Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  “You heard about something in Toronto,” he said.

  She should just get him off the phone. She wasn’t in the mood for this. “Okay, Dad—”

  “I think maybe you and your colleagues should go turn on the news. If you have news. They’re saying the CBC got the plague now and half the country has no TV.”

  Her eye fell on the cube of plastic with its blank screen, Jonas’s household god. A normal thing. Every house had one, every building here in this tiny town in its long valley under its huge sky.

  “You’re telling me you haven’t heard any of this?”

  Any what? Nothing was happening. She could hear it not happening, hear the usual silence of Alice, peppered by foulmouthed crows.

  “Dad, sorry, I’ll talk to you later, okay? I’m on duty.”

  “You carrying a gun?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have a gun? Do they give you a gun?”

  “Of course I’m not carrying a gun. This is Vancouver Island, it’s not freaking Somalia.”

  “Will you promise me you’ll wear one? Séverine? Promise?”

  “No, Dad. No. Try and calm down, okay?”

  “Do it. For me.”

  “I’ll call you later.” Much later. By a stroke of luck the station phone began to ring. “Got to go. Bye, Dad.”

  Her evening’s work began.

  • • •

  She considered going around the back of the station and knocking on the apartment door. Jonas was still the only person she knew in town, knew properly, that is. She’d stopped to chat with neighbors in her own building a couple of times, until they’d begun asking her whether she accepted Jesus as her savior.

  But Jonas was a colleague. She couldn’t treat him like a buddy. It would make it impossible for them to work together. God knew she wouldn’t have wanted him knocking on her door on her off nights, wanting to come in and watch TV.

  She went home. She picked the wetsuit off the floor and tossed it in the bathtub, not wanting to deal with the laundry room. She hung her uniform up by the door in readiness. There hadn’t yet been a call-out at night, but she had a feeling tonight might be different.

  What she wanted to do was get straight into bed. The kayak had done its job; she was exhausted, properly tired, her body full of that odd lightweight feeling suggesting that she’d probably get to sleep pretty quickly no matter what was going around in her head. But . . .

  She looked at her laptop.

  A very weird feeling came over her. You don’t want to know, it whispered. It was as though the laptop were one of those stars, a white dwarf or whichever, a tiny dense ball hot with energy, waiting to explode into the silent vacant zero of the apartment. It contained everything, all the information, all the knowledge, the whole rest of the world; without it she was floating as if alone in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific.

  She rubbed her face crossly. Just not used to small-town living, she told herself. New place, new job, missing Annie. Twenty-four hours worrying she was going to be fired. No wonder she felt a bit below par. She’d look up whatever had got Dad all freaked out, not that it took much. Maybe spend half an hour clicking around her bookmarks before settling down.

  She squatted comfortably on the bed and opened her browser.

  Instead of her home page the window displayed a grey rectangle with three words, large, white, upper case.

  VOUS ÊTES ICI

  As many times as she quit and restarted the browser, as many times as she rebooted the machine, however often she ran her antivirus and security software, she could not get past that page. The information, the knowledge, the rest of the world had all gone, replaced by that one message.

  VOUS ÊTES ICI

  • • •

  In the middle of the night she thought: it would be different if the sun would come out. Even if just for an hour. Everything always looked so much better under the face of the sun.

  • • •

  Staff Sergeant Cope came to the station the next morning at nine, unannounced. The first Goose knew of it was the rattling of the door.

  “Maculloch?”

  She straightened in the chair. Her neck felt horrible. She must have been slumped sideways. “Sarge.”

  “Were you asleep?”

  All the lights were on. There was a quarter of a mug of cold coffee on the desk in front of her. She’d kicked her shoes off; she felt for them with half-numb toes as discreetly as she could manage. “I guess I must have been. Sorry, sir.”

  “You look like shit. Where’s Paul?”

  She’d tried so hard not to fall asleep. She remembered now, leaving her apartment before six and walking through the dark town, finally giving up on her own bed. Switching on the lights, making coffee. She’d even tried watching TV. Some rolling news report was all she could find. It kept returning to shots of people in coats and scarves queuing on wide sidewalks, in Ottawa, in Edmonton, in Toronto. A peculiarly Canadian version of a crisis. In America there were people arming themselves, filling shopping carts with canned goods and heading off into the hills. Their northern cousins lined up in the cold and waited their turn. She tried to think of them as real people, worried people, whole cities full of people worrying, Annie among them, but the predawn hour and the scratchy picture made it all seem so far away. The heart of it wasn’t in whatever glitch in the banking system had got people panicking and lining up to get their cash out, or in whatever was wrong with the transmission satellites (sunspots? cyberterrorism? aliens?—there was a panel discussion about it on the rolling news, people she didn’t know in a studio thousands of kilometers distant; what did they have to do with her?). The heart of it was here. Her apartment. The cell the girl had walked out of. The burned shell of her house. The fog.

  “He, um . . . He should be here any minute.”

  “What kept you up all night? Anything I need to know?”

  She picked up the mug by reflex, sniffed its contents, put it down. “No, sir. I’ve been having trouble sleeping.”

