Anarchy (47 page)

“Has someone gone over to Hardy?” An older guy was standing by himself, leaning on a stick. Goose ran up next to him. “Excuse me? Sir?” He didn't seem to hear her. She touched his arm. “Sir?” He had the patiently bewildered expression common to most of the old guys. He turned it on her, or nearly on her; his eyes didn't focus. Half blind, perhaps, or half drunk. His mouth fell open but he didn't answer. She looked for someone who might have been in charge. The guy who'd been shouting about making a firebreak was trying to wrestle the pail away from someone else. Between the two of them they only managed to drop it. A tongue of spilled water licked across the road, reflecting the leaping brilliance as though the tarmac too had caught fire. She went over his way. “Sir? Sir?” But the noise of the burning was deafening here, either that or he was ignoring her too: he ran back toward the inlet with the pail. Someone behind her screamed. A white spot rose on the road behind and rushed closer: the motorbike again, making a return pass, both of the kids now howling with anarchic joy. Goose turned to see where the scream had come from. Her gaze was caught by a ripple of shadow on a roofline at the edge of visibility. For an instant she thought something huge and dark had moved there, spreading massive wings; then it was gone, if it had been there at all.

“Get everyone out of these houses!” No one even stopped to listen. By the light of the flames their faces were all masklike, flattened and filled with shadow. She imagined herself the same, another eerie phantom in the crowd. She needed the authority of her full uniform, then maybe people would start recognizing her and she could get something done. She turned her back to the burning house and started uphill toward the station, wondering where Jonas was. She'd gone the first block when it occurred to her that it was the middle of the night (wasn't it?) and she hadn't picked up her keys. She wasn't sure what she'd thought she was doing just running out of her apartment like that without even putting her shoes on, let alone grabbing anything else she might need; still, here she was. (Wasn't she?) She slowed down. Already, just a block and a half up the hill, the road was almost utterly dark, two rows of houses with their yards fed by Pacific rainfall between her and the blaze. In one picture window she saw candlelight, which, now that she thought about it, was probably how the fire had started in the other house. She considered knocking on the door, waking them up, ticking them off for leaving their candles lit, but she couldn't make herself do it. The little illumination would be all they had. Without it—
snuff—

Up another block and then two more along the slope. She thought she'd made the right turns but it was hard to be sure. She heard screams again, floating up like the short-lived cinders. In consort with the fistful of fire surrounded by absolute darkness and the memory of the gruesome dead face in the truck, the shouts turned the scene below her momentarily hellish. The kids, she guessed, doing their best to terrify already fearful people. She promised herself she'd have the two of them in cells in the morning. . . .

She halted, dizzy: or not exactly dizzy, because in the darkness she didn't feel stable on the earth anyway, but suddenly afflicted by a vertigo of uncertainty. She was remembering a girl in a cell one morning, a memory too concrete with consequences to be part of any nightmare. Jennifer Knox, The Girl Who Wouldn't Speak—except that Goose could recall the sound of her voice precisely.

It had just been the two of them, after all, with kilometers of nothing in every direction, the sea and the barren islands. She remembered Jennifer explained why it was okay to speak to Goose:
Talking with you's like talking with nobody.

The cells were just here, if she was right. She tried to make some sense of the dark. Edging along the road, she saw a tall straight shadow suddenly come between her and the glow. The flagpole: she'd reached the station, then. But there wasn't a hint of light inside. The power had left it, the same as everywhere else. No one was there.

Jonas might be at home, though. She couldn't see if the patrol car was out in front. It was hard to believe he wouldn't be out on duty somewhere on a night like this, but then if you'd have backed anyone to sleep through the apocalypse Jonas would be the guy. Anyway, her options were either getting lucky and finding him in or footing it back to the apartment for all the stuff she needed; she ought at least to give it a go while she was here. Unfortunately the half of the station where Jonas lived had its entrance at the back, where it was utterly dark. She remembered there were shrubs by the path but she couldn't see them at all, not even the suggestion of an outline. She went step by step, feeling for anything that might orient her. A few paces in off the road she thought she felt plants: something cool and living, at any rate. She prodded her way carefully past.

