by Trevor Zaple
He would jog starting from the hospital and east down Dundas. He would pass the silent, shattered remains of auto garages, hip vegetarian restaurants, and cluttered craft stores, not taking in his surroundings but concentrating solely on his feet slapping the pavement, the precisely engineered, expensive shoes that he’d looted practically lifting his feet off of each step. Signs with inscrutable Mandarin characters blurred at the edges of his vision. He would usually stop, blowing hard breaths and putting his hands to his knees, a few feet from the yawning darkness of the entrance to St. Patrick Station. The intersection, Dundas and University, was always eerie with its emptiness; there never appeared to be any human life present, but lately Carter felt as though he were being watched. He would catch movement in the tall buildings that crowded the intersection, flitting like finger-snaps in the far-up windows. Whenever he stood in the middle of the cross-street, staring up at them, however, those buildings would remain still and barren, staring out with a deaf idiot glee. Every time, Carter would feel his skin crawl, the muscles of his back would twitch, and he would slowly begin jogging back in the direction he had come from, his eyes darting back every few feet to check his six.
His centre point, the Dragon City mall which he was approaching, was also a source of vague dread. It was brightly lit, heavy with neon lettering and attractive light placement. At its peak was a gigantic television screen that had, before the disappearance, displayed the time, the news, and a steady parade of advertisements. Since then it had displayed a series of much more random items. For three days straight, when Carter had begun his jogging regimen, the ultra-wide display had shown an endless playlist of particularly nasty hardcore porn. Each time he passed by, Carter would stop for a breath and to see what perversions were being broadcast in epic form to the surrounding neighborhood. On the third day he had seen a girl that he had recognized as a friend from early high school being gangbanged by a group of overweight businessmen in a nondescript hotel room. Her mascara had run, eighty feet in the air and larger than life, and Carter had watched, transfixed. Her mascara had run from the tears that had resulted from those overfed MBAs gagging her with their subpar bluster-men’s cocks, and jabbing them inexpertly into her sensitive parts at odd angles. He’d watched until the bile rose in his gorge and he’d fled, running faster than was strictly advisable for a medical jog. The next day it had been replaced by incomprehensible animated shows from some manga-inspired show or another. He had seen a strange assortment of videos, although Carter suspected that they were all the collection of one person. There was no identifying mark to really prove that empirically, but Carter felt it deep within his gut.
As he approached the familiar intersection (once bustling with life and now only populated with shadows and the faint leftovers of rotted fish) he heard a loud rushing noise, like a vacuum through a loudspeaker. He approached the corner and slowly and turned to watch the enormous screen. It was drowned in a loud, steady burst of static. Carter stared up at it, wondering if the person who’d been running it had finally hustled off, and how long the television would run its deafening programme for. He considered this idly, remembering a piece of trivia that held that a part of the static he was now watching was cosmic background radiation from the moment of the Big Bang. He smiled over this and the static stopped with a shocking suddenness. It was replaced by a black screen. A low-octave, shuddering piano note clanged quietly and steadily in the speaker. Goosebumps prickled on Carter’s arm.
He swallowed and began to tense himself to start jogging off to the east. The piano note grew louder and a faint, distorted, and detuned string chorus joined it. It grew louder and the sound filled Carter’s head with a buzzing, like a wasp hive forming and multiplying. He heard a loud, heart-wrenching wailing rise up in a wave, punctuated it by an anguished blur of language, a woman expressing pure horror and heartbreak in a rapid language that Carter did not know. He took a step back, and the wailing ceased. The black background was replaced by grainy footage, a shaky video with that odd faded color that marked it as being from the late 1960s. A whimpering, stocky man with olive skin was tied to a chair in a plain-painted beige room. His face was jaggedly ripped down one side, and his face was heavily bruised. This was replaced quickly by a black and white video of a large crowd of men and women being lead along at a brisk pace over a brown, featureless wasteland. There were shouts, chants, and then the explosions began, landmines blossoming underneath them like slow-motion fireworks. Unable to blink, Carter watched the lower half of a human leg fly toward the camera in a low, hideous arc and then it changed again. An old man, wrinkled and grey-haired, stared levelly out of the screen, his deeply sunken eyes rimmed with tears.
