Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction Read online

  There’s nothing quite like fresh human meat. Partly it’s the fact that I don’t have to eat it seared, or frozen. The meat is tender and soft, the juices salty as gravy. It tastes better than wolf, better than deadhead, better than seal or fish or whale. Better than anything. It is, and has always been, my favourite meat. All the more delicious for its scarcity.

  I am aware of the boy watching me, from the floor, lying there like a hungry dog. I cut off a sizable chunk, pinch it between my fingers, and hold it out to him, right at eye level.

  “No?” I say.

  He doesn’t take it. Not until I make as if to pull it away. Then he snatches it from my hands, tears off a bite, chews and gnaws and swallows hurriedly.

  “Go slow,” I tell him. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

  He bites again, and again, eating it all at once, as if he needs to before he can think about what he’s doing, about what – or who – he’s actually eating. I can vaguely recall that feeling – that revulsion – but to me it seems almost quaint, now. Naïve. When he’s finished, he falls on his side, clutching his stomach, squirming and moaning.

  “You made me do it,” he says.

  I saw off another chunk for myself. Pink blood leaks across the plate.

  “Life feeds off life,” I say. “Besides – I didn’t even kill these people.”

  I don’t tell him that I have, more than once. I first got the taste when my brother and I were stuck in a blizzard, on a hunt. Separated from the rest of the tribe. Days stretched into weeks, the snow raging on and on. And the two of us, in a small ice-hut, getting thinner and thinner. It was him or me, or both of us. I think I saw relief in his eyes when I finally went after him. He thought it was better, perhaps, to die than live as what I’d become. Initially I thought he might have been right. When I returned to my tribe I saw the horror in their eyes. I was too tainted even to be killed. Once the devouring spirit is in a body, nobody wants to be the one to set it free. Who knows where it might settle next? So I was pushed out, exiled. Left to wander the waste alone. Feeding off whatever – or whoever – I could find.

  When I’m finished my steak, night has fallen. I go to get my lamp, light it, and put it on the table. The boy is still lying on the floor. I pick up an overturned chair, set it upright, and motion towards it. He crawls over, pulls himself into it, gazes at me across the table. The air smokes black between us. His eyes settle on the flame, drawn to it like a moth.

  “You found paraffin,” he says.

  “Fat makes good oil.”

  “Human fat?”

  “Deadhead fat, this time.”

  He does not seem so surprised by this. I offer him a bowlful of broth, which is still steaming. He doesn’t ask what it is, and instead sips it. Tentatively at first, and then more hungrily. It will be easier on his stomach than the meat.

  “How long have you been out here?” he asks.

  “Since before the sickness.”

  He thinks about that, peering at me.

  “What tribe are you?”

  “Would you know the name of any tribes?”

  “My mother was an anthropologist.” He is cradling his soup bowl, soaking up its warmth, still looking at the flame. As if it can distract him from the reality of what he’s saying, what he’s been through. “She was studying the Inuit, and their stories. Collecting some of the legends from the oral traditions. I came up to help, as part of my university degree. We were talking to a bunch of different tribes, so I know a few of them.”

  I nod towards my makeshift abattoir. “What about all that equipment?”

  “She was part of a team. The others were doing carbon dating on bones and tools. Learning about the history of your people.”

  “They are not my people anymore.”

  He sips, watching me over the rim of his bowl. The room is cold, now, and the temporary heat given off by the stove is dissipating. We will have to repair the door, the windows.

  He says, “A tribe told us about a man, one of their hunters, who had been cast out. They said he still wandered the plains. He had been possessed. He had gone wendigo.”

  “Wendigo,” I repeat, like an invocation. “The evil spirit that devours mankind. That is what the name means, in our language. But we are all wendigos, these days. Humans and deadheads alike. When there is nothing left to eat, we eat each other.”

  “Not everybody turns cannibal.”

  “No?”

  He meets my eyes briefly, then looks away.

