Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  He’d been travelling with five other people, and they’d gotten trapped in a grocery store in Moose Jaw. They’d killed off the shamblers by dumping propane on them and lighting a match, but not before his girl Andrea got bit.

  So he’d hugged her and kissed her and locked her in the walk-in freezer. He blushed when he said he kissed her, and I wondered just how enthusiastic that kiss was.

  He should have killed her. Freezing zombies doesn’t do much, no matter what the Americans believe; it barely even slows them down. It’s not like you can just thaw them out later, some magical day when there’s a cure. All he did was leave a nasty surprise for whoever opened that freezer next.

  “What’s your story?” he asked.

  But there’s only one story. You get caught off guard and people die.

  Me and Carl, our version of the story came early, back when we could still pretend everything would be fine, that all the strangeness we’d been hearing about was some American craziness that would never touch us. We had the food truck at a high school hockey game. Carl was crazy about hockey, took the truck to every game he could drive to.

  I never quite understood why he wouldn’t rather watch the game than be stuck outside selling poutine, but he just said I didn’t understand. He loved the whole world of hockey, not just the games – and being part of it was magical for him. His old hockey stick from college was hung up in the place of pride, right over the fryer.

  It was the third period. Carl left me in charge of the truck. He said he was going to the bathroom, but I knew he was going to watch the game. No problem; he’d come back when the quarter ended and I could handle it until then. Nothing hard about popping fries in hot oil.

  The crowd roared. Not an uncommon occurrence at a hockey game, but there was something different about this sound. The sound was more jangly and afraid; there were shrieks.

  And there were moans.

  I’d never heard anything like it, and I shuddered. Where was Carl? For a moment I wondered if I should lock up the truck and go find him, but some intuition told me to stay where I was.

  A guy came stumbling out of the arena, stunned and horrified. “What’s going on?” I yelled to him, but he didn’t answer. He just ran into the parking lot and disappeared.

  Coward.

  He was followed by more people, a growing mass of urgent terror-stricken people.

  It was an outbreak. A dozen or so infected people converted all at once. Time from initial exposure to full-blown Z can take up to ten days, but there were lots of reports of people converting all at once, even if they’d been infected at different times. It’s like a big pep rally. One of the zombies makes it all the way, and then sends out encouraging pheromones or whatever to egg the others on into full conversion.

  I saw Carl in the middle of the pack, shoving his way towards me. “Zombies!” he yelled, and then something else. I couldn’t hear over the roar of the crowd, but I swear he said to close the truck. He had a cut on his forehead, and blood all over his face. Then undead hands reached for him, and he disappeared into the crowd.

  I know he said “Close the truck.”

  I slammed the service window shut and locked the truck. I turned off the fryer and locked down the gravy vat. I hid, while all around me people shrieked and died and came back to life and turned on each other. The truck rocked as they hurled themselves against it, but it held strong.

  The truck was safe.

  A lifetime later, silence reigned. The undead had moved on, seeking weaker prey. Slowly, carefully, I unlocked the truck and got out. I looked until dark, but found no trace of Carl among the truly dead.

  Sometimes, when I dream about that moment, Carl’s already a zombie, and when he pounds his fists against the truck and moans, he’s trying to devour me.

  In other dreams, all Carl wants is for me to save him.

  I did not open the truck.

  The truck was safe.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  “So,” I said, after I told my story, “are you hungry?” We’d been driving for half an hour, and had settled into a warm companionship. The truck was full of the rich scent of my homemade gravy, and I was ready for dinner. “I’ll pull over and get us some poutine.”

  “What’s poutine?”

  “French fries, with hot rich gravy, and cheese curds. Good stuff. You’ll like it.”

  He made a face. “Gravy? On fries? Sounds gross.”

  “No, it’s great,” I said. He’d locked his girlfriend in a freezer, but thought poutine sounded gross?

