Before Jess was a bridge that spanned across a river and a never silent highway, but there it was, with cars piled up like the morning after a rough and tumble car derby. He had crossed this bridge hundreds of times in vehicles, but never really gave it any inspection since he usually crossed it within seconds. On foot, it suddenly became larger and more imposing. The metal beams that held it together were painted green. It had a metal arch of thatched beams overhead with a large clock smack dab in the middle. The glass face of the clock was badly cracked, so much so that he couldn’t quite make out the exact directions of the hands. Above it was positioned a sign that read
Too Soon Freed From Time
.
“What time is it?”
Orson said it was just past noon.
The sun should have been shining down from directly overhead. The temperature should have been quite warm.
Jess moved on but stopped midway across, looking down at the river below.
“This is the Don River, right Orson?”
“That’s correct. Many years ago it had become filthy due to illegal dumping and industrial waste. It was said that fish had only recently returned to its waters, largely thanks to the effort of community environmental groups trying to rehabilitate the area.”
Jess peered down at the passing water. It was grey and bubbling. Leaves and tree branches floated by and garbage bobbed downstream as well.
“We may have just lost a good deal of progress,” Jess said.
A single yellow shoe moved along like a little boat down the current and then something surfaced behind the footwear and Jess realized that the shoe was not moving by itself. The chest of a body surfaced briefly, followed by a blue bloated head and two arms and then it sank back down into the water, taking the yellow shoe with it.
Up on the shore, Jess spotted a blue tent, vivid against the grey surroundings. He knew that homeless people occasionally set up homes in the valley, even throughout the harsh winters. Some lived in huts made of cardboard boxes, others with real camping gear. Jess had heard stories about people setting up shacks in New York’s Central Park during The Great Depression but this was different. These were by-and-large people who were making a choice not to be part of society. He figured that the only people staying in city parks overnight in tents and crude shacks were those mad enough to not want anything to do with society such as it was.
He rested his arms on the handrail of the bridge and took a moment to consider what was ahead of him. The way home was almost entirely uphill and the weather was beginning to quickly cool. The falling ash was now mixing with a strange pink rain.
His legs were beginning to show clear signs of tiring. He was dragging his feet; his shoes had been catching every so often on a jagged or uneven part of the ground. The apple had become painfully acidic in his belly. He was feeling the pending need to empty his bowels.
There was a set of stairs leading down to the hearth of the valley where the tent and river lay. The green rungs of the stairs were made of metal and were slick with the stuff that fell from the sky. He wanted to continue, and to get home to his family, but his body was telling him that he was no longer in control.
It was a strange scene when he reached the bottom. Although the temperature seemed to be dropping quickly, it was still not cool enough to allow for snow, but everything including the grass and trees was covered with a thickening layer of white-grey fluff that made it appear like it was winter.
A body was slumped against the base of a tree about 30-feet from the tent. The plastic blue contraption was even smaller than it looked from the bridge. The smooth canvas was hung by string tied to trees and looked like a full shelter from above, but on closer inspection, it was clear that the synthetic fabric just wasn’t expansive enough to make a fully enclosed habitat. There were about three partial walls arranged with the careful positioning of cardboard boxes flattened out. The lettering along the side indicated that the boxes at one time held cans of tomato soup.
Jess bent down and groaned at the pain in his side. Whatever was inside him was now moving downwards quickly and he let out a large amount of gas, hoping to ease his insides. He picked up a thick tree branch on the ground that looked sturdy enough to at least cause anyone looking for trouble to have a second thought. The last thing he wanted was to be taking a shit and have someone come upon him looking for trouble.
He approached the tent slowly, trying to make as little sound as possible against the once lush ground of the valley. His hand extended, he poked the stick into the opening of the blue plastic. There was a pile of items lined up on one side of the tent. There were small boxes, a milk crate, a canvas bag with two fabric handles and on the other side sat an open sleeping bag: empty. There were clear glass bottles scattered throughout the inside. All seemed empty. Not a drop to share. There was also a stack of newspapers piled up and he reached in and took a copy of the Toronto Sun. The cover sported the new mayor, last week celebrating his election win with fireworks shot off the top of city hall. The paper was not old. Jess figured that this would be an appropriate piece to wipe his ass with, since the new mayor was loudly trumpeting his desire for no new wage increases for transit staff.
