by Trevor Zaple
He slowed to a very quick walk as he passed a sushi restaurant and saw the jaunty jut of the Bloor Street Cinema ahead. He passed under its cool shady overhang, not noticing the movie posters or the young lady who was napping in the doorway. He almost didn’t notice the God Lady, until she opened her mouth and issued her trademark shrill yell.
The God Lady was wearing a red dress the particular shade of which had been popular once several decades before. She was a Jamaican woman who cut a lean, powerful figure, easily passing six feet in height. She seemed like a competent, authoritative person until one got close and noticed her eyes, which held a poisonous stew of extreme religious fervor and utter madness. Her usual modus operandi was to stalk Bloor Street outside of the movie-house, raising her fist in the air and shouting about the presence of the devil in the city, and the hellbound state of those who lived within it. Even now, after the disappearance of everyone, she continued her pattern of tirades against an army of phantom sinners.
“You’re going to hell!” she exclaimed into the air, and Steve jumped back against the brick wall of a little sports shop just on the other side of the cinema. “You’re all going to hell, where you’ll burn in brimstone for the rest of eternity! Hellbound! Sinners! Heathens!”
Steve watched her wander the street half a block away, coming towards him and then wandering back up the street. He waited until his heart slowed down and then cautiously walked up the sidewalk towards his destination, which was, rather inconveniently, right where the God Lady was performing her daily proselytizing. As he got closer, her voice spiraled up in intensity. The brimstone was almost dripping from her tongue, she was so into it. He hefted the cinder block and winced at the twinge in his bicep. He didn’t think that he was in any real danger, but in a world where the police seemed to have vanished, taking every precaution with a crazy person was just common sense.
The God Lady caught sight of him as he got within a few stores of her. She stopped in the middle of the street, looking agitated, and then pointed one long, immaculately manicured red fingernail at him.
“You! Sinner!” she exclaimed. Steve kept walking, intent on ignoring her as much as possible. She seemed angered by his intentions and advanced on him.
“Sinner!” she screamed, “I am talking to you! Turn to face the Voice of the Lord!”
“Lady,” Steve shouted without looking at her, “you ain’t the voice of shit”.
“You stand in the Days of Judgement, sinner! Look upon the face of God!”
He passed her by and as he did so she reached out with a hand (that looked more like a claw Steve thought feverishly) and tried to grab at him. With his nerves as keyed up as they were, he felt lucky not to have jumped completely out of his skin; as it was, he danced around her bony grasp and brought the chunk of building material up in a threat. His bicep screamed at him and he exerted an animal grunt. The God Lady backed away from him, hissing like a feral cat being surrounded in a dark alleyway.
“Stay away!” he yelled at her, fear and adrenaline putting real murderous force into his command. She drew herself up and screamed “SINNER! GODLESS!” at him, but she did not make any move toward him. He forced himself to look away. He was almost there. His feet wanted to break into a run but he kept himself to a speedy walk. He checked behind himself furtively. She hadn’t moved, although she was watching him, her blazing eyes following him.
Two more storefronts and there it was. Without thinking he spun himself and whipped his arm out to hurl the cinder block into the inviting, pristine glass window. The window shattered inwards and then collapsed in a deafening orchestra. The brick itself flew through and collided with the hand-crafted street display, which had been erected to advertise the release of the new Animal Collective album. He stood in front of the jagged mouth he had created, breathing heavily and letting his arm hang loosely. Now that the weight had been released from it, his limb was taking the time to lodge every complaint that it had stored up over the course of his journey. He stared up above the former window, feeling the sweat roll out of his hair and down the rough skin of his face. “SONIC BOOM” the sign above proclaimed. “Sure was,” Steve said, and laughed.
The laughter echoed strangely and sounded weird and draggy; he stopped with a grimace and looked down the street in the direction that he had come from. The God Lady was gone. The street was as empty as any other in the depleted city. He shivered and stepped gingerly through the entrance he’d made, stopping to check out the Animal Collective record that had been the main focus of the window display. It was just the sleeve, he discovered, and spun it out into the street like a Frisbee.
Inside, he ignored the cash registers by the entrance and the entire top floor; CDs were not what he was looking for and like most people he knew he had not purchased an actual plastic compact disc in years. Instead, he made a beeline for the wide stairs that lead downstairs, where his real prize was. He’d come for the vinyl.
Downstairs, he found himself wandering, lost in a daze not unlike the one he’d found himself in after his mother, father, two brothers and girlfriend had winked out of existence at the breakfast table a few days before. There was an arsenal of selection, but he was aware that he could realisticaly only carry a finite amount away from the store. He hunted amongst the stacks for hours, picking over each album and pulling out selections for a later second look. He then sorted through the messy pile he’d made, agonizing over each one like beloved children. Finally, with the daylight a memory and his limbs feeling like lead, he had chosen twenty that he could conceivably carry. He spread them out on the floor and sat in front of them, looking over each one with an exhausted, giddy love. Funeral was there, he’d grabbed it eagerly, and he’d flanked it with OK Computer and The Soft Bulletin. Further down he lingered longingly on the monkey graphic that graced the front of Doolittle and moved on to the inscrutable cut-and-paste vibe of Bee Thousand. He opened the double-gatefold of Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antenna To Heaven and read through the spidery riot of black lettering that denoted the movements in each suite. He pored over the giant shaking hands on the cover of The Moon & Antarctica, trying to puzzle sense and meaning for a brain that was teetering on the edge of collapse. With his brain beginning to nod into shutdown, he bent over, ran his lips over the reddish guitar blur of Loveless and lay down with his head next to another empty street, the lonely view of Separation Sunday, an album that had been scratched into his soul. He fell asleep moments later, drifting off easily.
