NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  I went and reported back to Dave.

  He kept his head down and spat again. ‘It’s just more of their crazy ass bullshit. This sort of thing was happening all the time yesterday. I heard people talking about a fountain of silver water that was supposed to have appeared out front of the museum. They said if you drank it you’d be able to read minds. Don’t listen to the poor bastards—it’ll just fuck with your head.’

  The woman I’d spoken to followed us as we began to move slowly through the crowd.

  ‘Don’t you see them?’ she cried, sincerely sorry for us. ‘The angels are coming! Oh, thank God…thank God!’

  What were they seeing? I suspected the little sperm-like squiggles we all see when we stare up into a bright blue sky: amoeba angels swimming across the surface of our eyeballs.

  Meanwhile, Dave kept glowering at the asphalt, his face growing more and more furious. He was the engineer on some runaway train of thought, barrelling toward a destination I wasn’t particularly interested in visiting.

  ‘Watch this.’ He turned and faced the angel-watchers, smiling grimly. Cupping his hands around his mouth, and without even bothering to try to sound like he meant it, he yelled, ‘Holy shit! Those aren’t angels. They’re devils!’

  The effect was instantaneous. There isn’t much distance, once you’re forced to think about it, between a smile and a grimace of terror. Just two slightly different sets of facial contortions. On the street behind us, a hundred expressions shifted, and we all entered yet another hell. A man began to scream in a little girl voice while the skeleton woman dropped to her knees, still gazing upward, and began to deepen the wounds on her forearms with ragged fingernails. Within seconds, the rest had followed suit, falling to the ground and grovelling among the glass. I began to turn away in horror, but one screamed word stopped me even as it froze everyone else within range.

  ‘Satan!’

  The hundred or so haggard figures seemed made of grey stone, all of them fixed by four limbs to the ground. Two hundred eyes swivelled, locking on the solitary figure of a muscular young man with a shaved head and a ring of black tattoos around his neck. He had just emerged, shirtless, from the shattered front window of a boutique, stepping through a thicket of toppled and denuded mannequins, a two litre bottle of Diet Coke clutched in his right hand. He stopped and surveyed the scene.

  A hundred shaking arms lifted and pointed at him.

  My first impression was that he was someone who had been an arrogant prick. His tattoos and his gym-moulded body spoke of someone devoted to the dark arts of public presentation. Or maybe those were just my flabby prejudices showing through.

  ‘Satan…’ A hundred whispers wavered, finding an odd sort of harmony in a drawn-out recitation of that name.

  The tattooed man stood there surrounded by a briar patch of empty gestures formed by the mannequins’ hands and elbows, grinning and listening as the crowd murmured. His head jerked slightly up and down as he appeared to give his attention to an entire parliament of disembodied advisors. Then a decision was made.

  Dropping the bottle and splaying his hands far apart, he showed the crowd his palms.

  ‘I…’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I whispered.

  Dave shook his head. All the tension had fled from his face; his storm had passed, and he stood beside me, muscular arms crossed across his chest, an oasis of calm.

  ‘Nah. This should be fun.’

  ‘Satan…’ the crowd hissed.

  ‘…am…’

  ‘Satan…’ They willed him forward.

  ‘…Lucifer!’ he cried, then laughed hysterically. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and shook his head. ‘Fucking A! Oh, why didn’t I see it sooner?! Kiss the dirt, you motherfucking pieces of…’

  A cracking sound almost deafened me as Dave raised his rifle and shot. The newly-minted Lucifer fell amid the naked mannequins, and the mob recommenced its worm-frenzy.

  ‘Why did you—?’

  ‘Ah, fuck him. Let’s go. We’ve got miles to go before we sleep, my friend.’

  To my—literally—shell-shocked ears, his voice sounded like it came from a long, long way away.

  Eventually we came to the very familiar SkyTrain station on Granville Street. Its wide, shady entrance had, until recently, been favoured by beggars and buskers. Now a pile of dead bodies lay in the entrance, flies buzzing around them in the dimness like a thousand invisible electric shavers. All the dead appeared to have been killed by a single bullet to the forehead. The message wasn’t hard to read: attempt entry and die.