Jess turned around to find that the dead body slumped against the tree was looking in his direction. Or at least that’s how it looked. The man wore a blue winter hat with a red pom-pom on top. His grey beard was long and stringy – it reminded him of household insulation, pulled loose from its rectangular frame.
He had to take a few steps forward to be sure, due to the ash that had accumulated on the man’s face, but his eyes were closed. Nothing held him in place. His arms were hung loose at his sides; dead.
The land leading back down to the water’s edge was an awkward mix of mud and overgrowth. He walked sideways down the incline and squatted over the shallow end of the dying river, possibly polluting it even worse than it already was.
He cleaned himself as best he could, pulled his pants up, buckled his belt and went back, slowly, to the tent. The old dead man had not moved and looked rather subdued. Still, it was hard to feel at ease around a dead body. He wondered how certain people did it for a living. How many stories had he heard about undertakers becoming necrophiliacs, perhaps because they had become too accustomed to spending time with dead people? He took the remainder of the newspaper and tried to cover the man’s face with it.
He practically fell headlong into the tent. The diarrhea, he knew, was a symptom of something larger. His stomach growled in anger; his head spun and he felt like he was dumb from drinking.
There was a bad smell inside the tent, coming from somewhere, or everywhere; he wasn’t sure. He tried to remember when he had last showered. He must have – he always did – but he couldn’t recall any specifics. He ignored the smell and thought that the barely audible sound of ash falling on the tarp above his head was a comforting lullaby like the mobiles above his sons’ cribs when they were babies.
His dreams often played out like movies of recorded events in his life. The first time that Jess found out that Toni had a boyfriend she called him up to watch the kids.
“Where are you doing, taking my money on a shopping trip?”
“First of all, you don’t give us enough for those kinds of extras, and secondly, no I’m not going shopping. I have a date.”
“A date!” Jess said. He thought she was kidding.
He visibly slumped when he realized that it was not a joke. Toni seemed to peer in closer on the wall projection, as if scrutinizing the scene before her.
“You need to wake up to the reality of this moment. Because you made a decision about two years ago that has led us to this exact moment in time. I asked you to quit drinking, do you remember that?”
Jess nodded his head.
“And you made your choice. You put beer and booze before me.”
She shrugged off everything that he tried to say, waving him into silence.
“Why do you drink? Why do it? Do you want to know what I think? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. You drink because you’re weak. Because you live in constant fear and the only way you can live with the courage you need to make it through this scary world is to get drunk. It’s cowardly. It cost you your marriage. It cost you your kids. Now it might even cost you your job. What are you going to do then? Sit on the street and beg for money so that you can buy a bottle of mouthwash?”
Jess’s dreams turned to a horror movie as he watched from the front window as Toni and her new boyfriend locked lips and proceeded to literally eat each other’s faces until blood was splattered all over the windshield of the car.
When he woke, he wiped the perspiration from his forehead and rolled over, thinking he was at home in bed. It was either still dark or the drapes had been pulled tight against the window, he thought. One of the boys was silently tugging at his shoe, trying to gently rouse him from his dreams.
Then he wondered why he had shoes on in his bed, and he opened his eyes.
The old dead man with the grey beard was crawling on his stomach, now partly inside the tent. The edges of his eyes were so bloodshot that it was difficult to see anything else. It seemed the other parts of his eyes were covered with layers of white sickness of some sort. Then the thing’s arm reached out, grabbing hold of the heel of his shoe. A quiet sound came from the man’s throat. Quiet but grumbling, as if he were trying to talk with a throat full of liquid. Not the same as those noises he had heard before, but close enough to cause Jess to retract his legs and he backed up against the inner edge of the tarp as the old man pulled himself slowly forward with sickly arms.
