The Bewdley Mayhem

by Tony Burgess

  The two men listen to the echoes of the gunshots that travel outward. When the silence returns and the first fresh smell of gunpowder burns off the air, they turn to each other and, dropping their rifles, embrace in a tight hug, grateful to God to be alive.

  At a distance of nearly a kilometre the baby continues to race west through the underbrush, hopping over logs on her powerful little legs and swinging off lower branches on strong, pliant limbs. She is making her way to Lake Scugog, where she will dive to the bottom with frog-like kicks to snatch the body of Les Reardon’s baby.

  These two babies, made strong by the circumstances of their birth, will live together on the frigid bottom, near the lake’s frozen bowel, blind as sea bats and icy as eels, in a tingling rage that will last forever.

  23

  THE WORST WINTER EVER

  The Bruce Peninsula is an astonishing garden. Wildlife that has fled north from the cities is squeezed cheek by jowl on its pristine shores. The dazzling peregrine falcon, great loping herons, and hummingbirds meet in mid-air. Rattlesnakes, spiky hogs, and tiny alligators wrestle for egg-laying territory on remote Sauble Beach. There are even llama that can be ridden for a price. A lone bison roams like a shaggy mountain, dragging its dread-locked chin through cow shit. And off the tip of the Bruce is an island famous for its tall, attic-shaped rock towers rising up out of the shallows. This is Flower Pot Island.

  At dawn, when the sun buries the lake in fire, the “flower pots” cast their shadows up onto the flat white shore. This shadow is where night hides, shifting its position, cautiously opposing the sun, remaining sharp and wicked. This shape is identical to the shape of Ontario. Go there, you’ll see. The pots hide a little bit of night behind them as they face the sun. They look at each other throughout the morning and communicate in a sentinel’s code: we know exactly where they are from here.

  In the cities there are greater confusions. As fall approaches several things are contributing to a late-autumn military mania. The disappearance of Toronto’s most popular anchorperson, Grant Mazzy; the undeniable presence of cannibals much further south than anyone had wanted to accept. Although a plethora of laws exist that might deal with a new breed of violent crime that is highly contagious, and in spite of the horrific acts being committed by Ontarians everywhere, none, not a single person, can be held accountable.

  There are no arrests. No convictions.

  On September 7 strange new edicts are passed in the Ontario legislature with more hand-washing than wringing. And by late afternoon the instructions are handed over to heavily armed teams. They are directed to exercise maximum force immediately. To combat contagion all form of communication is banned. Speaking, listening, reading, even sign language are punishable at the brute discretion of Ontario’s own licensed assassins. Citizens are instructed to stay at home and communicate only through nods or shakes of the head.

  Besides an armed and helmeted military, the only other active organization is the hugely augmented social services, now responsible for the welfare of every living person. Among the ranks of the army any personnel who stammers, struggles for the right words, or otherwise exhibits any difficulty communicating is instantly quarantined. The only words spoken aloud in Ontario through the winter are militarese, punctuated with a sharply barked “Sir!”

  The alleys of the city and the forests of the north ring with the shaking chains of constant automatic weapon fire as every one of the many thousand disoriented is gunned down.

  American helicopters dangle in the sky like a Chinese New Year, strafing the fields and farmlands.

  Small Zodiacs buzz across remote lakes coordinating a sweep with armed troops firing their way through the woods on cross-country skis.

  In front of Big Town TV a crowd of thirty-eight people, their heads bobbing to a New York dance diva, are cut to ribbons.

  A man with his hands clasped behind his neck kneels in a barn in Pontypool. One of two men standing behind him steps forward and fires a handgun through the back of his head.

  At the top of Main Street in Bolton, three zombies climb up through an open manhole together and get stuck. A man on a bicycle swerves out from behind a parked car and tumbles over them. The zombies hold him in the air with their strong jaws until a truck hits them, knocking the man thirty metres down the road, where he lies bleeding to death through three bite-sized holes.

  A helicopter swings out of a cloud and slams into the Royal Bank tower.

  A runaway train hurls through the wilderness along the eastern shore of Lake Superior. It tumbles sideways across White River, pulling the tallest thermometer in the world behind it as it disappears up the million paths that lead to Ontario’s train-eating wolves.

