Disappearance

by Trevor Zaple

  The back patio was massive, and flanked on two sides by tall brick walls and on the back by a tall wooden security fence. It was eminently private, and (most importantly, in Barry’s mind) eminently defendable. Anyone trying to break through into the area would be forced through one checkpoint, and could be very easily picked off. This could work he thought, amazed, and shivered with the idea of it. He heard the door rush open behind him and turned around to watch Amber and Emily walk through. Amber’s shapely round face held a pair of searing blue eyes that were currently twinkling mischievously, which contrasted with the hints of sourness floating around mousy bespectacled Emily’s pretty, full mouth. He faked a cough to stifle a grin; Amber had probably said something lewd that had seemed like a funny observation to her, and Emily had probably taken offense to it. The former sociology student could be shockingly prudish, he’d found. Still, she was a friend, and a valuable one at that. She knew things that neither himself nor Amber would ever have thought of.

  “Check it out,” Barry exclaimed, turning around to take the area in. “Place is huge, it’s private, and we could totally defend it”.

  Amber giggled. “Who are we defending it from? It’s not like there’s many people left”. Barry forced a smile and Emily looked away, eyeing up the walls, and the fence.

  “Looks good, actually,” she said approvingly. “Once we scavenge some real weapons we could live here”.

  “We should look upstairs then, and check out some rooms,” Amber said, looking up to the small, dirty upstairs windows. She was wearing a stylish sequined white halter top and Barry noticed that it framed her generous curves rather well. Amber caught his eye and winked suggestively, which caused him a shock. He recovered quickly, though.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said quickly, and then shot a look at Emily. She was busily engrossed in examining the collection of tables with folded-up umbrellas sticking out of them about halfway across the patio.

  “You guys have fun,” she said dreamily. “I’m going to go find some vodka and some tonic water, and then go park on one of those tables for a while”. Amber grinned wickedly at Barry. “Alright, if you’re sure, then,” she said, with a fake pout directed at Barry. She stuck her hand out and grabbed Barry’s. “Come on!” she whispered, and they slipped away into the building.

  The stairs were beside the bathrooms just inside the patio door and were as narrow and claustrophobic as the rest of the bar’s interior. The hallway upstairs was nondescript, a ribbon of old, dusty wooden flooring flanked by silent white doors. Amber pushed the first door on the left open and pulled Barry inside. The room within was dusty and Spartan, containing a small made bed, a battered old nightstand, and nothing else. Amber pushed Barry on to the bed.

  “She’ll be awhile down there,” Amber whispered. She reached behind her neck to untie the halter. She pulled the shirt down and her breasts bounced free, full and sloped. She smiled and bent over him, letting her nipples graze against the crotch of his jeans. “We’ve probably even got a couple of hours,” she said alluringly, “if you think you can last that long”. Her lips found his neck and all coherent thought left him for some time.

  Meanwhile, Emily sat happily on one of the creaking wooden tables, a vodka-and-tonic sitting by her right hand. She dragged up the knapsack she had been carrying all over the city and extracted three items: a marked-up map of the city of Toronto, a copy of The Zombie Survival Guide, and a high standard .45 with checkered wooden grips. She studied the map, making a mark along Queen Street in pencil and marking it “HQ”. She traced her finger along to a large X that she had marked as a grocery store, only a few blocks east. She smiled contentedly and contemplated her pistol. She’d had some practice firing it, although she’d never had to use it on a live target. She wondered if she’d be able to pull it off when the time came.

  Paul Taggert threw a glass against the hard wooden wall of a bar called the Dog’s Bollocks, an establishment further east on Queen Street mocked up to look like an English public house. The glass shattered upon impact , resounding through the high-ceilinged, open space, and silencing the chatter that had been vibrating through the place. There were two dozen people sitting around the tables, drinking up the liquor and feasting on the food in the freezers, talking loudly, but the silence that followed the crash of Taggert’s thrown glass was absolute. All eyes went to him, an imposing, muscular figure with a bulldog set to his demeanor. The target of his violent gesture, a willowy young man wearing a grey suit, smiled easily as though nothing had happened.