The stick was there beside the sleeping bag about two feet from the man’s outstretched hand. Normally, another person would be able to grab it first, but the thing was crawling forward with one hand, inches at a time, never taking his bloody gaze from Jess’s position.
The man’s eyes were wrong, somehow. They were soul-less, foreign things like a shark’s, and he moved like a thing possessed – slowly snapping his jaws and reaching out for Jess as if he were a meal. He grabbed hold of Jesse’s foot and tried to bite it, but the material of his shoes protected him, despite the man thrashing his head, as if that might pull it off.
Jess reached down and grabbed the stick while the man continued to inch forward. Jess shuffled backwards, held the stick with both hands and plunged it down onto the back of the old man’s head like a stake. His aim was off and he connected with the back of the neck. It seemed like he partly decapitated the poor old bastard. There was blood, and lots of it, but it didn’t spray out like you might see in a horror film. It seeped out like dark red syrup.
It didn’t stop the old man, who continued to crawl forward, even with a deep gash, exposing a third of his neck.
Jess brought the stick down again, and again, his eyes closed to the carnage but still aiming for the remainder of the neck. He opened his eyes and the head rolled away. It came to a stop against one of the boxes. The body fell and the head too was finally stilled – frozen in a half-moan.
Jess sprinted out of the tent on all fours like an animal. Something had got on his face and he struggled to see. His hands and feet tore at the ground, and he pulled himself away from the tent, turning and tumbling, and ripping at the grass and the earth. When he finally stopped for a breath, he wiped the blood from his face. At first he thought it was his own, streaming from his nose or some unknown cut he suffered in the fight. But it was not his blood and it was everywhere. On his clothes, in his hair and on his face. He could even taste it. He screamed from somewhere deep within without really meaning to.
He panicked, thinking about infection and transmission through the exchange of blood. Other viruses passed from infected-to-new-host that way.
He ran again – terror propelled him now. Even on all fours his footing slipped beneath him due to the urgency of his movement and the snowy ash underfoot. He went shoulder first into a tree but bounced off it, pain searing the flesh. He continued running. His mind wanted him to move faster than his feet could manage, his head and torso moved too far out in front of him and he crashed, tumbling down a hill, hurting his shoulder and plunging face-first into the river. He knelt in it, the cold water coming up to his waist. His chest was heaving from the effort and he took big, deep gasping breaths of air. He looked down at himself, seeing and the dirt and grime and blood, which he slowly washed from his face.
The water was freezing. It moved rapidly around him, silently moving like an oil spill all around him. He didn’t know how clean it was, but it removed the blood from his skin.
Something collided with his leg. He looked down and saw something yellow protruding from the dark water. He reached down and pulled it out. It was a toy - a child’s toy. A white helicopter with Police printed in blue on its sides. Four long yellow blades attached to the top looking like a big X.
Something else bumped into him in the water, wrapping tightly around his right ankle.
Jess pulled his leg up out of the water and with it came a small child who gripped his leg like he was holding on for dear life.
Half the child’s face was raw - like old, rotten hamburger with, strands of grey, sinewy flesh hanging from where his cheek and nose should have been.
Jess kicked it off and ran up onto the grass. It was scratching at the water, trying to follow.
What came next Jess swore he would never repeat aloud to another person for as long as he lived.
The little sickly child came out of the water and ran for Jess. He was small and not very strong.
Jess pushed him up against a tree, pinning the boys’ shoulders with his weight on his hands. It thrashed vainly and Jess noticed the large blisters on the boy’s arms and the white film that seemed to cover his eyes completely. It reminded him of dead fish washed up on the shore – the opaque white eyes being the clearest indicator of the absence of life.
Finally, the boy stilled.
“Can you talk?” Jess said. “Can you hear me?”
There was so little space between their faces - Jess was hunched over, his weight keeping the child still. The boy’s mouth dropped open and Jess waited for the words to come out but all that happened was a tongue appeared instead, like a snake tasting the air. His tongue darted around for a few moments and then it retreated back into its mouth.
