Nod (17 page)

As soon as we’d put up our cardboard barrier, Brandon flopped down to the floor. He fell asleep almost instantly, but not before saying one final word to me in a gentle, relieved voice: ‘Goodbye.’

‘You. Do something with him. Wake him up.’

Back in the present, a strong hand grabbed the back of my T-shirt and hoisted me into a sitting position.

My captor—what else could he have been?—was a short, muscular man with a neatly trimmed black beard. But it was his clothes I was looking at. They were shockingly clean, just like his boots. In fact, his khaki pants and white T-shirt looked brand new, as did the gleaming rifle slung over his shoulder. This was the first person I’d seen in eleven days who looked like what normal had once been, if that’s not too tortuous a way to put it.

‘Are you from the ship?’ I asked.

He ignored me and pointed at Brandon.

‘Wake him up now. Don’t make me ask again.’

I pushed Brandon’s shoulder with the palm of my hand, but to no avail.

‘I don’t know why he’s not waking up. He hadn’t slept for days, I know that. He was tortured.’

Strange to be speaking openly of sleep again.

‘Roll him onto his back.’

‘Are you from that ship in English Bay?’

He spat and shook his head.

‘Nah, I’m from over by Main and Quebec. Just flip him over.’

I did, but just like the Cowardly Lion in the poppy fields of Oz, there was no rousing poor Captain America. Our new friend ground his teeth as he looked up and down the street.

‘God damn it. We can’t carry him all the way across town. God damn it.’

I fell easily into the rhythm of my captor’s baffled logic. ‘Well, if we can’t move him, we’d better hide him.’

He nodded, and so we dragged Brandon’s limp body inside the apartment, reasoning to one another as we did so that A) the place had already been looted and was unlikely to be a target for scavengers and B) the quantity of dried blood on display would be a turnoff for all but the most deranged of the Awakened.

We managed to stash Brandon behind a futon that, seen from the apartment door, concealed him fairly well. If anyone entered from the balcony, though, it would be game over. With this in mind, Dave—during our exertions we’d exchanged names—suggested we leave the interior door open.

‘What now?’ I asked.

He made the frowny face some people use to indicate serious thought: chin up, jowls down. And while he thought-grimaced, I studied him. Despite his admirable grooming, Dave was one of the Awakened—there was no doubt of that now that I’d had a good look at him. No matter how clean he kept himself, there was no disguising the black rings beneath his eyes and the cadaverous expression he wore. Although he’d tried.

The strangest thing about Dave was this: despite being a poster child for macho guerrilla chic, he was wearing makeup. Lots of makeup. Foundation and cover up, if my memory of female grooming habits serves me well. The effect was the exact opposite of what Tanya had tried to do with me before we went into the park: plausibly pre-Nod at twenty feet or more. Up close, however, Dave looked like an ageing soap opera Lothario. A perfect phrase popped into my mind: Cat’s sleep. Cat’s sleep is sham sleep: the sort that your household tabby will feign while surveilling a mouse. Dave was a Cat Sleeper.

Having finished thinking he relaxed his face. ‘I’m taking you back to the base. We’ll come back for your friend tonight if Dr London decides that’s the plan.’

‘But what if I’ve got somewhere else I need to be?’

To his credit, Dave had the good manners not to stare significantly at his rifle. Instead he rubbed his temples with his thumbs as he spoke.

‘We Sleepers have got to stick together. It’s a fucking nightmare out there, man. As I’m sure you well know.’

* * *

To his credit, Dave had walking through Nod down to a science. For the most part we stayed, abandoned cars permitting, in the exact centre of the street. He cradled his rifle, its barrel pointing the way forward—a clear statement of intent that no one we encountered was eager to dispute. He moved quickly but not so quickly as to create an impression of haste. Purposefulness was the name of his game.

I followed close behind.

We cut straight through the heart of the West End, passing within a block of Charles’ School, then turned up Robson and entered the urban canyon that led toward Granville Street and the heart of downtown. Until then, the streets had been quiet; all we’d seen were flitting shadows and the occasional blood-muzzled dog. It was a comfortable, familiar apocalypse, something I’d seen rehearsed in a hundred or more big budget movies: burned cars, ragged curtains fluttering through broken windows.

