Nod (25 page)

I emptied it. Two items foregrounded themselves immediately: a folding knife and the flare gun I’d used to signal the Ragnarok the night before. A knife to cut the rope that bound Zoe’s ankle and the flare gun to hopefully scare the shit out of the Grimm brothers and their wicked witch. I reloaded as silently as I could, though every creak of my bones and click of the gun’s cartridge holder seemed amplified by the wet air.

As the day warmed, the fog was beginning to melt like cotton candy in the mouth. Already wispy, it would soon be gone completely along with whatever cover it had offered. There was no time to lose.

I pointed the gun at the underbrush behind Zoe where Charles’ people had disappeared, closed my eyes, and squeezed the trigger. The effect was immediate and impressive. A loud whoosh was instantly followed by a neon pink explosion as the flare hit the ground and burst into fizzling chemical fire, sending up plumes of white, acrid smoke. Screams rang out as I sprinted forward. Falling literally at Zoe’s feet, knife in hand, I sawed frantically at the nylon cord that bound her thin ankle. It wasn’t easy: the knife was sharp but not serrated—unsuited for this kind of task.

Then the severed rope fell to the ground, and she was free. I leapt to my feet, took her hand, and we sprinted out of the clearing just as her erstwhile captors entered it, Gytrash at their rear, urging them on.

As we ran, the fog continued to thin. We were nearing the edge of the woods and the grass playing fields that lay beyond them, perhaps a half kilometre from Lagoon Drive. From there, it was only a couple of blocks further to Tanya’s and my old apartment, the only place I could conjure up as a possible destination.

But then, directly ahead of us, I saw something I’ll never forget.

Charles’ Thousand, swarming over an old stone bridge on the west side of Lost Lagoon, straight toward us. Staves in hand, they were spreading out into a large playing field in preparation for their march into the woods. And their heads, all of them, were painted bright yellow.

From this distance they didn’t seem to have faces. Rather, their bodies appeared to be topped by sticky, shiny blobs. Lollipop soldiers. Here and there among them were children from the park tethered to ropes. Bait, like Zoe had been.

We were still just inside the woods’ shadow, so they couldn’t see us yet, but there was no way we were going to be able to pass through that yellow line, and there was nothing behind us but woods, more woods, and then the churning ocean. I thought of trying to make it back to the dinghy, but I had no idea of what path to take, never mind that I was out of flares and Tyler was almost certainly dead. And so, no sooner had Zoe and I leapt out of one frying pan than we landed splat in the centre of another.

The crowd parted and a figure came forward over the crest of the bridge. There was no mistaking the Admiral of the Blue, even at that distance: his face and clothing were the same blazing hue as the summer sky. He spread his arms wide, shouting orders as his Thousand spread left and right, their line widening. Then Charles did something unexpected. He stopped his shouting and stared.

Straight at Zoe and me.

There was no way he could have seen us, wrapped as we were in shadow and the last wisps of the morning’s fog—but somehow he must have sensed that somebody was out there watching him. And that feeling stopped him dead in his tracks. I was too far away to see the expression on his face, to see anything but a mad slash of blue. Still, I braced myself, waiting for him to cry out and send death and destruction flying in our direction.

But that’s not what happened.

Instead, Charles’ head snapped around to look back over the bridge he’d just crossed.

Then I heard a new sound—the unmistakable roar of car engines, so strange and so familiar. It could only mean one thing: London’s Cat Sleepers had arrived.

Shots rang out and the Thousand began to force their way back across the bridge, urged on by Charles’ frantic figure. Taking advantage of the pandemonium on the field, Zoe and I ran north around Lost Lagoon. The hard-packed gravel path was abandoned, and within a couple of minutes we were on the city side and circling back toward what was by now the scene of a pitched battle.