“Goodbye Ben,” he said, and it boomed out to echo off of the empty buildings around the intersection. His voice seemed to hover near a point of breaking into tears. There was a shimmering, sinuous effect and the old man was replaced by a blue cartoon fish that Carter vaguely recognized from an animated show his children had enjoyed. A moment later he found himself suddenly on his knees, tears streaming down his face. He hadn’t thought of his children in weeks. They were gone, and their memory hadn’t even crossed his mind. He felt a great wave of sorrow and nausea burst up from within like a geyser.
Staring up at the screen he saw that the cartoon fish’s eyes had been replaced at some point by the puffy, cut eyes of the original man, the olive-skinned torture victim. The eyes darted around fearfully, at odds with the steady animation of the fish. The fish raised its hand and waved in a bye-bye gesture. The shot then switched again, to a close-up shot of a young man with an acne-pockmarked face and dull, bovine eyes. His lips were slack, hanging loosely open with a slight hint of teeth showing between them. He stared out of the screen for a full minute, not saying anything. In the silence, Carter rose to his feet, feeling a low-grade terror begin to catch hold of him. He felt deranged, and began to wonder if he was hallucinating.
The young man began to speak, slowly and flatly, as though he were reciting something from memory without feeling. He said; “I was just another loser now you’ll worship me as a god”. After he said it, he smirked, the wry smile crossing his flatlined expression in such a bare instant that it might not have been there at all. The camera pulled back and showed that the young man was holding a tarnished cheap pistol to his temple. He grinned wide, a ghoul’s grin, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in silent laughter. Then the screen shut off, and with the sudden change Carter thought that the man had pulled the trigger. He actually saw the bullet enter the man’s skull at full force, cratering inward in horrible slow-time and forcing a swarm of busted bone fragments inward to pierce at the soft, delicate tissue of his brain. Then he blinked, and the screen was off. The silence now seemed to echo, growing painfully loud in his ears. He staggered backward, and then realized that it was not just an artistic choice on behalf of the video’s creator. The gaudy lights and signs of the mall had gone dark. The ever-glowing fluorescent lights that sputtered in the gutted shops around the intersection and in the darkened, smashed interior of Dragon City had ceased to buzz and shine. He listened closely and found that the omnipresent background hum had ceased; air conditioners, that peak-of-summer lifeline in urban areas, quit rattling. The barely-audible hum of high-tension wires no longer tickled the cilia in his ear.
He turned suddenly and his heart vapor-locked. He clenched his fist on his chest and tried to suck breath in, but didn’t catch on much of anything. He felt his knees buckle again, and he knew morbidly that if he went down to the gritty, crusted sidewalk he would not be getting back up again. He stiffened, fighting madly against going down, and he managed to steady himself, finally. His heart began tentatively pacing itself once more, and his breath began to filter in, slowly. He staggered away, back west, towards the hospital. There were doctors there, he hoped fervently. Now more than ever.
The power cut out across the downtown at approximately the same time that the Mayor’s police force began their engagement with Tag
gert’s thugs. The police commander, a former army sergeant with Afghani experience, had chosen a cautious tactic. He had kept two lines of men to hug to the buildings, with four squads taking point and clearing storefronts. They had uncovered the original police’s heavy piece de resistance, a mobile sound cannon that would disable groups of people through sheer audio overload. That was being wheeled up behind the lines, through the center of the street.
For his part, Taggert had men in the high windows of the buildings lining Queen, which he’d identified as the Mayor’s likely path of assault. He’d learned about the sound cannon from a disaffected member of the Council’s staff and deduced that, if it was to achieve maximum intended effect, it would have to be used in conjunction with a head-on, overwhelming-force attack. This would mean wheeling it straight down Queen, to avoid the need to protect it as it turned corners from any other street. Therefore, Taggert had made a staid, predictable choice; take the enemy out from above with harassing fire followed by a wave of explosives that they’d discovered hidden in a smuggled cache of Tamil supporters.