  I say, “Human, deadhead, animal – it’s all the same to me.”

  “You eat the Zeds, too?”

  I frown. “Zeds?”

  “Zombies. You know. Zeds.”

  “If you cook or freeze the meat, it is safe.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “I took the chance. It was that or die.”

  We finish our soup in silence, the only sounds that of our slurping, like a subtle and subliminal conversation. Then I put my bowl down, lean back in my chair.

  “I could use your help, if you’re willing.”

  He puts down his bowl, too. I explain to him about cutting and preparing all the meat – both deadhead and human. We can freeze what we’ll be able to eat over the winter. There is enough food, though, and enough propane, to cure and season a large portion to last during the summer thaw. There is plenty to do, plenty to eat. Supplemented with hunting and gathering, the two of us should be able to live off the spoils for six months or more.

  “Or one of us could live off it for a year.”

  I smile at him. He is not stupid, this one.

  “Even frozen or cured, meat doesn’t last indefinitely.”

  “What about when we run out?”

  “Then we will find other sources. There are herds of deadheads – or your Zeds – all over the tundra, and in the towns. And wolves, ravens, hares. Other animals.”

  “Other people?”

  “If need be.”

  He nods, accepting this. Or pretending to. He will do fine, for what I have in mind. I will feed him, make him strong. I will train him. I have been alone for so long, it will be good to have a companion again. But I will not teach him all my skills, all my tricks. When the lean times come – as they inevitably will – I want to make sure I have the upper hand.

  Alliances up here are fleeting, friendships temporary.

  THE SEA HALF-HELD BY NIGHT

  E. Catherine Tobler

  Esteuan sees the bent figure at dusk and thinks nothing of it. His day has been long, beginning before the sun brightened the sky, ending as the sun takes a last gasp and puts herself away for the night. Exhaustion bends his broad shoulders against this darkening sky and he presumes it is another man much like himself, wearied from a day on the ships, amid the tryworks. The stench of his body, streaming with sweat, blood, and whale oil, masks anything else he might discern from the evening. Esteuan brings these scents home and even when he emerges from the bath some time later, he smells of whales, of sea, of hunting. I see the figure three days later; when I mention it to Esteuan, his head lifts from the tub of water and his eyes bore into me, as if what I have said makes no sense. There were only exhausted men; he tells me of the one he saw. I tell my story twice, and neither time does it change.

  Coming home from the harbour, my hands and arms still caked with spermaceti, I see the figure wandering the rocky shore. Here, the shoreline is strewn with the corpses of whales, flesh melting from stark white bone into the waters where it turns green and black with rot. The water glimmers at all hours of the day with those colours. If one is new to Red Bay, the scent is vile, causing eyes to water and stomachs to heave; when one has been here for years as we have, this scent fades and becomes common. I smell at least as bad, spending most of my days curled inside whale heads to scoop the spermaceti into buckets which never quite contain it.

  This figure – this man – stumbles. Perhaps on a rock, perhaps on an exposed whale vertebra. He doesn’t catch himself, but stag
gers half a dozen steps, arms shaking. His shoulder knocks into the arc of a whale rib which rises from the mud and he stares at this shape for a long while. Even standing, his body seems oddly liquid, flowing. He is wet from the sea, I think; he is tired from a long day of hauling whales from the waters, his shirt streaked with whale blood, other debris. My mind fills in the information I cannot know with what I do know: long days of hard, awful work. This man doesn’t lift his head and look towards any destination, but he turns, as if knowing he’s going the wrong direction. These staggering steps lead him away from the whale corpses, back to the glimmering water.