  He had the basset-hound face of a career cop, a face that said it had seen it all and was now unmoved by everything. He stared at her for a good ten seconds, looking neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic.

  “Well,” he said at last, “you better fix that.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I’m making some changes to the duty roster. There’ll be longer shifts.”

  “I’m fine with that.” She smoothed her hair. It still felt slightly crusty, the ocean salt clinging on. “It’s not a big thing, sir. Just a couple of bad nights.”

  Jonas arrived, straightening the cuffs of his shirt. “Whoa. Sarge.”

  “You’re late, Paul.”

  “I’m always late. Hey, Goose. Man, you don’t look too good. I’ll get coffee. What’s up, Sarge?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Don’t pay me enough to think.”

  “Have you two even been watching the news in your little holiday camp over here? Or do you just sit around making coffee all day?”

  “Hey, I keep an eye out. But, you know. Alice never seems to make it onto the news.”

  “Sit down for a minute, will you, Paul?”

  Jonas gestured peaceably and eased himself behind the other desk.

  “All right.” Now that he had their attention he’d turned self-conscious. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and sought gravitas. “Okay. So, we have a potential situation. I just got instructions last night. Whatever this problem is with the computers, they reckon it’s sending a lot of stuff haywire. Infrastructure. We can expect some volatility. The whole force is canceling all leave. I’ve got the new roster here.” He waved a handwritten piece of paper. “Until they get it sorted out we’re responsible for maintaining order. We have specific instructions to discourage hoarding and prevent looting.”
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  If Cope’s delivery was supposed to impress his seriousness upon them, it didn’t work on Jonas.

  “In Alice?” he said. Goose had to bite back a giggle.

  “This isn’t a joke, Paul. The assistant commissioner’s message suggests that we may be under attack.”

  Jonas stood a tiny fraction straighter. “Okeydokey. We’re vigilant.”

  “Maculloch was asleep at her desk when I came in.”

  “I’m vigilant,” Jonas corrected.

  Cope sighed. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on either. Here’s your rota. Keep an eye on the market. Nobody gets to clean out the shelves. Don’t let anyone start freaking out.” He was about to hand the paper over to Jonas when he stopped and studied it, looking over his glasses, eyebrows rising. “Wait a sec . . . Yep, Webber’s coming over here to cover you guys. Maculloch, I want you to take the day off. Got a pencil?”

  “Sir, I’m entirely capable of performing my duties.”

  “I’m sure you are.” He didn’t even look at her. He leaned the sheet on the desk and made an alteration, finishing it off with an emphatic crossing-out. “You get the day off anyway. Go sleep. That’s an order. Go get pills if you have to. Take them with two shots of bourbon, that’s what I used to do.”

  She hadn’t felt so humiliated since she’d left home. “With respect, sir—”

  “Just. Don’t. Argue with me.” He straightened and adjusted his glasses. “I need all my officers at their best.”

  “He’s right, Goose. Ain’t much we’re gonna be doing anyway. The invisible enemy, you know?”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Cope never let himself get excited about anything, on principle, but there was a slight edge of relish in his voice. “Some people’ll take any excuse to cause trouble. We’re not going to let them. Understand?”

  “Roger.”

  “We keep things nice and quiet here while the geeks sort it out.”

  “Hey,” Jonas drawled. “Might be nothing they can do either. The haunted Internet, you know? Ghosts in the machine.”

  Goose looked at her feet and concentrated on wiggling them into her shoes, in small movements.

  Cope pushed the handwritten roster in front of Jonas. “Just because we got the damn queen on our money doesn’t make us crazy Brits. Here you go, Paul. This is work. Remember what that is? You signed up for it. Do it.”

  Jonas picked it up. “You got it, Sarge.”

  “Good boy. Oh, and one more thing. The commish says communications may be compromised. E-mail, messaging. Mobiles too. So nothing secure gets done that way for now, you get me? No police business on the computer. Best damn thing about the whole rigmarole, if you ask me.”

  “Ahhey.” Jonas nodded to himself. “I was wondering why you drove all the way over here.”

  “Well, you can be damn sure it wasn’t for the pleasure of your company.” He wasn’t good at the banter. He tried too hard to do the gruff old cop act and so never got it right. “Anything I need to know before I get back to work, of which, in case you were wondering, there’s a damn shitload?”

  Jonas pursed his lips and looked at Goose.

  She felt rough-edged with tiredness, unpreparedness, and embarrassment. Her mouth seemed to open of its own accord and speak the sentence.

  “There’s a beached whale, sir.”

  His whole face screwed up in disbelieving amazement. “A what?”

  Why had she said it? It had been there in her unsleeping head all night. Stinking up the place. The smell of rotting fish. An offshore island, somewhere out in the fog. Tlatch tlatch tlatch tlatch. “A couple of guys in a boat reported it. I don’t know if it’s a police matter, sir. A stranded whale. I think they said an orca.”

  “Yeah,” Jonas said, to her surprise. “I heard about that.”

  Cope stared at her as if she’d confirmed all his suspicions about female officers in one convenient sentence. “As far as you know, Maculloch, has this whale committed a crime?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to interview it yet, sir.”