  But wait. He hadn’t said gross. His voice had slurred a little: grosh. No, no. It was impossible. He hadn’t been bitten. I’d seen that myself. Then I remembered the kid’s little stumble as he ran up to the truck. I should have noticed it.

  Then he sneezed. Oh, hell. Everyone knew the signs of Z infection: first the sneezing and a low-grade fever, as if it were just a mild flu. As the disease progresses, you start getting neurological symptoms: slurring speech, difficulty walking. Then your fever spikes and you die. For a moment. Once the first neurological symptoms start, you don’t have long.

  “Tissues in the glove box,” I said, keeping my voice calm. Damn it! I was screwed. Frantically I did the math: how long did I have before the kid fully converted and I had a hungry zombie on my hands? I looked at the kid, and his face was flushed and his eyes bright with fever.

  I’d cleverly put the gun under the seat. Because the truck was safe.

  Damn it.

  So much for old age and treachery.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  I slowed the truck and let it cruise to a halt on the side of the road. It’s not like we were going to see any other traffic on this road tonight, but old habits die hard.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Poutine. Let me make you some. You must be starving. I’m kind of hungry, too. And we have a long drive ahead of us.” All I could think of was to get some space between us; I was within biting distance of the kid.

  All that kissing before he locked his girlfriend in the freezer. The disease is spread through saliva, after all, from bites from the infected. He probably had a cut inside his mouth. It wouldn’t take much, just the tiniest break in the skin.

  Poor stupid kid. Just trying to get one last kiss before his girlfriend died, and now he’s turning into a zombie.

  Poor stupid me.

  The kid moaned. I was out of time.

  I unbuckled my seat belt, said a quick prayer, and stood up. I slid past him into the kitchen. He snarled and grabbed at me, but I wrenched myself away. He was still trapped by his seat belt, and it took him a few seconds to figure it out, press the button, and come lurching after me.

  A few seconds was all I needed.

  He shambled towards me, reaching out his arms. I’d grabbed Carl’s hockey stick from above the fryer, and hit him with it. My trick elbow complained. The kid stepped back a little, then came at me again.

  The galley was narrow, with the service window on my left and the fryer and gravy pot on the right. There wasn’t much room to manoeuvre, and flight was impossible.

  This time I kicked him in the nuts, as hard as I could. I don’t think it hurt him; do the dead feel pain? But the force was enough to make him stumble, and he fell against the fryer.

  Then I smashed the hockey stick against the back of his head, hard. I forced his face down into the fryer. I keep the oil at 175˚C, the perfect temperature for the perfect fries. It’s also the perfect temperature to melt the skin off a zombie’s head.

  The kid – no, the zombie – was stronger than I was, and pushed himself up from the fryer. He moaned and put his hands to his blistering face. His eyes had popped and melted and he couldn’t see me.

  But he could smell me. He took another lurching step towards me.

  I grabbed the cleaver I use to chop up bones to make the stock for the gravy. I swung the cleaver with my good arm, and it bit into the kid’s neck with a thick and meaty sound.

  Everyone thinks it’s so damn ea
sy to cut off a zombie’s head, but it isn’t. It takes strength and persistence and a good sharp blade. The kid was thirty years younger than me and twice as strong – but his eyes and his brain were gone, and I was determined to survive. Finally it was done, and his severed head rolled on the floor, and his body slumped after it.

  I stood there in my kitchen, breathing hard, adrenaline coursing through my body. I nudged the body with my foot, but he didn’t move. Of course he didn’t move.

  I stepped over him and went back to the driver’s seat, and sat there until my shaking stopped. Then I got out and stripped and looked myself over the best I could. I was pretty sure that little bastard hadn’t bitten me, but I wanted to be sure. I’d have someone at Whispering Pines give me another look when I got there.

  Then I cleaned out the back of the truck. I used extra bleach and made sure I got every last trace of that kid out of the truck.

