Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Holding her closely, Buniq looked at the older woman, then to the gathering.

  “We will leave today as soon as the proper words are said over Umiak’s Journey to Anguta.”

  As if that were the dismissal we were waiting for, the group slowly started to dissolve. Each family heading back to their tents to repack what had just been set up mere weeks before. Father exchanged a long look with Mother, before heading to the tent with her.

  I pocketed the rest of my whale meat and slowly started to follow. I would be expected to carry part of the camp.

  It was then we heard the scream.

  Umiak’s father came tearing into the camp, his hand clamped around a heavily bleeding wound on his arm.

  “My son is taken! Taken by the tuurngait that killed him!”

  His brother grabbed him on his shoulders and shook him gently. “The creature is no tuurngait, Akiak. Qilaq says this. Surely you mean a bear has gotten Umiak’s body?”

  Akiak shook his brother off violently and pulled his jacket sleeve up, exposing the bleeding, half-circle-shaped wound where a piece was missing from his arm. “It is a tuurngait I tell you! It has possessed my son! Listen to me! Umiak walks!” He turned and gestured frantically back the way he had come. “I went to the sledge, and his body was missing! I feared it was a bear and looked for scat or a sign of my son, but it was my son who found me! He walks and he has attacked me! Just as the yellow-haired creature did!”

  I could actually FEEL the fear rising in the crowd. Nothing that Qilaq or Buniq yelled helped to stop the panic now. There was a mad rush to get our tents packed and to get on our way.

  The need to leave this place behind had grown exponentially.

  Among the panic and disorder, no one save those closest to Qilaq, and myself, took notice when she collapsed. With a cry, I rushed to where she lay on the ground. I feared that the elder woman had suffered an illness of some sort. The kind of illness that attacks the heart of the elderly in times of high stress.

  It was with a pang of joy I saw her chest rise and fall gently.

  Amidst the raised noise of our camp packing up, and the fear we had lost our Angatkut before we were ready to say goodbye, no one heard the quiet shuffle and hesitant scuff of slippered feet.

  No one heard the gurgling, wet, meaty sound that leaves a mouth with no throat.

  But everyone heard the scream from Umiak’s mate, Mauja.

  Her shriek cut through the chilled spring air like the wind itself. Turning, we looked to see that she had fallen to her knees in the stones, surely cutting herself in the process. Tears streamed down her cheeks while one hand covered her open mouth, and the other pointed a shaky finger towards a shambling figure entering the ring of tents.

  Step. Pause. Teeter. Step.

  Step. Pause. Teeter. Step.

  Mauja’s face was contorted as she started to wail again, collapsing so her face lay buried in the rocks as she sobbed.

  Umiak stood there, still dressed in his burial finery, his hair still mostly tucked into an elaborate braid. He was scuffed all over from when he clawed out from under the rocks that had protected him. And the wounds that the yellow-haired creature had given him stood out like dark pits in the paleness that was his dead flesh. No longer bleeding a true red blood, but oozing something unnatural.

  There was a mad scramble as people tried to get away from the creature that Umiak had become.

  All but Mauja, who still kneeled in the rocks and the mud, crying for her mate.

  The creature that was Umiak took notice of the keening woman, its face contorting into a frown, and slowly, with less hesitant steps, made its way towards her.

  I stood frozen in horror as no one moved to help.

  As no one called out to her to run.

  I yelled for Mauja to run, to stand and get away. But she either didn’t hear, or ignored me, as she continued to kneel and rock back and forth, her face covered by her hands.

  And I swallowed a sudden surge of bile as I watched that shuffling figure approach Mauja, its arms outstretched. Kneeling on the ground in front of her, it covered her rocking body with its own. The wounds along its neck, shoulder and arms dripped and ran with orange and yellow ooze. The fluid seeped down and along her neck, into her hair and down her back, sliding to coat the suede that protected her arms.

