The Longest Night (7 page)

She inched to the door and called for Dave. When he didn’t answer the second time, she pushed her door open slowly, the hinges creaking, giving her the sense of being haunted. “Dave?” she whispered sharply a third time. She stepped out into the hallway. All the wallpaper had been stripped from the entire length of the hallway, and it lay crumpled on the floor. She stepped through it to his bedroom and opened the door. He wasn’t there either.

She left to look for him. The two weeks they had spent there was mostly indoors; neither had left the house unless it was to look for food or to commute to the grocery store. They stayed away from others, mostly because they were afraid of what they all were becoming. Even now Catherine was unsure of being amongst them. She searched the north side of town for the entire day, but there was no sign. The people she considered safe to approach hadn’t seen him either. As the sun sank from the sky, her hope went with it. She went home and cried herself to sleep, wishing he was there while bathing in relief of his absence. Still, he was her anchor, and with no one to lean on, Catherine was sure to falter.

A week later, things started to escalate at the grocery store. People began to follow the big man. Anything he said, they agreed with. Whatever it took to feel safe.

“It goes like this,” he began, crossing his arms over his broad chest and looking around at the blank, hungry faces in front of him. “We all go scavenging during the day, and we meet here by sundown to share what we got. If you don’t find food, don’t bother comin’, ’cause you won’t get your cut.”

He looked unfortunately like a boar on its hind legs: he had a round disposition, extremely hairy forearms, and small, malicious wild eyes that were the colour of mud. When he started dictating rules, no one challenged it. The fight had fled the rest of them; to have someone declare edicts of any kind was welcome.

Every day she would go to that uprooted store for fear they would hunt her down if she didn’t, and every day it would get worse. Most were becoming paranoid, defensive, vicious. Everyone including their de facto leader.

When their anger and malcontent began to surface, she couldn’t bring herself to conform with them. She knew that going numb and surrendering herself to the flow would be far easier. She could live her life in the direction they did, and all of them could live in blindness…but that was another sickness, one that she was as insusceptible to as the virus. She couldn’t imagine surrendering herself to something so…

She looked up at the faces of the people standing around her now, wondering on their reactions to his declaration. Most of them nodded sternly, their faces set with heated militancy. They would have to fight for that food, and they were willing to do it. Even though they knew nothing about them, they felt pitted against those in the south. They burned for a war. Just something to fight, like they could win back what had been lost.

“What if someone’s hoarding food to themselves?” someone asked. “What do we do?”

“Judgement can be a bitch,” the big man replied. Her heart dropped a little.

“Please…” he moaned. “For me. For us. We don’t deserve…whatever this is. Please.”

Catherine covered her mouth and turned halfway to the side, trying to fight off the sudden wave of uneasiness and apprehension. “Judgement Day”
was a story coming true.

“And if any of those Southbounders start any trouble, we start a call to arms. Enough of this bullshit. They pull any stunts, and it’ll be the end of them.”

The big man dismissed them after a few more minutes, and Catherine retreated to her small home, where she ate a sheet of paper towel and cried herself to sleep. She needed Dave there. Why had he left her behind? She could no more stay in this place than he could, but she was so afraid to go, like a child afraid to move a muscle in the dark after a bad dream. She thought of Dave as the father she never had, and to have him abandon her…

When she awoke the next morning, she threw up some of her napkin, used the last of the water she had collected from the river to wash her face and rinse her mouth, then started out to look for food. She
had
to think of a way to leave; the authoritarian disposition gave her a constant fear of her life in every action she took. But she couldn’t as easily survive out there on her own.

With no food gained and no Dave found, she spent the night locked in her house. Her stomach growled as she sat cross-legged on her bed. She didn’t report to the grocery store that evening. They would be coming to see why. They would be coming to see that she was suffering enough to their satisfaction. If she was not…

Hers used to be a child’s room, most likely a boy’s. Posters of cartoon superheros were scattered on the walls, along with crayon sketches of stick people standing next to a house. A mother, a father, a child, a baby. She found herself staring into those pictures often, imagining they gathered into their crayon-drawn car and drove away into the multicoloured sunset, happy and free from all of this.

She rested her forehead on her drawn-up knees, taking large breaths as the room closed in. It had been dark outside for hours by now, and they would be knocking down her door at any minute—

When she heard the distant buzz of shouts and cries, she snapped up. A lump grew in the pit of her stomach. She crawled off the bed and approached the front door slowly. Each step was weighted. With a shaking hand, she gripped the handle, opening it by a sliver.

From where she stood, she could see clearly out to Thickwood Boulevard. There were flames, flares, flashlights. People brandishing things in their hands like weapons. She froze behind her door, peering out fearfully at the scene. Whatever it was that they discussed at their nightly meeting had led to their militant desires and blood-thirsty demeanour spilling over. They were not going to have a simple discussion with the people across the river.

Catherine ran around the house, gathering whatever she could carry, including a spatula and old newspaper. Her body tingled as she slipped out the back door and crept across the yard. She was the wife from “Judgement Day,” and all the people with torches and weapons were no longer people.

The distant sounds of a struggle, or a preempt to one, reached her from the south. She sneaked through the back alley, then headed up the block to the next road. At the mouth of the street she listened for others. Nothing. Nothing.
Go.
She darted across the street and headed towards the corner store at the end. She had no hope that there was anything edible left, but she couldn’t leave without trying to scavenge something.

The doors had been shattered long before. She had to carefully duck through the lower gap, making sure not to cut herself on the shattered glass. She ran right to the front counter and tried the hatch to the cigarette display. It snapped up, revealing an entire carton of lighters. She slipped her pack off her shoulders and began to stuff them in by handfuls. Beside the counter was a stand filled with batteries, and she shoved packages of AAs and Ds in frantically as well. All the racks of food were bare, but small trinkets stood like relics on their shelves: aftershave, women’s toiletries, small toys for a dollar, cheap paperbacks. She swept a bit of those off the shelves into her bag too.

