Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(3)
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 first 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.
? ?
If this was a movie, we’d have to have some kind of song playing over the opening credits, right? Something at once unexpected and appropriate. Not Johnny Cash, because Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake beat us to that punch, and besides, “The Man Comes Around” isn’t quite right. So let’s go just one step to the side, and get Nick Cave and company singing Dylan’s “Death Is Not the End.”
And while the music plays, there’d be snippets of footage in the background. Stuff from security cameras, blurry cell phone videos, clips of news shows. You’d see hands coming out of a shadow where a light was just shining, showing an empty corner. You’d see a window filling with bloody handprints. You’d see a girl, being pulled into what looks like a solid wall, sliding up it, into the ceiling. Someone is running, holding the camera. The door is just a few feet away, and they look behind themselves, turning the camera with their gaze, and there’s nothing behind them to be afraid of, but as they turn back the door is gone, bricked up in those few half-seconds, and then you hear a scream, and the camera goes to static.
Yeah, that’s the opening credits.
? ?
The trick, when you’re trying to compress any story into a couple of hours, is how to handle the exposition so it’s not so clumsy. We’d want to avoid a text crawl or an opening narrator, because those are old-fashioned; reserved, nowadays, for more epic films, or things that purport to be “based on a true story.” And while we want verisimilitude here, we also want to distance you from what’s happening. That’s kind of the point. Hence the song, right?
If this was an indie film, or something from overseas, we’d probably not give you any exposition at all right away. You’d just get dropped into the middle of the action, and you wouldn’t have any idea what was going on. Just like in real life. Nobody knew what was happening. Most people died without ever knowing, they explained it whatever way they had to, or no way at all. There were street-corner preachers and politicians alike saying that it was God’s judgment, there were cults that sprang up in the last days. There were people who were trying to give it some kind of scientific explanation– hallucinogens and black holes – even as the walls were bleeding and doorknobs were disappearing under the sweaty grasps of desperate hands. Outside my window, someone had spray-painted across the side of an office building, “Now ’tis the very witching hour of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion.” It seemed as good an explanation as any, at the time.