  I could hear the muffled, high-pitched shriek from Mauja increasing in volume, covered as she was by the creature. It responded by grabbing her tighter, uttering a low, gurgling moan, and spewing more fluid along her back from the crater in its throat.

  I couldn’t take it any longer, just standing there watching. No one was moving to help her; they were all running around panicked, or standing and watching.

  I couldn’t let her be eaten and die like her mate had.

  Grabbing a large rock, I ran towards the creature with a scream, hoping to drive it off. But I was prepared to destroy it with a blow to the temple, like Umiak had done to the yellow-haired creature.

  The creature looked up, its milky, clouded eyes somehow focusing on me. It lumbered upright and I heard Mauja scream Umiak’s name again. Rock raised, I jumped towards the creature, aiming high to its head.

  I never saw the backhanded blow it dealt me.

  I felt the fisted hand of the creature slam into my cheek, shattering the bone. The sickening crack echoed inside my head and the pain flared brightly. I felt the pop of my eye rupturing, the fluid gushing from the socket and the pain blinding me in an instant. I bit my tongue from the force of the blow, my teeth cracking like hazelnuts and the taste of my own blood filling my mouth. My head whipped around sharply, and instantly after the crack of my cheek breaking, I heard more snapping noises within my body. My head spun to the side at an impossible angle.

  I never felt the ground as it rushed up to meet me.

  It felt like no time had passed, but at the same time the world had ended.

  I heard crying, could hear my mother calling my name over and over. I could feel wetness on my face. But it was probably from my eye, or the blood that poured from the open wound on my head. I was lying propped up on my mother’s lap. I opened my eye to look up at her, and she cried all the more to see me awake.

  Straining my eye in its socket, I tried to see what had become of Mauja.

  Of the thing that was Umiak.

  Had I saved her?

  Akiak was kneeling on the ground, his son cradled in his arms. Umiak’s form was still, and the body full of spears. Mauja lay beside him, and her mother stood above her still form, tearing her hair and crying. Mauja’s blank, open eyes stared at me from a head turned the wrong way on her neck, and she drew no more breath.

  I looked back up to my mother, my eye filling with tears. I tried to lift my hand to her cheek to offer comfort. It was then I realized that I couldn’t move my hand.

  Couldn’t feel her hugging me tightly.

  Couldn’t feel the cold rocky ground beneath my body.

  Couldn’t feel my heart beat in my chest.

  And I couldn’t breathe.

  My mouth opened and closed as I desperately tried to fill my lungs with air. I could hear the air moving in my body. But my heart no longer beat, and the blood no longer moved through my system.

  My mother wailed harder and pulled me tighter to her, pressing my face to her neck as she rocked me back and forth, her sobs shaking my body. Over her shoulder I could see my father holding on to my brothers.

  My vision was greying at the edges and I could hear the gasping noises I was making growing louder. My face hurt so much. I wished it would stop.

  Opening my mouth again, my mother’s ear was so close, surely she would hear.

  “...I…I was…so…p-proud…I…got to sing…the katajjaq...”

  MOTHER DOWN THE WELL

  Ursula Pflug

  I wanted more than anything to keep a stone tablet, but they always slipped out of my grasp back into the water. I felt there must be some rule I was missing. They were covered wi
th inscriptions of course; that was the whole point of tablets. Without inscriptions they’d just have been meaningless slabs of stone. Once they’d slid back into the pond I couldn’t remember the inscriptions anyway, so it was just the same as if they’d been blank, as if I hadn’t read them, hadn’t held so much wonder in my hands. Finally, one day a tablet stayed in my hands without being pulled back into the water, as if there was a giant down there tugging with all her might. Needless to say I felt stoked, pretty much like Moses, in fact. I wasn’t expecting proclamations that I could share with multitudes though, or even just my village, but hoping for something more personal. A fortune cookie, a horoscope. Some light thing to cheer and sustain me when all else had failed.

  I had trouble making out the engraved words, what with all the slime and chipping, so I left the tablet by the pond and went up to the house to get the wheelbarrow. My friend Blue was sitting on my back steps; he asked me what was up.

