by Trevor Zaple
Albert Johnson was of no such opinion, and it was with this in mind that he barged into the midst of their cold and cheerless meal. He came through the door with no knock or warning, dragging a pair of miserable-looking, disheveled young men behind him. Johnson stopped three feet inside of the tiny twin hotel room, through his arms wide, and bellowed.
“Gentlemen,” he intoned, his Jamaican burr thick and resonating. “We need to talk, you and I. Things are not right, and they must be put to rights”.
Zachan and Jon stared at the tall, imposing man that had burst into their room, and then at the bedraggled pair that had snuck in after him. Jon eventually shrugged.
“Alright,” he agreed. “Let’s talk”.
Mayor Tommy John sat in Council, his head resting on the palm of his hand. To his left sat Mr. Childs, whose hands lay entwined in front of him. To his right sat Nancy Kim, whose face was sunken and her eyes closed. A man was standing directly in front of him, talking agitatedly about Paul Fucking Taggert, the mick bastard who was busy making his way through the thick snow to City Hall. The mick bastard who would stop only to kick the crusted snow off of his engineering boots before he put a bullet through his head. He switched his head to the other hand. He found himself staring at Childs.
“What are we even supposed to do?” he mouthed at the bony, grey-haired former CBC executive. Childs shrugged, and drummed his fingers on his desk. Mayor John rolled his eyes and went back to ignoring the man who was speaking. After a moment of this, his mind rebelled at the situation and he brought a meaty fist down onto his own desk.
“ENOUGH!” he bellowed. Nancy Kim’s eyes flew open and the presenter stopped speaking in mid-sentence, his expression shocked. Childs’ fingers stopped drumming but he was otherwise outwardly bored.
“Gather every police officer you can and move into the street to meet the son of a bitch!”. His mind raced with the possibilities. He thought that he might have enough people left to turn the prick back to his half of the city. From there, he could starve and die. Tommy began to nod vigorously as he considered the idea. “Get them all! Get moving!”
The presenter hesitated, unsure. Tommy rose out of his seat and made as though he were about to lunge down and throttle the man.
“Get going!” the mayor screamed.
“You want me to gather every officer and bring them to meet Taggert’s men?” the presenter asked slowly, his voice disbelieving. The mayor slammed his palms down upon the desk, and the thick thud was very loud in the council chambers. The men and women who occupied the councilors seats were silent, their faces frightened.
“YES!” Tommy screamed, his voice becoming hoarse. His face was beet-red now, and the vein on his right temple was throbbing and larger-than-life. The presenter nodded his head quickly and fled, his luxuriantly long, curled chin beard whipping around with him. The mayor fell back into his chair with a creaking crash. He looked over at Childs for a sign of approval, but the bony old man was rubbing his eyes, theatrically irritated. He heard Nancy Kim laughing, or weeping, he couldn’t tell. He slammed his fists down into the desk again, frustration erasing any coherent speech he might have made.
Alice Laurence was not in attendance at the meeting, but she was sitting in the corridor that leads out of the council chambers. She had a cup of cold tea and was trying to enjoy it, although truth be told it was not an easy task. She reflected uneasily that the transition from pre-disappearance to post-disappearance would have been much easier if she had been younger when it had occurred. Getting old was difficult enough in a world of ease and comfort; the trying times of deprivation were not made for the elderly. She felt the cold leach into her bones constantly and thought that her life might be measured in months, at most.
Into this morbid rumination on mortality came the sound of the council doors slamming open and heavy footsteps hurrying away from the chamber and moved to intercept whomever it was that had left the meeting. She distrusted the mayor much more than she distrusted her own aging body. It was the mayor who was more likely to shorten her life, in the end.
Down the corridor came a stout, blustering man with red cheeks, hard eyes, and a flowing, curled beard. He was mouthing obscenities, and the further he went from the council chamber doors the louder his swearing became. She stepped into the middle of the hallway and held up a hand, so that there was no way that he could avoid her. He stopped in front of her, letting off a few choice swears before falling silent and staring at her expectantly.
