by Trevor Zaple
He stood on his tiptoes and tried to peer over the crowd, but they were all taller and his only perspective was of a hastily constructed black stage that had been erected in front of the wide, low, glass-walled disc that until only weeks before had been the council meeting chamber of City Hall. There was no one on the stage, and Jason thought that it would be a fine joke if no one ever went on, and this crowd of baaing followers waited until the sun went down, placidly expecting someone to climb the risers and tell them all specifically what to do next. The thought made him grin, although to anyone who observed him, it would look more like a dog’s snarl. Let them stand here, he shouted inside his head. The reverberations in his skull made it seem thunderously triumphant. Let them stand here until they rot, and then let them stand here some more. I should just walk away now and leave these idiots to their parasitic fate.
Mark and Olivia were much closer to the front of the crowd than Jason and Sarah; they were, in fact, only three rows from the front. They’d arrived in the early morning, hoping to find out what was going on. They’d come upon a group of people throwing the tenuous black stage together and a crowd gathering that was sizeable even then. None of the other people in the crowd had known what was going on, and as the crowd grew in size the situation had not become any clearer. Eventually they’d simply settled into a pattern of waiting politely, as though they’d arrived early for a music festival and were waiting for a sign that the festivities were about to begin.
Mark had been against going, at first. He’d been concerned about the distance between their sanctuary in West Lodge and the center of the city, warning of a two-hour walk in hot weather, with no one to call on if she started feeling faint, or if either of them had hurt themselves. Olivia had refuted each of his concerns, with heavy doses of acidity. Pregnant women needed exercise, she argued, as a healthy body made for a safer birth. She needed to keep her muscles active, to ensure that she was continuing to be a good host for her child. The walk wasn’t that long, she’d been on longer before. They couldn’t very well just sit in her apartment and wait until their stores of food ran out. Even more, she argued, they needed to figure out what to do next. It was no good stewing in a static life; they needed to have some sort of purpose, some inkling of a future, or (as Olivia declare vehemently at the height of their argument) Mark would wake up one night with her hands around his throat.
In the end, Mark had given into her. He knew that she knew that he would eventually; it made her victory all the more odious to him. He’d made dark predictions of people gone crazy in the streets; roving gangs that would take advantage of their small numbers and waylay them. Olivia had scoffed at his concerns and of course she had proven right. They’d seen a number of people on their walk down Queen Street, more than they’d seen in the entire time since the disappearance, and none of them had shown an inclination to mug them. Taken together they all seemed like pilgrims on the road to the unveiling of God, rather than wild groups of uninhibited wastrels turned loose to get their kicks. Everyone kept to themselves as they went, keeping to the original groups that they had started out in, looking around warily like cats in a strange alley, but there had been no repeats of the looting of the week prior.
The shattered shops of Queen Street had flanked them as they passed, staring from glaring jagged glass eyes. The detritus of the opening of the cornucopia had lain strewn beneath their feet; much of it crunched with the brittle snap of cheap plastic as they stepped through it, or skittered across the pavement with a sharp rasp as it was kicked aside into the gutter. Mark had felt nervous and jumpy as they walked, his eyes constantly darting into the darkened interior of the ripped apart stores. Who knows what could be lurking in there, he vividly remembered thinking, could be anything.
Those same people that had walked along the route with them were now standing around him. Although enough people had gathered that people were starting to knit closely together, the crowd still vibrated with repulsive tensions. Those small groupings of people still kept to themselves; people unconsciously kept a distance between themselves and anyone they didn’t know. It didn’t have the uncomfortable quality that Mark remembered from packed live shows, where people were jostling for position and trying to elbow out their own place. Instead it had the feeling of a hospital waiting room as those gathered were waiting to hear from a doctor. Not a great start for a rally to bring us all together Mark thought sourly.
The murmur over the gathering was low but constant. People talked in their groups, and when someone inevitably shouted, in anger or excitement, they were quickly and ruthlessly shushed. The black stage remained empty for what seemed like an excessively long time. Olivia shifted uncomfortably; she’d had the foresight to plan for the heat but she was still nearly six months pregnant and acutely distressed. She looked at Mark with a flare of anger; he seemed confident and put-together, and she wanted him to seem as uncomfortable as she was. Here she was, having walked two hours in sticky June weather with a fetus growing inside of her, and he was waiting stoically like he’d just stepped out of the door. It was completely unfair and she mentally added it to her list of faults that he possessed. At that moment he turned to her and his look was more concerned than it was anything else.
“Are you alright? We can get back through the crowd still, if you need to sit down. I have a few bottles of water in here,” he said, gesturing to the brand-new Adidas backpack on his shoulders. She shook her head, and blinked her eyes rapidly to hide the tears that had sprung up. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t. She privately blamed the hormones, knowing somewhere deep that it wasn’t just that.
“No, Mark,” she replied, and she made sure to get across her gratitude tonally. “We’ve waited here long enough that it would be silly to move now”.
“Alright, but I think that it might be prudent to find somewhere to sit if this takes any longer”.