  “Is that the response you would like me to take to the Council?” the man in the suit asked, his tone slightly insolent. Taggert felt his thick fingers itch toward his other glass, full of the flattened remains of the draft beer kegs. He considered throwing it as well, but decided against wasting it. Who knew how long it would be before they were making more Amsterdam Blonde?

  “No, you can twist your head on backward and take that to them as a message!” he raged. The young man’s expression remained softly contemptuous, and Taggert forced himself to breathe.

  “Listen to me very carefully, jackass,” he seethed, “I want you to deliver this message word for word to that fat preening fuck that fancies himself mayor material. Tell him that if he wants to go around confiscating all the food he’s welcome to try, but anyone he sends around here to do it will go back missing a head”.

  The young man actually seemed shocked by this. “Mr. Taggert,” he exclaimed, “once the election is over, anything that is done will be done in the name and with the blessing of the people of this city. It would be a fundamentally anti-social act to disobey any of the decisions of the council”.

  Taggert grunted at this, grudgingly impressed by the kid’s chutzpah. It didn’t blunt the force of his anger, though.

  “Tell you what, kid,” he said with some black humor, “I have a thirty-ought-six with a full load sitting in the kitchen. Wait here for a couple of minutes while I grab it and I’ll show you a fundamentally anti-social act”. The kid gaped at him briefly, gauged Taggert’s seriousness, and then ran like the devil himself was after him. Taggert blew out a huge belly laugh as he watched the kid run. Conversation returned throughout the bar and he felt a hand clap down on his shoulder. Michael Therin was behind him, his severe face broken apart by a wide white grin. There was a knowing glee in his dark eyes.

  “So I guess that means you won’t be giving them your vote, eh?” His soft, deep voice was ringed with laughter. Taggert did not return the smile. His face was tight-lipped and grim.

  “My vote?” he mused in a deadly tone. “I don’t think any of them will be getting my vote”. Therin peered at him intently.

  “No, eh…so what do you suppose will happen, then?”

  Taggert shrugged his linebacker-wide shoulders. “They can hold the election or they can go to hell, for all I care. There’s no law that says I have to listen to anything they say”. He paused significantly. “There’s no laws, Mike”.

  Therin nodded thoughtfully.

  “Very true, Paul, very true. So, I repeat, what do you suppose will happen?”

  Taggert considered this for a moment.

  “Well, the way I see it, we’re going to have to live to survive, which means that it’s really every man for himself, although,” and here he looked at Therin significantly, “a great man knows to bring along the right people to make him great”. Therin smiled at this, and tapped his broad, sweat-slicked nose.

  A network of messengers radiated out from the council chambers, bringing a slowly coalescing platform of two opposing although vaguely defined parties. The one centered predictably on Tommy John, who was harping on a message of protection; guns and a centralized food supply to protect against the wild unknown that existed outside the city’s border, and an emergency currency to protect the hard-working against the predations of the hordes of the weak and lazy of which they conjured visions. The other stood against all of this, finding no evidence to support either hordes o
f bandits or hordes of slackers, but their charisma and leadership was split between Terence Jones and Glen Campbell. The number of people that stood within this hazily defined party outnumbered the so-called tommyjohns by a ratio of three to one, but they could not find common ground on who their leader would be. Jones stood for a very laissez-faire ideal of how the city would work, although he endorsed a series of regulations that would keep people from doing what they eventually ended up doing. Campbell had a much more utopian vision of the future, replete with construction projects and social movements that the entire city would be involved in, and a central, strong council that would oversee the details of life for the survivors and ensure that their children were brought up in the best possible manner in order to continue to grow society.

