NOD

by Adrian Barnes

  ‘I love this child.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘And she could be any child. That’s the point. I could love any child, and by loving my Zoe, I love every child. That’s lucky, Paul. I feel really lucky.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  Her face was finally paying the full price for a week without sleep and showers. As I’ve already noted, her mouth now had a tendency to droop open when not in use. Her head hung as though on a coat hanger, and when she looked up, she always seemed to be looking at me over the rims of invisible reading glasses. And she had started sniffling away at some sort of cold. God know what sorts of diseases were flying around out there as overstressed immune systems began to crash and burn.

  It was all I could do to look at her, honestly. All I could do not to burst into tears and run out of the room.

  ‘Why you and not me, Paul? Is there a reason? If you’re chosen, you must know the reason.’

  ‘There’s no reason.’

  Was there a reason?

  ‘Yes there is. There’s always a reason for everything. Tell me.’

  Maybe there was a reason.

  ‘No. It’s always been this way—random. Why did you and I have food to eat and safe beds to sleep in when we were kids, while the kid next door got abused and the kids in Africa starved?’

  She flinched, then placed her mascara wand on the coffee table and held a mirror up to my face.

  ‘Welcome to my world.’

  I looked and found myself ridiculous—an extra from an Eighties Hair Metal video. Or so I would have seemed to someone with a good night’s sleep under their belt. To the people wandering around outside, I probably just looked par for the course.

  ‘It’s time to get going.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  The deal I’d cut with Charles was that the three of us would move into the school today. His followers had been busily boarding up the main floor windows, fortifying the place. That was the deal. In reality we intended to do no such thing.

  ‘North.’

  ‘To the North Pole? Are we going to seek refuge at Santa’s place?’

  ‘We’ll find some millionaire’s place in North Van and take it over. Live like kings.’

  She put her hand on my cheek but avoided my eyes.

  ‘There’s nowhere to go that isn’t here, Paul.’

  ‘You want Zoe to be safe, don’t you?’

  She paused.

  ‘Yes.’

  It was said about Vancouver that once you went beyond five-kilometre-deep North Vancouver, that was it: that was the end of ‘civilized’ North America. After leaving North Van, you could walk straight to the Arctic Circle and never see a soul or a settlement. This couldn’t be literally true: you’d have to cross the occasional forlorn highway or encounter a string or two of hydro lines, but the point still held. Maybe we’d hole up in that imaginary mansion for a few days, then try our luck with the bears and cougars. Maybe if we got far enough away from the city, the curse would lift.

  ‘We can’t stay here. It’s getting really scary out there.’

  ‘We’ve seen the writing on the wall,’ she snickered to herself.

  I hadn’t told Tanya anything about Charles and his creepy crawlies. I didn’t think she’d have been able to handle the news. Better just to run.

  We crammed what little food we had left into a backpack along with some toilet paper and our toothbrushes and slipped out of the apartment as silently as we could, leaving the door ajar as closing it might have alerted the sentries next door.

  The air stank as we felt our way down the dark hallway to the stairs. Shameful though it is to say, we’d been using the empty apartment across the hall as a toilet, shitting into a bucket in one of the bedrooms, then dumping the contents out the window into the alley.

  There were other smells wafting through the halls, the strongest emanating from Mrs Simmons’ place. A puke-up-your-guts sweetness that made us scurry through the darkness, we three blind mice, as fast as we could.

  It had felt crafty to plan our escape for five in the morning, before Charles’ people returned, though I was fully aware that whoever was watching us wasn’t likely to be sleeping on the job. Tanya had made a shawl for Zoe to hide her face from rheumy eyes.

  I’d decided we’d walk along the edge of Stanley Park until we got to the causeway that cut through its heart to Lion’s Gate Bridge and the North Shore. If trouble approached us from the city, we could always, I reasoned, make a run for it into the rainforest.

