by Trevor Zaple
“I killed them though,” he continued, confused. “Did I mention that? Slit their throats and before I did it they thanked me. Thanked me!” He began to sob harder, the sound mixing up with a wet ripping that was coming from inside of him. “They thanked me as I killed them, as I damned myself, and they smiled as I slit their throats. Smiled…” He settled onto the floor with his head resting back against the wall. He exhaled slowly, wetly. A smile grew on his lips, and his eyes grew wide. Then, so quickly that Mark did not realize at first that it had happened, the light of life left those eyes and the man was dead. He regarded the corpse for a moment, not feeling anything, and then walked on.
He reached the room that he shared with his wife and child and threw it open, not bothering with anything as useless as knocking. These were their last moments together on earth. There was no sense wasting time.
At first he didn’t see them, but then he realized that they were huddling in the bathroom; he saw Olivia’s shadow peeking out through the doorway.
“Get away!” she screamed suddenly. “I have a knife and I will cut your balls off if you try anything!”
“I would prefer you didn’t,” he said mildly, and there was a harsh gasp. He gently pushed the door open and looked down upon Olivia, huddled beside the worthless toilet with their daughter snuggled against her. Her face was shocked and deathly pale. Her eyes were watery and quivering.
“Mark?” she quavered, and broke down into wracking sobs. Mark knelt and held them in his arms for a long time. As her sobs lessened, he pulled away to look into her eyes.
“Now is the time for leaving,” he said, amazed at the confidence and command in his voice. She looked at him, dumbfounded.
“Now?” she whispered incredulously. “You want to leave now, with all the fighting going on?”
“Best time to do it,” he said, trying to sound off-hand about it. “We’ll slip out in all the confusion”.
“We’ll die, is what we’ll do,” she replied, but there was no recrimination in her voice. She seemed resigned to it. He shook his head.
“We’ll die if we stay here,” he countered. From several floors below there was what sounded like a large explosion, followed by a heavy exchange of small-arms fire. It underscored his point rather well.
“Alright,” she whispered, staring into his eyes. “Give me a second to get some things together”. He pursed his lips impatiently, but found the grace to nod.
“Quickly,” he admonished, and she handed Victoria to him. His weak, malnourished daughter woke up briefly, cried pathetically, and settled into against her father’s chest.
He held her while Olivia scrounged their lives out of the room. There was not much to take, but what there was could be said to be very important. They would need their thick winter coats, and Mark’s knapsack. Victoria would need heaps of swaddling to keep her warm as they went. They had no food, and this was bad, but there was always the possibility of finding some, further out of the city. Mark had a vague plan of going north until they were in the suburbs, and then turning west, until they were in the rural parts of Ontario. There, he thought, they would be safe. He didn’t try to plan anything more concrete than this; in truth he didn’t expect them to leave the hospital alive.
Victoria brought their coats and the packed knapsack over. They put their coats on, switching Victoria off as they did so. Mark put the heavy knapsack on his back and felt it drag him down. He was running short on energy, and he thought that the knapsack might be the death of him, in the end. He wore it, though, to placate Olivia. He would keep her hopeful until the very last moment, if he could. Olivia strapped a sling harness to herself and settled Victoria into it, wrapping her in thick receiving blankets and looking her over.
“Do you think she’ll be warm enough?” she asked, concerned. Mark shrugged.
“Probably,” he said noncommittally. “It’s the best we can do”. There was another louder explosion, closer this time. After the answering clatter of guns, there was a brief silence.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mark said, and then immediately put up a hand to hush her. He listened intently for a moment.
“There are footsteps out there,” he whispered, barely audible. Olivia’s eyes became huge, and her lips quivered.
“Mark,” she pleaded, but he shook his head.
“I have to find out,” he said, and tore himself out of her grasp. They would need a clear hallway to escape, at the very least. He gripped his .357 tightly, his index finger hovering around the trigger. He was very careful to avoid touching it at all.
He pushed the door open with molasses-like slowness, keeping the sound of it down to a minimum. He made himself move nearly imperceptibly, and peeked his head out around the door. There was only one person in the hallway that he could see, aside from the corpse of the older doctor. It was a short man with long black hair, tied back in a ponytail with a rough swatch of leather. He was wearing a thick-looking black winter coat. He aimed the gun quietly at the back of the man’s head, and then lowered the muzzle. It almost looked like –
He wavered, the lack of food catching up with him, and the barrel of the gun struck the door and sounded out a resounding metallic chord. The man in the hallway turned around and Mark was suddenly extremely glad that he hadn’t followed his first instinct and fired.
“Carlos?” he exclaimed, his voice seeming to fail him. The man in the hallway—it was Carlos, he could see now—nodded and walked quickly towards him. He was holding a finger to his mouth in an effort to keep Mark from talking.
Mark watched him walk, unable to comprehend what was happening. The .357 felt like a ragged chunk of lead in his weakening hand. Carlos dropped the finger from his lips when he made it to the doorway. A grin broke out on his dusky, weathered face, and he put a steady, soothing hand on Mark’s arm.
