Fractured Read online

  “Sounds like a polite thing to do.”

  “Three hours into the flight, we hit turbulence. I snapped out of it. The pilot was saying, ‘Sit down, strap in.’ I looked around. Nobody’d brought our pretzels. I was the only person awake on the whole plane.”

  “Were you frightened?”

  “No, not really.” He frowned. “I didn’t think ‘Oh my God, we’ve been gassed.’”

  “Or ‘Holy shit, I better do something?’”

  “I thought: ‘I’ve been at this for hours.’”

  Lindy nodded. The unconcern that accompanied Last Year, Jitterbugs quietly coping as Winkles dozed off by the hundreds, was one of the unexplained mysteries of the Napocalypse.

  “I darkened my display specs and kicked my shoes off. Next thing I knew, it was nine weeks later and I was being sliced out of a fantastic dream by this gigantic machete-wielding lunatic. Leopold Drummer.”

  “The Leopold Drummer?”

  “The hacker giant, in the flesh, I swear. He’d decided the way to kiss people awake was to cut out their cybernetic modems.” Abrik rolled up his sleeve, revealing a wrist-to-elbow scar, worm-white on his dark skin. “Put this on my shard, okay?”

  ◄ ►

  After Singh had gone, Lindy hit Repurposing, a subterranean parkade where they disassembled used-up cars, stripping out the working parts before adding the husks to the walls Missy was building to keep wolves out of the city.

  “Any glazier’s modems?”

  A bored-looking mechanic shook his head – she asked every single time – before pointing out the latest corpses. Lindy began busting out their windows and mirrors, gathering material for Abrik’s shard.

  Exertion and noise, the act of destruction, calmed her. She had filled an old blue recycling bin with glittering, fractured pieces when Paula Stern showed up.

  “I got a complaint you’re neglecting your kids.”

  “Don’t fucking call them that.”

  Paula had been a teacher in Wetaskiwin. She’d come into the studio a few times, but refused to bare her soul for Lindy’s project.

  “You eaten?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  Paula handed Lindy a sandwich – caribou and sprouts on bannock. “I have to issue you a warning.”

  “Grab a bin. You’ll save me a trip.”

  “Sure.” Donning a pair of heavy gloves, Paula began shovelling glass shards.

  Lindy bit into the sandwich, which was surprisingly fresh. The sprouts hadn’t had time to collapse to wet threads. “You’re in a good mood.”

  “Just got laid,” Paula said. “Mike Chang.”

  “Tractor guy?” Mike had been instrumental in salvaging farm equipment from across the Prairies, keeping the grain and rapeseed farmers in oil and working machinery until they transitioned back to horse-drawn plows.

  “Your Missy’s gonna make him Minister of Finance. He’s feeling full of himself. I am feeling full of him, too.”

  “Congratulations.” Would that make it easier to get Mike into her chair? The prime minister might be prevailed upon to insist.

  Right. More like, Oh, Lindy, you and your oral history. Isn’t it time we moved on?

  “You old enough to remember we used to call that a hook-up?” Paula asked.

  “Mike’s sowing wild oats,” Lindy said, and got a blank look.

  It was her delivery; nobody laughed at her, except when she wasn’t joking.

  They climbed out of the parkade into twilight and a fresh inch of snow, huffing steam as they toiled along, hauling glass. They stopped at a park bench to catch their breath. Lindy thumbed one of her portable mics when Paula wasn’t looking.

  “Hooking up,” she said. “You said once your students were the ones who coined the term Napocalypse.”

  “Cute, huh? Better than the Winkling. Or the Big Sleepover.”

  “Cute,” Lindy echoed.

  “Branding the end of the fucking world instead of…”

  “Of what?” By chance they’d stopped in front of one of Lindy’s bigger displays, neo-Gothic testimonials from a dozen Napocalypse survivors. She was tired of the medieval look, but this was the concept she’d pitched the Arts Council for her oral history of Last Year. Unless she wanted to end up in a canning factory or going on the caribou hunt, she was stuck with it.

  Stuck until her modem burned out, anyway.

  “If we’d acted sooner and Tweeted less, there’d be more of us left,” Paula said.