  It seemed a curious piece of luck that Vancouver was the only major city I knew of with a largely-untouched primordial forest right downtown. Stanley Park was so large, in fact, that it had historically been a refuge for the homeless and the addicted. There were rumoured to be settlements deep in the heart of the park where those unable to afford their own sliver of green glass could take shelter beneath green trees, beyond the green world of money. But did that mean that the woods were now filled with psychotic hobos? No matter. I liked our chances of escape better in the forest.

  As we walked, I swung an iron barbell, denuded of weights. The barbell’s heft transferred confidence into my right arm, and I did my best to carry it with swaggering ease, mindful of eyes that might be watching our progress. My ribs were feeling a little better today, sore but not so rickety.

  As we walked along the goose shit bespattered edge of Lost Lagoon, a pack of dogs on the far shore snapped at a swan that alternately flew at them, beating its massive wings, then retreated into the water where it paddled in lunatic circles, honking. It was like all of them were engaged in some sort of co-dependent role-playing game: dog and swan playing cat and mouse.

  But where were the human beings? Surprisingly for a city with a population of four million, the West End, Vancouver’s downtown core, was a mere forty thousand or so. The rest of that four million were commuters from the surrounding areas who filled the city each dawn, then staggered out twenty hours later when the last bars closed. Most likely, everyone who didn’t live here had simply gone home to the burbs when things began to fall apart.

  I’d seen a few bodies, smelled a few more, but it seemed as though most of us were still alive. So where was everyone? I looked up at the massed ranks of the apartment buildings fronting the park and felt them stare back—hard. Suddenly, our progress felt ant-slow.

  ‘Faster.’

  Tanya said nothing, but adjusted her pace as I sped up. Zoe trotted beside me, grinning. We rounded the muddy edge of the lagoon then proceeded down the Causeway into the mossy, permanent shade of Stanley Park’s giant cedars.

  It was cool in there. Cold, almost. Quiet too. The soft, fabric-like bark of the cedars soaked up sound like a sponge, and in the silence my paranoid thoughts were magnified to operatic levels.

  Tanya held Zoe’s hand tight as we threaded our way between abandoned cars, parked bumper to bumper across all three lanes. For five minutes we walked deeper and deeper into the park, the absolute silence occasionally given a hairline fracture by the fading cries of English Bay seagulls.

  And then I saw them.

  To our left, a pair of men were moving through the bush on a bike trail that paralleled the Causeway. An odd couple—one lanky and fair, the other squat and dark. The tall one was a skater punk, outfitted with a jabbering T-shirt and long, long black shorts tricked out with chains. The shorter one looked like an accountant. Slacks and loafers—a kind of autistic stab at Mad Men-style trendiness. Ironic, of course, given that he was now literally insane. But none of the tribal signals indicated by the pair’s clothing mattered, really; they were united by filth, wild eyes, and perfectly matching expressions of intense concentration. They were hunting.

  But hunting what? The park’s fat, tourist-fed squirrels? I squinted further ahead, deeper into the woods and saw, toddling obliviously along, their real quarry.

  A pair of Sleeper children.

  Two small boys, hand in hand, were trundling down the path,
a hundred or so feet ahead of their pursuers. You’d have thought they were off to get an ice cream cone from the concession stand at Lumberman’s Arch. But you’d have thought wrong.

  Behind them, the Mad Man shushed the Skater, bade him wait, and increased his own pace.

  Grabbing Tanya’s arm and pointing at them, I pantomimed instructions that she and Zoe should hide themselves behind a nearby SUV and wait for me. Then, bar in hand, I set off in pursuit.

  My stomach churned, but I knew what I had to do. Either I would take out the pursuers or they would take out the children. A simple either/or choice. Or, rather, no choice. And when I realized I had no choice, a weight lifted from my shoulders. It was so odd to realize that choice had been a burden I’d been lugging around all my life—and that choice had only really existed because, until now, nothing particularly important had been at stake.

  Ahead of me, the Skater slowed and stopped, his battery running low. Sneaking up behind him was no big deal, and neither, as it turned out, was lifting my dumbell and bringing it down on his head. The bar sank into his skull, black blood welling up around the wound, and the skater toppled to the ground. Human skulls as easy to smash as watermelons? I’d say that was about right. What did I feel at that moment? I don’t want to understate or overstate the case, but not that much. The death, my act of murder, felt TV-remote; the reality of those two little boys overrode any squeamishness or pity I might have been inclined to feel.

