Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  She opened his blazer to look inside, then turned back its collar. A white rectangle had been sewn inside the neck. There were faint traces of letters on it. She bent down, rubbed her eyes and read

  H JIA

  She leaned back against the headrest, eyes closing involuntarily. Too much adrenaline, too much exercise, too little rest. And she’d got cold out there too.

  “Hey there, Aitch Jia,” she said. “How’re you doing.”

  The hospital people came out with a gurney and wheeled the kid away. Jonas ought to have gone in with them, really—protocol—but he took one look at Goose and drove her straight home.

  • • •

  She slept as only the young can, all the rest of the afternoon, all through the evening, all night. While she slept, the fog spread, piling outward from the mainland across the Passage, filling in the strait. Through its dense and echoless silence the sound of the horn from the Scarlett Point lighthouse drifted over Hardy, a tightly wrapped moan blaring and fading in regular sequence until an hour before sunrise, when—although the fog was, if anything, worse, so heavy the sunrise might almost as well not have bothered—it ceased, forever.

  11

  The crows had gone quiet again. Or perhaps she’d woken before them. Certainly no one else in her building was up yet. Her eyes opened to an intense stillness.

  She rolled over and checked the time on her phone. It was indeed early, especially for a Saturday. Not dark, though. She could see all the way past the packing boxes into the kitchen, where a peaceful grey light touched the edges of the window. The boxes looked less depressing than they had all week. Amazing, she thought, what a proper night’s sleep can do.

  She had fresh voice mail and a bunch of texts. People trying to get hold of her while she’d been out cold. She didn’t want to deal with them, not now, when for the first time in days she felt like herself again. Except for Annie; but Annie’s message said she was driving to her parents’ place in Thunder Bay and would be out of touch until that night. She sounded exhilarated, not scared at all. Crazy Annie, scripting herself a road movie. Goose tapped out a couple of texts for her to get whenever she got a chance.

  She didn’t want to shower yet for fear of waking everyone else in the building by rousing the demonic groans of the plumbing. She got out her exercise mat instead and went through her postures for the first time since she’d moved in. Then, in a fit of blissful efficiency, she did some unpacking.

  She didn’t really Happreciate how heavy the fog was until she set off to walk over to the station. To her surprise she found it not ominous but beautiful. It turned every object in the world into a kind of suggestion of itself. I’m going to become a self-help guru, she thought, and make millions out of my book: How to Get Happy by Sleeping Fourteen Hours and Then Starting That Thing You’ve Been Procrastinating Over. She swung her arms as she walked.

  She heard noises ahead on the street well before she saw what was making them. A man was loading stuff atop and in the back of a station wagon. She recognized him; he was one of the people who’d answered their door when she was out searching for Jennifer, back when (it felt like an immensely long time ago) she’d thought Jennifer was just a runaway kid with an accomplice who smelled of fish.

  “Going away for the weekend?” she said.

  The man banged down the hatch of his car and stared at her, rubbing his hands. “What’s it look like?”

  She refused to take offense. “Just asking, sir.”

  “We’re out of here,” the man said. “My sister-in-law’s down in Comox. We’re taking the kids. Hey. Could you keep an eye on the place? I don’t have an alarm.”

  “You’re leaving town?”

  His wife appeared out of the house, a ghost in the fog for a moment before solidifying into a woman carrying a couple of shoe boxes. “Aw, for Pete’s sake,” the man said. “I just closed the goddam car.”

  “It’s my jewelry,” the woman said. She looked at Goose nervously. “Good morning.”

  “Morning.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. I’m just passing by.”

  “Nothing,” the man snorted, opening the hatch again with exaggerated weariness. “Sure.”

  “You must be the new girl,” the woman said. She was still wearing slippers.

  “Officer Maculloch.”

  “Do they have any idea how long this is going to last?”

  “For Pete’s sake, Judy.”

  “The fog?” Goose looked around in that way people do when wondering whether they can predict the weather. “It usually lifts in the afternoons, they tell me.”

  Both husband and wife looked at her uncomfortably.

  “I meant,” the wife said, embarrassed, “this . . . problem.”

  “Oh,” said Goose.

  “Course she hasn’t got any idea. No one’s got any idea. Go wake up the kids, Judy, we’re ready. Unless you got anything else you want to bring.”

  “You could be polite,” the woman mumbled, but she vanished back into the mist.

  “Excuse me if I was a little short.” He checked straps on the roof rack, grunting as he yanked them tighter. “It’s a lot of stress. I’m right, aren’t I? Bet I am. You police don’t know what’s going on any more than the rest of us.”

  “That’s sometimes the case, sir, though we do our best. It depends what you’re talking about, specifically.”

  “Specifically.” He leaned back. “Specifically. Let’s see. Specifically, that we got no TV and the phone line’s down the crapper. And they put the mill on half-shift ’cos a bunch of deliveries didn’t come in. And I got e-mails from the bank saying they got problems with my account except I don’t ’cos now I don’t got no e-mail either. What’d they do, give you orders to smile nice and tell everyone to stay calm?”

  “We have plans in place for all sorts of contingencies. It’s part of what we do.”

