The Apocalypse Club (8 page)

It turned out that the police were also aware of the meth distribution and had been watching the place for a while. They had swooped in with their task force and taken it down only two weeks before I came up with my brilliant plan. I admit that I should have paid more attention to the news that week. The woman who was waiting in the van, Carla Heisen, had the same brilliant idea I did and had talked her boyfriend, Maynard Felschbek, 32(!), into sticking the place up, thinking that he would walk out with more meth than she would be able to smoke in ten lifetimes. She claimed that she had never heard of Maynard and had no idea how she came to be sitting in the back seat of his camper van with a stolen home theatre system and a quarter pound of marijuana that definitely wasn’t hers, man. I guess her story was less credible than ours. She was on probation for various drug and prostitution convictions and was immediately sent back to serve the remaining four years of her term.

I would have thought that getting away without charges would have been enough for Max, but I was wrong.

“We looked like a couple of idiots!” he said back at our HQ. “We’re supposed to be going after the man. Right now, the man is laughing his ass off!”

I take it back. He did refer to our target as “the man.” I forgot about that.

“Live to fight another day,” I said. I was sort of feeling pretty good about how the whole thing had turned out. We had gotten involved in an adventure and inadvertently stopped a crime and contributed to the arrest of two known felons. People at school couldn’t stop asking us about it. Girls were suddenly aware that we existed. Nathalie Gausden, whose wearing of a 19th-century corset during a costume demonstration on a field trip to Pioneer Village had caused no shortage of embarrassed male stooping, had smiled and said “Hi.” As far as I was concerned, we had lost the battle but won a larger war. “At least we’re not dead. Or in jail.”

“We should’ve brought the ordinance with us,” Max said, referring to the grenade-sized explosive devices stored in the repair bay. This had been his desire from the start and it had taken a great deal of persuasion on my part to convince him that we could pull off the job without them.

“I think we probably did enough damage to the building with the van,” I pointed out.

“We could have used them as a diversion,” Max muttered.

“I don’t know that we really needed one,” I said. “Maynard seemed pretty diverted when we drove through the front window. And then by the fact that he was rapidly bleeding to death. More on top would’ve just seemed like overkill, I think.”

“We can’t lose sight of our objective,” Max said. “We need to take out that weather control station.”

I stayed quiet on that one. After barely escaping with my life and liberty intact after our first top secret operation, I was not exactly champing at the bit to dive into another, more ambitious one involving high explosives. In fact, I would probably have abandoned the whole insurrection idea at that point had it not been for Violet Haze.

S
he was born in Egypt. Her parents fled the country when the Nile ran dry and formal relations with their southern neighbour, Sudan, deteriorated to the point where neither side started paying much attention to where the bombs were falling. She was three.

On the plane, her parents decided that a new life required new names, so Muhammad Bakar al-Atash became Moe Greensleeves after his favourite Stooge and the baize-coloured uniforms of the flight crew, which he greatly admired. His wife, who had been born Faruz Amir Hafez, became Bridget Hermione, a name she took from two of her favourite fictional characters. Their daughter was a trickier proposition. Although she was only three, she was as stubborn and bullheaded as a goat with an ear infection. It didn’t seem appropriate to just assign her a new identity based on their likes and dislikes. Their trip to the new world was for her. They had left almost everything behind except for two small suitcases. She was too young to understand. How did you tell a three-year-old that her future school had been destroyed by artillery?

“Our new home will decide,” the newly monikered Mr. Greensleeves said as he munched a small bag of complimentary peanuts over the north Atlantic and eyed his sleeping daughter uneasily. She had only just fallen asleep after five uncomfortable and temperamental trips to an extremely cramped and noisy bathroom, and he very much hoped that she would not wake up anytime soon and demand a sixth. “It will give us a sign.”

It was foggy and the sun was coming up over Pearson International Airport as their plane circled in line for landing, so Fatima Hafez al-Atash became Violet Haze.

It was the first of many decisions with which she would violently disagree.

