by Trevor Zaple
“Sir, you need to come now”. Her voice was insistent, and Mark felt fear knot itself around his heart.
“What’s wrong?” he gulped, suddenly unnerved. She shook her head.
“Come,” she said, “come on. You have to come”. She extended her hand and Mark took it. Her hand was clammy and it imparted no confidence to him. She helped him out of his seat and he stretched without thinking, his muscles sore and cramped from sleeping in the chair. Janice waited for him to finish, although she shifted her weight impatiently as he did so. Janice lead him down the dark hallway and then around the corner into another dark hallway. They walked for what seemed like hours through blackened corridors that seemed reluctant to be lit by the bobbing candle that Janice held. Eventually they came to a damp hallway that seemed to be walled by large, sweating stone bricks. They stopped outside of a wide double-doorway.
“Wait here for a moment,” she said, and disappeared within the doorway, leaving Mark in pitch black. His skin crawled and his eyes played endless visual tricks on him, showing him images of all kinds of gibbering, cavorting creatures that hovered just outside of his reach. His arms broke out in goose-pimples and he felt himself shiver uncontrollably. He was approaching the point of madness when the doorway opened and Janice emerged from within.
“Come in,” she gestured, and Mark followed.
Inside the doorway was a large, high-ceilinged chamber. There were candles and lamps situated on every available surface, which made Mark cover his eyes to avoid the sudden, stabbing pain that had invaded them. He squinted until his eyes grew used to the influx of brightness, and his heart nearly stopped.
There was a mobile hospital bed in the center of the room, and Olivia was laid out on it. She was nude and bisected by a blue curtain that separated her upper and lower halves. The two doctors were standing by her lower half, conversing quietly. They looked up after a moment and saw that Mark had entered the room.
“Sir, please,” the older doctor motioned towards him, “take a seat near your wife’s head, hold her hand. This could get rather frightening”.
“Ha!” the younger doctor exclaimed, “frightening’s a word for it. I’ve never performed a Caesarean by candlelight before!”
“You’ve never performed a Caesarean at all,” the older doctor quipped, and then took pity at Mark’s perturbed expression.
“I’ve performed many,” he assured Mark, “and I’ve never lost a patient or child. We’re doing it by candlelight, so I’ll just need some more focus”. He reached into the pocket of his scrubs and withdrew a small vial filled with white powder. He unscrewed the cap from it, and offered it to Mark.
“Need some?” he asked. Mark shook his head, afraid that if he replied verbally his guts would come out of his throat to land in a steaming pile at his feet. The older doctor shrugged, tapped a little onto the side of his index finger, and snorted it back. He handed the vial to the younger doctor, who repeated the ritual. Mark walked to the other side of the blue curtain. There was a chair there, beside the bed, and he took a seat in it. Olivia lay beside him, her eyes closed. Her breathing was so peaceful that Mark thought she might be asleep, but her eyes opened after a moment. She turned her head to look at him, and at that moment he thought that she might be more beautiful than she had ever seemed before.
“This is going to happen, Mark,” she said, her voice cruising on a cloud. She smiled hazily. “They gave me something so I wouldn’t be scared”.
Mark stole a glance over the curtain at the doctors. He dared not ask what it was that they had given her.
“I can’t feel anything below my tits,” she said, and giggled. “Isn’t that funny?”
He made himself smile. “Very funny,” he said. “Very funny, very funny indeed”.
She reached her hand out tentatively and he took it, gladly, nearly crushing her in his first heartfelt squeeze. For a moment he thought that his heart might explode.
“Mark,” she drawled, “I love you. You know that, right?” He nodded.
“I love you more than anything in this world,” he replied, truthfully.
“If we get through this, we should start over,” she mused slowly. Mark squeezed her hand instinctively.
“Absolutely,” he agreed, trying to keep the overwhelming relief out of his voice.
“Tell me a story,” she implored. “Tell me how we’ll end up”.