  “I have a tablet,” I said. “It’s heavy so I’m going to get it into the wheelbarrow and bring it up to the well and scour it so I can read what it says.”

  Blue smiled. “I don’t believe in that whole stone tablets business,” he said, “but even if I did, aren’t you supposed to get them up on mountaintops and not out of the lake?”

  “Pond,” I said. “Siena got hers out of the water too. She found it upriver. Maybe some places it’s mountains but here it’s water.”

  When he was around, Blue stopped by fairly regularly to see if I needed his muscles for anything. He is a big strong man with long blond hair and dark roots.

  “Me either, really, but they’re just so tantalizing. Siena got one that said…”

  Blue smiled, as though now that I’d cloaked it as a bit of neighbourly competitiveness, my craziness made all kinds of newfound sense. “What did Siena’s tablet say?” he asked.

  “It said her third child would be a great leader of his people. Siena is confused because she couldn’t have any more after her second daughter; all the doctors said so.”

  “She could always adapt a third one,” Blue said, “in hopes of fulfilling the prophecy.”

  “You mean adopt,” I said.

  “I try very hard to mean what I say,” Blue said, “and say what I mean.”

  He followed me back to the pond where my tablet lay in the grass. A long crack running through its middle, right where the words were.

  “Tricky,” he said.

  “No doubt.”

  We headed back to the barnyard to get the wheelbarrow. It was between the well and the house, and I avoided the well like I always do, giving a little shudder.

  “Why do you always avoid the well,” Blue asked, “giving a little shudder?”

  “My mother fell in before I was born.”

  “Really, Clarissa? You never told me you had a mother. I didn’t want to pry so I didn’t ask, but I always assumed you’d grown up without one.”

  I looked at Blue. He is a friend I can stand. Most people really just want to take advantage of your kind heart, should you be lucky enough to be in possession of one. They want to complain and borrow things and not return them and call that poor assemblage friendship, when really what you’ve been praying for is the friend who can help you map it all out, say the insightful thing, help you disentangle the sheets of fabric softener from the wash as it were. Help get your mom out of the well she fell in before you were born.

  “I have spent my whole life coming up with ways to try and fish her out,” I said.

  “I take it none worked,” Blue said.

  “So it would seem.”

  “Getting mothers out of wells is something I have a little experience with, actually,” he said.

  “Really?” I asked, casually as I could so as not to give away the as-yet-unfounded hope I felt.

  Talking about such things, we took the wheelbarrow down to the pond. Blue and I tried to lift the tablet in but it was too heavy, even with him on one end. That made me wonder whether the giantess who lived at the bottom of the pond hadn’t pushed a little to help me get my tablet out onto the grass. The grass was wet, the tablet was wet; it was late October and the sky was overcast. I’d worn thick socks and rubber boots so my feet were okay but I needed an extra sweater under my sweater. I wanted to get this thing done so I could get back inside and have homemade squash soup and tea, perennial favourites for dinner.

  “We’ll lay the wheelbarrow on its side,” I said, “then we’ll tug the tablet into it; then you’ll right the wheelbarrow with me holding the tablet to prevent it from slipping out again.”

  Blue rolled his eyes as if I might find this much exertion and coordination a stretch, but he didn’t offer an alternate plan so we went ahead with mine, which turned out to be successful. We took turns pushing; Blue’s turns were longer than mine. It was hard going through the long wet grass; there hasn’t been much of a path down to the pond since I sold the last of the cows.

  By the time we got to the barnyard we were so exhausted we dumped the tablet out of the wheelbarrow instead of gently laying it on its side, and even more gently sliding the tablet out onto the gritty dirt. Because of our carelessness it split in half right along the big diagonal crack, making an inordinately loud cracking sound as it did so, almost like thunder.

  I thought I might cry, it was all so pitiful: the old well, the split tablet, the dirty barnyard. I’d tried planting flowers but even tansy and comfrey hadn’t taken.

