The Longest Night

by K. M. Gibson

  All was silent, all was dark.

  She woke with a start. She stared at her horn for a moment, trying to figure out where she was and why her steering wheel was there too. The airbag had deflated over her thighs. There was blood on it.

  She sat up slowly, hissing. She felt as if someone had taken her apart then put her back together wrong. When she caught sight of the rest of the car, she froze. The windshield was completely cracked, opaque. A large indent in the middle of the car dwarfed the cab – her head grazed the top, even hunched over.

  “Oh, my God,” she muttered. Again. And again. She looked around her car to find the other windows were in similar condition and the doors were impacted.

  Need to get out. She pivoted in her seat to reach her seat belt. When she went to unlock it the material ripped away from the base without effort and hung limp in her hands. She tried the door. It was jammed.

  After a few agonizing minutes of fighting to open it, mild hysterics took over. Why won’t you open? she thought. Just open for me, please. You won’t believe the day I’m having.

  She screamed and pounded her fist against the broken window. An impression of her hand remained in the centre, pushed out like a wall of silly putty. She wriggled her way out of her compressed seat, placed her boots against the window, drew back her legs, and kicked. Part of the window ripped away from the sides, and when she kicked again, the entire thing crumpled and fell away. Cold air and dark grey light spilled into the car. She heard a muffled cry. Carefully, she pulled herself through the window. When she was halfway through, she propped her arms up on the dented hood. Then she saw the highway.

  Some trees in the distance were still standing, grave markers for all the fallen ones. Cars littered the ditches, caught in giant holes torn into the road; some people were trying to help others out of their cars while some screamed out of injury or of finding a dead loved one somewhere in the wreckage.

  Catherine was prone to hyperventilation from crying when she was younger. She used to cry so often that she needed an inhaler for emergencies. Her mother was there to coach her through it as well. Breathe deep, she would say. In, out, in, out, in – in – in, ouuut.

  Thoughts needed collecting. There was an earthquake. I was in the earthquake. I was on the highway because I was going to see Gran. She’s sick. Lots of people are sick. He said I might not get through.

  A man close to her was climbing over a tree trunk that had a crushed another car beneath it. She pulled herself out of her car and quickly made her way to him.

  They both stopped abruptly, but neither spoke, just shared limp, shocked expressions that everyone wore. Then—

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “My car. My head hurts.”

  “You must have hit your head in the accident.”

  In the accident. There was an accident. This is an accident.

  “Are they coming?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The police, highway patrol, ambulance—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you call?”

  “Cell phones don’t work.”

  “Why?”

  “Towers must have been knocked down.”

  Catherine could feel the burn in her nose but tried desperately to stop it. Never in front of strangers, not even now. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “I think everyone’s heading to Fort McMurray. It’s our best bet.”

  Everything was in shades of grey: the snow and debris slosh, the broken road, the trees lying across it, the shadows of people wandering slowly up the highway, back in the direction they had run from.

  The man was just as disoriented as Catherine, for when she simply stood silently, trying to stem her crying, he wandered around her and continued shuffling up the torn highway, no comfort to give.

  She turned back to her car. The frame was cracked and crumpled, severely dented at the roof where the tree still lay, the windows like snow from poor reception. A corpse beyond recognition. She approached and climbed through the open window, squeezing herself under the dent in the roof and over to the glove compartment box. She took out her papers from inside, then shimmied back out of the car. She stumbled over to the back to find the trunk in even worse condition than the rest of the car – the sides of the lid had been thrust upwards from the blow, leaving a gap wide enough for Catherine to fit her arm through. With a careful hand, she reached inside and caught the corner of her overnight bag. She had clothes and food in the pack (which had become needs instead of luxuries now) – Oh, God, this is happening – and she pulled it out.

  She looked between the people grieving amongst the wreckage and the those walking north. She had no idea what to do. Somehow her feet made the decision for her, and she left her car behind with the rest of the mess. Silence reigned in the throng. Too much to process. This couldn’t be true. This couldn’t happen to them. First the virus, then this. These sorts of things only happened in the news, in places so far off they could hardly be imagined. Eventually a slow chorus rose, blathering nonsense with tears. A lone car drove by in the ditch and a dozen people ran after it, screaming. The driver went slow, but he still left them behind just as quickly.

  As evening set in the grey floated away, leaving clear skies behind. In the west was a sky of red and gold, like glowing flame, and in the east was a canvas of blue and black, calm, cold, entrenching. A few stars started to shine. A terrible and beautiful sight. War between night and day. Tears filled her eyes and the colours blended together.

  The night was winning.

  She tried to pick up her pace, but she knew it wouldn’t make the least bit of difference. The sun started to dip down below the horizon again. In her childhood, she couldn’t go anywhere without a lamp lighting the way. Now she was left in complete darkness. She didn’t know things could get that dark.

  She could see The Cliff through the thick of trees, and she sighed in relief. It was a natural buffer between her and anything that could possibly harm her, real or otherwise.