“What has the Mayor decided upon?” she asked intently. He threw his hands into the air.
“His fat Majesty has decreed –“ he paused, biting off his words. “That is to say, his Porcine Lordship has no interest in my advice. After all, who am I? Just a man who managed to survive the siege of that bloody fucking hospital and funnel a few men out with me while I was at it. Now I’m just someone whom his Pigness dismisses”. He stared down Alice until she felt distinctly uncomfortable. There was something in this man’s eyes that she had never encountered in person before, although she had read it in countless war stories of varying quality. It was a dash of shell-shock mixed with a pinch of esprit de corps, baked into a hard shell of grief and baked with anger. It was the look of a man who had lost his way and looked forward only to wrestling another dawn. She wanted to shrink away from it, but she forced herself to continue firmly.
“Son, what did the mayor decide upon?” she repeated, her voice louder this time. He spat to his side.
“I’m to get the rest of the men and women who’d signed up for this madman’s idea and lead them out into the snow to die. Then Taggert will just roll through and declare himself king, I suppose. I just wish I could live long enough to see the bastard put the mayor’s head up on the flagpole. I could die happy if that were my last sight, truly I could”.
Alice had stopped listening after the first sentence. Her eyes had gone very wide. She put a hand on the man’s shoulders, and he seemed to visibly relax.
“Remember your history,” she said, and moved authoritatively past him. He stared at her, incredulous, and then continued his profanity-laden march to find what was left of the police forces. She paid him no attention, letting his curses fade into the background of her racing, grinding thoughts.
“We must do the Lord’s work, today,” Albert Johnson finished saying. Jon and Zachan looked at each other, unable to put into words the deep distress that Johnson’s words had instilled into them. The other two, whom Johnson had identified as merely Moe and Zeeshan, were silent, their faces tired and miserable. Johnson saw their hesitation and pressed on.
“My sons,” he pleaded with them, “my sons. Consider. The bumbaclot mayor has put us all here as though we were prisoners, bad men. We are good men, men who just wanted to live freely, as God promises in Zion. Babylon wishes to keep us penned in. Are we to sit here and let him starve us? Or do we break out, break through, and let the Lord’s Bounty be ours, for real?” He spread his hands in askance. “I ask you, what will it be?”
Jon opened his lips as if to answer, but what it was that he would have answered was never known. At that moment, another person, a woman with wild, emaciated features and eyes that burned with a vicious hate, burst into the room.
“They’re gone!” she exclaimed. “The mayor’s pigs are gone!”
Johnson turned in place and roared at her.
“What do you mean, girl?” he cried. “What do you mean they are gone?”
“They’re gone, man!” she exclaimed, her voice screeching with glee. “There’s just one guy, standing outside the front entrance. The rest of them left, I don’t know where!”
“Then it is settled!” Johnson exclaimed. “Let us leave this prison! Let us go and tell the Mayor that we will not stand for this anymore!” The crazed, starved woman threw her fist in the air and screamed wordlessly.
Johnson and the crazed woman left the room, shouting and parading down the hall. They began to go from room to room, rousing the inhabitants a
nd haranguing them into joining on this spur-of-the-moment crusade. The four left in the room glanced at each other awkwardly, their eyes shifting and flickering.
“You know,” Zeeshan said slowly, “Moe and I kept this whole city from burning down, you know?” He seemed bitter, even though he smiled as he spoke. His eyes remained glued to the filthy, damp carpet floor. “We ran around and put out all the fires that were starting, got a whole bunch of people to go along with us and help. Whole core could have gone up in flames, wasn’t for us”.
Jon stared at him incredulously. “That was you guys?” he exclaimed, unable to hide the awe in his voice. Zeeshan nodded.
“Yeah, that was us. We even tried to start up a volunteer fire service, after. That Mayor, though, he didn’t want anyone doing anything that he didn’t think up and control. So here we are”.
