Funny things, flags, I thought to myself. Just a piece of cloth you took for granted until it was gone. Until what it represented was gone. The police, the ambulances, government… the people you hoped would have the answers; would know what to do. Stability and order. Reason and sober thought. Protection and safety. Society and civilization, the ultimate testament to strength and safety in numbers… I wondered how fragile it all truly was.
I parked on the street in front of the building and walked up the steps to the front door. It swung open, unlocked. No lights were on inside but sunlight entered, filtered through the frosted glass of the large windows facing the street. The windows gave the light a washed out and brittle quality, as though they were designed to sift all the warmth and colour out of it; designed to turn full spectrum light into its counterfeit fluorescent cousin. Down the halls that lead deeper into the building, only the dim emergency light, tinted crimson by the exit signs still shone, reminding me of the hospital, which made me shudder. Also like the hospital, the room was a wreck. Scattered papers littered the floor and the front desk. Two chairs were toppled over in the small waiting room.
“Hello?” I called tentatively. There was no reply. “Hey! Anyone here?” I called out, louder this time. The sound of my own voice startled me; seeming out of place. No reply, no movement.
I checked the large bulletin boards that lined the office. Plastered all over the walls were the usual posters one would find in any police station: posters about parolees in the area at risk of reoffending; posters about drinking and driving with the graphic of red and blue lights in a rear view mirror and the ominous slogan ‘Alberta Check Stop: What are you willing to lose?’ There was a poster full of missing people and their pictures and details. Some had been missing for years, some a matter of weeks. I noticed a poster of the fire hazard rating, a black arrow indicating that the hazard was orange, or at least had been at last update. The usual bulletins, however, had been mostly covered over with plain white sheets of printed-paper with large, no-nonsense block letters. No eye-catching graphics, no slogans, just pure unadulterated information in laser printed black font.
One poster dated January 21 stated in large bold letters:
The Illness Spreads Quickly. Be aware of the signs:
-Difficulty breathing,
-High fever,
-Severe joint pain,
-Involuntary muscle spasms,
-Blood in urine, stool, saliva and other fluids
-Difficulty thinking clearly and violent aggression
Contact RCMP immediately and report to the M. F. Wozdac Medical Centre at the first signs of illness.
January 21… three days after my ill-fated flight. I found it unlikely that the mysterious illness that had spread through town was coincidental. The illness that had disrupted my flight was almost certainly the same as had affected the town. In fact, it seemed likely that the illness had spread to this town as a result of the big man from the plane who had exhibited all the same symptoms as far as I could tell.
The notice also told me that I’d been unconscious for quite a long time, though I still didn’t know what the actual date was. I looked at the other announcements: a quarantine notice dated January 23, a declaration of emergency powers on January 24. There were more announcements about the illness; one notice stated that anyone presenting symptoms should be strictly avoided, as they could become ‘abruptly violent as a result of reduced of brain function’.
I stared in disbelief as I read a poster, which stated that any victims of the illness were to be immediately zip tied with the green ties issued to the public, as a matter of public safety. They were to be placed outside and the special disease control hotline was to be called for immediate pick-up. All doors and windows were to remain locked at all times and residents were required to remain in their homes.
The final poster, dated January 29, read:
Mandatory Evacuation
6:00 a.m. January 30th @ Town Hall
Anyone presenting any symptoms
will be turned away
Anyone with unusual skin punctures or lesions
will be turned away
Only one bag of essential items per evacuee
Absolutely No Exceptions.
I wondered why the posters had been posted if no one had been allowed to leave their homes for the last few days. Likely it had been habit more than anything. Bureaucratic habits were harder to break than personal addictions. I looked around at the desks in the main room. They were scattered with meaningless papers and files that had been left in the panic. The posters had told me what I needed to know, almost as if they had been left for me, left to fill me in.
Clearly a great catastrophe had occurred. Everyone was gone and I was left with the bonfire of the dead and diseased and perhaps a few survivors that wandered, like the man on the street, as shells of their former selves, their brains perhaps irreparably damaged. A Goddamn zombie outbreak, I thought in disbelief, realizing that it was not far from the truth. About as close to zombies as you could get in the real world.
It was unbelievable. I couldn’t take it in; couldn’t accept it. I sat down heavily on a chair in the waiting room in a daze. The chairs were uncomfortable in a way that only government waiting room furniture can be. It would have been better to sit in one of the comfortable swivel chairs behind the desk but subconsciously, I suppose, there were certain societal lines that I didn’t want to cross. I was trained to sit in the waiting room chairs with the other civilians and non-bureaucrats. I sat for a while, my head in my hands, feeling numb.
So I’d been out for more than ten days... I figured January 30 must have been a minimum of a day or two ago, the way the town looked, the way the emergency lights had dimmed to a faint glow, the way the heat had entirely leached out of the buildings. It might have been longer, but not much. I didn’t know how long emergency lights lasted but it couldn’t be too long. A week, maybe, at most. It was a guess based on nothing at all, but I stuck with it; used it to give myself some sense of the passage of time. The time that I had lost.