Their first few years in their adoptive land were almost impossible. Moe, a fully qualified pharmacist, worked as a doorman at the Royal York hotel while he waited for the OCP to certify his credentials. Bridget, who had been a line producer for an Egyptian news program, went to work cleaning houses. They lived in a tiny, windowless apartment under a fish market. Every morning at four
A.M.
, the ice maker would finish its cycle and drop three hundred pounds of cubes into a hopper with a crash that would wake everyone on the block. Their landlord was a small, fat, Greek man named Stavros. The fact that Stavros had himself once been a powerless immigrant in no way changed his view that immigrants were easy pickings for the unscrupulous and, as a bonus, the least likely to complain when swindled.

The apartment had no second exit in the event a fire blocked the first, which meant that it could not legally be called an apartment because people were not legally allowed to live down there. In Stavros’s view, that just meant that the Landlord & Tenant Act did not apply, meaning he could charge whatever the hell he wanted, raise the rent whenever he felt like it, fail to fix the plumbing, heating or electrical when they malfunctioned (frequently), and allow the unit’s insect and rodent populations to live in peace without fear of extermination.

They couldn’t afford a phone. Violet remembered walking with her father to a rusty and vandalized payphone on the corner, where he would place one of his stammering and terrified calls to their landlord after fishy-smelling water had started pouring through the ceiling or rats had been discovered burrowing through the basmati.

“Yes, please. Mister Stavros, sir. It is Moe Greensleeves.” Pause. There were always pauses in the conversation during which Violet could hear the muffled yells of the small, fat, Greek man who was the bane of their existence. “Yes. Sorry to be bothering you.” Pause. “Yes, I know you are a very busy and important man.” Pause. “We are very happy and grateful to be staying in your excellent apartment unit, which is well-maintained in every respect, sir.” Pause. “It is just that the heating unit does not appear to be functioning as it should be.” Pause. “Which is to say that it is not working at all.” Extended pause. “Yes, but it has been two days now and the temperature outside is very cold and now it is so cold inside that we are finding our pipes have frozen, too.” Pause. “Yes, your brother-in-law is a most excellent electrician, but I believe he has connected the wrong things and gave himself something of a shock.” Pause. “No, he is, I believe, okay. He is sitting on the kitchen floor and my wife is giving him tea. It is iced tea, but then, everything that we have right now is iced, if you will pardon my saying, sir.”

Violet hated listening to these conversations. Her father always brought her along because the skinny men who loitered around the phone were less likely to hassle him to get off the phone when she was there. She hated her father’s cowardice and the supplicating tone of voice he always used. She hated the rathole apartment. She hated the neighbourhood. She hated her parents for dragging her away from her warm and sunny home where they had everything to this frozen wasteland where they had nothing.

But above all, she hated Mr. Stavros. He was fat and ugly and smelled like fish. He yelled at her parents, calling them lazy and ungrateful and stupid and worse. He barged into their apartment whenever he felt like it and never showed up when they needed something fixed. He would take out wads of cash from his pocket and wave them at her father.

“You see this?” he would yell. “This is what comes from hard work, you lazy
skoulikia
! Any more complaints and I will report you!”

Near the end of their first winter, Violet’s father contracted viral pneumonia and couldn’t go to work for almost a month. He was fired by the hotel and too weak to look for another job. Her mother picked up a night job in a dry cleaners’, but it wasn’t enough. When they weren’t able to cover the rent, Mr. Stavros showed up immediately, thumping down the stairs like an angry bull. Her mother was at work. Her father was lying on the futon that doubled as the family bed. His breathing was raspy and his colour the same as the mildewed ceiling.

“Look at you!” Stavros bellowed. “Lazy pig! Lounging around when you should be out working! I am kicking you all out today! If this furniture is still here in two hours then it is mine!”

Stavros moved to grab her father on the couch, but Violet positioned herself in between. He pushed her aside with a fat and sweaty hand to the face and bent over to grab her father by the neck, shaking him violently.