Jess was disgusted, but couldn’t seem to forget that this was a child in front of him. Ill or in shock, or outright something else entirely, he wasn’t sure, but the shape and form were undeniable. This child was probably about Justin’s age.
But though the child-thing had recovered its tongue, its mouth still hung open and when Jess was about ready to loosen some of the weight that kept the thing stilled he noticed the sound coming from its throat.
It started like a low hum. It was like a thousand bees just at the periphery of your hearing and getting closer and closer. It finally developed into a long low moan and then the boy started to fight again, struggling to get free. The thrashing of limbs started up again; flailing, clawing and grasping.
There were no other witnesses - save whatever the child-thing saw in the last moments through its deadened eyes and Jess’s own tortured memory banks.
When it was over, the tree had been used like a nutcracker; it was harder than the boy-thing’s head.
Jess was wet, cold and he now had more blood on him.
He took off running again, his limbs beyond exhaustion, his mind not quite ready to quit and his body almost pushed to the brink of finality.
There were trees everywhere. Some were brown, and others, being white, were easier to see in the dark. But still more littered the floor where he ran. Many trees had fallen over for some reason that tripped up his feet and knocked him to the ground.
Still, he ran. Cut and bruised and winded so badly that it felt like his lungs were on fire.
He scrambled like a wild, mad thing, running straight into trees and nearly flinging himself off the edge of a cliff with nothing but the rocky riverbed some thirty feet below. He finally stopped a moment, looking down upon the black water and barely visible rock-bed when something swung out and struck him along the side of the head.
He rolled over onto his knees and saw a woman in a white jacket standing before him with a baseball bat coiled for another strike. The woman looked like a ghost in the snowy woods, wearing all white. Even her hair, long and wavy, was a white fresh as a layer of wintry precipitation.
“I advise you to speak, if you can,” she said.
Please don’t.
That was all Jess could muster.
He was about two feet from the edge of the cliff and wondered if he could survive the fall. He could hear the water below but did not know how deep it was. Further down, near the tent, it seemed to only be three or four feet at the most.
“Well, I have certainly heard better pleading speeches from people offered open access to the pulpits, but I suppose one word is almost as good as psalm thirty-seven twenty-five, at least under the circumstances.”
The baseball bat fell to her side and she began to walk away.
“God willing, and if you’d like to live, you might want to walk with me for a while.”
Jess got to his feet and turned around, to make sure that no more things were coming after him.
The woman walked north along the river’s edge. She was better prepared for the dropping temperatures than he was; she wore boots that rose almost to her knees. Her jacket had a hood with some worn but faux-looking fur liner. It almost seemed like she had been living all this for ages, so well prepared for it she seemed. The one exception was the colour of her clothes. At times, white made her blend in with the rest of the ashen surroundings but it also made it virtually impossible for her to blend into the darkness, which was in much more ample supply these days than anything one could view with any certainty.
She was an older woman but not as old as he would have imagined his own mother would have looked in such a position.
She led him to her own makeshift tent, albeit one that was clearly less patched with DIY band-aids. This was a fancy tent designed for harsh conditions. The cardboard boxes that surrounded the sides were functional add-ons – one to hold footwear, another housed a stack of newspapers. On top of the newspapers sat a lantern, turned low enough that they could see the other's faces. Jess could hear the flowing water of the river in the background. Everything else was quiet.
She didn’t offer to let him in. Jess was certain he wouldn’t have accepted despite his current situation. He was still tired, and couldn’t afford to stand still for long. He wound up slowly turning himself in a circle while she gathered various items. He couldn’t help but wonder where the next attack would come from.
How many other crazed and half-dead homeless people were there waiting in the woods?
Within minutes she had struck a fire and set a can of brown beans to warm beside it. She stood like a man – with her feet confidently at shoulder width and offered Jess what seemed to be her usual spot – a sawed-off section of a large tree.
Jess sat, wondering if she would ever speak again. Her eyes followed the trail of smoke as it reached the tops of the surrounding trees. She proffered a canister of water. Jess drank deeply. She waved her hand in front of her face in a gesture that implied that he should wash his face. When she finally spoke, she did not take her eyes off the swirling, pluming smoke.