I went over facts that I knew, counting them off on my fingers as I went. I’d learned that every person in the town was either sick, dead or evacuated. I’d been left behind in a morgue, presumed dead I suppose, probably afflicted with the illness but for some reason I’d recovered and it had done less damage to me than to other survivors. As far as I could tell my brain still functioned normally. I wasn’t feeling foggy or slow or unable to focus.
The evacuation notice had mentioned that anyone with symptoms or unusual skin punctures would be turned away. I remembered the chunk of arm that was missing under my sleeve. I guessed that the authorities would probably have counted that as an unusual puncture.
An image; a dim, red tinted memory came back to me. I felt the horrible pain in my arm… screams all around me. A snarling sound next to me. The burning hotness that pulsed through my veins and the cold that followed. I remembered turning and seeing the big man on the plane… the last thing I saw before blackness… a piece of raw meat dripping blood from his mouth; down his chin. My flesh, I realized. My flesh…
I gagged again and waited for my head to stop spinning. Was this what they’d had to deal with? Was this what we’d brought in our little plane? How had that big man caught such an illness? Where had the illness come from? What about the more populated cities? What about the rest of the world? Questions swam through my head. They came and went quickly and I was able to answer none of them.
I struggled with what to do next. If I headed south, I had little doubt I’d come across a checkpoint and I was sure to recieve a thorough medical examination. I’d probably be quarantined and studied for a long time if they didn’t kill me outright. And… possibly worse things I didn’t want to consider. I imagined becoming a test subject, dissected and tortured by faceless contamination suits. Given the pile of bodies I’d found; this was an extremely serious situation. It seemed within the realm of possibility that
this might be what I faced if I returned to society.
Clearly this was not your run-of-the-mill epidemic. Even kind, gentle Canada would be hard pressed to keep calm and careful in these circumstances. If I headed out of a quarantine zone toward the more populated south, it was possible that even here they’d shoot first and ask questions after. I could survive in the bush almost indefinitely, but I wouldn’t have any news about what was going on. I wouldn’t know when it was safe to come out. I needed to know what was going on in the wider world. I needed information, news; instructions.
I knew what I needed and I knew my own capabilities. This gave me my answer about what to do next. I’d search the police station and try to find anything like a radio. I’d see if any phones were still functioning; try to get a satellite feed; maybe even an internet connection so that I could find out what was going on out there and perhaps I’d even be able to contact someone who could give me advice about what to do. The worst they could do would be to tell me to stay the hell away. At least I’d have an answer; some information, and that would be better than nothing. I would follow the situation out there and I would stay away, surviving alone until I was sure it was safe to emerge. I felt the weight of exile upon me, but there was hope as well. Hope that all would be explained and that my exile would not be permanent.
Seven
After more than an hour of searching I had discovered no further information and still had no way of contacting the outside world. There was no power to the building. I felt certain that there would be generators somewhere to keep the RCMP powered even in an emergency, but I hadn’t wanted to venture too far into the tight, dark hallways and in my cautious explorations I hadn’t found the maintenance room or basement. Many of the doors were locked and I did not care to bash them in. It seemed to me that the generators in a police station would kick in automatically. This meant that the power had been cut long enough that the generators had run out without someone to refill them with fuel. How long had everyone been gone?
I was frustrated by all the electronics I found: presumably, they all still worked, but with no power, flipping switches did nothing. I lucked out and found a set of twelve hand-held radios that still had some battery power. Their winking green LCD lights shone from the dark corner of a desk. They sat in a non-functioning charging dock as though patiently waiting for the power to kick on. I took the radios, dock and all, out to the Jeep.
I turned one on and cycled through the frequencies, listening for any signals but found nothing. I broadcasted a short message on each channel, but there was no reply. These were short-range radios anyway. I’d used similar radios on the rigs that had a range of about ten kilometers before the signal started to become fuzzy with static; maybe fifteen or twenty, depending on the weather and the lay of the land, before the signal was all but lost. Up here, fifteen or twenty kilometers was not such a long way.
I spent a few minutes out on the sidewalk, trying to decide whether it was worth poking around in the deeper hallways of the police station. I’d never been afraid of the dark; was not particularly afraid of abandoned buildings or of being alone, but something about the close walls, the blood-red emergency lighting and the knowledge that only the dead or severely brain-damaged were left for miles around caused me to hesitate.
Normally, my claustrophobia didn’t extend to hallways and basements, but under the circumstances, the building felt as dark and imposing as the morgue drawer I’d woken up in the day before. Heading into the basement in the cold underground, with cracked cement walls, crowded machinery and only a single narrow escape route was almost out of the question… But I also couldn’t just sit here wondering. I had to know what was happening out there. I had to get my hands on a radio, a phone… something.
I was reaching for the door handle, ready to head back into the police station, having finally built up the nerve to try to get the power on when I suddenly realized how stupid I’d been. A police van was sitting quietly out in the sunlight; out in the wide-open air. The van would have a radio with longer range and quite possibly a wireless Internet or satellite connection. The RCMP all had in-car computers, and this particular department needed to operate equipped to handle the miles of wilderness that surrounded the town.