In his dreams that night the God Lady stalked him, following him through empty streets whose buildings had grown taller and thinner in his subconscious reflections. They seemed like broken skeletal teeth, and in his wavering dreams they seemed to be slowly closing in on him. Behind him was the God Lady, seeming to float through the streets with an insolent laziness, her arms relaxed, her red dress flowing out behind her via some eldritch breeze. She seemed thinner as well, her black skin pulled taut against the sharp bones of her sunken face. In the queer afternoon light that suffused his dream, the color of her dress took on the characteristics of blood.
He ran through empty buildings with elongated hallways, alleys that seemed to swallow light, and streets that seemed to heave like harbor tide. No matter where his feet took him, the God Lady kept pace. He became convinced that if he went to the record store he would be safe, that he would finally be beyond the reach of the God Lady and her clutching, skeletal wrath. He ran down streets he did not recognize and passed storefronts that never existed in any sane reality; each one featured nude, shapeless, vaguely defined people standing at attention and staring out into the street with blank, white eyes. They were missing pupils but Steve still felt them watching him en masse as he fled in vain from the brimstone-chanting witch that nipped at his heels.
Finally he saw it, an orange glow up the street that became the gaping hole he had made in the front façade of Sonic Boom. It wasn’t the exact store he had broken into in his real life that afternoon; this store was wider, and
the windows seemed far larger than would ever have existed. He knew it for what it was, though, even in the grip of a frightening dream-panic. He leaped into the hole in the front of the store and rolled, hoping to jar himself awake.
It didn’t work, and when he got to his feet he saw that the store was empty. The racks were still there but the albums themselves were gone, and the shelves were covered with a centurie worth of dust. The paint on the walls was peeling, and there were dangerous-looking holes in the structure. He turned around and she was there, only a few feet from him, floating an inch above the ground on bare, lacerated feet that dripped a slow flow of pitch-black blood into a shallow pool underneath her. Her arms were held out in front of her and the tight, liver-spotted skin of her arms seemed to undulate tempestuously. Her grin was wide, Cheshire-like, and she seemed to have too many teeth by a factor of three.
“Sinner,” she breathed, and Steve began to shiver uncontrollably. “Let the Days of Sin commence”.
She raised a hand and slid one fingernail down the front of her dress. As the red nail (which was, as Steve saw without surprise, actual blood) contacted the crimson fabric it split apart and she left herself nude with the ruined red dress puddling beneath her feet. Her frame was impossibly skeletal, and Steve could count each rib easily; her skin stretched over each in a way that made each rib resemble the edge of a knife blade. Her breasts hung deflated above them, and in place of whatever nipples the God Lady may have had was a single, blazing, undeniably mad eye. She placed her bloody skeleton’s hand over the mound of her pubis, and the rich stink of blood filled his nostrils.
“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven,” she intoned, her voice sounding like it was flowing over a series of corroded razor blades. “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”.
She moved suddenly, floating towards him with an ease that nauseated him. She removed the hand from her vulva and reached toward his own groin, and even as he wanted to crawl back with disgust and revulsion he felt drawn forward. He realized that he had an erection in his pants the size of which would never have been possible in reality.
“And she being with child cried,” she breathed as she reached forward, “travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered”.
She caressed his groin and he began to shake, feeling an explosive weight build rapidly in his lower belly.
“And there appeared another wonder in Heaven,” she whispered, leaning in to speak intimately into his ear, “and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads”.
His pants were opened deftly, and that bony black hand, impossibly cold, stroked once down the shaft of his penis and he cried out in agony.
“And his tail,” she whispered, “Oh, his tail…” and her tongue flicked into his ear like the warning hiss of a noxious, bloated serpent. At this instant he came, and as he came he awoke screaming.
He lay in the false light of the basement of Sonic Boom, listening to his scream fade away into the early morning air, panting like a schoolboy after his first experience. He remembered shards of the dream and wished that he didn’t. Within minutes he was in the street, his twenty albums stored in canvas bags (“RECORD STORE DAY” each one proclaimed) that he had found behind the cash desks. He peered fearfully down Bloor Street in both directions, acutely aware of the uncomfortable wet glob in the front of his boxers, but there was no sign of the God Lady, or of anyone else. He scampered away going east, heading into the jungle of the downtown as the strong morning sun rose before him.
After days of looting (which really took the form of exuberant, joyful exploration), word began to be passed around, at first orally by groups passing each other in the course of the day, and then later by posters that a group had copied and put up all over the downtown core. The posters were, of the two, the most effective, although in the end they both sent out the same message.