“Hey man,” he drawled, “you look like you’ve got a hunger that I wouldn’t believe. You want something to eat?”
Sixth Interlude
Taggert strode into what had once been Toronto Western Hospital (A Part of the University Health Network!) and was now a smoking ruin. His men were busy throughout, taking flashlights into windowless areas and ensuring that the defenders were thoroughly pacified. Sporadic gunfire could be heard here and there in far-off areas of the complex, and a strong smell of burning plastic wafted through the corridors. He was briefly concerned about that but discounted it after a moment’s thought. It would be some time before he could really consolidate power and start to do even simple things like turn the lights back on. Let his descendants figure out those machines, he could live well on what he had today.
Michael Therin and Sarah Cumberland followed behind him, their eyes taking in the hive-like activity going on around them with somewhat stunned expressions. Michael heard quick pops from some of the rooms that they passed; he looked apologetically at Sarah but she seemed lost in her own thoughts. Her eyes would glance every now and again at the darkened areas they passed but it would only be for the barest of instants. She seemed to be watching her feet more than anything else.
They had to climb to get anywhere, of course, since the elevators were out. That was one thing that Taggert was meaning to fix, and first if possible. Even if it meant rigging up some generators, it would mean not feeling winded halfway up the endless flight of auxiliary stairs. That was not the only problem with the stairs, of course. As the stairwells were the only means of ingress and egress to the various floors, they were often the scenes of the heaviest fighting. As a consequence, they were littered with bodies and stank abominably. Taggert stepped over these bloody, sometimes-twitching corpses with equanimity, but Michael felt as though he were going to throw up after two floors. By the time they crested the landing of the fifth, he could no longer help himself. He leaned over and vomited, splattering the wall with orange-colored bile. He stumbled backward and hit the opposite wall, where he stopped and wiped at his mouth frantically with the back of his hand. Taggert stared at him, waiti
ng for him to finish.
“Come on,” he panted, “just a few more to go”.
Sarah looked at Michael with something in her eyes—pity or contempt, he couldn’t tell which—and shook her head slightly. Her eyes were hard, and the corners of her mouth were angling downward sharply. They both followed Taggert further up the stairwell.
They came to the fifth floor and followed him into the hallways there, which were much more richly appointed than some of the others that they had glanced through the landing doors. They followed him through various hallways, passed any number of conference rooms and executive offices, to a heavy mahogany door. The door had a scraped patch on it where the nameplate had once been. Taggert pounded on the door and then opened it a moment later.
Inside there was a harassed, weedy man shuffling through expensive-looking papers. He saw who it was that had just barged through the door and straightened, his face suddenly shocked.
“Uh, sir!” he gulped. Taggert flapped his hand at him.
“Shut up,” he demanded. “Tell me what’s going on here. Where are the doctors that the pig-fucking Mayor had stationed here?”
The weedy man wavered visibly and put a hand to his mouth.
“Ah, they are, ah, dead, sir,” he stammered, obviously expecting to be lunged at. Taggert’s face reddened.
“Dead?” he asked, his voice deadly quiet. “What do you mean?”
“The, uh, the men found them, ah, dead on the floor below, sir. One of them had been stabbed and the other, uh, well, the other one had his head shot off”.
“FUCK!” Taggert screamed, and rammed his fist into the wall. It crumpled through and Taggert found himself stuck. When he managed to pull it out he was cradling it, as though he might have sprained something. He shot the weedy man a glance that could have withered him to dust; the man fled past them into the corridor, a brief sob issuing from him as he ran. Michael looked at Taggert’s hand with interest.
“That looks painful, Paul. You’re going to need someone to look at that”.
Taggert grimaced and tried to flex the hand. A twist of pain shot up through his face, and he snarled at Michael.
“Fuck off and get out of my way,” he grunted, and Michael complied mildly. He looked at Sarah, who tipped him a wink and walked past him.
Steve St.Omes wandered. It was what it was. It was his career, his calling, his raison d’etre. He bundled himself in coats and blankets and trudged through the snow piles between the buildings. His path was slow but sure. He would pick a path, walk in that direction, and find a place to sleep for the night. The next day he would rustle himself awake and begin again. That he could finally find sleep was, in itself, the main reason that he continued to wander.
Any person who had known him before his wandering began would no longer recognize him. He had long ago ceased shaving; his face was swathed in a thick coat of filthy, coarse hair that bushed out from his chin and tangled its way down to his chest. His eyes were wild, madman’s eyes, and on the rare occasions that he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror he was forcibly reminded of the cover of Aqualung. He would nod as he thought this, satisfied with it. It seemed to sum up, in a rather perfect way, his feelings on how his life had turned out.
He would wander through the twists and turns of the core, following any side street he came across, no matter how small or obscure. He would climb through the snow and watch where it collected atop the buildings, observing the patterns it made, the mushy-tongued symbols that glared from every surface with an unknowable internal language. He would stare at the small houses, once carved into numerous apartments and now squatting with collapsed roofs. They looked like squalid skulls with their tops caved in, the snow collecting in the shattered crevices like graveyard dirt. He would give each of these attention before moving on; his trips down these streets were quite lengthy and the sun would often set on him before he even realized.