  To cheer me up Blue said, “I told you I don’t believe in tablets. I also don’t believe in divine messages being accompanied by cracks of thunder.”

  “I’ll just run up to the house and get a brush and some scouring powder,” I said.

  “Scouring powder?” Blue asked.

  “You don’t believe in scouring powder?” I asked.

  “Just the syntax is unfamiliar. I call it Comet Cleanser or Old Dutch.”

  I came back from the house clutching a wire brush and a bottle brush and a brush for floors. The truth is I hate brushes now, the way the bristles are all shoddy and made of plastic.

  “I’d go gentle with the wire one,” Blue said. “That tablet is made of limestone and flakes easily. I wouldn’t want to brush away what’s left of the words.”

  “No ma’am,” I said. I say this all the time, to anyone and everyone, including small girls and grandfathers. It is true I particularly like saying it to big strong young men like Blue, because that makes it funnier.

  I cleaned out the carved words on my stone tablet as gently as I could with the sharp corner of a scraper and the wire brush. The well itself is open and level with the ground; no wonder, I sometimes think, that my mother fell in. There used to be a wall around it, a fieldstone-and-muck deal made a hundred years ago. Its crumbling accelerated at some point and I worried all the crumbles would make the water gritty, so I took it down. More truthfully, I called Blue and he came over and helped.

  We teamed up to push the two halves of the tablet back together.

  “Did you hear a clicking sound when they snicked together?” I asked.

  “Clicking and snicking sounds we believe in,” he said.

  “The crack didn’t disappear, though. The halves didn’t melt back together.”

  “Accompanied by a hissing sealing sound,” Blue said.

  “And maybe some smoke,” I laughed.

  “I can make it out okay now but I think you should be the one to read it aloud,” Blue said.

  “Raise Your Mother,” I said, after first reading it inside my head a couple of times to make sure I’d gotten it right.

  “Well, that’s kind of anticlimactic, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Come in for soup and tea?” I shrugged.

  “I would, Clarissa, but I’ve got a dinner date,” Blue said.

  After he had gone I stayed a moment alone by the well and thought about my mother. Trying to get her out of the well was a project that made me feel stupid so much more than it ever made me feel smart. I’d turn
over stones and ask them what I should do and they’d answer me with a stony silence. I’d make tea and forget to drink it. I’d walk until my legs ached. I spent as much time as I could outside, communing with nature, with tree spirits; seeing myself or the fate of the world in the flight of a bird or the curve of the current around a submerged rock.

  I’d wear necklaces that had once belonged to my mother or her mother or my beloved aunt, sometimes all three at once, thinking it would help. I’d stay up late worrying about my brother Dave, alone across the continent. After Father died I was alone too, but I stayed on at the family farm in eastern Ontario, so it was as if everyone was still there even when they weren’t, Grandma and Grandpa and Father. And of course Mother was still alive, just living down the well.

  I’ve only ever heard her voice the once, although Dave, who was there, has never been a hundred per cent sure it was even hers.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  After I retrieved the stone tablet, a doe came out of the woods every sunset for a fortnight to raid the gardens along the river, eating our lettuces. She was so pretty that we mainly forgave her foraging and just gathered on our verandahs to watch. My friend Siena kept her garden right up near the house, and after a couple of days the doe overcame her shyness and investigated Siena’s kale. We stood together drinking tea and Siena pointed, showing me how the deer’s left ear was split. We discussed whether this was the result of a wound or whether she’d been born that way. Siena also told me she had named the deer Georgia O’Keeffe. She seemed relieved when I didn’t laugh at this affectation and was even familiar with the famous artist’s work. I suggested that Georgia – the deer not the artist – was skilled like me and my mother at bridging dimensions, and that if I could only teach her to speak English we could have the nicest conversation about our metaphysical work.

  “Or you could learn to talk deer,” Siena nodded agreeably. “And how do you know Georgia-the-artist didn’t know how to bridge dimensions? Many artists and writers do, you know.”