The ambience of the darkness changed: tighter, closer. The air smelled of inside things. She thought she must be right by the back fence, but when she put her hands out they met nothing.

“Goose?”

“Jonas?”

“Goose!”

She must have gotten all the way inside without knowing it. So he'd left his door open too? Perhaps he'd been hoping for a trickle of light, though when she turned around there was nothing visible in that direction either.

“Hey, I didn't mean to just walk in. I can't see a thing. Where are you?”

“I'm right here, man.”

“Thanks, that helps. Don't you have a flashlight or something? What are you doing?”

“I'm sleeping.”

“You were asleep? Don't you know what's going on out there?”

“Lotta things been going on, Goose. What happened to you? Where did you go?”

“I—” She felt weightless again, as if her own history had fled from her, as invisible and intangible as the room as she was (wasn't she?) standing in. “I was—”
Was,
the past tense.
J'étais
 . . . It felt like a grammatical trapdoor opening onto a bottomless drop. She edged away from it. “Am I supposed to be on tonight? I guess I lost track. Sorry.”

“Aw, Goose. None of that works anymore.”

“None of what?”

“Rotas and stuff. Normal service. Is that why you're here? Worrying about work even in my dreams?”

“You're not dreaming, Jonas. Where are you?” She reached around her ankles, feeling for the clutter she remembered in his room, the TV and the man-cave chair.

“Hey, you're right. If this was my dream you'd be naked.” He chuckled his gentle amusement, a soft, slow belly laugh, at ease with itself. He sounded as if he were over . . .
there,
but when she tried to connect the direction with wherever she was facing it didn't add up.

“You fell asleep in your chair?”

“I guess.”

“Couldn't even make it to the bedroom? Jeez.”

“Nah. I gave the kid the bed.”

“Kid?”

“You remember. You saw him first. The Chinese kid.”

Fog.
She felt it vividly again—or rather
didn't
feel it; she felt or recalled or reexperienced the absence of anything to feel, the (non)sensation of floating in the dense grey mist, not knowing up from down. She'd been with Jonas in his boat. . . .

“I got him from the hospital.” Jonas sounded even dozier than usual. He hadn't even tried to get up from wherever he was. “They couldn't deal with extra bodies. Doctor stopped me in the street and said they were gonna put him out on the sidewalk. When the power went they tried to send everybody home. Man, nobody knew where to go. Crazy couple o' days. I couldn't just leave him on his own. Some of the guys were running pretty wild in the streets.”

“The kid on the beach? The killer whale? He's here?”

“Yep. He's been okay. Freaks out sometimes, but I think we're starting to get along. Said his name a couple of times. It's a start. Hey, you were right, maybe I was cut out to be a dad after all.”

Goose felt around, still trying to get her bearings in the room. She remembered the gigantic TV and was amazed she hadn't bumped into it yet. Her sweeping fingers tapped against something near knee level. “Jonas? That you?” No, it was an object, not a body; in fact, her hands identified it immediately, despite the darkness, as if its oval-eyed face had thrust out of the fog. The mask. Something about the rough solidity of the carved wood was unmistakable to the touch. “Where the hell are you?” Now she noticed a smell so powerful she wondered how she could have missed it before. He must have been fishing and forgotten to put his catch in the freezer. No. The freezer wouldn't be working either, of course.

“You sound kinda troubled, Goose. You got something you need to tell me?”

“Can't you just get your ass in gear? There's a fire in town. Someone needs to get down there and keep some order.”

“Order?” She thought she heard him stirring, getting up, but it was only a whispery exhalation, the quietest version of his half chuckle, half sigh. “Good luck with that. Order, heh. What, you want me to go wave my badge around, tell everyone to chill out, get back to work? Where've you been these last couple of days?”

