These two babies, made strong by the circumstances of their birth, will live together on the frigid bottom, near the lake’s frozen bowel, blind as sea bats and icy as eels, in a tingling rage that will last forever.
23
The Worst Winter Ever
The Bruce Peninsula is an astonishing garden. Wildlife that has fled north from the cities is squeezed cheek by jowl on its pristine shores. The dazzling peregrine falcon, great loping herons, and hummingbirds meet in mid-air. Rattlesnakes, spiky hogs, and tiny alligators wrestle for egg-laying territory on remote Sauble Beach. There are even llama that can be ridden for a price. A lone bison roams like a shaggy mountain, dragging its dread-locked chin through cow shit. And off the tip of the Bruce is an island famous for its tall, attic-shaped rock towers rising up out of the shallows. This is Flower Pot Island.
At dawn, when the sun buries the lake in fire, the “flower pots” cast their shadows up onto the flat white shore. This shadow is where night hides, shifting its position, cautiously opposing the sun, remaining sharp and wicked. This shape is identical to the shape of Ontario. Go there, you’ll see. The pots hide a little bit of night behind them as they face the sun. They look at each other throughout the morning and communicate in a sentinel’s code: we know exactly where they are from here.
In the cities there are greater confusions. As fall approaches several things are contributing to a late-autumn military mania. The disappearance of Toronto’s most popular anchorperson, Grant Mazzy; the undeniable presence of cannibals much further south than anyone had wanted to accept. Although a plethora of laws exist that might deal with a new breed of violent crime that is highly contagious, and in spite of the horrific acts being committed by Ontarians everywhere, none, not a single person, can be held accountable.
There are no arrests. No convictions.
On September 7 strange new edicts are passed in the Ontario legislature with more hand-washing than wringing. And by late afternoon the instructions are handed over to heavily armed teams. They are directed to exercise maximum force immediately. To combat contagion all form of communication is banned. Speaking, listening, reading, even sign language are punishable at the brute discretion of Ontario’s own licensed assassins. Citizens are instructed to stay at home and communicate only through nods or shakes of the head.
Besides an armed and helmeted military, the only other active organization is the hugely augmented social services, now responsible for the welfare of every living person. Among the ranks of the army any personnel who stammers, struggles for the right words, or otherwise exhibits any difficulty communicating is instantly quarantined. The only words spoken aloud in Ontario through the winter are militarese, punctuated with a sharply barked “Sir!”
The alleys of the city and the forests of the north ring with the shaking chains of constant automatic weapon fire as every one of the many thousand disoriented is gunned down.
American helicopters dangle in the sky like a Chinese New Year, strafing the fields and farmlands.
Small Zodiacs buzz across remote lakes coordinating a sweep with armed troops firing their way through the woods on cross-country skis.
In front of Big Town TV a crowd of thirty-eight people, their heads bobbing to a New York dance diva, are cut to ribbons.
A man with his hands clasped behind his neck kneels in a barn in Pontypool. One of two men standing behind him steps forward and fires a handgun through the back of his head.
At the top of Main Street in Bolton, three zombies climb up through an open manhole together and get stuck. A man on a bicycle swerves out from behind a parked car and tumbles over them. The zombies hold him in the air with their strong jaws until a truck hits them, knocking the man thirty metres down the road, where he lies bleeding to death through three bit-sized holes.
A helicopter swings out of a cloud and slams into the Royal Bank tower.
A runaway train hurls through the wilderness along the eastern shore of Lake Superior. It tumbles sideways across White River, pulling the tallest thermometer in the world behind it as it disappears up the million paths that lead to Ontario’s train-eating wolves.
A baby in Niagara Falls tips forward in its highchair, swinging a rope of saliva from its bottom lip. The suspended drool is teeming with influenza; but before the infant can slurp it back up, the baby is pulled headlong down a flight of stairs.
A grandmother in Oshawa lays the last of twenty pictures, depicting her twenty-three grandchildren, on a coffee table. The twenty-first grandchild twists the woman’s head backward and bites down on her forehead, blinding her with blood.
A tiny fish-hook is dropped into the lettuce at a salad bar by a madman and swallowed by a dieting accountant.
A child in Bobcageon tosses a full can of beans at a bear cub, causing it to bark out in pain. The mother bear lifts the child by her leg and breaks her head open against a tree.
A public poll is taken about the confidence people have in Emergency Task Forces; however, most of the respondents are zombies, and half of the pollsters are killed on front porches.
A rubber bullet fired at a school bus on Highway 6 bounces off an aluminum window frame back across a field through a kitchen window, hitting the Frappé button on a blender. A sleeping man falls off the couch.
A woman in Mississauga stands in front of her mirror kneading her breasts while a man urinates loudly in the toilet beside her. He glances over, and his growing erection interrupts the stream of urine, and he sprays the roll of bathroom tissue. He leans forward to flush the toilet and surreptitiously rotates the roll.
A stripper in the process of performing an illegal lap dance in a bar on Yonge Street is disoriented. She stops and puts her finger across the patron’s lips and says, “I’ll be right back.” She wanders out among the crates and towels on the floor and stands palming the full cheeks of her buttocks. The entire room has her attention: she fails to notice and says, “Hello? Hello?” In the corner a zombie, who has quietly murdered a dancer in the dark, hisses, “Hello… hello.”
A man with a bright-grey beard and rust-brown toupee kisses his walleyed daughter. The thirty-six-year-old woman licks him once quickly under his tongue and pulls back. She brushes her bangs with a saluting hand. Her father wants to guarantee that they are not just anybody. He says to her, as they cross a busy Saturday-afternoon intersection in Collingwood, “All I need to do is touch you with one finger and I’m electrified.”
A woman in Wawa lays six chicken breasts in a shallow pan and covers them with mushroom soup. She slides the pan onto the rack and closes the oven, preheated to 325 degrees. Two children sit on the couch in the other room. No one is happy. A man is coming down the stairs. An invisible trail of salmonella bacteria grows in strange places. On the back of a chair leg. On a fly’s wing. Strong inside the anti-bacterial dishwashing fluid.
A family is cross-country skiing out on the snowfields of Caledon. They stop and look to the north. They see four people in brightly coloured parkas climbing down a cliff face. One falls and lands with a bone-breaking snap on a large boulder. The family topple off their skis in an attempt to run toward the fallen climber. By the time they are standing again, on skis directed toward the cliff, the three remaining climbers have reached the ground. They run at the skiers with wild eyes and bloody ski masks.
A gathering of farmers, assembled in protest on the lawn of Queen’s Park, is blown to bits from the front steps.