Hopefully the van would have a charged battery and a full tank of gas. It would be as easy as turning the ignition and I’d have all the equipment I would have had in the police station without any of the heart rending fear. It struck me then that my stupidity reached further than that. My own Jeep had, if nothing else, an AM/FM radio that I could have been using to tune into radio stations. Surely I’d be able to pick up a news station from somewhere. You could often hear the AM signals hundreds of miles from their origin if the conditions were right.
“You ain’t gonna make it far if you don’t start using your head…” I muttered to myself. I grabbed a large pair of wire cutters out of the Jeep; I’d taken them from the sporting goods store in case I needed to get through any of the barbed wire fences that cut the farmland into neat square parcels out here. I also hooked a small hatchet onto my belt, in case I needed to break into the police van.
Never having tried to hotwire a police car, or any kind of car for that matter, I didn’t know if they had extra security on their cars; immobilizers to shut the engine down or something, but I didn’t figure they would. I doubted there was much business in stealing police cars. In fact, I hoped that they were so unconcerned with police vehicle theft that they’d just left a key tucked into the sun visor or something in case an officer needed to grab a vehicle quick.
The only time I’d ever started a car without a key was when my rusted old truck had been stolen for some teenage joy ride and the ignition had been knocked out. After the truck had been recovered, I’d driven around without the ignition for a few months, starting it instead with a bump to the exposed switch inside the steering column. I hadn’t bothered to replace the ignition, knowing that the truck was on its last legs. All the same, I didn’t feel overly confident that I’d be able to get the van running without the key and I hoped to hell I wouldn’t have to go searching for it in the police station.
The gate in the chain link fence around the RCMP parking lot was open. I let myself in and walked up to the van. I knew there was no one around to report me, and even if there had been, I had a pretty sound reason for doing what I was about to do. In spite of that, the same civilized instinct caused me to hesitate.
My hands were shaking. It was almost as though doing this; breaking into a police vehicle; the bastion of law and order, the symbol of the rule of law; would be an irreparable act. As though I was crossing some line that should not be crossed. Irrationally, I believed that I would either invite society’s vengeance upon myself or prove to myself a fact that had been stalking me like a predator: that here and now, at least, society was dead and gone.
Neither was an appealing idea, but I would have given anything to have been suddenly surrounded by lights and sirens, cuffed and taken to prison rather than stranded alone in a ghost town knowing that the swirling ashes of the dead swept through the gutters.
“Please be open…” I begged the driver’s side door. I pulled the handle, but nothing happened. The door was locked. “Shit,” I muttered. I took the hatchet from my belt, took a deep breath and swung the blunt side against the driver’s side window. It shattered into a thousand sparkling blue cubes that fell into the van and out onto the pavement at my feet.
I pulled my sleeve over my hand to brush off the pieces of glass that hung on around the frame. I pulled up on the lock and popped the door open. Now if I could just find a key.
“No way it’ll be there,” I said to myself negatively, looking up at the sun visor, folded neatly against the van’s ceiling. I flipped it down anyway and was startled by the loud clatter as something fell against the dashboard. Sure enough, a long key with a plastic Ford logo was sitting beneath the windshield next to the defrost vent. I stared at the key, hardly daring to believe
that it was actually there.
“Ha!” I barked triumphantly. “Bout time something went right,” I felt the cold hard metal in my hand, willing my luck to hold. Now if the van would just start…
I slid the key into the ignition, took a deep breath and turned. The engine turned over a couple times, cold and reluctant. The vehicle probably hadn’t been started for several days, maybe more than a week. I knew as well as any that cold weather could suck the juice out of the battery, freeze up the condensation in the fuel line and thicken the oil. I tried twice more and on the last try, the engine roared to life, protesting the cold with grumbling noises.
I patted the dashboard appreciatively, grinning like a lunatic. The needle on the fuel gauge sat around three quarters full. I decided to run it a while before switching on the electronics. I’d heard that police vehicles needed heavy-duty batteries and alternators to run all their equipment and the last thing I wanted was to kill the battery. If the engine stalled, I wanted to be able to start it again.
In the rear view mirror, thick white plumes of exhaust filled the parking lot with lingering fog; a sign that it was quite cold out. I wondered at this. I felt neither cold nor warm. I didn’t have gloves on and my jacket was half open in the front. Normally, when exhaust clouded like that, hanging low to the ground; pushed down by the cold, heavy air, I’d be shivering within minutes with my jacket open. I wasn’t, and I’d been out for ages without heat. I felt a little stiff, like blood wasn’t flowing as easily, but not cold.
I hadn’t noticed the cold in the police station either, but even a day or two without electricity or heat and the place should have been freezing. I hoped I didn’t have a fever or something, lingering symptoms from whatever had knocked me into a coma for over a week. I zipped up my coat and pulled my hands into my sleeves making a mental note to keep warm, even if I wasn’t noticing the cold. I’d have to monitor myself.
The Penance of Leather (Book 1): Ain't No Grave Page 6