  “Yeah. Well. Excuse me, but we’re not staying around to watch. Not with no TV. What’s anyone gonna do in this place without TV?”

  “Take extra care driving in these conditions, sir,” she called after him, smiling at herself, as he followed his wife away. Jonas would have talked him down, she reflected. Reassured him somehow that everything was under control. But she didn’t have that gift, and anyway—she went on through the fog; the man and his car and his family disappeared completely within twenty paces—things weren’t under control.

  There was a kind of clarity to it. The girl who wouldn’t talk, walking out of a locked cell, paddling away into the mist; the boy on the beach where the whale had been, huddled around that extraordinary mask; the messages from the rest of the world announcing that all was not well. The voices where voices shouldn’t have been heard, the three words on her screen. No, she thought, I don’t know what’s going on, but so what? It was kind of like unpacking. You just did what was in front of you. Or like walking in the fog: you kept on putting one foot in front of the other, even though you couldn’t see where you were headed.

  She was surprised to find the station open, lights on in the windows. So surprised that for a few moments she thought she’d gotten crossed up and accidentally walked into the driveway of somebody’s house. She turned around to check the sign and the flagpole. The top of the pole was invisible. If the flag was flying it would have been completely limp anyway. There was not a breath of wind.

  Webber was behind the desk with his feet up. She’d met him when Cope had introduced her to the Hardy detachment, otherwise they hadn’t exchanged a word. He had the stocky build and the faintly swaggering air of an athletic guy in the process of turning into a guy who used to be athletic. He stretched and yawned ostentatiously as she came in.

  “Thank God,” he said.

  “Hey. I wasn’t expecting anyone. What’s up? You been waiting?”

  He swung his legs
down and stood up, his legs just a little too wide apart. “New shifts,” he said, and tapped a sheet of paper on the desk, clicking his tongue. “Sarge wants all stations manned twenty-four seven. I’ve been here since midnight. So, yeah, waiting. You could say that. Oh, and guess what.” He picked up the paper. “Nothing else to look at, I read this up and down a hundred times. You’re on tonight in Hardy. Maculloch, that’s you, right?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Ten till two.” He handed her the sheet. “You’re going to have a fun night. I hope the TV’s working.”

  “I don’t watch TV.”

  He gave her a version of the Stare.

  “Don’t you. So you won’t have heard what happened.”

  “What?”

  “Last night.” He puffed out slightly as if he was giving her a lecture. It seemed he was enjoying the chance to deliver news, bad news particularly. “The navigation went down. All up the coast. All of it.” She must not have looked sufficiently impressed. “All the lights, the lighthouses, markers, whatever. As far as anyone can tell.”

  “They went out?”

  “Every single one. The coast guard’s been called in. And the navy. Now you’ve got this fog too.”

  “That’s . . .”

  Now he thought he’d impressed her. He swayed on his feet and nodded judiciously. “You know the Inside Passage is the busiest marine highway in the world? So now we’ve got all that shipping out there with no markers. In the fog.”

  “That sounds . . .” But all she was thinking of was the single yellow kayak heading away, with no need for markers, no need for lights.

  “You know what? I’d nuke the fuckers.”

  “Which fuckers are those?”

  “The Chinese. That’s what they should do. Send a fucking nuke. It wouldn’t have to be Tokyo. Just, like, some medium-sized city. No warning. Just, like, bam, there goes ten million of you fuckers, now let’s talk. If I was in charge I’d do it right now.”

  She paused, trying not to let him disturb her mood. “How would that help?”

  “They think we won’t do anything. That’s how it works. They know the government’s a bunch of fucking pussies. Look at this.” He leaned across the desk and tapped at the computer. “C’mere.”

  He tried to arrange it so he’d be able to stand right behind her while she bent to see the screen. She knew this routine. She stood back from the desk and crossed her arms. “What?”

  “It’s been like this all night. Go on, look.”

  A pattern was running across the monitor, horizontal lines racing by in blurry lines. “What’s that?”

  “Happens as soon as you run Windows. Here.” He switched the machine off and rebooted it. “I tried this like twenty times. That’s how bored I got. Take a look. Log in.” He stood back, not far enough, and waited for her to move to the keyboard.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  Thwarted, he sighed, and moved to tap the command line by the wavering cursor. A few seconds later the pattern appeared again.

  “Fuckers,” he said.

  The blur was letters, scrolling fast from one side to the other, like something out of a bad art installation. He pushed a finger right up to the screen. “You can read it if you look close.”

  Despite herself, she was curious. He was right; once your eyes matched the scrolling characters’ speed they became the same two words, repeated, looping rapidly past:

  sunthesunthesunthesunthesunthesunthesunthesunthesunthesun

  thesunthesun

  “I bet it’s like a signature, eh. They do that. Like dogs pissing. They have to leave their mark. Fucking geeks. They’d give up in ten seconds if we dropped a bomb. Sayonara, fucktards.”

  The words were strangely hypnotic. After a while the black of the moving letters and the off-white glare of the background blended into a grey haze: sea fog.

  “Oh, and you won’t have heard this either: Fitzgerald died.”

