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  FRACTURED

  TALES OF THE

  CANADIAN

  POST-APOCALYPSE

  The Exile Book of Anthology Series, Number Nine

  Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Fractured : tales of the Canadian post-apocalypse / edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

  (Exile book of anthology series ; number 9)

  ISBN 978-1-55096-409-7 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55096-412-7 (pdf).--

  ISBN 978-1-55096-410-3 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-55096-411-0 (mobi)

  1. End of the world--Fiction. 2. Science fiction, Canadian (English). 3. Short stories, Canadian (English). 4. Canadian fiction (English)--21st century. I. Moreno-Garcia, Silvia, editor

  PS8323.S3F73 2014 C813'.087620806 C2014-902982-9

  C2014-902983-7

  Copyright © the Authors, 2014

  Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com

  144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein ON N0G 2A0 Canada.

  Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2014. All rights reserved.

  Digital formatting by Melissa Campos Mendivil

  We gratefully acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), the Ontario Arts Council–an agency of the Ontario Government, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation for their support toward our publishing activities.

  Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights – or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: [email protected]

  For my mother

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  NO MAN IS A PROMONTORY

  H.N. Janzen

  PERSISTENCE OF VISION

  Orrin Grey

  ST. MACAIRE’S DOME

  Jean-Louis Trudel

  KALOPSIA

  E. Catherine Tobler

  WHITE NOISE

  Geoff Gander

  EDITED HANSARD 116

  Miriam Oudin

  THE BODY POLITIC

  John Jantunen

  D-DAY

  T.S. Bazelli

  MATTHEW, WAITING

  A.C.Wise

  JENNY OF THE LONG GAUGE

  Michael Matheson

  SNOW ANGELS

  A.M. Dellamonica

  KEEPER OF THE OASIS

  Steve Stanton

  MANITOU-WAPOW

  GMB Chomichuk

  SAYING GOODBYE

  Michael S. Pack

  OF THE DYING LIGHT

  Arun Jiwa

  @SHALESTATE

  David Huebert

  CITY NOISE

  Morgan M. Page

  BROWN WAVE

  Christine Ottoni

  RUPTURES

  Jamie Mason

  RIVER ROAD

  Amanda M.Taylor

  LAST MAN STANDING

  Frank Westcott

  DOG FOR DINNER

  dvsduncan

  MAXIM FUJIYAMA AND OTHER PERSONS

  Claude Lalumière

  AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

  INTRODUCTION

  One of the more interesting apocalyptic movements I’ve readabout is the one spearheaded by a farmer from upstate New York by the name of William Miller. Not because apocalyptic beliefs are anything new – remember Y2K or the supposed Mayan prophecies? – but because the Millerites seemed to gain so much traction back in 1843. When the apocalypse didn’t take place the movement fragmented, an episode that is called the Great Disappointment.

  That’s what makes me smile. The Great Disappointment, a title that seems to imply a desire for an eschatological out-come. Certainly, something in our hearts makes us covet this dark path, for it reappears in fiction over and over again. Admit it. Didn’t the punk fashions of Mad Max tickle your fancy? Katniss lives in a post-apocalyptic (and dystopian) society, but in a burst of irony the books and movies have inspired Hunger Games tie-in makeup. Much of the enjoyment of a zombie video game is not in the fear of the undead, but our trigger-happy fingers that allow us to blow everyone to pieces. The Road isn’t exactly my idea of a party and Oryx and Crake paints a rather depressing picture, but even when you are dealing with murder, mutants, cannibalism or disease, the post-apocalypse is something we eagerly consume because we like to think about our survival.

  By that I don’t mean that we are all hoarding cans of food and ammunition in our homes. But we do like to imagine we can survive a great disaster. There is something hopeful about the post-apocalypse precisely because it is post.

  The post-apocalypse caters to our more selfish fantasies. Wouldn’t the world be more fun if we didn’t have to go to work tomorrow and became vampire hunters instead? Small matters, like our commute, would dissolve into nothing.