In the end, it was Taggert’s strategy that would win the day, helped in large part by the city’s power failure in the midst of it. The two forces had begun encountering each other at the edge of Trinity-Bellwoods, in the buildings just past the open parkland. Taggert’s window snipers took a heavy toll on the police but the police, able to spot shadows and track obfuscation of light to inflict casualties in a roughly similar manner. Taggert’s men would take their lumps and fall back to the next position, and the next, for approximately an hour, keeping the police pinned down as much as possible while the men holding the explosives attempted to blow them out of their positions. This was largely ineffective, due in part to the men’s inexperience with high-level explosive devices and in part to the police’s good luck in choosing solid cover.
Then the lights went out, and the disadvantage that Taggert’s sniper squadrons faced disappeared. From then on out they were able to hide completely within the darkened windows and pop out with minimal warning. Police casualties rose exponentially, and after two hours of being cut down the police commander ordered a quick retreat. The sound cannon was wheeled around as rapidly as possible, although in the fray one of the four men in charge of moving it took a round in the shoulder and fell to the ground, where he was left. There was no sense of esprit de corps here. Casualties were left where they fell, regardless of their status as alive or dead.
By the end of the day, as a lurid red sun set over the jagged teeth of the horizon, fifty police returned to Nathan Phillips Square. Nearly two hundred had been sent to pacify the western downtown, and to arrest Taggert. Neither goal had been accomplished.
Mayor John contemplated this as he stood in the darkened silence of the council chambers, staring out into the deserted, playful concrete of the Square. He pursed his lips and chased the numbers around in his head. Two hundred left, fifty came back. No matter how long he ran those two numbers around in his skull, they didn’t come out with any real answer. What was he to do? With the power now gone, how was he supposed to retain control over the survivors in the city. He had captured only half of the food stores he had planned for; the rest had been taken by Taggert and by countless groups that had decided to strike out on their own. His police force had been dented—only saved from decimation by his insistence on sending as small a force as possible, thinking that there was no way that Taggert would be able to hold out against force. In retrospect the idea seemed stupid, but how could he have known? He soothed himself, telling himself that there was no way he could have.
He shook his head and his jowls drooped. Stress and anxiety were taking a definite toll on him. He was beginning to lose weight, something he had struggled with his entire life, although the reasons were hardly ideal. He had never been more miserable than he had since ‘winning’ the mayoralty, and this was the peak on it. He glared at the Square, remembering the giant crowd that had gathered there all those weeks ago; the survivors of Toronto coming together to find out what was to be done about their radically changed situation. They had found out, all right. Mayor John allowed himself a bitter, porcine smile. He had shown them once what the future of the city was, and he would show them again. His fists clenched in meaty wads at his side, going white with the strain. He would show them well.
Five
Mark stood in the window on the second floor of the Cadillac Lounge, watching the cold autumn rains pound at the street with surprising force. He rested his palms on the glass and lowered his forehead to it after a moment. The deep grey cloud cover that hovered over the city did not seem to be in any danger of dissipating, and there seemed to be an ample supply of fat, bone-chilling raindrops in them. Behind him, Olivia slept soundlessly, bundled beneath a pile of blankets. There was a definite coolness in the room; Mark was wearing a sweater and he felt a stiffness in his joints and a numbness to his nose. The glass was frosty to the touch.
He worried at the sky for a moment longer and turned back into the room. He walked by the bed and checked on his sleeping, pregnant ex-girlfriend. She was very large, now, her levitating belly stretched tight and ready to burst. He chewed his lip, watching her breath rise and fall evenly, contentedly. He worried at her and envied her in equal measure. To have even a fraction of her peaceful rest at that moment would have been like manna to him. He ran his hands through his hair and grimaced; it was greasy-slick and gritty, filthy to the touch. None of them had taken a proper shower in two months. Mark could feel layers of dried sweat coating his skin, like a deep-settled itch over everything.