Moe nodded emphatically. “Fuck yeah,” he said rapidly, his eyes twitching from place to place randomly. “We did all sorts of shit for this city and what do we get? We get stuck in here and told to starve all winter. Fuck that. That Jamaican dude is right. Let’s go get what’s owed to us. They can’t starve us. They can’t force us to jump through hoops just to eat. Let’s go”.
Jon and Zachan finally felt the embers of rage that had been glowing inside of them burst into life. The utter unfairness of it was the worst injustice of all. They ran out into the hallway, shouting after Johnson. By the time they caught up to him, he had amassed nearly everyone on that floor of the Chestnut Hotel. By the time they made it to the ground floor, the amount of people that they had gathered was massive. Many of the rooms had been doubled-up on occupancy in order to fit everyone into one building. Just over a thousand people ended up flowing out into the street, with Johnson and company at their head. They rolled over the one unlucky police officer who had been left behind to attempt a desultory guard of the Chestnut. The man died mercifully briefly, torn apart by a crowd not hungry enough to cannibalize him but too hungry to be rational. As they marched through the snow towards the towering twin curves of the City Hall, Johnson chanted the 23rd Psalm, and the crowd of a thousand picked up the chant and rang it into the still, frigid January air.
Conley walked grimly ahead of the sixty or so men he’d been able to gather who had remained at their posts and were still armed and primed to fight. It was a pitiful force, he knew, but it was the only force that he had. His teeth were clenched and grinding as he marched, his breath steaming out from between them in hot little spurts. He fingered the grip and trigger guard of his hefty Desert Eagle, a gun he’d owned forever and had secreted away in a special place before the disappearance. This would be the final time he would draw it, he knew, and now he loathed to be parted from it. Last time would pay for all, though, or so he told himself. He had been a simple police grunt the last time they had marched against Taggert; he had watched several of his friends cut down that night and had no real stomach to watch it again. There was no help for it, though. If he failed to make this incredibly useless gesture, he and the sixty people left under his command would be killed anyway, either by a vengeful Taggert or by a crazed, blustering Mayor.
He marched, then, and they marched, to their deaths. They knew it as well as he, but they continued to march anyway. They had no other choice, and as such they did it cheerfully. There were high-spirited catcalls, taunts, and boasts of prowess from the men behind him, as though they were children on their way to day camp. He smiled in spite of himself. He felt the cold air flow in through his nose in a particularly invigorating manner, and it added a buoyancy to his mood. He felt as though he could box the world, even though he would be dead before the sun finished setting on the empty city. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He laughed, throwing his hands in the sky, and the men and women behind him cheered.
Paul Taggert pushed his own soldiers through the thick carpet of snow, swearing and badgering them on. There was a crust of white around his nostrils that matched the color of what covered the ground, if not the consistency. His eyes raved and his tongue was hot and loose. The snow tripped several of the men as they marched; if they took too long to get up, Taggert simply shot them.
Michael and Sarah trudged behind him, struggling to keep up with Taggert’s powder-fuelled pace. They leaned into the wind, trying to cut it by turning slightly and failing. They looked at each other continuously, each of them wondering how long the other would go before they simply broke. Neither of them was willing to do so before a time came where they could safely do it. With Taggert around, they would likely end up dead moments after.
The men cursed and huffed, trying to keep up the demanding schedule that Taggert had insisted upon. Ever since he had learned of the doctor’s deaths at the hospital and the lack of supplies to be found within, he had been riding on a wave of adulterated anger. They all knew that if they fell behind the Boss would have them shot, and so they grimly marched on. At the intersection of Dundas and University they turned south, towards the City Hall, and the eventual goal.
“We’re almost there!” Taggert shouted, his voice echoing off of the stone shells that lined the wide white avenue. “Keep marching, you bastards! Once we take City Hall we eat like kings! Like goddamn kings!”
