The Longest Night (6 page)

“No,” he said quickly. He sighed, and opened his mouth several times to answer, but fell short. Then he said: “I don’t know. Hey, come on, kid. You’ll pull through. We all will. The RCMP will get this sorted out, and then they’ll get us food, and before you know it, we’ll all go home.”

Catherine quivered and shook her head gently. “What home?”

He rested his head gently on top of hers. “Shit…”

She felt his calloused hands on her hair. His roughness made her dirty, oily strands feel like silk.
Stroking my hair
, she thought.
Like a parent
.

“Did you have a son or a daughter?” Catherine asked quietly. So quietly, in fact, she thought Dave hadn’t heard her at first.

“A girl,” he mumbled in return. “She was six.”

Catherine’s lower lip quivered again. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothin’ to be sorry ’bout. She’s a tough kid. I’m sure she’s holding up.”

“Yeah.” She sighed.

Little plastic dolls sat unmoving; they had been off for days now. No one left alive to turn them on. “It’s a Small World After All,” they should have sang. She stroked his hair, singing the song to herself, trying to block out the howls from afar. It was enough to turn blood to ice, to scare sanity from the living, to chase hope away from His land.

Don’t think about that story now
. It reminded her of the man, and it made another well of sadness overflow inside her. He was dead as well. Everything she knew was dead and dying. That woman’s scream for her husband…

All traces of the RCMP were gone by morning. Nobody guarded the doors, nobody was even outside in the parking lot. Not a truck, bus, nor soul around.

They stepped outdoors reservedly, thinking that at any moment an officer would point a barrel in their faces and threaten to fire at point blank if they didn’t get back inside. She squinted as the high winter sun hit her from every direction – the sky, the snow, the glare of the road. The cold clamped its hands down on her too, but not as terribly as she would have imagined. The heating had gone off shortly after the food stopped coming – cold was now the norm. Cars clogged the road to the south; some empty, some with drivers behind them. They didn’t move. It was so quiet.

And the streets lined with bodies and death, and those who ran and hid for their lives knew what his name was. They knew how to spell it. It was the smell in the air; the decay of flesh; the spilling of blood; the stare of the undead.

She laid him out on the floor of the car before cramming herself between him and the front seat. Somehow managed to close the door. They were silent. She held her breath, needing to pee. Tips of her toes and fingers tingled like they were being bitten. Not in here, not in here, please don’t let that thing come in here.

He groaned, “I think I’m—”

“Shut up,” she hissed more harshly than she intended. She gripped the front of his pyjamas and held on for dear life. “Don’t make a noi—”

The door to the house opened. Muscles clenched and lungs shrank.

Pitch black in the garage, but she could still hear where it was. Tripped and fell over, knocking over the garbage cans. A squeak left her when they clattered and she trembled with fear that it had heard her it had heard it’s coming to tear out her insides.

It got to its feet somehow and wandered about the car. It knew they were in there. She strained her eyes to see movement in the dark but saw nothing. Only felt that awful shuffle like half its foot was missing.

The car shook as it threw its weight on the back door. Oh fuck oh fuck it knows we’re in here it sees us!

Accidentally ripped the buttons off his shirt as a scream tried to leave her. Made no noise—couldn’t breathe. He held onto her tight and she squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for it to break in and drag them to Hell.

Nothing came.

He breathed into her hair as the creature slipped off the car and shuffled away. Back into the house. An hour ticked by; now she could see everything in the garage, could hear every move it made in the house. It was in the half bath upstairs.

And it let out a long roar that chilled her blood. It spoke of death, pain, destruction, of all the reasons God had sent them to do His will.

“Jesus,” Dave said from somewhere behind her.

Fatigue was a heavy weight on her shoulders, like she’d spent twenty years in a dark prison, and this was the first moment she had seen the outside. It certainly seemed that way.

“They’re all dead,” someone whispered. “Oh, my God. Oh, my
God
.”

She looked north. She could just make out the highway. She started walking towards it.

“Where’s she going?” some man asked as she departed. “Hey, where’re you going?”

I don’t know. Where are any of us going?

She kept wandering, thinking of food and water, perhaps some blankets. She wound her way through the neighbourhood and found her way to the highway. There were others wandering slowly through the forest of abandoned vehicles. Survivors. She had no inclination to be with them.

She could see the river from where she stood. It looked so still. After a few moments, she realized that she had been followed.

“What are you doing?” someone asked. She turned. The girl couldn’t have been any older than Catherine herself. She looked like someone who had slowly been eaten away by her own fear: small, cowering, hollowed.

“There’s a grocery store across the river,” Catherine answered. “I want to see if they have any food left.”

“We’ll go with you.” There were plenty more people behind her. In fact, it seemed almost everyone from the community hall had followed her. To separate now felt like abandoning family. They had only known each other since The End.

“Okay.”

They made their way up the highway in a mass. The people who were wandering up and down the aisles between the cars paused to watch the horde of people flood onto the bridge, flowing through the crevasses towards them. One of them turned and ran. The others seemed to drift to the edges, watching like hawks.

Then came the bridge. A few bodies were caught in the rocks below, floating belly-down. Someone paused to throw up over the railing, trying her best not to soil any of the dead. Catherine looked over the side only briefly, for she could imagine the bodies turning over onto their backs and screeching at her. She closed her eyes.

