the clutch, I grabbed the gear shift with both hands and pushed it into reverse, smashing down on the accelerator at the same time. The van lurched a couple of times and then rocketed back out into the parking lot, where our rearward progress was sharply terminated by a telephone pole.

  I was shaking my head to get the two steering wheels I was looking at to resorb back into one when I heard a voice from the back seat.

  “Hell’s goin’ on, Maynard? You get them smokes?”

  A woman with oily yellow hair an
d horrific green teeth stuck her head between us. She looked at me first and then Max. Her eyes were bloodshot and she had some kind of band aid stuck to her chin. She seemed to have no awareness that we had just crashed the van into a pole.

  “Where’s Maynard?”

  My vision came back into focus and I saw Maynard pulling on the front door of the convenience store. Our crash through the front window had bent the frame, however, and it looked like the door was stuck. Realizing that the door was not going to open, he climbed over the ice cream freezer and started making his way through the hole we had made.

  “Abort abort abort!” I shouted, grabbing the handle and pushing open the driver’s side door. Operation Rolling Thunder had, I decided, reached the point of no return. The van was probably damaged beyond repair and had an unpleasant-smelling blonde woman in the back seat, both of which were definite cons in terms of assessing it from a mission effectiveness standpoint.

  I hit the ground and ran blindly down the street with Max on my heels. I could tell he was yelling something, but my head was so full of white noise that I didn’t know if he was trying to get me to go back and complete the mission or if Maynard was right behind us and he was imploring us to run faster.

  We only made it about half a block before the police cruiser caught up and arrested us. Max told them that we had seen what looked like a robbery in progress and, since we didn’t have a cell phone on us at the time, had done the next logical thing, which was to drive a van through the front of the store.

  It turned out that Maynard had sliced open his radial artery trying to climb through the window and was taken to the hospital, where they determined that he had lost three pints of blood. He also had 13 outstanding warrants ranging from grand theft (yes, the vehicle we were trying to steal was already, in fact, stolen) to failure to pay child support.

  I don’t think they believed our story about using the van to stop the robbery, but the clerk and security camera footage didn’t contradict it. They did consider charging us with dangerous operation of a motor vehicle and destruction of private property, but that was quietly dropped after the news got a hold of it. The resulting story portrayed us as a couple of brave, albeit slightly inept, young civic heroes. Why were we in front of a convenience store at three in the morning? We were bored kids. There wasn’t a hell of a lot else to do in our town.

  It turned out that the police were also aware of the meth distribution and had been watching the place for a while. They had swooped in with their task force and taken it down only two weeks before I came up with my brilliant plan. I admit that I should have paid more attention to the news that week. The woman who was waiting in the van, Carla Heisen, had the same brilliant idea I did and had talked her boyfriend, Maynard Felschbek, 32(!), into sticking the place up, thinking that he would walk out with more meth than she would be able to smoke in ten lifetimes. She claimed that she had never heard of Maynard and had no idea how she came to be sitting in the back seat of his camper van with a stolen home theatre system and a quarter pound of marijuana that definitely wasn’t hers, man. I guess her story was less credible than ours. She was on probation for various drug and prostitution convictions and was immediately sent back to serve the remaining four years of her term.

  I would have thought that getting away without charges would have been enough for Max, but I was wrong.

  “We looked like a couple of idiots!” he said back at our HQ. “We’re supposed to be going after the man. Right now, the man is laughing his ass off!”

  I take it back. He did refer to our target as “the man.” I forgot about that.

  “Live to fight another day,” I said. I was sort of feeling pretty good about how the whole thing had turned out. We had gotten involved in an adventure and inadvertently stopped a crime and contributed to the arrest of two known felons. People at school couldn’t stop asking us about it. Girls were suddenly aware that we existed. Nathalie Gausden, whose wearing of a 19th-century corset during a costume demonstration on a field trip to Pioneer Village had caused no shortage of embarrassed male stooping, had smiled and said “Hi.” As far as I was concerned, we had lost the battle but won a larger war. “At least we’re not dead. Or in jail.”

  “We should’ve brought the ordinance with us,” Max said, referring to the grenade-sized explosive devices stored in the repair bay. This had been his desire from the start and it had taken a great deal of persuasion on my part to convince him that we could pull off the job without them.

  “I think we probably did enough damage to the building with the van,” I pointed out.

  “We could have used them as a diversion,” Max muttered.

  “I don’t know that we really needed one,” I said. “Maynard seemed pretty diverted when we drove through the front window. And then by the fact that he was rapidly bleeding to death. More on top would’ve just seemed like overkill, I think.”