“Do you hear me,
malaka
?” he yelled. “Out of my house! I do not care if you are pretending to be sick to cheat your employer! Today you are all gone!”

Violet picked herself up off the floor and looked at the small, fat man she hated. The rage she had been feeling was, strangely, gone. Something about her had changed, though. Her calm was so unnatural that Stavros actually stopped assaulting her father for a moment and looked at her.

“What about you, little
skyla
?” he spat. “Think you are going to call the police? I think you are not!”

Violet shook her head. It felt like there was a silent cyclone spinning in her brain, but it was one that she had absolute control over.

“No,” she said, with a voice much larger than her own. “I think I am going to kill you.”

Stavros started laughing. He laughed until he tasted the blood running from his nose. Gushing, in fact. He let go of Violet’s father and staggered backward, reaching up with a shaking hand to try and stop the flow, but the blood only backed up and poured out of his mouth instead. He made a sound that was half gag and half scream before slipping on the wet floor and falling on his back. He was dead even before his head hit the bottom stair.

The autopsy would later show that every vein and artery in his head had more or less exploded at the same time. He had died of what the coroner described as the largest cerebral hemorrhage ever recorded. Stavros did have high blood pressure and a family history of diabetes and heart disease, but nothing to suggest he was a prime candidate for the neurological equivalent of Chernobyl. When they had used the cranial saw to get through the skull to examine the brain, they were stunned to discover that there was no actual brain matter left. The contents of his head had just run out like soup from a pot.

Violet had no doubt that she was responsible, but no idea how she had done it. She tried a similar experiment on her Grade 1 teacher, Mrs. Crepusky. She didn’t hate Mrs. Crepusky to the point where she wanted to kill her, just give her a bloody nose or an unpleasant-looking boil on her chin or something like that. Mrs. Crepusky was an older woman with poufy, peroxided hair who wore lots of jewelry and clearly considered the non-white children in her class, especially the ones still in the process of learning English, to be little more than a nuisance. Violet could count on one hand the number of times she had been picked to demonstrate something on the board or participate in a read-along. Mrs. Crepusky’s late husband was a police officer who had been suspended after shooting two unarmed young Somali men acting suspiciously outside of a liquor store. The Special Investigations Unit did not recommend charges, but did advise that he be pulled from active duty and see a counsellor. Neither of those suggestions sat well with Mr. Crepusky, who tolerated the desk job for 14 months before locking himself in his garage and shooting himself.

None of Violet’s attempts had any effect on Mrs. Crepusky, however, although she did leave early one day with a headache, which Violet took as a positive sign. Undeterred, Violet tried similar experiments on her bus driver, crossing guard and an obnoxious boy in her class named Maaz, who made a habit of sticking his hands down his pants and then shoving his hands in people’s faces or lunches. All of these experiments were met with the same nonexistent-to-indifferent results. Violet began to wonder if maybe she just wasn’t angry enough at these people. Maybe that was what it took. She tried working up the necessary emotion and even picked a couple of fights with Maaz, but all that got her was a trip to the principal’s office and a note in her agenda. Maybe, she thought resignedly, the whole thing hadn’t been her doing. Maybe she didn’t have any special power. Maybe Stavros’s stupid brain had just self-destructed all on its own. She gave up trying.

Her father died two years later. He had recovered from the pneumonia, but he was never really back to his full self after that. He was always sick with something: an endless series of colds, flus and coughs. One doctor whom Violet reckoned to be at least 80 years old at an after-hours walk-in clinic said he thought Mr. Greensleeves probably had asthma and prescribed a steroid inhaler that only seemed to make the coughing worse. He was working nights as a security guard in a chemical plant. They were supposed to give him a mask to complete his patrols of certain areas, but the only one they had didn’t fit properly.

Two days after the funeral, a letter came advising that Mr. Moe Greensleeves was now legally able to call himself a pharmacist and dispense drugs according to the laws of the province of Ontario. Violet’s mother framed the letter. Violet took the letter out of the frame the following day and burned it. Like the man it was addressed to, the letter and its false promise of the future went up in smoke.