This was another thing that Mark was secretly envious of Olivia for; in order to keep her as comfortable as possible, Mark and Amber had taken up the responsibility of keeping Olivia as clean as possible. They had struck out into the neighborhood and looted thoroughly through the holes that were once houses of commerce, picking apart all of the already-rummaged contents. They took baby wipes whenever they could find them, and baby oil, dry shampoo, moisturizing creams and tubes of toothpaste. The rest of the Loungers (as they inevitably called themselves) used these supplies as sparingly as possible, so as to save the majority for Olivia.
She grumbled at the singling-out but only half-heartedly; she seemed to very much appreciate the feeling, as it went. There was a lot to worry about these days, but it was the little things that would kill you in the end. As if a reminder, Mark’s stomach growled, and he felt faint for a moment. They had all reduced the rations that they were on, keeping an eye to the situation and hoping something positive would shift, one way or another. Emily had a source, she claimed; certainly she came back with enough food loot to prove it. Even after that, though, there wasn’t much to go around, although the Lounge’s stockpile never seemed to decrease, exactly. The roundup squads had been very efficient, though, and the food supply available to independent enclaves such as theirs was limited.
He pulled himself away from his tense study of her to leave the room. Across the hall, Emily was seated at her desk, her feet up, studying a tattered, faded map of the downtown. She had a battery-powered CD player on; bright, rapid-fire chanson music was playing quietly. He noticed her feet, sprightly on the desk and keeping a fiery pace with the beat. He stopped for a brief moment to admire her. She was lithe and athletic, underneath her dreamy, Hip Young Thing style. He caught himself wondering what she looked like naked, and shook his head. He loved Olivia, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually gotten laid. She’d probably rip me right apart he thought wryly and remembered a scene from just a scant week ago. A group of entrepreneurial spirits had attempted to break into the Lounge, mostly greasy types who thought they were a bigger deal than they actually were. Emily had leaned dangerously out of the window above them and with three quick, deft squeezes she laid a third of them out with blood and brains splattered against the grime of the sidewalk. She had made as though she were going to leap down two stories onto the remainder by herself, but they had scattered into the
night, their will to fight shattered. He kept walking. She kept a large arsenal.
He made his way down the main stairwell and peeked out into the bar. Barry was standing at the window in the raised area where bands had once played hard country and rollicking rock n’ roll. He was watching through the glass in a manner that Mark recognized immediately. He walked towards him, slowly. The sound of the rain was louder; it seemed as though a torrent were washing down. He noticed again that Barry seemed to have sprouted some grey hairs from that helmet of black that he had sported on the night before the party. He wondered how old the guy was, before dismissing it as completely irrelevant. He was as old as he was. He was as old as any of them would be.
“Amber hasn’t come back yet,” Barry said, not bothering to turn around. It startled Mark; he thought he had been approaching fairly quietly. He ran his fingers through his filthy hair again and thought randomly about finding out if the supplies of dry shampoo warranted him finally taking the plunge and cleaning it.
“Didn’t she leave last night?” he asked, not really sure at all of what time Amber had actually stepped out the door. She had left on a scouting expedition after the idea of ransacking the Jameson Avenue apartment complexes had been raised. Emily had noted that, although she hadn’t investigated the idea at all, it seemed to her that there were far more buildings on that one street than there were people in the area, and that there might be food stores in them. Emily had been willing to jump up and go out to check them out, but she had been scouting for three nights in a row and Barry eventually persuaded her to take a rest. Amber had volunteered, and although Barry had seemed perturbed by the idea it had been the best way forward—at least, in the rational light of the night before. Barry had attempted to convince Amber to wait until morning to go, but she had demurred. It was easier, she reasoned, to hide in the shadows when there is nothing else.