“Come to Nathan Philips Square in three days time—Saturday the 17th, for those who were still keeping track—and we’ll gather together to hammer out what should happen next”. The posters were mocked up to convey a sense of collective worth and inspiration—the old socialist images of strong workmen holding hammers aloft, and women holding wrenches and looking back over their shoulders with a clear, effective purpose. “LET’S BUILD UTOPIA TODAY!” they screamed in gigantic font, “FOR OUR FUTURE, AND OUR CHILDREN”. The scattered groups that huddled in the core saw these pictures and for most of them at least half of their immediate concerns were addressed here. Someone, it seemed, was willing to take charge. Someone was finally thinking of the children.
Three
Nathan Phillips Square drowned in sunlight on an indeterminate day at the end of June. A common magnet for not only tourists but for downtown workers out and about on their breaks, since the disappearance it had been empty. The glittering pools that flanked the open concrete plaza still burst into life with rows of synchronized fountains, but for weeks they had been performing their regular magic for severely diminished audiences—sometimes none at all. On this particular day, however, a crowd had once again gathered in front of the fraternal twin towers, chattering briskly among themselves and milling in a tight formation of unease.
Jason was near the back of the crowd; he and Sarah had arrived late. Sarah had hemmed and hawed about going, even though most of the survivors in their neighborhood had been by to tell them about it. The old Italian man who had driven the local ice cream truck had actually come by three times. Jason privately thought he was a drunk and probably more than a little senile, and that he had a way of eyeing Jason that Jason didn’t particularly care for. The last time he’d lain awake in bed until the moon had long since set, devising a cathartically violent way of showing his exact displeasure with the old wop. That he’d failed to do so was yet another entry in his growing library of personal failures.
Sarah stood beside him, her plain yellow sundress lying limp under the humidity. She wore a wide-brimmed garden hat (a matching yellow, of course, and didn’t Jason just sneer) and was busy fanning herself with a wide Chinese fan that she’d looted from a shop on the way to the meeting. Jason had cautioned against going into the shop; it had looked to him like a squat gorilla slumped in death, with its guts pulled out into the uncaring, dust-choked street. She’d ignored him, of course, and he’d stood uncomfortably in the street, alone, while she’d puttered about the useless junk and tourist bric-a-brac that infested such places. Small groups of three or four had passed by him occasionally as he stood like an awkward scarecrow straddling a streetcar track, and Jason had felt their searching, avaricious eyes on him as they walked by. When she’d emerged from the shop carrying two cheaply-made, garishly designed hand fans, he’d nearly exploded with burning rage. He’d snatched the one she’d brought out of her hand and stuffed it into the pocket of his baggy jeans, not bothering with thanks. It was still in his jeans pocket, in fact, and Jason was determined to keep it there.
It was a hard fight, though. The sun beat down from overhead and the humidity in the air (thanks to the cesspool of garbage that called itself a “Great Lake”) made him feel as though he were drowning in the open air. He hadn’t thought to bring a hat, and no one had mentioned that he should bring a hat. He seethed impotently at Sarah and at the survivors in his neighborhood; they’d wanted to see him burn, so that they could watch him squirm and snicker like naughty-eyed children up their sleeves at him. That he was burning was an inescapable fact. He spent most of his time indoors, in front of an LCD screen, and his tolerance to UV rays was quite low. His pale skin made him an attractive target for sunburn and he could feel the dull ache of the sun scalding him already. He stared at his sister from the corner of his eye, imagined kicking her in the knee and then pivoting his foot into her soft, yielding temple until her skull cracked like a weakened egg and the useless oatmeal within oozed out.
He made himself look away, knowing that if he kept it up he
would work himself up into another screamer of a headache. They’d been happening frequently since the disappearance, and he always found a way to blame them on Sarah. She was just so stupid! He had devised a plan to remain hidden within their house, and to fortify it into a stronghold. Let them try to come and take their food and water. They would be prepared, a two-story family home that would be ringed by lethal traps and defended by an arsenal of weaponry raided from police stations and gun enthusiasts’ homes. Sarah had laughed at this logical, rational decision, actually laughed at it, and had said that the only way to get along was to get along. She wanted to invite her neighbors in! As though they wouldn’t take one look at them, overpower them, and rob them blind! Saliva gathered in his mouth like hot battery acid and he forced himself to swallow rather than waste moisture in this broiling sun. She would find herself gang-raped and throat-slit before long, if that was her attitude, he knew grimly.
The people around him did not inspire confidence in them. Most of them were shifty, and looked around constantly. Their faces still had that sheep-like expression that had begun disgusting Jason after a while; it looked weak, and caused the bile to rise up his gorge every time he saw it. A number of people in the crowd wore dirty clothes, even though both clean clothes and functioning washing machines were free and available. They were lazy, that was all it was. Lazy, filthy, stupid sheep that would gather here because some pieces of paper with eye-catching designs had told them to come here. If the posters had said to grab a butcher knife and eviscerate your neighbors, Jason had no doubt that the majority of the crowd would have done it while cheerfully whistling a Katy Perry song.