by Trevor Zaple
Steve squatted down, fascinated. He put his index finger under the man’s chin and lifted up. The man’s face was slack, doughy, and there were angry, ragged scratch marks carved deeply into his cheeks and across his eyes. One of the eyes appeared to have been gouged out roughly; the jelly remained but it was mangled beyond recognition. The other was like that of the God Lady, glazed and rolled back like that of a drugged cow. He let the man’s head fall and stepped back. The man slumped down further, startling Steve, and as he stumbled backward he tripped and fell. The male corpse began to slide slowly to the right and Steve’s tired, battered mind conjured up an image of the corpse sliding over onto its stomach and then slowly rising up, like some terrible zombie in a late-night horror movie. It was enough to break what little control he had left. He ran screaming out of the projection booth and flew down the stairs, avoiding tripping and breaking his neck by only the narrowest of margins. He used the lantern to light his flight out into the street, able now to see the way he had come. His mind threw streaks of blood on all of the walls, long smears of red that seemed to be matted with hair and skin. He began to scream again, and he continued screaming as he ran wildly into the street. Three steps out onto the sidewalk and he slipped in the snow. He flew through the air and came to a rest in a crumpled heap in the left lane of Bloor. He sat there for a long time, shivering and screaming by the wavering light of a dying hurricane lamp.
Mayor Tommy John watched the snowfall with a rapacious grin. Behind him, the light level in the council chamber flickered and eddied by the whim of the hundreds of candles that lit it. Mayor John had been of the strong opinion that the candles made the place look like a cheesy gothic vampire movie, but that choice bit of Asian ass Nancy Kim had insisted that they needed light to work by. He didn’t know what kind of work was needed to just do what he told them to do, but he humored her nonetheless. She was attractive in a way that he didn’t typically find Orientals (as he called her), and he had always been one to try to coax a woman, rather than force her. Let her have her candles, and she might relent to letting him use his own on her. He grinned wider, rubbing himself through his cotton dress pants. He turned around to see if she was in the chamber, ready to proposition her right now if she was.
She was not. The only people in the room watching the snow fall were Childs and that damned writer, that Alice Laurence bitch with her oh-so-wise words and her calm, hateful demeanor. She would always smile just so whenever he started ordering his lessers to carry out his orders, and it infuriated her. He would have had her dragged out into the street and shot long ago had it not been for Childs. The spooky old bastard had cautioned him that there was still a lot of love for the writer left in what Mayor John referred to expansively and generously as “his people”. If he were to execute her, Childs had explained, it might cause what he called a “cascading effect” that would get people to take up arms against him. Mayor John doubted that very much, but he had followed Childs’ advice anyway. He knew that “his people” would never rise up against him, not when he held the key to the granary, but Childs was too smart for his own good and the Mayor was more than a little afraid of him. This was an admission he would never make to anyone, least of all himself, but it was true all the same.
Childs saw him turn around and approached him, a small, secret smile chasing across his lips. Mayor John watched him come over with his heart in his stomach. Ever since the power went out, and his police force had been smashed apart, Childs seemed to bring nothing but a steady cavalcade of bad news.
“Your Lordship,” the silver-haired old devil purred, and Mayor John felt his back go up. Childs’ bad news was always preceded by a hearty “Your Lordship”.
“Councillor Childs,” the Mayor replied formally. “What news do you bring today?” He had long ago found that the secret to dealing with Childs effectively was simply to be as formal as possible.
“No news but what you see in front of you, Your Lordship,” Childs said smoothly. “The snow comes down and with it, the first tidings of winter. Perhaps today should be declared a food holiday for the city? Rations could be given out to all who live under your rule, regardless of their ability to pay for them”
The mayor felt a lightning surge of anger shoot through him.
“WHAT?” he spat, feeling his jowls flush with blood and rage. “WHAT? You want me to just GIVE AWAY our FOOD? To anyone who simply ASKS for it? People who would otherwise just sit on their asses and starve because they’re too stupid and lazy to help themselves? BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!”