  A baby in Niagara Falls tips forward in its highchair, swinging a rope of saliva from its bottom lip. The suspended drool is teeming with influenza; but before the infant can slurp it back up, the baby is pulled headlong down a flight of stairs.

  A grandmother in Oshawa lays the last of twenty pictures, depicting her twenty-three grandchildren, on a coffee table. The twenty-first grandchild twists the woman’s head backward and bites down on her forehead, blinding her with blood.

  A tiny fish-hook is dropped into the lettuce at a salad bar by a madman and swallowed by a dieting accountant.

  A child in Bobcaygeon tosses a full can of beans at a bear cub, causing it to bark out in pain. The mother bear lifts the child by her leg and breaks her head open against a tree.

  A public poll is taken about the confidence people have in Emergency Task Forces; however, most of the respondents are zombies, and half of the pollsters are killed on front porches.

  A rubber bullet fired at a school bus on Highway 6 bounces off an aluminum window frame back across a field through a kitchen window, hitting the frappé button on a blender. A sleeping man falls off the couch.

  A woman in Mississauga stands in front of her mirror kneading her breasts while a man urinates loudly in the toilet beside her. He glances over, and his growing erection interrupts the stream of urine, and he sprays the roll of bathroom tissue. He leans forward to flush the toilet and surreptitiously rotates the roll.

  A stripper in the process of performing an illegal lap dance in a bar on Yonge Street is disoriented. She stops and puts her finger across the patron’s lips and says, “I’ll be right back.” She wanders out among the crates and towels on the floor and stands palming the full cheeks of her buttocks. The entire room has her attention: she fails to notice and says, “Hello? Hello?” In the corner a zombie, who has quietly murdered a dancer in the dark, hisses, “Hello … hello.”

  A man with a bright-grey beard and rust-brown toupee kisses his walleyed daughter. The thirty-six-year-old woman licks him once quickly under his tongue and pulls back. She brushes her bangs with a saluting hand. Her father wants to guarantee that they are not just anybody. He says to her, as they cross a busy Saturday-afternoon intersection in Collingwood, “All I need to do is touch you with one finger and I’m electrified.”

  A woman in Wawa lays six chicken breasts in a shallow pan and covers them with mushroom soup. She slides the pan onto the rack and closes the oven, preheated to 325 degrees. Two children sit on the couch in the other room. No one is happy. A man is coming down the stairs. An invisible trail of salmonella bacteria grows in strange places. On the back of a chair leg. On a fly’s wing. Strong inside the anti-bacterial dishwashing fluid.

  A family is cross-country skiing out on the snowfields of Caledon. They stop and look to the north. They see four people in brightly coloured parkas climbing down a cliff face. One falls and lands with a bone-breaking snap on a large boulder. The family topple off their skis in an attempt to run toward the fallen climber. By the time they are standing again, on skis directed toward the cliff, the three remaining climbers have reached the ground. They run at the skiers with wild eyes and bloody ski masks.

  A gathering of farmers,
assembled in protest on the lawn of Queen’s Park, is blown to bits from the front steps.

  A businessman at King and Yonge reaches for his pager and is fired upon. Eighteen hollow-point bullets perforate him, and he falls in pieces.

  Three teenagers prying open a garage door down an alley at Landsdowne and Bloor are surprised from behind by two men with baseball bats who club them to their knees.

  At the edge of Grenadier pond sixteen people lying beside fishing lines are stabbed by as many knives and rolled into the water.

  A theatre in the woods, back up in the trees of High Park, is a coordinating centre for military personnel. Volunteers in T-shirts are ordered to stack weapons and then kneel beside them. They are shot in anger by officers with handguns.

  In the SkyDome three women are ambushed by gunfire from beneath a van. They topple over on feetless legs and are dragged between tires and strangled.

  The entire Don Valley, deemed to be a hotbed of cannibal activity, is sprayed with a molten plastic.

  The Toronto Islands, which have reported only rare cases of the disease, are carpet bombed.