  Dave whistled loudly three times. Someone inside whistled back, and we went in.

  Seen from the street, the entrance was a black hole, but once we were inside the foyer, I could make out a string of flickering candles marking the way further in toward the escalators that led down to the station platforms below. Ahead of us, four men and a woman, each as impeccably dressed as Dave, crouched behind sand bag piles, rifles at the ready.

  One man with a gaunt, severe face, came out from behind the barricade and spoke to Dave, ignoring me.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘One of us. I found him over on Beach Avenue.’

  ‘Let’s see him.’

  He came close, took out a flashlight, and shined it into my eyes for a long time. He was wearing the same makeup as Dave, and he had the same careful watchfulness about him.

  Satisfied, he stepped back, jerking his head toward the dead escalators that led a couple of hundred feet further underground. A chill, blindfolded wind was feeling its way up from the tracks beneath, seeking warmth.

  ‘Okay. Go on.’

  More candles lit the way as we stumbled down the escalator.

  The platform, when we reached it, was completely dark, but Dave pulled out a flashlight then hopped onto the tracks and shone his beam down the eastbound tunnel. He gestured for me to follow, but I flinched, thinking of the third rail, that bright yellow bar of electricity that we’d all feared as we’d waited for our inventions to pick us up and whisk us away.

  Our inventions had sometimes demanded sacrifices. Trains, for example, would occasionally take their tribute in the form of certain unlucky individuals—depressed moms and stoned teenagers, mostly. Such sacrifices were built in. I mean, think about it. How hard would it have been to design barriers that would have made it impossible for people to jump or fall onto the tracks? But we hadn’t bothered; we’d been willing to accept a little blood for the sake of our economical and efficient train gods.

  Dave was growing more and more impatient. ‘Stop daydreaming and get your ass down here.’

  I sat down on the edge of the platform and hopped onto the track, avoiding the yellow rail. Dave snorted and, directing his beam downward, stamped on it with his boot-shod foot.

  ‘It’s dead. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Man up, buddy.’

  I nodded at the beam, which had now swung up to probe my face.

  ‘You don’t believe me? Just touch it.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Touch it.’

  Taking a deep breath, I reached down and did as he ordered, holding my breath. Somewhere above me, Dave laughed.

  And so we marched into the eastbound tunnel, the sea breeze at our backs.

  ‘Next station…Science World,’ Dave said, mimicking the voice and cadence of the SkyTrain system’s now-defunct automated announcement system. “No monsters down here, pal. They’re all up there in the daylight. This tunnel is secure. Just walk with one foot dragging along the right rail. That’ll keep you oriented. Stadium Station is just a half a click ahead. Then we’ll be back in the daylight. What a day. Man, I’m ready for some shut eye.’

  It took us about a half an hour to cover the distance. Stadium is the point on the downtown line where the tracks emerge from underground just outside BC Place and begin their elevated course across town, bathed in a tsunami of light I couldn’t even begin to imagine from down there.

 
; Daylight first appeared in the distance as a tiny, bobbing cousin to Dave’s flashlight beam, but it quickly grew and stabilized. When we emerged from the tunnel, we found Stadium Station fortified and manned by a dozen or so more Daves, both male and female. Their makeup genericized them, almost comically, as with some dance troupe or rock video where uniformity in appearance and motion is considered the hallmark of something avant garde. When they saw us, Dave’s compatriots nodded but didn’t speak. Instead, their attention was turned to the perimeter.

  Chain link fencing surrounded the station itself. The barbed wire-topped security perimeter predated our little apocalypse, having been put into place when the line was built in order to keep panhandlers and the suicidal homeless away from the tracks. Outside, a few dozen of the Awakened milled about, weaving in between the bodies of others who’d fallen to the guards’ rifles. One man approached the fence with a pleading look and pressed his face against the wire, only to have a woman with a long pony tail and heavy eyebrows smash the butt of her rifle into his nose. He recoiled, howling and bleeding, then fell to the ground.