Drifting. Nowhere.
“I—”

She couldn't answer that question. Not only because she didn't know: when she tried to know, when she thought about it, the terrible ungrounded vertigo made her spin. She glimpsed a reflection of her old childhood nightmare, the incommunicable horror of a solitary spot of consciousness moving in an infinite void.

“You not coming back, Goose? Here to say good-bye?”

“I'm trying to get to work. We're still Mounties. Sworn to serve, remember?”

“Kalmykov left. Hoaglund too. Hoaglund was supposed to be watching the SavaMart. Know what he did? Filled the back of the car with ham and beer and bagels and took off. Dunno where they all think they're going. Last we heard, things were getting pretty heavy down-island too. Before we stopped hearing anything. Me, I knew it was serious when they canceled the play-offs.”

“Hoaglund's a prick. You're not, Jonas. Come on. Are you planning to sleep through it?”

“What are you, my guilty conscience? Cute. I should know myself better than that. I can't guilt myself out of bed in the middle of the night. Hey, I took that kid home, that oughtta be good enough for you. Me.”

If only she could find him she could kick him. “How about you at least get up long enough to open the station? I don't have keys.”

“What's this about, Goose?”

She was trying to follow his voice, but every time she took a hesitant step she seemed to have gone in the wrong direction. She thought she heard another sound, faintly, a suppressed rattle or rustle; perhaps he was getting dressed after all.

“Ah, never mind,” Jonas went on, peaceably. “Whatever, it's good you came. Been missing you, you know? We had a good thing going.”

“Is that you moving?”

“Probably wake up after this, won't I? I hope I remember. This is kinda trippy.”

Someone or something was definitely moving. The reek of fish was disorientingly strong. Could someone else have blundered in through the open door? She heard a kind of wheezing grumble from a direction that might have been outside.

“Jonas.” She tried one last time. As far as she knew he didn't touch weed or even drink, but she hadn't known him long and it wouldn't really have been a surprise if he had a secret habit. “If you're drunk or stoned, whatever. Listen to me. You're not dreaming. We've got a problem in town. Up you get. We're partners. Right?”

Perhaps the scratchy sound was coming from the bushes outside. It had that quality, the massed bristling of stiff small twigs. A grunt went with it.

She went still, suddenly listening intently. The grunt hadn't sounded human.

Bear?

Distracted from her efforts to rouse Jonas, she was surprised when he spoke, very softly, very ruefully.

“I can't go with you, man. I'm not ready yet.”

The moving thing was big. Though she couldn't see a thing, she could sense its weight, its presence: like the
chug-chug-chug
of the ferry in the fog, massive even in the absence of any shape or ratio. The reek seemed to bear down on her like an unseen vessel.

“Did you take my boat?” Jonas sounded farther away. “I had a feeling that was you. When I heard you'd gone the same night. I'm right, aren't I? I guess that makes me partly responsible, something like that. You want me to tell someone the news, Goose? Kinda hard to imagine how, but sure, I'll do what I can. You want me to try and get word to your folks?”

His delirium passed her by, a mere mournful background hum compared to the gathering animal menace. “Jeez, Jonas,” she muttered, though she was talking to herself, “only you would take a kid home and then leave your freaking door wide open.” She took little sideways steps toward what she hoped was a corner of the room, looking to get solid walls at her back.

“You're not at peace,” he said, “are you. Still fighting it. Still that kind of lady.”

Something rustled and crunched, very nearby. “Hey,” croaked a new voice, also close yet muffled, as if behind a thick curtain. “White girl.”

“Wakin' up,” Jonas said, receding. “Go easy, Goose. Don't fight it. I'll say some words for you, help you along.”

The other voice, husky and full of malice, chuckled. “No help for you, white girl. Hear me? Get out here.”

Was Jonas finally rousing himself ? She was so confused now about what was happening where, she couldn't place the creak of a body shifting, turning over in sleep. The other person had the strong husky accent of the oldest First Nations people. Some old native bum stumbling by in the dark. Must have heard her voice and decided to pick a fight. “Jonas?” she called again.