Disappearance

by Trevor Zaple

  The thought was followed immediately by the most forceful orgasm he’d ever experienced in his life. He had felt like a rocket taking flight when Lillian had gone down on him; now he felt like the very white hole of creation. He thrust wildly, feeling like his soul was spurting away from him, out of him to entwine with his sister’s. When it was done he stumbled back, exiting her with a wet pop, and fell back against the carpet, the rough pile scraping against the soft skin of his behind. A flare of pain went up, but he ignored it. The redhead stepped over him and squatted down over his chest. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into his face. He felt his vision swim.

  “My turn,” she moaned, and anything that happened afterward was blacked out from Jason’s memory.

  On the roof, Olivia looked around uncomfortably. The crowd on the roof, although certainly more genteel than those below, was beginning to pass the point of being charmingly drunk and edging into the territory of obnoxious and dangerous. She tugged on Mark’s sleeve.

  “I think it’s time we go,” she murmured. “I think this party’s going to a place we’re not going to want to be at”.

  Amber overheard this and nodded. Her eyes were on a pair of athletic frat-boy types who were becoming overly loud and aggressive.

  “Probably time to split,” she said decisively. She looked to Barry. “Emily hasn’t shown up, yet,” she said, her tone worried. Barry shrugged.

  “Emily is a big girl,” he replied nonchalantly. “With a lot of big guns. She can definitely handle herself”. He turned to Olivia and Mark. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said. “Do you want to take me up on the offer?” he asked. Mark looked at Olivia and they studied each other for a moment without speaking. Barry had offered to let them stay at the Cadillac Lounge, for the night at least, and on a more permanent basis if they liked. He’d been charmed by Olivia’s spunk and strength, and found that Mark had a solid, dependable streak in him that Barry admired. Olivia pursed her lips.

  “I think we will,” she said slowly, giving Mark time to disagree. When he didn’t, she nodded and said “yeah”.

  “Not me,” Carlos said. “No offense, or anything. I just have some stuff at the apartment that would make me nervous to just leave behind”.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you, just to make sure you get there alright?” Mark asked. Carlos laughed.

  “Sure, but then who would walk you back to the Cadillac Lounge?” he asked. He shook his head. “Nah, I’ll be alright. I’ll meet you there tomorrow morning”.

  “Great,” Barry said, gesturing towards the stairs. “Shall we?” They placed their drinks along the wall that lined the edge of the roof and made their way through the sodden party-goers clogging up the hotel.

  When they emerged on the street some time later, they shivered in the rediscovered night air and began vacating the area as quickly as they could. There were people collapsed in the street, and it was uncertain as to whether any individual one was blackout drunk, stoned into incomprehension, or merely dead. They stepped around them gingerly, regardless, and disappeared into the stealthy confines of the deepening night. Behind them, the loud desperation of the hotel faded to a dull mutter.

  A block away, on the roof of another aged hotel, a mousy brunette in black thieves apparel crouched in the shadows and stared down into the camouflaging shadows outside a low-cost grocery store. She saw a group of men walk up to the darkened parking lot, weaving a large amount of wheelbarrows around the amalgamation of cars. She pulled away from the scene for a moment and rummaged through a black duffel bag that lay to her left. She came out with a long, weighty gun sight, which she screwed onto a slick long-barrelled rifle that was sitting in the grime to her right. She hefted the gun, levered a round into the chamber, and poked it out carefully over the side of the roof. She peered through the scope. She saw two dozen men, armed with bats, clubs, and handguns, supervising the line of wheelbarrows disappearing into the grocery store.