  In the end they were unable to come to a conclusion, and as the final week of the pre-election period drew to a close there were three candidates who were running for the executive position in the new government, which would be keeping the old title of Mayor. A further hundred people ended up running for the twenty-one seats that would form the new City Council. The ballot was five pages, copied off two thousand times; there was no shortage of paper in the city. Posters were chalked up, pored over, and agonized about. A minimal design was eventually settled on, informing in huge type the date of the election. Below that was the local place that the ballot would be held, handwritten on the poster by the person who put it up. It was a huge undertaking by agents who had to cross the city by foot or by bike, and the effort put in by all the election’s volunteers was nothing short of exhausting.

  When all was said and done, perhaps a quarter of the city’s survivors came out to vote.

  The election’s failure can be viewed as the ultimate contemptuous expression of Paul Taggert’s observation. The survivors, shocked by what had happened and simultaneously exhilarated by the possibilities that lay in the mass amount of goods left behind, had given up on politics as usual. The men and women that had planned and run in the election were tied to an old way of thinking, and the survivors had grown sick of it. They’d heard reports of the acidic bickering going on in the council chambers, remembered the acidic bickering that had been deadlocking the decision-making process before the disappearance, and had promptly washed their hands of the entire idea. They had food, and shelter, and companionship, and felt little need to progress beyond that. The mid-July sun beat down on the city with seasonable glee, and the need for laws and politicians seemed a remote need at best.

  As it stood, the ballots were counted and recounted on the night of the election, and the council positions were decided. They went primarily to the candidates who weren’t tommyjohns. When the ballots for the executive position were counted, it was found that Tommy John and Glen Campbell were within a few votes of each other. There followed three days of screaming and negotiations before Tommy John simply and expediently shot Campbell dead in the Council Chamber. Within a week, tommyjohns had replaced the elected council members, through intimidation or outright murder. By early August, their positions were cemented and they began to plan out their strategy to bring about their vision. Posters were created and hung up all over the city proclaiming a new era of peace, prosperity, and survival for the glorious new nation-state of Toronto. The agents who went out to hang up these posters reported that the people whom Mayor John repeatedly professed love and respect for would watch them, staring warily from windows or from dim doorways. Many said that they felt vaguely threatened, although they admitted that they had never been directly propositioned with violence. In this respect, they were quite lucky.

  Steve St.Omes, he of the record collection, had found his way in with a group that was occupying a squat stone apartment building near Bathurst and Harbord. They had staked the place out after combing through the torn-up remains of the electronics shops along College Street. Using their scavenged equipment, they managed to string together a large local area network comprised of the most powerful desktop computers that they could find and centered around a pair of rather valuable high-end servers that Steve himself had lovingly recovered from a securely locked closet in one of the classier computer boutiques. They used this network primarily to play all-night sessions of whatever games they wished; typically the hottest and longest-lasting games would be of simpler shooters although the grand-strategy playthroughs would also consume a grand amount of time. One of the apartments in the small complex had obviously belonged to a drug dealer before the disappearance, as it held copious amounts of drugs both chemical and organic. The complex quickly became an orgy of drugs and gaming.

  They were interrupted one night in the second week of August by a group of six men and women dressed in police uniforms that had been scavenged from a precinct. They carried police-issue sidearms and batons. Their gazes were steely as they watched the stoned group answer the door. Their leader smirked slightly as he took in their ragged appearances and red eyes.

  “We’re here to inform you of the laws put in place by the City Council. All of you are to report to City Hall within the week to register yourselves and to report for job assignment. Failure to do so will result in your being banned from living within the borders of the City of Toronto. You may keep whatever food you currently have within this domicile but the grocery stores within the area are as of now the property of the City Council and as such are off-limits. If you are found looting any of these stores you will be summarily executed. Is this clear?”

  Li Wing, whom most of the complex looked to as a sort of leader, elbowed his way into the doorway and stared down the upstart in the cop uniform. He kept his face a study of stone, and the police leader matched him. Finally, Li nodded his head.