  We passed through the station and began to march along the now-elevated rail, past BC Place and GM Place, the city’s two largest arenas. Almost immediately, the streets were fifty feet of falling, flailing dread beneath us. As the Awakened watched us pass over their heads, some screamed obscenities, others prayers. The abuse was clearly audible, but I couldn’t make out the words from so high up. I wondered if God experienced similar reception problems up in heaven.

  Soon the next station, Science World, appeared ahead of us—a giant geodesic dome that housed an interpretation centre where, until recently, celebrity Tyrannosaurus skeletons had come and gone while kid-friendly magicians taught surreptitious lessons about gravity and math. The dome’s glass triangles, winking in the sun, reminded me of the shattered UBC mirrors that had heralded my first foray into the Golden Light.

  I spoke to Dave’s back.

  ‘Who are you guys?’

  Nothing. Apparently it was flatter-the-mad time again.

  ‘You’re really organized.’

  Nothing. I couldn’t have pinned the feeling down just then, but as Dave and I were drawing nearer and nearer to Science World, he was changing. Maybe his back had stiffened when I started asking questions, perhaps his parched brain was emitting some sort of adrenaline frizzle or maybe it was something else entirely. Human beings can snatch fragments of emotion from the air with the same acuity with which a cougar picks up a whiff of deer blood from miles away. However it happened, though, I suddenly realized that if I was smart, I’d stop talking and just follow along.

  Science World, tone-rich in the orange-ing evening sun, turned out to be the last fortified station. Beyond, the rails were populated by the Awakened. Some were dressed in filthy thrift store mimicry of Dave’s people—crazy commandos holding plastic dollar store Uzis. Maybe they were mocking the Cat Sleepers, poor mice, or maybe they were auditioning in hopes of joining the cast. Once in a while, one would get too close to the fence. Then, like before, a rifle’s patience would snap in two and a rumpled body would tumble in slow motion toward an unheard thud.

  Within the compound that had been erected around the dome, however, there was order. Dozens of people, all dressed in that same uniform of khaki pants and T-shirt, strode purposefully about. A fleet of twelve SUVs was parked neatly in one corner. Six trailer trucks, their back doors open, looked to be filled with cases of food. A helicopter stood at the centre of a freshly-painted bull’s-eye, ready to take off and be mistaken for an angel or demon by the denizens of Nod.

  ‘What do you call this place?’ I asked, sincerely impressed.

  He looked disgusted. ‘Science World, Paul. What are you on, man? It’s called Science World. Quebec Street. Vancouver, British Columbia. Holy fuck, has everyone in the world gone crazy?’

  Dr London, when I met him, was a surprise: a fat cat in a world growing leaner by the second. Even before Nod the sight of a stout doctor would have raised at least one if not both of my eyebrows—and London must have tipped the scales at 300 pounds or more. The West Coast doctors I’d known had always been fastidious exercise addicts. It was as though all the dark and terrible secrets of the human body they’d learned in medical school had electro-shocked them into frenetic self-improvement regimes. But not Dr Wallace London.

  He was in his early thirties. Thinning blonde hair. Red-cheeks and a double-chin surrounding an embarrassed, teen-aged grin—but a grin I immediately sensed could be vicious, like the fat kid in high school who gets teased and teased and then turns mean.

  And so, when Dave presented me to London in the cafeteria, I trod gingerly.

  ‘Good to meet you!’ The doctor reached forward and held my left hand between his two damp paws.

  ‘Same here.’

  He had a British accent that I was sure was fake before he’d spoken three full sentences. His overall demeanour strove for ‘gracious host’ but he came across as more charmed than charming. A speckless white lab coat was wrapped around his girth and held in place by a wide white belt. He was a Cat Sleeper, too. They all were.

  As he studied my face, Dr London was slowly licking his chops. Round and round, doing the full circle every three or four seconds: his fleshy lips were raw with it. Was he even a doctor? Almost certainly not. It was far more likely that, a couple of weeks ago, ‘Dr London’ had been living in his parents’ basement, strung out on video games and Internet porn. In other words, a kissing cousin to Charles.