London’s people had arrived on the scene in a dozen SUVs, their path through downtown’s obstacle course having been blazed by a pair of snowploughs that now sat abandoned on the side of the street. The SUVs were lined up at the edge of the park, with the Cat Sleepers in their white T-shirts and khakis crouched behind the vehicles’ opened doors, sniping at the Awakened as they advanced. There were no more than fifty or sixty of them, but they were all armed to the teeth, so it was far from a fair battle. In fact, it was shaping up to be a massacre. You could almost keep count as the bodies fell one after another: 1000, 999, 998, 997…

Then another strange-familiar sound. I looked up and saw a helicopter descending from the now clear sky. It hovered twenty feet above the ground as riflemen shot casually and precisely down into Charles’ Rabbit Hunters. The Awakened were now officially fucked. They ran at the conglomeration of SUVs in waves of ten or twenty, only to be mowed down each time they tried. The bodies of perhaps two hundred of them already littered the path.

‘At the same time! Attack them at the same time!!’ Charles screamed from the rear.

The remaining Awakened hurled themselves at the row of SUVs, a wave of yellow. The Cat Sleepers held their positions, though, and increased the tempo of their firing as the helicopter hovered over the scene.

Charles watched the battle unfold, clenching and unclenching his hands. Then he looked up once more. This time he saw us. A look of intense hatred possessed his features. Unable to form words, he howled, a crazed sound that seemed to intensify the fighting like lightning seems to intensify a rain storm.

By now, a few of the Awakened had reached the nearest SUV and rammed their staves through the open windows into the bodies of shooters who’d paused to reload. Shaken, the other Cat Sleepers abandoned their positions and began to fire on the run, seeking cover behind trees and other vehicles parked on the street. The line was broken, but Charles’ people were still falling by the dozen as the gunmen in the helicopter kept firing.

* * *

And so Zoe and I made our way home. That’s what you do when you run out of options: you go home. Ask a failed college student or a new mother whose partner disappears. Ask the parolee and the schizophrenic. No matter what home is. Even if home is a false hope. You just pick yourself up and go there. Then you sit down and wait to see what happens next.

The old apartment building was in no better or worse shape than any other. Broken glass outside and the sweet smell of decomposition within. We climbed the dark stairs then locked ourselves inside the apartment, which looked much the same as it had ever done, despite having been looted in a desultory fashion during our absence.

I went out on the balcony. There wasn’t much to see, though there was plenty to hear. Shots and screams echoed back and forth through the trees, rising and falling like the ocean’s swell. I went back inside.

There was no radio to turn on to drown out the sounds. All I could do was close the balcony doors and the windows and wait for it to be over.

It was hard to remain awake. My eyes burned with everything I’d seen and done. I played a game of hide and seek with Zoe and the grizzly; I pinched myself and bit my lips, just as Tanya had done two weeks earlier.

* * *

In the late afternoon, I put Zoe to bed, closing the blinds in the bedroom as tightly as I could, then sat on the couch in the living room thinking about what to do next. If he’d survived the rout in the park, Charles would be coming after us very soon, and this would be the first place he’d look.

The time was drawing very near when the Awakened would no longer present any sort of threat to Zoe and she would be free to go—and I would be free to sleep. But what to do in the interim?

There was no way to fortify the ground level which was, typically for Vancouver, made mostly of glass. So I did the only thing I could think of and spent the night throwing furniture down the stairwell’s gullet. It felt a lot like madness, but an enjoyable madness. I went down to the second floor and began to drag chairs, tables, exercise bikes, cappuccino machines, and even some of the lighter couches out of the apartments and down the hall in order to pitch them into that black hole. I worked like a devil in the sweltering darkness, laughing to myself, at myself, stripped to the waist and dripping with sweat. It was about the best time I’d had since the world ended. My body felt wonderfully used and my mind was clear to the point of transparency.

When the stairwell was filled to the second level, I climbed up and jumped up and down on that contortion of
stuff
, cramming it as tightly as I could. Then I climbed up to the third floor and repeated the process. Now, however, I began to approach my task as a kind of jigsaw puzzle, figuring out how best to jam this chair against that chest of drawers or this guitar into that microwave oven. I imagined Charles’ people trying to untangle the mess and laughed some more.

