by Trevor Zaple
He vaguely noticed the beginning of overgrowth, especially amongst the weeds along the sides of the roads. With no road crews to maintain anything, the purple loosestrife was running riot, choking out competitive life with a brutal efficiency that humans could only dream of. In the towns, gardens planted in the spring were now growing out into the lawns; those lawns, where not in life-and-death warfare with the garden weeds, were nearing two feet in height. Richard would blearily eye these wild growths of grass, convinced that there were things lurking in them with malicious intent. Somewhere along the line he had uncovered a hunting rifle and it was now slung over his shoulder; the butt of the rifle often interfered with the side of his knapsack but he was quite often too drunk to care. Once he started carrying the rifle he had begun to feel better. There was little chance of him ever hitting anything with it (he was too gone to aim properly, for one) but the very fact of its existence served as a kind of balm to his paranoia.
The wind would rustle through these sprawling growths and shuffle the stalks of grass and weeds together in a strange, sibilant speech; Richard’s soaked brain would interpret it as speech and he would often direct his off-kilter rants at it. Sometimes it seemed to him as though that rushing, whispering wind were telling the most profound jokes he’d ever encountered, and he would collapse into the dirt and dust and laugh until he was hoarse. At other times he would almost catch a sort of deep philosophical meaning to it, and he would crouch near a tree to see if the wind would see fit to coalesce itself into a sermon. It never would, although he sometimes would wait until he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.
As he walked he began to forget, and in this the constant drinking did not help. He would go days without thinking of the precise names of things: the names of roads, towns, places in the greater world, people he had known. He remembered his mother, elderly and infirm, but only as a pattern of sense impressions and mental tonal recordings. His coworkers were shadows to him, except for Samantha. Her body haunted his nights and her sharp accusations haunted the parts of the day that he could not drink away. He would sometimes retrieve the letter she had written from the front pocket of the knapsack and read it, the deep creases that had been folded into it threatening to tear the whole thing into tiny pieces. He would mouth the words as he read them, each recrimination dancing on his tongue and lips and then leaping down the throat to be swallowed. After a time he did not even need the letter; he knew what was written on that fading scrap of note paper better than he knew his own name. He continued to take it out though; in a world as meaningless as then one in which he dwelled, his distressed mental process would cling to as many traditions as it could.
He followed a general path heading west, although the direction he took on any given day would vary. By the time he wandered north enough to be in the outskirts of Hamilton, it was mid-September. The temperature had dropped considerably from the convection oven that had been the late summer, and Richard had been forced to scavenge a heavy winter coat from a nameless outdoor supply store; it was not quite cold enough for the thickness of coat he had chosen, and so he found himself dragging along during the high parts of the afternoon, panting and sweating by the end of his daily exertions. As the days wore on and the nights grew colder, he would feel the chill prickle his skin when he peeled the coat off. It did not matter what sort of shelter he chose, he could feel the sweat drying into a clammy sheen against his skin, and the cold would seem to seep right into his bone marrow. It would only take several nips of his now half-empty vodka bottle to ward the chill off each night, however. By that time, the wine was strictly a daytime fuel, and the gin bottle had been discarded long ago. His nights, as he skirted around Hamilton’s southern edge, belonged to a fermented potato mistress whose touch was as acrid as Samantha’s tongue.
In early October, in a town whose broken blue sign denoted it as Alberton, he caught a cold. At first he believed that sleeping warm would help him get over it quickly. He found a sleeping bag in the basement of an old yellow house and drank extra rations of vodka to enhance the warmness. It didn’t help, of course, and within two days he was running a potent fever complete with wracking chills and a delirium that his alcohol-soaked fantasies bowed away from. In one feverish dream, slumbering deep in the basement of that dirt-washed yellow-brick house, he found himself walking through the streets of a city somewhat similar to the one he’d fled from. This dream city was boarded up: every single building that he passed was covered in hastily mounted plywood and particle board. There was something eerie, foreboding about it, but in Richard’s unkempt dreams he could not make any sense of it. It felt somewhat like the plague, but he saw no corpses; he in fact saw no bodies of any sort, living or dead, until he came to a small, bleak parkette across the street from a gas station.
The parkette was simply a cement patch with two basketball nets growing out of it, the kind that Richard had seen in countless videos where the intent was to denote a deep-urban setting. This square of tarmac was occupied by four adolescent males in clothing that Richard would have labelled as “skater” if he were in his right mind. They were certainly in possession of skateboards; their decks lay propped up against a stretch of chain-link fence. They were busy bouncing a small ball, whose rebounding force seemed greater than was physically possible. It would bounce nearly a mile into the sky and then come plummeting back, and the teens would gabble and make bets on who the incoming ball would strike.
Richard looked across the street to the gas station and saw that one of the pumps was on fire. Alarmed, he turned back to the teens and discovered that they had discovered his presence. They were standing in a line, observing him with sly, creepy grins quivering on their faces. One of them, a sharp-faced whippet of perhaps seventeen, stepped forward and cocked his arm back behind his head.