Mark paused, lost in thought. On the other side of the curtain, he heard the two doctors going about their business. He heard the soft snick of the scalpel, heard the older ask the younger to keep a very close eye on her blood pressure—with what instrument Mark could not say. He closed his eyes.
“We have our own place, far away from the city,” he began. “We might have neighbors, but for the most part it’s just us, and our child. Our days are always relaxing, filled with laughter and play, and our nights are peaceful and warm. We raise our baby to enjoy the peace of silence, and the value of life. We don’t have to worry about food, or violent thugs. We can live in peace, just us,” he squeezed her hand. “Just us”.
“Just us,” Olivia agreed, and closed her eyes. A smile slowly grew over her mouth, and Mark felt it’s twin appear on his face.
Uncountable moments passed, and all at once there was the wet, nasal screaming of a birthed child. Olivia’s eyes flew open and she looked to Mark, whose mouth fell open in a gape. A few seconds passed and a slick, red, squalling infant appeared over the blue curtain. Mark laid eyes on the infant and he was lost; he felt his heart leap and every cell in his body rejoiced. He squeezed Olivia’s hand and realized that she had already started squeezing his with amazing force. Mark drank in every square inch of his child’s appearance and then it was whisked away, around the curtain and out through a door that stood behind them.
“Wait!” Olivia cried out, but the doctors did not reply. Mark heard them go about their business, closing up the unseen wound that they had gouged in Olivia. “Please, wait!” she cried, louder this time. Janice appeared around the curtain, her face a rictus of fear.
“What, what is it?” she stammered. “Has the anesthesia worn off? Are you in pain? Are you going to pass out?”
“What is it?” Olivia asked, in tears, and Janice stared at her, confused.
“Boy or girl?” Mark asked, his voice amazingly calm, considering how he felt inside. Janice broke down into laughter.
“Oh, my,” she said, clutching at her middle. “I’m so sorry. Girl. It’s a girl”. Still laughing, she went back around the curtain and returned to helping the doctors stitch Olivia back up.
Olivia relaxed, and closed her eyes. She seemed more peaceful than Mark had seen her at any time since the disappearance.
“A girl…” she breathed softly. Mark continued to hold her hand, his thoughts racing. Around them, the candles that lit the room guttered and swayed with minute changes in air pressure. He closed his eyes, and let their shadows play on his eyelids. A girl.
Fifth Interlude
Five days after Olivia’s child was cut from her womb, the leaden grey clouds that had dogged their journey from the Cadillac Lounge erupted in a dizzying whirl of white snowflakes. That first snowfall, on the fifth of November, could honestly be called beautiful by any who beheld it. Light snow blanketed everything exposed to air. The trees of the city woke up on the morning of the fifth crowned with delicate white lace, and the survivors emerged from their frigid caves to look upon them with awe. They marveled at the crisp, defined footprints that they left in the snow, and goodhearted snowball fights broke out in more than a few places throughout the urban core. There was an air of spontaneous revelry, a breakthrough of goodwill and drunken cheer that had been missing during the miserable, wet autumn. Within days that feeling would reverse itself, but for that one shining moment it felt to the city that there was something finally worth celebrating.
Moe and Zeeshan, the firefighters of an earlier season, watched the snow fall from their new home atop a former sushi restaurant
on Bloor Street. Before the lights went out, they had planned on running the premier (and only) high-end Asian cuisine restaurant in the brave new city. Now they spent much of their time running patrols in an auxiliary fashion for the Mayor’s police, and counting their dwindling food stocks. The “pay” they drew from their activities (partial access to the Mayor’s sequestered groceries) kept them afloat but only barely. They watched the snow come down, half afraid and half in awe. The snow came down so pure, so clean, that it was difficult to really take it as seriously as they both suspected that it demanded. It fell in deliciously gauzy gusts, floating in wide, lazy spirals and covering the junk-littered streets with a uniform layer of white. It seemed like a restart, but with what in mind they could not say.