  And decisiveness was a pretty empowering feeling.

  Later that night I’d reflect and feel nauseous at what I’d done, but even then—and even now when the memory occasionally bloats up and floats back to the surface of my mind—animal horror is tinged by pride that I had acted, had saved two lives. But WWJD? What would Jesus have done in my position? My money would be on the barbell.

  The Mad Man hadn’t heard a thing: he was too far ahead, too intent on his task. I heaved the dripping bar back over my shoulder and carried on, pure and cold in my purpose, like I was made of iron myself. The weapon wasn’t an extension of me, as cliché would have it, but rather I was an extension of the weapon.

  The trail ahead was a minefield of twigs and branches, dangerous terrain for someone hoping to make a sneak attack. As I drew closer to the Mad Man, I saw that he did indeed have a knife—a long, curved kitchen blade. I began to hurry, but before I could reach him, he spun around. To my surprise, his face wasn’t hostile. It was conspiratorial.

  Hushing me, he pointed over his shoulder at the strolling boys and whispered, ‘Demons!’ like I’d understand and immediately get with the program.

  I hoisted my bar again. He looked up, saw his partner’s blood and brains spackled on it, then fell to his knees and began to whimper.

  ‘Oh God, Oh dear God, Holy Shit, what have I done?’ he cried, and began to alternate sobs and oaths.

  Up ahead, the boys heard his voice, let go of each other’s hands and bounded like startled rabbits. Then they ducked into the first available gap in the underbrush and vanished. I turned my attention back to the Mad Man, who was still burbling out chains of prayer.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’

  I’d programmed myself for a second kill, but the sight of easy prey on its knees, to all appearances overflowing with sincere remorse, stopped me in my tracks.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  He buried his face in his hands. His hands then spoke.

  ‘If you catch one and drink its blood, you get to sleep. They have the Sleepy Time blood. Like red chamomile tea. Have you seen their eyes? They’re crammed full of zeds. The fucking park’s swarming with them. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…’

  He was drifting from grief toward frustration and rage. I reached down, snatched the knife out of his hand, and hurled it as far as I could into the bush.

  ‘Get a grip,’ I hissed. ‘They’re not demons. They’re just little kids.’

  He rattled his head back and forth. ‘How do you know? You don’t know. Every time I pass by the fucking lagoon I see them peeking out through the bushes at me. And they’re always giggling. Why are they laughing at us when we’re fucking dying?’

  ‘They aren’t hurting anyone. They were just two little kids walking through the park.’

  He released his face from his hands and fixed his eyes on mine.

  ‘Not hurting anyone? They hurt me! They hurt my fucking retinas! They burn a hole through my shitting brains. Every thought I have, there’s one of those kids burned through the middle of it. Not hurting anyone? Fuck you. Know what I saw yesterday over on Denman Street?

  I waited.

  ‘A kid’s arm, man. In the middle of the street. Just an arm. And other little kids walking around with blood and shit all over themselves. Our kids, real kids. Not Demons. So what’s not demonic about them, out here, looking like everything’s fucking copacetic? Do you know what’s in their blood?’

  Tanya was watching us. The Mad Man saw her too.

  ‘Just get out of here,’ I told him. ‘And don’t follow us. Go back downtown.’

  I hated the sound and sense of all the words available to me, a nauseous swirl of chimp thoughts and grunted syllables. It had felt much better to simply hoist the bar and let it drop.

  I turned away, but he stopped me with a hand around my ankle.

  ‘Do me a favour before you go.’

  I pulled away and looked at him. He was smiling up at me, pine needles the colour of dried blood sticking to his left cheek.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kill me, man. It won’t get better. Right? This isn’t going to stop. And I won’t stop hunting. You know I won’t. As soon as you’re gone, I’ll be looking for another kid. So do it. Stop me. I’ll turn around so you don’t have to look in my eyes.’