  “Acted how? People tried waking the Winkles. What was the success rate. One percent?” Lindy rolled the glass umbilicus off her wrist, revealing words, tattooed amid a hash of razor scars: LET ME SLEEP, GODDAMMIT. “You got one of these too, right?”

  After a second, Paula responded by exposing her wrist.

  “WAKE ME IF YOU CAN, KILL ME IF YOU CAN’T,” Lindy read aloud, for the mic. “Why?”

  “I had nightmares. The idea of sleeping indefinitely terrified me.”

  “Wow. So, how did they kiss you awake?”

  “Acupuncture. Five hundred needles.”

  “Were you? Having nightmares?”

  Tears spilled down Paula’s face. “I was outdoors, in a meadow. It was the colour of a lawn but felt like mink, or how I imagined mink… buttercup-strewn mink.

  “My body felt strong, vibrant. There wasn’t an ache, a twinge of fatigue. Remember being a kid? Never hurting?”

  Lindy was suddenly conscious of the sand in her joints. “Not really.”

  “My mind, too. Alert, untroubled. I relived a few of my best memories: cuddling a puppy, dancing with my husband at a disco in New Haven. I went back to toddlerhood and listened to things my parents said to each other, stuff I’d heard them say when I was preverbal. Mama had a wicked sense of humour – I never knew that.”

  “Parenting wore it out of her,” Lindy couldn’t help saying, but Paula wasn’t listening.

  “Later, I got to putting together a galaxy. Deciding where every star would go, drawing orbital paths. I licked a black hole and it tasted like limes.

  “Then they poke-poke-poked me out of it, because of my tatts. Is it any wonder so many Sleeping Beauties turn on our so-called princes?”

  ◄ ►

  Paula handed her a foil-wrapped ball of rice and cooked meat when they reached the studio, but refused to schlep the glass up the three flights of stairs. Lindy hauled the bins herself, making two trips.

  The second time, she found someone reading the kids’ monitors.

  Yellowknife wasn’t so small that everyone knew everyone, though sometimes it felt that way. Before Last Year, the town had 20,000 people; now, since Missy had decided to collapse the surviving Canadian population into the North, it was bursting with 100,000 Jitterbugs and Beauties, plus 500,000 Winkles in storage.

  At first it didn’t click. He was just a guy. Tall – super tall – Caucasian and weathered, with grey eyes, he wore salvaged antique jeans that fit him well.

  Lindy had a fleeting thought of Paula, hooking up. Was it national get lucky day? Maybe he’s here to laugh at my sowing oats joke. Gimme a plow, big guy?

  Then she saw the hashmarks branded into his forearms: 15 on the left for 15 dead cougars, nine on the right for bears killed on Winkle retrieval missions…

  Matt Cardinal.

  Shit!

  “Sorry,” he said. “Your door was open.”

  I bet that smile opens a lot of legs.

  Lindy swallowed. He didn’t seem to know who she was. “What do you want?”

  “Twentieth anniversary of Last Year, innit?” he said. “Don’t you want a testimonial from the Post-nap’s answer to Shakespeare?”

  He’s up to something. Her stomach flipped.

  Licking her lips, she scooped up a mic and said: “Matthew Cardinal was in the Edmonton Institution, serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery. After Last Year, he joined the Rocky Mountain retrieval team—”

  “Retrieved these three, as it happens,” he murmured.

&nbs
p; Lindy fought the urge to step between him and the stretcher of kids. Where did that impulse come from? “Matt is Poet Laureate of Canada.”

  She gestured at the comfy chair. “Sit down. Tell us all about your Napocalypse.”

  Instead of sitting, he walked to her. Lindy backed up; he came until she was against a wall and they were inches apart.

  Testing: Would she scream? Fight? Tell him to back off?

  As if she’d ever had that much backbone. Twenty years melted away. Her eyes bugged; she could smell fear rolling off herself.

  He picked the mic, ever so gently, out of her grip. “Guys at the penitentiary started nodding off in February, right after Frankfurt. Corrections sent the first three to hospital. Then they reallocated cells, shelving Winkles in their cots. They kept us Jitterbugs in another section.