  She looked up. It was very interesting. Someone had a real interest in the contents of this food store. She pondered this, and then peered back through the scope again. She centered the sights on one of the men, a portly black-haired man with a swarthy face and florid cheeks. He aimed steadily at his left temple, her breath coming in and out with deceptive ease. She held it for a moment. One light squeeze, and a .308 shell would fly out through the whispering night to crack apart the man’s skull like a dropped egg. Her finger hovered. Eventually she pulled it away. There was too many of them. She mistrusted what they were doing; there was no reason to go around armed like that unless you were planning resistance to your actions. She frowned, caught in her dilemma. Killing one of them would solve nothing, and besides which she wasn’t sure if it was even a problem worth killing a man over. Her position would be compromised, and there was more than one gun down there. She didn’t fancy a group firing back at her. She decided to stow her rifle and watch, although the decision felt like a hot defeat in her heart. She reached into the duffel bag once more, and brought out a battered, well-thumbed copy of the Zombie Survival Handbook. It was too dark to read it, but she knew it off by heart. She hugged the book to her chest, watching the men loot the grocery store, and her lips recited passages from it like rosaries. Above, the moon continued on its steady disappearance over the far horizon, below rows of almost-blackened buildings.

  Fourth Interlude

  The sun would come up and shine down on people still reveling, spreading out as they went on their way to whatever they considered home. They radiated out from the Drake like the shockwave of an earthquake, spreading tired, sodden behavior as they went. As dawn intensified the city’s population finally achieved the furious dream of John Sinclair: there was a widespread epidemic of rock ‘n’ roll, dope, and fucking in the streets. Or, as his house band put it, “kick out the jams, motherfucker”.

  When they reached their intended destination they would crawl inside, into cool darkness, and fall asleep wherever they could. Debauchery of the most concentrated sort takes a lot out of a person. There were those, of course, who had been heavily abusing the stimulant spectrum of human drug use and so did not fall asleep. They would continue the party, in their own lunatic cells, but the greater part of those who had attended the Fuck the Mayor party were dead to the world by eleven that morning. It would not be until the sun had mostly set that evening that any of them would really be awake and functioning. They would arise, not really comprehending anything, sitting in couches and chairs or leaning over rooftops and balconies. They would rummage about for something to eat, their pounding hangovers preventing them from really being hungry. They would try to go about their day as was normal (although the definition of normal had been stretched to transparency) although it would only be a half-hearted effort. Eventually they would find a quiet place, perform some mind-numbing act of distraction, and seek sleep once again. They would be joined by most of those still carrying on the party, leaving a scant few hardcore miscreants to blast their systems with an ever-increasing dose of sleeplessness to combine with the other drugs chasing around their systems.

  That would be the first day after the party.

  On the second day, the city awoke and discovered that there were some who had not attended the party who had been very busy on that same night. Emily knew this, having witnessed some of their labors first-hand, and although she would pass it quietly onto Barry he would shake his head and refuse to discuss it, his eyes distant. The survivors would learn of it eventually, when they went to scavenge more food from the broken stores, although by then it would be too late.

  While a large percentage of the survivors were drinking themselves into oblivion, Paul Taggert and his associates had availed themselves upon every food storage in the west half of the city. They had come with a miniature fleet of carriage, cobbled together from wheelbarrows, shopping carts, and repurposed parade floats. They had come in the night, taken the food, and gone. On the second day after the party, it became known by w
ord-of-mouth that if anyone in western Toronto wanted food, they would have to get it through Paul Taggert. What would he want for it? was a question on a great number of lips that day. People eyed their remaining food stores with a newfound paranoia, mentally parceling it out in their heads, trying to find ways to make it stretch as long as possible.

  At City Hall, Mayor John met the news with a typical response, which is to say that he exploded with fury and came within a breath of causing himself an embolism. He screamed with red-faced fury, demanding that his police force go and arrest Taggert; he belted out vile strings of words that were barely recognizable as English and were so bedecked with profanity as to render them worthless. His council witnessed this meltdown with stony silence, many preferring to look down at whatever papers they had brought that afternoon and pretend that nothing was happening. Eventually he ran out of construction materials and broke down into a series of blustering sentence-starters: “Well”, “I”, “They”, “He”, and so forth. Even this ran down after a time and he sat in his central seat, panting heavily, his cheeks badly flushed. After a minute or two of this, Douglas Childs entered the chambers, strode across to the mayor, and stood behind him. A roughened, strong hand with the faintest beginnings of wrinkling was laid on the mayor’s shoulder. Childs smiled and projected himself to the council.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, and his unaided voice carried to the back of the chamber. “I believe that the mayor has requested a vote on sending our police force to arrest Mr. Taggert and his companions for crimes against the city. Are we going to sit here like lumps all day, or are we going to exercise democracy?”.