“Hey, man!” the kid shouted. “Look out!”
“The gas station’s on fire!” Richard shouted, trying to warn them. There was some fear of exploding gasoline in his dream, something he couldn’t quite grasp, but it seemed imperative to warn them.
“You better duck, then!” the kid screamed and shot his arm forward. The ball flew out of the kid’s hand at an air-searing speed and narrowly missed Richard’s head by an inch. Richard spun around to try to avoid it and fell. He watched the ball slam into the burning gas pump, saw the white flare burst out from it, and then he woke up.
He awoke to a clear head and a raging case of the DTs. He reached for his vodka bottle and realized that it was empty. He cursed and threw it against the basement wall; it shattered and he winced back from the volume of the sound. He writhed in his sleeping bag, feeling tiny inch worms mill about just beneath his skin. He itched abominably, both from the alcohol withdrawl and from three months of enforced filthiness. He checked his pack frantically and discovered that he had drunk the last of his wine as well.
He tried to explore the house, to see if there were any hidden bottles of hootch that he could guzzle to relieve his tremors. His body was weak, still overly warm, and stuffed with mucous, and he gave up after searching through the living room and the kitchen. Crawling back into his sleeping bag, he tried to sleep away as much of the tremors as he could. When he could not sleep he writhed, feeling like a human twister. He randomly remembered a junkie he had seen kicking unconsciously against the wall of an indoor ATM once in Toronto; the association his mind made was quite apt.
When he did sleep, his sleep was broken, uneasy, and full of grim dreams. He would never remember any of the details of the dreams upon waking, but he would remember the deep sense of distrust they instilled in him. He would twist and mutter in his sleep, bouncing in and out of REM sleep like a heart attack. The dreams exhausted him more than the alcohol withdrawal did, he decided after two mostly sleepless nights.
A week passed and the tremors grew less. He found himself able to get out of his sleeping bag for extended periods, and eat more than a bare can of tuna during the day. The basement was no longer his jail, although he felt
that the house was trying to trap him in at times. The great autumn storms buffeted the house in mid-October and he watched them smash against the window with apprehension. If one of the windows broke, he would have had no way of fixing it, but it proved to be a meaningless concern. The windows had been built to a quality standard, and the driving rains of the spasms preceding winter were of no concern to them. By the end of the storm he was feeling better than he had since the plague hit the world.
He entered the upstairs bathroom (a neat, tidy little room designed with a classy country décor in mind) and looked himself in the mirror. He hadn’t seen a reflection of himself in months, and he was shocked by what stared back at him from the glass. He was gaunt, his cheekbones beginning to sink in. His eyes were ringed in black and looked like sunken holes. They burned with a weird light that Richard found himself not caring for. His beard was bushy and knotted, and caked with food and filth. The exposed skin of his face was slathered with road dust and assorted dirts.
He cleaned himself up as best he could. The power had gone out at some point since he’d left the burning city, but there was still water in the toilet tank and he found a razor in one of the bathroom’s drawers. He trimmed his beard back with a pair of kitchen scissors and then use the razor to cut the rest down to the skin. His face was littered with small, bloody cuts, but he felt cleaner, and clearer, than he had since he’d begun drinking. He smiled shakily to himself in the mirror, still remarking at how generally unhealthy he looked.
He considered staying for the winter in the yellow house but decided not to when he did a quick calculation on his food stores. He would need to scavenge many of the nearby farms throughout the winter in order to stave off starvation, and he decided that it was something he would rather not do. He found a road map of the province in a room that seemed to be an office. After some deliberation as to how far he’d come from his starting place, he reckoned that he was only a day’s travel or so from the city of Brantford. He could make it, find good shelter, and be settled in with a large store of food before the snow buried him in. He packed his belongings that night and in the morning set out on the road again.
By mid-afternoon of that day he began to see dark clouds gathering quickly overhead. He cursed at his luck but he was already too far along to go back. As night fell he was nowhere near anything that resembled a city and a snap blizzard was setting in overhead. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen it snow hard near the end of October and decided that it had been a few years. He found shelter in a (thankfully empty) barn and in the morning set out again, his feet crunching against the thin layer of snow that had stayed behind from the previous night’s storm. He trudged along through it and had still not found anything urban by the time the sun began to dip down into the west again. The snow kicked up again around twilight, and the storm became a full raging blast before Richard realized that the only houses along this stretch of rural road had collapsed in on themselves at some point. Bereft of shelter, he bundled his coat around him, suddenly glad for its thickness, and powered on through the strengthening snow. He stumbled along for three hours, putting up a heroic effort against the travails of the whipping, stinging wind.
Nearing collapse, he put his arms out to try to steady himself and ran into something large and hard. Unable to see, he ran his hands along the wet, numbing snow and tried to make sense of what he was feeling. He came to a framed piece of glass and realized that it was a car. He excitedly cleared it off as best he could without really being able to see; the snow obscured all light. He found a door handle and pulled at it mightily. He despaired that it was locked and then wrenched it open with a massive pull. Cackling to himself, he dove into the car and pulled the door shut behind him. Safe from the ravages of the blizzard blowing it’s deadly chill around outside, he curled up into his belongings and went to sleep.