She rounded the corner of the last shelf and started toward the back. She stopped dead in her tracks the moment she saw the man standing at the end over the half-eaten body, blood covering everything. His eyes glowed and his teeth gleamed. Her hands lost feeling and she nearly dropped her bag. She almost didn’t run away. The moment he moved she threw herself at the door.

“Come back here!” he shouted, his voice contorted with the most terrifying sound she had ever heard. He lunged, colliding with the half empty battery rack as she ran by it. A blood curdling scream filled her lungs when she felt his hand brush her coat. She scrambled out of the broken window clumsily and cut through the dishevelled parking lot, heading west down the empty road, not daring to look back over her shoulder to see if the cannibal was chasing her. The only thing she could hear was her feet pounding on the pavement and the blood rushing past her ears.

“
Come back HERE!
” he shrieked as she tore through the trees on the other side. Past the thicket was an empty field, then forest, forest forest, always running, even after she had long left the outskirts of Fort McMurray, left the horrible screams and brutalities behind her.

She tried not to remember what had happened, but she found that the screaming had subsided long before she stopped dwelling on the past. When she carried on with her hike it was with a heavier step.

It had been a six week ordeal. Days after her escape she came across the cabin on McClelland Lake, just a few kilometres from the settlement of the same name. Most of the food in the fridge had spoiled, but in the pantry were boxes of macaroni and cheese, cans of tomato paste, graham crackers and marshmallows, and canned rhubarb and strawberries. On the porch, she found packs of potato chips and a few flats of bottled water. It was a treasure trove that lasted her months.

The cabin was small. One bedroom and one bathroom (which, of course, no longer worked), and the living room and kitchen were connected as one. The house was left relatively unchanged, save for a hole she had carved through the roof above a fire pit she had made in the middle of the living room floor. During the summer, she would collect vast amounts of water from the lake and boil it. Not as good as the bottled water, but she knew to save those for more special occasions. Save. Bide. Preserve. Remain afloat. Survive.

Baths were far and few between, but when she did bathe, she used a generous amount of dish soap wiped herself down by the fire with a rag. Every time she washed, she saw clearly just how much she was wasting away. In her mind’s eye, she still looked like the healthy Catherine from years ago, back when she was a young, naive student. But as the firelight bounced off her sheet-white skin, she couldn’t help but recognize the veins and bones that were plainly visible now. Her hips, knee and elbow joints moved under constraint of her tight weathered skin, and her ribs created valleys on her body which hadn’t existed before. Her eyes appeared to have sunk to the back of her head, underscored with dark rings. She caught a glimpse of herself in the cracked mirror across from the fire as she bathed, and she stared, fragmented and broken.
Who is that?
she thought. She ceased to exist; only her withered shell remained.

Why did she keep going? Perhaps it was only her natural preservation outlawing the thought of death. Perhaps it was because she knew that if she was dead, she could no longer revisit the memories which she held dear. Her childhood. Her mother.
Him
.

The desire to feel. Her memories were flashes of light that no one else would experience. They would never be recorded for the benefit of anyone else. Suicide? She couldn’t bear to fail again. But maybe she truly was too scared to die. His face, his eyes on hers…she never wanted to lose that image, no matter how pointless it was to hold onto.

Time sped up as she meandered, looking down at her feet. She was lost in old thoughts of that time, unable to leave them behind. When the sun was sinking low again, she was dragged back to here and now. Little daylight for travel in the winter, time so precious. She decided she would make camp the moment the sun rolled below the horizon. It meant at least another hour of travelling. She came across a slope and stepped precariously down it.

A muted groan caught her attention. She turned her head slightly and threw herself off her step, letting the deer and sack drop off her shoulders. She grabbed the gun as it slipped down her arm, pulled it into her grasp and aimed it on the man in the clearing. “Don’t move!” she barked in a scratchy, alien voice. She hadn’t spoken a word in weeks; her throat might as well have been clogged with dust.

The man who was seated in the snow froze. His back was to her. He wore a hat and a long coat, both midnight black, making him stick out harshly against a sea of white. The seam down the back of his left sleeve was split, down spilling out. He had a large pack on his back, with a machete tied to the side.

“Get rid of the knife!” she shouted, her voice breaking. She was forced to clear her throat.

His hand came across his side and he clumsily undid the throng holding the blade to the bag. He groped for it as it fell behind him, then he weakly threw it away with a pained grunt.

“Turn towards me!” she demanded more clearly, shifting her grip on the shotgun.

He planted his hands in the snow beside him and began to drag himself around very slowly, breathing with constraint. She spotted blood staining the white snow. She had a white-knuckle grip on the gun until she saw his face.

Weakness spread in her arms and legs. She fought to stay standing. She lowered the gun and straightened.

It couldn’t be.

His laboured breath billowed like thick smoke. His coat was open, revealing his blood-soaked shirt underneath, but despite an injury his face was soft.

She let the shotgun slip from her grasp. She walked down the slight slope of the valley with slow, misplaced, apprehensive steps. As she approached him, he winced, but his eyes never left hers. He watched her so intently that Catherine felt that he was looking right into her thoughts and reading them.

She came to a stop by his side and fell to her knees. His brow was still strong, resting over hard eyes with a long elegant nose surrounded by soft, masculine cheeks, underlined by thin lips and an angular jaw, which was covered in a short and relatively clean beard. She looked over his face, studying the small details. It was as if he never had left her on the platform.