  He walks into the water and I think surely he will stop. He will realize his error and turn back yet again, towards the houses which scatter the land for certainly one is his own, but he doesn’t. He walks until I can see nothing more of him; the water swallows him bit by bit, hips and belly and narrow chest. His head vanishes and though there should be bubbles of breath to mark the surface of the water, there are not. He sinks and is gone. Ghostsong rises in the air a breath later; this eerie sound is like the groaning of masts and sails, like the roll of thunder before a storm, but it is something else entirely. I think it is the whales, weeping in agony at what we do to them.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Esteuan refuses to talk to me about the man. He says I imagined him walking into the ocean. This is the only answer that makes sense to him. Where would he have gone, he asks me. I do not know. I cannot give him an answer. When I shake my head, Esteuan grunts and leaves the house, headed for the harbour. I follow; my work is there, too.

  When a whale is taken, it screams. Esteuan tells me I am a fool for describing it this way, for imparting such a human sound to a monster, but this is only what it is. The rip of harpoon and drogue into flesh sound like nothing else. The tearing of fabric? No – it is not that. It is the opening of a life, one body sundered into two things. The spill of liquid into liquid – life-giving blood into dark water. The animal makes this sound: black birds raking grey sky, a mouth smothered beneath a hand, a child running until the world around it is unknown. Esteuan calls me a fool.

  Our chalupas are small compared to the whales, and fragile. When captains are carelessly eager, we lose many ships. I used to go out into the waters with them, but now I do not. I wait in the harbour for them to return with the kill. Other than the young boys, I am the only one small enough to easily fit inside the split heads when they return with a sperm whale. I am the one they want scooping the soft spermaceti out by the bucketful. They train the boys to be men; train them to sail the chalupas and take the beasts in the open waters. Other wives stay home. They try not to see me most days, but when they do look, their eyes are mournful.

  But this is why we came: to hunt the whales. I was seventeen my first summer, having come with my brother Joanes and his crew of six hundred men. Esteuan was among them and had not yet taken me for a wife, though the long looks he gave me said he wished this very thing. Among my brother’s men, he was the least offensive – high praise, indeed – but the long journey across the Atlantic gave us time to learn one another. His mouth was coarse in all ways, but in those days his hands were patient, coaxing shapes and images from whalebones before gifting them to me.

  The first time Joanes took me to a hunt, the violence captivated me. The claiming of such beasts by mere men held a strange poetry; the manner in which we trailed the creatures, the way harpoons and ropes pulled them in. The great whales would bleed to death on the journey back to shore; would float once dead and unresisting. It was Joanes who cracked the head of the first sperm whale we brought back; the beast steamed in the cool autumn air and smelled like hot meat. It was Joanes who showed me the compartments inside that great head, the way the oils collected there. It was Joanes who first dared me to crawl inside.

  When you stand inside one of these animals, you almost cannot believe it. You are aware of your own breath for it sounds very close in your ears, aware too that these walls around you are not walls at all, but flesh that once lived and carried breath of its own. If you spread your arms wide, you cannot touch each side of the chamber; you must rock from one side to the other to touch the damp walls. At first, they feel warm and then the heat bleeds out, until only cold remains. The colder it gets, the thicker the oil which clots this compartment, so you work quickly, scooping bucket after bucket of spermaceti out, so that it may be purified, turned into rare oil for lamps and candles.

  The Bible tells its story of Jonah who was swallowed by a whale and thus saved, but standing within the creature is nothing like that. You do not feel as though you will be saved. This animal will draw you down if it can, so best you get there first. Standing inside, you still will not believe it, that you triumphed, but you did, and so you don’t mind the smell at the end of the day. You don’t mind the loss of occasional ships. This is part of the price to be paid for small miracles.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Esteuan marries me that first winter, when the harbour freezes so hard we don’t think we will survive. We can go nowhere, our ships frozen in place, and the whales have stopped coming. We can only hold on until the thaw and pray the beasts return and we can hunt them again.