He awoke in the morning and saw that he had spent the night with someone; a dead body slumped in the driver’s seat, mercifully hidden from view. The corpses arm sprawled out across the center console, grey and bloated, which was enough for Richard. He scrambled out of the car and into the bright, hot morning light. The snow was melting quickly, caught under the hot glare of a resurgent sun, and Richard was finally able to look around and get his bearings. He was at a four-way intersection, surrounded by mostly empty fields. Directly ahead there was a low building jutting out of an old farmhouse. Beyond it, heading further along the road directly in front of Richard, there appeared to be increasingly heavier growth in buildings. He clapped his hands and danced in glee.
He looked at the old farmhouse and saw that the short extension (that looked very much like a country market building) was painted a faded yellow, except for a wide patch that was painted in very fresh-looking pure white paint. He considered this for a while, and then realized something else that was odd about the intersection. There were street lights strung up here, although it had taken Richard a while to recognize it, since each one of the lights was covered tightly with a black garbage bag. He tried to decipher the meaning of this and failed. Shrugging, he put a jaunt into his step and walked on into the city.
TWO
The sights he took in did not get any more normal as he traversed further into the little city. If anything, they became decisively odder.
As he walked down the street into the town proper, he saw that the fresh white paint and the trash bags were not an outlier. The very next building on his left, after the maybe-maybe not farmer’s market was what looked for all the world like a U-Haul depot; the trucks looked exactly like U-Haul trucks, but the logos and lettering had been painted over with that pure, industrial white paint. He regarded it for some time, trying to catch ahold of his wandering, circular thoughts, but in the end he couldn’t figure it out. On the other side of the street were well-appointed, middle class houses with large yards, set well back from the road. They imparted no information at all.
When he came to the next set of buildings, a motel and a gas station by the looks of them, he realized that everything was treated in the same fashion. The building was obviously a motel – it was a long, single story plaza with a row of identical doors – but the sign at the entrance to the plaza’s parking lot was painted over in white. Peering into the plaza, he saw that the numbers had been removed from the doors. The gas station was an Esso branded one; he could tell by the colour scheme, with that red roof and those blue pumps. The name of the brand had been obscured, though, as had the digital display (although it would have been dark anyway) and the wording on the signs on and around the pump had been obscured as well.
He walked down the road for an hour and found that things were the same. Every building, every street sign, every free-standing billboard were covered over with obliterating white. By the time he saw the water tower rise up ahead of him he had gotten over the novelty of it. It was strange – creepy even – but he found that he couldn’t marvel over every instance of it past a certain point. Once he walked far enough that he could clearly see the water tower, he saw without surprise that the logo that had been painted on it (Brantford – The Telephone City) had been done away with as well.
The street stretched along in a semi-rural fashion for much longer than Richard had originally thought that it would. If not for the fact that it was slightly denser, he would have sworn that he was still passing through one of the nameless small towns he’d stumbled through in the course of his wild, drunken ramble. The grey clouds were gathering overhead again, the sweet morning respite already over. He eyed them nervously, knowing that he would have to find shelter before too long. He was loathe to settle into any of the buildings that lined the wide spaces on either side of the road. The paint that covered every sign, notice, and number had not yet gathered the streaks of dirt that were carried on the wanton wind. To Richard, this meant that they would have had to have been applied rather recently, which meant that the people that had done it were likely still around, somewhere. The thought filled him with a strange mixture of e
xcitement and trepidation, but in the end he had no wish to meet anyone. He had never been a shy man – a career in retail would never have worked otherwise – but after shaking off his need to be constantly drunk he had begun to feel intensely shy.
He came to a major intersection at last, the first in an hour of walking that had street lights. Rather, the first that he assumed had street lights; these ones, like the ones before them, were tightly covered with wind-whipped garbage bags. Just past this intersection was a small sign that Richard was sure would have at one time told him the distance to the city. Now it told him nothing. Beyond the sign, to the right of the road, a demolished store lay dusted with snow. Strange, kitschy sculptures and plain wooden furniture were strewn in the parking lot in front of it, and littered amongst them were the splintered remnants of what appeared to be children’s playground equipment. A sense of frustration began to well up from within him. He watched the clouds and the need to find shelter intensified within him. There were long shadows creeping across the road.
An hour later the temperature had dropped significantly and he was beginning to grown fearful of being caught outdoors in the inclement weather. He felt as though he had been walking for years and he still had not found anywhere that he considered suitable. The buildings that he had passed had been industrial in nature; small factories, outlet stores, and material depots. There had been houses, but for some reason that he could not quite decipher he had been unwilling to take up residence in any of them. He felt oppressed, closed in upon; the oncoming storm in conjunction with the weird, oddly frightening lack of signs and symbols combined to cause a sharp rise in panic within him. He sped up the further he walked, hoping that his feet would carry him to safety faster if he eased into a run.