  In Hockley Valley, one hundred and twenty cannibals are rounded up. Soldiers discover that if a bullet is grazed across the tops of zombie heads, they dance in seizure while squirting blood into the air. Informal contests are held to see how many zombies can be made to dance at once.

  Just outside Sudbury, troops succeed in getting sixty-three zombies to die jigging. The same is attempted on the bridge over Owen Sound Harbour and it backfires. Eight soldiers are dragged to their deaths beneath the hull of the docked Chi Chi Man. Two more soldiers are killed by friendly fire as bullets ricochet at the waterline of the ship.

  A helicopter descending on Caesarea by Lake Scugog encounters over a thousand zombies in a cannibal frenzy. They have discovered an enclave of healthy citizens hiding in the post office. The helicopter circles until its panicking pilot, his face streaked purple with anger, dives his aircraft into the centre of the orgy.

  A lighthouse in Gravenhurst catches fire. A nurse is hiding four elderly people in its lookout. She crosses herself and makes praying hands as the smell of burning gauze stings her nose.

  In Barrie a defiant population takes to the streets to embrace their cannibal brothers and sisters. An emotion-choked voice blares from a megaphone, pleading for people to return home. The snapping of compassionate necks can be heard clicking through the town and army personnel descend with guns blazing under tear-streaked faces.

  A convoy of heavily laden trucks snakes along Highway 7 toward the Elora Gorge, where bodies are dumped by the thousands from a great height into blood-oily water.

  A hidden coyote population joins with packs of agitated wolves to roam through ditches snapping at hands and feet.

  An arsonist in Orangeville kills his family in their sleep and slicks himself down with gasoline.

  A throng of looters in Scarborough greets the new day smiling and empty-handed. They are all shot through the head.

  A couple who have been holed up in a cottage on Rice Lake light a fire in their front yard to attract the attention of rescuers. They are shoved backwards onto flames by the giant hands of haunted people.

  In a farmhouse near Orillia a widow sneaks out at night and drags corpses through her front door. The scene is lit eerily from within by a flashlight held in its place on the table by a sugar dispenser.

  A zombie in Havelock leaps onto the back of a cow and looks up laughing as a farmer drives a pitchfork into its back.

  In Angus a group of men lash a suspected pedophile to a raft, then send him off down the freezing Nottawasaga river. A helicopter is dispatched to save him. As it swings along a river in the sky, men shake their fists from below.

  A schoolteacher hides his Grade Twos in a grain silo, only to become a predator himself by midnight.

  Four people stand under the Dufferin Gates, remove their clothes, and pass a straight razor back and forth on unspeakable dares.

  A prisoner in the Kingston penitentiary slams his back up against the bars in a sexual passion that will end in the death of the man he has loved for six years.

  A garage mechanic in Sarnia is shot by a stranger as he pulls down the rattling bay door.

  Three yachts set sail from Port Credit Harbour and are sunk by a coast guard vessel that has, up to this point, been firing on the seagull population. A young captain holds up his head, like a bust of Beethoven, in the pocket of air inside the ship’s bow.

  A four-year-old girl in Brampton runs screaming to her parents’ bedroom. They sit up to greet their crying daughter with faces that are unmistakably afflicted.

  The population of Norwood is zero.

  Guelph, three hundred. Maybe.

  St. Catharines, eight hundred.

  Hamilton is particularly disastrous. Pockets of homicide flare up with crazy unpredictability, confounding a military strategy that flexes itself, finally, in an anguished genocidal nightmare.

  Hamilton: population definitely zero.

  The QEW, stretching down around the corner of Lake Ontario to Buffalo, is host to a marathon of mad runners who are ignored by the Ontario military. They fall into a blinding wall of American weapons.

  A serial killer sits in silent obedience at home in North York, surrounded by four uncommunicative guests.

  By January the population of Ontario is only two-thirds of what it was, and there are no zombies left alive. By the first thaw an enormous clean-up is under way. By spring all killing has virtually stopped, except for the occasional murder committed by hunters who rush into the deep woods in the hope of bagging a real-life monster.

  24

  HOME

  If everything that ever brought a person to their knees, head bowed, hands clutching at thin air, had to be characterized somehow, several hands would shoot up immediately. Some of us are eager to tell others how this happens. You are born with what will bring you to your knees, and it patiently acquaints itself with you over long decades until, one day, with a blinding finger, it reaches up …

  No, that’s not true. Not really.