Soon enough, though, we came across a bizarre sight, even by Noddish standards. Directly ahead of us people were emerging from their hidey holes and gathering in the middle of the street. We stopped to watch as they gathered together, all of them staring straight up into the sky, faces open as sunflowers. Some grinned and laughed at whatever it was they thought they were seeing, while others held their hands over their mouths in amazement, joyous tears trickling down their cheeks. I looked up and saw nothing but blue sky and a few wispy clouds.

In a minute there were fifty people. In another minute there’d be a hundred.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Dave asked. He’d looked up for a second but was now keeping his red-rimmed eyes fixed on the pavement. He looked terrified.

Emboldened by my companion’s big brother of a gun, I went up to a particularly ecstatic young woman who had deep, infected scratches running up and down her arms. Two weeks ago, she would have been gorgeous: model-thin and fine-boned. Now she was a tottering skeleton, walking on tiptoes, as though in high heels, even though her feet were bare and bloodied.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Can’t you see?’ she said rapturously. ‘It’s the angels! There are thousands of angels flying across the sky! It’s going to be okay! They’re here to save us!’

I went and reported back to Dave.

He kept his head down and spat again. ‘It’s just more of their crazy ass bullshit. This sort of thing was happening all the time yesterday. I heard people talking about a fountain of silver water that was supposed to have appeared out front of the museum. They said if you drank it you’d be able to read minds. Don’t listen to the poor bastards—it’ll just fuck with your head.’

The woman I’d spoken to followed us as we began to move slowly through the crowd.

‘Don’t you see them?’ she cried, sincerely sorry for us. ‘The angels are coming! Oh, thank God…thank God!’

What were they seeing? I suspected the little sperm-like squiggles we all see when we stare up into a bright blue sky: amoeba angels swimming across the surface of our eyeballs.

Meanwhile, Dave kept glowering at the asphalt, his face growing more and more furious. He was the engineer on some runaway train of thought, barrelling toward a destination I wasn’t particularly interested in visiting.

‘Watch this.’ He turned and faced the angel-watchers, smiling grimly. Cupping his hands around his mouth, and without even bothering to try to sound like he meant it, he yelled, ‘Holy shit! Those aren’t angels. They’re devils!’

The effect was instantaneous. There isn’t much distance, once you’re forced to think about it, between a smile and a grimace of terror. Just two slightly different sets of facial contortions. On the street behind us, a hundred expressions shifted, and we all entered yet another hell. A man began to scream in a little girl voice while the skeleton woman dropped to her knees, still gazing upward, and began to deepen the wounds on her forearms with ragged fingernails. Within seconds, the rest had followed suit, falling to the ground and grovelling among the glass. I began to turn away in horror, but one screamed word stopped me even as it froze everyone else within range.

‘Satan!’

The hundred or so haggard figures seemed made of grey stone, all of them fixed by four limbs to the ground. Two hundred eyes swivelled, locking on the solitary figure of a muscular young man with a shaved head and a ring of black tattoos around his neck. He had just emerged, shirtless, from the shattered front window of a boutique, stepping through a thicket of toppled and denuded mannequins, a two litre bottle of Diet Coke clutched in his right hand. He stopped and surveyed the scene.

A hundred shaking arms lifted and pointed at him.

My first impression was that he was someone who had been an arrogant prick. His tattoos and his gym-moulded body spoke of someone devoted to the dark arts of public presentation. Or maybe those were just my flabby prejudices showing through.

‘Satan…’ A hundred whispers wavered, finding an odd sort of harmony in a drawn-out recitation of that name.

The tattooed man stood there surrounded by a briar patch of empty gestures formed by the mannequins’ hands and elbows, grinning and listening as the crowd murmured. His head jerked slightly up and down as he appeared to give his attention to an entire parliament of disembodied advisors. Then a decision was made.

Dropping the bottle and splaying his hands far apart, he showed the crowd his palms.

‘I…’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I whispered.

Dave shook his head. All the tension had fled from his face; his storm had passed, and he stood beside me, muscular arms crossed across his chest, an oasis of calm.

‘Nah. This should be fun.’

‘Satan…’ the crowd hissed.

‘…am…’

‘Satan…’ They willed him forward.