  This volume explores the Canadian post-apocalypse. What is it we in Canada fear, desire, worry and fantasize about? Ecological disasters, for one. This was a constant issue in the submissions I read and several of the stories I accepted consider the depletion of natural resources and global warming. Another common concern was the maintenance of Canada as a nation-state, a topic that seemed to be rather odd compared to American post-apocalyptic fiction: it doesn’t seem such a big issue to our southern neighbours. A number of characters in Fractured are marginalized individuals who did not fit comfortably in the pre-apocalypse. Because of this, even though it is the end of Canada as they know it… they feel fine.

  Canada is touted as a polite, even dull, nation. But Fractured is not about our good manners. It is about the cracks and the fragments of a shattered future, and what rises from the rubble. In these tales the Canadian post-apocalypse is frightening, exciting; sometimes it’s even beautiful.

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  April 2014

  NO MAN IS A PROMONTORY

  H.N. Janzen

  Kelowna has changed in the last five years. Back then, this was City Park. When Pennyweight and I snuck in under the protective shroud of darkness this morning, though, the dead trees and bare earth made it hard to think of this place as anything other than what it is now – a graveyard. Heaps of brown earth hastily scraped over the bodies of the fallen fill the void where the grass used to be, and charred bits of bone and teeth litter what used to be a kid’s water park before it was repurposed for disposing of those killed by the fallout. Apart from Pennyweight, I haven’t seen a kid in years. The bio-weapons killed almost all the plants above water, and some people will eat anything. Not Pennyweight and I. We’re the last people in this city, and we have food for two.

  There’s a promontory on the beach, a little rock toe stretched cautiously into the lake. On top of it is a raft made of barrels that some keen individual roped together in an attempt to cross the lake after the bridge went out. Beneath the rusty barrels, huddled together for warmth, Pennyweight and I are scoping the lake. Pennyweight is wearing a man’s medium corduroy suit jacket, the closest we could find to camouflage for a 12-year-old. He looks like a bundle of sticks in fancy dress. I’m wearing my old army uniform; with my gaunt frame and my face paint made from water milfoil, I look like a photograph in National Geographic, something with a title like Woman Soldier at the End of Days. Sometimes it amuses me that we’re both Indian, but different kinds, with Pennyweight coming from across the
lake and my mother having come here from across the ocean.

  Despite our clothes, the seeping moisture always finds its way in, and what heat it can’t take, the cold rocks leach away. The frigid air deadens my sense of smell, but I know that when we are warm in our beds tonight, the scents trapped in our clothes of plant rot and the last glacial run-off before winter will make the room smell like a camping trip. As it stands, all I can smell is Pennyweight’s salty breath.

  It wasn’t always like this. I used to be in the Canadian Armed Forces infantry. I got back from my first tour overseas right before all this began. When I was selected for advanced training, my mother insisted that I come back to Kelowna so that she could throw a party for me. No matter how old I got, I was still a little girl in her eyes. Sometimes, when I have a hard time falling asleep, I wonder if, as I cradled her in my arms that last time, she had finally gazed up at me and seen a woman instead. I doubt it. Even as I stared down at the weak, ephemeral husk she had been at the end, I still felt as though I were looking up at her.

  Across the lake is a dilapidated building on the hill, along with a gigantic wooden “L.” I think it used to be part of a series of signs that said THE BLUFF, but I never really paid attention to it when I had the chance to. I linger on the “L,” combing over the flecks of white paint. Pennyweight is trying hard not to shiver against my arm, but I can feel his shoulder jiggling against my ribs. Rather than pushing him away, my hands clench, steadying the scope.