“You must have an important reason to live.”
“What do you mean?” Jess wasn’t sure it was a question.
“He has special plans for those of us left. It will make some feel like insignificant pawns in a larger chess game but there can be no doubt that he has larger plans for those of us who have made it this far.”
“I just want to get back to my family and find out if they’re okay.”
“You serve a higher power now,” she said. “The Heavenly Father needs you.”
She offered him the beans with a metal spoon. Jess ate greedily, wondering what kind of nut he had run into.
“So what’s your story?”
She looked at him blankly.
“When everything changed,” he said, with arms gesturing upwards to include the whole world in his statement, “what were you doing? What’s your story?”
“I’ve been here for a long time,” she said. “Ever since I figured out my purpose.”
“Your purpose.”
“I learned a long time ago that my role was to reunite all the fractured religions of the world. We all idolize the same God; we just call him different names. Jesus, Allah, Brahman, a God is still a God by any other name.”
Jess knew what was coming next. All the righteous believers who thought that they would get others to see the light by recounting their tales. It wasn’t all bullshit, but he had half a can of beans left and could tell from the woman’s countenance that she firmly believed every single word she said.
“I’m not sure that’s a real Shakespeare quote.”
“You can’t argue against this being the apocalypse. God’s hand is clearly at play. His son died for our sins so that we could have a second chance. Two thousand years of sin and violence and turning their head from his embrace. We have run out of time. 40 days and nights of rain didn’t do the job. Letting the devil claim the wicked should certainly do the trick, don’t you think?”
“So you’re saying that God is trying to cleanse the Earth again? Because I don’t know if you’re seeing what’s going on out there but people don’t seem to be turning to dust. I don’t even know if they’re dying. You have a neighbour down there who looked like he had been infected with some disease that turned him into a cannibalistic monster.”
“And who’s to say that’s not how it happens? You’ve seen all the dust from the sky and the general absence of bodies and yet you still deny it’s there. That man was sick, a sinner who refused to help himself. He infringed on my privacy by howling at the moon every night after pouring the devil down his throat.”
The woman’s gaze went outwards into the trees to some unknown point. Jess just wanted to sit for a while but he wasn’t sure how long he could stay without saying something that would contradict her beliefs and anger her sensibilities.
The baseball bat lingered only a few inches from her side.
The wind was steadily blowing through the trees. The grey ash was coming down like bits of dirty, polluted cloud.
“What do I call you?”
He had to say it twice before she responded.
“If you need an earthly name to call me by, you can call me Anne.”
She never seemed to focus on him. Her gaze was always elsewhere - in the trees, on the darkened fireplace or down on her own hands laying palm-up on her lap.
“I don’t feel well. I’m tired.”
“Then sleep. You can have the tent - I will stay up.”
“Where are you going to sleep?”
“I won’t.”
“You won’t?”
“There is no need.”
“It feels like ages since the last time I slept. Orson, what time is it?”
“Three in the morning and my battery is getting quite low.”
Anne took two steps backwards.
She said, with an alarming look on her face: “Was that a person or a robot?”
“It’s a computer program of sorts. The very best, very advanced. I call him Orson.”
“It tells you the time.”
“Oh, it can do a lot more than that.”
Anne smiled, her gaze a good two feet astray from Jess’s position.
“How quaint,” she said. “But who needs time when there is no sun?”
“The sun is still there.”
“If you say so - I haven’t seen it. There is a working wristwatch in the tent. I haven’t looked at it in days. God’s plans go beyond these earth-bound concepts.”
Jess waited a moment but nothing more came.
“It’s safe to sleep?” he said.
“Of course not,” she said. “But I’ll be close by, if that’s what you mean.”
“I have two children,” Jess said. He didn’t know why he said it - it was an instinctual comment.
She actually made eye contact this time. She looked like a ghost – all white hair and face drowned in shadow. At least, he thought she did. Her head raised and turned to his direction before she spoke.