He screamed the obscenity into Childs’ face, too angry to feel his usual crawling unease around the man. Childs’ face remained neutral throughout the tirade, but his eyes had hardened to agates. The writer-bitch, however, the insolent Alice Laurence, had decided to pipe up.
“Save your speeches for your sycophants, Tommy,” she said disdainfully, and he felt his eyes twitch with uncompromising rage. She insisted on calling him by his first name, despite the fact that he demanded to be addressed with respect at all times. He knew that if some pansy liberal fuck had managed to become mayor—like that asswipe Campbell who he’d shot—then she would treat him with the utmost respect. Probably suck his dick after every meeting, too, he thought blackly.
“This isn’t a speech,” he rumbled. “This is a statement of the founding policy of this city. No food for parasites. No shelter for the lazy. No help for the shiftless. Where do you think giving away food to any jackass who wanders in fits into that plan, hmm?”
She smiled and it was as condescending as it could be. He felt a strong urge to leap across the room and drive his meaty fist into her face, and feel her teeth crumble beneath his assault. He controlled himself, barely.
“Your people are getting restless, Tommy,” she continued. You’ve taken them away from the homes they had started to make and made them huddle together in a cramped building for warmth. We both know that’s not why you did it, but that’s what you’ve told them. They’re hungry, tired, scared, and clumped together. Your payouts have gotten less and less since the power went out, and,” she leered contemptuously, “once again we both know why”.
Mayor John grimaced although he didn’t contest the point. He knew—everyone currently in the room knew—that the food supplies that his police force had managed to round up from the food shops and restaurants was going to last them into the late spring and not much further, unless they managed to convince the survivors to undergo a radical diet plan. If everyone were to eat at their accustomed rate, the food would have been gone before February had fairly begun, and so a choice had been made. Mayor John and his council would continue to eat well, and the rest of the city under his control would eat on what the mayor referred to pleasantly as the “wartime ration plan”. This ration plan had undergone a reduction after the amount of food was recalculated, and then a further reduction after that. The mayor had wanted to reduce it even more—insisting that he needed to keep himself at full strength and thus at full rations—but Childs had warned him against it. Any more, he had said, and they would risk starving the population.
“So what?” he asked bullishly. “Let them know that the harder they work, the more food they can get. It might not be true, but they’ll think it is, especially if you tell it to them, Miss High and Mighty”. He looked defiantly at Alice, who made a face like she’d bitten into a whole, ripe lemon. It filled him with a dark sense of glee.
“I will do no such thing,” she replied firmly, her eyes blazing. “They are under enough stress as it is. I will not add to it by lying to them”.
“Besides which,” Childs interjected soothingly, “that will not do anything to pacify them. They need to feel as though things might get better, Your Lordship, and that means food. They need a holiday”.
“A holiday,” Mayor John snorted. “A day for laziness, is more like it”. He contemplated the idea nonetheless. He ran up the totals from the last calculation of the storage in his head, subtracted a day's r
ations, and thought it over. He began to see the appeal in it. His people would be told that Mayor John, in honor of the beginning of the first winter of the free city, would give out a day’s rations for free, because of the hard work that they had achieved over the summer and autumn. He would ask that The Grasshopper and the Ants be read to the children, to cement the lesson in their heads. He nodded slowly as he played the idea in his head. They would cheer his name, praise him as a wise and benevolent leader. He pursed his lips. This might be a good idea, after all. He looked up and saw that Childs had a fox’s smile gracing his face. The old bastard knew, Mayor John realized. He had known all along what his decision would be. He felt nervous and off-balance all of a sudden, but shot it down with a dose of that anger that he still held in bubbling reserve. He would show the old fuck a thing or two before this was all over.
“Let it be known,” Mayor John proclaimed grandiosely, throwing his arms out to the side. “On this day, the first snowfall of a well-prepared for winter, that I, the Mayor of Toronto and Protector of the People, declare a Food Holiday for all and sundry within her borders, save for those fools and scofflaws that truck with the outlaw Paul Taggert. Let they who wish to collect their day’s rations come to the city storage and do so, and let no money change hands for such a transaction”.