  Esteuan marries me in the shack that will become our home. The wind is awful, blowing in a fresh storm which will leave two feet of snow on the ground come morning. The wind slips in between the wood slats, causing every flame in the room to shudder. The room is painted in shivering gold, every lamp in the camp brought here because it was my foolish wish. I did not ask for every candle – we would need something to see us through the winter dark – but I wanted every glass lamp. Each is filled with our most precious oil, bright honey in colour. The other wives and I spent the afternoon filling them and setting wicks.

  This oil burns without scent and its colour is clean, bright. It is the best marriage gift anyone could have given me. In this light, the shadows of Esteuan’s face are erased and he becomes a gilded being. Joanes stands at his side, offers my hand into his, and words are spoken. Words that, in that moment, seem easily kept. But after winter’s thaw, spring’s bloom, and summer’s harvest, there will come the autumn that will change everything. Joanes will leave us. He will cross the Atlantic in the San Juan, carrying casks of the oil we have made. Others will come in his place. He will return, in another year. Perhaps. Although there are days ahead of us, I already mourn his leaving.

  Esteuan seems to understand. I find it strange that he does, for sailors come and go so and this is also his way, but after our wedding, after our friends and fellow workers each set into the storm with a wedding lamp in their hands, Esteuan offers me another gift. It is a whale’s rib, an unbroken length that has been smoothed by his hands. He has carved images and words into it: my likeness and his own are there, and so too Joanes, his nose crooked from a fight he lost years ago. The images are darkened with soot, rubbed so deeply in it seems part of the bone itself. I mean to thank my new husband, but already he has moved on, to close the door so the snow does not come in, to extinguish the lamps because he needs no light to claim me as his.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  The stooped figure returns at sunrise. I am home today because Esteuan refuses to let me do my work. He refuses to let me do my work because I think I may be with child. I am sick these past two weeks and my courses have not come. We argued all night. I did not want to stay home – will I stay home for my entire pregnancy, should there be such a thing? Esteuan tells me I will. Marina, who has surely heard our arguments, comes to console me, but I don’t want consolation, so when the figure of the man returns, it is with relief I point at him and show Marina. She is slow to rise from the table; her hands are fisted in her skirt, because she has likely heard Esteuan and I argue over this man, too. Our houses are not so close; it is only that at night, the land is quiet and the walls thin. Voices carry.

  The man is farther inland than I have seen him before, his eyes seeming to rest on the house. My house. I shudder at that idea and Marina reaches
for me in fear. He will not run, I tell her. I do not know this for certain, but I remember the way he moves. He moves that way now, lumbering as though his body weighs him down. He is ill, Marina says, and we should ask Gil to come. I only stare at her. Gil is an old man; I am not certain what she thinks he can do, but I am insulted she believes he can do more than we can.

  For now we only watch the man as he shuffles about. When he goes to our supply shed, I move to the back door. Marina tells me no, tries to hold my arm, but I pull from her grasp and open the door. I do not yell at her, but instead at the man who seems intent on looking through our tools, our stored oil and wood. He does not react to my voice, his focus falling to the pale curve of whale rib which stands upright against a wall. It is the rib Esteuan carved for me. His hand falls to it and a rough sound pours from him. I scream at him to leave it alone. His sound – it changes, rises to the sound the whales make at slaughter.

  Leave us alone! Marina cries and it’s only then I realize she is there at all. She lifts a slat of wood and strikes the man, though he has done nothing. He turns and – half of his face is gone. From the cheekbone down, he has rotted away, his skin glimmering the way the water does from the whale rot. I can see the curve of a bone and where the muscle once connected; the muscle is familiar, having worked with whales so long. Having cut them apart. His eyes are milky, waxy, soft. I think I could scoop them right out the way I scoop spermaceti from the whales’ heads.

  Marina strikes him with the slat and he goes down at once, a pile of bones barely held together with muscle and fabric. His bone-thin fingers claw at the wet ground, towards my feet, and Marina jerks me backwards when I can only stare in silent regard. She hits him again and still he reaches for me. Tota, run, she tells me, but I cannot, because I cannot stop staring.