  I wouldn’t describe myself as a soft-hearted person – I’ve stolen food from a woman giving birth – but Pennyweight had managed to find his way in anyway. Three years ago, I was passing by the Starbucks on the edge of Glenmore, trying to ignore the sweat dripping down the middle of my ribcage, when I came across a scene I’d seen many times before. Two winters had passed since the mass deaths and, by that summer, children had become desirable because they couldn’t fight back. I watched from behind a house with melted siding as a man in his thirties slammed a bat with nails in it into a spindly goblin with skin too small for his bones. The child was beyond wailing tears, but every time the bat came down he made a sharp sigh like air being pumped through bellows. Seeing that the man was occupied, I bent down and picked up a rock, took aim at the man with my gun, then threw the rock at an overturned plastic tub on his other side. The man’s head whipped toward the noise, and my finger twitched. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  I was totally indifferent to the child. All I cared about was reducing my competition for the remaining food, and I’d seen wild children before. They had judged that it was better to starve than to be raped, eaten, or forced to crawl into collapsed buildings in search of food, which, more often than not, seemed to result in a stuck child starving to death. I couldn’t say that I blamed them. As I approached, he folded into himself like a paper airplane but I went to the dead man instead, stripping him of his clothes and belongings. He had brought a snack, a little box of Sun-Maid raisins, which I opened and dumped in my mouth.

  There are always two or three that stick to the bottom, so I lowered the box to scrape them out. Before I had even gotten the box to digging level, the child had sprung up and snatched it from my hands. I went for my gun, then thought better of wasting ammo, and by the time I had taken 10 steps in his direction, he had disappeared. Was it worth following him into his territory and risking injury over two raisins he had probably already eaten? I tied the dead man’s possessions in his jacket, made a bindle with his bat, and started back to the tree house I was living in at the time.

  None of my traps went off that night, or the next. It was on the third day that I heard a squeal. The boy was standing as still as possible, one of his feet stuck through rotted plywood, the other on the dirt. If he tried to pull his foot free, then there was a very good chance that he would lose his balance and fall forward. There was nothing he could do but watch as I approached, gun at the ready.

  “You’re lucky that you’re so light,” I said. “Otherwise, you would have fallen into a pit full of nails and broken glass.”

  He stared at me, taking in the massive knot of scar tissue that I called my left cheek, and my broken nose. I returned his gaze. He seemed to have cleaned up somehow, and whatever swelling his face might have suffered, it had gone down enough for me to tell that he would once have been considered an indigenous person. As I paused to assess him, his cracked lips broke into a tenuous smile, and he pulled something out of the garbage bag he was wearing, then held it out to me. It was a bullet from my gun. He held his other hand out as well, palm outstretched and empty, and after a moment I took the bullet from his hand. His smile widened.

  “I’ll let you out, but don’t come around here again,” I told him, and once I freed him, he ran off.

  As I covered the hole in the board with Gyprock, I considered what had happened. Perhaps he had felt that he had to pay me back. I doubted that he had felt any qualms about retrieving my bullet after what the body it was buried in had done to him. Well, hopefully, he would have enough sense not to test my traps again.

  A week passed, and I forgot about the child. During the second week, though, I came across a cache of ammo and food stowed away in the Rutland Salvation Army, and waited in sight of the entrance for its owner to return. I was there for almost a full day before I heard shrieking not far off. Stalking quietly but slowly, I located the source of the noise one street over. The child was standing beside the body of a woman with a broken, rusty knife stuck in her skull. She had managed to graze his ribs with a bullet before he had finished her off, and she had tiny, bloody handprints on her corpse where he had touched her in order to remove her clothes. Now, his slight, elfin frame was dressed in cargo shorts, and he was struggling with her leather jacket. When he saw me he paused, and then, setting the jacket down, he gathered everything else she had on her.

  “For you,” he said.

  I am snapped out of my reminiscence when I feel a tap from Pennyweight on my forearm, followed by two lines down and one to the left – his left. As I swing my scope down, I feel him tap me three more times, and a glandload of adrenaline trills through my veins. He saw someone.