“Mark, I’m fine,” she snapped, suddenly irritated. He always did this. She subconsciously pulled away from him, pointedly looking away. Let him be solicitous of strangers for a while.
Ten uncomfortable minutes passed and then a loud ripple ran through the crowd. A group of people were climbing the risers and taking up positions on the stage. Jason tried to get up on his toes to see what the people around him were talking about but there was no clear line of sight for him. He elbowed Sarah and asked her what was going on.
“Some people are getting on the stage,” she replied, and he could have struck her. He had gathered that little bit of information from what the people around them had been saying, and could have likely inferred it for himself without listening to them anyway.
“Details,” he hissed, and Sarah shot him a look that spoke as loudly as any raised middle finger would have. He sneered at her and she turned her face away with a roll of the eyes. He caught himself from stamping his foot in frustration at the last moment, and settled for watching fat beads of sweat roll down her alabaster neck to slide onto the slopes of her breasts. She was wearing a very low-cut top and Jason hoped savagely that her whore’s tits would burn like nothing else. He wanted to run ahead into the crowd—it wouldn’t be hard, there were definite channels to take—but something made him stay. If he ran from Sarah, he might never find her again, and then he really would be completely alone. He imagined being afloat in a sea of blank, clay-like faces, all of them chattering an incomprehensible language as he floated over them. No, he would stay where he was. It would be safer, after all.
Mark had a much better view of the stage but at first he had as little an idea as to what was going on as Jason did. He watched a group of perhaps a dozen people, evenly split between men and women, mount the stage. They climbed up and found a position along the front, each of them standing a foot or so apart from the next, and they held their hands behind their backs and remained mute. When they all took this position they remained silent for a few minutes, and Mark got a chance to observe them before they spoke.
He knew some of them. He supposed that
if it were true that people had survived at random then it was equally possible that famous people would survive as regular people. There were two city councilors in the lineup, a Cambodian woman that Mark knew by face if not by anything else, and ruddy-faced middle-aged man that Mark recognized as a city councilor, a rather controversial figure prone to heated outbursts. Another man up on the stage was the owner of an electronic superstore whose main claim to fame (besides legendarily bad service) was the series of over-the-top commercials that had been aired on local television for twenty years. There was a famous author whose name escaped him at the moment, a sprightly lady who, despite getting on in age, seemed to radiate calm power. Several of the others were unknown to him, although he suspected that, were he to run in the right circles, he probably would have. There was a heavy ball forming in his lower belly as he watched them.
The Cambodian woman stepped forward and began to speak. Mark realized then that they were all wired with lapel microphones.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began, her voice a perfect TV-journalist-approved High Cleveland. She spread her hands out, seeming to take the entire crowd in. “Thank you for coming. We were hoping that we would get a good turnout, even though we had to resort to good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Let me tell you, this turnout exceeds anything that we had imagined”.
Mark turned his body to look behind. There was a sea of people that stretched from the edge of the Council chambers back through the flying concrete arches that rose over the synchronized fountains all the way back to the rails and benches that edged the cluttered congestion of Queen Street. Some people had even managed to climb on top of the low buildings that served as changing stations for the ice-skating that took over the plaza in the winter. They hovered above the back of the crowd like impatient vultures. It would have been an impressive turnout for any normal event held there, but Mark wondered if perhaps this was the population of Toronto’s downtown now, and his mind shuddered back from the idea. Not everyone would have come, he told himself. This wasn’t everyone. It couldn’t be.
“We have been in consultation amongst ourselves,” the woman continued, her voice rising up at just the right moments, “and with a wide sampling of the constituency left in the city. We have come to the agreement that we need to pull together, as a city, yes, but primarily as a people. All of us, regardless of our gender, race, religion, or creed, must put aside our differences and work together to achieve a continuation of our civilization out of the wreckage of this tragedy”.
Well no shit, you chink bitch Jason jeered bitterly inside of his head, of course we need to pull together. All the better to scam us with, am I right, you fake lying twat?
“The people that you see before you on stage have all served the city in one capacity or another over the years.” She gestured to the people that she shared the stage with. “Although we may have our differences, we all share one common interest: we have a stake in the welfare and the progress of our city. Toronto!” She exclaimed, thrusting her hands outward to take in the wide sky and, presumably, the city that lay beyond the shadow of City Hall. “`From the lake to Vaughan, from Mississauga to Pickering, our city still remains, mostly whole. It waits for us to gather together, with one voice and one purpose, and take it.” She paused here for applause and support; there was a wave of dazed agreement that washed through the crowd but it seemed to crest and diminish quickly and the former city councilor seemed disappointed at the response. She gazed out into the crowd and Mark caught a worried expression flit across her face before it returned to its former calm, inscrutable set.
“My colleague would like to say a few words here, I know, before we continue, but I want to reiterate, before I turn the floor over to him, that it is imperative that we join together for a purpose”. She looked intently at the other former councilor on the stage, the larger man with the shock of blonde hair and the red cheeks. He seemed to scowl and then slowly moved himself forward.