  But getting to the bottom was another issue altogether. The memory of her first fall was as vivid as if it had happened a day ago. She had a permanent limp now, and whenever seasons changed, her knee ached and demanded rest. She was keen not to make the same mistake again, or she was sure to die this time.

  She slipped the doe off her shoulder and let it drop down the slope. The limbs flopped where the bones had snapped while the rest of the corpse remained stiff. Finally the doe connected with the bottom in a pulp, and Catherine situated her pack and shotgun properly to climb down.

  At the base, she found a suitable spot to camp. Within minutes she had collected enough twigs to make a fire. She pulled a sheet of newspaper from her sack for kindling. One article remained visible. It read:

  Prime Minister to Meet With International Environmental Ministers Regarding SAVS-1

  She crumpled the paper into a ball and stuck it underneath her pyramid of sticks. Next she retrieved one of the lighters to start a fire. It was gaudy, an unnatural sort of purple with an unnatural sort of flower painted on it. For how precious it was, it may as well have been encrusted with diamonds.

  Night was so dark that it was pitch black not five feet away from the fire, even once it started to burn brightly. Too dark to treat the doe. For how chilly it was outside, she was sure the meat would be preserved another night, and took to her rations instead. Huddled close to the flames, she ate slowly, trying to make it last. Her stomach was a neglectful master and her mouth a dog on a long leash; within minutes her dinner was gone. Finding food was becoming harder and harder, and she had to travel out farther from the cabin each time to find more. She knew she would have to relocate soon, and she worried over it.

  She unrolled her blanket and lay back by her tent and the fire, watching the stars flicker. The world had eradicated its infestation of life, and most of the stars in the sky had also long been extinguished like Earth, yet light continued to travel to her distant planet,
with so few to witness it. Did life exist on planets near those faraway stars? Would they ever know of what happened here? No. If she would never know what happened to her own world, no one ever would.

  The universe was so huge that it became insignificant, so expansive that the amount of space and time became incomprehensible and meaningless. A few streaks darted across the pitch black sky, the last of the meteor shower that had been going on for the past few nights. She watched as the meteorites made small scratches on the heavens, only to be swallowed whole by the sky. She fell asleep watching each shooting star, thinking of how beautiful they once were.

  “Humans were designed to destroy themselves,” Catherine’s professor declared in a firm and honest voice in front of the lecture hall. “It’s a simple fact that has perpetuated itself in cycles throughout history. Like a forest was designed to burn to the ground, so that its seeds might grow something new.”

  She was watching his every move, as if she would garner more knowledge from him that way. He was a very interesting man, who shared an insight that went further than facts. Unlike some instructors, he didn’t just aim to teach what would be on the tests (which aggravated more students than intrigued them), but taught in order to educate, in order to spark interest and understanding about the world. This usually involved his subjective theories and errant anecdotes about his experience, but Catherine still found herself looking up to him, despite his predisposition to conjecture. The class was supposed to be on Humanistic Psychology but the content he presented was anything but optimistic, and he usually diverted from the syllabus, changing to seemingly unrelated topics on history.

  “The Mongols were one civilization to recognize this trait,” he said as he strolled across the room, looking across the many faces that sat before him. “It usually took form in the cycles of their dynasties; when a new kingdom was established, they rose in power until they claimed the mandate of heaven, but eventually their power declined, and a new band of barbarians would take over and form a new dynasty. Then the cycle would start again.

  “Other examples include the Greeks, the Romans, even all the way to the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans, to be more recent. They were all civilizations on the brink of greatness, each showing their advancement and domination over other civilizations. But obviously, as we’ve seen, they all fell apart. And the higher they went, the harder they fell.

  “In the past few centuries, there hasn’t been such a firm example, other than the British Empire, but they certainly did not fall into oblivion. At least from an objective standpoint. But if we approach it from a bird’s eye view over a time line, the world could be considered one large civilization, and we’re still climbing the cycle. Perhaps we are climbing the cycle towards the mandate still, or perhaps we have overstayed our welcome. The fact is, our civilization is continuing to be more and more advanced, and the more we climb, the greater the damage will be if we fall. When we fall.

  “Perhaps I am far too pessimistic for my own good. But it is an inevitable pattern we have seen through history; great civilizations are made and have a great leader at their pinnacle. Then they decline, slowly but surely. What goes up must come down. Nature.

  “Here is another interesting concept: Let us consider humans from the beginning of time. Their nature, their advancement and innovations. Tell me what you think that was like.”

  Quite a few students stood and walked across the hall to the exit. Once the door shut behind them, the girl sitting next to Catherine stuck up her hand. Black clothes, baggy pants, chains, multicoloured hair. He motioned to her.

  “Probably the same it is now.”

  “Interesting,” he said, a tinge of scepticism in his voice. “Elaborate.”

  “Well, a lot of people in this room would probably want to preach about peaceful tribal society, imagining that life in the past was so much better and free of social construct, but it wasn’t. It was probably like how it is now – like, typically, the man is the provider, the woman is the hearth keeper, and people gather together in communities to make things more comfortable so they don’t have to do so much work. They might not have had the same technology as we do now, but essentially our basic form of society hasn’t progressed very much since we started practising agriculture in 10000 BCE.”