John Trinder and Zachan Cory stood atop their perch in Kensington Market as the snow fell, letting it gather in their hair and taking a child-like delight in scooping it up and throwing it into the air. They had continued to live in the same building since the summer, finding themselves in agreement with each other on most things and desiring to build the sort of place that they could invite others to live with them in. The power failure had put paid to this idea and now they rattled around in the tall building like crackers in the bottom of the box. They had so far avoided having to treat with the Mayor for supplies, but both of them knew that it was only a matter of time. They had managed to put together a good store but neither of them expected it to last through the winter; they had put some research into putting together a rooftop garden but without a steady influx of food before then they would likely starve before it would bear fruit. At any given time one or both of them would be on the roof, keeping watch on the Market and the parts of the nearby neighborhoods that they could see, lost in thought and worry. There were others living in the Market, they knew, but those others kept to themselves in a rather extreme way. Zachan had a deep scar on his right arm that bore mute testament to this fact. They had been investigating a European deli when the shotgun blast had rung out of a back room and sliced the edge of Zachan’s arm in bloody ribbons. As they had fled into the narrow streets they had heard a grizzled voice scream “get out!” behind them. Since then they had not gone anywhere unarmed, even within the building that they had claimed as their own.
All that was forgotten now, as they played with the new-fallen snow and tried to recapture some of the joy of life that seemed to slowly have been drained over the course of the summer. The hunger that was even then settling into them as a normality was cast aside; one scoop of snow tossed into a friend’s face, and the laughing that occurred thereafter, was enough to put it aside for the moment.
Steve St. Omes did not find the same sort of childlike delight in the lightly falling snow. He had been constantly on the move since shortly after the power failure. The druggy gamer-commune that he’d found himself a part of had failed along with the electricity. Without the current to power their lashed-together gaming rigs, the apartment block had devolved into a tawdry, bloody affair. Once the gaming had ceased, they had begun to amuse themselves by playing increasingly vicious pranks on each other, which had culminated in one of them taking a razor-sharp tree ax and chopping up their roommates. It had been Steve himself who had found him, breathing quietly and sitting bolt upright on a blood-soaked couch that looked as though it might have been expensive once. On the floor directly in front of him had been the ax, soaked in the same crimson fluids that had inundated the couch and dulled badly by its murderous work. Scattered around the apartment were the various limbs and innards of the man’s roommates. The intestines were hanging from various hooks around the apartment like streamers, like a festive season in hell. The torsos, headless all, were sitting in a semi-circle in front of the dead television, the blood leaking out of them to stain the gaming console that sat in front of the middle one. His stomach rebelling strongly, he had turned his head to regard a bloody arm nailed to one wall through the palm. The entire scene, like a Hieronymous Bosch painting come to shuddering life, was enough to drive him insane. It was the smell, however, that forced his legs into flight. That foul smell of wet, sharp copper mixed with impacted shit that permeated the entire apartment. That rotting-meat, rancid flesh smell. It was more than he could bear.
So he had fled, and had been on the run ever since. Any shelter he took he inevitably ran from; he would spend one night and his dreams, a grisly parade of severed limbs and blood splashing every surface, would drive him screaming into the wee hours of the morning. Now, as the snow fell in light layers, he trudged through countless streets, his legs weary, looking dully for another place to spend another restless night. His eyes were heavy, and he could have happily laid down in the street; the only thing keeping him from doing so was his knowledge that, with the temperature dropping, to do so would mean his death. This fact was becoming less important as the days went on, however.
He turned off of a side street and found himself on a wide street that Steve recognized. To his left was that sprawling discount superstore for the ages, Honest Ed’s, its garish Broadway lights finally gone dark and silent. The place was as looted as any other, he saw. He turned to his right and realized that this was the same street that he had wandered down all those weeks ago, brick in hand, to loot a record store of its treasures. Those records were gone, he realized then, left behind at the disintegrating commune as he fled scenes of bloody horror. He felt a tear course its frigid way down his dirty cheek, and then another. Blinking back the tears, he turned in that direction and tottered down the street, putting staggered, drunken footprints into the virgin snow.