  There was an undercurrent of grumbling but the vote was held, and the ‘motion’ that was the mayor’s rambling, seething diatribe was passed by a near-unanimous vote. The city’s newly founded police force, which had already suffered bad attrition in the mayor’s initial push to control the food supply, would be sent into battle against those who worked for Paul Taggert. The members of council would go home that night with deeply troubled expressions, unable to truly put into words the unease that they felt. The sole dissenter who had voted against the mayor’s rant, a former real estate agent and career glad-hander named Charles Adler, went home with no expression at all. He would fix himself a thick tuna fish sandwich and heat up a can of Campbell’s tomato. He would eat it, savoring every bite, while reading through a book of collected poetry that he had treasured for years. He would flip to a random page and find Brian Henderson, and read what we see by is crushed out of us / and begins to flow with a viscous clarity. He would work over this, playing with each word in his mind, as he sipped at the comforting blanket of thick tomato soup. He would put it down, and go to the window of his million-dollar lakeshore condo, and stare out over the city. He would look down at the various developments that he had maintained financial fingers in, his wheelings and dealings spread out over the rough topographical map of high and low buildings. He would count them, one by one, and then he would retire into his bedroom. He would pick up the heavy service revolver that his father had brought back from the Korean police action, all the way on the other side of history. He would place the barrel, cool and intrusive, against the underside of his chin, in the soft flesh he always thought of as a frog-bladder. He would swallow reflexively, feeling it lump around the gun. He would close his eyes and squeeze the trigger home. His bloody oatmeal brains would exit through the newfound jagged hole in the top of his head to stain the pure white paint on his ceiling. He would fall forward with a heavy thump to the floor, his protest complete.

  That would be the second day after the party.

  On the third day after the party, the lights went out.

  Irene McCallister was watching a DVD copy of Sanford and Son for the hundredth time, her blinds shut tight against the hazy August sunlight. She was getting on in years and had a horror of developing a cancer. She refused to step out into the sun without heavy layers enveloping her, stopping those lethal, invisible UV rays from sizzling carcinomas on her slack, greying skin. She would spend most of her time indoors, her windows shut tight against the intrusion of the sun, her eyes dully watching collections of faded television glory. Her life ran on government disability cheques, although since the disappearance even this minor contact with the outside world had ceased.

  She was watching an interchangeable episode when her television suddenly went blank. The change in the ambient light level was extraordinary; the loud, flickering light had been immediately replaced by a darkness so complete that for an instant Irene thought that she had simply closed her eyes. This was followed by a quailing of her soul, an urge to run to the nearest window and throw open the blinds that was so severe that she nearly forgot herself and did it. She breathed heavily in the womb-like conditions of her apartment, paralyzed by indecision. The television remained off; she wondered if it would come back on, like an eye opening in a miraculous iris, but it did not.

  She rose, and fumbled slowly towards the wall with the light switch. She flicked it but the lights did not come on. She turned it off and turned it on again, convinced that it was just a mistake the first time. The lights remained dark. Her heart fluttered inside her ribcage like an ancient, palsied bird. She licked her aged, cracked lips, trying to find some moisture. Flick off. Flick on. Nothing. Again. Nothing. She closed her eyes and realized that it was just as dark. She would have to find the windows, she realized, and shortly after that another, even more unsettling idea chased it. She would have to find her heavy, anti-sunlight clothing. She concentrated hard, trying to remember where she might have put it, but nothing came. She would need to look for it.