‘…Lucifer!’ he cried, then laughed hysterically. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and shook his head. ‘Fucking A! Oh, why didn’t I see it sooner?! Kiss the dirt, you motherfucking pieces of…’

A cracking sound almost deafened me as Dave raised his rifle and shot. The newly-minted Lucifer fell amid the naked mannequins, and the mob recommenced its worm-frenzy.

‘Why did you—?’

‘Ah, fuck him. Let’s go. We’ve got miles to go before we sleep, my friend.’

To my—literally—shell-shocked ears, his voice sounded like it came from a long, long way away.

* * *

Eventually we came to the very familiar SkyTrain station on Granville Street. Its wide, shady entrance had, until recently, been favoured by beggars and buskers. Now a pile of dead bodies lay in the entrance, flies buzzing around them in the dimness like a thousand invisible electric shavers. All the dead appeared to have been killed by a single bullet to the forehead. The message wasn’t hard to read: attempt entry and die.

Dave whistled loudly three times. Someone inside whistled back, and we went in.

Seen from the street, the entrance was a black hole, but once we were inside the foyer, I could make out a string of flickering candles marking the way further in toward the escalators that led down to the station platforms below. Ahead of us, four men and a woman, each as impeccably dressed as Dave, crouched behind sand bag piles, rifles at the ready.

One man with a gaunt, severe face, came out from behind the barricade and spoke to Dave, ignoring me.

‘Who’s he?’

‘One of us. I found him over on Beach Avenue.’

‘Let’s see him.’

He came close, took out a flashlight, and shined it into my eyes for a long time. He was wearing the same makeup as Dave, and he had the same careful watchfulness about him.

Satisfied, he stepped back, jerking his head toward the dead escalators that led a couple of hundred feet further underground. A chill, blindfolded wind was feeling its way up from the tracks beneath, seeking warmth.

‘Okay. Go on.’

More candles lit the way as we stumbled down the escalator.

The platform, when we reached it, was completely dark, but Dave pulled out a flashlight then hopped onto the tracks and shone his beam down the eastbound tunnel. He gestured for me to follow, but I flinched, thinking of the third rail, that bright yellow bar of electricity that we’d all feared as we’d waited for our inventions to pick us up and whisk us away.

Our inventions had sometimes demanded sacrifices. Trains, for example, would occasionally take their tribute in the form of certain unlucky individuals—depressed moms and stoned teenagers, mostly. Such sacrifices were built in. I mean, think about it. How hard would it have been to design barriers that would have made it impossible for people to jump or fall onto the tracks? But we hadn’t bothered; we’d been willing to accept a little blood for the sake of our economical and efficient train gods.

Dave was growing more and more impatient. ‘Stop daydreaming and get your ass down here.’

I sat down on the edge of the platform and hopped onto the track, avoiding the yellow rail. Dave snorted and, directing his beam downward, stamped on it with his boot-shod foot.

‘It’s dead. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Man up, buddy.’

I nodded at the beam, which had now swung up to probe my face.

‘You don’t believe me? Just touch it.’

‘That’s okay.’

‘Touch it.’

Taking a deep breath, I reached down and did as he ordered, holding my breath. Somewhere above me, Dave laughed.

* * *

And so we marched into the eastbound tunnel, the sea breeze at our backs.

‘Next station…Science World,’ Dave said, mimicking the voice and cadence of the SkyTrain system’s now-defunct automated announcement system. ‘No monsters down here, pal. They’re all up there in the daylight. This tunnel is secure. Just walk with one foot dragging along the right rail. That’ll keep you oriented. Stadium Station is just a half a click ahead. Then we’ll be back in the daylight. What a day. Man, I’m ready for some shut eye.’

It took us about a half an hour to cover the distance. Stadium is the point on the downtown line where the tracks emerge from underground just outside BC Place and begin their elevated course across town, bathed in a tsunami of light I couldn’t even begin to imagine from down there.

Daylight first appeared in the distance as a tiny, bobbing cousin to Dave’s flashlight beam, but it quickly grew and stabilized. When we emerged from the tunnel, we found Stadium Station fortified and manned by a dozen or so more Daves, both male and female. Their makeup genericized them, almost comically, as with some dance troupe or rock video where uniformity in appearance and motion is considered the hallmark of something avant garde. When they saw us, Dave’s compatriots nodded but didn’t speak. Instead, their attention was turned to the perimeter.