Michael heard each word and grew more despairing. He eyed Sarah and realized that she was already looking at him. Her eyes were narrow and speculative, and he felt uncomfortable under her gaze. What are you staring at? he mouthed. How long is this going to continue? she mouthed back. Michael was taken aback, and he didn’t know how to answer her at first. He shrugged uneasily, his back complaining with the gesture. His legs were going to give out any moment, he was sure.
Conley led his men down Armoury Street, away from the City Hall and the Chestnut Hotel. They passed the broken and decayed remains of a Staples on their right and turned. Conley had a hunch, a rather obvious one, that Taggert would be leading his men straight down Dundas. It would be the easiest path to take, being straight down from the hospital, and in this dense snow it would be the easiest paths that would be taken. This was not the time nor the place for fancy, sneaking tactics. He had certainly not thought of any. He would lead his men to meet the enemy in a time-honored fashion that had precedence stretching back to the ancient days of cave raids. They would find a good place to stand, and they would fight. Nothing else was needed; at any rate, nothing else would be considered. It seemed to be a general consensus: if they were going to die, they were going to die standing and facing their death.
He lead them up University and then saw them, a black mass in the distance, coming at them slowly and directly. He marched his officers a small distance further and then halted them. He turned to look them over, to seal in his mind one last time the men and women who were to take this last stand with him. They faced him proudly; not one of them seemed frightened, or likely to bolt. He felt an immense feeling boil up from deep within him, and he found it necessary to wipe up tears that had begun to spill from his eyes.
“Men,” he began, and then stopped. It wasn’t just that there were women in the crowd as well; it seemed too formal, too distant.
“My friends,” he continued, and it sounded better, although not perfect. “We’re here to do one thing, and to do it well. At any other time, I would give you a stirring speech about how we would crush the enemy and dine on their stores tonight, flush and wealthy. We both know that’s not the case, though”. He looked into each of their faces. “We’ve come a long way, I suppose. I’ll lay all the money in the city down to bet that none of you ever thought that this would be how you would die. Here we are, though”. He chuckled, and it seemed fitting. “I guess that now there’s nothing left to do but take up our position, level our rifles, and get ready to fire. There’s little else we can really do, is there?” He did not see one dissenting expression on their faces. “So let’s prepare, then. Let’s get ready to die, and die well”. The men and women gathered to die with him let a moment pass, and then they exploded into applause that threatened
to rival thunder in the sky.
Taggert heard the thunderous cheer from down University Avenue and it threw him even further into an abyss of rage. He shouted at the sky and beat at the air with his fists. His men looked to him, worried, but continued to march onwards. Sarah looked to Michael and mouthed how about now? Michael grinned, for lack of anything else to do. It was blackly funny, how it had all turned out. He thought about the brief toss he’d had with the girl beside him, thought about his gentle, thick-fingered hands over her scarred, pinpricked flesh. He shook his head in amazement.
They marched inexorably towards the position that Conley had taken up, and as they neared the line Taggert shouted a command. His soldiers took the hodgepodge of pistols, rifles, and shotguns that they had scavenged months ago and flipped them into their hands. Safeties were disengaged, cartridges put into place. As they marched closer they raised their weaponry into a ready position, aiming at the line of police. Time and distance revealed that the police were also aiming back at them. Taggert’s soldiers, exhausted, frightened, and hungry, found this concept to an unwelcome one. They looked at each other in askance, wondering if they were really going to go through with this.
Conley watched them approach with a jaded, uncaring eye. He was prepared to die. He had been prepared to die in the hospital, ready to expire firing into the soldiers that had been swarming in to take what they could find. He hadn’t, but he had come to realize that he had been spared simply to die in a more honorable fashion here, where lawyers and paralegals had flocked to make photocopies with agitated demands and harass long-suffering clerks. It was ludicrous, but it was his life, and he was willing to pay it off here. He remembered the writer, Alice Laurence, telling him to “remember his history”, briefly and vividly, and then it was gone. It was no matter. He raised his Desert Eagle into the sky, waiting for just the right distance to give his signal.