“Hi folks,” he started, his voice a force of bluster. “I know we’d all like to know what the hell is going on here, of course, but I don’t think we’re ever really going to find that out. So, like Nancy just said, we’re going to need to stick together and support each other”. “Nancy” quickly turned her head and her stare bored a hole into the side of the speaker’s head. It had been a quick line, delivered nonchalantly, but Mark had the idea that it had been meant as a veiled insult.
“We gotta get back to work,” he continued, “we gotta make sure we’re making this city a great place to live, for us, and our families, and our future. We need guns, first of all. People need guns. We need guns,”
There was a loud ripple that ran through the crowd. Mark looked at Olivia, who had a strange look on her face. He thought that they might be thinking the same thing. Guns? What is this guy going on about? A number of the people on stage were looking uncomfortable with this statement as well; the writer looked positively radiant with anger about this. She seemed as though she were about to speak when the florid politician continued.
“We don’t know what’s out there, folks. I mean, I’m sure everyone here are good people, good Canadian folks, but not everyone that’s left here came here, if you get me. There’s some others out there, pinko perverts I bet, that didn’t come. They’re out there. They’re the looters, the people that broke into our shops and turned our downtown into a war zone”.
Jason saw people looking around at each other with vague clouds of guilt coming together on their faces. I bet just about everyone here was looting just as much as everyone that’s not here, he thought. Where’s this guy been?
“We need to arm ourselves to defend ourselves, folks. It’s just a fact of existence. If we don’t, those perverts out there will just roll right over us and steal our food. So we need guns. Next, we need to lock up our food, so people that don’t deserve it don’t try to steal it. If they want to get some food from us, they’ll have to contribute to the community. That’s how our society works, folks. You gotta give something to get something”.
There was a real undercurrent of anger to the haze of insular conversation that followed this. Mark stared up at the portly politico with disbelief. He thought uneasily about the stockpile they’d built up back at Olivia’s apartment. He tried to measure out how long it would last them before they would have to resort to bartering food from people like this.
“So we’re going to have a point system set up,” the ex-councilor went on, “where you get so many points for doing work that’s important to the community. You can redeem those points for food and shelter from the city”.
Shelter Mark mouthed, unable to comprehend what this bigmouth gasbag was going on about. Shelter? Every person here could easily have whole floors or even buildings to themselves, should they choose. They were just there, lying open or at least easy to open, and they could be taken with very little effort.
“I gotta level with you folks, we don’t want slackers in our city. If any of you guys are lazy and just think you can take other people’s stuff without permission, you should just leave now. Go out there and see what those perverts in the suburbs will do when you get there. If you wanna live here, you gotta pay the price. If you get found out living in our city without helping out, we’re gonna throw you out. And we certainly aren’t going to give you any food.”
That undercurrent of anger spiked. There were exclamations of furious dismay throughout the gathering. One of the people in the front row near Mark shouted something rancorous at the stage.
“What?” the ex-councilor shouted suddenly. His ruddy cheeks had flushed a deep, mottled red. “You there, the greasy fuck in the black shirt. Yeah, you. What did you just say to me?”
“I said it sounds like a fucking stupid idea!” the unknown guy ahead of Mark shouted at the top of his lungs. There was a deep murmur of approval from the crowd around them, including Olivia. Mark grinned in spite of himself. The guy on the stage didn’t seem to find it funny.
“Well FUCK
YOU, PERVERT!” he screamed. The other people on the stage seemed shocked and taken aback. All except the writer, Mark noted, who seemed to be angry but also unsurprised. Like she’s grown used to outbursts like this from him he thought. He’d seen a couple of the councilor’s outbursts on YouTube, and in retrospect he realized that the writer’s lack of surprise probably wasn’t all that surprising in itself.
“That’s the LAW!” the politico continued, “That’s the way we LIVE in this CITY! You don’t just get to LEECH off of us while we do all the WORK! You don’t live in Commie Fuckin’ China asshole! This is capitalism! Capitalism! Capitalism!”
He seemed to be trying to start a chant but from what Mark could tell it wasn’t working. The crowd around him was starting to cross their arms, silently erecting barriers between themselves and this dervish of anger shouting from the stage. At the back of the crowd, Jason began to laugh as the awkward silence descended upon the gathering. Sarah looked at him sharply.
“What are you laughing about?” she hissed angrily, looking around at the people around them. “No one else is laughing, why are you laughing? There’s nothing funny, are you listening to what’s going on?”
This made Jason laugh even harder, and there were tears beginning to squirt out of his eyes.
“Oh god, oh god,” he panted, like he’d just emerged from a particularly mind-blowing orgasm, “I hope there’s some people online who’ll appreciate this, it has to be shared. It’s so funny Sarah, how are you not laughing? It’s just…” and as he trailed off he started laughing wildly, a deep bubble of dark hilarity rising up from his abdomen and splashing out of his mouth. The people around him started to cast surreptitious glances at him, their eyes confused and concerned. Sarah smiled weakly at them and continued to berate her brother.