“An excellent decision, Your Lordship,” Childs murmured, his expression beatific. Childs looked to Alice Laurence, who returned his expression with one that slowly darkened. She shook her head, and said no more.
At the Gladstone Hotel, Jason peered out of one of the top floor windows and watched the snow flutter down like tiny white fairies. Unlike most of the city, he did not regard the weather with delight. He hated snow, always had, and regarded anyone who took pleasure in it as a simplistic moron. How could you enjoy snow? It was misery incarnate. It was cold and wet. It would stick to anything you left exposed to it. It clumped together and made it difficult to walk through. It made it uncomfortable to air out his room. Idiots would gather it up into hard-packed balls and throw it at him, causing him pain and humiliation. It lasted forever, lingering until well into what liars would always call “spring”. He looked upon anyone who bothered to play sports in it as degenerate masochists. The only good thing he had ever found in it was that it gave him an excuse to be “forced” to be confined to his room for an entire season.
He turned away from it, then, taking no pleasure in watching it fall. He regarded it as a bad sign in any event. People would get desperate once the snow started really coming down. He was working for Paul Taggert now, so he was inured against the coming winter, but there were a lot of people out there who had chosen to remain independent from either Taggert or that fat, belligerent asshole who styled himself the Mayor of Toronto. They would likely start to starve and freeze once the winter really took hold. He had seen winters in this city, and he had no idea how anyone could choose to go it alone in conditions like those that were likely to come. He remembered one winter where the trees had bowed and cracked under the weight of accumulated ice and the streets had virtually shut down after they had been choked with drifts of packed snow. The idiot mayor of the time had demanded that the army come in and clear them out, but despite the lunacy of this request and the deserved, derisive laughter it had generated in the rest of the country, the fact had remained that the winters this city could endure were terrible. They may not have really needed the army to dig them out then (a possibility that Jason was not even sure of—he had been a child at the time) but it was a grim truth that there would be no army to save them this time, no matter how bad the weather got. People would have to make do as they could, and if that meant that the city’s lone wolves would starve or freeze to death, then that was what it would come to.
He walked over to the bed, a king sized bed in the most opulent room in the entire hotel. It was a former dive bar and flophouse that had been remodeled as a hangout for Hip Young Things, so opulent was a relative term, but it more than suited his purposes. Sarah was stretched out in it, nude as she was born and covered with a plethora of scratches, gashes, and scars both old and fresh. There were cigarette burns on the undersides of both of her breasts, and an ugly-looking cut across the right half of her collarbone. Bruises flared and faded along her arms and down her legs, clustering especially darkly on her inner thighs. They were matched by pinprick scars that traced her veins. Her blonde hair was filthy and stringy, and seemed to stretch off of her head as though looking to escape with prejudice. She smelled like an unwashed goat. He smiled and ran a loving finger over a fresh burn that was only an inch from her perking right nipple.
“My darling,” he whispered, and she moaned in what passed for her sleep. Earlier, he thought that he might have given her too much of her favorite drug, and that she had drifted off into death on the wings of a heroin-soaked sleep. It wasn’t until he had noticed her breathing shallowly that he had allowed himself to relax. He thought of it again, his smile fading. He couldn’t kill her. Not his sister. Not his only love.
“Not you,” he whispered, and went to sit in his favorite spot, an overstuffed easy chair over which hung a battery-powered Coleman lantern. The batteries, like the food, heroin, and ammunition, were supplied by Taggert’s men. He was supposed to watch the street like a sentry in exchange, and he did enough of that to warrant continued transactions, but his heart really wasn’t in it. He preferred to curl up in his easy chair and read; he would gorge himself on information until he began to get ideas, and then he would act on them. Freedom.