  “We accept, and obey,” he said slowly. The police leader looked past him, into the house, and snorted.

  “Better get rid of the drugs, too,” he said with heavy contempt, “Mayor John is going to ban all of that shit too, just like it was before”. Before anyone could respond, the half-dozen “police officers” turned and walked away down the wide stone steps that fronted the complex. Li watched them go without changing expression, and then turned to face the small crowd that had gathered just inside the apartment building’s lobby. He hesitated for only a second before giving the barest of nods. Ten of the crowd leaped forward, slipping out into the night on cat’s feet. Steve was one of these ten.

  The Mayor’s police walked down Harbord and turned left onto the tree-lined silence of Euclid Avenue. As they passed by Our Lady Help of Christians on their left, the group of ten shadowed them through the backyards of the houses on their right. They functioned like an elite squad of soldiers, having trained their reflexes through long sessions of gaming and their bodies in exercises conducted while not jockeying a mouse and keyboard. They slipped up the narrow path that ran through those backyards (Scarfo Lane, a battered sign named it), keeping watch on their quarry through the gaps in the houses. They had to be careful, as the setting moon still cast a great deal of light over the city. The lane ended at the next street up, and they let the police go further up Euclid before continuing their pursuit. The next few blocks were all backyards with no real path and several fences that needed jumping. By the time both parties had moved into Koreatown, the group of pursuers had begun to believe that they might have lost the police squadron.

  Steve spotted them as the group moved quietly out onto the desolation of Bloor Street. They were almost two blocks ahead, having turned left towards the Korean shops that lined this section of the city. They slipped back into the alley behind the shops and hurried ahead. Steve slipped to and from the street, keeping tabs on the police; eventually he reported that they had turned into the Korean Central Market. They approached the back entrance and tried the door. Finding it unlocked, they moved one by one into the enveloping darkness within.

  Fifteen minutes later they emerged, holding a variety of homemade weapons that they had concealed on their persons; hammers, butcher knives, tin wire for garrotting. All of their wea
pons, and a lot of their clothes, were covered in blood. They looked at each other in the dying moonlight, their uniformly stone expressions unchanging. A few blocks ahead, from the sprawling parkland of Christie Pits, a group of dogs barked violently at something unknown. Steve broke ranks, leaned against the grimy back wall of the market, and vomited a rainbow of frozen dinners and booze.

  “Sorry,” he croaked, wiping at his mouth, but none of the others seemed disturbed by this. They waited for him to ready himself and they floated away into the creeping shadows, losing themselves in the dead of night.

  Paul Taggert did not even bother with stealth and mystery. When the kid in the grey suit returned to the Dog’s Bollocks with a detail of five of Mayor John’s new police force, he flew into a rage. He ranted at the kid until his face was beet-red, a vein in his forehead standing out to its limits. The kid continued to repeat that the nationalization of the food supply was simply the will of the Council and that his obedience was a legal necessity. Taggert told him that the law could go fuck itself for all he cared. The kid repeated his lines a few times and motioned the police forward. Things happened very quickly after that.

  The “thirty-ought-six” that Taggert had bragged about weeks ago was in fact an aged M1 Garand that had been brought home by his grandfather, who had fought through Europe starting in 1944 and had kept it as a souvenir from an American friend who had died on the banks of the Rhine in early 1945. Taggert’s father had kept it oiled and maintained, and Taggert himself had kept up the tradition. For all of it’s oiling and maintenance, however, it was the solid stock that precipitated its first usage in sixty-five years. Said stock was swung forward by Taggert, who had kept the gun hidden under a nearby table and had grabbed it just seconds before the kid had given the gesture to his cronies. The gun connected with the kid’s jaw, and the kid went sprawling backward, his jaw sprung loose and several of his back molars flying out of his mouth in bloody arcs. Taggert was over him with a grace and speed that belied his size, the barrel of the semi-automatic rifle pointing straight down into the kid’s newly-misshapen mouth.