  She blinked. “Shawn Fitzgerald?”

  “Last night. Sarge got a call early this morning.”

  “Crap,” she said. “That’s no good.”

  “I knew he was sick but no one said he was sick that bad.”

  “Shame. You hate to lose an officer.”

  “He was one of us. One of the team.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Tough act to follow.”

  She had no interest in being intimidated by this guy. She reached around the monitor and forced the computer to quit again. “Speaking of which,” she said, “I’m on duty. So I guess I’ll see you later.”

  He waited a moment. She didn’t look at him. He strolled to the door and collected his hat.

  “I have to say, though,” he said, “you’re a lot better-looking.”

  She thought of Fitzgerald, too foul with sores to sleep in his own bed. Dying young, in quarantine, under his parents’ hopeless eyes, just because Jennifer Knox had wanted him to die.

  “Hey.” Webber tried to sound casual. “You play that game, don’t you? The sarge said. What’s it called?”

  “Rugby.”

  “Rugby, yeah. That’s the one where you stick your heads up each other’s asses.”

  “And lift each other up by the shorts.”

  He cocked his eyebrows, a gesture copied from movie scenes where tough guys were playing it cool.

  “Chicks’ teams?”

  “That’s right. They don’t let us play with the guys in case we hurt them too bad.”

  “Now that I’d pay to see.”

  “Free admission.”

  “It keeps you pretty fit, I guess?”

  I could knock you flat in half a second. “You guess right.”

  He was stuck at the door, holding his hat in his hand like an idiot.

  “So anyway,” he said. “You want to maybe have a beer sometime?”

  And my boyfriend’s a girl. “Webber?”

  “What?”

  “Go away.”

  • • •

  Jonas came in only briefly, an hour or so later, still early in the morning. He and his boat were needed again. She felt like she wanted to talk to him about yesterday, and the days before that. He’d seen most of the things she’d seen, starting with the empty cell. He’d just put his head around the door to say he wouldn’t be around, though.

  “I only got a minute. My skills are required.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You hear they found that ship?”

  “I was asleep all afternoon.”

  “That tanker. The one that went missing? Showed up off Cape Scott, drifting. Nobody on board. One lifeboat launched.”

  She did remember the story. Her father was convinced it had been hijacked by terrorists and was carrying radioactive waste. “That was months ago.”

  “Yep. In the Atlantic. Now it shows up over here. Same name, Star of Whatever. That place in Russia I can’t say. Somewhere Star. Same ship. Coast guard wanted the launch out to help look for the lifeboat but the launch is stuck down in McNeill. So. Yours truly.”

  He waited in the doorway. The minute that was supposedly all he had was already long past, but he wasn’t quite willing to go. It was as if they both knew there was something else to talk about but neither wanted to start.

  “What happened to that mask?” Goose asked.

  He thumbed through the wall. “It’s on my couch. I left it in the car yesterday. I guess we’ll look into it when things, you know. Power down a little.”

  But Goose wasn’t afraid to think about it anymore. After all, she was the only one who knew, for sure, that Jennifer Knox had walked out of a locked cell in the back of the station; that Jennifer had gone paddling away from the land, alone, not looking back; that her coat had gone missing from her house before it burned and then h
ad been found covering the marooned boy.

  “It’s a whale, isn’t it. Orca.”

  “The mask?”

  “Yeah.”

  After a long pause, he pressed his lips together, ruefully, and bobbed his head.

  “Yup,” he said.

  “You saw the mark,” she said. “On the beach. Didn’t you?” She traced the shape in the air with her palm, the wide shallow scoop, the impression of a massive body left like God’s fingerprint in the pebbles. “Didn’t you?”

  He broke away from her look and glanced at the clock. “I got to run.”

  • • •

  She was expecting the phone to keep her busy. But it was a quiet morning, as quiet as if the fog were dissipating slowly to expose another uneventful Alice day.

  The town, she thought, was holding its breath.

  • • •

  Jonas was supposed to take over the desk at two. She wasn’t surprised when he didn’t show up, given where he’d said he was going. She was glad of the chance to make up for some of the extra time he’d done yesterday.

  She’d have done a couple of patrols just for a change of scene, but she didn’t have a radio, so she sat by the desk. There were a few calls, routine things. The guy from the market came by in person to ask whether there’d been problems on the highway. One of his deliveries hadn’t come in and he couldn’t get hold of the driver.

  Every half hour or so she tried the computer. Most of the time she got the same result, the two words chasing each other across the screen in a dizzy blur. Sometimes nothing came up at all, as if the monitor were fried.

  She didn’t touch the TV. She didn’t call anyone. The outside world didn’t have anything to tell her; the fog was like a reminder of that. Vous êtes ici.

  • • •

  One of the officers from Hardy arrived late in the afternoon to take over. Lots of problems on the roads, he confirmed. Some big pile-up a hundred kilometers down the island highway, near Sayward, black ice on the steep climb there. They’d had to close the road.

  “We’re cut off,” he said, enthusiastically.

  The remnant of the morning’s fog was now no more than the usual forest-hugging pencil-colored cloud, but darkness was coming in its place.