By the time the sun rose, I’d filled the stairwell up to the fourth floor. Sliding down the nearest wall, my muscles burning, I laughed and cried. Nod was almost over. My final stand had begun.

A consumptive cough, indicating the approach of death.

As the next day began, the skyscrapers began to direct their long shadows toward the park, pointing accusingly toward the wreckage of the Rabbit Hunt. The streets were utterly quiet, except for the familiar whoomph of herons landing and taking off from the cedars across the way. They’d launch themselves and disappear, but the bough they’d abandoned would bounce up and down in slow motion for a good thirty seconds longer.

The way I saw it, the longest Zoe and I would have to survive up here would be a week before the remaining Awakened were either dead or completely incapacitated. In the meantime, I was pretty sure I could scavenge enough food from the building to keep us going. In fact, I’d already managed to secure a few cans of lonelyhearts food: kippers, asparagus, and water chestnuts. Yellow label stuff mostly. Even demented foragers had their standards.

In order to last the week, though, the main thing we’d need would be water, and I had a theory that I was eager to try out. When I envisioned the building’s water supply, I pictured an incredibly intricate three dimensional grid—a completely sealed unit. But it couldn’t be a perfect grid: there had to be slopes and sags. And if this was so, there would be water trapped in the lines at various points; flat runs of copper behind walls and inside ceilings that previous scavengers would almost certainly have missed.

With this in mind, I found a hacksaw and set to work kicking in the drywall behind sinks, tubs, and toilets. I’d hack through copper tubing and direct the severed ends toward a plastic bucket I’d found. And it worked. Not a lot came out, just a trickle here and a trickle there, but by noon I had almost two litres of metallic-tasting but clean water for Zoe and me to drink. I felt like the most resourceful guy in Vancouver and—given the nature of the competition—I probably was.

* * *

Back in the apartment we ate lunch: cold mushroom soup with crackers and stale water. It was a silent meal, needless to say. Zoe fed the grizzly crackers (it was a messy eater) with her typical attention and contentment.

As I watched her, I wondered what would become of these children when we were gone. Would they grow up into mute adults and, in turn, have mute babies of their own? If I’m to be honest, part of me recoiled slightly at the thought of a planet populated by Zoe’s kind. The thought of a universally-benign species taking over the planetary reins seemed like a kind of cheat, seemed pointless. What about struggle? What about confusion and turmoil? All those tried and true character builders? What about words?

But if I’m forced to hazard a guess, Zoe and her friends are probably just some sort of next step in evolution. In that case, I’m one of the throwbacks and my opinion doesn’t count any more than that of a Neanderthal surveyed about the potential of stone wheels or harnessed fire. Ug.

After we finished our lunch, I went out on the balcony and saw, as I’d expected, Charles.

He was standing on the sidewalk glaring up at me. Around him were gathered what was probably the last ten of his yellow-faced Thousand. Zoe appeared beside me, her chubby hands clutching the iron rails of the balcony like the world’s tiniest jailbird.

Watching Charles’ trembling face turned up at me, I thought of something my father had said a few years back about his cancer diagnosis and the anticlimactic tumour that had failed to kill him. He said the worst thing about having cancer was that nothing really changed. You were still you, even in the middle of that potentially-life-ending drama. The phone calls and tinfoil-wrapped lasagnes lasted for a few days or a week, then they stopped and you were just lumped with cancer like you were lumped with a job or a mortgage or a second-rate marriage. That, he felt, was the disease’s most terrible secret: not the suffering it prompted, not the death it dealt in, but its ultimate mundanity. Well, that afternoon Charles looked as though his body housed a cancer too phlegmatic to finish him off. And he looked as though he’d been trying to scratch the cancer out of himself with his fingernails for decades. Nod was nothing new to Charles—it was an old and bitter dream. In the end, it wasn’t some sort of monster that stared silently up at me until night fell and he crept away, but an ordinary man. And that was the most terrifying thing I ever saw in Nod: humanity.