“Come on,” she urged him, “we need to get inside before the sun sets. Once the sun goes down, we’re in real trouble. Up you get.” Her voice broke as she half dragged her husband across the littered asphalt. Paper, food wrappers, clothes, money, brief reminders that people had been here once very recently, and they were no longer. Lives gone in the blink of an eye.

She paused on the road, for she could see bodies lying up ahead. Her husband groaned at her side, trying to stay on his feet. Grip was weakening. Her legs gelatin, heart ice.

“Please don’t move,” she whispered.

“What?”

She kept staring at them. Shelter, look for shelter. Her head would not turn. Her feet would not move. Fear like jaws clamping down on her spine. Her breath was hard to keep.

One of the corpse’s arms moved and she let her bladder go.

Once they crossed the river, she let her breath go. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding it. Some were crying behind her, while others cussed under their breath. Catherine was no longer at the front of the group as they neared the grocery store. She figured it would give a semblance of control back, being able to navigate their own town. They needed to feel in control of
something
.

As they travelled down Thickwood Boulevard, the grocery store came into view. The parking lot was completely full of cars. At some point people stopped parking in the stalls and simply parked wherever there was empty space. Even the road was jam-packed with vehicles. But all was void of life.

As they got closer, she could see that the automatic doors had been broken in and shoved aside. They were cracked and bent; half of one pane of glass had shattered completely. There were spots of blood on the edges. A faint trail led inside. The implication of food being in there made her step in. Skylights cast little light on the empty ruin. But as they passed the broken-down doors, they could see the mess clearly enough. A rancorous stench hit them as they ventured farther in. Rotten food lay scattered on the tile along with baskets, bags, scales, money. Nobody was here anymore because they had taken all the food there was to have and left. Nobody was here anymore because they died.

She looked to the produce section that stretched from the entrance to the back of the store. Brown and black chaos remained in the green cartons lining the walls. Some people began to spread out and look down the aisles for any food that was left. She was almost certain there would be nothing, not even a coupon or a price tag.

“Catherine,” Dave said from behind her. She turned slightly to see him standing there. They shared heavy glances, then turned back to the storefront. A man was rummaging through scattered papers on the ground. His son, who could have been no older than six, stood next to him, crying quietly.

“Shit,” Dave muttered under his breath.

“What are we going to do?” she asked quietly as a man began to curse wildly from somewhere on the other end of the deserted store, throwing around bins and shopping carts full of nothing. She’d known hunger, but she could never have fathomed starving.

A scream pierced the air, shrill, petrifying. Her heart skipped. Dave rushed past her down the nearest aisle and she rushed after him. The shelves were stark white and utterly empty, and the scream just
echoed
.

Dave rounded the corner and skidded to a stop, swearing loudly. She jerked to a halt beside him in similar fashion. A woman stood leaning against the wall, her hands shaking over her eyes as screams flew from her mouth uncontrollably. A large black and brown stain covered the floor at her feet, where laid the remains of a dismembered body, which had been pummelled and cut
.
From where she stood she could see the teeth marks.

Their hands were of claws and blades of the beast, their teeth were of the iron that God had forged, their eyes were the omnipresent spirit not of good nor evil, waiting to claim every last soul and devour their humanity and their bodies. They were the saviours of the world and the reapers of the living, and they would feast on flesh not out of hunger but out of the sanction that God hath given them, and the Judgement they had both received and given. They were the divine, and yet they were the empty vessels of an age extinguished by His wrath.

She heaved up stomach acid onto the floor.

That had been the end.

A month went by. Those who survived and remained moved into the houses that were abandoned or where families had died. Bodies were moved to the riverbank, covered in the bed sheets they were found in. White coffins stained with sick, excrement, and blood. Their epitaph.

Catherine and Dave had found a small house together. The day after they had come to the grocery store, everyone began to gather there and talk on a daily basis. Some would just share information about what was going on around Fort McMurray. Mostly people got together for the sake of being together. This was all too much to take on alone. Even Catherine, who’d spent her life shutting out the world, now embraced it; she had absolutely nothing left but strangers and words.

Those on the south side of the river were seen as dangerous and erratic. They found food and kept it to themselves; they found supplies and refused to trade. It was believed the RCMP shed their uniforms for civvies and settled there. Rumours of their hostility and danger began to spread easily, and everyone absorbed the stories, shaping them, changing them.

“What are they doing out there, Dave?” she whispered. She had buried her head into the crook of his shoulder, her niche, clutching at his filthy jacket. He smelled rancid, but so did she. It was comforting to be surrounded in it.

“I dunno, Catherine,” he whispered hoarsely. His arm was wrapped around her and he gently rubbed her shoulder comfortingly. “I dunno.”

“Do you think we’ll be okay?”

“I hope so.”

When Catherine tried to talk with him throughout that week, his mind seemed elsewhere, like he couldn’t really hear what she was saying. He’d pace the halls at night, grumbling to himself, cursing, hissing. One night she got out of bed to peek through the crack of her door to find him tearing the wallpaper from the walls. When he turned towards her room, she saw a ferocious look in his eye, and she quickly backed away out of sight, heart pounding. He looked like the rest of them.

Catherine awoke in the morning slouched against the wall. She was afraid of closing her door, for then it would make it known to Dave that she was wary of him and he would snap. The bed was also visible from the doorway; she feared he’d watch her sleep, and therefore had resorted to curling into a ball against the wall to avoid his line of sight. When she straightened, a wrenching pain slid down her back, and she had to hold her position for a while before she could stand properly.