  To look for it, she would have to open the blinds. A fierce shaking began in her knees and she put her palms to the wall to steady herself. She told herself that it would have to happen, nothing could happen until she had light to see by. She told herself sternly that she was made of better stuff than this, and that it would just be a scant few seconds of sunlight on her skin and then she could scurry away like a cockroach into the shadows. She clenched her fists, her jaw, and her sphincter, and prepared herself. She ended up crawling.

  One shaky hand rose up, touched the thin, vinyl-wrapped wooden bar that ended the blind, and pulled tentatively down on it. The blind rose up with a dizzying speed and Irene threw herself back, her eyes wide and her pupils dilated with the sudden influx of light. She hissed, involuntarily, expecting to feel the oppressive warmth of unfiltered sunlight burning into her arms with cancerous force. The light that came in, however, was as grey and muted as her own flesh. The sky was mercifully overcast.

  She stumbled back into her apartment, grateful for being able to see the impediments that the sudden darkness had hidden but still deathly afraid of what invisible horrors might be coming through the dirt-fogged pane of glass separating her from the outside. She crawled, panting heavily, and found her way to her bedroom. It was heavily shadowed, and Irene had trouble rummaging through her disorder, but eventually she found what she was looking for. She took a grey, long-sleeved sweater, a thick black canvas coat, a pair of sturdy black work-pants, and a pair of delicate leather gloves from various places within the pile of clothes she kept in one corner of her musty bedroom. She put these on and strode out into the main room of her apartment, already feeling more confident.

  Her fears calming, she found her heavy black boots and put them on, stopping momentarily to grab the wide black bonnet from its hook beside her heavy apartment door. After this she stood, stretching her extremities, feeling the soft, whispered friendship of the thin, supple leather of her gloves against her gnarling fingers. She put her fingers to her face, feeling their cold comfort against the trails of tears that had been cut down from her quivering eyes. Wiping away the remnants of her fear, she walked with a purpose to her balcony door and, with a whistling-past-the-graveyard flourish, threw it open.

  She stood on the decaying balcony of her crumbling cement apartment building, looking out over the silent warrens o
f Regent Park. Short public housing blocks spread out before her, given a strangely dying look in the cloud-choked steel light. She saw no one in the streets or in the claustrophobic passageways; the city seemed dead and buried. There were no lights in any of the windows; the ubiquitous sound of static in unoccupied apartments had ceased. Silence—real silence—had descended upon the city. She shivered, although the weather was quite warm. She wondered, not for the last time, what she would do with herself now.

  Carter Henderson jogged his way down Dundas Street, nimbly dodging the detritus of trash that littered the cracked sidewalks. He was halfway through his typical daily jogging route, approaching the colorful bombast of the Dragon City mall. The skies were thankfully overcast, cutting out much of the sweltering late-August heat that had concerned him on previous jogging excursions. He was getting older by the day, and the blubber that he carried on his belly was not getting any thinner, and the heat had weighed down on him in a way that it never had before.

  This was part of the reason that he had chosen to move to Toronto Western Hospital. He had not been alone in this decision, of course. A number of people had taken up residence in the hospital as well, driven by proximity to medical supplies and machinery, as well as the baser need to be near the heavy narcotics. Several of the more comfortable private rooms on the recovery floors were now occupied by people who were intent on turning it into a high-powered rooming house. A few of them even seemed to be doctors, as far as Carter could tell, and this possibility cheered him up even as the leaden thud of his heart and the occasional worrying tingle in his left arm depressed him.

  He had never been one to commit to an exercise program, having been one of the countless pre-disappearance people who had opened up a gym membership and then promptly ignored it. He had ordered home-gym programs (the boxes of which were inevitably decorated with ripped, cut men covered in sweat and exercising at what seemed like a ludicrous pace) but had never opened most of them. The jogging was something he’d chosen on his own, after awakening in the dead of night with a weight on his chest and sweat pouring off of him. He had been painfully aware that he had been lying in a hospital bed, and the connotation, although coincidental, had not been lost on him. The next day he had begun the regimen.