Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(5)
It wasn’t just red tape, like in the movie, though that was a great touch, guys. It was red anything. Something about the colour red kept them out. Some people speculated it was a spectrum thing, that ghosts were some kind of light or energy themselves, and that the red spectrum disrupted them somehow. Others thought that red was the colour of life, of blood and the heart and human passion. That maybe it reminded ghosts of mortality, or that it protected those who still pulsed with living blood and heat. People brave enough to do research in the big, abandoned, spooky libraries full of books that floated off the shelves or opened themselves up to thematically relevant passages turned up records of Victorian-era “ghost traps” that were just red-painted rooms, or even containers with red interiors, designed to cage spooks.
Whatever the proof of it, it seemed to work, and so those of us who survived did so by painting the insides of everything red. Red walls, red floors, red ceilings. Painting over windows. When paint wasn’t at hand, we used red paper, red markers, even red ballpoint pens, though those didn’t work so well, it turned out.
From inside our red rooms we sent out parties dressed in red clothes to try to bring back food, fresh water, more paint. Most of them didn’t return.
That’s not a very good Hollywood ending, is it? All of us sitting in our red rooms, waiting to get picked off one by one and join the ranks of our oppressors? What they don’t tell you about surviving the apocalypse is that it’s really not worth it. Everyone you care about is probably dead, there’s nothing fun left to do, and not a whole lot to live for. With the zombie apocalypse or whatever, at least you’d have some hope, however na?ve. You could imagine a cure being found, or the zombies eventually all just rotting, if only you could outlast them. What are you supposed to do when the dead really do come back, though, and not just their carcasses? What’s the endgame on that? They’re not going to rot, get bored, go away. They’re not going to sleep, or die again. There’s nothing left to do, except delay the point at which they get you, a line of hopeless desperation that stretches out forever into the horizon, like a hallway in a Kubrick film.
? ?
I’m not going to tell you how Georgiana died. That was her name, though everyone just called her Georgie, me included. If this was a movie, you’d see it. If this was a movie, and I was the protagonist, I would have seen it. It would have been dramatic, would have happened at some climactic moment. I would have been there, inches away from saving her, clutching at her hand as her fingers were pulled from mine, one by one. But this isn’t a movie, and that’s not how it happened.
I’m not going to tell you how she died, because I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Am I even sure that she’s dead? Well, I’m pretty sure. One of her co-workers told me she was gone. Those were his words, “Georgie’s gone,” just before he himself was gone, pulled around a corner and just gone, the hallway empty for 100 feet in both directions.
I didn’t give up on her, even then. I went out looking, after the first of the red rooms got put up. In my red clothes, red hood pulled up, I went searching like I was on my way to grandmother’s house. And maybe I finally found her, or she found me. I don’t really know, not for sure, not anymore.
I won’t tell you how she died, but I will tell you this. One last bit, and maybe it’ll make for a better ending. I still go outside to smoke. How crazy is that, right? But I don’t see any reason to quit anymore, and sometimes it’s worth maybe being dragged down into a storm drain, or disappearing into the street, or just suddenly turning white and weeping blood. Sometimes I just want to be outside again, and there’s no death horrible enough to make staying in that goddamned closed-up red room worth it for even one more minute.
On nights like that, I go out behind the building where we’ve been staying – it used to be a hospital, we painted up an entire wing – and I smoke a cigarette while I look out over the river. And lately, every time, I see Georgie there, standing on the edge of the water. I know that it’s her, even though I can’t really see her face. I’d know her in a crowd, by now, from the way she stands, the way her hair falls. I’ve seen her against the back of my eyelids every day since she was gone, and I’d know her backward, blindfolded. I know that it’s her, and I know what she wants. Not to drag me away, not like the others, not yet. Give her time, maybe. For now, though, she just wants me to follow her. To go willingly into that good night. To grind out my cigarette and walk down into the freezing water of the St. Lawrence. And I know, as surely as I know any of this, that one night soon, I will.
Roll credits.
ST. MACAIRE’S DOME
Jean-Louis Trudel
Before entering the port of Quebec, the Express de Rouen skirted shallows, the pilot identifying each one aloud for the handful of passengers on deck.
“The old harbour.”
Straight lines intersecting at right angles beneath a stretch of calmer water.
“The former train station, to starboard.”
Darker waters, choppier waves, and a squat angular shape coming into focus as if rising out of the inky depths.
“When the tide goes out, the pinnacle pokes out.”
Above the reef, a madly bobbing buoy warned away incoming ships.
“And over there is where the ruins are closest to the surface. And where the fisherfolk set their traps for lobster.”