He settled into the chair and chose a well-thumbed copy of a treatise by Alistair Crowley. He found himself drawn to Crowley more and more as the weeks dragged on. That man had known where it was at, Jason had decided. Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law. It sounded just peachy to him. Crowley was quite the crazy bastard, he had discovered. He had surrounded himself with drugged-up whores and committed unspeakable acts with them—orgies, sex rituals, violent nastiness that drew Jason like the proverbial moth to the flame. He read of the sex magicks that Crowley had supposedly cast in the midst of these sex parties, lost himself in the vivid descriptions of filthy perversion. The only time he had physically penetrated his sister since that wild night at the Drake Hotel had been an attempt to recreate one of Crowley’s sex-magick rituals. The result had been unsatisfactory and had resulted in the ugly gash across her collarbone. He hadn’t fucked her before or since; instead he had shot her up with her heroine, waited until she nodded off, and then tortured her flesh while pleasuring himself. Freedom.
He began to feel sleepy as he read, and eventually nodded off himself. As he slept he dreamed, as he seemed to do more and more as the weeks continued. He dreamed of something that had happened not even a week ago. He had been standing in the window of his room, watching the street with the rustic hunting rifle he’d been given. Despite the dying light he had seen a group of three people walking down Queen Street, as bold as a burst of fireworks. One had been a tall, skinny bitch with rough brown whore’s hair, a bitch who had been carrying a rifle that bore a similarity to the one that Jason had been lurking with. The other had been pushing a wheelchair that held a slumped, tied-up woman. He couldn’t see the woman well but the man he recognized; it was the stupid-looking monkey-man who had been on the roof of the Drake on that fateful night. The night he had seen his angel, the woman that would save him and bring him into the Light. He had very nearly raised the rifle and shot that stupid, leering man right there, but something had held him back. He had realized that the woman in the wheelchair might be his angel. That glittering creature, that resplendent giver of Salvation, had been tied rudely to a battered chair and was being kidnapped. In the dream, he heard the whore say to the monkey that when they got to where they were going they would have to build a large fire, because otherwise it would take forever to cook the angel. That would be a shame, the barely-evolved ape had replied, because he had heard that angel-meat was the tastiest food he knew.
In the d
ream as in life he had slipped out behind them and followed them through the darkening streets. He knew that the whore was watching for him and had spotted him several times; he was not the most adept of hunters, but he was determined. In reality he had been accosted by other agents of Taggert, who had come along with him as they tracked the group. They had lost them in a schoolyard, something for which Jason had cursed the other two slack-jawed idiots for until he was blue in the face. In the dream, however, Jason remained alone, and silent, until he was able to get into such a position that he was able to swiftly and mercilessly eliminate both the whore and the ape. He untied the angel, who rose up from the chair upon her release and spread her wings like the first rays of dawn on the horizon of the darkest night of the year. They then made love on the flat field of the schoolyard, his angel’s voluptuous body pressing into him, her slick wetness sliding along him like some exotic European oil. They came together, the orgasm echoing through them like the ringing shockwaves of an earthquake. In his sleep, Jason squirmed and moaned, his body arching and grinding in rhythm to his fiery dream.
After the first snowfall, the weather-hardened rapidly. That lacy early snow gave way to grim, steel skies that spit heavy flakes that would gather and pack on the ground. With no plows to remove the leaden snowfall from the streets, movement between neighborhoods slowed to a crawl. At first, footprints dotted the building snow piles, running to and fro the inhabited areas. Later, those footprints would be covered over as though they never existed. New footprints that pierced the hard, icy crust of the snow would be few and far between.
For those caught without a group or shelter, the snows that came in mid-November were hard, and the blizzards that crested through the city in early December were deadly. In between the areas controlled by Mayor John and Paul Taggert, bodies froze in the unheated caves they had crawled into to ride the snows out. Their food supplies having run out, they fought off their sub-zero demises by tracking, killing, and eating each other. The terrible realities of these people reached the “civilized” areas in only the vaguest of ways, as rumors of darkness and cannibalism in the darkened, snow-choked streets away from light, warmth, and companionship. The truth of these rumors would only be discovered when the weather thawed in the spring, when the tattered remnants of the city’s population wandered out, dazed, into the streets and discovered the greying, gnawed bodies of the unlucky dead.