  When I was certain everything was clean again, I started a fresh vat of oil heating. Fortunately, I’d had the lid on the gravy pot, so I wouldn’t be serving up zombie gravy.

  I’d chosen safety once before, and Carl had died. Now I knew that even the safety of the truck was an illusion. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to let that stop me. Whispering Pines needed poutine and ammo and hope, and I would be the one to deliver it to them.

  DEAD DRIFT

  Chantal Boudreau

  Darren sat on his front stoop, sulking and kicking at the dirt. He was freckled-faced and tanned from the summer sun, reddish-blond highlights showing in his brown hair, the result of rarely wearing a hat like he was supposed to. He heaved a heavy sigh and glanced over at his dark-haired friend, Byron, who stood a few feet away, rolling a pebble with his foot. They had had plans for the day, great plans, and now those plans were ruined. What was worse was that the evening’s activities, a yard party and clam bake, had had to be postponed as well – and all because of a red tide.

  Lower Wedgeport was like many other small fishing villages in Nova Scotia. Unless you had a car and could make your way into the closest town, there wasn’t a heck of a lot to do to keep yourself entertained. The village didn’t even have a golf course, unlike Pubnico, and the playground down the road from where Darren lived was rotting from weather-wear and had not been all that exciting even when it had been brand new. For fun, you could fish or swim off of the pier, but not during low tide. You could ride your bicycle to the corner store, but Darren didn’t have any money and wouldn’t get his allowance for three more days and his mother never allowed them to collect on it early. Or you could go digging for clams, but never during a red tide. His father had just informed them that they had announced a red tide on the radio, a proclamation of doom and gloom for Darren and Byron.

  With the current tide schedule, fishing and swimming were out of the question and Darren preferred to dig clams anyway. He loved coming home after shovelling through the muck while standing in an ever growing briny puddle, his feet sinking part way into the greyish-brown sludge. He would be plastered from head to toe in the sea-stink riddled ooze, despite wearing his hip-waders. There was nothing like the crusty feeling as it dried onto his skin and hair, crackling in the creases of his joints and flaking off in the spots that brushed together, accompanied by the satisfaction of a pail so full that the topmost clams were prone to sliding off.

  Of course, you didn’t have a successful day of digging without the yard party that followed. Darren loved the bustle of those parties, Acadian and country music blasting from the radio, beer bottles clanking, people laughing and talking loudly to be heard above the music, and the smell of fresh clams steaming away over the fire pit, just waiting for the opportunity to be dipped in melted butter and slide delightfully down some hungry person’s throat. The thought made Darren salivate.

  All that had been destroyed by the only thing that could keep them from going on a dig in the middle of summer, during low tide on a sunny day. His disappointment rested as heavily on his heart as his boredom did. His father had pointed out that it wasn’t the end of the world; they just had to wait for a better day when the red tide wasn’t a health hazard. Then they could dig to their heart’s content. It didn’t feel that way to Darren. Like most twelve-year-old boys, he lived in the now, and what he wanted to do right now was go digging for clams.

  He had tried defying his parents once, and had ventured out with bucket and shovel regardless of the red tide advisory. His mother caught him secretly trying to light a fire in the pit, when she had noticed the clam pot missing and had gone looking for it and Darren. She had sat him down to explain why the red tide made eating clams dangerous.

  “Clams are the ocean’s water filter. It’s how they feed – they draw water in and spurt it out again, keeping anything worth eating for them,” she had told him. “If there’s anything bad in the water, it sticks with them, and if we eat them, it ends up in us. That’s why you can’t eat these, Darren. When the red tide hits, it turns them to poison. They may still taste okay, but they could kill you.”

  “But what’s so bad about it. Why would it make us really sick, but not kill the clams?” he had asked.

  “I guess they’re used to it and they aren’t built the same way we are. The poison comes from algae in the water, and they’re exposed to a little bit of it all the time. It builds up in their system when there’s a lot of it in the water. That’s the most I can tell you. I’m not a scientist, but that’s what I’ve read and I know people who have died from eating contaminated clams,” she had said.