  “Does everyone agree?” he asked, looking up across the blank faces of the class. “Is that all to human history?”

  “No,” a guy said from behind, quite adamantly. “You can’t make such a broad statement as that. You can’t say we haven’t progressed. Humans have changed considerably since then. Politics, ethics, medicine—”

  “But have we?” the girl questioned. “I mean, no matter how much knowledge we gain about our world, all it’s done is increased our population and our uncanny ability to survive in great numbers when we shouldn’t. Think about it,” she said emphatically, turning her body towards him and motioning with her hands. “If the world ended right now, and only two people were left, they could try to change the development of human culture as much as possible, to something more – I dunno, error free, but it would probably end up the same, no matter what. Eventually we’d build civilizations again which would get our ‘mandate of heaven’ or whatever, and then we’d fall apart. It’s just hard-wired into humans to keep going further to destroy themselves, like he said.”

  “You’re still making a pretty broad, ambiguous statement,” the other student countered, shaking his head. “Technology made a considerable change to how humans do live and operate. Lives across the world were altered considerably by the invention of the flushing toilet.” Laughter followed.

  “Yeah, so, something like what I’m saying is poorly supported, toilets and TVs aside. I dunno. I’m thinking along the lines of Atlantis.”

  “Atlantis,” their professor exclaimed, strolling across the floor to the board and sprawling the word over it. “Atlantis is my favourite story.”

  He turned back to the class, shaking the whiteboard marker in his hand excitedly as he smiled to himself. “Atlantis was a place that was very advanced for its time, knowing more in medicine and technology than anyone would have ever hoped to know, but the gods were wary of their advances, and they finally decided to put an end to the civilization. Atlantis was essentially one giant volcano that erupted.”

  He returned to the board, scribbling a sloppy picture of a volcano with stick people standing atop it. “The sheer size of the volcano and its activity caused earthquakes to spread out far out into the ocean, which in turn sent tsunamis storming the island from every direction. So if the lava or the earthquakes didn’t kill them, the water would.”

  The class continued to be silent as they watched him. “This story was purely allegorical on Plato’s part. In fact, Atlantis’s key message might have been that humans always strive to discover more, to advance higher and higher, but doing so will only result in our demise, for the farther you reach, the harder it is to keep your balance.

  “And therefore, class, humans were designed to destroy themselves.”

  2: NOW I AM BECOME DEATH

  “You should read this,” Brittany had told her. “It’s actually very good. My boyfriend got me in to it. I’m not usually in to these kinds of stories, but…I dunno. I thought it was good.”

  “What is it?”

  “A…post-apocalyptic zombie novella.”

  “You’re right, that doesn’t sound like something you’d be in to.”

  “Hey, I’m not a total drag. I’m open-minded.”

  Next Catherine pictured Brittany watching war movies about fire fights and bromance. She was the kind of girl that couldn’t possibly put down her cell phone and who would never dream of going to the corner store for milk without fixing her hair and at least one application of lip gloss. Zombie stories?

  “I promise, Catherine,” Brittany said pleadingly, “it’s actually really good. You’d like it.” In reality, Brittany had no idea if Catherine would like it or not. They’d been acquaintances in high scho
ol, but they were never as close as Brittany seemed to want to believe. But Catherine looked between the little booklet and Brittany’s wide eyes and tight, small smile, and decided to humour her.

  “Okay.”

  So she read it. Every morning as she stood on the platform waiting for the train, she read a little bit of the story at a time. It was different from anything she’d read before. The sentences were blunt and some half-finished, leaving her abandoned, like she was in the story herself. Sharp, harsh imagery and frightening themes held her by the throat. In several instances within the first few pages, she had to stop and look around the platform just to make sure she was standing safe in reality.

  Trees even looked dead. Crooked bones sticking up from the ground like hands trying to claw out of a grave. Everything died and came back.

  Catherine had finished that influential story half a year ago. Brittany wasn’t lying when she said it was very good. That particular passage sprung to mind as she read an article in the morning paper:

  Wood Buffalo National Park Closed To Public: Federal government funding epidemic research in national parks

  She had just started wearing her mask like everyone else. For a few weeks, SAVS-1 was only an issue in Northern Ontario. Cases appeared in their own city and everyone had become plagued with fear. A lot of students stopped coming to her classes, most going back home in other towns, provinces, countries. According to the article, signs of the virus were appearing in the States.

  Passengers began to descend the stairs to the station, and Catherine looked up inconspicuously. She’d formed a habit of only tilting her head enough so that her eyes could just scan the crowd. As usual, at the very end of the line was him. She looked away quickly. Her eyes were on her paper but focused on him as he descended the stairs and strode across the platform.

  He was wearing his usual winter regalia: a long black pea coat, dark grey slacks, and polished black loafers. He carried his briefcase and wore his aged leather gloves. She gnawed her lip and shifted her feet. She still felt embarrassed about the incident with his glove. But he was wearing a mask too. It was an ill confirmation.