Halfway down to the record store he found the broken, darkened remnants of the exterior of the Bloor Street Cinema. The ticket-taker’s booth was shattered, and blood had been smeared on the outside. A trail of broken junk lead inside. Steve followed it without thinking; in truth, he was approaching a scenario where he would be incapable of any real thought. He would have followed anything by that point, be it a trail of junk, a trail of blood, or a trail of shimmering rainbows. The buildup of chemicals in his brain that resulted from his lack of real sleep had made him highly suggestible.
The inside was dark, to the point that Steve soon found himself lost in pitch blackness. At any other time he would have panicked and fled back out into the relative light of the street; now, however, he pushed onward, letting his fingertips brush against the rough texture of the walls and guiding himself along into the unknown. Several times he tripped over things, but he never went down. Eventually he began to sense an imperceptible change in the light. The hallway grew brighter until he found himself in a place where he could see. There was a hurricane lamp hanging at the end of the hallway, still giving off light. Two exits ran from here; one led into what Steve imagined was the theatre room, the other was a set of stairs that he surmised must lead to the projection booth. He took the lamp and considered his options. He would have to stay the night here, he realized; it would be getting to full darkness outside soon, and with it would likely come a drop in temperature lethal to both the snow and himself. He mulled the options and decided to climb the stairs to the projection booth. He thought about it on the way up and decided that it would be easy to defend in case any other wandering survivor came in, looking for a cheap and easy mark. He clenched his teeth and grinned a madman’s skeletal grin. He would be ready for them.
At the top of the stairs he threw the door open and strode inside. At first, his brain refused to process what he was looking at, and then when it did it refused to process his reaction to it. He stared at the scene he had uncovered with shock, his mouth going slack and his tongue feeling loose and heavy on top the bottom row of his teeth. It was the smell that clued him in, eventually, although the visual scene was bad enough.
It was the God Lady, he realized, that Jamaican woman who had haunted his dreams before he truly knew what a nightmare could really be. She still wore her red dress, although it had been hiked up past her thighs. It reminded him forcefully of the dream that he had end
ured in the basement of Sonic Boom, and he began to shake all over without even realizing. She was dead, of this there was no doubt; there was a jagged, splintered wooden stake sticking out of the top of her head, and her eyes were open but glazed and rolled back. Her arms were splayed to either side of her, and a sharp-looking fish-cleaning knife had rolled away from one slack, outstretched hand. Her dress had been torn open in the front, although it had folded over to hide her body in the last extremities of death. Her mouth gaped open, and it seemed to Steve that even in death she was proselytizing like a mad, cunning angel. He could hear the venom spewing from that deceased orifice; Hell! it screamed. You’re going to Hell! Sinner! Fornicator! Murderer! Thief! Enjoy the lake of fire and the legions of the damned that will rape and stab you, minute by minute, on the fiery plains of the Devil! His mind caught up with his eyes at about this point, and he began to back up without really thinking about it. He went on an angle, though, and backed into the wall. As soon as his back touched it, he screamed. The scream reverberated around the tiny projection booth and doubled back on itself, causing him to scream harder. As he did so, he turned the hurricane lantern slightly and revealed another corpse that had taken up residence in there.
This one was a man who appeared to have been in his late twenties when he died. He was slumped against another wall, his face cast downward. He was dressed in heavy denim work clothes and his boots were heavy and looked to have steel toes. His hair and beard were both long and matted, encrusted with unknown filth. The fly of his jeans were open and the jeans themselves had been pushed down slightly off of his hips. Steve pushed off of the wall and walked closer to this second corpse in spite of himself. As he got closer he was able to see that the man’s penis was out, a desiccated question mark hanging limply out of his jeans. There was no sign of what might have killed him.