  ‘You’ve got quite the set-up happening here.’

  ‘Thank you. Yes, I’d say we do. Some of us thought we should have made a convoy and headed east into the mountains to wait out the plague. But I disagreed. I felt that we’d want to be here when the madness ended in order to begin to put things back together. In the meantime, we do what we can to make sure those poor, demented bastards out there don’t destroy too much. We’re a government-in-waiting, if you like. We’ll have a jolly difficult time putting things back together as it is, without letting those poor bastards burn the place to the ground first. But they’ll be gone soon enough. Right now we kill the ones we can, but our ammunition is limited, so mostly we confine our activities to securing resources and rescuing people like yourself. Our fellow Sleepers.’

  As he checked out my reaction I strove not to have one.

  The cafeteria was open for business, with food being prepared on propane stoves. Seeing this, I realized how hungry I was and said as much to London. He gestured to one of his troops who went and got me a large bowl of stew and some freshly-baked flat bread.

  While I ate, my stomach groaning with relief, London enthused about his plans.

  ‘I assume you’ve heard of the Four Weeks timetable? Of course you have. One more week and we can begin to take back the city, I think. We’ll begin in Chinatown—low density compared to downtown proper—and move west, building by building. Then over the Lion’s Gate to the hydro dams on the North Shore. We’ve got a couple of engineers on the team who’ll be able to get the power turned back on. We’ll take it all back. A terrible tragedy, by Jove, but we can only hope something stronger will emerge after all these trials.’

  He paused and licked his lips some more.

  I focussed on my stew and thought fast. London talked about rescuing Sleepers, but I had yet to see a real one here. What did that mean? Looking up, I saw he was giving me a dead-eye stare.

  ‘What’s up?’ London scowled, his accent slipping. Then he paused, twitched, and reverted to bad-Gatsby mode. ‘What do you think about it all, old chap?’

  Two men at the next table, rifles slung across their backs, stared at me hard. Think? About what? I hadn’t been paying attention. A woman came up and set down two cups of coffee and a small pitcher of cream. As I tried to find the dropped thread of the conversation an odd expression drifted into view on London’s face.

  ‘Have you visited Stanley Park recently?’ he asked. The question popped out
a little too eagerly for my liking. Behind his face, something rattled at a door. I sensed that the correct answer was ‘no’ and replied accordingly.

  London rubbed his neck like a poor orphan boy rubbing a magic lamp. He reddened, and the effect was to cause the makeup around his eyes to look like two poached eggs about to slide down his cheeks.

  ‘Only we hear such strange stories about the park. Have you heard any rumours?’

  ‘Just the usual ones, I guess.’

  ‘Such as…’

  ‘Like about the kids.’

  London stopped breathing, as did the rest of the room.

  ‘Yes,’ he began again after a moment. ‘We’ve heard similar things. What do you know?’

  ‘The usual stuff. That they sleep but don’t talk. That they live in the park. That the Awakened hate them and are hunting them down and killing them.’

  Whispers everywhere, spreading like spider webs.

  ‘The Awakened? Is that what you call them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s all you’ve heard?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  My heart was racing and racing but unable to escape the confines of my chest: it understood the danger I had stumbled into better than my poor brain.

  London nodded and nodded, all the while stirring his coffee. Up and down. Around and around.

  ‘Would you like to hear what we’ve heard?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He snorted. ‘Of course you’d like to hear, old chap. But can we trust you? Can you give me a reason? You are on our side, aren’t you? Or maybe you’re a spy…’

  His accent was almost gone now, and his face was darkening. All around me rifles shifted in sweaty palms. Suddenly I knew why there were no other true Sleepers here: London wanted reasons from the mice he brought home, but all our pockets were full of holes. Still, I had to give him whatever pieces of lint I was able to pinch between my fingers.

  ‘There’s one more thing. A group of the Awakened. They’ve got a plan.’