  “It might’ve been a relief. An unconscious prison population is less work. But they were losing guards too. Some guy goes home, eats his beef and beans, kisses the kids goodnight and sits down to watch the game. Nods off. Next day, nothing’s getting him out of that chair. Right?”

  She forced herself to answer: “He’s just gone, yeah.”

  “We had 80 prisoners down and a skeleton crew watching the rest when this team of strung-out geeks shows up with defibrillators, scalpels, caffeine enemas, for fuck’s sake. They play around with prince charming the guys. Pris-oners, right? Who cares?

  “Soon they’d killed a fellow in for a short stretch. Evan. Drunk driver, I think. Threw a sheet over him, wheeled the body down the hall, kept going.

  “Then they got lucky. Three guys in a row they woke up. One they got with a defibrillator. Stopped his heart. Three. Two. One. Clear! Badoom, badoom. He surfaces, screaming. Cry after cry, like a gut-wrenched horse.

  “Thing was, there weren’t enough guards anymore. Thing was, we weren’t lambs in a pen. And the guys they woke weren’t petty vehicular homicides.

  “They didn’t just piss and moan, those Sleeping Beauties, they didn’t cry about happy dreams or paradise lost. Sam Gees, the screamer, tried cutting his own head off. While those poor misguided ghouls were trying to restrain him, the other two tore apart everything they could reach.

  “They had long arms.”

  I hate this spoken-word crap, Lindy thought.

  “Riot built, like a tsunami. Soon we had a dozen dead science nerds, the remaining guards’ guns, the keys to the whole lock-up. We scattered, like kids fleeing a haunted house.”

  With that, Matt thumbed the mic off. “Howzat?”

  Lindy fought to keep her voice steady. “I’ve collected similar stories from your fellow inmates.”

  “Oh, you bored? This a rerun for you?”

  He definitely didn’t know who she was.

  She’d assumed one of the other prisoners had taken Matt’s identity, to hide a more serious crime. But this guy hadn’t seen Matt’s drawings, hadn’t heard his obsessive stalker blah blah: “My girl Lindy, when we get married, Lindy and me, the babies we’ll have…”

  Never mind she’d been 16 and he’d been nearly 30. Never mind that they’d met once, at a party.

  Matt Cardinal had been even crazier than Lindy herself. This guy didn’t know that, so he couldn’t have been in lock-up.

  “I got a million stories, you don’t like that one.”

  She tried to smile. “Sure you do. Bear fights and Winkle retrieval.”

  “Worst was Hinton, near Jasper. Nine hundred Winkles stored in a barricaded mall. Cougars got in. I’ll write you a poem about it.”

  Don’t, she tried to say, but the words froze in her throat. The man calling himself Matt Cardinal slid out of the room like a slick of dark oil.

  Lindy collapsed to the floor, hands over ears, shaking. Now what, who is he, gotta run, what’s he want, can’t someone just come along and take care of this, of me…

  When the hand touched her face, she shrieked and hurled herself backward, banging her head on the wall.

  It was Satan.

  ◄ ►

  “Prime minister’s office.”

  “I gotta talk to my sister.”

  “Hi, Lindy. I’ll see if she’s free.”

  Missy’s window was mounted at Town Hall.

  Melissa Hertz is prime minister of Canada.

  I was visiting my teenaged sister at work – her first real job was printing windows at our dad’s auto shop in Etobicoke – when a car drove itself in. It had an appointment to get its AC fixed. The owner had gone down in the back seat, and the summer heat killed her. It was… Lindy, you freaked out, remember?

  While we waited for the police, I checked the news. A tenth of the city was comatose. There was a heat wave on. Thousands of Winkles might bake.

  The electrical grid hadn’t yet fallen apart, and the Internet was mostly working. People believed it would stop, we’d ride it out. But I’ve always been a pessimist.

  That much was true.

  “Lindy?” The assistant was back. “Could you email her?”

  “Tell her it’s a fucking emergency.”

  “Is it about your modem?”

  Missy wanted the modem to die; she wanted Lindy on a work crew. Regulated mealtimes, laundered uniforms, barracks and a daily shower. That was her idea of taking care of little sis.

  She imagined telling the assistant that Missy’s precious Poet Laureate was the guy who’d stalked, drugged, and fucked her, all those years ago when Missy was off at college. The guy wanted to play identity thief; why not give him all of Matt’s illustrious past? “No, not the modem.”