  “We can’t lose sight of our objective,” Max said. “We need to take out that weather control station.”

  I stayed quiet on that one. After barely escaping with my life and liberty intact after our first top secret operation, I was not exactly champing at the bit to dive into another, more ambitious one involving high explosives. In fact, I would probably have abandoned the whole insurrection idea at that point had it not been for Violet Haze.

  -6-

  She was born in Egypt. Her parents fled the country when the Nile ran dry and formal relations with their southern neighbour, Sudan, deteriorated to the point where neither side started paying much attention to where the bombs were falling. She was three.

  On the plane, her parents decided that a new life required new names, so Muhammad Bakar al-Atash became Moe Greensleeves after his favourite Stooge and the baize-coloured uniforms of the flight crew, which he greatly admired. His wife, who had been born Faruz Amir Hafez, became Bridget Hermione, a name she took from two of her favourite fictional characters. Their daughter was a trickier proposition. Although she was only three, she was as stubborn and bullheaded as a goat with an ear infection. It didn’t seem appropriate to just assign her a new identity based on their likes and dislikes. Their trip to the new world was for her. They had left almost everything behind except for two small suitcases. She was too young to understand. How did you tell a three-year-old that her future school had been destroyed by artillery?

  “Our new home will decide,” the newly monikered Mr. Greensleeves said as he munched a small bag of complimentary peanuts over the north Atlantic and eyed his sleeping daughter uneasily. She had only just fallen asleep after five uncomfortable and temperamental trips to an extremely cramped and noisy bathroom, and he very much hoped that she would not wake up anytime soon and demand a sixth. “It will give us a sign.”

  It was foggy and the sun was coming up over Pearson International Airport as their plane circled in line for landing, so Fatima Hafez al-Atash became Violet Haze.

  It was the first of many decisions with which she would violently disagree.

  Their first few years in their adoptive land were almost impossible. Moe, a fully qualified pharmacist, worked as a doorman at the Royal York hotel while he waited for the OCP to certify his credentials. Bridget, who had been a line producer for an Egyptian news program, went to work cleaning houses. They lived in a tiny, windowless apartment under a fish market. Every morning at four A.M., the ice maker would finish its cycle and drop three hundred pounds of cubes into a hopper with a crash that would wake everyone on the block. Their landlord was a small, fat, Greek man named Stavros. The fact that Stavros had himself once been a powerless immigrant in no way changed his view that immigrants were easy pickings for the unscrupulous and, as a bonus, the least likely to complain when swindled.

  The apartment had no second exit in the event a fire blocked the first, which meant that it could not legally be called an apartment because people were not legally allowed to live down there. In Stavros’s view, that just meant that the Landlord & Tenant Act did not apply, mea
ning he could charge whatever the hell he wanted, raise the rent whenever he felt like it, fail to fix the plumbing, heating or electrical when they malfunctioned (frequently), and allow the unit’s insect and rodent populations to live in peace without fear of extermination.

  They couldn’t afford a phone. Violet remembered walking with her father to a rusty and vandalized payphone on the corner, where he would place one of his stammering and terrified calls to their landlord after fishy-smelling water had started pouring through the ceiling or rats had been discovered burrowing through the basmati.

  “Yes, please. Mister Stavros, sir. It is Moe Greensleeves.” Pause. There were always pauses in the conversation during which Violet could hear the muffled yells of the small, fat, Greek man who was the bane of their existence. “Yes. Sorry to be bothering you.” Pause. “Yes, I know you are a very busy and important man.” Pause. “We are very happy and grateful to be staying in your excellent apartment unit, which is well-maintained in every respect, sir.” Pause. “It is just that the heating unit does not appear to be functioning as it should be.” Pause. “Which is to say that it is not working at all.” Extended pause. “Yes, but it has been two days now and the temperature outside is very cold and now it is so cold inside that we are finding our pipes have frozen, too.” Pause. “Yes, your brother-in-law is a most excellent electrician, but I believe he has connected the wrong things and gave himself something of a shock.” Pause. “No, he is, I believe, okay. He is sitting on the kitchen floor and my wife is giving him tea. It is iced tea, but then, everything that we have right now is iced, if you will pardon my saying, sir.”

  Violet hated listening to these conversations. Her father always brought her along because the skinny men who loitered around the phone were less likely to hassle him to get off the phone when she was there. She hated her father’s cowardice and the supplicating tone of voice he always used. She hated the rathole apartment. She hated the neighbourhood. She hated her parents for dragging her away from her warm and sunny home where they had everything to this frozen wasteland where they had nothing.