  Other hands go up. No one is called upon to answer. The look from the person at the front of the room, a left hand caging a left eye, communicates that it’s already too late, that we are already sitting in positions strange to this endeavour. We quiet down, fold our hands in our laps, respectful. The instruction is that forgiveness should be sought in the most forgiving space in the world: a little lounge music, an unregenerate appetite for heroin, a peaceful hand touches the corner of a chin, and a scratching fingernail is dragged up and down a forearm. A forearm as long as a country laneway. Someone leans over a neighbour’s crossed legs and says, “It’s good to be here anyway.” As a chosen member is carved open at the throat, hands knocking a lamp, a box of pencils, several people moan — “mmmmm” and “ahhhhh” — so we lower the lights.

  Greg’s Higher Power reaches out beside his bed and traps a lamp switch between his fingers. The turquoise adjustable work lamp is clamped not to a table but to a short plank of wood held in place on the floor by a brick. When he pushes the switch on the crown of the metal shade the bulb is inadvertently directed towards his face. He redirects it with a swat. He turns to face the wall and waits for Harley who is sleeping in the upper bunk, to hit the snooze button. The beep persists and seems to get louder, more obnoxious. Greg’s Higher Power raises a leg from the bed, pulling it through the coarse grey blanket, which slides off, grating the smooth leg he extends into the bottom of the mattress above him.

  “Yeah. Mmm-hmm. Ten minutes.”

  The Higher Power sits up on the mattress and leans his face into his hands, breathing deeply through his nose. He smells the dampness of the mattress on his fingers. The lamp faces out across the cellar floor. A long space heater sits on three old issues of the Hamilton Spectator. The front pages of the papers are
browned by the heating element and their bottoms are cold and wet against the concrete floor. Like a closet of props the cellar is crammed with neglected junk. Two old televisions, a collection of broken hoes, a saddle, canoe paddles, a stack of rough scaffold planks, a mouldy array of old coats, a rusted-out stove, a soft, black cardboard box full of engine parts, a rack of clothes bundled under plastic and tied with binder twine, a plywood reindeer with a red bulb hanging from its nose. Under the charred pipes of a giant furnace is a bunk bed. Greg’s Higher Power has lived here throughout the winter in the orange glow of the space heater, waiting for his grief to settle, for Greg to be less with him, for spring to come. For summer to follow.

  He was picked up at the side of the road by a farmer named Jackson several months ago, and by the end of the trip, which took them down to Markham and back again, to a farm just outside Pontypool, the farmer had taken on his grim-looking passenger as a hand. Jackson led the lifeless man into the cellar, where his son Harley slept, and left him there to wait out the winter months in bed until the first haying in August. And now, after an interminable season spent with the conjugating clicks of a furnace and the hug-me glow of a battered space heater, the Higher Power is woken by Harley’s alarm on the first day of haying season.

  Halfway up the stairs the Higher Power smells bacon, and by the time he opens the door, heavy with winter coats, onto a large kitchen, the mould on the back of his tongue suddenly tastes of toast, fried tomatoes and pancakes. Dolly, the farmer’s wife, turns to him from an electric skillet full of bacon sitting on a dishwasher and smiles, gesturing with a greasy spatula for him to sit. The table has been extended with a mismatched leaf to accommodate a vast array of hot food. Three tall stacks of light-brown pancakes, a huge peppery bowl of steaming tomatoes, a long plate, heavy with bright-green-and-red-flecked omelettes oozing cheese. An entire corner of the table is devoted to a small city of jams and preserves. A tray of still-sizzling steaks sits between two fat glass pitchers of freshly squeezed orange juice. Jackson is seated at the head of the table, and though he’s a reserved man by nature the Higher Power senses an excitement in him today. He is wearing cleaned and pressed work clothes with a bright orange cap on his head. He is staring thoughtfully at his plate, chewing, taking care, it seems to the HP, that his long grey sideburns, trimmed and combed, stay clear of the huge forkfuls of food he brings up between them.