When the sun went down he would hide. His memory of the weeks before his wandering began were becoming faded, like printed photographs on cheap paper that had been left in the back window of a car. Despite that, he remembered vividly the fate of the God Lady, left to rot in the projection room of the Bloor Street Cinema with a stake through her skull. Sometimes when he stared at the houses with their cavernous tops he would think of her, and his memory of her dashed-in head and loose, slackened face would interlay itself atop them. He knew that the streets that he wandered were not safe, and that they became even less so after the sun turned its face from them. He knew that murderers and worse stalked the streets around him; he would see their marks, where they had drug themselves through the snow, and turn down another street to avoid them. The night would hide them, though, and so he hid himself to counteract that.
So it went. He would wander, hide, and then wander again. As he went, he would whisper to himself. Sometimes he would whisper utter nonsense, garbled garbage-language that rarely made even the slightest bit of sense. Mostly he would whisper songs to himself, singing them in a voice that he could barely hear. The number of songs that he remembered from before the disappearance was amazing. He sang three-quarters of the Beatles discography as he trudged through Liberty Village, watching the tall, featureless buildings with a wary eye and singing the medley from the end of Abbey Road in the middle of a flat field of snow that had once been a soccer pitch. He crossed through the sprawling Exhibition Place with most of Oh, Inverted World on his lips, although he avoided the dark, imposing soccer stadium with a superstitious fear racing through him. He nearly met his end crossing over the GO Train tracks, falling into the rail lines without warning thanks to the treacherous buildup of snow. He managed to scramble through and crawl out on the other side, nearly collapsing with exhaustion and singing “A Spoonful Weighs A Ton” in victory. That night he slept in a collapsing old flophouse on the edge of Parkdale, running through the verses from Illmatic that he remembered. He got through Nas’ observation of sleep being the cousin of death and fell into it, welcoming either.
As Toronto Western Hospital fell to its besiegers he was trudging through Adelaide Street, past once-opulent buildings of sooty brick and glittering glass that now lay buried in white, pure snow. Where there had once been nightclubs, ridiculously expensive condos, and consulates, there was now only dead shells, holding nothing but those queer, fading memories. Steve walked by them without interest or observation; they were mostly intact, and thus held no character that he could discern. The entire area was like this, and he was beginning to find himself bored of it. The crisp winter air crackled with far-off fireworks sounds, but this had been happening for weeks and Steve had grown bored of this as well. The first few nights he had hidden with more terror than was usual, unsure as to what was causing the noise and unwilling to meet its source. That terror had worn off after repeated exposure and he had simply added it onto his list of things to avoid, much like the other indicators of the existence of other humans.
He came to the wide, white stretch that had been University Avenue. On a whim he took it north; normally he did not take the main avenues but in this case he did. There was no more thought put into this than there was put into his decisions to take random laneways. The days of conscious decision-making were rapidly passing him by. He vaguely remembered that City Hall was somewhere in this direction. He shrugged and whisper-sang a collection of Rolling Stones songs as he went. It was as good a path to take as any.
Adjacent to City Hall, there was a rather plain-looking hotel, the Chestnut. Although the ballroom had played host to any number of events, before the disappearance most of the rooms had been taken over as part of an emergency annexation by the University, desperate for available space to house incoming freshmen students (and, at one point, Preston Manning). Under Mayor John, the Chestnut had once again been pressed into service, as part of the City’s Emergency Winter Relocation Act. Under the Act, the police had forcibly herded anyone living within their reach to the Chestnut, where they were given bedding and some suppli
es and told to ride out the winter.
The situation was understandably chaotic. There had been no attempt at a census, or even an organized room-occupation plan. Fights had broken out over room assignment almost immediately. Physical altercations had broken out all over, both amongst the survivors and between the survivors and the police. It was only through the use of frank and brutal force that any sort of order had been imposed at all. There had been several deaths, and many of the rest bore the mute marks of the truncheons deadly caress. The Mayor had finally authorized the police to assign rooms arbitrarily; the system was heavily abused and more beatings occurred. Finally, the new occupants of the hotel/student residence settled down into a grudging, muttering existence. Supplies and food remained meager and spotty.
Jon Trinder and Zachan Cory lived on the eighth floor of this arrangement, their room sparsely appointed but heavily blanketed. A heavy duvet was draped in front of the window, and the room was lit by candles. They were both eating half-heartedly from cans of baked beans and staring into space. Both of them felt as though they needed to talk, but neither of them felt as though the other wanted to. Both of them had heard the rumors, that the hospital had fallen and that Taggert was pushing east towards Nathan Phillips Square. They could be there within hours, within the day at the outside most. They had heard whispers of atrocities, although both of them discounted such talk. They were of the private opinion that, as they had once been Canadians, such things could never happen. The world could fall apart, strange situations could occur, but they would never perform evil actions en masse against fellow countrymen.