  Sure enough, as I focus on the old docks near the remains of the bridge, two people are emerging from the shack, both male and in hunting garb. Apart from their years, they look identical. The older one has grey hair streaked brown and a braided beard, while the younger one, around my age, only has a goatee and keeps his hair under a black toque. The young one aims a shotgun at the scenery while his elder approaches the houseboat attached to the dock. Stroking his beard as he goes, he walks up and down the mildew-slicked boards, and when he sees that the boat has no leaks, his coarse face splits into a grin. Tonight, I am sure he is thinking, they will cross the lake. Tonight, they will eat again.

  He turns around to give the younger man the news. When he does, I can see the M21 on his back. Though their clothes are filthy, their guns are clean. I wonder if the older man taught the younger one how to clean a gun. I feel Pennyweight quivering beside me, and then I wonder if the older man ever brought the younger one to the beach. As the older man brings up his rifle to scope out my side of Lake Okanagan, I wonder if, five years ago, they might not have been here before. Maybe they took pictures in front of the sails and got goat cheese scones at the Bean Scene before the younger one went off to play volleyball and the older one read Dean Koontz on a towel with nothing on but shorts and a driftwood necklace. Maybe they dangled their feet in the lake and fed the ducks and maybe, just maybe, the younger one went through the water park.

  But that was a long time ago. The Bean Scene’s been torn up for firewood, the beach is a graveyard, any ducks that made it to winter that first year did not come back the next, and Pennyweight’s parents burned up in that first wave of dead set alight in the old water park.

  Pennyweight buries his face in my shoulder.

  By the time the older man catches the glint off Pennyweight’s scope, I’ve already fired the fir
st shot, and he crumples like a paper doll left out in the rain. As I reload, the younger man falls to his knees and hunches over the body of the older man, pulling it onto his lap and rocking it. His shoulders, wide as a bookcase, shake as he buries his face in the corpse’s chest. He knows I’m out there, but maybe he knows he’ll never get the M21 up in time, or maybe he doesn’t care. I fire the second shot, and he collapses over the older man.

  We don’t know when the plants will come back. Maybe next spring. Maybe next decade. We can last that long provided we adhere to a single rule.

  We have food for two.

  PERSISTENCE OF VISION

  Orrin Grey

  I want you to act like this is all a movie. That’ll make it easier.

  If it was a movie, it would open with darkness. No credits, no titles, just a black screen that you stare into waiting for something to appear, waiting for the darkness to resolve into a picture. Instead, there’s a voice reciting familiar words: “911, what is your emergency?”

  Then another voice; a woman, crying, terrified: “There’s a man in my house. He’s in my bedroom.”

  “Are you in a safe place?”

  “Now he’s in the living room. He’s in whatever room I go into. He’s standing in the corner, pointing at me. He’s talking, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.”

  At this point, you’d get the titles.

  ◄ ►

  It wasn’t the first 911 call. No one knows what the first one was. There’s no way to separate it out from the others, even if anyone had wanted to. There’s no way to draw the line and say, “This is the first real one. All the ones before this were just hoaxes, crazy people, misunderstandings.” And then there’s the question, of course, about how many of the ones before were crazy people, hoaxes? How long had it been going on, before we even knew?

  And once it started, it took everyone so long to figure it out, because how do you figure something like that out? What do you do with that call, the one that played there in the dark, when the police and the EMTs arrive and find the woman crammed under her couch somehow, huddled up there like a frightened cat, dead from shock, the phone still gripped to her ear, the house otherwise deserted? What do you do with the call from a college kid who says that his fiancée went into the closet and never came out? When you look in the closet and find that it’s maybe two feet square, just enough room for some clothes and the vacuum cleaner and no place for a person to go? You dismiss them at first, of course. You take the kid into custody, notify the woman’s next of kin. But after a while, there are too many. After a while, people are no longer calling 911. After a while, the phones don’t work anymore, and when you pick them up all you hear is voices, hundreds of them piled atop one another, all whispering your name.