  He shuffled around on his knees until he was facing away from me, palms flat on the ground, head raised high. Like Tanya ready for a sleepy-bye fuck.

  I looked back at Tanya, who was watching me intently, something glinting in her eyes. I couldn’t see Zoe.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said after a moment. ‘I can’t do it.’

  Not in cold blood, anyway. If he’d made a move in my direction, I’d have done it in a heartbeat, but he didn’t move. So I walked away.

  By the time I got back to Tanya and Zoe, the Mad Man was up on his feet again.

  ‘Big mistake, fucker!’ he screamed. ‘Big fucking mistake. I’m your fucking shadow now, you hear me?! When you’re asleep, I’m going to take you out and drink your blood, you sleeping motherfucker! I saw that fucking mascara all over your face! And when I’ve done you, I’ll take care of your fucking traitor bitch girlfriend! And then your little bitch demon!’

  Tanya glared at me with naked scorn. Zoe sat at her ankles, scratching idly at the asphalt with a stick.

  ‘Why didn’t you do it, Paul? What? You were man enough to kill the first one when his back was turned, but you didn’t have the guts to take out the second one even though he was begging for it. What if he comes after Zoe? Man up, Paul. This isn’t a joke. This isn’t one of your stupid books.’

  She was wrong about that, of course.

  The Mad Man was still there, listening.

  ‘You know what? I’m so fucking glad you didn’t kill me, dude! I just got confused for a second, that’s all. I’ll be seeing you soon. I’ll remember you. You better remember me!’

  Then he turned and started walking back toward the city, whistling and swinging his arms. I watched for a while to see if he would try to turn around and follow us. But he didn’t, and soon enough he disappeared around a bend in the Causeway. We pressed on.

  Five more minutes’ walking brought us within sight of Lion’s Gate Bridge. Viewed from the woods, the bridge is a spectacular sight. Framed by imperial forest it arches up into the sky like a man-made rainbow. A breeze is always blowing across Coal Harbour and that wind, though invisible, is somehow a part of the picture: the bridge so still, but with invisible motion rippling across it. And on the mountains be
hind the bridge, the twin peaks of the lions themselves: they were there before we came to North America and stuck a name on them—and they’ll be there long after we’re gone.

  The line of abandoned cars extended from where we stood all the way up to the crest of the bridge where a clash of colours caught my eye. Fabric flapped and snapped. Tiny figures moved to and fro as though on the deck of a giant, impossible ship.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ I asked. Rhetorically. All my questions were rhetorical now, I realized, given that Zoe wouldn’t answer and Tanya saw me as either a useless fool or a dangerous one.

  ‘I wouldn’t go up there if I were you, Paul,’ a familiar voice behind me answered.

  Charles. My shoulders slumped while Tanya froze in her footsteps beside me.

  ‘There’s an unfriendly city being built up there by some pretty uncompaniable people, Paul. Not like us. They aren’t people of the book.’

  I turned around. Charles wasn’t alone. Arrayed behind him were about two dozen of his people, a strange and terrible crew. They’d been rich, they’d been poor. They’d been young and old, but now they were all the same in their greasiness and their gritty, gummy eyes, all stuck on me.

  There was more than safety in Charles’ numbers: there was consensus, there was culture, there was reality. Surrounded by a wasteland of isolates, Charles bore the gift of order. When Charles moved, his people moved. When he stood still, they did the same.

  ‘Are you ready to come home, Paul? Done sightseeing?’

  Tanya was staring at Charles, dumbfounded. He accepted her stare with royal bemusement.

  ‘Hey, Tanya? How’s it hanging?’

  ‘I’m good. Good.’

  She shocked me with the timidity of her reply. I’d expected withering scorn but heard…acceptance.

  Charles nodded.

  ‘I just wanted to say something to you, Tanya. I know we parted on bad terms last week, but no hard feelings? It’s a new day, so let’s make a fresh start.’

  Tanya made a half nod, which is to say her chin sank down to her chest and stayed there. I considered our options, but there was no way to escape. We’d be going back downtown.