  Mercifully, Jonas intervened. “I talked with those guys yesterday. They were asking who was gonna deal with it.”

  “Oh,” Cope said. “Well. That’s an easy one. Not me. Not me, and not you. Paul, you’re responsible for this town till Webber gets over here. Maculloch, you’re going to sleep until you look like a human being again. And try to pay attention, Paul. You get no backup this morning. We’re not using the radio unless it’s an emergency. Got that? And when I say ‘emergency,’ I don’t mean some dumbass whale that can’t tell the difference between land and water.”

  “The citizens of Alice are safe in my hands,” Jonas said, cradling his palms into a bowl.

  “God help them.”

  They waited for his car to disappear from earshot.

  “Hey.” Jonas directed a sympathetic shrug at her. “Sorry, man. But seriously, you gotta take a break.”

  She put her head in her hands. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “Just tired, man. It messes you up. The sarge is right, you should drop some pills if you need to. They got some behind the counter at the market, I can tell Linda to let you have some. She’s good people.”

  She looked up, studied his broad impassive face.

  “None of this bothers you, does it,” she said. “Whatever’s going on out there. It just rolls right off you.”

  For a moment he was about to make a joke of it, but maybe he heard something in her voice, a fraction of desperation. He stood up and strolled over to the pane of glass in the door. He looked out thoughtfully. You could almost see him gathering words, getting them in order.

  “You ever find it weird, Goose? Being . . . here. Instead of somewhere else. You ever think about that?”

  “No,” she lied.

  “I mean . . .” He crouched so he could peer up at the ocean-thickened sky. “You look out there every day and you’d think, okay, nothing’s goin’ on. Nothing much changes. But it’s the same planet, you know? Same ball of rock. You keep going that way”—he nodded outward, in no particular direction—“you go on far enough, you get, I dunno. Africa or somewhere. Kids with AK-47s and no water. Or England. People sitting in circles and drumming, shouting and screaming this and that. It’s connected, you know? Get on a plane and you can be there the same day. But from here . . . It doesn’t feel real. Know what I’m saying?”

  Vous êtes ici. She suddenly thought that maybe sleeping pills weren’t such a bad idea.

  “I sort of think I do,” she said.

  10

  Instead, she went for a run.

  She was too embarrassed to have Jonas escort her down to the pharmacy counter at the market. And, she told herself, she might have weakened enough to let herself be forced into buying pills, but she’d never have taken them. She’d never touched a cigarette or a joint. She’d never had a glass of wine. She wasn’t putting anything in herself that had even the slightest hint of the glamour of addiction. It was all part of her project to make herself as unlike her mother as possible. She knew only one way to blot out the passage of empty time, to haul up a barrier between herself and the lurking ennui of existence: violent exercise.

  She promised Jonas she’d go back to the apartment and go to bed. She did, at least, go back to the apartment. But she changed, avoiding the mirror, and left again as fast as she could. She kept thinking. She thought: I should call Annie to make sure she’s okay. I should call Dad to make sure he’s okay. I should call Tess too. I should this, I should that. I shouldn’t have let Jennifer go. I didn’t let Jennifer go. She’s gone, she isn’t gone. It’s a bug, it’s a virus. It’s a plague. It’s a curse. What will happen now, what will happen, what what what. The only way to stop thinking was to run.

  There was one road long enough to run on, Route 30. It followed the inlet out of town and
then turned steep, heading up toward the pass. She went steeply up with it. Her legs found themselves in a fight and fought. There were trees on all sides and no sound but the choreography of that battle, the steady thrum. She didn’t worry about when to turn around. She’d recognize the moment when it arrived: when she’d gone far enough that she couldn’t think at all for the pain.

  Cars occasionally passed. Trucks. One, oncoming, was a patrol car. She glanced up for half a second, saw Webber, glanced down. He might have recognized her, or not, it didn’t matter; she’d been going steeply up for almost an hour, maybe, long enough anyway that nothing mattered but keeping her legs turning and her elbows swinging. A while later and she topped the ridge, the road dipping into a long shallow descent. At that moment she felt a clean burst of elation, pure and weightless. Running downhill was so easy she felt she could be flying, loosed from the weight of existence altogether.

  Many curves of the road later a car slowed as it passed her from behind. Another patrol car. It pulled up. The door swung open and out stepped Jonas.

  Crap, she thought. It was the first thought she’d been conscious of for some time.

  He waited for her to jog up, hands on his hips. She let herself slow, carefully. Bewildered at the change in their rhythm, her legs wobbled and threatened to drop her.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re in big trouble.”

  She stood, gulping air. He pulled open the back door.

  “In you get,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Way.”

  “Can’t make you go to bed if you don’t want to. We’re just gonna talk. In you get.”

  She put her hands on her knees. They were trembling. “’Kay,” she said, and crawled into the back.

  He started driving: not, as she’d assumed, back the way he’d come, back to Alice, bringing her in like a fugitive, but on east, toward the other side of the island and Hardy.

  “Where we going?” she croaked.

  “Webber brought a message over from Cope. There’s been a boom break. Sarge wants me out in my boat to check it out.”

  “Boom break?”