  Darren made a face, remembering her explanation and wishing there was some way around it. He didn’t want to die any more than the next person though, so he wouldn’t disobey his parents like he had tried to in the past. He’d just have to come up with some other way of entertaining himself and Byron, and forget about the yard party for now.

  He got to his feet and shuffled over to Byron, his hands in his pockets.

  “Well, there ain’t nothing we can do about it. How about you and me go over to the duck pond and see if we can catch a couple of frogs. It’s better than sitting around here all day.”

  Byron shrugged and nodded. Frog hunting had lost its mystique the prior summer, when they had decided it was too babyish an activity for someone their age. Nevertheless, it was a way to pass the time and better than wallowing in ennui. If nothing else, it would take up the few hours they would otherwise have to wait until supper.

  “I’ll race you there,” Darren said, and the two boys ran off towards the pond, laughing and shoving at one another.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  It had been two weeks since the end of the red tide advisory, and finally Darren’s parents had agreed to reschedule the yard party and clam bake. Darren was so excited his toes were curling in his hip-waders. It didn’t matter that he and Byron had been up incredibly late the night before, watching an old zombie movie at Byron’s house once everyone else was asleep; tired or not, they were more than willing to dig. Sacrificing sleep had been worth it as well. The zombie movie had been a particularly gory and scary one, a film to which any well-meaning parents would have objected. That was what had made watching it all the more thrilling – knowing that their parents would have considered it taboo.

  Darren still had zombies on the brain when they set out with their buckets and shovels for the beach. The flats were dotted with tidal pools and the mud squelched beneath their boots as they searched for the holes in the sand that were the telltale sign of clams hidden below. Darren noted that the tidal pools looked particularly cloudy that day, the silt within greyer than normal, but that wasn’t that uncommon a couple days after a storm, and there had been a doozy earlier that week. He also detected a slight oily sheen on their surface. Perhaps a motorboat had overturned or had sunk during the gale-force winds and rough waters, emptying the contents of its gas tank into the ocean. He had seen such things happen before.

  “Over here!” Byron yelled, pointing at a patch of mud littered with a multitude of tiny ho
les. Sometimes the holes led to the tunnelling sea worms that were okay to collect for bait, but were otherwise useless. Finding them, instead of clams, after digging down a certain distance, was always disappointing. Usually, however, an area this big, bearing this many holes, was a good sign it would be clams below and not worms.

  Darren and Byron chatted happily together as they dug, their conversation starting with talk about girls, and eventually veering off to a discussion of the movie they had secretly watched the night before. Remembering some of the most violent scenes made Darren’s blood run cold, particularly one involving a zombie chewing up one of the lesser characters’ face. They laughed when they talked about that moment in the film, but it was more of a posturing thing, trying to prove their bravado, the laughter nervous. The conversation came to an abrupt end as they reached a sizable collection of clams. With a celebratory shout of triumph, the two boys began to load up their buckets, digging off to the sides as they cleared the place where they had started.

  It wasn’t very long before their buckets were brimming with clams and, lifting their harvest up from the sand, the two boys turned to start towards home. Something, however, caught the corner of Darren’s eye, some unexpected movement that seemed out of place. He glanced over at its source, something he had assumed was an oddly shaped chunk of driftwood, draped in drying seaweed and bleached by the sun.

  “Did you see that?” Darren asked Byron, pointing towards the whitish-grey clump jutting out from the flats. “I think it moved.”

  Without bothering to put down their fare, the two boys wandered over to get a better look, thinking that perhaps Darren had spotted some kind of animal hiding among the seaweed, and curious to see exactly what it was. They had seen racoons, skunks and even porcupines lurking along the beach before, as well as a wide variety of birds. It was likely just a seagull or a crow, creatures that commonly scavenged along the shore, but Darren wanted to find out for himself, just in case it was something more interesting.