  “Hold on.”

  I put out the word. Bring cars. Bring evacuees.

  We loaded Winkles five and six to a vehicle, packing supplies in the trunks. Canned food, blankets, batteries. We’d lay children across the laps of the seated, strapped-in adults.

  There were so many.

  I wanted to hook up trucks to pull bigger loads, but Lindy convinced me they’d crash and block the road.

  We programmed routes to autopumps, to rechargers, and we sent the cars north, where it was cold, so the Winkles wouldn’t fry. Port Saint John, Thunder Bay, Yellowknife – anywhere you could reach by road.

  Within a week, people started going to bed in their vehicles. Deliberately, I mean. They’d set an alarm: if it didn’t wake them, the car would automatically upload the route and head north.

  I may have sent that first car up to the Arctic, but the Uplift wouldn’t have worked if not for thousands of hardworking, dedicated Canadians who pulled together as the crisis worsened, keeping the roads open, the Internet functional, the fuel pumping—

  “Lindy? You okay?” Melissa’s voice, in the here and now, drowned out her remembrance of Missy’s testimonial.

  “I got a Beauty on my hands.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Were you varnishing? StatsCan says one in 600 Winkles are awakened by smells. Solvents—”

  “StatsCan? Which is what – some guy with a calculator implant and three college stats courses?”

  “I’m not having this argument with you again. Was it varnish?”

  “Right. I routinely force the kiddies to sniff glue as they take up shelf space in my studio.”

  “Call Health Canada.”

  “You know what they’ll tell me. I broke it, I bought it. Missy, can’t you take care of me here?”

  “I can’t give you special favours.”

  Stretching, uncomfortable silence. Missy knew that Lindy’s studio was bugged. She wouldn’t say anything to damage her approval rating.

  “Please?” She couldn’t quash the whine in her voice.

  Missy said: “If you join a work crew—”

  “I have a job.”

  “Uh-huh. The first night – do you know this? – after someone’s awake, they’re at risk of self-harm and harm to others.”

  “We’re talking about a four-year-old.”

  “A child probably doesn’t seem dangerous—”
r />   “Fine, I’ll hide the knives.”

  “If the solvents in your studio are that strong, they’re probably not doing you any good.”

  “Fuck! I wasn’t varnishing.”

  “What is it, anyway?”

  The devil had been sucking on most of one fist. Now it announced: “I’m a girl.”

  “That’s great, sweetheart,” the speakerphone enthused. “Do you know your name?”

  “Zazu, Queen of the Snow Angels.”

  “That’s not your name,” Lindy said.

  Through the speaker, a chuckle. “Important safety tip, sis. Unlike you, kids like to eat regularly.”

  “We are hungry,” Zazu agreed, as if she were 50 and poring over a menu, someplace pricey.

  “Too bad.” Lindy said: “Missy, while I’ve got you, my modem—”

  “You’re in the salvage queue.”

  “It’s getting dire.”

  “Rules are rules.”

  “I’m listed as a project of cultural significance.”

  “You know what I think,” Missy said. “The oral history shards encourage morbid thinking.”

  “You mean I’m morbid.”

  “Dwelling on a past we can’t have back—”

  “What do you call keeping old government departments alive? StatsCan?”

  “I call it crisis management. Democracy in action.”

  Her sister’s tone made suspicion bloom. “Are you blocking my modem request?”

  “I have no influence over the salvage queue.”

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  A click. The royal audience was over.

  “Bitchbitchbitch!” Lindy screamed at the phone.

  Zazu had homed in on a file cabinet at the back of the studio. She dug up a box of mac and cheez.

  “I was saving that,” Lindy snarled, but her mouth watered.

  “Cook it.”

  She snatched the box, fighting an urge to clout the kid – and a wave of shame. “Fine. But we’re only making half.”

  “You have weiners?”

  “No.” Cooking meant finding her hotplate and saucepan, then begging a couple pats of fake butter off the physiotherapist next door. Zazu waited, in her devil costume, in the hallway.

  “Cutest thing I ever seen,” Glenda – the physio – cooed.

  “She’s yours if you want her.”