A businessman at King and Yonge reaches for his pager and is fired upon. Eighteen hollow-point bullets perforate him, and he falls in pieces.
Three teenagers prying open a garage door down an alley at Landsdowne and Bloor are surprised from behind by two men with baseball bats who club them to their knees.
At the edge of Grenadier pond sixteen people lying beside fishing lines are stabbed by as many knives and rolled into the water.
A theatre in the woods, back up in the trees of High Park, is a coordinating centre for military personnel. Volunteers in T-shirts are ordered to stack weapons and then kneel beside them. They are shot in anger by officers with handguns.
In the Sky Dome three women are ambushed by gunfire from beneath a van. They topple over on feetless legs and are dragged between tires and strangled.
The entire Don Valley, deemed to be a hotbed of cannibal activity, is sprayed with a molten plastic.
The Toronto Islands, which have reported only rare cases of the disease, are carpet bombed.
In Hockley Vailey, one hundred and twenty cannibals are rounded up. Soldiers discover that if a bullet is grazed across the tops of zombie heads, they dance in seizure while squirting blood into the air. Informal contests are held to see how many zombies can be made to dance at once.
Just outside Sudbury, troops succeed in getting sixty-three zombies to die jigging. The same is attempted on the bridge over Owen Sound Harbour and it backfires. Eight soldiers are dragged to their deaths beneath the hull of the docked Chi Chi Man. Two more soldiers are killed by friendly fire as bullets ricochet at the waterline of the ship.
A helicopter descending on Ceasarea by Lake Scugog encounters over a thousand zombies in a cannibal frenzy. They have discovered an enclave of healthy citizens hiding in the post office. The helicopter circles until its panicking pilot, his face streaked purple with anger, dives his aircraft into the centre of the orgy.
A lighthouse in Gravenhurst catches fire. A nurse is hiding four elderly people in its lookout. She crosses herself and makes praying hands as the smell of burning gauze stings her nose.
In Barrie a defiant population takes to the streets to embrace their cannibal brothers and sisters. An emotion-choked voice blares from a megaphone, pleading for people to return home. The snapping of compassionate necks can be heard clicking through the town and army personnel descend with guns blazing under tear-streaked faces.
A convoy of heavily laden trucks snakes along Highway 7 toward the Elora Gorge, where bodies are dumped by the thousands from a great height into blood-oily water.
A hidden coyote population joins with packs of agitated wolves to roam through ditches snapping at hands and feet.
An arsonist in Orangeville kills his family in their sleep and slicks himself down with gasoline.
A throng of looters in Scarborough greets the new day smiling and empty-handed. They are all shot through the head.
A couple who have been holed up in a cottage on Rice Lake light a fire in their front yard to attract the attention of rescuers. They are shoved backwards onto flames by the giant hands of haunted people.
In a farmhouse near Orillia a widow sneaks out at night and drags corpses through her front door. The scene is lit eerily from within by a flashlight held in its place on the table by a sugar dispenser.
A zombie in Havelock leaps onto the back of a cow and looks up laughing as a farmer drives a pitchfork into its back.
In Angus a group of men lash a suspected pedophile to a raft, then send him off down the freezing Notta-wasaga river. A helicopter is dispatched to save him. As it swings along a river in the sky, men shake their fists from below.
A schoolteacher hides his Grade Twos in a grain silo, only to become a predator himself by midnight.
Four people stand under the Dufferin Gates, remove their clothes, and pass a straight razor back and forth on unspeakable dares.
A prisoner in the Kingston penitentiary slams his back up against the bars in a sexual passion that will end in the death of the man he has loved for six years.
A garage mechanic in Sarnia is shot by a stranger as he pulls down the rattling bay door.
Three yachts set sail from Port Credit Harbour and are sunk by a coast guard vessel that has, up to this point, been firing on the seagull population. A young captain holds up his head, like a bust of Beethoven, in the pocket of air inside the ship’s bow.
A four-year-old girl in Brampton runs screaming to her parents’ bedroom. They sit up to greet their crying daughter with faces that are unmistakably afflicted.
The population of Norwood is zero.
Guelph, three hundred. Maybe.
St. Catharines, eight hundred.
Hamilton is particularly disastrous. Pockets of homicide flare up with crazy unpredictability, confounding a military strategy that flexes itself, finally, in an anguished genocidal nightmare.
Hamilton: population definitely zero.
The QEW, stretching down around the corner of Lake Ontario to Buffalo, is host to a marathon of mad runners who are ignored by the Ontario military. They fall into a blinding wall of American weapons.
A serial killer sits in silent obedience at home in North York, surrounded by four uncommunicative guests.
By January the population of Ontario is only two-thirds of what it was, and there are no zombies left alive. By the first thaw an enormous clean-up is under way. By spring all killing has virtually stopped, except for the occasional murder committed by hunters who rush into the deep woods in the hope of bagging a real-life monster.
24
Home
If everything that ever brought a person to their knees, head bowed, hands clutching at thin air, had to be characterized somehow, several hands would shoot up immediately. Some of us are eager to tell others how this happens. You are born with what will bring you to your knees, and it patiently acquaints itself with you over long decades until, one day, with a blinding finger, it reaches up…
No, that’s not true. Not really.
Other hands go up. No one is called upon to answer. The look from the person at the front of the room, a left hand caging a left eye, communicates that it’s already too late, that we are already sitting in positions strange to this endeavour. We quiet down, fold our hands in our laps, respectful. The instruction is that forgiveness should be sought in the most forgiving space in the world: a little lounge music, an unregenerate appetite for heroin, a peaceful hand touches the corner of a chin, and a scratching fingernail is dragged up and down a forearm. A forearm as long as a country laneway. Someone leans over a neighbour’s crossed legs and says, “It’s good to be here anyway.” As a chosen member is carved open at the throat, hands knocking a lamp, a box of pencils, several people moan — “mmmmm” and “ahhhhh”— so we lower the lights.
Greg’s Higher Power reaches out beside his bed and traps a lamp switch between his fingers. The turquoise adjustable work lamp is clamped not to a table but to a short plank of wood held in place on the floor by a brick. When he pushes the switch on the crown of the metal shade the bulb is inadvertently directed towards his face. He redirects it with a swat. He turns to face the wall and waits for Harley who is sleeping in the upper bunk, to hit the snooze button. The beep persists and seems to get louder, more obnoxious. Greg’s Higher Power raises a leg from the bed, pulling it through the coarse grey blanket, which slides off, grating the smooth leg he extends into the bottom of the mattress above him.
“Yeah. Mmm-hmm. Ten minutes.”
The Higher Power sits up on the mattress and leans his face into his hands, breathing deeply through his nose. He smells the dampness of the mattress on his fingers. The lamp faces out across the cellar floor. Along space heater sits on three old issues of the Hamilton Spectator. The front pages of the papers are browned by the heating element and their bottoms are cold and wet against the concrete floor. Like a closet of props the cellar is crammed with neglected junk. Two old televisions, a collection of broken hoes, a saddle, canoe paddles, a stack of rough scaffold planks, a mouldy array of old coats, a rusted-out stove, a soft, black cardboard box full of engine parts, a rack of clothes bundled under plastic and tied with binder twine, a plywood reindeer with a red bulb hanging from its nose. Under the charred pipes of a giant furnace is a bunk bed. Greg’s Higher Power has lived here throughout the winter in the orange glow of the space heater, waiting for his grief to settle, for Greg to be less with him, for spring to come. For summer to follow.